I have never known such Anglophobia but I do know it will end badly –
Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Independent
Last week, I looked up my grandfather Pat Harris’s application for a military pension in records recently released – but any pride I felt has long since departed, leaving only a sense of waste and foreboding.
The sense of waste comes from his later impoverished life due to his IRA service, and the equally impoverished country that came after the Civil War, when we exchanged a relatively tolerant society for clerical repression.
The foreboding comes from the stream of anti-British sewage that surges every day through both mainstream and social media under cover of Brexit.
In my longish lifetime, I have never known such Anglophobia but I do know it will end badly.
We are sowing dragon’s teeth by dwelling obsessively on relatively few crimes by British forces which were a far cry from the savage repressions common in other European conflicts.
But as the great ballad, Dark Horse on the Wind reminds us, when you sow dragon’s teeth “the warriors spring from the earth to maim and kill their own”.
The latest and sickest suggestion – in mainstream and social media – is that because Earl Mountbatten might have been a paedophile this mitigates the IRA’s murders of innocents at Mullaghmore.
Maybe Mountbatten had such predilections, but the evidence that he acted on them by actually abusing boys is flimsy compared with the firm evidence that convicted Liam Adams, brother of Gerry Adams.
Between the Centenaries and Brexit, those who should have been our moral guardians – historians and journalists – in helping us get to grips with the legacy of the War of Independence, either stood aside or poured petrol on the flames of retrospective hatred.
Three influencers either incited or surfed on the wave of anti-British feeling that followed Brexit.
First, the army of Sinn Féin trolls who smash into silence anyone trying to remind us of our own crimes against humanity.
Second, The Irish Times, which for over four years pumped out posh anti-Brexit polemics which gave bourgeois nationalists permission to Brit-bash and even vote Sinn Féin.
Last week, belatedly recognising our rising Anglophobia, it shamelessly published a piece titled: ‘Brexit has emboldened casual anti-Englishness among the Irish.’
Finally, RTÉ’s non-stop stream of nationalist necrophilia, with no balancing programmes such as Spotlight on the Troubles and Cops on the Frontline.
RTÉ’s latest offering, Bloody Sunday, 1920, was one of the better documentaries and tried to deal with the two sets of killings that day. But it did not hammer home two things.
First, Michael Collins’s much-vaunted operation barely dented British intelligence in Dublin for the simple reason that only seven of the 15 killed were intelligence officers.
The rest of the victims comprised two ordinary courts martial officers, one RIC, two Auxiliaries and three innocent civilians who deserve remembrance.
Patrick Joseph McCormack, in Ireland to buy horses, was from a prominent Castlebar family. Leonard Wilde was a former monk, and Thomas Smith of Morehampton Road a Protestant landlord.
Second, the film failed to probe the morality of a botched operation that still incites retrospective tribal gloating in Sinn Féin and nationalist circles.
For years, Vinny Byrne’s cackling face cheerfully reassured potential recruits to the Recurring IRA how justified and how easy it was to “plug” helpless men.
Does it not bother us that the Provos used Byrne and Bloody Sunday to justify the most brutal murders in Northern Ireland?
But it is Michael Collins himself who must bear moral responsibility for what, in half the cases, was cold-blooded murder.
Far from the clinical Collins precision of folklore, the attempt to wipe out British intelligence was a sloppy operation, with names (and wrong addresses) being added on the morning of the killings.
Seán Russell helped Collins plan the killings. Later, as IRA chief of staff, Russell launched a campaign of bombings in England which murdered five civilians, and died in 1940 on a Nazi submarine off the west coast of Ireland.
When I mention Michael Collins’s moral responsibility, I am also thinking of the Squad’s youngest killer, Charlie Dalton, who was 16 when Collins recruited him.
Dalton had just turned 17 when he helped to shoot two British officers, Dowling and Montgomery, on Bloody Sunday.
Charlie Dalton was marked for life by what he did that day. In 1922, as a senior Free State officer, he helped murder three innocent Fianna boys near the Red Cow.
What happened that day in Croke Park, in response to Collins’s earlier killings, was an atrocity. But a whole country is mourning “our” dead while Collins’s victims are treated as collateral damage.
But we lose our humanity if we turn others into abstract figures who can be blown away as casually as in Natural Born Killers.
Planning Michael Collins, the director Neil Jordan in his diary for June 20, 1993, wrote about the IRA violence of Bloody Sunday. “Find a way to make it gripping not nauseating.” But it would have been better for our sense of morality if Jordan had shown how nauseating some of the murders were.
To hold our humanity we need to put a face on “our” IRA victims and not look away as they die.
So let me put a face on Captain WF Newberry, a court martial officer, shot in front of his wife in Lower Pembroke Street.
Captain Newberry was not an intelligence officer. Few intelligence officers go on duty with a pregnant wife sleeping beside them.
Bill Stapleton, who shot him, recalled without regret: “He was in his pyjamas, and as he was attempting to escape by the window he was shot a number of times. The man’s wife was standing in the corner of the room and was in a terrified and hysterical condition.”
But he is evasive about the desperate bloody details. He and Joe Leonard fired through the inner bedroom door which the hunted couple had blockaded. They wounded Newberry who ran for the window where they shot him repeatedly.
His corpse hung out the window. His wife could only throw a coat over his body.
But the greatest tragedy was that Captain Newberry was already married in England: his “wife” turned out to be a woman who was pregnant with his child.
Traumatised, for three weeks she seemed to hear the laughter of Stapleton and Leonard as they washed her husband’s blood off at a sink. She died as nameless as her stillborn child.
To this day, researchers don’t know her name. But she was most likely Irish.
Finally, I see the Abbey Theatre and the GAA are marking “our” Bloody Sunday by commissioning 14 writers to write short monologues remembering “our” Croke Park victims.
By not including some victims of the IRA the Abbey retreated from the redemptive power of art to show us the face of the other.
It would have been more cathartic if some of Collins’s victims were brought to life. More dramatic, too – Patrick McCormack and Wilde lived lives that were racy enough to give some humour. And the nameless ‘Mrs Newberry’ is the stuff of Greek tragedy.”
Courtesy The Sunday Independent – November 22 2020
Cartoon by Jim Cogan
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