Government ‘fears to speak of Easter Week’

No one, not the IRA, not Sinn Féin, not Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael, nor any party or organisation, owns or has a monopoly on the Rising or its legacy, writes Danny Morrison

Prison officers guard the coffins of 10 War of Independence Volunteers in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, including that of Kevin Barry.

But you can see from the reactions and opposition to the powerful re-enactment of O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral through the streets of Dublin last August that someone “fears to speak of Easter Week”, that someone is embarrassed about 1916 and all that.

And you can understand why Irish republicans would want to give due honour to those brave men and women who fought, if others lack the enthusiasm.

The Government’s very first foray into the commemoration was disgracefully to produce a video about 1916 which didn’t even mention the names of the signatories and those who were executed. That is a glaring but telling omission. It would like be talking about the Cuban Revolution and omitting the roles of Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. Or talking about the struggle against apartheid and omitting Nelson Mandela. But those GPO veterans who the Government did manage to include in the video were such strapping physical force republicans as Field Marshall Bono, General Bob Geldof, Queen Elizabeth, David Cameron, and the late Ian Paisley.

The Government also managed to turn the Proclamation into gibberish by using Google to translate it into Irish.

The Government is free to do its own thing in its own peculiar way, as are others. But what it most is an analysis and debate about why the Rising was the proper reaction to what was happening at that time. It fears — with some justification — the drawing of certain parallels.

For all its good intentions, the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) to understand imperialism and colonialism, that party’s flawed and damaging compromises, showed that its leaders were putty in the hands of the British.

It had played by the constitutional rules, had assiduously, peacefully and patiently for decades worked hard for Home Rule and its position had been overwhelmingly endorsed in nine successive general elections across the 32 counties of Ireland.

Unfortunately, the IPP swallowed everything it was told, and that included buying into the War, recruiting and sending 300,000 Irishmen to the trenches of France and Gallipoli who believed, naively, that by fighting, Ireland would get a better post-war deal.

In 1914 Redmond accepted the exclusion of four counties of Ulster, then in talks in 1916 Lloyd George got him to agree to include Tyrone and Fermanagh, bringing the number of excluded counties to six — allegedly, on a temporary basis during the emergency period of the war. However, in talks with Edward Carson Lloyd George assured the unionist leader that the exclusion of six counties was to be permanent.

But there were other Irishmen and women, like Pearse and Connolly and Markievicz, who had the measure of the British government, and who knew that once the war was over, Ireland’s sacrifices in the trenches would be forgotten.

They saw the necessity of striking out at Easter 1916 and staking a claim regarding the freedom of this small nation.

Even before the run-up to the centenary of the Rising we got a taste of the distaste to the honouring of our patriotic dead. Ten years ago at the re-interment of Kevin Barry and nine other IRA Volunteers in Glasnevin Cemetery, one Sunday newspaper asked, “Why could they not be exhumed and reburied in private?” The funerals, wrote another leading commentator, will offer “a great boost to those who want us to feel that the only difference between a terrorist and a patriot is the passage of time”.

So now we are getting to the crux of the matter: Whether there are any parallels between the aims, objectives and modus operandi of the IRA during the War of Independence, and the IRA’s armed campaign in the North from 1970 until the ceasefire.

To justify or to sympathise or, at the minimum, to understand 1916, is to justify, sympathise or, at the minimum, understand the IRA’s armed struggle in the North. It is inescapable, regardless of what sophistry is employed to argue otherwise.

But the IRA didn’t need that comparison to justify itself: Partition did that.

If 1916 was about the denial of freedom and British misrule in Ireland, the recent armed struggle in the North was about the denial of the same freedom and a more egregious form of British misrule in the form of partition with its “Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”. Where a prime minister could boast he wouldn’t have a Catholic about the place.

In Ireland’s major cities prior to 1916 there was, of course, extreme poverty and high unemployment. There had been two deaths in baton charges during the Dublin lockout in 1913, which preceded and helped define the radical nature of the Proclamation. There had been three deaths at the hands of the British army after the Irish Volunteers’ Howth gun-running incident in July 1914.

So what did northern nationalists suffer in comparison? Fifty years of humiliation; the physical persecution of any outward expression of their identity; discrimination in housing, employment and investment; its minority position entrenched; a people denied access to government or power to change government; more deaths than occurred in Dublin prior to the Rising, deaths at the hands of the RUC, B-Specials, loyalists, and the British army, long before the IRA reorganised and launched its armed struggle.

