SUPERB WORK Authors PJ Clarke and Michael Feeney pictured at the launch of their book ‘Mayo Comrades of the Great War’, which has helped re-awaken interest in the conflict. Pic: John O’Grady
Going back to the war front County View
John Healy
FOR dozens of Mayo families, the history of the Great War achieved a new relevance with the launch last year of the superb work of research by PJ Clarke and Michael Feeney.
‘Mayo Comrades of the Great War’ stirred the ashes of family involvement in the First World War, as well as reawakening interest and a legitimate pride in the part played by so many unsung Irish soldiers in the fight for the freedom of Europe.
These families, and all with an interest in the Great War, will have an excellent opportunity for further developing those links when Castlebar based Military Heritage Tours organises a trip to the Arras/Somme/Ypres battlefields this August.
The conducted tour will depart from Shannon Airport on Saturday, August 25, returning on the following Wednesday, and the packed programme will offer participants a unique, first-hand experience of that theatre of war.
Military Heritage Tours director Donal Buckley says that the trip will give priority to the people who want to visit the grave or memorial of fallen family members. And, he says, it will be very much an Irish tour, escorted and guided by an Irish colonel.
Among the ceremonies lined up for the tour will be a wreath-laying ceremony at the Somme battlefield by the descendants of Pte Garret Hughes, who died on January 28, 1917. At Ypres, meanwhile, the descendants of Lance Corporal M Lynch and Pte G Redmond, who died in the summer of 1916, will lay wreaths.
Other highlights of the tour will be a visit to the grave of Pte John Condon of Waterford who, at fourteen years of age, was the youngest soldier to be killed on the Western Front. The group will also pay their respects at the grave of the Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge from Slane, Co Meath, who fell in the service of the Royal Inniskillin Fusiliers. Ledwidge was a nationalist who believed that Home Rule for Ireland would follow at war’s end. He served with many other Irishmen at Gallipoli prior to falling in France in 1917.
Also at Ypres there will be a visit to Sanctuary Wood Trench Museum where the original landed family returned here at the end of the war and fenced in the front-line trench which ran through their land, and which marked the point where the rival powers engaged each other in combat.
The Messines Ridge battlefield, also due to be visited, in where the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions fought together to capture the largest gains by British Forces up to that point in the war.
The tour will visit the Island of Ireland Peace Park, inaugurated jointly by President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth II, together with King Albert, to commemorate all Irishmen who fought in the Great War. At Pilckem Ridge and Boesinghe, the tour will visit the location where in 1998 excavations discovered previously unmarked trenches and dugouts, and the remains of nearly a hundred soldiers which had lain there undiscovered for over eighty years.
The final highlights of the tour will be the attendance and wreath laying at the Menin Gate ceremony. This impressive nightly ceremony has taken place every day since 1927, except during the war years, and is regarded as one of the most moving tributes to the war dead.
Outside of the planned ceremonies, Military Heritage Tours will facilitate friends or family who wish to visit a particular grave, and will organise an appropriate wreath-laying ceremony in each case.
ROCKING AT KNOCK ‘STILL haven’t found what you’re looking for’, the posters are asking, and what they have in mind is a youth festival with a difference.
Forget Oxegen, forget the Electric Picnic, forget Glastonbury – the Knock Youth Festival is, according to the organisers, where it’s all going to happen this summer.
The last weekend in July is the target date for what is hoped to be one multi-thousand gathering of the young which is being promoted as the highlight of the year for the young Catholics of Ireland. The festival will be packed with music, song, inspirational talks, workshops and plenty of craic, all centred on the Mass and reconciliation services.
Organised jointly by Knock 2000 and the Knock Youth Ministry, intending patrons will not need to worry about admission or accommodation costs.
The weekend is donation only, with food and basic accommodation laid on, and eight free buses running from various centres around the country.
Slane, RDS and Marlay Park, step aside. You’ve got a rival!
THE LOST LITHUANIAN FOR the small Lithuanian community in Mayo, Tuesday last was a day which commemorated a bond which had been all but forgotten.
When Felix Waitkus flew solo across the Atlantic in 1935, and was forced to ditch his plane in a small field in Cloongowla, just outside Ballinrobe, it made world headlines. And although the pilot had been thwarted in his original aim to fly from the United States to Lithuania, he was still hailed as a true hero.
