The Irish State has issued a new commemorative stamp to celebrate its joining the League of Nations in 1923 to which its representative referred as commemorating “the significance of Ireland taking our place among our fellow nations.”1
Well, sorry to poop on your party, Gombeen Government and to point out your lie. The truncated IrishState was admitted to the League of Nations, not “Ireland”, of which one-fifth was held in arms by the British occupier – who was one of the founders of the League.
Furthermore, the Gombeen state’s management committee entered the League as the victors in the Civil War – Britain’s proxy war in Ireland – dripping in the blood of those who fought for Ireland’s freedom. But that was not unfitting for the League was full of blood-drenched governments too.
The League was formed in 1920 and though the true government of the Irish nation, the First Dáil,2 applied for membership, its emissaries were not even received. At the Paris Peace Conference, US President Woodrow Wilson did not even reply to the Irish Delegation’s letter.3
Irish nationalist media commentary on the exclusion of Ireland by Lloyd George from the Paris Conference (Image sourced: Internet)
The original permanent members of the League’s Executive Council (it had four non-permanent members too) were Britain, France, Italy and Japan and its languages reflected those of the dominant European and American powers: English and French.
Britain came into the League with its Empire of allegedly independent states: Australia, Canada, India (which incorporated present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh), New Zealand and South Africa.
Map showing empires and colonies in the world in 1920 but there were also areas of influence apart from colonies. (Image sourced: Wikicommons)
PEACE?
Allegedly about peace, the League was formed as a club to discuss the areas of the world owned by the European colonial powers and to create a space where the losers and winners could discuss those lines, over which they had just fought a four-year bloody war.
Henceforth, there would be many, many wars, but mostly of colonial conquest and repression of resistance – but the European powers would not war among themselves, leastways except by finance and diplomacy. Until another 19 years, that is.
In fact, one of the major causes of WWII was the Treaty of Versailles, containing the crushing and humiliating WWI reparations demanded of Germany by the British and French imperialist powers. That Treaty was incorporated into the terms of the League of Nations.
The Big Four that framed the Treaty of Versailles; L-R: Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S. (Photo sourced: Internet)
Ireland would see short armed liberation struggles in the 1930s, 1940s and of three decades from 1969. Hundreds of armed liberation struggles would break out across the rest of the world, in every continent except Antartica. And yes, including Europe.
The League of Nations was a club, chiefly of European colonial powers in which the conquest and suppression of a huge number of other nations was agreed and ratified. It was followed by the hugely-expanded United Nations after the next World War.
The UN has much the same role and of its 193 members, its only binding decisions are made by five Security Council Permanent Members voting without dissent: USA, UK, France, Russia and China. The vast majority of the other states are clients of one or other of those five.
The Irish state joined that earlier League not as one of the colonial powers but as a defeated nation, a neo-colonial client regime, an experiment in native self-government under external colonial control, one to be adopted by the other imperial powers and replicated across the world.
The Irish state joined the United Nations in December 1955 in exactly the same client relationship to its old masters but over time the yearly tribute has been shared among new part-masters, first the USA and then EU imperialism.
Neither the state’s advent to the League of Nations nor to its successor, the United Nations, has anything whatsoever of which to be proud. An opportunity for Irish real independence and world friendship of nations was squandered.
The new stamp should carry a black border in mourning.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1Words of Mícheál Martin, the Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) of the Irish Government quoted in numerous media reports.
2The First Dáil was founded in January 1919 in defiance of British occupation, based on the results of the UK’s December 1918 General Election results in Ireland which returned 73 MPs of the newly-reconstituted Sinn Féin party out of a total of 101 MPs elected in Ireland. The SF members set about organising an Irish Government and, though declared illegal by the British occupiers shortly afterwards, continued to operate as a government until it split over whether to accept the terms of the British offer in 1921, which led to the Civil War of 1922-1923.
3 Seehttps://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/how-the-plea-for-irish-independence-made-its-way-to-paris-1.3742328. Though interestingly, Wilson did reply to the young Ho Chi Minh’s in respect of Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh, while working in Britain, had commented admiringly on the Irish capacity for resistance at the time of Mac Swiney’s funeral march in London from Brixton Jail to Southwark Cathedral). Most of Indochina at the time was a French colonial possession.
Original Breaking News article: DAVID YOUNG, PA (with commentary in italics by Diarmuid Breatnach)
The rededication of a memorial to the National Army soldiers killed in the Civil War enables their memory to be rehabilitated, a ceremony in Dublin has heard.
Defence Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Sean Clancy paid tribute to the some 810 soldiers killed serving on the Free State side in the 1922-2023 conflict as he addressed the event at Glasnevin Cemetery on Sunday.
Descendants of some of those who died, representative of all four provinces, were invited guests at the ceremony, among them relatives of Michael Collins, the commander in chief of the National Army who under direction by Churchill, gave the orders that began the Irish Civil War and who was killed in 1922.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin, the leaders of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the two main parties forged from the divisions of the Civil War, also attended the rededication of the National Army Monument.
Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy also attended the military commemoration, as did Dublin Lord Mayor Daithí de Róiste.
This neatly brought together political parties of the neo-colonial and neo-liberal Irish State with opposing histories: Varadkar to represent the pro-British and fascist neo-colonial origins of Fine Gael; Mícheál Martin and De Róiste representing Fianna Fáil, the allegedly Republican but in reality Irish Gombeen split from the previous iteration of Sinn Féin; Carthy for the current neo-colonial, neo-liberal and colonial servant Sinn Féin.
Taoiseach Varadkar (Fine Gael) and Tánaiste Martin (Fianna Fáil) unveiling monument to soldiers of the ‘Free State’ killed in the Civil War 1922-1923. (Photo cred: Brian Lawless/ PA)Matt Carthy TD, who represented his party Sinn Féin at the unveiling and dedication of the monument to soldiers of the Free State killed in the Civil War 1922-1923. (Photo sourced: Internet)
Prior to the ceremony, there was no monument in the country specifically dedicated to the soldiers of the National Army who fought against the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War.
Weeks after the war ended, on August 3rd, 1923, the Oireachtas passed legislation that led to the creation of the modern-day Defence Forces, Óglaigh na hÉireann. That is, the defence forces of the neo-colonial ruling class who created the Irish state.
The rededication event for the forgotten fallen of the National Army, which had already robbed the Irish language version name of the IRA, adopted the name Óglaigh na hÉireann during the Civil War, took place on the Sunday prior to the centenary of that date.
“It is appropriate then, in the spirit of real inclusiveness, of ethical remembering, and with a full desire to deal with some of the more uncomfortable aspects of our shared history, that we remember some of 810 uniformed members of Óglaigh na hÉireann who gave their lives in the service of the State during the tragic and critical period at the foundation of our democracy,” Lt Gen Clancy told the ceremony.
It is necessary, in order to bury any idea of achieving the Republic declared at the start of the 1916 Rising, that we honour some of the 810 men we recruited to bury that Republic in 1922, kitted out in uniforms, armed and transported by our ancient enemy. We wish to pass over quickly over not only the kidnappings, torture, murders, killing of disarmed prisoners and even sexual assaults by this fine body of men – the precursors to the current army of the Irish State – but also their terrorising of major part of the country with raids on homes and internment of men and women. Although this fine body of men were fighting to establish a neo-colony not even covering the whole of Ireland, we make no apology for calling them what they clearly were not, Óglaigh na hÉireann, i.e “Warriors of Ireland”.
The monument in Glasnevin to soldiers of the Free State killed during the Civil War – apart from the Free State Army having appropriated the name in Irish of the IRA, the legend claims they “died for their country”, a clearly inaccurate statement since at best they were fighting for the government and state of the 26 Counties, which excludes the UK colony of the Six Counties (‘Northern Ireland’ sic). (Photo cred: PA)
“For far too long there has been no memorial of any kind, nor any complete listing of the National Army war dead.” Understandably.
