NATIONALISM allows people to wrap murder in a flag and present it as war in a just cause. And it allows the ideologues of that cause to take history, scrub away the bits that do not fit the new fairytale, and write a version more fitted to their aims.

We have managed to overlook this huge centenary of Irish sacrifice on the world stage, writes Victoria White

Gallipoli Peter Hart

NO one has done more in the past decade or so to give meaning and definition to our continued quest for peace and reconciliation on the island of Ireland than President Mary McAleese in her two terms of office, whether in greeting the English rugby team at Croke Park or Lansdowne Road or in sharing communion with communicants of the Church of Ireland in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

THE indefatigable Tom Cooper has written an important and uncomfortable letter (March 1) on the subject of the cynical exploitation of the Irish war dead in the First World War.