Yesterday I came across a piece published in an Australian Journal, of which I had never heard, by Kevin Myers, of whom I had.
This morning I read in The Dublin Review of Books an essay by Emmet O’Connor, a Lecturer at Ulster Univesity of Myers’s “Burning Heresies – a Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979 –2020)”
Amongst the stories peddled by Myers to the Australians is that Catholic Holy Days of Obligation are Public Holidays in the 26 Counties. They were not so under British rule and never were under Free State or subsequent regimes. During the five years I worked in Dublin where my colleagues were overwhelmingly practising Catholics, they arranged to attend Mass before the start or after the end of their working day, or during their lunch hours. If their lunch hour was slightly extended it was understood. Religion was tolerated, not imposed by the State , in those enlightened times.
In 1962 Conor Cruise O’Brien married Maire MacEntee in St Patrick’s ( Roman Catholic) Cathedral in New York in accordance with Canon Law.
Had he done so in Dublin he would have been in breach of Irish Constitutional Law and should have been charged with bigamy and the officiating priest would have been guilty as an accessory to the crime.
O’Brien, a baptised Catholic but an unbeliever had married in a civil ceremony some twenty-odd years before and had two children. The family was taken seriously by Irish law, and by his repudiation of his marriage O’Brien was implying that his children were what were then called bastards.
I recall Myers casting stones at unmarried mothers and “bastards” in a most unChristian, indeed inhuman manner. How a journal selling in Australia, whose non-Aboriginal population is largely descended from pickpockets, pimps and panders, and prides itself on its forebears, can stomach Kevin Myers , is a mystery to me.
Emmet O’Connor concedes that Myers has bees in his bonnet, believing that the 1919-21 War of Independence was a war against Protestants and that most Catholics or Nationalists knew nothing of Irishmen who fought in the First World War or else rejected them as traitors. It seems to me that Mr O’Connor accepts the bunkum peddled by Myers.
I am by no means atypical of Irish Catholics with a republican outlook. Nor are those I was brought up with very different to myself in family history.
My mother had four brothers and two sisters. Three of her brothers served in the British Forces. Her two sisters married men who served in those forces. My father was in the IRA but was never on active service. My mother’s eldest sibling would probably be automatically classified as a man of violence. He outlived them all. Uncle Denis was a Christian Brother. Uncle Ned joined Fianna Eireann, he was in the GAA and played the bagpipes, and helped unload the Asgard in Howth in July 1914. But when John Redmond advised Irishmen to fight Germany, he joined the Dublin Fusiliers, fought for over three years in Flanders and when the Germans launched their counter-offensive in the Spring of 1918 threw away his rifle and ran like hell to keep up with the rest of the British Army in that sector and ingested mustard gas. He was sent home to die and burned his flea-ridden uniform in the garden of the family home in the Burrow Road, Sutton, and was nursed back to life, though not good-health ,by his family. He married and had a family and was, like his own father, a master bookbinder. He died in 1963, still in his sixties.
The next brother, Jack, was mad about the sea and was six weeks shy of his 17th birthday in May 1916 when a German shell landed on the Cruiser HMS Princess Royal, off Jutland. All those near him were killed. He was wounded but survived with a pig-skin stomach. He died in 1963, a few months earlier than Ned, aged 63. Both of them were regularly in and out of hospital for 45 years or more, The youngest brother, Leo, born in 1904, joined the Brits between the World Wars and was a Senior Warrant Officer enjoying a cushy posting when, in February 1942 the Japanese paid a surprise visit. He was evacuated on a ship that was sunk.
I was born six weeks earlier in Dublin and baptised shortly afterwards. My godparents, my father’s sister Maev, and her husband Bill O’Connell had qualified as doctors in UCC a few years earlier and moved to England, so proxies had to stand in for them. Bill had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. I understand that he was the first medic from that Corps at the liberation of Belsen. He and Maev were GPs in Sheffield for the rest of their careers,
I’ve read numerous memoirs of the War of Independence and never come across an instance where veterans were rejected by their communities for having served in the Great War, nor where republicans were anti-Protestant, nor motivated by hatred of the English or British people.
In defence of the Republic established in an electiion “treated on all sides as a plebisciite” according to THE TIMES, the virtually unarmed IRA resisted the forces trying to crush it, whatever religious creed individuals in those forces profesed and whatever their ethnicity.
Tom Barry and Emmet Dalton had served in the British Army and Ernie O’Malley had a brother in it. Donall MacAmhlaigh, a writer who served in An Cead Cath – the Irish Speaking Battalion of the Irish Army in the 1940s was the son of an Irishman who served in the British Army in the Great War.
When i did my Leaving Cert a book on the Irish syllabus ,”CEACHTA AS LABHAIR NA CRUINNE” written by Padraig Mac Giolla Chara, a priest who had been a Chaplain in the GREAT WAR, described rats in the trenches who made room for him to pass and closed in behind him as he proceeded.
Kevin Myers poses as a man with a moral compass, and writes in a journal called Quadrant, but he presents as one lost at sea. His apparent disciple, Emmet O’Connor appears to be out of his depth.
Whilst my Godfather served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WWII , the Godfather of my elder sister (born 1937) served as an IRA Officer in the War of Independence and Civil War. For the good of his health he went to the USA in 1923, returning in 1932 when Dev came to power.
My maternal Grandfather died early in 1914, and I gather he’d sooner have seen his sons in Hell than in the British forces. He was a cousin of John Devoy, described by Pearse as the greatest of the Fenians. I don’t know how close the relationship was.
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