Villagers: Letters to the Editor 2006-04-26
1916: Debate needs to come into 2006
In this debate which you, Sir, have so sagely hosted, we have edged closer to the issues which should be concerning us in 2006.They are not just 'about 1916'. Jack Lane's question, (Village 20 April 2006), as to how much longer will Maurice O'Connell keep stating that the Rising was not democratic? "As long as Maurice's fingers can reach feebly for his computer!"
Mr Lane believes that in 1916, (and in 2006?), "democracy was for the naïve and the ineffectual". (Where has one read that before?). Central to the philosophy of 'the West', very much incorporated in the words of the 1916 Proclamation is the affirmation: democracy, however inadequate, is preferable to a system of arbitrary power where might is right. Where all "citizens" are recognised and have at least the right to participate, there is a possibility of moral validity.
Was the Rising, (which Mr Lane now angrily insists was not democratic), 'morally justified' in the actual historical context? Unfortunately, the Rising's supporters either ignore, distort or "discredit" the facts. Mr Lane now concedes that "Home Rule was the democratic choice of the people (and of Patrick Pearse)" – a huge concession, for which credit is due. Unfortunately, the same sentence continues: "… but it was killed off by the Unionist armed revolt in 1912 and the Government accepted that reality". Almost every word is factually incorrect. There was no Unionist armed revolt in 1912 – although a very serious threat of force. The House of Commons debate on this Home Rule Bill only began in 1912. The Government (for whatever reason) conducted it through a national debate which convulsed the entire United Kingdom. The Bill was signed into law by George V on 18 September 1914. Whether or not the British establishment liked the end result, the Act of Union was effectively dead. After the War, despite its huge majority (including Tories), the British government brought in the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which implemented "Home Rule" (by then politically irrelevant in "Southern Ireland").
All this might be "tedious" (to use Mr Lane's euphemism), were it not for the fact that the Rising was not victimless and had factual consequences – right up to 2006. These include people who would have been alive at the end of Easter Week but for the decision of Pearse and his associates deliberately to end the lives of others – not just their own.
Like a Waco cult, they convinced themselves that the 32-County Gaelic republic was the minimum with which they could live and that, against all the facts, "all was lost"! Cocooning themselves from the realities of 20th century war, familiar to thousands of their fellow Irish, they answered the call of a "higher" but minority morality to a blood-sacrifice. "Naïve and ineffectual" democracy was irrelevant. Enter our old friend: Omelette Which Cannot Be Made Without The Breaking of Eggs. Enter Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and the anonymous Dubliner shot dead by an anonymous Volunteer in Stephen's Green – and a couple of hundred of what Pearse had called – in advance – "the wrong (killed) people". Enter 7,000 Bosnians at Srebenica. Enter that little Iraqi family whose parents were shot dead all over them in the family car in one of those accidents which are, as Pearse himself said, unavoidable when you initiate the cleansing process of war.
Maurice O'Connell, Tralee, Co Kerry
The eighth signatory
Jack Lane is a dedicated defender of the founding myths of our nation state. Such myths are neccessary for building a national identity from the rubble of one brought down through a successful coup in 1922. However there comes a time when these shibboleths, like children's toys in a playroom, have to be put away in the interest of our national maturity; we live not in 1966, but in 2006.
The claim that Home Rule was not only endangered, but "killed off " within the British constitutional system is a monstrous falsehood, and one not only propagated by popularist historians like Tim Pat Coogan and Media Ryan, but also believed by some serious academics.
It may come as a surpise to Jack to learn that there was in a very real sense, an eighth signature on the Proclamation, that of the Bishop of Limerick, Edward O' Dwyer. In 1915 a crisis arose regarding an immigration issue concerning 700 Irishmen who wished to leave Liverpool for America but were prevented by officials from doing so.
An argument ensued between Redmond and O'Dwyer, culminating in Bishop O'Dwyer publicly asserting that Home Rule was a "simulacrum with the express notice that it is never to come into operation". In one sentence Bishop O'Dwyer brought into existence a pure myth that became the staple diet of separatist propaganda; one that Jack, and his fellow apologists for the insurrection, revel in promulgating.
