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Sir: Your fine article on the trouble in Northern Ireland seems to miss the main point, for it is only incidental that the struggle is between Protestants and Catholics. It is really between English and Irish and always has been.
To show how very true that is, in the infamous Plantation of Ulster the settlers were both English and Scottish, and almost immediately the Scots began to receive the same brutal mistreatment at the hands of the dominant English that the Irish were receiving. All the Scotch-Irish who could left Ireland. Mainly they came to the American colonies, and they brought with them an abiding hatred of England. That hatred proved useful to the Americans during the Revolution.
GALE HUNTINGTON Vineyard Haven, Mass.
Sir: Your otherwise excellent piece on the situation in Northern Ireland had an irritating bit of malarkey about the 12th century Pope who first "gave" Ireland to the English. You forgot to tell your readers that the Pope in question [Adrian IV] was English!
H. DESMOND BYRNE Pinole, Calif.
Sir: I would like to applaud my fellow countrymen, the British soldiers. What other country can boast of such disciplined men, keeping their tempers and feelings under strict control in a situation that daily causes them to be jeered at, insulted, stoned, wounded and even murdered? I am reminded sadly of the panic and disorder that was Kent State, when all the troopers faced that black day were students.
(MRS.) EMILY JANE FOLLIS San Jose, Calif.
Supreme Mistake
Sir: Father James Schall epitomizes the insensitivity, the blindness and the outright stupidity that have characterized the attitude of mankind in his relationship to the rest of this planet [Aug. 23]. Few creatures with an intellect above that of a canary would doubt the primacy of man.
Where ecologists and like-minded people differ from Father Schall is in the extent of man's dominion-his rights and privileges against those of all other living things. To believe that he could reverse or remedy the situation by intellect or will so long as his number continues to increase without bound is easily the supreme mistake of all time.
HOWARD A. GARCIA Boulder, Colo.
Sir: Hope and blind faith are fine-up to a point. But I also believe that God gave us intelligence, and that it is sinful not to use it. I say it is the ecologists who are using their intelligence and who really have the interests of man as well as those of nature at heart.
(MRS.) JOSEPHINE T. KAESTNER Baltimore
Sir: All of us, feathered, furred, naked, scaled or multilegged, make it together or not at all.
ALEA H. PETERS Lakewood, Colo.
Sir: Cheers to Father Schall for his sobering views on the subtle heresy of ecological zealots who place nature above man. There is a terrible insanity afoot when we display more outrage over oil-soaked ducks than over human fetuses that are disposed of because there is no room.
JERRY KLEIN Peoria, III.
Honest Anger