NOLA Reviews Van at New Orleans Jazz Fest:

It was about halfway through the closing show at the New Orleans Jazz Festival Gentilly Stage on Saturday (April 23). Master musician and songwriter Van Morrison asked his guitarist to “give me a G.” He modulated his voice to match the chord then launched into a jaunty version of “Jambalaya.” Who knows, the Hank Williams tune may be a regular part of Morrison’s repertoire, but the Bayou State crowd accepted it as a tailor-made gift, cheering and bobbing to the first few bars.

The ability of Morrison and his impeccable five-piece ensemble to incorporate a loping, country classic seamlessly into the jazzy, R&B flow of their set is a tribute to the team’s flexibility. Flexibility is key, because, stylistically speaking, there are several Van Morrison’s to accommodate. There’s the pop radio Van Morrison of “Brown Eyed Girl,” the Christian mystic Van Morrison, the romantic balladeer, the Ray Charles devotee, and the sultry jazz instrumentalist. All of whom shared the stage Saturday.

It would be hard to praise the 70-year-old’s vocal skills enough. When Morrison sings, and particularly when he scats, his voice is as saxophone-like as his saxophone.  Instead of tiring as the concert progressed, he always seemed to be able to reach down for yet more power and emotional depth in his delivery. He handled “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Wild Night,” and “Days Like This,” with muscular, mature authority. There was no mistaking that this show was crafted for adults.

Van Morrison performs on the Gentilly during the second day of the New Orleans Jazz Fest at the Fair Grounds Saturday, April 23, 2016. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune) 

Even “Gloria,” Morrison’s 1964 love anthem that has become the bouncy go-to crowd-pleaser of every bar band in the land, had a more serious, serrated tone in Saturday’s performance that breathed life back into the old warhorse.

It was unfortunate that when the band deliberately dropped the volume on the jam that followed “Moondance,” to achieve a sort of musical whispering, sound bleed from another stage — or stages — ruined the effect.

Despite the gorgeous weather, the notoriously deadpan Morrison appeared, as is his custom, dressed for summer in San Francisco, with a suit jacket, felt fedora, and ascot. He never frowned, nor did he crack a smile. Except, perhaps, once. As the perfectionistic Northern Irish knight began singing the comically bawdy lyrics to “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” he may have, just may have, guffawed with laughter.

As the last notes of the closing jam faded away, an audience member quietly opined: “Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.”

Agreed, agreed, agreed.

– Doug McCash

Van Meets With Old Friends in New Orleans

During the Jazz and Heritage Festival, Sir Van met up with his old friends, Mitch Woods and Taj Mahal.

Here they are pictured at Esplanade Studios, located in the historic Treme neighbourhood of New Orleans.

The first deliberate raid took place on the night of 7 April. (Some authors count this as the second raid of four). It targeted the docks but neighbouring residential areas were also hit. William Joyce (known as “Lord Haw-Haw”), whose links with Francis Stuart have been fully documented , announced in radio broadcasts from Hamburg that there would be “Easter eggs for Belfast”. Stuart and Joyce  came from similar backgrounds as “Anglo-Irishmen”, from Protestant or at least non-Catholic backgrounds who had attended school in England. In Germany, Stuart served an apprenticeship to prove his usefulness to the Germans by inter alia writing scripts for Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts. Finally, in August 1941, the Germans gave Stuart a broadcasting slot for himself, with the broadcasts aimed at Ireland whereas those of Lord Haw-Haw’s had been directed at Britain.

There had been little preparation for the conflict with Germany. Craigavon had said: “Ulster is ready when we get the word and always will be.” And when asked in the N.I. parliament: “if the government realized ‘that these fast bombers can come to Northern Ireland in two and three quarter hours”, he replied: “We here today are in a state of war and we are prepared with the rest of the United Kingdom and Empire to face all the responsibilities that imposes on the Ulster people. There is no slacking in our loyalty.”

Five years ago, in the Linen Hall Library, 17 Donegall Square North, Belfast, at the request of my publishers Colourpoint Books of Newtownards, I gave a presentation on my book, Bombs on Belfast, The Blitz 1941 as part of the Library’s City in Flames:Blitz Exhibition.

