There was one fellow in particular whom I should mention, given what he started away back in 1169. Dermot MacMurrough was the King Of Leinster at that time, then he found himself being the deposed King of Leinster. So Dermot asked the Anglo-Norman King Henry 11 to help him get his kingdom back and in return he would pledge his loyalty to Henry and promised land to the Normans. Henry 11 sent over a chap called Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, the Earl of Pembroke, with an army at his rear and before you could say 800 years of British Rule In Ireland Dermot had his kingdom back and Strongbow married his daughter Aoife.
King Dermot died a mere two years later in 1171 and Strongbow became King of Leinster. The Anglo-Normans, being the Anglo-Normans, decided that while they were here, they might as well just invade the rest of Ireland.
The Irish continued to resist the English, in the decades and centuries that followed. They achieved a number of victories but at other times their rebellions were brutally put down. Defeated Irish Chieftains would be pardoned in exchange for promising loyalty to The English Crown.
Some things never change.
One famous prisoner to emerge from these rebellions was Hugh Roe O’Donnell who was only 16, in 1587, when the English lured himself and two friends to a ship berthed in Lough Swilly close to Rathmullan in County Donegal, then known by it’s Gaelic name, Tír Chonaill, and carried them off as prisoners to Dublin Castle where the young prince was held hostage. He made two escape attempts, one in 1590, but he was recaptured. The second attempt occurred a year later on Christmas Day 1591, when he and two brothers, Henry and Art O’Neill managed to escape by crawling through the castle sewers. They made their way through a blizzard hoping to reach the O’Bryne stronghold in County Wicklow. Art O’Neill died from exposure just as a rescue party found them. Hugh Roe and Henry O’Neill suffered severe frostbite but were safely returned to Ulster.
As the English occupied more and more territory in Ireland the young Hugh Roe O’Donnell joined forces with Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, then known by it’s Gaelic name, Tír Eoghain, and they led the Gaelic clans in a rebellion known as The Nine Years' War, which took place from 1593 to 1603. The Irish won numerous victories against the English forces in Ireland, such as the Battle of Clontibret (1595) and the Battle of the Yellow Ford (1598). But the English won a pivotal victory against the alliance and their Spanish allies in the Siege of Kinsale (1602). Many of the defeated northern lords left Ireland to seek support for a new uprising, in what came to be known as the Flight of the Earls (1607), but they would not return to Ireland.
This marked the end of Gaelic Ireland and created the groundwork for the foundation of the Plantation of Ulster.
The Plantation of Ulster was something the Irish people have in common with the Palestinian People. After the Six-Day War in 1967 Israel had captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and began to build the first of many settlements. They forced thousands of Palestinians off their land, demolished their homes and encouraged their own people to colonise the stolen land by offering them financial incentives and cheaper homes. The objective was to secure a Jewish majority in key strategic regions of the West Bank. Today over 600,000 Israeli colonialists live on stolen Palestinian land.
Likewise The Plantation of Ulster was the name given to a project by the English monarchy to colonise the northern province of Ireland with Protestant settlers from England and Scotland, known as Planters. To be able to do this the Gaelic Irish lords were driven from their lands, which were then granted to the Planters. The intention was that the native Irish would be removed from lands in Ulster set aside for Planters, who would all be English speaking and Protestant.
Cultural Genocide is another tactic which has been used by colonialists such as Britain. The purpose of which was to bring the native population to it’s knees by the destruction of their culture, language, religion, and national identity. Cultural genocide has long been associated with imperialism and with settler-colonialism. It is particularly associated with forced religious conversion and with forced assimilation policies, including child removal and the outlawing of cultural expression. One of the more widely known examples of cultural genocide was the use of it against the Native American people by the European settlers. They seen these proud people as savages who needed to be civilised.
The British were no different here in Ireland, likewise the Gaelic speaking Irish were seen by them as savages who had to stripped of a culture and indeed a language which predated their own by over a thousand years. The English implemented policies to anglicise the Irish population and effectively outlaw anything which gave them self-identity. Place names were also anglicised. For example from as far back as AD 75 this city, Derry, was known as Doire Calgach (Calgach’s Oakgrove) Calgach was believed to been a Gaelic chieftain. Then it was renamed Doire Colmcille after Saint Colmcille who founded a monastic settlement here in 546 AD. The name was in later years anglicised and became Derry. Then in 1613, during the Plantation of Ulster, the prefix London was added by the English King James 1 when he granted it a royal charter.
