Sir, - The silliest day in Ireland is July 12th. It is a day when Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter should be marching shoulder to shoulder to celebrate the victory of the Dutch Republic over Monarchist France at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This statement may come as a sharp shock to many people who think they know my political opinion but do not, but there are no ends to stereotyped assumptions based on falsified Irish history.
The problem is not that history needs revision, but that it needs to be fleshed out or dimensioned fully with particular reference to the dimension of time. For what emerges as Irish Republicanism after the Famine, "raw" Fenianism, was a product of the sectarianism of Daniel O'Connell and John Bull's moral constabulary at Maynooth, but even more of the attempts of the Young Ireland movement to reconcile the Jacobitism of Patrick Sarsfield (leader of the redcoats) with the Jacobinism of Wolfe Tone.
Let me make quite clear that my republicanism emanates from that first battle for an Irish republic fought by Englishmen of the five regiments of Cromwell's army which revolted at Burford against his proposed invasion of Ireland in 1649; they demanded that the Irish were entitled to the same republican independence which they had secured in England in 1640 with the overthrow and beheading of Charles I. In short, my republicanism is rooted in the Dissenter political ethos of 1798 and a rational defence and vindication of that position. This apologia has been enshrined within the covers of my historical work An Open Letter To Ian Paisley - Demythologising History.
Beginning next year, as a supreme peaceful and thus genuine ecumenical gesture, the Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters of towns such as Greystones, Bandon, Sligo, etc. might converge in a July 12th march, celebrating the victory of the Dutch Republic at the Battle of the Boyne. Catholics might assuage their consciences with the knowledge that there are IOUs in the Vatican with his signature, relating to the financial and military aid given to the commander-in-chief of the Dutch army and navy, namely William III, Prince of Orange of the South of France, by Popes Innocent XI and Alexander VIII. Yours, etc.,
Greystones, Co. Wicklow