Sir, – The Rite & Reason opinion piece by Fr Seamus Murphy ("Government betrays the Republic in desire to placate the ghosts of 1916", January 12th) should be delivered by an Army officer to every school in this Republic. – Yours, etc,
ALAN McCARTHY,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – One sentence in Fr Seamus Murphy’s excellent article on the issues surrounding the commemoration of 1916 is open to challenge. That is his assertion that “the Rising was a shriek of protest at the prospect of constitutional nationalism compromising with unionists”.
The Rising was more a shriek of protest at the refusal of the imperial parliament in Westminster under Asquith to implement its own Act giving limited self-rule to the island of Ireland.
If that had been implemented, there would still have been violence from the unionist side. But the compromise with unionists might have come much sooner than the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and nearly a century of trouble avoided. – Yours, etc,
A LEAVY,
Sutton,
Dublin 13.
Sir, – Yet another revisionist is given space in your publication to deplore the violence of 1916 and later. It behoves people that publish such views to support them with examples of what freedoms have been won from our present and past colonial rulers without the use or threat of the use of force.
This definitive list would serve to leave those who hold the politically incorrect, traditional view that violence achieved what we have without the means of offering any form of rational counter-argument. – Yours, etc,
DAVID FITZGERALD,
Kiuruvesi,
Finland.