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Post by theguvnor on Sept 12, 2023 15:43:01 GMT
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Post by theguvnor on Sept 12, 2023 21:45:55 GMT
A bit more history about this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nHYdhiDJ7kAlthough the oratory is religious in purpose it also manages to sum up the end of one phase of Irish history and the start of another. It was constructed to memorialize the Irish who died fighting in World War One. A few years after that conflict most of Ireland would become independent and many people simply would not pray for these people any more. I will but I have been called a traitor and a West Brit for doing it or noting that these men were as much part of Ireland's story as were those who fought in the War of Independence.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2023 22:21:23 GMT
It's good there are still those in Ireland who remember the many young Irish men who died fighting in the British Army in the First World War. I understand that given it was around the same time as other Irish men were dying for the cause of independence, those who died in the Great War were sometimes seen as traitors.
My history teacher at secondary school was an Irish Catholic from Kilkenny. A great teacher. Anyway, though he was Irish, he always said the British Empire was both good and bad and above all he was obsessed with the First World War and a strong supporter of remembering those, particularly New Zealanders, who died in the war. He once told me that when he was at school he was taught a very simplistic nationalist version of Irish history and that as he grew he up realised that narrative of the British as oppressors and nothing else except oppressors was nonsense.
I don't know if you are aware guvnor but in New Zealand the First World War is a huge part of our identity because we see it as a nation-building experience for us. 3,500 young New Zealand men died fighting the Ottomans at Gallipoli alone in 1915. For a small country of 1 million people to lose that many men in one place was catastrophic, especially as many more New Zealanders died in Belgium and France. There was a huge deficit of young men in New Zealand after that war that caused a demographic imbalance. My own secondary school lost hundreds of former students in the First World War. Our main secular holiday, ANZAC Day, is celebrated on the 25th of April each year, commemorating the date of the landings at Gallipoli in western Turkey.
In 1989, my grandfather invited two of the last surviving NZ veterans of the Great War to tea at his house - both of them were very famous men and one of them was a companion of Lawrence of Arabia. There are photographs of my grandfather and mother standing with these two men, both in their mid-90s at that time. In New Zealand they were heroes.
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Post by theguvnor on Sept 13, 2023 11:32:07 GMT
Were is he from in Kilkenny do you know? This is my father's home county. Yes I am aware of the importance of the First World War in Kiwi History.
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Post by theguvnor on Sept 13, 2023 11:37:11 GMT
Luke - This is my own small YouTube channel I am trying to grow. The first few videos I used text to speech but then I started thinking, 'bugger that for a game of soldiers' and you can see me speaking. You can an idea of the range of things I am interested in from it: www.youtube.com/channel/UCb8qLJ9-CzZLEcsz8mNskRA
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2023 18:26:13 GMT
Luke - This is my own small YouTube channel I am trying to grow. The first few videos I used text to speech but then I started thinking, 'bugger that for a game of soldiers' and you can see me speaking. You can an idea of the range of things I am interested in from it: www.youtube.com/channel/UCb8qLJ9-CzZLEcsz8mNskRAVery interesting, I was watching your Catholic / Orthodox video. That isn't how I imagined you to sound! I think you should continue to record your own voice - text to speech sounds artificial and is difficult to digest for long periods of time. I have a blog the link to which I haven't posted here but most of the articles I write for it end up on here anyway.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2023 18:29:10 GMT
Were is he from in Kilkenny do you know? This is my father's home county. Yes I am aware of the importance of the First World War in Kiwi History. I do not know unfortunately. He has lived outside Ireland for most of his life by now as he was born in the 1960s and taught at Catholic schools in England in the 1990s before coming to New Zealand.
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