IRISH POST 30th January 2016
May I thank Mike Serridge (January 23) for sharing with me his knowledge that my father, born 1899, and my mother, born 1901, their siblings, parents and grandparents, were British?
How sad it is that they all believed themselves to be Irish. I don’t think I could survive any further nuggets from his stock of knowledge.
Donal Kennedy,
London
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IRISH POST 7th December 2013
I’m sure many watching BBC’s Panorama programme on the British Army’s unacknowledged plain clothes killers in Belfast in 1971 and 1972 expect in future revelations that at the time the Pope was a Catholic.
Considering that the British Army claimed to uphold and defend democracy it might be no harm to turn a spotlight on Britain’s Defence Minister at the time, Peter Carrington, 6th Baron Carrington.
Carrington never stood for nor ran for Parliament in his long life, but has had a seat there for 73 years. He succeeded to the title on the death of his father in 1938 and took his seat in the House of Lords on June 6, 1940, his 21st birthday.
When internment without trial was reintroduced in the North of Ireland in 1971, accompanied by torture, Carrington was Defence Secretary, and when the Parachute Regiment gunned down unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972, and until the Cnservative Government was defeated in 1974, he remained in office.
In 1981 he was Foreign Secretary, and when IRA and INLA prisoners were being elected to Westminster and to Dublin, the never-elected Carrington claimed that the IRA represented nobody.Although the Parliamentary Franchise had been gradually widened since the Great Reform Act of 1832, in 1981 it was decided to narrow it. Henceforth prisoners were ineligible to stand as candidates and voters had their options reduced.
It’s said that the Duke of Wellington, on seeing the House of Commons immediately after the Great Reform Act of 1832 exclaimed that he’d never seen such bad hats in his life. It seems that despite IRA prisoners being unable and unwilling, if elected, to attend Westminster, the spectre of Republican Bad Hats haunted the dreams of the antediluvian anti-democrats in the War and Foreign Offices in London.
Donal Kennedy
London 7/12/2013
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IRISH POST June 27th 2015
Joe Horgan (‘An Ireland without the Catholic Church’, June 20) says he wouldn’t go to Mass if we paid him. Those of us who do go wouldn’t go if we were paid for it.
And I’m certain that our fellow Christians and believers in other religions would not go to places of worship if paid to do so.
I’m amazed that anyone should pay Mr Horgan even a penny for his thoughts.
Donal Kennedy
London 27/6/2015
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-IRISH POST April 30th 2011
LEAVE OUR PUB NAMES ALONE
News that Archbishop Nichols has asked that the Cardinal Pub in Westminster retain its name, given to honour Cardinal Manning and his dedication to the welfare of workers, gives rise to various reflections.
The late great Jim Larkin hoped to see the grass grow green over Dublin’s Guinness Brewery. It was customary before his union put a stop to it, for dockers to be paid by their foremen in pubs, and expected to buy drinks for them. Larkin, Connolly and other champions of workers’ dignity regarded alcohol as its deadly enemy.
Notwithstanding my admiration of those heroes I rather like pubs, particularly those which have been around for a long time and developed their own character. I don’t think many of the pub chains have any feeling for that sentiment, and I imagine that some of their PR managers are rather dim teenagers, more at home with text messaging than folklore, history or literature.
They think such names as “Slug and Lettuce” or “Faltering Fullback” are the soul of wit and I fully expect pubs near graveyards, sensibly identified as “The Gravediggers” to be rebranded “The Stiff and Maggot” before long.
One chain of Phoney Baloney “Irish” Pubs has a place called “Seamus O’Donnell’s”, where, if they knew anything of Irish literature would be “Jams O’Donnell’s” , In tribute to Flann O’Brien’s mock Misery Memoir An Beal Bocht where every poor Gaelic-speaking schoolboy had the name “Jams O’Donnell” beaten into him by a brute of a teacher.
Old pub names should be left alone, or we are all likely, if we dilly and dally like Marie Lloyd, never to find our way home.
Donal Kennedy
London
30/4/2011
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IRISH POST 1st June 2013
BEWILDERED AND BEMUSED
I was bemused by Richard S. Grayling’s article of May 18, and particularly his references to “Ireland’s Second World War” and of “amnesia.”
The Professor’s Google profile reveals he was born in 1969, too late to remember Britain’s 1939-1945 war, or even the wars conducted by Britain in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s, and officially described as “Emergencies” – which involved industrial-scale hangings and other official barbarism,not notably more humane than the German campaigns in Poland and Russia.
As an academic specialising in the history of the 20th Century, the Professor might be forgiven his ignorance of one British Emergency, but ignorance of two suggests carelessness.
I believe that the Second World War can properly be dated to December 1941 when the Empire of Japan overran territories previously seized from their inhabitants by Great Britain, France and the Netherlands, and attacked the United States in territory seized by the Americans from the natives in Hawaii and from Spain in the Philippines.
The Indian civilians who died prematurely from famine arising from British war measures in 1942 and 1943 outnumbered the total of British and Commonwealth fatalities, civil, military and naval, of the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars combined.
It’s anachronistic to call the “Phoney War” from September 1939 to May 1940 “World War ll” or to include the period before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union under that description.
And it is nonsense to pretend that powers quite happy to deal with Mussolini’s dictatorship from 1922 to 1940 were motivated by crusading zeal for freedom and human rights.
Donal Kennedy
London June 1st 2013.
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3rd September 2016-
SHIFTS IN OPINION?
Riots ensued when the Abbey Theatre staged J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1907, the cue being the apparent pronunciation of “shift” with the “f” omitted. The heroine, a simple peasant called Pegeen Mike had been smitten by the boasting of a simpler peasant, Christy Mahon, on how he had murdered his Da. As the supposed murder had happened outside the parish, and as Pegeen hadn’t seen a corpse or even blood, her romanticisation might be forgiven.
Ireland’s Minister for Health Simon Harris illustrates how roles have adjusted to the shift of history since 1907. He fulfils the role of Pegeen Mike by appearing smitten by a young woman who betook herself not only out of the parish, but beyond the sea, in a flying machine to have, not her Da, but her child obliterated, and electronically boasted to the whole world of her heroism.
Like Pegeen Mike, neither Simon Harris or anyone in Ireland saw the mortal remains of the child, nor the blood.
I must be an awful stick-in-the-mud, but I consider Synge’s “shift” less offensive than that of Simon Harris.
Donal Kennedy
LONDON
3 September 2016.
P.S. No doubt Simon Harris has his fans?
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