Sir, – Stephen Collins’s thoughts on how 1916 should be commemorated should be welcomed. (“Present-day politics has no place in 1916 remembrance”, Opinion, November 9th). It is going to be a feat of high-wire casuistry for a nation looking back ruefully on a century of hardship and mismanagement – does anybody really know how many Irish people have been “disappeared” by emigration in that period, for instance – to appear to be upbeat about an event that begs so many questions.
The Big Bang of 1916 has fuelled division and discord on this island, and further afield, ever since. It is by no means established that anything like a majority of the Irish people wished to leave the union, in that particular way, and at that particular time. What is even more certain is that only a small fraction would have chosen the route hacked-out by Pearse, Connolly, and latterly Adams, et al. If “Better Together” is true for Scotland in 2013, it was true for Ireland in 1916.
Violence has been a curse on our people and those who have been its godfathers need to be constantly apprised of the cloud they have brought down on all of us. There were civilised alternatives, whatever “republican” propagandists say.
Had the people been consulted about a precipitate lurch out of the union, it is unlikely that the leaders of the carnage would have got away with the thorny way they proposed.
But no such consultation was offered. Rather than go through a hollow travesty in 2016 which puts those who oppose(d) violent methods, then and now, in the position of having to appear to be faking enthusiasm, (so as not to be accused of being West Britons, by the usual “guardians of the threshold”), for an event many wish hadn’t happened in the first place, I propose that a plebiscite be held on the role which guns, bombs, and intimidation, have played in this distressful country over the past 100 years.
Violence, and its justification, have become a cancer in our society and those who have taken any act or part in it, and the many grisly forms it which has manifested itself, have made the rest of us pay a heavy price for their two-faced and delinquent recklessness. But for the Irish people to be asked to celebrate the bitter fruits sown by the gunman is surely too much, considering the other charades they are currently being forced to go along with?
The Irish people should have been consulted about “armed struggle” in 1916.
Ask them now, in a belated bid to collectively turn a corner, and in an overdue attempt to clean out our stinking stables. – Yours, etc,
PADDY McEVOY,
Ardmore Road,
Holywood, Co Down.