“Indeed, this year represents perhaps the last real opportunity to rectify that.”
As we prepare to commit this armed force to NATO at some point in the future and to PESCO in the nearer future, it is important to take a further step in legitimising this armed force of the neo-colonial state.
The remains of some 180 of the 810 soldiers who died serving in the National Army are buried at the plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. Uncomfortably close to graves of many of their victims.
“Sources at the archives show that the average soldier buried here was in his early 20s, was unmarried and from a working-class background,” said Lt Gen Clancy. In other words, the typical recruitment profile of lower-rank soldiers in capitalist and imperialist armies.
“Many had previously served in the IRA during the War of Independence, some even in the 1916 rising, many others had served in the British Army, underlying yet again how complex is the weave of Irish history.”
Actually, “many” is a questionable though vague estimate of the numbers who had “served in the IRA during the War of Independence”, though some had, including some of the most vicious, such as Major-General Paddy Daly, torturer and murderer.
The chief of staff highlighted the “poignant example” of two young Belfast-born Dublin-raised brothers – Frederick (18) and Gerald McKenna (16) – who were buried in Glasnevin after being killed together in action in Cork in August 1922 only a month after joining the National Army.
Aye, two men born in Belfast, a city which the Free State was fighting to ensure remained a direct colony of the United Kingdom.
“Whatever the often very legitimate reasons our forebears may have had for forgetting in the intervening 100 years, I think it’s appropriate now that I as the 32nd Chief of Staff of Oglaigh na h Eireann should finally take this opportunity to rehabilitate their memory,” said Lt Gen Clancy.
Especially as I try to establish a legitimate background to the armed force of an illegitimate State preparing to enter foreign imperialist wars and suppression of legitimate uprisings.
After all, we have great experience in all that, as the history behind this monument shows.
In all areas of endeavour and no less in revolutionary work it is essential to review our actions (and those of others) periodically in order that we may draw lessons to improve the success of future activity.
Irish history provides an abundance of material to revise.
The most recent period worthy of intensive review in my opinion is the three-decade war, mostly in the Six Counties but also having repercussions within the territory of the Irish State, in Britain and even further abroad.
An article in the July issue of An Phoblacht Abú1, monthly hard-copy newspaper of the Anti-Imperialist Action organisation, discusses the psychological and organisational problems arising from the way that three-decade struggle came to an end and its effects on the resistance movement.
That period in Ireland commenced with a struggle for democratic civil rights, not one of the demands of which were for more than was already well established in the rest of the ‘UK’. But it soon changed into a guerrilla war with huge numbers of political prisoners and jail struggles.
The movement experienced a number of splits and changes of leadership but for most of of the time it was led by the Provisional organisation’s leadership although changes took place inside its own leadership too.
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, President Provisional Sinn Féin 1970-1983, speaking at GPO rally 1976. He led an unwinnable war. (Photo cred: Pat Langan/ Irish Times)
Some of the Provisional IRA leadership following the 1970s split: Martin McGuinness, Dáithí Ó Conaill, Sean Mac Stiofáin, IRA press conference 1972, Derry. (Photo cred: LarryDoherty)
The period ended with that leadership not only abandoning armed struggle but being coopted with its structures into joint management of the colonial occupation and preparing for joint management of the neo-colonial Irish state, a number of smaller splits in the movement a much disillusion.
The An Phoblacht Abú article concentrates on building or rebuilding trust in leadership through measures such as clear communication, discussion, organisational restructuring, collective solidarity, open discussion, transparent communication and education.
The article does not say this but in my opinion one of the basic educational needs is to acknowledge that in the circumstances, what happened was inevitable (and to consider how different circumstances might be constructed in future).
UNWINNABLE
It is essential in my view to acknowledge that the struggle, as it was waged, was bound to lose. Yes, unwinnable: an unassisted armed struggle against a world imperialist power fought primarily in one-fifth of our territory where the population is deeply divided – how could we think otherwise?
Clearly, the Provisional leadership did think otherwise. Assuming they were not insane or very stupid, on what could their belief have been based?
I can see only two rational possibilities:
1) They believed the British had no essential need to retain the 6-Co. Colony and would abandon it if put under enough pressure, or
2) that the Irish ruling class, through its government, would step in and join the struggle.
If they believed the first, their analysis was not historically-based. Since its invasion and occupation of Ireland in the mid-12th Century, the British ruling class has repeatedly gone to enormous efforts to suppress Irish self-determination.
When they had the opportunity to leave in 1921 they had cultivated a client bourgeoisie, then instigated a civil war and partitioned the land, leaving themselves a firm foothold in the country.
Their initial response to a call for simple civil rights in the late 1960s was violent suppression on the streets, abolition of habeas corpus and introduction of internment without trial – and army massacres.
If the previous lessons of history were not clear to the movement’s leadership, then those events up to 1972 should have made them crystal clear.
If the Republican leadership believed the Irish ruling class would step up, they failed to draw the lessons of history since at least 1921 and to understand the neo-colonial nature of the Gombeen class, amply illustrated in the preceding 50 years of the Irish State.
As embarked upon and fought, the war could not be won but a strugglewas potentially winnable.
However, to have a chance of winning, the struggle would have to be over the whole 32 Counties. And to engage the maximum number of people, it would have to take up the social, cultural, economic and political deficits across the Irish state and across the colony.
The social rights of women and LBG2 people were widely-acknowledged deficit areas, yet the Republican movement did not seriously address them. Of course, doing so would have put the Movement in direct opposition to the Catholic Church hierarchy and its followers.
Why should that be a problem? Hadn’t the Hierarchy been pro-British occupation since the late 1800s3 and anti-Republican since the 1790s? Wasn’t it one of the cornerstones of the neo-colonial Irish State, its social prop and social control mechanism?
Yes but the problem was that some of the leadership themselves were in that ideological ambit and were in any case afraid to disaffect many of their followers. A natural fear, of course. Yet only in that way could the struggle go forward across the Irish state’s territory.
It was left to campaigners mostly outside the Republican Movement, including social democrats and liberals, to fight for the rights to contraception, divorce, equality for women, LGB rights. And later, to take on the huge institutional abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
Those issues affected directly well over half the population of the Irish state and the the leadership lacked the interest or the courage4 to take part in their struggles, never mind lead them, which it left to mostly non-revolutionary leaderships.
There were many other issues that affected people in the 32 Counties which a revolutionary leadership could take up and, I would argue, should have taken up.
The latter includes emigration, rights of the Irish diaspora (particularly in Britain), foreign penetration of the Irish economy, foreign land ownership, housing shortage, industrial struggles, academic freedom, Irish language rights, Church control of education and the health service …
Some of those issues were taken up for a while by the movement in parts of the 26 Cos. prior to the split in the Republican Movement but were progressively dropped as the armed struggle in the 6 Cos. took off.
When years later the Provisional leadership got interested in social democratic reformism, they found they could hardly make any headway in the unions against the Labour Party and the remains of the Workers’ Party – because of the Provos’ earlier overwhelming neglect of that area of struggle.
SUMMARY
The struggle in the Six Counties could not be won precisely because it was primarily confined to that area and also one in which a powerful enemy had seduced a huge section of the population.
When the leadership acknowledged the unwinnability of the struggle as being waged, instead of changing their methods and aims of struggle to take in the whole 32 Cos, they decided on capitulation and getting the most possible out of it for themselves.
