A chara, – John Bruton’s paean of praise to John Redmond and Home Rule (Opinion, April 13th) is a laughable distortion of history. Bruton’s political record shows that he never had much time for Irish neutrality, so his effort to defend Redmond’s call to fight for Britain in 1914 in the name of Belgian neutrality is monstrous.
He might think on the anecdote told by the Republican activist George Gilmore, a Protestant in Dublin who spent his holidays in Co Down where his family originated. Gilmore explained that when his train left Dublin he could see a poster urging young men to Join the Army and Fight to Defend Catholic Belgium. But when he arrived in Portadown the poster there read Join the Army and Fight Catholic Austria! You don’t need to be a man of John Bruton’s intellect to see that both sets of Irishmen were being manipulated and duped.
In fact the first World War was a war between imperialisms, all of which were at the same moral level of greed and exploitation. The German and Austro-Hungarian empires were exactly the same as the British empire which Redmond extolled and which Bruton now attempts to justify.
Irish Republicans of the time correctly saw that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, while Redmond preferred to squander thousands of Irish lives in useless deaths in the trenches of Flanders. Those deaths should be remembered not as a glorious sacrifice for a good cause, but a monstrous crime against working people dragooned into a war for profits.
But at least we now know where John Bruton stands in relation to the 1916 Rising. The question is do Fine Gael and their Labour Party sidekicks agree with him? – Is mise,
Sir, – John Bruton’s excellent piece (Opinion, April 13th) rightly emphasises the achievements of John Redmond, culminating in the recent centenary of the third Home Rule Bill.
Mr Bruton also justifiably questions the enduring blind glorification of all things Easter 1916 by challenging the morality of the allegiance with “our gallant allies in Europe”. The mythology of 1916 memorably captured by Yeats is a founding myth of our nation. Unlike Redmond (MP), the leaders of this putsch had no popular mandate for their decision; James Connolly was alone of their number in having stood for election, having been twice defeated in the Wood Quay ward. They struck “in full confidence of victory”, but victory of the narrative, not of the battle. Not only was Redmond more enlightened than the republicans of 1916, as Mr Bruton posits, but Redmond’s very legacy was fatally undermined by their actions.
Strangely, this piece about a great Irish realist turns me into something of an idealist – making me wonder whether it is Easter 2012’s centenary of Home Rule which should rightly have been celebrated, in place of inevitable pageantry which will accompany Easter 2016 and 100 years since “a terrible beauty [was] born.” – Yours, etc,