Remember the ten fenian brotherhood

 

 

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Following a 1916 uprising and years of guerrilla war led by the legendary Irish nationalist Michael Collins, the British government decided in 1920 to split up Ireland, which it had ruled for centuries. An independent state was created in the island's predominantly Catholic south, with its capital in Dublin; a smaller, northern district called Ulster, with a Protestant majority, remained part of the United Kingdom. The south descended into civil war over the partition, which cost Collins his life and led to the rise of Eamon DeValera as the president of the new Irish Free State. DeValera refused to vacate Ireland's claim to the North and steered a strict neutral course in world affairs during the decades in which he would remain in power in the Republic of Ireland, as the Free State became known.

In the North, the Catholic minority, many of them with "republican" or "nationalist" sympathies," found they faced discrimination for jobs, housing, and in their treatment before the law.  On the other side, Protestant "unionists" held sway, controlled the patronage that doled out government jobs, and remained fiercely loyal to the British crown. Throughout much of the 20^th century, Northern Ireland's shipyards, linen mills, and other manufacturing hubs played an important role in the economy of the British Empire. Catholic residents, however, largely were excluded from this prosperity, and when the conflict the Irish call "the Troubles" erupted in 1969, the Catholic unemployment rate in some parts of the province topped 30 percent

 

 

 

BOBBY SANDS R.I.P.

 

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.

My heart is very sore because I know that I have broken my poor mother's heart, and my home is struck with unbearable anxiety. But I have considered all the arguments and tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity.

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution. That is why I am incarcerated, naked and tortured.

Foremost in my tortured mind is the thought that there can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically.

I believe I am but another of those wretched Irishmen born of a risen generation with a deeply rooted and unquenchable desire for freedom. I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-Block, or to gain the rightful recognition of a political prisoner, but primarily because what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed whom I am deeply proud to know as the 'risen people'.

BY BOBBY SANDS MP