Madam, – It was wonderful to see the prominence and consideration you gave to the most important event in Irish democracy, the First Dáil. However your portrait of Count Plunkett, who opened the First Dáil, had many inaccuracies and misleading implications which I would like to rectify.
1. He did not build for the Papacy, he gave a villa to the “Blue Nuns” so that they could have a house in Rome.
2. He was sworn into the IRB before the Rising, not after.
3. He was elected for North Roscommon as an Independent, not representing any organisation.
4. After the election he made the choice to be an abstentionist, there was no question of anyone having to persuade him.
5. His interest in politics did not come from his son, Joseph Mary Plunkett, he had been a nationalist journalist, a friend of Isaac Butt and a close ally (to the end) of Parnell’s.
6. He was also on the first negotiating team to London in 1921 with de Valera, Stack and Griffith. This does not equate with his being “eased out”.
Much more could be said of his admirable work but it would take too long so I will just say that a man who, between the ages of 65 and 72, spent much of his time in jail for his belief in Ireland should not be dismissed and I (a great-granddaughter) recommend his daughter's memoir All in the Bloodfor a better perspective. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Given its primary focus, there was an understandable omission relating to the role of Seán T O’Kelly in amending the Democratic Programme in Brendan Halligan’s otherwise stimulating essay on the subject, as contained in your excellent supplement on the first Dáil. There were, of course, tactical considerations (well understood by O’Kelly) that had to underpin the wording of such a document. Michael Collins, for one, vigorously opposed any such explicit statement of social policy for fear that it would expose class and other divisions within the movement for political independence (between, for example, the recently created, and highly heterogeneous, owner-occupying farmer class and its landless labourer counterpart).
Beyond this, however, one must also consider possible philosophical influences that led O'Kelly to amend Tom Johnson's original text in specific ways into its definitive and final form. Comparing the two texts (as given in Brian Farrell's The Founding of Dáil Éireann) it is clear that, consciously or otherwise, O'Kelly's emendations reflected elements of contemporary Catholic social thought, expressed primarily through his excisions from Johnson's draft.
Such omissions included references to class struggle; worker “control and administration” of industries; and two references to the power of the State to appropriate (in Johnson’s words “resume possession [of]”) property “wrongly used” – if necessary, without compensation.
An obvious exception, where O’Kelly went beyond Johnson’s text, official Catholic thought, and considerations of tactical prudence, was, interestingly enough, that subordination of all right to private property “to the public right and welfare” correctly highlighted by Brendan Halligan as the document’s key phrase.
In view of James Connolly’s ultimate rapprochement with Catholicism, might it be suggested (to the sound of a ball being hopped) that the necessarily rushed and ad-hoc fusion of some of the more attractive elements of Irish socialist thought and Catholic social doctrine articulated by the much, and unfairly, maligned Seán T was rather closer in spirit to the ideas of the towering father figure of the Irish Labour movement even than those suggested by Tom Johnson himself – truly one of the great, unsung figures of modern Irish history. – Yours, etc,