Sir, – John Green (“Decade of centenaries must respect all factions”, Opinion Analysis, December 27th) seeks to create a moral equivalence between the 1916 Irish Volunteers who in the aftermath of the enrolment of thousands of Irishmen in the greatest blood sacrifice ever known – Britain’s “Great War” of 1914 – decided to pit their modest strength against the greatest empire the world had ever known, and Irishmen who fought for pay in England’s brutal war against the Boers in 1899-1902 in a war to incorporate South Africa within the British Empire. He refers to men of the Dublin Fusiliers who did so as having “served with distinction”. This moral equivalence really takes the biscuit.
How can the Dublin Fusiliers be said to have “served with distinction” in the Boer War? That regiment, unfortunately, was deployed mostly against farmer volunteer militias, carried out a vicious and murderous “scorched earth” campaign against a rural civilian population, and assisted in the incarceration of many thousands of women and children in concentration camps (in a process accompanied by many rapes), where 26,000 civilians were starved to death. – Yours, etc,