Sir, - Let us have an Arthur Griffith Summer School, urges Griffith's biographer Brian Maye (An Irishman's Diary, August 26th). And indeed why not?
But it is surely wrong of Mr Maye to use his article to cast unjust aspersions on the Labour historian the late C. Desmond Greaves, and the Greaves Summer School established in his honour.
Mr Maye accuses Greaves of giving a completely false impression of Griffth in his books by representing him as "a fascist, a racist, an imperialist, an anti-Semite, an implacable enemy of the workers."
As Desmond Greaves's literary executor, someone who knew him well during the last 30 years of his life, and a committee member of the Summer School called after him, I am quite certain that Greaves neither regarded nor ever referred to Griffith as a fascist, which he certainly was not. That Griffith made anti-semitic remarks and held attitudes of racial superiority towards blacks when that was much more common and acceptable than now is a fact. That Griffith wished Ireland to maintain and help run the British Empire side-by-side with England through a dual monarchy, and that he strongly opposed the Connolly and Larkin-led workers' movement at the time of the 1913 lockout, are also well-known facts.
Greaves was a meticulous historian and always careful to distinguish facts and values. He examines Griffith's historical role in detail in his classic study of the revolutionary period, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution. Readers will find it illuminating on Arthur Griffith and much else. All histories are selections of facts, mediated through the political values, ideology and temperament of historians. Brian Maye and Desmond Greaves take rather different views of Griffith's politics and historical role in their respective books, but that does not warrant Mr Maye's accusation that Greaves "greatly distorted history". He did not. - Yours, etc.,
Anthony Coughlan, Desmond Greaves Summer School Committee, Belgrave Road, Dublin 6.