Sir, – Frank McNally (An Irishman’s Diary, July 7th) suggests that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first and only visit to Ireland was in the late 1940s, after his now notorious, poker-wielding altercation with fellow Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. In fact, the man widely regarded as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher was quite a frequent visitor to this country. He first came here as early as 1934, when he was a guest of my father, the late Maurice O’Connor (“Con”) Drury, in the cottage in Connemara where he again stayed in 1948.
It was at my father’s invitation that the philosopher returned to Ireland after the war, to do what is regarded as some of his finest work here. Con had been a student of Wittgenstein’s in Cambridge and became one of his closest friends and confidants.
Over the years, he faithfully recorded Wittgenstein’s pithy observations on the Ireland of de Valera, from the complacency of the local clergy to efforts to restore the Irish language, and these were published in 1984 as Conversations with Wittgenstein, now sadly out of print.
Frank McNally is, however, on the money when it comes to Wittgenstein’s complicated religious heritage and its implications.
It was at the suggestion of my father, whom Wittgenstein had dissuaded from becoming an Anglican clergyman in the 1930s, that this Viennese Jew, with both Catholic and Protestant ancestors, was given a Catholic funeral in 1951. Con, however, agonised, until his own death in 1976, as to whether he had done the right thing.
Muddy waters indeed. – Yours, etc,