Revolutionary socialist & anti-imperialist; Rebel Breeze publishes material within this spectrum and may or may not agree with all or part of any particular contribution. Writing English, Irish and Spanish, about politics, culture, nature.
A maverick who denounces the political and economic establishment, Bernie Sanders is longest-serving independent in congressional history. Amazingly he came from the far Left and an urban background to win elections in one of the most rural states in the country. Serving as United States Senator from Vermont since 2007, Sanders has finished second twice in his bids to win the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. An icon of the American left, Sanders’ attacks on the rich and support for the struggles of working people have shaken the Democratic Party establishment and also earned him the adoration of tens of millions of Americans.
Born in Brooklyn to Polish Jewish parents who could not go to a college, Bernie Sanders grew up in on East 26th Street. His father, Eli, worked most of his life as a struggling paint salesman. His mother, Dorothy Sanders, was a stay-at-home mother who died young — she was 46 — the year after Bernie Sanders graduated from high school. The family barely made ends meet and arguments about money were a regular feature of the Sanders’ Home. His brother Larry Sanders recalledT that they didn’t really know whether they’d have the rent the following month. They probably would, but it wasn’t sure.:
“We had what we needed in general, but it was the fact that our parents were arguing that was the problem. And I think what Bernard and I took from that is that financial problems are never just financial problems. They enter into people’s lives in very deep and personal levels.“
Educated in public schools and Hebrew schools, Sanders was taught that all people are equal and that they are entitled to be treated with dignity. Sanders grew up in an immigrant Jewish culture that stressed the importance of getting an education and doing something worthwhile in life. Sanders graduated from James Madison High School, where in addition to being a good student, Sanderswas also an excellent middle-distance runner.
Sanders spent a year at Brooklyn College before transferring to the University of Chicago, which had a smart, precocious student body that was passionate about fighting racism and achieving social justice. At the university, Sanders spent a lot of time in the library reading about politics and social issues. In 1963, Sanders traveled to Washington for the famous march where Dr. Martin Luther King made his iconic “I have a dream speech.” He became active in protesting against segregation in Chicago and did his first public speaking in rallies denouncing segregation.
While Sanders was at Chicago, he discovered the life and writings of Eugene Debs, the founder of the American Socialist Party and a five-time presidential candidate. Sanders would echo Debs’ conviction that there was something fundamentally wrong in America where so few had so much and so many had so little. Debs’ campaign focus on wealth equality and social justice would later become the central issues of Sanders’ presidential campaigns.
MOVING TO VERMONT
As a child Sanders had read brochures about the bucolic beauty of Vermont. After graduating from college, Sanders his then-wife and brother pooled their money and bought a piece of land in Middlesex, about six miles north of the state capital of Montpelier. “We had never been to Vermont in our lives; we just drove up,” Sanders told NPR. “We bought 85 acres or $2,500. How’s that? But it was woodland.”
Rural Vermont was vastly different than the intellectual, activist scene that Bernie Sanders experienced seven at the University of Chicago, but Sanders enjoyed life in Vermont. Sanders became an activist in Vermont’s tiny, radical, Liberty Union Party, which opposed the Vietnam War and was trying to become a viable third party in Vermont. The state was seeing an influx of young people, a demographic shift that later became known as the “hippie invasion.” Sanders ran for United States Senator on the Liberty Party line in 1971, as well as a 1974 race for Senate and a 1976 race for governor, never breaking more than 6%. In 1979, he broke with the Liberty Union. In his book, Outsider in the House, Sanders said it was a painful decision, but that the small third party wasn’t attracting members, energy or leadership.
Though Sanders had lost four elections in Vermont, undeterred Sanders ran in 1980 as an independent for mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest college town. Burlington was economically depressed and the city’s Democratic mayor did little to address the housing affordability crisis that the city was grappling with. During the campaign, Sanders turned his attention to local concerns including unplowed streets and a City Hall that listened to business and developers more than ordinary people. The mayor dismissed Sanders as a fringe candidate and did not campaign vigorously against him. Sanders shocked not only Burlington, but also America when he won election as mayor by a ten-vote majority. Sanders became the only mayor in the entire country who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and one of the few self-described socialists to gain public office. Burlington’s political establishment was aghast, but Sanders proved himself to be a competent mayor who could fashion bipartisan coalitions to achieve results. Sanders was re-elected mayor three times, laying the foundations for his later campaigns for statewide office.
In 1986, Sanders ran as an independent for governor, losing to the Democratic incumbent as well as the Republican, Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders faced Smith again, this time in a race for Vermont’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Smith won, but Sanders surprisingly received more votes than the Democratic candidate Paul Poirier.
Bernie Sanders on election campaign trail (Photo sourced: Internet)
THE LONE INDEPENDENT IN CONGRESS
In 1990, Sanders again challenged Smith, who made some costly political miscalculations, including support for a ban on assault rifles. Sanders then won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association and the election, shocking the national political establishment.
Sanders was the lone independent in Congress. He had never been a legislator previously, and also had no party affiliation. At first, the Democrats refused to let him caucus with them but, after they lost control to the Republicans in 1995, they decided they needed Sanders’ vote. Ever since, Sanders has caucused with the Democrats and earned seniority in the congressional system, even though he was not a member of either party. Sanders took extremely controversial positions by opposing the War in Iraq and supporting normalization of trade with China.
In 2006, when Sanders ran for an open U.S. Senate seat, he garnered more than twice as many votes as his opponent. In 2012, he was re-elected with 71 percent of the vote. On December 10, 2010, Sanders rose to speak against President Obama’s extension of tax cuts for the rich. Speaking for more than eight hours, so many people tuned in to Sanders’ filibuster that the Senate’s web servers crashed.
PRESIDENTIAL RUN
In 2015, Sanders announced he was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. His run for the White House was described as quixotic, and pundits have labeled his goals as unrealistic and unachievable. Sanders and his policies however attracted millions of voters and amazingly he won 23 primaries and caucuses and around 46% of pledged delegates before losing the nomination to Hillary Clinton. A feature of his campaign was his supporters’ enthusiasm. He also stood out from other candidates for rejecting large donations from corporations, the financial industry, and associated political action committees.
Bernie Sanders campaigning for the Democratic Party’s Presidential Nomination (Photo sourced: Internet)
Though he lost again four years later to Joe Biden, Sanders continued to articulate his social and economic justice platform. Sanders showed that he has had more influence on American politics than almost any other failed presidential candidate in the country’s history. Many of his ideas, which were once considered fringe concepts, became part of the party’s platform, including Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and the Green New Deal.
Recently the Queen of the UK and Commonwealth regions reached the 70th year of her reign, called by convention the “platinum jubilee” and has received congratulations from the heads of imperialist, colonial and neo-colonial states around the world. In Ireland, she has also received the congratulations of the head of a formerly Republican party now aspiring to neo-colonial government. When Mary Lou MacDonald, President of Sinn Féin praised Elizabeth II for her “long service” we should ask: service to whom and to what? We are also entitled to compare her words to those of James Connolly, Irish revolutionary socialist and republican, in reference to the British Monarchy.
WHAT THE PRESIDENT OF SINN FÉIN SAID
Mary Lou McDonald, President of Sinn Féin was widely reported reacting to the news that a tree is to be planted in the grounds of Parliament Buildings at Stormont to mark the anniversary.
“I think it is important that we are respectful of the identity of our citizens who are British,” she said on Thursday.
“I think that is entirely appropriate and I welcome that decision.
She was reported wishing well to those who will celebrate the jubilee, and said she believes those who won’t “are now big enough, bold enough, generous enough to acknowledge the identity of others.”
“Can I also extend to the British Queen a word of congratulations because 70 years is quite some record,” she added.
“That is what you call a lifetime of service.”
Any logical consideration of those words should quickly find some problems with them. What does “respecting the identity of our (Irish) citizens who are British” or “acknowledging the identity of others” actually mean? One would imagine that respecting the identity of others would involve primarily not subjecting them to discrimination, racism or religious sectarianism. Does respecting the national identity of any people give them the right to seize with armed force and occupy a part of the nation? Because that is what constitutes the basis for the British colony of the Six Counties in Ireland and the administration of that colony is the purpose of the Stormont Parliament and Executive. Furthermore, discrimination and sectarianism is precisely what is suffered by a huge part of the population of that colony – from the very institutions being upheld by SF and by its President.
Stripped down to its essentials, we are only “big enough, bold enough, generous enough” if we accept the partition of our small nation, the forcible retention of a colony and pay our respects to the Head of that state and the Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces.
This is a monarch who has presided over her armed forces’ participation in at least 24 wars or interventions since her inauguration, two of them in our national territory. Her armed forces invaded foreign lands, bombed and shot down those who resisted, carried out massacres, tortured prisoners and she has personally decorated the leaders of those armed forces, including those who murdered Irish people. The very least one could expect from an Irish politician with any dignity would have been silence or “no comment” on the occasion.
A poster calling for retired Army officer General Sir Mike Jackson to be jailed and advertising a march commemorating Bloody Sunday, on display in the Bogside area of Derry, Six Counties. Jackson was one of many military murderers to be decorated by the British Queen. (Photo by Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images).
This is far from the worst thing that the Sinn Féin leadership has done with regard to the British Monarch, for in May 2011 they called for no protests against her while she desecrated the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin and while the Gardaí attacked “dissident” Republican protesters nearby and outside her state reception in Dublin Castle, the old seat of her royal enforcers in Ireland. The following year, Martin McGuinness, prominent in the leaderships of both the IRA and Sinn Féin, welcomed her to her colony and shook her hand.
Martin McGuinness, in leadership of Sinn Féin and the IRA, welcomes the British Queen to visit her colony in 2012 (Photo sourced: Internet)
WHAT JAMES CONNOLLY SAID
James Connolly on occasions too referred to contemporary British monarchs – but in markedly different terms to those from the leadership of Sinn Féin in recent decades.
