Dear Editor
Dear Editor Reviewing Ireland An error has crept into my article, "Facing Reality in Ulster" (NL, March 6), which may have caused some confusion in readers' minds. Allow me to correct it. I argue...
...At least we would then not have had half a century of fruitless violence and an apparently endless train of resentments and frictions...
...And thus far it has been powerless to prevent the shutdowns...
...3. Few workers will receive severance...
...It is operating three shifts per day, seven days per week...
...The union may not have been silent, but it hasn't exactly been vocal either...
...It has also of course revealed their incompetence, since their ostensible target was the Parachute Regiment active in Londonderry on "Bloody Sunday...
...In Everett, Weyerhaeuser's is not the only pulp operation closing...
...Robert Lekachman was giving reign to his prejudices...
...During that period each employe must decide between taking his severance (or early retirement) or accepting a transfer, most likely to another town...
...Weyerhaeuser's Everett Sulphite mill will close, under the conditions of its state permit, because it was in effect ordered to create a new air pollution problem in a prime residential area as a means of reducing its deep water diffusion of wood sugars??which, on the basis of most of the scientific evidence, is not now harming the salt waters of Port Gardner Bay or its marine life...
...It will close in mid-1973...
...I would point out that: 1. The mill has not closed...
...I wrote that the "Official IRA" was opposed to violence...
...6. The mill involved is not a lumber mill, but a mill which produces specialty pulps for the manufacture of textiles, plastics and chemicals...
...It seems to me that anyone with scholarly pretentions should not declare, without setting forth the reason for his opinion, that the Gross National Product will increase to an extent less than one-half that projected by the Administration...
...The research on the mill closure around which he keys his piece is, however, somewhat more than lacking...
...There may be more violence to come...
...One of the stranger things about "the troubles" of the '20s was that the North stood apart and was in no way involved??once the British had withdrawn??and that far more Irishmen were killed, or interned, by the Republican Free State authorities than by the British Army...
...This was true at the time of writing...
...and the Scott Paper plant has curtailed production, throwing 100 men out of work...
...There appears to be a power struggle at the top of the Official leadership (some of whom Prime Minister John Lynch has now had arrested...
...No one can tell for sure why the "Officials" have changed their tactics in this way??certainly they have done themselves no good, for the Aldershot massacre has profoundly shocked opinion both in England and Ireland...
...7. It is not on a river...
...Thus the IRA did not fight "against better-trained Northern troops," but against better trained Free State troops, equipped with British arms...
...Tacoma, Wash...
...the second act of "Official" violence was the??very nearly successful??attempted assassination of an Ulster Minister, John Taylor...
...Most will be transferred...
...It happens that I do not agree with many of the policies of the present Administration, and that the forecasts of both government and academic economists have often been less than precise...
...New York Citv Rudolph Weissman W. E. Hittton & Co...
...The Simpson-Lee Paper Company will soon be shutting down...
...All one can safely say (as of this writing, February 28) is that the incidents confirm the extreme difficulty of predicting how events will move, and the true reason for the difficulty: Anti-Unionist forces, far from being "monolithic," are as I suggested in my article, "a fragmented mosaic, troubled by constant feuding and persona] animosities...
...The italicized word should of course read "the Free State"??what we call today "the Irish Republic...
...5. Annual timber growth far exceeds annual harvest...
...The cold, harsh reality," notes the Everett newspaper, . . is that over 1,000 working men and women will very shortly be without jobs...
...Nonetheless, I would be willing to wager a double-rich malted milk that the increase in GNP this year will be closer to $8590 billion than to the $50 billion predicted by Lekachman...
...Perhaps I should add that I have succumbed to the journalist's perpetual enemy??the too-swift passage of events...
...He says: "When the mill closed last month the union was silent...
...London John Mandek Margolis Richard Margolis has, as usual, written some excellent prose in his column, "Strange Silence in Seattle" (NL, February 7...
...These facts may seem remote and unimportant to us today, and it is even arguable that it might have been better if there had been an outright struggle between North and South in the '20s...
...The 350 men who work there will have a 16-month breather while Weyerhaeuser prepares to pack up and move on...
...I argue on the opening page that the roots of Ireland's present troubles lie in the "settlement" of 1921, and that the Provos see their present activities as a continuation of a revolution that "was never fought to a finish because of a combination of British duplicity and shameful betrayal by the newly, and democratically elected, leaders of Ulster...
...High Finance When I read "A Sour View of *72" (NL, January 10), I concluded that Dr...
...With mills failing throughout the Northwest, the lumber industry is "booming'' in a strange way...
...Since then, as readers will know, there have been two hideous acts of revenge for "Bloody Sunday," for which responsibility has been specifically claimed by the Official IRA...
...4. The lumber industry, locally and nationally, is booming, not dying...
...Thus De Valera never launched a civil war "against the North," but against his fellow Republicans in the South...
...According to Parris Bryson, an official of the Western Pulp and Paper Workers, many of the older members will undoubtedly choose severance rather than move...
...The lumber industry is dying, a victim of its own rapacious axe (and of new river antipollution laws forcing mills either to clean up or shut down...
...Tom Ambrose Weyerhaeuser Company Richard J. Margolis replies: My report on the mill's closing was premature...
...2. The union was not "silent...
...I am referring to the explosion at the British Army base of Aldershot, which succeeded in killing five waitresses, a gardener and a Roman Catholic chaplain...
...All that remained were a few tired Weyerhaeuser workers patiently awaiting their severance...
Vol. 55 • March 1972 • No. 6
