Sir, – Patrick Pearse did not, as Frank Fitzpatrick (January 14th) would have it, spontaneously emerge as the icon (and the use of that much overused word is for once appropriate) of the new and not-so-new Irish state. He was manufactured. Eamon de Valera elevated him thus and then placed his sister, Margaret, on the ard comhairle of Fianna Fáil, the party for which she served as both TD and senator, thus creating an impression there could be little doubt as to whose side he would have been on.
It is, however, impossible to understand how he would have reconciled his deeply humane philosophy of education with what actually went on in Irish schools during periods of Fianna Fáil (and other) governance, and nobody in office tried to do so. – Yours, etc,
EOIN DILLON,
Dublin 8.