A chara, - The "English question" has been given a new prominence by the words of the British Home Secretary (an Englishman) in the BBC Radio 4 programme Brits (a revealing title in itself). Sadly, his comments about the English "propensity to violence" can only serve to raise the emotional temperature on an issue on which calmness and tolerance are vital, and his references to the subjugation of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and to their fate "within the United Kingdom...over the centuries under the cosh of the English" only confirm the fact that the English are inexcusably ignorant of their own history. Thus, in contradiction of the British Home Secretary, one may point out the following historical facts:
1. Ireland, Scotland and Wales have never been subjugated by the English. Wars between Anglo-Saxons and British settled the boundaries between England, Wales and Scotland, while the island of Ireland has always had a separate and distinctive history.
2. England and Wales were united under a Welsh dynasty (the House of Tudor) in 1536. Henry VIII was the son of the man who ended the rule of the English Plantagenets at Bosworth Field in 1485.
3. The union of England and Scotland in 1707 was precipitated by the accession to the English throne of James VI of Scotland in 1603 after the failure of the Tudor (anglicised form) line.
4. It is hard to know whether Ireland or Northern Ireland is signified by the British Home Secretary as one of the three small nations. Northern Ireland as such as been part of the United Kingdom for less than a century, and the whole island of Ireland was part of a United Kingdom only from 1801 to 1922.
As an Englishman who has lived in Ireland for over 30 years, I look forward to the day when there is true equality (or parity of esteem) between the four great nations that occupy these islands. - Yours, etc., Gerald Morgan,
FTCD, Trinity College, Dublin 2.