Reason to enjoy Wednesday night number 67: Victor Wanyama didn’t get booked.
21-year-old Victor is a fabulous talent but he has also been a tad rash in his earlier Champions League outings this season. One more yellow card will bring a suspension but his timing, and more importantly, his concentration, on Wednesday was excellent. This is a player maturing; more to come.
The 1254125 charity cycle left Lurgan this morning for Belfast port where they caught a ferry to Cairnryan. After they set wheel on Scotland they have a 37 mile cycle to Maybole, 7 miles of which is uphill, one of the most difficult parts of the endeavour.
They are people with the spirit of this club pumping through their veins right now. Check out their everyclick page for more information.
You can read CQN Magazine for FREE here , you can also subscribe for £10 or £20, and our sponsor, Executive Shaving, who offer an enormous range of grooming products, are offering readers a £20 voucher for all £30 CQN Magazine subscribers.
921 Comments- Pages:
- «
- 1
- ...
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- ...
- 25
- »
TET
Yes, I suppose it does.
SPF
There were more soldiers decorated from the free state than the north, FACT :o)
Thot it was a nice touch that newco offered hearts 500k to help with their tax bill. Nearly welled up!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foahtz9xnw8
Well said Jimmy Quinn ‘Crucially, however, freedom should be difficult. It should challenge, affront, and insult each and every one of us. Otherwise, well… it ain’t freedom, but a bland and/or malevolent conformity.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74BrJXa-n3U&feature=youtu.be
Commentary from wednesday.
“…..tony waaaaaaaaaa……!!!!!”
BT – the Minx is lurking and your in Trouble!!!
SPF
ouch….
good luck mate…
I am directly across the road from you… give me a shout we can go for a beer, you may need one..
stivs
I don’t usually get involved but he ho… those soldiers who died in the wars died for our freedom to agree or disagree..
I disagree with being forced to wear a poppy or being told I am wrong for not doing so.
dena29- You can bet your bottom dollar that Leckie, Jackson and the Clive Dunns everywhere will have their stethoscopes hard up against their radio speakers tomorrow.
minx
I knew I culd flush you into the open.. o))
My Take on this yearly poppy debate is,buy one if you want too.
Don’t buy one if you don’t want too.My choice is give them some money, but refuse the poppy.simples.
oldtim67,
Hail hail
Nice one Oldtim
izzy
23:03 on
10 November, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74BrJXa-n3U&feature=youtu.be
Commentary from wednesday.
“…..tony waaaaaaaaaa……!!!!!”
That is hilarious
i have flushed both of them out so I can go to bed now.. o))
good night bhoys/Ghirls
God bless…KTF
neil canamalar lennon hunskelper extrordinaire
They will be in my thoughts tomorrow.
There are millions of deserving reasons to respect in whichever way you believe appropriate, this is just one of them.
Ireland and the First World War: the Historical Context
Professor Keith Jeffery
I. Introduction – the numbers involved
II. Why did these men join up?
III. Where did they serve?
IV. The war, nationalism, and remembrance
V. The war, unionism, and remembrance
I. Introduction – the numbers involved
Between August 1914 and November 1918 considerably over 200,000 Irish served in armed forces engaged in the First World War. They fall into three main categories. In the first place a fair number were serving soldiers at the start of the conflict. For example in August 1914, in the British army there were 28,000 Irish-born regular soldiers and 30,000 reservists who were immediately called up back to the colours. Secondly there were what were known as ‘Kitchener’s men’, people who responded to the urgent call for volunteers made by Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in August 1914, and most dramatically represented in the world-famous ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster. Between August 1914 and February 1916 (more or less when conscription was introduced in Great Britain, and just before the Easter Rising in Ireland) about 95,000 men joined up. Thirdly, there were those who joined up during the rest of the war, after the initial recruiting ‘surge’, up to November 1918. These men total about 45,000, including nearly 10,000 recruits in the last three and a half months of the war alone.
