JOHN DE COURCY
Sir, - A correspondent of yours recently complained, very understandably, that Irishmen lost their lives in the 1914-18 war elsewhere than on the Western Front. (My father was one.)
But because we live in a State whose politicians have turned their backs on the once flourishing Irish maritime heritage (e.g. the government that scrapped the national mercantile fleet which saved us from extreme food shortage in the 1939 war, and the Taoiseach who forgot to appoint a Minister for Marine in his government so uninterested was he in maritime affairs), nobody ever recalls the hundreds of Irishmen who lost their lives in the tragic, disastrous and unnecessary "Great" War.
One was a Co Meath man who was killed helping Irish soldiers from the regiments named by your correspondent, who won a rare posthumous Victoria Cross. He served in the River Clyde, the most celebrated ship in the whole futile Dardanelles campaign. Scores of other Irish seamen lost their lives at sea in the 1914 war. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN DE COURCY IRELAND, Dalkey, Co Dublin.