Debate around commemoration also exposes just how little successive Dublin governments have lived up to the principles enshrined in the Proclamation or pursued the cause of Irish independence and reunification. Celebrating 1916, triggers certain imperatives, including an examination of the malignity of British rule in Ireland, the divisions it caused between brothers and sisters, families, communities, political parties.

It is easier to repeatedly attack Sinn Féin, and internalise our problem, than it is to confront the British government on collusion, its agencies’ involvement in bombings and assassinations, including the killing of dozens in Dublin and Monaghan.

We have yet to achieve full independence; we are still undoing the damage which partition wrought on our people, nationalist and unionist, who from their respective positions paid heavily for this division and the political mistakes of the past. We have all hurt each other.

But we have, undeniably, come a long way. Peace has come “dropping slow”.

The state I live in is not the state I grew up in — it has been transformed. But it has not been transformed enough. We still have major problems socially, economically and politically, but none that we cannot redress through skill, good political leadership and patience.

If Sinn Féin and the DUP can share power in the North, given our bloody past, then isn’t it about time that Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour ‘cease-fired’ in the South, stopped using the Troubles as a substitute for political debate, and simply agreed to disagree about the legacy of 1916 whilst honouring the undoubted bravery of the men and women who fought at Easter Week?

Danny Morrison is former Sinn Féin publicity director and a former republican 

Lord Haw-Haw: The traitor executed for helping the Nazis

William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was a notorious broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the UK during World War II. His announcement 'Germany calling, Germany calling' was a familiar sound across the airwaves, introducing threats and misinformation which he broadcast from his Hamburg base.  Joyce was originally an American citizen and lived in Britain before becoming a naturalised German citizen in 1940. He was hanged in London on January 3 1946 for betraying Britain. In this article originally published in 2005, Selina Hastings reviewed Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale.

                       Lord Haw-Haw: The traitor executed for helping the Nazis

 It was Jonah Barrington in the Daily Express who coined the name "Lord Haw-Haw", by which William Joyce became known worldwide during his notorious broadcasts from Germany during the war. Designed to demoralise and depress, Joyce's nightly programme of propaganda, Germany Calling, was initially treated by the British as a huge joke.

It became immensely popular, welcomed as an hilarious alternative to the BBC's more sedate offerings, including a regular 10 dreary hours of Sandy Macpherson at the organ. By contrast, Joyce's electrifying speeches were considered premium entertainment, his voice, with that of Churchill, Hitler and the comedian Tommy Handley, quickly becoming the best known on radio, with more than nine million a day listening in. Naturally enough Dr Goebbels could hardly believe his luck, noting in his diary: "I tell the Führer about Lord Haw-Haw's success, which is really astonishing."

Joyce was given a big pay rise, promoted to Chief Commentator of the English Language Service and generally made a great fuss of at the Funkhaus (the equivalent of Broadcasting House) in Berlin. By the time the Phoney War had ended and the real war had begun, the British public, in an atmosphere of increasing paranoia, were no longer finding Lord Haw-Haw so funny. And because of a BBC policy in applying a time-lag to the reporting of news, Joyce was sometimes able to pull off a scoop – he was the first, for instance, to announce the resignation of Hore-Belisha as War Minister on January 5, 1940. This unnerved audiences at home and led to a series of widely-believed myths, favourite among them that Lord Haw-Haw regularly forecast Luftwaffe bombing targets and that he was uncannily well-informed as to which town-hall clocks were running slow.

As Nigel Farndale makes clear in his excellent biography, one of the ironies of Joyce's situation was that his career as a traitor directly resulted from the man' s fanatical patriotism. A passionate anti-communist, he believed that an alliance between Britain and Germany was the best protection against the Red Menace. "From my earliest days," he wrote, "I was taught to love England and her Empire. Patriotism was the highest virtue I knew." Furthermore, although Joyce was hanged as a traitor, there is a considerable doubt as to whether technically this judgment was legal: Joyce was an American, born in the United States of Irish parents, and during the war in Germany, where he was granted citizenship, his status was that of an alien outside the King's dominions, owing no allegiance, therefore, to the Crown.

