Sir, – On September 19th you published what was surely one of the most significant letters of your paper in recent times. The strength of Michael Lillis’s argument was his focus on responsibility rather than blame, and in his reminding us of the sorry role played by the government and citizens (of the Free State) with regard to the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland between 1921/2 and 1968.
There were very few Northern nationalists in the councils of the Free State in the 1920s – the Presbyterian minister Ernst Blythe, whose sage advice was ignored, and the Mac/McNeills from Antrim, Eoin and James, Kevin O’Shiel of Tyrone, assistant legal adviser to the Provisional and first Free State governments and later director of the North Eastern Boundary Bureau charged with preparing the Free State’s case for boundary revision under the terms of the Irish Boundary Commission.
Despite the contradictions of his Northern policy, Collins was deeply concerned with the fate of the minority – as was initially James Craig, it is fair to recall. The Civil War and Collins’s death put paid to any hopes for a juster settlement and successive Irish governments from Cosgrave to de Valera (for all his myth-making about unity) and their successors turned their backs resolutely on the North.
Following the fiasco of the Boundary Commission, O’Shiel, who like many other middle-class Ulster Catholics “west of the Bann” had scant understanding of what working class Belfast Catholics were enduring, accepted the accusation of his friend Cahir Healy, and later long-serving MP for Fermanagh, that the Free State leaders “cut our cable and launched us, rudderless, into the hurricane, without guarantee or security, even for our ordinary civic rights”.
“The saints”, remarks the attractive cynic in the Gate Theatre’s recent production of Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, “have only a past, but the sinners have a future”. As the centenary of 1916 approaches, we citizens of the Republic and our Government need to display something of the moral and political courage of the German Federal Republic’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (co-ming to terms with their past) in addressing suppressed facts of our past and in showing the will to investigate and give due acknowledgment to our failures with respect to the nationalist minority of Northern Ireland. – Yours, etc,