Sir, – The headline to Séamus Nevin’s article (“Sir Michael O’Dwyer, apologist for the Amritsar massacre, was also an Irish nationalist”, Heritage, February 6th) is ironic.
Séamus Nevin highlights the schooling in Cork of Reginald Dyer, the man who ordered the massacre. The inference is that Irish education and culture somehow influenced Dyer’s decision to kill hundreds of Indian people. Dyer was born in India to an English family and raised there to the age of 11. He was sent to Midleton College merely because it was cheaper than English boarding schools. As it happens, the Midleton headmaster at the time was English. In fairness, however, it is impossible to believe that Rev Thomas Moore as a Christian clergyman would have approved of his past pupil’s mass murder in Amritsar. And when Dyer finished school in 1883, he spent one term as a medical student at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. The pity is that if he had not dropped out of Irish education, he could have spent his career saving lives, instead of killing people.
Michael O’Dwyer, the Irishman serving as lieutenant-governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, was, in essence, a civil servant mercenary. Ireland as a nation is in no way responsible for his approval and endorsement of Dyer’s massacre.
As Séamus Nevin points out, the IRA planned to assassinate O’Dwyer in 1923, in support of Indian independence. He doesn’t mention that, in 1940, Indian freedom fighter Udham Singh did shoot O’Dwyer dead in London in revenge for Amritsar. Many Indian people consider O’Dwyer got what he deserved and that Singh’s subsequent execution was a martyrdom for his country. It would be hard to disagree.
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At the time of the Amritsar Massacre, Ireland’s War of Independence was under way. It was in turn highly influential on India’s achievement of independence. Indian people knew that although some Irish individuals such as O’Dwyer served in their colonisation, Ireland as a nation had been colonised in the same way. This was reflected in Éamon de Valera being the guest of honour at a reception in Birmingham on January 26th, 1950, celebrating India becoming a republic. Organisers asked why they had chosen an Irishman rather than an Indian replied, “We and the Irish had strong ties of friendship. We suffered under the same tyranny for many centuries. They had the Black and Tans; we had the massacre of Amritsar.”
Revisionist insinuations that Ireland as a nation had responsibility for the Amritsar Massacre and should apologise for it are clearly not what the Indian people felt at the time. And they could not be more grossly insulting to us as a people. – Yours, etc,
FINTAN SWANTON,
Westport,
Co Mayo.