Comments - Bruton: Commemorations Reveal What We Believe Today - The Wild Geese2024-03-28T20:28:38Zhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/comment/feed?attachedTo=6442157%3ABlogPost%3A187701&xn_auth=noMe thinks that Bruton should…tag:thewildgeese.irish,2016-04-06:6442157:Comment:1887082016-04-06T20:11:56.733ZThat's Just How It Washttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/MaryThorpe
<p>Me thinks that Bruton should read his history books again,,, not only were thousands of Irish men killed for during the 1st and 2nd World Wars Britain but the also signed up for the Boar War.. And to add insult to injury in all of this,,, many , many thousands of Irish people were in mud huts ... living in squalor.. living on the street living from day to day , hand to mouth as my Grandmother would have said. I think Bruton should be ashamed to have written that book at all,,, the…</p>
<p>Me thinks that Bruton should read his history books again,,, not only were thousands of Irish men killed for during the 1st and 2nd World Wars Britain but the also signed up for the Boar War.. And to add insult to injury in all of this,,, many , many thousands of Irish people were in mud huts ... living in squalor.. living on the street living from day to day , hand to mouth as my Grandmother would have said. I think Bruton should be ashamed to have written that book at all,,, the 1916 Easter Rising took place on the backs of the Dublin Lock out 1913 .. and the Wexford lock out of 1911...</p>
<p>Then going back further than any of that , there was the Famines,,, all caused by the British ,,, the greedy Landlords etc...</p>
<p>Hang you head in shame Bruton </p>
<p>Well said above Kieron Punch above </p> It would appear that Bruton,…tag:thewildgeese.irish,2016-04-05:6442157:Comment:1885392016-04-05T21:30:28.870ZKieron Punchhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/KieronPunch
<p>It would appear that Bruton, or 'John Unionist' as Albert Reynolds accurately labelled him, had help writing this speech by Eoghan Harris, Kevin Myers, Ruth Dudley Edwards or one of the other revisionist apologists for British misrule in Ireland.</p>
<p>How strange that Bruton should condemn Pearse and the other 1916 leaders for causing the deaths that occurred during the Rising, particularly the deaths of fellow Irish people, while he himself worships at the church of John Redmond as Prime…</p>
<p>It would appear that Bruton, or 'John Unionist' as Albert Reynolds accurately labelled him, had help writing this speech by Eoghan Harris, Kevin Myers, Ruth Dudley Edwards or one of the other revisionist apologists for British misrule in Ireland.</p>
<p>How strange that Bruton should condemn Pearse and the other 1916 leaders for causing the deaths that occurred during the Rising, particularly the deaths of fellow Irish people, while he himself worships at the church of John Redmond as Prime Minister Bruton had a picture of Redmond above his desk). Bruton conveniently forgets that it was Redmond who urged tens of thousands of Irishmen to sacrifice their lives fighting an imperial war for the largest empire the world had ever known. Bruton condemns Pearse and his comrades for having no mandate for rebellion but was the Irish public consulted before Redmond committed them to Britain's war? For that matter, was the British public given a choice about whether, or not, they embarked upon war with Germany. Even if the British public had voted on the subject it should be remembered that the vast majority of the men who wound up fighting in the trenches were still denied the vote - no women, of course, would have the vote for several years.</p>
<p>Bruton must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel if he had to quote P.S.O'Hegarty to support his argument. Bruton states that O'Hegarty's opinion was that of one of those who made the decision to initiate military action in 1916. That is a lie. O'Hegarty has no involvement in the planning of the Rising and was working in Britain in the postal service in April 1916, where he remained until 1918.<br/>O'Hegarty, who was a man most of his colleagues found obnoxious and impossible to work with, wote those comments in 1924 at at time when he was serving as Secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs under the Free State government. He was an ardent supporter and apologist for the Free Staters, so of course he would deplore and deprecate the militarism of the Republicans who had fought against his side in the recent civil war and who claimed to be the upholders of the principles of Pearse and the other militant 1916 leaders.<br/>O'Hegarty was no pacifist, democrat as Bruton would have us believe. One of his first actions in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was to cut the pay of his workforce, suppress their union (with miltary backing), fire many members of staff and only remploy those who accepted that they would lose their pensions. He supported the Free State government when they sent military detachments to suppress workers' co-operatives and workers councils. His comment, from the above quote, that, "we placed gunmen, mostly half educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas" merely shows his contempt for the rural poor and urban working class who formed the majority of the Irish nation and who had born the brunt of the fight against British oppresion.<br/>Bruton says that 100 years after the Rising, Irish people should read and remember O'Hegarty's words. He is right, we should remember what sort of man O'Hegarty was from his words and what Bruton's support of this man's words says about him. Here are some of O'Hegarty's gems:<br/>(Speaking of the Irish people who filled the ranks of Sinn Fein) "When it swept the country, it swept into itself a great deal of bad material, drunkards and crooks and morally unsuitable people of all sorts...With the vanishing of reason and principle and morality we became a mob, and a mob we remained."</p>
