Social Items

TPQ
Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs ✏ 11-February-2023.

We’re in a culture war and it’s killing us all…

Woke! well, I’m awake and whatever woke was, whatever once stirred people to awake from slumber has now been transmogrified into an instrument of oppression, wielded by the zealous practitioners of cancel culture. it’s now nothing but a weapon of subjugation and used by those that want to rid themselves of all who disagree with them.

It is a bitter irony that these self-styled warriors for social justice have adopted the tactics of those they claim to despise. They engage in public shaming, harassment, and the erasure of history, all in the name of progress. They demand conformity and submission, and in doing so, they stifle the very diversity and pluralism they claim to celebrate . . . 

. . . In the grand theatre of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves captivated by the spectacle of the “Woke” brigade, a self-righteous collective that has taken it upon itself to dictate the limits of discourse and thought. Once a term to signify social awareness, “woke” has now become a bludgeon in the hands of the self-appointed guardians of virtue, who use it to silence and cancel those who dare to dissent.

Continue reading @ Labour Heartlands.

The Culture Wars Of Woke Imperialism 🪶 How Progressive Liberalism Is Killing the UK’s Left

Christopher Owens 🎵 with the 46th in his Predominance series.  

“Cleaned my teeth, put on my best clobber. Tonight's the night I'm going to knob her/Vauxhall Viva's covered in rust but you can't fuck a bird on a 29 bus.” - The Macc Lads

Horns up 

New Horizons 

 


Ritual Error – Dial in the Ghost

The London based post-hardcore outfit return with a remarkable record that envisages scenarios like Tony Blair being haunted by ghosts, nostalgia being poison and the modern band as a war unit. Musically, there are Minutemen and Fugazi references galore. Songs like ‘Life as a Contact Sport’ and ‘Return to Lagos’ are angry, abrasive and enthralling.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

Buñuel – Mansuetude

Arriving not long after the implosion of Oxbow, the fourth album from Buñuel is what you expect from a band whose singer is Eugene Robinson. Elements of thrash and new wave are evident, especially in demented opener ‘Who Missed Me’. Drummer Franz Valente deserves praise for his tour de force performance that holds the chaos together and gives it a proper framework.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

Pharmakon – Maggot Mass

Since 2013, Margaret Chardiet has been releasing records that use noise and industrial as a way of looking not just at herself but also at the decay within society. ‘Maggot Mass’ carries on in this vein and is utterly thrilling. Opener ‘Wither and Warp’ revels in its sturm und drang and ‘Splendid Isolation’ feels like a tribal war chant being conducted in a back alleyway.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

Salisman Communal Orchestration - A Queen Among Clods

Ethereal psychedelic rock with trippy beats, this feels very much like a summer record. With a mix pushing all the instruments to the front, it’s an immediate record (with ‘The Blessed Swan & Me’ being a particular highlight) and the one/two punch of the title track and ‘Emerald​-​Aniline’ makes the listener soar into the sky.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

 


Golden Oldies


🏴In memory of Geordie Walker 18/12/58 – 26/11/23🏴


Killing Joke – Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions

After two years of legal issues, relentless touring and internal friction, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this LP remains, possibly, the most furious thing the band ever recorded. Although it saw them returning to their original sound, one or two new directions were evident in tracks like ‘Slipstream’.



Killing Joke – Absolute Dissent

The first album with the original lineup since 1982’s ‘Revelations’ was eagerly anticipated among the Gathering and it did not disappoint. An encapsulation of the many periods of the band, they upped their game for this and sounded utterly revitalised while paying tribute to fallen members (‘The Raven King’) and their roots (‘Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove’).



Killing Joke – Nightime

The perfect compromise between their newfound sound and old tricks, this 1985 record has an atmosphere that can never be recaptured by anyone. For pop fans, the album has KJ’s biggest hit single (‘Love Like Blood’) and their most influential (‘Eighties’) due to it (allegedly) being stolen by Nirvana.



⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

Predominance 46

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Four Hundred And One

 

A Morning Thought @ 2349

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 25-November-2024.



Sinn Féin has said that it would ask for a review of the national broadcaster RTE’s biased coverage of Palestine and other international conflicts. They were criticised by almost all and sundry for doing so. They were accused of censorship and their own use of lawsuits to silence critics was raised once again.[1] The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) came out with guns blazing, claiming it would be in breach:

of the principles of the European Media Freedom Act and would set a dangerous precedent in terms of direct and indirect State interference in the remit of the existing regulatory body.[2]

The NUJ has rarely challenged what it sees as state or private interference in the media before and less still at RTE. RTE’s board is made up of cronies and business interests, people whose interest is served by limited coverage of financial and other issues. Many of them come from the financial sector. Six of the eleven board members are appointed by the Minister for Communications, so there is already government interference in RTE.

The NUJ itself would not come out well of such a review, if the review was honest. For decades it implemented Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, censoring Sinn Féin, even when the party was standing in elections. When a brave RTE journalist Jenny McGeever was sacked because she broadcast one sentence from Martin McGuinness, “If that is ok with the Police, that is ok with us”, in reference to arrangements for the transport of three IRA volunteers’ bodies back to Belfast.[3] It was an innocuous statement. The NUJ did next to nothing to defend her. They did not defend her just as they meekly accepted the sacking of the RTE authority in 1972. Colum Kenny commenting on his time at RTE remarked that:

During my years at RTÉ, I became for a period what is known as ‘The Father’, or chairman, of the Programmes Chapel of the National Union of Journalists. I found no great appetite among its members, or indeed among the membership of another union representing many producers, for industrial action aimed at drawing public attention to the existence of the gagging Order known as Section 31.[4]

In other words, neither the union nor the members did anything about it. They either agreed with it or decided the truth was not that important, not as important as their careers. The union will not look well, if coverage on Palestine is looked at, nor will it come out shining if coverage of Ukraine is also included, as on this issue, the union itself intervened directly in helping to shape a narrative at odds with reality.

