Post by Wasp on Apr 8, 2007 17:49:44 GMT
Before anyone accuses me of anything I am genuinely interested in how people view this article from 2004, especially those from the republic.
The Irish government has just completed the restoration of the Prince Albert statue, on the Merrion Row side of the Leinster House estate. This project has enraged the Sinn Fein Six inside the Dail who have demanded that the statue be pulled down because it is a symbol of British imperialism.
Perhaps someone, preferably those in the party leadership, ought to have a quiet word with their TDs and remind them about that old saw regarding stones, glass houses and people inclined to hurl objects. Before the Sinn Fein TDs start ranting and raving about a harmless old symbol from Ireland's Victorian past they should ponder on the presence of another very different statue north of the Liffey, in Fairview Park. This effigy represents Sean Russell, the commanding officer of the IRA during the Second World War. Russell, whose life ended on a German U-boat a couple of hundred miles off the western Irish coast in June 1940, was a self-proclaimed ally of Nazi Ger many and was prepared to kill and maim British and Irish civilians to disrupt the Allied war effort. He even asked Hitler's Germany to supply the IRA with weapons and money.
Think about it. Dublin remains the only city in democratic Europe where a figurine still stands in homage to a man who openly collaborated with the Nazis. What's more, modern day Sinn Fein politicians, such as the party's candidate in Dublin for the Euro elections, Mary Lou McDonald, seem to have no problem attending commemorations to honour this ally of Adolf Hitler. Compared to the Prince with the exotic ring piercing, the statue of someone who was prepared to risk handing over his country to the benign mercies of the SS should be a greater cause of controversy and outrage.
There are far more deserving characters who should have statues built in their honour across Ireland. They are the Irish volunteers, a large number of whom came from what was then Eire, to fight and die to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. It is worth repeating that more Irishmen signed up to the British forces in the Second World War than those from 'loyal' Ulster. It is significant to point out again and again that the only Northern Ireland man to win a Victoria Cross during World War Two was James Magennis, a Catholic from Belfast's Falls Road. And what is also worth reminding the present generation who have enjoyed unprecedented peace and freedom in Europe, is that because of Magennis' religion the bigoted Unionist establishment refused to recognise his valour.
UTV's Paul Clarke has just sculpted a memorial to these men through four new television programmes. His series 'We Were Brothers Too' will be screened in the run up to the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
Clarke's films challenge the orthodoxy that the Irish Free State was malignly neutral in the conflict between the Third Reich and the allies. Programme Two for instance centres on the strategic importance of Lough Erne in Co. Fermanagh and the arrangement between the Allied powers and Eamon de Valera to allow aeroplanes to fly over Eire. The use of the 'Donegal corridor', Clarke reminds us, was vital in giving air cover to the Atlantic convoys, so crucial to Britain's survival.
There are many touching reunions between the living and the dead in Clarke's examination of Ireland and World War Two. The most moving involves D-Day veteran Bill McConnell MBE who visits the cemetery where a number of his fallen comrades lie. In a simple and personal act of humanity, McConnell pauses for a prayer at the grave of the German sniper he killed when his platoon was pinned down on that first day of the Normandy invasion.
The testimony of McConnell and others like him who faced hurricanes of steel and storms of fire to wrestle Europe back from Hitler's murderous grip should shake us all from our complacent slumber.
Last week's reunification of Europe, signed and sealed in Dublin, was partly brought about through the incredible sacrifice of millions like Bill McConnell and James Magennis six decades earlier. The man commemorated in that statue over in Fairview Park and his friends in Berlin would in contrast have bought us nothing but enslavement and racial extermination all the way from the Urals to the Atlantic; compare that potential legacy to poor Prince Albert whose only claim to fame is a penile piercing.
AND THIS;
THE Irish Republic has been forced to confront the legacy of its neutrality during the Second World War after anti-fascists attacked a memorial to a pro-Nazi IRA leader.
A statue to Sean Russell, who died on board a German U-boat in 1940, was left headless after an attack by youths in Fairview Park in Dublin.
As the group that looks after the statue admitted that it is almost certainly beyond repair, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris called for it to be left unrestored as an enduring symbol of Ireland’s “shame”.
Shimon Samuels, director for international affairs at the centre, the world’s largest Jewish human rights organisation, told The Times: “It’s a blot on the history of Ireland, but blots have to see the public light.”
Ever since his death in 1940, the issue of Russell’s collaboration with the Nazis has been a divisive subject in Ireland. Republicans claim that he was merely following in the footsteps of some of the country’s most celebrated rebel leaders by enlisting foreign assistance at a time of British vulnerability, but others are repelled that Russell was plotting with Germany when Hitler was publicly promising that Jews across Europe would be eliminated.
Trained in sabotage techniques near Berlin, Russell’s mission was to foster a coup in the Irish Republic and to attack British military installations in Northern Ireland. The only thing that stopped him was his death from a perforated ulcer 100 miles off the coast of Co Galway, on August 14, 1940.
Admitting responsibility for breaking the head and right hand off the statue on December 30, the anti-fascists said that they could “no longer tolerate the shameful presence of a memorial to the Nazi collaborator . . . Russell sought to overthrow the Government of Éamon de Valera by fomenting terror and sabotage in the shipyards and munitions factories in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, IRA volunteers were ordered to help the Luftwaffe to bomb their own city at the cost of nearly 2,000 dead and thousands made homeless.”
