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Irish Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Disunited Irishmen - Frank McNally on the year Shankill Road protestants paid tribute in Bodenstown and were attacked by the IRA
Two years after his failed libel action , Peadar O'Donnell enjoyed arguably the finest hour of his political life when inspiring a contingent of Belfast Protestants to attend the 1934 commemoration of Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown. A busload from the Shankill Road among them, they were there under the umbrella of O'Donnell's short-lived Republican Congress, formed when he and others of socialist leaning were expelled from the IRA. On the way to Kildare, according to the next day's Irish Press, 'three dozen Protestant workers' stopped off at Arbour Hill, Dublin, to lay a wreathe in honour of James Connolly. Presented by a 'Mr G McVicar', it read: 'To the memory of Connolly and his heroic comrades of Easter Week, 1916. On to the Workers' Republic.' READ MORE En route to the Workers' Republic, they then drove to Bodenstown, where the Belfast banners included one, in echo of the 1790s, proclaiming 'United Irishmen 1934'. Alas for unity, the first item on the agenda in Bodenstown was a split, or at least an expression of the split that had already forced O'Donnell and his associates out of the IRA. The Irish Press played down the subsequent drama in a three-part headline that dwelt mainly on the event's overall success. '17,000 in Pilgrimage to Grave of Tone', read the top line. 'Biggest Tribute Yet Paid,' read the second. Then came 'Many Protestants in Six-County Group', followed by a colon, and after the colon, ominously: 'A Scene.' The 'scene' arose from the insistence of the main IRA organisers that there should be no 'unauthorised banners'. That turned out to refer to the Belfast ones, including – in a bitter irony – the 'United Irishmen', as well as those of the Congress generally. First there were angry words. Then, reported the Press, 'fifty or sixty members of the Tipperary Battalion of the IRA were called upon to aid the stewards and blows were exchanged with members of the Congress Groups. 'In the course of the struggle, which lasted for several minutes, the identity scroll of the Congress and the two flags of the Belfast clubs were torn.' Recalling the event decades later, veteran communist Michael O'Riordan, who had been there, noted that job of attacking the Northerners 'was given to the Tipperary people because they were the most conservative. The Dublin IRA did not join in at all'. O'Donnell reached a similar conclusion on the day itself. As paraphrased by the Press, he said: 'The IRA leadership was afraid of the Congress, and they had used as their tools that day poor, deluded workers from the Midlands. They would not ask the Dublin workers to attack the Congress flags because [the Dubliners] were finding out their leadership.' O'Donnell went on to suggest that along with the Belfast flags, a 'mask had been torn from hypocrisy' at Bodenstown. He blamed himself and fellow Congress leader George Gilmore that it had not happened earlier: that for years, by their presence in the IRA, they had 'kept this treachery from exposing itself'. But he was optimistic now. The attack would bring 'thousands more to [the Congress] banner,' he predicted. Furthermore: 'The presence of their Belfast comrades that day was a momentous happening, and the laying of the foundation of unity in the future.' Such optimism proved to be unfounded. At its first conference, held at Rathmines in September 1934, the Congress itself split over tactics, with O'Donnell and Gilmore on one side and Roddy Connolly, son of James, on the other. Thereafter it went into steep decline, apart from a last stand fighting for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, where both Gilmore and O'Donnell took part. Some Belfast Protestants fought in that too. But there were no more massed outings from the Shankill to Bodenstown. Gilmore's life was a remarkable journey in its own right. Born in Howth, Co Dublin, in 1898, he was descended from Portadown unionists. But despite a home education, he and his brothers all became republicans. George joined Fianna Éireann as a teenager, fought in the War of Independence, took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and, after escaping from prison, worked as secretary for a future Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Seán Lemass. He and Lemass helped organise a mass jailbreak from Mountjoy in 1925 and Gilmore remained close with some of the leadership of Fianna Fáil even while supporting O'Donnell's hard-left Saor Éire (1931) and then helping lead the Republican Congress. O'Donnell was known to complain that Éamon de Valera 'took the best republicans with him into Fianna Fáil and left us with the clinkers'. But after the Congress's dissolution, he and Gilmore combined in organising tenant leagues, which influenced Fianna Fáil's slum clearance and State housing programme of the 1930s. Gilmore later stood as a socialist republican in a South Dublin byelection in 1938 and lost by only 200 votes. Thereafter, he was less prominent in Irish politics. Both men survived to visit Bodenstown again on the 50th anniversary of the 1934 commemoration. O'Donnell was 91 by then and lived another two years. Gilmore was 86 and died 11 months later, 40 years ago this June.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Unquenchable, Unconstitutional Greed is Deforming America
