BY FRA HUGHES
For 800 years the Irish have fought a genocidal British occupation.
Eight centuries of ethnic cleansing, land clearances, massacres, starvation, colonisation and a brutal military oppression.
Successive generations of Irish men and women, boys and girls have fought clandestinely and openly to liberate Ireland from foreign imperialist control.
Ireland was Britain’s first conquest.
The British Empire went on to occupy and at times colonise approximately three quarters of the world’s land mass and citizenry.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, North America, South Africa, Egypt, India, China to name just a few.
The only difference between the British occupation of Ireland and the Zionist occupation of Palestine is one of time and scale.
Ireland endured a British imposed Famine.
In 1847, the ‘potato blight’ destroyed a large percentage of the harvest leading to a shortage of a basic food staple and a subsequent increase in prices.
Ireland, having been invaded centuries before, was now a land of tenants ruled by absentee landlords. Sections of the British aristocracy owned large swathes of Irish land stolen through military occupation.
The Irish were dispossessed of their homes and farms and forced to become almost indentured slaves, tilling the land and raising cattle only for the profits of their labour to be extracted for the largess of a foreign occupier who enacted laws to oppress the indigenous population while protecting the invader.
One law for the occupied a separate law for the occupier.
Two million died or emigrated. This is why there are Irish communities all over the globe.
54 million North Americans claim to be of Irish descent.
The Irish people were deliberately starved.
Hunger and famine were used as a weapon of war to end ‘The Irish Question’ at the heart of British politics.
Those who resisted occupation were murdered, imprisoned or deported as Felons to Australia, the Americas and the Caribbean.
Massacres, land theft, colonisation, famine, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing.
These were the weapons of the oppressor. This is the fate of all people who live under occupation.
This is Ireland’s history. A legacy of suffering before partial liberation.
People in Ireland support the people of Palestine. That is a fact.
There is a moral imperative on all people who are suffering or have suffered under foreign occupation or colonisation to support each other.
Ireland gained partial independence in 1922 when Britain partially withdrew from 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties.
This resulted in the Irish civil war where those opposed to partition were then attacked with British guns and British artillery being operated by their former comrades.
Fratricide, imprisonment, torture and summary executions once used as tactics of war by the oppressor were adopted by pro-partition Irishmen onto the inheritors of the ideals of a fully independent sovereign Irish Republic.
In 1969, a new generation of oppressed Irish people in the British-created state of Northern Ireland fought to reunify the country.
After 30 years of struggle, a peace deal was agreed between the protagonists, the Irish Republican Movement, the British Government, the Irish Government and the counter-revolutionary death squads armed and directed by British intelligence alongside their locally recruited mercenary forces.
Throughout all those years of armed political resistance the Irish Republican Movement supported their comrades in Palestine.
From the Fayedeen through the PLO to the PA.
Now in Northern Ireland history has been made by the selection for the first time in the country’s history of an Irish Republican as First Minister.
A party that I have supported all my life is now in government.
Irish reunification is only now a matter of time.
Sadly, the Irish Republican Movement in the form of Sinn Fein is no longer a radical Republican party.
It is a shallow shadow of its former glory.
Now a Nationalist constitutional party, it has embraced the establishment and the trappings of power and, although still endorsed by many, it has abandoned its revolutionary roots and embraced neo liberalism.
There is a growing chorus in Ireland demanding that Irish politicians do not take part in the traditional St Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House on March 17 2024.
While the ‘Shame Fein’ party members and elected representatives north and south attend and even organise control of some of these rallies calling for a ceasefire they have publicly asserted their intention to go to Washington.
While ‘Shame Fein’ and other corporates-endorsed Irish politicians drown their shamrock alongside Genocide Joe, while posing for selfies, Palestinians will be drowning in their own blood or suffocating slowly to death under the rubble, as the death toll rises under the bombardment of American imperialist bombs. Remember the treachery of Sinn Fein.
It is not the bombs of our enemies that hurt us the most but the duplicity of our friends and the treachery of their deeds.
