Unionists abused Great War veterans on their return

Mr Lacey further calls for republicans/nationalists to stop spitting on the memory of these brave men.” Mr Lacey is the latest to add his voice to what is termed the national amnesia and intolerance displayed by the Irish state towards those Irish who fought in British uniform in the Great War

In 2011 former President Mary McAleese spoke at Suvla Bay commemorating those Irish who died during the invasion of Turkey. Also, in 1998, in an unprecedented act of political ecumenism at Messines Ridge, President McAleese, alongside Queen Elizabeth II, dedicated a Peace Tower in memory of those from the entire island of Ireland who answered Redmond’s call and never returned. The fact that we nationalists give our primary allegiance to those who established the Irish state, not to those who tried to prevent it, does not constitute neglect of those Irish who went away and never returned. On the contrary, the greatest abusers of those returning soldiers from the Great War was the British/unionist establishment. When the Irish people had voted overwhelmingly for Independence in 1918 and proclaimed an independent State in 1919 the British sent the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries who went on a rampage of torture, arson attacks, killings and evictions to preserve the status quo. While many families in Ireland had treasured photographs of their Somme dead on their walls, men in British Army uniforms were kicking in their front doors as they ruthlessly suppressed the Easter rebellion.

Those Catholics returning north of the border fared just as badly. Few ‘Taigs’ could hope to secure employment as unionists dominated the Catholic community by bigotry and discrimination in jobs, housing and voting as they were governed by a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’. From the murderous pogroms perpetrated against Catholics in Belfast in the 1920’s, the ‘Catholic cleansing’ of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, to the burnings of hundreds of Catholic homes in Bombay Street in 1969, some of us are in no positions to look down our moral noses or point our sectarian fingers at others.

Tom Cooper, Irish National Congress