A decade on from the 1916 Easter Rising, 40,000 Dubliners gathered in the Phoenix Park for Poppy Day. Thousands of poppies were sold in the city, and there were physical clashes between republicans and those observing the day. This post shows how four years on from Irish independence, some in Dublin still held very different loyalties.

Ireland Honours Her Dead” – Armistice Day 1926 http://comeheretome.com/2013/03/06/ireland-honours-her-dead-armistice-day-1926/

In the years following Irish independence, one issue of contention that existed was the issue of political commemoration, and just what ‘war dead’ could and should be remembered in the city. While the state was constructing the narrative of the revolution it claimed had brought about its establishment, thousands of Irish citizens still identified with, and partook in, events like Armistice Day. The poppy was openly sold in Dublin and other Irish cities and towns, and thousands would march in honour of Ireland’s war dead on an annual basis. This brief post looks at the Armistice Day celebrations in 1926, when an impressive 40,000 people attended the ceremony in the Phoenix Park, at the Wellington obelisk. Similar demonstrations occurred in the years before and after 1926, but this post uses it as a sort of case study.

The popularity of Armistice Day, or ‘Poppy Day’, is evident from sales of the remembrance poppy in Dublin in the 1920s. In his history of the IRA from 1926 to 1936, Brian Hanley notes that “Poppy Day was observed by thousands of people, particularly in Dublin during the 1920s. Over 500,000 poppies were sold in the Dublin area in 1924.” This was at a time before the British Legion had even opened an office in Dublin, which they did in 1925. It was late October of 1925 when the poppy was formally launched in Ireland, something which led republican women to the creation of the Easter lily in 1926, as an ‘alternative’ symbol, and Ann Matthews has looked at this symbol in great detail during the course of her research on the role of women in the republican movement. The popularity of the Easter Lily never even approached that of the Poppy. In the inaugural year of the symbol, we know from Cumann na mBan’s (The women’s republican movement) own Annual Reports that only £34 was raised from sales of the lily, pittance when contrasted with the £7,430 evident from the “Annual Report of the Southern Ireland Area of the British Legion”, documenting poppy sales.

Armistice Day in 1926 witnessed a huge procession through the streets of the capital, destined for the Phoenix Park. The Irish Times wrote after the event that “Dublin was astir early for the ceremonies, and at 8am the great march to the Phoenix Park began.” Crowds assembled in the park, and were joined by ex-servicemen who marked from Beresford Place, ironically the home of Liberty Hall, and where the immortal words ‘We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser- But Ireland’ had hung on a banner just over a decade previously in an act of anti-war defiance. On the command being given by A.P Connolly, President of the British Legion in the Free State, about twenty different contingents of ex-servicemen began the march to the Wellington monument in the Phoenix Park.

The Irish Times wrote of this gathering of the park that:

It would be hard, indeed, to estimate the size of the gathering. It did not, however, number less than forty thousand. From an early hour people began to arrive by every kind of vehicle and on foot, and an hour before the ceremony began the wide open space in the Phoenix Park surrounding the Wellington Monument was densely crowded.

The Wellington monument, completed in 1861, commemorates Arthur Wellesley, who secured British victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. As Prime Minister of Britain, Wellesley oversaw Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and his statue in the Phoenix Park is one of the grandest monuments on the island. Footage of the huge assembly at Wellington’s memorial in 1926 is available on the British Pathe website, and can be viewed here.

Newspaper reports at the time noted that a perfect silence followed the Last Post, and “so deeply impressive it was that when one closed one’s eyes to pray one felt alone in the vast acres’ of the park.” Yet Remembrance Day was not perfectly observed in the city, as some republican and anti-imperialist elements organised protests around the events, something which had been occurring in the years before 1926, and would escalate in the 1930s, with the IRA organising protests under the auspices of the Anti-Imperialist League.

An interesting quote in Hanley’s book from Frank Ryan shows that he believed the British Legion marchers would be drawn mainly from “bank clerks and students of Trinity College”, but in reality this just wasn’t the case. As Hanley correctly notes, “a section of working class Dublin continued to identify with its contribution during the First World War well into the next decade, but the image of well heeled pro-British demonstrators was a powerful mobilising tool.” Adrian Hoar notes in his biography of Ryan that the annual demonstrations against Poppy Day “would become synonymous in the public mind with his name”, but other influential figures such as Peadar O’Donnell were also involved.

