To the Editor:

“Ulster: In the Empty House of the Stare” by Herb Greer [January] is so obviously slanted and historically biased that it would be impossible to refute every part of it without writing just as lengthy an article.

Mr. Greer writes of the 12th-century Irish nation being a “crazy quilt” of influences although having a “common Celtic language.” He uses this argument to give weight to his justification of the English invasion of Ireland. How different was Ireland at this time from the other nations of Europe—which had not reached the sophisticated state of 20th-century Europe. He tells of Adrian IV (the only English pope) giving Henry II the gift of Ireland. So much for the sectarian argument. It was the hatred of the Saxon for the Gael and the wish to conquer Irish lands for England that was the impetus for the first invasion of Ireland.

The Norman invasion in the 12th century resulted in the almost complete assimilation of the Norman into the Gaelic culture of Ireland. This was a great problem for Henry II and other English kings. The notorious act of Kilkenny (1367) was but one of a long series of legislative acts designed to forestall the English invaders from taking up Irish customs and language. Of course, if Mr. Greer were correct, there would have been no need for any such law because he states that there was no Irish culture or country.

The hatred of the English for the Irish developed a new dimension in the 16th century with the coming of the Reformation. Up to this point it was Gael against Norman. Cromwell’s Protestant crusade to rid the Irish of their Catholic faith helped to identify the Irish Catholic with the cause of Catholicism. But it was the basic desire of the Irish for freedom from English domination which was still the basis of their struggle.

The Ulster Plantation started in 1607 after the defeat of the Earls O’Neill and O’Donnell. The estates of the earls, which belonged in truth to the whole clan and not to the earls alone, were declared forfeit to the crown and were settled with English and Scottish subjects. Mr. Greer speaks of this episode as if a benevolent monarch allowed the impudent Irish to be helped judiciously by their betters.

The “undertakers,” as they were called, who were responsible for most of the Ulster Plantation, were supposed to have the natives completely removed from their lands; in practice they accepted Irish tenants because it paid them better to do so. Religion was now identified on the one side with the wish to recover territory and on the other with the desire to hold it.

With the arrival of Cromwell and the defeat of the Irish rebels a new transplantation of the Irish was begun. The Irish were to be pushed west of the Shannon and all their land usurped. But this again was not as complete as it could have been because Irish labor was needed east of the Shannon. The outcome of this was the “Protestant Ascendancy” which lasted into the last quarter of the 19th century. This was the establishment of an imported ruling class, mainly of English and Scottish origin, professing some form of Protestantism and dominating a native Roman Catholic and still Gaelic-speaking peasantry.

Mr. Greer glosses over the Penal Laws—the whole purpose of which was the continued domination of the conquered population. The Penal Laws have some resemblance to the law of apartheid in South Africa whereby the conquering minority rules over a conquered majority.

Mr. Greer also glosses over the famine and relegates it to a “folk tradition.” It is hard to believe that a documented historical fact, the famine of 1840, which it is generally accepted the English did less than nothing to correct or forestall, in which a population of ten million was reduced by half, could be treated in this manner. Perhaps a hundred years hence some budding Nazi might speak thus of the Holocaust of the Jews under the Nazis.

Mr. Greer makes light of all forms of Irish resistance during the 18th and 19th centuries because they were not made by the “right” people. The Society of United Irishmen was formed in Dublin in 1791 by a group of Anglo-Irish Protestant rebels which included Ireland’s greatest patriot, Wolfe Tone. Again the integration of the conqueror into the Irish society had caused a love of Ireland and a hatred of English misgovernment in Ireland. Mr. Greer does not realize that even a Protestant can love Ireland. So again, the wish of freedom from English domination was born and also the hope for the creation of an Irish republic.

For Mr. Greer to say there never was a spirit of nationalism or a country called Ireland is a cruel manipulation of historical fact. The history of Ireland is rife with attempts to expel England from its shores. Can Mr. Greer not see that this was the cause of the uprisings for 800 years?

In 1918, elections throughout the 32 counties of Ireland were held. Seventy-eight percent of the Irish people voted for parliamentary candidates who supported a unified and independent Irish state. The English ignored the wish of the people and the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21 followed. In 1920 England granted Home Rule to 26 counties—gerrymandering the state of Ulster into a state with a Protestant majority and leaving three counties with distinctly Catholic majorities out of the state of Ulster.

