Madam, - Gemma Hussey was too kind to Roy Hattersley in her review of The Edwardians (Weekend, January 15th). As she said, he writes that "English politicians have never understood Ireland and the Irish", and Hattersley certainly goes a long way to proving his own point.
He entitles his 22-page chapter on Ireland "Ourselves Alone", but never says where that phrase comes from. "Sinn Fein" he has it, misspelt throughout. London music hall audiences sang "Bravo! Dublin Fusiliers!" not "Brave, Dublin Fusiliers". The Chief Secretary was Augustine Birrell, not "August".
Michael Collins was never in "Clonakilly". Larkin's "starving children of strikers" were never on their way to "Kingston".
Hattersly pooh-poohs the "elaborate prose" of George Dangerfield's brilliant The Strange Death of Liberal England, cites Dangerfield for his account of the Larkin episode, mentions the UVF gun-running into Larne, but fails altogether to mention the Asgard running into Howth.
This is what Dangerfield wrote of those episodes: "If ever a slipshod killing deserves to be called a 'massacre', the killing in Bachelor's Walk deserves that name. For comparisons between Larne and Howth are odious and revealing. At Larne, 30,000 Orange rifles were landed while the police and the coastguards and the soldiers slept: at Howth, the landing of 1,500 Nationalist rifles could only be expiated in blood".
No "elaborate prose" there, eh, Mr Hattersley? Unless the thought-police of your New Labour would reckon "odious", "revealing" and "expiated" to be "inappropriate".
But the finest clanger is kept to the final chapter. Mr Hattersley writes that in the Great War "millions of Irishmen fought for the Empire they longed to leave". Millions? No references are given for this claim, but by the time the reader has got to that point, it's no surprise. - Yours, etc.,
ANDY BARCLAY, Howth, Dublin 13.