‘Six Blasts from the Past’ by Donal Kennedy

A JUST RISING (18 JANUARY 2016) –  ANSWERING SEÁMUS MURPHY, S.J.

The latest contribution to the Easter Rising debate was from an Irish Jesuit Priest in California, who told a newspaper that the Rising, “not having a realistic prospect of success”, did not pass the “just war” criteria, but that we can “laughingly forgive a gloriously hopeless battle.”

It seems to me that the insurgents were over-brimming with faith and charity.

Their faith was in the essential common sense of the Irish people in whom they had not lost hope, their charity was in hazarding their lives in their enterprise and the mass of the Irish people responded to those three divine virtues.

Fr. Murphy says that a real republic is created by voters and established in structures of representative democracy.

I wonder when the United States became a republic by his criteria. But I doubt if Jefferson, Washington or Alexander Hamilton were so minded.

I can’t “laughingly  forgive” Father Murphy’s assertion that “to celebrate the Rising is to celebrate anti-democratic elitism and blood-lust.”

On May 11, 1916, the day before his troops shot the prisoners James Connolly and Sean MacDiarmada, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the House of Commons that the “rebels” fought a clean fight.

What evidence has since come to light to suport Father Murphy’s Insults?

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U.S. REBELS IN THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

(29 JANUARY 2016)

I understand that the American War of Independence succeeded because the rebels’ gallant alies from Europe had temporary command of the seas. Had the Battle of Yorktown gone the other way, George Washington would have dangled at the end of a British rope and other rebels would have shared the fate as the Irish at Ballinamuck  in 1798.

Just as goodness had nothing to do with Mae West’s Diamonds, democratic elections had nothing to do with the outcome of the American War of Independence.

Popular support for the American rebels was not tested by universal adult suffrage or universal male suffrage. The aboriginal Americans, the so-called Indians, were not on electoral registers. Neither were black men, or women, most of whom were the property of rebels such as Jefferson, Washington and other apostles of liberty. Indeed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence wrote of “life, liberty and the enjoyment of property”.

But, as the slave owners were appealing to the conscience of the world they thought better about being quite so frank about their objectives.

I’ve read that among white Americans a third supported Independence, a third opposed it and a third was indifferent. When things were going bad for the rebels some leading businessmen were very ready to treat with the British.

After the British conceded defeat, the empire loyalist “Tories” were not uniformly embraced as brothers by the victors or their hangers on and left, embittered, for Canada.

A descendant of one of those loyalists, Hamar Greenwood, was Britain’s Chief Secretary for Ireland when Lord Mayor MacCurtain was murdered, his successor Terence MacSwiney died on hunger strike and Cork City Hall and the Carnegie Library were destroyed in Cork.

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PATRIOT GAMES  ( 10th AUGUST 2015)

THE TIMES (of London) has the nerve to label the Irish patriot Roger Casement as a traitor, but not the American patriot George Washington.

Both of them were born under British rule, both of them rebelled and sought help from continental European powers.

Might I suggest that the inconsistency stems from the fear of an epistolary rocket from the American Ambassador in Grosvenor Square or an exploding one from the Pentagon in Washington whereas the paper has no fear it will hear a peep from the Irish Ambassador in Gloucester Place?

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RECONCILIATION? A SOLDIER’S VERSE . (16 APRIL 2015.)

The following is an edited extract from the letter submitted to the Evening Echo. I strongly rejected Colonel Patrick Mercer’s suggestion –

“Colonel Patrick Mercer, who served eight years of duty with the British Army in Ireland, believes it would be “the ultimate reconciliation” if the Taoiseach were to visit the graves killed in the suppression of the 1916 Rising.

I’d have difficulty reconciling the Colonel’s attitude with that of Tom Kettle. the ex-MP for an Ulster constituency who died leading a platoon  of Dublin Fusiliers in Ginchy in France in 1916. Kettle replied in verse to an Englishman who urged that Irishmen forget the past, with ‘Reason in Rhyme’   which is said to expressed Kettle’s mood to the last.

Kettle wrote that free, Ireland might be England’s friend, but unfree could not cease from ‘the toil of hate’ and when the time came to attend England’s banquet :

‘Soldier with equal soldier must we sit,

    Closing a battle, not forgetting it,

          With not a name to hide,

   This mate and mother of valiant

                   ‘rebels’ dead,

    Must come with all her history on

                            head.

          We keep the past for pride:

 No deepest peace shall strike our

                             poets dumb:

   No rawest squad of all Death’s 

                               volunteers,

      No rudest man who died

To tear your flag down in the bitter

                      years,

But shall have praise, and three times

                  thrice again,

  When at the table men shall drink

                    with men’ “

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GREAT WAR IRISH NOT AIRBRUSHED FROM HISTORY  (30 APRIL 2015.)

I don’t remember Gallipoli, for I wasn’t born until 1941. But I do know it was a battle in which the record of Irishmen was remembered with respect by nationalists and republicans.

For example, ‘A Classbook of Irish History, Book IV’    by James Carty M.A., first published in 1931, and used for some decades afterwards in Irish schools, had the following:-

” One tribute may be quoted to the bravery of Irish soldiers during the most terrible war in history. It is from General Gourard, who commanded French troops at Gallipoli, which was held by the Turks and Germans .

   ‘In Turkey, even the younger generation has heard the story; for fathers who fought have not hesitated to tell their children of the marvellous heroism of these strange foes from over the seas to hold them up as examples to all who would be trye to the traditions of a fighting race.’

  ‘I myself was an eye-witness of the magnificent heroism of your deathless Dublins. When I met General Von Sanders, who had directed the defence of Gallipoli, he told me that he marvelled that men should have carried themselves as your men did on that day.’

   ‘If ever you meet with Irishmen, he said ‘ I wish you would tell them from me that I have never seen anything as fine as the bearing of those men. They did    something that was deemed impossible, and they proved there are no limits to what human valour will attempt against the most fiendish devices of modern war.’ “

I could name other sources that give the lie to the story that the role of Irishmen in the Great War has been airbrushed from history.

They vary from a Brendan Behan column in The Irish Press   and an article in Sinn Fein’s United Irishman,    both in the 1950s to the Republican Ballad The Foggy Dew  and its reference to “the lonely graves by Suvla’s waves.”

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THE FOLLOWING LETTER WAS PUBLISHED IN THE IRISH EXAMINER 23 MAY 2015     .

“Englishman Attlee attended MacSwiney’s Funeral ”

Not only did Irish nationalists and republicans respect the courage of those who fought at Gallipoli, but at least one Englishman, an officer veteran of that campaign, walked behind uniformed officers of the the First Cork Brigade of the IRA, in the London stage of the funeral of Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in October 1920. In his regalia as Mayor of Stepney, together with other civic dignitaries of London boroughs, Clement Attlee honoured Cork’s late Lord Mayor.——–