Thursday 2 June 2011

Boys of the Old Brigade – The Myth

Today, the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland shocked many of its flock, by apparently sanctioning an article in the Scottish Catholic Observer, who share an office with the Scottish Catholic Media Office, that condoned support for the IRA by the Celtic Support.

The article cited an ill informed statement by an unnamed Sheriff in a case recently reported in the Scottish Media, where said reports also did not name the Sheriff.


“Bizarrely, prior to the Rangers vs Celtic match at Ibrox in April, Chief Superintendent Andy Bates, divisional commander for Glasgow South and East Renfrewshire, in his promise to ‘blitz the bigots,’ brought Celtic supporters into the equation when he said: “If you sing Boys of the Old Brigade, we’ll arrest you… If you sing anything derisory about the Pope or the Queen, we’ll consider that an arrestable offence.”
Leaving aside the fact that on the second point—singing an anti-monarchist song would see singers such as John Lydon of The Sex Pistols and Billy Bragg arrested, the first point again suggests a lack of knowledge of what is and what isn’t sectarian.
Defining sectarianism
Chief Superintendent Bates and his colleagues would have been wise to heed the outcome of a court case, in which Professor Tom Devine was called as an expert witness.
The accused in that case had been charged under Section 74 of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003, with committing a breach of the peace aggravated by singing Irish Republican songs, which mentioned, in their lyrics, the IRA, in much the same was as the Boys of the Old Brigade does.
However, the sheriff concluded that doubtless some members of the public might take offence at the songs being sung in support of an organisation, which the UK Government considered to be a terrorist movement. Nonetheless, he ruled that the IRA was a military organisation, was not sectarian in intent and that those who showed support for it, real or rhetorical, were not showing ‘malice or ill will towards members of a religious group.’
“To my knowledge, little of this case was reported in the press, which is a pity because its results have significant legal implications as to how Scottish law officers and the police respond to fan behaviour at these matches,” Professor Devine said.
The equality group Celebrate Identity, Challenge Intolerance was also critical of the police in this regard. It commented: “From an equality perspective, there are no reasons whatsoever for supporters attending football matches to be arrested for singing this particular song, or any other patriotic songs that are a reflection of legitimate pride in one’s cultural, national or ethnic identity…the song Boys of the Old Brigade is a legitimate song relating to nationhood.”
What you can take from this is clear, that the Scottish Catholic Media Office, and therefore the Church itself view sectarianism as a one way street, and want the Police to clamp down on one community only. Not only that, but they are happy to re-write history and paint the IRA of the period as non sectarian, and are happy to quote serial anti Rangers activist Kieron Brady to do so.

Truth is, like the Provos, the Official IRA that the song “The Boys of The Old Brigade” refers to was a sectarian violent terrorist gang.

Respected journalist and writer Gerard Murphy wrote of the sectarian ethnic cleansing of Protestants in Cork by the IRA. The Review by fellow Roman Catholic Kevin Myers of the Irish Independent newspaper was controversial.

Both writers are clear in their condemnation of this disgusting organisation and their killing campaign against Protestants.

It is this “Old Brigade” that Celtic fans sing, and that is being condoned today by the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, and “Equality” organisation CICI.



By Kevin Myers


Friday November 12 2010

GERARD Murphy's “The Year Of Disappearances -- Political Killings In Cork 1921-2” is very properly causing a major stir. Even more than Peter Hart's account of the IRA in the county, this book is revealing the terrible horror that befell the Protestants of Cork.

Moreover, it finally destroys any claim that a non-sectarian Republic could have resulted from the violence of 1916 onwards. In a society as confessionally divided as Ireland then was, with the general Catholic-nationalist and Protestant-unionist divide, political violence would inevitably lead to sectarian war.

Yet not merely does this State still celebrate the 1916 Rising as if it were a fine and noble thing, it is planning a swaggering bonanza in 2016 -- just as the remains of this pathetic, broken Republic are divided up between German banks and Chinese property dealers.

I've been writing a dissenting narrative about this period for most of my life and the response has been for me to be largely ignored by Official Ireland.

No matter. I can truthfully say that I invented the entire subject of historical journalism for the period 1914-23. Yet despite my work on the Irish and the Great War, I was not (of course) invited to participate in Sean O Mordha's acclaimed television series 'Seven Ages'.

Indeed, my exclusion by the 'Irish Times' from its supplement to mark the 90th anniversary of the Rising was one of several reasons why I resigned from that newspaper.

I say all this to establish my credentials here. Despite my knowledge, I've been astounded by Gerard Murphy's revelations, which clearly show that the campaign in Cork against Protestants and non-republicans was on a truly vast scale.

