Madam, - The more neo-colonial of the two recent letters from Maurice O'Connell (April 11th) brings to the highest level yet the fantasies built around Home Rule. It was, he tells us, "the final concession by the entire political and constitutional system, using due process, that Ireland did, indeed have that right to self-government". If one believes that, one will believe anything.
Under Home Rule foreign and military matters remained the function of the British government. We would again have become complicit in sordid affairs such as the Boer War with its terrible death tolls of women and children.
"Military necessity" has too long been an excuse for this kind of killing by neglect and bad staff work. Under Home Rule we would have participated, wearing British uniforms, in the aerial bombing and machine-gunning that made Iraq what she became under British mandate.
One hopes that Mr O'Connell won't destroy his illusions by comparing the Home Rule Bill with the Treaty. Reading of the party political manoeuvring in Britain and the determined, but quiet attempts to repeal the Bill might complete his disillusionment. Prof Horne and Mr Kramer found no evidence of attacks upon nuns by German troops in 1914 - but such attacks were the centrepiece of British recruiting propaganda in Ireland and the cause of Church support (although not, be it noted, by the Archbishop of Dublin, Ireland's the most populous diocese).
To reverse a neo-colonial question: by what right were young Irish troops, in foreign countries, killing young Germans and Turks who had done us no harm? I am sorry if some friends may be hurt by this question, but it is time to deal with some of the more outrageous assertions. - Yours, etc,
ED DOYLE, Tower Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 22.
Madam, - Maurice O'Connell asks where the passing of the Home Rule Bill in 1914 leaves the moral justification for the Rising. I would suggest to Mr O'Connell that this question was addressed admirably in a letter on this page by Padraic Mac Bheatha in your issue of March 7th.
Suffice it to say for now that the Act to which Mr O'Connell refers to was a British Act, enacted by a British Parliament. As an Irishman, I do not consider that the British Parliament had any right to legislate for my country.
Mr O'Connell's view may, however, be different. That is one of the benefits of living in a free democracy - a benefit, I might add, won for Mr O'Connell by the rebels of 1916 and later whom he seems inclined to disavow. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN HAUGHEY, Staatsburg, New York, USA.
Madam, - Garret FitzGerald gives an ebullient, optimistic account of the consequences of the Rising, vindicating his father's part in it.
The fact that this country was in dire economic circumstances for the following 80 years and that millions of our people found a home in England, the old enemy, should be remembered; also that two narrow, sectarian states developed here.
Hindsight surely shows that an evolving Home Rule would have served the nationalist cause much better. - Yours, etc,
PEADAR CASSIDY, Moynehall, Cavan, Co Cavan.