The Faith Of Our Fathers

About a massacre, about Ireland and Israel, about the IRA and the Nazis, and why my family ended up in Canada. Weekend Special. Put your feet up. Long story.

The Loudest “Pro-Palestine” Protesters of Europe

It pained me to write my column in the National Post this week: Antisemitic Ireland needs to shake off the imbecility: Not a few of Ireland's gallant heroes were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators.

It hurt because it’s personal. It’s about family. It’s about the legacy of the Irish freedom struggle being put to the purpose of apologetics for the barbarism of Hamas. It’s about the triumph of a self-flattering Irish “narrative” that requires acts of vandalism to be committed against history.

It bricks up a strain of blood-and-soil Irish nationalism that remains antisemitic to its core. Even worse, it paves over an old and abiding affinity between the Irish and the Jews, and between Irish republicanism and Zionism.

Jimmy Glavin, third from left, was 19. He was among 12 IRA volunteers killed that day, seven of them murdered after surrendering. A textbook war crime.

“The Bravest Little Lad I Ever Met”

Bear with me here. This is important.

One of the worst atrocities of the War of Independence as it unfolded in County Cork was committed by British forces on February 20, 1921 just a few miles from my dad's hometown of Midleton, at a farmhouse near the village of Clonmult. An IRA “flying column” was holed up in a barn, surrounded. After a raging battle, the survivors surrendered and came out with their hands up.

In the photograph above is the Fourth Battalion of the East Cork Brigade of the Irish Republican Army. Left to right: Michael Desmond (killed at Clonmult, with his brother David); Patrick Higgins (wounded at Clonmult); James Glavin (killed at Clonmult); Daniel Dennehy (killed at Clonmult); Joseph Aherne (his brother Liam was killed at Clonmult); Richard Hegarty (killed at Clonmult); Joseph Morrissey (killed at Clonmult); Michael Hallahan (killed at Clonmult); D. Stanton; Patrick White.

All told, twelve IRA volunteers were killed at Clonmult that day. Five were teenagers. James (Jimmy) Glavin was a cousin of my grandfather’s. Age 19, “the bravest little lad I ever met,” the IRA brigade's senior officer, Patrick Higgins, said of him. Another two men taken alive that day were later executed.

The Clonmult massacre was a war crime of the ugliest sort, and the Cork IRA’s worst single-day casualty count during the War of Independence.

I’ll come back to that February day in 1921 and what is conventionally understood to be the lesson to be drawn from what happened back then, down below. It’s a story that explains a lot about how we can end up making no sense at all of the present if we allow unwelcome truths to be expunged from the record of the past.

The Clonmult story also figures into the reasons why it came to pass that my older brother Michael and I ended up being born in England, and why my parents couldn’t move back to Ireland after the Second World War, and why we all ended up in Canada. Speaking of family. . .

I heard from one of my cousins back in the auld country the other day: I just wanted to check in on you and that you’re staying safe through all the Middle East madness. I’m currently embarrassed to be Irish. I can’t say anything in public for fear of getting dogs’ abuse.

It was because of this that I decided to write that column in the Post this week. I’d been meaning to get around to the story anyway. I’d been putting it off.

History grants no Irish exemption from the obligations of decency.

For several years now the Republic of Ireland has been a tantrum house for “Anti-Zionist” histrionics at the highest levels of government and polite society. The way I put it in my column: On the question of Israel and Palestine, Ireland has become the unbearable, hectoring, sanctimonious bore of the entire 27-nation European Union.

In the same way that Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has become a millstone around the EU’s neck in the matter of Vladimir Putin’s barbarism in Ukraine, the Republic of Ireland has become the EU’s foot-stamping outlier in the matter of Israel and the Palestinian “resistance.”

Even on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Irish military neutrality means Ireland only “almost stands with Ukraine,” says the besieged Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy. But when it comes to Israel, there’s something deeply dysfunctional going on.

The main thing to notice here is the self-flattery of the boilerplate Irish pretext for histrionic Anti-Zionism, put so elegantly by the creepy former Irish diplomat quoted in my column, Niall Holohan: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche — underneath it all we side with the underdog.”

This sanctimonious paddywhackery has allowed Ireland’s “Pro-Palestine” windbags to get away with all manner of antisemitic slander and blood libel against the State of Israel going back decades. The Irish can claim no rightful entitlement to any sort of a victim coupon or free pass here.

