Those from the Irish Free State who fought for Britain in the Second World War were more numerous than those from Northern Ireland, where there was no conscription.
And this week, they have not merely been pardoned. They have been officially vindicated.
According to Alan Shatter and the Government in which he serves, they were not merely right by their own lights. They were plainly and simply right.
The official position of the Irish Republic is now that the Irish Free State ought to have fought among the Allies.
The official position of the Irish Republic is now that the Irish Free State ought to have fought among the Allies.
What next, that the British Establishment was right to regard the Free State's neutrality as illegal? Or is that implicit in what has already been said?
David, you must be pleased to see the Republic of Ireland become the first team eliminated from Euro 2012. We all know that you don't like them & would like to see British forces move into the 26 counties.
ReplyDeleteMany of them would only be going home, anyway. And, frankly, when even the Minister of Defence there is a Unionist...
ReplyDeleteThat broadly Unionist view of Irish history has been the scholarly norm in the Republic for decades, and it is now barely contested by anyone within serious academia there. Senior politicians are more products of that than the general population. But still, I am not aware of anyone's having taken issue with the astonishing development this week. They would have done so in the strongest terms even only very recently indeed.
Irish Nationalism or Irish Republicanism of any historically or ideologically serious kind, such as has specific political aspirations at least beyond the maintenance of a certain culture or subculture, is now confined almost entirely to people of fairly or very distant ancestral connection to Ireland, plus a section of the population of Northern Ireland whose very heavy levels of employment by or other dependence on the British State utterly belies their professed desire to cast it off for something always far less munificent, and no longer in any position to be anything remotely approaching so.
As for the Irish and football, they do well to get to these things at all since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia, and more widely since certain enormously populous places that did not used to compete at that level have come to do so. Scotland no longer manages under those circumstances. But Ireland does, at least for now. Good for her.
Shatter recently said "Londonderry" in the course of a Dail debate. Picked up for it on Twitter but not by any other TD including Gerry Adams. That must be what the state with its seat at Dublin now calls Derry City.
ReplyDeleteObviously given up all hope of convincing them to adopt the euro, or the Irish health system.
ReplyDeleteThe Irish education system might be another matter, though, once Sinn Féin has finished destroying theirs.
Meanwhile, look forward to paying a £53,150 "winding up allowance" to Martin McGuinness this year when he stands down from the seat that he has never taken.