Éirígí For A New Republic has called for the controversial RIC / Tans commemoration to be permanently cancelled and not temporarily deferred as Charlie Flanagan has indicated. The call came amid frantic efforts by Fine Gael and other anti-national elements to limit the negative fallout from the commemoration debacle. Speaking from Dublin, Cathaoirleach Éirígí, Brian Leeson said,
“The RIC was a terrorist force from the day it was established as the Irish Constabulary in the 1820s to the day it was disbanded a century later.
During the hundred years of its existence the RIC was guilty of many acts of treachery against the Irish people. Some examples include assisting in the transportation of Irish prisoners to the penal colonies in Australia, guarding shipments of food out of Ireland during the genocide of the 1840s, assisting in mass evictions of tenant families, suppressing the Fenian rebellion of 1867, attacking striking workers and numerous atrocities during the revolutionary period of 1916 to 1921.
To suggest that the RIC was a legitimate police force upholding legitimate law is not only historically inaccurate, it is also a gross insult to the millions of our people that died from preventable starvation and disease, or were forced to emigrate between the 1820s and the time of partition.
The RIC was the strong-arm enforcer that oversaw every British-inflicted horror of the 19th and early 20th centuries. No amount of revisionism or spin will ever change that historical fact.
The agenda that is being pushed by Leo Vardkar, Charlie Flanagan and other anti-national politicians, journalists, academics and commentators has as much to do with the Ireland of 2020 as it has to do with the Ireland of 1920.
In attempting to rehabilitate the image of the RIC, they are also attempting to rehabilitate the much more recent track record of the RUC and contemporary British forces in Ireland. They understand that this is all part of a historical continuum that has yet to reach its conclusion.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that many of the same anti-national elements are also trying to stifle and long-finger any discussion about the prospect of Irish reunification.
There is no doubt that Leo Varadkar, Charlie Flanagan and the wider establishment have been left reeling by the breadth and intensity of opposition to their proposed RIC commemoration. Their decision to temporarily defer this most offensive of ‘comemmorations’ now needs to be permanently cancelled without delay.
The forces of regression have failed in their efforts to revise our history and they will fail in their efforts to limit the march of the Irish Nation in the future. Despite their best efforts, momentum is growing by the day for a British withdrawal, reunification and the establishment of a new all-Ireland republic.”