|
Yesterday's Irish Times article by the Taoiseach will be noted for many reasons, but not for its historical accuracy, argues Sean McDougall
Spin and counter-spin characterise everything we read, and most of it is tolerated. However, the Taoiseach's claim that "voluntary disarmament will be a unique event in Irish history" on this page yesterday is so inaccurate that it demands a proper response.
There are, in fact, plenty of examples of decommissioning (or disarmament) in Irish history. Some of them are rather quaint: following the War of Independence, for instance, the withdrawing British army handed huge numbers of weapons to the embryonic Irish Army.
Others are more direct: the IRA, for instance, disposed of a large number of weapons in 1968 by selling them off to a fledgling organisation called the Free Wales Army, most of whom were promptly arrested. The Defence Forces still have over 40 Thompson sub-machineguns (a favourite of the IRA in its day) which were handed in on licence as the State scrambled around for weapons in the period before the Emergency.
Far more important, though, are the 40,000 rifles which the UVF handed over to the British authorities in 1916 following the Easter Rising. Although it is commonly assumed that the UVF took their weapons to the trenches with them, the fact that they were mostly of German and Italian origin meant that they were unsuitable for use at the Front, where it would be difficult to resupply them with ammunition. Instead, they were buried in dumps throughout Ulster.
Following the Easter Rising, as A.T.Q. Stewart makes clear in his "Note on the rifles" appended to his authoritative The Ulster Crisis, it became obvious to the British authorities that the civilian population would have to be disarmed.
The leaders of the UVF were eventually convinced that there was no chance of obtaining republican owned weapons while the UVF kept its rifles, so an order to hand them over to the British army in return for receipts was issued. Many thousands of the weapons were subsequently sold, and some were used in the campaign to restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne of Ethiopia in 1941. Others were used to arm
|
|