“What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.
“Every class in society save royalty, and especially British royalty, has through some of its members contributed something to the elevation of the race. But neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every friend of the people, it has befriended every oppressor. Eulogised today by misguided clerics, it has been notorious in history for the revolting nature of its crimes. Murder, treachery, adultery, incest, theft, perjury – every crime known to man has been committed by some one or other of the race of monarchs from whom King George is proud to trace his descent.
…………………….
Two completely opposite attitudes to British Monarchy: Mary Lou McDonald (L) and James Connolly (R)
“Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but signs of disease in any social state – diseases which a royal visit brings to a head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social state of its political and social diseases, we must recognise the elements of corruption. Hence, in bringing them all together and exposing their unity, even a royal visit may help us to understand and understanding, help us to know how to destroy the royal, aristocratic and capitalistic classes who live upon our labour. Their workshops, their lands, their mills, their factories, their ships, their railways must be voted into our hands who alone use them, public ownership must take the place of capitalist ownership, social democracy1 replace political and social inequality, the sovereignty of labour must supersede and destroy the sovereignty of birth and the monarchy of capitalism.
“Ours be the task to enlighten the ignorant among our class, to dissipate and destroy the political and social superstitions of the enslaved masses and to hasten the coming day when, in the words of Joseph Brenan, the fearless patriot of ’48, all the world will maintain
“The Right Divine of Labour To be first of earthly things; That the Thinker and the Worker Are Manhood’s only Kings.”2
SUPPORT FOR SINN FÉIN
Most followers of the Sinn Féin party, who are by long tradition anti-monarchist and desire a reunified and independent Ireland, tend to regard those kinds of heretical statements by the party leaders as no more than some kind of camouflage to get them into power. Once there, they imagine, their party will lead them to the hallowed objectives of Irish independence and unity. In fact, the same kind of attitude that was that of the early followers of Fianna Fáil, “the Republican party”3.
The blindness, or more accurately the ability of self-deception exhibited by these followers is amazing. The majority continued to believe the leadership when it publicly abandoned armed struggle against British colonialism and declared it would never return to that (believing that to be a fake position) and even when it had most of its arms decommissioned. Then the party not only fielded candidates in elections in the partitioned Irish state but also in the colonial one and, in arguably its greatest betrayal of its previous position, participated in the running of the colonial state which it continues to do. Since then its leaders have sought support for and even assisted in recruitment for the sectarian and colonial gendarmerie4 and, more recently, declared its acceptance of non-jury special courts, a clear reference in particular to the no-jury Special Criminal Courts of the Irish state5, condemned by a number of civil rights organisations6 and of which the party’s own supporters have been frequent victims.
The attitude of the larger mass of instinctively pro-independence people, mostly working-class or lower middle-class is that they might as well give Sinn Féin a turn in government – after all they can hardly treat them worse than the other gombeen7 parties that have been in government since the creation of the Irish State. Such attitudes account for the rapid growth in the party’s electoral base in recent years when it became the first party in terms of elected representatives so that two other neo-colonial parties, with a long history of hatred for one another, were obliged to join and form a coalition with a third8 in order to form a government excluding the new kid on the block.
General Jackson with Prince Charles, heir apparent to the throne of England and Commander-in-Chief of the Paratroop Regiment (Photo sourced: Internet)
The attitude expressed by the President of the SF party runs not only completely contrary to the traditions of Irish Republicanism but even to its own history. It is more than that, it is an expression of the lack of dignity and craven forelock-tugging attitude of the neo-colonial Gombeen class that has ruled the Irish state since its inception.
While socialists and republicans rightly condemn that mentality and its practical applications, we should place our hopes in another outlook, as outlined by Connolly over a century earlier, and in the practical expression of that outlook today and in the near future. It is surely appropriate then to end this commentary with Connolly’s own words on another British royal jubilee, Queen Victoria’s in 1897:
“….. It is time then that some organised party in Ireland — other than those in whose mouths Patriotism means Compromise, and Freedom, High Dividends — should speak out bravely and honestly the sentiments awakened in the breast of every lover of freedom by this ghastly farce now being played out before our eyes. Hence the Irish Socialist Republican Party — which, from its inception, has never hesitated to proclaim its unswerving hostility to the British Crown, and to the political and social order of which in these islands that Crown is but the symbol — takes this opportunity of hurling at the heads of all the courtly mummers who grovel at the shrine of royalty the contempt and hatred of the Irish Revolutionary Democracy. We, at least, are not loyal men; we confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland to-day than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England ….
“The working class alone have nothing to hope for save in a revolutionary reconstruction of society; they, and they alone, are capable of that revolutionary initiative which, with all the political and economic development of the time to aid it, can carry us forward into the promised land of perfect Freedom, the reward of the age-long travail of the people.”9
End.
APPENDIX:
List of armed interventions and wars by British Armed forces under Queen Elizabeth II:
1In Connolly’s time, the term “social democrats” covered most revolutionaries in Europe in addition to reformists whereas today it is confined to describing only the latter.
3Fianna Fáil was a 1926 split from Sinn Féin led be De Valera, based on participating in elections within the Irish State, initially supported by many Irish Republicans in elections and when voted into Government in 1932 released Republican political prisoners jailed by the Government of pro-Treaty forces. Subsequently however a FF Government banned the IRA and jailed and even executed some Republicans.
4A gendarmerie is an armed state-wide military-like police force, such as for example the ones in the Spanish, Italian and Turkish states, typical of a State endeavouring to impose central rule on subject nations or regions where recurrent resistance may be expected. In Ireland the English occupation had the Royal Irish Constabulary which after 1922 in the colonial statelet became the Royal Ulster Constabulary, later changing its name to the Police Force of Northern Ireland. It has always been a sectarian (anti-Catholic) and repressive force.
5Both the Irish State and the colonial statelet have no-jury courts to jail political dissidents on low evidential requirements and under emergency legislation. The position SF’s elected representatives since 1972 has been to vote against the existence of the Special Criminal Court until two years ago, when it began to abstain and finally this year at its Ard-Fheis (annual general meeting), after an extremely poor debate, the party voted to accept such a court.
6Including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Amnesty International.
7A term of contempt dating from the years of the Great Hunger to describe capitalists who are happy to use the colonial system to amass personal wealth at the expense of their compatriots; its source is in the Irish language (an gaimbín/ gaimbíneachas — https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gombeen)
8Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. The first two have been the major parties of the State almost since its inception, with the Greens being a smaller and more recent phenomenon. Fine Gael are the political representatives of the neo-colonial class that supported the partition of the country in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1921 for which they fought a Civil War (1922-1923) against the Irish Republicans (chiefly the IRA and Sinn Féin). Fianna Fáil led a major split in the Republican movement to form an Irish Government and soon attracted support (and later domination) by a section of native capitalists, soon becoming the favoured choice of the neo-colonial Irish capitalist class, alternating in government from time to time with Fine Gael (the latter in coalition, several times with the social-democratic Labour Party). However, since 1981 no Irish political party has commanded an absolute majority in elected representatives and all governments of the State since then have been coalitions of one kind or another.
9https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/xx/qundimnd.htm Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Day, 22 June 1897, was marked by Connolly and Maud Gonne with protests on the streets of Dublin. Connolly dumped a symbolic coffin into the River Liffey and shouted “to hell with the British Empire”, for which ‘crime’ he spent the night in jail.
Queen Elizabeth II / Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald
Mary Lou McDonald, the current president of Sinn Féin, surprised a few, just a few, with her recent comments thanking the English queen, Elizabeth, for her service. She stated that “Can I also extend to the British Queen a word of congratulations because 70 years is quite some record. That is what you call a lifetime of service.”(1)
Why someone who describes herself as a republican would want to heap praise on a monarch and refer to the reign of the monarch as service is bewildering. However, it is not that strange in the context of the Irish peace process. It is part of the long road of Sinn Féin’s accommodation to the British state that was laid out in the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin at that time abandoned any pretence of having a critique of imperialism and capitalism.
The agreement signed basically stated that the British had no selfish interest in Ireland and the conflict was a communal one. Putting it in blunt terms, two savage tribes agreed to settle their differences, the British state was not one of those savage agents in the conflict.(2)
Exactly what service has the English queen given and to whom? As a monarch she has blessed every British military adventure since her coronation in 1953, including the savagery of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, various other colonial wars, not to mention her awarding of an OBE to Lt. Colonel Derek Wilford the man responsible for Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972. In 2019 she stood over her behaviour when she stated that the British government would “bring forward proposals to tackle vexatious claims that undermine our armed forces, and will continue to seek better ways of dealing with legacy issues that provide better outcomes for victims and survivors”.(3) The massacre of Bloody Sunday was placed in the category of vexatious claims.
Part of the service that McDonald now lauds includes this and many more such incidents. Though it is not unexpected. It can only surprise those who pay no attention to the outcomes of peace processes around the world. Yasser Arafat spent more time repressing Palestinians than he did fighting the Israelis after the Oslo Accords. In South Africa, the former mining trade union leader Cyril Ramphosa became a mining magnate, whose company was involved in the massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana in 2012.(4) He and the ANC made their peace with white capitalists and obtained a share of the wealth, in Ramphosa’s case a very substantial amount which some estimates place around $780 million dollars. In El Salvador, the FMLN eventually gained power, but did not implement a single thing they had ever fought for and their former commander Joaquín Villalobos is now a consultant to right wing forces on how to defeat left wing movements and contributes to the right-wing think tank The Inter-American Dialogue, which includes such illustrious figures as Violetta Chamorro from Nicaragua and former head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, to name just two unsavoury characters.(5) In Colombia, the ink hadn’t even dried on the agreement and the FARC commander Timochenko declared that the Colombian armed forces would be allies of the FARC in building a new country. The murder of just over 300 members of the FARC since the signing of the peace agreement has not caused him to change his evaluation of the Colombian armed forces, in fact he has doubled down on his position.
