Yes, we should all thank Wellington

Sir — “‘We gave Wellington to them (the English)?’” — that was Eoghan Harris’s ironic and rhetorical question, challenging the nationalist jibe that Wellington (a Dub) was English not Irish, in his brilliant talk at the 45th Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Daniel O’Connell is the Liberator, but his fellow Irishman Arthur We(lle)sley is himself the liberator of Portugal, Spain and Europe (1808-1815).

But in many ways Wellington’s greatest contribution (the one for which he received the title the Iron Duke, such was the opposition in England) was for securing Catholic Emancipation (a view he held with his brothers in Trim in the 1790s) as prime minister in 1829 and for which he sacrificed his premiership.

The fact of Catholic Emancipation in itself makes Wellington one of the greatest of British Prime Ministers (despite his reputation as the worst).

As Eoghan Harris rightly points out, Wellington got no thanks for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland and even less in England.

As for Daniel O’Connell, we are told he used magnanimity as a weapon and surely there is no greater weapon.

And O’Connell urged us to amalgamate the Protestants, Catholics and Presbyterians in the interest of Ireland as a whole.

It is surely time for us to take his advice. Gerald Morgan, Dublin