Sir, - Regarding the 1798 bicentenary, we are all being told now, in the newspapers and on radio and TV, that the Catholic Church, in the 19th century, hijacked 1798 and presented it as a Catholic uprising, "air-brushing" the Protestant participation out of the picture. The fact that Protestants and Catholics fought side by side is being presented like a rabbit out of a hat as a long-suppressed piece of information.
In the 1950s, I went to a Christian Brothers school and my wife went to a Mercy Convent school and both of us were taught all about Tone, the McCrackens, the Sheares brothers and Bagenal Harvey, not to mention Lord Edward FitzGerald and many others, and were left in no doubt that all of these were Protestants. "Father Murphy of Old Kilcormack", like "Kelly, the boy from Killanne", was simply a character in a particular song and was not presented as being particularly important historically.
Anyway the whole idea of denying Protestant participation would have run counter to the much stronger inclination at the time to claim "Protestant Patriots" and to prove that the Republic, unlike Northern Ireland, was not just a confessional state. People my age will also remember the Waltons radio programme and the song, "Beat the drums for Mitchell, boys, beat them too for Tone", which was a forlorn appeal to northern Protestants to remember their Nationalist antecedents. In short, this supposed "air-brushing" just never happened and I cannot help wondering whether the current claim that it did is just another example of the anti-clericalism so prevalent at the moment. - Yours, etc.,
Ciaran O'Connell,
Tralee, Co Kerry