It is in the nature of the beast. In every peace process that has happened, the former enemies of the state reconciled themselves to the regime and the system, without exception. McDonald’s declarations are just a confirmation of that and also a sign that it is a bottomless pit and there is no level of political depravity that Sinn Féin will not sink to.
(from The Treason Felony Blog le buíochas: The Weaver Street Bombing and not dealing with the past)
(Reading time: 3 mins.)
In Belfast, on 13th February 1922, some children playing in Milewater Street, at the corner of Weaver Street, off the York Road, were approached by two Special Constables and told to go and “play with their own” (Special Constables invariably being Protestant, the children were Catholics in a largely Protestant district). They joined other children in the mainly Catholic-occupied Weaver Street and played on a swing attached to a lamp-post. Ten minutes later, two men came to the North Derby Street end of Weaver Street (one eye witness claimed one Special Constable had just spoken to the same two men). They were about 20 metres away from where the children were playing. One of the men then threw a bomb into the middle of the children. As the bomb exploded, gunfire directed into Weaver Street from North Derby Street, covered the two men’s retreat.
Map showing Weaver Street running from North Derby Street to Milewater Street (which isn’t named on the map)
The explosion killed or injured Mary Johnson (13), Catherine Kennedy (14), W.J. Dempsey (13), Annie Pimley (16), John O’Hanlon (16), Elizabeth O’Hanlon (11), Murtie O’Hanlon (16), Barney Kennedy (10), John McCluskey (12), Rose Ann McNeill (13), Mary McClinton (18), Mary Kerr (6), Susanne Lavery (14), George O’Connor (16), Joseph Conway (12), Patrick Maguire (14), Kate O’Neill (14), Robert McBirney (16) and William Connolly (13). All lived in Weaver Street. Adults standing in their doorways were also badly injured.
The force of the blast threw the children up into the air and caused catastrophic injuries, maiming many of those who survived. Mary Johnson and Catherine Kennedy died immediately. Eliza O’Hanlon died the next day. Statements made in the press and in Westminster indicate that three of those injured had died by the next day, the third being O’Hanlon. By the time the inquest was held on 3rd March, a fourth girl had died from the blast. Two adults were to succumb to their injuries. Margaret Smith died on the 23rd March, while Mary Owens (who lived in nearby Shore Street) died from injuries sustained in the blast on the 6th April.
This was not the first bombing of its kind. On September 25th the previous year, a bomb had been thrown into a group of Catholic children on Milewater Street, injuring nine, including four under six years of age. One man, George Barry, died from injuries he received. The bomb had such force that two houses were wrecked. A bomb had also been thrown by loyalists into a group of school children in Herbert Street on 12th January, injuring six (the Belfast Telegraph erroneously reported it as an IRA attack). The same month, a bomb had been thrown into Weaver Street from a passing taxi.
The Belfast Telegraph claimed the 13th February bomb was one of the largest ever used in the city. It also implausibly offered justification for the bomb attack, saying shots had earlier been fired at an armoured car in Weaver Street. In retrospect, the Belfast Telegraph’s link to an attack of an armoured car merely ties the Special Constabulary closer to the bombing (the ‘Specials’, created at roughly the same time, performed the Black and Tans roles in repression and reprisals in the north).
James Craig also included a reference to the bomb in a report sent to the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill and read in Westminster the next day. It stated that there had been…
..the indiscriminate throwing of bombs over a wall into Weaver Street, a Sinn Fein area, which resulted in the death of two children and the wounding of fourteen others. These outrages are greatly deplored by my Government, especially the latter dastardly deed, involving the lives of children.
Craig was more concerned about a gun battle in Clones between republican forces and Special Constables travelling to Enniskillen the day before the Weaver Street bombing. Joe Devlin fumed that Craigs wording was deliberately vague and that some international press had been led to believe that the bomb was thrown by republicans.
As sectarian attacks continued through 1921 and 1922, and even after the 13th February bomb, the (relatively) safe places for Catholic families to live in that part of the York Road had shrank to the area around Weaver Street. The attacks continued to intensify in early summer. On 18th May Thomas McCaffrey from Shore Street was killed. On the night of 20th May, Thomas McShane from Jennymount Street was killed. That same night the remaining Catholic residents of Weaver Street, Milewater Street, North Derby Street, Shore Street and Jennymount Street, some one hundred and forty-eight families, were forced from their homes at gunpoint. By the 21st May 1922 the Catholic community that had established itself around Weaver Street had fled. The 1924 street directory only shows one household remaining from the 1918 directory (in comparison, nearby Seaview Street had two thirds of the same households). Houses in Weaver Street remained occupied until the 1960s as Unilever and the Associated Feed Mills bought up property around Shore Street, Weaver Street and Milewater Street eventually enclosing all but the York Road end of Milewater Street.
The view today of where Weaver Street met North Derby Street. This is more or less where the bomb was thrown from.
Today, Shore Street and Weaver Street are gone, no longer visible on the streetscape of Belfast. Patiently neglected over the decades after 1922, their former occupants were dispersed around other districts of the city. Similarly, the detail of its own particular sadness, sectarianism and savagery are now, largely, long forgotten. The memory of the violence of 1920-22, mostly unarticulated, was indelibly etched into the psyche of the Catholic residents of Belfast.
Some 20-25% of those killed in the 1920-22 conflict died in Belfast but, with few notable exceptions, little was written or said about it over the decades that followed (even today only a handful of books have been written about it). So despite what has happened since 1969, few have considered how the memory of 1920-22 influenced communities. Even fewer have considered the role an absence of public discourse around the violence of 1920-22 may have had in later outbreaks of sectarian violence in the 1930s and 1960s.
Today, the very obliteration of Weaver Street from the streetscape of Belfast, somehow elevates it as an appropriate metaphor for the eclipse of public discourse on the violence of 1920-22.
The press and large swathes of the academic world usually think of crime as natural, even normal and constant throughout the history of our societies and consequently, punishment is also natural and normal, although one or other of them usually condemns punishments which seem abhorrent, such as the death penalty. Although within that group there are those who only oppose the death penalty because they acknowledge that they could end up executing some innocent people. But neither crime nor punishment is constant in history.
There have always been transgressions of societal norms, but the concept of crime that we use today is not the same as a transgression in a communitarian society. Of course, a person could attack another, even end up killing them, but the transgression is against the community and its social harmony and not just against the person. Crime as we conceive of it nowadays comes into being with class society. In a society where goods are held in common, such as water or collectively such as tools or food, the modern crime of theft cannot exist. The Anarchist Proudhon, wrote a piece entitled What is Property? Better known for its famous phrase “Property is theft.” Marx in response ridiculed Proudhon explaining with very little patience that in order for there to be theft, the property must previously exist. If there is no private property then neither can there be crimes such as theft. It is something basic the poor Proudhon did not see, but neither do the majority of commentators, academics, jurists and other liberal style personalities.
So in the case of private property, people are alienated from other people’s property, from that which is not theirs. Before, in the face of threat from another tribal group, the collective responded jointly, but any threat to private property is only defended by those who have deeds on the asset and as is obvious, one person cannot respond to attacks or threats from more than one person, nor can they enjoy their property, if they have to protect it constantly and so they have to use a part of their wealth to hire those who will do that work for them and thus private and later still the armed forces are born. As property is no longer collective and the rules on its usufruct, possession or consumption are not agreed upon, nor obvious and with a greater commercial exchange amongst groups there is a need for agreed upon norms between the proprietors on the rights and obligations of others regarding their property. The development of writing allowed for the drawing up of the first penal and civic codes for everyone, so as all knew their rights and duties. So one of the first known codes in the world was the Hammurabi Code in 1,772 B.C., in Babylonia, the region in which writing was born. This code contained severe punishments for physical injury, it is one of the first times the adage of “Eye for an Eye” is mentioned, but the guilty party could avoid such a punishment by paying a fine, however this was not the case with crimes against property, which were punished by the death penalty;1 i.e. with money you could avoid or minimise punishment but private property was sacred. This was a clearly classist penal code just like the other ancient codes from India, China and Philippines amongst others that punished the poor more severely than the rich. One exception was that of the Aztecs that expected the nobility to behave well and punished them more severely when they didn’t,2 i.e. not only is crime born with class society but also punishment is clearly classist.
It is worth saying that the need for a state comes into being with private property, which is a distinct form of community organisation. The State represents the interests of the dominant classes and the form and structure it takes, whether it is slave, feudal, monarchist, or capitalist depends on which are the dominant classes and the dominant mode of production. But as for crime, an infraction was an injury to the community, its social harmony, whereas in class society, crimes are not committed against the person but rather against the State and this can be seen even today in trials which are presented as cases of the State vs X. This is so in cases of crimes against property and against the person.
Even with codes and private and state armed forces, punishment as we know it today in the shape of prisons was not common. Hollywood has inflicted great harm to our concepts of crimes in society, giving us a continuous line in terms of concepts, crimes and attitudes regarding them and also twisting the history of punishment. Prisons as we conceive of them today are an invention in a constant changing state of flux and in Roman and Ancient Greek times that concept did not exist. There have always been places of confinement for criminals, however imprisonment in and of itself was not the punishment. The dungeons of old were on the one hand transitory in nature, whilst the real punishment was awaited or places where debtors and people who had not paid their taxes were placed etc. and stayed there until such time as they paid their debt, tax or fine. Today, in many countries they continue to imprison people for this type of behaviour.
