Madam, – Reading your supplement on the 90th anniversary of the first Dáil I was surprised that nowhere could I find any reference to the fact that that same day was the 90th anniversary of the ambush at Soloheadbeg, generally regarded as the opening shot in the key phase of the armed struggle for independence.
Both events were the work of the same revolutionary Sinn Féin movement.
Historians tend to agree that the two things happening on the same day was a coincidence, rather than a deliberate assertion that physical force and democratic politics had equal validity in the Sinn Féin project.
Even so, as Seán Treacy and his colleagues were shooting dead two policemen in Tipperary, the Dáil in the Mansion House was asserting its right to establish an Irish Republic “by every means” at its command.
Just as the meeting in the Mansion House initiated 90 years of representative democracy, the fatal ambush at Soloheadbeg was the start of 90 years of the use of armed force to achieve political aims, whether you call it armed struggle or terrorism, which gave us a disastrous civil war and repeated violent assaults on democratic authority in both parts of the island.
Surely the analysis of one event cannot be complete without consideration of the other? – Yours, etc,
DENNIS KENNEDY
Belfast.