The historian Raymond Douglas, distinguished professor of history at New York’s Colgate University, has examined this special pleading in exhausting detail in a chapter titled Not So Different after All: Irish and Continental European Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective, in Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (Irish Studies).

What Professor Douglas finds is that the special claim Irish “Pro-Palestine” polemicists make for themselves is groundless. It’s just the same radical-chic derangement that is ubiquitous among the soft-palmed classes in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and much of Europe. Except in Ireland, it’s been in hyperdrive for decades.

Its pedigree goes back to a lunatic Catholic fascism that once preyed upon innocently devout Irish Catholics with the state’s blessing, and nobody likes to mention that, least of all Sinn Fein.

Hysterical accusations to the effect that Israel is engaged in a “genocide” did not begin after the Israeli military launched its overwhelming-force campaign to smash the Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza last month. The most senior Irish politicians have been accusing Israel of genocide fairly routinely going back to the early 1980s.

A week into the First Lebanon War in 1982, Garret FitzGerald, between his two terms as taoiseach (prime minister), said it had become “increasingly difficult to resist” leveling the charge of genocide against Israel.

FitzGerald’s colleague Austin Deasy, Fine Gael’s foreign affairs spokesman, didn’t hesitate to say Israel appeared determined to carry out a “wholesale genocide of the Palestinian people in Lebanon.”

Proinsias de Rossa, who would later serve as social welfare minister in the 1990s-era coalition government, said Israel was engaged in a merciless “holocaust” driven by an intent to “wipe out the Palestinian people.”

Threats of retaliation against Irish Jews for the actions of the Israeli government go all the way back to the creation of Israel itself, and those threats have come routinely from the highest authorities. In 1949, Professor Douglas records, the Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid told Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits that if Christians found themselves encumbered in any access to Israel’s holy places, “innocent people” in Ireland’s Jewish community could be made to suffer.

To dispel any confusion about what he meant, Archbishop McQuaid told the papal nuncio that he saw nothing morally amiss about using a raised fist to instil “that which most worries a Jew: the fear of reprisals.” And nobody could question the credentials McQuaid brought to his appointment as Archbishop in 1940.

In 1932, during his time as president of Blackrock College, McQuaid delivered a two-hour Passion Sunday address that would have made Osama bin Laden proud. No antisemitic conspiracy theory was left unturned. The Bavarian Illuminati, the Jews at the till in the Warburg Bank who lavished millions of dollars on Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the manipulation of the world’s news media by the “Jew-enemies of Our Saviour,” the sulphur stench of the Rotary Clubs, the Jewish financiers behind the Great Depression, the “Jew-controlled League of Nations,” the lot.

In 1949, Rabbi Jakobovits got Archbishop McQuaid’s message loudly and clearly. Irish Jews were being “treated as hostages,” the rabbi pointed out.

A pattern of threats and retaliatory targeting persisted through the 1980s and the 1990s and well into recent years, recurring any time there’s some flareup involving Israeli-Palestinian violence.

In 1994, in the Progressive Jewish cemetery in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham, 36 headstones were smashed, and the local Gardai said it could not conclude that the desecrations were “specifically antisemitic.” Ten years later, Jewish graves in the Belfast City Cemetery were vandalized. During the same period in Dublin, vandals damaged the Central Synagogue, the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Old Age Pensioners’ Home and two Jewish cemeteries. In 2016, a mob descended on the Belfast cemetery in broad daylight, using hammers and blocks to break up the headstones. The Belfast synagogue’s windows were smashed, two nights in a row.

Straight out of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Something else the Irish diplomat at Holohan told The Guardian warrants a close look: “Holohan claims that another factor in Ireland’s outlook has been its tiny community of approximately 2,500 Jews – barely 0.05% of the population – that contrasts with sizeable and influential Jewish communities in Britain and France.”

Never mind that distinct Jewish communities have been a presence in Ireland since at least the 16th Century - Moses Annyas Eanes, grandson of an emigre from Portugal, was elected mayor of Youghal, County Cork, in 1555. The older communities were primarily Sephardic, but Ashkenazi Jews from the Lithuanian, Russian and Polish pogroms began to settle down in the late 1800s. The Jews of Ireland are dwindling now.

Holohan’s insinuation is so hackneyed and hoary it even shows up in James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses. It comes up in an encounter between Stephen Dedalus, the young friend of the novel’s Jewish protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and the Loyalist bigot Mr. Deasy, the headmaster at the school where Dedalus works as a teacher.

