Have you checked whether he married his GF?. And as for marriage certificates, I met a chap through a local genealogy group who has some examples of fake certificates that were available in most towns and cities. His oldest was one from the 1840's.

Fact is, with the huge rise in social mobility the industrial revolution gave to people, it was far easier for people to marry two, three or even four times without divorcing a previous spouse as who would know you in a new town?...

We have no paper documentation from the time. He moved from Lambeth to Lancashire so it is possible fake documentation was available in London but bigamy was quite a serious crime as was forgery so safer to just call themselves man and wife. His real wife appears to have had some contact, she continued to use her married name and call herself 'Married' until after his death when she called herself 'Widow'. She became a hospital matron so suspect she was quite a strong character.

He was a joiner / carpenter, the union regularly published a summary of the state of trade in different areas so he might have been able to find out work prospects and get help there.

They died quite young and my Grandmother, aged 17, effectively became the head of the household with seven siblings (one an infant). Two of her sisters went into an orphanage and then emigrated to Canada along with a brother. Another sister was with their Grandmother in rural Yorkshire in 1881, 1891 and 1901 but don't know whether she just happened to visit in April or whether she spent a lot of time there.

They were not civilians. They were members of the auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.

What truth do you believe they were prevented from speaking?

They were a flippin' occupying force. Since the Irish Republican state was declared, the British Army de facto became an occupying force.

I am not sure the episode about Boris Johnson was very pertinent either. Were you just as critical of that episode?

Listening to many of his crimes, it would appear that he was more of a psychopath.

They weren't executions, they were murders. To be "executions" there would have had to have been trials.

We had the same in our family, my Mother swore blind her family came over from Ireland, but my wife did the family trees and found they were all farm labourers from the Home counties.

On the subject of the IRA, I was at a conference where a rep form another company told me that their factory in Ireland was built on a site where De Valera made an important speech, and in the early 80's it was an anniversary of the speech so the Powers that Be in Ireland wanted them to close the factory so they could have speeches etc.
The owner agreed on the proviso that he was made an "honorary member of the IRA", which is a huge honour in Ireland apparantly. And this was at a time when the Provos were blowing up horses in London.

It seems you claim that anyone killed by the IRA was 'executed' and anyone killed by the legal authorities was 'murdered'. Any civil war is a nasty business, as was often said in the more recent IRA terrorism 'Big Boys' Games, Big Boys' Rules'. If you go around murdering people then don't be surprised if you get the same treatment.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The IRA were feared by most people in the Republic during the Troubles. It may not be widely known in the UK but they actually didn't recognise the Irish government or the Irish state and their stated aim at the time was to establish a 32 county Marxist republic. They were engaged in widespread criminality within the Republic, including numerous bank robberies and kidnappings to fund their terrorist activities. The attitude of most Irish people towards them was one of fear and revulsion.

They were executed under martial law by General Maxwell of course. At the time there was considerable disquiet, even in Britain itself going as high as PM Asquith who quickly realised that court martials in secret and the subsequent executions may even have been illegal under British law.

The British government moved to stop the summary executions but the damage was done : Britain's credibility (imposing martial law on the city of Dublin and executing the leaders of the Rising) was left shattered in Ireland.

I grew up in Ireland and I'm pretty sure that's not true, in fact I always thought it was illegal to be a member of the IRA (provos that is), in fact I remember as a kid hearing on the news every now and then that someone was arrested on suspicion of being a member of the provos.

*Edit - just found this on wiki - The IRA was a proscribed organization under the terms of the Offences Against the State Acts passed between 1939 and 1998 in the Republic of Ireland and under equivalent anti-terrorist legislation in the United Kingdom, making membership of it a criminal offence. In the Republic, conviction for membership can take place in the Special Criminal Court (where three judges hear cases without a jury, on the evidence of a Garda superintendent or higher rank) and carries a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment.


