Yitzhak Shamir and Michael Collins
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was born Yitzhak Yzernitsky in 1915, in the small Polish town of Rzhnoi. In his family he was known by the nickname “Itzel.” The first name Shamir chose for himself in the underground was “Michael”-an interesting choice, for Shamir took the name from the Irish underground fighter Michael Collins, whom he greatly admired. Michael Collins, who had sprung de Valera from prison, headed the British list of wanted men. That Shamir identified himself with a professional revolutionary who had fought both the British and his own people-a tough, practical organization man rather than a man of words is not surprising. But it is worth recalling that Collins was the person largely responsible for signing the 1921 pact with Britain which established the Republic in the southern part of the island and gave up the provinces that are now called Northern Ireland. Shamir should be compared not with Michael Collins but with the revolutionaries who ambushed Collins at Beal na Blath and killed him as a traitor for giving up a part of his ancient homeland.
Reprinted from “The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir” by Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books.
Irish Studies Summer Program
The Institute of Irish Studies Summer 1992 program offers three residential interdisciplinary courses to be held in Trinity College Dublin. Though presented at the highest academic standard, summer school programs are intended for anyone with an intelligent interest in Ireland and things Irish. No detailed prior knowledge is necessary or presumed.
June 14-27, Celtic Roots and Irish Branches concentrates on Irish history from the earliest settlements to 20th-century independence, with emphasis on genealogy and studying the Irish at home and the diaspora of an estimated 70 million worldwide.
June 28-July 11, From Mystic Origins to Contemporary Inspiration discusses the rich heritage of myths in Ireland and the profound influence they have had on Irish writers from the Elizabethans to the present day.
August 2-15, The Celtic Muse studies the Celtic influence upon Poets and Dramatists in Ireland, North and South.
Fees are IR£655 per course. This covers tuition, campus accommodation (13 nights with breakfast), excursions, and some entertainment.
Those interested should telephone: 011-353-1-2692491
Editor’s Note: The contact information may be outdated.
Three Tonys for ‘Lughnasa’
“It seemed a time to get out the big cannons,” said producer Noel Pearson. If Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa won the Tony for best play, Pearson would read W. B. Yeats’ short poem “He Wishes For the Cloth of Heaven” as his acceptance speech. He hoped the audience of theatrical luminaries before him and the millions more watching on television would appreciate the connections between Yeats, a founder of the Abbey Theatre, and this present Abbey Production that had enchanted audiences in Dublin and London and now could receive Broadway’s highest honor.
Then Michael Douglas opened the envelope, “and the best play is Dancing at Lughnasa!”
“I got a ten second blank,” says Pearson. “Then I stood, As I went up the stairs I decided to drop the poem. But some instinct said ‘Doit.’ Still, I was scared to read a poem on such an occasion. After all, I’m not an actor.”
First Pearson thanked the playwright Brian Friel who was not present. “Like a fine wine, he doesn’t travel.” He thanked the cast. And he mentioned Joe Harris, the American producer who “urged me to cross the pond with this play.” The audience applauded. For Pearson, it was now or never.
He reached into the inner pocket of his tuxedo and brought out a small book.
“Had I but heaven’s embroidered cloths,” he read, “Enwrought with golden and silver light. The blue and the dim and the dark cloths/Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: but I being poor have only my dreams/I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
Dreams — the theme of Dancing at Lughnasa. We are pulled below the surface of the hard life of 1930’s rural Donegal into the inner lives of each of the Mundy sisters. We feel the tensions between the dreams they have buried and the ones they still hold and when that tension explodes into the pagan dance at Lughnasa, we know the exhilarating victory of dreamers even when the world seems to defeat them.
Brian Friel’s aunts inspired these characters and their lives ended in seeming tragedy. Yet here was Noel Pearson accepting the third Tony Award given for the play based on their story.
