Your columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia mentioned my name in her column in The Malta Independent on Sunday last weekend. The problem is that she referred to me as “Black and Tan”. I asked the editor to explain why she did this. The term “Black and Tan” or “Tan” remains a pejorative term for British people living in Ireland and to say I am not happy with what I perceive to be an obviously libellous remark would be an understatement. Given the fact that this group operated in Ireland in around 1920 to 1921, I see no good reason for your paper to describe me or anyone else for that matter in such a way. I suggested that the columnist retracted this statement and printed an apology. Obviously I have received no apology from Daphne Caruana Galizia, but then, as my late grandfather used to say, what more can you expect from a pig but a grunt?

This woman, and believe me I use the term loosely, obviously thinks she is above the law and can say or do whatever she wants. She treats authority with total contempt but only because the law, it would seem, has so little respect for itself in Malta that it allows this to happen. What she writes in her silly little blog is of little concern to anybody apart from her small group of fans who obviously share her pathetic views. But when she writes in The Independent she does so with the tacit support of the paper’s editor. Therefore, whatever she says in her column in that publication has to also be the view of The Independent, otherwise she would not be allowed to say it – unless, of course, she is given free rein to write whatever she wants which, I would suggest given the sort of

garbage she writes, is a recipe for disaster.

I also fail to see why she was allowed to use a terrible tragedy in Norway as an excuse to attack people through the pages of your paper, especially when that attack is a pure fabrication since at no point did I enter into Saturday’s Times online debate about the Renzo Piano open-air theatre. To see your columnist exploiting this terrible tragedy for her political ends with the obvious support of the editorial staff at The Independent is an insult at such a time.

James A. Tyrell

COUNTY ANTRIM

N. IRELAND