Madam, - Kevin Myers deserves credit for his long campaign to remind us of the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who participated in the first World War.
Much remains to be done in studying the background and motivation of those who joined, and in seeing how the survivors dealt with the experience and how they were received in the fast-changing world to which they returned.
Perhaps some time soon it will be possible to set up a museum that would deal imaginatively with the whole question.
Leaving Kevin Myers and Maurice Earls to resolve their debate about British power after the War (December 10th), I would merely observe that Mr Myers has a tendency to gather all who disagree with him into one camp onto which his fire can then be concentrated.
But while this makes for lively journalism, it can lead to distortion and over-simplification.
It is possible, for example, to respect the choices of those who joined the British army, and to wish to see them remembered, without identifying with that army.
It is possible for an Irish person to be anti-imperial without being Anglophobic. It is also possible to be a British communist or leftist and to have rather imperial attitudes towards Ireland (like the historian Eric Hobsbawm or the commentator John Lloyd).
Myers's own case is not a simple one. He reacts with justified horror to German atrocities in Belgium (echoing the "Gallant Little Belgium" line of the time), but has he addressed Belgian mass murder and brutality in the pre-War Congo and Belgium's wiping of this horror from its memory?
He usefully and courageously reminds his Irish readers in graphic detail of what the infliction of violence means to the body and spirit of victims and witnesses; any exercise of violence by Irish people against the British is excoriated.
Writing for publications like the Sunday Telegraph or the Spectator, which uphold British imperial and military memory, however, Myers does not challenge his readers by reminding them of the centrality of militarism to British culture, both elite and popular, over the centuries.
He does not feel it necessary to remind them in graphic detail of cases of massacre and brutality that their country has been involved in over the years.
And he does little to remind them that Britain has not just wearily observed modern Irish realities but has actively shaped them, from Bonar Law's encouragement of unionist sedition in 1912 through Britain's inattention to justice within Northern Ireland and on to the disastrous mishandling of the early years of the recent Troubles.
Like France or Britain or Belgium, Ireland needs the honesty to face its past and the resolve to build on the constructive elements within its culture.
Kevin Myers would see himself as having a continuing role in that process, but can he continue to lecture us on our selective memory while failing to address the selective memory and inconsistency displayed in his own thinking and writing? - Yours etc.,
BARRA Ó SEAGHDHA, Victoria Road, Rathgar, Dublin.