“i ngleanntaibh ceoigh”
“Within the foggy glens”
Sometimes in all the horror with which we deal we need to remind ourselves of peaceful places, times, and people, lest as Nietzsche warned, when we gaze into the abyss we find it staring right back at us. This somewhat self-indulgent posting is me reminding myself of why I fight.
If you’re Irish you come from a country that was invaded and rose in rebellion quite literally once a generation. Ireland was at war more or less permanently for 800 years until eventually the invaders were forced to sign a peace treaty and leave most of the island, hanging on only to a politically and economically unviable rump of their former colony. The Republic from which I come and whose constitution contains the promise that she will cherish all her children equally is a lot less than a 100 years old. Within my lifetime the Republic has gone from a poverty stricken backwater to a vibrant, successful, and open society.
I’m very proud of that.
Within my lifetime, or shortly thereafter, I expect Ireland to be united and that that’ll be done peacefully. I have no doubt that there will be atrocities and setbacks - but the momentum of the peace process is such that it is now unstoppable.
I’m very proud of that too, even fifteen years ago saying or writing that would have been inconceivable.
The place in the photo above is an easy bicycle ride and then a short walk from the home in which I grew up. It was the scene of a ferocious and bloody revenge attack upon a patrol of British “irregulars” - the notorious “Black and Tans.” The “Tans” were counter terrorists used by what was at the time the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. We had risen in rebellion yet again and in an early version of the “Salvadoran Option” the British empire resorted to terrorism, death squads, collective punishments, murder, torture, and rape to try to get their oldest colony back under their heel.
I’m probably one of the very few people who knows what happened at that place now and I only know about it because I knew some of the elderly men who had fought in our war of independence. Certainly it wasn’t known to the family from South London peacefully having a picnic there on the last day of their Irish holiday and who sent me this photo. I saw no reason to enlighten them - those days are long gone.
The leader of the 1916 uprising that started the war of independence - Padhraic Pearse, famously characterised the British empire as “strong and wise and wary” but strong and wise and wary though they were they failed and went down into the dust. Empires built on blood and racism always do fail in the end and their life-spans are getting shorter and shorter. Empires are built on fear and the biggest change of my lifetime is that “brown people” are no longer afraid and longer prepared to let others set their societies’ agendas. Long after the current attempt at an American empire is but a bitter and embarassing memory, people like me and you, and them, the people who say “no” will still be here.
On those days when we come close to despair, we need to remember that.
Mháircaish.
No tag for this post.
Thank you, Mark, for placing the present morass in history’s more hopeful context.
I hope you are well. If not well, at least, getting better.
I’m an Australian (or as I’d rather call myself nowadays, a Tasmanian) and as a boy I remember my grandmother telling me stories of “Black and Tans” and “Soupers”.
In later years during British History classes (it was the only history taught!) in highschool, I would relish retelling these stories. I am reflecting now and realise that I have forgotten the details of these stories, which is a good thing.
I remember a friend of my father’s, a Catholic from Northern Ireland, was amazed he could get a job in Australia working for the government as a Postie. And I was amazed he couldn’t in Northern Ireland.
The violence has been a tragedy to me and I have often wondered whether a Ghandi type of non-violent revolution would have worked. But, of course, I am in no position to know.
I always smile to myself ruefully whenever I hear the “common wisdom” that “Ghandi’s revolution could only have worked against the British” as if the British were some sort of benign overlord!
I took great heart from a book on the history of non-violent revolutions in the Twentieth Century called “A Force More Powerful” by Jack DuVal and someone else. I can thoroughly recommend it. I think the publisher is Paragon but I could be wrong on that.
Great photo. The world can be a magical place.
Go raibh maith agat. I love the pic up there. In fact, your description: I nGleanntaibh ceoigh remined me of my favorite Chieftain’s song, An Goath Aneas, meaning “the south wind.”
