Bun Fights & Good Salaries -- Stormont Watch

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Date Posted: Fri, Mar 30 2007, 19:27:35 PDT
Author: The Blanket-Dolours Price
Subject: Bun Fights & Good Salaries
In reply to: The Blanket-Brendan O'Neill 's message, "Paisley & Adams" on Fri, Mar 30 2007, 19:07:19 PDT

Bun Fights & Good Salaries

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?

Dolours Price � 27 March 2007

What a day! I have been calling for it for so long: surrender, give it up, you know you will, but do not keep us all in this vacum, this limbo. Get on with the sell out! And you did, and I thank you for puting my head at peace, at last. They say it is the uncertainity that causes most anxiety, it does, and now I, for one, am free of it. You mean nothing to me, you people with whom I once shared a dream, an aspiration, prison and pain, but all for "The Cause". You abandoned that today and brought me relief.

How far have we moved apart? You would say that I stayed behind. I did, I stay with the unresolved, the injustice done to the Island, the failure of Michael Collins to stand up to Lloyd George and say, "Go on then, wage your bloody and terrible war!" The biggest mistake made by any Irishman (sorry Michael, I respect you to a degree).

You think anything will change? Bun fights in Stormont, and good salaries, that's all.

Is this what we killed for, died for? Not me; I respect life too much to reduce it to a return to the old "Status Quo". Joe Devlin did it first and never fired a shot, nor took or gave a life.

You look smug and happy, Gerry, an Easter Lily in your lapel will not qualify you as a Republican. You have found your level as a Nationalist, prepared to administer British rule in six counties of Ireland, I believe I have heard you call it "Northern Ireland". No matter to you, all matter to Republicans.

You think you have "grown", have been progressive, have changed the face of politics in that "small place" (your words). You have taken us back to Imperialism, to conquest, to submission... well, you have not taken all of us.

I had seen this day coming, wished for it, for closure, for relief and a chance to see off the confused. I have taken no pleasure in any of it. I have spent a great deal of the day in tears, for myself, my dead comrades, my damaged comrades, for innocents and even for squaddies. We have, none of us, with a soul or conscience, come through without some damage.

Yet it need not have lasted so long if this is what the Leadership had decided upon. Sunningdale provided this and more. So, where does that leave me, a Volunteer, ready and all too willing, to take the orders of my superior officers, they deny me, and the cock crows...

It leaves me a girl of 21 years with a sister of 19 years in an English prison and all of the horror that any Convent school girl could not imagine. My choice, my breeding, my heritage. No pity required.

I would never claim that my experiences in English Gaols, or in Armagh Gaol, did not have a severe effect on my physical and mental health. Gaol is not natural to human existance, how could one remain unaffected by it?

We bore it as well as we could. (I was not a good bearer!)

Yet we held fast to the notion of liberation, freedom, a United Ireland and victory, 1975, 1976, ... ... 1979... 1980... until I found all the handpainted hankies in the store cell when there were three of us left with political status, I cut them up, they were a dream never to be realised.

So we sat in silence, the three of us. I bade the time of day to the YP's below, I spent time with the girls who could not face the dirty protest, the Republican girls, and I defy anyone to say that those girls were not the best of Republicans that ever had to grace a gaol. They carried me through hard times, and their credentials cannot be disputed.

I was ordered by the gaol O. C not to associate with "criminals", these were the Republican prisoners who decided against the dirty protest (and I would have been one of them). I, reluctantly, resigned from the Irish Republican Army then because I could not obey that order. A freelance Republican since, and a diehard. And may God forgive you, Mr. Adams, and even more so, may your dead volunteers forgive you for spilling their blood in vain.

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Replies:

No New Era Yet! -- Republican Sinn F�in, Fri, Mar 30 2007, 19:37:34 PDT
- The Cul de Sac called 'Futility' -- The Blanket-Anthony McIntyre, Fri, Mar 30 2007, 19:55:04 PDT
  - Re: The Cul de Sac called 'Futility' -- Fionnbarra, Sat, Mar 31 2007, 10:25:10 PDT