Sir, - We are perhaps suffering from a surfeit of commemoration at this time, yet there is one individual whose bicentenary appears to have passed without much notice. I refer to Luke Gardiner, Viscount Mountjoy, who was slain at the Battle of New Ross on June 5th, 1798, while leading a detachment of militia against the rebels. Gardiner and his antecedents of course were primarily responsible for the construction of northside Georgian Dublin. While the family's surname and titles live on in the names of streets, a square and a prison, the Gardiner estate papers have lain uncatalogued for half a century in the National Library.
Gardiner was also responsible for overseeing the passage of the first major legislation repealing the Penal Law in 1778 and 1782, and possessed a commitment to the cause of Catholic relief which cannot be dismissed as merely opportunistic. He may have been killed at New Ross while attempting to persuade the rebels to surrender, displaying perhaps a naive estimation of the degree of his credit with them. "Well they have requited him," commented the Earl of Shannon without much obvious sympathy.
Gardiner represented a compromising tendency which was utterly crushed in the late 1790s, but which enjoys a precarious ascendancy in the late 1990s. It is therefore regrettable that neither the Government or its commemoration committee was interested in incorporating Gardiner in the official programme of events. There has been rather too much pike-waving in commemorations to date down here, and we need to be careful during the coming summer months that Green triumphalism does not combine with Orange obduracy to overturn the delicate peace process. - Yours, etc., Sean Murphy,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.