BRITISH STILL TORTURE OLD FENIANS OCCUPIED IRELAND

Thomas J. Clarke ‘The Grand Old Fenian’

‘I and my fellow signatories believe we have struck the first successful blow for Irish freedom. The next blow, which we have no doubt Ireland will strike, will win through. In this belief, we die happy.’ Thomas Clarke, ‘Message to the Irish People’

Early Life

Thomas J. Clarke, the first signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, was born on the Isle of Wight to Irish parents on 11th March 1857. His father was a sergeant in the British Army and the family moved to Dungannon, County Tyrone when Clarke was about seven. For the rest of his life, Clarke would consider himself a Dungannon man.

Clarke was a deeply committed and seasoned revolutionary. A veteran member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB], Clarke joined ‘the Fenians’ or ‘the organisation’ when he was just eighteen. Clarke soon volunteered for active service and took part in the Fenians’ ‘dynamite campaign’. This campaign had been organised by O’Donavan Rossa to take the war for Irish freedom to England, the ‘belly of the beast’, by blowing up public buildings and infrastructure in England. In 1883 Clarke was ordered to blow up the famous London Bridge. However he was arrested before he could carry out the operation and put on trial under the alias ‘Henry Wilson’. Clarke was sentenced to penal servitude for life for his republican activities and went on to spend over fifteen years in British prisons.

Released under the general amnesty for Fenian prisoners in 1898, Clarke left prison determined to continue the fight for national liberation. He moved to Brooklyn in the USA where he worked under the great Fenian leader John Devoy as a member of the IRB’s sister organisation Clann na Gael. While in America, Clarke married Kathleen Daly, a niece of John Daly, a well-known Fenian who had sworn Clarke into the IRB and had also been imprisoned with him.

Re-organising the IRB

Clarke firmly believed in the old Fenian saying that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. In 1907 he sensed that a European war was inevitable and believed that republicans should use that opportunity to strike another blow for Irish freedom. He returned to Ireland and settled in Dublin, where he opened a tobacconist shop at 75A Parnell Street.

The tobacconist shop soon became a hotbed of republican activity as Clarke immersed himself in the underground work of the IRB, which by this time was lead by an old guard which lacked the required pro-activity. Clarke immediately came into conflict with this group and made it clear that he had no time for ‘armchair revolutionaries’.

Working with a younger generation of IRB activists, such as Seán Mac Diarmada and Bulmer Hobson, Clarke began a total reorganisation of the IRB. These younger men, along with Denis McCullough, had become disillusioned by the inactivity of the IRB and decided to do something about it. They established the ‘Dungannon Clubs’ as a way of attracting a new generation to the struggle for an Irish Republic. The clubs openly functioned as republican debating societies but all the while the organisers were recruiting the promising members into the IRB. To this younger generation Clarke was the embodiment of what a Fenian should be. His return to Ireland and his setting about the re-organisation was a signal to them of a change in the fortunes for the IRB.

Mac Diarmada and Hobson soon forged a close relationship with Clarke, becoming his protégés. Together the three men drew up a plan for increasing the influence of the Fenians by directing IRB members into other nationalist organisations such as the GAA and the Gaelic League.

Clarke was the engine driving the re-organisation of republican forces at this time. He was a deeply committed revolutionary, determined to ensure that a generation would not pass without striking another blow for Irish freedom.

The Irish Volunteers

In 1913, the re-organised IRB were in a position to take advantage of the rising national sentiment. In November the IRB organised a public meeting in the Rotunda, Dublin to form an open military organisation, the Irish Volunteers. Clarke took no position in the new organisation, but other IRB members such a Mac Diarmada, Hobson and Éamonn Ceannt were elected to key positions. This ensured the central influence of the IRB in the new overground organisation.

By 1914 the IRB’s supreme council was largely controlled by Clarke and the ‘young turks’ of Hobson, Mac Diarmada, Patrick McCartan, John Mac Bride and Denis McCullough. The re-organisation of the IRB which had begun in 1907 was now complete and the organisation now began to pursue all options for launching a revolution in Ireland.

Hobson’s support for a proposal to accept twenty-five members of the Irish Parliamentary Party on to the provisional committee of the Volunteers, however, led to a major falling out with Clarke who viewed the move as extremely dangerous. From that moment on Hobson became persona non grata in leading IRB circles, but remained a member of the organisation.

The Military Council and preparations for the Rising

Clarke and Mac Diarmada were by now inseparable. As Treasurer and Secretary of the IRB, the two men ran the organisation. Together they began drawing up a plan for a military rising in Ireland. Under their leadership, leading members of the Volunteers had been recruited into the IRB including Joseph Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse, and the IRB now dominated the Volunteer executive.

