I'm Irish. Not just the typical American way, by heritage, but I'm a dual citizen. I acquired my Irish citizenship before the Dáil closed down a legal loophole. As I type this, I'm looking at my Irish passport.
Consequently, I don't drink green beer on St. Patrick's Day, nor do I dress up in green and effect a horrible Irish brogue. I take my Irish heritage seriously and, more than that, I take Irish history more seriously than a heart attack.
We Irish are infamous for holding grudges. That may well be true, but when you as a people have suffered as much as the Irish have, it's little wonder. The Jews have the motto Never Forget which came about after the horrors of the Final Solution and Hitler's concentration camps. The Irish run a close second to the Jews for being an oppressed people.
Whereas the Jews have suffered at the hands of many different peoples, the Irish have been persecuted almost exclusively by the British, led by the sanctimoniously self-righteous English. The oppression of the Irish goes back nearly a millenium. Despite the longevity of this persecution, the British have been able, largely, to sweep what they did to the Irish under the historical rug.
The original invasion of Ireland by the English took place between 1168 and 1171 A.D. Some time
thereafter, Irish were forbidden to have recourse with English laws. Thus began application of the old English saw – Britannia rules the waves – with its perverted approach to the Irish –
Britannia waives the rules.
In 1367, the infamous Statute of Kilkenny was enacted. Among the highlights of the law were (1) that any alliance with the Irish by marriage, nurture of infants or standing sponsors, should be punishable by high treason; (2) that any man of English race taking an Irish name, or using the Irish language, apparel or customs, should forfeit all his lands; and (3) that to adopt or submit to the Brehon (Irish) law was treason. Thus, an Irishman had no recourse under English law, but was guilty of treason if he sought justice from Brehon law. This created a lawless class in society, which in turn subjected the Irish to English penal laws.
In 1649, the town of Drogheda rebelled against the English government. Cromwell brought his army over and put the rebellion down brutally and quickly. Then his army began to massacre every man, woman and child in the town for the next five days. The well-recognized concept of “sanctuary” – where a person may take refuge in a church and remain inviolate so long as he stayed in the church – was violated, as Cromwell’s troops set fire to the church. When people sought to flee the burning building, they were killed with the pike. Cromwell, upon returning to England, was hailed as the conqueror of the sub-humans. Those people not killed outright were sent to Barbados as slaves. There are those who believe that the Irish slaves were then forced to breed with African slaves in order to take the Irish out of them and to propagate a more valuable biracial slave.
To give this some historical perspective, in 1942 Czech partisans killed Heydrich, Hitler’s representative in Prague. Upon learning of the death of his trusted representative, Hitler ordered that reprisals take place. The town of Lidice was wiped off the map, with the women and children sent to concentration camps and the men burned alive in barns. Any men trying to flee the flames were machine-gunned. For this the Germans were rightly vilified. The English have suffered no such condemnation. There is no qualitative difference between the two events.
Thereafter, in 1692, the insidious Penal Laws were enacted. To summarize just a few of
them, Catholics (which almost every Irishman was at the time) were:
Deprived of their right to sit in Parliament
Forbidden election to Parliament
Denied the right to vote
Fined 60 pounds for absence from the Protestant form of worship
Forbidden from traveling five miles from their homes, from keeping arms, maintaining suits at law, or from being guardians or executors
Subject to the vote of any four justices of the peace who could banish an Irishman from Ireland for failure to attend Protestant services
Subject to the vote of any two justices of the peace who could force the Irishman to abjure his faith or forfeit his property
Forbidden from employing a Catholic instructor to educate their children
If priests who came to the country, subject to immediate hanging
From 1845 to 1849, Ireland suffered a potato blight that ruined the main foodstuff for most of the Irish peasantry. There was plenty of food available, but it was shipped to England as payment for the rents that came due on the lands the Irish were forced to lease from English landlords. Rather than give the starving Irish peasants food or money for food, the landlords instead agreed to buy the Irish one-way tickets to America, Australia, Canada and other faraway lands, the way then open to confiscate their lands. During the Famine years, Ireland had a population of approximately eight million people. The Census of 1951 showed that Ireland’s population decreased by two million people.
By 1911, Ireland’s population was cut in half.
A Frenchman observer at the time said of Ireland:
“[It is] a conquered country, from which nothing need be feared,
from which nothing could be hoped; a country that was done for, that
could never revive, and towards which the best policy to pursue
was to draw from it as large a tribute as possible, of men for
the army, and of money for the Empire.”
During this time, Irishmen were forced to fight for King or Queen and Country – Great
Britain. Millions of Ireland’s sons died to keep the British Empire afloat. In many cases, it was because it was the only work they could find.
The nefarious Black and Tans -- now remembered if at all as the name of a beverage -- were actually decommissioned British soldiers who had no jobs to which they could return from the Great War. Given carte blanche by the Crown, they terrorized the Irish citizenry as best they could. The acts perpetrated by these troops were mostly criminal and had little if anything to do with keeping the peace.
At the time of Partition, the British agreed to carve out three counties -- Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan -- and give them to the Republic of Ireland. Rather than the magnanimous gesture that the British proclaimed it, it as a cynical manuever that gave away three predominantly Catholic counties so as to preserve a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. This allowed the British to claim that the majority in Northern Ireland desired to remain a part of the British Empire and not join the Republic.
The UK is today America's greatest ally. We are inundated by English actors and shows. We fawn over their accent and spend untold hours riveted to the television whenever one of the royals does anything. The British have apologized for their role in enslaving Africans, but to date there has never been anything approaching an official apology for the centuries of massacres, enforced exiles, thefts of land and dragooning of millions of Irishmen to further British imperial aims.
The British have employed the best and longest publicity campaign to hide or at least blur their crimes from the world. Justice delayed is justice denied.
On St. Patrick's Day, I think about the sacrifices my Irish ancestors made for their, and my, freedom.
(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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