It is as clear as day that on Palestine, Irish coverage has been very biased, in terms of who it gave interviews to, the issues it refers to and the kid gloves that apologists for genocide such as the Israeli Ambassador have been treated with. It is clear even in the language used. The word genocide is never used in reporting, unless quoting someone and even then, sparingly. It is referred to as the war, the conflict etc. It has mainly used the term when reporting on the case taken to the International Court of Justice and gave a succinct but incorrectly limited definition of what genocide is. It stated “In short, genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.”[5] The definition is actually a lot broader than that and Gaza fits the bill on various counts.[6]

When reporting on the murder of civilians in Palestine, it never uses such terms. It says killed and the casualty figures are always referred to as “According to the Hamas run Ministry of Health”. The message is clear, that these figures come from an organisation that is considered to be a terrorist group and therefore the figures are not reliable. But it is actually the elected government. The last time there was an election in Palestine, Hamas won, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, though it only assumed power in Gaza with the Vichy Palestine Authority appointed by Mahmoud Abbas undemocratically taking control of the West Bank. So, of course the Ministry of Health is run by the elected government. This language is never used in relation to Israel, we are never told “according to the Likud run Ministry of Defence”. In fact, such caveats are almost never used, not even when quoting the most vile dictatorships in the world. At best, they state “according to an official government communiqué”, which is technically correct and does not have the same moral laden judgement contained within it.

In Lebanon, they engage in a similar sleight of hand, referring to attacks on “Hezbollah strongholds”, which is the type of language they hope will give some justification to the bombings. But what are Hezbollah strongholds? They are areas in which the organisation has mass support. You would be hard pressed to find in the media, in general, and RTE in particular any significant explanation of what Hezbollah is. Many viewers hearing about strongholds being bombed would not know and are never informed that what this means is areas in which the organisation has a support base, which is also electoral. We know which areas are Hezbollah strongholds because they are the areas where people voted for them. It is an electoral and military force, increasing its number of parliamentary seats in the 2022 elections from 13 to 15, though its allies in parliament lost seats. But the point is, it is a force with a huge popular base.

Likewise, when Israel told Irish UN soldiers to leave, the President of Ireland, described it as a threat, but the media was more hesitant. When Israel then used UN compounds as shields in their attacks, the resulting damage was described as damage caused by the exchange of fire between the two. You would never guess that one of the sides deliberately used them as protective shields.

In terms of RTE bias and coverage, whilst it has reported on Palestine over the years, once October 7th happened, the official discourse emanating from RTE and most other media outlets was that history began on October 7th. No attempt was made to look at the history of the region, nor the context of Israeli aggression and crimes against humanity prior to October 7th. Previous Israeli attacks and crimes were rarely if ever mentioned. It made one attempt at explaining what Hezbollah was in an article published on its site.[7] The article recognises that it has political support, but constantly refers to the fact that it is designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and that other bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have never been elected. Saudi Arabia, despite having a nominal parliament is led by a bunch of royal head chopping kleptocrats. Though RTE quotes them favourably as a source of analysis on the nature of Hezbollah. The organisation is according to RTE nothing more than a group that:

…has risen from a shadowy faction to a heavily armed force with major sway over the Lebanese state. The United States, some Western governments and others deem it a terrorist organisation.

The headline on the piece reduces Hezbollah to just being a group that supports Hamas. And that was about it from RTE on the nature of the organisation.

Likewise in Ukraine, though RTE had reported on the country previously, once again history started on a particular date, this time February 22nd 2022. They ignored the 2014 Maidan Coup, the breaking of the Minsk Accords by Ukraine, the repression of non-Ukrainian cultures, which included not just Russians but also gypsies and others. The promotion of WWII fascist Stepan Bandera, the fascist nature of the Azov Battalion were all ignored to favour a simplistic account. Previous acts such as the burning to death of trade unionists in Odessa by fascists in 2014 were never mentioned again. RTE presenters even questioned why NATO wasn’t pushing for all-out war with Russia, and they included in that the possibility of going to the brink of nuclear war. The Irish Times has recently doubled down on this, basically resurrecting the “Russia will invade and attack everyone scenario” so common when the war began and arguing in a piece written by Kier Gillespie from the right wing think tank Chatham House that Ireland should abandon its “neutrality” and Europe should get ready for all-out war with Russia.[8] Incidentally, a sentiment echoed to some degree by the “pro NATO left” in the Irish parliament.

The NUJ for its part, whose members push the narrative on Palestine and Ukraine were not content with the complicity of its members in a particular narrative but organised a protest to skew the debate altogether. Shortly after the war started the NUJ organised a protest at the Russian Embassy to protest the lack of press freedom and attacks on journalists by the Russian state. The Russian state has a dreadful record on the matter, but so does Ukraine. Moreover, in its attempt to portray the Russians as the only threat to freedom of the press the NUJ invited ambassadors from other countries to join in with it at the protest. Fine, except with one exception, those ambassadors represented countries with a poor record in the matter, such as Georgia, Poland and Ukraine coming in 89th, 66th and 106th respectively in Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index for the year 2022. By doing this the NUJ set a narrative that the only threat to press freedom was Putin and whitewashed a number of regimes with dubious records themselves. Whilst it has condemned the deaths of journalists in Gaza it did not protest at the Israeli Embassy but held a vigil instead at an art gallery.[9] You couldn’t make such cowardice up.

