Snide comment on Dev the freedom fighter

PERMIT me to comment on a rather snide remark by Tim Pat Coogan on TG4 (May 23) when he likened Éamon de Valera’s occupation in Boland’s Mills in 1916 to “the man who shot Liberty Valance”.

It is very easy to hijack a person’s historical character long after his death in this way.

Assuming John Wayne shot ‘Liberty Valance’ to save the skin of James Stewart in the film of this episode, who takes the part of Wayne, assuming Coogan was equating de Valera to Stewart?

In the early 1960s, my landlady’s husband, an Old IRA man, volunteered to me (I did not ask him) that all the men who served with de Valera in Boland’s Mills had the “height of respect for him” and when the surrender came through, Dev did not want to give up.

More than 20 years later de Valera kept Ireland out of the Second World War.

If we are not grateful for that, we are grateful for nothing.

Frank O’Meara

Newline Road

Quin

Co Clare