Sir, - Was the photograph of the bowler-hatted Patrick Pearse accompanying Kevin Myers's Irishman's Diary of July 22nd chosen deliberately for its striking resemblance to the protagonist of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange? The resemblance is more than superficial: both gentlemen combine a love of culture with a capacity for ultra-violence, a conjunction which Brian Murphy (Opinion, August 2nd) apparently doesn't regard as contradictory when he holds up Pearse's support for the rules of "civilised warfare" as evidence of his respect for human life.
The assumption that Pearse's words are sufficient to refute his actions, and that the judgment of Pearse's contemporaries has more authority than that of someone looking back at their complacency about "civilisation" through a century of barbarism is a classic case of a supposedly rational human being resorting to flimsy arguments in support of something in which he has an unexamined emotional investment.
I suppose this is why we so often fail to learn the lessons of history and, dare I say it, why Father Murphy's church is still taken seriously by so many people in this country. - Yours, etc.,
John Tangney, Mountainview Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.