Sir,—Madeline O’Neill’s article on Colonel Maurice Moore (HI 32.1, Jan./Feb. 2024) was informative in the assessment of his work during the second Anglo-Boer War, but she seemed to elide the extent of his radical turn as the Home Rule crisis deepened in the build-up to the First World War. He was the most senior military figure appointed to the provisional committee at the foundation of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913. During the first six months of 1914, as the ranks of the Volunteers swelled, he served as inspector general. In 1917 he pledged his support to Sinn Féin and was part of a key coterie of moderates who opposed Lloyd George’s policy on Ireland. He was present at the founding meeting of the Irish White Cross on 1 February 1921.
Moore was part of a coterie of Irish men and women whose relationship was changed by the experience of Britain’s war against the Boers. Others on that list might include Alice Stopford Green, Erskine Childers, Richard Pope-Hennessy, George Fitzhardinge Berkeley, Roger Casement and Jack R. White.
Moore’s name would have been largely expunged from the historiography of the last decade but for the edifying article by Daithí Ó Corráin, ‘“A most public spirited and unselfish man”: the career and contribution of Colonel Maurice Moore, 1854–1939’, in Studia Hibernica No. 40 (2014), pp 71–133.—Yours etc.,
ANGUS MITCHELL