Letter: Irish president

Sir: As a Protestant citizen of the Irish Republic, I am deeply dismayed by the election of Mary McAleese as our President (report, 1 November) for two reasons in particular.

First, while our government professes to be working for peace in Northern Ireland, it has aggressively promoted an unabashed Northern Irish nationalist for President at a particularly sensitive time, when 40 per cent of Unionists remain outside the peace talks. Ken Maginnis has said that this confirms Unionists in the belief that they cannot do meaningful business with Dublin.

The second reason is that those who voted for Mary McAleese (only 21 per cent of the total electorate, as over 50 per cent abstained) could not, or would not, see through the nonsense of her claiming to "build bridges" to the Unionists, the very people she has strongly criticised over many years while working in Northern Ireland. She has even referred to Northern Ireland in the past as an "archetypal police state". Those who saw through this smokescreen, and still voted for Mary McAleese, frighten me even more, as they are declaring their lack of interest in pluralism and confirm their desire for a Catholic island for a Catholic nationalist people

The main opposition candidate, Mary Banotti, is a genuine pluralist of a gentle disposition with an excellent record of public service. British people, with justification, often accuse people in Northern Ireland of living in the past. Sadly, if they have not done so already, they now have justification for including the citizens of the Irish Republic, just at the time when Mary Robinson was trying to show the way to a pluralist future.

ROBIN BURY

Killiney, Co Dublin