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Reds under the Bed in Ireland?
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12-07-2011 1:34am#1
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.In 1952 Ireland and Yugoslavia were scheduled to meet in a friendly soccer match in Dalymount Park, Dublin. But one of the most influential and dominant Catholic Church figures in Ireland at the time, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, had other ideas.
McQuaid did not want Ireland to play a ‘Godless country’. He was, like many others, virulently anti-communist. The Cold War was in full spate. Archbishop McQuaid weighed in with his considerable power to get the match stopped. He successfully lobbied the Football Association of Ireland to have the invitation to Yugoslavia withdrawn. FAI officials capitulated very easily.
McQuaid had also sent out feelers about his objections to the politicians of the time. The Cold War anti-communist line was an easy sell in the Ireland of the early 1950s. Pupils in national schools around the country prayedfor ‘the conversion of Russia’ each day. The match did not take place.
McQuaid got his way. :cool:
Ireland v. Yugoslavia, round two
The match report in the Irish Times, 20 October 1955. No mention was made of the controversy surrounding the game.
In view of the cancellation of the 1952 match it came as a surprise when the FAI arranged another match with Yugoslavia for Dalymount in October 1955.
Archbishop McQuaid was furious that his power had been undermined and that the FAI had not sought his permission before they arranged the match.
The FAI was accused of entertaining the ‘tools of Tito in the capital city of Catholic Ireland’. The Yugoslav team were branded as the puppets of a communist state and representatives of a ‘tyrannical regime of persecution’.
Schoolboys were warned not to go to the match as it was seen as a mortal sin. On 15 October McQuaid called on the Irish people to boycott the match. The archbishop did not seem to be observing the teaching of Pope Pius XII that politics should not interfere with sports. Nevertheless, on the evening of Wednesday 19 October between 21,400 and 22,000 supporters turned out at Dalymount Park to see the match.
Liam Touhy was the youngest player on the team on the day. He remembers that there was ‘a bit of a fuss’ about it. But for him it was an international, he was playing for his country, and he did not care about the other things that were going on. He did not think that the players in the dressing room knew or talked about McQuaid and the boycott. ‘To us it was a match to be played for our country.’
I sent a letter to the Evening Herald asking for the views of anybody who was at the match. I got replies from two people who attended with their fathers. The perspectives they gave on it now, as adults, were quite interesting. One was understanding of McQuaid’s anti-communist position, in the context of the time, while the other was quite the opposite and ridiculed the role of the archbishop.
Philip Green, as a Catholic, refused to do the match commentary. The government and the president did not know whether they could or should attend the game. A group of writers and artists, including Paddy Kavanagh, who we now know often received financial assistance from McQuaid, led a protest by publicly attending the game. Dalymount was full. Ireland lost 4–1. McQuaid lost.
The boycott was ignored. :pac:
Afterwards the FAI was praised in certain quarters for showing ‘much daring’ against the might of the Catholic Church. This was one of the first times in recent Irish history that Irish people, in a very public way, went against the Catholic Church’s directives.
Roy Keane’s departure from Saipan pales in comparison to the events surrounding the international in October 1955.
http://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume15/issue5/features/?id=1141330 -
Two things:
1) I was unaware of the first cancelled match in 1952.
2) Although it was long before my time,I remember hearing about the second one in 1955. I believe that my now aged mother, a very proper Catholic, went along to the match deliberately to thumb her nose at the Archbishop. She would have been in her early 20s then. She also lived in the Dalymount Park area and was a fervent Bohemians supporter, so she was a fairly regular attender of games.
That is what passed for rebellious anti-authoritarian youth at the time.
I believe one of the immediate issues colouring McQuaid's opinion at the time was the persecution of Cardinal Stepinac of Zagreb who had been tried for war crimes concerning his collaboration with the Nazi-allied Ustashi regime of Croatia during the war. This was widely seen as a show trial given the atmosphere of the Cold War.
By 1955, although he had been released from prison, he had refused to leave Yugoslavia as he had been encouraged to do by the authorities, he remained under house arrest and his death five years later was widely believed to have been caused by poisoning at the hands of the regime.0 -
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I can't help you there -but why not ask Marchdub deferentially he may put you out of your misery.
