'Exporting Death to Ireland': An Exchange Of Views
older vessel, an eighteenth-century merchantman containing gold and gems bound from the New World for the mistress of the King of Spain. With the morphine as a decoy for Cloche the divers go...
...I can find no one who is sending arms to Ireland...
...I did not intend to make the arms issue the mainspring of that problem: justice is the core of it and without justice there will be no peace, or, at least, no lasting peace...
...and even up to the present time they have been denied representation in the Executive...
...DR...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN i,~ the President o/ Bucknell University in Pennsylvania...
...authorities will change the behavior of gun-running groups...
...We probably sense its disaster as well as we ever will without going there...
...Why do they act as they do...
...I wish you had asked Mr...
...Shame on you...
...Her pocketbook rests against the cheap chair, her market bag leans uncertainly against the pedestal of the table...
...That is akin to having Pinochet's man tell us what the people of Chile are thinking...
...The Irish in the North have had to depend on themselves in this struggle for equality, and for freedom...
...Nixon, Ford, and Carter have ignored them completely...
...I favor the IRA, I would give them money for arms, if I could find a way to do it, because such arms are defensive...
...The reason for the trouble in Northern Ireland for the last eight years is that there has been a denial of civil rights to the Irish minority...
...How did they become killers and Marxists, if that's what they are, and how can they be changed...
...Lll I I I azm exchange e l v ewx 'Exporting Death to Ireland' New York, N.Y...
...The crux of the Northern Ireland problem and the cause of conflict and bloodshed is the absence of equality for the Irish minority...
...Messrs...
...The larger notion that "lost" causes ought to be abandoned is more silly than cynical...
...They have had no help from anyone...
...While it is seemingly impossible to discover a theme which runs through the image of America chronicled by its artists--and Taylor does not attempt the synopsis there seem to me to be two themes which repeat themselves so consistently that they are worth noting...
...The four "leading" Irish Americans may have been taken in but you should not...
...Carter and Mr...
...He does not seek only the masterpiece but is interested also in uncultivated art as a figure for a type of American sensibility...
...If the Indian Princess's ,~ornucopia runneth over, so doth the shopping bag, the lunch, the clothes, the figure of the Lady at Table...
...To the Editors: "Exporting Death to Ireland" [June 10] was a bad article and it was unethical of Commonweal to print it...
...MSGR...
...It is one of the issues which brought down the government in a general strike in 1974 when the Unionist majority refused to continue the coalition government in which the Irish minority were represented for a few months...
...To the Editors: Desmond Fisher's article "Exporting Death to Ireland" [June 1.0] caught my interest as an IrishAmerican with a horror of bloodshed...
...If peace is established without equality, and the turmoil is ended through revulsion, there is little doubt that another generation will take up the issue again...
...they have been oppressed by tendentious laws...
...The question I was raising was whether a continuation of the IRA's shootings and bombings would bring that justice nearer or whether their campaign, supported as it is by arms and money from U.S...
...When this has been accomplished, the basis of support for the IRA in the minority community will evanesce, and peace will result, not through the peace movement, but through the realization of justice...
...On all the topics he has something interesting to say and the book can be read as an essay on arts or general intellectual and cultural history...
...First, the utility of inflating the Irish body count to the American scale in order to bring it home to us is very dubious...
...You let the writer say things such as "Irish people, North and South, were pleased etc...
...Moreover, as was the case with Vietnam, television brings home what figures may not...
...I share his hope that the export of guns will stop, but I question his understanding of how to stop it...
...Using the titles of two of his other books, this colleclection of pieces on Americana is an exercise in Learning to Look and proof that To See Is To Think...
...Finally, the perception of the IRA cause as a lost one will be hard to come by at this distance, given the nature of guerrilla war and its reportage...
...Commonweal: 501 Barbara Sweeney Francis is probably right in dismissing as pointless my attempt to illustrate the extent of the death-toll in Northern Ireland by scaling it up to a comparable U.S...
...He writes of America, about which he knows nothing, not about Ireland and its problems, which would seem to be the point of the violence in the North of Ireland...
...DESMOND FISHER J oshua C. Taylor's elegantly presented and richly insightful study of the image Americanus is bracketed by the figures of two women: the first never was, the last "is" too much...
...They should not be made to endure what the present generation is suffering...
...When a single death by violence has no haeaning, it is doubtful that 1000 similar ones will...
...Rice...
...Since the beginning of that government in 1920, they have been discriminated against...
...Msgr...
...We need a new approach to violence and revolution, and this is a good place to start...
...She is probably right, too, in her other views except for the "silliness" of abandoning a lost cause...
...The image is a symbol, not a portrait of actuality...
...The other was the repudiation of the Council of Ireland in the Northern Ireland Assembly...
...Who are the IRA and what do they want...
...Fisher appears to be doing his duty well...
...Reva Rubenstein accuses you of using an article by a member of the staff of the Irish broadcasting service, a fact which you made known at the time...
...5 August 1977:502...
...Among the many paradoxes which mark this long trajectory of images, is that the non-existent symbol clearly conveys a message, while the confrontation with the eternally polyeuruthaned sloven sitting in our space yet incapable of discourse forbids communication...
...R~VX RUBENSTE]N Pittsburgh, Pa...
...Two thirds of the total has been killed deliberately by Protestant Ultras...
...Despite this implication, however, the false bottom in both the supply ship and the film's plot make for a pretty good adventure story...
...Brzezinski, his mentor, it appears that their zeal for human rights does not apply to the Irish since there is no seeming political profit to be gained there...
...Taylor, Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, has written in America as Art a series of studies on the way in which America has been seen and symbolized by visual artists from the first European guesses at American fauna to the last observed fallout of the present age...
