The death of Wolfe Tone

Sir, – Paddy Cullivan suggests that Wolfe Tone’s death was murder rather than suicide (“Wolfe Tone did not take his own life in jail. He was murdered – and I know who did it”, People, June 6th).

Suicide is a much more complex phenomenon than Mr Cullivan suggests in his article, and a simple did he or didn’t he belies the complexity of both Tone himself and the phenomenon. There is much about suicide we can never know, and intent is often a thing on which verdicts were decided.

The idea that cutting one’s throat is a method more likely to suggest murder than suicide needs to be considered in light of historical research.

I’ve gone through hundreds of inquests and newspaper reports which reveal that this was a form of self-inflicted death often resorted to by gentlemen with access to a particularly dangerous type of shaving razor, and a highly infrequent form of murder.

Michael D Higgins: ‘What I had was a form of mild stroke. It didn’t affect my cognitive abilities’

---

Trapped and starving, two families in Gaza Strip try to keep their children alive

---

EU could be preparing tougher car emissions rules

---

Leinster provide too many players to the national squad for it to be an equitable system

---

While it has never been proven beyond reasonable doubt that Tone killed himself, it was a reasonable assumption at the time and fit within a long lineage of “heroic” suicidal deaths that dated back to Roman times. It is not a position I advocate, however; all suicides are tragedies. But Tone’s death by suicide followed the behaviour of someone who did it only three years previously, someone known to Tone and in a similar situation who was awaiting a death sentence. Tone, in speaking of the Rev William Jackson’s death by poisoning in the dock in 1795, wrote, “fortitude in a voluntary death must command the respect of the most virulent persecutor”.

This is an old argument and one which has been rehashed in many places and to which we are unlikely ever to know the answer. It is worth asking who is served by the “murder” rather than the “suicide” argument? Who is served by being dogmatic rather than seeing Tone’s death in a more nuanced historical context? – Yours, etc,

Dr GEORGINA LARAGY,

Department of History,

Trinity College Dublin,

Dublin 2.