Our First Victory! Beware of the Risen People – Seamus Healy TD

Our First Victory! Beware of the Risen People – Seamus Healy TD

Statement by Seamus Healy TD “OUR FIRST VICTORY! BEWARE OF THE RISEN PEOPLE

Whatever way Charlie Flanagan and the government or the media wish to present today’s capitulation on the RIC commemoration, it is a definite victory for people power. Sincere thanks to all of you who got behind the campaign.
I watched yesterday evening’s Six One interview with Minister Charlie Flanagan with a mixture of disgust and awe: disgusted by his cowardice in merely deferring the RIC Commemoration, I was equally in awe of his outstanding and continued arrogance in the face of a groundswell of public and political opposition to it.

While another may have admitted the poor judgement exercised in the decision to commemorate the RIC, the Minister said he is determined to go ahead with it this year.
With a look of condescension, disdain and regret, he pleaded with us, mere plebs, to “broaden our sympathies” and be “mature”.

Minister Flanagan, let us be clear: We are not immature; we are not lacking in empathy and neither are we fools.
Flanagan was given free rein to yet again distort reality and present an alternative truth by painting people who have opposed the RIC Commemoration as either unreasonable, emotional types or hard-liners incapable of empathy. He credits us with no intelligence, no clarity of thought and no emotion whatsoever. A very dangerous underestimation indeed.

“Broadening our sympathies” to include paid members of an armed, para-military militia created by the British in Ireland to supress the democratic outcome of the 1918 general election in this country and who murdered and tortured many Irish freedom-fighters and civilians while doing so, would amount to treason.
But Flanagan is not the real issue here.

The real issue of concern is the hundreds of others like him in positions of power in this country who rather than acting as custodians of the past are manipulating it to re-tell the story as they would like it told.
What other parts of our national story will they try to erase, revise, edit or sanitise during this all-important “Decade of Centenaries”?

We must unite to ensure that this proposed Commemoration never takes place and plan for a mass people’s commemoration of the War of Independence in 2020.
Bígí linn!
-Seamus Healy T.D.
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