Crushed By Ingsoc

Crushed By Ingsoc doesn't watch Rugby. To us, it's a pointless game with a daft scoring system and strange rules.
Football, normal style, will always be the beautiful game.

Yet it has not escaped this site that there was a Rugby match this weekend betwen Ireland and England.

We noticed because it was at Croke park.

Now, we have to say, our loyalties are somwhat split here, born here, live here, heart Irish.
I'm not going to harp on about reconciliation or any such rubbish.
I would say the wise forgive but don't forget.

But first, before I get all weepy, I'm going to look at the facts.
I have a biography of the big fella (Collins, to the English) by Tim Pat Coogan, whom I'm sure all good Republicans amongst you will recognise, is a fine and impartial historian of the Republican cause.

p161 'Meanwhile the Auxillaries and Tans made arrangements to surround Croke Park while the match was in progress, ostensibly to search the crowd for known Sinn Feiners. Later it was claimed in their defence that IRA men in the crowd fired first. But it is not denied that the security forces opened up on both the crowd and the playing field with rifles and machine guns causing bloodshed and panic. Fourteen people died and hundreds were injured, none of them Tans or Auxillaries. The stand in which each year the Sam Maguire cup is presented is named after one of the dead, Hogan, the Tipperary player who was shot on the field.'

I think those terse lines say it all really. To be sure, it's not as clear cut as the Liam Neeson film has it, but the cold facts, without emotion, as showed above are clear. This was a Hillsborough type disaster caused by trigger happy thugs, rather than a deliberate murder spree, but isn't the truth bad enough.

I love the Liam Neeson film, because mostly it is true, same as with 'The Wind that shakes the Barley', but sometimes poetic license can denigrate the real truth.
Because the real truths about British rule in Ireland are bad enough.
They don't need adding to.
And it didn't end in 1922.
Forgive, of course. Forget? Never.