Chris Trude's main point that 99.5% of the British population had to bail out the slavers through government-enforced taxes (Letters, 2 September) is a good one, but he makes a few mistakes. Not all British slave owners lived in Britain, nor were they all aristocrats. My great-great-great-grandfather, George Henry Burt, himself the great-great-grandson of one of the 17th-century settlers, owned 129 of the 19,780 slaves in St Kitts at the time of emancipation and took his share of the £329,393 compensation paid to the slave-owners in St Kitts. He lived in the West Indies and was most certainly not an aristocrat.

Chris Birch

London

• The recent letters on the compensation to slave owners discuss what is only one part of the story of slavery. Many are unaware of what happened in Ireland: starting in the reign of Elizabeth I, tens of thousands of men, women and children disappeared from Ireland. Catholics were shipped off to plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean. The cry "to hell or Barbados" was official policy.

Plantation owners used Irish women and black male slaves to produce "light-skinned offspring" who proved more valuable at market, while thousands of children under the age of 14 were kidnapped and transported as slaves. In the island of Barbados, there are the "redlegs" – the descendants of these Irish slaves. The story of Irish slaves was expunged from the school books in Ireland and England, a decision no doubt made by the British aristocracy. Compensation for slave owners confirms we placed profit (property) before people then – and we still do now.

John Berry

Herongate, Essex

• The republic of Vermont outlawed slavery in its constitution of 1777, which pre-dates both the British and French actions.

Kevin Chaffey

Enniskillen, County Fermanagh