At_Last

Gaffy's hatred of England is beyond measure. He totally abandoned English speech during his incarceration shortly after 1963 when he was nearly 17 years old. Caitlin was about a half year older. This jail break was almost a prelude, by four years, to a regional psychological implosion that, paralleled more broadly, eventuated in the Bogside riots in Derry in 1969. McGuiness was not alone. He was just the first and the best writer, able to retell history with passion. Generalized oppressive events, not long after his escape and Caitlin's death, escalated to the point of wholesale mass killings of Catholics and house burnings by heavily armed Protestant Ulster mobs incensed at pressures for political parity. English troops were called in, not to protect the Protestant interests, but due to extremely bad world opinion and American business financial pressures resulting from news reels of the massacres perpetrated in Ulster under the banner of Royalism which they called Loyalism. Local Derry and Ulster officials were very much into personal empire building and did indeed exploit the local populace. It is not merely accidental that the police did not create official documents for their many activities, as such a paper trail might later prove ruinous. This was the rule, not the exception. The deviant nature of these Northern Irish personages cannot be divorced from official English policy. Indeed, the long-standing "get tough" policies of the English were terribly off the mark. It was rather commonplace for English criminals with histories and convictions for mindless brutal behaviors to be "freed for rehabilitation". This was a nice way of saying that they would be enlisted along with the "Black and Tans" and sent to Ireland to "dull the green". It was exactly such a later day long ingrained group mentality, which the young McGuiness encountered. It was the incarnation of his father's words of warning. The Catholic - Protestant animosity, created by the British, was a drum played for all it's worth. Since the invasion of Ireland and brutal confiscation of land by William of Orange, there has been little deviation in its substance in the North. William wished that the local Irish populace would just die off, including the children. He said so. "Nits become lice.” It was policy. Laws were created to not just suppress the native Irish, but to keep them down "in perpetuity", identified by their religion which was systematically linked to landlessness. No land, no political voice, no representation or forum of grievance of any kind, forever. The English poet, Spencer (hence the term Spencerian Darwinism) mused about a 'final Irish solution', an elimination of Irish altogether from the isle. Driven from their farms, natives were forced to grow about the only thing that would grow on salty marshland - not potatoes , but - a certain kind of a potato. The blight was of this one breed of plant. The original farms were still productive and making great profits as produce was nearly all being shipped to England. The official dictum, voted in parliament, was that to assist the Irish starving in the famine was against the principles of 'Lassis Faire', an economic dictum hurried into practice. It isn't about religion, McGuiness aptly points out, as Catholics and Protestants in the larger southern Republic of Ireland get along fine under laws which do not discriminate.

5