Griffon - If I could ask you what is a ’souper’? I, too, grew up tales from the Troubles - but the term ’soupers’ is not familiar to me. My sympathies for only having British history available in high school. I think that Irish students of my era were very fortunate in that we had our history drilled into us. Lucky for us there were a number of new texts available and our classes were conducted in a very enlightened manner It certainly gave us a sense of who we were. I was very disappointed with my daughter’s history classes in high school - the texts were a joke.
slskenyon - you’ve got good taste in music :-)
grania - “soupers” were people (and their descendants) who during the famine took food in return for converting to protestantism.
During the famine a lot of British evangelical protestant churches organised soup kitchens and medical treatment for the people who were dieing either of starvation or of cholera. However they would only feed you or give you medical treatment if you agreed to convert to whatever their particular flavour of evangelical protestantism was. Very few people actually took them up on this but there are a few pockets of “souper” descendants to this day. Mostly in the midlands around Carlow and in the Wicklow hinterland.
They’ve mostly died out now either through emigration or through lack of increase because they were shunned by everyone else and there weren’t enough them to start off with - if nobody will marry you then you either leave or resign yourself to dieing single.
When I was a very small boy it was still one of the ultimate insults. The class bully in my first year in school called me it once (because my mother was English) so I picked up a chair and hit him with it. Once the enraged nun (who separated us by grabbing my ears and pulling hard) found out that he’d called me a “souper” I got an apple to make up for the severe spanking I’d just been given and he got sent home where his parents delivered another spanking. I never had any further problems with him.
Incidentally if you’ve ever wondered why people say:
“Céin gcolair atá aige/aici?” it’s because so many people died of cholera during the famine (especially in the workhouses) that it entered the language as the word for serious illness.
Not at all incidentally and something that has to be remembered is that once the British government found out what was going on with those soup kitchens they put a stop it very quickly indeed.
Mark,
I had just assumed that the “souping” was going on with the British (or should I say English) Govt’s approval if not support.
Apologies to m’Luds.
A Scottish friend of mine used to say that whenever as English sporting team had a victory it was reported, naturally enough, as an English victory. But when a Scottish team had a victory, it was a British victory!
Grania, History is invariably the winner’s tale.
And, that should have been “Gandhi”, duh!
Oh it had that meaning too griffon, but the roots of it are as I gave above. The ensuing bitterness was well on its way out by the time I took a chair to that guy. He was from a very IRA background. But mostly he was just a fat bully who was hurling an insult without really knowing what it meant while I was a slightly built 4 year old who’d just about had it with him picking on me and had a chair handy.
If you wanted to put a date to the end of that sort of sectarianism thing, in the Republic at any rate, I’d say once 1966 was over (50th anniversary of the ‘16 rising) most people recoiled at that sort of codology and in all fairness it was never widespread to start off with. As is usually the case when you did come across it you’d find that those who were most sectarian were those who definitely never had a thing to do with IRA during the war of independence. I got to know a lot of veterans. Sectarian was the one thing they weren’t.
If I were to relate that incident and explain the meaning of “souper” to the current generation of schoolkids I’d be bankrupted by dentists repairing the damage of a classroom full of jaws hitting the ground at high speed.
“Proper order.”
Let us know how you get on with Gandhi’s enraged pacifistic ghost :-))))))
MFI - thanks for the explanation. I was not aware of that term - or maybe it’s buried. My famine knowledge is a little ’skewed’ - there was a whole new (somewhat faddish) approach to it when I was at UCD - which ran counter to everything I had been previously taught.
OT - have you ever tried to explain to young people about hedge schools? My daughter didn’t believe me at all!
Gandhi was not a pacifist. He expressly rejected that label in his lifetime.
He was a revolutionary who was determined to throw the English out and he thought very strategically.
He just chose not to fight the English with their weapons of choice; the ones they were far superior in, force of arms.
He recognised that the English were small in number and needed the larger Indian population’s co-operation to function. He recognised also that force of arms is, in the end, a bluff to cower people into co-operating. (It’s not a bluff at an individual level (i.e. “move or I’ll shoot”) but it is at a population level unless your aim is complete genocide.)
