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BBC 2 screened a wonderful revelation of “The Northern Ireland specialist Peter Taylor on June 14 but it revealed Sweet Fanny Adams about Ireland, Britain or anything else.
It started with Taylor’s arrival there in 1972 over three years after Pro -Democracy demonstrators, including Gerry Fitt MP, had been beaten off the streets by blackthorn-stick and baton wielding, firearms equipped’ Constabulary. It was also some years after John Hume and other peaceful demonstrators were set upon by Marines commanded by the homicidal braggart veteran “Paddy” Ashdown, and convicted on a trumped-up charge, later quashed. The House of Commons later, at some midnight hour, altered the law to legitimise Ashdown’s contribution to the promotion of peace.
From 1969 on, British Governments, of whatever party, British judges and most of the British media have played the parts allotted to them by Frank Kitson who had earned his spurs in dirty campaigns in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, Peter Taylor’s excursion into the earlier Twentieth Century is no help to its understanding,
The 1916 Rising was not planned as a blood sacrifice by the trained barrister Pearse nor the Labour Party founder James Connolly.
Connolly founded the Irish Labour Party in anticipation of Home Rule,
Pearse had written that if the British offered Ireland her freedom, the Irish would be stupid to respond by saying they’d pefer to fight for it
. Pearse also said that while Nationalists might ridicule the beliefs of Unionists the sincerity with which those beliefs were held demanded respect.
Events since 1912 – the Tory organisation of a partisan army “the first Fascist force in Europe” according to one of its prominent members, and the outbreak in 1914 of the Great War and the Irish Party’s support for Britain made the 1916 Rising an extremely reasonable undertaking.
Peter Taylor apparently believes that Orangemen were the only Irishmen to wear British Uniform in the Great War. I could show him where Nationalist Irishmen share graves with their Unionist fellow Irishmen. I wrote about this in July 1986, 70 years after the Somme, and recycled my piece in a BLOG – “SERMONS IN STONES” which can be accessed in a few seconds.
My uncle Jack Burke was six weeks shy of his 17th Birthday when a German shell landed on the battle-cruiser Princess Royal, killing all those nearest him, and wounded him off Jutland in May 1916 when Pearse and Connolly were just getting cold in their Dublin graves. His brother Ned, a few years older was sent home to die after being gassed during the German counter-offensive in the Spring of 1918. Ned, who used sign his name as Eamon, played the Irish pipes, Gaelic games, and as a member of Fianna Eireann had helped unload the Asgard in Howth in July 1914, was fooled by John Redmond into joining the British Army. My grandfather Burke died in 1914 before the outbreak of war.
I believe he would sooner have seen his sons in Hell than in the British forces. Jack and Ned spent repeated times in hospital until their deaths in their sixties in 1963.
Ned was a master bookbinder, as was his father and in turn, his father. Most Irish republicans and nationalists could tell Peter Taylor similar, true stories.
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