Am I the only person to find todays WW1s events mawkish, dishonest and a bit creepy, at least in most cases. Some wars are stupid and unnecessary but few if any can have been more stupid and unnecessary than this one. From an Irish perspective, people had various motives. Ordinary decent Unionist Irish at least had a certain logic to their position. Redmonds people believed that the British Government would honour its promises, in spite of many previous broken ones. I dont think its for us, of a later generation, to find either group to have been in bad faith. But we should also remember that many, if not most, Irish servicemen joined up because they had little or no other choice. Im a fan of archbishop Martin, although agnostic myself, but I find his claim that Irish solders fought with great courage in defence of an ideal to be sentimental nonsense. People from Ireland fought in defence of someone elses empire, against people who had a sense of entitlement to a similar empire. No-one was in the right and there was no just cause. As for Catholic Belgium, yes, the Germans committed atrocities there, but the record of Belgium itself in the Congo is the most blood stained, dishonorable and murderous of all of the European imperial/colonial powers. Much of this we know, of course, thanks to the British/Irish envoy who changed, a certain Roger Casement
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 21:17:40 +0000
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