Madam, - Mary Kenny (December 9th) is right to take me to task for misstating the first name and marital status of William Joyce's second wife, Margaret - whom, rather confusingly, he married twice - in 1939.
However, Ms Kenny takes needless umbrage at my comments, based on his youth, about Joyce's association with the Black and Tans in Galway in 1920-1 and an alleged IRA plan to shoot him.
No doubt she found many such stories.
I just wonder how reliable these are.
Ms Kenny says that it was "startlingly ungenerous . . . to avoid mentioning the research" on which her book is based.
I thought I was doing her a service by not drawing attention to obvious inaccuracies.
By way of brief illustration, Sir John Anderson was not a policeman, but a cabinet minister (p. 186).
Major A. E. Percival (misspelt as "Perceval") won notoriety in Cork not "with the Black and Tans" but as a soldier in the Essex Regiment (p. 190).
Moreover, it is not true that Ireland was called the "Irish Free State" up to 1949 (p. 247), a point which any Irish writer might fairly be expected to grasp.
Ms Kenny stresses the significance of her "original archival research", and advances this as a reason for people to read her biography.
Anyone requiring a careful exploration of the recently released British archives on Joyce on which she draws would be far better advised to consult Peter Martland's Lord Haw Haw: The English voice of Nazi Germany, published in March. - Yours etc.,
EUNAN O'HALPIN, Department of Modern History, TCD.
Madam, - My late mother, Ms Mamie Connolly, who lived with her parents in the Twelve Pins in Barna, Co Galway, during the "Tan War", informed me many moons ago that Mr William Joyce, later known as Lord Haw Haw, was a British informant when he lived in Galway.
She told me that on one occasion Master Joyce gave her a fright as he was snooping about the back of the Twelve Pins and she came upon him unexpectedly.
Mary Kenny would appear to be on the right track in connecting William Joyce to the abduction, torture and murder of Father Michael Griffin and the subsequent burning of Barna by the Black and Tans.
It is also rumoured that William Joyce left Galway when the British forces withdrew from Galway after the Treaty was agreed.
It always causes me great mirth to remember that the British establishment saw fit to hang William Joyce as a traitor when they were the first to introduce him to treachery. - Yours etc.,
Dr EAMONN SHEA, Newtowncunningham, Co Donegal.