Sir, - Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, August 19th) referred to Irish press reports in Pearse's time on German atrocities in Belgium. The time of the Great War is notorious for the amount of false and lurid allegations placed in the public domain as propaganda, particularly by Britain and her allies. The general hysteria got to such a pitch that Kipling stated: "There are only two divisions in the world today, human beings and Germans".
An example was the British government's Bryce Report of 1915 on German atrocities in Belgium. Hearsay evidence was presented as officially verified fact and widely publicised. A Belgian government committee after the war in 1922 failed to substantiate a single major allegation. The reality is that Germany did have a policy of armed reprisals against civilians as an answer to Belgian guerillas, but the results did not meet the scale of horror as reported by Bryce and by the press in the English-speaking world.
There is more on all of this in The First Casualty by Philip Knightley. The Bryce Report and press coverage of the war were discredited in 1928 in the book Falsehood in Wartime by Lord Arthur Ponsonby.
Thus Pearse cannot be faulted for apparent indifference to reports of German atrocities - Yours, etc.
Ted O'Sullivan, Homefarm Park, Dublin 9.