Madam, - Kevin Myers's superb Irishman's Diary of April 16th puts Garret FitzGerald's extraordinary comment about Patrick Pearse being "a realistic man of his time" in its correct context.
Pearse was a nationalist zealot, a psychopath uttering blood sacrifice rhetoric, comparable today to the leaders of Hamas and to al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden. He loathed the English, even though his father was English. After he, Connolly and the IRB had laid down their arms in 1916, there were 398 innocent civilians lying dead in Dublin. Would Garret FitzGerald think these people died in the name of realism? Come off it! The people responsible for their deaths were unelected and had been forbidden to take up arms by the Chief of Staff of the Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill. Some 6,000 died between 1916 and the end of the Civil War as a result of the resort to violence in Easter week. A further 3,000 died in the past 30 years in Northern Ireland, as the tradition of physical force politics was continued.
If we want to talk about realism, it was the Irish Parliamentary Party which "had mapped out the achievable far more clearly than had the architects of the 1916 Rising", according to the historian Stephen Howe in Ireland and Empire. And they, like the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, despised violence and sought a resolution through constitutional means. Ruth Dudley Edwards's biography of Pearse, The Triumph of Failure, is far closer to the truth about Pearse than the pronouncements of Dr FitzGerald.
In the 1918 election, not only was there massive personation and intimidation, but ballot papers did not reach most of the Irish serving in the British army. Recent historical reassessment suggests that had there been proportional representation, Sinn Féin would not have won. - Yours, etc.,
ROBIN BURY, Military Road, Killiney, Co Dublin.