Sir, – Ronan McGreevy's piece on Tom Kettle reflects a welcome, renewed interest in the significance of Tom Kettle who, in recent years, has figured more positively in public discourse than at any time since his death ("The 'foolish dead' who perished in foreign wars", Opinion & Analysis, September 9th).
President Michael D Higgins’s 2014 Westminster speech highlighted Kettle as an “Irish Patriot, British soldier and true European” who is singularly relevant today.
However, Ronan McGreevy’s interpretation presents too narrow a picture of Tom Kettle as an unappreciated war “hero” who died defending “Christian values”.
Tom Kettle was an extraordinarily gifted public intellectual, steeped in the European Enlightenment tradition.
He was a resolute constitutional nationalist and defender of parliamentary democracy as the vehicle through which, he held, Irish freedom must be advanced. He backed the British war against German aggression because he believed the latter was a fundamental threat to democracy as an emerging European norm upon which Ireland’s freedom would be secured.
As his wife, suffragette and nationalist Mary Sheehy Kettle noted, he was a “man of peace, who had nothing of the soldier in him except courage”.
Kettle’s deep Catholic faith undoubtedly shaped both his highly egalitarian worldview and his conviction that the war against Germany was just. But the idea that Tom Kettle was ultimately motivated by a transcendent commitment to “Christian values” over “petty nationalism” is misleading. He hoped he would not be remembered primarily for his role as a “British officer”.
It is time to expand and deepen the narrative on Tom Kettle’s legacy and to rediscover his wide-ranging contributions as a uniquely Irish modern political and social thinker. – Yours, etc,
Prof NIAMH REILLY,
School of Political
Science and Sociology,
NUI Galway.