The Dream Built In the Heart

A great Irish Republican patriot was buried today, Brendan Hughes. I was thinking and below are a few thoughts on what for me Republicanism is all about.

I can accept that the death and destruction over the past 100+ years has all acheived very little. The dream of the Republic - 'the dream built in the heart' (P. Pearse) is no closer - perhaps even further away than ever. However, as sad as that is, we cannot simply accept lies as truth and wrong as right!

The world is governed on the basis of greed, corruption, power. The fight for the dream of the Republic was to create another world. But alas we were defeated. Brendan accepted that - he could not be fooled by the duplicity of the power hungry. Nothing was achieved by the war for liberation. The ex-republicans in the provisional movement not only gave up but accepted the British anti-insurgency strategy ver batim. The war of liberation with so much sacrifice is now labelled as a squalid little sectarian conflict by these ex-combatants.

The armed struggle for me was just that a struggle, an attempt to create the circumstances for a generalised over throw of the current situation in ireland. If it could be achieved in ireland, like dominoes it would ripple across the world.

Hope for a future without colonialism, sectarianism, bigotry, hope for a world other than the one we are forced to endure, a world where we now sell our one and only lives to the highest bidder, in order to pay it back to the rulers through mortgages and shopping malls. This hope to live in a better world in our little island has been almost extinquised with the corruption of the provisional republican movement. Just as it was with Fianna Fail etc etc. But life goes on and the few hold this dream and the dream lives because of the few. And out of nowhere the dream catches fire in peoples imagination again - and who knows next time we might win!

Hope springs eternal.......Brendan Hughes left us a legacy - he came, he saw, he responded - with passion to injustice - he put his life on the line for a dream - he lived his life on the basis of a truth - the same truth that people throughout millenia have stood up for. The people so brilliantly illustrated in Bobby Sands' poem 'The Rhythm of Time'.

Injustice is all around us, in every walk of life, our lives are blighted by it, when this becomes acceptable then we as humans are lost. The many may accept this but the few must remain. And as Terence Mac Sweeney had it "if but a few are faithful found they must remain all the more steadfast for being but a few".

Tiocfaidh ar la!