Sir, - As a person who feels it would have been far better if the Treaty had been accepted by the overwhelming majority of Dail Eireann, and as an admirer of both Collins and de Valera, I think that the recent RTE television programme on the Civil War (The Madness from Within) was anything but a fair and objective assessment of that tragic period in our history.
If their knowledge of the history of the time is to be judged by two statements made in the commentary, then the writers of the commentary would badly need to go back to their history books. The general election that resulted in the setting up of the first Dail Eireann did not, as the programme said, take place in 1919 but in 1918; and W. T. Cosgrave was not Taoiseach in the 1920s - the term "Taoiseach" came into use only with the 1937 Constitution.
That Tim Pat Coogan, with his well known biases against de Valera, was allocated so much time and so many opportunities to present his views and that no historian who might have differed from those views was interviewed, I cannot understand. And why, oh why was no reference made to the execution of Erskine Childers, one of the Provisional Government's most shameful acts of the Civil War? The attempt to justify the executions of 77 men on the grounds that it hastened the end of the Civil War is like the American government's attempt to justify the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Are we to now accept a new moral law: that the end justifies the means? - Yours, etc.,
Cuas, Raheen, Limerick.