Madam, - Recent letters coinciding with or responding to John Bruton's welcome remarks on Home Rule and 1916 have attempted to "indict" John Redmond with responsibility for the deaths of 50,000 Irishmen in the Great War (Padraig Ó Cuanacháin, September 20th), with never wanting Ireland to be independent of Britain, and with responsibility for partition (Pat Burke, September 22nd).
Those who complain that Home Rule did not offer sufficient independence at the time can hardly go on to complain about partition, since the only slim chance of avoiding it lay in the untiring efforts at conciliation by Redmond and his colleagues.
At the Buckingham Palace Conference in July 1914, and again in July 1916, they had almost no room to manoeuvre between Ulster Unionist demands and the all-Ireland aspirations of their own supporters.
The answer to Mr Ó Cuanacháin's "damning indictment" is that every one of the 50,000 men who died was a volunteer, unlike the more than 500 involuntary civilian victims of the 1916 insurrection in Dublin and the many more who have since been made to die in the name of republican ideals.
To understand why Redmond encouraged Irishmen to enlist in the British forces, it is helpful to compare the situations which faced him in 1900 and in 1914.
In April 1900, at the height of the Boer war, Redmond wrote in a US journal of the strategy of the Irish Parliamentary Party, recently reunited under his leadership: "What they did was in the most unmistakable manner to teach Britons the lesson that so long as Ireland is deprived of self-government she must be reckoned with as an enemy at all times of stress and danger for the Empire."
The context for this statement was a war in which most Irish nationalists, rightly or wrongly, took the side of the two small Afrikaner republics then resisting the forces of that empire.
Fourteen years later, the circumstances had changed utterly. The Home Rule Bill passed through parliament in the summer of 1914; when war was declared on August 3rd, the Bill awaited only the King's assent to be placed on the statute book.
In the House of Commons on September 14th, Redmond drew on the example of the South African leaders, Botha and Smuts, who, having won self-government, had pledged their support in the coming war to their former British enemies. In his declaration to the Irish people the following day, he said:
"A new era has opened in the history of the two nations. . .the democracy of Great Britain listened to our appeal and have kept faith with Ireland. It is now a debt of honour for Ireland to keep faith with them."
On September 18th, the Royal Assent passed Home Rule into law (with an accompanying Act suspending its operation until the end of the war). It was only then, in his speech to assembled Volunteers at Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, on September 20th, that Redmond called on them to go "wherever the firing line extends, in defence of right, of freedom and of religion in this war".
The ending of the historic British-Irish conflict removed, in the eyes of Redmond and of the overwhelming majority of nationalists, the chief barrier to Irish support for the British stance in the war. But there were more positive reasons for the young men of Ireland to enlist. Ireland's traditional ally, France, had been invaded in the most brutal way by the German army. Belgium, a small Catholic country with which the Irish could easily identify, was the victim of unprecedented atrocities by the Kaiser's forces - the cold-blooded shooting of thousands of civilians, the bayoneting of children, the destruction of churches and their use as execution centres. (These were for long dismissed as propaganda, but have been documented authoritatively by John Horne and Alan Kramer in their 2001 book German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial.)
By the time Redmond made his call, the war reports from Belgium of the Irish Home Ruler Tom Kettle in the Daily News had appalled nationalist, as well as unionist, Irish opinion. One of those forced to flee from Belgium was a niece of Redmond, a nun in a convent there.
A further reason for Redmond's stance was the hope (vain, as it turned out) that the opposing armed Volunteer forces of nationalists and Ulster unionists, who had so recently faced each other in a potential civil war over Home Rule, would forge a common identity in fighting in a common cause.
Left-wingers, pacifists and republicans have had a clear run for too long with the assessment of the Great War. The long stalemate, with its seemingly pointless carnage, which it rapidly became have made it possible to obscure the worthiness of the cause which drove many of those in these islands who went to war. A victory for the slightly democratic German state, with its government answerable not to parliament but to the autocratic Kaiser, would certainly not have favoured the development of free institutions in Ireland.
It is a pity that John Bruton, in an otherwise fine defence of Redmond's achievement as a possible "stepping stone" to full independence, should seem to have absorbed some of this attitude, when he denies that the war was a "great cause" and says baldly of Redmond that he had "no choice. . .he was obliged to support Imperial policy".
Redmond's position was, on the contrary, one of loyalty freely offered by a freed people, which is why he opposed conscription to the end of his life. - Yours etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.
Madam, - It is marvellous to see people thinking, questioning and debating again the whole issue of Home Rule, which has been put under the carpet politically for 80 years.
John Bruton eloquently raised the thorny subject at the Reform Movement Conference at The Mansion House on September 18th, in tribute to the Home Rule Movement and the patriots who sought change through peaceful means. Sadly, their pluralist idealism was replaced by the primitive posturing of Republicanism and Loyalist demagogues, which in turn led to great political, social and religious divisions on this island.
I welcome letters to your paper on the topic in the hope that new insight on this sad history may lead us all forward as a society.
The Reform Movement is to be encouraged and congratulated in its quest to question this aspect of history. - Yours, etc.,
CLARE MORRIS, Cabinteely green, Dublin 18.
Madam, - About Mr Bruton's speech to Reform. Indiscreet yes, Undiplomatic, of course. But more important, normal.
It seems that when a people have a successful revolution or rebellion some of them, even generations afterwards, will still be regretting or apologising for it. In the United States, for instance, some people still say they got their ideas of freedom from British politics, rather than admit they got control over their own affairs only by rebelling against King George.
More revealing still, during the second World War when German troops invaded France, some prominent French writers and preachers said the invasion and occupation were a punishment on the people for abandoning the monarchy and becoming a republic. That, in short, their revolutions were a ghastly mistake punishable by eventual humiliation.
It seems the hankering after kings - and of course princes - lies deep in the human soul. Indiscreet, undiplomatic, of course; but normal. - Yours, etc.,
DESMOND WILSON, Springhill Close, Belfast 12.