Dear Daily Telegraph ...

http://ciarantierney.com/
http://www.jimfitzpatrick.com/


Dear Daily Telegraph,

I wish to apologise. Over the past few days, I’ve been guilty of some sinful thoughts. I have actually taken some pride in honouring the people who lost their lives in the fight for my country’s freedom.

I know, I know … I should be ashamed of myself. They were “terrorists”, the equivalent of Islamic State today if I was to believe what I read in your newspaper.

Those cowardly men and women stabbed the British Empire in the back at the height of the Great War, they were traitors one and all at a time when Irish people should have known that their real “enemies” were over in Germany, Austria, and Turkey.

Dublin, of course, was a “British” city, part of the greatest empire in the history of the world. It was an empire which civilised the “savages” from Egypt to India, Kenya to Pakistan, for so many years.

It was all the rebels’ fault. England was eventually going to treat Irish people with a modicum of respect. It was just a matter of time before you’d begin to treat us as equals and grant us our independence.

I know, I know. The 1916 leaders’ parents and grandparents had seen thousands of their countrymen and women perish in the Great Famine just 70 years before, but it wasn’t Britain’s fault. There was no famine. Food was still being shipped to Britain as the Irish lay dying on the roadsides.

We have a homelessness crisis today, so we haven’t done a great job at ruling ourselves, although there was a bit more of a homelessness crisis in the 1840s, when starving people still had to pay rent to absentee landlords in Britain.

But let’s not talk about that, or the cartoons in British magazines at the time which depicted the starving Irish peasants as a sub-human species.

You didn’t give Catholics a vote for many years, hell you didn’t even allow them to own any land. But, of course, it was just a matter of time . . .

The “terrorists” in the GPO were murderers and you did wonders for the law and order problem by bringing in the Black ‘n’ Tans in response to their terrible uprising. Do English people even know the atrocities that raggle-taggle band of brothers carried out across my land?

I guess the Black ‘n’ Tans don’t feature too prominently on your schools’ curriculum these days. Might make for uncomfortable reading.

By executing the 1916 leaders, the British Empire was only sending out a message. It was wrong, so wrong, to take over the centre of Dublin when Britain was at war and Home Rule was on the way. Eventually. Maybe not for ten years or 20 years or 50 years, but it was on the way. Eventually.

Ireland was part of a parliamentary democracy and we all know that the MPs who sat in Westminster had the best interests of the Irish at heart.

Your columnists believe that the 1916 rebels were their era’s equivalent of Islamic State, and who am I to disagree?

Can’t imagine why my grandfather despised the British Empire after armed soldiers shot up his house in rural East Galway. You can still see the bullet holes today.

Can't imagine why his neighbour hated anything to do with Britain, after being hunted down for five years while he managed to survive "on the run" in haysheds across the West of Ireland.

Can’t imagine why the people of Ardrahan were anti-British after the Black ‘n’ Tans shot an unarmed woman dead at the door of her house as she held a baby in her arms.     

The executed 1916 rebels, by Jim Fitzpatrick

Can’t imagine why the starving Irish who took the ‘Coffin Ships’ to America – and were damn lucky to survive the voyage – might have decided to send funds back to support the “rebels”.

It has taken Ireland a hundred years to come to its senses, you claim, notwithstanding the fact that millions of people of Irish descent are scattered throughout North America because of racist British policies towards my people in the 19^th century.

You condemn “our” terrorists for the “collateral damage” caused by the rebels in 1916, yet I never see you question how many innocent lives were lost when Tony Blair decided to join George W. Bush in his ill-fated Afghan and Iraqi wars as recently as a decade ago.

It’s still ok, it seems, for the former empire’s forces to bomb innocent civilians thousands of miles from home in the 21^st century, but not for Irish rebels to take over Irish cities and towns in order to proclaim a republic, where men, women, and children might have equal rights.

When your country kept playing the Irish along, promising but never delivering home rule, you played into the hands of the “terrorists”. Irish people instinctively knew they would never achieve freedom without spilling blood.

