The 5,000 Irish heroes

THE LEFT HAVE always had a soft spot for the Irish Republic. I myself , when embracing communism in my early twenties, fell hook line and sinker for the romanticism of Irish republican history, and the terrible atrocities that the imperial British had brought upon the Irish people.

The Wolfe Tones were the musical accompaniment to Irish republican history. They, like many other such minstrels  poured their sugary ballads down the throats of young idealists on the Left. The Ballad of Kevin Barry brought a particular lump to ones throat: while Charles Stewart Parnell, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly Arthur Griffith, and Éamon de Valera were, for a brief period, my comic book heroes who had stood against the might of British imperialism.

There was even, in the 1970s, a certain sympathy for the Provisional IRA, despite their lunatic bombings that did not distinguish between Protestants and Catholics in the North…after all, as they would have said, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”.

The British had been the Irish Republic’s scapegoats for hundreds of years before 1922, and continued to be so after. It amazes me to think that a people with such a loathing for the British could contemplate coming to these isles in order to find work and live among us. It makes me wonder whether the comic book heroes that enchanted me during my youth were ever real…if so, then those Irish that have, over the years swamped these shores are hypocrites.

The cruel mythology that that great oppressor of the Irish, imperial Britain, has been part of the republic’s folk law for far too long. Over the past decade this over sentimentalised nation (especially across the pond) has allowed the many crimes and injustices within the Irish republic to go unpunished. We have had a child abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church, as well the cruel exploitation of young women involving the same institution…but it was all kept incognito by the Irish political class who must have known what was happening but were happily compliant in what the priests and the sisterhood were up to.

NOW THE IRISH republic is making one those fashionable apologies usually reserved for past colonists, that have gained in popularity since the arrival of the liberal hegemony. Many people may not know that during the Second World War many young men from the Irish republic chose to join the British army  in order to defeat German Nazism. There were some 5,000 young men serving in the Irish republic’s military who decided that Nazism had to have an end put to it. So they joined the British Army; but they paid a heavy price for so doing.

            

             On their return from the battle field, they were treated as traitors by the republic and could not find a living on their home soil: and when Hitler died, the Irish republic held a memorial service under the auspices of no less a figure than Éamon de Valera. But like everything else in the republic’s history that disturbed the romantic illusion of a poor benighted people living off potatoes thanks to their British persecutor…the potato famine was not, by the way, the fault of the British.

Éire has dinned well on its loathing of the British for many decades. But there is another side to the Irish that you never see, as for instance, in a John Ford western, where they are represented as  lovable rogues dragged from some Irish bog, and put in a cavalry uniform on their arrival in America

It was said, with some truth, that as the Irish landed in New York, they were put into police uniforms. The reality was more like the depiction in the film Gangs of New York. Hollywood had romanticised the Irish. But the reality in the Irish Republic under de Valera was a virtual theocracy where the Catholic church took care of state welfare; and we are now beginning to learn how brutal to those poor unfortunates who found themselves under its wing, the church was.

THOSE BRAVE YOUNG Irishmen who fought to defeat Nazism were not allowed to work in the republic on their return. Their families also suffered from the ignominy of one of the members putting on a British uniform.

            

            Éamon de Valera was a romantic medievalist who believed, like Hitler, in a wholly idealistic and pastoral view of his country that never ever lived up to reality. A country of rich greenery decorated by sturdy hard working peasants labouring the land, and in  supplication to Catholicism. A land which, had it not been for the British, need never have sent generation after generation of its young people across the pond, or, bewilderingly, to the evil empire itself.

            

             Irish history is faced with one final irony. For hundreds of years the Irish have fought the British in order to secure their independent nationhood. From the Late 1960s and the beginning of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, through the campaign of terrorism by the  Provisional IRA costing thousands of lives on all sides in order attain a united Ireland…a nation state for the Irish, in fact.

            

             Now what do we see? We see Eire willingly and freely giving up the national identity it cherished and spilled blood for, for hundreds of years and fought at great cost to its republican heroes…and for what? To become a canton of Europe – a mere county council, in fact. This is what the Irish Republic has sold their heroes out to…and they cannot blame the British for this ultimate betrayal.