The Irish government has just completed the restoration of the Prince Albert statue, on the Merrion Row side of the Leinster House estate. This project has enraged the Sinn Fein Six inside the Dail who have demanded that the statue be pulled down because it is a symbol of British imperialism.
Perhaps someone, preferably those in the party leadership, ought to have a quiet word with their TDs and remind them about that old saw regarding stones, glass houses and people inclined to hurl objects. Before the Sinn Fein TDs start ranting and raving about a harmless old symbol from Ireland's Victorian past they should ponder on the presence of another very different statue north of the Liffey, in Fairview Park. This effigy represents Sean Russell, the commanding officer of the IRA during the Second World War. Russell, whose life ended on a German U-boat a couple of hundred miles off the western Irish coast in June 1940, was a self-proclaimed ally of Nazi Ger many and was prepared to kill and maim British and Irish civilians to disrupt the Allied war effort. He even asked Hitler's Germany to supply the IRA with weapons and money.
Think about it. Dublin remains the only city in democratic Europe where a figurine still stands in homage to a man who openly collaborated with the Nazis. What's more, modern day Sinn Fein politicians, such as the party's candidate in Dublin for the Euro elections, Mary Lou McDonald, seem to have no problem attending commemorations to honour this ally of Adolf Hitler. Compared to the Prince with the exotic ring piercing, the statue of someone who was prepared to risk handing over his country to the benign mercies of the SS should be a greater cause of controversy and outrage.
There are far more deserving characters who should have statues built in their honour across Ireland. They are the Irish volunteers, a large number of whom came from what was then Eire, to fight and die to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. It is worth repeating that more Irishmen signed up to the British forces in the Second World War than those from 'loyal' Ulster. It is significant to point out again and again that the only Northern Ireland man to win a Victoria Cross during World War Two was James Magennis, a Catholic from Belfast's Falls Road. And what is also worth reminding the present generation who have enjoyed unprecedented peace and freedom in Europe, is that because of Magennis' religion the bigoted Unionist establishment refused to recognise his valour.
UTV's Paul Clarke has just sculpted a memorial to these men through four new television programmes. His series 'We Were Brothers Too' will be screened in the run up to the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
Clarke's films challenge the orthodoxy that the Irish Free State was malignly neutral in the conflict between the Third Reich and the allies. Programme Two for instance centres on the strategic importance of Lough Erne in Co. Fermanagh and the arrangement between the Allied powers and Eamon de Valera to allow aeroplanes to fly over Eire. The use of the 'Donegal corridor', Clarke reminds us, was vital in giving air cover to the Atlantic convoys, so crucial to Britain's survival.
There are many touching reunions between the living and the dead in Clarke's examination of Ireland and World War Two. The most moving involves D-Day veteran Bill McConnell MBE who visits the cemetery where a number of his fallen comrades lie. In a simple and personal act of humanity, McConnell pauses for a prayer at the grave of the German sniper he killed when his platoon was pinned down on that first day of the Normandy invasion.
The testimony of McConnell and others like him who faced hurricanes of steel and storms of fire to wrestle Europe back from Hitler's murderous grip should shake us all from our complacent slumber.
Last week's reunification of Europe, signed and sealed in Dublin, was partly brought about through the incredible sacrifice of millions like Bill McConnell and James Magennis six decades earlier. The man commemorated in that statue over in Fairview Park and his friends in Berlin would in contrast have bought us nothing but enslavement and racial extermination all the way from the Urals to the Atlantic; compare that potential legacy to poor Prince Albert whose only claim to fame is a penile piercing.
AND THIS;
THE Irish Republic has been forced to confront the legacy of its neutrality during the Second World War after anti-fascists attacked a memorial to a pro-Nazi IRA leader.
A statue to Sean Russell, who died on board a German U-boat in 1940, was left headless after an attack by youths in Fairview Park in Dublin.
As the group that looks after the statue admitted that it is almost certainly beyond repair, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris called for it to be left unrestored as an enduring symbol of Ireland’s “shame”.
Shimon Samuels, director for international affairs at the centre, the world’s largest Jewish human rights organisation, told The Times: “It’s a blot on the history of Ireland, but blots have to see the public light.”
Ever since his death in 1940, the issue of Russell’s collaboration with the Nazis has been a divisive subject in Ireland. Republicans claim that he was merely following in the footsteps of some of the country’s most celebrated rebel leaders by enlisting foreign assistance at a time of British vulnerability, but others are repelled that Russell was plotting with Germany when Hitler was publicly promising that Jews across Europe would be eliminated.
Trained in sabotage techniques near Berlin, Russell’s mission was to foster a coup in the Irish Republic and to attack British military installations in Northern Ireland. The only thing that stopped him was his death from a perforated ulcer 100 miles off the coast of Co Galway, on August 14, 1940.
Admitting responsibility for breaking the head and right hand off the statue on December 30, the anti-fascists said that they could “no longer tolerate the shameful presence of a memorial to the Nazi collaborator . . . Russell sought to overthrow the Government of Éamon de Valera by fomenting terror and sabotage in the shipyards and munitions factories in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, IRA volunteers were ordered to help the Luftwaffe to bomb their own city at the cost of nearly 2,000 dead and thousands made homeless.”