So, an investigation of bias in the coverage of conflicts would be welcome. Neither Sinn Féin, RTE, nor the NUJ would come out of it well. But the problem is political. The reason why RTE does that, is that it gets away with it because there is no challenge to its bias. Sinn Féin and the Irish left represented by such stalwarts of mediocrity like People Before Profit, applauded and egged on the push for war and bias about Ukraine and now finds the media supporting those same reactionary forces (NATO, US, EU) in their assault on Palestine. The penny has almost dropped for them, but not quite. RTE was biased on Ukraine and they agreed with it, now it is biased on Palestine and it is too late. But RTE and the Irish media in general represent the interests of the Irish state and so it should come as no surprise that it is biased. This does not mean we should accept it lying down, but you can’t call for bias on one issue in favour of a NATO proxy (Ukraine) and against bias in favour of another proxy, Israel. The two are linked.

In the case of Palestine, the NUJ is passive, passing resolutions and issuing communiqués. As with the Irish censorship law Section 31, the union is content to not take any industrial action on the issue and let its members lie, downplay the seriousness of it all, treat the Israelis with kid gloves and use language that deliberately distorts what is happening. Their role in echoing Their Master’s Voice should be exposed, though Sinn Féin is not the best placed organisation to do so, given its prioritising of its relations with Washington and its own attempts to censor Palestinians in Ireland who did not follow the Palestine Authority line.

References.

[1] Irish Examiner (19/11/2024) LIVE: Election 2024 — Sinn Féin promises 'peer review' of RTÉ's Gaza coverage if elected. Paul Hosford and Cianan Brennan. 

[2] RTE (20/11/2024) McDonald defends Sinn Féin plan to review RTÉ's Gaza coverage. Tommy Meskill. 

[3] Sunday Business Post (20/04/2003) How RTE censored its censorship. Niall Meehan. Archived at CAIN 

[4] Colum Kenny (2005 ) Chapter 5 Censorship, Not ‘Self-Censorship.’ 

[5] RTE (11/01/2024) Explained: Ireland's position on the genocide case against Israel. Juliette Gash. 

[6] See Genocide Convention.

[7] RTE (31/10/2023) What is Hezbollah, the group backing Hamas against Israel? 

[8] Irish Times (23/11/2024) If Russia is indeed planning an attack against a Nato state, distance and neutrality will provide no defence. Keir Gillespie.

[9] NUJ (30/04/2024) Dublin vigil for slain journalists. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

RTE’s Biased Coverage Of Palestine And Sinn Féin’s Call For A Review

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Four Hundred

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ In February 2022 Russian President Vadimir Putin sent his armed forces into neighbouring Ukraine.

Putin gave several reasons for his decision some of which held a small amount of water. He claimed Ukraine was harbouring “Nazis” on its territory and he, Putin, is clearing the area of “Nazi” organisations. This claim has been given credence by the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s, use of the self-proclaimed Nazi troops of the Azov Regiment. The Azov claim to model themselves on the “Das Reich” Division of the Nazi Waffen SS of World War Two infamy. This the Azov Regiment proudly boast making Putin’s claims of Nazi activity appear more than credible. Was invasion the answer? No, not in my view but the Russian fears at the time were understandable. Another of Putin’s worries was that Ukraine was/is seeking NATO membership bringing the US led alliance right up to Russia’s western border.

Putin is not a nice man and, in my opinion, neither is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine who, although the darling of the west, is not in my view all he appears to be! What is a man who claims to be of Jewish stock doing using Pro-Nazi troops in his army? Surely these soldiers, should Ukraine win the war, would be gunning for Zelenskyy one day? 

Putin was partly responsible for the present situation many years previous when he was working in the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence agency, and was also an agent of Boris Yeltsin. It was Yeltsin who, as President of the Russian Socialist Republic, allegedly organised the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989/90. Yeltsin was not happy “playing second fiddle” to Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. So, when the General Secretary of the USSR was away on holiday Yeltsin, aided by Putin and others, including the then General Secretary of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Stanislav Hurenko, met to discuss the best way of bringing down, or winding up, the Soviet Union. Did the collapse of the former super power make such a confrontation between Russia and other former Soviet Republics, particularly Ukraine and Georgia, inevitable? I believe it did and the West knew it!

What Putin did not take into account on launching this invasion was that the Russian Army was not, and are not, the fighting machine which was once the Soviet Red Army. The Ukrainian Army (themselves once part of the Soviet Red Army) on the ground, despite being well outnumbered, have given the Russians a good run for their money and there is no way Putin can claim his goals in Ukraine have been achieved. Zelenskyy has been heavily supplied with arms by European countries and even more so the USA which have given the Ukrainian leader weapons to the tune of 69 billion dollars and rising! Zelenskyy in fact never seems to have enough weapons and keeps asking for more and more to a point, I believe, somebody should say no we cannot afford to keep this up. Britain are supplying Ukraine with weapons and have pledged a further two billion pounds worth of arms to defeat Russia. 

This is the policy of the new so-called Labour Government under Keir Starmer, and his predecessors, who will have spent six billion pounds sterling arming Ukraine yet have told their own pensioners they cannot afford to give these elderly people in Britian their winter fuel allowance. All Starmer’s political opponents are attacking his government for not paying this allowance to pensioners but not one of these detractors mention the money spent helping Ukraine! Why have they not mentioned this expenditure as a cause of the pensioners' misery? Because every one of them would have done exactly the same thing! Anything to beat Putin seems to be the order of the day.

