Sir, - Mary Robinson is right, the Irish Government should be doing more for the Kosovar refugees. Certainly the Celtic Tiger can afford to offer refuge to more than it has but a more important role for our Government would be to apply pressure on the International Community to help the hundreds of thousands of poor innocents caught up in the fighting.
Whether or not the civilian population is being used as human shields, as has been claimed, there is no doubt that it is they and not the armies of Milosevic or NATO who are sustaining the bulk of the casualties in this dirty war.
It could be argued that when war breaks out these days the safest place to be is in one of the combatant armies. Between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the casualties of the First World War were civilians. By the time the world went to war for a second time this rate had risen to 50 per cent but in contemporary wars civilian casualties represent on average 80 per cent of the total.
The situation in Kosovo has reached farcical proportions when NATO drops cluster bombs down among the people that it is trying to protect. How they ever thought they could protect the population from the safety of warplanes flying high enough to avoid anti-aircraft fire is beyond me.
It is now just a matter of time before a ground force of some description is sent to protect civilians and the Irish Government would do well to use all the means at their disposal to make this happen sooner rather than later. - Yours, etc., John O'Shea,
GOAL, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.