Most Belfast nationalists know of the terrible things that befell Catholics in the city in 1922. What happened in Cork was actually worse because it was accompanied by almost no chaotic street violence. It was a planned assault on a unionist community and executed with abominable method.

This villainy has been matched by the supine silence of Irish historians, to match their previous silence on Ireland the Great War. For Irish historiography has long been the academic wing of party-political republicanism, even though the main villains in Cork -- Corry, O'Donoghue and O'Hegarty -- who are at the centre of Gerard Murphy's book, should be well known to historians of the period.

The most sobering revelations concern Martin Corry, Fianna Fail TD for 40 years, a cheery psychopath and much-loved killer. How much the people of Cork knew about this vile Leeside Robespierre I cannot say. Many men -- and it is impossible to say what number -- were shot and buried at Corry's farm after being imprisoned in a nearby vault in Kilquane graveyard, which Corry called Sing Sing. As TD in the 1930s, he even jeered at James Dillon TD in Dail Eireann: "Come down and I will show you. I will show you a lot of things you never saw before. I would nearly show you Sing Sing. I am sure the Deputy would have to be very fascinating before he'd get out of it."

On St Patrick's Night in 1922 -- ie after the Truce and before the Civil War -- six members of the Young Men's Christian Association in Cork were abducted and executed at Corry's farm. That same week, half a dozen loyalist farmers were similarly disappeared in west Cork.

OVERALL, from the summer of 1920 to the start of the Civil War, 33 Protestants were shot in Cork city proper, while another 40 were killed nearby -- a total of 73 Protestant victims from a small minority community. From around 1921, IRA units murdered or "disappeared" at least 85 civilians. Some 26 were killed after the Truce, thereby making a mockery of the date that this State now chooses to commemorate the dead of all our wars -- July 11. As chilling as anything has been the toxic legacy amongst middle-class Cork Catholics, who until recently thought it chic to make jibes about a Protestant community which has never properly recovered from these terrible days. What you might call An Interim Solution.

We might have learnt all this long ago. A farmer bought some of Corry's land in the 1960s and dug up several skeletons in a mass grave. These were handed over to the local gardai at Watergrasshill, after which they vanished without trace. What a surprise.

Look. You cannot use violence in a divided society without militarising politics, after which, society's psychos and zealots feel authorised to kill their political opponents. The fundamental issue is not the dead of Cork or west Belfast: it is the use of violence to achieve political ends. It doesn't work. It kills people, but it doesn't get you what you want.

Moreover, killing innocents is not some aberration that only occurs at the end of a prolonged period of violence. The first victims in the opening minutes of 1916 -- which this Republic is dementedly determined to pretend was a poetry festival and for which it is preparing another grisly jamboree in 2016 -- were all innocent unarmed Irish people, killed in their native city. But then why not? Killing Irish people in their native cities is, after all, what our "republicans" do best of all. Step forward, Cork, 1921-22.

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers



Myers and Murphy are not alone in exposing the real history of the Official IRA.
Eoghan Harris also wrote in the Independent of this hidden history of the Sectarian IRA.


Tuesday, 05 September 2006

IF YOU have want an insight into the intimacies of Irish history, into how the foul deeds of the past are only a few fields away, into how hard it is to tell the truth that sets us free, then I have a tale to tell. It started a few weeks ago when I got a phone call from an old school friend, Robert Kearney, whom I had not seen for over 50 years.

Robert had read my column about how The Wind that Shakes the Barley - in which, by some serendipity, his son Damien plays the Flying Column commander - had stirred memories of the April massacres of 13 West Cork Protestants in the Bandon Valley in 1922. Robert wondered if I would be interested in his researches into Ballygroman House, where he had lived from 1991-98, and which had featured in a prelude to that hard history.

We met at a fine pub in Innishannon, perfect for lunch, apart from the Wolfe Tones on the music track. After they changed the track we consumed the best bacon and cabbage outside the Sibin in Rath and Annie May's in Skibbereen. But Robert and I still kept our voices low as we reviewed the history of Ballygroman House, which stood between between Cork and Bandon, overlooking the beautiful valley of the River Bride.

Robert was not aware of the history of Ballygroman House when he bought it, but he later did some local research. What he found out largely tallies with what the historian Peter Hart learned from IRA veterans in the Seventies. Needless to say, Robert is not responsible for my account and the commentary on the atrocity which follows.

At about 2.30am, on the night of April 26, 1922, a party of anti-Treaty IRA officers from the Bandon Battalion, under the command of Michael O'Neill, broke into Ballygroman House, the home of Thomas Hornibrook, his son Samuel, and daughter Matilda, members of a respected family of Cork Protestant merchants. Also in the house was Matilda's husband, Captain Herbert Woods, a Bandon Protestant.

