Okay I'm being facetious but it was wrong to lay the wreath. The people celebrated in that garden were terrorists of no greater moral standing than the Real IRA today, as the likes of Kevin Myers have pointed out:
There are many things that truly nauseate me about the celebrations for the Easter Rising. The most central is the misrepresentation of facts, as if the Rising was a civil-rights poetry-reading that was cruelly interrupted by British guns. The Proclamation was a late adornment to the Rising, not its inspiration, and the "volunteers" knew nothing about it.
Indeed, most of them had been unaware that this was actually a genuine insurrection, in which real people would be really killed. So here we have Pearse, the schoolmaster with his teenage pupils, suddenly all decked out for war, and here James Connolly, with the 14-year-old-son he had just "commissioned" -- God help us -- into the Irish Citizen Army, all embarking on a killing spree, which started soon after Pearse's largely unheard words. Thomas Playfair, aged 14, was hunted down and shot dead by Volunteer Holohan at the Phoenix Park. Constable O'Brien, unarmed, murdered in cold blood at Dublin Castle. Constable Lahiffe, unarmed, murdered in cold blood in St Stephen's Green. The arming and deployment of underage boys, the murder of unarmed civilians: these are violations of all the laws of war.The Queen should not have been laying wreaths to honour a bunch of suicide terrorists who went on a killing spree in order to gain an independence for Ireland that was pretty much inevitable in any case (and probably would have happened by 1916 but for the First World War.
4 comments:
The BBC delighted in telling us that the Garden Of Remembrance was dedicated to the Irish fallen of the 1916 uprising but it took an Irishman to point out that it is in remembrance of all those who have died on behalf of Eire, much as our own Poppy Day.
I guess this is one of the downsides of being the monarch.
Indeed Julia. Having to read to East European Parliamentarians a speech about Western faith in the temporary nature of the division of the Continent drafted by the same Foreign Office that foisted Nicolai Caucescu on her hospitality must rather rankle too.
Just saw this, and couldn't agree more.
Have a look at our expat blog.
http://rossrightangle.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/queen-obliged-to-honour-ulsters-enemies-shame-but-eire-too-is-under-eussr-misrule/
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