Letters

What ‘Up the Ra’ really means

“Up the maimed and the bereaved, the broken and the bereft”

Wed Oct 19 2022 - 00:06

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole has done a great job in outlining many of the “achievements” of the IRA that could have formed other verses of “Up the Ra” (“The full, unexpurgated version of Up the Ra”, Opinion & Analysis, October 18th).

Let me add a couple of sporting ones. I had the privilege of playing rugby for the championship-winning Ireland teams of the 1980s. We had Special Branch officers sleeping on our corridors of the Shelbourne Hotel to protect us from the IRA as two of our Irish teammates from Ulster, Jimmy McCoy and Brian McCall, were in the RUC and the British army.

In 1987, three of our teammates – Nigel Carr, David Irwin and Philip Rainey – were driving down to Dublin for a training session before we went to the first Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. They were caught by an IRA bomb which could easily have killed them. It finished Nigel’s career. I was in a car in front of them with two of my other teammates, Trevor Ringland and Keith Crossan.

The fantastic achievements of our women’s soccer team deserve great praise and admiration. The “achievements” of the IRA and their loyalist counterparts certainly do not. – Yours, etc,

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HUGO MacNEILL,

Killiney,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Would you now give us the “unexpurgated” version of every former empire’s national anthem? Or at least of God Save the King, where the virtues of the symbol and representative of the mighty former empire, built on slavery and genocide, are extolled? I’m sure you are very aware that when we sing songs that express our pride in our republic we do not intend to celebrate the atrocities that are part of every nation’s history. – Yours, etc,

SUZANNE McMAHON,

Dublin 6.

Sir, – Up a coruscating, clear-eyed, unsentimental, unromanticised and wholly accurate depiction of 30 years of bloody mayhem. Up Fintan O’Toole. – Yours, etc,

PIERCE O’SULLIVAN,

Glaslough,

Co Monaghan.

Sir, – The achievement of the Irish women’s football team in securing qualification for the World Cup was something to be celebrated. In their rapture afterwards, they sang an old, visceral chant that wells up in the body a kind of spiritual, abstract pleasure. Its historical associations are no doubt complex, but that it has led to such a contortion of the public spirit in condemnation and dismissal of what should have been a proud and defining moment for these young women is nothing short of perverse.

All Fintan O’Toole’s piece does is perpetuate the ascendancy of a dramatic past, rather than recognise it for what it is: history, a foreign place. Not one of these women was born when that chant might have meant something different. – Yours, etc,

ANTHONY BEHAN,

Killeagh,

Co Cork.

Sir, – What an excellent article by Fintan O’Toole on the legacy of the brutality of the IRA. If anyone under the age of 55 needs any education in their country’s recent history, just read this piece. – Yours, etc,

MARGARET O’NEILL,

New Ross,

Co Wexford.