Madam, - I welcome the debate that has been inspired by the President Mary McAleese's speech at UCC on January 27th. However, I am most uncomfortable with the President's apparent association with the Taoiseach's announcement at the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis last October of a plan to to reinstate the traditional 1916 Easter Parade with the involvement of the Army.
I feel it would be unwise to permit any political party to hijack the Defence Forces for the purpose of parading its own concept of patriotism.
It is clear to me that any commemoration of our nation's independence should be ratified by the peoples elected public representatives in the lower and upper houses of our parliament at least as a matter of courtesy and respect - and that any commemoration should be seen to embrace the sensitivities of all traditions. - Yours, etc,
PETER GAUGHAN, Monkstown, Co Dublin.
A chara, - Kevin Myers does himself little good in regurgitating an unfounded allegation against Major John MacBride, and proceeding to make vile insinuations against his memory (An Irishman's Diary, February 6th).
For the record, MacBride's estranged wife, Maud Gonne, made the allegation to his family in the expectation that he would acquiesce to her demand for full custody of their baby boy. He refused and a Parisian divorce case ensued.
Maud did not raise the allegation there; rather was it MacBride's side, in order to clear his name, which they did to the court's satisfaction.
Mr Myers's authority, Roy Foster, in his biography of W.B. Yeats, neglected to mention this fact, and his authority is no less a person than Maud Gonne's spurned suitor, W..B Yeats.
Kevin Myers may read the facts in my next book, Boer War to Easter Rising: The Writings of John MacBride, to be published by Westport Books at Easter. - Yours, etc,
ANTHONY JORDAN, Gilford Road, Dublin 4.
Madam, - The men who set off bombs and fired shots in Sarajevo in July 1914 did so in the hope of liberating Bosnia from the Austrian Empire. Five years later they got what they wanted, but at the price of being blamed for starting the first World War.
Similarly, the men who started the 1916 Rising hoped to free Ireland from Britain and by 1922 most of Ireland had become free. But this was achieved at the cost of the War of Independence and the Civil War and the bitter partitioning the country. It should have seemed obvious what important lessons the 1914 Bosnian liberators had for the Irish liberators of 1916. - Yours, etc,
SEAN O'BRIEN, Carnanes South, Kilrush, Co Clare.