Sir, - Prof Tom Dunne (April 1st) is strongly critical of the decision by Comoradh '98 to erect a plaque at the site of an alleged rebel hospital in New Ross "for which we haven't a shred of evidence". I leave aside the question of the propriety of marking the site, but the existence of such a makeshift hospital and the fate of the wounded therein can scarcely be doubted.
Admittedly, James Alexander, writing in 1800, merely described the incineration of 75 rebels in a four-storey building, and made no mention of a hospital. (Alexander, Some Account of the first apparent symptoms of the late rebellion, Dublin, 1800, p.82.) However, the Rev James Gordon, writing in 1801, told of "the firing of a house which had been used as a hospital by the rebels where a number of men, 14 at least, who by wounds and sickness were unable to escape from the flames, were burnt to ashes."
Gordon glossed his account by adding: "I am informed by a surgeon that the burning was accidental; the bed clothes being set on fire by the wadding of the soldiers' guns who were shooting the patients in their beds." (Gordon, History of the Rebellion in Ireland Dublin, 1801), p. 145.)
The 19th-century historian W. E. H. Lecky accepted Gordon's claim that the building was a makeshift rebel hospital but, with typical even-handedness, he wrote that "the number of the victims was at least 14, and one writer places it as high as 70." (Leckey, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, iv, 445.) Such evidence may not be conclusive, but it is compelling, and certainly far beyond a "shred". - Yours, etc., Thomas Bartlett, Professor of Modern Irish
History,
University College,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.