On the 10th September, 1919, the 'British Viceroy for Ireland', a Mr John French, and his political and military pal, a Mr Frederick Charles Shaw, the 'Commander of the British Army in Ireland', signed a proclamation outlawing Dáil Éireann.
Some days later, in Westminster political circles, an in-house letter came to light showing that the British 'Chief Secretary for Ireland', a Mr Ian Macpherson, and his buddy, a Mr Andrew Bonar Law, the 'Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal', had... 'allowed (!) Dáil Éireann to assemble and sit in consultation if they wished (but when they) conspired by executive acts to overthrow the duly constituted authority (by which they meant Westminster), then we had to act...'
And, in acting in that manner, the British inadvertently showed, and proved, that politics alone wasn't going to be enough to shift them from Ireland...
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On the 10th September, 1919, a Mr George Frederick Ernest Albert (aka 'King George V of England', pictured) instructed his 'Lord Privy Seal of England', a Mr Bonar Law, to attend for a meeting with him and, on the 11th, the two men were in each others company.
Mr Ernest Albert questioned Mr Law about the measures that the British government were taking to protect... "..the lives of unoffending people in Ireland, and what measures were to be brought into parliament for the government of the country (ie Ireland)..?"
The "unoffending people" in Ireland were, no doubt, those who weren't fighting against the savage hordes unleashed on them by both Mr Albert and the political savage hordes he surrounded himself with.
Anyway - the poor man wasn't in the best of health, and he died, at 70 years of age, on the 20th January, 1936, in London, from a purposely-administered drug overdose.
Whether his death was an act of euthanasia, medically assisted suicide or murder, he should have been more concerned about his own governance than that of a country foreign to him...
GAS LADS...
The massive finds of oil and gas on our western seaboard could ensure Ireland's financial security for generations.
Wealth approximating that of the Arab countries is within our grasp, but the Irish government seems content to sell off our birthright for a handful of votes and a few dollars.
In a special 'Magill' report, Sandra Mara investigates just what we are giving away, and why.
From 'Magill' magazine, March 2002.
However, things were not straightforward, and it took difficult and prolonged negotiations to reach an agreement with Enterprise Oil which resulted in some Irish rig-workers being employed.
At one point, Enterprise Oil threatened to pull out of Foynes, which was being used as a service base, and relocate to Ayr in Scotland.
This move was prevented when Emmet Stagg TD told the oil companies that they could not claim Irish tax breaks while operating out of the jurisdiction.
Following these negotiations, a number of experienced Irish rig-workers got jobs on board the Petrolia drilling rig and were there when it hit a "huge gas find, almost a blow-out", as one worker describes it.
The pressure of the gas find was so high that it caused major technical difficulties and drilling was abandoned until 1998 but, eventually, almost two years later, the 'Sedco 711', owned by Sedco Forex, was contracted to drill and Enterprise Oil agreed 34 jobs for Irish rig-workers...
(MORE LATER.)
On the 10th and 11th of September, 1920, as the Newbridge and Athgarvan Companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Brigade Kildare IRA (1st Eastern Division) were carrying out a number of successful raids for arms in their areas, their republican comrades who worked on 'The Irish Bulletin' newspaper published details of a 'false flag' operation by British forces.
In November, 1919, raids by the DMP and other British forces had yielded sheets of blank Dáil notepaper on which Westminster and Dublin Castle agents were issuing false orders and instructions to IRA Units countrywide in the hope of disrupting the Movement.
The republican newspaper had in its possession false orders and instructions issued on Dáil paper by Dublin Castle agents in January and April and it also published an intelligence report written by a British Army Captain, a Mr Frederick Harper-Shove, who was attached to the 'BA General Staff, Intelligence', and was better known in BA circles as a 'spy instructor' - he mostly operated from the 'spy school' in Hounslow, in West London, in a premises known as 'Cavalry Barracks/Silent Section'.
Mr Harper-Shove had been staying in the St Andrew's Hotel in Exchequer Street, Dublin, from where he wrote a letter to one of his spy buddies, a British Army Major, Jocelyn Lee 'Hoppy' Hardy -
"Dear Hardy,
Have been given a free hand to carry on, and everyone has been charming.
Re our little stunt, I see no prospects until I have things on a firmer basis, but still hope and believe there are possibilities..."
The "little stunt" was probably a reference to the 'false flag' orders/instructions he and his people were placing in Irish republican circles, in the hope that it would lead to IRA members executing their own people in the belief that they had been 'turned'.
When not trying to stitch good people up, Mr Harper-Shove was apparently stitching himself up - his military 'Medal Index Card' contains complaints from his superior officers that he was fond of wearing medals to which he was not entitled and, in his dealings with the 'Herbal Medicine' (!) industry, Mr Harper-Shove was known as a Lieutenant-Colonel, a rank he was never entitled to!