...It is the context, rather than the statistics, of violent death that engenders grief and outrage...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN LOOKING AT AMERICA Amertea As A r t JOSHUA C. TAYLOR National Collection o/Fine Arts/ Smithsonian Press, $25 The initial symbolic promise of so much has become the actual reality of too much...
...These themes are secularism and self-creation...
...In an article on the peace movement titled, "On the Road to Drogheda" by James Gilhooley, Commonweal, March 18, he said that at such a peace meeting in Ireland, 1976, he asked Protestant ministers whether there was to be justice as well as peace for the Irish in Northern Ireland...
...John Branigan has given an admirably succinct and, in my view, correct statement of the Northern Ireland problem...
...A deeper ex$ August 1977:500 change over these questions, disentangled from politic "branding" and inept intervention, will take us a long way in an intriguing direction...
...They have a saying in the British House of Commons when a member speaks to a brief: "Declare your interest, Sir...
...The figure that never was is the so-called "Indian Princess" exemplified in a print by Jacob van Meurs of 1671...
...He found them evasive and unwilling to give a direct answer...
...level...
...Why then the overwhelming Catholic reaction to the peace movement and the condemnations of the IRA by Catholic prelates, priests and politicians who are presumably among the community requiring defense and who presumably know a lot more about the IRA than Msgr...
...She then cries shame on you for neglecting to state my position...
...Not all the periods are equally rich in extant visual images and Taylor has been free in extending his analysis to literary material...
...CHARLES O. RICE Santa Fe., N.M...
...The article was written by a functionary of the Republic of Ireland, a repressive regime, where trial by jury and other civil rights are in abeyance, where there is torture...
...You have fallen for a seam...
...JOHN BRANIOAN Reply Dublin To the Editors: Dr...
...Of the civilians killed in the North very few were killed by the IRA...
...Official harassment and the interest of federal agencies in our activities may well be among the social factors responsible for the romantic lure of the Irish revolution in the first place, which may seem a simple revolution with someone to shoot, quite unlike our own morass...
...This was pledged by Britain in a White Paper, 1973...
...To the Editors: I find it regrettable that your expert on Irish affairs is an employee of Irish state television and radio, and as such an official of Dr...
...I believe the Southern Irish Government in concert with Britain is trying to muzzle Irish Americans...
...Peace will come when the British Government secures justice and equality for the Irish minority in fact and not by promises...
...For many years an outstanding teacher at the University of Chicago, Taylor brings to these essays the clarity of exposition and subtlety of interpretation which his pupils (including this one) well remember...
...As Taylor says, "We are so dose to these characters physically and psychologically, and yet there is no possibility of communication . . . a consciousness of a simple 'is-hess' . . . stop(s) us cold . . . . " If the Indian Princess formed a message for America, the Lady at Table seems to say that American life has no message, it simply exists utterly resisting meaningful direction and statement...
...It is not...
...In between the symbolic savage and Hanson's simple salvage, Taylor studies seven images of America: the American Cousin, the virtue of American landscape, the frontier (a chapter written by John Cawleti), optimistic urban images, folk and mass art, the world art of the New York school of abstractionists and, finally, pop and photo realism...
...Southern Irish governments have been hoodwinked into abandoning the Irish Catholics of the North in the past...
...sympathizers, is only making the community divisions deeper and perpetuating them for another generation or two...
...The British Government in London should try once again to re-establish a coalition on the same basis as the government formed in 1973/4 in which both groups were represented in the Executive...
...Why do we want to arm them...
...It's too bad that we don't go to movies any more just to be entertained by such fare...
...Rice would give the IRA money for arms "because such arms are defensive...
...The Noraid countersuit suggests instead that harassment has a galvanizing effect...
...For Mr...
...The final image in Taylor's study is called Lady at Table 1971 by Duane Hanson...
...and would we still if we knew them...
...If that is true, increased indefinite pressure at home should lead to more guns and not fewer...
...Instead of seventeenth century engraved symbol (a small sheet of paper with multiple copies to be distributed for edification, enchantment or to entice colonists), we have the life-size, utterly life-like figure of an overweight woman sitting at an actual table, in actual clothes, reading the National Enquirer...
...We have seen Belfast...
...Fisher to declare his interest before you foisted him on your liberal readers...
...If a lost cause in Vietnam was abandoned, whether because of the nature of the television reportage or otherwise, why not one in Northern Ireland...
...I visited Ireland last summer and was astonished that this story of censorship on television and radio in the Republic is not better known here...
...The fact that Ian Paisley and his Unionist ultras were not successful in inducing a general strike in May of this year might indicate that more of the Unionists are willing to compromise than before...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, who has directed that no Republican--Provisional or Official--may appear on the air waves he controls...
...BARBARA SV4EENEY FRANCIS Staten Island, N.Y...
...With the morphine as a decoy for Cloche the divers go after the jewelry, and there is a certain racism here in the fancy that drugs are a fit booty for a black man while only WASPs can appreciate the value of art and history...
...I fail to follow her logic...
...We go only out of more urgent cultural needs now, and those The Deep never gets down to...
...To the Editors: Desmond Fisher, in his article, "Exporting Death to Ireland," [June I0] makes the issue of arms the mainspring of the problem in the North of Ireland...
...A moderately dark young woman clad in feathers and tobacco leaves, she appears to be standing on the lip of a cornucopia scattering gold to an ill-assorted group of Indians, Europeans and goats...
...He quotes Bishop Daly of Derry as saying that justice be included with peace...
...Second, it seems quite unfikely that harassment by U.S...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The IRA could not exist if the alternative to it were not so horrible...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
