Volte-face
Sir: The spectacle of the well-known Roman Catholic apologist, Mr St John-Stevas, championing individual rights in the House of Commons must have come as a somewhat startling volte-face to those of us who are not Roman Catholics but who live in predominantly Roman Catholic Eire.
Those of us who are not Roman Catholics and who would like to restrict the size of our families are nevertheless forbidden by law and by heavy penalties from the means of doing this, thanks to the Roman Catholic prohibition of birth control. Similarly, books which in other countries are re- garded as normal, and even valuable, contributions to knowledge can here be swept out of circulation because they offend an intellectually jejune but intensely puritanical board of censors. In recent years an anthropological textbook by the doyen of American anthropologists, Dr Margaret Mead, and a social documentary of intense interest by the Italian social reformer, Danilo Dolci, have been so banned.
As is well known, there is a powerful lobby at Westminster dedicated to exposing what they call Northern Ireland's disregard for individual rights. In this country we are faced with an epidemic of neuroses among young married women unable to cope with excessive families, and with the inability to procure books of serious intellectual content in some subjects without an appeal to the authorities to let them in.
One does not therefore need to be a Paisleyite to suggest that the boot of disregard for individual rights is not all on one foot!
Wynne Jones Knockaney Rectory, Hospital, Co. Limerick, Eire
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