The main punishments were different. You only have to read the Bible, especially the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where the Jews consecrated their laws, both those that were supposedly divine in nature or profane to get a general idea of what punishment was like. There is no real difference between the divine and profane laws, both responded to the material needs of society e.g. the prohibition on adultery in the Ten Commandments is supposedly divine, but really the pleasure of this sin is that it calls in question the lineage and the inheritance of private property.
In the Book of Genesis Adam and Eve are shown to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. Banishment was a common practice and even today there are various tribal peoples who practice it in cases of serious or repeated transgressions. But in various books from the Bible we can see different crimes and punishments such as compensation, whipping, mutilation, torture etc. It is clear however that the main punishment was the death penalty, described precisely according to the type of crime, so prostitution was punished with the bonfire, adultery with stoning, which was the most common method and not only permitted for an endless list of crimes but rather ordained by a supposed law of god, something the modern Right forget when criticising Islamic countries, as they continue to practice the same rules of the Bible in that sense. They weren’t the only ones, the Greeks also used the death penalty for a wide range of crimes just like the Romans.3
Prison, in the modern sense, was rare. The modern prison is the product of large scale expansion at the end of the 18th Century. Before then prisons were different and served a different purpose and what passed for justice was clearly a lack of justice and thirst for vengeance and public shaming with social control in mind. You only have to look at the punishments in the Bible, but if you don’t like referring to a text so basic to the social, moral and legal formation of the European countries that would later impose their vision on the rest of the world, then just look at what those countries did from the Middle Ages onwards. Amongst the punishments, there to be found some practices that leave the chosen people in second place when it comes thinking of the most inhumane thing in the search for a supposed “justice”. It is presumed that we have made progress and have improved, however as Roth explains the punishments were severe and ruthless, but the majority of the ancient punishments were insignificant in comparison to the punishment of the wheel, being burned alive or disembowelled alive.4
Physical punishment was common and there existed a wide variety of punishments across time and societies. Roth shows in his book An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment how stoning, flagellation, banishment, mutilation and amputation existed in one form or another in societies as diverse and different as Egypt of the Pharoahs, Greece and Rome, Sumer and China. Of course, the most inhumane punishment is the death penalty. In 2021, there were 35 countries that retained the death penalty in practice, amongst countries as diverse as the USA, North Korea, Iran, China and Japon. There are a further number of countries who retain it for non-common crimes (six, amongst them Israel) of those that retain it as a legal practice but do not implement it (48) and others that abolished it formally for any type of crime (93).5What is clear is that the barbarity of the past is not in the past but the present and can return at any time.
The death penalty as stated has been one of the constant aspects in the sad history of punishment. However, it has evolved and changed through history and was applied in the same manner in all country, just like it is not applied uniformly nowadays.
Chamber for gas execution, USA (Photo cred: WILX by AP)
There are various methods of applying the death penalty, some are from the Judeo-Christian tradition such as stoning and decapitation still exists in various Islamic countries, whilst the Christians in the USA opt for equally cruel methods, such as the electric chair. Fortunately, the practice of crucifixion, which was common amongst not just the Romans but the Jews6 has disappeared from our world.
Electric Chair paraphenalia on exhibition Virginia Museum (Photo sourced: NBC on line)
At the end of the 18th Century, various changes took place in criminal policy. Large prison building projects were undertaken in Europe, particularly in Great Britain. In the British case, it was due to social changes and changes in thinking but also the fact that the war of independence in what would become the USA cut off the possibility of continuing to deport criminals and to populate the colony with felons. So, there was a need for an increase in prisons and the prison would not just function as a temporary point of reclusion before execution, deportation or payment of a fine, debt or tax, but rather prison would be the punishment. Confinement in and of itself was the punishment. Although it seems strange nowadays to think so, but prisons were a progressive measure, the judicial systems aimed to be more than just organisms that rubber stamped vengeance by the state.
One of the most renowned prison architects of the period was John Howard, who saw himself as a prison reformer, and in fact one of the oldest prison reform organisations in that country bears his name, the Howard League. He designed prisons that he thought would contribute to the reform of the person and he introduced a relatively new, though not unknown, concept for the period, the prison cell. The cell for Howard was meant for one prisoner, something which should be borne in mind when we think about modern overcrowding in almost all prison systems in the world and the design of cells for two or more prisoners in various recently built prisons, as is the case in some prisons in Colombia, paid and designed by the US Federal Bureau of Prisons as part of the drugs strategy of Plan Colombia.
Howard was not the only reformer, throughout the 18th Century there were various reformers who published reports and proposals on prisons and what to do with prisoners, amongst them William Blackstone, who believed that punishment should be used to prevent recidivism and reform the criminal,7 a new concept for the period and coincides with various modern proposals and others such as the Italian, Cesare Beccaria who in 1764 supported the idea of using punishment to reduce crime and that it be proportional to the crime committed and selectively applied. His ideas influenced various reformers, including John Howard who travelled throughout Europe on various occasions visiting centres for imprisonment.8 The debate on the suitability of punishment and proportionality i.e. what crimes deserve to be punished and how is not new. It is a clear sign of the slippage we have experienced in the last 30 years, that basic ideas from more than 250 years ago are no longer applied in practice and in many jurisdictions they are questioned and even explicitly rejected as is the case in others such as the USA and other jurisdictions with mandatory sentences.
Photo sourced: Internet
Athough the rise of the prison was an important advance, as with many developments under capitalism it did not lead to the immediate abolition of cruel practices from the past nor the abolition of the death penalty, which plagues us even today. In fact, in England in “1603 there fifty capital offences but by the early 19th century this number had risen to over 200. Crimes ranging from murder to minor theft were punished by execution.”9 Nowadays there are 35 countries where it is still practised, including the USA and Japan and there are a further 48 where it is on the statute book but no execution has been carried out in the last 10 years, amongst the Russian Federation and Cuba.10
The death penalty wasn’t the only form of punishment, as stated previously there existed a variety of physical punishments throughout history, some of the lethal, but not all of them. Amongst the Jews there were varied punishments and they considered their system of justice to be an enlightened one as they did with their monotheistic belief system when compared to the polytheists that surrounded them.11 It may well be the case, but it is not about measuring a society by our current yardstick, but rather about accepting that all societies justify their punishments as being enlightened ones, blessed, when not ordained by their gods. So, in Europe in the Middle Ages, the use of the Wheel was justified as was the burning of witches. A barbaric practice by any measure, but a normal one that was accepted at the time.
The Prison Treadmill, a punishment in early Victorian England (Image sourced: Internet)
When we look at the various punishments, we that some still exist in various countries and others still exist in the popular imagination as desirable and justifiable and in some cases continue to be meted out to minors, even though in many countries corporal punishment is classified as a crime and child abuse. Whipping was common to almost every society throughout history with a great variety of implements used, some designed not only to inflict pain but also death,12 is used in very few judicial systems nowadays, but there is no lack of supposed human rights defenders in Colombia who do not hesitate in leaving their child red raw with a belt and see no contradiction between their own behaviour and their denunciations of abuse and torture at the hands of state forces and there is no shortage of indigenists who justify that same punishment using the argument of cultural autonomy. The legacy of times gone by is still with us in our culture, something which explains the passivity of society in the face of problems and abuses in our prison systems across the globe.
There are other punishments that have now been consigned to history but were common in many countries such as branding, and the bonfire, used throughout history but particularly against supposed witches in Europe. It is difficult to know how many women were burnt alive, though there are estimates that around 100,000 women perished in this manner over three century period in Europe.13
There was a transition in the types of punishment, as slowly various countries banned torture, Scotland and Prussia (1740), Denmark (1771), Spain (1790), France (1798) and Russia (1801), although as Roth points out torture resurfaced in the colonies, under other guises.14 Though they no longer tortured the sentenced prisoner, they tortured the dead post-execution. Following the Murder Law of 1752, up to 1832 the English courts imposed sentences that called for the post-execution punishment of the corpse.
The modern prison was born in this same period in which such punishments were imposed and the death penalty was common. Although it seems contradictory and senseless, the first prisons were a progressive proposal in relation to other sentences and their designers were penal reformers, who sought the redemption of the prisoner and not just punishment, though in practice the idea of punishment has never been far from the minds of judicial and prison functionaries.
Towards the end of the 19th century various national prisons in Great Britain were closed, partly due to a fall in the number of inmates and changes in judicial policies.15 The new prison act of 1898 explicitly promoted the reform of prisoners and throughout the 20th century new policies were introduced to that end, a policy that was echoed in other parts of the world. In the USA the concept of reform and the education of the prisoner was not such a common policy, prison labour never stopped, the so called chain gangs have been a constant feature, that still exist in some parts, with other types of forced labour within the system.
Forced labour was seen for a long time as a punishment and redemption at the same time and later as a punishment and form of the accumulation of surplus value from the prisoners work. One of the countries that countries that has most taken advantage of prison labour as a means of enrichment is the USA. No sooner had the Civil War ended and slavery abolished there was an increase in the sentencing of blacks with forced labour included. Nine states in the South promoted vagrancy laws applied to blacks and eight allowed for prisoners to be rented out to the plantations where the slaves had formerly been slaves.16 In one state they passed a law where the black population had to show documents confirming that they had work, or if not they were sentenced as vagabonds and sent to work in the plantations.17 However, over the course of the 20th century there was a reduction in the number of prisoners producing for the capitalist market, due in part to legislative changes that restricted the sale of such products, but not their manufacture as such. Further legislation in 1979 began to reverse that tendency.18 Sometimes the economic importance of prison production in the capitalist and penitentiary economies is exaggerated. However, it has an ideological importance. It tells quite clearly that the function of the prison is not to reform the person and help them overcome the conditions that led them to jail and it also tells us something about the role of labour in society. Work is foremost, it is the only thing that counts in society and the generation of profits is the only valid aim for a society. In reality, capitalism has always been like that, but the retreat in the discourse points to a real retreat in the correlation of forces in society. The workers movement has suffered large defeats, not just in terms of struggles but also in ideological terms where a vision that does not praise labour and profits over human dignity is not even put forward.