Among the thousands gathered in the Phoenix Park, newspaper reports noted that a “party of Fasciti in their striking black shirts” was to be found. While there was no physical confrontation in the park between veterans, republicans and others, there were some scenes of violence in Dublin on the day, although not on the same scale as previous Armistice Day celebrations. The Irish Times noted that “between 300 and 400 men and women” were involved in opposition to the day, and noted that:

Divided into gangs, they moved about the city, snatching poppies from peaceable citizens and molesting ex-servicemen. One gang, larger than the others, attacked two police men in Dawson Street, and broke into the Representative Body in St. Stephen’s Green in order to remove a Union Jack from a window.

Union flags were burned in the city too, in one instance following a meeting on O’Connell Street which was addressed by the republican priest Michael Flanagan among others. Another flag was burnt at College Green. The violence of Armistice Day led to the republican socialist George Gilmore appearing in court, on charges of assault, as this 20 November newspaper report details. Gilmore would spend a period in prison for his activities, but was later instrumental to moving sections of the republican movement to the left in the 1930s.

Throughout the 1930s, street violence became much more common place at political commemorations in Dublin. Not alone did the republican-left continue to organise in opposition to Armistice Day, but there would also be violent confrontation with the Blueshirts and the nationalist right. This brief post is by no means a very in-depth look at Armistice Day events even in 1926, but is designed simply to show that four years after independence, and a decade on from the Easter Rising, some in Dublin still identified with the commemorative events of the British Empire.

In April and May, 1941, as the price of its loyalty to the Allied cause against the scourge of Nazism, Belfast suffered four air raids by German bombers. There was a heavy loss of life — almost 1,000 people perished — and 2,500 were injured, many of them seriously. In one particular raid, on Easter Tuesday, nearly 75 years ago, no other city in the United Kingdom, save London, suffered such a high death toll. The success of this mission, from the German point of view, was due to the exemplary preparatory methods of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, as well as excellent aerial reconnaissance. Their special agent, working through Queen’s University, Belfast, was Jopp Hoven of the German Academic Exchange, which had strong links to the IRA. He was later designated as a member of the Bataillon Brandenburg (Brandenburg Battalion), roughly equivalent to the British SAS . He was controlled by the Dublin-based Nazi Spy-master and propagandist, a professional archaeologist and “serious scholar”, Adolph Mahr, who had been the de Valera appointee as Director of the National Museum of Ireland, but who was actually planning a Nazi invasion of Ireland.

It is obvious that, during the Second World War, the Government of Northern Ireland lacked the will, energy and capacity to cope with a major crisis when it came. And come it did in April and May, 1941. James Craig, Lord Craigavon, who was Prime Minister of Northern Ireland since its inception in 1921, until his death on November 24, 1940, had become very frail. Richard Dawson Bates was the Home Affairs Minister. According to Sir Wilfred Spender, the cabinet secretary, he was “incapable of giving his responsible officers coherent directions on policy” Only Sir Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture, actively pursued his duties and successfully performed with the task of making Northern Ireland a major supplier of food to Britain in her time of need.

John Clarke MacDermott, the Minister of Public Security, after the first bombing, initiated the “Hiram Plan” to evacuate the city and to return Belfast to ‘normality’ as quickly as possible. MacDermott was the person who sent the telegram to de Valera seeking assistance. There was unease with the complacent attitude of the government, and resignations followed:
• John Edmond Warnock, the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs, resigned from the Northern Ireland government on 25 May 1940. He said “I have heard speeches about Ulster pulling her weight but they have never carried conviction.” and “the government has been slack, dilatory and apathetic.”
• Lt. Col. Alexander Robert Gisborne Gordon, Parliamentary and Financial Secretary at the Ministry of Finance (i.e. Chief Whip), resigned on 13 June 1940, explaining to the Commons that the government was “quite unfitted to sustain the people in the ordeal we have to face.”

Lord Craigavon died on Sunday, 24 November 1940 and was succeeded by John Miller Andrews, then 70 years old, who was no more capable of dealing with the situation than his predecessor. The minutes of his cabinet meetings show more discussion on protecting the bronze statue of Carson outside Stormont than the provision of air-raid shelters and other necessities for the civil defence of the population..
On 28 April 1943, six members of the Government threatened to resign, thus forcing him from office. He resigned on 1st May.

