Madam, - In the course of his defence of the reputation of Sean Russell against Kevin Myers (September 12th), Manus O'Riordan refers to the Irish War of Independence as "the 20th century's first war for democracy. . .fought to give effect to the democratic mandate of the 1918 elections".
There are two difficulties with this assessment.
The first relates to the question of whether that war was fought subject to the mandate given by the people in December 1918. The second relates to the precise nature of the mandate itself.
Whatever the mandate of 1918 was, it was not a mandate for further violence. Those who voted were not asked for, and did not give, approval for a war. Those who started the assassinations of policemen in 1919 were a tiny self-appointed group determined to force the pace of events.
They formed a movement within a movement, not only beyond the control of the recently elected Dáil, but holding even the official leadership of their own paramilitary organisation, the Volunteers, in distrust and contempt.
Two months after the first police deaths at Soloheadbeg at the hands of Dan Breen and his associates, Harry Boland was eager to repudiate any notion that a recent interview by de Valera offered any support for violence. As late as one year afterwards, the last official act of the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas McCurtain (himself shortly afterwards murdered by a rogue police squad) was to apologise for the unauthorised killing of an off-duty constable.
The recent study by Peter Hart of the Cork IRA makes clear that almost all the shootings in that county in 1919 and early 1920 took place in direct contravention of official orders. But then, as the memoirs of former activists such as C.S. Andrews and Ernie O'Malley make plain, the deliberations and wishes of the political leadership were not taken seriously by those wielding the guns.
If the gunmen were working to their own bloodthirsty agenda, was not the actual mandate given to Sinn Féin in the general election a genuinely democratic one?
It was certainly the expression of a majority wish for a 32-county state outside the United Kingdom and a hope that this claim could be pursued at the Peace Conference in Paris. But the major obstacle to the fulfilment of this wish was the resistance of Protestant Ulster to inclusion in all-Ireland state, and Sinn Féin had no more idea how to handle this than did the Parliamentary Party whom they had castigated with so much success in the election campaign for being willing (very belatedly) to accept some form of partition.
Granting the Sinn Féin demand would have meant ignoring the democratically expressed wishes of the unionists in Ulster and in all likelihood the attempted military suppression, by either the British or the new Irish government, of armed resistance from that community. It has taken nationalist Ireland another 80 years to accept the compromise implied in a truly democratic settlement.
Calling the struggle "a war for democracy" seems to suggest that the fundamentals of that system were not in place in 1918. Such a simplistic formula may be all right for feeding to gullible tourists on the open-topped tour buses of Dublin, but it ignores many facts. Free and fair elections had taken place for decades and, since 1885, on a franchise as wide as could be found anywhere.
Thanks to 40 years of patient and peaceful work by Parnell, Dillon and Redmond, an executive responsible to an elected native parliament was there for the taking by 1914, were it not, tragically, for the Ulster difficulty.
Simply because the War of Independence was followed by the establishment of democratic government, history should not be read backwards to claim that the first was the only way to achieve the second.
As die-hard Republicans always (correctly) maintained, it also took a counter-revolution to establish the institutions we have today. - Yours, etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.