Madam, - I would like to congratulate the Government on a spectacular Easter military parade. The Defence Forces did the nation proud. Capt Tom Ryan's potent reading of the 1916 Proclamation should ensure that never again will members of the Provisional movement claim the document as their own.
May I also commend members of the reserve Defence Forces - the FCA. They carried out their duties as the President's guard with professionalism and great dignity. They showed the real spirit of an "Irish Volunteer" force and were a credit to the nation.
The parade only makes it more the pity that members of the Garda Representative Association and the ASGI cannot see the real benefit a volunteer reserve can add to an organisation.
- Yours, etc,
JOHN KENNY, South Dock Road, Ringsend, Dublin 4.
Madam, - Ian D'Alton's elegant letter of April 19th, criticising my views on 1916, certainly deserves a response.
No doubt he has a point when he refers to my "filial piety", but my historical analysis should surely be judged on its own objective merits: it either stands up in its own right or it doesn't.
I concede that he has some justification in identifying an apparent contradiction between my view that the men of 1916 should be judged by the mores of their time rather than by ours, and my calling into play what I believe would have been their view of the actions of the modern IRA. Touché - but only slightly! His critique of the use we made of our independence in the early decades of the State has, of course, much validity, but he totally distorts the picture by proceeding to ignore the fact that during the past half-century we have used the power given to us by independence with such remarkable effectiveness that our State has caught up with the rest of Europe more rapidly than any other country has ever succeeded in doing. And although, as Michael Casey argued on the opposite page last Wednesday, we were of course helped in this by external events, without the power that independence gave us to determine, inter alia, our own taxation, industrial relations, and industrial promotion policies, this would not have been possible.
I certainly never said, as he alleges, that we would have been "so prosperous" under continuing British rule that we "might not have wanted independence". My point was precisely the opposite: that, as has happened to Northern Ireland, within the United Kingdom our output per head would have remained so low that we would have become hugely dependent on transfers from the UK, the scale of which would have become such as to make insupportable the immediate impact of the loss of these transfers.
We would have been trapped in a relationship that would have prevented us from ever becoming the prosperous and viable state that we are today.
His final point about the Protestant population of the Republic is equally misleading. He ignores the fact that within what became the territory of the Irish State the number of Protestants had been in steady decline at least since 1871. Moreover, much - although of course by no means all - of the drop in that population in the immediate aftermath of independence was accounted for by the departure of the British army and the families of soldiers. The continued decline in their numbers after the 1926 census had little or nothing to do with independence. As demographers have shown, it was a function of a lower Protestant birth rate, combined with one quarter of Protestants marrying Catholics and, until the 1970s, coming under very strong pressure to bring up their children in that faith.
Since the second World War Protestant emigration from our State has been consistently lower than in the case of Catholics, reflecting the superior economic situation of Protestants, 40 per cent of whom were shown by the 1991 Census to be in the top three socio-economic groups, as against only 19 per cent of Catholics.
Finally, between 1996 and 2002 the Protestant population grew very much faster than that of Catholics.
- Yours, etc,
GARRET FITZGERALD, Dublin 6.
Madam, - Congratulations to John A Murphy (April 20th) for taking Tim Pat Coogan, John Waters and Garret FitzGerald to task on 1916. His fellow historian Dr Ruth Dudley Edwards, an expert on 1916, would probably share his views. She has just written that 1916 was "illegal and immoral".
We all know it had no support. Eoin MacNeill countermanded it, calling it "criminal lunacy". Roger Casement, a powerful advocate of armed rebellion, returned from Germany to call it off. Arthur Griffith wanted to pursue constitutional means to achieve political change. The historian Francis Shaw SJ, strangely absent from this debate, wrote in Studies in 1972 that it was "blasphemy". He pointed out that the IRB broke its own constitution, which insisted that "the majority of the Irish people" must approve "a war against England". Let us also not forget that the leaders wanted Germany to invade and had suggested that a relative of the Kaiser might become King of Ireland.
But, as George Bernard Shaw wrote at the time, England wanted to "drop Ireland like a hot potato". There is little doubt that we would have achieved independence peacefully, as did the 32 republics now in the Commonwealth. This is hardly a "mad" view, as Dr FitzGerald suggests, and it is one held by another Fine Gael taoiseach, John Bruton.
What did 1916 bring? Apart from 1,351 people killed or severely wounded, central Dublin was destroyed (179 buildings), a civil war ensued in which over 5,800 died, there was mass emigration, much poverty, and we had arguably a "narrow, mean-spirited and dishonourable country", in the words of Mary Raftery (Opinion, February 20th). Not least of all, we had the collapse of the Protestant minority, very many of whom fled during a period of intimidation and murder from 1920 to 1923. Easter 1916 also gave validation to the Provos' campaign in Northern Ireland. So what is there to celebrate? Why not instead celebrate independence day? - Yours, etc,
ROBIN BURY, Killiney, Co Dublin.