Chain Gang & Armed Guard 1941, Oglethorpe County, Georgia, USA (Photo sourced: Internet)
At the same time, we have seen a massive expansion of the use of prisons for minor crimes, longer sentences and a real explosion in the prison population, particularly in the USA. The increase in that country is due in large part to the policies of the Democratic Party and amongst those with greatest responsibility are Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton who publicly called for bringing black youths to heel as if it were about punishing dogs and they were jailed in cages like dogs in the new prisons built throughout his presidency, the majority for non-violent crimes related to the consumption of drugs.
Nowadays, we see new changes in the prison system and the concept of punishment in societies. Whilst various countries in Europe have reduced their prison population, that is only to be seen if we exclude another category of prisoner: the migrant. Most of us do not see migrants as criminals and the migrating in what is euphemistically termed in an irregular fashion is not a crime in many countries, but the treatment received by the migrant is punitive and penal. Many countries do this, including the Nordic countries famed for their social security systems, social cohesion etc.
Prison for migrants — Direct Provision (Source photo: RTÉ)
Denmark is not the only country, Great Britain also imprisons migrants, Ireland sends them to a special regime less punitive, but it is still a type of prison (Direct Provision) and in the USA, the Biden government continues with the penal policy in the area of migration.
The migrants are the new debtors, thieves etc., They are seen as something different to decent society, something set apart from us and as has been done for centuries they are punished instead of helped.
End.
(24/01/2022)
REFERENCES
Galvin, A. (2015) Old Sparky: The Electric Chair and the History of the Death Penalty. New York: Carrel Books paras 7.10 y 7.11 (epub format)
2. Roth, M. P. (2014) An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment. London. Reaktion Books Ltd. p.11
Between 400 and 500 people gathered in Moore Street on Saturday 22nd January 2022 to hear a number of speakers declare their complete opposition to the plans of the Hammerson property group, most of which had been approved by the chief officer of Dublin City Council’s Planning Department, in the face of a great many formal and informal objections and against even decisions of the elected councillors. Musicians also played and sang a number of songs at the event.
Section of the crowd at the rally. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
SPEAKERS AND SPEECHES
Chaired by the Secretary of the Moore Street Preservation Trust, Mícheál Mac Donncha (Sinn Féin Councillor), the crowd listened to a range of speakers: dramatist and campaigner for decades Frank Allen, 1916 relatives Brendan Mulvihill and Donna Cooney (latter a long-time campaigner and also Green Party Councillor), Diarmuid Breatnach for the Save Moore Street From Demolition campaign group (with a campaign stall every Saturday), Carolyn Alright (fourth-generation street trader), Stephen Troy (2nd generation local butcher) and Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Sinn Féin TD [member of the Irish Parliament]).
Micheál Mac Donncha, Secretary of the Moore Street Preservation Trust (also SF Dublin Councillor) chairing the event. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Each speech was different but of course sharing such themes as the struggle for Irish independence, historical memory and conservation but also closely linked to issues very much of the day: lack of justice in economic and social policy, lack of democracy in decision-making, reference to the housing crisis, property speculators, vulture funds, the banks ….. A number also made reference to the recent deaths of two homeless people in the vicinity.
Diarmuid Breatnach, of the Save Moore Street From Demolition campaign group, speaking at the rally (Photo sourced: Internet).Independent businessman in Moore Street Stephen Troy speaking during the rally (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
There were some additional points made, for example Frank Allen called on people to tell the Fianna Fáil party they’d never get a vote in Dublin again if they didn’t act to save the area from demolition; Donna Cooney pointed out that demolition of buildings had a much worse effect on the environment than restoration; Diarmuid Breatnach stated that the area was of international historical importance and merited world heritage status; Stephen Troy spoke about the disaster for small businesses next to a 15-year building site; Caroline Alright pleaded for the future of the street to be taken out of the hands of the developers and Ó Snodaigh expected a more supportive attitude from the next Government (widely predicted to be a coalition with Sinn Féin as the larger partner).
Pat Waters, performing at the rally. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Donna Cooney, long-time campaigner for Moore Street and relative of Volunteer Elizabeth O’Farrell (see her portrait next to Donna) speaking at the rally. (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Live music for the event was provided by Pat Waters, performing his own compositions, including a song about the O’Rahilly who was fatally wounded in 1916 in Moore Street leading a charge against a British Army barricade; also two musicians from the Cobblestone Pub, including the son of the owner, Tom Mulligan who performed Pete St. John’s Dublin in the Rare Aul’ Times.
Musicians of the Cobblestone performing (note Frank Allen in left background, who was a passionate speaker at the event). (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
There was speculation in some quarters as to why the rally had been called at such short notice; with prominent members of the Moore Street Preservation Trust absent1 and having an incorrect Irish name of the street2 on the event poster and promotional merchandise did seem to indicate a rushed event.
For some too, the Trust is being increasingly seen as closely linked to Sinn Féin, which for some is a positive factor but for others is not. The closeness has been evident on a number of occasions: a SF public meeting some years ago at which Jim Connolly Heron, prominent member of the Trust was the only speaker representing campaigners and more recently the promotion of the Trust’s Alternative Moore Street plan by SF, including the party President, Mary Lou Mac Donald, speaking at its launch a few months ago. At the rally on Saturday, the speaker for the Save Moore Street From Demolition campaign group made a point of saying that their group is independent of any political party.
Aengus Ó Snodaigh, SF TD and sponsor of Bill on Moore Street in the Dáil, speaking at the rally (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
However, the Bill to make the area a cultural quarter, currently proceeding with glacial slowness through the Dáil (Irish Parliament) is sponsored by a Sinn Féin TD, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, who spoke at the rally. Others counter by pointing out that Darragh O’Brien, a Minister of a party now in Government, Fianna Fáil, had sponsored a very similar bill back in 2015; however, with that party now the leading member of the current coalition Government, their leaders have welcomed the speculator’s plan for Moore Street.
A view of the crowd at the very start of the rally (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
GOVERNMENT
The Government department most concerned with the Moore Street issues is the Department of Heritage, part of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage3. When Heather Humphries was the Minister responsible for Heritage she championed the bid of property speculator Joe O’Reilly to get control of Nos. 24-25 (owned by DCC) at the end of the central Moore Street terrace in exchange for the four buildings the State had declared a National Monument (Nos.14-17).
When Dublin City councillors voted not to allow that “land-swap”, against the recommendation of the City Managers, she castigated them publicly. She also instructed her legal team to appeal the High Court Judgement of March 2016 that the whole area is a National Historical Monument and in February was successful in having the judgement set aside.4 When Humphries attended Moore Street during the Easter 2016 events she was picketed and booed when she spoke. However, the current Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O’Brien actually put in a submission against the proposed demolition of a building at the south end of Moore Street; however the Planning Department of Dublin City Council approved it.
Section of the crowd in front of the rally (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
As Minister 1n 2016, Humphries set up a Consultative Group on Moore Street on which all the Dáil political parties had a seat, along with a couple of councillors. From the campaigners, only the Jim Connolly Heron group had representation on it. The Minister’s group (latterly “Advisory”) has been in operation from 2016 until late last year but seems to have achieved nothing. The Hammerson Plan was welcomed by its Chairperson and by some of its members, including Brian O’Neill, Chairperson of the 1916 Relatives Association which seems a volte-face of that organisation, which had the conservation of the Moore Street battlefield as a central point of the Association’s constitution. However, the Hammerson plan was strongly opposed by others in the Minister’s Group, including Jim Connolly Heron. Outside the Minister’s Group, the opposition is even more widescale.
Street traders and independent businessman in Moore Street chatting at the rally. Photo: Rebel Breeze)
THE FUTURE
The planning permission given to Hammerson will be appealed to An Bord Pleanála but the Bord has a bad reputation with conservation campaigners, who see it as generally favouring the property developers5. Scheduling the appeal would take at least two months and possibly much longer. Should the campaigners not succeed at that stage, a legal challenge is also a possibility. Alongside the exploring of these options, street activities such as the rally on Saturday are likely. In 2016 conservation campaigners occupied the buildings for six days, blockaded them for six weeks, organised marches, rallies, pickets, re-enactments, concerts, history tours and public meetings.
Moore Street might be in for a hot summer. Or, given how long some processes have taken to date, even a hot Autumn.
2 The name they used was Sráid Uí Mhórdha, which is also the one on DCC’s street nameplate. However, it has been widely accepted in recent years that the correct name in Irish is Sráid an Mhúraigh, which is the one recorded in the State’s database for place-names, logainm.ie and furthermore is the version used in Sinn Féin’s own Bill currently proceeding through the Dáil.
4 The Appeal Court verdict did not discuss whether it was or was not but instead declared that a High Court Judge was not empowered to declare a National Monument.
5 In fact, the Bord approved the O’Reilly plan for a giant “shopping mall” in the area (forerunner to the current Hammerson Plan) even though the Bord’s own officer recommended rejecting it.
On Saturday 22nd January 2022 an event was held to commemorate the centenary year of the occupation of the Rotunda building in Dublin by 150 unemployed workers led by Liam Ó Flaithearta, a Republican and Communist and writer from Inis Mór (off the Galway Coast). The occupation took place two days after the formation of the Free State and was attacked by an anti-communist crowd while after a number of days the occupiers were forced out by the police force of the new state of the dismembered nation1. The event last week was organised by the Liam and Tom O’Flaherty Society.
