The truth about Connolly

■ Paul Doran writes about James Connolly: “Why is it that the State fails to acknowledge this man and his Marxism? What are they afraid of ?” (‘Why the fear of James Connolly?’, Letters, June 5).

I think that it isn’t a question of fear, it is a question of shame.

There is nothing to be proud of in recruiting Marx and Engels to one’s cause, considering that in 1849, Engels demanded (in his ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’) that the “human garbage” – as he called them (Basques, Bretons, South Slavs, and Scots) – should “perish in the revolutionary holocaust”, and he blamed the Irish immigrants for the poor condition of English workers (in his ‘The condition of the working class in England’).

I guess that for the same reason, Sinn Féin isn’t too keen on acknowledging Seán Russell’s links with SS and Abwehr and the fact that the IRA wanted to replace the British occupation of Northern Ireland with the Nazi German occupation of the entire island of Ireland (in their ‘War News’, November 21, 1940, they even published a sycophantic poem about Adolf Hitler); and admirers of George Bernard Shaw are not amused when someone reminds them that he supported Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler; and denied both the Ukrainian famine and the Holocaust.

If there is any great Irishman that is really forgotten, it is not the economically illiterate James Connolly, but Edmund Burke (the founding father of conservatism who predicted the terror of the French Revolution), who – although himself an Anglican – was deeply immersed in the Gaelic Catholic culture of north Cork and opposed the British suppression of the Irish language – yet there is no Edmund Burke railway station.

Grzegorz Kolodziej Bray, Co Wicklow