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ireland, irish, ulster, ireland, irish, ulster, Sinn Féin, Irish America

Irish Holocaust museum needed

(John Coulter, Irish Daily Star)

Buck the Northern Ireland Office out of Hillsborough Castle and convert it into Ireland's much-needed Holocaust museum.

Yesterday (Sunday) was Remembrance Sunday when we commemorated the millions who served and fell for the English Crown in conflicts around the globe.

November 11 marks Armistice Day when the guns of the Great War fell silent, ending four bloody years of terrible slaughter which left an entire generation of Irishmen in their graves.

The Belfast Agreement also effectively brought to an end eight centuries of sectarian butchering across Ireland – so the island fully deserves a globally renowned Holocaust museum.

It should be based on London's impressive Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition to the six million who perished in Hitler's death camps.

The Hillsborough Castle Holocaust Museum would also undo Ireland's other Hidden Holocaust – the thousands of Irish-born soldiers airbrushed out of British military history by hate-filled Irish republicanism.

Ireland's war dead lie in many British military cemeteries across the globe, yet in their native Ireland, for centuries it was if they never existed.

It is only since the turn of the new millennium that the Irish government has even begun to officially mark the graves of Irish war dead buried in the Republic.

Some of those who lie in the South even won Britain's highest gong for bravery – the Victoria Cross, having served in bloody conflicts such as the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny in the 19th century.

And such an Irish Holocaust museum could end the daft row surrounding the future of the old Maze prison.

Unionists have expressed fears part of the old jail complex near Lisburn could become a shrine for republicans commemorating the 1981 Hunger Strike.

Britain's Imperial War Museum has German and British artefacts in the same building. Pictures of Hitler are located near Churchill and Monty.

If the Brits can have their war heroes next to the Nazis, surely Unionists and Republicans can commemorate their respective dead in the same building?

The Hillsborough Castle complex could also house the memorial to the 3,000 dead of the Troubles. But knowing Ireland, some dead bodies are more sacred than others.

Imagine a section on the East Tyrone IRA members shot dead at Loughgall beside another section on the 18 Paras killed at Warrenpoint.

Think of the storm which would erupt if a commemoration to Catholic victims of the Shankill Butchers or Billy Wright's LVF was next to those murdered by the Provos in the Kingsmills or Teebane bus massacres?

And Gordon Brown's cash-strapped government may be reluctant to give Stormont additional dosh to build a section to the victims of the Nazi death camps.

What about a memorial to the thousands of Boers who died in British concentration camps in Southern Africa?

How about another memorial to the 300 plus British soldiers – more than two dozen of them Irish-born – who were executed by firing squads during World War One because they were suffering from shell shock?

What about marking the 20 million people butchered by communist tyrant Joe Stalin in Russia?

How about remembering the hundreds of Christian missionaries who have been slaughtered over the ages – especially the dozens murdered by supporters of African crackpot Robert Mugabe in Rhodesia?

And we definitely need a memorial to the victims of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as well as the thousands of Christians murdered by the evil tyrant Saladin during the Crusades.

November 10, 2009
________________

This article appeared in the November 9, 2009 edition of the Irish Daily Star.

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