The Department of Education in Dublin used publish English Prose and Poetry anthologies for Intermediate and for Leaving Cert students.Those sitting an exam in 1955 would be expected to study a pre-selected selection from an anthology and those sitting them in 1956 and 1957 different selections. But the anthologies which had Swift, Addison and Steele, Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett, Macaulay, Goldsmith and Chesterton, among others, I read with pleasure whether I was expected to be questioned on them or not. I think Chesterton was the only writer who had lived in the twentieth century featured in the anthologies.
Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and their contemporaries didn’t get a look in. As they themselves hadn’t studied twentieth century writers in their schooldays and yet didn’t do so badly, I don’t think I was much disadvantaged by the system.
One prose piece was headlined “Mr Collins’s Proposal” and I opened it eagerly, expecting it to deal with the Anglo/Irish negotiations of1921, and intending to compare it with Frank Pakenham’s magisterial account in ” Peace by Ordeal” a classic which puts the violence in Ireland in the preceding decade and the succeeding century in context.
Instead I found, to my disgust, a soppy story of a creepy clergyman trying to woo a young lady. It was years before I read Pride and Prejudice and appreciated the hilarity of that passage.
Mr. Stephen Collins proposes that we should put violence and other such unpleasantness in context. Mr Collins writes for THE IRISH TIMES’, which was the mouthpiece of the usurping British Government in Dublin Castle in 1921, and today is quite tightly controlled by the secretive, oathbound IRISH TIMES TRUST, set up by the crooked Lord Arnold Goodman, Harold Wilson’s fixer, so that it serves the same function it did in 1921. The context is covered at greater length in THE BRITISH FORCES’ NETWORK IN IRELAND series of Blogs.
Michael Collins, the Finance Minister appointed in the democratically established IRISH REPUBLIC, and Director of Intelligence of the Republican Army took his responsibilities seriously. The British decided to rob the Republic of its finances and appointed an official, Alan Bell with dictatorial powers to organise the robbery,. Bell was taken off a Dublin tram and shot dead in broad daylight in March 1920, on the orders of Michael Collins.
Following the 1780 Gordon Riots i in London the Bank of England was, for over a century, guarded by troops to defend England’s Treasure.
Ireland’s fledgeling Treasury was also entitled to its defence.
Michael Collins acknowledged in speech and in writing the actions he had proposed and his comrades had executed in defence of the Republic, its citizens and their property. As a beneficiary of their work and their endurance this citizen owes them his thanks.
I revere and salute their memory.
As for Stephen Collins, Fintan O’Toole and Micheal Martin I hope you will join me in the cry -“CONFOUND THE BEGRUDGERS” -and in the prayer that their names are erased from history.
The paragraphs above were addressed, in the main to Irish readers. It was not done to offend Britishers of good will who have been ill-served by British media and educators
Charles Townshend,a British commentator considered an expert on Ireland, apparently thinks a Finance Minister directing gunmen was an eccentric aberration, oblivious of its centuries’ role in the British Constitution.
First Lords of the Treasury have been directing gunmen and gunboats for centuries. During David Lloyd George’s tenure Turkey moved its Capital from Constantinople to Ankara, out of range of British battleships. Attaturk defied Britain’s threats, the Tories deserted Lloyd
George’s coalition and he was consigned to the wilderness. During his tenure Britain also threatened Athens, no friend of Turkey, with a naval bombardment
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