In 2014 the IRISH DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS WAS BUSILY SPONSORING FAKE HISTORY. In Britain the IRISH AMBASSADOR was enthusiastically involved, as I observed at the time in the Evening Echo (Cork) in December of that year and repeated in Part 1, (My Blog 8 July 2022)
The piece below first appeared in the on-line Irish Democrat in 2014. It describes how the Irish Embassy in Brussels in promotion of its FAKE HISTORY hosted a hate fete against those who fought for the establishment of a sovereign Irish Republic.The fete included a film produced by the “National” TV Station RTE and a presentation of chips on his, and his late father’s shouders by Gay Byrne.
When the piece below appeared in the IRISH DEMOCRAT it was No.2 in a series called “Pseuds’ Corner Boys”.
” In the corner of a foreign field, the Embassy of the sovereign Irish State in Brussels recently hosted Gay Byrne and a film made by the Irish State Radio and Television station to blacken the name of the Irish insurgents of Easter 1916, to belittle the nation which endorsed the short-lived Republic of that week, to misrepresent two generations in Ireland in its train.
Gay Byrne, who has exercised more uninterrupted power than any other Irishman or woman in modern history and been highly paid for it, has a grudge against the nation he fattened on. He cherishes that grudge above all the other treasures of his Irish heritage.
It seems his father was a begrudger of truly heroic stature. He considered the 1916 Rising a mere skirmish, though it took nearly a week, many thousands of British troops with artillery and machine-guns and no qualms about using them on civilians, to persuade the insurgent leaders to surrender. No insurgent garrison had been overrun by the British.
The insurgents had inflicted more casualties on the enemy than they sustained, and they still had the ammunition and the appetite to use it. Knowing that they most probably would be shot by the British if they surrendered, they had the discipline to do so when ordered, by their leaders, in order to save the lives of Dublin’s citizens.
In the House of Commons on 11 May 1916, hours before his firing squads shot to death the prisoners – Sean McDermott and the wounded James Connolly – Herbert Asquith, Britain’s Prime Minister said the rebels had fought a fair fight.
It appears that, like many a better man, Gay Byrne’s father was serving with the British forces in France or Belgium at the time. Two of my mother’s brothers and the husbands of her two sisters also served in that war in the British forces and there probably were few families in Ireland without any members similarly involved. I could show you on Howth Summit and in the Dublin suburb of Killester “Soldiers’ Cottages” built for some of the survivors, Those survivors were not despised by their neighbours, nor were their children outcasts, nor were the cottages burned or damaged, as they surely would have been had the revisionist narrative of recent decades had any basis in fact.
I was born in 1941 in Dublin, about 6 years after Gay Byrne. About six weeks later my mother’s youngest brother was killed serving with the British Army in Singapore. (Another brother was wounded serving with the British Navy off Jutland in May 1916, and another was badly gassed in Flanders in 1918.) The eldest brother had joined the Irish Christian Brothers before the Great War, the Order which taught both Gay Byrne and myself.
According to Gay Byrne’s narrative, Irish Great War veterans were hard done by, by their fellow-countrymen on their return and written out of history. That is an untruth. The Irish Army whose nucleus was the Insurgent Force of Easter Week, paraded to “The Foggy Dew” a march whose lyric had been changed to honour the insurgents of 1916 and to salute also their brothers who had joined the British Army in the belief that they were furthering the rights of small nations. For at least four decades Carty’s History of Ireland was a standard textbook in Irish schools and newspapers such as Fianna Fail’s Irish Press and Sinn Fein’s United Irishman carried stories of Irish heroism in the Great War.
Neither the Irish Free State nor its successor discriminated against Irishmen who had served in the Great War. But following the Civil War, veterans from the losing side were not favoured during Cosgrave’s decade in control. My father had a friend who had been on the losing side in the Irish Civil war and thought his life and his livelihood would be better preserved and enhanced by a spell across the ocean. He came back to Ireland in the 1930s after Cosgrave’s party had been swept from office, and took his California-born son out to Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Then, “Like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Upon a peak in Darien”
the child beheld the 1,752 green acres, and asked –
“But, Dad, who waters it all?”
I’d surmise that Gay Byrne’s much-put-upon Dad did, not with his blood, nor his sweat, nor his tears. For Gaybo tells us that he returned from a battle of Ypres, sound of wind and limb, to a guaranteed job for life with Arthur Guinness.
Like the “Paycock” in O’Casey’s play, he crewed on a barge from St James’s Gate to Custom House Quay and exulted in the lifting and the lowering of uncounted barrels of porter, whereas my father’s friend had to endure Prohibition in California, which obviously suffered from drought.
Gay Byrne has earned the title of Pseud’s Corner Boy, together with the right to be recognised as one of Pseuds’ History Boys.
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