Letters

The Irish people of the 32 counties in 1918 democratically elected a government. Their elected representatives in National Parliament declared Ireland a sovereign independent nation. They further declared that foreign parliaments in Ireland were an invasion of the Irish people’s rights and must never again be tolerated. Britain suppressed that government by armed forces and set up two States under the Government of Ireland 1920 and put it over as a treaty in 1921.

The IRA was the lawful army of that government of all Ireland. General Tom Maguire, the last surviving member of the all-Ireland parliament, withdrew his allegiance from Adams and the Provos and delegated its authority to Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA. No negotiators had the authority to destroy the mandate of the people of all Ireland.

The propagandists who would criticise this were the very people who defended “Government on Exile” during the last war – rightly so. The great Fintan Lawlor wrote “The Irish people must never submit to be governed by people of another nation”.

We have had no all-Ireland election since 1918.

The Government of Ireland Act 1920 brought no prosperity. Two million Irish boys and girls had to seek a livelihood in foreign lands. So let Catholics, Protestants and dissenters settle their own affairs without outside interference. Only then will we have real peace with prosperity for all.
MARTIN CALLIGAN
County Clare
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So why are they being harassed? The answer is they are the true Republicans, they wouldn’t settle for an agreement like the Provos. For example a Republican Sinn Féin member was arrested for selling Easter Lilies, the symbol of Republicanism. Here’s a message to all Special Branch Detectives: we won’t be intimidated.
MICHEÁL KEARNEY
Gaillimh
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Liverpool was the main port of entry for that period and the horror of 150 years ago will be commemorated and a memorial sculpture unveiled in the city this year. Sadly, the Great Famine Commemoration Committee set up to organise these events has itself fallen victim to historical revisionism and, in its literature, appears to stress “Liverpool’s response” more than it does the Great Hunger. The committee’s booklet claims: “Throughout the period Liverpool was generous in its response” and “the civic authorities offered assistance to the starving in the city”.

It goes on: “Liverpool began to feel the full force of the famine migration . . . The poor, without money or strength, became a problem for the authorities . . . This was a great financial burden . . . “ It all reads as though the hunger was some kind of “shared experience” between the starving Irish and the civic authorities.

Even the proposed sculpture will be designed in the form of a begging bowl.

Nowhere in its literature does the committee suggest that the English establishment might, in some measure, have been responsible for this human disaster. Nor was “Liverpool’s response” as generous as the committee would have us believe.

The starving Irish were left mainly to fend for themselves and – in thousands of instances – this meant dying in appalling conditions in the cellars and gutters of the city.

Thousands of armed soldiers and Cheshire Yeomanry were drafted in, and 20,000 Special Constables recruited in order to contain the Irish in their squalid ghettos near the docks. Marauding gangs of Orangemen roamed the streets looking for weak and vulnerable victims to attack. Liverpool was the most hostile place the Irish could possibly find themselves in. If any other people were treated in this way it would not be described as generous, but as genocide.

This is not to deny that there were individual acts of kindness by local people. Irish migrants from an earlier period also helped – Irish navvies building a railway from Liverpool to Bury donated a day’s pay each. But to imply that Liverpool welcomed the Irish refugees with open arms is revisionism gone mad. Fortunately, there is a counter-revisionist movement under way – the Rev Roger Friel, Rector of Liverpool, being one of its adherents.
PÁDRAIG MacDOMHNAILL
John Whelan Cumann
Republican Sinn Féin
PO Box 110
Liverpool, L69 8DP
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As reported last year by some newspapers, the 1916 Plot had offensive remarks painted on the resting stone by vandals. This matter was attended to by the Association.

This year two of our associate members attended the Plot on March 24, 1997 preparing it for Easter Week. A small dignified cross was erected over the Plot to prevent people from standing on this sacred place. Over the following few days a number of people had remarked to NGA members how well the Plot was looking.

On April 1, a committee member was informed that the cross had been removed from the Plot. The associate member in question found the cross broken and dumped down on a nearby railway track.

It is hard to put into words what one feels towards people who do something like this.

The National Graves Association would like to assure readers this matter will be attended to once again. It has always been one of the Association’s aims to restore, where necessary and maintain fittingly, the graves of our patriot dead.
MATT DOYLE
Assistant Secretary
National Graves Association
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1798 marked a high point for Irish Republicanism. Irish men and women, inspired by the success of France in 1789, disregarded their diverging religious affiliations and came together in armed revolt in pursuit of the Republican ideal: British disengagement from Ireland and Irish national independence.