Gandhi called their bluff.
Consider what would have happened in Iraq if the US had left the economy in a functioning state i.e. everyone still had jobs and money to buy food.
No Iraqis would have co-operated with them. They would have all smiled and nodded at the Americans and then gone on their own sweet way.
It would have been Passive Agression on steroids.
I’m sure the US leaders (not the soldiers) would much rather have the economic chaos/armed resistance scenario to deal with.
I’m sure because they wouldn’t have done it otherwise.
The only other way to get the Iraqis’ co-operation would have been to give them what they (the US) had promised; freedom, democracy, sovereignty and not steal their resources. But, of course, that would have defeated the whole purpose of the invasion.
So from that point of view, I reckon that sacking the Army, closing down the State enterprises, no reconstruction work for the locals and now stopping the Iraqi farmers from saving their own seeds, all of this is a no-brainer.
Goodness, all that when all I wanted to say was Gandhi was not a pacifist.
Mind you, I did smile at the thought of a four year old boy swinging a chair over his head! I guess I’m not a pacifist, either!
Interesting I was always thought in school that Gandhi was a comlete pacifist.
I know Mandela got very annoyed about being called one and very explicitly said, that he never renounced violence. I’ll leave the chair thrower to answer the rest :-)
What is a hedge school??????
Reading it again, Erdla, I realise I wasn’t as precise as I might have been.
A pacifist will not resist an oppressor.
A non-violent revolutionary, such as Gandhi, will resist with everything they can think off short of violence. Not only because they are literally outgunned but because the means of the revolution usually determines the state you inherit.
You would have been mistaken about Gandhi most likely because that is the way he has been painted by “History” for two reasons, in my opinion.
First it allows the British authorities to present themselves as being benign if not benevolent in granting India independence.
And secondly, it obscured what a powerful weapon non co-operation is if organised and wide spread. i.e. the most powerful empire the world had seen to that date was powerless against it.
It’s a little known fact (probably for the same reasons) that the Danes during WW2, inspite of being occupied by the Germans, saved every last one of their Jewish citizens because they all decided to do so and then organised and did it.
When the Germans wanted Danish Jews to wear armbands, EVERYONE wore armbands. When the Germans then decided to round up the Jews, everyone co-operated in spiriting them over to Sweden. Not a bloody thing the Gestapo could do about it.
They were also of very little help to the German war machine because of widespread passive aggression.
You might have guessed by now that this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine!
If a sizable number of US citizens were prepared to pull together around some decent strategies and maybe risk the next promotion, they could bring their government to it’s knees; especially today with all the communication available. Who cares if the NSA are listening.
It’d be like trying to stop the tide from coming in.
Maybe people could look at the ways that the Eastern Block countries toppled their repressive regimes.
Grania - Yes I have, how do you think I know about how expensive a classroom full of young jaws hitting the desks at high speed can be? :-)
Erdla - “Hedge Schools” were illegal schools run for the native Irish peasantry by illegal native teachers. Under English law it was illegal for the native Irish to have their own schools:
“no person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm…”
It wasn’t that there were no schools the colonial government opened plenty of schools but hey were aimed at indoctrinating the populace into accepting British rule and also of course to prosletyze them against their religion.
So the Irish started their own (very illegal) schools which met in secret.
They were called “Hedge Schools” because they were held - wherever was safe barns, in the ditches of out-of-the-way roads and so on.
Now that the topic has come up I think this is worth doing a posting on. I’ve some material on it somewhere.
Griffon - Erdla is one person you don’t have to tell about how the Danes got most of their Jewish citizens to safety before the German army and the SS got their paws on them. Her maternal grandparents were amongst those who took part and her grandfather eventually wound up in Neuengamme concentration camp for his resistance activities.
Thanks for the straightening out, Mark.
Well, Erdla can be mighty proud of them, is all I can say.
I look to the Danes (and the Poles) as shining examples to us all as to what is possible.