A change in the top leadership of Sinn Féin and the IRA: Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness photographed in 1987. They recognised they could not win and set about managing abandoning it while getting something out of the system for the leadership. (Photo: PA)
The leadership of the Republican movement was unwilling to widen the struggle because they believed that it was unnecessary to do so and/ or they were unwilling to overcome their own ideological indoctrination and/or lacked the courage to confront prejudices among their following.
Some of the social struggles have now been won or hugely progressed but without the leadership of the Republican Movement, in fact by leaderships of mostly reformist trends.
Due to leaving the industrial struggle to social democrats, the trade union movement has degenerated hugely and is in a poor state to take on any substantial economic or rights struggle, to say nothing of a revolutionary one.
The surviving Republican movement seems unwilling to acknowledge those historical facts and its failure thus far in leadership. Admission of the facts is necessary in order to commence to repair the movement and to prepare for a struggle with a prospect of success.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1Page 9, entitled COMRADESHIP – GUARD AGAINST BETRAYAL; I intend to review the July issue of the newspaper separately some time soon.
2I have omitted the T from LGB because it is only comparatively recently that the transexual issue has gained wide acknowledgement, whereas the Gay, Lesbian and even Bi-Sexual issue were widely known about at the time under discussion.
3The Irish (settler) Parliament passed an act giving middle-class and higher Catholics the right to vote in 1793.
A broad group of socialist Republicans gathered at the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone on Sunday 2nd July to honour his memory and to reiterate their commitment to an independent and socialist Ireland outside of imperialist military alliances.
Wolfe Tone’s grave in the Bodenstown Church graveyard has been a place of pilgrimage for Irish Republicans at least since the days of Thomas Davis1 of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, who wrote of his own visit to the grave and composed the song “In Bodenstown’s Churchyard”.
The late 1960s saw huge numbers of people in attendance at annual commemorations there near the village of Sallins, Co. Kildare, including not only Sinn Féin2, who led them, but many political and social organisations, GAA clubs, along with many non-aligned people.
Over the years, the voluntary and unfunded National Graves Association has improved the site comprehensively and sensitively, leaving the ruins of the Protestant church as they are but building a stage attached to one side, fronted with plaques and commemorative flag stones.
Commemorations currently are usually organised around a Sunday near the date of the patriot leader’s birthday on 20th June but have to be managed between different groups wishing to hold their own commemorations.
Speeches, songs and Garda harassment
The Annual Wolfe Tone commemoration organised by the Wolfe Tone Commemoration Committee took place over the weekend with members of a number of groups and Independent Republicans in attendance.
A Socialist Republican Colour party led the march up from the bottom of the road, turning in to the graveyard through a side gate and taking up positions in front and to one side of the monument, at ordú scíthe (parade rest) position but with flags held high.
Colour party in front of Wolfe Tone monument, Bodenstown Churchyard (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Behind the colour party followed a crowd carrying banners bearing the legends “Irish Republicans against NATO”, “We serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland” and an assortment of flags including green-and-gold Starry Ploughs, Irish Tricolour, Palestinian and Basque national flags.
The event was chaired by a young Socialist Republican who spoke about the importance of the event before introducing a representative of a midland Republican commemoration group who read a short message of solidarity.
This was followed by a socialist republican accompanying himself on guitar singing The Three Flowers.3
The main oration was delivered by veteran Independent East Tyrone Republican Margaret McKearney who linked the past with the present, including the current housing crisis, the British occupation and the Irish State’s push to join PESCO and NATO military alliances.
Musician performing The Three Flowersat the Wolfe Tone monument (Photo: Rebel Breeze)Veteran Republican from Tyrone delivering the oration at the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
There was a clear message at the event that the push towards NATO will be energetically resisted at every turn by the people of Ireland.
Wreaths were laid and a minute’s silence was observed, while the colour party lowered the flags in memory of all those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the ongoing struggle for Irish Freedom. The event was brought to a close with the musician playing and singing Amhrán na bhFiann.
A handful of Gardaí4 in uniform and in plainclothes (Special Branch, the political police) were parked outside the graveyard watching people arriving and leaving but at that point having no direct interaction with those attending the event.
Part of long tail-back cause by Garda checkpoint very near to Bodenstown Churchyard after the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)Gardaí in uniform and Special Branch in plain clothes harassing and attempting to intimidate people who had attended the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
However, once the event concluded, the Gardaí set up a checkpoint at the bottom of the road and began to harass and attempt to intimidate drivers of vehicles, stopping them, asking for identification, where they were from etc, causing a long tailback.
This is part of the regular harassment of Irish Republicans by police on both sides of the British Border.
“The Father of Irish Republicanism”
Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was formally a member of the Church of Ireland5 congregation (Anglican), in his time the dominant religious group in England-occupied Ireland but also one of the smallest.
No-one could be elected to the Irish Parliament unless of that congregation.
In the early 19th Century a section of the Irish bourgeoisie, nearly all Anglican or of the other Protestant churches, “dissenters”, wished to develop the Irish economy free of interference, control, patronage and bribery associated with being an English colony.
Many of them understood the need for a strong base in the population, for which they recognised the need to include representation for the majority population in the country, the Catholics, along with the most populous of the Protestants, the Presbyterians.6
When the liberal but pro-English Crown Henry Grattan brought the issue to a vote in the Westminster Parliament, his motion failed due to many MPs’ sectarianism or vested interests, a situation which continued for decades afterwards.7
That seemed to point to revolution as the only logical way forward.
Theobald Wolfe Tone was one of the founders of the Society of United Irishmen in October 1971, the first broad Republican organisation in Ireland, which soon developed a comprehensive revolutionary agenda, for Irish independence and a Republic based on universal male suffrage.8
In order to accomplish a successful uprising, they invited assistance from Republican France and planned a simultaneous uprising across Ireland, with particular concentration on Antrim (largely Presbyterian and Anglican), Wexford and Wicklow, Midlands and Mayo (largely Catholic).
Colour party leading a march towards the Wolfe Tone monument (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Spies and informers working for the English occupation betrayed some of their plans and most of the Leinster Directorate of the United Irishmen, including Wolfe Tone, were arrested, a disaster for uprising plans in Dublin but also for overall leadership in Leinster.
The 1798 Rising had initial great success in the south-east, particularly in Wexford but was quickly and bloodily suppressed in the Midlands and in Antrim. Mayo rose when a too-small detachment of French soldiers arrived under Humbert in Kilalla but they were outnumbered and beaten.
Tone was was unapologetic at his trial, was sentenced to death by hanging but appears to have attempted to take his own life while awaiting execution, surviving for a few days in great pain before dying on 19th November 1798 as British and Orange loyalist repression swept the country9.
Wolfe Tone Monument by Edward Delaney (d.2009) at S.E entrance to Stephen’s Green, Dublin city centre (image sourced: Internet)
Many leaders of the United Irishmen are honoured in song, writing and in commemorative events to this day but Theobald Wolfe Tone is still the most widely remembered of them all.
End.
The Colour Party and some of the participants line up for a group photo by the monument (Photo: AIA)
FOOTNOTES
1Thomas Davis (1814-1845), journalist, author of the song A Nation Once Again and other works, also co-founder of The Nation newspaper.
2Prior to its split resulting in Provisional Sinn Féin and the later split resulting in the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
3Composed by Norman G. Reddin, a Republican ballad honouring the memory of three United Irish leaders, Robert Emmet, Michael Dwyer and Wolfe Tone. Both Tone and Emmet were sentenced to execution, the latter carried out in 1803 on Thomas Street in Dublin. Dwyer was transported to exile in Australia where he was later accused of planning an uprising in New South Wales for which he was twice imprisoned and tried but exonerated, became Police Chief in Liverpool, Sydney in 1813 but was imprisoned again in 1825 for alleged non-payment of a £100 debt, contracted dysentery, was released again and died very soon afterwards.