Despite his many enemies, he stitched-up (!) a long life for himself - he died in 1974, at 88 years of age, in Gateshead, in Tyne and Wear, North East England.
That, at least, is true about the man...
'SCAB!
This is Robert Bruce, who continued to drive (British Army) munition trains while his comrades are being dismissed (for refusing to drive them).'
- Mr Bruce was the driver of a train from Belfast to Dublin on the morning of the 10th September, 1920, and the above comment was written on a placard that was made for him...
After he stationed the train in Dublin, he had a few hours before doing the return journey so he went to a pub in nearby Talbot Street, and had a pint or two.
He finished his drinks and left the pub - immediately outside, three IRA Volunteers identified themselves to Mr Bruce, showed him their placard, moved him over to a street pole and, using a length of chain and a padlock, secured him to it and placed the placard around his neck.
He wouldn't agree, but he got away lightly...
At the same time as Mr Bruce was trying on his jewellery, 155km (about 96 miles) up the road, in County Leitrim, Volunteer Patrick Gill, a middle-aged farmer from Corlara, Kilmore, County Roscommon was walking down the street in Drumsna, County Leitrim, with his sister, Elizabeth, and one of her friends, a M/s Netley.
The three friends were on their way home after attending the wake of a colleague, a Mr Bernard O'Beirne, and were walking slowly through the village when, without warning, shots were fired from the back of a British Army lorry, and Volunteer Gill fell down, dead.
An inquest was held and a Lieutenant Wallace, from the East Yorkshire Regiment of the British Army, claimed that Volunteer Gill was shouted at three times to stop, refused to do so, and was shot dead because of the danger he presented to the armed soldiers present!
The verdict reached was that "death was caused by a shooting by persons unknown..", while a coroners jury subsequently found that Volunteer Gill "had been murdered without provocation".
RIP Volunteer Patrick Gill.
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ON THIS DATE (10TH SEPTEMBER) 69 YEARS AGO - LESSONS IN HOW TO KILL PEOPLE QUICKER.
On the 10th September 1956, the British, not content with the carnage they inflicted in Dusseldorf 14 years earlier, wanted to see if they could blow things up quicker and kill even more people with less effort, and hundreds of British nuclear 'trials' took place in South Australia, about 800 kilometres north-west of Adelaide, between 1956 and 1963, at the Maralinga site, part of the Woomera Prohibited Area.
A total of seven major nuclear tests were performed,along with hundreds of minor trials, with approximate yields ranging from 1 to 27 kilotonnes of TNT (4.2 to 113.0 TJ).
Frank Walker, the author of the above-pictured book, came across the minutes of a meeting held on the 24th May 1957 between members of the 'UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment', chaired by Professor Ernest Titterton, during which the group agreed to continue its testing programme to determine the long-term effects of nuclear explosions on Australian citizens and also agreed to continue secretly testing the bodies of dead babies, infants, children, teenagers and young adults (of which the known total examined was given as 21,830!) for radiation contamination.
This violation of the dead apparently started innocently enough (!), with testing carried out on soil samples, graduating from that to tests on dead animals and then to its final phase - tests on dead humans, to discover "...if Strontium-90 is entering the food chain and getting into humans..."
'The site was contaminated with radioactive materials and an initial cleanup was attempted in 1967. The McClelland Royal Commission, an examination of the effects of the tests, delivered its report in 1985 and found that significant radiation hazards still existed at many of the Maralinga test areas.
It recommended another cleanup, which was completed in 2000 at a cost of $108 million. Debate continued over the safety of the site and the long-term health effects on the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land and former personnel.
In 1994, the Australian Government paid compensation amounting to $13.5 million to the local Maralinga Tjarutja people...'
A 'small price' to pay, I'm sure, for such invaluable knowledge - how to kill people quicker than you had done before.
'Progress' indeed.
CASH NO EXCUSE FOR RTE PUTTING DOCUMENTARY TO DEATH...
It has been a disastrous 12 months for RTE.
£23.5 million in cutbacks, a bid to increase the licence fee rejected, an enforced postponement of digital expansion, and a predicted £20 million loss to report for 2001.
By Belinda McKeon .
From 'Magill' Annual, 2002.
What is needed is the establishment of a structured co-production scheme, involving both organisations and all Irish broadcasters - as well as BBC Northern Ireland (sic), a frequent co-financer of independent productions - which would lift Irish arts documentary out of the thankless rut into which it has declined.
As for RTE, the need to create a strong, individual identity for the station has never been greater.
Despite its shortcomings, it still has a loyal viewership, and can only bolster this loyalty by building a reputation as something different, something daring, something which taps into the interests of its audience and documents the obsessions of their imagination...
(MORE LATER.)
ON THIS DATE (10TH SEPTEMBER) 83 YEARS AGO : CIVILIANS TARGETED BY BRITISH.
