This is how the 1916 Rising should be commemorated

Wolfe Tone first advocated Irish neutrality in 1790. In September 1914, when all the leaders of the 1916 Rising met together they decided to establish the Irish Neutrality League (see www.pana.ie ) to bring together all those opposed to the imperialist war of the British Union & Empire.

Therefore, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) is proud to take part in the Reclaim the Vision rally of 1916 rally at 2.00pm on Sunday 24th April starting from Merrion Square. The PANA banner will be at station F in Merrion Square South. We urge all of you to take part not just to remember the Rising against the British Empire, but to continue the struggle against imperialist wars today, especially the use of Shannon Airport by US troops (2.5 million & climbing) and the militarization of an emerging European Empire via its EU Battle Groups and its European Defence Agency. 

There is a strong and deeply rooted imperial tradition in Ireland just as there is an anti-imperial tradition from the United Irishmen to the 1916 Rising and our war of Independence. The conflict between these two traditions has not gone away you know. The Reclaim the Vision rally is to show that the Imperial culture that, as in 1914, now dominates Ireland can and will be challenged. We need to rededicate ourselves to achieving the Republic.

Roger Cole
Chairman
PANA

Churchill, World War 2 and Brexit

First the Maisky Diaries and now Kevin Myers (PM Boris Johnson is too high a price to pay for Ukexit, Sunday Times, 17th April 2016). Churchill’s reputation was always going to come under scrutiny at some point but, typically, the scrutiny is not coming from orthodox British historians. Myers is wrong about the British public not liking Churchill. They had good reason to dislike him but his absolute determination not to make a deal with Hitler in 1940 was the basis of his popularity ever afterwards. Indeed, had it not been for the British public (particularly Labour supporters) he would probably have lost office by 1943 (not least because his penchant for military disasters in WW1 continued in WW2) and replaced by Halifax, Cripps, Eden (an utter weakling as Myers says) or Lloyd George (the only one of the four who wasn’t a weakling), who would have done a deal with Hitler but regretted it afterwards. As his funeral cortege was going down the Thames in 1965, dockers, many of them war veterans, I suspect, lowered their cranes in salute. (Some upper class woman told Maisky that Churchill, whose mother was from the southern states of the US, had negroid features. I think that is worse than saying he was Irish!)

 

Myers’ comments about Churchill’s blood lust against German cities (which are absolutely spot on) raise an interesting issue. There is at least one programme per day (usually many more) about WW2 on at least one of the many British channels I have. Apart from the fact that the programmes are a total bore, they must be getting up the noses of the Germans big time at this stage. If the British vote for Brexit, the nonsense about job losses will be disappear off the papers immediately but what the media forget (both here and in Britain) is that the Germans are going to use Brexit as an opportunity to express their frustration at the wall-to-wall programmes on British TV channels about WW2. They are likely to anyway – you can imagine a state visit to London by the German President where he politely but firmly calls time on these boring programmes – but Brexit will be seen by the Germans as an opportunity to demand an end to WW2ism by the British. And they will be typically Germanic in how they demand it, i.e. not diplomatic. Something to look forward to.

 

Geldof and Willy

I was up Benbulben last week. The locals aren’t friendly so we had to go up a very tough way. Great views from the top. If Yeats (or Willy, as his intimate friend Geldof calls him) had ever got up there his poetry would really have taken off ....

Geldof is a good programme maker but why does he have to be so foulmouthed? It took away considerably from what was otherwise a very fine programme. In the midst of the wall-to-wall crass and embarrassing programmes on all channels and articles in all newspapers it was interesting, entertaining, informative and important but Geldof had to reduce it to the level of a pub discussion with his crude language.

Why does RTE not realize that a television programme is not the same as a discussion in a pub? No wonder this society is in the gutter.