5A branch of the Church of England, the state religion of the UK of which their Monarch is the titular head (in addition to being the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces).
6“Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter”, as Wolfe Tone famously called the alliance.
7In May 1808 Grattan proposed emancipation in the House of Commons, with certain qualifications, but his motion was defeated by 281 votes to 128. In June 1812 the Commons accepted, by 225 votes to 106, a motion in favour of considering Catholic claims. An emancipation Bill, introduced in February 1813, received a second reading but was lost in committee by a narrow margin. Frustration at this lack of progress led to the formation of the Catholic Association in 1823 (of which Wolfe Tone was an active member). Parliament passed an Act to restrict the Association’s activities two years later.
8Very few radical or revolutionary individuals, not to mention movements of the 18th (or even much of the 19th or early 20th) Centuries proposed universal female suffrage, one reason why the 1916 Proclamation of Irish Independence is such a remarkable document, beginning its address with the words “Irishmen and Irish women”.
9Which many, in particular Protestants, fled the country to escape, some settling in the United States and in Canada. The great Catholic emigration from Ireland did not occur until the Great Hunger of the mid-19th Century and later.
Pat Reynolds gave this oration in East London Cemetery on Sunday 21st May 2023 for Michael Barrett, the last man publicly hanged in Britain
A cháirde agus a chomrádaíthe,
Tá fáilte go leor romhaibh chun chruinnithe i gcuimhne Michael Barrett inniu. Welcome friends and comrades to this commemoration today for Michael Barret and Patrick O’Donnell. I have been asked to speak of Michael Barret and the movement he represented.
Michael was born in Ederney in the Maguire County of Fermanagh in 1841 and was judicially hanged though innocent by the British Government in 1868 at Newgate Prison, where the Old Bailey now stands.
Newgate prison was closed in 1903 and his remains with others were interred here in this cemetery. He was the last person to be publicly hanged in Britain.
A Fenian bombing took place on 13th December 1867 to try and rescue O’Sullivan Burke the Fenian who planned the successful prison van escape in Manchester.
The bombing blew a huge hole in the wall and demolished nearby tenement buildings, killing 12 people and injuring many others. It led to a huge State-engineered backlash in Britain against the Fenians and put their cause back some 10 years.
Michael Barret, who had gone to Glasgow to work was an innocent man and was in Glasgow at the time of the incident.
False evidence given by a police informer Patrick Mullaly who was given a free passage to Australia implicated Barrett, but he had compelling evidence that he was in Glasgow at that time. After two hours the jury declared him guilty.
One of the trial lawyers Montagu Williams stated of Barrett:
‘On looking at the dock, one’s attention was attracted by the appearance of Barrett, for whom I must confess I felt great commiseration. He was a square built fellow, scarcely five feet eight in height and dressed like a well-to-do farmer.
This resemblance was increased by the frank, open, expression on his face. A less murderous countenance than Barrett’s I have not seen. Good humour was latent in his every feature and he took the greatest interest in the proceedings’.
Barrett ended his speech from the dock thus:
‘I am far from denying, nor will the force of circumstances compel me to deny my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer.
If my life were ten times dearer than it is and if I could by any means, redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life, I would willingly and gladly do so.’
The Daily Telegraph the next day stated that Barrett had:
‘Delivered a most remarkable speech, criticising with great acuteness evidence against him, protesting that he had been condemned on insufficient grounds, and eloquently asserting his innocence.’
Michael Barrett monument detail, Co. Fermanagh (Sourced: Internet)
In Fermanagh his aged mother had walked many miles to appeal to the local Tory MP Captain Archdale, a noted Orangemen, who rejected her. Barrett was hanged in front of 2,000 jeering people singing Rule Britannia. The following day Reynolds’ News recorded that;
‘Millions will continue to doubt that a guilty man had been hanged at all; and the future historian of the Fenian panic may declare that Michael Barrett was sacrificed to the exigencies of the police, and the vindication of the good Tory principle, that there is nothing like blood.’
His hangman was the notorious Calcraft who had botched the hanging of the Manchester Martyrs, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien.
There is a huge difference between an accident leading to deaths by patriots fighting tyranny and the deliberate actions of the imperialists, which is why patriots have to be always careful to avoid civilian deaths.
There are many similarities between the Clerkenwell bombing and the Birmingham bombing of 1974.
In both cases they set back the cause of Irish freedom for many years, deeply harmed the Irish community in Britain and was used by the State for repressive measures against the community and to divide off the Irish community from the English working classes.
Disraeli brought in the Habeas Corpus Act and created the Special Branch. Of interest is that their first definition of Irishness was ‘Persons who were born in Ireland or whose recent forebears came from Ireland.” Back in the 1980s the GLC adopted the same definition.
We also had the Birmingham Six case with the ‘appalling vista’ of Lord Denning the Appeal Judge, who later regretted that the six innocent men were not hanged. For Gladstone it set him on his mission ‘to pacify Ireland’.
I ask you two questions today, what kind of people and community gave rise to patriots like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs, and the second question, what kind of regime or government would hang knowingly innocent men.
To understand the Fenians we have to understand the colonisation of Ireland and in particular the Great Starvation of Ireland An Gorta Mór. Over one and a half million people were starved to death by British imperialism and another two million forced to emigrate to Britain and the USA.
There was no famine in Ireland at this time, and it is imperialistic propaganda to call it such. It was clearly genocide in a land overflowing with food.
The potato crop made up under 25% of the agricultural produce of Ireland, but at this time Ireland was part of the UK where the potato crop was about 5% of the total produce of the UK. I know of no country where there was famine because of a 5% failure of the crops.
Michael Davitt back in 1904 called the Great Starvation a ‘Holocaust’ as did others. Ken Livingstone drew some comparison between the Great Starvation and the experience of the Jewish community during the Second World War.
Hitler named his strategy ‘The Hunger Plan’ where he starved Poles and Jews and others groups of food, and these victims are included in the Holocaust figures including also his starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The shipment of food grown by the people of Ireland to Britain during the Great Starvation was a clear decision by the British government to starve the Irish people.
The Nazi Governor in Poland Hans Frank wrote of the starvation of Jews ‘that we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally’.
The economic theory of laissez-faire is a total invention, within years they could spend millions in Crimea, a place most English had never heard of.
I recall the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor stating ‘Famine is a useful word when you do not wish to use words like ‘genocide’ or ‘extermination’, and again ‘It was not that the people were too simple to realise the Dachau-like nightmare of their circumstances’.
He goes on ‘The word famine itself is a question begging for its meaning ‘an extreme and general shortage of food’, and to use it of a country with a vast surplus of food, cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, eggs and corn, is simply to debase a language’.
O’Connor went further: ‘Irish historians who are firmly convinced that the Famine was all a mistake in the office, explain it in terms of an economic theory called laissez-faire. This is another cock that won’t fight.
Anyone who can believe that the British government maintained a garrison of 100,00 men in Ireland for the purpose of not interfering in trade and industrial affairs attaches some meaning to the word history that escapes me’.
The Great Starvation of the Irish people was a daily planned strategic intervention by the English government which is borne out by the evictions and forced migrations which followed and by the white supremacist and racist beliefs held in England at that time, which has largely been ignored by the historians.
The failure of the Young Ireland movement in the 1848 rebellion led to the deportation of their leaders and a flight of others to France and the USA. From this came the Fenian movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood set up in the USA and Ireland in 1858.
There was of course also the French Revolution of 1848 which inspired people all over the world and which also inspired the Fenians.
The American Civil War of 1861-65 was to inspire the Irish in the USA. Over 30,000 Irishmen were to lose their lives in War the vast majority fighting for the Union and for the abolition of Slavery.