So it continues to the present. Mr. Greer again finds fault with the new nationalism of the 1960′s because it had its roots in civil rights. Again England misjudged the Irish character and grudgingly gave small relief to the Catholic minority in the north of Ireland.

Mr. Greer can speak as sarcastically as he wants of the hunger strikers who died in the early spring of 1981. But words such as “ploy” in his description of their deaths does not lessen the fact that they did die. In their own way they gave their lives for Ireland, and the wish for a unification of their country.

England has not yet learned the lesson heard so frequently when conflict in Ireland is mentioned: “Ireland divided will never be at peace.” Until it does, the north of Ireland will be the unhappy place we have read of this past year. Until it does, men like the hunger strikers will continue to grab the headlines and the sympathy of the entire world. In the future we hope Mr. Greer’s “history of Ireland” sheds its references to his hope for the “merging” of England and Ireland. Cloudy vision such as this has been the root of Ireland’s trouble for the past 800 years. . . .

Mary Jane Byrnes
Aileen Ryan
Ancient Order of Hibernians
Division 13
Bayside, New York

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To the Editor:

Herb Greer, after claiming Irish ancestry, proceeds to caricature, debase, and belittle Ireland and everything Irish and Celtic.

The text is abundantly laced with derisive quotation marks (I counted nine sets in the first column) and the writer has taken great pains to appear intellectual—using many archaic words like atavistic, avatar, phratric, revanchist, etc. throughout the article. He starts his lesson on Irish history in the centuries before Christ, but one searches in vain for any mention of the accomplishments of the Celts of this period who were Europe’s founders and gave Europe its first civilization north of the Alps. Nor is there any mention of Ireland’s contribution of teachers and scholars during Europe’s Dark Ages from the 6th to the 12th centuries.

One would think that a writer who claims Irish ancestry would take some pride in Irish monasticism which flourished during this period. Irish monks and teachers built places of learning in Iona and Lindisfarne in Scotland, then on the continent at Cologne, Erfurt, Nuernberg, Regensburg, Modra, Luxeuil, St. Gall, Bobbia, and Kiev.

Mr. Greer’s callous explanation of the great famine of 1845-48, in which one-fifth of the population died horrible deaths while the English shipped most of the livestock and produce to England, is that English actions were excusable because they were in keeping with the customs of the times!

The main reason for Nationalist discontent in Ireland is Britain’s denial of majority rule. The last time all Ireland, North and South, voted in a general election (December 1918) there was a three-to-one victory for the candidates pledged to a free, sovereign, and independent Ireland. But Britain, which had inveigled America into “the war for the freedom of small nations,” denied majority rule for Ireland and set up the artificial statelet of “Northern Ireland” which has no historic or natural geographic boundaries but only artificial boundaries drawn solely to insure perpetual domination by the empire loyalists. This resulted in privilege for the loyalists and second-class citizenship for all others. Mr. Greer conveniently omits mention of this stolen election in his history lesson.

Referring to the massacre of thirteen civilians at a civil-rights rally in Derry on January 30, 1972, he not only repeats Lord Widgery’s whitewash but goes him one better. According to Mr. Greer: “The IRA maneuvered civilians between themselves and troops, then opened fire. Seven civilians and six IRA men were killed by return fire. Surviving terrorists removed the weapons of the dead IRA men and withdrew, leaving apparently innocent ‘civilian’ bodies.”

For the IRA to fire through the crowd at armed troops would not only be sheer madness (none of the soldiers received as much as a flesh wound), but a veritable impossibility. It boggles the mind how “surviving terrorists” could remove the weapons of the dead IRA men and withdraw while face to face in the street with point-blank fire from the paratroop regiment.

What really happened was sheer unadulterated murder. An eyewitness, Fulvio Grimaldi, a photo-journalist for the Italian Septe Giorni, said: “There hadn’t been one shot fired at [the British troops], there hadn’t been one petrol or nail bomb thrown at them. They just jumped out and with unbelievable, murderous fury shot into the fleeing crowd.”

