Madam, - With regard to General O'Duffy and Fascism (February 9th), it appears to have been overlooked that Antonio Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, was apparently O'Duffy's role model.
Salazar was regarded as a benign dictator, a technocrat who introduced a corporative form of government in Portugal with one of the houses of parliament formed from representatives of the main divisions in society - industry, trade unions, agriculture, education, etc. Mussolini introduced a similar system in Italy.
That O'Duffy was interested in corporativism as a form of government is shown by the fact that, when he was ousted from Fine Gael, he formed the Corporate Party, which was not a success.
It should not, of course, be forgotten that the system of electing our own Seanad is a corporative system which de Valera borrowed from the Portuguese and Italian models when he was framing the 1937 Constitution.
As regards O'Duffy's intervention in the Spanish Civil war, it should be remembered that that conflict was viewed in Ireland as a conflict between Christianity, in particular Catholicism and atheistic Communism, Franco being the hero of the hour in the eyes of the vast majority in Ireland at that time. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICK FAGAN, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.