This to express my deep appreciation of the great gesture towards peace and a genuinely united Ireland made by Ulster First Minister Michelle O’Neill today by her laying a wreath in commemoration of the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for British and European freedom. This is the second time in as many years that she’s done it.
It’s a gesture I could not imagine anyone from her party making when I was growing up in the ’80s and in the 90s before the Good Friday Agreement. Nationalists hated Britain to such an extent that they very definitely did not celebrate Remembrance Day and you could be treated as persona non grata or worse if you wore a poppy. One British comedian on one of the chat shows recalled the difficulty he had getting a taxi after he’d finished a gig in Belfast. There’s a memorial cemetery to the Irish soldiers who fell in the First World War in Dublin, and I’ve been told that it’s got the unofficial name of Traitors’ Gate or something like it.
But Britain benefited immensely from the covert aid given to us by Eire. Premier de Valera secretly supplied us with information on Nazi plans and movement, even though his country was officially neutral. The BBC a few years ago also did a programme on Radio 4 on the many Irishmen who secretly joined the British army in order to fight the forces of Nazi brutality. It had to be done secretly, as if there neighbours and fellow countrymen found out they would be traitors. Yet these talked with pride about the comradeship they found among their fellow squaddies in the north. It didn’t matter which part of the Island of Ireland you came from, everyone was ‘Paddy’. And some subversively taught their loyalist friends the old rebel songs.
These immensely courageous men played their part in creating a free Europe, like everyone else in our countries who gave their lives. We need to remember them.
Sections of the Loyalist community are responding and reaching across the barriers of ethnicity and language. A group dedicated to encouraging Protestants and Loyalists to take up Irish Gaelic produced a list of Protestant Gaels who fought in World War I. A Presbyterian group staged an exhibition of Gaelic translations of the Bibles made in the 19th century. Part of MA in History at UWE was on European contact with the wider world from the 16th to the 18th century. It dealt with contact with the Indigenous Americans in the 15th and 16th centuries. One of the remarkable fact was that British ethnologists saw the Scots and Irish Gaels as the equivalents of indigenous Americans because of their very distinctive dress and hairstyles. Gaelic men worse the glib, a forelock dyed orange, which recalls some of the distinctive hairstyle of Amerindian tribes. The early descriptions of these people and their folkways purposefully did not mention their religion, as at that time several of the Gaelic clans in Ireland were Protestant.
First Minister O’Neill tweeted on X this morning that she intends to be the First Minister for everyone in Ulster, while working, of course, for a united Ireland. I believe this may eventually become a reality. The Irish border as it stands makes zero sense. One section of road criss-crosses it four times in very few miles and it cuts through people’s gardens. Obviously, you can’t stick a check point down at the bottom of Mrs. O’Grady’s cabbage patch! Brexit threw a real spanner into the relationship between North and South, so that there was talk of an Irish backstop in the middle of the Irish Sea, for heaven’s sake. This annoyed the Loyalists, despite all the right-wing yak we’ve been subjected to about how wonderful Brexit has been and how it’s worked wonders.
Pull the other one. It’s got bell’s on.
Sinn Fein has already succeeded in passing a motion in the Dail in the south stating that the Irish state should begin preparations for a move to Irish unity within the next ten years. As with their counterparts in Ulster, they are trying to move away from purely sectarian politics. Mary Lou MacDonald, their chief woman, condemned the sectarian abuse meted out at the head of the Alliance Party because she had a Presbyterian husband who had, fifty years ago, been a member of the Orange Order.
There are dissident elements in the nationalist community who resent this. There have been a few posts on the Internet about the emergence of a dissident nationalist group, the New IRA. The gardai are keeping an eye on them and passing information to Ulster’s finest. There was enough hate and bloodshed in Ireland and Britain when I was growing up. There is nothing romantic about the killing of ordinary people because of their religion. All it created was hate and more hate.
So I have the deepest respect for Michelle O’Neill for her efforts to go beyond sectarian and community divisions. If anyone can create a genuinely united Ireland, where Roman Catholic and Protestant, Loyalist and Nationalist, can live together in peace, it will be through the efforts of women and people like Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou MacDonald.
I therefore salute her for her participation at the Remembrance Day service, and hope she will be able to continue working for all the great people of the Six Counties.
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