SAY WHAT YOU WILL about MAGA podcasters and influencers and the media owners making humiliating moves to stay on Donald Trump's good side, but actual reporters by and large are doing their jobs and informing the public. The same can't be said of the Republican Congress. There's no outrage dark or damaging enough to spur it to action. It is an epic, ongoing institutional failure. The latest test for U.S. leaders came early Sunday morning when ABC News revealed that Trump is getting a $400 million gift from Qatar: A 'palace in the sky' for use while he's in the White House and then later at his planned presidential library. So what's the big deal? It's not like we didn't know Trump was transactional, even when the transactions are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The corruption back in his first term seemed huge—most obviously the foreign, federal, and state officials, lobbyists, cronies, allies, job seekers, and even pardon recipients who swelled Trump's income by patronizing his Trump International Hotel near the White House. Later House Democratic investigations showed, for instance, that six nations had spent over $750,000 at that single hotel while trying to influence foreign policy, and that the hotel had even 'extracted . . . exorbitant rates' from the U.S. Secret Service. That blatant profit center triggered three 2017 lawsuits claiming that Trump was accepting unconstitutional payments because the Constitution does say, after all, that officeholders can't accept 'emoluments,' as in gifts or money from foreign and state governments and leaders, as well as our own federal government, without the consent of Congress. The Supreme Court declined to hear one of the cases and, after the 2020 election, with its habitual fawning deference to Trump, granted his request to dismiss the other two as moot. We give fawning deference to no one. Join us: THUS DID THE SUPREME COURT set the stage for this year's ongoing, unchecked festival of domestic and foreign corruption. Dinner with Trump for top buyers of $TRUMP crypto coins, spurring millions in purchases. Multiple nations courting and committing to Trump Organization projects. An invitation-only, $500,000-per member Executive Branch club cofounded by Donald Trump Jr., opening soon in Georgetown. Talks that might lead to the Trumps taking back control of their first-term hotel in the federally owned Old Post Office Building (it's been a Waldorf Astoria since they sold their leasing rights in 2022.) The palatial Qatar plane fit for a king. And that's a tiny fraction of a long list. 'The corruption is brazen,' Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.), posted on social media after ABC News broke the luxury plane story. Yet the brazenness is Trump's cover, at least in his mind. The plane gift is perfectly aboveboard, the president said, a 'very public and transparent transaction.' Not quite. News of the overtly unconstitutional gift was under wraps until it was leaked. But let's leave that aside, along with the fact that less than two weeks ago, the Trump Organization signed a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar—a deal that involves a company owned by the Qatari government. The real question is: what are congressional Republicans going to do about it? Some conservatives and MAGA figures are worried, but uncomfortable issues like bribery and constitutional violations have not come up much. Most of them are raising safety and security concerns based on mistrust of Qatar. And even on the slight chance that some GOP congressional leaders would attempt hearings on those issues, they would be likely too late or feeble to put a stop to the bestowing of the sky palace. Alternatively, as Bill Kristol noted Monday, Trump could ask his allies in Congress to make an exception—it's allowed!—for this very special plane. That would be an interesting vote. Share The Bulwark HERE'S AN IDEA FOR DEMOCRATS: Next time they are in the House majority, hopefully in January 2027, they should revive the 'weaponization of the federal government' subcommittee created by Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan in 2023 (which, shockingly, vanished when a GOP president took power). Trump is already targeting and punishing colleges, students, law firms, media organizations, and federal employees if he doesn't like what they're saying or doing. Call Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about how that can possibly be constitutional. Call her and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to testify about how Trump's $400 million flying palace can possibly be constitutional. Because they have said it's fine, and they are known to be independent, principled thinkers