Sir, - Even reading Roy Foster's life of W. B. Yeats drives poor Kevin Myers (March 5th) into a lather of indignation about how VC recipients are not remembered for their hours on the killing fields, while glory is attached to the memory of Major MacBride. Myers should be mature enough to know that nobody (in the sense that he uses that word) gives a damn about the Major.
Hardly anyone under 50 (say) has heard of him, even if he did fight in the Boer War and the English executed him in 1916 - as much for that adventure as for his role in the Rising. The exceptions would be those who became aware of him, in a negative way, because of the Yeats and Maud Gonne connection. If anything helped to keep a tenuous memory of him from fading away faster, it was Maud Gonne, who lived until 1953 wearing black weeds to honour, or exploit, his name.
My own first noting of Major MacBride was when, around 1950, my English teacher in Synge Street CBS identified him as the father of Sean MacBride and the "drunken vainglorious lout" in Yeats Easter 1916 who "had done most bitter wrong/to some who are near my heart." Some epitaph, and it has been in print for over 75 years!
Kevin Myers slights his readers in assuming that as a block, they and the community of which they are a part, are consistently naive, blinkered, ignorant and unthinking. For my part, I think they have a firmer grip on reality than does Mr Myers. - Yours, etc..
Mullach Ide, Co Atha Cliath.