Honour soldiers who fight for a just cause
But there is no way in which Ireland was served by killing Germans, Turks, Austrians and Hungarians in 1914-18. Ireland had no quarrel with those people. Ireland's quarrel was closer to hand.
Whether or not they were courageous, the Irish in the Great War were not killing in a just or worthy cause. We would not commemorate those Irish who killed for the pro-slavery side in the American Civil War, not even if their heroic fortitude knew no bounds. The unspoken assumption in Mr Morgan's letter is that, though their generals were butchers, the common soldiers fighting on the British side were fighting in the cause of right.
But why is Britain always right, and her enemies always evil?
Britain's assumption of the power and authority to determine right and wrong in the world by violence and conquest for such contradictory objectives as the slave trade in the 18th century, abolition of the slave trade and promotion of the opium trade in the 19th, saving Christian civilisation in the 20th century, and free speech, democracy and human rights in the 21st is predicated on the assumption of the unique virtue of a chosen people. This goes back at least as far as Cromwell and Milton. In his first speech to parliament in 1653, Cromwell said: "England was called upon by God, as had been Judah, to rule with Him and for Him."
Milton's Paradise Lost speaks of "God's special Providence for England His chosen People". This is the mindset that makes it possible for the British and their apologists to come to terms with world conquest, genocide of several continents, and the centuries of practically unremitting warfare in other peoples' countries that the Great War exemplifies and to accept it all without shame but with the characteristic chirpy good humour of the poem quoted by Mr Morgan: "'He's a cheery old card' grunted Harry to Jack But he did for them both with his plan of attack."
The 1916 Rising and the War of Independence it initiated have a very different moral basis. This was the second such movement to achieve a measure of success in modern times. The first was in Haiti. The earlier American revolution was a civil war among the British, in which each of the contending parties had genocidal policies towards the native inhabitants of America. The British-American civil war of the 1770s followed a divergence of interests between the colonists and their British kith-and-kin arising from the war of colonial conquest and genocide that both parties waged against an Indian alliance led by Pontiac in the 1760s.
About the same time, the Guarani Indians in South America fared better than Pontiac in their anti-colonial war led by Irish Jesuit Thaddeus Ennis.
It is remarkable that, while the mindless, criminal butchery of the Somme and Gallipoli are recommended to us for admiration, one of the worthiest and most notable feats of arms with which any Irish person was ever associated is practically unknown.
Pat Muldowney
Belmont Crescent
Derry
Northern Ireland