The event began with a gathering at 1.30pm in North Great George’s Street, where the Manifesto had been printed in 1922.2 People then proceeded to the nearby Rotunda, site of the occupation in 1922.3
Copy of the manifesto available at the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Seosamh Ó Cuaig (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Seosamh Ó Cuaig from Cill Chiaráin, Carna, Conamara, opened the proceedings as Chairperson, ag cur fáilte roimh dhaoine i nGaeilge agus i mBéarla, briefly introducing the historical occasion and recounting how some companies, including Boland’s, had supplied bread, sugar and tea to the occupiers, before he introduced published historian and blogger Donal Fallon.
Fallon not only recounted the events of that occupation 100 years ago but also placed it in context of a number of other factors: the unemployment then in the State (30,000 in Dublin) and to follow through into the 1930s, the upsurge in workers’ occupations and local soviets, the reactionary nature of the government of the new state and of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at the time, which was very supportive of the new regime and extremely hostile to any kind of socialism, along with the cultivation of a reactionary social and political attitude among sections of the population.
Donal Fallon speaking at the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Fallon also commented on the censorship and otherwise neglect of Liam Ó Flaithearta as an accomplished modern Irish writer and hoped for his writing to become more popularised now.
Alan O’Brien reading O’Flaherty’s Manifesto (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Alan O’Brien, Dublin poet and dramatist, was welcomed on to the stage to read the Manifesto which had been issued at the time, copies of which were available at a nearby stall. One of the aspects of that document was a call for Dublin City Council to set up public works to provide paid employment for those out of work in exchange for services to the community.
Diarmuid Breatnach, singer and blogger was invited to the stage to sing “The Red Flag” because it had been sung there during the occupation. No doubt those in the Government, Church hierarchy and generally among reactionary people at that time would have been horrified by the lyrics and would have asserted that they were foreign to Irish culture and thinking. However, as Breatnach explained, the lyrics had been composed by an Irishman (see Appendix 1), Jim Connell from Meath. Connell wrote the lyrics to the air of The White Cockade and was appalled to hear it sung to the air of Oh Tannebaum, a Christmas carol. Breatnach had never heard it sung to the White Cockade air but had been practicing it for days and hoped he would be faithful to the original air.
Diarmuid Breatnach singing The Red Flag to the air of The White Cockade
Called by the Chairperson to sing a follow-up song, Breatnach sang most of the verses of “Be Moderate”, satirical lyrics published by James Connolly in 1907 in New York. There had been no air published for the song and it has been sung to a number of airs but he would sing it to the air of A Nation Once Again, which provides a chorus:
We only want the Earth, we only want the Earth, And our demands most moderate are – We only want the Earth!
The event was later reported by RTÉ briefly in English on the Six O’Clock News and also by video on TG4’s Nuacht in Irish including interviews with Fallon an a number of participants.
End main report.
Early arrivals at the event with the plinth of Parnell monument in background centre left (Photo: D.Breatnach) Section of the crowd and media filmers at event (anti-vaccine etc march in background) (Photo: D.Breatnach)
APPENDIX 1:
THE RED FLAG: AUTHOR, LYRICS AND AIR
After the Rotunda occupation was terminated, Liam Ó Flaithearta emigrated to London, which is where the Red Flag lyrics had been composed twenty-three years earlier. The lyrics were composed by Meath man Jim Connell in London in 1889 to the air of the Scottish Jacobite march TheWhite Cockade — he was reported livid when he learned that it was being sung to the air of Oh Tannebaum, protesting: “Ye ruined me poem!”
Jim Connell was a Socialist Republican (he had taken the Fenian oath), activist and journalist who emigrated to England in 1875 after being blacklisted in Dublin for his efforts in unionising the docks in which he worked. Apparently he began to write the song lyrics on his way home from a demonstration in London city centre, on the train from Charing Cross to Honor Oak in SE London, where he lived and completed it in the house of a fellow Irishman and neighbour, Nicholas Donovan.
Photo of Jim Connell, author of The Red Flag (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The lyrics have been sung by revolutionary and social-democratic (the latter less so now) activists all over the English-speaking world but also in some other languages in the years since.
Not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on Jim Connell is the fact that he also wrote a book, apparently a best-seller in his time, called something like “The Poacher’s Handbook“. I’ve been looking for that book for years without success (DCC Library could find no reference to it).
UNVEILING PLAQUE ON JIM CONNELL’S HOME
Today there is a plaque on the two-storey house where Connell lived until his death in 1929, having been awarded the Red Star Medal by Lenin in 1922.
Plaque on house in which Jim Connell lived in SE London when he wrote the lyrics (Photo: D.Breatnach, sorry about the shadow)
In the late 1980s a history archivist with the London Borough of Lewisham contacted the Lewisham branch of the Irish in Britain Representation Group, of which I was Secretary, to consult us about the erection of a history plaque on the house and the wording to use4. We attempted to have the words “Irish Republican” added to “Socialist” after his name on the plaque and were successful with “Irish” but not with “Republican”.
There was a handful at the unveiling at midday on a weekday, including a representative of the local Council, a couple from the Greater London Council including its Irish section, a trumpeter (who played the Oh Tannebaum air) and Gordon Brown (then just an MP). I believe this was 1989, the centenary of the song being written.
Brown’s speech did not mention Ireland once but as he finished, I jumped up on a nearby garden wall and while thanking those in attendance said that it was sad to see the country of Jim Connell’s birth omitted along with his views on Irish independence, particularly at a time when British troops were fighting to suppress a struggle for that independence.
This was during the age before mobile phones and I have no photos, sadly. So no big deal but the next edition of the Irish Post, a weekly paper for the Irish community in Britain, carried a report on the ceremony and my intervention. It was written by the columnist Dolan, who was the alter ego of the Editor, Brendan Mac Alua (long dead now) and a supporter of much of the IBRG’s activities.
I lived in Catford then, five minutes by bicycle from the site of the house and have photographed the plaque.
FENIAN CONNECTION BETWEEN LYRICS ACROSS TWO DECADES
The words and sentiment “Let cowards flinch or traitors sneer” in the Red Flag mirror some in a song celebrating Irish political prisoners, The Felons of Our Land: “While traitors shame and foes defame” and “Let cowards mock and tyrants frown”. Arthur Forrester wrote that song 20 years before Connell’s and it would be surprising indeed had Connell not consciously or unconsciously borrowed the construction and sentiment.
Arthur Forrester was himself of great interest as were his poet sisters, both raised by their Irish nationalist mother, also very interesting person and poet in her own right, in Manchester, known to Michael Davitt. Arthur was a Fenian and did time in prison for it5. He was also for a period proof-reader for the Irish Times! Frank McNally wrote an article about the song but I don’t have access to anything except the first few lines.
T-shirt worn by one of those in attendance (Photo: D.Breatnach)
APPENDIX 2:
Lyrics of The Red Flag:
The People's Flag is deepest red,It shrouded oft our martyred dead,And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold.Chorus:Then raise the scarlet standard high.Beneath its shade we'll live and die,Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,We'll keep the red flag flying here.Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,The sturdy German chants its praise,In Moscow's vaults its hymns were sung,
Chicago swells the surging throng.(chorus)It waved above our infant might,When all ahead seemed dark as night;It witnessed many a deed and vow,We must not change its colour now.(chorus)It well recalls the triumphs past,It gives the hope of peace at last;The banner bright, the symbol plain,Of human right and human gain.(chorus)It suits today the weak and base,Whose minds are fixed on pelf and placeTo cringe before the rich man's frown,And haul the sacred emblem down.(chorus)With head uncovered swear we allTo bear it onward till we fall;Come dungeons dark or gallows grim,This song shall be our parting hymn.
FOOTNOTES
1Not long afterwards, the new Free State’s National Army, under the orders of Michael Collins, attacked a protest occupation by Irish Republicans of the Four Courts which began the Civil War of the State against the IRA, lasting until 1923 with over 80 executions of Republicans by the State along with many kidnappings and assassinations (such as Harry Boland’s and of course others killed in battle (excluding the shooting of surrendered prisoners, which the National Army also did on occasion). Some were even murdered AFTER the war had ended, for example Noel Lemass, his body left in the Dublin mountains.
2Possibly this was the same location which had housed the James Connolly College (raided by the Auxiliaries in 1921).
3Also the location of the first public meeting to launch the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and where much of the GPO garrison and others were briefly kept prisoner after the surrender in nearby Moore Street in 1916. And just beside it the Parnell Monument, across the street the location of the founding of the Irish Ladies Land League (where members were arrested) and diagonally in SE direction, Tom Clarke’s tobacconist and newsagent shop (occupied by the British Army during the Rising).
4The Lewisham branch of the IBRG had been founded in 1986 and founded the Lewisham Irish Centre in 1992, I think. It was a very active branch in campaigning, community and political work, ceasing to exist around 2002. The IBRG itself was founded in 1981 and was active on many issues, including anti-Irish racism, representation for the diaspora, release of the framed Irish prisoners, British withdrawal from Ireland, against anti-Traveller racism, plastic bullets and strip-searches. It was also for equality in general, being against all racism, gender discrimination and homophobia and one year shared a march with the Broadwater Farm campaign.
5 Despite the Irish diaspora having given the working class in Britain its anthem (The Red Flag), its classic novel (TheRagged-Trousered Philanthropists) and, among many social and trade union activists and leaders, two leaders of the first genuine mass workers’ movement in Britain (the Chartists — O’Brien and O’Connor), and having fought against the Blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street, there is no BA in Irish Studies alone available in British Universities. The Irish diaspora is also the first migrant community in Britain and for centuries the largest, has made significant contribution to the arts and a huge one to rock, punk and pop music. It would seem that the British ruling class does not want its population to know in any depth about the Irish.
