IN HER google-ish profile of Gary Lineker (News, 4 June), Fiona Looney describes Michelle Lineker "escaping the prison of a 20-year marriage".

What does Fiona Looney know that entitles her . . . in the midst of an otherwise banal and red-topcopy article . . . to foist her snide, superficial and baseless opinion on the reality of the Linekers' marriage on her readers? This is real life, Fiona, not some romping farce where people's feelings are irrelevant.

John MacKenna Apple Field, Prusselstown, Athy, Co Kildare

Irish Citizen Army's role in Civil War From Michael Cunninghan

SHANE Coleman's review of The Wind That Shakes the Barley questions Ken Loach's inclusion of an "improbable" character . . .a Dublin socialist member of the Irish Citizen Army who fights with Anti-Treaty IRA in Cork.

The members of what Lenin described as the "first Red Army in the world" fought not only in the War of Independence but also with the republicans against the Free State army during the Civil War.

As early as the historic 1917 by-election in Co Roscommon, the Citizen Army sent an armed unit to the county, to protect Count Plunkett's election workers. R M Fox, in his authoritative History of the Irish Citizen Army, states that during the Civil War "individual Citizen Army men were attached to Republican Flying Columns" and that one group of 12 "fought as a unit in the Wicklow mountains". In total, 125 men and 18 women from the Irish Citizen Army fought on the Republican side. Their motivation for doing so best summed up James Larkin's 1921 statement against the Treaty, written from Comstock Gaol in the USA: "We serve the common people of Ireland only. We are of them, therefore we are with them to the ultimate consummation."

Michael Cunningham Brisbane, Australia

Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope From Marie Celine O'Byrne S.S.L.

RE: 'The Man They Call Hitler's Pope', by Peter Stanford, (Review, 28 May). Who are 'they'?

Hitler's Pope was the title chosen by John Cornwell for his hostile biography of Pius XII. Cornwell presents Pius as anti-Semitic and an ally of Hitler. To his credit he has since admitted factual errors (not widely acknowledged by the press) but the book gives quite a distorted picture of the pope's attitudes and activities during the terrible years of the Third Reich.

There was no criticism of Pius XII in relation to Hitler's brutal regime until the publication in 1963 of a play by Rolf Hochhuth, depicting Pius as a coward and a pawn of Hitler.

Historians have shown the play to be factually untrue but many commentators have accepted it uncritically. It is important to let the voices of Jewish people speak in Pius XII's defence. Pinchas Lapide, a senior Israeli diplomat and historian, in his book The Last Three Popes and the Jews writes that Pius XII's actions saved 800,000 Jews.

On the pope's death in 1958, the president of the World Jewish Congress, Dr Nahum Goldman, states: "with special gratitude we remember all Pius Xll has done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods in their entire history".

Rabbi David Dalin's recent book, The Myth of Hitler's Pope, gives a comprehensive defence of Pius XII and disagrees strongly with Cornwell's depiction of the pope's actions and attitudes during the war. Other voices support the above views.

Nicholas Kunkel, a German army officer, stated that in 1943, German forces in Rome were ordered to round up the city's Jews but that only 1,000 were arrested, over 7,000 having taken refuge in the Vatican (where German soldiers were not free to pursue them).

While Stanford writes disparagingly of Pius XII's Christmas message of 1942, The New York Times, referring to the message, expressed a different opinion; "[Pius XII] is about the only ruler left on the continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all". In his letter, Pius had denounced "the persecution of hundreds of thousands of people without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race".

This is presumably the "single ambiguous sentence" referred to by Stanford. It was not ambiguous enough for the Nazi Command, which rushed to print "[the pope's] speech is one long attack on everything we stand for. . . he makes himself the mouthpiece of Jewish war criminals". In a Newsweek article in 1998, Kenneth Woodward examines the accusations of Pius XII's wartime record and concluded "no one person, Hitler excepted, was responsible for the Holocaust, and no one person, Pius XII included, could have prevented it. In choosing diplomacy over protest, Pius had his priorities right. It's time to lay off this pope."

Marie Celine O'Byrne S.S.L. St Louis Convent, Monaghan

Rewriting history, Provo-style From Tom Carew

THE Provos are busy rewriting the hunger strike story. Having lost their long war on the Irish people, they are now trying to replay the match with their own rules and referee. As usual, thay are very misleading and unbalanced.

Their 1981 H-Block agitation did not have widespread support, as only two IRA men were elected TDs, and most of their "demonstrators" were Northern IRA members and supporters bussed to Dublin, who attacked and injured our gardai protecting the UK embassy. Further their hunger strikers were not simply "republican" prisoners, but convicted PIRA/INLA gunmen or bombers.

The Irish government faced similar IRA blackmail in 1940 to 1946, and let three IRA gunmen choose to die, rather than give in to terror . . . the IRA and the aerial bombs of their Nazi allies together murdered 19 Irish police in 1940-44 (north & south . . . six in the south). And all but a handful of our 31 gardai who lost their lives on duty, like the RUC, were slain by a so-called "republican" gang. The new Provo propaganda campaign completely ignores that brutal reality . . . more evident since the moving RTE documentary on the PIRA murder of Det Jerry McCabe, and attempt on his colleague, Ben O'Sullivan, while escorting a post office van.

The publicity ignores the free choice of 10 convicted prisoners from two secret, armed revolutionary gangs to use the emotional blackmail of a hungerstrike to enforce their will within the prison system in 1981.

Why not a single word about 29 public servants . . . two retired men, two women, three governors, a hospital officer, a chief instructor, three clerks, and 17 male officers of various levels . . . who are on the NI Prison Service roll of honour?

Tom Carew, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.

Criticising Benedict XVI is the lazy option From James McGrath

IT IS obvious that Peter Popham (Sunday Tribune, 4 June) set out to find nothing but fault with whatever Pope Benedict XVI said at Auschwitz. He first attacks the pope for speaking in his own native tongue. It wouldn't occur to Mr Popham that this is the language the pope would use to best express his thoughts and feelings on such an occasion. He goes on to attack him for not using the phrase 'anti-Semitism', for not "apologising" on behalf of Germany. The pope was addressing it as a crime against humanity, and wasn't there as a representative of Germany.

In criticising him for not apologising on behalf of the church, and for the "silence of Pius XII", Popham demonstrates his lack of historical perspective. In this, he merely repeats the slanders against Pius XII that originated in a revisionist and false history dating from the 1960s.

This has become so widespread as to be accepted as self-evidently true in many circles. For the record, Pius XII was advised both by Jewish and Catholic leaders in Nazi-occupied territories not to denounce Nazi atrocities publicly, as such denouncements, easily made from the Vatican, would provoke far greater reprisals against them. The charge against Pius XII also ignores the fact that thousands of Jews were saved by the underground work of the church throughout Europe, on direct orders of Pius XII, and through the direct intervention of the Vatican state itself.

Of course, Popham's attempt at denigrating the present pontiff includes the charge of his membership of Hitler Youth. Has he never heard of conscription under penalty of death? When Benedict referred to Israel as the "taproot" of Christianity, he was making a statement of fact.

In drawing a link between Jews and Christians, the pope again finds himself condemned by Popham, who draws the outlandish conclusion that the Jews are somehow "bit-players and bystanders" in their own extermination.

I find it fascinating that not a single point made by Benedict XVI meets with the high standards set by Popham. Of course, writing an article which would have agreed with the pope's message would have presented him with a far greater challenge.

James McGrath Birchgrove, Hollyford, Co Tipperary