Sir, – Newton Emerson once against gets prominence, especially on your website, to continue to push his unionist agenda ("Licensing next war is Adams's real legacy", Opinion & Analysis, November 23rd). There is no corresponding nationalist columnist who gets remotely the same space.
Pro-unionist columnists greatly outnumber any that expound any nationalist views in your newspaper. Why is this? Believing that the hundreds of thousands of nationalists in the North have equal rights to unionists is hardly a minority view point.
Believing that unionists should be called out on issues like rioting because their flag won’t be flown every single day of the year, or that they should give the Irish language the respect it deserves, are hardly extreme viewpoints.
Or is that the point?
To drive the centrist viewpoint so far to the unionist side that even the most benign of opinions is considered extreme.
Maybe that is why fringe unionists like John Taylor think it is perfectly sensible to say Donegal should be on the other side of the Border and that issues caused by Brexit are Ireland’s fault.
If unionists succeed in making a hard Border look like Ireland’s fault, which they are well on their way to doing, it is this type of one-sided writing that will have laid the groundwork for it. – Yours, etc,
JOHN TEMPLE,
Dromiskin,
Co Louth.