Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

So, who was Sean Russell? Well, he was a leader of a nationalist-terrorist-fascist organization called the Irish Republican Army, better known as the IRA. Born in 1901, he died in a German U-Boat 100 miles off the coast of Ireland in 1940. Eh? Hold on a minute. If he died 65 years ago, how could he have been beheaded this year? Simple. It was a statue of Sean Russell that was decapitated. Wow! That's pretty grotesque. Yes, it is. But then so is Irish politics.

BACKGROUNDER: when dark clouds were gathering over Europe in the 1930s, Sean Russell perceived not great danger but great opportunity. Irish nationalists saw in Hitler, just as they had seen in the French tyrant Napoleon 130 years earlier, the island's saviour. According to the IRA worldview, the destruction of Great Britain would lead to the liberation of Ireland and the creation of an Irish-speaking, Catholic nation peopled with epic poets, quaint storytellers, harp-playing maidens and sturdy hurley wielders. With this goal in mind, Sean Russell set off to Berlin to make his pact with the devil. Having overseen a campaign of assassination and sabotage in England, he felt well qualified for greater things. Thankfully, he died before he was able to achieve any of his aims.

Despite his bloodstained record and his perverted visions, Russell did not want for admirers in his homeland, and so it came to pass that in 1951, which would be six years after the full scale of Nazi barbarity became known to the world, a statue of Russell was commissioned and placed in one of Dublin's most public spaces. It immediately became a focal point for IRA groupies. In fact, two years ago, the Sinn Fein/IRA Member of the European Parliament, Mary Lou McDonald, chose the location of the memorial for the delivery of a panegyric to the Russellian dream, er, nightmare.

Here's a suggestion: The next time Ms McDonald is down Strasbourg way, enjoying her fat EU salary, protesting the liberation of Iraq and supping with her anti-imperialist allies, someone should take the time to give her a copy of the address delivered by the late W.G. Sebald at the opening of the House of Literature in Stuttgart in 2001. The writer devoted his speech to one of the sons of the region, Friedrich Hölderlin, the great lyric poet. Saying that some connections cannot be explained by causal logic, Sebald continued:

"For instance, the connection between the former princely residence of Stuttgart, later an industrial city, and the French town of Tulle, which is built on seven hills — 'Elle a des prétentions, cette ville,' a lady living there wrote to me some time ago, 'That town has grand ideas of itself' — between Stuttgart, then, and Tulle, in the Corrèze region, through which Hölderlin passed on his way to Bordeux, and where on 9 June 1944, exactly three weeks after I first saw the light of day, in the Seefeld house in Wertach, and almost exactly a hundred and one years to the day after Hölderlin's death, the entire male population of the town was driven together in the grounds of an armaments factory by the SS Das Reich division, intent on retribution. Ninety-nine of them, men of all ages, were hanged from the lampposts and balconies of the Souilhac quarter in the course of that dark day, which still overshadows the memories of the town of Tulle. The rest were deported to forced-labour camps and extermination camps, to Natzweiler, Flossenburg, and Mauthausen, where many were worked to death in the quarries."

If Sean Russell and his ilk had their way, Ireland would have become a willing part of this totalitarian death machine. He failed and they failed and the machine was stopped, and the gangster movement to which Mary Lou McDonald belongs and which honours the memory of this wretched Nazi stooge will fail as well. Still, it would be comforting if the voters in the north and south of Ireland who have, to their shame and our horror, elected Sinn Fein/IRA members to their respective assemblies would admit the error of their ways as soon as possible so that democracy can be restored to the island. Until then, we must depend on the statue desecrators to remind the nation about choices and consequences.