17 January 1972: In a dramatic escape seven internees on the Maidstone ship in Belfast harbour swam to Freedom on this day. The men were Seamus Convery, Tom Gorman, James Bryson, Thomas Toland, Thomas Kane, Peter Rodgers and Martin Taylor. They had planned their escape well in advance and the internees had saved their butter rations for weeks so that the men would be able to smear their bodies in a protective cover before they took to the icy waters of Belfast Lough. They also applied black boot polish to themselves for further protection. Straight after the delayed afternoon roll call they cut a bar on a porthole, slid down the hawser and swam in single file to the docks about 600 yards away. Meanwhile up above their comrades struck up a ‘Skiffle Group’ to cover any sounds they would make hitting the water. Overheard the British searchlights from the ship swept the darkened surface of the Lough but spotted nothing.

Up to this point everything had gone according to plan but on reaching dry land they realised that they had landed adrift of where their would be rescuers should have been waiting for them. Dripping wet and ice cold and dressed only in shorts and socks they eventually managed to gain control of a bus and by a stroke of fortune one of the group had been a bus driver in Belfast some years before. They made off down into Anderstown and into a local pub where immediately they were offered help. Fully clothed and in a car given to them by one of the clientele they then set off to safe house. Within days they were in Dublin [above] and by their audacious and daring action they gave the IRA a major publicity coup that severely embarrassed the British Government.

All over Belfast there were bonfires that night. The people danced in the streets with joy.

"There are so many people to thank, the IRA on the outside, the people in the safe houses, but the people in that bar in the Markets were great. We could not have done it without them.

"It was a collective effort but the success of the escape was down to each individual. That is where the strength of it lay. It is sad to say that Jim and Toadler later died in a feud with the Sticks and Tucker died in a car accident. The remainder stay in touch and we had a bit of a reunion for this, the 30th anniversary.

"They were tough times but boy, it was a remarkable escape, and worth every minute of anxiety and effort."

Peter Rodgers

An Phoblacht 2002

17 January 1860: Douglas Hyde/ Dubhglas de Híde, the future President of Ireland and a co founder of the Gaelic League, was born on this day. He was brought into this World at Longford House in Castlerea, County Roscommon while his mother was on a short visit there. His father, Arthur Hyde, was Church of Ireland Rector of Kilmactranny , County Sligo. On his fathers side they were descended from the Elizabethan planter, Arthur Hyde of Denchworth, Berkshire.

Young Douglas spent his very early years in Co Sligo before being brought up at Frenchpark in Co. Roscommon. Due to a childhood illness he was educated at home and thus had ample opportunity to roam the countryside in the pursuits of shooting and fishing. It was on these outings that an Old Fenian, Johhny Lavin, befriended him. At this time the Irish Language was in noticeable decline but Douglas Hyde learned it directly from the local speakers in the neighbourhood and also through an old copy of the New Testament his father possessed that was written in Gaelic. He also imbibed the old stories of local folklore and history from local people that fired his imagination and developed his strong nationalist beliefs.

His lifelong passion was the preservation of the Gaelic Language and in July 1893 he along with Eoin MacNeill, founded the Gaelic League (Connradh na Gaeilge), and he remained its President until his resignation in 1915. He believed that:

‘Wherever Irish is the vernacular of the people there live enshrined in it memories and imaginations, deeds of daring, … an heroic cycle of legend and poem … which contain the very best and truest thoughts … of kings, sages, bards and shanachies of bygone ages. … if we allow one of the finest and the richest languages in Europe, which, fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four millions of Irishmen, to die out without a struggle, it will be an everlasting disgrace, and a blighting stigma upon our nationality’.

In 1938 he became the first President of Éire and held that Office until he retired in 1945. He died on 12 July 1949 and was given a State Funeral in Dublin before being buried at Frenchpark Cemetery near his family’s old home in County Roscommon.

14 January 1965: For the first time since the partition of Ireland the two current leaders of the respective parliaments on this island, Sean Lemass [right] and Terence O’Neill [left], met in person. The meeting was held over cups of tea at Stormont, site of the Northern Parliament, just outside Belfast.

 

On the face of it this was a most unlikely encounter. Sean Lemass was a veteran of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. A long time member of Fianna Fail he held Ministerial Office for many years until he came to power in 1959 on Eamon De Valera’s election as President of Ireland.

Terence O’Neill, despite his Irish name, was a true son of the British Empire. He had been educated at Eton and served on active service with the Irish Guards in World War Two. He was later elected an MP and served as a Minister of Government in the North. A dyed in the wool Aristocrat he had taken over the top job when Lord Brookborough retired in 1963.

Both men were however anxious to bring about a thaw in North –South relations and thus it was agreed that they meet to break the ice on this day. However not everyone was happy with this development and a certain Reverend Ian Paisley organised a group of followers to protest at this perceived outrage. Upon the Taoiseach’s motorcade arrival at Stormont they threw snowballs at his car. The following month the Reverend gentleman denounced O’Neill as a ‘Traitor’, but such an outburst did not stop the leader of the Unionist Party from paying a complimentary return call on Sean Lemass in Dublin later in the year that was meant to further cement the relationship.

However events precluded a further development of such contacts. Lemass retired the following year and Jack Lynch, who had little interest in the idea, replaced him. O’Neill then thought better of pursuing such contacts, which he knew clearly upset such a wide body of the Unionist opinion.

He was well aware that Paisley was all to ready to make use of any further such episodes to undermine him at a time when the political situation in the North was becoming increasingly fragile.

　

Ian Paisley threw snowballs at Lemass’s cortege in protest at this 'Betrayal'!

13 January 1800: Daniel O’Connell made his first public speech at the Royal Exchange, Dublin opposing the idea of a Parliamentary Union of Britain and Ireland.

