I’ve just opened a 2023 Calendar from Viking which sends one every year since my wife and I took a cruise on the Rhone a few years ago.
It lists holidays, Christian and Moslem and other breaks from work. It lists St Patrick’s Day.for Northern Ireland, and also the 12th of July celebration of the Battle of the Boyne. It doesn’t list anything for the rest our island.
It does have Good Friday,but, being a Danish company, has nothing to say about Clontarf, Brodir or Brian Boru, though they are featured at length in the Njal Saga.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to devote Holy Days to the celebration of Battles.The Boyne coulld be celebrated in the Vatican, because the Pope at the time was allied with William of Orange against King Louis XIV of France. Indeed our cruise on the Rhone started at Avignon where 7 successive Popes were based during the 14th Century and proceeded through Orange, the ancestral seat of Princes of that ilk, less than 6 miles upriver.
If Irish Nationalists were to devote a day each year to toast the victors of Crossbarry, Kilmichael, or Narrow Water, would it add to the Gaiety of Nations? Then again, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander..
I have in my hand a copy of the Oxford Paperback Dictionary. It lists El Alamein “the site of the British Victory of the North Africa Campaign of 1940-43.” The same copy tells us that Singapore is “an island forming (with others) a country south of the Malay peninsula,” No mention of the surrender of the
British led garrison there of 130,000, which surrendered to about a quarter of that number of lightly armed Japanese in !942. No mention whatever to the surrender at Kut el Amara on the 29th of April 1916 of 9,000 British troops to the Turks who kept its commander fed with puddin’s and pies in splendour while lower ranks died. That was the same day that, to save the lives of Dublin civilians soon to be promoted to citizenship, Pearse and his fellow insurgent leaders surrendered themselves to the tender mercies of British justice.
The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary describes the Irish-born and educated Edmund Burke, who first visited England as an adult, as an ENGLISH writer, orator and statesman.
And it describes William Burke,the Edinburgh based “resurrection” man who murdered his victims and sold them to hospitals for vivsection as “Irish.”
Could it be that there is a pattern of forgetfulness and deceit in “disinterested” reference works , which smells of totalitarian calculation?
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