As tonight’s leaders debate on RTÉ draws near, let me tell you a little story from the Irish Civil War.
In March 1923, nine prisoners from Kerry No 1 Brigade (Anti-Treaty) were taken from Ballymullen gaol in Tralee to Ballyseedy crossroads, ostensibly to clear landmined roads. The Free State troops made sure that they were, “all fairly anonymous, no priests or nuns in the family, those that’ll make the least noise”.
Some of the prisoners had already been beaten by the time they arrived at Ballyseedy, where they were tied around a landmine and literally blown to smithereens. One man, Stephen Fuller, was not killed but blown clear by the blast and lived to tell about the massacre. At the scene, the Free State troops shovelled the remains of the pulverised bodies into nine coffins and drove them back to Tralee with the story that they had been accidentally killed while clearing a mined road.
I mention this incident because it was perpetrated by the Free State forces – that is, the forerunners of Fine Gael. Thirty-five years later would have been 1958, which I remember distinctly. Men who had been involved on both sides in the Irish Civil War were still alive, many of them active in southern politics. But the idea that this appalling action in Kerry, or any other Civil War killing, should be raised to score political points off political opponents, was unthinkable. The war had been horrible, the war was over; the policies of parties were what was scrutinised, not events from thirty-five years earlier.
Why is it then that the descendants of men who would have been involved in these ghastly acts in the 1920s feel no compunction in casting up at every turn events from our more recently Troubles at Gerry Adams? Is it that they feel morally superior to someone who was involved in the northern conflict? If so, do they not feel an equal measure of moral superiority towards their own forebears who carried out such barbarism as the Kerry mine explosion?
The truth is, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour do not hesitate to use the carefully-selected victims of the Troubles (or in the case of Regina Doherty, poorly-selected victims) with which to bludgeon Sinn Féin and in particular Gerry Adams. The dead are useful weapons with which to damage the living.
I have two suggestions, should such cynical strategies be employed tonight, as they probably will.
1. RTÉ should be bombarded by messages from those who think such tactics are beneath contempt.
2. Every viewer who has a vote and is outraged by such two-faced tactics should make certain to register their disgust in the only effective place: at the ballot box, this Friday.
Excellent article, Jude. Ar fheabhas.
Grma, C
Excellent comment as always.Free Staters still abound in both FG and FF.Regina Doherty is typical of their thinking
Well said, Jude.
In 1957 an FCA unit was established at Rockwell College. Those enlisting needed parental
permission, which I got. Most of the 5th and 6th Years joined. Apparently not everyone asked
for parental permission and two shocked their parents when they brought their uniforms home.
They were from Kerry and oblivious of the atrocities there.
Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour are employing the exact same one-sided tactics that the Unionists use up here. I haven’t listened to what Regina Doherty said on the radio yet but she should really be ashamed of herself. To say Gerry Adams (who was shot and had a bomb thrown at his home), his cousin (who was kidnapped by the UVF, beaten and murdered), his brother in Law (who was murdered by the parachute regiment in Ballymurphy while Gerry’s sister was on the verge of giving birth to their child) and the 3 men who were murdered in Gerry’s own MP office (by an RUC man) was to blame or in some way deserved what they got is despicable and disgusting.
Does Fine Gael and Regina also believe that the actions of the RUC/UDR/UVF/UDA/British Army isn’t comparable to that of the IRA? Garret FitzGerald certainly had that mind set, as he angrily said to Bishop O’Connor in New York when the Bishop refused to condemn the IRA alone but insisted on condemning the injustices against the Catholic community in the North of Ireland. Did all the children murdered by the British Army, Unionist paramilitaries and RUC/UDR also deserve what they got? Were the people marching for an end to internment and for civil rights in Derry on Bloody Sunday “asking for it” when the paras opened fire and kept firing even while people were running away? Were the Catholics brutally tortured to death, one of whom was practically beheaded, by the Shankill Butchers (with RUC help) getting what they deserves too, Regina?
