British anthem at Croke Park unacceptable to Irish sensibilities
But if this historic development is to be a success (as I hope it will) a corresponding generosity on the part of the rugby and soccer authorities will certainly be required, particularly in regard to visits by English national teams.
We can hardly overlook the significance of Croke Park as the stadium in which 14 people were killed and more than 60 wounded by the Auxiliaries on Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920.
It was indeed, as one writer put it, “a senseless and bloody massacre of innocent people.” We need to find some way between now and 2007 of properly acknowledging and showing respect for this terrible tragedy in Ireland’s history.
No one in Ireland needs reminding that 1920 was the year in which a British government at Westminster unleashed the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries on the Irish populace, a catastrophic decision even by the standards of British government in Ireland.
But I would emphasise here that the government was a British government, and not an English government. How could it be otherwise when the prime minister, David Lloyd George, was Welsh and the chief secretary for Ireland in 1920-1922, Sir Hamar Greenwood, was also Welsh. It was the Scots who predominated in that cabinet, from Andrew Bonar Law (leader of the House of Commons) to Arthur Balfour (foreign affairs, later Lord President), Robert Munro (secretary of state for Scotland), James Ian Macpherson (chief secretary for Ireland in 1919), Sir Robert Stevenson Horne, minister of labour and, in March 1920, president of the Board of Trade, George Nicoll Barnes, minister without portfolio, Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, minister without portfolio and, in October 1919, minister of transport, and Sir Auckland Campbell Geddes, president of the Board of Trade in May 1919. Added to these are Walter Long (first lord of the admiralty), Anglo-Irish on his mother’s side, and a leading opponent of Home Rule from 1905 onward, and two imperial grandees in lords Curzon and Milner. However we may describe a cabinet composed of such men, it is not in any meaningful sense English. It is a British imperial cabinet dominated by Scots and Welsh.
It was this cabinet that formally agreed on May 21, 1920 to send to Ireland eight garrison battalions.
It was Lloyd George who insisted on September 4, 1920, that the continued detention of TerenceMacSwiney was required by “the supreme interests of the British empire.”
It was an English member of the cabinet, HAL Fisher, a famous historian, fellow and later warden of New College, Oxford, and president of the Board of Education, who on November 16, 1920, in the light of the ‘reprisals’ inflicted by the Auxiliaries, complained to Lloyd George that they “offend the conscience of English people”.
They did and do. But as so often, the English have been timorous and muddle-headed in their response to the injustices of the empire of which they have seemed to form the central part. And Fisher’s words did nothing to avert the tragedy that descended on Croke Park on Bloody Sunday.
In the light of this historical context, it seems to me (an Englishman) that England should not go to Croke Park in February 2007 and expect the British national anthem to be played. It would be perceived by many as an insult to the memory of the dead.
The English can dissociate themselves from the barbarities at Croke Park by adopting an English flag and an English anthem.
Dr Gerald Morgan
School of English
Trinity College
Dublin 2