After three days spent recovering in Ballinrobe, his aircraft Lituanica II was packed in containers and shipped back to America. He himself was given a traditional ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York, with his name going into the Hall of Fame of his native country.
Last Tuesday, the Lithuanian ambassador, Izolda Brickovskiene, travelled to Ballinrobe to a function in the local library to honour the achievement of Felix Waitkus.
Among those she met was local businessman Patsy Murphy, whose late father, Christy, was among the townspeople who converged on the field at Cloongawla.
He took a large number of photographs of the stricken plane and its pilot, which still remain in the family archives.
Mr Murphy’s mother, Josie, now in her 99th year, has vivid memories of the excitement and drama which surrounded the Waitkus adventure, and of the huge international media interest it generated over many months.
It is now hoped that a suitable plaque will be erected in Ballinrobe to ensure that Lithuanian ‘forgotten hero’ will not remain forgotten for much longer.
FINE GAEL TAKES ANOTHER SCALP IT must be a galling experience for Fianna Fáil, so long used to power as if by right, to see the chain of office as Mayo’s first citizen being filched by Fine Gael year after year.
Seamus Weir last week succeeded Gerry Coyle as Mayo Cathaoirleach, thus affirming the trend initiated in 2004 when Enda Kenny’s men wrested decisive control of the Áras an Chontae chamber. To rub further salt in the wound, Fine Gael proceeded, for good measure, to take the Leas-Cathaoirleach spot as well. There was no vote, no challenge, no heated passion as in days of yore. Fianna Fáil were simply unable to field a team. In football parlance, it was a walkover for Fine Gael.
The pattern of dominance was set with the local elections of 2004, when Fine Gael for the first time finished with 15 seats against Fianna Fáil’s 12. The remaining four seats are held by one each for Sinn Féin, Labour, a Fine Gael-leaning independent and a Fianna Fáil-inclined independent, meaning that the scales remain firmly tipped in Fine Gael’s favour.
Central to all of that was the Fine Gael success in garnering four out of the six seats in both the Castlebar and Ballina electoral areas, an achievement subsequently mirrored in the general election results of a month ago.
With the next round of local elections due in two years time, and with Fianna Fáil still in a state of disorganisation on the ground, it is little surprise that the party thinkers are getting seriously concerned about what the future holds. An apparent dearth of eager young candidates, a lack of cohesion among sitting councillors, and the morale-bruising reality of being reduced to one Dáil seat out of five, are factors which have to impinge on party morale and spirit.
Whatever the extensive restructuring of the party over the past year may have achieved, it has signally failed to raise the fighting spirit of the elected councillors. The resurgence of Fianna Fáil at national level – and the winning of three-in-a-row for Bertie Ahern – has not manifested itself at local level in Mayo.
The party has no option but to get its house in order if it is to have any chance of re-establishing its old dominance in Mayo. Whether it has the leadership to make that happen is a question which will be put to the test over the coming months.
COLLINS’ POLITICAL EVEREST THE appearance on RTÉ’s ‘Questions and Answers’, and his contribution to the debate, of Castlebar auctioneer Tom Collins, may have been of some help in his quest for a Seanad seat. But the affable former president of his professional institute is under no illusions as to the mountain he aims to climb.
Collins is seeking office on the Industrial and Commercial Panel, but as an ‘outside’ nominee – in other words, lacking the endorsement of a party – his will be an uphill struggle.
In a contest where the old boy’s network of county councillor contacts, a nod of approval from a serious politician or the recognisability of being a former TD can make all the difference. Those outside the circle have their work cut out.
Collins will be largely depending on his contacts in the auctioneering business to open doors for him across the country. He also has an extensive network derived from his highly successful tenure as head of Gaisce, the President’s awards for achievement.
The Castlebar man, it has to be said, is sparing no effort in what he says will be a one-and-only bid for the upper house. He has trudged the highways and byways of the country and knocked on the doors of as many councillors as he can possibly reach. He is realistic enough to know that the vast majority of the electorate will be under strict instructions from their respective parties as to how their votes must go.
Tommy Collins can only hope that, in the peculiar lottery which is the PR voting system, the ball might bounce kindly for him.
