Sir,—Jim Smyth in his article ‘Wolfe Tone today’ (HI 32.1, Jan./Feb. 2024, pp 14–15) is less than fair to Patrick Pearse. It is contended that his famous 1913 Bodenstown oration tells us more about Pearse than about Tone. A reading of the speech shows otherwise. Pearse spends much of it praising the character of Tone, whose dictum of the unity of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter is central to the speech. Jim Smyth thinks that Pearse’s description of Tone as an Irish nationalist ‘doesn’t sound quite right’ and that ‘separatist would have made a better fit’. But Pearse described Tone as both. Pearse entitled his 1916 essay on Tone ‘The Separatist Idea’ and called him ‘the greatest of modern Irish Separatists’. And Tone himself summed up Irish nationalism: ‘To say all in one word, Ireland shall be independent. We shall be a nation, not a province, citizens not slaves’ (‘An Address to the People of Ireland’, 1796).—Yours etc.,
MÍCHEÁL MacDONNCHA
Baile Átha Cliath