Madam, - Dr Kevin Whelan (Book Reviews, March 6th) brings us good news of contemporary Irish culture. Self-confident, tolerant, open-minded and eager to see things anew: this is the world we now enjoy. Contrast this with the rigidity of thought, intolerance and sectarian name-calling of the past.
Dr Whelan was, no doubt, a toiler for this emancipation, just as he is surely, a masterly exponent of the new liberated style.
Older readers of The Irish Times, like myself, may remember that, in those bad old days, when you read a review in The Irish Times you were told what the book was about. The reviewer may have disagreed with the position taken by the author, but at least he explained what it was before dismissing it. I, for one, am sorry to see this useful service disappear.
The character of debate has also changed. Once about evidence, it is now, it seems, about virtue. Dr Whelan, apart from having "spent 25 years marinating in the sources", is, like Einstein, open-minded, with a healthy life of the mind animated by dynamic understanding. We know this is so, because he tells us. We must believe such a person when he reports that Prof Dunne is tediously caught up with "calcified certainties, sour sectarianism and reductionism".
This censorious tone had the inevitable result: I could not wait to get my hands on the wicked book to see what it actually said. I can report to your readers that it appears to have the old-fashioned qualities of careful exposition and reasoned debate.
I looked Dr Whelan up in the index, and found him referred to as "the most distinctive, and to my mind the most important, of a talented new generation of Irish historians".
Can this be the same Dr Whelan who wrote the review? - Yours, etc.,
FRANK LITTON, Eglinton Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.