Madam, - Digging up atrocity stories from Ireland's past for the purpose of discrediting nationalism is an underhand method of making a political point, all the more so when done through the medium of an seemingly objective television programme. RTÉ's "Hidden History" programme on the Pearson tragedy at Coolacrease, Co Offaly (shown on October 23rd) was carefully worked atrocity propaganda masquerading as history. It reflects badly on the national broadcaster and the professionals involved in making it.
A member of the Pearson family stated during the programme that all the family now wanted was for the truth to be told. Instead, the programme intermixed their story with subtle hints about ethnic cleansing, sectarianism, land grabbing and a barbarous form of execution, all of which are at variance with the known facts or the documentary evidence.
One of the shots from the firing squad hit one of the brothers in the right groin. During the programme this fact was transformed by Eoghan Harris into a claim that the firing squad deliberately shot the brothers in the genitals. Actually, the right groin is a different part of the body to the genitals. Harris's distortion of that point is a straightforward example of hyped up atrocity propaganda. It might have been more revealing if the programme had probed whether either of the brothers would have survived had they received more competent or timely medical attention.
The political context against which the incident took place was also distorted. Professor English from Queen's University Belfast gave the British view, asserting that the Pearsons had the right to shoot terrorists attempting to fell trees on their land.
No mainstream nationalist historian was interviewed to counter that assertion. The significance of the landslide election victory achieved by Sinn Féin in 1918 was played down, as was the military repression used by the Crown to flout the election result.
The necessary context - that the IRA was acting under a democratically elected civil authority - was absent.
The Pearsons were sentenced to execution by a republican court-martial because they shot an IRA volunteer on active duty, not because they were Protestants.
The idea that the attack was motivated by land hunger was mentioned in the programme but no supporting evidence was provided.
The facts are that in the few parts of the country where land grabbing was attempted, it was blocked by the IRA, a policy for which they were later criticised for being too protective of bourgeois property rights.
A two-part "Hidden History" programme on Irish Nazis broadcast earlier this year has also been criticised for misusing history in pursuit of a political agenda. Following this latest offering, it is reasonable to ask, has the national broadcaster come under the influence of an anti-national agenda? - Yours, etc,
DAITHÍ Ó hAILBHE, Corrig Road, Dalkey, Co Dublin.
Madam, - I would agree entirely with D. Kelly ( Letters, October 31st). RTÉ deserves full credit for an outstanding and even-handed portrayal of the events that led up to the agonising death of two young Protestant farmers in 1921. It displayed a brave and visionary approach to a subject that still has the capacity to create serious tribal divisions, even amongst normally measured academics.
The programme came across as professionally detached, and while some interviewees did attempt to justify, in retrospect, what happened on that fateful day, it didn't in any way take away from what was a beautifully constructed documentary, that surpassed even the renowned BBC for quality and attention to detail. - Yours, etc,
NIALL GINTY, The Demesne, Killester, Dublin 5.