Ulster's Fighting Advocate
SIR,—Mr. A. P. Ryan tells your readers, in his review of Mr. Montgomery Hyde's Carson, that Stormont, the Northern Ireland House of Parliament, is " grim "—a word, which, of all words, is the least applicable to this handsome House. Eireans, like nearly all Gaels, are deficient in artistic impulse, and they are seldom sound on aesthetics because they confuse art with politics. Their poetry is paltry, and their architecture is deplorable, culminating, at best, in the empty Round Towers about which so much nonsense' has been written. If it had not been for the Anglo-Irish,' who will probably have ceased to exist in Eire by the end of the present century, Dublin would be destitute of anything remotely resembling architecture. All that the Eireans could do with the handsome houses and noble squares with which the Anglo-Irish endowed them was to turn them into slums to be inhabited by the more slovenly of the characters created by Mr. Sean O'Casey. But Mr. Ryan has been in England long enough to have shed some of the terrible taint of Eireanism; and perhaps he will tell a simple Ulsterman who holds tenaciously the belief that Stormont is the handsomest House of Parliament in these islands, why he calls it " grim." Stormont is fine in itself and is perfectly placed. When I sat outside it in the April sunshine and looked at the lovely green hills of Down by which it is surrounded, I felt proud of my countryman, the first Lord Craigavon, who, more than any single person, was responsible for choosing its site, and proud of my people who had the grace of spirit to build it.—Yours faithfully,
Honey Ditches, Seaton, Devon.
ST. JOHN ERVINE.
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