In Jack Lane's Cinderella world of modern British and Irish political history, mandates, legislation, and the workings of representative government vanish in a whiff of smoke, at the stroke of midnight on 25 May 1915, when Asquith once more becomes prime minister in a national coalition government; one incidentally that he begged John Redmond to join.
This legal and popular extension of parliament due to the continuing war, represents to Jack, among many, the de-legitimisation of all forms of legal and constitutional authority in the whole of Britain, and Ireland at that time, conveniently providing a morally legitimate context, in which a gang of killers were able to spit on democracy with their venomous secretions, as they organised villainy and mass murder on the streets, and from inside the buildings of Dublin on the 24 of April 1916 in the name of freedom.Welcome to Soviet-style historiography!
Pierce Martin, Celbridge, Co Kildare
PSNI: The killing of Steve Colwell
On the 25 November 1992 Pearse Jordan was shot dead at point blank range by a member of the RUC. He was unarmed and shot in the back. After his death there was a frenzy of leaks from the RUC press office, grossly misrepresenting the events surrounding Pearse Jordan's death. Pearse Jordan was the last person to be killed by the RUC before their rebranding to the PSNI.
On 29 April 2003 Neil McConville became the first person to be killed by the rebranded police in the North. He was unarmed and shot at point blank range by a member of the PSNI. After his death, as in the case of Pearse Jordan, the media quickly regurgitated the PSNI press releases. Checkpoints were being rammed, guns were being brandished, drugs were being ferried and finally dissident republican links were being investigated, all false and – as in the case of Pearse Jordan – these events were later accepted by the police as being false. There was no checkpoint in Neil McConville's killing, his car was rammed from behind and then he was shot by PSNI personnel at point blank range while his car was stationary. The Police Ombudsman was slow to attend the scene that night but they were quick to recount the PSNI version of events on live TV, giving credence to a story which they later embarrassingly discovered had no resemblance to actual events that night.
Last week another young man, Steven Colwell, was killed because he drove through an alleged roadblock, only he didn't, he turned the car he was driving before the roadblock and was shot at point blank range by PSNI personnel. Various reasons for opening fire on this unarmed man have been bandied about, and they should be taken with a pinch of salt.
These three deaths are carbon copies of each other and lay bare a subculture within the police in the North in which they feel they can kill with impunity, without fear of recompense. After these incidents the police follow the same procedures which have served them well from the shoot-to-kill incidents in the 1980s. They close ranks, intimidate witnesses, concoct a story and use black propaganda in the media to blacken the name of the person they unlawfully killed.
It will be up to four years from now before we know the truth about the Steven Colwell killing. My reasoning for this is that Neil McConville was killed three years ago this week and the Ombudsman still refuses to publish her report. She has denied that the delay is due to political pressure, for it will condemn the PSNI activities on the night. Whatever her reasons for holding back the publication indefinitely, her delay may have cost another life. Lessons have not been learnt from the killing of Neil McConville, this much is obvious, for the PSNI still tout their guns like Jesse James, and use them in a similar carefree way.
If Mrs O'Loan's report had been published and the PSNI tactics were open to public scrutiny, perhaps the PSNI involved in the latest shoot to kill incident would have been a little less gung ho in their stopping of the car, and another young person, regardless of his religion or politics, may still be alive today. My advice to the Colwell family would be to contact Relatives for Justice, get a good solicitor with experience in state killing and don't put all your faith in the Police Ombudsman. All that glitters is not gold.
Barry McConville, Co Down
Chinese-US visit - Chinese protest was welcome
Hats off to the lady who heckled the Chinese leader on the White House lawn. She reminded me of the great Rosa Parks, who highlighted the racial segregation laws of Alabama back in the 1950s. And of the "White Rose" protesters who threw leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime from the windows of a Munich university at time when most Germans looked the other way.