devoted to truth and the Constitution. Just kidding! Bondi is not only a former lobbyist for Qatar, she's a former Florida attorney general who decided not to pursue fraud complaints against Trump University after Trump in 2013 made a $25,000 contribution (illegal, as it turned out) to a group supporting her re-election. Hegseth, suffice it to say, has demonstrated he is not overly concerned with national security or constitutional concepts like equal protection and non-discrimination. But I'm not kidding about inviting them in to testify, perhaps for eleven hours apiece to a hostile panel, like Hillary Clinton did in 2015 when she was secretary of state and Republicans were trying (fruitlessly) to blame her for the deadly U.S. embassy shooting in Benghazi, Libya. A couple of colleagues and I must have been in a relatively light, hopeful mood just before Trump was inaugurated for the first time in 2017. With fingers crossed, we wrote him a short, simple Cliffs Notes Constitution—and after stating the emoluments rules in conversational English, we joked, 'Bummer.' We should have foreseen the outcome. The Founders' warnings about emoluments—and everything else—were tossed onto Trump's raging first-term bonfire of rules, laws, oaths, and constitutional edicts. Now, less than four months into Trump's second four years, the heat is already unbearable.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it
Less than seven weeks into Donald J Trump's second term as president, his administration has set off a new wave of handwringing over what has by now become a familiar question: has the US entered a constitutional crisis? Triggering the latest iteration of that worry, the government hastily deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, without hearings or evidence and thus without anything even resembling due process of law, pursuant to the US president's proclamation 'signed in the dark on Friday evening' that they constituted an invasion by a foreign state. Trump invoked a 1798 statute last used to intern Japanese Americans during the second world war, buttressed by powers he claimed were inherent in the presidency. Chief judge James E Boasberg of the US district court for the District of Columbia rushed to convene a hearing on the legality of the challenged action as two deportation flights departed from Texas, followed quickly by a third. Moments after the judge ordered them to return so he could rule on a motion barring the deportation, El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, tweeted: 'Oopsie ... Too late', with a laughing emoji, even as the court considered whether its order had been defied. The branch of government best able to uncover and safeguard both our noblest traditions and the simple truth in moments such as these – the judiciary – has been hobbled and vilified by Trump and his allies, making wildly irresponsible calls for impeachment that put dangerous targets on the backs of judges who rule in ways they dislike. Even mild-mannered chief justice John Roberts had to cry 'foul'. The administration's cavalier attitude toward courts that fail to do its bidding, exemplified by calls for Boasberg's removal, seemed to confirm concerns about a looming crisis. But searching for evidence of a 'constitutional crisis' in the rapidly escalating clashes of the executive branch with the judicial branch misses the larger cataclysm taking place across the US. This president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law. What we are currently living through is nothing less than a reorganized forgetting of the building blocks of our republic and the history of our struggles, distorting what it means to be American. The body politic is being hollowed out by a rapidly metastasizing virus attacking the underpinnings of our entire constitutional system. Make no mistake. This is how dictatorship grows. Symptomatic of that reshaping is the peculiar emergence, in a duet staged by the president together with the world's richest man and Trump's main benefactor, of a co-presidency without precedent in our republic and without even a hint of the irony in such shared power being propagated by ideologues whose mantra has long been the need for a 'unitary presidency'. As staffers of the newly minted so-called 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) raided congressionally created independent federal agencies and foundations without warning and slashed entire programs without thought, the Trump administration stuttered when asked by the courts to explain who was in charge of the 'department' that no Congress had created – and how the leader of that enterprise had somehow acquired the power of the purse that the constitution clearly delegated only to Congress. More than just stonewalling courts and refusing to provide basic information on government activities, the Trump administration has waged war on history itself. Having first debilitated our capacity to act, it is now coming after our capacity to think. The same day Boasberg directed the administration to explain why it had seemingly failed to comply with his order, Doge staffers