IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY – by Donal Kennedy

 

For nearly 70 years I have been inspired by Frank Gallagher, alias David Hogan since reading his “THE FOUR GLORIOUS YEARS”

From 1919 t0 1921 he was the main compiler of Dail Eireann’s IRISH BULLETIN, part of a team of brilliant writers including Lawrence Ginnell, Robert Brennan, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Erskine Childers.

The British regime was so afraid of its exposure of their crimes in Ireland, troops searching passengers on a train arrested a woman who had two copies of it and courtmartialled her and sentenced her to a month’s imprisonment. Troops found one of the Bulletin’s offices and their propaganda department rushed out a counterfeit copy which was immediately recognised as such, as the real Irish Bulletin didn’t miss an issue.

The Irish Establishment, Government, Academic, and Media are no less scared of the IRISH BULLETIN one hundred years after its last issue was published.

It is a key primary source for an understanding of our country’s history. No study of it has been published by any University. In any Decade of Remembrance it should have been examined minutely. Instead what we have had is decades of amnesia and lying by politicians and ambassadors, professors and others who owe their current exalted positions to the blood, toil, sweat and tears of the generation which established and defended the democratic Irish Republic of 1919-21.

For the past ten years the Aubane Historical Society has been publishing full reprints of THE IRISH BULLETIN. It is a labour of love for it, unsubsidised by government or academia, and beyond the imagination of those who accept the largesse of Lockheed or other war profiteers.

 

Volume 5  of the Bound Reprints has just been put on sale. It deals with the burning of the Customs House in May 1921, the Truce offered by Britain to the IRA in July, the election of the Second Dail Eireann and its conferring on de Valera of the Presidency of the Republic. (This was a promotion from mere Presidency of Dail Eireann June to October 1921, gifted by the conspiratorial Irish Republican Brotherhood, which had retained its “virtual” Presidency even after the creation of the democratically established Republic in 1919). It covers too, the opening of negotiations in London in October 1921. A  Sixth, final Volume, ending on the 11th December 1921, immediately after the signing of the Articles of Agreement in London, is in preparation.

Not only Ireland, but the world should thank the amateur historians of the Aubane Historical Association – Jack Lane, Brendan Clifford, Philip O’Connor, Geraldine Conway, Jenny O’Connor and Angela Clifford, for rescuing our history from the mercenary grip  of  meretricious mendicants.

I have been inspired over the years by the example of Frank Gallagher and his colleagues and though not having one hundredth of the talent or courage of the least of them have tried to imitate them.

I hope to write a series of Blogs in imitation of a series “Books From My Shelves” by Gallagher, published by in THE SUNDAY PRESS during the 1950s.

I’ll concentrate on books which I find helpful in trying to make sense of a world boasting its freedom and incarcerating Julian Assange and murdering honest journalists.