But the turning point, or peripeteia, as Nigel Farndale describes it in terms of Greek tragedy, came before this, in 1933, when Joyce, having long been settled in England, falsely claimed British nationality in order to get a passport. As the author puts it, "Joyce had unwittingly signed his own death warrant. From this moment on, he was a condemned man." In this vivid and intelligent account the extraordinary complexities of Joyce's character are made clear: on the one hand the political extremist and maniacal demagogue, on the other the linguist and scholar with a passionate love of language (James Joyce was a distant cousin).

                        Lord Haw-Haw at a meeting of British fascists in Chiswick 

In private William Joyce was an amiable, amusing man of immense courage and conviction, like one of those slightly barmy schoolmasters with a crazy bee in his bonnet who is none the less a genius in the classroom. Having left America as a small boy, he spent his childhood in Ireland, came to England at 15, and was swept up by Sir Oswald Mosley into the British Union of Fascists. With war imminent he was threatened with internment, warned just in time by that mysterious, ambidextrous figure, Maxwell Knight, on whom Ian Fleming modelled James Bond's boss, "M".

On August 26, 1939, only a week before the outbreak of war, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret, left London openly for the German capital, one-way tickets in hand, luggage clearly labelled. "Berlin! That's a rum place to be going right now," their porter at Victoria Station chattily remarked. But nobody tried to stop them. Joyce's marriage to Margaret Cairns White, or "Lady Haw-Haw", as she became known, was turbulent in the extreme.

Politically at one with her husband and in Berlin a celebrity propagandist in her own right, Margaret was beautiful, sexy, compulsively unfaithful, and like Joyce regularly drank to excess. They had stupendous rows, even divorced once, but then remarried as neither could live without the other, she loving his jokes and looking up to him as a father-figure, he sexually enslaved by her.

In their letters, as a term of affection they referred to each other as sheep: "Yp -Baa!" Joyce would sign himself off; and after his eventual arrest, at night on the German-Danish border, Margaret was picked up wandering through the forest bleating for him like a lost ewe. Nigel Farndale shows both sympathy and understanding for his difficult subject. He is good, too, on the historical context, making admirable use of a daunting variety of sources. Particularly memorable is his portrait of the Joyces' Berlin: in the early days of the war the well-paid couple lived high on the hog, enjoying a ceaseless round of expensive restaurants and cocktail- and dinner-parties with their Funkhaus colleagues; by the end, in a city of smoking ruins and amid hordes of desperate refugees, they were facing starvation, and taking shelter where they could from the nightly bombing raids carried out by the RAF.

No wonder Wandsworth Prison proved a welcome contrast, with Joyce proving himself a model prisoner, liked and respected by warders and police. Despite the harrowing experience of being sentenced to death, Joyce never flinched, never showed fear, even at the arrival of the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint – who, as he pinioned the condemned man's arms behind his back, said reassuringly: "Follow me, sir, it'll be all right."

Selina Hastings

PN: William Joyce is buried at the New Cemetery in Galway City, Ireland

Photos Minute: Beyond the crossroads

Photos minute: Germany before the wars in 1900 and in colour

Photos Minute: What's all around us

Is it fair to point the finger at religion as primary cause of war?

Martin Luther King was a great apostle of non-violence. Picture: AP

‘Deus Vult” which can be translated as “God wills it” or “God willing” was the phrase used by Pope Urban II to launch the First Crusade in 1095.

It was a response to a cry for help from Eastern Orthodox Christians who were suffering Muslim invasion and conquest. The bloodiness that came later in the Crusades and is used to this day as a whip to beat the Church often overlooks the cause which places Christendom as a defender of justice rather than aggressor.

That is not to say that Christians through history were not at times instigators of bloodshed but any examples that may be cited of people of religious belief fighting one another or others on religious grounds does not offer any basis whatsoever for claiming that violence is linked to religion rather than simply to human nature.

It is a claim without any foundation whatsoever and shows an astounding ignorance of both history and religion.

Human nature is one with violence in the way that nature is one with rapine. The tenets of the Christian faith direct us to not alone conquer the urge to violence but to make friends with our enemies.

The message of Christ, heralded as “the prince of peace”, is one of peace to the point of turning the other cheek. His teaching is anticipated in the Old Testament in images such as swords being turned into ploughshares and the wolf lying down with the lamb.

Through the scriptures, there is of course a recognition of the nature of humankind in a fallen world and again and again we have stories of strife and struggle, wars and holocausts.

