Sir, - John Paul McCarthy (June 15th) suggests that the first (two? three?) Dails lacked democratic legitimacy. In this, he is backed by Owen Quinn (June 22nd) who corroborates with statements from two Sinn Fein activists.
Their letters pose a new problem. If the Dail lacked democratic legitimacy, who had it? Of course, women under 30 lacked the vote, but this disability affected all parties in these islands, not just Sinn Fein. At the very least, the 1918 election left a power vacuum in Ireland, but one which Sinn Fein was the best suited to fill of all the contestants. It had won 25 of its 73 seats unopposed and won 22 more with two-to-one majorities. Such victories cannot be dismissed as mere products of intimidation and personation. Only a handful of results could have been affected by such means. The number of such results may be reduced further by the well-documented cases of intimidation by Britain (which had the biggest firepower) and by anti-Sinn Fein employers. Neither matter is taken into consideration by your correspondents.
At the very least, the election put the onus on the British government to negotiate with Sinn Fein. Instead, it attempted to impose a settlement unwanted by any sizeable political group in Ireland. This was a far worse breach of democracy than the establishment of Dail Eireann.
Finally, Mr McCarthy uses Tom Garvin's 1922 as his authority for claiming that the actual leaders of Sinn Fein (or some of them) doubted the democratic validity of their 1918 mandate. This is less convincing when Professor Garvin's actual passage is read. It comes to two sentences in 206 pages, without any authority given for them in an otherwise well-annotated work. Only the already converted should be convinced by this. - Yours, etc., D. R. O'Connor Lysaght,
Clanawley Road,
Dublin 5.