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CANADIAN AMBASSADOR KEVIN Vickers won praise from other attendees this afternoon, after he tackled a protester who began shouting at a ceremony to commemorate British soldiers who died during the Easter Rising.
Security had been tight in the area ahead of this afternoon’s event, which was invite-only. Politicians, the British ambassador and other invited guests gathered at Grangegorman Military Cemetery from shortly before noon, ahead of a ceremony that included readings of historical accounts, music and prayer.
However, shortly after the event had begun, a man started shouting loudly.
“He was shouting that it was a disgrace and things like that,” one attendee told TheJournal.ie.
Fair play to him, the first person up was the Canadian ambassador – he pretty much bear-hugged him and brought him off to one side before the Special Branch swept in.
Formerly the Sergeant-at-Arms at Canada’s parliament building, Vickers was named ambassador to Ireland in January of last year.
In October 2014, he intervened to stop a terrorist attack in the Canadian parliament – shooting dead a gunman who stormed the building.
Gardaí confirmed a man in his mid-40s had been arrested by gardaí from Cabra over a public order offence at the cemetery at 12.10pm today. He’s being detained at Blanchardstown garda station.
“The guards moved in immediately after it happened,” the attendee who spoke to us said.
It didn’t take away from the ceremony at all.
Solemn occasion
Official State events have been held this year to mark all deaths that occurred during the fighting in Easter week 1916.
For instance, wreaths were laid at six iconic sites associated with the Rising on Easter Monday last.
That followed Easter Sunday’s main military parade on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, and the previous day’s Garden of Remembrance ceremony “to remember and honour those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom”.
Charlie Flanagan, the foreign affairs minister, laid a wreath at today’s ceremony. Dominick Chilcott, the British ambassador, also laid a wreath on behalf of the British Government.
Politicians from other parties also attended – however Sinn Féin declined an invitation, saying it wouldn’t be “appropriate” to do so.
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So some people mocked something they opposed. And this is news how exactly?
@Norvik_1602:
Irish feminists like reading this sort of stuff. Don’t ask me why…but they do.
@Norvik_1602: you 100% would have loved those drawings if you’d been around back then
@Norvik_1602: it’s part of the Irish female history and how we got the vote. It’s gas that all the usual mocking that goes around women who just want equal rights were around then as they are now. Had they been in existence now they would have been called feminazies, etc to make them sound like Nazis therefore demean their plight. Who knew some men were so fragile even back then? Very interesting.
@Conor Paddington: They fought for middle class women only.
They had contempt for the lower orders.
The precise criticism levelled today.
“Markievicz died at the age of 59 on 15 July 1927, of complications related to appendicitis. She had given away the last of her wealth, and died in a public ward “among the poor where she wanted to be”.
Well, I’ll be. An article about men being upset over women getting votes and a couple of dudes, 100 years later, all over it telling us why it was a bad idea and that such feminism is harmful.
The irony is delicious.
@James Doyle: *ironing
They appear to have fought for basic rights (that many of the opposit sex took for granted) to be given to them by the state.
For that they were lampooned and ridiculed by people who had vested interests in things staying the way they were and who were ably abetted by partisan agenda driven publications that saw their request for institutional equality as a distraction from their own main agenda and so portrayed it as something that right thinking women in general didn’t even want.
Fair dues to them for persisting and winning out against the stacked odds.
It’s probably an inspiration to those who currently find themselves in a similar position in Ireland today. Well worth seeing.
@Nydon: They fought exclusively for middle class women’s rights.
They had contempt for the lower orders.
A sentiment echoed today.
@Battaz: You know this how? Did you ever speak to someone with the lived experience? My grandmother lived with me until her death in 1982. She was hugely involved in all the political arenas from 1912 until my father was born in 1923. She campaigned for voting rights for all women and was disgusted that it was only given to married women or women who had property and were over the age of 30. This meant that she was unable to vote until the 1924 elections and she never missed voting in an election after that.
Why is the word “suffragette” misspelled in the headline and most of the article?
@Ricardo Shillyshally: they’re two somewhat distinct groups, though obviously closely related. The Suffragists were the first wave of activists and were typically more peaceful. The Suffragettes came later and were and were more aggressive/militant in their methods. Both words are correct.
