Sir, I refer to An Irishman's Diary (May 22nd). After an atypically insightful, if somewhat reductivist, piece on the genealogy of the Fianna Fail/Fine Gael divide in Irish history, Myers reverts to type in his comments on TnaG and 1916.
Over 170,000 "nobodies" regularly view TnaG. In catering for the linguistic rights of Irish speakers, and those who want to learn Irish from television, the State is only doing its duty in perhaps the most cost effective way yet in this regard. Support for the concept of TnaG doesn't imply a cravenly uncritical attitude to what it serves up.
As to 1916, Myers is labouring under a misapprehension. It wasn't a main plank of 1916 thinking that it would be easy to persuade Unionists to accept an Irish republic. It was precisely the nonnegotiable promise of six county partition by Lloyd George that transformed many Redmondites into revolutionary Republicans. Yet there were people of Unionist upbringing who fought for the Republic in 1916.
An increasing number of historians now accept that the immediate achievement of the Republic was not the main motivation of the Republican combatants in 1916. The main motivation was to ensure that conscription to the British Army would not succeed. In that, they were successful. They gave their lives so that Ireland might survive. Even a majority of Roman Catholic bishops at that time were very strongly opposed to conscription.
It is exceedingly tragic that so many Irish people, Roman Catholics and Protestants, Unionists and Home Rulers, lost their lives in World War I, fighting either for the British Empire, or for Home Rule, or for both. The conflict which caused the first World War hasn't yet petered out in the former Yugoslavia. Irish Protestant participation in the war wiped out a whole Protestant generation in southern Ireland. How could it then be justified morally? How can it now be justified, almost 80 years later? Yet Mr Myers is forever glorying in British militarism. - Yours, etc., 83 Beaufort Downs, Rathfarnham Village, Dublin 14.