Madam, - It was a nice coincidence that your report of John Bruton's address to the Reform Movement appeared on September 20th, the 90th anniversary of John Redmond's speech at Woodenbridge.
On that quiet Sunday afternoon in 1914 Redmond, on his way home to Aughavanagh and flushed with gratitude to the British prime minister Asquith for the enactment of the Home Rule Bill two days earlier, committed the young men of nationalist Ireland to the first World War.
He could not have known the scale of the slaughter that was to come and there is no proof that anyone joined the army as a direct result of his speech, but he gave respectability to the recruiting agents, many of them self-appointed, who encouraged other men's sons to go to their deaths. It is a pity that very little has been published on this subject.
Pearse and Redmond used different rhetoric but both of them were prepared to sacrifice other people's lives for their ideals and it is a moot point which of them achieved the highest body count.
We do know, however, that by the beginning of 1916 very few Irishmen of any persuasion were joining the army and that Redmond himself was opposing conscription.
It has become an accepted "fact" that the Irishmen who died in the first World War have been written out of our history. If they have, the process began at least as early as 1918 and the parallel with the American reaction to the Vietnam War 50 years later is striking.
Many of us are alive today because de Valera and most members of the Dáil in 1939 remembered the speech at Woodenbridge and the fate of the man who made it. - Yours, etc.,
DENIS FAHEY, Drumcondra, Dublin 9.