I hope readers will forgive my laziness. I wrote the piece below as a draft nearly four years ago. I didn’t polish it at all, or send it for publication. I’m sure the usual begrudgers will find faults with it, punctuation, split infinitives perhaps. No “Ad Majorem Britanniae Gloriam” dedication.
Recently the Irish Times reprinted from its archives “An Irishman’s Diary” from November 1951, believed to have been written by Bertie Smyllie, its Editor from 1934 to 1954.. The Diarist waxed indignant and lyrical in turn, as he described being called an Imperialist So-and-So by a young Dubliner for wearing a Poppy on Britain’s Remembrance Day, and the pride with which he recalled wearing it ever since its first outing on Remembrance Day 1919, and of the British Empire’s unbroken record of defending the weak against the strong in the years between.
On the original Remembrance Day in 1919, Ireland’s capital city, Dublin, was treated to the spectacle of massed tanks, terrestrial Dreadnoughts or land battleships paraded past a saluting base at the Bank of Ireland.The tanks were at the service of the British Government and their role was to Shock and Awe the citizens of Ireland. The Bank of Ireland was, as the British well knew, as iconic as the Rock of Cashel in Ireland’s consciousness, having housed an Irish Parliament up to 1801. It is why the building was used as the backdrop for British Army recruiting posters and postcards.
One such chocolate-boxy postcard was in danger of giving schmalz a bad name.
It showed rosy-cheeked gossoons, virgin soldiers in British uniform , being cheered by winsome, rosy-cheeked virginal colleens as they marched off to rescue the equally virtuous Little Catholic Belgium from the lustful grasp of the Hun. The return of the Bank of Ireland to an Irish Parliament was the bait that lured tens of thousands of gullible Irishmen to dusty, muddy and briney deaths.
That same Remembrance Day in Dublin, British Crown Forces arrested John O’Mahony, MP for Fermanagh South, John Hayes, MP for Cork West, Frank Lawless, MP for Dublin North and Diarmuid Lynch, MP for Cork, South East. In common with 69 other Sinn Fein candidates in the General Election of the previous December they had been elected on a mandate to establish an Irish Parliament to serve a Sovereign Republic for Ireland. As the party thus had 73 of all 105 Irish seats, it set about keeping its promises. The MPs named were sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for being members of Sinn Fein and for illegal assemby, as both Dail Eireann and Sinn Fein were deemed illegal by the Shocking and Awesome British Government. Other officers of the Dail and of the Republic’s Army were also arrested and jailed with them.
On 10th November 1920 the 73-year-old parish priest of Dunmanway, Co Cork, Canon Magner, received a threatening letter demanding he ring his Church bell on the following day, the anniversary of the Armistice. He ignored the threat, and was murdered in broad daylight by an “Auxiliary Police Cadet” – in fact a British Army Officer and Great War veteran named Harte, who had just murdered a young man, Timothy Crowley, whilst Crowley was speaking with the priest. By this time the British had suppressed Inquests in Ireland, a suppression which has been a boon to a school of charlatans posing as historians which has been assiduously promoted in recent years by the Irish Times. Pre-eminent amongst the charlatans was the late Professor Peter Hart, whose “The IRA And Its Enemies” brought to History the same standards as “Police Cadet” Harte brought to Policing.The immediate trigger to the suppression was the inquest held on Tomas MacCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork, murdered by Royal Irish Constabulary men led by District Inspector Swanzy, which named not just Swanzy, but also British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Lord French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Acting Inspector General Smith and Divisional Inspector Clayton of the RIC’, whose policy Swanzy was implementing when he murdered MacCurtain. For many decades The Irish Times annually commemorated Swanzy in its Roll of Honour.
Armistice Day 1920 was a very busy day in Westminster. In Whitehall a stone cenotaph, or symbolic empty tomb was unveiled in Whitehall by King George V, who that day also attended a solemn ceremony in Westminster Abbey when the mortal remains of an Unknown Warrior who had died wearing British uniform in the Great War was interred there. That same day the Better Government of Ireland Bill, partitioning Ireland, had its Third and Final Reading in Parliament, to become law when King George gave it his Royal Assent some weeks later. Not one of the 29 Irish MPs (23 Unionists and 6 Nationalists) voted for the Bill, and as the remaining 73 repudiated British rule altogether, the Bill had no Assent in Ireland.Is it too fanciful to imagine that the Unknown Warrior was an Irish Home Ruler, or some honest Briton who thought that his sacrifice would promote the cause of justice, and that his remains were spinning in his grave at the blasphemy of manipulating propagandists and blackguard politicians? Is it too much to suspect that the Cenotaph is not empty, but stuffed with the empty promises of those who did well out of the war?
Skipping some unpleasantness we come to Remembrance Day in Dublin in 1931 when the British Legion is accompanied in its commemoration by the Dublin Branch of the British Union of Fascists, without any sign of dissension between them. Then to 4th March 1933 when the Irish Times hailed (heiled?) the accession of Hitler to power in Germany, as “Europe’s standard-bearer against Muscovite terrorism.” A couple of years later, after the accession of Smyllie to the Editor’s Chair, the paper lamented, on the death of Edward Carson, that the Unionist leader had been born forty years too soon, for otherwise “he might have been a Mussolini, or even a Hitler.”
Smyllie’s people nearly eighty years later seem to have have no difficulty in emulating the feats of a late German Minister of Propaganda, replicating his real habits and mimicking the shortcomings attributed to him in the British army marching song.
For I fear they have No Balls At All.
suppressed inquests,brits murdering priests whats changed eh.