Madam, - In their letter (March 24th), Sinead McCoole, Margaret Ward, Niamh O'Sullivan, Annie Ryan and Ruth Taillon charge me with "dismissing almost a quarter of a century of scholarship" on the role that women played in the Easter Rising of 1916, the subsequent War of Independence and the Civil War.
The whole point of my article in The Irish Times, "The Forgotten Women of 1916" (March 20th) was to reiterate and emphasise the role that women played in the liberation and formation of the Irish State and to highlight the fact that this participation has gone largely unrecognised in the current popular debate on the legacy of 1916.
By current debate, I mean the ongoing, contemporary discussion of these events in media and political circles as to the meaning of the 1916 Rising on its 90th anniversary.
These popular discourses almost always automatically refer to the participants in the Easter Rising as the "men" of 1916.
My intention in writing the article was to debunk the mythical notion that the Rising was an all-male affair.
My intention was never to dismiss the ground-breaking work of academics and researchers who have contributed significantly to our understanding of the role that women played in these events.
In criticising me for identifying a deficit in the manner in which women are denied their fullest recognition in these matters in the current debate, the authors of Friday's letter - if you'll excuse the military pun - may have simply shot the messenger. - Yours, etc,
Dr TOM CLONAN, Captain (Retired), Trimleston Avenue, Booterstown, Co Dublin.
Madam, - The article on "The forgotten role of women insurgents in the 1916 Rising" (March 20th) ironically suffers from some serious amnesia itself regarding the same topic. I refer specifically to the role of the late Dr Brigid Lyons Thornton.
She tended to the wounded and dying throughout the week of the Rising as part of the Four Courts garrison. After the surrender she was interned in Kilmainham Gaol. Her memories of listening from her cell to the fusillade of shots each morning as the signatories of the proclamation were executed, as recounted in Dr John St Patrick Cowell's book, A Noontide Blazing, are particularly chilling.
After the Civil War Dr Lyons Thornton was commissioned as a lieutenant, the first female officer and the only woman commissioned in the Irish Free State army. As your correspondent points out, the women in the Rising were quietly and quickly airbrushed from the pages of history and any possibility of exercising power in the new State they had sacrificed so much to create was thus shamefully denied them. - Yours, etc,
Dr PETER KIRWAN, O'Connell Avenue, Limerick.