They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day. As Dedalus is leaving, Mr Deasy catches up to him, with this:

I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?. . .- Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly. -  She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter … that’s why.

The point here: Genuine feelings of empathy with the Palestinians are one thing, but the fraudulent claim of a distinct Irish entitlement to what routinely amounts to outright antisemitism is embedded in a “narrative” of revisionist parallels between the cause of Palestinian statehood and Ireland’s own long and agonizing journey to sovereignty.

It’s an alibi and a cover story that has indeed become part of the Irish psyche, as Holohan says, and my column just scratched the surface of a deep disgrace that so many Irish nationalists have buried within that psyche. Do read the column. There will be more archeology out of that subterranean history in this newsletter. It’s poking up out of the ground, wherever you look.

A breaking-news interregnum:

“Irish Lives Matter”

If you think Canada’s political culture and Prime Minister Trudeau are an embarrassment, a fair match is made in Ireland’s jackeen class and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and especially in Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Fein. The parallels between Varadkar’s government and Trudeau’s Liberal government are astonishing.

In Dublin, riots erupted Thursday following a horrific stabbing spree by a deranged man who was initially reported in social-media incitements to have been an Algerian. Among his victims were three schoolchildren and a caregiver.

Whatever his origin, Irish police say he’s in his late 40s and he’s been an Irish citizen nearly half his life. In any case, within hours, hundreds of people were going mental in what appears to have been mostly spontaneous bedlam. Police arrested 34 rioters after three buses and streetcar were set ablaze and 11 Gardai vehicles were smashed up, and there was looting of shops all along O’Connell Street.

While the riot had a distinctly Black Lives Matter vibe about it and a handful of ‘Irish Lives Matter’ placards were carried in the crowds, the Gardai say right-wing agitators were involved, and there’s truth in that. Even so, “anti-immigrant” rabblerousing doesn’t fairly describe the tensions that have been building in Ireland lately.

Just this past year, Ireland took in the second highest number of immigrants since record-keeping began, largely because of the necessary welcoming of 50,000 Ukrainian refugees on top of a divisive government ambition to add 25 per cent to Ireland’s current population of five million by 2040. One fifth of Ireland is already foreign-born.

Rents and house prices have shot through the roof, and the cost of living has been escalating at a punishing rate along with taxes. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people have fallen below the poverty line.

Canadians will be intimately familiar with this sort of thing.

A contentious “direct provision” policy has required villages and towns to turn over entire hotels and hostelries to newcomers who are provided a grudging pittance of welfare. In Greater Dublin, the new arrivals have been kept away from the city’s leafier districts and crammed into the working-class inner North Dublin.

With Sinn Fein’s abandonment of proletarian radicalism and its subsequent diffusion from Ulster to respectability in the Republic, the vacuum in Irish politics has been taken up by populist yobbery. But even the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a human rights NGO that focuses on combating polarisation, disinformation and extremism, says there is a surfeit of “legitimate grievance” at work here.

The establishment parties have been pleased to dismiss the discontent as merely the anti-immigrant bigotry of howling pikeys. Sinn Fein and Fine Gael and the Social Democrats and Fianna Fail have preferred to busy themselves with more avant garde activities, like shouting themselves hoarse about the wickedness of the world’s only Jewish state.

And that’s how you start a riot.

From Jew-baiter to rebel hero to the Kishinev Pogrom

Whenever the issue of Irish animus to Israel comes up, sooner or later someone will mention that upon the death of Adolph Hitler, Irish president Eamon de Valera popped round with condolences to the German embassy in Dublin. In the Nazi-fancying Irish scheme of things, that’s nothing. In my family, it’s often the opening line of a circuitous yarn that ends up with us becoming Canadians. I’ll explain below the paywall [removed].

In my column I mention a number of instances of Irish nationalist fellow-traveling and collaboration with Nazis. I mentioned the early Sinn Fein president Arthur Griffith, later Dáil Éireann’s vice president and foreign minister, and I noted his absolutely septic antisemitism.

But perhaps I overlooked what some scholars conclude was Griffith’s change of heart, later in life. One thing I just didn’t have space to cover at all was the work of Griffith’s adversary, the heroic Michael Davitt, founder of the insurrectionist Land League and prominent figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the clandestine precursor of the IRA.

The Mayo-born revolutionary spent years in and out of prison on charges including treason and arms trafficking. He was the child of a family that survived the Great Famine only to be evicted from their farm, and he began his journey into journalism at the age of 11, after having lost an arm in the cogs of a machine in the cotton mill where he’d worked as a child labourer from the age of nine.

