Why Irish nationalism failed the stress test

I AGREE with Anthony Leavy (Letters, March 27) that Andrew Bonar Law’s extra-parliamentary opposition to the passage of the Home Rule Act mandated by the electorate of the United Kingdom in the general election of 1910 was an act of treason.

But I did not blame the rebels of Easter Monday 1916 for shattering “the unity of Irish nationalism”.

That unity had long been under strain by reason of the events following the 1910 general election.

Rather I regard it as a tragic consequence of the Easter Rising that the divisions within Irish nationalism became impossible to reconcile. It seems to me that in the circumstances of 1916 in Ireland — the dead in Gallipoli, the wounded returning to Dublin from France and Gallipoli and continuing British intransigence — an insurrection of some kind was inevitable.

We must go further back in history if we wish to apportion blame.

Dr Gerald Morgan

School of English

Trinity College

Dublin 2