Sir, - For better or worse, the legacy of Pearse is the Celtic Tiger. A hundred years after the Act of Union, Ireland had become a decaying backwater of Britain. Our population had halved and poverty, emigration and unemployment were the normal way of the country.
The 1916 rising led, inevitably, to the War of Independence and eventually to the Treaty, the Constitution of 1937, the 1948 Republic, entry to the European Union in 1973 and the process of trial and error which has brought Ireland to a level of prosperity which the most optimistic of us could not have imagined even 20 years ago.
As reported in The Economist of July 29th, 2000, the current GDP per capita per annum in the Republic is 3 per cent higher than in Britain and 11 per cent higher than the EU average. Irish incomes, measured by GDP per head, were less than two-thirds of those in Britain, as recently as 1987. Northern Ireland's GDP per head is a mere 76 per cent of that of the United Kingdom or 74 per cent of the Republic.
Success cannot be measured in material terms alone and there are many aspects of life in Ireland to-day which are unsatisfactory or unacceptable but, by any standards, the Ireland of to-day is far far better than the defeated, depressed brainwashed, impoverished island of 90 years ago. We owe an enormous debt to Patrick Pearse and his comrades for the undemocratic sacrifice which they made for their country. Some people may have a nostalgia for slavery, but most of us are glad that we have got up off our knees and that we are now respected members of the European Union. - Yours, etc.,
Cathal Mac Gabhann, Na Fabhrai Maola Thoir, Bearna, Gaillimh.