Sir,—Perhaps it will be beneficial to add the following to Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh’s excellent ‘“Years of storm and charm”—W.P. Ryan and the Irish Nation’ in the last issue (HI 31.4, July/August 2023). London’s Daily Herald, of which Ryan became its ‘first staffer’, had been launched with donations, including £300 from G. Bernard Shaw, himself a long-standing Irish journalist in London (among other things). Ryan’s The Labour Movement (1919) contributed to James Connolly’s post-1916 reputation, particularly arguing a labour slant to the 1916 Rising, which he saw as embodying ‘the social and mental gospel of the workers who advance, and of those who help them advance, towards the sovereign and co-operative nation’. Ryan suggested that P.H. Pearse’s last pamphlet, The Sovereign People, ‘established Pearse as Connolly’s comrade’.—Yours etc.,
NELSON O’CEALLAIGH RITSCHEL
Massachusetts Maritime Academy