Sir, - When I was a little boy in the 1960s I was already internalising a vague sense of inferiority due to something called "Irish ancestry". Eventually, as a young adult, I got the idea to travel here from my native New York, and I've have been studying the place first hand since 1985.
Now, living in Dublin, I'm encountering the new incivility along with the wonderful affluence, and a less friendly atmosphere than I'm accustomed to in New York City. Lately, I've become so distressed by the responses I hear to the tragedy in the US that I want all Americans to know that we have fewer friends here than even I previously imagined.
After the memorial ceremony at the US embassy, which I attended, and the Late Late Show interview with President McAleese (which was extraordinary) I've seldom heard any word of sympathy. I've received one call and one e-mail since September 11th, and a hundred of the same from the United States. Almost immediately, my associates in the art world and in the world of letters here began to let their views be known. An alarming number of people I've talked to - a number still growing - believe the US deserved what it got (we are talking about more than 5,000 homicides, let alone that some of my interlocutors knew that I'd known some of the victims). I have been lectured repeatedly about "world justice", and by some of the very people whose anti-Nice votes put the futures of millions of Eastern Europeans into question.
Few of these people knew that the US was already the largest food and supplies donor to Afghanistan. They want to blame the US for the factional fighting that took hold there after the Cold War. No doubt one day they will find a way to blame us for the faction fighting in Northern Ireland. I still haven't met anyone who understands the southern no-fly zone in Iraq, and our attempt to shield the Shi'ites, the Kuwaitis and the Saudis from Saddam. Iraq, like North Korea, would starve or poison its people before giving up its weapons laboratories.
The Irish who have left me so appalled in the past three weeks are all fellow travellers in my estimate, and all are culpable in lowering the general standards of decency and sanity with their sham purity. They are pretending to represent some Cold-War era virtue. I see it another way. Whereas the Irish preserved Western civilisation during a former dark age, I see now an adolescent recklessness, even a romantic eagerness, to tear it all down. This is now a possibility.
Undoubtedly much good can come out of the attacks in the US, from greater civility at home to greater justice in the world and less want. It is a changed world. Yet, ever since President Bush, on the day after the attack, announced the word "coalition", the animosity toward all things American has been palpable and growing in this town. The resentment about offering Shannon Airport to the US military campaign did not go unnoticed at home. Nor have I heard a single word of credit for how it has all been handled thus far. Instead, I hear countless cynical digs and the ubiquitous sanctimony I'd already come to know.
Unless there's a silent majority in this country quietly backing the admirable efforts of Mr Ahern, Mr Cowen, President McAleese et al., I will be leaving this place with a strong impression of Ireland's pompous ingratitude towards the US, let alone its foolishness on the world stage. I can think of nothing more serviceable to my country than to devote myself to drying up every dollar, every tourist, every last outmoded bit of the dream of Ireland.
I am once again embarrassed to have Irish blood in my veins, and I'm afraid this time I'm inconsolable. Ireland may be hopelessly insignificant in determining the shape of this world, but there's no excuse.
If there's another voice out there, for goodness' sake, speak out! - Timothy O'COnnor, Clontarf, Dublin 3.