Something else we have in common with the Palestinian people is the Irish Holocaust (1845-1850) erroneously referred to as The Irish Famine or The Great Hunger. The rural Irish population at the time lived in cabins that seldom kept out the weather and they grew potatoes on a tiny plot of land connected to these cabins. They still had to pay rent to the English landlords, many of whom didn’t even live in Ireland. When the potato crops failed in 1845 they lost their only means of subsistence. Failure to pay the rent meant eviction and as a result many died of hunger out in the open countryside or along the roads they travelled in search of food. But there had been no famine in the ordinary sense of that word. It was genocide perpetrated by more than half of Britain's army (67 regiments of its 130 regiments in total). They removed, at gunpoint, Ireland's abundant meats, livestock, and food crops to the ports for export; thus starving the people. As a result one million Irish men, women and children died from hunger and disease. The Irish Holocaust also caused mass migration, as about 1.5 million people fled the country, mostly to north America. This mass migration, which continued throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, triggered a permanent demographic decline in the Irish population, which fell from about 8 million in 1840 to about 4 million in 1900. It also dealt a fatal blow to the Irish language, spoken by up to half the population before the Holocaust but only 15% by 1900. This of course was what the British intended.
The Times Newspaper in England carried a letter to the editor on 23rd August 1895 which perfectly summed up the attitude of the English in regard to the Irish. 'Soon a Catholic Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian upon the shores of Manhattan.'
I chose these two periods in the history of our country, The Plantation of Ulster and The Irish Holocaust because of their remarkable resemblance to the recent history of the Palestinian people.
There is of course a lot more to the history of Irish revolutionary opposition to the British conquest of our country. The 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence 1919 to 1921 and the subsequent Partition of Ireland which saw the Unionists retain six of the nine Ulster counties the English had taken from the Gaelic Irish and presented to their ancestors the English and Scottish Planters. A state forged in sectarianism and anti-Catholicism came into existence they called Northern Ireland.
The first prime minister of this state, James Craig, called it ‘a Protestant state and parliament for a Protestant people.’
The Belfast Pogrom was a terror campaign lasting 20 months from 1920 until 1922. It was unleashed against Catholics in the greater Belfast area to ‘teach them a lesson’, and to silence all opposition to the establishment of a Northern Ireland state. The pogrom involved large-scale expulsions of Catholics from their workplaces and from districts where they were a small minority, and violent attacks on isolated Catholic populations. Hundreds of innocent men, women and children were killed by loyalist murder gangs, many of whom were members of the temporary police force known as the Specials. Belfast Catholics were left traumatised and terrified by the scale of the murderous brutality brought down upon their heads. All carried out with tacit approval from on high.
In the 1960s, a new generation of politically and socially conscious young Catholic nationalists started looking to the Civil Rights Movement in America as a model for ending what they saw as brazen anti-Catholic discrimination in this part of their country. They took to the streets in peaceful protest and the reaction of the Unionist government in Stormont was the use of violence in the form of the RUC, (the so called police force) The B Specials, (the RUC reserve) and Unionist thugs.
It came to a head on August 12th 1969 when the Unionist Apprentice Boys came to Derry, which was predominately Catholic, for an annual parade which was little more than a hate fest, a reminder to the people living in the city that they could do what they want and parade their hatred wherever they wanted to. The RUC, B Specials and the Unionist thugs attempted to invade the Bogside and were beaten back by the people of the city led by Bernadette Devlin and Eamon McCann. The Battle of the Bogside lasted for three days during which the ordinary gable wall of a terraced house was transformed into a symbol of resistance in the face of oppression. Eamon McCann provided the words that would become the most famous graffiti in the world. He had been inspired by a placard he had seen on TV during the American Civil Rights protests. The wording on that placard, ‘You Are Now Entering Free Berkley’ became ‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry.’ A local lad who had come across a tin of paint, Liam Hillen, put those words on the gable wall but they were little more than a scrawl. Another local lad, Caker Casey, came along some time later and improved on them.