Apart from his contributions to Irish nationalist mobilization, Davitt was one of the world’s leading authorities on the pogroms of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, having taken up an investigation for the Hearst newspaper chain in the United States. In his book on the Kishinev Pogrom, a horrific outbreak of hysterical antisemitism in Bessarabia, Davitt concluded: “I have come from a journey through the Jewish Pale, a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism.”

In my column I did have enough space to briefly summarize the similarly papered-over story of Sean Russell, the 1930s-era IRA chief of staff who trained in Nazi Germany in the use of explosives that were to be put to the purpose of a joint IRA-Nazi takeover of the six counties of British-controlled Ulster.

I mentioned that Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has justified her admiration of Russell and her attendance at annual commemorations celebrating Russell’s moral squalor on the grounds that his Nazi affinities were merely “misguided.” And she’s gotten away with it.

Straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

I didn’t have space in my column to make sense of Sean South, another IRA hero of martyrology and maudlin ballad who McDonald has also lionized. The fanatically antisemitic Limerickman was killed in a botched raid on a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Fermanagh in 1957.

That was the year South set off to join that gallant band Of Plunkett, Pearse and Tone, as the rebel song goes. A martyr for old Ireland, Sean South of Garryowen. The year 1957 was also the year the Glavins emigrated to Canada. The two events are not unrelated, which I’ll explain below the paywall.

Every year, South is commemorated in a public ceremony in Limerick. Mary Lou McDonald has attended, and there’s some dissatisfaction with the meagre plaque that marks his family home. Two years ago, Limerick’s Sinn Fein councillor John Costelloe was suggesting that there should something more grand to honour the man. “You go around the world and Sean South’s name is immortalised. . . Times are changing. People’s attitudes are changing and I feel now is the right time for Limerick to stand proud.”

Times certainly are changing in Ireland. The Anti-Zionist hysteria that has been sweeping the country in ever more intense waves over the past 30 years certainly does suggest that it’s the right time for Sinn Fein to try and get away with more uproarious annual celebrations of fascist cranks.

As laid out by historian Sean Gannon here, among South’s many patriotic contributions to Ireland was his establishment of the Limerick branch of Maria Duce, a gruesomely antisemitic cult inspired by the Catholic fascists of Spain and Italy. The boss of Maria Duce was a priest, Denis Fahey, who was an intolerable embarrassment to the Catholic Church of the late 1940s, which should tell you something.

The Maria Duce organization of South’s devotions came straight from a circle of depraved French Jesuits whose lunacy was such that Pope Pius XI excommunicated them. The Maria Duce doctrines read as though they were straight out of the founding charter of Hamas, with all the requisite mystical obsessions with Jews, Freemasons, and Communists:

The Jews were engaged in a 2,000-year-old covenant with Satan to destroy the Catholic Church. They were behind the Protestant Reformation, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Hollywood. They controlled the international news media, the banks and the labour unions.

Arrayed against Catholic Ireland was a vast Judeo-Masonic network capable of mobilizing legions of secret agents, among whom were the American actors Danny Kaye and Gregory Peck, and the celebrated harmonica player Larry Adler. In his letters to the Limerick Leader newspaper, South listed up to 60 stars of stage and screen who were in league with both Satan and Moscow.

The establishment of the State of Israel was a sin against God committed by “the Allies and the Adorers of the Beast of the Apocalypse,” and it was out of this asylum that Sean South burst into a feverish commitment to the IRA, bringing all that psychotic baggage with him. It was less than two years after his IRA oath-swearing that South was killed in that botched attack on an RUC barracks in Fermanagh, a martyr for old Ireland, Sean South of Garryowen.

I don’t know the status of Limerick councillor John Costelloe’s proposal to upgrade the simple plaque outside South’s home on Henry Street to something more imposing.

But I can tell you what happened to the plaque on the Cliftonpark Avenue house in Belfast that was once the home of the great Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a committed Irish nationalist, fluent Irish-language speaker and the first Chief Rabbi of the Irish Free State.

The plaque was vandalized so many times and became such a popular target for rock-throwing that it was removed by the Ulster Historical Society because of the danger posed to the locals.

Rabbi Herzog later served as the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel.