The biblical call to justice, reconciliation and peace speaks to the violence in the heart of humankind. Violence is the context of the message of peace. Otherwise, it would not have been necessary.

It is very demonstrable from the pages of recent history that most violence comes from those who are without religious belief or hostile to the very idea. In the 20th century, the greatest violence was perpetrated by avowed atheists.

Millions died under the Stalinist regime in the endless wastes of the Gulag. In China, during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, 45m died. Hitler, whose religion was social Darwinism, said that Christianity was opposed to the natural law of selection and survival of the fittest: it was that philosophy that brought six long years of violence on the world in which millions perished.

Adolf Hitler

The Cold War between the Communist East and the Capitalist West, which came perilously close to a nuclear inferno in 1963 with the Cuban missile crisis, had nothing to do with religion.

Elsewhere in the world in the latter half of the 20th century ethnic conflicts, the worst of which occurred between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and the dirty wars of state repression and persecution in several South American countries, arose from clash of ideologies and interests and not from any religious cause.

To claim that there is some inherent link between religion and violence is more absurd than claiming a link between a particular nationality and violence, or a particular political ideology and violence.

It would be much easier to mount a case for a link between British people and violence given their colonial history and the fact that they appear as players in most of the great wars of history as well as generating a fair amount of home grown, bloody wars and battles too.

Something similar might be said of Germans or Americans US or Russians. Easiest of all, however, is to establish a link between violence and the ideological, institutional atheism of the 20th century.

It may be argued from the same pages of history that religion has led many people to actively promote peace in places of conflict.

Christians do not of course have any monopoly in this and one has only to think of Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu who was the great apostle of non-violence in the early 20th century.

A notable Christian example is the great Martin Luther King, the leader of the American civil rights campaign of the 1960s. The collapse of the Iron Curtin during the early 1990s through a series of “velvet revolutions” was in no small way helped by the peaceful, diplomatic exertions of another great religious figure, Pope John Paul II.

Yes, you can point to violence in the pages of the Bible. In fact when there was only one family in the narrative with only two sons, one of them Cain, murdered the other, Abel. That was not promoting violence: It was acknowledging its reality.

However, as the biblical narrative moves along down the generations the idea of reconciliation is gradually developed. A later family of brothers sell their father’s favourite, Joseph, into slavery but are forgiven by him many years later when their fortunes are reversed.

With the entry of Jesus into the history of Israel, an overwhelming emphasis is placed on peace and forgiveness. He tells Peter that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

And, can anything be more radically anti-violence than turning the other cheek to your assailant? It is a trope rather than a literal instruction but it makes the point. When Christians engage in violence and there is no denying that they do, it is not because of their faith but despite it.

Yes, there has been violence based on religious difference and yes and there have been religious wars but in the tapestry of human conflict they are very far from being the dominant strands.

In the context of Islamist terrorism, the religion of those involved is without doubt a large part of their motivation. Can they find justification in the pages of the Koran? It is disputed but it is certainly possible to find passages there that are equivocal in their denunciation of violence.

The same might be said for selected passages of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures but they must be read against the call to mercy and forgiveness which is the base doctrine of the Christian faith.

Nobody can dispute that Islamist violence, with its manic barbarity and disregard for any life — including the lives of their own adherents — is as horrific as any manifestation of violence the world has ever seen.

It does not offer a basis, however, for concluding religion of its nature tends to violence. The tendency is in human nature. The Christian faith — and perhaps others too — offer a remedy.

The remedy cannot be said to have failed where it has not been applied.

Margaret Hickey

Sending your child to the school of choice via a baptism cert

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin. Picture: Niall Carson/PA

Dr Martin told a gathering that he had an issue with parents who baptised their children in order to gain entry to a Catholic school. There have been numerous reports in recent years of parents who are not practicing Catholics doing just that.

“Baptising children simply to be able to attend a specific school is an abuse of baptism,” he told a schools’ mass at St Mary’s Pro Cathedral in Dublin.

He has a point. Baptism is a sacrament of the Church. Engaging in it with a hidden agenda is certainly an abuse. Yet the archbishop might well have asked another question of those who would act in such a matter. Who could blame them?

It’s not a matter of abusing the sacrament to get into a specific school, but of doing so in some cases to get into any school at all. The Catholic Church enjoys patronage of more than 90% of primary schools in a State where practice of the religion is down around 30%.