Given that this was the dead of night, in the middle of a civil war, with no police to call and armed men raiding Protestant farms far and wide, it was not surprising that armed intruders should strike fear into the family huddled upstairs, or that Captain Woods should have fired a shot to frighten them off - a shot which fatally wounded Michael O'Neill who was carried away by acting commander Charlie Donoghue and his men.

In the words of Peter Hart, "Revenge was swift and complete. Charlie Donoghue drove back to Bandon and returned with reinforcements - and rope." The reinforced republicans laid siege to the house until eight o'clock the next morning, when the two Hornibrooks and Captain Wood agreed to surrender on condition their lives were spared.

Charles O'Donoghue and Michael O'Neill's two brothers confronted the helpless men and asked who had fired the fatal shot. Captain Woods without ado, admitted responsibility. "I fired it." He was beaten badly - the details are dire - and the three men were taken by car towards the hilly country of Templemartin. On the way, Woods was tied to the car and dragged a few miles along the road until he died.

The next day the two Hornibrooks were told they were to be shot and were forced to dig their graves. Thomas Hornibrook threw his stick into the grave, drew himself up to face the firing squad, and told them to go ahead.

The bodies of the three men were buried secretly - but of course the location was no secret to the the large number of men from Bandon and Kilbrittain who took part - or indeed to some of their descendants today.

Neither was there much secrecy about the share-out of the spoils. Ballygroman House was looted, then burned, the plantation of trees was cut down for sale, the fences flattened and the land seized. In sum, scores of people took part in the atrocity or the aftermath.

Now for the frightening part. Nothing about the murders appeared in any Irish newspaper. No attempt was made then, or later, to look into the murders. It was as if the three men had been taken away by aliens.

And no attempt has ever been made to find the three bodies and give them a Christian burial.

It must not be assumed that the families of the three men had no feelings about what happened. But the smears about "spies" and the muddying of the waters by republican apologists which always followed such sectarian murders - and which still go on - created a climate of secrecy and shame that would have made it difficult to go digging in that area.

Even so, I was astounded to learn from Robert that Daniel Corkery, author of The Hidden Ireland, had moved into Ballygroman house in 1931, only nine years after the murders. How did he live so happily with that other Hidden Ireland? How did any of us live with it?

The answer is that there is a amnesia about the atrocities against Irish Protestants, mostly in provincial Ireland, in the period 1920/21. Apart from the propaganda of republican apologists, the silence of Irish Protestants has also protected us from some terrible truths. West Cork Protestants have told me many stories of severe suffering. But none of them is prepared to go public.

Dublin Protestants and Catholics listen to these stories with disbelief. How could such things have been hushed up, they ask.

Clearly they have no idea of how vulnerable a Methodist family can feel in the middle of remote rural area. Or how reluctant to raise the murder of a relative when the descendants of his murderers might now be good neighbours.

The amnesia has also been assisted by Irish Protestants in three other areas. First, the Church of Ireland, in the name of an empty ecumenism, has failed to call for a full accounting of what happened to southern Protestants in 1921/22.

Second, those who call themselves Protestant republicans have also played a part in the cover-up. Anytime I write about these events I can be sure that some Protestant republican will surface and tell me that he is perfectly happy, and that "it doesn't help the peace process" to look back at these things.

Finally, some Irish Protestants put the soft life before their duty to the dead. On previous form, my mailbag next week is sure to bring anonymous letters from Dublin Protestant blow-ins to West Cork telling me how well they get on with their RC neighbours and signed Blissfully Happy.

Let me make something clear to empty ecumenists, Protestant republicans and blissfully happies alike. This has nothing to do with you. Most of us digging for truth are from Roman Catholic republican backgrounds. We are digging because justice must be done even if the heavens fall.

Right now, the unholy alliance of Protestant republicans and republican apologists is keeping the Hornibrooks buried. But, as Yeats said:


Though grave-digger's toil is long,/Sharp their spades, their muscles
strong,/ They but thrust their buried men/ Back in the human mind again

Let’s be clear. Singing “The Boys of the Old Brigade, is to sing support of the Sectarian IRA, which was responsible for the Ethnic Cleansing of Cork and beyond.

There is no excuse to condone anyone singing this song, unless you condone ethnic cleansing and murder on the basis of someone’s religious beliefs.

DJM


2 comments:

  1. Well said Sir. The IRA were and are a sectarian murder gang.

    Anyone indulging in the glorification of them i.e by singing songs in praise of them should feel the brunt of the full force of the law.

    Alex Salmond, your peers await!

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  2. I salute these brave and gallant journalists. It's time the truth about these sectarian atrocities was uncovered and we can all start to put the past behind us and get on with building a better future for people of all faiths. Then the peace process can truly begin.

    Mind how you go.

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