A few days after having Sunday lunch at the hotel where Michael Collins ate his last meal, we found ourselves on the road to Beal na Bla.
We had gone to get hay and the hayman was out to lunch, so we followed the heritage signs to the site of the ambush where Collins was shot dead.
The events of 22 August 1922 immortalised this picturesque valley in West Cork near to where the builder boyfriend and I have bought an old country house. Beal na Bla, or Blath, translates as ‘entrance to the good land’.
The memorial by the curve in the road where Collins was murdered is surrounded by lush pastureland.
We pulled the pick-up truck into a layby and walked along a newly made walkway installed for the 100-year anniversary so that Leo Varadkar could have some razzmatazz when he visited with the TV cameras.
Sadly, it means that the actual spot where Collins fell, still shooting his gun as he died from a head wound, is now impossible to see unless you know where to look for it.
Beneath the modernistic grey granite walkway walls, very Strasbourg, there is a small crumbling white marker stone on the grass verge. We caught sight of it quite by accident as we pulled away in the truck. Too late, we had passed and could not stop on the busy road. How sad that the real tribute to Collins goes unnoticed, hidden by a pretentious new structure installed for speech-making about what the untimely death of Ireland’s most beloved revolutionary meant for independence, and a united Ireland.
What would Collins make of the current leaders of Ireland? Not much, I don’t think, if you consider that the mainstream parties have been only too happy to sign away their freedoms to the European Union.
The elections currently being held here are a strange affair, not least because the issue of open borders has become so confused. No one seems to know how to sell the European project to the Irish any more.
Most of the farmers are losing their subsidies. If they want them at the same rate, they will need to acquire more land, because payments have been switched from per head of cattle to per acre.
This favours the larger producers. The small family farms can’t just spend hundreds of thousands of euros acquiring more land. They are having to either rent their farms to bigger producers or get out of farming.
The wife of the farmer next door came into our yard for a chat the other day. He has a brain tumour so she’s been doing the cattle herself. She’s a tough lady but she intimated that the game was up.
The front page of the local paper states one in four farmers here are getting out of it.
The other problem is that while cutting back these subsidies, the EU is calling in the debt they so obviously feel they represent.
Ireland has been told that it must take its fair share of immigration, more than 100,000 Ukrainians to date, around 4,000 a month ongoing.
And while the Irish love an underdog, particularly if it’s a rogue state, they only liked the idea of housing 2 per cent of Ukrainian migrants when it was a novelty.
When we moved here last year, it was a matter of pride in this small village that it was hosting 46 men who apparently didn’t want to stay and fight for Volodymyr Zelensky.
Now, if you mention the guests at the inn, people pull a face and say it’s not fair. Two complaints: there’s no housing for Irish people, and why should the Irish send troops to Ukraine when the Ukrainian fighting-age men are here?
‘We’re not having the ones from England either, did you see?’ said a neighbour of ours the other day, a formidable pensioner in her seventies who takes us out for Sunday lunch every week. Sometimes we go to the carvery up the road, other times the Eldon Hotel in Skibbereen, where we sit beneath black-and-white pictures of boyish, good-looking Collins climbing into that open-top car bound for Beal na Bla.
She was referring to the campsites in Dublin where immigrants are sleeping rough, having travelled via Northern Ireland to get out of being sent to Rwanda. ‘How gardai escorted 50 immigrants on to ferries and back to the UK in three days,’ is the headline in the Irish papers.
Meanwhile, politicians standing in the European elections nail up hundreds of placards bearing their smiling faces on the roadsides. ‘Vote Pat the fisherman!’ says one independent.
There are mainstream, independents and breakaway parties, like Aontu, meaning Unity, who are former members of Sinn Fein in a tizz about immigration.
Sinn Fein itself is in a total pickle, because it’s hard to explain to working-class republicans, whose ancestors fought alongside Collins, why you’re giving Ireland away to an open borders project.
Sinn Fein allegedly means We Ourselves, but there’s also a theory it means Ourselves Alone, or even Ours Alone. How on earth do you sell full-scale, sudden onset multiculturalism if that’s your title?
Perhaps they’ll have to change the name to Gach Duine, which means Everyone’s.
Comments