LIFE, LOVE, HISTORY AND THEIR INTERPRETERS by Donal Kennedy


Life, it has been remarked ,is one damned thing after another.

Love, two damned things after each other.

History, many damned things after each other.

Unfortunately, too many interpreters,trusted as guides for the populace, have neglected the order in which historical events unfolded.

Thus devotees of Ruth Dudley Edwards, for instance, may believe that Pearse, Connolly and a bunch of bloodthirsty hotheads unleashed a century of war on a world at peace.

.A man standing on O’Connell Bridge in 1916 would have a view of  the site of a 1913 baton charge by Royal Irish Constabulary which killed and injured Dublin workers
 and the site of the  July 1914 killing and wounding of unarmed Dubliners by the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

In August 1914 Britain embarked on a European War, meticulously prepared over ten years, to crush her trade rival Germany. That war sucked in much of the world.
The reverberations of that cynical crime could yet wipe out the human race

.Ms Dudley Edwards, born 1943 is a beneficiary of Pearse and Connolly. All of Ireland was spared military Conscription then and since and most of Ireland has been at peace for
the last 97 years.

And for most of those years the people of most of Ireland have been able to appoint, EVEN DISMISS, their  governments.

Irish citizens have rightly rejected the grotesque attempt to have the Royal Irish Constabulary honoured in their name. But many of them have taken umbrage because such honour
would go to the Black and Tans. The First Dail Eireann, after a debate in April 1919 eleven months BEFORE  the first “Tan” set foot in Ireland unanimously decreed that the RIC
should be ostracised by the people. Perhaps the strongest condemnation of the RIC came from Professor Eoin MacNeill,founder of the Gaelic League in 1893,and of the Irish Volunteers in 1913,and of Cumann na nGaedheal  fore-runner of Fine Gael. If historians and commentators were doing an honest job Charlie Flanagan would have been torn limb from limb by his party colleagues for his sponsorship of the Commemoration, if not by by the citizens of Laois-Offaly when he stood in the recent election.

A campaign for Real History and Real Journalism could be got underway online during the lockdown. As Thomas Davis said – “Educate that you may be free.”

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