Dear Madam, - As many of your readers may already be aware, during the month of August there were commemorations of two very different personalities associated with the Catholic Church community in Fermanagh - Bobby Sands and Maximilian Kolbe. Both were courageous men and were subjected to death by starvation. The former was a militant republican idealogue who used suicide by starvation as a weapon in pursuit of ideological aims; the latter was a Franciscan priest who was murdered by starvation and lethal injection for truely living a humble Catholic priestly vocation.

Bobby and Maximilian are both considered to be heroes by their respective ideological and Catholic followers, which unfortunately and illogically, in Fermanagh and other parts of Northen Ireland, tend to be conflated. Maximilian, died, along with a million murdered European Jews and others - including the Dutch Jewish diarist Anne Frank and the German Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, in Auschwitz concentration death camp during the second world war. Maximilian was declared a Saint by the Latin Catholic Church (as was Edith Stein). Bobby, died in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, and is seen as a republican Icon.

One might ask were the decisions that these two brave men took and which led to their deaths, and which have given them martyr status in their respective communities, on a par or are they different? I would suggest that not alone are their thinking and actions different but that they are diametrically opposed.

Maximilian, by substituting himself to save the life of a condemned man in Auschwitz, showed that he gave first allegiance to God, the creator of the Universe, and placed a high value on human life which he saw as a precious gift from God. Bobby, in the manner of his death, showed that he gave first allegiance to an ideology and he demonstrated that he valued this secular ideology more than life itself. Maximilian voluntarily took the place of, and thereby saved the life of another man, who had a wife and young children to support, and who had been condemned to the starvation cell in Auschwitz; Bobby, on the other hand, by choosing voluntarly to take his own life showed that he considered himself and his life autonomous of any other power and/or authority and to do with as he wished; in effect by killing himself he placed himself and his life above God the creator. His gruesome death by self inflicted starvation, though courageous, is clearly the very antithesis of Christianity and the rejection of Catholic belief.

Yours faithfully, Micheal O’Cathail Co Fermanagh