FROM THE IRISH TIMES, Monday 18 November 2013 –
“Sir,
I understand that the peoples of Sweden and Switzerland were the only Europeans to suffer less from violence than the people of Ireland these past 100 years ;and Ireland’s good fortune stems from the actions of Pearse, Connolly and their comrades.
Had those comrades not fought in 1916 polite ladies would have offered them white feathers. It should be recalled that the first shots fired in anger in Western Europe in 1914 were fired at unarmed civilians in Dublin’s Bachelors Walk by the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and that before Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh faced a British firing squad in 1916, Ireland’s best-known pacifist, Francis Sheehy Skeffington had met the same fate before a British firing squad.
Paddy McEvoy (November 14) does violence to the historical record, apparently deliberately. He may, however, have been made a sucker for the historical poppycock peddled by unscrupulous merchants.
There are some of them still about but a stone’s throw from Bachelors Walk, and as ill-willed as ever towards the people of Ireland.
Yours etc.
Donal Kennedy
LONDON”
(My reference to polite ladies offering white feathers does not refer to Republican ladies. Mr McEvoy had written in support of an opinion piece by Stephen Collins, a paid correspondent of the Irish Times of 9 November 2013.)
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FROM THE IRISH WORLD (London) 5th April 2008-
‘Stupid Boy’ Gove.
“It’s a funny old world indeed where Michael Gove can be a Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and also the Conservative Shadow Minister for Families, Schools and Children, for he frequently presents like Private Pike, the ‘Stupid Boy’ of Dad’s Army.
Take his latest effusion, in THE TIMES of March 19, where he describes the Insurgents of 1916 as ‘Squalid Gangs who Betrayed Ireland.’ One might imagine that the Irish people are best placed to judge who served and who betrayed her.
Certainly the British Government thought so in 1916, for the Insurgent leaders were not charged with betraying Ireland, nor were they tried by a jury of Irishmen. Rather they were tried away from the public eye, by British Courts Martial, and shot.
Even sir Roger Casement (who had tried to have the Rising called off), a Dublinman captured in Kerry had to be sent to London for a jury to find him guilty of High Treason to England’s King, not the betrayal of Ireland.
Within three years of the Rising its veterans were feted in Ireland, and, in or out of jail were elected to Parliament, supplanting those Irish politicians who had urged tens of thousands of Irishmen to death in the Great War.
For decades afterwards very few politicians were elected in Ireland who had not participated in the 1916 Insurrection or the struggle which it had inspired. But young Mr Gove would have us, and the rising generation of British children, believe otherwise. We, and they, deserve better.
Donal Kennedy
London.”
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