I sent Regina a youtube video of all the children murdered by the British Army in the North (one of which is my mother’s childhood friend, 11 year old Francis Rowntree. I’ll put a link to the video below) and I told her she should be ashamed of herself. If Fine Gael had any decency they would force her to apologize or expel her.
The last leaders debate is on tonight and I feel Gerry Adams needs to pull off something special tonight. Expect the usual crap from FF/FG/LAB but Gerry really needs to nail them all and also nail RTE on their scandalous bias over the past week. It will be very interesting.
Thank you for your post Ryan ” lest we forget”.
Great story.jude.keep.up.the good.work..
Grma.Jim. But.Terrible.Story.
I accidentally bought The ‘Irish’ Sunday Times yesterday thinking it was the Sunday Business Post. Carefully eschewing the predictable and intemperate ranting of Kevin Myers my eye was drawn to an article by a good old County Down stalwart Conor Brady. In the course of the article Conor conceded that while there were able,capable, sincere and visionary people in SF many members hands were stained with blood. Hate to tell you this Conor but the same could have been said about all the parties in the 26 counties up to the70’s and beyond. I won’t mention unionist and British parties as killing Germans, Africans,Arabs Cypriots and Irish does n’t count.
This may be of interest:
Niall Meehan’s commentary 24 October 2010 on Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography. Kevin Myers penned versions about Kilmichael in the ‘Irish Times’ on 30 May, 22 June, 3 July and 6 July 1989. On 29 January 1992 Mr Myers acknowledged that the story was not true.
http//www.spinwatchorg/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/52
One of the Republican prisoners, Esteemed Blogmeister, who might have been shackled to the landmine that democratic day in Ballyseedy but wasn’t, was Austin Stack. The day that might be called Boomsday.
The football stadium in nearby Tralee is named in his honour, much to the enduring chagrin of Brian O’Connor, the touchy Sport of Kings’ correspondent in The Unionist Times. The same high dudgeoner whose trilby almost became dislodged from the crown of his high-minded head even as he directed his furiously furled brolly in the direction of the eponymous Joe on the same topic of outrage in recent times/ Times.
A brief biographical sketch of Austin Stack would allude to his captaining his native Kerry to All Ireland glory in 1904 (the same year the navel-gazing novel sometimes called Useless is set, and in which the racially-inspired abuse directed at the founder of the GAA is annually celebrated on Bloomsday in the Blackpool of the Liffey); was Commandant of the IRA in Kerry in 1916 and was to have his sentence of death commuted; elected an abstentionist Sinn Fein MP in 1918; took the Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War; captured, went on hunger strike for 41 days; remained in Sinn Fein after Dev ascended to Fianna Failure heaven; and died in 1929 of pneumonia at the age of 49, his health never having been fully regained.
Fast forward to 1958, the same year not unlike your good self, EB, one has a good memory of, not least on account of All-Ireland Day. When a short-panted Perkie, his one Official Programme remaining, having been especially unsold for such a purpose, under his oxter, ran on con brio to the field of play on the blow of the final whistle and, with biro in hand, buttonholed the nearest Dublin forward to him.
-Would you ever eff off !
Was the cockles of the heart-warming welcome by the said nearest Dublin forward. One often wonders to this very day what that player’s reaction would have been if the result had been the reverse, and Dublin had been beaten by Derry. Though the unexpected surly response, in fairness going backward, might have been down to ancestral reasons, such as the player in question being (gasp) Padraig ‘Jock’ Haughey, son of a Derry man from Swatragh and brother of a Mayo man.
Not entirely unresourceful, an undaunted Perkie turned to the next nearest Dublin forward who this time graciously gave his autograph, even though he too had just endured the heartbreak of victory. A son of Down this time, and member of the same club, St. Vincents, one Dessie ‘Snitchy’ Ferguson. Less than twenty years later the same player was to see the inside of the same chokey which Austin Stack had also seen, and for the same reason.
Fast further forward to March 1983 when The Perkin, by this time having jumped into long pants, was in attendance at a different sporting event in Dublin, though not as a programme-seller this time. Having just exited from the National Stadium after the evening’s boxing, a commotion on the other side of the South Circular Road caught his attention: a small crowd had gathered in the semi-darkness around a prone figure on the footpath.