There had been little preparation for the conflict with Germany. Craigavon had said: “Ulster is ready when we get the word and always will be.” And when asked in the N.I. parliament: “if the government realized ‘that these fast bombers can come to Northern Ireland in two and three quarter hours”, he replied: “We here today are in a state of war and we are prepared with the rest of the United Kingdom and Empire to face all the responsibilities that imposes on the Ulster people. There is no slacking in our loyalty.” Yet Dawson Bates simply refused to reply to army correspondence. When the Ministry of Home Affairs was informed by imperial defence experts that Belfast was a certain Luftwaffe target, nothing was done.

Unlike other British cities, children had not been evacuated. There had been the “Hiram Plan” initiated by John MacDermott but it failed to materialise. Fewer than 4,000 women and children were evacuated but there were still 80,000 children in Belfast during the Blitz. Even the children of soldiers had not been evacuated, with calamitous results when the married quarters of Victoria barracks received a direct hit. From papers recovered after the war, we know that there had been a Luftwaffe reconnaissance flight over Belfast on November 30, 1940. The Germans established that Belfast was defended by only seven anti-aircraft batteries, which made it the most poorly defended city in the United Kingdom. From their photographs, they identified suitable targets:

• Harland and Wolff Ltd shipyard
• Die Tankstelle Conns Water…“Fuel Depot” or possibly “Oil Refinery”.
• Short and Harland aircraft factory
• The power station of Belfast
• Rank & Co mill
• Belfast Waterworks
• Victoria Barracks

There had already been a number of small bombings, probably by planes that missed their targets over the Clyde or the cities of the north-west of England. On 24 March 1941, John McDermott wrote to the Prime Minister, John Andrews expressing his concerns that Belfast was so poorly protected. “Up to now we have escaped attack. So had Clydeside until recently. Clydeside got its blitz during the period of the last moon. There [is] ground for thinking that the … enemy could not easily reach Belfast in force except during a period of moonlight. The period of the next moon from say the 7th to the 16th of April may well bring our turn.” Unfortunately, McDermott was proved right.

By 6am, within two hours of the request for assistance to Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, 71 firemen with 13 fire tenders from Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, and Dún Laoghaire were on their way to cross the Irish border to assist their Belfast colleagues. In each station volunteers were asked for, as it was beyond their normal duties. In every instance, all volunteered. They remained for three days, until they were sent back by the Northern Ireland government. By then 250 fire men from Clydeside had arrived.

De Valera formally protested to Berlin. He followed up with his “they are our people” speech, made in Castlebar, County Mayo, on Sunday 20th April 1941 (Quoted in the Dundalk Democrat dated Saturday April 26 1941): “In the past, and probably in the present, too, a number of them did not see eye to eye with us politically, but they are our people – we are one and the same people – and their sorrows in the present instance are also our sorrows; and I want to say to them that any help we can give to them in the present time we will give to them whole-heartedly, believing that were the circumstances reversed they would also give us their help whole-heartedly”

Initial German radio broadcasts celebrated the raid. A Luftwaffe pilot gave this description “We were in exceptional good humour knowing that we were going for a new target, one of England’s last hiding places. Wherever Churchill is hiding his war material we will go … Belfast is as worthy a target as Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol or Glasgow.” William Joyce “Lord Haw-Haw” announced that “The Führer will give you time to bury your dead before the next attack … Tuesday was only a sample.” However Belfast was not mentioned again by the Nazis. After the war, instructions from Joseph Goebbels ordering it not to be mentioned were discovered. It would appear that Adolf Hitler, in view of de Valera’s negative reaction, was concerned that de Valera, and the Irish American politicians he controlled, might encourage the United States to enter the war.

Among the people of Northern Ireland, reactions tended to blame the mediocre Ulster Unionist government for inadequate precautions. Tommy Henderson, the great Shankill working-class hero, an Independent Unionist MP in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, summed up their feelings when he invited the Minister of Home Affairs to Hannahstown and the Falls Road, saying “The Catholics and the Protestants are going up there mixed and they are talking to one another. They are sleeping in the same sheugh (ditch), below the same tree or in the same barn. They all say the same thing, that the government is no good.”

