Sir, - As a fairly regular reader of your newspaper, I have come to admire the usually measured tone of its Editorials, particularly as regards the complicated outworking of the Belfast Agreement. I was therefore puzzled and disappointed to see your dogmatic approach to symbolism and the RUC (November 25th).
You assert that the present symbols of the RUC - harp, shamrock and crown - are a political statement signifying the Union, and must therefore go. This seems tantamount to saying that any symbols formerly associated with the British state in Ireland must go. There can be no more Royal prefixes, no crowns and, presumably, no Union Jacks.
Not only will this be bad news for institutions such as the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin Show, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the entire southern Irish medical profession; in the event of a unified Irish state it is impossible to see how the then substantial British minority could be symbolised in any of that new state's institutions.
The reality surely is that if the Belfast Agreement is to be brought to fruition, from now on British and Irish symbols are going to have to live side by side: within Northern Ireland, within Ireland (by virtue of cross-Border bodies) and within the east-west British-Irish Council. And this week, when the President takes lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Reconfiguring the RUC name and symbols would be a good place to start. It could be called the Northern Ireland Police Service/RUC, and there seems no good reason why the crown should not sit alongside the harp. The new relations proposed in 1999 for our islands have nothing to do with the British imperial reflex of 1867 in response to the Fenians. - Yours, etc.,
Simon Partridge, East Finchley, London N2.