O’Connell was concerned on two grounds, one professional and the other political. He knew, as did others, that the end of parliamentary sittings in the Capital of Ireland and the removal of the MPs to Westminster would rob Dublin of much of its vigour and political and monetary rewards. As an up and coming member of the Legal profession he well foresaw the pecuniary consequences of such a transfer of power and patronage out of the Country.
 

On the other hand Daniel O’Connell was as Irish as they come and as proud of the land of his birth and her People as the next man. He rightly suspected that the British Ministers would pay even less attention to Ireland once the Union had taken place and a thorn in their side removed.
 

‘On 13th January, 1800, he attended a meeting in the Royal Exchange convened by a number of influential Roman Catholics for the purpose of protesting against the insinuation that the Union was favourably regarded by them. Being induced to speak, he opened his mind freely on the subject. It was the first time he had addressed a public gathering; but the diffidence with which he began soon wore off before the approving cheers of his audience. Were the alternative offered him, he exclaimed, of union or the re-enactment of the penal code in all its rigour, he would without hesitation prefer the latter as the lesser and more sufferable evil, trusting to the justice of his brethren, the Protestants of Ireland, who had already liberated him rather than lay his country at the feet of foreigners. To this opinion he continued faithful through life. It is the key-note of his whole political creed — union amongst Irishmen of every religious and political persuasion for national objects an Irishman first and then only a Roman Catholic.’
 

It is a curious thing enough, he afterwards re-marked to O'Neil Daunt, that all the principles of my subsequent political life are contained in my very first speech.

‘Daniel O Connell’

By Robert Dunlop

 

 

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12 January 1729: Edmund Burke, one of the foremost political thinkers of 18th century, was born in Dublin on this day. He was also Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after relocating to England, served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party.

Burke was born in Dublin to a prosperous, professional solicitor father (Richard; d. 1761) who was a member of the Church of Ireland. His mother Mary (c. 1702–1770), whose maiden name was Nagle, belonged to the Catholic Church and came from an impoverished but genteel Cork family. Burke was raised in his father's faith and would remain throughout his life a practising Anglican, unlike his sister Juliana who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. His political enemies would later repeatedly accuse him of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership of the Catholic church would have disqualified him from public office. Once an MP, Burke was required to take the oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy, and declare against transubstantiation. Although never denying his Irishness, Burke often described himself as "an Englishman".

He spent the bulk of his life in England and became active in Politics, opposing Britain’s policy on the Revolt of the American Colonies and at the end of his life the British policy towards Ireland. He never totally adopted any political philosophy but overall he could be said to represent a conservative liberalism that eschewed extremes. His most famous work was Reflections on the Revolution in France which was a best seller, and in it he warned against the dangers of excess in political affairs especially as events unfolded in France in the wake of the start of the French Revolution.

He basically wanted the State to play but a limited role in the personal affairs of men and allow as much individual freedom of thought and action that was commensurate with the Social Order.

‘That the State ought to confine itself to what regards the State, or the creatures of the State, namely, the exterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land; the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat; in a word, to every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity.’

　

"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."

 

And

'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'

　 Edmund Burke

While hard to sum up such an active career over many decades a pithy summary of what he stood for might well be:

His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watch-words of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect.

Winston Churchill

Burke died in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, on 9 July 1797, five days before the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille which marked the official start of the Revolution he so long predicted and fought against. He was buried in Beaconsfield alongside his son and brother. His wife survived him by nearly fifteen years.

　

 

11 January 1970: The foundation of ‘Provisional’ Sinn Fein on this day. The political organisation was activated after a formal split arose within Sinn Fein as to what was the best approach to take in regards to opposition to British Rule in the North and towards the 26 County Government. The more left wing members of the leadership like Cathal Goulding and Sean Garland wanted to operate a broad based ‘National Liberation Front’ that would include both Sinn Fein and the likes of the Communist party within its ranks. They also wanted to recognise the parliaments in Leinster House, Westminster and Stormont as legitimate. Political Action within the current political framework was their chosen method of approach.

However to the more traditionally minded SF members these policies were anathema. They wanted to pursue a policy of active opposition to British rule in the North that would include support for armed struggle to bring about a British withdrawal from Ireland. They did not want any recognition of the partitionist States here. In an acrimonious Ard Feis that took place in Dublin at the Intercontinental Hotel a split emerged into the open that had long being brewing. Despite the best efforts of MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, who eventually led the subsequent walkout, the changes were finally approved by the party membership but not, however, by the two thirds majority required for an alteration of the party’s constitution. In the wake of these decisions they organised a walkout by a minority of like minded delegates who reconvened a meeting at Kevin Barry Hall on Dublin’s Parnell Street and duly set up a ‘caretaker’ Sinn Féin Executive to liase with the previously elected Army Council.

Some days later the new group made its intent clear in a newly issued pamphlet:

We pledge our allegiance to the 32 county Irish Republic proclaimed at Easter 1916, overthrown by force of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British imposed Six County and Twenty-Six County partition states’

Thus were born the ‘Provos’!

 

 

10 January 1970: A major Anti Apartheid march and rally by some 6,000 people took place in Dublin to the Irish Rugby Union’s grounds in Lansdowne Road, Dublin on this day. They were protesting against the tour by the South African Rugby Team and that State’s discrimination against many of its people on racial grounds. While generally peaceful a small section of the crowd arrived there to cause trouble. They attacked members of the Garda Siochana who responded in kind. A mini riot broke out and people were in danger of being crushed as things turned nasty. Eventually order was restored and a potentially tragic situation was averted.

Inside before a large crowd Ireland held the visitors to an 8-8 Draw. This was probably the first mass demonstration in Ireland against Apartheid and marked an upsurge in Irish support for the overthrow of White Rule in South Africa.