Sir, – Dennis Kennedy (Opinion, December 20th), claims that "in 1966 and 2016, official Ireland trumpeted the message that the violent ideologues of the Easter Rising were the true founders of the nation." This is untrue.
Whatever about the amorphous and ever changing “Irish Nation”, what the government celebrated in both 1966 and 2016, with the enthusiastic approval and participation of the great majority of the people, was the 1916 Rising as indisputably the founding moment of the modern independent Irish State.
As to the “violent ideologues”, the very modest violence of 1916, compared to the cataclysmic violence in which the British state was enthusiastically engaged elsewhere at the time, is viewed by most people as the regrettable but worthwhile price that had to be paid. – Yours, etc,
PHILIP O’CONNOR
Howth,
Dublin 13.