Sir: Neil Lyndon does not, to my mind, adequately explain
the confusion in the minds of both the Government and the electorate.
The Catholic 'minority' is only minor in the sense that it was deliberately hacked away from the vast majority of the inhabi- tants of the island of Ireland in 1921; its terrorist activities have arisen from their perception of the impossibility of getting what they regard as fair play, re-integration with their fellow co-religionists.
The Protestant 'majority' is not only an incredibly small minority of the population of the United Kingdom; it is also a tiny minority of the Irish people, though many Protestants have been allowed to live in peace, amity and usually a high economic position within the Catholic Republic.
The self-labelling of Protestant terrorists as 'loyalists' has been taken up by the. British media quite uncritically, and hides the fact that their murdering activities, their gun-running and their deliberate manipula- tion of their voting strength are all com- pletely counter to acceptable behaviour in the rest of the United Kingdom, while their `loyalty' is not, as they claim, to the Crown, the Flag and Parliament but to their own sectarian, segregationist policies.
Until everyone has been clearly appraised of these basic facts, any referen- dum would be a charade.
Kenneth R. Lake
London E17
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