"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]....it should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives ; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories...."
- Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Commander, British Royal Air Force (from here).
On the 10th of September 1942, 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Dusseldorf, Germany, by 476 British Royal Air Force bombers - the objective was as stated above by one of Britain's more infamous 'mad bombers', a psychopathic mass murderer who, along with the man who issued him his instructions (and agreed that the first wave of RAF bombers should drop explosives thereby opening up the infrastructure for the second wave, incendiary bombs) , Churchill, should have been tried for war crimes, along with Goebbels and Himmler, amongst others.
Yet the British continue to propagate the myth that they are 'peace keepers' and here, in Ireland, they have found a gaggle of willing fools to assist them in spreading that myth.
On the 10th September, 1922, as IRA rebels from the Kerry No. 1 Brigade were consolidating their hold on the Kerry village of Tarbert, a Free State Army convoy was ambushed by the IRA near the village of Rathmore, in County Kerry.
The Staters were under the command of a republican-gamekeeper-turned-Free State-poacher, a Mr James McGuinness, who had fought with the IRA against the British but was now fighting against his old comrades (he participated in the Stacumney Ambush in July 1921).
Mr McGuinness survived the IRA ambush, but seven other Free State Army renegades were killed before the rebels withdrew, as FSA reinforcements with an artillery piece arrived on the scene.
As the rebels were withdrawing, Mr de Valera was writing a letter to a Mr Joseph McGarrity in which he outlined how the Staters had started the Civil War in Ireland and also voiced his concern that public opinion in the country was moving in the direction of support for the Treaty of Surrender ; other supporters of that Treaty, in Westminster, were - on that same date - reading the 'Weekly Intelligence Summary' from the 'Dublin District of the British Army', in which the British military leadership in Ireland noted that "there are no signs of double dealing at present (by the Staters)..." in relation to their support for the Treaty and, by association, their willingness to suppress the 32-County Republic.
So - 103 years later - no change there, then...
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DEATH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN...
Desmond Boomer, a Belfast engineer working in the Libyan oil-fields, disappeared seven years ago.
Officially, the plane on which he was a passenger crashed as a result of mechanical failure and pilot error.
But is that the real story?
Or were the Irishman and his fellow passengers unwitting victims of the shady war between Islamic fundamentalism and Mossad, Israel's intelligence network?
A special 'Magill' investigation by Don Mullan, author of 'Eyewitness Bloody Sunday'.
From 'Magill' magazine, January 2003.
In October 1996, ten months after the incident, the Maltese Board of Inquiry was officially informed by Tunisia that local fishermen had pulled wreckage from the plane to the surface.
However, the Tunisian government has never identified the fishermen, the name of their vessel or the exact location where the wreckage was allegedly discovered, nor were they pressed by the Maltese Board of Inquiry to do so.
On 14th November 1996, the inquiry in Malta was shown photographs of the wreckage taken by the Maltese Charge d'Affaires in Tunis, including photographs of Captain Bartolo's wallet and its contents, allegedly found amongst the wreckage, but no specific information is given regarding the actual date the wreckage was 'discovered'.
The Maltese Board of Inquiry report, published in January 2000, states that ... "..following the recovery of the wreck, a search was carried out in November 1996 in the indicated area, but the search proved unfruitful..."
(MORE LATER.)
ON THIS DATE (10TH SEPTEMBER) 102 YEARS AGO : FINAL PREP DAY FOR A LON-ANNOUNCED (AND IMAGINED) 'NEW NATION'!
A LESS-THAN-USELESS FAILED INSTITUTION.
(No, not Leinster House - that it is the above goes without saying!)
We refer to the so-called 'League of Nations' organisation which, on this date in 1923 - 10th September - was preparing to open its doors on 'Day 1' of having somehow officially announced the 'birth of a new nation' - Ireland, all 26 of its 32 Counties, that is!
The new entity (!) was, unbelievably, allowed membership of that August body (!) as "a nation".
This despite the fact that the application was endorsed by a (Free State) political administration which was in turmoil and had only just 'officially' emerged from a war with its neighbour, Britain, the effects of which were still being felt in the country as a whole and, indeed, are still being felt to this day, as the issue remains unresolved.
The 'main man' at the time, in this then war-torn State, William T. Cosgrave - a republican-poacher-turned-Free State-gamekeeper - was delighted that the Free State was 'allowed' to join the then four year-old 'League', which was considered by both the home-grown and foreign political 'Establishment' as a 'sacred circle'.
The British representative in that failed grouping, amongst others, gave what was described at the time as an "..eloquent speech...a spontaneous manifestation of good-will toward Ireland (sic) (in which) felicitations were extended...(to the new member)..."
