Critics of John Bruton’s Home Rule advocacy are thinking wishfully

With respect to your correspondents (August 16, 2014) who have attacked John Bruton, their approach has been unhistorical wishful-thinking and not an empirical appraisal.

I do not share most of Bruton’s general socio-economic philosophy, but, having watched his political development since his election to Dáil Éireann in 1969, I respect him as a serious and hard-working politician.

Part of what he identifies as “Redmondism” could better be described as “constitutionalism”: The belief that rights, the protection of the weak and disadvantaged, the cherishing of all children equally, can only be guaranteed by a political system and culture based on, and faithful to, the rule of law as formulated by parliament mandated by the people.

We see only too vividly, every day, the consequences of the doctrine that “might is right”. What comes out of the mouth of guns is not justice, but intense, gratuitous and manically thorough injustice.

What actually happened in Ireland from 1916 until 1923, following the apotheosis and sanctification of non-mandated violence in the Easter Rising, was a period of bloodshed. During the 1930s, there was a prolonged and extremely damaging so-called Economic War, followed by outbreaks of guerrilla warfare in Britain and on the border, and 30 years of sectarian “troubles”. The reinforcing of the Unionist laager (circle the wagons) mentality created and institutionalised discrimination and social deprivation in a North upon which the South largely turned its back.

Far from ignoring the long constitutional struggle led by Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and John Redmond for what was effectively the repeal of the Act of Union, the British Parliament finally passed a Home Rule Act.

Exclusion of the six counties may have been a bitter pill to swallow, but nobody with a smidgen of realism could argue that blanket Home Rule could have been forced onto a powerful and armed Unionist minority.

In fact, the Government of Ireland Act (1920) did ‘concede’ what were in effect two Home Rule (local or devolved) administrations.

In a different atmosphere to that which actually applied, the two Irish sub-governments might have co-operated better, and sooner, than they did.

But that has to be pure speculation.

Maurice O’Connell

Fenit Without

Fenit

Tralee

Co Kerry