Until recently Zelenskyy has not been able to use certain weapons supplied by the USA and European countries including Britian outside Ukraine. They have not been given permission to use long range western supplied missiles inside Russia. It appears that has now changed with the US, now in the last months of the (Irishman, that’s a laugh) Joe Biden's Presidency - because in January Donald Trump takes over as President despite him being a convicted felon! Trump appears not to share his NATO allies' love of Ukraine and may well stop the supply of weapons to Zelenskyy. So, in his last months of his Presidency Biden is increasing the supply of arms to Ukraine and allowing them to use US supplied long range missiles inside Russia. True to form it appears Britain has followed the US by allowing Zelenskyy to use British supplied ‘Storm Shadow’ long range missiles inside Russia. When asked whether this is the case British Secretary of State for Defence John Healey said; “we are not going to talk about the situation for security reasons”. What security reasons? Britain is not at war with Russia are they? Or, are they fighting a proxy war to every last drop of Ukrainian soldier’s blood? The same applies to the USA. Britain says they will continue to back Ukraine but what about a situation when Trump takes over and US support is no longer a guarantee, in fact the supply from Washington drying up would perhaps be more accurate!

The British media are now using such phrases as “the Western allies” which was a term coined during the Second World War against fascism. They used the term “western allies” to differentiate Britain, USA, Canada and many other countries from the Red Army of the Soviet Union, without who the war could well have been lost. On BBC2s Daily Politics on 19th November the Daily Mirror's Suzie Boniface referred to the “Western allies” several times, almost like Britain is at war, or at least preparing for war! 

So, are the British preparing for some sort of confrontation with Russia? Well, as a point of observation, Putin has lowered the bar for the use of nuclear weapons in this war with Ukraine which to all sensible people spells danger, particularly if he really is as mad made out by the media! There is no such thing as ‘limited nuclear war.’ Once these things come into play it could well mean good Night Vienna for all of us! If Putin, and he is mad enough to, so we are constantly told, decides to use a nuclear bomb on Ukraine will the West retaliate? Even though Ukraine is not a NATO member and, therefore, is not covered by that organisations constitution which states under article 5 of collective defence:

If a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.

Will the NATO countries decide to make an exception if Ukraine is attacked by Russia using nuclear weapons? Article 5 only applies to NATO member countries which Ukraine is not, but the language coming from Britain and, at least short term, the USA suggests should Putin use his nuclear weapons then he could expect retaliation in kind. Will the West supply Zelenskyy with nuclear weapons? That would be very foolish move and certainly, in the case of Britain, was not in the Labour Party’s election manifesto!

I have remained neutral in this conflict, unlike the Israeli/Palestinian war where neutrality is not an option, and I shall remain neutral. I do not like Putin, he is a para-fascist dictator who aided Yeltsin in collapsing the USSR, thus making the world a more dangerous place, and to me Zelenskyy is a fraud. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine – if for no other reason the Russian Army were in no state for war – and there were other ways around Putin’s concerns. The West did not help. All they had to say was – words to the effect of – any application from Ukraine to join NATO will be turned down. Even British Conservative MP, Michael Gove, is on record as saying no to a Ukraine application to join the alliance. Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal of any single country in the world including the USA, not that matters a great deal once a certain number of nuclear warheads has been reached. Somebody should get these two headbangers, Putin and Zelenskyy, together and iron out an agreement, satisfactory, if not perfect, for both waring countries. Regretfully, and I really, really hate suggesting this but Trump might be capable of arranging such a meeting. This does not mean Trump, having tried and failed to get a meeting of minds in Eastern Europe, would not be prepared to use nuclear weapons himself. The question would be, under such circumstances, whose side would the US be on? Even a Trump brokered deal is preferable to nuclear annihilation which very few on this planet will survive. Continuing supplying one side with weapons, which of course lines the pockets of the arms dealers paid by pensioners heating allowance money, is not the way to promote peace in the region. Of course, Trump may be able to cobble something together in Eastern Europe, but the other side of this coin is he supports the Israelis even more so than Biden, and that is saying a lot, in the Middle-East.

This is bad news for the Palestinians and the people of Lebanon. Would Trump make even more weapons available to Israel? Israel's motives in the region are more than revenge for the attacks of 7th October 2023, they have more than avenged the deaths involved that day. Neither are they too bothered about the Israeli hostages taken that day still held by Hamas. No, Israels goals I believe are far wider and deeper than this. I believe they are out to expand their influence and governance in the entire area, an even greater Israel putting a two-state solution regrettably well and truly to bed. Neither Netanyahu, Hamas or Hezbollah are interested in a two-state solution and neither is Trump I understand. With Trump at the helm the misery of the Palestinians and citizens of the independent nation state of Lebanon can expect little or no let up from the Israelis! Israels arms supply will be endless once Trump takes the reins of Presidential power.

These are potentially dangerous times, and this excludes the ever-growing threat of man-made accelerated climate change. With nutters like Putin, Zelenskyy, Netanyahu, Ali Khamenei, Hamas, Hezbollah and shortly Donald Trump responsible for the planet and human kinds future, or no future, the possible eventualities are endless and the stuff of nightmares! It does not paint an encouraging picture for the future no matter how we dress it up or which paint we use!!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

The Ukraine And Middle East 💣 Are We Heading For Armageddon?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Three Hundred And Ninety Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 2348

John Crawley 🎤 I would like to thank the Kilmichael commemoration committee for inviting me to speak today

I consider it a great personal honour to be given the opportunity to join with all of you in paying homage to the valiant men who fought and died here for the complete freedom of Ireland.

