The dog catcher, the terrorist and the dark history of Sinn Fein

The dead in the ground and those who put them there in the name of ideology do not rest easily in Ireland. The Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin was recently forced to close its wall of remembrance to those who died in the Easter rising of 1916 because of relentless vandalism. In previous attacks the wall had been smashed with sledgehammers and in 2017 paint was thrown over it.

What drove this constant destruction? It seems it was targeted because the attackers could not tolerate the presence of the names of British soldiers on the wall. These soldiers had died alongside republican rebels and civilians in the five days of insurrection that gave birth to the modern Irish state.

It is worth noting that the wall was designed as a ‘necrology’ – its purpose was to simply name the dead without putting any political spin on their memory. It was designed on the same basis as the Ring of Remembrance at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire in France which remembers 580,000 soldiers, victors and vanquished alike, killed in world war one.