Madam, - Gearóid Ó Clérigh (April 7th) writes that "today, Ireland is very different in all respects from anything John Redmond envisaged". In fact, Ireland is at last coming close to the Ireland of the comprehensive nationalism of men like Grattan, Tone and Davis, who claimed it for all of us, "Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter", under the "common name of Irishman". They were followed by the great patriots Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. John Redmond stood on their shoulders.
History is what happened and we have just got to live with it as long as we learn from it. Were we led down the wrong road in 1916 by a small group of physical force fanatics? Did we pay too much in a century of blood, tears and terror? Did it end in Omagh?
John Bruton was simply giving due credit to a man shamefully neglected in schools, on pulpits and political platforms. His relevance to today's hope of peace and power-sharing in the North is that, as Dermot Meleady writes in Redmond the Parnellite, he represents "a more inclusive concept of the nation", a "reconciliation of the British and Irish components of the Irish psyche", adapting Séamus Mallon's words and describing the Belfast Agreement as "Redmondism for slow learners".
- Yours, etc,
P D GOGGIN, Glenageary Woods, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.