Irish Ireland, not Ireland

'Posting in Ireland', by James Gillray

Republican teaching records that Irish Ireland and the true Irish Nation had nearly extinguished, only the Easter Rising ‘woke up’ the Irish people and unleashed them towards independence.

Todd Andrews wrote that "Dublin [in 1901] was a British city and accepted itself as one", and Ernie O'Malley said, "‘the old hatred of the redcoats had disappeared."

Tom Barry wrote that he had "no  national consciousness" but events of Easter Week gave him a "rude awakening", and "Through the blood sacrifice of 1916 had one Irish youth been awakened to Irish nationality."

Eamon de Valera said in 1926:

"[Clarke, Pearse and Connolly] made sure of an Irish Ireland by dying for it."

Imagining if America and Ireland had stayed British

George Washington crosses the Delaware

John Bruton, former Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael wrote on his blog and in the Irish Times, 'Home rule could have led peacefully to independence'.

Dylan Matthews wrote on Vox.com, '3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake'.

A narrative account of the Easter Rising 1916

The seven signatories to the Irish Proclamation

Read my account of Sunday April 23 1916 here. The rebels are thrown into chaos by Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order, which read:

‘Owing to the very critical position, all orders given to Irish Volunteers for tomorrow, Easter Sunday, are hereby rescinded, and no parades, marches, or other movements of Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer will obey this order strictly in every particular.’

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Thomas "Dixie" Elliott

I was born in Rickmansworth England in 1957. My Mother is a Catholic and my late Father was a Protestant. My Father was working over there at the time and my Mother later joined him. They returned to Derry when I was two years old. I went to Saint Joseph's Secondary School where I was really only ever good at art. I became involved in Republicanism at the age of sixteen and was jailed in 1976 at the age of nineteen. I was sentenced to twelve years in 1977 and went on the Blanket Protest, where I remained for four and a half years until it ended after the second Hunger Strike in 1981. I spent nine years out of the twelve year sentence in jail and was released in 1985. I was married in 1988 and it was around this time that I left Sinn Fein. I'm an artist and I also write. I have finished two children's book's as yet unpublished which I've illustrated myself and I am presently writing an adult novel which could be best described as being a cross between Puckoon and An Beal Bocht by Flann O'Brien.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Mick Fealty

Mick Fealty was born in Belfast and raised in the religiously mixed community of Holywood in Co Down. In his early adult years he worked extensively in schools across Ireland and Britain and western Europe. For much of the last twenty years he has lived in England working as a qualitative researcher and consultant advising companies and third sector organisations on digital engagement as well as finding time to be the founding editor of what some have suggested is NI’s ‘blog of record’, Slugger O’Toole.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Alan Burnside

Alan Burnside was born in North Belfast in 1947. He lived on the front of the Woodvale Road from 1953 to 1973 opposite the original Holy Cross Primary School. From 1969 the immediate vicinity of his family home was a scene of frequent public disorder (even today) and occasional murders. His home and the adjacent houses have since been demolished to create a sterile barrier. Alan's education was at Boys’ Model, Methodist College Belfast and Queen’s University for a BSc(Econ). Following ten years in the NI Civil Service, most of it as a Departmental press officer, Alan was in the NI Housing Executive Information Service for 18 months, then three years in the Belfast office of the CBI. The combination of experience as a press officer and the business credibility developed in the CBI encouraged Alan to launch a public relations business in 1982. He is now semi-retired and working mainly at Westminster.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Anthony McIntyre

Anthony McIntyre grew up in South Belfast until, aged 16, he was first imprisoned. Anthony moved to West Belfast upon release from imprisonment and he is now a denizen of Drogheda.

Anthony gained a first class honours degree in politics from the Open University and a PhD in history from Queens. He has effectively relinquished the doctorate, having lost all faith in academia to stand up for anything other than academic careers. A doctorate is more like a bell to warn people, “beware, academic approaching.”