Sunday, the 28th of November 1920, would cap a tumultuous month in the struggle to achieve Irish independence. On Monday, the 1st of November, 18-year-old IRA volunteer Kevin Barry was hanged in Mountjoy prison. On Sunday, the 21st of November, IRA units in Dublin killed 15 members of the British Crown Forces in a highly coordinated operation, many of them intelligence officers. Later that day, British soldiers and constabulary retaliated by killing 14 civilians and wounding at least 60 others at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park. That same evening members of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary would torture and murder IRA commanders Peadar Clancy and Dick McKee in Dublin Castle. They also shot to death Conor Clune, who was not involved with the republican movement.

The Auxiliary Division of the RIC was an elite mobile counter-insurgency strike force. Composed exclusively of former commissioned officers from the British armed forces who had fought on one or more fronts during the Great War, they were a qualitative step up from the ordinary Black and Tans who had served primarily as enlisted men.

The Auxiliaries numbered no more than 2,300 men throughout Ireland during the conflict. 150 of them had been based at Macroom Castle since August 1920. Previous to this, they had been causing havoc in the Leinster area.

About a fifth of the Auxiliaries had been awarded medals during the First World War, including three Victoria Crosses. Intelligent, brave, and ruthless, they would as soon have killed an Irishman as stepped on a bug. And here is a critical point to remember: until the late afternoon of 28 November 1920, the Auxies, as they came to be known, hadn't suffered a single casualty while raiding and patrolling the countryside.

The Auxies were only sent to where the conflict was hottest for the Crown. And no place in 1920 was hotter than County Cork. Here in West Cork, the true nature of the conflict was fought at its starkest. Here, it was a war between an Irish army and the British armed forces. This area was a propaganda nightmare for a British government determined to portray the conflict as a criminal campaign of murder carried out by faceless cowards.

On that fateful Sunday, 18 men of No.2 Platoon, 'C' Company of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary based in Macroom drove into a well-prepared ambush position at this spot. They were seated in 2 Crossley-Tenders, travelling at approximately 40 miles per hour and about 50 yards apart.

Waiting for them were 36 IRA volunteers from the Third West Cork Brigade led by Tom Barry. Only two of the volunteers had previously seen action, and most had never fired more than four shots at a training camp.

Revisionists and apologists for the Royal Irish Constabulary like to imply they mainly were decent men doing their duty and that their reputations were sullied by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. Never forget these traitors were armed and paid by the British government to overthrow a democratically elected Irish government and to hunt down and arrest its elected representatives. Acting as the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle, they were the backbone of British rule in Ireland.

Criminalising the Irish struggle for independence has always played a major role in British policy on Ireland. That is why police primacy remains important to them to this day and why, in 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary was augmented by paramilitary police forces like the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and not the British army wherever possible.

Four years before the Kilmichael ambush, on Easter Monday, 1916, a courageous band of Volunteers set in motion a train of events they hoped would lead to the full measure of freedom for the thirty-two counties of Ireland.

Their leader, Pádraig Pearse, while inspecting Irish Volunteers at Vinegar Hill in Wexford in the early autumn of 1915, declared:

We, the Volunteers, are formed here not for half of Ireland, not to give the British Garrison control of part of Ireland. No! We are here for the whole of Ireland.

The aims and objectives of the 1916 leadership were set out in a stirring Proclamation, which called for the establishment of a government of national unity based upon the republican principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. It outlined the republican position that Irish constitutional authority resided exclusively within the Irish people. That 'the unfettered control of Irish destinies' must be 'sovereign and indefeasible'. It positioned national unity and democracy as core values calling for a 'National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland, and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women...' The British government executed every man who put his name to that Proclamation.

Support for the men and women of 1916 was not apparent at first. Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, who at that time commanded the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate, declared the 1916 Rising to be treason against the Irish people. He longed for a:

brighter day when the grant of full self-government would reveal to Britain the open secret of making Ireland her friend and helpmate, the brightest jewel in her crown of Empire.

His fellow Irish MP John Dillon told the British House of Commons, 'It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had a majority on your side'.

But things began to change. In December 1918, the Irish people voted overwhelmingly in a UK general election encompassing all 32 counties of Ireland for a republican manifesto that endorsed the aims and objectives of the 1916 Proclamation. The manifesto declared that:

…the right of a nation to sovereign independence rests upon immutable natural law and cannot be made the subject of a compromise.

On the 21st of January 1919, the First Dáil Eireann was established by the MPs elected in that contest, who now referred to themselves as Teachtaí Dála or TDs. Dáil Eireann was promptly banned by the British government and declared an illegal assembly. From that day to this, Britain has never permitted a 32-County national parliament to exist in Ireland.

Britain's constitutional response to undermine and subvert Dáil Eireann was the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which partitioned Ireland and formally legislated for the fact that the British government rejected the concept of majority all Ireland opinion. Britain made it clear that the consent principle did not exist for the Irish nation as a whole, and the only principle they would recognise was the Unionist veto in the Six Counties. The 1918 General Election was the last time the British government would permit the national will to be tested in an Ireland comprising one political unit.

Since then a narrative has taken hold, and has been powerfully reinforced of late, that the struggle for Irish freedom is fundamentally about ending partition. If our goal as Republicans is simply to end partition, what was our goal before partition? There was no partition in 1916 when Pearse, Clarke, and Connolly were placed before British firing squads. The boys of Kilmichael were not fighting to end partition. Britain's Government of Ireland Act would not receive Royal assent until a month after the Kilmichael ambush in December 1920, and partition would not come into force for another two years. Partition was not an issue for these men as they lay waiting in their ambush positions. Neither was it an issue for the Auxiliaries, who were an all-Ireland police force determined to keep Ireland united under Crown jurisdiction.

What were Wolfe Tone and the 27 other Protestant founding fathers of Irish republicanism determined to achieve when they formed the United Irishmen in 1791? What did they mean by a united Ireland? There was no partition in 1791. Their objective, of course, was to break the connection with England and to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide.

That objective was echoed over a century later by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation, who declared their determination to forge a national unity that would end British divide and rule strategies by remaining determinedly '…oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.' The signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should never be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.

In contrast, those who support the two nations' Shared Island' concept are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. A shared island means we share in Britain's analysis of the nature of the conflict as a domestic dispute between sectarian factions. According to this analysis, to achieve permanent peace, we must amicably share Ireland with 'the other' nation in our country. That other nation in the Six Counties that is represented by the British Crown and the Crown forces. Some nationalists argue that by welcoming British royalty on Irish soil, they are reaching out to unionists as a gesture of reconciliation. This ignores the fact that the primary reason the Crown means so much to unionists is because it symbolises the twin pillars of plantation Protestantism, confiscation, and sectarian supremacy. Why would anyone claiming to be an Irish republican attempt to reconcile an Irish citizen with that? The Irish Republican Army did not risk life, limb, and liberty to share this island with others but to unite our country for all.

While their claim to be British is, for many unionists, heartfelt and sincere, so too for many is their anti-Catholicism. That's why their British identity has often proven to be conditional upon England maintaining their sectarian supremacy. The Orange Order was set up in 1795 to support 'the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy.'

For a Republican, reaching out to unionists does not mean reaching out to them as foreigners who happen to live here. Foreigners are born in another country. The vast majority of Ulster unionists were born in Ireland and live their entire lives here. They must not be treated as the civil garrison of an alien state. That is not pluralism; that is submitting to the social and political modelling of colonial conquest. Robert Emmet did not request his epitaph be withheld until his country had taken its place as two nations among the nations of the earth.

The British and their allies in Ireland hoped that the referenda on the Good Friday Agreement in May 1998 would decisively undermine the legitimacy of the republican position by trumping the result of the 1918 election, which led to the formation of the First Dáil Eireann. What many forget is that these referenda took place in different jurisdictions, voting on separate questions. The North voted on the all-party agreement, while the South voted on amending Articles 2 and 3 of their constitution. Britain's Northern Secretary Mo Mowlam made it clear that if any dispute arose, only the vote in the North of Ireland would count with the British.

Many republicans were critical of the campaign to demote Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution from a territorial claim to a notional aspiration. The Brits and the Unionists protested that the existence of Articles 2 and 3 were the real impediments to peace and stability in Ireland, not partition. Rollover nationalists accepted that these articles were archaic and aggressive and needed to be diluted.

Republicans recognised the strategic mistake in diminishing these constitutional provisions and placing London's claim to jurisdiction in the north of our country on a higher moral plane than Dublin’s. As a former member of the IRA, I, along with many others, disagreed profoundly with those who scorned Articles 2 and 3 as little more than political posturing by Éamon De Valera. They argued these Articles could be effectively discarded as they had never been of any practical use to an IRA volunteer on hunger strike or on active service in the North.

Many of us saw beyond the shallow rationalisations for weakening the Irish State's claim to Ireland. We believed that Articles 2 and 3, in their original format, were an attempt to address the injustice of partition by declaring that Ireland is one nation. Ireland had been treated as one nation by England for hundreds of years. Diluting Dublin's claim to the six north-eastern counties of our country gives a veneer of democratic legitimacy to partition. It confirms that Dublin has partnered with London in declining to acknowledge Ireland as one democratic unit and has conceded that fact in an international agreement. It was another of the many steps designed by the Brits to draw Republicans deeper into a constitutional funnel from which they could never again turn around and get out of.

It is a credit to the negotiating skills of the British government, and the political clumsiness of the so-called pan-nationalist front that weakening the Irish territorial claim to Ireland was the only binding constitutional change required by the Good Friday Agreement.

Under the present political dispensation, the future of the Northern state rests securely in a political and legal framework of terms and conditions comprehensively safeguarded within an intricate web of constitutional constraints controlled exclusively by the British government. No Irish citizen, elected or otherwise, can call an Irish unity poll in Ireland. That decision lies firmly in the hands of the North's Secretary of State, an English politician belonging to a political party that doesn't organise in Ireland and who personally hasn't received a single vote in Ireland; so much for the unfettered control of Irish destinies being sovereign and indefeasible.

The British have taken great pains to ensure that ending partition and uniting Ireland is not the same thing. Ireland cannot and will not be united under the auspices of the Good Friday Agreement because the sectarian dynamic and conflicting national allegiances are baked into it.

The GFA states that the parties to the agreement:

…recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland.

In a nutshell, an Irish citizen born in any of the six north-eastern counties in a future non-partitioned Ireland can be considered a British national. So much for being 'oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.'

The British government has a long tradition of shaping Irish democracy in their interests and co-opting the political classes that emerge. They have displayed a remarkable capacity to channel Irish political trajectories in a particular direction, harness Irish leaderships to drive the strategy and make the Irish believe it was their own idea. James Connolly called it 'ruling by fooling.'

Ending the partition of the country while sustaining the partition of our people, giving it constitutional legitimacy, and imprinting that division with a democratic mandate is a dream come true for the Brits. It makes us willing accomplices in our national discord. It guarantees that the political malignancy through which Britain historically controlled and manipulated Ireland will endure in this 'New' Ireland predicated on all the old divisions.

How have so many nationalists been lured into swallowing the narrative that the British government is neutral in Ireland? That they are patiently awaiting the day that intrinsic character faults in the Irish people can be resolved so that London can benignly hand Ireland back to the Irish when it is safe for the Irish to do so.

The British state is, at heart a sectarian state. It was England that injected the sectarian dynamic into Irish politics by declaring a Protestant kingdom in which no Catholic could be head of state. It made Protestantism the test for loyalty and patronage for centuries. In May of last year, Britain's King Charles, head of the only monarchy in Europe still conducting a religious coronation, took three oaths - the Scottish oath to uphold the Presbyterian church in Scotland; the Accession Declaration oath to be a faithful Protestant; and the coronation oath, which includes promising to uphold the rights and privileges of the Church of England.

The Brits are in no position to lecture the Irish on the constitutional model of a united Ireland based on liberty, equality, and non-sectarianism. They are primarily and overwhelmingly responsible for political violence in this country as a result of their divide and rule strategies. Had England respected a genuine consent principle in any meaningful way at any time in our history, the Irishmen who fought and died here at Kilmichael would never have picked up the gun.

How did the narrative that the onus is on nationalists to persuade unionists to end partition gain such traction? Unionists did not partition Ireland - England did. Nor can unionists initiate the mechanisms to end partition; that is a decision exclusively for the British government. Of course, it suits the Brits to place all the blame for the national divisions they planted and sustained on Irish shoulders.

How has the British counter-insurgency machine so thoroughly changed the narrative and co-opted so many Irish nationalists to its policy of validating and perpetuating the civic disunion of Irishmen and women in the deferred hope of achieving territorial unity in some vague and distant future determined exclusively by the British government?

Unionists are pro-British for deep historical reasons that cannot be glibly dismissed, but they are not the British presence and must not be made so. The British presence is the presence of Britain's jurisdictional claim to Ireland and the civil and military apparatus that gives that effect.

Ulster unionists vow they will not be forced into a united Ireland. Yet, they lived in a united Ireland for hundreds of years. A united Ireland they were not forced into, but their ancestors forced themselves upon during the plantation of Ulster. An Ireland united in the sense that until the early 20th century, England treated our country as one political unit. Unionists never had an issue with a united Ireland per se. The Orange Order is an all-Ireland institution. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches are all-Ireland ministries. And, of course, the Church of Ireland is not the Church of Northern Ireland. Their real objection is becoming subject to the majority decision-making of a national electorate that contains a Catholic majority. The sectarian bedrock at the heart of unionist objections to even the most benign and insipid form of Irish self-government was summed up by their slogan 'Home Rule is Rome Rule'. A key component of unionist dogma is that they inhabit a unique and entitled position in Irish politics. A national democracy rooted in non-sectarianism and civic equality holds no allure for this mindset. That is not a valid justification for partitioning our country.

Britain's claim to be in Ireland to protect the democratic wishes of Ulster unionism is a feeble alibi. England's conquest of Ireland began centuries before the Ulster plantations. There was no Union, and there were no unionists when England's sword first cut its genocidal swathe through Ireland. Britain won no argument in Ireland. It achieved no legitimate mandate for its presence. In the words of Roger Casement, 'Conquest has no title.'

Just as unionists were awarded a veto on Irish unity in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act before the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks even began, there is a campaign to grant unionism a veto over the identity and symbols of a non-partitioned Ireland before it is even legislated for. The Plantation of Ulster was an act of ethnic cleansing intended to change the national character of Ireland. Some hope to use the descendants of these planters as allies in expanding that agenda by sabotaging the ethos and symbols of an All-Ireland polity in order to downplay and degrade any concept of civic unity based on republican principles.

It is increasingly suggested that the 26 Counties should re-join the British Commonwealth as a gesture of reconciliation toward unionists. That is a dangerous revisionist trap because London will portray this to the world as the Irish people acknowledging that there is, and has been for centuries, an essential Britishness about Ireland and those who struggled against it were on the wrong side of history. Far from breaking the connection with England, there are powerful and influential forces attempting to deconstruct the concept of Irish nationhood and lure the whole of Ireland more fully into a British orbit. In March of last year, Lord David Frost, a former British diplomat and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office, told a gathering in Lisbon that 'In time the Irish will be part of our British future'.

Republicans who remain loyal to the aims and objectives of the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 and ratified by the First Dáil in 1919 must be critical of the fundamental political premise fuelling the Good Friday Agreement. Those who extol the concept of a dis-united Ireland rooted in British/Irish identity politics are undermining republican principles by striving to ensure that differences that would become incidental in a genuine Republic remain fundamental in their 'Shared Island'.

Republicans are often asked, 'What's the alternative'? The alternative to the two nations Shared Island in the one nation Republic. The alternative to embracing differences in national allegiances for the sake of peace is to end those differences for the sake of peace.

Abraham Lincoln put this best while struggling to overcome divisions within his own Republic when he said:

…a house divided against itself cannot stand…I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

It has always been the republican position, and remains so, that crucial to beginning a genuine process of national reconciliation is ending British jurisdiction in Ireland; this includes Britain's entitlement to act on behalf of Ulster unionists in a future 32-County state.

Britain was awarded no right to represent Ulster unionists in the three Ulster counties incorporated into the Free State in 1922. Many of these unionists in Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal had signed the Ulster Covenant and were as loyal to the Crown in their day as their brethren a mile up the road in Fermanagh or Tyrone are today. Many still attend Orange Lodges and Orange marches. Yet, they are now equal and valued citizens of the Irish State and, since the Ireland Act 1949, have no claim to British citizenship or a British passport.

While no one suggests a British government withdrawal from the Six Counties would lead to a sudden unionist reappraisal of their identity, the fact remains the Union is existential to unionism. Within ten years of a British military and police evacuation from the 26 Counties, a unionist party no longer existed in the Free State. You cannot be a unionist without the Union, but, unfortunately, you can be a nationalist without the Republic.

Unionist fears about the potential for a 32 County state emerging from the Good Friday Agreement confirms for many nationalists that the political tide has to be moving in the right direction, so why, they ask, would Republicans criticise this process, and why else would unionists so strenuously object? Unfortunately, the sectarian zero-sum game that passes for politics in the Six Counties ensures that for many nationalists, the alarm raised among unionists obscures the hidden agenda of England's deep state strategists who have their own reasons for implementing and sustaining partition and their preconditions for ending it, that transcend the supremacist agenda of many loyalists.

Powerful forces in the British military, intelligence, and security establishments have no desire to undermine the political and territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. Ireland is an important strategic landmass on Britain's western flank. The North of Ireland affords rapid access to areas of the North Atlantic vital to British defence interests. Ireland has been rated as a place of vital strategic importance to Britain since Elizabethan times. It remains so.

Anyone who believes the British government will simply leave Ireland when the unionist population dwindles to an unsustainable level and close the door behind them is mistaken. The Brits play the long game and are working now, as they have been working for years, to shape the strategic environment and set the conditions for the constitutional future of an Ireland that will work to their benefit. London can live with a non-partitioned Ireland within the British Commonwealth and NATO. It will not tolerate a sovereign Republic immune to its influence. At the heart of the so-called Irish peace process lies the hidden agenda of a British war process.

In February of this year, Policy Exchange, the most influential Think-Tank in the United Kingdom, published a document called Closing the Back Door. This document, which is forwarded by two former UK Secretaries of State for Defence, states that:

…the UK quite obviously has a strategic interest in Northern Ireland by territorial definition, and per the contours of geopolitical rivalry…the interests of the island of Great Britain and the territories of Northern Ireland are indissolubly intertwined…Northern Irish and British strategic interests are one and the same…Northern Ireland is therefore the key to addressing the UK's security concerns…preserving the strategic unity of the Union is an inextricable component of British grand strategy. In doing so, the strategic indivisibility of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – which, despite subsequent interpretations, the Downing Street Declaration did enshrine – must be rediscovered.

The Brits see what they have always seen in Ireland. A geographical, material, and human resource to be exploited and one that must never be encouraged to become a cohesive democracy that could conceivably develop policies for the benefit of the Irish people that might potentially conflict with Britain's strategic interests.

A non-partitioned Ireland rooted in British/Irish identity politics can be neither united nor a genuine republic. That is why the British government is all over this. It is their best opportunity to retain maximum influence with a minimum footprint when the demographics eventually prove incontestable. No one has been preparing more diligently to shape the strategic architecture of a future 'Shared Island' than the British government.

When Tom Barry was asked why the people of West Cork supported the IRA, he replied, 'Because they knew we were right'. But he knew not everyone was with them. The evolution from colonial status to that of a sovereign republic is never straightforward and often tarnished by elements of civil war. There is always a percentage of the population that remains loyal to the old order and wants no part of independence. The Cork IRA executed 78 informers during the Tan War, and you can be sure far more than that escaped justice. There was no shortage of unionists in County Cork, both Catholic and Protestant.

The American loyalists who supported the British during the American Revolution didn't want an American republic. The Afrikaners didn't want a democratic South Africa. Zionist settlers don't want a Palestinian state. The French Pied Noir settlers didn't want an independent Algeria. The Southern Confederacy didn't want to let go of slavery. Ulster unionists don't want a national republic. Ideologies and political cultures based on imperial conquest and colonial expropriation are, in the words of James Connolly, 'crimes against human progress'. Sometimes, for humanity to progress, certain belief systems must be jettisoned and leave the historical stage. Unfortunately, under the present political dispensation, it is Irish republicanism that is being jettisoned and dumped on the trash heap of history.

A relentless campaign is being waged to encourage the Irish people to accept and legitimise a British political component as an essential ingredient of a 32 County Ireland. To inculcate in the Irish people a herd immunity against republican principles and replace it with the concept of an 'Agreed Ireland' where the differences carefully fostered by an alien government are preconditioned into future constitutional arrangements, and the Irish agree to it.

Tom Barry and his men did not join the Irish ‘Equality' Army or the Irish ‘Nationalist' Army, not the 'Agreed Ireland' Army, the 'New' Ireland Army, or the 'Shared Island' Army, but the Republican Army. They believed and had every right to expect that the term 'Republican' was not merely a notional aspiration but a resolute declaration of intent.

The courageous men who fought and died here, and those Cork men who fought at Toureen, Crossbarry, Rosscarbery, and countless other engagements against British Crown forces, were not fighting for Cork alone but for all of Ireland. It is just as important for us to remember that, and it is for us to remember them.

We remember with pride Volunteers Mick McCarthy, Jim O'Sullivan, and Pat Deasy, who were killed in action here as the result of a treacherous false surrender ruse by the Auxiliaries.

We remember the IRA volunteers from all the Cork Brigade areas who played a pivotal role in the struggle for freedom. The women of Cumann na mBan and the brave republican people of West Cork and beyond, without whose support the Irish Republican Army wouldn't have stood a chance.

Long live the memory of the Boys of Kilmichael! Long live the memory of what they fought for!

Up the Republic!

John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank.

Kilmichael Ambush Commemoration 🪶 24 November 2024

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Three Hundred And Ninety Eight

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)