Sir, – While I wholeheartedly agree with Eoghan McSwiney’s (April 14th) analysis of John Redmond, I feel he is rather unfair on Yeats in finding him responsible for the national myth of Easter 1916.
Had more nationalists read Yeats’s poem with attention they might have recognised some of its ambiguity and taken to heart that line, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”.
Yeats’s understanding of the dangers of violence and fanaticism is continually relevant. Eoin Ó Murchú’s (also April 14th) terrifyingly thoughtless claim that the revolutionary leaders of 1916 “correctly saw that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity” reminds me of the truth of some lines from Meditations in Time of Civil War: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities than in our love”.
This decade of commemoration should be about softening our hearts, not hardening them with the old, hateful fantasies. – Yours, etc,