These figures do not include all the Irish people who joined up. They do not include officers, nor do they include all of the Irishmen in the Royal Navy, and they do not take into account Irishmen serving in formations raised outside the United Kingdom—in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, for example—or in foreign armies (most notably that of the USA), nor even those in non-military services like the Merchant Marine, which participated and suffered in the Great War. I have four great-uncles from Ireland who served in the First World War. Each one of them emigrated to Canada before 1914, and each of them served with the Canadian forces (two perished), thus they do not appear in the statistics already quoted. This is surely not unique, and there must be many similar cases among families in our emigrant Irish society.
We can break down the statistics by location and religion, though not quite for the whole war. The figures for recruitment by religion and province from August 1914 to January 1918 (which is the period for which we have more-or-less reliable figures) are as follows:
Province Catholics Protestants Total
Ulster 17,092- 45,798- 62,890
Leinster 25,357- 4,989- 30,346
Connacht 4,316- 410- 4,726
Munster 17,842- 1,168- 19,010
Totals 64,607- 52,365- 116,972
What these figures show, overall, is that more Catholics than Protestants (and hence we can assume more nationalists than unionists) joined up in Ireland during the First World War. Only in Ulster (nine counties) does the number of Protestants exceed the number of Catholics. But these figures are largely meaningless without some idea of the proportionality of enlistment, and the following table shows the recruiting response as a proportion of the religious group, again by province and again over the period from the start of the war to January 1918 (% of population first; % of recruits in brackets):
Province Catholic Protestant
Ulster 44 (27)- 56 (73)
Leinster 85 (89)- 15 (11)
Connacht 96 (92)- 4 (8)
Munster 94 (93)- 6 (7)
Ireland 74 (55)- 26 (45)
What these figures show us is, as we might expect, that, overall, a higher percentage of Protestants joined up than Catholics. In Ulster, for example, where the population was just over half Protestant, nearly three-quarters of all the recruits came from that section of the population. But in the other provinces the figure was by no means so clear-cut. While in Munster, the proportions of population and religion were more or less equal, in Leinster, which includes Dublin and which we have seen from the previous table supplied more recruits than any other province except Ulster, Catholics were slightly more likely to join up than Protestants. Thus, we cannot easily come to any simplistic conclusions about which group was more likely to join up than the other.
To put the numbers into some sort of context, we can relate the 200,000-odd to the total number of young men living in Ireland at the time. According to the 1911 census there were just over 700,000 men between the ages of 15 and 35 in Ireland. The great majority of the recruits fell between those ages. We can say, therefore, that between a quarter and a third of the available young men in Ireland—a very strikingly high proportion—joined up to serve in the First World War.
And of those who enlisted, many did not return. The casualty statistics are as imprecise as those for recruiting, but one careful calculation of the dead has come up with a figure of 29,779 ‘born in Ireland’. Even this, apparently very precise, figure is only a start, and the compiler has suggested that we add ‘approximately 5,000’ more to allow for Irishmen in British imperial armies and that of the USA.
II. Why did these men join up?
Why did these men join up? This is one of the most tantalising questions we can pose about the First World War. We know—with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure—how terrible it was on the Western Front, and how futile and hazardous it seemed to be. And yet many thousands of young Irishmen continued throughout the whole war to join up. The popular view we have of enlistment in the war is that of huge crowds of men surging to the recruiting offices in August 1914, like lambs to the slaughter, or lemmings heading for a precipice. But we also know that recruitment continued throughout the war, even after it had certainly become clear to those back home that the war was no simple adventure. No-one in Ulster, or any other part of Ireland, could have been misled about the risks of joining up after the terrible casualties of the Somme in July 1916, and yet many, many more young men continued to join up after then. And we must remember that throughout the war, unlike in England, Scotland and Wales, all the Irish recruits were volunteers, they did not have to go, and yet many decided so to do. What we have to try to do is recover the rationality of recruiting: individual men made individual decisions to join up, and although they may have been swayed by the kind of patriotic fervour we no longer experience, they nevertheless evidently had good reason for doing what they did. Any theory (or theories) which we come up with for enlistment must not only explain the thousands who joined up ain August and September 1914 (the ‘easy bit’), but also the thousands who joined up in 1918 (which may not be quite so straightforward).
