Opinion

Jim Gibney: Soloheadbeg holds a significant place in Ireland's struggle for independence

Jim Gibney
Jim Gibney Jim Gibney

Soloheadbeg is a little village situated northwest of Clonmel, Tipperary’s main town, in the province of Munster.

Many might not have heard of it but it is historically very significant in terms of Ireland’s long struggle for independence.

It was there 100 years ago on January 21, 1919, that the first armed action by the IRA in the war of independence took place.

The IRA operation, which led to the deaths of two RIC men and the capture of arms, involved some of the IRA’s leading figures from that period, including Dan Breen, Sean Treacy, Sean Hogan and Seamus Robinson.

The operation coincided with the formal setting up of the An Cead Dáil, the First Dáil, in the Mansion House In Dublin.

The Dáil and Soloheadbeg can be traced back to the 1916 Rising and the national revival of the independence movement and the flourishing of popular movements: labour, feminist and cultural.

The actions of the IRA at Soloheadbeg were in keeping with the centuries-old armed insurrectionary activity against British occupation by Irish people – actions which took many forms, agrarian and urban, and involved many different types of organisations.

Such activity was a response to the injustice administered by the British government’s political and armed representatives in Ireland.

An Cead Dáil was a separatist parliament based on Irish suffrage as expressed in the general election of 1918, when Sinn Féin won 73 out of the 105 seats contested.

While the actions of the IRA were in keeping with a long insurrectionary history, the Mansion House meeting was highly significant and unique in that it established the first ever independent, sovereign and separatist parliament for the Irish people.

Its mandate overwhelmingly rejected the British parliament and abstention from Westminster began.

Several events next month will mark Soloheadbeg and the setting up of a separatist Irish parliament.

They will take place in the Mansion House, the first organised by Sinn Féin, the second by the Irish government – a joint meeting of the Oireachtas – and Sinn Féin and a local organisation will mark the Soloheadbeg operation in the village.

With the historic and fateful abandonment of the nationalist community in the north by parties in the southern state (in its various constitutional incarnations) there has inevitably come the revisionist expropriation of the term ‘Ireland’ to make it synonymous with the twenty-six counties.

As the prospects of reunification increase, there has actually been an even more pronounced usage of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’, encouraged by the establishment in the south.

I, and many within the nationalist community, find this offensive – as if we are less than Irish and do not live in Ireland and did not suffer because we clung to our Irishness.

The other revisionist distortion is that there was a good IRA (before partition), and a bad IRA (who struggled on after partition).

Thus the IRA at Soloheadbeg are freedom fighters whereas the IRA who emerged from and the pogroms of 1969 and the Battle of St Matthew's in 1970 are terrorists.

This distortion of history is not confined to a view of the IRA past and present, it also distorts the political debate today.

For example, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, will praise those of An Cead Dáil who were elected on a manifesto of abstaining from Westminster while condemning Sinn Féin - elected and honouring the same pledge.

Historians generally do a service to society through revisiting the past and bringing a fresh eye to past events which can help better understand events of today.

But there is a world of difference between letting history serve society on the basis of factual accuracy and using history to serve a narrow political view.

The latter approach was taken by successive Irish governments, the media and some historians.

They may have deluded themselves into thinking that this approach was securing their privilege and power but there was a historical time-bomb ticking and it exploded, literally, onto the streets of the north in 1969 and we are still dealing with the consequences today.

Is it too much to expect, given all that the people of this nation have been through over the last century, that the historical narrative would be corrected to reflect the facts and not the politics of our times?