Sir, – We have all benefited from John A Murphy’s scholarship, and especially his courage.
But his way of interpreting the 1916 Proclamation (September 12th) is too narrow, akin to the "originalism" associated with Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court.
Of the promise to cherish all the children of the nation equally, Prof Murphy says that the signatories only meant that unionists would be treated equally with nationalists. They surely meant that, and perhaps he is right to say that they meant no more. Perhaps the same is true of the members of the first Dáil when they ratified the Proclamation in January 1919.
But the Proclamation no longer belongs to its authors. They gave it to the republic they were proclaiming.
It is for the living generations of that republic to make what we can of its founding documents, using the lights of our own time. – Yours, etc,
EAMONN CONLON,
Shankill,
Dublin 18.
A chara, – John A Murphy takes everybody, including a former president and serving Government Ministers, to task for what he claims to be a gross historical misreading of the famous Proclamation phrase, “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”.
I would dispute his narrowing of the meaning of “children” in this context to the figurative sense of the national family, incorporating the nationalist and unionist traditions.
To narrow it in this way misses completely the multilayered, metaphorical power of the phrase, and the reason why it has continued to resonate with successive generations ever since.
Patrick Pearse, the main author of the Proclamation, was a powerful prose writer in both Irish and English.
I believe the historian Charles Townshend got it right when he described the Proclamation as a “kind of distillation of national doctrine, a kind of national poem: lucid, terse, and strangely moving, even to unbelievers”. – Is mise,
JOHN GLENNON,
Hollywood,
Co Wicklow.