(This article is from the Stoneybatter & Smithfield People’s History Project on Facebook)
On 28th and 29th April 1916 the South Staffordshire regiment of the British army went on a murderous rampage through the working class neighbourhood of North King Street. The community was terrorised and sixteen civilian men and boys were murdered, many secretly buried in yards and cellars. It is one of the forgotten stories of the 1916 Rising and has not featured in any of the State’s commemorative programmes.
Not only has this shocking event not been officially remembered in the State’s commemorative programme, but shamefully the Irish government decided to include the names of members of the the South Staffordshire regiment responsible for the North King Street massacre on the 1916 ‘Memorial Wall’ at Glasnevin Cemetery alongside those murdered by that regiment.
‘STARTLING LIST – 14 casualties in King Street – SHOT IN ONE MORNING’
– Sunday Independent, 14th May 1916
This Sunday Independent report published on 14th May 1916 was two weeks after the British army massacre on North King Street, indicating that information about the atrocity was only becoming public. It reports thirteen dead and confirms none of victims were involved in the Rising and that no arms or ammunition was found in any of the dwellings.
The bodies of Patrick Bealen and James Healy, secretly buried in a shallow grave in the cellar of O’Rourke’s public house at 177 North King Street, had only been discovered on 10th May.
Those killed on 29th April 1916, but who were not included in this initial report, were John Beirnes, William O’Neill and Edward Dunne.
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Terrible events. It’s like something the IRA’s chief executioner from 1920 to 1922, Martin Corry TD, would do. Over 70 deaths have been attributed to him with many victims being imprisoned in his Sing Sing torture chamber for days before being executed. Then in a macabre, Fred West style way, many of the bodies were buried in the confines of his own farmland. During his lifetime he was better known as a TD but towards the end of it, in true psychopathic fashion, he seems to have wanted to garner some attention to his past life as a cold blooded executioner.
That’d be like Bomber Harris sort of thing, then, KC?
Nice “What Abouttery” Kop, you even indulged in it without mentioning the infamous words “What about”. Well done.
That is a classy bit of “youse uns are as bad” and you did it with a masterclass of not even acknowledging the incident of the murder of innocent civilians cited by clapping that s on to the end of “event”.
Well done KC!
Feeling smug in your own lonely world!
Chemical agents and secret agents
Mark Curtis writing about the war the war in Malaya 1948-60:
Between 1948 and 1960 the British military fought what is conventionally called the “emergency” or “counter-insurgency” campaign in Malaya, a British colony until independence in 1957. The declassified files reveal that Britain resorted to very brutal measures in the war, including widespread aerial bombing and the use of a forerunner to modern cluster bombs. Britain also set up a grotesque “resettlement” programme that provided a model for the US’s horrific “strategic hamlet” programmes in Vietnam. It also used chemical agents from which the US may again have drawn lessons in its use of agent orange…
Decapitation of insurgents was a little more unusual – A photograph of a Marine Commando holding two insurgents’ heads caused a public outcry in April 1952…
Dyak headhunters from Borneo worked alongside the British forces…
British detention laws resulted in 34,000 people being held for varying periods in the first eight years of the emergency. The Foreign Office explained that detention regulations covered people “who are a menace to public security but who cannot, because of insufficient evidence, be brought to trial”.
“whataboutery”, KC, where will we start & who will we start with, any suggestions KC
TERRIERS V TERRORISTS
Mandated ok blokes in khaki over from Stoke
Leave mandating chinas the homefires to stoke
The locals are Micks
Yokels and mavericks
Slippery Pats who cry’ havoc !’- pitbulls to provoke.
Lets start at the START when the British came here and decided that IRELAND was theirs
and they would kill to keep it and anyone who killed them was a murderer