Sir, – Richard English writes that republican nationalism has a Pearsean pedigree ("Why Republican dissidents have not – and will not – go away", Opinion & Analysis, July 19th). This is an ambivalent heritage – dominated by the violence which Pearse, the romantic, plotted in the IRB and ultimately gave his life for, but ignoring the views expressed by Pearse the thinker in his last pamphlet before the Rising, significantly called "The Sovereign People" (March 31st, 1916). He declared "that the people are the nation; the whole people, all its men and women; and that laws made or acts done by anybody purporting to represent the people but not really authorised by the people, either expressly or impliedly, to represent them and to act for them do not bind the people; are a usurpation, an impertinence, a nullity".
The tragedy of his leadership of the Rising must be judged in the light of this principle.
Unfortunately, it has not weighed with self-styled republicans. Since they first rejected the democratic will of the Irish people, as embodied in Dáil Éireann, in June 1922, successive IRAs have pursued the violent part of Pearse’s heritage with ever-diminishing popular support. They seem oblivious to the fact that they are engaged in the kind of acts that Pearse condemned so forcefully. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DRURY,
Brussels.