JOYCE ANDREWS,
Madam, - Fintan O'Toole lays into the Irish people with a whip in his piece on Arts at the Crossroads (The Irish Times, March 3rd).
He castigates us for driving out our 20th-century artists "by hostility and neglect". Now we are letting them down again because we are not providing them with enough resources. And all the time we are taking the credit for producing these wonderfully gifted people: "We have come to take for granted our self-image as a nation of high cultural achievement," he says. We think we are great but really we are only a smug, self-satisfied and philistine lot.
Who can tell why the writer writes or the painter paints, or why genius takes root and flourishes? I would like to assure Mr O'Toole that I take no credit whatsoever for Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Kavanagh or Heaney, and neither does anyone I know.
I am just immensely grateful they were born and that they wrote. The fact their voices were fashioned in Ireland makes me happy and, yes, proud. Is that so bad? - Yours, etc.,
JOYCE ANDREWS,
Goatstown Road,
Dublin 14.