Revisionists question whether the Irish were really fighting for the abolition of Slavery, yet the same historians in hindsight claim that the British and Irish who fought in the 2nd World war were fighting against fascism and the Nazis.
The Irish men who died firing against slavery are entitled to the same respect from history.
The 1867 rebellion in Ireland did not really take off. Frantz Fanon stated: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. The Fenians took a more measured road and passed it on to the next generation, but not without a fight.
In the USA they invaded the British Canadian Dominion twice in 1867 with about 700 Fenian soldiers, veterans of the American Civil War. They held a convention in in 1867 with 6,000 armed men present.
In Britain the Fenians massed near Chester Castle in an attempt to seize the guns there and get them to Ireland via Holyhead for the Fenian Rising. As in the USA they were betrayed by spies and with Chester Castle reinforced by soldiers, the raid was called off in February 1967.
In September Colonel Kelly was arrested in Manchester and was released when Fenians attacked the prison coach which later led to the Manchester Martyrs, Allen Larkin and O’Brien who were innocent men framed up by the English government.
The impact of the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland was huge with some 17 monuments put up in their honour and with the Catholic Church forced to backtrack on their anti-Fenian stance and allow masses and commemorations to be widely held in Ireland.
Michael Barrett is part of this sacrifice of the Irish abroad to Irish freedom made within a year of each other. My call is for Michael Barrett to be included within the Manchester Martyrs’ history and commemoration.
By the 1870s the Irish had moved to parliamentary means to move their fight for liberation onwards. You will notice that the fight for Irish freedom goes in flows, a rebellion often followed by political and parliamentary activity along with agitation. Both means were effective for their times.
In Ireland we had Michael Davitt and the Land League, again we have the huge contribution from Britain to this effort from Davitt. We also had the bombing campaign in Britain by O’Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke from 1880-87, the Invincibles in Dublin and the execution of Lord Cavendish in 1882.
We have the great Irish Literary and Gaelic revival. Again, the Irish Literary Society was founded in Southwark, SE London in the 1880s which spread to Dublin, Belfast and Cork.
We had the Gaelic League and the GAA as part of this revival which led on to the 1916 Rising and the founding of the nation.
What kind of regime or government could knowingly judicially murder innocent men like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs? We know the history of British colonisation of Ireland and British Imperialism.
This is the same British Imperialism which would in 1919 lead to the Amritsar massacre in India. But let us stay in 1860s iwith this colonial Empire.
In 1865 the Jamaican people rose up against British colonial rule in Jamaica which left 400 dead in a colonial reign of state terrorism. They hung the leader Paul Bogle and 14 others and executed seven women and prosecuted George William Gordon who had nothing to do with the Rebellion.
They executed him. The Fenians at the time raised funds to help the survivors bring action against the English government. You see here a long history of hanging both Irish and Black people across their colonies.
Today I salute the Irish in Britain who marched in the 1980’s against apartheid in South Africa and who today march with the Palestinian people following a noble Fenian internationalist tradition.
British rule in Ireland was based on Imperialism, White Supremacy and Racism. This was first formulated by Gerald of Wales in 1187 some 700 years before they hanged Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs.
Gerald in his books Topography of Ireland and Conquest of Ireland used racism to justify the conquest of Ireland and portrayed the Irish as inferior, backward, inhuman, uncivilised, feckless and lazy.
This was a litany of manufactured racist lies when Ireland had been the ‘Island of Saints and Scholars’ and the seat of learning in Western Europe bringing enlightenment to Europe during the Dark Ages.
Gerald’s views were published across Europe and held sway until around 1650 for about 500 years. This first racialisation of the Irish did not require any religious framework.
When Henry 8th split with Rome in 1534 the racist code used for conquest in Ireland was then overlaid with a state-sponsored sectarian religious code.
Irish scholars were driven out of Oxford where they were a dominant force and Henry sought to build up his fleet to destroy Irish fleets on the south coast to control trading in Irish sea ports and towns.
There followed the Plantation of Elizabeth 1st who knighted Gilbert the mass murderer of Munster who later founded a British colony in Newfoundland.
Later on, we had the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland with large-scale massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, widespread smaller massacres and the forced transporting of Irish slaves to the Caribbean.
Revisionists deny this history and seem to wrongly believe that these people were on some kind of ‘Cromwell Tours of the Caribbean’. For the record these forced transported people were not indentured people.
It is of interest that Gerald of Wales’ views on the Irish were not held of African people from 1200 onwards but were lifted from the Irish situation and applied to African people on the advent of enslavement to justify what the European colonial powers were doing.
So now Africans can be perceived in the same way as the Irish, as backward, inferior, childlike and have their freedoms taken away.
Let us now look at racism and the White Supremacist views of British Imperialism in the 1800s which gave rise to the great Starvation, the Manchester and London hangings of innocent men.
Robert Knox in The Races in 1850 described the Celts as an inferior race which became part of the ‘scientific’ racism of the day, with Knox updating Gerald of Wales.
Even Engels came out with his racist views of the Irish ‘The race that live in these ruinous cottages in measureless filth, and stuck in this atmosphere penned in, as if on purpose, this race must have reached the lowest stages of humanity’, instead of seeing what British imperialism and racism had done to the Irish people at home and abroad.
John Bedoe in his Races of Britain in 1862 views the Irish as Africanoid and having African roots, and again as ‘European Negroes’. Punch portrayed the Irish as apes and monsters, even Parnell, and the Irish as Aboriginals and on the same level as gorillas.
Charles Kingsley on visits to Ireland in the 1860’s states ‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw’ and ‘to see white chimpanzees is dreadful’. A new Gorilla at London Zoo is called ‘Paddy’ and the ‘Irish Yahoo’ is seen as the missing link between man and gorilla.
The Irish are described ‘as half naked savages who retain a vast amount of their primitive savagery to this day’.
We can see how scientific racism is now applied equally to Black and Irish for the purpose of colonisation and oppression.
In this context we can see the mindset of the British establishment who committed genocide against the Irish people, and who over centuries had murdered Irish people at random. We can see how the same regime of government can hang innocent people at home and abroad.
Michael Barrett, a self-educated man emerges from this dunghill of White Supremacy and pure racism as a heroic figure, like the Manchester Martyrs a true patriot as shown in his speech from the dock. He should be remembered with the Manchester Martyrs and not separated from their heroic end.
Barrett, a Christlike figure and a Cúchulainn who died on behalf of his people and for his political beliefs.
He was part of an Irish tradition in Britain of being in the forefront of democratic rights for liberty justice and freedom, not just for the Irish but also the British people.
We see in the Chartist movement of the 1840s being led by Irishmen Fergal O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien that fight for liberty and the rights of man.
Also the leadership of Donegal man Doherty leading the workers of Lancashire and the ongoing links in the trade union movement to today from leaders like Mick Lynch inspired by James Connolly to Pat Cullen of the RCN.
We see it in the gift of The Red Flag song from a County Meath man and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists novel by Noonan to the British working class.
In honouring Michael Barrett today, we stand full square for a United Ireland as proclaimed in the Fenian and 1916 Proclamations and for working class liberty in Britain.
I will finish today by reading the Fenian Proclamation of 10th February 1867 from the Irish People to the World. In it we can see what the 1916 Proclamation borrowed and built on. It is also what Michael Barrett lived and in the end died for.
Fenian Proclamation, 1867
Proclamation of the Irish Republic, issued February 10th, 1867, by the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I.R. — PROCLAMATION! —
THE IRISH PEOPLE TO THE WORLD
We have suffered centuries ofoutrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who, treating us as foes, usurped our lands and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches.
The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty.
But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers. Our mildest remonstrances were met with sneers and contempt. Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful.
