King Charles and Queen Camilla on the balcony of Buckingham Palace following the coronation.
Posted By: October 28, 2023
While England still has foothold in Ireland nothing will change
King Charles and Queen Camilla on the balcony of Buckingham Palace following the coronation.
[Note: This is now how the letter, heading, and photo, are presented on the “Opinion” landing page of Irish News website, Saturday, October 28, 2023]
Fr Sean Mc Manus. President, Irish National Caucus. Capitol Hill, Washington
Letters to the Editor. Irish News. Belfast. Friday, October 27, 2023
I FOUND myself having a daytime, wide-awake nightmare reading “On This Day in 1973: Ted Heath’s ‘agony’ over north’s divisions” (October 23). The buffoonery, empire hubris, condescension, and Big Lie all came back in living color.
Said Heath: “All I am asking is that they [the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland] try to understand each other and learn how to live with each other.”
What blatant hypocrisy and colonial patronization. It was England’s historical policy to ensure that their Protestant-proxies would help England keep the Catholics down – for centuries in the whole of Ireland, and later on in Northern Ireland. On December 23, 1920, the King-in-Parliament, not the Protestants of Northern Ireland, enacted the “Partition Act” – absolutely engineered to keep the Catholics down, and preserve England’s foothold in Ireland.
(I use the term England because we can hardly blame Wales or Scotland, despite horrible individuals like Lloyd George and Lord Balfour. It has always been about England. The British formal phrase “King in Parliament” (or Monarch in Parliament or Crown in Parliament) is used to describe the British legislature, composed of the Sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons.)
It would be one thing if this had ended in 1973. But the entire world, on May 6 2023, was hit in the face by King Charles’s coronation oath, blatantly vowing, with blithe indifference and imperiousness, to uphold the infamous anti-Catholic 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement explicitly excluding a Catholic from ever being king or queen of England.
Let nobody please try to use the old canard that since the monarch is also Governor of the Church of England, the monarch cannot be Catholic. That’s like saying in court: “Your honor, I had to have that illegal gun to commit the robbery” – using one crime to justify the other crime. Church and state should be separate, and in modern democracies, there should be no established Church.
If the pathology of anti-Catholicism is still enshrined and justified in the British constitution and in the highest laws in England (forming the foundation stone of the royal family), can anyone really expect that extreme Protestants in Northern Ireland will ever have a change of heart, for as long as England controls any part of Ireland?
