Madam, – Pádraig Yeates (An Irishman’s Diary, August 24th) taxes me with being unfair, in my biography of John Redmond, Redmond: the Parnellite, to the memory of JJ O’Kelly, MP for North Roscommon in the 1890s, in characterising him as an advocate of racial superiority for his remarks in a speech to voters in the local election campaign of 1899. Rather than call O’Kelly an “advocate” of such, I wrote that his speech exemplified the acceptance by many nationalists of contemporary notions of racial superiority. Unfortunately, contrary to what Mr Yeates suggests, it was not merely a case of the “regrettable” use of the term “nigger”.
He omits part of O’Kelly’s speech quoted by me: “He did not want to insult them by comparing them with niggers, but he would say that if the men of Roscommon were going to cast their votes for landlordism in the coming elections, they would be worse than the South Carolina niggers.”
It would seem that even if O’Kelly was not animated personally by racial prejudice – and some of Mr Yeates’ evidence certainly supports that view – he felt the need to pander to such prejudice in his audience. Irish nationalists were hugely sensitive to their portrayal by some British politicians as differing from other white nationalities in being unfit for self-government, and thus being grouped with non-whites. Lord Salisbury’s comparison of nationalist Irish to Hottentots was long remembered as an insult.
It is strange Mr Yeates should mention the survival of slavery in Cuba in the 1870s while painting a benign picture of the Mahdi, the Sudanese Islamist leader whose revolt was, among other things, fuelled by Gen Charles Gordon’s attempts to stop the slave trade in Sudan. That trade, run by the small Arab minority which kept the 85 per cent black Sudanese majority in subjection, long predated the Atlantic slave trade, involved far higher numbers and continues to this day. O’Kelly’s admiration for the Mahdi is an early example of the tendency in Irish nationalism – later manifested in Sean Russell and the 1940s IRA – to support any force, no matter how oppressive, with whom the British happened to be in conflict. – Yours, etc,