Madam, - The recent upsurge of interest in the Irishmen who joined the British armed forces in the 1914-1918 war and the underlying implication that they were ignored and not regarded with the respect they evidently considered due to them by the Irish nation is not so difficult to understand when one considers how some of their supporters behaved towards the Irishmen who took part in another war - the Rising of 1916.
A relative of mine who took part in the 1916 Rising told me, decades later, that after capture, as he and his comrades were marched down O'Connell Street, a large crowd of jeering, mocking Dubliners, obviously relatives and supporters of the men engaged in the Great War shouted abuse. "Bayonet the b-------" and other unprintable obscenities were howled at them. He, as a born and bred Dubliner himself, felt devastated. It is surely not so strange that he and his comrades, and later their families, should remember this performance by their fellow-countrymen.
With such a background is it not rather unrealistic of Capt Donal Buckley to expect the descendants of these Irishmen who fought for their own country's freedom "to be proud and humbled" by the other Irishmen who fought for Britain and her allies?
It is not an uncomplicated historical fact: one part of a nation fighting against and another section fighting for the same country.
Capt Buckley writes:"Whatever the cause, they fought for you and me". He appears to be uncertain of the cause himself. Here he seems to agree with Sir John Robert Seeley, the British historian, whose summary of British history is equally disturbing:
"We the English seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind". Think of it: millions of men dying in indescribable agony or perhaps worse left blind, limb-less and catatonic. Let's hope such costly "fits of absence of mind" are no longer admissible.
Perhaps it is Capt Buckley who should grow up. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICIA YOUNG, St Aidan's Park Road, Dublin 3.
A chara, - Your edition of October 31st reported that 28 Irishmen were finally honoured by the US Government for their role in the Korean War. Surely it is time that all Irishmen who fought and died in both World Wars, the 1916 Rising, etc., were remembered here in Ireland in the most appropriate way possible by the wearing of the lily on Easter Sunday?
If the IRA can decommission its arms, than surely Sinn Féin can "decommission" the lily? - Is mise,
DAN WADE, Edinburgh, Scotland.