<p><br/>(Speaking of Irish women) "They were the first to be thrown off their base, and, as the war lengthened, they steadily deteriorated. They took to their hearts every catch-cry and every narrowness and bitterness, and steadily eliminated from themselves every womanly feeling."<br/>"In the worst phases of the war, Dublin was full of hysterical women, living on excitement, enjoying themselves in the thought of ambushes and stunts..."<br/>"War, and the things which war breeds - intolerance, swagger, hardness, unwomanliness - captured the women, turned them into unlovely, destructive-minded, and begetters of violence, both physical and mental violence."<br/>"Cumann na mBhan concentrated itself of making twenty thousand first-aid outfits - <strong>contemplating with enthusiasm twenty thousand approaching casualties</strong> - and on learning to shoot."<br/>"In the whole period of war, both the 'Tan' war and the civil war, the women were the implacable and irrational supporters of death and destruction. They never understood the political situation and they never tried to understand it...the women jumped to conclusions without any considerations whatever, save their emotions, and once having done so, never afterwards looked facts in the face or attempted a re-examination of the situation. Their influence, even in the 'Tan' war, was not good, but in the civil war it was wholly bad."</p>
<p>(Speaking of his former comrades now in the 'Irregular' IRA) "The Irregulars drove patriotism and honesty and morality out of Ireland. They fouled all the wells which had kept us clean, and made the task of saving Ireland tenfold harder than it had been. They made people ask themselves whether Ireland was worth saving..."</p>
<p>(Speaking of the Opposition to the Free Staters in the Dail) "It has no more thought for the good of the country as a whole, no more notion of real patriotism, than have the mass of the people themselves."</p>
<p>(Speaking of the morailty of the Irish people) "There has been a grave increase in sexual immorality, and a general abandonment to levity and dissipation. Jazz dancing, the motions and postures of which are ugly and ungainly, and vary between suggestiveness and indecency, has swept Ireland like a prairie fire. Bazaars, fetes, dances, crowd each other out, and amusements and dissipation of all sorts flourish...The atmosphere of materialism and dissipation which we are developing is cinsistant neither with fine thinking, fine living, nor fine accomplishment." (Anyone who has seen the film "Jimmy's Hall" will recognise in these comments, and thos below, the fascist views that dominated Irish life in the decades after the Free State victory in the civil war)<br/>"We mus go get back to simplicity and strenuousness. Jazz dancing, joy rides, fetes, and bazaars have never built a civilisation, and never will build one. They lead only to fatty degeneration of the morals, of the character; to inefficiency and extinction. We may go out in a blaze of light, and music, and garishness, as Babylon went out, but unless we produce something other than a crze for idleness and amusement, we certainly shall go out. There is more in life than amusement, and as a people we must find that out, We must rediscover work and rediscover honesty. We must rediscover the Duties of Man, and bury the illusory Rights of Man..."</p>
<p>And Mr Bruton, while it is tragic that some members of the DMP and RIC were killed in cold blood during the Rising, lets also remember the people beaten to death by DMP thugs during the Dublin Lockout only 3 years before the Rising<br/><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/57440481?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/57440481?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a>or the hundreds of thousands of Irish people evicted by these lackeys of the British Empire<br/><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/57440446?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/57440446?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></p> 'Bruton wrong to claim Irelan…tag:thewildgeese.irish,2016-04-04:6442157:Comment:1885222016-04-04T13:52:11.100ZGerry Reganhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/ger_regan
<p>'Bruton wrong to claim Ireland could win independence by peaceful means alone' -- <span>A reasoned rebuttal of John Bruton's premise: </span><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/bruton-wrong-to-claim-ireland-could-win-independence-by-peaceful-means-alone-1.2591173#.VvtUpstLrfs.twitter" target="_blank">http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/bruton-wrong-to-claim-ireland-cou...…</a></p>
<p>'Bruton wrong to claim Ireland could win independence by peaceful means alone' -- <span>A reasoned rebuttal of John Bruton's premise: </span><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/bruton-wrong-to-claim-ireland-could-win-independence-by-peaceful-means-alone-1.2591173#.VvtUpstLrfs.twitter" target="_blank">http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/bruton-wrong-to-claim-ireland-cou...</a></p>
<h1><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/bruton-wrong-to-claim-ireland-could-win-independence-by-peaceful-means-alone-1.2591173#.VvtUpstLrfs.twitter" target="_blank" style="font-size: 13px;"></a></h1> "Was it needless death after…tag:thewildgeese.irish,2016-03-31:6442157:Comment:1880442016-03-31T00:43:50.141ZJim Curleyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JimCurley
<p><span>"Was it needless death after all?</span><br/><span>For England may keep faith</span><br/><span>For all that is done and said."</span></p>
<p><span> Yeats, "Easter, 1916"</span></p>
<p><span>When England next "keeps faith," it'll be the first time.</span></p>
<p><span>"Was it needless death after all?</span><br/><span>For England may keep faith</span><br/><span>For all that is done and said."</span></p>
<p><span> Yeats, "Easter, 1916"</span></p>
<p><span>When England next "keeps faith," it'll be the first time.</span></p>