Sir, – The rededication of Trinity College Dublin's Hall of Honour is a welcome acknowledgement of the college's part in the first World War, but it is misleading to suggest that the ceremony was intended "to roll back a century of collective amnesia within the university" ("Trinity rededicates Hall of Honour to first World War dead", September 26th).
For most of that period, the college remembered its dead through solemn public acts such as chapel services, processions, and the laying of wreaths at the Hall of Honour, the Irish National War Memorial, and latterly St Patrick's Cathedral. Since 1986, when the Trinity History Workshop published Ireland and the First World War, college students, graduates, and staff have done much to revive public and academic interest in the topic. According to your report, Prof John Horne considers Trinity's contribution of "some 3,000 Trinity students, staff and alumni" to be "exceptional . . . and only slightly fewer than the numbers enlisting from similar but larger universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge". I fear that Prof Horne's words have been inadvertently misrepresented. The published war lists record 3,042 from Trinity, 14,561 from Oxford, and 13,878 from Cambridge. While 471 names are currently inscribed in Trinity's Hall of Honour, the death toll was 2,707 from Oxford and 2,470 from Cambridge.
The recorded Trinity contingent thus amounted to far less than a quarter of those from either of its English counterparts. It does not devalue the college’s human sacrifice to suggest that its true Oxbridge equivalent was Trinity College, Cambridge, which gave 3,130 men of whom 574 died. – Yours, etc,
DAVID FITZPATRICK,
Department of History,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.
Sir, – I was very interested in your story about the honouring of the members of the Trinity community who were killed in the first World War. I presume that the Trinity dead of 1916 and the War of Independence – on the nationalist side – will be similarly honoured in 2016 and subsequent years. – Yours, etc,
PADDY O’FLYNN,
Dublin 6.