The standard, public reason for joining up was the moral purpose of the war. At the time it was widely seen as a kind of crusade against ‘Prussian militarism’. Tom Kettle, an Irish nationalist who had actually been in Belgium buying guns for the nationalist paramilitary Irish Volunteers, argued that men went because the cause was a just one. It was, said Kettle, the cause of small nations threatened by large ones, of Belgium and Serbia, which Germany and Austria had outraged, and Britain and her allies had taken up. This made it right for Ireland to fight on England’s side, especially since England had (at last) granted Home Rule for Ireland. Kettle himself joined up and died on the Somme in September 1916.
Home Rule had been the aspiration of Irish nationalists for fifty years and, finally, in 1914 it appeared that the deed was done. On 18 September 1914 the third Irish Home Rule Bill became law, although its operation was suspended for the duration of the war. No-one (at least on the nationalist side) thought that this would be for very long, but the passage of the legislation was crucial for John Redmond, the leader of the Irish nationalist movement. On 20 September he made a celebrated speech at Woodenbridge, county Wicklow, in which he said that ‘the interests of Ireland, of the whole of Ireland, are at stake in this war’. He drew out the high moral purpose of the struggle against the Germans and Prussian militarism: ‘This war is undertaken in defence of the highest interests of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, a reproach to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of her history if young Ireland [note the allusion here to 1848 and the traditions of Irish nationalism] confined their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores of Ireland from an unlikely invasion, and shrinking from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which have distinguished their race all through its history’. Stirring words indeed, and words which clearly found a response among many young Irishmen.
But high patriotic duty was not the only possible reason why men might join up. Another factor was a simply desire for adventure. For many at home the war offered excitement and the chance of glorious opportunity. Tom Barry, later to become a leader of the IRA in Cork, enlisted in June 1915. Seventeen years old, he said he ‘had decided to see what this Great War was like … I went to the war for no other reason than that I wanted to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel like a grown man’. This was nearly a year after the war had started, and provides some evidence that the recruiting rush of the early days does not tell the whole story.
And if Irish nationalists were responding to their ‘patriotic duty’ as articulated by John Redmond, so Irish unionists, too, in Ulster and elsewhere, also joined up for patriotic reasons. Having pledged their loyalty to the Crown and the link with Great Britain, they could hardly stand back when the ‘Mother Country’ was in its hour of need. ‘We do not seek to purchase terms by selling our patriotism’, said Carson. ‘England’s difficulty is our difficulty.’
There were also economic motives for joining up, as there always had been. Service in the army, after all, was a steady job, and one with a pension at the end. Even in wartime, with the heightened risks of military service, many men were undoubtedly attracted by the rates of pay which the military offered (and the family allowances which accompanied them). The August 1914 rush to the colours was also boosted by the fact that across Ulster many factories laid men off, or put them on short time, when war broke out because of uncertainties in the economic situation. Irish linen mills specialised in the quality end of the market—fine table and bed-linen, high quality shirting and so on—just the sort of products which people might stop buying (as they did) because there ‘was a war on’. Export markets in continental Europe and the USA were disrupted. Thus, just at the moment when there was a stirring and insistent call for troops, many workers were put out of a job, evidently making enlistment more attractive than might otherwise have been the case.
Nor were these the only possible motives for joining up. Some men enlisted through family tradition, for others it was merely a kind of emigration, though one which was not necessarily so permanent as going to America. Looking especially at big urban centres like Belfast, it is also evident that many men joined up in groups, with ‘peer pressure’ carrying them into the army with friends and work mates. By one account, Francis Ledwidge, the poet from Slane (and a socialist and nationalist), enlisted ‘on the rebound’ from being rejected by a sweetheart. Whether true or not, it adds another possibility to the wide range of motivations to joining up.
