Madam, - Seán O'Byrne has a point when he says (September 11th) that the Irish participated, alongside the English, Scots and Welsh, in creating the British Empire. However, I cannot agree with his assertion that we were never a colony.
If that word is defined as "a name vaguely applied to a State's dependencies overseas or abroad" (Chambers), then surely Ireland was a colony of Britain to an ever-increasing extent in the 16th century, and completely so in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was ruled from London through a subservient Dublin parliament that was exclusively in the hands of the settler or colonist class.
The British Empire long predated the creation of the UK in 1801. Its Irish leaders overseas in the 18th century (Eyre, Wellesley) and in the 19th (Gough, Nicholson, the Lawrences, Kitchener et al) all came from this colonist background. Indeed, their skill in defeating and administering the indigenous populations of India and Africa may have been inherited from their Cromwellian and Williamite forebears. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DRURY, Avenue Louise, Brussels.