Today, having no honourable alternative left, we again appeal to force as our last resource. We accept the conditions of appeal, manfully deeming it better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter serfdom.
All men are born with equal rights, and in associating together to protect one another and share public burthens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it.
We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of Monarchical Government, we aim at founding a Republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour.
The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored.
We declare also in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.
We appeal to the Highest Tribunal for evidence of the justice of our cause. History bears testimony to the intensity of our sufferings, and we declare, in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England —
our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields — against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our blood and theirs.
Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour.
Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human freedom.
Can you tell which of the clovers growing wild in Ireland is the genuine Shamrock (Seamair óg)?
Now, while it is still in bloom, is a good time to spot the plant, the smaller leaves and the yellow (buí) flower on it is what really distinguishes it from its clover cousins, with their bigger leaves and flowers in white (S. Bhán, T. repens) or pink-red-purple (S. Dhearg, T. Pratense).
How do we know that the Seamair Bhuí (Lesser clover, Trifolium dubium) is the genuine “shamrock”? Well, perhaps we can’t be certain but in the 1890s out of a survey of opinions of people in a still quite traditional Irish society, T. Dubium emerged as the first choice.
The shamrock, Seamair Bhuí/ Trifolium dubium/ Lesser trefoil, about real size, photographed in Dublin city with grass growing through it. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Amateur botanist and zoologist Nathaniel Colgan (1851-1919) asked people from around Ireland send him specimens of what they believed to be an Irish shamrock, of which the two most common were the yellow clover followed by the white.1
A hundred years later, Dr Charles Nelson repeated the experiment in 1988 and found that yellow clover was still the most commonly chosen.2 According to Wikipeida, the yellow clover is the species nominated by the Department of Agriculture as the “official” shamrock of Ireland.
If you want to pick your own for St. Patrick’s Day, you’ll need to learn to identify it by its leaves because in Ireland it won’t be flowering in March. However, you can spot it now by its flowers and get a mental picture of the size of its leaves to retain in your memory.
THE IRISH AND THE SHAMROCK
What is it with the shamrock and the Irish anyway? The children’s fable of the Christian missionary Patrick using the leaf to explain the Christian Holy Trinity is just that, a fable, although repeated in one of the Wikipedia entries for “shamrock”.
Neither the Celts in general nor the Gaels in particular needed anyone to explain a three-in-one deity, since they had their own pagan trinities (Éiriu, Fódlha, Banba; the Mór-Righean/ Morrigu). Researchers have found no reference to any importance of the shamrock prior to 1681.3
Patrick himself, in what is considered his genuine autobiographical Confessio, never mentioned the shamrock once. My suspicion is that the shamrock-Christian-Trinity fable was fancifully created either by British settlers such as botanist Caleb Threkeld or by native Irish Christians around 1726.4
Although a few sources on line have claimed medicinal properties or druidic use for the shamrock, they never quote the actual original sources which may indicate that the references are undependable or obscure, if they exist at all.
Interestingly, writing a little before the 1798 Rising, Drogheda Presbyterian and United Irishman John Sheil used the shamrock as a reference for a different trinity, i.e that of Catholic, Protestant (Anglican) and Dissenter (all the non-Anglican Protestant denominations).
“ ….. the three-leaved plant …. It is three in one To prove its unity In that community That holds with impunity To the Rights of Man.”5
However, green was the colour of the United Irishmen and at times of repression by the occupation forces and the Loyal Orange Order, a sprig of shamrock on St. Patrick’d Day could be a useful way of indicating resistance while also claiming it was a harmless obeisance to a Christian saint.
Nevertheless, even wearing it on St. Patrick’s Day might have been dangerous in some quarters as when TheWearing of the Green reported, in reference to the shamrock, that
“… It’s the most distressful country that you have ever seen For they’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the Green.”
5The Rights of Man, by John Sheils. The air to which it is most commonly sung is that of the Irish Language song Eanach Cuain/ Anach Cuan but I have composed an original air for it and sing it a little faster than the song about that boat sinking tragedy.
The media announces that “the population of Ireland has reached 5 million … for the first time in 170 years”. Interesting – and a barefaced lie! The population of Ireland passed 5 million some time ago and is actually around 6.5 million now.1
Ireland remained with negative population growth until near the end of the last century – mismanaged for most of the population first by the British occupiers of the whole of the island, then by a combination of the native neo-colonial bourgeoisie and of the settler colonial ruling class.
Filling in a census form from which population statistics can be extracted (Photo sourced: Internet)
For more than a century the population of Ireland stood at around 5 million, static despite a high birth rate. This was mathematically possible only through continual massive emigration – mostly to English-speaking regimes: Britain, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
But it is true that 170 years ago it was more than 5 million – in fact it was around 8.5 million. And it is worth reflecting on how they were able to produce enough food domestically to feed that entire population while now, with a smaller population, we import as much as 80% from abroad.2
It was the Great Hunger that wiped out much of the earlier population, statistics somewhat hiding the pain and sorrow of millions of Irish in death, disease and emigration — and the great transfer of land for cultivation (and rent) to pasturage, with its dangerous environmental impact.
It provided an opportunity for growth of the Catholic Irish capitalist class, the Gombeens, huckstering money-lenders buying up the lands of afflicted neighbours.
The kind of class that the British could depend on in 1921 to manage the neo-colony and to murder and jail those of national liberation3.
Emigration kept population stats steady and, combined with unemployment, ensured a low internal home market for development. An educated workforce and natural resources could be developed but the Gombeen class opened it all to foreign multinationals rather than develop it themselves.
Even with foreign exploitation of the workforce at home, the education system turned out mostly emigration fodder: the Irish tax-payers funded an education system to provide a literate and numerate English-speaking workforces for capitalist exploitation abroad.
No wonder the Irish political class declined to give the Irish abroad a vote in the Irish state – unlike for decades any other state in the European Market. Yet during the 1930s through to the 1960s, money sent home by Irish migrants accounted for an estimated 30% of the Irish State’s economy.4
The Irish state remains a neo-colony with low taxation and other incentives for foreign companies to take over our few industries5 and local and foreign property speculators to rake in profits out of the despair of homelessness or of struggling to meet rent or mortgage payments.
A neo-colonial market for produce of foreign companies and to plunder not only our labour force, not only our natural resources on land, sea and wind and but even our infrastructures in transport and communication, energy, health service, water supply and even our city sanitation.
TRUNCATED
The announced statistics were truncated, appropriate perhaps for a truncated country, with the history behind those statistics not so much truncated as obliterated.
That is our present and our past but not how the future has to be – we can write our own future but we won’t do it by putting a mark on a ballot paper.
3The Irish Civil War or Counterrevolution, 1922-1923.
4I have read this in the past but am unable now to find the reference; however I have posted some references on the figures of remittances from Irish emigrants.
5 For a few examples of foreign takeover: Irish stout, beer and lagers (Guinness, Smithwicks, Harp); Irish whiskey (Paddy, Jameson, Bushmills); cigarettes (Afton); preserved vegetables (Erin); aviation (Aer Lingus); public transport (Transport for Ireland; LUAS); sugar (Irish sugar beet replaced by subsidised cane sugar from the USA); woodlands (Coillte).
The Irish State recently commemorated the end of the Irish Civil War but what it was really doing was celebrating its victory over the democratic national liberation forces.
The Irish national bourgeoisie, the Gombeen ruling class, armed and supplied by British Imperialism and colonialism, in 1922 launched a war against the forces that had brought the British Occupiers to the negotiation table.
In that short war or counterrevolution, the Irish State formally executed over 80 Irish Republican Volunteers – many more than had the British during the War of Independence 1919-1921. It also shot dead and blew up surrendered Volunteers and kidnapped, tortured and murdered others.