Looking at the recruiting figures, and taking into account the many possible reasons behind enlistment, it is impossible facilely or glibly to generalise about these fellows, about who they were or why they joined up. No single or simple explanation will do, and in many cases it must have been a combination of factors. Patriotic feeling might have been significant but not in itself sufficient to impel a man to enlist. Yet combine it with uncertain prospects at work and the urging of a next-door neighbour—‘Come on, John, it’ll be great crack’—and the lure might be irresistible. What, in any case, we can say about these men—who were both ‘ordinary’ and extraordinary at the same time— is that they became victims of circumstances well beyond their control.
Those who joined from the South were volunteers to a man and woman.
Minx1888.
I agree.People will think I’m a raving poppy smoker,or the derivative that comes from the poppy.
Red isn’t really my colour, I wear a daisy instead.
It’s individualist whether 1 decides to observe a minutes silence or not.
Everyone to their own.
I for1 will have no hun tell me or make me feel I shouldn’t.
My forefathers gave me that rite.
They picked up the gun were be it in france,Italy or even Ireland,they fought for freedom.
That’s all folks.hail hail.
Vhman -prayer said ,try keep your chin up .HH
Saint Stivs-I thought Lilyhammer was brilliant.
southside,
As I told you earlier, I will reflect on the innocents, because the board have forced me to consider the poppy politics at a football game, the same board who told us all to leave our politics at the gate.
Can you tell me how many English games had a minutes silence today ?
Kitalba, thank you!
Evening Everyone.
Hope as many of you are able to get to the match tomorrow and raise the roof in recognition of the Club’s midweek efforts.
Hail Hail
Oldtim67
Brit army caused havoc and death in the six counties,don’t wear the poppy,but give them donation.Dont think so.Not in my Name.
Canamalar
Did all of them not have one?
They cheat , their support are hard core bigots, they practiced a 100 year sectarian signing policy , their support have wreaked havoc the length and breadth of the UK and on foreign fields, MSM are their propagandists, they are a deid club , they have shed multi millions in a shameful liquidation and have not paid their dues . They show no remorse or embarrassment.
AND THEY LOOK DOWN ON US!!!
Shame on them , those stupid , stupid orcs.
Hail Hail
Oldtim67
Brit army caused havoc and death in the six counties,don’t wear the poppy,but give them donation.Dont think so.Not in my Name.
Well said oldtim.
Kickinthe-A minutes applause is totally inappropriate for Remembrance Sunday,imo the Club should have been stronger in the past to mark it with silence.Applause for an ex player possibly mate.HH
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children…………a great mhan once said
Just a thought but see when they talk
about the ‘War’ in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They are not really wars.
These countries were invaded.
I have often wondered why on everyday league business the atmosphere is sometimes like a morgue, yet euro games, are the total opposite.
If we don’t win the league, there won’t be nights like wednesday.
Just a thought.
Why not a tartan poppy,
to remember all who lost
there homes and lives
during the highland clearances,
or even a tricolour poppy to remember our descendants
who were poisoned, starved,
killed and made to leave there homes
and country during the famine…
I was going into M&S in Argyle St before the game on Wednesday and was waylaid by a Nun selling, would you believe it, Poppies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/nov/10/neil-lennon-history-celtic-barcelona
If you haven’t read it yet, read it now.
Like taking the side of the school bully for a quiet life
How many are wearing the poppy
As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I
There Armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No fife did hum nor battle drum did sound it’s dread tatoo
But the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell rang out through the foggy dew
Right proudly high over Dublin Town they hung out the flag of war
‘Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Sulva or Sud El Bar
And from the plains of Royal Meath strong men came hurrying through
While Britannia’s Huns, with their long range guns sailed in through the foggy dew
‘Twas Britannia bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free
But their lonely graves are by Sulva’s waves or the shore of the Great North Sea
Oh, had they died by Pearse’s side or fought with Cathal Brugha
Their names we will keep where the fenians sleep ‘neath the shroud of the foggy dew
But the bravest fell, and the requiem bell rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the springing of the year
And the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few
Who bore the fight that freedom’s light might shine through the foggy dew
Ah, back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I’d kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, When you fell in the foggy dew.
______________________
I will stand in respectful silence tomorrow.
What thoughts are in my head will be my own concern.
BT you will keep my friend :-) neverbeenflushedoutCSC