marched into the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency responsible for funding many needy public museums, libraries and historic repositories across the country. Like Julius Caesar besieging and burning the Library of Alexandria, the Doge officials descended upon the IMLS to begin the process of gutting the public institutions dedicated to preserving and making widely available the shared memory of our past. It was none other than Benjamin Franklin whose conception of public libraries democratized knowledge and made it accessible to ordinary people. What used to be the private province of the few became the public province of the many. The attack on the IMLS is only the latest episode of the Trump presidency's attempt to privatize information while replacing authentic history with a version more to its liking. As internet archivists race to back up the nation's files and records, Trump administration officials have been systematically purging government websites in real time of the tools, concepts and language we need to act as informed citizens. In response to secretary of defense Pete Hegseth's order to remove 'diversity' content from the department's platforms, the Pentagon took down pages about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness and suicide prevention. So too, the Department of Agriculture deleted entire datasets and resources that farmers relied on to identify ways of coping with heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires. Websites belonging to the Small Business Administration and Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed their platforms of photographs and references to women, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color, including facts about American heroes such as Jackie Robinson or Gen Colin Powell. Taken together, these events of the past few weeks reveal an alarmingly rapid collapse of what gives the United States constitution life and meaning. Its words may remain unchanged, but its role in our lives is crumbling before our eyes. Looking for a decisive explosion or a moment of crisis – what physicists call a singularity – in the chaotic onrush of presidential provocations is a fool's errand, one calculated to disarm the resistance without which we will surely be doomed. The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump's rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country's capital, followed first by the Senate's abdication of its duty in Trump's second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court's gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power. Rarely noted is how this frightening power to ignore federal criminal law has been conferred not only on the president but on his legions of loyal lieutenants, from public officials to private militias. Because the constitution itself gives presidents an unbridled power to pardon others – a power Trump reveled in employing to free from prison the violent insurrectionists that he had himself helped unleash – we now live under a system in which any president can license his trusted followers to commit crimes to consolidate his power and wealth, making clear that a pardon awaits them should they face federal prosecution. The upshot is that privateers in league with the president can safely ignore federal laws criminalizing corrupt evasion of rules designed to protect public health and safety while they casually usurp powers the constitution gave to Congress, moving so fast and breaking so much that not even genuinely independent federal courts can keep pace with the mayhem. In his iconic poem The Hollow Men, TS Eliot a century ago famously wrote: 'This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / ... /Not with a bang but a whimper.' Rooted in our past, the antidemocracy virus has reached a fever pitch as it ravages the body politic and revises all traces of our history. It's a virus we must fight with all the energy we can muster if we don't want our system of self-government under law to die – not in a sudden explosion but with a quiet whimper. The tragedy is that too many politicians and organizations are caving in without a fight, leading others to follow suit. With each surrender, Trump and his minions not only grow more emboldened but cement their hold on power by cracking down on all who dare oppose them in court, including lawyers who come to the aid of the administration's enemies. Without more courageous leaders – including Republican officeholders who fear being primaried by candidates backed by limitless wealth – and without more bravery on the part of corporate CEOs whose fortunes can be threatened by Trump, elite lawyers whose business can shrivel if Trump targets them, and ordinary citizens understandably fearing online threats and worse, this darkness will be our destiny as we are reduced to mere memories and then relegated to the vast wasteland of the forgotten. Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School. Meriting special thanks and acknowledgment is his research assistant, Radhika M Kattula, a third-year law student at Harvard Law School.