Another claim was that the Roman Catholic population in general and the IRA in particular guided the bombers. Dr Barton, an expert on the Belfast Blitz, has written: “the Catholic population was much more strongly opposed to conscription, was inclined to sympathise with Germany”, “…there were suspicions that the Germans were assisted in identifying targets held by the Unionist population.” This view was probably influenced by the decision of the IRA Army Council to support Germany. As we have seen, however, German Intelligence had been very active both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with both the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) through the German Academic Exchange at Queen’s University, Belfast, as well as the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS) sending agents there. Yet this fact is generally ignored by the whole Irish Academic Establishment in books on the Belfast Blitz to cover up the complicity of their predecessors.

There was a later raid on Belfast on 4 May; it was confined to the docks and shipyards. Again the Southern Irish emergency services crossed the border, this time without waiting for an invitation. On 31 May 1941 German bombers bombed neutral Dublin.  German intelligence operations effectively ended in September 1941 when An Garda Síochána made arrests on the basis of surveillance carried out on the key diplomatic legations in Ireland, including the United States. I think this was a result of the Blitzing first of Belfast and the realisation that Hitler’s intentions in the South were not so benign as de Valera had first thought. During the First World War the German objective was to roll back the borders of the Latins and return to those of a more ancient Greater Germany. Protestant Britain was to become a German colony, Roman Catholic Ireland an Austrian one. For Hitler the Second World War was merely an attempt to clear up the unfinished business of the First.

The modern English term Easter, cognate with modern German Ostern, developed from an Old English word which usually appears in the form Ēastrun, -on, or -an; but also as Ēastru, -o; and Ēastre or Ēostre. The most widely accepted theory of the origin of the term is that it is derived from the name of a goddess mentioned by the 7th to 8th-century English monk, the Venerable Bede, who wrote that Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English ‘Month of Ēostre’, translated in Bede’s time as “Paschal month”) was an English month, corresponding to April, which he says “was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month”. And so it is today..

The “Easter Rising” of 1916 celebrated by republican nationalists had its real roots in the Gaelic revival of the late nineteenth century.  In 1884 was formed the Gaelic Athletic Association which promoted Hurling and Gaelic Football and forbad the playing of foreign games.  In 1893 the Anglican, Douglas Hyde, founded the Gaelic League, which ironically had as its aim the “de-Anglicisation” of Ireland.  From this sprang Gaelic nationalism “Ireland not free only, but Gaelic as well, not Gaelic only but free as well.”  Strangely enough a pseudo-Celtic twilight culture was created by such “Anglo-Irish” as Willam Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, which anglicised the old Gaelic literature out of all recognition.  The political manifestation of this “Gaelic revival” was the foundation of Sinn Fein – “We Ourselves” in 1905, founded and later led by Arthur Griffith.  This movement was soon attracted to and taken over by the veteran and militant Fenian movement.

Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin, Ireland on 31 March 1872, of Welsh lineage, and was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers. The charge of anti-semitism has often been levelled at Griffith. He published articles signed by ‘The Home Secretary’ in his newspaper, the United Irishman, during the Dreyfus Affair which displayed clear hatred for Jews. Even after Alfred Dreyfus had been pardoned Griffith remained virulently Anti-Dreyfusard. In 1899 he wrote in the United Irishman:

I have in former years often declared that the Three Evil Influences of the century were the Pirate, the Freemason, and the Jew.

A few days ago a Jew traitor, who had sold the most vital secrets of France to her military enemies, was condemned to the mild punishment of imprisonment, after his guilt had been for a second time in five years demonstrated to a court martial of his comrades … The simple fact is that the whole European world, with the exception of the Anglo-Jew coalition and its Irish sycophants, is utterly indifferent to the traitor’s fate.

At the same time there was a growth of Marxist philosophy and an active socialist movement was led by James Connolly of Edinburgh and James Larkin of Liverpool.  Connolly, however, tried to use Gaelic nationalism to further his own ideals, thus compromising the labour movement in both Britain and Ireland.  The blending of Roman Catholic and Celtic mysticism created in people as diverse as Patrick Pearce and James Connolly the myth of the blood sacrifice which was thus to have lasting consequences.