A brief visit with the Herzogs

The house on Cliftonpark Avenue was also the birthplace of Rabbi Herzog’s son Chaim, who would go on to serve two five-year terms as the sixth president of Israel.

After the Herzogs moved to Dublin when Chaim was just a toddler, Chaim went on to become Ireland’s bantamweight boxing champion while still in his teens. During the Second World War, Chaim participated in the Normandy landing and ended up involved in the liberation of the death camp of Bergen-Belsen. In the following years he headed the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, rising to the rank of Major-General, and also served as Israel’s envoy to the United Nations before his presidency.

Rabbi Herzog’s other son Yaakov graduated in law from McGill University and served as Israel’s ambassador to Canada. Rabbi Herzog’s daughter Shira was a prominent Canadian philanthropist who served as a senior official with the Canada Israel Committee, a forerunner to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

Chaim’s son Isaac Herzog is currently Israel’s president.

Quite the family, the Herzogs. You’d think they would be celebrated, that maybe there would be a republican statue of Rabbi Herzog at least somewhere. Instead, there are annual commemorations for the likes of the Nazi Sean Russell and the deranged Catholic fascist Sean South.

In Belfast, it isn’t even safe to leave up a plaque at Rabbi Herzog’s old house, the place where Chaim Herzog was born.

Now to the delicate subjects I alluded to up top.

About Clonmult, and why it matters.

In the way the story of the Clonmult massacre is usually told, it’s a story that illustrates the wickedness of the British occupation, and especially the savagery of the hated British auxiliaries known as the Black and Tans. It certainly can and probably should be told that way, but it’s not the only way to tell the story. I’ll come to that.

Here’s what we know.

Jimmy's battalion was hiding out in a farmhouse in the townland of Garrylaurence, in the parish of Dungourney, near Clonmult. They'd attended Mass and gone to confession, and they were preparing to leave the following morning because word was going around that the British Army had become aware of their location.

Before they decamped from the place they were surrounded. Ordered to come out with their hands up, initially they refused. The decision was made that some men should make a run for it, to get reinforcements. In the attempt, Michael Hallahan, Liam Aherne and Richard Hegarty were shot and killed. Only “Jacko” O’Connell got away.

The British soldiers outside consisted of a unit of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and the Black and Tans. They'd pounded the farmhouse with a barrage of rifle bullets and set the thatched roof on fire, and then demanded that the men inside come out with their hands up, promising that they would not be harmed.

Inside, the lads held a vote. The decision was made to surrender. They came out with their hands up. The first out was John Harty, 17. One of the Tans smashed his head with a rifle butt, knocking him unconscious, and another of the Tans put a pistol in Patrick Higgins' mouth and fired, but the bullet lodged in Higgins’ jaw. A Hampshire officer stopped the Tan from firing again.

The Tans lined the rest of them up against a wall and executed them in cold blood. The Hampshire officer tried to stop the massacre, but seven men were shot and killed then and there. Harty and Higgins ended up surviving, thanks to the Hampshire officer. Two of the wounded, Pat O’Sullivan and Maurice Moore, were executed at Cork Military Detention Barracks two months later, on April 28.

The bit about the story that I think is important is the bit about that officer with the Royal Hampshire Regiment. He tried to stop an act of depravity as it was being committed by his own countrymen before his very eyes.

I don't know the officer's name. I wish I did. If the story has a hero, it’s him. There should be a republican monument to his memory somewhere.

Right. Now for the touchy part.

My brother Mike and I were born in England and came to Canada on Irish passports when I was two and Mike was three, he named after the War of Independence hero Michael Collins and me after Terence McSwiney, the playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork who died on the 75th day of his hunger strike in Brixton prison, where he’d been jailed on charges of sedition.

My dad emigrated first, and when he was settled we followed with ma. Owing to the citizenship laws at the time we could call ourselves British subjects if it made things easier, which it always did.

Ma was from an Irish emigrant family in England. She’d enlisted in the Royal Air Force in the war’s early years and she went on to work in the Nazi-hunting Bletchley Circle; it was all very hush hush and Official Secrets Act and so on until we were in our teens.

If there are readers new to the Real Story just coming upon this, when you’re done here you really should read Marsha Lederman’s tribute to ma, the last of the auld wans, the matriarch of a tribe that includes quite a few of her “Jewish children.” It’s in the Globe and Mail, here.

Here’s the difficult thing.

There’s a bit in my National Post story about the militant Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the insurrectionary Zionist Irgun organization in British Mandate Palestine, coming over to Ireland at the invitation of the anti-treaty IRA leader and later Irish president Eamon de Valera.

