Madam, - President McAleese's speech in Cork has clearly irked those who continue to regard her as a Fenian upstart, a tribal time-bomb or a Croppy who will not lie down quietly in the former Vice-Regal Lodge and hold her whisht, except by royal command. Is the tribute paid to the 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic by the President of this sovereign Republic now expected to become some "post-modern" version of Oscar Wilde's "love that dare not speak its name"?
People are, of course, entitled to their prejudices. What is most extraordinary, however, is Margaret Lee's question (January 31st) as to whether it is "now permissible" that the President "chose to speak on the subject of the Easter Rising". She completely ignores the fact that two of the President's predecessors were themselves Easter Rising veterans who annually celebrated that event in full conformity with the role of President as envisaged in the Constitution authored by one of them.
Ms Lee fails to appreciate that there has been no constitutional counter-revolution in the interim. She proclaims that "if Mary Robinson had ventured into such terrain during her presidency it would surely have provoked a constitutional crisis". Really? On May 12th, 1996 it was none other than President Robinson who unveiled the statue of James Connolly opposite Liberty Hall, the nerve centre of the 1916 Rising, from which Pearse and Connolly had led the combined forces of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army to seize the GPO that Easter Monday. She declared that "Connolly was and remains an inspirational figure - as socialist, as trade unionist and as Easter Rising leader". She emphasised how important it was "to revisit the man and his vision on the 80th anniversary of his execution, to reclaim him".
President Robinson went on to speak of "the relevance of James Connolly to modern Ireland" and how vital it was to "draw further inspiration" from "the emphasis Connolly placed on the values of pluralism and inclusiveness, until his death on the 12th of May, 1916".
There was, of course, no "constitutional crisis". The Rising remains the common inheritance of the Republic as a whole, notwithstanding sharp party divisions, or even the Civil War itself. The Cumann na nGaedheal president of the Free State executive, W.T. Cosgrave was no less proud a 1916 veteran than the Fianna Fáil leader Eamon de Valera, who would eventually defeat him at the ballot box in 1932.
Each had previously been elected to the first Dáil whose Declaration of Independence on January 21st, 1919 explicitly stated: "Whereas the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people. . . and whereas at the threshold of a new era in history the Irish electorate has, in the General Election of December 1918, seized the first occasion to declare by an overwhelming majority its firm allegiance to the Irish Republic; Now, therefore, we the elected Representatives. . . in National Parliament assembled, do, in the name of the Irish nation. . . ratify the establishment of the Irish Republic".
In less than three years the 1916 Rising had been vindicated by the first ever election held in Ireland based on adult suffrage. It could have had no more impressive a democratic validation than that. - Yours, etc,
MANUS O'RIORDAN,
Head of Research, Siptu,
Liberty Hall,
Dublin 1.
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Madam, - In an uncharacteristically pacifistic turn, Kevin Myers pours scorn on the leaders of the 1916 Rising and accuses those of us proud to remember Pearse, Clarke and Connolly as propagating a "political cult of necrophilia" (An Irishman's Diary, January 31st).
He asks: "Why had none of the signatories of the Proclamation, not one of them, ever stood for parliament?" As a scholar of the British constitutional framework, I would have thought Mr Myers capable of recalling the manner in which the Act of Union was bought from an utterly unrepresentative parliament. The Union was imposed and maintained against the will of the Irish people throughout the 19th century, mostly by legislation that routinely suspended the rule of law. The privilege of the minority ruling class was that it could impose such violent constitutional change without bloodshed. So what parliament would Pearse have attended?
Not since the Act of Union had a parliament sat in Dublin. The best efforts to establish a parliament based on the principle of Home Rule were scuppered by the combined machinations of the British military officer corps and the Tories. As early as 1914, it was evident that even if Home Rule were granted at the end of the first World War, the country would be divided.
For whom did the men and women of 1916 speak? The simple answer is the people of this country who sought the legitimate goal of national self-determination. That the leaders of 1916 were so removed from a national mood of independence is not credible when one considers the results of the 1918 general election. The sweeping victory of Sinn Féin at the December polls not alone provides a retrospective legitimacy to the campaign for nationhood sparked in Easter Week but proves that the leaders of 1916 did not act in a political vacuum.
The murder of combatants on each side was a consequence of a quest for national self-determination. Mr Myers refers to the death of Const James O'Brien. He fails to mention the murder, in custody, of the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, on the orders of Colonel Bowen-Colthurst.
It is only right and fitting that the President of this country should declare herself proud of the achievements of the men and women of 1916. Unfortunately, the intransigence and fulminations of a generation of British politicians, stoked up by a loyalist dimension in the British high command, provided little scope for a democratic solution to Ireland's quest for independence. Long before Easter 1916, the likelihood of bloodshed in Ireland was raised by none other than the combined forces of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the staunch unionist ethos of the British military. - Yours, etc,
BARRY ANDREWS TD,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.
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Madam, - President McAleese, in her speech on 1916 in Cork as carried by you last Saturday, seems to have undone the good work she has performed over the past few years on cross-community relations. Or is it a case of the mask slipping and the real person coming through, as suggested by her famous "Nazi" remarks last year? At least her fellow Nazi comparisoner, Fr Alec Reid, has said that he condemns all such uprisings, and that he wishes 1916 had never taken place.
Mrs McAleese is President for all; and her speech, coming as it does soon after the Taoiseach's announcement of a reinstatement of the military parade at Easter, leaves me very worried. Now that the Provos have stopped killing Protestants, is this a case of it being respectable once again to commemorate Pearse and his red blood-sacrifice theories. For if 1916 is now justified, why not go the whole hog and celebrate the murderous campaign from 1970 onwards which ran out of support and respectability, to be rescued perhaps by the peace process? So let's "celebrate" Enniskillen, Kingsmills, Le Mon, etc. These too, like 1916, did not have political justification, which was sanctified retrospectively.
I well remember the 1916 anniversary in 1966 when we were treated to an uncritical treatment of all that went on in 1916 in a sort of blood and guts way on RTÉ and elsewhere. Many people believed this helped to fuel the Provisionals' campaign a few years later. I had thought "never again", but now I am not so sure.
Maybe our President should praise the likes of Parnell, who, if he had not been brought down by his own party in collusion with the Catholic Church, might have obtained Home Rule for us, and a better Ireland.
I am so disappointed by Mrs McAleese, and I think she should consider her position. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN McCAFFREY,
Clifton Crescent,
Galway.
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Madam, - In view of the lead given by President McAleese's commitment to the ideals of the 1916 Proclamation (guaranteeing "equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens"), when can we expect to see lady members teeing up at Portmarnock? - Yours, etc,
PAT MURPHY,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.