A weapon that must never be put beyond use

For the day that’s in it, there are two centenaries from the Tan war today.

I wrote this piece in January of this year.

The very idea that an Irish Government would commemorate those British war criminals had even apolitical folks on this island rising up against the gobshites in Leinster  House.

One hundred years ago today The Tans sacked the Balbriggan.

The Brits killed two civilians, burned down four pubs, the famous Balbriggan hosiery factory and thirty houses.

Today, Uachtarán na hÉireann, Michael D. Higgins said that the destruction of Balbriggan was “a defining episode” in the War of Independence.

Of course, there’s nothing new in history about Crown Forces inflicting their spleen on defenceless Irish civilians.

It had always been thus.

However, this particular orgy of death and destruction by the Brits in Ireland caught the attention of the world.

Much as they tried, the British state lost the propaganda battle on the global stage.

Their rule here was increasingly seen as lacking legitimacy.

It is no coincidence that the year before Balbriggan was razed to the ground Sinn Féin representatives who had been elected to the West minster Parliament were good to their word.

As promised at the hustings in 1918, they did not travel to the imperial capital and swear the oath to the British King.

Instead, they met in January of 1919 in the Mansion House in Dublin and formed the first Dáil Éireann.

On the same day that the Tans were burning an Irish town and bayoneting innocent men to death, a young IRA Volunteer was captured by the enemy in Dublin.

His name was Kevin Barry an 18 years old medical student.

It is fairly certain that Barry did not fire this weapon during the ambush on Bolton Street where three enemy soldiers perished.

However, that didn’t matter to the Brits, and despite an international outcry, he was hanged in Mountjoy prion the following November.

In an affidavit a few days before he was hanged the young Volunteer detailed his treatment after capture:

“He tried to persuade me to give the names, and I persisted in refusing. He then sent the sergeant out of the room for a bayonet. When it was brought in the sergeant was ordered by the same officer to point the bayonet at my stomach … The sergeant then said that he would run the bayonet into me if I did not tell … The same officer then said to me that if I persisted in my attitude he would turn me out to the men in the barrack square, and he supposed I knew what that meant with the men in their present temper. I said nothing. He ordered the sergeants to put me face down on the floor and twist my arm … When I lay on the floor, one of the sergeants knelt on my back, the other two placed one foot each on my back and left shoulder, and the man who knelt on me twisted my right arm, holding it by the wrist with one hand, while he held my hair with the other to pull back my head. The arm was twisted from the elbow joint. This continued, to the best of my judgment, for five minutes. It was very painful … I still persisted in refusing to answer these questions… A civilian came in and repeated the questions, with the same result. He informed me that if I gave all the information I knew I could get off.”

Like many Irish people of my generation, the first rebel song I learned was “Kevin Barry”.

A century ago, this island was a warzone, and the bad guys were from Britain.

The good news is that they lost.

Although the British State still has a grip on the North East corner of this country, it is weakening.

They always were on the wrong side of history here and they still are.

My interview with filmmaker Sean Murray, this week about the activities of the Glenanne pro-British death squad, is a stark reminder that the people who sent the Tans to Ireland have not changed.

However, the world is a different place now in many ways.

When Balbriggan was burned, there was not the technology available to someone like Sean Murray to reach a global audience as easily as Unquiet Graves has so demonstrably done.

The other major difference is that when the Tans were murdering with impunity here, Britain was the global superpower on the world stage.

In that regard, all is changed, changed utterly.

History remembered is a weapon.

Moreover, it can never, ever be decommissioned until wrongs are righted.