Jack Lynch, Ireland’s Prime Minister, said that the government of the Republic was satisfied that British troops had fired recklessly at unarmed civilians. Isaac Cohen, Chief Rabbi of Ireland, said: “The people of Ireland on both sides of the border are united today in a common expression of horror at the latest tragic killings in Derry. Men and women of all faiths are shocked by the horrifying escalation of bloodshed in Ireland, casting a sad cloud of gloom over those many homes which are today filled with sorrow for their beloved sons, and where anxious brothers and sisters nurse the wounds of those who dared to protest in the name of freedom.”

The worldwide outcry of indignation and horror forced the British government to appoint a tribunal headed by Chief Justice Lord Widgery, a former army officer, to investigate. Many eyewitnesses on learning that the investigation was being conducted by some of the army’s own, simply stayed away. The Widgery tribunal, to no one’s surprise, concluded that there had been no breakdown of discipline, although the firing of some of the soldiers “bordered on the reckless.” The British army claimed that eight of the dead were on the wanted list. This statement was later scaled down to six wanted men, then to three wanted men—until it was completely withdrawn. The British government subsequently exonerated all the victims from involvement in the so-called provocation. . . .

So much for the truth and veracity of Mr. Greer’s account of Bloody Sunday and the millennium of history leading up to it. It does not require too much reflection to convince any thoughtful person that Herb Greer is a dedicated empire loyalist who uses his claim to Irish ancestry as a smoke screen. . . .

Thomas Garvey
Ancient Order of Hibernians
Four Province Division
Neptune, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

. . . Herb Greer expresses blatantly anti-Irish sentiments. Not only does his article support British racism, it is historically untrue. For example, Mr. Greer says: “Before the 1921 partition of Ireland, the province of Ulster contained nine counties.” The province of Ulster still contains nine counties even though six were illegally annexed by England without the consent of the Irish people.

Mr. Greer speaks of terrorism and terrorists in the North of Ireland . . . [but] he does not mention the real terrorists, namely, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Ulster Defense Force, Paisley’s armed gangs, or the English army. Nor does he mention H-Block, the concentration camp where Irish men are tortured and beaten after being “convicted” in a Diplock court without jury or due process of law. Ireland doesn’t need any more British propaganda articles like Mr. Greer’s. . . .

Catherine McGillicuddy
New York City

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To the Editor:

Herb Greer’s analysis of the Irish “Troubles” concludes with the assertion that “. . . the need to survive in a fiercely competitive world must inevitably push together the interests of the British and the Irish.” Quite the contrary, it is precisely this competitive economic arena which is pushing Britain and Ireland apart!

Since its 1973 entry into the European Economic Community, the Republic of Ireland has prudently loosened many of its remaining economic ties with Britain. This is clearly borne out in the trade statistics of both the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, and is exemplified by the 1979 severing of the parity relationship between the British and Irish currencies which had existed for nearly two hundred years. Closer ties with Britain in a harsh economic era would mean that Ireland would be even more prone to the most dreaded of European ailments, the “British disease.” (The “British disease” is a peculiar combination of low productivity, a negative rate of capital investment, severe labor turmoil, and bloody-mindedness.)

The modern Irish Republic has followed a strategy which aggressively pursues industrial and economic development, and its policies have achieved a remarkable degree of success. The Irish Republic has become a very forward-looking nation. In “a fiercely competitive world” advocating closer ties to . . . the Britain of today is both unwise and a prescription for a return to “the stultified agricultural backwater” which Southern Ireland once was.

Daniel L. Quinn
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Herb Greer has an interesting and I think generally accurate view of the genesis of the current imbroglio in Northern Ireland. Especially perceptive are his remarks on the essential “Britishness” of all of Ireland, North and South. Like it or not, Ireland is indeed John Bull’s Other Island. However, I found one of his constant themes rather disturbing. Mr. Greer makes the point over and over again that there is some peculiar relationship between National Socialism and Irish nationalism. Thus, Patrick Pearse was a “proto-fascist”; Sir Roger Casement was attempting to form “a kind of Waffen-SS” among Irish POW’s in Germany in 1915-16; the late hunger-striker Bobby Sands, MP, acted in a manner similar to another “‘sincere’ martyr,” Horst Wessel. Prime Minister De Valera is portrayed as a politician who may have “allowed the Germans to use the Irish coast as a haven for submarine action against Allied shipping,” who definitely permitted “the German representative in Dublin to send weather reports to the Luftwaffe” and hence aided the bombing campaign against Britain, and who struggled (along with Joseph P. Kennedy) to do “what he could to keep the United States out of the war.”

