A good antidote to Elaine Byrne and other Begrudgers is an amateur colour film available on You Tube of Howth Regatta and Lambay Races in 1942 when I was less than 8 months old. It has had a musical soundtrack added a few years ago.
It is a vindication of De Valera’s statesmanship.
It shows people at peace, some fishing from Howth’s West Pier, motor trawlers unloading their catch, and graceful sailing boats including the unique Howth 17 footers.
It is a picture of a serene Heaven in a world gone mad.
Six months earlier my mother’s youngest brother, Leo Burke was last seen swimming towards Java.He was a Senior Warrant Officer in Britain’s Royal Army Service Corps and the ship which had evacuated him from Singapore was sunk by the Japanese (whose rape of Manchuria Brits had facilitated when Dev, at the League of Nations, demanded in vain joint action by the League to oppose by sanctions including military force. In London Leo’s brother Jack,who had been wounded off Jutland in May 1916, was serving in the Home Guard.
My godfather, Uncle Bill O’Connell had been unable to attend my Dublin christening. He had graduated as a doctor at UCC a few years earlier and was working in England when war was declared on Germany and joined the Royal Army Service Corps and was at the liberation of Belsen.
Confirmation of Leo’s death was received from the British War Office in 1946.
Another colour movie, of the Hill of Howth tram was made shortly before it was replaced by buses in 1959, when Dev retired from politics to do two laps of honour in the Phoenix Park. It shows happy and relaxed people.
Groaning under the twin evils of Church and State?
On Thursday, 29 December 2022 at 08:19:10 GMT, Message Server <jacklaneaubane@hotmail.com> wrote:
Elaine Byrne: A changed Ireland regards decade of commemorations without fanfare
We may have come a long way in 100 years since the foundation of the Irish state, but it is important not to forget those who suffered on the journey
- DECEMBER 28, 2022
The Beal na Blath 100 Year Commemoration for the death of Michael Collins. Picture: Rollingnews.ie
The decade of commemorations concludes in 2023. It has been ten years of relatively low-key observance of often contentious events which accumulated in the creation and consolidation of the Irish state, and it has passed most people by.
Perhaps it is because we no longer recognise the Ireland that has been officially commemorated – men in bowler hats, sombre suits, stiff collars and neck ties kneeling to kiss an archbishop’s ring represent an Ireland of religiosity, deference and formality.
Compare that Ireland to the centenary ceremony of An Garda Síochána in Dublin Castle last August. A pregnant minister for justice, now on maternity leave, was saluted by a Garda commissioner from Belfast who was previously awarded an OBE from the British queen for his services to policing in Northern Ireland.
This is an Ireland where a Taoiseach of Indian heritage lives with his same-sex partner. An Ireland presided over by Michael D Higgins, whose humble origins in a small half-slated, half-thatched farmhouse in Ballycar in Clare are celebrated.
An Ireland where an individual’s sexuality, socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity, or faith are not a prerequisite for public service. A country that is far from perfect, but whose ethos is underpinned by the republican values of equality, civic virtue and community.
That restrained, understated and muted approach to commemoration was particularly evident on December 6, 2022, when the state turned 100 years old. There was no independence day, no grandiose state ceremony or bank holiday.
The front pages of the newspapers did not look back, but were instead preoccupied with the perennial Irish conversation staples of the weather, house prices and emigration. There was no great fuss. We like it that way.
At the time of writing, the government’s decade of commemorations website had yet to publish the programme of activities for 2023. Many of the county councils had not published their activities for 2022.
The minutes of the expert advisory group for centenary commemorations were last published a year ago, in December 2021. When I rang the contact number on the website, it automatically went to the voicemail of an extension. Indeed, when I first attempted to access the website, it was unavailable.
This does not suggest a great deal of official enthusiasm for remembering the significant historical occasions that fashioned the construction of the Irish state and divided families for generations.
In his critique of the recent RTÉ three-part production on the Civil War, Ed Power, the Irish Times journalist, summed up best where we are as a nation with commemoration. He described it as a documentary that “never rouses itself out of a grim box-ticking . . . By the final credits, even [the narrator] Brendan Gleeson sounds ready to check out”.
But there is an obligation to remember. In January 1923, thirty-four men were executed by the firing squads deployed by the Irish state around the country to end the Civil War.
The poignant memorial card of 25-year-old James Daly is typical of the republican dead: “Executed at Tralee Prison after a trial by a Secret Court on the previous day, and without any communication with his widowed mother and sister, or his brother, a prisoner in the same prison.”
Daly had been found in possession of a rifle and ammunition at Knockeendubh on the outskirts of Killarney in Co Kerry the previous month. In reprisal for attacks on the railway system in the county, four men were picked to be shot, each representing a different geographical part of Kerry.
There was no due process. Patrick O’Daly, the National Army commander, radioed his superiors in Dublin seeking permission to “sanction the death sentence . . . feeling very strong here for immediate action”. According to an account by historian Tim Horgan, the four men were forced to wait beside their coffins for nearly 30 minutes for the officer in charge of the executions to arrive.
This was the same O’Daly who was responsible for forcing republican prisoners to clear road barricades for fear of booby-trap mines. Seventeen prisoners were killed in March 1923 in horrific circumstances in Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and Cahersiveen.
The military archives have published online the pensions records of those who were executed. James Daly’s mother, Mary, wrote several heart-breaking letters over the decades to the minister of defence, seeking financial compensation for the death of her son.
In 1942, she wrote: “I only got one hundred and twelve pounds and ten shillings for the execution of my son . . . how do you think I can live or support myself” on my “miserable” army pension of “£1.13.4 per month”. She then lists the costs of butter, half a dozen eggs, milk, bread and 28 potatoes.
In another letter in 1943, she asks for an army pension medal so that “I will wear in public, my son was executed”.
In 1946, she again writes: “I was just going to ask for a few shillings more as I am in the verge of starvation . . . I haven’t a hen or duck to help me or any other means in this world, I am very short of clothes and shoes”. The letters become more and more desperate until her death in 1954.
This is a different Ireland from that of 100 years ago. There is a weariness to all the remembering, but that does not lessen the obligation to acknowledge the generational hurt of those easier to forget.
Many thanks Jude for the above narrative.