1913 saw the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force under Sir Edward Carson and Sir James Craig to resist such threats to their British heritage. With the help of the former British Army officer Captain Jack White of Broughshane, James Connolly set up the Irish Citizens’ Army while Eoin Mac Neill of the Gaelic League, who came from Glenarm, formed the Irish Volunteers.  But the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 averted civil hostilities and Irishmen of all persuasions sailed to Europe to fight either for the King and an Empire which was already in decline or for the independent rights of small nations against an expanding German one.  The Irish Republican (Fenian Brotherhood) leaders saw this as an opportunity for revolt and a republican uprising was effected without success during Easter 1916.

The majority of the casualties, both killed and wounded, were naturally civilians, as the insurrection took place irresponsibly in a peaceful city centre celebrating the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Army reported casualties of 116 dead, 368 wounded and nine missing. Sixteen policemen died, and 29 were wounded. Rebel and civilian casualties were 318 dead and 2,217 wounded. The Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army recorded 64 killed in action, but other casualties were not divided into rebels and civilians. All 16 police fatalities and 22 of our British soldiers killed were Irishmen. Their families came to Dublin Castle in May 1916 to reclaim the bodies and funerals were arranged, and bodies which were not claimed were given military funerals in Grangegorman Military Cemetery.

Most notorious of the insurgents was also Anglo-Irish, the bogus Countess Markievicz, born Constance Gore-Booth, near Buckingham Place in London, who killed in cold blood the unarmed constable Michael Lahiff, the son of a peasant family from County Clare. Then there was the  Scottish sniper and assassin Margaret Skinnider of the Irish Citizens’ Army, who threw a high-explosive fragmentation bomb into the crowded Shelbourne hotel in Dublin. Both of these vicious people masqueraded under the cloak of humanitarianism and the rights of women and the poor. Both escaped execution because they were, indeed, women.

Sexually obsessed as he was with the republican nationalist English-born Maude Gonne, also of Anglo-Irish stock and birth, the insurrection and the subsequent execution of its leaders evinced a “terrible beauty” in the eyes of William Butler Yeats, at a time when thousands of Irishmen were dying unsung in Flanders.  On 1^st July 1916 the 36^th Ulster Division sustained 5,500 casualties at the Battle of the Somme, a sacrifice greater by far, as were the losses of the mainly Catholic 16^th Irish Division, fighting the “gallant allies” of the insurgents, who wished to make Ireland an Austrian colony.  Nevertheless, in 1918 Sinn Fein won a majority of Irish seats at Westminster and the first self-styled Dail Eireann (Government of Ireland) met in Dublin the following year.

The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, tried a compromise settlement in 1920, which provided for separate parliaments in Northern and Southern Ireland.  Northern Ireland consisted of the whole of Old Ulster (Ulidia) ie Antrim and Down, as well as four other counties of the contemporary English provincial configuration of Ulster,which consisted of nine counties.

The other lost twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State in 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, but the dominion status of the new State was not acceptable to republicans. Arthur Griffith served as President of Dáil Éireann from January to August 1922, and was head of the Irish delegation at the negotiations in London that produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, attending with Michael Collins, leader of a death “Squad” gang of assassins. Civil War then erupted between pro- and anti-treaty factions, the former led by Michael Collins, the latter by Eamonn de Valera.  During the last six months of this war nearly twice as many republican prisoners were executed by the authorities of the Free State as were executed by the British in the whole period from 1916 to 1921.

In 1926 de Valera formed his Fianna Fail (Warriors of Destiny) Party.  The Free State Party lost power to Fianna Fail in 1933 and changed its name to Fine Gael (Tribe of Gaels) the following year.  How many of either party were Gaels in either language, culture or ethnic origin is open to question. Most were actually of British decent . De Valera’s basic Roman Catholic Nationalism was highlighted by a radio broadcast on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1935, when he said “since the coming of Saint Patrick, Ireland has been a Christian and a Catholic Nation, she remains a Catholic nation.”

This statement demonstrates, according to Conor Cruise O’Brien, the peculiar nature of Irish Nationalism, as it is actually felt, not as it is rhetorically expressed.  The nation is felt to be the Gaelic Nation, Catholic in religion.  Protestants are welcome to join this nation.  If they do they may or may not retain their religious profession but they become as it were Catholic by nationality.  In 1937 de Valera was thus able to produce a new constitution which was in essence a documentation of contemporary Roman Catholic social theory.