And why wouldn't Westminster (and its 'friends' in Ireland and abroad at the time) welcome an acknowledgement by Cosgrave and his ilk that, to all intent and purpose, they agreed with Westminster that the part of Ireland handed back to 'the Irish' was indeed considered to be a 'nation', as it helped propagate the lie that the (still occupied) six north-eastern counties of Ireland were "part of the Empire".
Mr Cosgrave died 60 years ago but the political fault-line he so ably gave succor to in 1923 (and before and after that year) lives on after him.
Nothing to be proud of.
On the 10th September, 1923, the newly-spawned Irish Free State became a living oxymoron, when it was admitted to the 'League of Nations' organisation.
"We can no longer say, as we could formerly about the Irish question, that it is an internal matter..."
- the words of a Mr Antrobus, an official in the British Colonial/Dominions Office, in a letter he sent on the 19th of that month to a Mr Lionel Curtis.
Mr Antrobus opined that the Free Staters could now take a complaint against Westminster to the League because delays in appointing the Boundary Commissioner violated an 'international agreement' ie the Treaty of Surrender but, of course - as correctly judged by the British - the Free State Leinster House administration wouldn't dare bite the hand that fed them ; it would bark, but not bite.
"Our friends' heads (the Free State government) are, of course, pretty full at the moment, but this would soon change once they realised that their position in the world counted for little apart from their position in the British Commonwealth of Nations..."
- the reply to Mr Antrobus from Mr Curtis (on the 25th September) : then, and now, the Free State politicians consider(ed) themselves to be 'world players' when, in reality, they are occasional pebbles in the shoes of the real players.
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ON THIS DATE (10TH SEPTEMBER) 102 YEARS AGO : AN IMPOSTER JOINS A CLUB!
- the words of Michael Collins, delivered to a meeting of (the 32-County) An Chéad Dáil (the First Dáil, 1919-1921) in April 1919, in relation to the then-probable formation of a 'League of Nations' organisation (which was formed in January 1920) .
The British forcibly partitioned Ireland in December 1922 and, on the 10th September 1923, the then three-years-old 'League of Nations' organisation accepted the Free State (a 26-county entity) as a member of the club - had that grouping been called the 'League of States' rather than the 'League of Nations' then we would not be writing this piece but for any so-called 'organisation of nations' to accept a request for membership from a landmass that contains a little more than three-quarters of its own land brings to mind the Groucho Marx quote - "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member"!
And, in a further twist of logic, 'Time' magazine stated -
"Ireland was admitted into the sacred circle of the League of Nations by unanimous vote. On all sides there were spontaneous manifestations of good-will toward Ireland. In eloquent speeches, representatives of Britain, France, China, Persia and other countries extended felicitations to the Free State representative...." again confusing the Free State as being 'Ireland', rather than part thereof.
Incidentally, this very issue caused a rift between U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the then leader of the Clann na nGael organisation in America, Judge Daniel Cohalan - the Judge was known to be of the opinion that the 'League of Nations' was a ploy by the British to integrate themselves into American society.
It was he and the Clann organisation that financed the opposition to Wilson's 'League of Nations' proposal - indeed, of the estimated $900,000 dollar 'war fund' that the Clann had, only $115,000 dollars was spent in Ireland ; the other $785,000 dollars was spent in attacking the 'League of Nations ' or "Britains League", as Judge Daniel Cohalan and John Devoy called it.
But that's a story for another day...!
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"(The Boundary Commission) will hand over to the Southern States (sic) the Catholic parishes which were anxious to join them, but which would, on the other hand, transfer to the North those Protestant parishes which are now in the Free State..."
- British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, addressing an audience in Wales, on the 10th September 1924.
One of the legal referees involved in the Boundary Commission fiasco, a Mr Kevin Matthews, stated that an award based on the wishes of the population in parishes would mean that large portions of Counties Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh would go to the Free State as well as Derry City, Strabane and Newry, which the British wouldn't countenance, so they loaded the dice by granting themselves two votes on the Commission - their own, and that of the Six County rep, whom they picked!
Mr Matthews repeatedly voiced concern regarding the legality of that move, arguing that Westminster did not have the unilateral authority to make such an appointment and that parliamentary legislation was required (...a point we have made numerous times on this blog), and the British 'Judicial Committee of the Privy Council' supported his argument (having ruled in June 1924 that the British government did indeed need to pass legislation to nominate the Six County representative to the commission).
However, the Commission (chaired by a Mr Richard Feetham, a friend of Westminster) rode roughshod over the ball-less Free Staters and, in its 1925 report, ultimately recommended no changes to the imposed border, a decision that proved highly controversial but went legally unchallenged by the Staters, who were quite happy to rule over (?!) the portion of Ireland that Westminster had allocated to them.
Shame on them, but it wasn't unexpected...
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Thanks for the visit, and for reading - appreciated!
Sharon and the team.
(We'll be back on Wednesday, 24th September 2025.)
