On October 31 1920 , London Labour Borough Councillors, Aldermen and Mayors, in their Municipal regalia. walked in procession in the funeral of Terence MacSwiney who had died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison.
MacSwiney had been elected in the General Election of December 1918 as a Sinn Fein candidate, one of 73 of the party’s sucessful candidates pledged to establish a sovereign Republic in Ireland. Having won 73 of Ireland’s 105 Parliamentary seats Sinn Fein established a Parliament in Dublin, appointed Ministers to run the Republic and set about the work of government. In 1920 Sinn Fein had participated in Municipal, Co Council and other
local elections throughout Ireland and the electorate gave them renewed support.
Terence Mac Swiney was elected a member of Cork Corporation and was Lord Mayor of that City when he died.
Alongside the hearse as it made its way through London streets, marched a uniformed Guard of Honour of the First Cork Brigade Irish Volunteers (aka IRA) of whom MacSwiney had been its Commanding Officer until his death.
I don’t know the later record of any but one of the London Labour men who marched behind the IRA. But the Mayor of Stepney, Major Clement Attlee, who had served with the British Army in Gallipoli , didn’t do too badly, as he said himself –
“Few thought he was even a starter
There many who thought themselves smarter
But he ended PM
CH and OM
An Earl and a Knight of the Garter”
Some 40 odd years later Harold Wilson led the Labour Party to victory in four out of in five General Elections between 1964 and 1976. He met the IRA’s Provisional Army Council in Dublin in rather irregular circumstances. He was in Opposition at the time and under the pretext of visiting Irish Labour Party leaders in international fraternity, he was acting at the request of Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath. The Irish Government was eager to arrest and imprison the IRA leadership and would have had the support of Irish Labour, not to say Fine Gael Opposition members.
At the time Sinn Fein had not a single elected TD or MP , perhaps even a local councillor in the whole of Ireland.
It was an underhand, discreditable contemptible act of Wilson and of Heath. An insult to elected Irish elected politicians and those Irish citizens who had elected them.
But Wilson escaped censure in his own party as Heath did in his.
Contrast that with the fate of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn met Gerry Adams in London openly. There was no subterfuge. There was no warrant for Gerry Adams’s arrest. Like Corbyn, Adams was a democratically elected public representative, Adams is now an international
figure of some stature who was honoured at Nelson Mandela’s funeral more favourably than any European Royal.
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