Burchill-bashing
From Mr Oliver Hume Sir: While accepting that the legendary `vicious bile to column inch' ratio in Ms Burchill's writing is calculated to shock or irritate, rather than to inform, I feel that her Diary diatribe (5 February) begs some factual correction.
First, to tar the late Siobhan McKenna with anti-Semitism is patently absurd. Miss McKenna detested all forms of racism, was a leading activist in the Irish Anti- Apartheid Movement and, in the Seventies, had as her closest. constant companion a rather charming English-Jewish chap.
Second, De Valera's infamous condo- lences to the German ambassador on Hitler's demise were prompted partly by the man's pedantic reading of diplomatic proto- col and partly by his narrow anti-British- ness, having no anti-Semitic undertones.
Third, unlike England, the Republic does not have 'a long and sordid history of anti- Semitism'. Our few sporadic outbreaks of the virus, such as the distant 'Limerick Boy- cott' episode alluded to, bear no compari- son to the more robust English tradition, stretching from the Blackshirts back to the Pogrom of York. In the current Irish parlia- ment there are three Jewish deputies, Messrs Shatter, Briscoe and Taylor, in a House of around 150 and coming from a Jewish community of fewer than 2,000.
But, then again, maybe Burchill's intem- perate outburst was merely a spoof in bad taste, and not a cheap attempt to rekindle the defunct English pastimes of anti-Popery and Paddy-bashing.
Oliver Hume
61 Sutton Court, London W4
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