| RSAUB | Date: Wednesday, 2012-04-18, 2:27 AM | Message # 1 |
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Colonel general
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| http://www.rte.ie/player/#!v=1145320
An Tost Fada - The Long Silence
Just over two years ago, in the RTÉ programme CSÍ - Cork's Bloody Secret, the relatives of some of the 13 Protestants murdered in West Cork in the April 1922 spoke out for the first time. Now on the eve of the 90th Anniversary of the killings, another man is breaking the long silence about those troubled times.
Canon George Salter is nearly 87 years old. For most of his life he has lived and served the people of Cork City as a Church of Ireland Minister. But there is a lot more to George than his bible and his clerical vocation. For years George has been at the heart of the educational and cultural life of the city. A friend of Sean Ó Riada's, he has also been a life-long advocate of the Irish language, and an enthusiastist of traditional music and folklore.
But George has another story to tell and in An Tost Fada- The Long Silence he tells it for the first time.
In April 1922 the Salters were hardworking farmers in West Cork. When the killings started one night George's father William was stopped on his way home by a local man and told "Bill boy you best be gone by morning". Leaving almost everything behind George's family left their farm at Kilronane near Dunmanway and fled to England.
George's father had six sisters and two brothers. By the end of 1922 all of them had left Ireland. Bill Salter was the only one to return despite receiving compensation from the British Government the family never settled in England. In 1924 Bill Salter quietly moved back to a farm at Castletownshend Co. Cork and a year later George was born a citizen of the Irish Free State.
All his long life George Salter has heard stories about the farm and the house at Kilronane that the family were expelled from. Though it was hardly 30 miles distant George had never visited the old homestead or ever walked the land. Then last year, while sitting on an interview board at the Cork Institute of Technology he struck up a conversation with Dan Collins, a senior member of the Institute's staff. They discovered they had much in common. Both from West Cork, both had links to Dunmanway. Dan's sister was married to a farmer Oliver Crowley who farmed good pastureland just outside the town. "Where?" George probed. "A place called Kilronane" Dan said.
One thing led to another and George set's off to take up the remarkable invitation from the Crowley family to see his ancestral home at Kilronane for the first time.
It's a journey that takes George Salter back to the dark days of April 1922 and brings up long buried memories and reflections on the Ireland that emerged from the War of Independence.
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| RSAUB | Date: Wednesday, 2012-04-18, 2:33 AM | Message # 2 |
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Colonel general
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| Just a video of what the Irish have always done; murdered, threatened and butchered then assimilated the rest, it’s happened through-out history. Regardless of how you view this video Mr Salters has ended more Irish than the Irish.
Yet the same Is happening in Ulster, and we still get these so-called loyalists telling us that fenians hate seeing “loyalists” accepting and celebrating their so-called Irishness, when Jim Gibney and plenty of other prominent republicans say otherwise.
Keep on walking around celebrating St Paddy’s day and what other crap and your kids will end up like him speaking Irish and probably playing GAA like some of our schools are doing at present.
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| Culzie | Date: Wednesday, 2012-04-18, 2:03 PM | Message # 3 |
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| A few things came out of that for me. As you say you had to assimilate. The irish way had to dominate. It had to be their way or no way. In the movie 'A Love Divided' when the Protestant mother went to her local COI minister looking for support his answer was ''you know how it is here,we have to keep our heads down and say nothing'' The only man who spoke sense in that programme was the man of 100 years of age. The man Salters shows that the COI minister in 'A Love Divided' was speaking the truth. He has took the green brick road bigtime and the once Protestant school in Bandon (and now mixed) has the Protestants speaking irish. Yes it has to be their way,or no way. Those Protestants may say they chose to speak irish but I still think behind it is, that they know they have to do these things to be fully accepted and so assimilate,to be part of the irish set-up.
Yes its now moving that way in BU and I believe that there are those on the Protestant side who have already taken that road, who are pushing an all-ireland agenda and eventual assimilation.
Ulster Protestants consider themselves to be a separate nation. This nation they call Ulster
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| Culzie | Date: Wednesday, 2012-04-18, 4:50 PM | Message # 4 |
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| We saw how a few years back that R.M.s (Resident Magistrates) were to be replaced in NI by District Judges. Not sure,but I think that Eire is the only place in the British Isles which has District Judges. Another step in the ongoing unification procedure?
Reading though the Two Irelands I came across this....
