“The last words I heard him speak were ‘Papa, I am hungry'."
The parents of Gaza lose their children knowing that their children were unsafe, afraid, and hungry.
They live with the inability to do what parents instinctively live to do, keep they offspring safe, happy and fed.
That generational trauma is too much for most of us to witness. The images of surviving siblings watching their brothers and sisters being buried and their parents broken should be recorded now in order to understand what is to come. Because it will come.
Irish people watch forced starvation and have a visceral understanding of the suffering involved. It is in our DNA. And it is almost impossible to bear.
For some, reconciling the Great Hunger in the 1840s in Ireland is easier because it happened so long ago — rather than happening in real time on devices in our pockets and handbags. But that historical distance cannot 'other' the very same themes and inhumanity that we see today.
The evil state of Israel operates with the same mentality, degrading the population they murder in order to legitimise the slaughter. The responsibility of the British for utterly destroying our landscape, environment and population is the unspoken part of the settlement between our islands. And the impunity they enjoy for their misdeeds.
Unspoken but not forgotten.
Did you ever take the train from Dublin to Galway and see the miles upon miles of boglands and wonder what it might have been like when it was a rainforest? Before the British came with their axes, when they needed wood for their 'colonial exploits'. Those exploits being, of course, primarily, the enslavement of full populations and selling human beings at profit.
It is only now that we are beginning to realise that our land is meant to sing with the rustle of different leaves on different soil. While the Irish rainforests were not bombed out of existence, they were no less destroyed with no prospect of return.
That desecration was the scorched earth upon which forced starvation was possible. The next time you visit Killarney’s national parks and smell what remains of Irish rainforests’ last few acres, think of how our land used to be — and wonder at our forgiveness.
In 1997 British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s aides wrote a hasty note for the 150th anniversary of An Górta Mór, acknowledging that London could have “done more” to avoid the starvation of millions of Irish people. It was not an apology. It was a nod towards history, made with impunity.
Colonialism and colonialists have always murdered and stolen with impunity. Modern international law attempts to move forward with a 'gentleman’s agreement' that the past is the past and we are all better now. America’s enablement of genocide tells us that is far from the case.
It is difficult to find a way to speak about Ireland’s future which does not acknowledge Britain’s role in Ireland in the past — let alone the present. Yet many try.
Britain’s mealy-mouthed cover-up of its own role in driving Israel’s murderous and inevitable campaign to occupy more land and wipe out the Palestinian people is tied to its own past in that region and in Ireland.
Britain's impunity for her actions across the globe while she built her blood-soaked empire, which began and will end in Ireland, is the frame by which she must be judged today.
