Sir, - Fintan O'Toole's "expert opinion" on the teaching of English is stretching his expertise beyond its elastic limit (Exam Times, June 7th). He invites us to be amazed that Thomas MacDonagh, "Professor of English at UCD", should speak with rapture of Jane Austen in his last lecture before going out "to kill and die for Ireland in the Easter Rising".
Thomas MacDonagh was not Professor of English in UCD. He did not die in the Easter Rising. As a literary man, regardless of his political opinions, he would readily appreciate the art of Jane Austen, of the French and classical writers whom he had read, of Cathal Bui. Jane's depiction of the comfortable England that created the Empire would not have alienated MacDonagh. After all, his own mother, Mary, in her minor work Translations, depicts the Irish people as being joyfully part of the same Empire!
Fintan reverts to the slibhin tendency when he refers to MacDonagh as "a violent Irish republican". All the evidence suggests that MacDonagh was not at all a violent person. When he joined the Irish Volunteers in December, 1913, his views were nearer to the Home Rule wing than the IRB wing of the movement. Over the following two years he gradually concluded that physical force was necessary to achieve Irish freedom. He must have known that this conviction would lead to disaster for himself and his family.
Your "expert" hopes that students who really understand the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen will have genuine sympathy with real people in society. I fear that he himself is a long way away from understanding what made a gentle scholar become a revolutionary. - Yours, etc.,
Peadar Mac Maghnais, Bothar Bhinn Eadair, Baile Atha Cliath 5.