Sir, - Alas for our hopes. Geraldine Abrahams, in a touching account of her visit to Spain to trace memories of her father among the remnants of the Irishmen who fought with the International Brigade (Features, December 4th), suggests that "it has taken more than 50 years for them to be exonerated and for their countrymen to recognise the sacrifice they made." Reading Kevin Myers two days later shows that half a century has exonerated nothing as far as some people are concerned.
It was too much, I suppose, for Kevin Myers to resist poking his oar into the Spanish Civil War, given recent correspondence. And, of course, some of what he says is quite correct. As far as I am concerned AndrΘ Marty's dreadful record in Spain cannot be denied. I personally believe that he was mad. But then war breeds madmen.
And of course soldiers in battle and the men who conduct wars often behave very badly indeed. Holders of the Victoria Cross DSO, and MC, and other recipients of honours for valour, whom Kevin Myers so often venerates and admires, do not get their decorations by being pussyfoots but for killing other men, often in the most appalling ways.
Mr Myers has had in his day the whiff of powder and grapeshot, though not as a combatant. Few among us can forget his dispatches from the Balkans and Middle East. Fewer still among those of us who have been in the military have been war lovers.
There are times when it seems that his adulation for Irishmen who fought in the first World War (and even in WWII) goes beyond normal bounds. These men and many more youths like myself joined up or tried to join up for a variety of reasons - democracy, some; gallantry, a few; adventure, many more; na∩evety, God knows how many. Aye, and poverty, too. It was always thus.
But how dare Kevin Myers mock and condemn men who went to fight in Spain, whether they were communists or not? The huge majority of them did what they thought was right and bloody few gave any thought for Stalin or Stalinism. I was lucky to know dozens of them, both when growing up and when I made a film with them - and on both sides - in the 1970s. They believed in a cause, and that's what matters, a cause they believed was right.
Paddy O'Daire from Donegal who fought right through the war in Spain and went on to fight as a lieutenant-colonel in a fighting regiment in the British Army from 1939 to 1945, pointed out to me: "Of course we were right to fight. And if O'Duffy's men felt that they had a cause then they had not just a right to fight for it, but a duty, too."
Generous words, not from a man fooled by Stalin or Marty or Swierczewiki, but from a decent democrat, who may or may not have been a communist, I don't know, but who believed that Franco's and Hitler's fascist evil was of a greater malignancy than anything to be found among his comrades in the International Brigade, including the unfortunate George Nathan, whom he mentioned as a bΩte noire.
Whether Kevin Myers likes it or not the International Brigade did fight for freedom - a freedom from which he and I are benefitting today. - Yours, etc.,
Cathal O'Shannon, Anglesea Road, Dublin 4.