Sinn Féin need not apologise

If you want to link violence with politics in Ireland. Look no further than the Wikipedia timeline on the Irish civil war. I would imagine some people will be very surprised by the scale of the conflict.

It was a full scale military battle between the pro -treaty and anti-treaty forces. Its history is not widely spoken of in Ireland. Or is it taught in any great detail in our schools. The reason of course is that it doesn’t suit the powers that be, to inform the citizens how their political parties began life.

The years 1921-23 were turbulent years in a state just celebrating a form of independence. But as in many similar conflicts around the world what shames our current political masters? It isn’t the fact that we had a civil war where one side collaborated with our former colonists to seize power or on the republican side it isn’t that they fought for a thirty two county republic and lost. No! The shame is in the detail. The war degenerated from a military engagement into a campaign of dirty war. Where men were summarily executed in revenge for the actions of others and where barbaric torture took place. Also human rights were continually violated on both sides. Yet it was the Free State government that held all the aces in both infrastructure, financial and military support. It appears that the people were divided but because there was no clear ethnic differences, we avoided the genocide of civilians’ so rampant elsewhere.

From this dreadful and cruel conflict came our modern heroes FF & FG. They have between them almost exclusively run the state since 1923. After the civil war the pragmatic De-Valera re-entered main stream politics and with many of the socialist and leftist thinkers having been executed during the conflict it was the centrist republicans that he mainly represented. Life went on. Ireland was in the grip of the Catholic Church, who had threatened to excommunicate republican Catholics during the civil war. Yet they remained strangely ambivalent to the needless and often spiteful executions.

So the state moved on. The country was in the main economically poor. The Ireland created after the civil war was a very unequal one. In the 50’s people like Seán Lemass bought into a new economic ideology. This was the budding neoliberalism that was born in the USA. Ireland took this road of dependency. Inviting mainly American companies to come here and enjoy low taxes. This was done at the expense of us developing our own ingenious industry, and then developing our natural resources for our citizens.

We saw the results immediately an upturn in economic growth. Improved life styles for the middle-classes. However the poor remained poor. Ireland dubious prosperity was on a roll. The 60’s brought us all new hope. In 1969 the first man stepped on the moon. But the joy was rained on somewhat by events in Northern Ireland. Irish citizens were attacked and burned out of their homes. In scenes not unlike our civil war houses blazed. Sectarian death squads roamed the streets and the police force were 99% from one community. A new civil war had started in Northern Ireland.

The Fianna Fail government had many choices to make. They could go to the United Nations. They could request their economic allies in Great Britain to solve the crises.
When thousands of refugees fled across our border they could have intervened militarily to protect our citizens. But they didn’t. So the IRA rose from the ashes and they did protect their community. Their political wing Sinn Féin were also prominent in defending their people.

What followed was over 30 years of frustration. War, atrocities on all sides. Like in all wars innocent people bare the brunt of it. Young people executed often for sectarian reasons. Car bombs, gun attacks. Knee capping! Hunger strikes, interrogation, torture humiliation. Politics clouded with fear and tainted with old school pragmatism.

Our FF & FG sat back and watched. Their main aim was to appease the British. They colluded to have the conflict referred to as the troubles. Could you imagine anyone referring to the Irish Civil war as the troubles? But the real damage was done when along with middle Ireland they colluded in the labelling of those people defending Irish citizens as terrorists.

This resulted in section 31 of the broadcasting act. Its main function was to steal from the struggle any sense of ideology, and replace it with one motivation criminality and gangsterism. Now there is no denying that in time paramilitaries’ were infiltrated by some criminal elements. But there were banks robbed to finance the anti-treaty side in the early 20’s also.

It concerns me that Sinn Fein spend so much time defending their position on the war in Northern Ireland. They speak apologetically about reconciliation and moving forward. They might be better quoting back the atrocities and the murder that took place here in the early 20’s. It was on a much grander scale than anything witnessed in the terrible Northern Ireland war. They should ask the FG or FF hack to explain these dreadful deeds and ask how they ever got into constitutional politics. The same questions should be thrown back at journalists and analysis’s made by people like Vincent Browne. War is evil it kills people. Moving on at least adds some meaning to their existence and their deaths.