Madam, - Joe McGowan (January 25th) reproaches Kevin Myers for denying the historical truth of the drowning of tenants evicted from a Gore-Booth estate without providing any credible evidence to show that this actually happened.
Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, December 17th) was commenting on my recently published book about the Gore-Booths of Lissadell in which I described how what had commenced as a wild rumour subsequently came to be accepted as a fact simply because the legend has continued to be repeated with various embellishments for more than a century-and-a-half.
He makes an interesting point when, after accepting that the boat in question, the Pomona, safely carried the Ballygilgan tenants to Canada, but avers that a second one, "an unregistered coffin ship" which had an almost unbelievably similar name, the Pomano, sank with all its Lissadell passengers before it had even left Sligo Bay. Sadly, he presents no evidence for this other boat's existence apart from quoting from an old ballad. The fact that the last line of the quoted verse reads: "Aboard the Pomano" (rather than Pomona) suggests that this was a deliberate misspelling - an artist's licence - in order to rhyme with the earlier line: "But we were forced to go".
A decade later, Sir Robert Gore-Booth was widely praised by the local press and by several parish priests for his actions on behalf of his tenants during the Great Famine, but only four years elapsed before two priests and at least one local newspaper denied his benevolence and conducted a campaign of vilification against him. The records of the Pomona period have not survived, unlike those of the Famine period which show that the campaign was grossly unfair to his memory, representing as it did the newly emerging feelings against landlordism in general. Perhaps if the records of the earlier period could be discovered they would confirm that the Pomona/ Pomano legend is nothing more than that.
Joe McGowan is a respected local historian whose energies have recently resulted in the erection of a memorial to Constance Markievicz not far from her former home. It is not altogether a bad thing that he and I should see this small piece of history from different perspectives. After all, 33 years after publishing his own biography of Constance, Sean Ó Faoláin welcomed the arrival of a second one with the comment that "two points of view are better than one". - Yours, etc.,
DERMOT JAMES, Clonskeagh, Dublin 14.