Fire is an important source of heat and so facilitates life but it can also be a killer. Fire safety is particularly important in multi-occupied buildings but essential safeguards are often not provided or when they are there, are ignored or misused. One can see evidence of that frequently in news reports and even on many occasions in one’s own life and, on a number of occasions as a manager of accommodation services, I have certainly seen examples all too often. Buildings are being constructed to greater heights than can be reached by the ladders of fire-fighters. Those responsible for lack of fire safety procedures or of violating them should face severe penalties.
Fire at tower block in Tower Hamlets in London last year. (Photo: Supplied to Guardian newspaper).
When it is being destructive, fire kills in many different ways, not just by extreme heat. Smoke inhalation is another killer, as are toxic fumes emitted by some materials when burning. People can be killed by falls when attempting to escape a fire or be crushed by falling parts of the building, beams etc. And fire can also cause explosions when it encounters volatile liquids or gasses. Whether we live, work or relax in a building, we should never be blasé about the dangers, never disregard precautions and in fact be prepared to insist on adherence.
There are various headings under which we can discuss fires safety but Prevention, Detection, Suppression and Evacuation cover most of them — to which we can add Educated Awareness.
Prevention has to do mostly with safe design, use of safe materials and with safely operating processes that generate heat or produce flame, classically cooking and smoking but also many others — in industry all such procedures should be clearly advertised.
In Detection, apart from what to do when one smells burning or personally encounters flames or smoke, it is with systems such as smoke and heat detectors and alarms that we are concerned.
With regard to Suppression, although of course occupational fire-fighters may use other means, we are interested in fire extinguishers (more rarely fire hoses) and sprinkler systems and, in Evacuation, in the means of safe escape and subsequent assembly, along with indications of when one should do so, which of course are linked to detectors and alarms.
SUPPRESSION
How often we see a fire-extinguisher being used to prop open a door! This is a serious misuse of a piece of fire-fighting equipment and its use in that way may mean it will not available in the appropriate place or malfunctions when required. Often too the door being propped open is very close to a staircase, with the danger of the heavy extinguisher being dislodged and rolling or bouncing down the stairs to strike someone.
International Fire Extinguisher pictogram sign (Image sourced: Internet)
Fire extinguishers in buildings are usually installed by a fire-protection company, under contract to check and service them once a year. Does that sound safe enough? In a team of which I was a member, we checked the fire extinguishers on each shift, to ensure they had not been tampered with and we lifted the water-filled ones to check, by weight, that they still contained water. Those checks were written into our work rotas and we were required to sign off on them. We had developed those safety routines as a team and I carried them forward into subsequent management roles. In the case of an extinguisher we found too light or with the seal removed, that was recorded and the urgent task was to have it replaced by the fire-protection company under contract.
Sprinkler systems should have a means of checking that they are functioning well and should be regularly checked.
Fire alarms and smoke detectors need to be regularly checked also. In the case of smoke detectors they can be checked by spraying with an aerosol and the fire alarms have a facility for testing — though an arrangement with the fire-fighting service that alerts them to a test being carried out is advisable.
Blackbird Granary fire, Oregon, last October (Photo: Statesman Journal)
EVACUATION
I’v worked in places where I never experienced a fire drill. That is terrible, when you think about it. In a good team of which I was a member we made sure we carried out drills but we also had to balance the need for fire drills with the possibility of injury during evacuation to the hostel residents, who were drinkers and many of whom were infirm. We compromised by holding drills for the staff and local management while informing the residents of what we were doing. When I came to manage a hostel, I arranged to have a member of staff with a pen and clipboard follow the fire evacuation drill in action, which is when we discovered that a wheelchair-bound resident could not be got out the main door at all quickly. How had that not been noted previously? Not only that but for security reasons, the team members were not using the emergency exit. And then it was discovered that a member of staff was keeping his bicycle in the passageway leading to the emergency exit, potentially a hazard to people trying to escape a fire. Incredibly, the individual concerned was the team’s elected health and safety representative, which made for an interesting discussion with him later.
As a team, we resolved all those issues — but only because we carried out the drills and observed what happened during them.
During a fire there may be a power cut so the provision of emergency lighting is important, along with luminous signs indicating the evacuation route. That lighting too should be checked.
Worse things than obstacles in the path to emergency exits occur, when building owners or management lock or chain emergency exits for reasons of building or product security or in some cases even to imprison workers. As children some of us would “bunk in” to cinemas: one who had purchased a ticket would go to the toilet to open a nearby emergency door and admit others. The cinema management ended that practice by chaining the emergency doors shut. It is understandable that a commercial business might wish to discourage evasion of their admission charges but certainly not at the cost of putting lives in danger — many other means can be developed, including monitoring systems and alarms. In north Dublin’s Artane suburb, the management and owners of a nightclub had locked some fire exits and on 14th February 1981 a fire broke out during a dance attended by 841 young people, causing the deaths of 48 and injuries to 214. Exit doors were also locked in the Summerland leisure centre on Douglas on the Isle of Man on 2nd August 1973, when a fire caused the deaths of over 50 and serious injuries to 80.
One organisation I worked for had a stipulation that they would hold fire drills once every six months while another held them once every three months. As a team member I advocated them to be monthly at least and as a manager made that a requirement, marking the date for them in advance into our diary. Also, some drills should be carried out without warning and, as in the case outlined earlier, with an observer following the procedure and recording its progress.
Shift fire safety inspections should check or test the emergency lighting and emergency exits, while periodic drills should check the functioning of the fire alarm and display panel, by activating the alarm at a different location for each drill (there are keys supplied for that purpose).
Can the ladder reach?
It would be no bad thing for every person to attend a fire prevention course but it is essential for some kinds of work, in particular for people working in buildings with others or where people live. Such training not only deals with prevention best practice but also with how to act upon discovering a fire or in response to a fire alarm, what are the appropriate extinguishers in different circumstances, etc. The cost of such training (and of replacing staff while on training, if necessary to maintain the service) should be built into the operational budget of the facility.
One fire prevention course I attended had us consider what to do if we were trapped on an above-ground level of the building and unable to proceed to the fire exit. In most cases, if the fire-fighting service has been summoned (by the service-linked fire alarm or by other means), it is usually safest to retire to a room facing on to an area with a window which the fire tender can access easily enough, then close the door and stuff cloth around the bottom to limit the ingress of smoke. In the case of residents being trapped on that floor with us, we were to encourage them to come into the room we had chosen and to remain there with us until evacuated.
Speaking of evacuation, in a scenario such as the one just described, we might have to be brought out through a window by firefighters who would normally gain access to us by one of their ladders. It is a fact that the maximum ladder available to fire tenders in Dublin is 100 feet long but since a ladder cannot be used at right angles to the ground, the effective height is around 75 feet. Yet Dublin City Council and many other local authorities around the country regularly permit the erection of buildings with floors that are higher than 75 yards from the ground. How can that be allowed?
Grenfell Tower ablaze, West London14 June 2017; 72 were killed and more than 70 injured (Photo sourced: The Telegraph)
Earlier in this article, we saw the example of a fire extinguisher being used to prop open a door. This is sometimes compounded by the door in question being a fire door, in other words a door the function of which is to retard the spread of fire. Such doors should be kept closed at all times when people are not passing through the doorway and should have automatic closing mechanisms. The should also have a slot of glass in them so that one can look through without having to open the door, the latter being an action which in some cases might have lethal consequences. The material of the doors should be such that they can resist actual flames and heat without burning for one hour but unfortunately it is not unknown for such doors to be constructed of inferior materials which might be discovered only in an emergency — i.e too late to be of use. A reputable supplier is the only safeguard against such unfortunate discoveries but their production batches should be regularly and randomly tested by State or local authorities too.
Documentation
A work team should have appropriate procedures in place to deal with contemplated dangers and with regard to fire, a separate file detailing them is recommended. As a team we developed one (model fire precaution files can be purchased also) that listed the suppliers of our alarm systems and fire extinguishers, recorded their checks or replacements, referred to daily checks, training courses attended and by whom, recorded the fire drills; as a manager I ensured our team had duplicate files, one for staff access at any time and a backup copy in the management office.
A new member of staff or management should be introduced to that file as part of their induction.
International emergency exit pictogram sign, displaying its nature and direction; these are usually lit from behind by emergency lighting. (Image sourced: Internet)
Arson
The attractions of fire are well known with children having to be cautioned about it, so much so that “playing with fire” has entered the language as a metaphor. People who live on the street, especially in ‘western’ countries tend to contain a certain proportion of mentally-ill people or others with social behavioural issues. For some of those fire holds a substantial attraction and, when in a multi-occupation building, they can constitute a very real danger. In one hostel there were a series of small fires deliberately set and we never found the culprit in the act. We did have our suspicions and some circumstantial evidence and on that basis I instructed the individual’s eviction. That seems harsh but the series of incidents indicated that we might have a very serious one eventually either because he was building up to it or through it unintentionally going out of his control. With the lives of a number of other residents and also of staff at risk I felt obliged to take that action and informed the organisation’s head office of what I had done and why. DCC’s Homeless Agency tried to force us to revoke our decision but we stuck to it. Agencies responsible for housing homeless people but without sufficient funding often try to shoehorn individuals or families into unsuitable accommodation. Of course there should be a housing option available to everyone but the one we provided just wasn’t suitable for what we considered a serious arson risk.
Similarly as workers or residents we should not tolerate behaviour of our peers that puts us in danger or neglect of laid down fire precautions. In an example referred to earlier, I could do nothing about the incredible attitude of a safety representative elected by the staff team but as a manager I could act on a member of staff endangering the team and he was of course instructed to remove his bicycle from the premises and to risk it locked on the street (as indeed I risked mine). I have heard of places where team members had a battle using fire extinguishers which is no doubt great fun but incredibly irresponsible.
