No doubt Senators Brian Hayes and Paschal Mooney meant well when they asked Northern Secretary Peter Hain for pardons for the executed Irish of the Great War. But such pardons change nothing - moreover, Irish-alone pardons would merely contribute to that tiresome sense of historical victimhood which now is surely due for retirement to the Sunset Home for Outmoded Attitudes.
Irish soldiers may well have been executed in disproportionately large numbers. I don't know. I do know that the allies and their enemies were fighting total war in one of the most utterly barbaric episodes in human history. To retroactively administer political absolution on 26 Irish soldiers amid the millions of dead would be simply grotesque.
We have recently gained a far clearer picture of the catastrophe of the period, thanks to the work of Irish amateur historians. One of these is James W. Taylor, who three years ago produced an outstanding history of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, and has followed it up with the equally splendid history of the 2nd battalion of the same regiment.
An index reference in the latest volume (Four Courts Press) takes us to one of the most outrageous courts martial of the entire war, that of 21-year-old Pte Patrick Downey of the Leinster Regiment. He had failed to follow an order to fall in on parade in Salonika, and then refused to put on his cap when his officer told him to. Poor Downey was court-martialled, and the presiding officer, his own CO, decided that this wartime volunteer-soldier should be shot, because "morale in the unit was poor". The officer in question was Capt Robert Otway Mansergh, of Rock Lodge, Ballyhooley, Co Cork, kinsman of Brian Hayes's and Paschal Mooney's colleague in the Seanad, Senator Martin Mansergh. Maybe they should have a word with him.
What was done to Patrick Downey was by any standards murder. But it was a time of murder. Last weekend, the Sinn Féin/IRA dripping blood-fest moved to Kilmichael to celebrate the massacre of 17 Auxiliary police officers in 1920. Reasonable people who have read Peter Harte's account of the ambush cannot doubt that many, if not most, of the Auxiliaries killed at Macroom were shot after they surrendered. And no one can be in any doubt whatever about the fate of Cadet Guthrie, who escaped the ambush and had nearly reached sanctuary in Macroom before he was picked up by the IRA, interrogated for two long days, then shot and secretly buried in Annahala bog. And nor can anyone be in any doubt about Cadet H. Forde, who survived massive head injuries and spent the rest of his life as an drooling, epileptic quadriplegic.
Nor indeed can there be any doubt about the earlier fate of two police officers of the Macroom detachment, both ex-soldiers - Thomas Walsh of Dublin and Lionel Mitchell from Somerset - who had been taken off the Macroom train by the IRA, interrogated (whatever horror that means), murdered and secretly buried. Their bodies have never been recovered.
Now is anyone going to propose retrospective benedictions on these 19 dead (plus one vegetative victim) murdered by the IRA 85 years ago last week? Is anyone going to insist that the Irish Government say they were unjustly killed (or unjustly turned into a gibbering cabbage with fits, but one, dear God, I hope, with no sense of self)? And is anyone going to say anything about the 77 anti-treaty IRA men executed by the Free State government in the course of the Civil War? The Government can hardly be expected to pardon them, because the dead were, so to speak, its own men.
No sense can be made of any of this; for sense is impossible when people propose irreconcilable projects as being complementary ones. You cannot "pardon" some executed war dead and not others. Nor can you re-order history to suit your contemporary requirements. Moreover, if retroactive rearrangements of history were possible, we who wear the poppy would reach back in time and undo the horrors of the Somme, Ypres and Gallipoli. We loathe the lot. But republicans, both the kneecapping variety and Martin Mansergh's lot, are proud of the Easter Rising.
They don't commemorate it. They celebrate it. Not for them the peaceable rearrangement of history which would mean no Rising. Hell, they love the bloody thing.
No doubt the Shinners were quietly celebrating the massacre at Kilmichael (and poor ranting, dribbling, paralysed Cadet Forde) last Sunday, and no doubt they soon will be having annual celebrations at Narrow Water. But as they have drawn a prudent veil over the butchery of Protestants not far from Kilmichael 18 months later, another veil is being woven to conceal the 14 Protestants fried alive in a napalm attack at La Mon in 1978, and the 14 dead at Enniskillen, and the nine dead at Frizzell's fish shop and the. . .no, no, please, not again, not another list of IRA atrocities.
But somehow or other, such lists seem necessary, because if people like me don't supply them, who will? For I am with the good senators in one regard: the proposed capitulation to Sinn Féin-IRA by the British government on the issue of on-the-runs is utterly shameful. Moreover, it is actually part of a wider republican programme to rewrite history, and thereby exclude the IRA's vast litany of war crimes. That is why the senators are wrong to seek a pardon for our boys executed by firing squad. Let history stay where it fell, in all its hideous sordidness.