Comparing Catalonia with Ireland or Kosovo | Letters

Dominic Keown (Letters, 12 October) compares Catalonia today to Ireland in 1916. This is beyond hyperbole. Ireland under British rule was a colonial society, impoverished and exploited, a Catholic country governed by Protestants. Catalonia, by way of comparison, is wealthy and largely self-governing with a Catalan-speaking political and business elite and schooling conducted entirely in Catalan. Far from being oppressed, Catalan separatists are making a selfish bid to keep more tax revenues at home, starving Spain’s poorer regions of investment.

Unlike Ireland’s struggle for independence, Catalan nationalism has always had a helping hand from the highest echelons of government. This should be no secret to Professor Keown, who recently spoke at a widely publicised forum at CIDOB, a Barcelona thinktank whose president, Carles Gasòliba, resigned in 2016 citing pressures from the Generalitat to act as a mouthpiece for the separatist movement.
Sergio Bacallado de Lara
Cambridge

• The EU has not recognised or supported the democratic wishes of Catalans for independence. Indeed, it has refused to condemn the hideous scenes of Madrid police closing polling stations and battering voters. What a contrast to the recognition of the Kosovo referendum and the independence of a state built on terrorism and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs but which had full support from the EU. Catalonia was a bastion against fascism in the 1930s while Kosovo was a haven of fascism on the 1940s. That might explain it.
Rodney Atkinson
Stocksfield, Northumberland

• Most of the world has seen shocking pictures of Guardia Civil and Policía Nacional violence on peaceful civilians in Catalonia. Most of Spain has not, and certainly not on mainstream TV. The media problem is not some imagined Catalan cocoon (there have been countless real debates with all views freely expressed on Catalan TV, none on Spanish TV. And 80% of TV viewing in Catalonia is of Spanish-language Spanish channels), the problem is that Spanish media has misrepresented Catalonia and Catalan issues for years, thus ensuring that most Spanish people haven’t a clue what’s going on in Catalonia and much less why.
Francis Humble
Sitges, Catalonia

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