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Your report "Troubles and strife as IRA historian draws peers' fire" (3 July) gives the misleading impression that our conference was dominated by the Kilmichael debate. In fact, over two days we heard 28 papers that looked at many different aspects of the Irish Republican Brotherhood over its 60-year history. Peter Hart's keynote examined the Fenians in the context of other 19th-century revolutionary secret societies. Along with a selection of the papers, it will be included in the volume The Black Hand of Republicanism: the Fenians and History published next June by Irish Academic Press.

James McConnel and Fearghal McGarry, University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast.