This is an eulogy I had the honour of delivering in Bellaghy this evening at the graveside of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey.

It is an honour for any republican to stand here today at the resting place of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey. It is a deep honour for me to be that particular republican. It is also an honour that we would rather not have to claim, wishing instead that a different outcome had led to us being in the pub or at a game of football with either of the two people we stand here paying tribute to. Yet we must be philosophical rather than sentimental, take a deep breath and accept things as they are. That was the approach to life adopted by Dominic and Mary McGlinchey.

I never had the opportunity to meet Mary, although her reputation had preceded her and so I was aware of her republican standing long before she came to the type or prominence that led to her being placed in the soil where we stand. For all of Dominic’s fearsome reputation, a colleague of both said ‘but Mary really frightened me.’ He said it in that humorous way that while facetious on the surface was designed to convey a sense of awe and respect for her military prowess as a republican activist. She was as committed to armed republican engagement with British state repression as her husband.  A relative of mine once told me about attending a Cliftonville match in the 1980s during which a section of the crowd taunted the RUC with the chant ‘Dominic McGlinchey.’ Perhaps had they included Mary in their chant Solitude Football ground might have been a peeler-free zone.

So was Dominic fearsome and did he deserve the reputation he got? He certainly did not merit the label Mad Dog as if he was some rabid carrier of a deadly republican virus that society must be inoculated against and he in turn quarantined. But that is the media for you. Cuddly Cat McGlinchey just wouldn’t have sensationalised the headline sufficiently to sell enough newspapers. And so he became a mad dog.

Truth to be told, in military terms his bite was harsher than his bark. And many a member of the British security establishment met their end because of Dominic’s application of military force. But we are not here to gloat or wax triumphal over martial successes, operational strikes or glorify death whether sustained by enemies or our own. Republicans know the savagery of war and conflict and the pain endured when a loved one or close friend is killed. It is a horror we should neither want for ourselves nor wish on our opponents.

Another truth to be told is that his bark was very mild. That is probably what leapt out at me the first time I met him in the H Blocks in early 1985. I had known and been friends with his brother Sean who would never have won a part in the John Ford classic The Quiet Man. Paul, another brother and, incidentally, the longest serving blanket prisoner in the history of the IRA/INLA campaign, seemed pretty reserved so there was no way of knowing how Dominic would swing.

When our paths finally crossed his quietude amazed me. Soft spoken, laid back, wickedly and tersely funny if the need arose, this was one of those republicans who cast a shadow more resembling Rodin the thinker than Sean O’Casey’s Gunman. An erudite and clearly well read man, his intellectual horizon did not stop at the edges of the island of Ireland. He could discuss a wider range of issues from abroad. Nicaragua, South Africa, Palestine were not areas of ignorance to him. In the time I spent with him he proved an intensely contemplative man, a republican activist equipped with a politically nuanced mind who spoke in terms of political trajectories while readily discerning strategic subtlety.

There was an intellectual promiscuity to Dominic. He was not married to one single struggle or idea. A social radical he, like Mary, hailed from conservative rural families, yet both ended up embracing progressive Left ideas and were only too ready to loudly proclaim, not merely whisper, that they were socialists.

This was the very man whose face in unprecedented fashion had been thrust onto the television screens in 1977 alongside Ian Milne and Frank Hughes as being the most wanted men in the country. Frank, a fighting comrade-in-arms of Dominic lies in this very cemetery. Ian, another comrade back in the day, has moved on to do other things with his life.

At the time when these most wanted images appeared Brendan Hughes made a comment to me while we chatted at the wire which separated Cage 11 from the soccer pitch. It was the one time we could talk in private without having to shout across a gap between the separate cages that housed us.  He suggested that the three men were the future leadership of the IRA and that the Brits wanted badly to remove them from the scene.  Clearly Brendan was not alone in understanding this. Within a year all three had been captured and were in prisons North and South.

Dominic was also one of those people who clearly survived for so long because he remembered the tricks of the trade. He knew how to survive using the field craft of the guerrilla fighter. There is also the view that he survived much longer than he otherwise would have largely because of his wife Mary. Dominic was never slow to flag up the influence that his wife had on him. Once during those endless jail conversations that help punch in the hours, we talked about love and relationships. His description of love was ‘compatibility.’ And he explained how he was compatible in every way with his wife. And so his love for her was as deep as hers for him was great. And in that compatible togetherness that they shared they rest here, so similar in life and poignantly similar in death.

Over a number of years I have spoken to those who knew the couple and referred to them sitting in a house with no food yet refusing to dip into the republican funds in the same dwelling to buy any. There is a revealing anecdote that highlights this point. It is important to relate it because in today’s climate some people observing republicanism seem to think a swearing-in ceremony involves making an oath over a Euro note rather than the national flag.

The day before Dominic’s capture in March 1984, his children were playing upstairs in the house where they were billeted. Kids doing what they will they pulled out two suitcases from under the bed. The first one was filled with weapons, Uzi sub machine guns and the like. The second was packed with banknotes to the point that the children found it difficult to zip the case closed again. One of the children confronted his father telling him it seemed wrong for him and his sibling to be wearing the same pair of track bottoms day in day out when there was a suitcase packed with cash in the house. The response was as terse as it was selfless. ‘Son, that money belongs to the army.’

Stories like this that flag up the frugality of Dominic McGlinchey and his wife abound.

In many of those places where Dominic and Mary were known, there is a gushing of admiration for them. And there is an abiding memory of the couple’s children. I can never think about this couple without also thinking about what their children endured. A year before Mary’s own death at the young age of 31, the couple lost a baby daughter to a tragic illness.  The two remaining sons were being bathed by their mother when her killers arrived. She did not plead for her life but asked not to be slain in the presence of her kids. One of the children was with his father when he too, not yet 40, drew his last breath. Their experience can only be described as horrendous. Few of us have come close to even peering into the abyss that those children were hurled into and hurtled through. Today is as much about them as it is their parents.

When I commented to a leading member of the republican jai staff how strong an impression Dominic had made on me he bristled. The response was frosty. I stood in this graveyard in 1994 and heard Dominic’s close friend Bernadette McAliskey say that home is somewhere that you are always let into when you rap the door. I knew after my jail conversation with the jail leader that the H-Blocks would not be a place where Dominic would ever feel at home. He was viewed as a rival source of authority that would need to be undermined in some way. It saddened me greatly that republicanism was so intolerant, so unforgiving of people like Dominic whose transgression amounted to having a different view which he vented in Portlaoise Prison: a view that his comrade Danny McErlean had been subjected to a serious injustice when the IRA leadership ordered him executed. Republicanism for too long lacked alternative voices, relying as it did on the leadership promoted cult of the personality. Dominic was no worshipper of political personalities. There was something of the iconoclast about him that did not feed into the already inflated myths that ‘great leaders’ liked to hold about themselves.  

Fortunately for Dominic he did not stay around the blocks long enough for any whispering campaign to make itself felt, managing to overturn his life sentence on appeal, and making the government of Garret Fitzgerald look daft for the indecent haste with which it had rushed him over the border into the arms of the tender and merciful RUC back in March 1984. Now it was the turn of the RUC to play handover and Dominic duly made his way back to Fitzgerald, so eager to have got rid of him in the first place yet unable to say no in this bizarre game of extradition ping-pong.

Now the RUC, that paragon of vice, had a visceral hatred of the McGlincheys which seems not to have abated even to the present day. With a bit of rouge on its face to tart up the appearance, on Christmas Eve it invaded the home of Dominic’s brother Paul and forced the family to undergo a violent experience. That the longest serving blanket prisoner of the republican struggle in the supposed new dispensation has to put up with that conveys in one image just how far short of republican goals the campaign against the British ultimately pulled up.

Because Dominic and Mary McGlinchey have been either credited or blamed with inflicting so much damage on the RUC a few words are required by way of context just in case anyone, certainly none at this graveside today, think that Dominic and Mary constituted some sort of Bonnie & Clyde type partnership that ruthlessly preyed with murderous intent on solid dependable decent citizens in uniform who daily upheld the law in the face of rampant criminality. It has been said of a former leading Belfast republican that he would know a dozen ways in which to militarily kill a person but not one political reason why he should. Let that not be said of Dominic or Mary McGlinchey. What they did they knew why. They knew when to start and perhaps more importantly knew when to stop.

The force that waded into the struggle to suppress republicanism with sleeves rolled up included the police criminal Bill Mooney and his gang of torturers in Castlereagh. At the very same moment that Dominic’s face was becoming public property the faceless men of the RUC were plying their trade out of sight. No photos of Bill Mooney were made available. Mooney was a wanted man ok, wanted by the British to torture but not for torture.

Mooney’s detectives even went on strike once. But don’t allow ourselves to think this was a radicalisation of the coppers, that some new hybrid revolutionary red peeler had emerged from a mythical magical garden without the slightest hint of an evolutionary past, poised to storm the corridors of power and deliver social justice. They resorted to the strike tactic because MI5 had been secretly recording their torture of suspects in the interrogation rooms of Castlereagh. They felt compromised and so took industrial action to be allowed to torture free from observation. Novel indeed, but not the sort of demand the working class movement would usually consider sticking at the top of the agenda when considering a strike.

It is this type of activity, this type of police force, that threw Dominic and Mary McGlinchey into battle with the British state. The British police in the North betrayed their own societal vocation to civic policing and opted to be an instrument of political repression. And with the greatest of audacity they labelled as Mad Dog someone who gave them a bloody nose.

This is one of the issues that goes to the nub of the apology discourse currently in vogue, at the heart of which sits a political pen still eager to rewrite history.  Its core demand, masked of course in the language of the humanitarian, is for a political rather than a human apology. The victors in this conflict are demanding of the vanquished that we acknowledge their narrative and legitimise their stance while simultaneously hollowing out our own perspective and denuding it of any legitimacy. 

There should be no problem with a humane, forward looking, contemplative republicanism that is genuinely sorry for the past, offering a human expression of regret for having being hauled down the path that it did. But it can never be a mea culpa. It can only be a nostra culpa. Not I, a republican, apologise but we, a political society of combatants, are sorry for the hurt our engagement in armed conflict caused.  If republicanism alone apologises, republicanism alone will be blamed. And to do that would be to mask the hideous truth beneath this conflict, and to deny the role of the British state which claimed the people of the North were its citizens and then set about them with homicidal viciousness. If the state will not desist from murdering those it claims are its citizens what chance of others refraining?  An undifferentiated political apology would be tantamount to a lie about the past.

A human apology? By all means. But to make the type of political apology some are looking is on a par with a slave kneeling down to kiss its chains. It would be to denigrate the sacrifice of the communities, the hunger strikers, the volunteers, the tortured, the victims of shoot to kill and collusion. It would also be to elevate the violence of the British state which in the case of every country it has stuck its boot into suddenly seemed to have a criminal population explosion. And it would create the pretence that unionism was the law abiding community while nationalists were the terrorist community. Unionism was the political community that supported illegality and state repression. But like a doctor who can easily and literally bury his mistakes, political unionism and the British political class wants the power to bury its role and label its republican opponents with the tag ‘unmitigated aggressor’. It wants to defile through having the power to define.

Republicanism should have no fear of discussing with victims of whatever hue its role in visiting harm and grief. It should, while proud of its volunteers and activists, be humble when addressing the concerns of victims. It should respond positively and politely to the queries for justice and truth recovery. But when the British political class and political unionism come along and demand that republicans make a political apology for, say, having attacked the murderous Parachute Regiment at Narrowwater in 1979, we should forego the false language of polite society and respond in the language of the streets: 'Go fuck yourself'. That is something we must never ever say to the families of those who died in that attack because we can never deny their grief or loss.  But it must be said to the political establishment so that it may not deny its responsibility and its role in helping to create the war that consumed so many lives.

Do not be fooled that there is any truth and reconciliation process at work here. There is nothing of the sort. Truth is being used for recrimination not reconciliation. What is being concealed within the apology discourse is a weapon strategically honed to exonerate the British state/political unionism and deeply implicate republicanism in the causal conditions of the war this society has emerged from. We have no right to falsify or distort accuracy. We have no right as a matter of short term political expediency to portray the actions of the British state and political unionism as benign. What next? Are we to come to the graves of Frank Hughes and Tom McElwee in this very cemetery and apologise for them having died on hunger strike?

So, what legacy do we leave here today with? In my view what stood out about these people was that they were heavily political. Whatever the rigours of the military campaign it was never an end in itself, a mere keeping alive of the flame if it had no potential to cause a conflagration to consume British repression in Ireland. 

When we depart from here this evening we shall be leaving not the graves of two criminals, but the final resting place of two Irish republican political activists who through circumstances not created by them took up arms to confront the armed repression of the British state. In terms of republican responsibility for the conflict this was not ourselves alone. If as republicans we manage to achieve nothing else we must strive to protect the one fundamental truth which is this: the couple we honour here today were armed opponents of a malign, brutal power.

Eulogy in Bellaghy

This is an eulogy I had the honour of delivering in Bellaghy this evening at the graveside of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey.

It is an honour for any republican to stand here today at the resting place of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey. It is a deep honour for me to be that particular republican. It is also an honour that we would rather not have to claim, wishing instead that a different outcome had led to us being in the pub or at a game of football with either of the two people we stand here paying tribute to. Yet we must be philosophical rather than sentimental, take a deep breath and accept things as they are. That was the approach to life adopted by Dominic and Mary McGlinchey.

I never had the opportunity to meet Mary, although her reputation had preceded her and so I was aware of her republican standing long before she came to the type or prominence that led to her being placed in the soil where we stand. For all of Dominic’s fearsome reputation, a colleague of both said ‘but Mary really frightened me.’ He said it in that humorous way that while facetious on the surface was designed to convey a sense of awe and respect for her military prowess as a republican activist. She was as committed to armed republican engagement with British state repression as her husband.  A relative of mine once told me about attending a Cliftonville match in the 1980s during which a section of the crowd taunted the RUC with the chant ‘Dominic McGlinchey.’ Perhaps had they included Mary in their chant Solitude Football ground might have been a peeler-free zone.

So was Dominic fearsome and did he deserve the reputation he got? He certainly did not merit the label Mad Dog as if he was some rabid carrier of a deadly republican virus that society must be inoculated against and he in turn quarantined. But that is the media for you. Cuddly Cat McGlinchey just wouldn’t have sensationalised the headline sufficiently to sell enough newspapers. And so he became a mad dog.

Truth to be told, in military terms his bite was harsher than his bark. And many a member of the British security establishment met their end because of Dominic’s application of military force. But we are not here to gloat or wax triumphal over martial successes, operational strikes or glorify death whether sustained by enemies or our own. Republicans know the savagery of war and conflict and the pain endured when a loved one or close friend is killed. It is a horror we should neither want for ourselves nor wish on our opponents.

Another truth to be told is that his bark was very mild. That is probably what leapt out at me the first time I met him in the H Blocks in early 1985. I had known and been friends with his brother Sean who would never have won a part in the John Ford classic The Quiet Man. Paul, another brother and, incidentally, the longest serving blanket prisoner in the history of the IRA/INLA campaign, seemed pretty reserved so there was no way of knowing how Dominic would swing.

When our paths finally crossed his quietude amazed me. Soft spoken, laid back, wickedly and tersely funny if the need arose, this was one of those republicans who cast a shadow more resembling Rodin the thinker than Sean O’Casey’s Gunman. An erudite and clearly well read man, his intellectual horizon did not stop at the edges of the island of Ireland. He could discuss a wider range of issues from abroad. Nicaragua, South Africa, Palestine were not areas of ignorance to him. In the time I spent with him he proved an intensely contemplative man, a republican activist equipped with a politically nuanced mind who spoke in terms of political trajectories while readily discerning strategic subtlety.

There was an intellectual promiscuity to Dominic. He was not married to one single struggle or idea. A social radical he, like Mary, hailed from conservative rural families, yet both ended up embracing progressive Left ideas and were only too ready to loudly proclaim, not merely whisper, that they were socialists.

This was the very man whose face in unprecedented fashion had been thrust onto the television screens in 1977 alongside Ian Milne and Frank Hughes as being the most wanted men in the country. Frank, a fighting comrade-in-arms of Dominic lies in this very cemetery. Ian, another comrade back in the day, has moved on to do other things with his life.

At the time when these most wanted images appeared Brendan Hughes made a comment to me while we chatted at the wire which separated Cage 11 from the soccer pitch. It was the one time we could talk in private without having to shout across a gap between the separate cages that housed us.  He suggested that the three men were the future leadership of the IRA and that the Brits wanted badly to remove them from the scene.  Clearly Brendan was not alone in understanding this. Within a year all three had been captured and were in prisons North and South.

Dominic was also one of those people who clearly survived for so long because he remembered the tricks of the trade. He knew how to survive using the field craft of the guerrilla fighter. There is also the view that he survived much longer than he otherwise would have largely because of his wife Mary. Dominic was never slow to flag up the influence that his wife had on him. Once during those endless jail conversations that help punch in the hours, we talked about love and relationships. His description of love was ‘compatibility.’ And he explained how he was compatible in every way with his wife. And so his love for her was as deep as hers for him was great. And in that compatible togetherness that they shared they rest here, so similar in life and poignantly similar in death.

Over a number of years I have spoken to those who knew the couple and referred to them sitting in a house with no food yet refusing to dip into the republican funds in the same dwelling to buy any. There is a revealing anecdote that highlights this point. It is important to relate it because in today’s climate some people observing republicanism seem to think a swearing-in ceremony involves making an oath over a Euro note rather than the national flag.

The day before Dominic’s capture in March 1984, his children were playing upstairs in the house where they were billeted. Kids doing what they will they pulled out two suitcases from under the bed. The first one was filled with weapons, Uzi sub machine guns and the like. The second was packed with banknotes to the point that the children found it difficult to zip the case closed again. One of the children confronted his father telling him it seemed wrong for him and his sibling to be wearing the same pair of track bottoms day in day out when there was a suitcase packed with cash in the house. The response was as terse as it was selfless. ‘Son, that money belongs to the army.’

Stories like this that flag up the frugality of Dominic McGlinchey and his wife abound.

In many of those places where Dominic and Mary were known, there is a gushing of admiration for them. And there is an abiding memory of the couple’s children. I can never think about this couple without also thinking about what their children endured. A year before Mary’s own death at the young age of 31, the couple lost a baby daughter to a tragic illness.  The two remaining sons were being bathed by their mother when her killers arrived. She did not plead for her life but asked not to be slain in the presence of her kids. One of the children was with his father when he too, not yet 40, drew his last breath. Their experience can only be described as horrendous. Few of us have come close to even peering into the abyss that those children were hurled into and hurtled through. Today is as much about them as it is their parents.

When I commented to a leading member of the republican jai staff how strong an impression Dominic had made on me he bristled. The response was frosty. I stood in this graveyard in 1994 and heard Dominic’s close friend Bernadette McAliskey say that home is somewhere that you are always let into when you rap the door. I knew after my jail conversation with the jail leader that the H-Blocks would not be a place where Dominic would ever feel at home. He was viewed as a rival source of authority that would need to be undermined in some way. It saddened me greatly that republicanism was so intolerant, so unforgiving of people like Dominic whose transgression amounted to having a different view which he vented in Portlaoise Prison: a view that his comrade Danny McErlean had been subjected to a serious injustice when the IRA leadership ordered him executed. Republicanism for too long lacked alternative voices, relying as it did on the leadership promoted cult of the personality. Dominic was no worshipper of political personalities. There was something of the iconoclast about him that did not feed into the already inflated myths that ‘great leaders’ liked to hold about themselves.  

Fortunately for Dominic he did not stay around the blocks long enough for any whispering campaign to make itself felt, managing to overturn his life sentence on appeal, and making the government of Garret Fitzgerald look daft for the indecent haste with which it had rushed him over the border into the arms of the tender and merciful RUC back in March 1984. Now it was the turn of the RUC to play handover and Dominic duly made his way back to Fitzgerald, so eager to have got rid of him in the first place yet unable to say no in this bizarre game of extradition ping-pong.

Now the RUC, that paragon of vice, had a visceral hatred of the McGlincheys which seems not to have abated even to the present day. With a bit of rouge on its face to tart up the appearance, on Christmas Eve it invaded the home of Dominic’s brother Paul and forced the family to undergo a violent experience. That the longest serving blanket prisoner of the republican struggle in the supposed new dispensation has to put up with that conveys in one image just how far short of republican goals the campaign against the British ultimately pulled up.

Because Dominic and Mary McGlinchey have been either credited or blamed with inflicting so much damage on the RUC a few words are required by way of context just in case anyone, certainly none at this graveside today, think that Dominic and Mary constituted some sort of Bonnie & Clyde type partnership that ruthlessly preyed with murderous intent on solid dependable decent citizens in uniform who daily upheld the law in the face of rampant criminality. It has been said of a former leading Belfast republican that he would know a dozen ways in which to militarily kill a person but not one political reason why he should. Let that not be said of Dominic or Mary McGlinchey. What they did they knew why. They knew when to start and perhaps more importantly knew when to stop.

The force that waded into the struggle to suppress republicanism with sleeves rolled up included the police criminal Bill Mooney and his gang of torturers in Castlereagh. At the very same moment that Dominic’s face was becoming public property the faceless men of the RUC were plying their trade out of sight. No photos of Bill Mooney were made available. Mooney was a wanted man ok, wanted by the British to torture but not for torture.

