One year ago, on Mayday 2004, the summit of the EU heads of state took place in Farmleigh House in the Pheonix Park. The entire park was filled with surveillance cameras, ringed with fences, draped with barbed wire, buzzed by helicopters, rigged with motion detectors and surrounded with riot police. In the end water cannons were deployed to keep a protestors out of the park

History is normally written by the winners and it is common to find each new generation of radicals having to rediscover the stories of those who went before them. Thus, it is not surprising that many of those who protested last year probably were unaware of the history of battles between radical movements and the state that the park played host to in the past.

While the park hosts many of the symbols of power in Ireland - past and present - from the monument to the arch-reactionary Wellington, to the US-ambassador's residence and the Garda Headquarters, it has also seen its fair share of opposition. The invincibles assasinated the British Secretary there in 1882, it was the site of many early 20th century trade union ralies and the magazine fort in the park was captured at the start of the 1916 rising and was raided again by the IRA in 1939. The phoenix park is, in many ways, a symbolic battleground for the soul of Ireland. In recent years radical movements in Ireland have re-energised Mayday in Dublin. This year, even without the pomp and grandeur of the EU heads of state, a series of radical events are planned to span the weekend. A festival of radical opposition that is once again bubbling to the surface. And once again the Phoenix Park is on the menu.

Mayday Radical Events: Anarchist 1st of May picnic in Phoenix Park | DCTU May Day Demonstration - Solidarity with Migrant Workers including a Get up stand up block to help organise the unorganised | Reclaim the Streets

(An introduction to this discussion can be found at this Indymedia article: What Is The Dispute About Kilmichael And Dunmanway Really About? The accusation that the IRA had a sectarian policy during the War of Independence will be addressed in a talk from historian Brian Murphy in Cork on April 15 at 8pm in the Imperial Hotel)
UPDATE: Audio (mp3) now available from: Radio Indymedia

Jim O'Sullivan - Killed after British Surrender

Michael McCarthy - also Killed after British Surrender

This is unfortunate, not least since Hart insists on a strong relationship between Kilmichael and Dunmanway: “one is as important as the other to an understanding of the Cork IRA” (1998:292). The killings in Dunmanway were “the culmination of a long process of social definition that produced both the heroes of Kilmichael and the victims of the April massacre”. (ibid)

(These and other references to Kilmichael and to Tom Barry that pepper Hart's account undermine his curious assertion that Kilmichael occupies only 6% of his book and his claim that Tom Barry appears as a “minor character”.)

The omission of a reference to Dunmanway is also surprising given that the interviewer wrote in The Village (Nov 6 2004) that the Dunmanway question is “much more serious” than the “increasingly sterile debate about Kilmichael”. Why then is Dunmanway ignored in the interview (except where Hart interjects a reference, of which more below)? It goes to the heart of Hart's contention that the violence of the war of Independence “had an ethnic basis.”

Complete Events Listings Here

"I am not a Nazi. I am not even pro-German. I am an Irishman fighting for the independence of Ireland" - Sean Russell whose memorial statue in Fairview Park was recently beheaded by an unknown and previously unheard of group of 'anti-fascists'.

Earlier this month a group of (supposed - Ed) anti-fascists beheaded a statue of the republican leader Sean Russell because of his connections with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Russell's request for German aid to help the I.R.A has long been controversial but the historical facts, and the extent of Russell's alleged collaboration with the Nazis often escapes the sternest critics of wartime republicans. This article hopes to examine the extent of Sean Russell and Frank Ryan's involvement with Nazi Germany and asks "Was the destruction of the statue justified?" (The Original Indymedia article on this subject is here)

The idea that "my enemy's enemy is my friend" is as old as war itself. The United Irishmen and later the Fenians held that "England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity" as the British military became increasingly involved in colonial wars and disputes. In the First World War Irish republicans sought German military aid. The small amount of aid rendered does not mean that the I.R.B. supported German imperialism or a German monarchy. Pearse stated at his courtsmartial "Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force, we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany except what I state: My aim was to win Irish Freedom." It was in this tradition that republicans saw themselves acting, when they sought foreign military aid in later years.

After simmering along on Indymedia for a number of weeks, a dispute over the actions of legendary guerrilla commander Tom Barry and the IRA in Cork during the 1919-22 period boiled over into print in The Village, the BBC, The Irish Examiner and The Sunday Times. The controversy relates to research by historians, Meda Ryan and Brian Murphy, criticising claims first put forward by former Queens history lecturer, now Memorial University Newfoundland academic, Peter Hart.

The dispute centres mainly on two areas:

1. Peter Hart’s attempt to overturn the long held and widely accepted view that British Auxiliaries fired on and killed three IRA soldiers after the Auxiliaries had called a surrender during the Kilmichael ambush in November 1920.

2. Peter Hart’s suggestion that the post-Truce killing of Protestant males in the area surrounding Dunmanway in April 1922 was part of a sectarian war being pursued by republican forces. Point 1 is related as it formed Hart’s launching pad into his thesis that the Anglo-Irish war was in reality a squalid battle for ethnic supremacy, and that the two states in Ireland are an expression of a mutually exclusive ethnic sectarianism (except that Hart is accused of under-reporting unionist sectarianism and British responsibility for using sectarianism as a method of government in Ireland).

In other words it is suggested that Hart sees Irish politics in the context of balkanisation, rather than in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

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