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Shane Kenna

Shane Kenna is a Doctor of History. Shane holds a PhD in Modern Irish History from Trinity College, Dublin and has written extensively on the subject of Irish Republicanism. He has a particular interest in Fenianism and the Irish question in the early 20th century.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - David McCann

David McCann is a political pundit and deputy-editor of Slugger O'Toole. He is from Belfast and was educated at Ulster University where he was awarded as PhD in politics. Read David's political testimony, '1916 Rising and how it inspired me 78 years later'.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Olwen Dawe

Olwen Dawe is a businesswoman and economics student, undertaking an MEconScience in Policy. She is based between Westport, Co. Mayo and Dublin City. She is a feminist, arts enthusiast, music obsessive and politics junkie.

Olwen was the former Project Director of Yeats2015 and President of Network Ireland. She is a graduate of the National College of Industrial Relations and is an advisor to economic and social development agencies, including cross-border projects.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Ian Acheson

Ian Acheson is married, is 48 years old and is living in south west England. He is a "council house culchie made good via amazing parents and grammar school." Born in Enniskillen he was educated at Portora. He is a former senior civil servant with the Home Office, now living off his wits in the private sector with the odd diversion into troubles poetry you can see here in a collection called '51% British: writing the Troubles out of my head'.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Conor Houston

Conor Houston is a 32 year old who lives in Holywood, Co. Down. Conor is a social entrepreneur, influencer, lawyer, change agent and active citizen. 

Conor born in Holywood but moved with his family to Surrey, England at the age of 3 where he spent 10 years of his childhood. Conor returned to Northern Ireland in 1996 and attended Our Lady & St Patrick's College, Knock.

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Ruth Dudley Edwards

The name on her passport is Ruth Edwards, but the men of the family had Dudley as a second name so it became the family name and she couldn't escape it.  Ruth was born Dublin 1944 and brought up there, though parts of summers were often spent with maternal relatives in rural north Cork.   

W.B. Yeats describes the Easter Rising

Yeats by Tom Lalor

W.B. Yeats was in Gloucestershire when he first heard about the Dublin rebellion. He wrote a letter to Lady Gregory, May 11 1916:

"If the English conservative party had made a declaration that they did not intend to rescind the Home Rule Bill there would have been no rebellion. I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me—and I am very despondent about the future. At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics… I do not yet know what [Maud Gonne] feels about her husband’s death. Her letter was written before she heard of it. Her main thought seems to be ‘tragic dignity has returned to Ireland’. She had been told by two members of he Irish Party that ‘Home Rule was betrayed’. She thinks now that the sacrifice has made it safe… ‘I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘‘terrible beauty has been born’’."

The German and Russian sympathies of Connolly and Pearse

As by the Paris Review if he could speak German to his German captors in the Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut said:

"I had heard my parents speak it a lot. They hadn’t taught me how to do it, since there had been such bitterness in America against all things German during the First World War. I tried a few words I knew on our captors, and they asked me if I was of German ancestry, and I said, “Yes.” They wanted to know why I was making war against my brothers. 

I honestly found the question ignorant and comical. My parents had separated me so thoroughly from my Germanic past that my captors might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me."

Nora Connolly, daughter of James Connolly, on Easter 1916

Read 'The Unbroken Tradition' by Nora Connolly, published 1918, in full here

The writer and activist Nora Connolly (born 1893), daughter of James Connolly, wrote ‘The unbroken tradition’ an account of the Irish rebellion of 1916, published in 1918. Nora wrote about the her experience of Easter Week 1916 and the aftermath of the rebellion, with general commentary on the movement, its leaders and events.

'The [Easter Rising] as I saw it' - By Mrs. Hamilton Norway

'The Sinn Fein rebellion as I saw it' was written by Mrs. Mary Louisa Hamilton Norway (Mary L.G. Norway) (wife of the secretary for the Post Office in Ireland). The 100 page book, formed of three letters originally intended for friends and family, give an account of Easter Week 1916 as she experienced it from the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Dawson Street, Dublin. Original text, via archive.org, in full here, and in PDF here.

