Contrasting views nurture thought

■ John F Kennedy once said that “for a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market, is a nation that is afraid of its people”. In 1926, Ireland set up The Committee on Evil Literature – but the current restrictions on freedom of speech far exceed those in the pre-War World II Ireland. For example, in 1942, senator Sir John Keane told the Seanad Éireann that 1,600 books had been banned since independence in 1922 (80 books per year on average) – but the Cambridge University Press (the world’s oldest publishing house) has, at the request of the government’s general administration of press and publication, pulled more than 300 articles (on Tiananmen and Tibet) and book reviews from its “China quarterly”, just in one week.

Much noise was made in Ireland on Stephen Fry’s blasphemy probe (which was just a publicity stunt, and which was dropped) – but no defenders of the freedom of speech protested when, in Germany, journalist Michael Stürzenberger was sentenced to six months in prison and an additional 100 hours of charitable work for posting on Facebook a historical photo of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting the Nazis in 1941.

So far, the Irish Independent has been the only major newspaper in Ireland that gives a platform to contrasting views – both among its readers and its journalists. I believe that this is the only way to prevent what Oswald Spengler described as: “Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it anymore.” Grzegorz Kolodziej Bray, Co Wicklow