THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 9, 1994 TAG: 9409090020
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 41 lines
While your cautionary response to the IRA's cease fire is certainly warranted, your choice of a mentor on Irish affairs is odd (``Orange and green,'' editorial, Sept. 2).
Conor Cruise O'Brien (known derisively in Ireland as The Cruiser) is best known for having gotten censorship laws passed in the Republic of Ireland hindering the free flow of information on the situation in Northern Ireland. If Conor C. O'Brien is one of the most perceptive observers of Northern Ireland, perhaps it is because his censorship laws have denied others the right to know what has been going on there.
That the editorial page editor of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star chooses a pro-censorship editor (O'Brien was the editor in chief of the London Observer from 1978 through 1981) as a mentor is somewhat unsettling. Further, Conor O'Brien is such an extreme Anglophile that he appears to be running for either the title of ``Most Anglophilic Irishman Ever'' or for a British knighthood for his services to the British crown.
On the same day as the editorial on the cease-fire, your paper ran an article from the Deutsche Presse Agentur listing some of the bloodiest events in the 25 years of fighting. It left out the bloodiest of all - the killing by bombs of 33 people on May 17, 1974, in the Republic of Ireland by Northern Ireland loyalists believed by many to be aided by British Military Intelligence. Perhaps Conor O'Brien's censorship laws were a factor in the omission.
Unfortunately, we have already seen that having one side in a struggle lay down their weapons does not effect a complete cessation of violence. This morning it was reported that the loyalists had killed a member of the Catholic community overnight.
WILLIAM L. HICKEY
Virginia Beach, Sept. 2, 1994 by CNB