When your empire’s forces executed the 1916 leaders, you lost all moral authority over the Irish. People would not have voted Sinn Fein 'en masse' in the following General Election if they did not have genuine grievances over the way the country had been governed by colonisers for centuries.

It’s no fun being treated as a second class citizen in your own land – ask the people of Palestine, another country you meddled with for so long. They are still feeling the pain caused by British meddling in other people's affairs to this day.

When you continued to rule part of the island of Ireland, you played into the terrorists’ hands again in 1972, when your wonderful forces shot 14 innocent people in Derry on Bloody Sunday.

They were guilty, too. Guilty of demanding equal rights in a sectarian state, in a city where a single Protestant had a better chance of getting a Council house than a large Catholic family.

You could not have come up with a better recruitment policy for the IRA than slaughtering innocent people on that horrible January day on the Bogside. In one afternoon, you managed to turn a whole generation of young men in a run-down part of the city into "terrorists". Well done.

So spare us your observations about what a backward, priest-ridden society Ireland became after the Empire left these 26 counties.

But, in case you haven’t noticed, we have moved on. Irish people voted overwhelmingly for peace in 1998 and nobody wants to steamroll a million Unionists into a United Ireland. Not against their will, anyways.

We have a President we can be proud of, rather than a “Royal” family – what a quaint and simply absurd concept in the year 2016.

We have an army we can be proud of, who represented us on peace-keeping missions all over the world, from the Congo to the Lebanon.

We have music, games, and a culture we can be proud of, instead of going cap in hand to our bigger neighbours who treated us with disdain – and even racism – for so long.

We still have our ancient language, despite your best efforts to kill it off and to ridicule the peasants who spoke it for centuries.

We didn’t like being subservient to a Government which discriminated against us and we get on much better with the British now, don’t you think, that you treat us as equals.

So, instead of focusing on the shortcomings of our revolutionary “heroes” on this side of the Irish Sea, maybe it’s time to take an uncomfortable look at your own nation’s legacy down through the centuries all across the globe.

Your Empire didn’t “civilise” the Irish, or the Indians, or the Egyptians, or Palestinians, or Malaysians . . . you raped their countries’ resources for as much as you could get and it wasn’t the natives’ fault that you left chaos in your wake, when your beloved Empire began to crumble.

But I guess you don’t teach the lessons of your own troubled history to your children. It might be just a tad too painful to examine how much pain you yourselves have caused for so many years.

Peace.

http://facebook.com/ciarantierneymedia

* Thanks to legendary Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick for the superb illustration of the 1916 leaders

Why are we so selective in our grief?

Unlike many of my Facebook friends, I didn’t change my profile photo this week. I got home after a Saturday afternoon in town to find that a host of people had adopted the blue, white, and red tricolour after being prompted to do so by Facebook itself.

It’s not that I don’t care. France was the first country I visited outside the island of Ireland as a teenager in the 1980s. A summer holiday on the west coast opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a youngster who had never been outside of Ireland until he was 14. 

I like France. My brother is fluent in the language and once lived in Paris. My cousin married a wonderful Frenchwoman. I’ve had fantastic holidays scuba diving off the coast of Hyeres, partied and enjoyed rugby games in Toulouse, and enjoyed city breaks in Lyon, Paris, and Marseille.

The terrorist attacks in Paris were horrific and the reaction completely understandable. 

I have been teaching English part-time as I build up a freelance journalism and content writing business and one of my students missed class on Monday and Tuesday because his mother lived near the scene of one of the attacks. He had been sick with worry all weekend.

But seeing all these flags as I flicked through my timeline made me feel uncomfortable. 

I wondered why so many of my Irish friends were expressing public sympathy with the French victims of terror when so many horrible events happen every week without any reaction on our shores.

I didn’t see any Lebanese flags on my timeline after 43 people in Beirut were blown up by the same horrible ISIS terrorists just 24 hours before the French attacks.

