Sir, - Your readers may be familiar with Dublin: A People's City, a photographic record of Dublin in the 1950s by Nevill Johnson. It is a record of the poverty and destitution of Dublin city in those transition years of the mid 1950s. l would suggest that it is against the background of Johnson's fascinating record that we put in context the recent outburst of Mr Gerry Owens (letters, October 17th) in which he berates the Christian Brothers and wishes them "good riddance".
find his letter contentious, selective and offensive. In particular, I contest his assertion that the Brothers were "sadistic, brutal and bigoted". If they are to be thus accused in such generalised comment, then the lay teachers they employed also stand accused, as do the lay teachers in schools not conducted by the Christian Brothers. It is patently unjust to condemn all for the excessive corporal punishment administered by some, both lay and clerical.
Finally, I do not accept Mr Owen's view that the decline of the Christian Brothers ends a shameful chapter in Irish education. On the contrary, I would suggest that their decline in Ireland has much more to do with the much vaunted liberalism and "me-feinism" of the New Ireland than with their vision of education - a vision of dedication and generosity exemplified in the lives of the Brothers and transmitted to the young men in their care, and now so smugly rejected.
The silence of our elected representatives on the contribution of the Presentation and Christian Brothers to Irish education is deafening. What does The Irish Times have to say? Yours, etc.,
Fitzwilliam Square,
Dublin 2.