This newspaper has a convention by which journalists who are criticised by letter-writers may be allowed to reply immediately in the space beneath the letter. It is an opportunity which in my case and at my specific request is waived; I take the position that if I am prepared to give it, I must therefore be prepared to get it.
There is one serious drawback to this approach; letter-writers can declare that I said things which I simply didn't say, and then crowingly denounce me for saying them. J.P. Duggan is a regular letter-writer to this newspaper, and the custodian of such an ardent dislike for me that I am surprised he still imperils his health by reading what I write. Normally I allow his fulminations to pass unanswered, because they do not merit reply; but I cannot allow his latest public misrepresentations - appearing on Armistice Day, as it happens - to stand uncontradicted because they are the exact opposite of what I actually believe.
"Second class" Writing in reply to my column of November 4th about Richard Doherty's Irish Men and Women in the Second World War, J.P. Duggan declares: "Kevin Myers's jingoistic tunnel vision relegates to second class the thousands of young patriotic Irishmen who answered the de Valera-Cosgrave `call to arms' in 1940, believing that their first duty was to defend their own country in accord with the overwhelming will of the people."
This is utterly wrong. The book I was writing about was not about the Defence Forces during the Emergency. It was about the thousands of Irish volunteers who served in the allied forces in the second World War. By neither uttered word, implication, nor even unspoken thought in the writing of that column could be it be said that I "relegated" to second class the thousands of Irishman who stayed at home to serve in the defence of their own country. Since J.P. Duggan seems to be a fairly sedulous reader of this column - though I cannot imagine why - he will know that I believe that neutrality was the only viable option, politically, militarily and morally, for this country.
I have said this often before; and the reasons are many. Very few countries went to war voluntarily with Germany, and those that did - France, Britain - were world powers, with vast armed forces.
This was not the case with Ireland, which had no fleet, no armour, no aircraft. Nor was Ireland alone in seeking neutrality. The US and the USSR also opted for a neutrality which was ended solely by German intervention. Did not all those other involuntarily participant countries - Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Holland - envy Ireland its neutrality?
Neutrality was right
Neutrality was absolutely right; and those who chose to defend this country's neutrality had right on their side, and not just because they were defending their own country and were no doubt prepared to die for it. The greater truth is that enlistment in, say, the British armed forces could have meant that if by dreadful circumstance Churchill had won the 1945 election, Irishmen could have been obliged to assist in the armed suppression of Indian independence movements. And as J.P. Duggan himself says, the Black and Tans were within living memory. The arguments against becoming an armed servant of the British empire were powerful indeed.
All I have ever said is that many people weighed those arguments and chose to take the path of enlisting with the British against the Nazis. This is what happened; and thousands of such volunteers died. It is no criticism of those who remained at home to do their national duty in the drudgery of an under-equipped Army in wet and bitterly cold barracks to state this truth. Anyone who knows anything about the conditions the Defence Forces endured during this period can only wonder at their matchless stoicism and their unwavering morale.
Democracy I say again: the book I was writing about was Richard Doherty's account of the Irish who actually served in the war rather than those who served in the Defence Forces. They helped achieve the greatest victory for democracy in the history of the world. The end result of the victory against the Third Reich - with the defeat of communism 10 years ago - has been the creation of the world we now live in: an almost continent-wide social democratic European Union.
"These young patriot soldiers endured five years of unglamorous hardship for their country," J.P. Duggan wrote of the men who served in the Army. "Their lot was aggravated by an unbelievably hostile Department of Finance - and by the likes of Mr Myers."
This is thin, meretricious stuff; but alas, no more than I expect from its author. Can he really have nothing better to do with his pensionable years than to read a columnist he clearly dislikes and then offer for publication letters which wholly misrepresent both what that columnist has written and passionately believes? And do not the readers of the Irish Times Letters page deserve better fare than these regular eructations of querulously imaginative bile?