In his biography of Winston Churchill, whom he credited with bringing peace to Ireland, Roy Jenkins mentioned the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in October 1920.
Jenkins did not mention MacSwiney’s immediate predecessor as Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomas MacCurtain – “wilfully murdered in circumstances of most callous brutality; that the murder was organised and carried out by the Royal Constabulary, officially organised by the British Government” according to a Coroner’s Inquest” The Inquest returned a verdict of “wilful murder against David Lloyd George, Lord French (the Viceroy),Ian MacPherson (Britain’s Secretary of State for Ireland), as well as three Inspectors of the Royal Irish Constabulary and unknown members of the same force.
At the time of MacCurtain’s murder (19 March 1920) Churchill was Minister for War. In that role he established two terrorist bodies, “RIC Auxiliary Cadets” experienced Officer veterans of the Great War” and another RIC auxiliary body mainly of former *other Ranks” who were arriving in Ireland at the time.
Jenkins conceded that MacSwiney was cut above the Irish-American Tammany Hall politicians who had robbed New York city blind. What Jenkins did not mention the local election of 1920 where Sinn Fein Republicans of high integrity many of them highly cultured became the first citizens of their cities and towns. For instance George Clancy, Mayor of Limerick, murdered , in front of his wife on the night of 7th March 1921, by Auxiliary “Cadet” George Nathan.
Clancy was a friend of James Joyce when at University College Dublin, one of two of his friends to be murdered by a British Officer in Ireland. The other was Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Ireland’s most noted Pacifist and Feminist, murdered by Captain Bowen Colthurst on Easter Tuesday 25 March 1916. Colthurst had collaborators including a Sergeant (an NCO senior enough to check him) and senior officers who tried to bury the evidence and impede justice afterwards. Colthurst was treated as insane enough to be shifted off to Canada without being locked up.
The night of Mayor Clancy’s murder, his predecessor , Michael O’Callaghan, also of Sinn Fein,was murdered by the same again by George Nathan. The circumstances were exactly the same as the murder of MacCurtain nearly 12 months earlier.
At the time there was, living in Dublin, in some style, Richard “Boss” Croker, the County Cork born, Tammany Hall politician who out of New York when it was getting too hot for him. (The Wikipedia entry for him depicts a thorough scoundrel, his horse O involved in murder and every racket imaginable.He apparently had a vocabulary of about 300 words. He lived like a Lord and his horse “ORBY” won the Epsom Derby in 1907.
His house still stands and today is the Residence of Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador in Ireland
It was the Residence, in 1969 of Sir Andrew Gilchrist when he was arranging for THE IRISH TIMES to toe a line dictated from London.
In 1965 Gilchrist, as Ambassador to Indonesia, masterminded a lying propaganda campaign which violently overthrew the Government of that country and the murder of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people. The British Navy transported Indonesian troops involved in the massacres.
At the time Roy Jenkins was in the British Cabinet, where he was credited with making Britain a more civilised society.
The Australian John Pilger wrote the best-selling -THE NEW RULERS OF THE WORLD in 2002 which describes the Indonesian putsch, and Gilchrist’s role in it in convincing detail,
See my next BLOG!
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