Madam, - Congratulations on your 1916 Supplement. For those of us who question the justification for the Rising and its consequences (though not its aspirations), it was objective and factual. Thanks also for your call for the debate to continue clinically and calmly. Because it is about the very foundation of our State, that debate is as much about 2006 as it is about 1916.
Ireland in 2006 is a far better place in which to live than it was in 1916 or 1956. Irish nationality and nationalism have evolved to cope with the economic and technological realities of our times. One can be proud to be Irish.
And yet: how real and relevant is the concept of an Irish nation in 2006 - not as an abstraction but as the clear inspiration and rationale of our life together in its most practical details, in public policy? How real, particularly, in relation to that key phrase about "cherishing all the children of the nation equally"? However clichéd, the key political question in 2006, in the shadow of 1916, really is whether we belong to an economy or a community.
Could it be that, as we fling ourselves into a minor orgy of apparent nationalism celebrating 1916, that this is pageant, not current philosophy? That the core of what its leaders hoped to achieve, an Irish nation (of people not of territory), has been abandoned, or hopelessly compromised, and is no longer the central objective of public policy? Nationality is not about flags or even land but about how - and if - we see ourselves as a "people".
The Ministers who will be making patriotic speeches over the next couple of weeks are members of a Government that wishes eagerly to flog off the national airline which not only has been one of the symbols of our capacity to compete in the contemporary world, but has significant strategic importance for our practical, national sovereignty. At a time when we need constant symbolic reminders and reinforcements of our national community, this Government has decided, either casually or as a deliberate gesture, to run a honky-tonk highway through that Tara landscape which, more than any other aspect of Ireland, symbolises our shared and unique identity. This Government has presided over the emergence of a "society" which is increasingly individualistic, greedy, violent, dysfunctional and centrifugal rather than cohesive - and which quite patently does not cherish all the children of the nation equally. Indeed it is a society that may no longer want to be a nation.
It may seem facile (and certainly is "unhistorical"), to ask what Pearse, Griffith and Connolly might think of Ireland 2006. Nevertheless, if honouring them is not to be just "polite, meaningless words", and an exercise in treachery cloaked in hypocrisy, that question must be asked, and answered honestly. I am not sure that it will - given that the answer could be very painful.
Connolly said that Ireland was nothing to him without its people. When I look at my Ireland in 2006, I am proud of so much that has been achieved. But it seems as if, to those who lead our society, none of this "nation stuff" matters in real 21st-century life - and worse, is some kind of obstacle to a brave new world of competing individual consumers in which "our people" would cease to have meaning.
With horror, increasingly frustrated and angry, I find myself witnessing the steady, simultaneous, sometimes methodical, sometimes casual demolition of all that true nation of which our ancestors dreamt and fought so hard to create. It will be difficult, without anger, to watch lip-service being paid to a republicanism (sic) which is a sham and a Republic which is an empty shell. In this anger, I am sure I am not alone.
- Yours, etc,
MAURICE O'CONNELL, Tralee, Co Kerry.