Sir,—Your Winter 1997 issue, the first I have read, made fascinating reading and reminded me how involved in Irish history my own family has been. It is sixty years since my parents and my brothers and sisters came to England in January 1938, after my father’s farm failed, but it is only in my recent retirement years that there has been the leisure and inclination to review the family past in a wider historical perspective.
The first paragraph of ‘Fianna Fáil and Arms Decommissioning 1923-32’, by John Horgan, brought to mind a discussion I had with my mother’s brother at his farm in County Limerick over twenty years ago. He was then approaching eighty, and tidying up some of the unfinished business of his life. We had met during summer visits in previous years but had never discussed the ‘Troubles’. On that occasion he told me he had pointed out to his oldest son the place on the farm where his weapons and ammunition were buried after the Civil War.
My father spent three months in Limerick Prison in 1920 for his IRA activities, but never told his children what he did, except that he was in intelligence. My mother was in Cumann na mBan and was fined for rescuing a Tricolour from a British soldier who had removed it from the coffin of an IRA man. Although my uncle was a die-hard IRA Civil Warman, my father was a political moderate and became a Fine Gael supporter.
Family relationships reflected the complexities of Irish society. When my father’s father died at the young age of thirty-six, my grandmother re-married to a retired RIC officer in 1903. My great-uncle Frank B. Dineen, who was an all-Ireland champion athlete in the 1880s,was fourth President of the GAA from 1895-98.
Until we left for England in 1938, my younger brothers and I went to the National School at Bruree, where Éamonn de Valera had been a pupil. He visited the school around 1937 causing great excitement. De Valera’s mother’s people lived across the fields from our farm.
The ultimate historical irony has to be my service in the RAF from1945 to 1948. Twenty-five years after my father was imprisoned for three months by His Majesty’s forces I served in those forces for three years. But having lived on the Essex side of the Thames flight corridor for German planes bombing London, living for months in a bomb-damaged home, and having seen the mind-scarring pictures of the British Army’s liberation of Bergen-Belsen I was proud to do so. But it did not make me any less proud of my parent’s service in the cause of Irish freedom.
I received the best education of my life when at the ages of nineteen and twenty I was with the British occupation forces in Germany from 1947-48 and saw the horrific aftermath of a modern war and the suffering of the innocent along with the guilty.—Yours etc.,
FRANK DINEEN
Essex
