Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Never mind the media circus. There’s more to being Irish than shamrocks and boozing; there’s a proud legacy of revolutionary thought, too.
James Connolly: Socialist, labor leader, egalitarian thinker, Martyr of 1916. I wonder how the nation would have developed had he not been executed by the forces of the Crown. His idea for an ecumenical Irish state free of religious interference and equal rights for all, including women, was forward-thinking for its time, although the victory of the Free State forces after his death, meant that -- to paraphrase one disillusioned Republican -- all that blood was shed for the sake of handing over the keys to the kingdom to the priests and the shopkeepers, the very same bourgeoisie elements Connolly considered as much as an impediment to Irish freedom as the British were.
Both my wife’s grandfathers fought in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Republican side, against Michael Collins’s Free State sellouts). My maternal grandmother’s people were Orangemen from Donegal and Carrickfergus, but radical politics have trumped upbringing in my case. (I’ve been told my mother used to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day when she was in high school. It’s an ugly bit of spite that I have a hard time reconciling with my memories of her being a kind, good-hearted woman.) My wife thinks it’s kind of funny that out of all the kids in her very Irish, right-off-the-boat family, she’s the only one who married someone of Irish descent, and he turned out to be Anglo-Irish.
Although I oppose actions against civilian targets on general principle, I can at least respect that the Nationalists stand for something other than the Loyalists’ reactionary desire to maintain the institutionalized prejudices of the colonial status quo. It’s amazing how Sinn Féin gets raked over the coals for every misstep or bit of wrongdoing by the I.R.A., but the DUP is pretty much given a pass despite the fact they their armed wings have engaged in nearly an equal amount of violence since in the Good Friday agreement of 1998.
The Pogues and The Dubliners – The Irish Rover (from a 1987 single, collected on The Ultimate Collection, 2005) – Forget the nasally warbling of Celtic Woman or the grandma music of the Irish Tenors, this is real music of the people.
Flogging Molly – Rebels of the Sacred Heart (from Drunken Lullabies, 2002) – It just dawned on me that all of today’s tracks were played at our wedding reception…in between various punk and new wave favorites. Those four mix CD’s are a lovely glimpse into the nature of our relationship.
Wolfe Tones – Rifles of the I.R.A. (from Rifles of the I.R.A. 1991) – Anytime a large enough number of the wife’s relatives gather together for a holiday or whatnot, it’s a given that this song will be given a spin, accompanied by much whooping, stomping, and dancing.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
'twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky
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15 comments:
Hi Andrew,
Happy St. Patrick's Day to you !
You've picked a fine place to spend it, too. I am a proud Irishman, having been born and brought up in Derry - throughout the Troubles (so I find your historical remarks interesting) -with family almost entirely from Donegal.
I now live in St Albans , in England and am listening to my daughter and her friends get ready to go our to celebrate, my daughter with an Irish Tricolour as a belt.
Slán agus saol agat, páiste gach bliain, bás in Eireann.
Apparently a favourite blessing of Michael Collins.
Take care - John Bradley
Thanks, John!
Hopefully "interesting" doesn't mean "oh, not another American leftist spouting crap." (Oddly enough, the local socialists won't touch the issue of the Troubles with a ten foot pole.)
It's a damn shame that things got as bad as they did over in the North, as there's a lot of common ground overlooked between the factionalism.
We're going to head over to the in-laws later and see what they've got happening. Based on past experience, that'll be boiled dinner, loud music, and loads of whooping.
always remember the James Connolly marches when I lived in Edinburgh - unsurprisingly they don't happen in (conservative) Cheshire. Think its interesting these days that the Irish 'problem' is completely overlooked when Bush/Blair bang on about the 'War On Terror' completely erasing historical reference to Ireland from memory. The fact that you can't wage a war on an unseen enemy without attacking the entire populace and alienating those who would otherwise remain ambivalent is also handily forgotten. (much ranting removed) Oh ye, Happy St Patricks.
Nice to see you supporting the ethnic cleansing of Ireland, long after the real republicans themselves (as opposed to Yank poseurs like yourself) have decided on peace.
I hope you show equal support to those who kill Americans as those who kill the British. You lot have done more damage, and brutalised more innocents, than we did in Cromwell's wettest dreams.
I'm so bored with the USA
Hey, it's a St. Paddy's Day troll! Apparently the leprechauns were too busy to show this year!
How can one tell it's a troll?
1. He/she didn't bother to read the post before launching into a rant.
2. He/she doesn't have the courage to put a name to his/her convictions. (Isn't the usual procedure in these cases to let one's friends in the RUC and SAS do the dirty work, in order to free up more time to harass Catholic school children and peddle dope?)