Mooney’s detectives even went on strike once. But don’t allow ourselves to think this was a radicalisation of the coppers, that some new hybrid revolutionary red peeler had emerged from a mythical magical garden without the slightest hint of an evolutionary past, poised to storm the corridors of power and deliver social justice. They resorted to the strike tactic because MI5 had been secretly recording their torture of suspects in the interrogation rooms of Castlereagh. They felt compromised and so took industrial action to be allowed to torture free from observation. Novel indeed, but not the sort of demand the working class movement would usually consider sticking at the top of the agenda when considering a strike.

It is this type of activity, this type of police force, that threw Dominic and Mary McGlinchey into battle with the British state. The British police in the North betrayed their own societal vocation to civic policing and opted to be an instrument of political repression. And with the greatest of audacity they labelled as Mad Dog someone who gave them a bloody nose.

This is one of the issues that goes to the nub of the apology discourse currently in vogue, at the heart of which sits a political pen still eager to rewrite history.  Its core demand, masked of course in the language of the humanitarian, is for a political rather than a human apology. The victors in this conflict are demanding of the vanquished that we acknowledge their narrative and legitimise their stance while simultaneously hollowing out our own perspective and denuding it of any legitimacy. 

There should be no problem with a humane, forward looking, contemplative republicanism that is genuinely sorry for the past, offering a human expression of regret for having being hauled down the path that it did. But it can never be a mea culpa. It can only be a nostra culpa. Not I, a republican, apologise but we, a political society of combatants, are sorry for the hurt our engagement in armed conflict caused.  If republicanism alone apologises, republicanism alone will be blamed. And to do that would be to mask the hideous truth beneath this conflict, and to deny the role of the British state which claimed the people of the North were its citizens and then set about them with homicidal viciousness. If the state will not desist from murdering those it claims are its citizens what chance of others refraining?  An undifferentiated political apology would be tantamount to a lie about the past.

A human apology? By all means. But to make the type of political apology some are looking is on a par with a slave kneeling down to kiss its chains. It would be to denigrate the sacrifice of the communities, the hunger strikers, the volunteers, the tortured, the victims of shoot to kill and collusion. It would also be to elevate the violence of the British state which in the case of every country it has stuck its boot into suddenly seemed to have a criminal population explosion. And it would create the pretence that unionism was the law abiding community while nationalists were the terrorist community. Unionism was the political community that supported illegality and state repression. But like a doctor who can easily and literally bury his mistakes, political unionism and the British political class wants the power to bury its role and label its republican opponents with the tag ‘unmitigated aggressor’. It wants to defile through having the power to define.

Republicanism should have no fear of discussing with victims of whatever hue its role in visiting harm and grief. It should, while proud of its volunteers and activists, be humble when addressing the concerns of victims. It should respond positively and politely to the queries for justice and truth recovery. But when the British political class and political unionism come along and demand that republicans make a political apology for, say, having attacked the murderous Parachute Regiment at Narrowwater in 1979, we should forego the false language of polite society and respond in the language of the streets: 'Go fuck yourself'. That is something we must never ever say to the families of those who died in that attack because we can never deny their grief or loss.  But it must be said to the political establishment so that it may not deny its responsibility and its role in helping to create the war that consumed so many lives.

Do not be fooled that there is any truth and reconciliation process at work here. There is nothing of the sort. Truth is being used for recrimination not reconciliation. What is being concealed within the apology discourse is a weapon strategically honed to exonerate the British state/political unionism and deeply implicate republicanism in the causal conditions of the war this society has emerged from. We have no right to falsify or distort accuracy. We have no right as a matter of short term political expediency to portray the actions of the British state and political unionism as benign. What next? Are we to come to the graves of Frank Hughes and Tom McElwee in this very cemetery and apologise for them having died on hunger strike?

So, what legacy do we leave here today with? In my view what stood out about these people was that they were heavily political. Whatever the rigours of the military campaign it was never an end in itself, a mere keeping alive of the flame if it had no potential to cause a conflagration to consume British repression in Ireland. 

When we depart from here this evening we shall be leaving not the graves of two criminals, but the final resting place of two Irish republican political activists who through circumstances not created by them took up arms to confront the armed repression of the British state. In terms of republican responsibility for the conflict this was not ourselves alone. If as republicans we manage to achieve nothing else we must strive to protect the one fundamental truth which is this: the couple we honour here today were armed opponents of a malign, brutal power.