I didn’t see any Russian flags when so many people were blown up over the Sinai desert the previous weekend.

I’m probably unusual for an Irish person in that I’ve been to the Sinai at least a dozen times, thanks to my love of scuba diving. I’ve become good friends with Egyptians, Bedouins, and British people thanks to all my travels, which proves that travel broadens the mind.

People I know are hurting right now because people are afraid to visit Egypt, understandably, any more. Their businesses are suffering and they could yet close down if people from Europe stop flying to the Muslim world.

Understandably, the tourism industry in Tunisia disintegrated after the shocking gun attack on tourists on a beach a few months ago. People want to relax on holidays, not to be in fear for their lives.  

But this separation of the world into "us" and "them" is part of the problem.

If people don’t travel, we don’t get to meet ordinary Muslims. We don’t break down barriers. And they lose their jobs in countries which don’t have any social welfare systems, playing into the hands of the extremists who want them to hate the decadent western world.

It’s easier to hate people when you never meet them, as I found out during a gap year in Nicaragua in 2010 when I was astounded by the amount of American expats who had an irrational hatred of Muslims.

43 people were blown up in Beirut on Thursday and nobody mentions it on Facebook. It got a five minute mention on BBC or Sky News.

A sad dog in Paris, considered more newsworthy than a dead child in Palestine 

A MSF hospital was bombed by the U.S. three weeks ago and we didn’t see interviews with the survivors on our news.

Almost 130 people were killed in Paris on Friday night. They were ordinary, innocent people enjoying a night out, at a rock concert, a restaurant, or a football match. Yes, it's horrible. But suddenly BBC and Sky News were broadcasting for 48 hours non-stop from the crime scenes and people changed their profile photos.

If Kay Burley and Sky News broadcast 48 hours non-stop from Gaza last summer maybe they might have influenced public opinion and stopped the murder of 2,100 people, including 550 children.

But that’s the problem. Sky News don’t focus on all the hardship the people of Gaza, effectively trapped in an open air prison, have had to endure over the years. 

Kay Burley brought journalism to a new low this week when she tweeted a photo of a dog looking sad in Paris. She was rightly ridiculed.

The Daily Mail used the Paris attacks for their own right-wing agenda, likening migrants fleeing the war in Syria to rats just as the same paper demonised the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

News channels spend a full week broadcasting 24/7 from Paris so we are bound to have more sympathy with the victims. They treat a bombing in Beirut as a ‘non-story’ and move on as though nothing has occurred. We don’t care because we don’t see the victims on our TV screens.

If the wide world could witness the huge injustice being suffered by the people of Palestine, perhaps their lives could change for the better and they would feel less of a grievance against those of us lucky enough to be born in Western Europe.

We didn't see their families or the survivors being interviewed constantly over a 24 hour period on Sky or BBC last year. It’s easy to label them as “terrorists” when we never see them, even though 1.8 million people – many refugees from what is now Israel – have been living in deplorable conditions for years.

ISIS are depraved fundamentalists, but they are not fools. They see that killing people in France generates ten times more publicity than a bomb in Beirut.

Meeting ordinary people in the Middle East challenged my own preconceptions built up through the Western media.

By being so selective in our grief we play into the hands of the extremists and the cynical people in the West who sell them arms.

Wasn’t it George Orwell who wrote that some lives were more important than others? Well, the media in Europe and America make that abundantly clear every day.

The ignorance about Muslims in America and now Europe is alarming. The more we divide up the world into important (Paris, New York, London) and unimportant (Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq) victims, the worse the division becomes.

ISIS are scum and that doesn't mean I disrespect the grief French people have been going through over the past week.

By all means mourn the terrible loss of life in Paris.

But let's not be so selective about our grief. The loss of any innocent life is a tragedy, whether it's in Paris, Beirut, Gaza, Sharm, or London.

We are all human. It might be easier to relate to a tragedy in Paris, simply because we’ve been there, but that should not prevent us from learning about gross injustices in other parts of the world.