You could also do a piece on how female Irish Unionists who supported votes for women have been written out of our nationalists only please history books.
Suffragettes actually put back and damaged the cause of votes for women. It came about despite them, not because of them.
@Norvik_1602: well there’s a rewriting of history
@Norvik_1602: so wait! This wasn’t good enough to be news according to you yet you’ve commented twice and tried to change the narrative? Typical!
@Norvik_1602: your correct. First world war need for industrial workers was the game changer. Woman proved themselves as equals
@Deborah Behan: Tsk, Tsk, trying to silence male voices has gotta run contrary to your usual ‘diversity’ agenda.
Stop being so closed off from the world.
Censorship is disturbing.
@Battaz: how is replying trying to silence someone or even censor them?
Seriously? I don’t think that’s how it happened. Throughout history, most women have always worked. I had the impression that the Industrial revolution and various plagues and famines caused people to gravitate towards paid work instead. Later, the propaganda in English-speaking countries ran something like this: “The conscripted men are back in town, time to step down and give up your jobs to all the unemployed ex-soldiers.” Naturally no one wanted to resign and live on air. Then it became the law that married women at least had to resign and become dependants. Such a law was not made with the consent of working women, was it? No wonder they wanted a vote.
What the feminists love to leave out of the conversation is that most working class men didn’t have the vote either. Usually only property owners or higher professionals could vote. The process of universal suffrage was a gradual one (and it had to be gradual to match the slow educating of the wider population, remember most people couldn’t read or write), and it wasn’t some conspiracy against women.
@Fred Jonsen: Well it was probably a conspiracy against women in the higher classes to be fair Fred.
@Daniel Donovan:
Absolutely my heart bleeds for those upper class women but the point is the correct dimension to analyse voting history is class and education, not gender.
@Fred Jonsen: Correct. The thousands of men who were killed and maimed fighting for their country’s freedom in the First World war did not have a vote as they did not own property. Many of them lived in army barracks. Women at that time may not have had the vote but they did not have the obligation to go to the trenches to sacrifice life and limb. Men, most of whom did not have the vote either, did that for them and indeed the suffragettes were at the forefront of the White Feather movement who publicly shamed pacifist men who refused to go to war. Equal rights without equal obligations – a core value of the feminist movement even to this day.
Anyone else sick of hearing about this rubbish. The World Cup is on it’s all anyone cares about.
@6ljJQRRU: Yes, we are sick of hearing about the World Cup…
@6ljJQRRU: F off and watch the World Cup then. No one has a gun to your head! Oh you’d prefer to moan on an article about women? As you were.
Are you suggesting that women don’t, or shouldn’t have an interest in football?
What a sexist perspective you hold.
@JamesMcCarthy did nobody tell you that Ireland didn’t make it to the World Cup James
@Teresa Scanlon: don’t you know the World Cup is an elaborate feminist plot to get the guys looking at the bouncy ball instead of up skirting.
I’m sure many did and many didn’t. Identity politics is a layered matrix with horizontal socio-economic layers existing within every vertical identity. I suspect that just like today the lower layers were expected to remain in the background only to be called on if sheer numbers were required to bolster the aims of the vertical.
My point is more to do with the determination of any group to remove an institutionalized inequality where laws bestow advantage on one group above another. Institutionalized inequality is still prevelent in Irish society today.
The thousands of men who were killed and maimed fighting for their country’s freedom in the First World war did not have a vote as they did not own property. Many of them lived in army barracks. Women at that time may not have had the vote but they did not have the obligation to go to the trenches to sacrifice life and limb. Men, most of whom did not have the vote either, did that for them and indeed the suffragettes were at the forefront of the White Feather movement who publicly shamed pacifist men who refused to go to war. Equal rights without equal obligations – a core value of the feminist movement even to this day.
The subjugation of Women…..still happening today, all over the World.
Suffragists were decent legitimate campaigners for equality. Suffragettes were sexist, frustrated, terrorist trolls who who did a lot of damage to more than only the Suffragist’s campaign.
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