Take an example of a large town or city suburb that has, say five local schools, four of which are under the patronage of the church. The non-Catholic parent is faced with the scenario of confining their chances to getting a place in the fifth school. Everybody wants to send their children to the “best” school available and if that happens to be one of the Catholic schools in the above scenario, our non-Catholic parent is guaranteed to see their child miss out.

In rural areas, the absence of a baptismal cert puts the child at the bottom of a waiting list. That’s how things go in a patronage system that is 30 to 50 years out of date.

I have respect for those who practice their religion, and particular respect for Diarmuid Martin, a lonely progressive voice in the Church. Yet I would advise any parent to have their child baptised in the interests of education. This may well be an abuse, but what do you expect in a system whereby a Catholic education is the default setting of the primary school system.

That’s just one of a number of crazy outcomes that exist in a patronage system that is dysfunctional. Dr Martin touched on another in that particular talk — the matter of teaching religion.

“Teachers who do not believe should not feel compelled to teach religious education or faith formation,” he said.

“Those who do not believe — who may very well be men and women of great personal integrity and goodness — are in any case not the ones who can transmit what faith means.” Again, he is spot on. But put yourself in the shoes of a young teacher applying for a job. You appear before an interview panel, which may or may not include the priest who is a member of the board of management. Are you prepared to teach religion and faith formation, which are basic tenets of our ethos?

Of course you are because if you say you’re not you can be damn sure the next applicant will nod vigorously at the question, ensuring that he or she has a better chance of landing the job. The reality is that any teacher who really wants the job will swear blind that they’d be only too happy to teach religion.

In a survey by the INTO two years ago, teachers were asked whether they “willingly taught religion”. Only 49.17% responded in the affirmative.

So at least half of the teachers in Catholic schools don’t even believe what they are imparting. Diarmuid Martin is of the opinion that they should not feel compelled to teach religion, but in the real world no teacher is going to stand on such a matter of principle unless he or she is entirely secure in their employment, and have no ambitions for career advancement.

These are features of the dysfunctional patronage system. The Church controls the schools, but at what cost to the tenets of the religion, and does anybody in the hierarchy, apart from Dr Martin, care about these things? Or is the imperative to retain as much societal power as possible through the status quo.

In 2011, then Education minister Rúairí Quinn set up the Forum for Patronage and Pluralism to provide a roadmap for, among other things, how the Church should divest itself from some of the schools. Despite the best efforts of those involved, little has changed. Two schools have been handed over by the church, out of around 2,900.

The stock defence from the hierarchy is that it can only act with the consent of parents; and parents want to stick with having their children educated under a Catholic ethos.

But what is that ethos? Certainly, some parents, most likely a minority, have strong views on having their children raised in the faith. There are also those cultural Catholics who want to see their offspring go through the sacraments, as they themselves did.

One attraction of the Catholic school for some of that cohort is that they can subcontract out the religion business to the school. They don’t have to involve themselves with that stuff. It gets taken care of in school, just like maths and PE.

For these people, a change of school might force them to involve themselves in preparing for the sacraments, or, God forbid, organising it outside of school hours, as is done under patronages such as Educate Together. Some would consider having to involved themselves in the inculcation of religions as an imposition.

Apart from any of that, one might well ask what exactly consists of a Catholic ethos in education these days.

In a recent contribution on Today FM’s The Last Word, the theologian Vincent Twomey pointed to a culture of “inclusion” as evidenced by how immigrants have been integrated into Catholic schools in this country.

Another “expert” in this area, Dr Niall Coll, touched on a similar theme in The Irish Times recently. He concluded that the ethos was “a vision of education as essentially a humanising endeavour characterised by love, home and social justice, forming young people who will serve the world with their gifts.”

Both these gents may well be learned men but they appear to be making the basic mistake of confusing religion with morality. Their respective characterisations of a Catholic ethos could easily be applied to the ethos of any educator anywhere in this country and beyond. In fact, the inference that the virtues mentioned apply to a Catholic ethos only is downright insulting to all other educators.

That’s the problem when a system is dysfunctional. The air tends to thicken with accusations of abuse and the dispensing of casual insults.

But enough of all that at this time of joy and goodwill. Happy Christmas and keep an eye out for those who are lonely at this time of year.

Michael Clifford