Monthly Archives: January 2013

Kerry drink drive, rural isolation (Part 2)

Some quick folo-up on the last post about County Kerry passing a measure to allow limited drink driving in rural areas, in part to allow isolated residents more freedom to socialize at the nearest pub.

The Irish Independent has this story about a pub-owning couple in Kilflynn (between Listowel and Tralee) who have been driving home their customers for the past 15 years.

The Irish Times has an in-depth story about the closing of nearly 100 rural garda stations across Ireland, including one near Kilflynn. (See map with story). To be sure, many of the stations were open only part time, and “564 Garda stations will remain – significantly more than Northern Ireland, for example, which has 86 police stations for a population of 1.5 million people, with further closures planned; and Scotland, which has about 340 stations for 5.2 million people.”

But a County Galway woman quoted in the story sums up the concerns of many rural residents:

“Rural Ireland is slowly – and not even slowly – being closed down. Everything they are legislating for in Dublin has a huge impact here, and it will eventually close villages down. Why would young people come back here? Even to farm? The barracks is gone … the health centre will be next. The post office will be next. You can’t come out for a drink any more. People who for all their lives had the pub as their social outlet have had that taken away.

Kerry allows limited drink driving on rural roads

Expect waves of news coverage and lots of late-nite television jokes about County Kerry Council’s vote on allowing limited drink driving on rural roads.

The measure by Kerry councillor Danny Healy-Rae passed earlier this week on a 5-3 vote, with 12 absent and seven abstaining. Healy-Rae, a pub owner, said his measure is designed to ease the isolation of elderly rural residents, many whom might be riding slow-moving tractors to fetch a few pints.

Full implementation of the measure requires the Department of Justice to issue rural permits.

The Kerryman’s digital edition quotes the surviving family member of someone killed by a drunken driver as being “appalled, repulsed [and] ashamed” of the vote. Expect to see more backlash in the weeks ahead.

Here’s a round up of some of the headlines already ricocheting around the Web.

This isn’t good for Kerry and for Ireland. Anything that hints of promoting or tolerating drink driving (or drunk driving, as we say in the US) is bad news.

Surely there are better solutions to alleviating rural isolation, which is a real problem in Ireland.

Irish priest in showdown with Vatican

An Irish priest and the Vatican have engaged in a showdown over his ability to publish liberal views at odds with Roman Catholic Church doctrine.

Fr. Tony Flannery of County Galway told a press conference in Dublin on Sunday that he would not sign a pledge agreeing to adhere to church orthodoxy regarding women priests, contraception and homosexuality. Now he is being threatened with excommunication.

Here is a portion of Fr. Flannery’s statement in The Irish Times:

I either put my name to a document that would be a lie, and would impugn my integrity and my conscience, or I face the reality of never again ministering as a priest. I have always believed in the church as the community of believers and as an essential element in promoting and nourishing the faith. I have enjoyed my years of preaching, the main work of Redemptorists, and never had any doubt that Christ’s message was one worth proclaiming.

But to give up on freedom of thought, freedom of speech and most especially freedom of conscience is too high a price for me to pay to be allowed minister in today’s church.

The online reader comments below Fr. Flannery’s column offer a wide range of views both for and against his stance. As of 10:30 Monday morning (USA EST) there was no coverage of the issue on the Vatican news site.

For Downton Abbey fans, a primer on revolutionary Ireland

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What’s going to happen to Tom Branson and Lady Sybil?

As “Downton Abbey” fans watch Sunday for the next plot twists of the popular “Masterpiece” series on PBS, some might be wondering about the backdrop in Ireland at the time. Season Three begins with Tom and Sybil living in 1920s Dublin.

Here’s a quick primer on what happened in Irish politics immediately before and during this period:

Season One of “Downton Abbey” begins in April 1912 with news of the Titanic disaster. Men like Branson were talking again about Ireland becoming an independent country after centuries of English (and later British) rule. In the spring of 1914, the British Parliament authorized a form of limited domestic autonomy for Ireland called home rule. But the political accommodation was immediately suspended due to the outbreak of war with Germany. Matthew Crawley and the footmen William and Thomas fight; Branson didn’t go because as an Irish national, he wasn’t subject to the draft.

Though Britain promised to reinstate home rule after the war, militant republican factions among Irish nationalists grew restless. (Here, “republican” means favoring elected representation instead of a monarchy, not the American political party.)  At Easter 1916, republicans launched an insurrection in Dublin by seizing several government buildings and posting the Proclamation of the Irish Republic:

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom…

The revolutionaries had scant support in Dublin and the rest of Ireland, since many Irish men volunteered to fight on the continent with British troops. The “Easter Rising” was crushed in a week. Branson remarks in Season Two that he would have returned to Ireland to fight with the republicans if the fighting hadn’t ended so fast. Plus, he was sweet on Sybil.

The British government soon made the tactical error of executing the revolutionary leaders. This created a backlash in Ireland (and America) that shifted popular support to the nationalist cause. By January 1919, two months after the armistice ending World War I, Irish republicans once again declared independence, established their own government in Dublin and began a guerilla war against British military and police forces. The conflict, known as the Irish War of Independence or Anglo-Irish War, took place about the time that Season Three starts.

The brutality of the period is probably best exemplified by the events of “Bloody Sunday” in November 1920. Irish republican operatives under the direction of Michael Collins carried out the assassinations of 19 British Army intelligence officers living in Dublin. The British retaliated later the same day by opening fire on the civilian crowd at a football match, killing 14 and wounding scores more.

The two sides reached a ceasefire in the summer of 1921 and began to negotiate a peace treaty. In early 1922 this resulted in the creation of the Irish Free State for 26 counties in southern Ireland. Six northeast counties remained linked to Britain and were partitioned as Northern Ireland.