I have come accross an interesting site about the Irish Left and the regimes it supports and has supportedThe Irish left's support for Cuban communist dictatorship- Cuba Support Group - Ireland
- Galway "One World" Centre
- One man emigrating is another man 'fleeing', Galway "One World" Centre, November 29, 2007. These pampered western leftists, who have known nothing but freedom all their lives, actually defend Castro's policy of denying freedom of movement, and laugh at those who risk their lives to escape communist rule as "emigrants". They quote some lackey of the regime who they hosted in Ireland. Why did they not host a Cuban dissident?
- "The crumbling buildings in these barrios demonstrate the high price that years of sanctions have exacted from the people of Cuba." Not the high price that communism has exacted from the people of Cuba.
- Communism
- The unfree world
- Cuba
- Che Guevara
- The modern left's support for Cuban communist dictatorship
- Finian McGrath
- Tom McGurk
- Irishwoman Bernie Dwyer actually works for Cuban state propaganda organ Radio Havana Cuba. (This in a country where no free press is allowed.)
- Her film The Day Diplomacy Died (2010) actually defends Castro's 2003 crackdown on dissidents, journalists, human rights activists and democracy activists. Shame on her.
- Bob Geldof's sister Lynn Geldof liked the non-democracy of Cuba so much that she lived there from 1985 to 1989. Of course, unlike the Cuban people, she was free to leave at any time.
- Publishers Weekly review of her 1992 book on Cuba says she "takes a distinctly sympathetic stance toward the Cuban state ... Most of the 19 people interviewed in Cuba announce support for the revolution ... In the preface, Geldof likens Cuba's history and geopolitical situation to that of Ireland and says that Cuba's social achievements are impressive compared with those of its Latin American neighbors."
- Travel writer Dervla Murphy also supports communist Cuba.
- Her 2008 book on Cuba is called "The Island That Dared" - as if being an oppressive, unelected dictatorship is something exciting and unusual in this world.
- Dervla Murphy also supports Gaza.
T-shirt from here sums up the real Cuban revolution.
Irish left support for other fascist and communist tyranny- International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic - Ireland (Anti-America, anti-NATO)
http://markhumphrys.com/unfree.world.html
Now I haven't read the site or checked its accuracy but I did read up on Che Guevara and my impression was psycho homicidal nutter and whoever shot him might have done the world a favour.
So , reds under the bed , may be a cliche and may do a disservice to our own politicians who emerged after 1922 in what was probably one of the only new democracy of post WWI europe to remain in tact.
What types of regimes did our "reds under the bed" support.
Its a bit simplistic to say " well ,they opposed Franco" while they supported and took money from Stalin and others.0 -
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jonniebgood1 wrote: »Who took money from Stalin CD? did I miss that in your link?
Ah cmon johnnie - the Soviets were not averse to interfering in national politics
And, I visited Arigna mine a few years back and spoke to a retired miner on the rates of pay in the early 70's as they were a lot higher than the industrial wages etc anywhere in Ireland and it was dangerous work and had piece rate pay for low quality coal..
He told me that he went to England as a miner and the pay was collosal and working conditions fantastic but the guys in Ireland were real miners.
The miners strike in England was politics he said. Scargill had soviet links.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/29/margaret-thatcher-soviet-aid-miners?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitterWill Spain Inevitably Follow Portugal, Ireland and Greece?
By Michael Moran
NEW YORK - Not since civil war engulfed Spain in the 1930s has so much ridden on the defense of Madrid.
Back then, the Nazi-backed nationalists sought to topple the Soviet-backed Republic behind its ramparts in the Spanish capital. Today, the Germans are playing both sides, riding to the rescue of Spain's debt-ridden European Union partners - the Greeks, the Irish and the Portuguese - under conditions that many economists believe will push Spain, a much larger, more important economy than any to fall so far, to the brink of disaster.
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/05/04/will_spain_inevitably_follow_portugal_ireland_and_greece_99507.htmlWalter Kendall in his book, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-21: the Origins of British Communism, 1969, deals with The Call, the BSP and its evolution into the Communist party. Most of his material about The Call is in Chapters 6 and 9. Kendall’s thesis seems to be that there was an organic growth until some point between early 1918 and early in 1919 when the changes that occurred were increasingly pushed through with Russian money and agents and did not arise out of British conditions and so were, in a sense, artificial, all of which is dealt with in great detail in the Part 2 of the book. Studies since the archives have been opened up have tended to confirm Kendall’s thesis as regards the amounts and frequency of Russian subventions though whether the CP was simply an artificial creation of the Russians is a much more debatable point.
http://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/call/index.htm
No Johnnie there is no evidence that the Soviets ever spent any money in Ireland or elsewhere for political purposes.0 -
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