The lady on the White House lawn had every reason to be angry. The Communist regime of the so-called "People's Republic" of China has been responsible for numerous horrific crimes against humanity. The Falun Gong sect that the protester referred to – whatever one thinks of their beliefs – has millions of followers in China. Like the adherents to any religious or spiritual belief system, these people deserve the freedom to give non-violent peaceful expression to their beliefs. Instead, Falun Gong members are subjected to relentless persecution. They are tortured and jailed for their beliefs on a daily basis.
The regime also retains its bloody vice-like grip on Tibet, a country that China, under the direction of its murderous Communist dictatorship, invaded and annexed half a century ago. Since the occupation began, millions of innocent Tibetans have been murdered or imprisoned; and repeated attempts have been made to exterminate the nation's unique Buddhist culture.
The paranoid control freaks who run China have imposed strict media censorship, and restricted access to the internet to the point where, for example, it is impossible for any citizen to locate a website containing information or opinions critical of the regime's brutal policies. References to the 1989 massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square are forbidden, and Tibet no longer exists on globes made in China – the tyrants deeming it to be a mere province of their totalitarian state.
China's immense value and potential as a trading partner has blinded many people in the West to the cruelty and horror that its leaders have inflicted on their own citizens and the people of occupied Tibet. Greed has overridden concern about the human rights catastrophe that is Communist China. President Bush and the supposed democrats that surround him talk a lot about an "axis of evil" in world affairs. They pay a lot of lip service to the right of people everywhere to live in free and democratic societies. These sentiments are worthy and laudable, but carry no credibility whatsoever while America and other Western nations continue to turn a blind eye to one of the most evil dictatorships on earth. Yes. That lady on the White House lawn had every reason to be angry. And I thank God that her protest has been seen and heard by millions in the free world.
John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny
1916 Easter parade - Honouring the dead with a military parade
Many of the contributors to your letters columns commenting on the parade which marked the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising were critical of its military aspect, many expressing the view that it was inappropriate to militarise the event.
Strangely enough, not one of these contributors who were offended by the sight of Irish military personnel honouring the Easter Rising volunteers, appeared to take offence at the participation of Irish Navy personnel alongside their British counterparts in the Royal Navy in an event to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Admiral Nelson's defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar.
Nor, it seems, were they much concerned when the Irish Air Corp, alongside the Royal Air Force, took part in the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Indeed, no disapproval was voiced at the annual involvement of Irish Army personnel accompanied by the Minister for Defence at Remembrance Day ceremonies honouring those who fell at the Somme. Apparently, it is quite acceptable for Irish military commemorations and parades to take place provided they are not honouring those who fought for the Independence of this nation.
How ironic that the Rising against British rule in Ireland in 1916, which had such global significance and influenced revolutionaries such as Lenin, Gandhi and Mao, was snubbed by Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown Council in 2006 when council members voted against displaying the 1916 Proclamation in their building.
Tom Cooper, Dublin 16
The Freudian in Irish society
Of course, your editorial last week on the splendid State ceremony on Easter Sunday is correct; psychology does have a term for the "capacity to proclaim solemn allegiance to ideals which consciously have been ditched". Sigmund Freud names this ego-splitting strategy as "disavowal". It is the hallmark of clinical perversion. But Mr Browne is a little hard on Bertie Ahern in this matter.
Our current Taoiseach is merely expressing a split ego that first manifested itself when Michael Collins declared that swearing allegiance to British imperial law was a "stepping stone" to re-installing the Republic that the same oath of allegiance had just overthrown. It's a split that marks the discontinuity between, on the one hand, the uncastrated idealism and decency of the 1916 Proclamation and the Democratic Programme of the First (32-county) Dáil Éireann and, on the other hand, the cute hoorism of swearing an oath of allegiance to a system you claim you are against, but ruthlessly implement all the same. The oath is no longer there but the system of privilege is, and the allegiance of the 26-county elite to it is total.
