(Published in THE IRISH POLITICAL REVIEW APRIL 2015)
“The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads to England” quipped Dr Samuel Johnson, a Tory.
These days any Commons prospect for a Scots Tory entails their forsaking Scotland and standing for an English seat, preferably in such leafy and loot-laden constituencies as Surrey Heath. Take the Right Honourable Michael Gove MP, currently Government Chief Whip and formerly (2010-2014) Secretary of State for Education, Before the Conservatives combined with the Lib-Dems in Government in 2010 Gove was Shadow Secretary for Education and wrote a regular column for The Times. Ignorance did not preclude him commenting on Irish events and persons. For instance, one Easter he described the 1916 Insurgents as “squalid gangs that betrayed Ireland.”
In the House of Commons on 11 May 1916, some hours before British firing squads shot Sean MacDiarmada and James Connolly to death, Prime Minister Asquith said that the rebels had fought a fair fight.
Like the other prisoners shot in Dublin and Cork, they had not been charged before a jury, or before fellow Irishmen, or in open court, but before British Courts Martial, nor did the public know anything about the procedings except the verdicts after the execution of their sentences. They were charged and found guilty on charges of taking “part in an armed rebellion and in waging war against His Majesty the King.”
Nowhere did the words “treason” nor “Ireland” occur in the charge or the verdict, and I imagine had they done so, the most dumb-headed Court-Martiallers would have fallen off their chairs laughing. If the rule of the King of England, or the Parliament in England, had any moral traction in Ireland the execution of a handful of insurgents would have left Irish men and women unmoved.
One Irish Republican, Roger Casement, was hanged for High Treason, and he had travelled to Ireland to dissuade his comrades from staging the insurrection. Though he was captured in Kerry, the British dared not arraign him before a jury of fellow-Irishmen in Ireland. He was tried in London’s Old Bailey. Leading for the Crown was the Attorney General (and later Lord Chancellor). F E Smith, who a couple of years previously had promoted the Ulster Volunteers, pledged to fight against the British Army if Parliament attempted to implement Irish Home Rule. Connoisseurs of squalid manipulation of politics and law could do worse than study the career of Smith,and the history of the Act under which Casement was charged.
Since the 12th Century when Henry II of England claimed the Lordship of Ireland, the betrayal of Ireland has never been a crime in English Law, nor is “the betrayal of England” known to the Statute Book.
But Irishmen and women who betrayed Ireland have been rewarded time and time again by the monarchs and parliaments of
England, their agents and their champions. Informers like Leonard McNally in 1798, venal politicians such as members of the Irish Parliament, bribed by money and peerages to vote for the Act of Union in 1800, Sadlier and Keogh in the 1850s, and forgers like Richard Pigott in the 1880s.
Rewards for betraying Ireland and all moral principle still apply, including earning plaudits from Michael Gove and The Times. In November 2007 Gove celebrated the 90th birthday of Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien by describing him as “the greatest living Irishman.”
I recall the days when I myself held O’Brien in high regard, days when O’Brien sued The Daily Telegraph for libel. But, in 1972 O’Brien and his wife Maire Mac an tSaoi blotted their copybook. In fact they spoiled their brilliant, scholarly “Concise History of Ireland” in order to ingratiate themselves with the British government and its sycophants. They wrote of the British Army firing on “rioters in Derry” on Bloody Sunday and thus they aligned themselves with Lord Chief Justice Widgery, Prime Minister Edward Heath and their squalid gang. Lord Saville’s enquiry and Prime Minister David Cameron repudiate the story that those fired on, killed, or wounded were rioters. O’Brien’s coat-turning did not prevent him becoming Editor-in-Chief of London’s Observer, nor did his Pilgrim’s Progress into squalid propaganda prevent him being hailed as ” Valiant for Truth.”
Since this article first appeared Michael Gove has been made Minister for Justice and has also been advanced to the ancient office of Lord Chancellor of England once occupied by Saint Thomas More.
To descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, the office has also been occupied by a couple of Hoggs and the afore mentioned F.E.Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, considered by some of his countrymen as “a fluent and plausible bounder” early in his career, and later, to his fury, “as a crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”
Donal Kennedy.
‘John Bull’s Other Island’ was a seminal piece of journalism for the Observer by the late Mary Holland. It was the first story in a British quality which revealed the truth about gross, Unionist injustice to the minority in the Six Counties. Holland was regarded as one of the finest and most perceptive of writers, covering Ireland in the late sixties and early seventies. Her work was recognised by the award of Journalist of the Year in 1969. Conor Cruise O’Brien became Editor- in- Chief of the Observer in 1978 and produced a series of editorials which were seriously at variance with the events being reported by Mary and others on the ground. Eventually, he spiked a profile on Mary Nelis, written by Holland who then left the paper to join the Irish Times. Following the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, O’Brien arrived and was ordered out of the area on pain of arrest and trial as a traitor to Ireland by Paddy ‘King’ Doherty.
Splendid info, John. But I thought he was called ‘Paddy Bogside’…?
Well ‘King of the Bogside’. Hope to visit him at the weekend. He’s poorly these days.