Madam, - I read with interest Frank Callanan's fine article on Tom Kettle (Opinion & Analysis, September 4th).
However, he omitted to mention that the reason Kettle was in Belgium during the German invasion of 1914 was that he was trying to buy guns for the Irish Volunteers.
Kettle's life sums up the dilemma facing many Home Rulers, sucked into a political crisis that was becoming increasingly militarised that summer. The anxiety of some commentators to recruit leading constitutional nationalists to the modern peace process - see page 8 of the same edition - distorts and makes a nonsense of events at the time.
Many constitutional nationalists, including senior figures such as John Dillon, were opposed to political violence on practical, not moral grounds. Many were in fact former Fenians or close associates of Fenians. If they had been opposed to political violence in principle they could hardly have urged thousands of young Irishmen to join the British army and fight for the rights of small nations abroad.
Their purely pragmatic opposition to the use of force left them very vulnerable to the Sinn Féin challenge after the 1916 Rising and to the argument that Irishmen might as well die fighting for the rights of small nations at home, rather than in Belgium.
The acceptance of political violence as a legitimate part of the nationalist tradition also made it easy for Irish Party supporters to defect to Sinn Féin as the first World War dragged on. The same tradition saw members of all the main political parties in the Republic give money to arm northern nationalists from 1969 onwards.
Anyone under the illusion that Kettle was a pacifist should read his dispatches from Belgium in 1914: he was deeply aware of the ambiguities of the Irish situation. The widespread rejection of violence as a legitimate means of achieving political objectives in Europe has evolved only since 1945 and has been very slow in permeating some corners of this continent. - Yours, etc,
PADRAIG YEATES, Balkill Road, Howth, Dublin 13.