The Battle of Hulloch and the Easter Rising

My adventure is spiced with meeting interesting people with interesting stories. An Irish colleague told me an interesting story about Irish history, with a personal irony folded in. We often hear of the human sacrifice in the Irish revolution of 1916, especially during the Easter Rising. The Easter Rising was a failure costing approximately 380 lives but did lead to eventual Irish independence from England. At about the same time, the Germans were gassing members of the Royal Dublin Fulisers in Hulluch, France. This was the first gas attack of the horrific World War I.

My colleague says "As my grandfather was fighting in the trenches with the Royal Dublin Fulisers, I regret that we, the southern Irish, don’t remember their courage and sacrifice. There were 35,000 Irish killed in WW I who are more or less forgotten. The victors write the history books and in this case it was the Irish Republican Army (the original IRA) who fought and eventually won independence. My personal irony is that my other grandfather was in the IRA shooting British at the same time as my maternal grandfather was in the British Army. Should the two of them have been in Dublin in April 1916, I might not be here saying this!!! Thankfully, my other granddad was from Cork (250 km south of Dublin!)."

This sort of imbalance is frequent all over the world.

As I write this, the BBC and CNN Europe airing in Stockholm are dwelling on the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shootings and suicide. They are interviewing the shooter's former teachers, roommates, classmates, etc. trying to understand the psychology of the shooter, a Korean immigrant named Cho. They are evaluating and scrutinizing the gun laws in the US. It seems ironic that 33 people die tragically in the US, a country of 400 million while the ticker at the bottom of the TV screen says 166 people died in a suicide bomber blast in Baghdad, Iraq, a much much smaller country. If they did a psyscho-analysis of the Baghdad suicide killer equivalent to the one afforded Cho, I think we'd all learn a lot: the West and the Islamic world. Instead we over-simplify it as a horror of war or the insanity of fundamentalism or whatever....

Ah, I wax political, sorry.