Sir, - Two points struck me as I watched the Armistice Day coverage on TV. The first was that most commentators glibly threw out the line that the first World War, and Ireland's part in it, were somehow expunged from Irish history textbooks. This is false and is an attempt to create a new mythology of Irish nationalist perfidiousness. If, however, those commentators mean to say that these textbooks did not make us understand that these Irishmen fought for freedom and glory, king and country, and the rights of small nations (remember Belgium - the small nation with the small empire) while a bunch of treacherous terrorists stabbed this glorious project in the back by rising in Dublin, then I suppose this is true.
The second point is that we are now being congratulated on a new maturity which allows us to commemorate our Irish dead. This is an insult to the people of Ireland of both traditions who lived in the decades after the first World War. To expect the majority of Irish people in the early years of the State to come out on Armistice Day every year to march behind the Union flag and sing God Save the King would be truly bizarre when the struggle for nationhood was not yet over. The struggle to establish the State, the economic war, not to mention the small matter of fellow Irish nationalists cut off by partition excluded the possibility of showing our respect to the Irish dead in a manner which resembled paying homage to lost empire. Nor should we have expected that those people in the South loyal to Britain could have rejected those trappings of Empire to enable a more inclusive commemoration to take place.
This is not a question of maturity, but rather of the establishment of a new reality - a reality in which Ireland and the UK are equal members of the EU, both confident states at the end of the 20th century, and, most importantly, both partners in the process to bring permanent peace to the island of Ireland. In this new reality I was glad to watch the President of Ireland and the British Queen, as equals, commemorate the memory of Irish nationalists and unionists who fought and died in the muddy fields of Flanders. - Yours, etc., Daithi Mac Carthaigh,
BL, An Leabharlann Dli, Na Ceithre Cuirt, Baile Atha Cliath 7.