To examine these charges, I will take them point by point.

1. Patrick Pearse did indeed write all sorts of nonsense on the uplifting character of war, on the unique glories of the Celts, and on the redemptive qualities of blood sacrifices. I suppose, in a way, such maunderings are “proto-fascist,” though endemic to Western culture in the early 20th century. It was quite normal among poets, politicians, and scholars (some of whom later were prominent in the fight against real fascism) in America, Russia, France, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere to exalt racial and warlike virtues. To condemn Pearse is, rightfully perhaps, to condemn almost an entire culture.
2. To accuse Sir Roger Casement, perhaps the foremost opponent of racism against blacks in early 20th-century Europe, of forming a “kind of Waffen-SS” is a slur on the memory of a compassionate, if foolish, man.
3. One need not sympathize with Sands or his movement to see little comparison between a man who dies a lingering and horrible death by the avoidance of food—for his principles—and the National Socialist brownshirt, Horst Wessel, who was killed in a squalid domestic quarrel initiated by his landlady.
4. Much to the chagrin of Churchill, Roosevelt, their foreign offices, and press opinion in London and New York, Southern Ireland was neutral in World War II. Switzerland was also neutral. So was the United States until rather late in the game. And so would the United States have presumably remained save for an opportune attack (by Japan) and a declaration of war (by Germany). De Valera certainly never allowed German submarines the use of the Irish coast. No serious historian accepts the truth of such a charge and even Mr. Greer—though he repeats that old canard—wonders as to its reliability. When De Valera discovered the manner in which the German legation in Dublin was using its radio transmitter, he ordered it lodged in a bank. Is there any real evidence that DeValera “did what he could to keep the United States out of the war”? De Valera himself strenuously denied that he had any dealings with FDR’s political or isolationist opposition. The Prime Minister certainly did offer his personal condolences to the German minister in Dublin on the death of Hitler. He thought it was the honorable thing to do under the circumstances, given Ireland’s neutrality. In this he may have been wrong or insensitive, but it certainly did not reflect any deep-seated pro-German leanings. When the Germans in 1940, flushed with seeming victory, more-or-less offered to guarantee an end to partition, De Valera politely declined to pursue the matter. He was always neutral and always diplomatically correct.

James J. Sack
University of Illinois at
Chicago Circle
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

The year is 1982. In this mythical world, the Nazis have won World War II. An American publication documenting that period writes: “Like many an atrocity in [Jewish] mythology, this charge of genocide has a prima facie plausibility; but it will not stand serious examination.” The writer in the publication goes on to justify the reasoning of the time: “It would have required a vast aid operation of late 20th-century proportions—something unimaginable at the time, without a ready and deep-seated belief that these large numbers of poor, useless as a labor force, were worth a gigantic effort and expense, just because they were human beings. . . . To portray the calamity as cold-blooded murder is exciting melodrama but bad history.”. . .

Let us shift back into the real world of 1982, in which the above passages were written not about the Jews, but by Herb Greer about the Irish of the mid-19th century. . . .

Historical records show that during the Potato Genocide of the 1840′s, enough agricultural produce was shipped from Ireland to England to have fed the entire Irish population (that “useless labor force”) two times over. During that time period, the potato crops failed in the rest of Europe, but no one perished in any of the other countries. Only in Ireland was an attempt made to starve the Irish out of existence, something that Oliver Cromwell, a few centuries before, had tried and partially succeeded in doing. . . . Only off the coast of Ireland were food ships sent by the Sultan of Turkey to the starving populace turned back by England.

If anyone still has a question in his mind about the “civilized English” and their genocidal policies, look to Tasmania. During the same 19th century, England succeeded in exterminating the entire Tasmanian population. Bounties were put on their heads, and some were sold for dog food. At the last moment, England tried to save the remaining few, knowing that those few were doomed.

Herb Greer is an anti-Celtic. In his piece, not one kind word is said about the Irish, their history, culture, or civilization. Mr. Greer very subtly makes fun of the “800-year struggle of the Irish nation.” Would he do likewise about the “2,000-year struggle of the Jewish nation”? He mocks the Irish freedom fighters of today. Yet . . . Mr. Greer discreetly chooses not to mention that it was the Irish Republican Army who, in the late 1940′s, trained and fought alongside many Jewish freedom fighters in English-occupied Palestine.

