Remembering with sadness and gratitude

 “All the cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one axiom: happy nations have no history.”

― Albert Camus

This week I  was forced to think of this wisdom by a centenary yesterday and an anniversary today.

An IRA ambush in Mayo and a death inside a British prison.

For me, both events are inextricably linked and part of the same struggle for Irish freedom.

Had it not been for the Covid restrictions, then I would have been in my father’s county this week.

History remembered is a weapon.

History forgotten is a betrayal.

For me, the ambush at Tuar Mac Éadaigh and the death of Óglach Bobby Sands MP were episodes in the same struggle.

The South Mayo Brigade in 1921 and the Belfast Brigade in 1981 were different only by location and the passage of time.

Tom Maguire’s men in Mayo and the POWs in the H-Blocks, the same army, and the same struggle in different eras.

The War of Independence came out of generations of suffering; “we’re from Mayo God help us!”

It is worth noting that the revolutionary generation in Mayo were born and reared within living memory of An Gorta Mór.

That was no natural disaster; it was a genocidal crime.

The Brits long derided the Irish as congenital imbeciles who were only suitable for menial tasks and back-breaking work.

Right under their noses, in places like Frongoch, we imagined and invented a new form of warfare that would confound the elite troops of the British Empire.

These men, including my father’s uncle Michael Derrig, were there because of the Rising.

He wasn’t a Volunteer in the “Good Old IRA”; he was in the IRA, the same Army that Bobby Sands served in with distinction. 

By the time of the ambush at Tuar Mac Éadaigh, the Brits had lost the intelligence war in Mayo.

The Frongoch graduates had applied themselves well to their studies!

Of course, it had all started with Éirí Amach na Cásca, and Britain reacted in a way that showed, after centuries of colonial occupation, that they had no clue about the people they thought they had conquered.

105 years ago this week, the executions had started.

Pearse, MacDonagh and Clarke were the first.

In many ways, it was Tom Clarke’s rebellion, and he was the driving force and the main architect.

On this day, 105 years ago, it was Westport man Major John MacBride who was marched to the sandbags in Kilmainham.

This is his memorial on the Mall in Westport. At the bottom are the names of the 31 local men transported to Frongoch for their part in the Rising.

After the Tan War, this island was partitioned, and for half a century, the ruling elite in Westminster devolved power to the grim-faced haters in Stormont.

It was an Apartheid regime that othered an ethno-religious minority who were socially excluded in almost every area of life that the local polity controlled.

Of course, we now know that this was incubating a rebellion.

Bobby Sands was born into a statelet that considered him unwanted and unequal.

Dear reader, ordinary people do not become revolutionaries unless the situation they find themselves in is, in some way, essentially intolerable.

When Bobby refused food and started his hunger strike, his enemies thought that their intransigence and duplicity would win the day for them.

Today it is clear across the world that they were wrong and utterly underestimated him and his brave comrades who followed him.

The featured image was yesterday in Rome.

Thatcher wanted to break the IRA POWs.

She failed.

The Brits failed.

So, from Tourmakeady to Twinbrook and from Frongoch to Long Kesh, this is what has brought us to this moment in our island story.

The conversation on re-unification has started, and the Partition polity that Bobby was born in is now almost certainly in the departure lounge of history.

Future generations of Irish people will know what it took to get to the situation where the soundtrack of the new Ireland will be the laughter of all of our children.

Fuair siad bás ar son Saoirse na hÉireann.