Madam, - Someone recently said that if Bertie Ahern so much as sees a fence he sits on it. It seems to me he has done this again with his suggestion (decree?) that the commemoration of the 1916 Rising should go in tandem with commemorating the soldiers who died at the Somme.
Initially, this has a ring of pluralism, if not generosity of spirit. But then one wonders why: (a) the casualties of the Great War should not be commemorated in any case, if only because so many Irishmen were among them; and (b) why the Rising should be commemorated at all, given that it ingloriously took advantage of "England's troubles" as it did, and replaced hundreds of years of oppression with three-quarters-of-a-century of the same.
The only good thing that happened then was the Christmas truce when British troops (including Irish) sang Silent Night and Stille Nacht together with their Germans counterparts. Britain is our neighbour and friend and we have a tentative ceasefire on this island. Let us not return to the trenches or in anyway glamorise the use of violence by any group with a mandate from only a tiny minority. - Yours, etc,
PASCAL ROSENSTOCK, Drayton Close, Monkstown, Co Dublin.