During the second Great War in 1939-1945, the Irish Free State remained neutral.  The Gaelic nationalists had much in common with Fascist Spain but baulked at assisting the German Nazis.  During April and May 1941, as the price of its loyalty to the allied cause, Belfast suffered four air raids by German Bombers.  There was heavy loss of life – almost 1000 died – 2500 were injured, many of them seriously.  In the air raid of Easter Tuesday 1941 no other city in the United Kingdom save London, suffered such a high death toll in one night.  No other city except possibly Liverpool ever did.  Following the war Southern Ireland left the British Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland was formally instituted on Easter Monday 1949.

Thus it is that both Easter and 1916 have different connotations for different sections of our community.  It is particularly unfortunate that the Easter Lily, which in reality symbolises the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, should be used as a partisan and essentially blasphemous symbol in our society, for the insurgents were followers of Barabbas, not of Jesus. As the people of Northern Ireland take their first tentative steps on the road to a new pluralism, we would be better served by adopting symbols which make us more fully aware of the extent of our inter-related characteristics and Common Identity, not just with each other, but with the other peoples of these Isles of the Pretani, rather  than persisting with those which divide us.

Holy Monday….Our Lord Jesus demonstrates genuine faith in God and affirms his Messianic destiny in the Cursing of the Fig Tree and the Cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem

Holy Tuesday…Our Lord Jesus taught from early morning until late at night…When the sun had set his earthly teaching was done….He left us the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and the Parable of the Talents, advising eternal vigilance for the Children of God….

Holy Wednesday….This is the day the Sanhedrin met to plot the destruction of our beloved Lord Jesus….This is the day when Mary, at the home of Simon the Leper in Bethany, washed his hands and feet in precious oil out of pure love ….and the disciples did not like it….This is the day Judas Iscariot, the Dagger man, betrayed him for 30 pieces of silver….This is Spy Wednesday, spy in this sense meaning ambush and treachery….

Holy Thursday….also known as Maundy Thursday, Holy and Great Thursday, Covenant Thursday and the Thursday of Mysteries….This is the day of the Maundy, the Washing of the Feet and Our Lord’s Last Supper….The Maundy, or Mandatum in Latin, is Our Lord’s new commandment that he gave to us, ” that you love one another, even as I loved you”….

The Declaration of Nazareth

 He [Jesus] went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.

And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Gospel of Luke Chapter 4, verses 16-21

The Gospel of Mark may well be the first to have been written, by John Mark, the personal secretary of the apostle Peter. The version we have now was certainly composed in 65-70 AD, 35 to 40 years after the events Mark recorded, by a well–educated Greek-Speaking Christian. The term Gospel means “Good News” and the author was concerned with how he was bringing such news to the people rather than writing an actual biography of Jesus.

In this Gospel, Jesus is described as “the Christ, the Son of God” (1:1). For most Jewish people at the time this would have been a remarkable statement and to the educated élite would have appeared quite unacceptable. For “Christ” is Greek for the “Anointed One”, and is the equivalent of the Hebrew term for “Messiah”. The Jews were awaiting a great military leader or cosmic figure who would deliver them from their enemies, not a person who had just suffered and in their eyes died ignobly on Calvary. And yet that is precisely why the author says… Jesus was the Messiah….

One of the significant points about the account is that at the beginning nobody actually seems to have known he was the Messiah. Jesus’s family didn’t seem to know. The neighbours from his virtually unknown little village of Nazareth wondered what on earth this son of the local carpenter was talking about… But, most of all, his disciples didn’t seem to know who he was. God, of course, knew who he was, because Jesus, at his baptism by John the Baptist, and only Jesus, heard a voice from heaven declaring” you are my beloved son” (1:11)…. Mary Magdalene knew, for she was the closest and most faithful friend Jesus ever had, and he loved her more than the other disciples…. And the demons he cast out knew….But no one else seems to have had a notion.