In 1915 Clarke and Mac Diarmada established a secret military council to organise preparations for a Rising and co-opted Plunkett, MacDonagh, Pearse, and later James Connolly onto the Council.

Tom Clarke’s many years of republican activism had led to this point. He more then any other of the IRB leaders can be described as the driving force behind the Easter Rising. After each setback, whether it was failure of the dynamite campaign or imprisonment, Tom Clarke had dusted himself off and started again. Now, thanks to his never failing efforts a Rising was planned that would take advantage of the European war and strike a blow against the British Empire.

When the veteran Fenian leader O’Donovan Rossa died, Clarke became chief organiser of his funeral. Clarke aimed to use the funeral to mobilise the Volunteers and heighten their expectation for imminent action. Under Clarke’s direction O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral became a rallying point for a rejuvenated revolutionary republicanism. Clarke was proposed as the main speaker but he refused. He said,‘No, the young men must come forward’, and he asked Pearse to give them main oration. Clarke had chosen wisely. In a now famous speech, Pearse set the tone for what was to come.

The Easter Rising

Clarke and Mac Diarmada took an important decision and outlined their plans for a Rising to James Connolly, who had been planning something similar. Connolly agreed whole heartedly with the planned Rising and was co-opted onto the military council. The Irish Citizen Army would now join the Volunteers and the IRB in battle for the freedom of Ireland. The date of the rising was set for Easter Sunday 1916. Orders were issued to all Volunteer and ICA companies for general maneuverers on that day. This was the signal that the insurrection was to begin.

When the news of Eoin MacNeill’s infamous countermanding order to Volunteers reached the military council on Easter Sunday morning, Clarke immediately proposed that the rising should go ahead as planned. He argued that once the fighting began in Dublin, Volunteers around the county would inevitably join in.

However the other leaders disagreed and voted instead to postpone the Rising until 12pm on Easter Monday. The next twenty four hours would be spent rallying their troops and salvaging what plans they could.

When the Rising began, Clarke was stationed in Republican headquarters at the GPO in Dublin. Clarke was chosen by the Provisional Government to be the first signatory of the Proclamation of the Republic. This was testament to the respect held for Clarke in republican circles. He was viewed as an inspirational leader, a man of action and, importantly, as a symbol of the unbreakable spirit of the republican struggle. Although Clarke held no formal military rank, those stationed in the GPO garrison looked to him for direction and he played a key role in directing the fight throughout Easter week.

Clarke was opposed to the eventual surrender of the republican forces, supporting instead a proposal by Commandant Sean McLoughlin to fight their way to safety down Moore Street. However the Military Council agreed to a proposal from Pearse to cease hostilities in order to prevent further loss of civilian life. The Rising was over, but the struggle for national liberation had been reborn.

Arrest and execution

Arrested and court martialled along with the other republican leaders, Tom Clarke was the first of the leaders to be executed by British firing squad. It is said that the largest intelligence file of all was the file on Tom Clarke, a fitting testament to a life lived in the service of Ireland. Clarke’s life work had come to fruition. He had successfully re-organised the IRB to a position where it was ready to strike a blow for Irish freedom and had seen an independent Irish Republic proclaimed in arms. Although the Rising had not been a military success, Clarke gave his life happy in the knowledge that the next generation would take up the fight for freedom and that this time it would be continued until victory.

Thomas J. Clarke, the veteran, unrepentant Fenian, and one of the main architects of the 1916 Rising was executed on May 2, in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.

Fuair sé bas ar son na h-Éireann.

