Ireland and the Spanish Republic (Donal Fallon Speaking) October 30, 2016
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The photograph on the video is of Gardaí inside Connolly House, which was attacked by a mob in March 1933.(Thanks to Donal Fallon CHTM for the photograph)
Ireland and the Spanish Republic.
On the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.
Speaker: Donal Fallon. Remembering the dead, fighting for the living: the Republican Congress & commemoration in 1930s Ireland.
UNITE, Abbey Street, Dublin, Thursday 20th October, 2016.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
There was a good film on Arté about the Spanish Civil war with a lot of original film footage with an emphasis on the International Brigades.
They seem to have been sent to the front lines of many militarily hopelessly planned actions.
Lions led increasingly by increasingly cynical Leninist donkeys, as the civil war went on.
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There is the Soviet interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, and there is George Orwell’s independent leftwing eye witness account in Homage to Catalonia. Anthony Beevor gives a more recent short military and political account from a conservative viewpoint in The Battle for Spain.
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There are lots on interpretations – no least the anarchist one. Where militarily you had the problem of the effectiveness of a poorly-armed democratic (and highly motivated) militia against the traditional well-disciplined and well-equipped army.
But the impression I got from the film was that the only person who understood militarily what was needed to win against the fascists with modern equipment was André Malraux with his cobbled together squadron of planes. Had there been a 30 more of them, the outcome might have been different.
Says the armchair general…
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Michael O’Riordan “was a machine-gunner in the battalion’s No 4 company which crossed the Ebro river at Asco on the moonlit night of July 25 1938. The attack took the enemy by surprise, and XV brigade reached the town of Gandesa, where, at the heavily fortified Hill 481 known as “the Pimple”, it was checked by heavy casualties.
Three days after the crossing O’Riordan was hit in the back by shrapnel from a German bomb. A citation for bravery from his commanding officer declared: “He carried his light machine-gun into every action and, when he was ordered to withdraw, he waited until the whole company had done so. His weapon was worth a dozen men. When he was wounded, he refused to leave his position until others had to leave it. Even then, he did not leave until he was ordered.”…
In Connolly Column (1979), his book about the Irish International Brigaders, O’Riordan described how the Irish organised a celebration to coincide with the annual Wolfe Tone parade at Bodenstown, Co Kildare. “Food was very scarce, but the Irish did not draw any rations for two days in order to provide the invited guests from other units with a banquet of black rice-bread and mule meat,” he wrote. “These were washed down with copious draughts of vino tinto which had been collected earlier in the evening in a well-scrubbed ash-bin from the nearby winery at Marsa. Concern was expressed at the overdue arrival of the wine but eventually the two deliverers arrived, none too steady, with the explanation that the bin was found too heavy when full, so they had to lighten the load!”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1519535/Michael-ORiordan.html
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