IAUC Responds to Irish Independent Article “Proposing a Memorial…”

IAUC Board member Michael Cummings responds to “Proposing a memorial for IRA terrorists“:

February 3, 2010

Letter Editor
INDEPENDENT
Independent House
27-32 Talbot Street
Dublin 1, Ireland

Dear Editor:

Kevin Meyers commentary on a proposed memorial in Enniscorthy (“Proposing a memorial for IRA terrorists” 2/3) is an example of the very selective memorialisation he derides.

Those who erect political memorials such as that proposed in Enniscorthy do so for two reasons. First, there is the process of grieving and remembrance. Second, is the need to challenge those who re-write history. In the case of Ireland’s conflict, British historians have made this a cottage industry. Not far from your offices in 1974 the British Army and their loyalist allies committed the largest atrocity of the conflict. The no-warning Dublin-Monaghan bombs cost the lives of 33, mostly women and children shopping. With the smell of Bloody Sunday still in the air, this act of war transformed a civil rights protest to an armed conflict. Any fair reading of both the facts and the numbers since 1920 proves without question it is the British and their loyalist subjects who have the “..deviant addiction to violence”…Meyers abhors.

Those who lose their lives in struggle, armed or otherwise, could never be accused of “..going with the flow.” On the other hand, there is an Irish expression to describe those who would have people bury painful memories of British malevolence in favor of recalling those who fell in service to the British Army. Can you guess it? Anything for the quiet life.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Cummings

Member, National Board