Madam, - It is hard to disagree with Frank McNally (An Irishman's Diary, November 7th): the Taoiseach's gift for the mixed metaphor is a thing to be cherished. Even so, Senator Tomás Ó Maoláin might have given him a run for his money. In 1961 he voiced his fear that parent-teacher committees might prove to be "the thin edge of the wedge which opens the floodgates and torpedoes the whole system of education".
There are masters of the genre in journalism too - some of your own contributors not least among them. Only last week Prof William Reville (Science Today) worried in that "if we put all our eggs in the basket of science we will eventually reap the whirlwind of a big backlash against science when it 'betrays' us by failing to lift the impossible loads we would ask it to bear." And I think it's hard to beat Michael McCaughen, who in 2004 evocatively described Venezuela's President Chavez as "the guinea pig who popped his head over the parapet and challenged the backyard bully". - Yours, etc,
BREFFNI O'ROURKE, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.
Madam, - The media should know that "smoke and daggers" is in fact a well-known Irish term which originally described the process of selecting Fianna Fáil and, in particular, Fine Gael leaders. - Yours, etc,
RONNIE SIMPSON, Herbert Road, Bray, Co Wicklow.