Jabotinsky was looking for advice and guidance in the arts of overthrowing a British military occupation of vastly superior troop strength and firepower. He wanted to learn as much as he could about Ireland’s guerrilla war against the British. Jabotinsky stayed for several weeks in Ireland, mostly taking notes from IRA leader Robbie Briscoe, himself a prominent Dublin Jew. Briscoe was later elected Dublin’s mayor.

Anyway, there’s a statement attributed to Jabotinsky along the lines of his determination upon returning to British Mandate Palestine to form “a physical force movement in Palestine on exactly the same lines as Fianna Eireann and the IRA.”

So here’s the really awkward thing. My father was a member of Fianna Eireann.

The Fianna was founded as a youth militia by Constance Markievicz in 1909, and it later established its own circle in the underground Irish Republican Brotherhood, precursor to the IRA. Fianna Eireann played a key role in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence. Its members fought on the “anti-treaty side” during the civil war.

Eamon de Valera was the senior leader of the anti-treaty forces that lost the civil war - but you could say De Valera and his Fianna Fail party eventually won at the ballot box in 1932, and “Dev” got his republic from out of the shell of the Irish Free State, although only a 26-county republic, in 1937.

The 1930s was a chaotic decade in Ireland. The Fianna Eireann was an above-ground anti-treaty organization after 1932, but Dev outlawed them again in 1938. The Fianna were doctrinally opposed to any concession regarding British sovereignty in the Six Counties. Hardliners.

Around this time, my dad was graduating from the North Monastery in Cork, where he came a couple weeks away from ordination in the priesthood. His service in Fianna Eireann when he was in his teens consisted mostly of organizing attacks on the fascist groupuscules and near-fascist formations like the Blueshirts.

Dad did not like the Blueshirts one tiny bit, and at some point he and a few of his comrades decided that De Valera’s declaration of neutrality in 1939 was an unpardonable offence against decency. The British were the enemy once, but a confrontation with the Nazis was inevitable and morally inescapable. So dad crossed the Irish Sea and “put on the uniform of the enemy” by joining the RAF to fight the Nazis. That’s how he met my ma.

Three weeks before Victory in Europe Day, my Uncle Patrick, ma’s brother, was killed in an encounter with German soldiers near Hanover. He was only 19. His loss broke granddad’s heart. As soon as he was able, granddad moved the family back to Ireland and settled down in East Clare, in the parish of Bodyke, just a short walk from Tuamgraney.

It’s important to understand the visceral hatred so many Irish people harboured against the British forces in those days. It’s also useful as well to consider the contempt and bitterness a great many English people felt towards the Irish at the time, especially Irish republicans.

The 1950s was not an especially pleasant time to be Irish in England. It didn’t help that the IRA and its formulations, like Fianna Eireann, were engaged in the bloody Border Campaign in Ulster - Sean South’s raid in Fermanagh was one of the major operations of the campaign - and the Fianna were calling their demobilized members back to duty.

It would have been hard enough for ma to go back to Ireland with Dev in power. For my dad it would have been impossible to go home, and nearly unbearable to stay in England.

If dad had served in the Free State Army and then absconded to fight alongside Englishmen in a British uniform, it would have been bad enough. De Valera’s government was targeting that cohort with legislative measures known as the Starvation Orders, “seven years’ starvation, seven years’ destitution, and to find themselves branded, as far as the State can do so, as pariah dogs, as outcasts, untouchables. . .”

Dad had been Fianna Eireann, and after crossing the Irish Sea to join the RAF he’d been disowned by many in his own community. It’s not like he could just barge back into that little East Cork world of the Clonmult martyrs with two sons and a demobilized RAF wife who couldn’t quite explain what she did during the war.

So it was off to Canada with us.

Dad remained an unrepentant Irish republican throughout his life. He was a leading figure in the Irish Solidarity Committee and the Irish Prisoner of War Committee here in Canada during the 1980-81 hunger strikes in Ulster. He died an unrepentant republican, but he never forgave De Valera’s Ireland for its neutrality in the Second World War.

He never questioned his decision to choose exile, to join the RAF, to walk down the high street of Midleton in the uniform of the enemy in one final act of defiance, after signing up with the other side to fight the Nazis.

Funny auld world. You’ll end up making no sense at all of the present if you allow unwelcome truths to be expunged from the record of the past.

The End.