Letter to the Taoiseach

THE very day that the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission officials descended on Dublin was the day that the National Library of Ireland launched its exhibition ‘Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival’.
I travelled by train from Newry and was pleased to witness the new bilingual emphasis at Newry Railway Station, thanks to Conor Murphy, the Sinn Féin Regional Development Minister in the North.
On the journey down, some people shared with me their enthusiasm for Gerry’s imminent arrival in the Dáil. That made me think that perhaps the vox-pops and commentary in both the print and broadcast media may be off the mark.
The taxi driver in Dublin couldn’t wait for this political development because some party leader needs to put it up to those who “sold out the Free State’s 95-year-old sovereignty in 95 minutes”.
Definitions of sovereignty are contestable but he still had a point.

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Anyway, back to Alice Milligan.
Did you know, Taoiseach, that Alice was brought up in Mountfield, just six miles from me in County Tyrone. She was a personal friend of my grandfather’s.
Alice came from the Protestant tradition and became a republican and a poet/playwright of considerable renown who put culture and the arts at the very centre of the civic society and the Republic that she wanted to create.
She counted among her friends WB Yeats, Standish O’Grady, Arthur Griffith and John O’Leary.  Someone said that the radius of her friendship was an index of her greatness, adding up to a roll call of modern Irish history.
Thomas McDonagh described her as the greatest living poet of his generation.  I bet you didn’t know, Brian, that Alice is buried in Drumragh Old Church Graveyard, a mile outside Omagh. All credit to the Sinn Fein members from Mid-Tyrone who maintain her grave and hold a commemoration there every Easter Saturday evening. I told this to Dr Catherine Morris who guest curated her exhibition.
Many think that Alice has been written out of Irish history because she was a woman who came from the North.  She was accredited with wonderful fresh thinking which she often outlined in ‘The Shan Van Vocht’.  If you get a chance, Taoiseach, nip down the street from Leinster House to the National Library where this exhibition runs until the end of February.
As I spotted Fianna Fáil ministers being driven in ministerial Mercedes through the back gates of Leinster House on my way to the exhibition for their meetings with the IMF and the rest of them, I wondered what Alice Milligan would have made of it all.
Just on a historical note, Alice was born in 1866 and died in 1953. I think we should remember her, don’t you, Brian?