Letters: Time for people to show caution

Irish foreign affairs minister Simon Coveney may have lost the run of himself by discussing elections in Northern Ireland. It is not his purview to discuss such matters.

As an Irish citizen in the Republic I was surprised and even shocked that he would broach the subject of elections in Northern Ireland from a positional and preferential standpoint. We have never seen such inroads before and if such comments were made at the height of the Troubles, it would have been regarded as an international incident provoking perhaps an extreme response from unionist parties, never mind loyalists. As it is, Sir Jeffery Donaldson has simply remarked, “It is entirely a matter for the secretary of state to decide when an election will be held.”

The situation in Northern Ireland is not a good one and we have now heard of harrowing murmurs of the status of ceasefires being affected. It is indeed time for caution and for everybody to know their place and not get carried away.

To my mind, things have changed in Northern Ireland away from the dark, old days and some of the proof of that is in the brilliant restoration of Bank Buildings in Belfast and the creation of hundreds of jobs in Primark, but traditional unionist attitudes for all unionists remain no matter what party they are a member of. Northern Ireland is Northern Ireland, the Republic is the Republic.

Maurice Fitzgerald, Shanbally, Co Cork