EXPLOITING IRISH GRIEVANCES

GABR1EL FALLON (June 27) wants to know what "Irish Utopia" Eoin O'Keefe was writing about (June 20) when he challenged your Irish correspondent and pointed out that we are the best-fed people in the world and the best-housed in Europe. The answer is simple. Eoin was writing about the country in which he and Gabriel and I live, a demonstrably prosperous country and one in which social conditions have improved cumulatively over the last 40 years.
In his attempt to disprove Eoin's case, Gabriel mentions two Irish priests, "one a Jesuit, one a Dominican" (a description which helps to identify the priests but adds no force to the argument), felt impelled "to associate themselves with public social protest." What he does not make clear, however, is that the protest with which these two priests associated themselves was concerned not with general social conditions but with what some people think fit to refer to as "Dublin's housing scandal." And Gabriel knows as well as I do (since he grew up in Dublin about the same time) that the city is ringed with ever-spreading working and lower middle-class suburbs, and that its efforts to provide houses for the people are a cause for pride rather than shame. (It was this, incidentally, which led one of our Ministers to spoil his defence of Dublin's housing record by an unfortunate reference to "an alleged cleric," since the understandable reaction to this piece of bad manners obscured the real point at issue.) In his closing sentence Gabriel Fallon says, "though the end is not yet, the end will come." I share his fears, for there is plenty of evidence that subversive forces are at work in Ireland. But if the revolution comes it will come, not as the result of injustices screaming to heaven for vengeance, but from the activities of those whose business it is—in Ireland as everywhere else — to exploit grievances; and it is a matter of surprise and regret to me that Gabriel, who like myself is committed to the democratic way of life, should miss no chance of exaggerating such grievances as we have. John D. Sheridan Dublin 6.