Galway In Days Gone By
1922
A nations agony
The news which it is our melancholy privilege to convey to our readers this week is sad reading. Irishmen who but yesterday lived in brotherly comradeship are in death grips.
It is not a fight with a foreign enemy, but a fratricidal strife. And it must leave its inevitable trail of bitterness, which may sour the opening years of a land restored to nationhood after seven and a half centuries. Hence, it would have been better if the struggle could have been avoided, if the constitutional way of settling our own differences had been chosen.
The people have stated their wish and will. Surely in a civilised country it should be the supreme law?
The politicians, too, seemed to have reached mutual understanding, whereby the advantages already gained would be secured to the country, and it was common property that the army was on the point of arriving at a working arrangement.
In Galway City, the two sections had, some earlier incidents notwithstanding, worked admirably together. It is of a piece with the national tragedy today that men who but a week ago were doing police work in the City, and doing it admirably, should now be ranged against brothers in the recent struggle.
But those who grumble against the destruction of national property should take consolation from the outstanding fact that at a time of acute tension and trial, every precaution was taken locally to ensure that no Irish blood was spilt, no person endangered, and looking out upon the wreck of Dublin, they should thank God and hold their peace.
None the less, there is the poignantly tragic feeling that those for whom – blood being thicker than water – we had gained a sincere affection since they came amongst us no longer as hunted men should not be working together for the common weal instead of strangling the economic and national life of a country that for years to come will need the services and the strenuous work of every single son.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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