British recruiting posters in Ireland depicted prosperous Irish farms and persuaded gullible Irish youth that they should join their war on Germany to defend them from destruction by the Hun.
Scores of thousands of Irish dupes were killed and more maimed attacking and killing German, and, later Turks, innocent of any ill will towards Irelamd.
In November 1920 as British troops in Ireland sacked towns, burned factories and homes, and murdered their owners indiscriminately, they paid particular attention to the co-operative creameries which were essential for farmers’ prosperity. The Co-ops were the apple of Sir Horace Plunkett’s eye, as he had spent his life promoting them. Sir Horace was a Unionist and a sincere Irish patriot who protested at the British reign of terror.
At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, Prime Minister David Lloyd George boasted of the terror he presided over, and “getting the right men” and claimed that Horace Plunkett “couldn’t even speak for his own Creameries.”
On 11 November 1919, one year after the Armistice, the British Army staged a massive parade through Dublin with masses of ironclad land “dreadnoughts” or tanks to frighten the people. The same day two TDs and the Clerk of Dail Eireann, Ireland’s elected Parliament, were nabbed by British occupation forces, court-martialled and imprsoned for conducting an illegal assembly.
On 11 November 1920, ten days after their hangman murdered the pro-democracy Irish soldier Kevin Barry in Dublin, and their gunmen had murdered the pregnant 23 yearold Mrs Ellen Quinn who had been holding another of her children in her arms, in Kiltartan, Co Galway, the British put on a show of the utmost hypocrisy in Westminster Abbey.
They picked an unidentifiable corpse in France and buried him in Westminster Abbey in British uniform, to represent all the unknown soldiers sacrificed in their criminal exercise.
Irishmen were not the only dupes. Gallant Britishers were duped, and many of them had woken up to that truth before they died. We should remember the dead and how they were duped, and , once dead, used to fool succeeding generations into repeating their mistake.
A letter in THE IRISH TIMES today (11 November 2020) would have us believe that Britain led the fight against Fascism.
Mussolini was bankrolled by the British taxpayer from 1917 , was dubbed a Knight of the Bath by King George V in 1923 and was praised to the skies by Winston Churchill when he attacked Abyssinia.
Major Hugh Pollard of MI6 flew General Franco from the Canaries, ( where the Republican Government had posted him for its own safety) to Morocco, whence that traitorous mutineer launched his murderous dictatorship. Pollard became MI6’s man in the British Embassy when Madrid fell to the Fascists.
Pollard played a prominent part in Dublin Castle’s Black Propaganda Unit during the War of Independence. Film of an engagement near Tralee was shot on Dublin’s Vico Road by British Pathe at Pollard’s direction. Dublin cinemagoers recognised the fake originally, but footage of it appeared in work by Robert Kee, himself an MI5 or MI6man and occasionally in THE IRISH TIMES itself. Pollard’s counterfeit copy of Dail Eireann’s IRISH BULLETIN was laughed to scorn in the House of Commons itself.
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