Mr. Greer doesn’t explain how Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament with 10,000 more votes than Margaret Thatcher received in her most recent election. Or why more than 100,000 people attended the funeral of Mr. Sands. Or why Andrei Sakharov, the Russian political dissident, is to be congratulated for staging a hunger strike, but Bobby Sands, the Irish political dissident, is to be condemned.

However, Mr. Greer, unwittingly in his anti-Celtic version of Irish history, does put the lie to the current English propaganda that the war in Northern Ireland is a “sectarian war.” Mr. Greer first writes about “English and Scottish settlers”; then miraculously, they are transformed into the “Protestant settlers” and the “native Irish” suddenly become the “Catholic Irish.”

English colonialism is not dead. The use of English torture against Irish political dissidents, as attested to by Amnesty International, the European Commission on Human Rights, and the International League for Human Rights, is still with us. The use of plastic bullets by the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary to murder and maim innocent Irish men, women, and children is prevalent. Anti-Celticism, apparently, is alive and thriving. . . .

Raymond Quinn
American Irish Unity Committee
New York City

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Herb Greer writes:

Mary Jane Byrnes, Aileen Ryan, Thomas Garvey, and Catherine McGillicuddy illustrate perfectly the typical Irish-American view which I mentioned in my piece. Their fury over what they say I wrote would be better directed at what I really did write. That it is not so directed may be explained by the fact that most of their complaints and assertions are adequately refuted in the original piece. But I will comment on a few of their more obvious errors and distortions.

The arrival of the Normans in Ireland had nothing to do with the “hatred of the Saxon for the Gael,” but a great deal to do with the hatred of Gael for Gael. Dermot MacMurrough’s purely Irish quarrel inspired his invitation to the Normans to come and help settle it.

Mr. Garvey is mistaken about the election of 1918. Sinn Fein had a popular vote of 485,105. The anti-Republican vote, including Nationalists and Unionists, was 557,435. This majority foreshadowed popular Irish acceptance of a treaty which retained important ties with the British Crown. It also adumbrated the later civil war and the Republican defeat. As I pointed out, the extreme Republican groups so noisily supported by Mr. Garvey and his ilk have never been really popular in Ireland and are still intensely disliked by most genuine Irish (as opposed to American Irish) both in the North and South, Catholics included. If any proof of this were needed beyond the historical record, it was on show in the last Irish general election, when all the extremist candidates were electorally wiped out.

Fulvio Grimaldi’s hysterical rhetoric is no more an accurate description of what happened on Bloody Sunday (1972) than is Mr. Garvey’s. The IRA were not face to face with the soldiers, but crouched behind a barricade, and fired from there, and from apartments overlooking the scene. Thus their withdrawal is hardly “mind-boggling.” For Republican terrorists to fire through a civilian crowd is not at all surprising. One of their standard tactics in Ulster is to use civilians (including young children) as a screen when ambushing soldiers and policemen. During the recent bombings in London, the civilian victims—an Irish Catholic boy and an old woman—were in full view of the terrorist who detonated the bomb which killed them. Shortly after that the same “active-service unit” planted a booby-trapped toy in the street near a London school. So much for the Bold Fenian Men.

Prisoners in the Maze have a regime that is one of the easiest and most comfortable in the United Kingdom, and among the best in Europe. It is so good that other British prisoners have complained bitterly over the favor shown to convicted terrorists. The foul conditions featured in “H-Block” propaganda were created by the terrorists themselves precisely for the purpose of that propaganda. Their complaints are rather like the plea of the man who murdered his mother and father and then demanded mercy on the ground that he was an orphan. The European Court of Human Rights, among others, has rejected the allegations of torture, etc. So do I.

Daniel L. Quinn’s remarks about British and Irish interests are of limited value. My comments were made on a scale of some eight centuries. He is talking of a period which spans approximately a decade. He must be aware that since loosening its technical economic ties with the United Kingdom, Ireland has suffered a major recession—one of the most prominent issues in the recent Irish general election. That may or may not prove something about the UK connection. What it definitely disproves is Mr. Quinn’s claim of a “remarkable degree of success.” Of course, the UK remains one of Ireland’s most important trading partners—and common membership in the EEC is a tie between the two countries, not a mark of division.