And yet, isn't it a pity Mr Freud didn't live to see the fine demonstration of continuity our elite gave us, in front of the GPO, between them and the men and women who took up arms to smash that system. Of course, not only the elite are stricken by this pathological disorder. The fault line runs deep. Who has ever stood on the hill of Tara and not felt that this ground holds the very soul of our nation, and yet we; you and I, are going to allow a group of neo-liberal bureaucrats to build a motorway right through it. I hardly need to go on, the list is endless: the Irish language, the North, the mindless property riot, the alienation of youth who are barred from opportunity as they watch wealthy parents buy university places for their pampered offspring, the legal system which affords as much justice as you can pay for, etc, etc. It's not really Bertie's fault. The fault or split is in the structure of the 26-county state. Freud discovered that the pervert can say, and believe, that no woman has a penis and that some women have a penis. Since 1922 this state has believed itself to be a revolutionary force for equal rights and opportunity and, at the same time, the guarantor of privilege and unfettered profit. It's hardly a wonder then, that we have a Minister for Equality who claims that inequality is good and indeed necessary for society.
Donnchadh MacGill, Dublin 20
Remembering Tom Johnson
The success of the recent Easter Rising commemorative events is under no doubt. The important task of re-establishing the legitimacy of Irish Republicanism has been furthered. However, in all the commentary about the Rising and the subsequent founding of our State, one name has been shamefully omitted. That name and that man is Tom Johnson.
Following the Rising, Tom Johnson, as President of the Trade Union Congress and Labour Party, skilfully worked for the continued unity of working people throughout Ireland. He subsequently led the Anti-Conscription Committee, drafted the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil and was Leader of the Opposition in Dáil Éireann in the very important initial years of our independent parliament.
Of course the Leaders of the Rising and succeeding leaders such as Cosgrave, Collins, O'Higgins and de Valera deserve to be acknowledged and remembered. As a democrat, and a proud citizen of this independent Irish Republic, however, I want to remember a great man who, throughout his adult life, worked to turn Connolly's ideals into a living reality. Ireland should never forget Tom Johnson or the debt he is owed.
Cllr Dermot Lacey, Dublin 4
Willie O'Dea - Political magpie
In your article on Minister Willie O'Dea (Village, 19 April), you quote his put-down of John Bruton and Nora Owen when, in the course of a Dáil debate, he described the two Fine Gael deputies as "immaturing with age". This was presented as an example of Mr O'Dea's originality and rapier-like wit. In fact, it was neither. The phrase was first used in the 1970s by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to describe Tony Benn.
Mr O'Dea is less of a political wit and more of a political magpie.
Breandán Morley, Dublin 15
STATEMENT - Make housing of the marginalised a priority
Focus Ireland is calling for greater political and public support to make housing the most marginalised families and individuals in Irish society a priority.
The charity's latest call comes following Minister Noel Ahern's announcement that 6,477 social rented dwellings were completed and acquired in 2005.
Declan Jones, Focus Ireland, Chief Executive said: "The creation of 6,500 social housing units is to be welcomed but the reality is that we are falling significantly short of the level of social housing development needed."
Focus Ireland's calls echo earlier comments on the matter by the National Economic Social Council (NESC) that a "high level of ambition is now appropriate in the provision of social housing".
Mr Jones said: "These latest figures show while total national housing output continues to grow, social housing output is still falling far short of that required, given that over 43,000 households remain on local authority waiting lists."
He added: " I believe the Government now has to show 'greater ambition' along with significant additional capital investment if these problems are to be tackled more effectively. We need to rethink our attitudes towards social housing."
The charity stressed there while there are still challenges ahead a critical step to a long term solution in the areas of housing and homelessness is galvanizing the political and public support to make the issue a real priority in the count down to the next General Election.
Focus Ireland launched it's own ambitious strategy earlier this year which aims to provide a home a day for thousands of people over the next five years. This national target will be achieved by securing 800 units of accommodation through a combination of direct acquisition, partnership and building programme.
In addition Focus Ireland's tenancy support and settlement services will be doubled which will help 1,210 households move on to independent living. The strategy also places a strong emphasis on preventative work and early intervention measures to help cut the number of people at risk of becoming homeless.
More: www.focusireland.ie