Conor Cruise O’Brien has suggested that William Joyce, later dubbed “Lord Haw Haw” was involved in the murder of Father Michael Griffin, whose body was found in a bog in Barna, Co.Galway, on 20 November 1920.
If the story is true, the jejeune William Joyce, all of 14 years old, was rather precocious. Alhtough he was hanged in London in January 1946 there was never any suggestion of his ever killing anybody. He had broadcast pretty noxious matter and spoke with an Irish accent and I can well understand why
the temptation to do him in arose. Anyone who can remember how stroppy Terry Wogan got with foreigners who didn’t give the UK all their votes during
Eurovision Song contests can understand the temptation. Or anyone who has heard the repeated falsehoods of Fergal Keane.
Father Michael Griffin had agreed to give evidence to an American Commission of Inquiry into conditions in Ireland which had held its first meeting on November 19. The previous month seventeen Irishmen had been murdered by British agents and in early November at London’s Mansion House, Lloyd George boasted they were “getting the right men.” Crown Forces had recently burned dozens of Co-operative Creameries, and in corner-boy style
the Prime Minister had a sneer at Sir Horace Plunkett, the founder and driving force of the Co-operative movement “who couldn’t even speak for his own creameries.” Check Sir Horace Plunkett on Wikipedia, one of the most honourable, constructive and decent men who ever lived. Forget Donald Trump – if you want to find a speech as outrageous as that Mansion House speech, perhaps Hitler, in his speech defending his murders of the Night of the Long Knives capped that of Lloyd George.
A lot of entries on William Joyce contradict one another and one said he went to a Jesuit school in Galway, whose existence seems to have escaped notice elsewhere. Others say he was an Informer for the Crown Forces, who, almost certainly, murdered Father Griffin. When, in the House of Commons, an Irish Member, (I think Belfast’s Joe Devlin) asked who had killed the Priest, Winston Churchill was heard to prompt his Cabinet Colleague – “Say Sinn
Feiners.”
I don’t think Eoghan Harris, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kevin Myers,Fergal Keane, Professor Paul Bew, or Seumus Murphy SJ, has yet suggested that Winston Churchill was asking that the truth be told, nor that they themselves are very anxious that it should be.
Hi Donal. Interesting piece. Thank you. I can declare a very minor interest in William Joyce. My Grandmother is from Oughterard, Co. Galway and her brother was a class mate and good friend of Joyce’s. They were at St. Ignatius college together and apparently he was often at their home for tea. By all accounts he was a rum lad with his confused political beliefs evident from an early age.
Just thinking, would William Joyce be one of the Irish who were in volved in WW2 we are urged to remember every November?