Madam, - The fascinating debate on these pages about Irishmen in British uniforms illuminates the persistent fault line in Irish political culture. In 1798, Wolfe Tone pronounced that the cause of the United Irishmen was "to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter".
If you wish to see the fulfilment of this Republican aspiration, as I do, it is worth asking afresh: Why does this laudable aspiration find so little resonance among most of the Protestants and Dissenters of today's Ireland? This being Ireland, of course, we must turn the clock back in order to look ahead.
1798 was a bad year for my family. Allen Ellison, an unarmed farmer from Killane, Co Wexford, was piked to death at Vinegar Hill. His wife, Eliza, and their six children were locked in the Killane church, around which bundles of faggots were piled high as a mob with lighted torches chanted they would make an "orange pie of them".
I would not be writing this today, but for an old Catholic woman, "Peggy the Pishogue". She stole out of the village and found a horseman who rode to Kiledmond for help. A detachment of cavalry galloped to the rescue of my surviving, no doubt terrified, ancestors, who left Killane for good, making their way to Dublin, where, after much travail, the family made good lives for themselves as shopkeepers.
For Allen, my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather, the rhetoric of republican principle and the reality of sectarian hatreds were catastrophically detached. When Republican politicians today seek to go upstream of the recent Troubles, stand beside to the grave of Wolfe Tone and reaffirm their commitment to his ideals, many Protestants, who see the Rising through the narrow lens of Scullabogue where the faggots were actually lit, view the gesture with disdain. The same could be said of the Easter military pageantry. Ulster Protestants, uninterested in the subtleties of politics in the Republic, see this as sacrilegious State amnesia towards the fate of other young Irishmen of the time.
Republicans are from the other side.
Visiting Belfast last week, I drove between forbidding avenues of loyalist banners. I tried, and failed, to think of any annual official rituals of the Irish Republic that celebrate things that matter to the people who hang these flags. I wondered whether, if there were such rituals, we might come closer to achieving Tone's ideals.
Last May, for the very first time, the President addressed the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in Galway, and it's difficult to convey the impact of this gesture to Irish Anglicans. But this was probably a one-off event and of little relevance to the Dissenter inhabitants of East Belfast.
So we return to the subject of Irishmen in British uniforms. On October 7th, a "peace park" in Castlebar, Co Mayo will be opened by the President (http://www.mayomemorialpeacepark.org/). It records the names of thousands of soldiers from the county killed in the World Wars, in Korea and Vietnam. As far as I know, it is a first in the Republic.
With such initiatives, we on this side of the Border can show there is a shared history in which Ulster Protestants can see themselves reflected and not rejected. Today's Anglo-Irish, long schooled in political timidity, should be encouraged in public life to expand Tone's legacy beyond those who prescribe the narrative of Irish history and thus what it is to be Irish.
I see no orange in the Union Jack. This is my family's country, thanks to that wise old papist, Peggy. - Yours etc,
JULIAN ELLISON,
Ardagh,
Newport,
Co Mayo.