'Six Days of the Irish Republic' - By L.G. Redmond-Howard

The front cover - the great Greek portico of the GPO circled in flames like "a prairie fire"

L.G. Redmond-Howard, nephew and biographer of John Redmond, wrote 'Six Days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative And Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics', published in 1916.

The book was an account of the Rising at its aftermath. On Monday when the fighting broke out Redmond-Howard was installed at the “Metropole” hotel, situated alongside the Post Office. From here he could not get any direct view of what was the centre of the battle, so he moved across to the “Imperial,” which, situated vis-à-vis the Post Office on the top of Clery’s Stores, commanded the fullest view of the rebel headquarters.

Revolution and perpetual oppression

George Orwell wrote:

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

Andrew Sullivan observed:

"Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup."

Revolution is a mentality, not an actuality. W.B. Yeats wrote:

"Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again, The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on."

It was explained like this:

"Yeats cynically dismisses armed revolutions as merely perpetuating cycles of oppression. The new ruling class then oppresses the others with the same vehemence with which it was once oppressed."

Yeats also said:

"Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: Ireland shall get her freedom and you will still break stone."

Kevin O’Higgins the Irish Minister for Justice was assassinated by IRA for signing death warrants of 77 republicans during the Civil War. An Phoblacht described O’Higgins as “one of the most blood-guilty Irishmen of our generation”.

Ian Paisley said in 1993:

"We often hear from republicans about the treatment meted out to Irish people by the United Kingdom, but we are apt to forget that the bloodiest deeds ever carried out in Ireland took place when Irishman fought Irishman in the civil war, led by De Valera. De Valera was however defeated, and the settlement was established and stood."

Examples of revolutions include the French Revolution — largely orchestrated by the bourgeoisie (middle class professionals) against the nobility, and the Russian Revolution — in which socialist urban workers ultimately triumphed. In both cases, the winners viciously persecuted the vanquished, and ruthlessly dominated.

The Algerian FLN went on to impose a military dictatorship on Algeria vastly more repressive and blood thirsty than the French colonial regime ever was. It continued to persecute ethnic minorities like the Berbers. And more to the point, it ethnically cleansed Algeria of Jews – the vast majority of whom were not only indigenous but belonged to a community that pre-dated Islam in Algeria.

Read about Fethardism, the religious boycott, in Ireland here.

Oliver Cromwell when dissolving parliament in January 1655 exclaimed:

"What greater hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, so soon as their yoke was removed."

Patrick Kavanagh wrote in 'The Green Fool':

"The Black and Tans were gentlemen when compared with the Free Staters."

An anonymous Irishman is reported to have said via ‘Is Ulster Right?’ (1913):

"Roman Catholics who fled from the tyranny of the penal laws at home [in Ireland] had no scruple, when they reached the Continent, in taking part in persecutions far more terrible than anything they had seen in Ireland. During the dragonnades in Languedoc, Louis XIV’s Irish brigade joined eagerly in the butchery of old men, women and children and the burning of whole villages. The same heroes distinguished themselves by destroying everything they could find in remote Alpine valleys so that the unfortunate Waldenses might die of starvation."

Sean T O'Kelly said in Geneva in 1933:

"The Free State Government was inspired in its every administrative action by Catholic principles and doctrine."

#NorthernIreland2016 Interview Series - Catherine Molloy

Catherine Molloy was a primary school principal until she retired in December 2013. Originally from Derry, she was a member of the SDLP until 2012 and represented the Balmoral area of South Belfast as a City Councillor from 1997 to 2005. She has served on several statutory boards and committees and is currently a Trustee of National Museums NI. She is also now enjoying “studying and filling the gaps in her education” i.e. history, the appreciation of Art and the Latin language.