The Bogsiders eventually drove the forces of Unionism back in defeat, but they were soon replaced by the British Army. The Provisional IRA came into existence and waged a guerrilla war against the might of the British Empire. In response the Unionist and British governments introduced Internment Without Trial on 9th August 1971. Anyone deemed to be Republican or subversive in any way were rounded up in violent raids on Catholic areas. Around 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. During one of those raids in Belfast’s Ballymurphy housing estate, the notorious Parachute Regiment murdered 11 innocent people over the course of two days. One of the victims was a Catholic priest who had been giving aid to a wounded civilian. This would come to be known as the Ballymurphy Massacre.
During the Internment raids 14 men were chosen for 'special treatment' - which was in fact torture - and were taken to a secret interrogation centre. The men were forced to wear hoods and were thrown from low-flying helicopters while hooded. They didn’t realise that they close to the ground. These 14 men became commonly known as the 'Hooded Men'. On top of brutal beatings and death threats, the men were then subjected to what would become known as the five techniques which had been authorised at a high level. Michael Donnelly from here in Derry was one of these men.
On a sunny afternoon on January 30th 1972 around 15,000 people gathered together in Derry’s Creggan housing estate to take part in an anti-internment march to the Bogside. Before the days end 13 men and boys lay dead, murdered by the same Parachute Regiment which was responsible for the Ballymurphy Massacre. One man would die a few months later which brought the number of dead to 14. Seventeen others were wounded.
By 1974 the conditions in Long Kesh concentration camp got so bad that the prisoners rose up and burned the camp, including the huts they were living in. In response the British military dropped toxic gas from helicopters on the helpless prisoners and sent in troops to beat them and to attack them with dogs. Michael Donnelly was in the camp at this time.
The British Government decided to end Special Category Status, which was effectively the recognition of Republicans convicted in the courts as political prisoners. in other words, prisoners of war. This status had been achieved in May 1972 after a 35-day hunger strike by IRA prisoners in Crumlin Road Gaol. The British Labour Government announced that those convicted after 1st March 1976 would be denied Special Category Status. This meant that they would be regarded as criminals.
The Blanket Protest began in September 1976 when IRA prisoner Kieran Nugent refused to wear the prison uniform of a common criminal.
Others quickly followed him and the number of men on the protest gradually grew. I joined the protest after being sentenced to twelve years imprisonment on June 15th 1977, a week before my 20th birthday. I would remain on it until it ended on October 3rd 1981. During that time I had the honour of sharing a cell with Big Tom McElwee in 1978 and Bobby Sands in 1979. As the years of protesting dragged on things got increasingly worse in regards to beatings etc. Eventually the protest escalated to such an extent that we were living in our own excrement.
The escalation in the protest merely gave the authorities another weapon with which to attack us. This came in the form of brutal wing shifts and forced washings; a living nightmare. Throughout the protest men were gradually leaving: being unable to endure what had been a hellish existence. No one can judge anyone in this situation unless you lived through it and those of us who did could fully understand why they left.
Brendan Hughes and Bobby Sands knew that things were getting bad and that morale was dipping alarmingly. A change of tactics was even proposed in which we would go into the system and wreck it from within. This was rejected because of the prison clothing aspect. We simply could not wear the convict's uniform. There was only one other alternative, the Hunger Strike. Leading up to this the men who had left were encouraged to return to the protest and many did.
The first of two hunger strikes, which was led by Brendan Hughes, ended in December 1980 without achieving anything. Bobby Sands began to lay plans for the start of a second hunger strike on the same night it ended. He began the second hunger strike by going on it first with the other hunger strikers following him at staggered intervals which made his death inevitable. During this hunger strike Bobby won the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election, while down South shock-waves had been sent through the system with the election victories of hunger striker Kieran Doherty and Blanket Man Paddy Agnew, as well as a few other Blanket Men coming close to taking seats. After that the world could no longer be fed the lie that we were criminals.
After 66 days on hunger strike, Bobby Sands died on May 5th 1981. One hundred thousand people attended his funeral in Belfast. As the months passed nine more brave men followed him to his grave. The hunger strike came to an end on October 3rd.
Three days later on October 6th British Secretary of State, James Prior announced that he would be introducing three of the Five Demands, which been the aim of the Hunger Strike. The most important being the right to wear our own clothes at all times.
Forty three years after those dark days and nights of the hunger strikes we are still no closer to achieving what Bobby Sands, his nine comrades and many other brave men and women died fighting for.
And Ireland is most certainly not in a far better place.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
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