Two days late much to one’s surprise, one received a phone call from a Detective Garda wondering if one could give an eye-witness account of the shooting of PrIson Officer BrIan Stack. As one’s arrival on the scene was some ten seconds too late for that, one was no longer troubled on that score. The unfortunate Prison Officer succumbed to pneumonia the following year, aged 47.
His son, Austin Stack, also a prison officer, has been one of the most reluctant of interventionist activists in G.E. 2016, due no doubt to the relentless number of phone calls he has been receiving from a preternaturally unbiased media.
One’s most enduring memory of that episode on the South Circular Road was the extraordinary efficiency of An Garda Siochana. Just how they had managed to locate the unlisted number of a mere, unassuming spectator cum modest speculator in the Sock Exchange in the cheap seats would have caused M. Hercule Poirot lui meme to twirl his waxed tashes, to whisper a near breathless Mon Dieu ! in stunned admiration and to rack his little grey cells in search of an explanation.
Curiously, this would have been around the same time a national basketball coach, by the name of Bill Kenneally, a close relation of not one or two, but of three generations of Fianna Failure T.D’s for Waterford, was preying on the male youths of the city on the Suir.
Although his name was given to the local Gardai at the time, no action was decisively taken. It took, in point of chronological fact, till last week for this pedophile to be sentenced to a long sentence in chokey.
So far there has been no call for a tribunal of inquiry by the relentlessly righteous media. Into the peculiar passivity of the policemen in the Viking City of Veorafjoror. The same city which recently unveiled a bust in honourable memory of a low-key ethnic cleanser by the avuncular name of Field Marshal Earl Roberts. (There is a theory that he was the endearing inspiration of the phrase ‘Bob’s yer Uncle’) .
Possibly even to the unbridled joy of the Sport of Kings’ correspondent in The Unionist Times.
Could this be a case of nothing, i.e., no RC clergy to see here, move along there, please?
Or, anam an diabhail, could be down to all the distractions of the G.E. 2016?
Ca fios?
Jude,
re. “Why is it then that the descendants of men who would have been involved in these ghastly acts in the 1920s feel no compunction in casting up at every turn events from our more recently Troubles at Gerry Adams?”
I’m not sure that is a very strong argument – those criticising Adams may be opposed to the events in Kerry. I think we can safely say that there are double standards in celebrating one insurgency at the start of the 20th century whilst condemning those involved towards in the one at the end of the century. (Although there are significant differences between them).
Gerry has been badly advised to persist with the ‘I was never in the IRA’ and should have been going on the attack when confronted with double standards rather than constantly on the back foot. Legally Marty is happy to say he was involved and Gerry should have been saying something similar.
It looks like SF will taper off at about 16 or 17 percent and that is partly down at least to the untidy peace in Northern Ireland – where it appears the British allowed the Provos to keep some guns for ‘housekeeping’.- arguably a necessary element of the ‘peace process’ but that understandably and reasonably will stop a large number of voters in the South voting SF.
Unfortunately for SF – there was really nothing they could or can do about that – it is simply not acceptable to many to have Gerry as Foreign Minister when he is still ‘linked’ to a partly armed organisation in the North which has to protect its own members.
As something of a fan of Gerry – I think he must now realise (after what will be an improved but ultimately disappointing election) – that it time for him to go.
It could only happen in Ireland. Ad hominem arguments from the Tánaiste et al in order to deflect questions from the actual performance of previous administrations.
RTÉ has questions to answer about naming one individual and making factually incorrect statements. Sloppy to say the least.
I sent this Question to Ms Doherty yesterday as yet no reply, maybe we should draw attention to her despicable behaviour. Obviously for some the Civil War continues .
Ms Doherty I find your comment on the murders at the Sinn Fein Belfast office absolutely Disgraceful & shows no regard for Innocent People going about their normal business, I have a cousin who while on a Bus on his way to Donate Blood was Murdered along with another unfortunate man, Perhaps they also brought death on them selves too John Murphy.