Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney has said that Boycotts never work. Could it be that he has never heard of the Land League or of Michael Davitt?
The Taoiseach has spoken of a modern Constitution for a modern people.It is as if our people have just arrived on the planet without any history, traditions or principles.
We Irish are an ancient people with the oldest literature north of the Alps, a people, who have played a distinguished part in the conversion of Europe from savagery before there was an England or an English language. The first history of the English Church and People, by the Englishman Bede, is one witness to that claim. And quite robust buildings still standing in Britain and on the Continent provide further evidence, even for those who cannot read.
When a former Taoiseach, during a rare spell out of office, visited India in its first years of Independence he was given a hero’s welcome. Partly because he had led other heroes in the struggle for Irish Independence which had inspired imitators in the lands conquered, robbed and oppressed by the British, French, Dutch and other Western hypocrites who claimed to be champions of liberty.
I know Africans and Indians, only some of them Christian, who were taught by Irish Catholic priests, nuns and Brothers, or whose parents were taught by them, and hold those teachers, or their memories in high regard. Irish missionaries from the other Christian denominations have a similar high reputation.
There have been shameful episodes of the Catholic Church in Ireland but they were matched by Protestant institutions, at least one of which had connections with the Irish Times.
The Irish Times is silent about those connections, as it is also about the 1933 Editorial “Herr Hitler’s Way” which cheered Hitler’s accession to power.
The OBSERVER (of London,11 June) recalled the thousands of British babies , taken, even seized, from their mothers in the1950s in the 1960s for adoption by Church of England and Salvation Army agencies as well as by Catholic ones. This was done under both Conservative and Labour Governments.
The media in Ireland would have us believe that the Catholic Church and the Irish State were the only offenders in those matters.
A young and ignorant generation can hardly be expected to form valid opinions when its nation’s leaders can’t get their tongues out of their orifices.
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