The Irish government of the day put the financial cost of the Civil War at 50 million sterling which today would be near to 3 billion euro.
A curtain of repression settled over Ireland, in the Irish state and in the colony in the Six Counties (in particular from the RIC re-baptised as RUC and the State-armed Loyalists of the B-Specials). Many Republicans were in jail and if not, could not find work and so emigrated.
The political party allegedly representing the Republicans, Fianna Fáil, led by a former leader of the forces attacked by the State, joined the Gombeen system and became in fact the preferred party of the Irish ruling class.
Though the Republican forces recovered and returned to the struggle in the 1930s (with the Communists against the fascist Blackshirts), again in the 1940s and onwards, they never again came close to winning control over the State.
What the Irish State has given us since its inception, even after the Civil War, has been generations of underdevelopment; unemployment and emigration; a huge decline in the Irish-speaking areas; inequality and social repression of women and LGBT people.
The latter was due to Catholic Church domination in every sphere of life, resulting in institutional physical, mental and sexual abuse, along with censorship in printed, audio and visual media and in banning of contraception.
The ruling class of the Irish State, the Gombeens, tolerated the foreign occupation and control of more than one-fifth of the island’s land mass and abandoned the large Catholic minority in the colony to discrimination and pogroms.
It tolerated also institutional and media racism against the Irish diaspora in Britain, the repressive legislation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the jailing for long sentences of a score of innocent Irish people in five different cases in the 1970s.
The Irish State tolerated Loyalist/ British Intelligence bombing inside its territory, failed to protect its citizens from terrorist bombing in the 1970s and covered up its complicity, for example with regard to the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings.
In addition, it used a Loyalist bombing to disarm the opposition to repressive legislation, not against Loyalists but against Irish Republicans, sending Republican activists to jail on the unsupported word of a senior police officer.
More recently this Irish State that we inherited has given us a housing crisis while it makes the territory a rich hunting ground for property speculators, bankers, landlords and vulture funds and also sells off/ gives away our natural resources, public transport and other infrastructures.
The selling-off includes our health service which is also in crisis while the private companies chop off parts of it and sell service back to the State at a profit. And a country that was able to feed 8.5 million prior to 1845 (and export foodstuffs) cannot now feed 5 million without huge imports.
They have given us nothing to celebrate but as always, there is a choice. We can bemoan the situation or we can “take back the nation they’ve sold” (Soldiers of Twenty-Two). And that cannot be done through electing any party or parties into the system.
On the 49th anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings a number of speakers criticised the Garda closure of its investigation a mere four months after the bombing with the highest number killed in any one day of the 30 years war.
The criticisms were made on 17th May at the annual commemoration of the atrocity in Talbot Street, Dublin, organised by the Justice For the Forgotten campaign, held at the location of the memorial on the site of one of the bombings of that day.
The annual commemoration has been organised for many years by the Justice For the Forgotten campaigning group at the Talbot Street monument to the bombing1. It usually comprises reminiscences, poetry and music and a call for the British State to release its secret papers.
As of rote, an Irish Government Minister is invited to speak who routinely says how hard the Irish Government has been trying to get the British State to release the secret papers revealing the latter’s connection to those who carried out the bombing.
Years after the bombings, a British TV company (!) pointed the finger at the Ulster Volunteer Force, a British Loyalist paramilitary group but believed acting under British Intelligence agency direction, named some of those involved and a week later the UVF claimed responsibility.
In addition to British Intelligence, the British colonial police2 and British Army3 had been widely known to be working in collusion with Loyalists.
But few would have suspected Irish State collusion.
THE BOMBINGS AND AFTERMATH
On 17th May 1974 three car bombs exploded without warning in crowded Dublin city centre streets and another in Monaghan town centre. Thirty-three people were killed along with a full-term baby and a miscarriage with around 300injured. No-one was ever even charged in relation to the atrocity.
Scene post-bombing in Talbot Street, the site where the Monument was erected later is out of shot to the right. (Photo sourced: Internet)
The intention, unlike that of many other city car-bombings in the Six Counties and in England, was clearly to cause maximum death and injury to civilians. The areas chosen in Dublin were full of shops with bus stops and 5.30pm was going home time from shopping and work.
And no warning was given.
In the course of the short Garda4 investigation, in macabre irony the remains of the exploded cars were sent for forensic examination to their very source: the Six Counties, i.e to the colonial police force (at the time, the RUC5). Unsurprisingly, nothing useful came back.
In a war that was already five years old (six years, if the civil rights marches are included) the collusion between the British colonial police and Loyalist paramilitary murder gangs was well known and collusion with the British Army widely suspected.
Floral tributes on the north face of the monument in Talbot Street. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Floral tributes on the south face of the monument in Talbot Street. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
CAMPAIGN OF BOMBING DUBLIN
The Loyalist bombing of two cities in the Irish state in 1974, although by far the worst of the whole period, were not the first in Ireland, not even the first fatal ones.
In 1973 a Loyalist bomb in Dublin city killed Tommy Douglas and the year before that another killed George Bradshaw and Tommy Duffy – all were employees of Irish public transport state company CIE.
Even after the horror of 1974, on 29th November 1975, another a bomb at Dublin Airport killed John Hayes, a worker there.
And there were other earlier ones where no-one was injured, such as the blowing up of the Wolfe Tone monument just outside Stephens Green on 8th February 19716 and the Daniel O’Connell Monument in Glasnevin Cemetery (the round tower) in December 1971.
Pieces of the statue of Theobald Wolfe Tone on St Stephen’s Green. The statue was blown up by a loyalist bomb. A report at the time noted that ‘Huge slabs of the bronze sculpture were hurled 20 feet in the air’. 08/02/1971 (Photo sourced: Internet)The O’Connell Monument in Glasnevin (round tower) seen here at sunset from the Botanic Gardens was a target of Loyalist bombing in 1971. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
If the Irish State had pursued investigations and cross-Border links after the earliest of those bombings, they might have headed off the carnage that followed later.
Not only did they not do so but in fact used the 1972 bombing to blame Irish Republicans so as to get an unpopular piece of repressive legislation through parliament, the Amendment to the Offences Against the State Act, along with the establishment of the no-jury Special Criminal Court7.
The Garda Commissioner at the time of the 1974 bombings was Patrick Malone and Ed Garvey, his Assistant Commissioner, was later exposed as a British Secret Service asset run by Fred Holroyd, a disenchanted British agent who revealed he had visited the policeman in his Dublin HQ.
Garvey, by then Commissioner, denied being a British agent and claimed no memory of the visit.
The Barron Report (2003) concluded that visit had undoubtedly occurred and that he had not informed his superiors, contrary to all rules regarding contact with agents working for a foreign government.8 When Fianna Fáil came into Government again, they sacked Garvey.
Since FF had not subjected him to a regular disciplinary process, probably in order to avoid the sordid story going public, Garvey was able to sue the Irish Government, win damages and ensure he received his former pension entitlements.
THE COMMEMORATION EVENT
Aidan Shields, who lost his sister Maureen in the bombing, chaired the event for Justice for the Forgotten and introduced its Secretary Margaret Unwin who, as all speaking or performing at the event seemed conscious that next year would be the 50th anniversary of the atrocity.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
The regular Government slot was occupied by the current Tánaiste (Dep. Prime Minister) Mícheál Martin who, as has every Government representative since the JFTF commemorations began, claimed energetic diplomatic discussions for release of the papers with their British counterparts.
Martin also criticised the British Government’s widely-criticised intended legislation to prevent official investigations and trials regarding past crimes committed by British forces, while he simultaneously praised the British pacification process.
A young Italian woman played the theme from the Schindler’s List film and another air on violin. A visiting Italian couple had been killed in the bombing also but that was not mentioned when she was introduced.
