Can you remember when young people marched in American streets asking their Presidents how many kids he killed that day?If you can you must be getting on a bit.
Imagine citizens whose sensibilities were outraged at the thought that their President, his administration and their armed forces were zapping innocent kids’
Today’s young citizens, in a country I once knew well, would be more likely to mock the Minister for Children with the cry – “Why zap one when ya could zap the bloomin’ lot?
I’m continually amazed at the ignorance of commentators born since 1950 on life in Ireland for those born ten years earlier than them.
For example Professor Diarmuid Ferriter, who has written a volume defending Eamon de Valera against many calumnies, can’t understand why we were not taught about the Civil War.
I was born in 1941 when former combatants from both sides were reunited in their thousands in the Irish Defence Forces and De Valera’s most bitter Dail opponents supported his policy of neutrality. Though most of those parliamentary opponents had by the mid twenties nothing to offer but recrimination and in the thirties a blustering imitation of Black- and Brown-shirted thuggery, De Valera and Fianna Fail offered an orderly democratic way forward. Most of the senior officers in the Defence Forces had fought against Dev in 1922. In fact as late as 1960 most of the senior officers were ex “pro-Treatyite”.
In 1932 Dev’s Defence Minister Frank Aiken released IRA men imprisoned by the outgoing Government and met with the leaders of the Defence Forces who had been their opponents and won their trust and obedience. The prospect of a right-wing mutiny was buried. And that of an IRA insurrection seen off.
Dev’s Fianna Fail finessed a situation which might otherwise have seen a re-opening of the Civil War. But Dev was not content with rapprochement with formerly estranged comrades – he co-opted his Redmondite opponent in the the 1917 East Clare By-Election and made him Attorney General – and a co-author of Bunreacht na hEireann.
Most of my teachers were of the generation which fought various wars between 1914 an 1923. Most of the parents of my friends were of similar vintage. Brothers and sisters had been on different sides. Teachers might have quarrelled with each other, pupils re-fought ancestral feuds.
James Carty, whose Classbooks of Irish History were used in the schools, had been born in 1900, published his first textbook about 1930 and died in 1959. He did not deal with the Civil War. I imagine most of my contemporaries admired anyone who had thrown a stone for Ireland against her most easily identified enemies.
I think Carty as a 20-year-old may have helped write THE IRISH BULLETIN, Dail Eireann’s Newsheet.
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