The IRISH EXAMINER appears to eschew the examination of history and instead favours recycling stories concocted by the British Black Propaganda gang in Dublin Castle a century ago,and rumours that were demonstrably false.
Back in 2008 I took issue in HISTORY IRELAND (HI 16.3 May/June 2008) with a correspondent who peddled the British propaganda line.
I think the recycling of my letter may be of more interest to those of adult tastes than the best efforts of the Examiner.
My letter was headlined ETHNIC CLEANSING and went as follows:-
“Sir,
Writing from Cork (HI16.2, March/April 2008) Clive Sinclair-Poulton embraces the view that more needs to be taught on what happened in the 1920s and he reckons there should be no taboos. I say Amen to both propositions.
A good place to start might be two recent (March and April) obituaries in The Irish Times, one for the bookseller Maureen Kenny, a native of Mohill, Co.Leitrim, and one for the late President, Patrick Hillery, the son of a dispensary doctor in Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare.
Maureen Kenny was born in 1918 and was but three years old at the time of the Anglo/Irish Truce of 1921. Before reaching that age, on a couple of occasions she was used as a human shield by Black and Tans, who carried her on a tender whilst they discharged their rifles at random into the houses of her neighbours.
Dr. Hillery was born in 1923, but a couple of years previously his parents’ home was burnt to the ground by the Black and Tans. The political context is that from Leitrim southwards through to Clare, and on to Kerry and Cork,the electorate had supported Sinn Fein in the 1918 General Election.Every parliamentary seat in the province of Connacht was gifted or ceded to Sinn Fein, and every seat but one in the province of Munster. Waterford returned a Redmondite nationalist to parliament, the sole Sinn Feiner not returned in the provinces of Connacht and Munster.
In late 1920 Major Bernard Montgomery was posted to Cork to suppress democracy there. His British biographer,Nigel Hamilton, in a sympathetic portrayal ,quotes Monty as saying that he did not care how many houses were burned by Crown forces in order to defeat Sinn Fein. Mr Clive Poulton-Sinclair writes of ‘a sustained campaign of destruction of Ascendancy country houses’ by Republicans, but fears to face the fact that such destruction followed rather than pre-dated the sustained campaign of destruction of the houses of non-Ascendancy folk, and their businesses, farms, creameries and shops by Crown Forces. Unlike the Ascendancy,
few commoners possessed both town houses and country seats. Major Montgomery was himself of the Ascendancy, his family keeping a house in London and another in Moville, Co.Donegal. On leave from military duties in Palestine the 1930s, suppressing Arab resistance and blowing up Arab houses, Monty rested, sported and played in Moville.
During the Second World War, Monty’s mother, who chose to spend it in Moville, habitually ran, unmolested, along the western, non belligerent, bank of Lough Foyle, waving a giant Union Jack, as British naval vessels passed into and out of Derry, whose Nationalist majority would have been arrested or beaten up by Crown Forces had they dared to display an Irish Tricolour. Some thirty years later, to maintain the Ascendancy, Crown forces were to baton pro-democracy demonstrators off the streets of Derry or shoot them down like dogs. Am I right in imagining that the term ‘Ascendancy’ could be fairly rendered ‘Ubermenschen’ in German, and that we may infer that Mr Poulton-Sinclair deems the rest of us ‘Untermenschen’ and deserving of whatever our betters deem good for us? The tenor of his letter suggests that I am”.
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