A new book, promoted by Cork Public Libraries, carries an anonymous verse blaming Republicans for the burning down of the City’s pride and joy, its Opera House, in 1955. No such allegation was made at the time and an enquiry established that the fire resulted from an electrical fault.
You may recall a BLOG of mine mentioning Sir Christopher Wren’s London Monument in Pudding Lane, which for 150 years bore the lying legend that the Great Fire of London of 1666 was deliberately started by Catholics.
Or you may recall that I mentioned the fact that the activities of Nurse Edith Cavell, whose statue stands in London’s Trafalgar Square, were claimed simply humanitarian until, last year, 100 years after her 1915 execution by the Germans, Dame Stella Rimington (former Director of MI5) revealed that, according to the internationally accepted rules of their game, the Germans had every right to shoot her.
The British boasted then, and accept now, that tens of thousands of chivalrous men rushed to the British Colours, believing their lying propaganda. Edith Cavell was included on the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England. It may be appropriate here to remark that an excerpt, or a typewritten copy of an excerpt, of an alleged writing of Roger Casement, was shown to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1916, lest he support an appeal for clemency for Roger Casement.Casement would deserve at least as prominent place in anyone’s Calendar of Saints as Edith Cavell, an English patriot.
When, in December 1920 British Crown Forces, both Regular Troops from Victoria Barracks,and Royal Irish Constabulary “Auxiliary Cadets” amongst them, went on the rampage in Cork City, murdering the citizenry, burning and looting shops, dynamiting and burning the City Hall – centre of local
democracy, and similarly dynamiting and burning the Carnegie Library – source of education and enlightenment, British Ministers in Whitehall followed their customary practice of blaming Republicans for those outrages.
But the “Auxiliary Cadets” throughout Ireland, wearing burnt corks in their Glengarry caps, rather gave the lie to the Ministerial claptrap. The charges against the Crown Forces were certainly not vexatious.
When the RIC murdered Lord Mayor MacCurtain the previous March the lie was put about that he had been killed by fellow Sinn Feiners, but a Cork inquest found David Lloyd George, amongst others, guilty of promoting that murder.
I see the Emeritus Professor John A Murphy writing nauseating bilge about Queen Victoria’s statue, and his own conversion from wanting to kick to wanting to kiss John Bull’s backside, in The Irish Times.
I await his comment on the allegation that Republicans burnt down the Opera House. And I await what Eoghan Harris, former Buion Gaelach FCA Man in Cork, former Republican diehard, and whatever the devilish persuasions since, may have to say on the matter.
They seem never tired of Arsin’ About with history.
While the western media,including the Irish Times and Irish Independent,went into paroxysms of approval in the late 80’s and early 90’s when the peoples of East European republics pulled down the statues and symbols of Soviet rule after the downfall of the USSR. And likeqise with statues of Saddam in Iraq. However the same organs voice tears of nostalgia for the war criminal Nelson, and expressed full approval when JA Murphy had exhumed the musty remains of a most un-realistic statue of the Anglo-Saxin supremacist Famine Queen, and had it placed on display in the staff room of UCC as a standing insult to the hundreds of thousands who died in the Great Hunger.
Truth is a very rare commodity. Falsehoods are a penny a dozen, even when you make allowance for genuine mistakes.
I cannot name any conflict where any side in that conflict has been particularly truthful. I now rarely believe anything I read or see on TV. Does anyone?
Well, I’m having no problem believing what I’m reading right now, Robin: your comment…; )