Rachel Hegarty read from her poetry compilation about the victims, based on testimonies by surviving relatives and friends. Cormac Breatnach on high D whistle and Eoin Dillon on uileann pipes played the Irish air Tabhair Dom Do Lámh (“Give Me Your Hand”).
Poet Rachel Hegarty reciting from her work on the bombing. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Closeup of Cormac Breatnach on high whistle playing at event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Eoin Dillon playing uileann pipes at event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Fuller shot of Cormac Breatnach playing at event with Eoin Dillon out of shot to the left. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The Shillelagh North Ukulele Group played and sang The Sound of Silence and Things (we used to do), both appropriate in metaphorical context, the first for the official silence about the perpetrators and their British intelligence organisation, the second about the loss of the victims and to their loved ones.
Dublin City Lord Mayor Caroline Conroy, of the Green Party, spoke about the atrocity and criticised the closing of the Garda investigation a mere four months after the bombing.9
Vincent Browne giving his oration. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Well-known journalist and former TV presenter Vincent Browne gave the oration at the event and went into horrific detail on some of the injuries he had witnessed as a journalist at the scene with his doctor brother as they struggled to help the victims still alive.
Browne departed from the subject of the bombing, as a few had done to speak of the long war and the Good Friday Agreement but in his case also to accuse the Provisional IRA of having killed most of the people during the 30 Years War which seemed not appropriate on this occasion.
Seán Conlon, Cathaoirleach (Chair) of Monaghan Council10 spoke of the bombing and focused on the effect on his town. He also condemned the early closing of the Garda investigation and the failure to pressurise the British State into releasing security papers relevant to the bombing.11
Seán Conlon, Cathaoirleach of Monaghan Council, speaking with part of monument visible to his left. Aidan Shields is standing right next to the Monument. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
A number of speakers referred optimistically to the investigation into the Glenanne Gang by former English police chief Jon Boucher, who was present in the crowd at the commemoration. Boucher is heading a number of other historical investigations, including that of Stakeknife.12
The older age profile of the attendance was noticeable with only two teenagers visible and this in itself must be of concern.
FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF STATE COLLUSION AND COVER-UP
The failure to investigate the earlier Loyalist bombings and apprehend the perpetrators made the planning and execution of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings much easier. The early closing of the Garda investigation of the 1974 bombings ensured the perpetrators would run free.
As well as failing relatives and friends of those murdered and injured in Dublin on the 17th May 1974, the lack of pursuit had repercussions for many other victims of Loyalist murder squads, in particular the over 120 victims of the Glenanne Gang, including the Miami Band Massacre in 1975.
An aspect not normally commented upon was the choice of predominantly working class areas for Dublin massacre victims. It was not the high-end Henry or Grafton Streets that were chosen but the more working-class shopping areas of Talbot Street and Parnell Street.
The fatal Dublin bombings of 1972 and 1973 had also been directed at workers by location: three public transport workers and an airport worker.
Section of the Shillelagh North Ukulele Group playing and singing at the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
THE GOMBEENS: A CRAVEN CLIENT RULING CLASS
The whole chain of events from the first Loyalist bombing of Dublin points quite clearly to the client nature of the Irish national bourgeoisie, the ruling class of the Irish State. Even if it wanted to, it is too weak to make strong demands of the British State.
What self-respecting national ruling class would allow a foreign power to send terrorists to bomb its capital city? And then collude with that power in drawing silence and secrecy over the atrocity?
None, of course. But the Irish bourgeoisie came into being in a truncated client state and, armed and equipped by its master, went to war for two years (1922-1923) against the very national liberation forces that had brought the British State with offered concessions to the negotiation table.13
To talk of uniting Ireland under such a class, apart from being impractical nonsense, is a travesty. To expect any real change by electing a party or combination of parties to government in such a situation is a pipe-dream.
The 1974 bombing, the subsequent investigation and the record of Irish governments since in relation to the bombing are together a stark illustration of the spineless nature of the Irish bourgeoisie when dealing with their masters.
A client ruling class yes but more accurately, a servant.14
End.
Section of the crowd in attendance viewed from the north-east of the location. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Section of the crowd with the tower of Connolly (formerly Amiens Street) Station in the background. During the British suppression of the 1916 Rising, British Army machine-gun fire was directed from there along Talbot Street towards the General Post Office garrison and North Earl and Henry Streets. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
FOOTNOTES
1There was originally a plaque at the Garden of Remembrance and the Talbot Street monument was erected in 1977 after campaigning by relatives and victims. There is also a monument in Monaghan Town. In Dublin there is also a plaque at the site of another explosion that killed people that day in Parnell Street.
2Now the Police Service of Northern Ireland, formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary (and before that, up until 1921, the Royal Irish Constabulary, when the whole of Ireland was under direct British rule).
3In particular the Ulster Defence Regiment, which had recruited from the part-time RUC B-Specials when the latter were disbanded but also special units such as the MRF in special operations and more generally across the whole of the occupation forces.
5When the Irish State and colony statelet were created in 1921, the colonial gendarmerie of the Royal Irish Constabulary in the colony became the Royal Ulster Constabulary. In more recent years the force has change its name to the Police Force of Northern Ireland.
6The body of the monument to the Anglican leader of the United Irishmen was destroyed but the head was salvageable and rests on the re-cast body of the monument today.
7The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has dubbed that Court “a sentencing tribunal” but every party in government since has upheld those repressive provisions and Sinn Féin has abandoned its decades of opposition to them as it prepares to enter government in coalition with one party or another.
8Having a Garda Commissioner who was or became a British Intelligence agent might be shocking until we remind ourselves that the current Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, coming from being Assistant Commissioner of the PSNI, was at least formerly part of MI5 operations in the colony and that must have been known to those who appointed him!
9Mayors of Dublin City are selected for one year from among the elected councillors. It is more of a ceremonial role than an executive one and the choice is usually negotiated in turn from among the represented political parties.
11A number commented that his contribution was so much better in every way than that of last year’s Monaghan Cathaoirleach. Conlon is a member of the Sinn Féin party and some may say his posture would therefore be expected. However, given changes in the party’s public position on many questions in recent years, a hard stand against the British administration no longer seems natural for this party’s public representatives.
13Irish Civil War (or as some see it, the Irish Counterrevolution) 1922-1923.
14It should be noted that the Gombeen class has also been a client in turn of US Imperialism and of EU Imperialism, with all of which it aligns itself on most questions of international policy and to which it opens up its markets, natural resources and infrastructure networks.
A deadly disease has struck some people in Ireland, affecting tendons in the legs, control of the tongue and causing partial amnesia. By a strange twist, some of those affected are attracted to the very site of the first outbreak of the disease.
The effect on the tendons in the legs of those affected is dramatic: they can no longer stand up straight and find themselves bending a knee or even collapsing on to both knees, the tongue protruding in bizarre licking motion.
Less visible but in many ways more striking is the amnesia effect. Those affected lose memories of parts of what they learned in school or what they themselves thought and said in the past – even in recent years.
According to Dr. P O’Neill of the Institute of Research and Adjustment, a new symptom was observed recently: “Affected people spent four hours staring vacantly at a film of some anachronistic ritual”.
Dr. T.W.Tone, who has been studying similar outbreaks in the past observed on the affinity of the disease for people of higher social classes: “No-one is guaranteed immunity but it does seem that the lower the social class, the less likely the person is to contract this disease.”
Commenting on the low recovery rate of those who contract the disease, Dr. J.Connolly pointed to the crucial importance of prevention, for which community programs of education can be very effective. “We rely especially on Volunteers,” he said, “men and women who are dedicated to preventing the spread of this disease.”
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