I agree Eurostar, in fact didn't they murder a Garda in Limerick during a post office raid or something, his name escapes me at the minute, I want to say McCabe but think that was the recent whistleblowers name. I'd say the majority of people hated them & were definitely afraid of them.

Pity we weren't allowed to do the same in the recent lot of troubles, our forces had to fight with one hand tied behind their back. The government were advised by the military that if we took out a few known I.R.A. men, that would leave the I.R.A leaderless and paralysed, but the government didn't dare do it for fear of upsetting the Americans.

They did indeed. They shot dead Detective Gerry McCabe during a bank robbery in 1996 and also a Garda and an Irish soldier in 1983 during one of their numerous kidnappings. Anyone who thinks there was widespread sympathy for the IRA in the Republic during the Troubles is wide off the mark. They were a criminal organisation and membership of it was illegal meaning automatic imprisonment in the maximum security prison in Portlaoise. They didn't recognise the Irish government or Irish state as legitimate and actually wanted to overthrow it.

Errrrrr, no. It really isn't.

You were told a massive porky pie there, I assume it was an American company.

There was no connection between De Valera and the post-independence form of the IRA either. By the 1940s, they were already a terrorist organisation completely opposed to his government (and they even tried to forge links with Nazi Germany) and he responded with draconian laws and interning them.

Wow! Seriously? You seem to be making an awful lot of claims about things that I never actually said. let alone implied. Wouldn't it have been better if you had actually read my posts, before shooting off with things that didn't actually happen.

I remember it being brought up on a programme once, what would people think if it was found that it might have been arranged for a well known IRA bomb maker to be killed in an explosion at his home. From what I remember most people would not have been bothered. This was at the time that the opposition politicians kept making a fuss about 'shoot to kill' policies.

Worth thinking that if they had been planting their bombs in Israel there would have been a lot of very new blocks of buildings in Dublin and other Irish towns now (and perhaps Boston!) as the IDF don't bother about niceties and just bomb suspects homes and tough if the rest of the building is destroyed.

As above, they were fighting with one hand tied behind the back with people in the Garda and Irish government actively assisting the terrorists and RC church of course.

Really? So you wanted people to be dragged out onto the street, in the middle of the night and shot in the head as a legal execution? Without trial or due process?

And some people wonder why we become targets of terrorists.

Blimey, you do cover an awful lot of ground, don't you. It really is a pity that you know very little about the subjects you are touching upon.

Any collusion between the Garda and the IRA was tiny to neglible.....the IRA were regarded as a serious threat to the security of the state and were widely involved in criminal activity such as bank robberies and kidnappings, which brought them into direct conflict with the Irish police.

Not sure what you mean by the Irish government assisting the terrorists. They were even more draconian in their treatment of the IRA than their British counterparts : Sinn Fein were completely banned from the Irish airwaves from 1968 to 1994 and hundreds of IRA men were imprisoned for their membership of the organisation.

Not of that will register with those who refuse to see. They would rather perpetuate their hatred and bigotry and refuse to study history, just in case they find out the truth.

You need to read the history books before posting such a wholly inaccurate statement!

During the period I referred to Ireland was part of the UK so British troops were not an occupying force - You can't logically occupy your own country!

Ireland was partitioned by an Act of the British Parliament, which created the six-county Northern Ireland. The post-ceasefire talks led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921. This treaty ended British rule in most of Ireland and, after a ten-month transitional period overseen by a provisional government, the Irish Free State (not Irish Republican State as you wrongly refer to it) was created as a self-governing state with Dominion status on 6 December 1922. At that time British troops left what became Eire.

Boris Johnson is British and, whether you like him or not, has character. The programme about him was of interest to me so why would I be critical?

Brendan O'Carrol is a foreigner whose only claim to fame, as far as I can see is that he comes from a family who were active terrorists in Ireland pre partition. Oh, I also believe he dresses up a woman in a very feeble comedy programme!

Each to their own!