Britain responded to the threat posed by Tone and the united Irishmen in three main ways. Firstly, the formation of the Orange Order in 1795, only fours years after the society of United Irishmen had been organised, marked a speedy attempt by Britain and her allies in Ireland to curb the influence of Tone’s non-sectarian organisation. Britain tried to tip the balance once again in favour of sectarianism, bigotry and intolerance. the Orange card had been played. The second way in which Britain reacted to the United Irishmen concerns the manner in which Britain responded to Tone’s ill-fated rebellion in 1798. It was hopelessly and mercilessly crushed by the British authorities in a vain attempt to banish, once and for all, Irish Republicanism from these shores. Britain could torture and kill these brave Irish men and women, but she could not break their spirit. And that same unyielding, uncompromising spirit, the spirit of freedom, resists yet.

The 1800 Act of Union was the third aspect of Britain’s response to the United Irishmen and was a direct reaction to the ’98 revolt. This piece of British legislation enacted by a British parliament robbed the Irish people of their right to national self-determination by placing the affairs of Irish men and women in the hands of British politicians.

Today, our nation is artificially divided in two: one, a squalid, sectarian British Statelet, the other , a neo-colonial, collaborationist 26-County ‘Republic’. It would seem, therefore, that we have not come far in realising the aims and ideals of Tone and the United Irishmen.

Yet we should remain hopeful. As long as we are striving to be United Irishmen and women, as long as we are promoting the non-sectarian, separatist message of Wolfe Tone, as long as we remain unbowed and unbroken, committed to continuing to struggle until a lasting and permanent memorial can be erected to the efforts of the United Irishmen, we should remain confident, safe in the knowledge that one day victory will be ours. Agus ansin, tiocfaidh ár lá!
GEARÓID MAC
Ard Mhacha
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The media in a capitalist society is the domain of the corporate giant, the ‘capitalist octopus,’ and as such ‘the culture of consumption and destruction’ is ceaselessly propagated.

The west made much propaganda value of the ideological grip which official communism held the media in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Their approach to the media was however somewhat amateurish and unsophisticated in comparison to that of capitalist society.

The bourgeois State has managed to form an ideological oneness with the media and as such a status quo is maintained. This oneness is best seen at election time wherein establishment parties are given saturation coverage by the media.

Media power is political power. Thus Tony O’Reilly and Rupert Murdoch are two major political heavyweights. It is obvious that both men have political axes to grind.

The old British Labour Party bore the brunt of Murdoch's invective through-out the 1980s as Michael Foot and Neil Kinnoch were constantly derided. Foot was portrayed as being senile and decrepit, whereas Kinnoch was dismissed as a Welsh windbag with no intellect.

Tony O’Reilly has also adopted this tactic of political termination via character assassination, although he has expanded his targeting to include the nationalist community in the Six Counties.

The O’Reilly press have gathered together some of the greatest ‘pathological cretins’ available, who in turn deliberately fail to provide a colonial or balanced historical analysis of the Irish Question.

Those who do not conform to the media’s pro-British/establishment agenda are invariably consigned to silence, thus the concept of a balanced media becomes just that – a concept. O’Reilly’s press interests in the 26 Counties include The Star, The Evening Herald, The Examiner, The Kerryman, The Sunday Independent, The Irish Independent, The Irish Times, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Tribune, and The Sunday World .

Murdoch’s media interests include The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Times and The News of the World. This journalistic muscle is further compounded by a vast array of magazine interests and Sky television.

Such is the monopoly which Murdoch and O’Reilly have attained that they have significantly weakened the consumers power of rejection. This narrowing of choice within the media is a major threat to democracy, as the consumers is effectively served a starvation diet of information. the net result is an inbalanced and undernourished outlook on behalf of the viewer, listener or reader.

The continual propagation of one side of the story moulds the masses, making them ‘infinitely malleable’, and more prone to personality-based politics. SAOIRSE works against this background and against over 70 years of media conditioning in an attempt to produce the only worthwhile Irish political every month.

The Republican Movement has chosen the hard road in its decision to remain outside the constitutional sewer and as such it remains open to harassment and intimidation from both colonial and neo-colonial forces. Within this framework Republican are censored and marginalised , as such freedom and democracy must be fought for.

“ . . . for they sell their country to the most terrifying of all its enemies: Stupidity.” (Franz Fanon, The wretched of the Earth)
PAUL FINN
Waterford
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