Sir, - I wish to answer the forceful comments made about my letter of August 22nd by Kevin Myers in his Diary for August 26th. Some of the controversy is now dated, but on one point I feel that Mr Myers is less than equitable both to myself and to Irish nationalists.
John Redmond's Wooden bridge speech, in which he asked the idealistic young men of Ireland to volunteer for the trenches, was an extraordinary overture, a beau geste rare in Anglo-Irish relations. There is very little like it in history. It is a testament to Redmond's political stature that, at his urging, Irishmen joined an army which had fired on unarmed crowds in Dublin only a few months before.
Redmond was betrayed by the people to whom he offered help. The soldiers who volunteered at his behest were doubly betrayed, in that both their political ideal (the peaceful achievement of Home Rule) and their honour and reputation as soldiers, which are the chief reward of a soldier's sacrifice, were betrayed.
Committed Irish separatists, a small, peripheral group in 1914, did in fact stay at home, ignoring the fashionable hysteria about the rights of small nations and the burgeoning lie about the war to end wars. They can honestly say that this was so. They pursued their own aims with courage equal to the Redmondites, and perhaps with greater wisdom. Irish nationalists can, however, look at the Redmondite volunteers as misguided heroes, benighted crusaders in a quixotic cause. A hint of that perspective appears as early as the war period (see Ernie O'Malley's book, On Another Man's Wound). It is Unionists who are proprietary about the Western Front.
It is of course merely mischievous to link neglect of the Redmondites with deaths in the Troubles; ex-British soldiers were also active in the national forces during that period. On both sides, men killed former comrades in arms.
It is also unionists who must live with the darker legacy of the betrayal of the Redmondites; with the slurs on the 16th, with the disavowal of the Irish Divisions, with the secret courts martial and imprisonment which Mr Myers describes (and for knowledge of which I am indebted). All this was enabled by the Goughs, the Haigs, the Henry Wilsons - those with whom the men of the 16th thought they shared a uniform and a cause.
Perhaps Mr Myers's historical and polemical gifts could be used to elicit an apology from the British army for the shameful treatment of these brave men. For neglect, with which he charges Irish nationalists, is not the same as betrayal, which he himself attributes to the army for which they died in thousands; nor is it fairmindedness to equate the two. - Yours, etc.,
Dunville Avenue, Dublin 6.