Free State status was similar to Britain’s arrangements with Canada and Australia. It provided more domestic autonomy than originally contemplated by home rule, but Ireland remained under the monarchy and far short of an independent republic. This caused a split between hardline republicans and moderate nationalists. The ensuing Irish Civil War over the next year claimed more lives than the three-year conflict with Britain.

The Free State forces prevailed by the summer of 1923 and a decade of violence in Ireland finally came to an end. The 26 counties of the south would not achieve republic status until 1949. The six northeast counties remain partitioned to this day.

For “Downton” fans looking for more details, the BBC has an excellent online presentation that explores the entire period “through essays, photographs, sound archive, music and newspapers from the period.” The Irish Bureau of Military History also has a deep archive of interviews, maps and images from the war years.

New Famine books, and agrarian violence in Kerry

The Washington Post reviews two recent books about the Great Famine (an Gorta Mor): “The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy,” by Tim Pat Coogan; and “The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People,” by John Kelly.

Kelly and Coogan have both written polemics against the British government of the day and its inadequate response to Ireland’s nightmare. They sustain their arguments with sound materials. Kelly, an American, is cool and prosecutorial in tone. He has the facts, ma’am, and his book is an accessible, engrossing history of horror. Coogan, the Irish author of controversial popular biographies of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, as well as a history of the Irish Republican Army, is fiercer and angrier. He sounds like the witness who saw the crime.

Like the 1916 Rising and War of Independence/Civil War years of 1919-1923, the 1845-52 Famine is one of the most explored periods of Irish history. It remains a topic of vigorous sociopolitical debate and compelling human interest due to new historical approaches and new research details.

For myself, I’ve just cracked open “Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872-86,” by Donnacha Sean Lucey. The book explores the post-Famine, Land War (Cogadh na Talún) period leading up to the Home Rule effort of the late 19th century.

My great, great grandfather and great grandfather worked the same 5-acre farm plot in Lahardane townland in North Kerry from at least 1864. The next in line, my grandfather, emigrated in 1913, leaving the property to a younger brother. It remains in the family today.

Irish Cultural Museum opens in New Orleans

In September we blogged about the opening of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Now we can report the opening of the Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans, 933 Conti St. in the French Quarter. (Yes, an Irish museum in the French Quarter of an American city!)

From the museum website:

Beginning in the 1700’s New Orleans received thousands of Irish who made a treacherous journey from their distant homeland across the Atlantic. And only here will you learn of the sacrifices and contributions these unsung heroes have made to this great city. From the appointment in 1769 of Irish military strategist Alexander O’Reilly as the second governor of Louisiana, to the thousands of Irish who perished digging the New Basin Canal, the Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans traces the city’s Irish Heritage through rarely seen archival maps, photographs, and newspaper articles.

There are also grand plans to build The Irish American Museum of Washington D.C., though progress in the effort appears to be rather slow.

Flag protests continue in Belfast, threaten Dublin

Loyalists demonstrators continue to protest restrictions on flying the British Union Jack flag over Belfast City Hall. Police claimed Saturday they were fired upon by someone in an unruly mob of about 1,000 people.

The protests have reached the one-month mark. Here’s a BBC Q & A explaining the issue, which so far is drawing only lite media attention in the U.S.

But the story could heat up more in the coming week if bus loads of protesters make good on their vow to bring the demonstrations across the boarder to the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Examiner reports the demonstrators want to demand removal of the Irish Tricolour from Leinster House, the seat of government. Said one protest leader:

“Under the Good Friday Agreement we were promised that this would remain part of the United Kingdom. Now we are continually told to move on, and that this is an island of equals. If that’s the case, how do the people in Dublin feel when we come down and ask them to take the flag off the capital in their country? Very annoyed, I would say.”

For me, the issue resonates from my newspaper coverage more than a decade ago about changing representations of the Confederate period in the City of Mobile, Ala., city seal. Confederate partisans wanted to keep the controversial Battle flag image in place, while many African-Americans and tourism/economic development-focused whites wanted it replaced by a less offensive (and less familiar) flag of the Confederate government. Similar controversies have flared across the American South for years.

In Mobile, protests and debate lasted for 18 months before the city government and “Southern Heritage” supporters finally reached a “Dixie détente.” Here’s hoping the flag issue on the island of Ireland doesn’t take as long to resolve, or get any nastier than it’s already been.

Leaving Ireland…again

The Irish Independent ended the year with a story featuring the latest emigration figures.

More than 200 people a day left Ireland during 2012, as emigration surged to levels not experienced since the famine…Some 87,000 people emigrated from Ireland in the year to April 2012, three times as many as the annual exodus during the [Celtic Tiger] boom years.

The story was based on a September release from the Central Statistics Office.

Britain, Australia and Canada are top destinations for the emigrants. The United States also remains a strong draw for the Irish, though a few living here have become skeptical about life in America. Here’s part of one reader post in the Independent story:

For any young Irish lad or lass listening now I have one bit of advice to you all. Go to anywhere, I mean anywhere else, but not the USA. Economy here is still finding it hard to provide jobs to the unemployed.

This new year of 2013 is the centennial of my maternal grandfather’s emigration from County Kerry in May 1913. Weeks before he boarded a steamer at Queenstown (Cobh), The Kerry News published an editorial under the headline, “Still Going.” It referenced a report showing that nearly 30,000 people left Ireland the previous year, two thirds of them sailing to the United States.

The emigration returns prove very clearly that our young people cannot find work and must go to places where they will get work and decent wages. They must face risks and hardships, but it is better to face them than remain in slavery and poverty all their lives.

History repeats itself. Happy New Year.