Around 1917 or 1918 Padraig O Caoimh, the Corkonian General Secretary of Sinn Fein, was outlining the aims of the party. It seems that one British journalist was being rather tiresome and asked O Caoimh what was in it for him .”Vingeance, Bejasus, Vingeance!” was his answer.
About the same time, in Russia, V.I.Lenin was explaining the tasks facing the Soviets amongst the peasantry who constituted the bulk of the country’s population. Perhaps it was in answer to the same Britisher that the great Revolutionary said that the most urgent task was “The Abolition of the Village Idiot.”
I wonder did Lenin ever visit, or John Lennon in his most hallucinated moments ever imagine, an unenclosed community populated in the main by idiots.
I’ve been off cigarettes these past nineteen years and have only smoked two spliffs in my life. But a couple of evenings ago I chanced to see a snippet from “Hidden Villages” part of a TV series presented by Dame Penelope Keith. And I had to pinch myself that I was neither
hallucinating nor watching a skit.
Each year many of the denizens of a Dorset village dress up and enact the capture and execution by gunfire of Aodh O Neill, “THE O’NEILL” to our Lot, and “The Earl of Tyrone” to the English, and long the bane of Good Queen Bess.
Back in 1607 when O’Neill sailed from Ireland the rumour in Dorset was that he’s been shipwrecked on the English coast the simple buggers of the village have swallowed that story these past 410 years. They embellished it and to this day they so relish the idea of doing the Irishman to death that they executed his effigy at 17 sites in the village during the filming.
In fact O’Neill made his way to Rome where he died peacefully in Rome in 1616 aged about 66.
Perhaps it’s unsporting to to mock village idiocy, spoil a Yokel Pageantry and expose the ignorant Plight of the Churls?. But it is Sweet Vingeance!
Comments are closed.