17 comments:

  1. Really enjoyed reading that. Excellent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. After all these years there remains such a sadness around their deaths.
    Mary's murder was brutal in the extreme, as was Dominics some years later.
    I agree with Larry it was nice to read this excellent piece and remember them especially on an Easter Sunday.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Excellent tribute Anthony.

    Also I felt humbled reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What happened to Mary and Dominic was facilitated in no small part by the media at the time pandering to the RUC an the full force of the state apperatuse functioning together to dehumanise political opponents. It's an example of the potency of this combined influence. It is still at work today. Just try getting airtime in opposition to the piss-process.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Excellent piece a very fair and balanced view of the lives of two people who for no other reason than to be born into a sectarian state were discrimination
    was rampant against the nationalist and republican people, decided to fight back the only way they knew how, I may not agree with their tactics but I most certainly understand why they did
    What they may or may not have been labelled, they were still a young Irish family who were surrounded by trouble but still managed to bring up two children. While their victims will not forgive them, the human story of the two boys and what they endured would break down most barriers the victims could relate too

    ReplyDelete
  6. I am glad you mentioned the revisionism of the Troubles. This is mainly being done by people who disingenuously claim they are saying these things to prevent the re-writing of history.

    It is a pity they do this as not only do the falsehoods and outlandish propaganda-style exaggerations undermine their own position but it will revise history to the extent that it may be misunderstood. You cannot learn from a false premise.

    Kenneth Bloomfield was reported in the News Letter earlier this month as saying "I welcome recognition of the IRA’s campaign against border Protestants/unionists, which was ethnic cleansing." Many Unionist politicians have made such comparisons before. Firstly, it not only takes away from the severity and horror of actual ethnic cleansing but makes a mockery of places like Rwanda and the Balkans by the trite comparison. The definition of ethnic cleansing doesn't meet the circumstances for numerous reasons. The main reason is that the IRA killed Catholics along the border too including those in the Security Forces. The scale, geography, intent, methodology etc. also don't meet the definition of "ethnic cleansing". I don't know what aspect of the IRA campaign does.

    It's like Ian Paisley Jnr calling IRA arms "weapons of mass destruction". Both "ethnic cleansing" and "weapons of mass destruction" sound plausible as phrases but fall down under scrutiny and comparisons with the proper definitions. It's like the response to the Conflict Transformation Centre at Long Kesh- the warnings of a "shrine". I don't think anybody intends to turn it into a place of worship.

    There were many attempts to dehumanise Dominic McGlinchy. The same reasons and motivations are behind the attempts to revise history.

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  7. AM-

    Good picture in the Irish news of Christ looking down on your good self-[page 9]good write up also-not a word on the NUJ carry on-bit late for the Irish News to stay quiet on that subject-

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  8. Michaelhenry,

    took an eye like your own to notice! What would have been said by John McGirr had the statue toppled over on top of me?

    Whether the Irish News stays quiet or not, it makes no difference. I will not be quiet.

    Thanks to everyone who commented on this piece.

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  9. Mackers,
    Missed that. Very observation of Michaelhenry!

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  10. This is something I've been pondering over for a long time. I can understand that a lot of Irish republicans were brought up to some degree as Catholics..But my problem is why do Irish republicans use the movable date of Easter to commerate their fallen comrades instead of for example the closet Sunday to April 24th...

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  11. Great Piece Mackers as usual...

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  12. Frankie,

    the symbolism associated with the Easter Rising.

    Thanks Dixie

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  13. Mackers,
    Not to take away or deflect from the relevance or sincerity of the event but you do look kind of Saintly!

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  14. Just home a cara and have just read your excellent eulogy,I,m sure the two young lads,now young men will be well pleased with the humanity of your address,Dominic and Mary were inspirational as revolutionaries,and it seems feared every bit as much in death as in life,they have left a legacy in two very fine sons,whom I sincerely hope find some comfort in the high regard their parents are held within this community to this day while those who pulled the triggers have faded into oblivion where they belong .

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  15. Very moving and poignant Mackers....I don't attend any of those Easter events and haven't done so for many, many years as I can't be bothered with the 'our event is the real event' syndrome especially when I see those who are running around full of self-importance on such occassions actually sacrificed very little or have a lot of doubt over their loyalty...sickening to be honest...but this was one event that would have been worh attending...

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