Madam, - Readers of The Irish Times will not necessarily have had the opportunity to look at John A. Murphy's original article in the Sunday Independent of October 10th about which Kevin Myers wrote so comprehensively (October 14th) and to which Prof Murphy then replied (October 16th), referring to one peripheral point as a "distortion".
Having read the Murphy article more than once I can say that throughout it there are verbal distortions and exaggerations on a large scale. He refers to John Bruton as "airily declaiming (with all the dogmatic certitude of the non-historian)" the Home Rule message that has been at the centre of the subsequent controversy.
He describes this as "the old-hat, politically motivated revisionist stuff of Conor Cruise O'Brien in the Seventies". He describes the hypothesis as "unprovable", as of course are all alternative views about history, none knowing this better than John A. Murphy. He gives a self-serving view of how he promoted in public life two matters: firstly, closer UK-Ireland links, and, secondly, the separation of Church and State.
Yet at the same time, in his condoning of the Angelus on RTÉ John Murphy seems happily to accept a sectarian exercise twice daily, and he rejects Reform, an organisation working for precisely the closer UK-Ireland ties he says he once espoused.
To the Protestant grievances "rehashed" at the conference, and only "allegedly" experienced, he offers the historian's stock response: "This kind of stuff is long familiar. . .", etc. He uses a similarly outmoded and disreputable historian's trick, in respect of Roy Garland and Chris McGimpsey, of raising the alternative grievances with unionism which were simply not part of the conference.
His lack of balance as a historian was demonstrated in his claim that, during the afternoon in the Mansion House, "we were made to feel that ethnic cleansing of Protestants in the South had taken place on a grand Balkan scale".
I have no recollection of that atmosphere, nor have the others I have consulted about the occasion. The "no petty people" remark by Yeats was, according to Murphy, "trotted out", as though the Reform Movement conference of September 18th was conducted as a form of haute école.
Using another historian's trick, the prefacing words "of course", he concedes Protestant population decline, suggesting persecution as the least plausible explanation, but doing so without historical support.
Nor does he have support for the notion that all Protestants "enjoyed their favourable social and economic status". There were poor Protestants and isolated ones, as indeed there were the same Catholic victims of poverty and possibly isolation.
I am no historian, but if John Murphy's exercise in making rubbish of alternative views about the past and the present is an example of the probity, intellect and balance his profession usually demands, then give me my own and Kevin Myers's trade as journalists every time. - Yours, etc.,
BRUCE ARNOLD,
Albert Road,
Glenageary,
Co Dublin.