In a BLOG – “I MET A TRAVELLER FROM A DISTANT LAND” I told the story of the man, who, when introduced to me, told me that he had lunched with Eamon de Valera in Dublin in the early 1960s in Aras an Uachtarain. The Traveller had a distinguished career as a journalist, a diplomat and statesman and had UN prizes for translating Ottoman verse a major French prose work into Bengali. A Moslem, he had been taught by Irish Priests in Calcutta and sent his daughters to a Convent.
The establishment of an Irish State in the teeth of the most powerful Empire the world had seen was a stupendous achievement and recognised as such by the whole world -except those parts of the world where Imperialist media and academia maintained hegemony. For the past 50 years Imperialist propaganda has enjoyed a near monopoly.
The criminal attempt to imprison Captain James Kelly, Finance Minister Charles Haughey and others, on the perjured evidence of Defence Minister Jim Gibbons, although thrown out of Court by an honest jury was followed by a State suppression of history teaching (see Blog ‘Fukuyama, Ruairi Quinn and the End of History Teaching’) and its substitution by a curriculum meeting British anti-democratic requirements. In 1969 British agents had established a secretive, oathbound “Trust” to bring the Irish Times, which had recently evolved, after more than a century’s fawning servility to English herren-volk interests, into a self-respecting journal for Irish men and women, back to its crawling past.
As the statues of slave-owners and the reputations of their admirers are dumped and derided around the world the hegemony of Imperialist propagandists is crumbling, even in London, Liverpool and Bristol. It can’t last much longer in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Can Sir Terry Wogan’s statue much longer escape a ducking in the Shannon?
About three years ago I was at Mass locally in London, celebrated by a Nigerian Priest of the Holy Ghost Order. I told him I had been taught by a priest of his order who had been with Bishop Shanahan in Nigeria in the first decades of the 20th Century. He told me that Bishop Shanahan’s reputation in Nigeria was as great as that of St Patrick in Ireland.
Indeed Wikipedia describes Bishop Joseph Shanahan (1871-1943) as “The Apostle” of Nigeria, He died in Kenya, but his remains were returned in 1956 to Nigeria and reburied in the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity in Onitsha after a “solemn but joyous ceremony performed for a paramount Chief to ensure that his great spirit would always remain with the people, protecting and guiding them as he had done in life.
He was the only non Igbo (Ibo?) to be awarded this honour.”
The Priest who had been with him was the lovable Thady O’Connor who was 73 years old when he first taught me in 1957 and remained in fine health, until he died 2 years later. He coached Rugby teams and had an eye like a hawk. He had captained the Rockwell College Senior Rugby team as a pupil in 1904 when one of its stars was a Student/Teacher known as Ed. de Valera. He and Dev remained friends thereafter. And Dev was a lifelong lover of Rugby.
The Apostle of Nigeria, Bishop Joseph Ignatius Shanahan was the son of a Farm Labourer from Tipperary.
Eamon de Valera was brought up in a farm-labourer’s cottage in the neighbouring county of Limerick.
A fellow countyman and contemporary of the Apostle of Nigeria, the son of “strong farmer” with 500 lush acres in the “Golden Vale” was born in 1864 and made a name for himself in the world. He was educated by Jesuits in Ireland, whom an Irish Times columnist approvingly tells us, boasted of how many Generals, and other luminaries their Society furnished the British Empire.
THE TIMES (of London) gave Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, former Lieutenant-Governor of the Indian Province of the Punjab, a glowing Obituary in 1940. The Indians, (ungrateful wretches?) apparently did not demand his remains be sent back to the Raj for burial. In fact they erected, in 2018, at the site of the 1919 Massacre, the statue of Udham Singh, who was hanged on July 1940 for the shooting of O’Dwyer. There’s a lot about O’Dwyer, and General Dyer and Amritsar and available online. But divil a bit about how the IRISH TIMES reported on them, except its approval of the Jesuits, rarely given to Catholic bodies by them.
(See YOU TUBE “RADHARC” – “HE WAS OUR ST PATRICK- BISHOP JOSEPH SHANAHAN”)
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