Patronage was also ubiquitious in judicial and local appointments,both before and after the creation of the Free State. The few barristers who had imperilled their careers by acting as republican justices were shamelessly favoured in the selection of judges,provided they had not shown Irregular sympathies during the civil war. The decentralized structure of the revolutionary courts had rendered them incontrollable after the split over the treaty,leading to the summary dissolution of those outside Dublin in July and October 1922. They were replaced by a reorganized system of district and circuit courts, the new 'district justices' being resident magistrates under a less tainted name. As a future District Judge observed sardonically: 'If you are appointing professional minor Justices,don't call them ''R.M.s''or you will damn the whole system'
So way back in 1922 it was seen as part of the breaking of links to the British system. So here we are 90 years later and the same thing is happening as we edge towards all thing irish and gradually disengage from all things British.
Ulster Protestants consider themselves to be a separate nation. This nation they call Ulster
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| RSAUB | Date: Friday, 2012-04-27, 11:55 PM | Message # 5 |
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| Eoghan Harris: How Haughey hinterland was rebuffed by O'Reilly regime
Sunday April 22 2012
Last Monday RTE showed An Tost Fada, the testimony of Canon George Salter, about the enforced exodus of his father and thousands of Cork Protestants from their shops and farms in April 1922. It was the most important programme in which I have ever been involved.
The reason is the reaction from Roman Catholics. It was exactly as I had expected. The courage of the Crowley and Collins families in welcoming Salter back to his ancestral home was matched by the warm response from the wider Roman Catholic community.
George Salter and Richard Draper, the two Protestants who testified, were engulfed in a wave of empathy from the people of Cork and Skibbereen. This reaction was a robust rebuff both to bigots and to rhetorical republicans. The latter, faking concern for Protestant sensibilities, frequently claim such truth-telling causes trouble between Protestant and Catholic.
But I had more trust in the people of Ireland. For nearly 40 years I have been talking to west Cork Catholics and Protestants about the suppressed sectarian side of the War of Independence. All feared to go public. But I became convinced that both sides desperately craved the truth: the Protestants to tell it, the Roman Catholics to hear it.
But there were three obstacles. First, fear of reprisals -- not without foundation until fairly recently. Second, the deep divide between the comparatively benign community memory of Dublin Protestants and the much rawer and rougher historical memories of provincial Protestants. Finally, the majority found it hard to accept the sheer size of the historical wound.
Between the Ne Temere decree of 1911 and the aftermath of the Civil War we lost a third of our Protestant population. That is, 107,000 southern Protestants, including 10,000 working-class Dublin Protestants. And some of that exodus was enforced by threats and murder.
This traumatic experience was excised from the Irish State's public memory. Remaining rural Protestants nursed their grief in silence.
Privately, however, many rural Roman Catholics felt a sense of shame. That shame formed a saving grace that touched me through my father and mother.
My mother came from the cottier class of rural Roscommon. She liked the local Protestants. So the impoverished Protestant Moroneys, who let the young John McGahern loose in their library, recalled in Memoir, were already familiar to me as archetypes from my mother's anecdotes.
McGahern wrote: "That library and these two gentlemen were, to me, a pure blessing." He never forgot his debt. "I was given the run of a library. I believed it changed my life, and without it I would never have become a writer."
My father also aroused my interest in the minority community. Politically a Wolfe Tone republican, he had no time for tribal nationalism. But in speaking about Protestants he went beyond republican rhetoric in ways that left a more indelible mark than ideology.
For a start he saw Protestants as real people, not as republican abstractions. He had worked with Protestant clerks in the Cork milling business. Later, as manager of the Bride Valley stores in Waterford, and in the Local Defence Force during the Emergency, he widened his contacts.
As a result he came to have a real regard for the minority community. And not just the abstract Wolfe Tone type of regard that never reaches real empathy. My father had a personal, wish-you-well affection for rural Irish Protestants.
He also respected their financial rectitude. That was why in my Kilcrumper speech I pointed out that it was not Irish Protestants who destroyed our economy. The damage was mostly done by the Catholic business bourgeoise, who had come out of the Haughey hinterland with a chip on their shoulder, waving the green flag, but actually anxious to ape the Anglo-Irish gentry.
I knew nothing of that Haughey hinterland when I arrived in RTE in 1966. I was delighted to find myself working with two talented Cork Protestants: Dick Hill and Jack White. Given their talents, I assumed White would become Controller of Programmes and Dick Hill Director-General. But it was not to be.
It was widely believed that White and Hill's religion prevented their promotion to the top jobs. But nobody could prove that. Only a few years before, after Todd Andrews had closed the Harcourt Street line, a speaker in the Dail observed it was not CIE's business to bring Protestants to Dundrum.
