Nearly six decades ago Anthony Sampson wrote a classic examination of those working the levers of power in Britain and in later decades updated it. It was called THE ANATOMY OF BRITAIN. I salute his work and, in tribute, name this much lesser effort THE LOBOTOMY OF IRELAND.
I’ll limit my comments to a few examples of this phenomenon.
In August 2012 the then Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave the annual speech at Beal na Blath commemorating the patriot Michael Collins killed there in combat with his former comrades and friends, charitably described as Cogadh na gCarad.
A former Volunteer, the London Irish Joe Good, in a memoir recalled that when he and Collins were Interned in Frongoch after the 1916 Rising they discovered that they had attended a lecture on Economics by a Russian. At the time Collins had been working in London’s Mount Pleasant Postal Sorting Office, and forty odd years later a café owner in nearby Gray’s Inn Road could recall the Russian being a regular there, though he wondered what had become of him.
When Joe Good and Michael Collins were interned in Frongoch in 1916, following the Rising they got into an argument and it transpired they had both heard a talk on economics by the then unknown Russian, who was to burst on the consciousness of the world in October (by the Julian Calendar) 1917as V.I.LENIN.
Enda Kenny declared that when Lenin was struggling to bring the vast former Tsarist Empire under Bolshevik rule (and when British agents were plotting his assassination) that he took a Sabbatical, eluded all-powerful British Navy and slipped into Ireland, for a Tutorial from Ireland’s busy Minister Michael Collins, who was also orchestrating an intelligence war against the British Forces, who would have regarded the capture or death of either Colllins or Lenin as an occasion for a Te Deum in St Pauls’s Cathedral, and the capture and death of both, for the ringing of Church Bells from Canterbury to Canberra and Capetown to Katmandu.
Joe Good’s memoir “Enchanted By Dreams” was written for his family in the 1940s with no intention of having it published but his grandson published it long after his death, It is well written by an intelligent and decent man who took the “Treaty” side in Cogadh na gCarad.
Sean Moylan and his “Men Of The South” were the subject of a celebrated painting by Sean Keating in 1921 though Sean was not a man to seek the limelight. Sean Moylan too wrote a memoir intended for his fmily only which was published about sixty years after his death. It is a work of manifest decency, heartwarming, humorous and inspirational. Born in 1888 he was a skilled carpenter, a well read man who served as an iRA Officer and as a Republican judge. He led a Flying Column and became Commander of the Cork No. 2 Brigade. He was elected to Dail Eireann in 1921 and voted and fought against the “Treaty.” He later served In Fianna Fail Cabinets including a term as Minister for Education. He died in 1957.
Fianna Fail has for some years had annual Commemorations in his honour.This year the party’s Brexit spokesperson, Lisa Chambers was the main speaker. Her reported remarks concentrated on women’s grievances from which nobody could learn anything about Sean Moylan’s generous, humane, enlightened and inspirational life.
I’ve written before of the former leader of the Labour Party Ruairi Quinn, who downgraded the teaching History in the schools. The current leader of the party founded by James Connolly, apparently knows no history .
After the Great Starvation of the 1840s the former Young Irelander, Charles Gavan Duffy said that the cause of Ireland had no more hope than a corpse on the dissecting table’ Although Ireland’s population today is only about half what it was in the early 1840s, hope, together with faith in Ireland’s cause, endured, and allied with intelligence gained many victories. But there appears to be a concerted effort to lobotomise Ireland which will succeed if unopposed.
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