Madam, - EU Ambassador John Bruton's portrayal of John Redmond as an Irish leader who would have won freedom for his country by constitutional means, if he had not been defeated at the ultimate hour by an outbreak of physical force nationalism, is nothing more than a phantasmagoria of the ambassador's fertile imagination.
Home Rule, which is to say devolved unionism or devolution to Ireland of certain functions of governance within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, subject to the continued supreme authority of the Crown and the Imperial Parliament, was already dead in the water when the Home Rule Act was passed in 1914.
Placing it in abeyance for the duration of the first World War merely disguised this fact.
Home Rule's demise pre-dated the Easter 1916 nationalist uprising by some years.
The appeal to physical force was institutionalised in January 1913 with the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force.
No British government would try henceforth to coerce Ulster Protestants, and the proclaimed delay in putting Home Rule into effect for the duration of the war, which began later in 1914, was merely a ploy to buy time.
Following the foundation of the Ulster Volunteers in 1913, Eoin Mac Neill founded the Irish Volunteers later the same year by way of response.
Just as John Redmond persisted in his refusal to take the Ulster threat seriously, so Mac Neill failed to admit, even to himself, that the Irish Volunteers could have no ultimate logical object than that of coercing Ulster.
Had the bulk of the two private armies remained in Ireland during the following years, it is likely that they would have come to grips, with the British army supporting the unionists.
Under these circumstances, it may have had beneficial effects for future community relations within this country that John Redmond was a British Empire romantic, married to an Australian, as was his brother William.
By drawing off a majority of the Irish Volunteers to the slaughter trenches of Flanders and northern France, Redmond may in the event have forestalled widespread internecine mayhem in Ireland during the first World War.
Today, Ireland is very different in all respects from anything John Redmond envisaged. This is not surprising.
His Europe was dominated by imperial forms of government: in Britain, in Germany, in Russia, in Austria-Hungary, even in the French Republic.
Today Europe favours the American model.
A great effort is taking place to unite democratically, peoples, who in Redmond's era, formed part of several disparate imperial systems.
It is curious at such a juncture to witness a serving ambassador of the European Union constructing a rehabilitation of John Redmond, which disregards the central role in that Irish leader's major decisions, as in his fall, of loyalty to the British Empire of his day.
- Yours, etc,
GEARÓID Ó CLÉRIGH, Goatstown, Dublin 14.