Date Posted:09:39:36 02/17/08 Sun Author: mfcb Author Host/IP: host86-142-9-201.range86-142.btcentralplus.com / 86.142.9.201 Subject: BRITAIN IN IRELAND
I would be interested in hearing people’s opinions of Britain’s legacy in Ireland? I’m a bit sick of hearing the romantic Hollywood versions of events portrayed in the films and popular literature! For example:
That Oliver Cromwell’s actions were yet another example in a long line of unjustifiable and unprovoked incidents of British brutality against the Irish. Countless times forces opposed to Protestant Britain could count on Catholic Ireland for support the practically Catholic Charles I in the civil war was one of them. James II and the Jacobites also, even Hitler could rely on Irish neutrality and the Allies being unable to use Her ports and airfields.
That the Irish Potato Famines in the 1840’s were some how an act of genocide and ethnic cleansing by the British and what is never mentioned is the failure of the British potato crop at the same time, the charitable collections made in Britain for the Irish, the support of Irish merchants and landlords for the Corn Laws and other import duties, the banking and financial crunch in Britain at the time, and the Irish landowners who became rich buying up the land of other emigrating Irishmen.
The “heroic” 1916 Easter rising being carried out by brave and glorious martyrs ignoring the fact that Britain and the world was at war at the time and other terrorist/action groups had suspended activities so as not to undermine the efforts of the soldiers at the front (Irish Catholic volunteers among them), the people they killed that day were not well chosen political targets but included unarmed policemen and a woman. Also only one of the rebels ever went down the democratic route of change by standing for election.
That Michael Collins gets a film made about him and De Valera doesn’t and in it Collins is held up as some mythical hero for Irish independence. He was pro the British treaty that partitioned the six counties of Ulster whereas it was De Valera who opposed it. The falling out over the treaty dragged Ireland into civil war followed by a period of poverty and troubles it has only recently started to emerge from.
That the IRA and PIRA, Sinn Fein are again in film and literature portrayed as heroic freedom fighters as if it were only the British army that did any killing in Northern Ireland. Ignoring La mon, Warrenpoint, Omagh, Birmingham etc etc.
It seems as if all we ever hear is the one side of the argument, the British were, are and never have been anything other that bad men in red coats, point of view.
