Addressing the annual commemoration of Michael Collins, Enda Kenny claimed that during the War ofIndependence Lenin slipped into Ireland for advice from Collins on financing a Revolution.
I can imagine Lenin’s report to his comrades back in Moscow. “Collins, Man of Cork, claims Ireland can Float a Loan”. And Joe Stalin, Moscow’s Man of Steel,boasting “I can Build Socialism in One Country.” As a teenager in London Collins had attended a lecture by Lenin, as had the young London-Irish Joe Good, who LATER fought in the Rising, and like Collins, was interned in Frongoch. Kenny could be nasty as well as stupid.Following the revelation of some abuses in Catholic institutions and the lying allegations of thousands more, he cut diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and discouraged attendance at the Canonisation of Cardinal Newman, an Englishman who made an enlightened contribution to education globally, including in Ireland. Newman’s “Idea of a University” champions the courteous exchange of different opinions in pursuit of truth’ In “GREAT IRISH SPEECHES” published in London by Quercus in 2007 some 50 speakers from 1782-2007 are quoted. Not all of them deserve the description great, but they may give the measure of the speaker. John A. Costello was a brilliant lawyer who was Taoiseach from 1948 to 1951 and from 1954 to 1957. He led a Coalition for its main Party, Fine Gael (though he never joined the party).The Party LeaderRichard Mulcahy, was unacceptable as Taoiseach because of his promotion of atrocities during the Civil War. Costello’s quoted “Great Speech” was delivered in the Dail on the 28th of February 1934 in opposition to “The Wearing of Uniform (Restrictions) Bill”. Costello argued that the Bill should be opposed, firstly, as “a bill….brought in by a party which, for the moment forms the government, against a party which, for the moment forms the chief opposition …in this house.” Fine Gael never, ever, won a majority in that House, and depended on a large Unionist contingent in the Free State Senate to block the Bill which was passed by the Dail. Fianna Fail’s Dail majority, following several elections, survived unbroken for 14 years. Mr Costello’s “second…and possibly more fundamental objection” was that the bill was an ” invasion of individual rights and the constitutional freedom which was guaranteed to the citizens of this state by the constitution which was brought into force on 6 December 1922. Some rights! Some freedom! As Ireland was being held for the Empire with an economy of English lives.
Costello went on to boast – “The Blackshirts were victorious in Italy and the Hitler Shirts were victorious in Germany” and predicted …..”the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish Free State.” They were a lawful political movement he claimed that menaced the political longevity of the Fianna Fail Party….. Four months later Hitler himself organised murder of the leading “Hitler Shirts” surprising their leader, Ernst Roehm in his Night Shirt. Nearly four years later Irish voters abolished the “Irish Free State” and established a sovereign, independent state with a republican constitution.Without firing a shot De Valera secured Britain’s evacuation of Cork Harbour, Bantry Bay and Lough Swilly, and kept the State out of the bloodiest war in history. To remain neutral it was necessary to expand the Defence Forces, which remained voluntary. Men and women who had fought each other in1922-1923 served as comrades. In 1948 Fianna Fall lost power to a ragbag coalition including two squabbling Labour Parties, and Republicans willing to recognise the legitimacy of the new Constitution. Whereas De Valera, a supremely rational operator concerned himself with the essence of sovereign democracy he was content not to label it Republican. For motives never explained Costello stuck that label on the State, which since 1938 claimed sovereignty over all Ireland. London officialdom mulled over the situation and the Cabinet Secretary prepared a Memorandum which dismissed Unionist claims over the Six Counties as unconvincing, but said that “for strategic reasons, some part of Ireland should be within His Magesty’s Dominions.” Clement Attlee wrote “noted” on the Memo and a new Ireland Act was passed purporting to vest the status of the disputed territory in “the Parliament of Northern Ireland.” As “every person, matter and thing in the UK comes under Imperial Parliament in Westminster” the Act, passed the year NATO was created,,the Act was a nonsense.The Parliament of Northern Ireland was suspended by the Imperial Government seven years before the Memorandum was released for examination in the Public Records Office, which less ceremony than Thatcher was to abolish the Greater London Council nearly 40years after the Memorandum was written. |
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Costello extolled the “rights” guaranteed citizens brought into force by the constitution brought into
force on 6th December 1922.
They were in force about 30 hours when the custodians of that constitution shot dead unarmed prisoners
without even the farce of a court-martial., a little over eleven years before the “Great” speech.
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