But what bothered me more than the covert tribalism was the lie-down-and-die attitude of many Dublin Protestants. Instead of challenging the tribalists in their society some sought instant integration by becoming rabid rhetorical republicans -- causing their tribal critics to secretly despise them even more.
This development led to a growing gap between the buffered historical memory of Dublin Protestants and much rawer memory of provincial Protestants. That gap was brought home when I took leave of absence from RTE in 1979 and went to live in west Cork to research and write Souper Sullivan, a play about religion and the Great Famine.
But it was the sectarian side of the War of Independence that kept cropping up in conversations with local Protestants and Catholics. It must be 20 years since Richard Draper first told me about the "conversion" conversation at the local creamery in April 1922. But he only felt free to talk about it in An Tost Fada in advanced old age.
Richard has always wanted to put his memories on the record. But he feared reprisals, feared making trouble, feared the sheer silence itself. Until recently his fears were well founded.
George Salter's story about sectarian jibes of a few pub bigots happened only a few years ago. Salter got the best of the exchange because he had good Irish and the courage to confront the bully boys. But many a Protestant had to walk away from similar jibes with the head down.
Even today there are fragments of the Haughey hinterland festering in Dublin business circles. We have only to recall what Sean FitzPatrick said to David McWilliams at UCD in November 2008, when it looked as if the allegedly 'Protestant' BoI or AIB would take over Anglo Irish Bank. "No f***ing Protestant is coming near us . . . None of them are ever going to look down on us again."
Under the O'Reilly regime, INM kept a warm fire for the Protestant minority tradition on the island, both north and south. Conversely it remained a cold house for the Haughey hinterland. The Sunday Independent, as the recent presidential election revealed, remains the main critic of tribal nationalism.
If Gavin O'Reilly's exit was to mean the end of that ethos, it would be a bad day for Irish democracy. Because Enda Kenny and Fine Gael will soon find themselves alone, facing the tribal forces which -- as the polls show -- are massing in the Haughey hinterland, making ready to ride the back of the recession to State power.
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| Culzie | Date: Saturday, 2012-04-28, 12:31 PM | Message # 6 |
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| Good article and so true. One thing about all of this it does bring out those Catholics who will always seek to defend the murders committed by the IRA. But also it shows that there were a few(like Eoghan Harris) who were prepared to admit what was happened to the Protestants of Cork and elsewhere was wrong.
Ulster Protestants consider themselves to be a separate nation. This nation they call Ulster
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| RSAUB | Date: Sunday, 2012-04-29, 3:25 AM | Message # 7 |
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| True, but you have to laugh at the Irish all the same, they'll talk about this issue now, when most of the Protestants who lived through the genocide are now dead or their memorys weren't what they were or have left Cork. In a few short years they managed to complete wide-spread ethnic cleansing, and it's almost been wiped from the history books.
Yet in Ulster, the Roman Catholic population has continued to grow and more towns, villages, streets and whole areas have changed from being Protestant to Roman Catholic with hardly none the other way, yet the lies and myths surronding our bigoted Orange State and anti-Catholic genoicidal Protestant maniacs that we're viewed the World over.
You really couldn't make it up!
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| Culzie | Date: Sunday, 2012-04-29, 5:55 PM | Message # 8 |
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| No you couldn't. But I do believe that the Irish have been working on their image over decades if not centuries,always playing the role of a 'downtrodden people'. Of course just across the sea they had a nearby island which ruled a good part of the world and they could be used to fit the bill as a superior evil regime with their foot on the neck of the poor irish people. While there may have been some truth in this,it was not always the case and has been hyped up and exaggerated by the irish. The British and the English especially were a convenient scapegoat for all their ills and problems. Unable to face up to what life deals you, they blamed hard times on those on mainland Britain. What I notice with the vast majority of irish catholics is that they never admit to any wrongdoing.
Yes the ethnic cleansing of Protestants went virtually unnoticed and what helped was the Eire goverment and the RC church working together in a cover-up of these actrocities.
Ulster Protestants consider themselves to be a separate nation. This nation they call Ulster
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| RSAUB | Date: Sunday, 2012-04-29, 9:27 PM | Message # 9 |
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| Yip, there's nobody in the World who can spin a good 'yarn' like your fun loving Irish man.
It all comes down to propaganda, sticking together and a belief that they are only righting the wrongs of Irish history, nothing is ever their fault. As you say they are the poor freedom fighters fighting against the evil British Empire and all it's military might.... Yet back in the real World!
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