Sir, - In terms of peaceful intention there is a unique significance in the report by Andy Pollak (The Irish Times, April 26th) of Gerry Adams's call for an end to NATO's action in the Balkans. If there had been a sea around Kosovo, Adams might have drawn an analogy between this and our north-eastern territory, i.e. between "non mainland" Britain and "non mainland" Serbia. The fact that there is no such sea should not blunt the analogy. He might, thus, alternatively have called for the bombardment by NATO of England because of that country's historical and contemporary occupation and brutalisation of our people still enclaved within the Six Counties. Sorry, Mr Pollak, it is not time to write Robert Emmet's epitaph, as you suggested on RTE. Such talk, like the wining and dining of British Royalty at Dublin Castle, is conducive to the resumption of the IRA campaign.
Effectively what Adams was saying (despite the Provisional IRA's bombings in the UK, following the grotesque example of the Official IRA's bombing of the British paratroops headquarters at Aldershot in 1972), is that he would not wish the current scale of bombardment in the Balkans on any country. He was also reiterating Ireland's traditional neutrality, first promulgated by Wolfe Tone and in recent times jealously guarded by the late Eamon de Valera.
Now our foreign minister, David Andrews, as know-all and as self-opinionated as P. Flynn, is aiding and abetting the Opposition in switching sides. John Bruton's role is now similar to that of John A. Costello, Taoiseach of the first coalition government, in upstaging Sean MacBride of Clann na Poblachta as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1949. He also thus upstaged Eamon de Valera in cutting links with the Commonwealth by transforming the Irish Free State into the Republic of Ireland, an ersatz version of the 32-county Irish Republic proclaimed in arms in 1916 and ratified by popular suffrage in 1918. Its restoration de Valera endeavoured to put "on hold", as his 1937 Constitution proclaimed, "pending the reintegration of the national territory". Sean MacBride just "blew it", as Ahern is doing now.
This Albert Reynolds apparently grasped in dealing with both the Brits and Gerry Adams and was thus beginning to orchestrate a new Republican convergence. Fianna Fail under Ahern and Andrews is rapidly eroding anything that was honourable in that party. They seem incapable of resisting the tendency of adherence to that part of its past with its grovelling gratitude of nepotism. Now get this quite clear, this Irish nation owes nothing to anyone, neither Europe, the UK, the US nor Australia. We saved European civilisation from Teutonic barbarism in medieval times and our "huddled masses" in the later category built up their railways, highways, canals and cities as we had done with reference to cities in medieval times. As Thomas Cahill has recorded in his work How the Irish Saved Civilisation, the whole of western Europe have written languages which would not have been so but for Irish intervention. Muscail do mhisneach a Bhanba. As Camille Desmoulins put it, "The great only appear great because we are on our knees". - Yours, etc.,
Derry Kelleher, Hillside Road, Greystones, Co. Wicklow.