Let’s honour an unlikely revolutionary

I SUPPORT of the suggestion by Nora Comiskey (Letters, June 14) to rename Dublin Airport after Tom Clarke to coincide with the Easter Rising centenary.

Tom Clarke was a most unlikely revolutionary. He was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of a British army sergeant. So highly was Clarke thought of by his revolutionary peers that he was given the honour of being the first to sign the 1916 proclamation.

To those who would oppose renaming the airport in his honour because of the physical force tradition he adopted, may I say the Rising is as much part of our history as is the Great Famine and Queen Victoria. If we have the political maturity and generosity of spirit to accept the many placenames which reflects our imperial past, should we not adopt the same maturity to accept our own revolutionary past?

Dublin retains many placenames and memorials to our former colonisers like Victoria and Georges’s quays, Nelson Street, Trafalgar Terrace, Pembroke Road and a host of others. We even retain “royal” prefixes to many institutions like the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal Irish Academy, etc. This is a residue of our imperial past and accept it as such.

The sacrifice the Clarke family made for Irish freedom is significant. Tom Clarke’s widow, Kathleen not alone lost her husband but also her brother, Ned Daly, who was executed two days after her husband for his part in the Easter Rising.

In addition, Kathleen Clarke in 1939 became the first woman to be elected Lord Mayor of Dublin. Surely a worthy new name for Dublin airport for 2016.

Tom Cooper

Knocklyon

Dublin 16