My thanks to James J. Sack for his attempt to discuss my piece with a modicum of civility. He does well to be disturbed about the relationship between the IRA’s nationalism and Nazism. This happens to be a matter of record. He will find a fairly thorough account of it in Tim Pat Coogan’s book, The IRA.

To answer his points:

1. I agree that Patrick Pearse uttered “all sorts of nonsense,” etc. The nub of the matter is that he and his colleagues took this nonsense absolutely seriously and acted on it with horrifying results. That the nonsense is “endemic to Western culture” is neither here nor there. So is opposition to it. Many people, including Irishmen, have died on behalf of that opposition. So my condemnation of Pearse hardly extends to “an entire culture.”
2. I did not accuse Roger Casement of racism. The Freikorps or Irish Brigade which he wished to form with Irish prisoners of war was a close cognate to the World War II Waffen SS which recruited foreign nationals into special units to fight for the Third Reich. If the facts—and they are facts—are a slur on Casement’s memory, so be it.
3. I doubt that Mr. Sack can deny the sincerity of Horst Wessel’s Nazism or his status as a martyr. He passes over my closer parallel of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who also committed suicide in prison and were used for the same sort of propaganda that attended the deaths of Bobby Sands and his friends. I do not think the sincerity or manner of a suicide proves much in itself except in terms of propaganda value. Certainly neither makes a bad cause any better, or excuses terrorist crimes. (Hitler was utterly sincere.) Nor can either deodorize the stench of blood; and there was plenty of that on the hunger strikers’ hands.
4. My point about De Valera was not that he was a Nazi sympathizer, though he contrived to make himself look like one in the eyes of many responsible people. It was that his political actions widened the gulf between Eire and Ulster. I note that Mr. Sack avoids the incident of De Valera’s protest over American troops in Ulster as an “infringement of Irish sovereignty,” with the coincidental failure to remonstrate with the Germans over their heavy bombing of Belfast. Even on his own terms that was hardly a demonstration of neutrality. It was not diplomatically “correct,” either. His impounding of a radio transmitter—after great (unprotested) damage had been done—can as easily be explained by fear of Allied intervention as by any attachment to principled neutrality. De Valera’s pro-German leanings were not “deep-seated.” They were right up front. He was one of those who had acclaimed the Germans as allies—glorious allies—in World War I. In the circumstances, his subsequent conversion to neutrality appeared rather disingenuous. So did his denial of connections with isolationist circles in the United States. The American State Department’s accusation of a “pro-Axis” neutrality was clearly not made out of chagrin but from a fairly shrewd assessment of fact.

As to Raymond Quinn’s somewhat distasteful equation of the 19th-century famines with the 20th-century Holocaust: the suggestion that a great, horrible, but natural disaster was in any way like the planned and deliberate slaughter of some 6 million human beings with technology specially created for the purpose is fatuous nonsense. But this brings me back to the matter of a certain fascist strain in Irish Republicanism. It goes further than a fleeting alliance between Nazis and the IRA in World War II. The points of comparison today are many: the compulsive, almost mystical addiction to random violence, a virulent irredentism based on historical and racial myth (there was no Ancient Irish nation, and there is no Celtic race in modern Ireland—or in America, either); the dehumanizing of opponents; the insistent and stubborn use of lies; the use of mutilation in “punishing” dissenters; the aim of a one-party state; the use of conspiracy and intimidation; the exploitation of Jacobin rhetoric about “liberation” and “human rights” while violently and deliberately flouting such rights—there are many more parallels. Those who wish to explore the question will find other criteria in The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics by A. J. Gregor.

None of these remarks makes me “anti-Irish.” On the contrary, I am very pro-Irish. What I oppose is a vicious armed cabal and its foreign backers, who together mean to destroy Ireland’s system of government and install another in its place, using the usual fascist means of ruthless violence, insurrection, and the most brutal intimidation.

Finally, I do not just “claim” Irish ancestry. I have it, plus documented descent from a branch of the same family that produced Theobald Wolfe Tone. I doubt that the famous Irish apostle of freedom would care much more than I do for the active and vicarious terrorists who now brandish his name.