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Rare footage of inter-Celtic involvement in the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter rising has come to light.
The brief item which is accessible off the RTE website shows the Manx and Welsh contingents, part of a crowd of several hundred, which took part in an event organized in 1966 by the Republican Sponsored National Commemoration Committee.
Following the official parades at the GPO building in O'Connell Street, which was the focus of the Rising, the epublican parade marched from the Custom House to Glasnevin Cemetery.
Among their numbers was Joe Clarke an 85-year-old veteran of 1916 who together with other Irish republicans accompanied members of Celtic groups from Wales, Brittany, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Cornwall.
The event is recorded by the Welsh Republican leader of the Free Wales Army the late Julian 'Cayo' Evans in Roy Clews book "To Dream of Freedom - The Struggle of MAC and the Free Wales Army" by Row Clews - Lolfa Press
"The actual march was one of the proudest moments of my life. Scores of our boys from all over Wales had managed to get to Dublin. There were two big separate parades. The Free State parade, which the Plaid Cymru delegation marched with, routed for the Kilmainan Jail; and our parade, the Republican.
The Flag parties of each contingent led, with the rank and file following the massed banners. I felt tremendously proud to be carrying the Red Dragon that day. The Irish Republican Army with their pipeband and the old veterans headed the procession.
We came behind them and had a terrific reception from the crowds of spectators when they saw the Welsh flag. The Breton Liberation Movement followed us with their black and white flags, then the Flemish, the Mec Mannin (Manx Independence movement), Irish Americans, Cornish Republicans of the Mebyon Kernow (Sons of Cornwall),. French Canadians, Scottish Liberation Army, there seemed to be dozens of different groups on parade.
There was even a bunch of Glasgow Celtic football supporters marching behind their own flag, a tricolour with an Irish Shamrock centred - there's little doubt about that club's political loyalties.
Our route was from the Custom House to Glasnevin Cemetery"
The event is also recorded in a Celtic History Review issue (Vol. 1 Issue 2 - spring 1995) entitled "Ripples in the Tide: Evolution of Manx Nationalism"
"The first week of April 1995 a para-military funeral took place with all the trappings we have come to associate with television reports on the IRA. National flags were in evidence, the coffin flag draped, men in paramilitary dress and black berets.
The setting however was not Ireland. It was St Sulien's church on a weather beaten hillside in Carmarthenshire. The party had gathered to pay their respects to Julian Cayo Evans. Evans, thirty years earlier had led the Free Wales Army, one of a number of militant Welsh groups which had sought to import the "armed struggle" into Wales long before that generic term had gained the notoriety of recent years.
Evans (or Cayo as he was known) in addition to being a committed Welsh nationalist was committed to supporting other groups in the Celtic countries and elsewhere to achieve their freedom. He forged links with them including some Manx nationalists.
The various groups also established contact with members of the "old" IRA (what is now termed the Official IRA). In the early 1960s that organisation disillusioned, after many years of fruitless military campaigning and without the popular support which the repression of the Civil Rights movement would gift the Republican movement later, had decided to "dump arms" or demilitarise in todays parlance. Many of the struggling and emergent national movements saw an opportunity in this to acquire their own arsenals."
The brief clip can be accessed (using Realplayer) at:
J B Moffatt Director of Information Celtic League
14/11/06
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