I suppose I should be flattered that the troll took a break from writing Ian Paisely/Maggie Thatcher slashfic long enough to grace this place with their presence.
"Ethnic cleansing"?
What the hell does that mean?! Surely you must mean the forced emigration of the Nationalist population from northern Ireland that has been going on decades? British sponsored brutality by Loyalist thugs? Hey--let's go back 400 years: invasions, forced evictions, penal laws, famine, war, ect....
Boo-hoo--The Colonialists are crying 'ethnic cleansing'. Look up the definition for chrissakes!
I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by throwing my shoe at the TV after they ran a car commercial featuring The Pogues's "Sunny Side of the Street."
Uck.
Ouch, that's painful, Bully. I wonder if we'll next see "Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go" used to sell caskets.
By the way, how do you fit shoes over your hooves?
Nothing like 'Nationalism' to cause a bit of controversy and debate.
By the way, how do you fit shoes over your hooves?
Carefully.
Paisleyite troller here: For what it's worth, I did read your post. I was expressing resentment at the habit of left-leaning Americans blithely showing their support for the IRA. If you support the bombing and shooting of 'Brits' and Protestants, then that is your right in a free country - but you should also accept the shooting and bombing of Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan etc as being an equally valid political act. The attack on the twin towers and the Birmingham pub-bombings amount to the same thing: it's just that Al Qaeda did a better job of it.
Blithely somehow including:
"Although I oppose actions against civilian targets on general principle..."
and..
"It's a damn shame that things got as bad as they did over in the North, as there's a lot of common ground overlooked between the factionalism."
"...every misstep or bit of wrongdoing." Like murder, you mean. Or like the fact that Catholics who joined the army or the police in the early 1960s are STILL prevented from entering Northern Ireland (because they and their families will be killed by the IRA).
I agree about Paisley, by the way. I read with horror that Blair decided that the way to get through to him was by appealing to his religion, and apparently the pair of them exchange religious books on a regular basis.
I am responding to you in this way because you are an American, not because you are 'Irish'. The minute someone attacks America and Americans, you lot go beserk. We might have behaved appallingly over Ireland, but even the Black and Tans' killing spree was minimal compared to the American reaction to the the WTC attack.
You might not be a supporter of the war on terror, any more than I am a supporter of UVF atrocities (or Blair's dismal pandering to Bush), but it really rankles when I hear Americans showing their 'solidarity' with the IRA. As a Briton, and specifically one who lived most of his life in Birmingham, I was a target for the people you admire so much - even if you have a few, erm, reservations, about their methods - put my neighbours down as collateral damage, eh?
As I said before, as an anti-colonialist, you should show equal, and vocal, support for Al Qaeda, as you do for the IRA. You should be dancing in the streets with those in the Muslim world who celebrate every death of an American in Iraq.
"...every misstep or bit of wrongdoing."
I was actually referring to the post Good Friday obstructionalist tactics. That irritating double standard where Sinn Fein(technically the "political wing of the IRA" but I assume we can both agree that the IRA is not a monolithic entity with any central control at this point) was expected to be answerable for everything, while Paisely's crowd was not -- even though the nastiness since then has been pretty equally divided between the two sides. If there's going to be fair resolution to the Troubles, they need to apply some fairness going in.
I do not -- in any form, for any reason -- endorse violence against civilians. Even from the most ruthless pragmatic perspective, it simply doesn't work, and in the case of the North, only played nicely into the reactionaries' hands and prolonged things.
(It's happening today in Iraq, where no one here seems to grasp the fact that civilian casualities make a great recruiting tool for the insurgents. Attacks on civilians by insurgents are a calculated attempt to incite a civil war by the same logic.)
It never should have gotten to this point in the first place, and probably wouldn't have, if the British didn't employ a divide and rule policy in the area that ended up slipping its lead and going feral. And yet the leadership in London act all perplexed how things could have gotten out of hand...
I know of the sorts of American you refer to, but I'm not one of them, nor are they socialist. They're mostly second and third generation Irish Americans who rediscovered their roots (meaning they painted a shamrock on the side of their tradesmen's vans) and holler "Up the 'RA" without having a fucking clue what it even means.
As for Al Qaeda and IRA violence, there's no excuse for either, but there's a tendency to want to swat mosquitos without ever considering the nearby swamp that breeds them.
Fair point. The (protestant) Belfast novelist Glenn Paterson once said that he couldn't understand why Paisley was against a united Ireland. "He'd fucking love it in the Dail."
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