Dealing with staff health and safety representatives as a manager reminds me of the time I had been such a representative myself. Wanting a bit of a break from confrontations with management, I declined nomination as shop steward and accepted nomination as staff health & safety representative instead. To my unpleasant surprise I found myself in more confrontations with the management than did the shop steward. And that was with a local management team that was quite progressive.
Owners and managers of buildings, along with companies employing people to work in them, have serious responsibilities with regard to comprehensive fire prevention, detection, suppression and evacuation procedures and should be rigorously inspected and pursued when they fail to ensure sufficient safety standards. When deaths are caused due to failure to ensure safety, the least they should face are manslaughter charges. A homeless person suspected of arson can be evicted without too much trouble but neither the owners of the Summerland leisure centre on the Isle of Man nor the Butterly family, owners of the Stardust nightclub in Artane have ever faced a single charge in a court of law.
Palestinian flags fluttered in the breeze over the iconic Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin City centre, while banners festooned its length on New Year’s Eve. The numbers were down from previous years, more likely from the soaring Covid19 infection rate than from any lessening of the long-running Ireland solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. This was ironic since, unlike previous years, this was not a rally braving sleet, snow, rain or icy wind – in fact, the very mild weather raised only the amount of breeze necessary to set the flags fluttering.
(Photo by Tamin Al Fatin, IPSC)
Tamin Al Fatin, IPSC Chairperson, centre photo (Photo by IPSC))
The event is organised every year for New Year’s Eve at the same location by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and supporters, among which were Irish and Palestinians, handed out leaflets encouraging BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) of Israel, an apartheid ste. Martin Quigley, for the IPSC led some chants on a megaphone, which were taken up by people on the pedestrian Bridge, among which were that “Israel is a terrorist state”, that “Palestine will be free” and in solidarity that “we are ALL Palestinians”.
Each year more Palestinian land is stolen, more of their homes demolished or under threat of eviction, in Gaza they have periods without electricity, they are restricted in importing fuel for heating or cooking (never mind transport), or building materials (so much has been destroyed by the Israeli bombardments), they continue to be harassed and made have lengthy waits at checkpoints, their inshore sea is polluted, their fishing boats further out are attacked and harassed ….
(Photo by Tamin Al Fatin, IPSC)
As of 2019, more than 5.6 million Palestinians were registered with UNRWA as refugees, of which more than 1.5 million live in UNRWA-run camps.
According to prisoners’ rights group Addameer, there are currently (2021) 4,650 Palestinians held in Israeli jails in Israel and the occupied territories. Palestinians view them as political prisoners attempting to end Israel’s illegal occupation. Of those: 520 are being held without charge or trial.
At the end of September 2020, 157 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, at least two of whom were held in administrative detention. Another 2 Palestinian minors were held in Israel Prison Service facilities for being in Israel illegally. The IPS considers these minors – both detainees and prisoners – criminal offenders. In addition, a small number of minors are held in IDF-run facilities for short periods of time. (And the Israeli Prison Service since October 2020 has been refusing to publish figures or to supply Palestinian human rights groups with them).
BIG POWERS BACKING ISRAELI ZIONISM
The United States is the major power backing the Israeli Zionists and partly because of its position in the world and partly also for their own economic or political interests, most of the European states back the Zionists too.
In 2018 Donald Trump, as US President, moved the US Embassy for Israel into Jerusalem, endorsing the Zionist claim that the multi-faith city is Jewish and Zionist, although it is an occupied city even in international law. Shortly before he reluctantly left the office of the US Presidency, Donald Trump also endorsed Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco recognising Israel. So far, Joe Biden, Trump’s successor, has not reversed either of those decisions.
(Photo by D.Breatnach)
THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD SUPPORT THE PALESTINIANS
As is usually the case, it is the ordinary people in Ireland and around the world that support the Palestinians, while the big capitalists and imperialists, while occasionally criticising the Israeli Zionists, continue to support them politically, economically, culturally and militarily. Even in the United Nations, an organisation controlled by the big powers, a majority condemned the Zionist state in 17 separate motions in 2020 and last year formally ratified another six resolutions criticising Israel.
So why has international action not been taken against this terrorist state? The answer is that although the UN has 193 member states, only its Security Council decisions have to be carried out and there are only five permanent members of the Security Council: USA, UK, France, Russia and China. And what’s more, their decisions have to be unanimous.
(Photo by Tamin Al Fatin, IPSC)
On the other hand, so many civil organisations around the world have declared themselves in solidarity with the Palestinians and in Ireland. Hundreds of thousands have marched in so many countries and sports people, many popular culture stars and academics have refused to perform or attend conferences in Israel. One can no longer find Israeli goods in most shops or supermarkets (and when on occasion they are on sale, their country of origin is not marked on the product).
“Ayer se escapó de la custodia a importantes prisioneros y ahora se está llevando a cabo una intensa persecución. Se advierte a la gente que no los ayude so pena de un proceso penal y de sanciones severas si es condenado.
“Según fuentes confidenciales, pero no confirmadas por las autoridades, se cree que los prisioneros son Aodh Rua Ó Domhnail y Art y Henry O’Neill, del los clanes importantes de la provincia de Ulster, cuales escaparon de su confinamiento en el castillo de Dublín. Se cree que se sospecha de asistencia interna.
“Los prisioneros pueden dirigirse en una de varias direcciones o pueden haberse separado. Es probable que el frío y la nieve retrasen su avance, pero también impiden la búsqueda”.
Tal, en el lenguaje moderno, podría haber sido la respuesta de los medios de comunicación de los ocupantes ingleses a la fuga el día de Navidad de 1591 de los rehenes políticos Aodh “Rua” (“Pelirojo”) Ó Domhnail, Art & Henry O’Neill del Castillo de Dublín. Un asistente se reunió con ellos y les dio ropa ligera para que se cambiaran de las que se habían ensuciado por su escape a través del conducto del baño del castillo.
El Record Tower, Castillo de Dublín, tomado en recién anos. (Foto: D.Breatnach)
Los fugitivos estaban mal provistos y vestidos o se habían separado de las provisiones y la ropa preparadas y estaban a pie. Además, al salir de la ciudad de Dublín, uno de los hermanos Ó Néill (‘Henry’), se separó y se hizo su proprio camino.
Cuando llegaron a cierto lugar en las montañas de Wicklow, Art Ó Néill ya no pudo viajar y el asistente fue a buscar ayuda. Cuando regresó con un grupo de rescate enviado por Fiach Mac Aodh Ó Broin, su hermano Art había muerto y aunque Aodh Ó Domhnaill todavía estaba vivo, iba a perder el dedo gordo de cada pie por congelación.
Una impresión gráfica de los hombres de Fiach Mac Aodh que encuentran a Art O’Néill muerto y Aodh Rua Ó Domhnaill en una situación desesperada. (Imagen encontrado: Internet)
UN ENEMIGO FORMIDABLE
Aodh Rua Ó Domhnaill se convertiría en un enemigo formidable de los ingleses en los años venideros, primero ganando el liderazgo de su clan, luego estallando en una rebelión abierta y en una conspiración secreta con Ó Néill, quien más tarde se unió a él abiertamente en la Guerra de los Nueve Años.
En el 15 Agosto 1599, Aodh Rua Ó Domhnaill preparó emboscada a una columna de 1,700 en el Puerto (montaña) de Corrsliabh (Curlew Pass en inglés) en lo que hoy es el Condado de Ros Comáin (Roscommon). La columna invasora fue encabezado por el Señor Conyers Clifford y su cabeza fue presentado a Ó Domhnaill al fin de la batalla, cual fue una derrota para los militares ingleses en que fallecieron 1,230 de sus soldados.
“Art’s Cross” (la Cruz de Art) en las montañas de Wicklow, donde los rescatistas los encontraron. (Photo encontrada: Internet)
Aodh Ó Néill, en alianza con Aodh Rua Ó Domhnail, resistió todos los intentos de los ingleses de castigar a los clanes del Ulster, les infligió fuertes derrotas y comenzó a atraer a otros clanes a sus estandartes. La rebelión se desvaneció en la batalla de Kinsale (Cath Cinn tSáile) en 1602 en lo que hoy es el condado de Cork, lejos del territorio de ambos caciques, donde una fuerza invasora de aliados españoles había sido sitiada por los ingleses.
Tras la derrota de Kinsale, los dos líderes y muchos otros se huyeron al Reino de España de Felipe II con intención de volver a Irlanda con ayuda militar del Reino pero nunca sucedió.
La partida de Ó Néill y Ó Domhnaill provocó una evacuación a gran escala de los líderes de los clanes que se resistían y sus familias, lo que ha sido llamado “La Huida de los Condes” y abrió el camino para una profundización de la conquista inglesa.
La resistencia a gran escala volvió a estallar ostensiblemente por una cuestión de religión, aprovechando el conflicto interno inglés en 1649 y en 1688, en ambas ocasiones en las que los irlandeses apoyaron al bando inglés perdedor. Los vencedores completaron no solo su conquista, sino también la apropiación a gran escala de la tierra para la plantación de colonos que debían ser protestantes, de habla inglesa y tener prohibido emplear católicos, una guarnición colono para los ingleses en Irlanda.
Algunos creen que Aodh Rua fue envenenado por el espía anglo-irlandés, James “Spanish” Blake. Sea así o no, Aodh Rua murió el 10 de septiembre de 1602 en el Castillo de Simancas, Valladolid, España. Fue enterrado en el capítulo del monasterio franciscano de Valladolid. Aunque el edificio fue demolido en 1837, la ubicación exacta de la tumba puede haber sido descubierta después de una excavación arqueológica española en mayo de 2020. Si sus restos se identifican con éxito, serán devueltos para su entierro en el condado de Donegal.
El mensaje en palabras es sin sustancia de realidad pero el arte del mural es magnífico. En Ard Eoin, Béal Feirste (Ardoyne, Belfast). (Foto encontrado: Internet)
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