The following is just a small excerpt from an excellent article about John Mitchell who was mostly based in Newry, in Wikipedia. I strongly recommend it as a essential reading for anyone interested in the Irish struggle and the connection with Tasmania or Van Diemen's Land. There is still a Cumann of Sinn Fein bearing his name in Newry kept alive by Tom Lonergan. Mitchell's ideas and analysis are very relevant to todays struggle in Ireland and encompass much of the solution on the way forward. Mitchell a Presbyterian, was also an internationalist who saw International capitalism as the real enemy. His role in the American civil war was misunderstood by many.
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
I will not write a lengthy article in the hope that I will not be censored in certain Irish quarters like Indy media Ireland for example(What a sick joke, Indymedia Ireland my with a BBC logo and a brit agenda) perhaps this can serve discussion purposes. I just wish to state from Child abuse, Child rape to emigration, Ireland has failed so many of its children and youth. Whilst the British Empire and remnants of the Roman Empire are responsible for a lot of it, the general heartless response of the community to hardship in it midst, has a lot to answer for. Right now personally, post the Child Abuse Commission report and L'Adamsgate I am really angry with my own country.
A few brave genuine people have shouldered a liberation effort in Ireland for so long and been abused by their own. Catholic Ireland has been mostly opportunistic in its approach to its problems many self-inflicted and we would have been liberated decades ago, were it not for our own duplicity and lack of solidarity.
I have spent a large part of my life travelling and being an activist, always proud of my irish origins, particularly as a country that generally was popular, without a history of colonial aggression. I now find my sadness with recent revelations in Ireland turning to extreme anger and shame, with our population's general non-caring attitude to such rampant horrific crime in its midst.
Ireland is beginning to appear very similar to Israel, who also has a horrific holocaust past, forgotten where it has come from and become an indiscriminate abuser itself. Right now I am ashamed, very sad and very angry at Ireland in general.
Below is the a link to todays Sunday tribune articles.
Where Lagan stream sings lullaby
There blows a lily fair
The twilight gleam is in her eye
The night is on her hair
And like a love-sick lennan-shee
She has my heart in thrall
Nor life I owe nor liberty
For love is lord of all.
Her father sails a running-barge
'Twixt Leamh-beag and The Druim;
And on the lonely river-marge
She clears his hearth for him.
When she was only fairy-high
Her gentle mother died;
But dew-Love keeps her memory
Green on the Lagan side.
And often when the beetle's horn
Hath lulled the eve to sleep
I steal unto her shieling lorn
And thru the dooring peep.
There on the cricket's singing stone,
She spares the bogwood fire,
And hums in sad sweet undertone
The songs of heart's desire
Her welcome, like her love for me,
Is from her heart within:
Her warm kiss is felicity
That knows no taint of sin.
And, when I stir my foot to go,
'Tis leaving Love and light
To feel the wind of longing blow
From out the dark of night.
Where Lagan stream sings lullaby
There blows a lily fair
The twilight gleam is in her eye
The night is on her hair
And like a love-sick lennan-shee
She has my heart in thrall
Nor life I owe nor liberty
For love is lord of all.
In Scottish Gaelic a "leannan-sidhe" is a Faery Lover. This type of Faery Lover
often takes a person's love and then leaves. He or she goes back where they came
from leaving the human pining for their lost love. The poor
mortals in the tales of leannan sidhe often died of sorrow.
The song was first published in "Songs of Uladh" in Belfast.
Hughes' preface says: "I made this collection while on holiday in
North Dun-na-n Gall in August of last year." "I got this from Proinseas mac Suibhne who played it for meon the fidil. He had it from his father Seaghan mac Suibhne. It was
sung to a ballad called the "Belfast Maid," now forgotten in Cill-mac-nEnain."
Lambeg is a village between Lisburn and Belfast and the Drum is the site of a
bridge across the river and the canal that was made beside it, which eventually
diverged from the river and entered Lough Neagh. There
for the sake of scansion! " - JM
To quote from Mary O'Hara's notes on this song, from her book "A Song For
Ireland", - "The leánan sídhe (fairy mistress) mentioned in the song is a
malicious figure who frequently crops up in Gaelic love stories. One could call
her the femme fatale of Gaelic folklore. She sought the love of men; if they
refused, she became their slave, but if they consented, they became her slaves
and could only escape by finding another to take their place. She fed off them
so her lovers gradually wasted away - a common enough theme in Gaelic medieval
poetry, which often saw love as a kind of sickness. Most Gaelic poets in the
past had their leanán sídhe to give them inspiration. This malignant fairy was
for them a sort of Gaelic muse. On the other hand, the crickets mentioned in the
song are a sign of good luck and their sound on the hearth a good omen. It was
the custom of newly-married couples about to set up home to bring crickets from
the hearths of their parents' house.
Intimidation of working class homes by censorship gangs. Visits by members of their thought police gang. Any alternative version of Irish events outside the British controlled media one, is censored in many different ways besides the obvious. I personally have had British spooks call me in the middle of the night, with less than subtle threats to silence me. Having failed to win the media war, mercenary gangs opt to increase the pressure off-camera, in the back streets of working class ireland through intimidation. It makes no difference, truth will out.
The existence of such a culture of British inspired censorship and intimidation has been the backdrop of traditional republicanism since it first emerged. The leadership within Provisional Sinn Féin now supported by a British controlled Irish media do not want their credentials scrutinised. Working class activists, are informed that they cannot speak in public, if deviating from the movement's pro-unionist line. The same principle is applied to republican family meetings. Activists who ask difficult questions of an Adams party speaker are 'gripped' after the event and told such behaviour is non-acceptable behaviour.
Andrew Marr, a very British columnist made the following observation:
"The gunmen in the dripping border villages aren't doing well out of this. ... The poor bloody infantry, and the poor bloody sergeants, with our council flats and farmworkers' cottages? These are the people who now matter most, and are about the only people who haven't been bribed. Everyone else benefits from the peace process."
The nationalists who participated in a Stormont government of the mid-1970s very much to the left of the present one, were labelled by the pen of Danny Morrison, writing with the pseudonym Peter Arnlis, was that they were collaborators, traitors and opportunists.