This article was borrowed from Eirigi 

ORIGIN OF SAINT PATRICK'S DAY AMERICAN FENIANS

Cead Mile Failte, A Hundred Thousand Welcomes

Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter Hunger: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools  By Bill Bigelow  March 15, 2012 "Huffington Post' -- "Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing. Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present. Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of "Skibbereen," which includes the verse: ... Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak December day, The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive Us all away They set my roof on fire, with their cursed English spleen And that's another reason why I left oldSkibbereen. By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a "horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The Enduring Vision: A History of the American Peopleblames the "ravages of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror. These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history -- they exemplify much of what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks. First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity. Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato -- during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes inThe Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve? Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad. The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time. More than a century and a half after the "Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System: "Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight." Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on -- reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th-century Ireland to 21st-century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland -- that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit. But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion -- that's nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto. As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, "Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Ore. -- included at the Zinn Education Project website -- students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market? These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time. So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish -- and that are starving and uprooting people today. Bill Bigelow - Co-director, Zinn Education Project; Curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools "Skibbereen" By Sinead O'Connor.   Video embedded in this article by ICH Share Follow the discussion Comments (18) Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity Frank· 12 hours ago Contrast the treatment (or lack of it) with copious materials on the holocaust. Report Reply 1 reply · active 10 hours ago Ironhead· 11 hours ago "Let them eat their children. It will kill two birds with one stone..." Queen Victoria Report Reply 1 reply · active 8 hours ago hypatia· 11 hours ago then they had to go through the nightmare of ellis island and being checked for admission to the US, some being denied entry. There was no food stamps for the lucky Irish that were admitted into the US. No free housing and no free healthcare. Of any immigrants to the US, it was the people at this time that came here that I admire the most for their endurance and patience with the bigotry that met them by the WASP. They really had to fend for themselves, unlike the over-weight illegal immigrants of today that stand in grocery line ahead of you and whip out their welfare card to pay for their cart of groceries and then open their wallet brimming with 100 dollar bills to pay for the stereo and other non-food items (its like they want you to see all their cash, because they make a big effort to flash it around). There's been quite a few murders of whites of this magnitude and larger in history. Mostly it gets shoved under the carpet, but it's good to remember that victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing come in all colors. There was also the Russian one that Stalin did killing something like 20 million Christian russians. Humanity never learns. Pearson: Glad he brought Pearson up. Pearson is in the business of propaganda too. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 gave them the opportunity to make some big bucks: This article is from the now dead American Pendulum, which was destroyed by some sly ones. Used to be good site but they still have some of the old articles and this one is perfect about Pearson: http://www.americanpendulum.com/2011/09/01/pearso... here is Pearson's Learning Guide in PDF format: http://www.onlinelearningexchange.com/content/ass... Report Reply 4 replies · active 7 hours ago Chris & Mary Fogarty· 10 hours ago Grarifying to see this piece of truth-telling. For more see mywww.irishholocaust.org. Be sure to click on its map to learn which Brit reg't starved your relatives. Report Reply refirex· 10 hours ago Similar to the deliberate destruction of the buffalo in order to wipe out the plains Indians. Report Reply jan36· 9 hours ago Whats in these words ? famine / genocide maybe its blame or fault . I contest that prince-ably ittle has changed FOR THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY since 1840's. PRIVATE Corporate entities stalk and pillage the planet at will , programmed to maximize profits .Lying is '' the Art of spinning '' The avaricious is pure and in its core / heart a simplicity ,understood by all who breath or who wish to breath . I believe man is unique in the application of CAPITALISM . this capitalism is fueled by greed , Its principle enemy is community , The Irish peasants of 160 years ago we're superfluousness for a variety of reasons just like the present daily death toll of darker skins , racism is within the armory of capitalism, the Irish peasant we'er depicted in caricature as primates. i D'ONT HAVE THE ANSWER TO Hep INOCULATE humanity but i am understanding my enemy . Happy St Patrick's Day xxxx Report Reply Ron· 8 hours ago The hatred the British must have had for the very poor Irish they ground under their feet is something of a puzzlement. Food shipped from America by the Quakers was not allowed into Irish ports by the British. It had to be transferred to British bottoms before entry. God bless the Irish. I'm not one of them except in my heart. Report Reply VoxFox· 8 hours ago The English Ruling Class (& their American cousins) are a death-oriented group that despises everyone else on the planet - they have done so for hundreds of years, hence the British & then US Empires. These groups currently hide behind the mask of giant corporations. They need to be rooted out & thrown on the trash-heap of history. Report Reply Jake· 7 hours ago A good argument against textbooks. Many textbooks are written to please the big textbook purchasers (states that buy the same textbooks for all the schools in a state, like Texas). If they don't want something in it, it usually is taken out and vise versa. Then those same annotated texts are sold everywhere else. The good teacher doesn't rely on the textbook. He/she supplements with real world knowledge and truth as the author has done. That's getting tougher to do today with lock-step curriculum and standardized tests keyed, often, to the text. Report Reply Itsafluffy· 7 hours ago Super good to see this, being 5th generation Irish (and don't think the Scots-Irish, whether in Scotland or northern Ireland had it any differently...you do know that the majority of indentured servants in early America were Scots-Irish) and also Scots-Irish. Now, would ICH, a leftist site, mind telling the truth about how Stalin starved several million Ukrainians to force them into collectivisation in the 1930s? BTW, Stalin did what the Brits did: sell every last ounce of food confiscated from the starving Ukrainians abroad? It's okay, leftists, to tell the truth. Report Reply 1 reply · active 6 hours ago 12Next » Post a new comment Embed video Check Spelling Comment as a Guest, or login: Login to IntenseDebate Login to WordPress.com Name Email Displayed next to your comments. Not displayed publicly. 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