I was born on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, 28 December 1941 in the National Maternity Hospital,
Holles St, Dublin.
My mother jokingly called it Holler Street. An older lying-in Hospital across the Liffey was and remains called the Rotunda, echoing the shape of its patients.
There are many lying-in institutions in Dublin where you may be told that the Pistol-Packing gunfighter Daniel O’Connell never shot a man, that De Valera gave a sectarian eulogy on the interment of Roger Casement in Glasnevin, and that he 1916 Easter Week Insurrection ushered in a century of violence in Ireland.
Unless I am badly mistaken the first alternative reality claim was published in the Irish Times at Easter 2016 over the name of Seamus Murphy SJ, a Professor at Loyola University in California.
The second alternative reality claim appeared in same paper under Fintan O’Toole’s name and the Irish Times hadn’t the backbone, balls or guts to publish its refutation by the late Manus O’Riordan.
The third alternative reality claim was uttered by Ruth Dudley Edwards.
It is a fact that within a day of Pearse’s addressing Dubliners with the words of the Declaration
of Independence, Ireland’ s most prominent pacifist, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was shot dead.
He was shot by a British Firing Squad without even a Court Martial, in Dublin’s Portobello Barracks.
The Firing Squad was an irregular ad-hoc group from the garrison’s Guard Room, pressed into action by Captain Bowen Colthurst, whose home, Blarney Castle, had been wrested from the McCarthy Clan many years earlier.
Colthurst had led a detail of British soldiers who had shot dead in cold blood unarmed civilians some
hours earlier.
He was promoted for his crimes by Prime Minister Asquith, and Major Francis Vane, who had sought
his punishment was treated shabbily by him.
Colthurst was spirited away to Canada unpunished and took an active part in public life there.
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was not only Ireland’s leading Pacifist, but its most prominent Feminist
The Insurgent leader James Connolly had appointed him as his legal Executor, but his execution preceded Connolly’s by 18 days.
The Republican Proclamation promised female suffrage, a policy which Asquith had assured the
Manchester Guardian’s C.P. Scott would lead to “National Disaster” for the U.K. John Dillon and
John Redmond who backed the war on Germany were equally opposed to female suffrage.
Far from ushering in a century of conflict in Ireland the 1916 Rising saved all of Ireland from Conscription for the past 108 years and most of Ireland from war for 101 years.
As I said I was born in Dublin in Decembe 1941. I have never witnessed lethal violence in real time
until recently. I have been watching Aljazeera, many of whose journalists have perished while exposing the US/UK Israeli onslaught on the indigenous people of Palestine.
That station shows up most Western comment as Mickey Mouse Media.
Three weeks to the day before I was born, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Nazi troops
had reached the bus stops in the Western suburbs of Moscow. A week or two after I was born a conference in Berlin determined to murder all the Jews in Europe. A few weeks later my uncle Leo
was seen swimming towards Java. The British troopship which had evacuated him from Singapore
had been sunk by Japanese aircraft. His brother Jack was serving with the Home Guard in London.
Jack had been wounded by German shellfire on the Battle Cruiser HMS Princess Royal off Jutland
a few weeks after the Easter Rising Six Weeks shy of his 17th Birthday,
I and most of my Irish contemporaries have been spared such misery. Ruth Dudley Edwards,
born in Dublin in 1944 and exposed to primary, secondary and University teaching there would
dispute this.
I ask you to watch the amateur colour movie “Howth Regatta and Lambay Races 1942” on Youtube.
And I dare you to claim I look on the Age of De Valera through rose-tinted spectacles.
TO BE CONTINUED
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