All this changes in the middle of the Gospel, with the metaphor of the blind man who gradually regains his sight. The disciples at last begin to understand, though Jesus instructs them not to tell anyone. And he continues to predict that he must suffer and die, to take away the sins of the World. Yet, at the very end, even Jesus himself seems not to be so sure after all. He prays to God three times to save him from his fate, and then cries out in total despair before he dies, literally of a broken heart. He had suffered extreme torture and mental anquish, following flogging or scourging with a flagrum, consisting of braided leather thongs with metal balls and pieces of sharp bone woven or intertwined with the braids, causing hypovolaemic shock, so he could no longer carry the cross.

On crucifixion his heart finally failed, with massive pulmonary oedema and pericardial effusion, as the description of his death authentically shows, for ”one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water” ( John 19:34), rupturing his heart and releasing the pleural and pericardial effusions.  He was totally, absolutely, completely dead. Yet if anyone had any doubts at all about what happened next, the author does not. Jesus’s death and resurrection had inevitably to be such, and, in fact, we are all expected to take up our own crosses and follow our beloved Master….

The Gospel of Thomas is of another kind, a “Sayings” Gospel, which records 114 of Jesus’s sayings rather than the story of his life, death and resurrection. Its purpose is to promote the secret teachings of Jesus and explain to the faithful that by understanding his words rather than by believing in his death and resurrection that they would have everlasting life. The Gospel is attributed to Didymus Judas Thomas, whom Jesus says is his “twin”, “Didymus” being Greek and “Thomas” Aramaic for “twin”. If it is not a forgery, as some believe, it may be the closest we ever get to the real Jesus. Yet, as we have been told, the leadership of the church in Jerusalem passed, not to Thomas, but to Jesus’s brother, James the Just, who followed the Law, supported the poor against the rich and was deeply respected among the whole Jewish community. He sought to limit the doctrine of Paul, whose mission was essentially to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews. When James was executed in 62 A.D., therefore, on the orders of Ananus (Hanan), a corrupt High Priest who was bathed in luxury, the whole Jewish community were appalled.

The convert Paul was, apart from Jesus Himself, the most important figure in the spread of Christianity. His letters to the young churches were probably written sometime between 50 and 60 AD. Paul’s conversion appears to have been the result of an encounter with the living Jesus following his death and resurrection which completely altered his understanding of Jesus, God’s Law and the true road to salvation. He became convinced that the end of the World was nigh and people needed to be saved before it was too late. His total belief in the resurrection of the Christ had the clearest implications for the ethical well-being of the community.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke have been dated to between 80 and 85 AD. The Gospel of Matthew concentrates on Jesus’s Jewishness but at the same time demonstrates his opposition to the Jewish leaders of his day.  Yet for all that, Jesus was a Jewish Messiah, sent by a Jewish God to a Jewish people to gather Jewish disciples, in fulfilment of Jewish Scriptures. He was merely summing up the Jewish Law into two Commandments: to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbour as oneself (22:35-40).Thus he superseded the Scribes and Pharisees and all their works.

Luke was a Gentile physician, known to have been a travelling companion of the apostle Paul, but there is the usual academic debate about whether he wrote the Gospel or not. Nevertheless, Jesus is portrayed as a Jewish prophet, who as the Son of God brought the whole world to salvation, not just Jewish people but Gentiles as well. He was therefore the Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World. He was born like a prophet, preached like a prophet, and finally died like a prophet. He was even obliged to go to Jerusalem to be killed, for that is where all the prophets die (13:33).

The Gospel of John, as we have it, was written between 90 and 95 AD and has been traditionally ascribed to John, the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’s closest friends. But this ascription cannot be found anywhere until the latter part of the 2^nd Century. In earlier sources John is described as a countryman from Galilee, who would have spoken, like Jesus, Aramaic, not the literary Greek in which the Gospel is written. Moreover in Acts 4:13 John is described as illiterate. The Gospel is, in fact, likely to have been translated from oral or written Aramaic sources towards the end of the 1^st Century, so that whether John was illiterate or not is of no special significance.

John’s Gospel provides a completely different view of Jesus. He is no longer the compassionate and charismatic healer and worker of miracles, proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God, a prophet without honour among his own people. Nor even the Jewish Messiah, sent by the Jewish God to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures to physically liberate the Jews from their enemies. He is now the Logos, the Word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. Jesus had passed from the prophetical to the mystical to the Divine….

For on the third day he rose from the dead as He Himself had foretold.

So, trully this man was the Son of God….