Brid Brennon, “Aggie,” won the Best Featured Actress award. Patrick Mason was named Best Director. He said when he accepted his award, “It was a long journey from Ballybeg to Broadway.” The journey itself had been a dream.
First of Brian Friel’s, then of the actresses that created these women by drawing on their own family memories (see Irish America, March 1992).
The Abbey Theatre has nurtured many great plays that have become classics. But there was some fear that this play was so rooted in a particular Irish experience that American audiences would not respond. Noel Pearson’s belief carried the play across the pond and into Broadway legend. Audiences have filled the theater, the critics have raved and now, every major group — The New York Drama Critics’ Circle, The Drama Desk, The Outer Critics Circle, and Theater World had named it Best Play and cited the “outstanding ensemble performance.” So when Noel Pearson read the last lines of Yeats’ poem, it was directed at all those that had embraced the play. “I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
Pearson thanked those who had tread softly and finished by wishing everyone good night in Irish.
Actor Richard Harris summed it all up in the gala celebration at Eamonn Doran’s restaurant. “You can’t beat the Irish. Noel Pearson is an example of a great Irish charac-teristic. We can’t be beaten if we just hang on long enough.” Indeed there were many Irish Americans among the other winners, too. Robert Falls of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago which received the award as best regional theater, traces his ancestry to Dublin where he is going to bring the Goodman’s production of The Iceman Cometh complete with Brian Dennehy, who won rave reviews for his portrayal of Hickey. Dennehy and Falls visited Ireland recently and stayed in Mallow, County Cork, the homeplace of Brian Dennehy’s grandfather.
Daisy Egan, the 12-year-old from Brooklyn who won a Tony last year for The Secret Garden, and was a presenter at this year’s awards, spoke to Irish America of her Irish father.
And even Vincent Gardenia drew on an Irish source for the most humorous mispronunciation of “Lughnasa” — “We were at a luncheon together,” says Rosaleen Linehan who was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as “Kate,” “and I said ‘people are having trouble with the title.
Someone actually called it ‘Dancing at Lasagna.’ He pinched my joke. But he was welcome to it. It was a great night for all of us.”
– By Mary Pat Kelly
Patrick Sloyan: Uncovering Desert Storm
Newsday’s Patrick Sloyan started his journalistic career in the U.S. Army but the Pentagon was far from pleased when he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Operation Desert Storm. PATRICK FARRELLY talked to him about covering the Gulf War and his illustrious Irish connections.
When Newsday’s Pat Sloyan arrived in Saudi Arabia in September 1990 he wanted to go to work reporting on the buildup to the Gulf War.
But there were problems, chief among which was that the Bush Administration wanted to control the coverage of every aspect of the war. “Right then and there you hit a stone wall if you wanted to do any serious journalism. They blocked your every move,” he said.
“I would ask them day after day if I could go out with army troops and watch them do night maneuvers, and they would say, no, but do you want to watch the Marines? And I would say, no, I don’t want to watch the Marines, Then they would say, do you want to watch the jets, and I would say, no, I want to see the army doing night maneuvers. So I just went off on my own and found some soldiers and did my own stories.” Later when Sloyan was covering Operation Desert Storm the situation remained the same. “When the war started the army went to great lengths to hide the killing of the Iraqis. There wasn’t a single picture of it, no video of it and no eyewitness accounts of it. They did that by forcibly restraining reporters – in some cases beating reporters and threatening them with guns.”
“They had a system where you had your copy reviewed by the soldiers and they then transmitted it. Well, during the ground war nobody’s stories got relayed. They got ‘lost’.” That goes for video, film, and news stories. Some guys risked their lives getting those things and they never got anywhere,” Sloyan said.
In April, Pat Sloyan, now a 55-year-old veteran reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Gulf War.
This most coveted prize in journalism was awarded not for the stories that Sloyan did in that first month in the fall of 1990 or for his later reporting when he went back for two months when the war began in January 1991.
Sloyan got a Pulitzer for the job he did when the rest of the media had moved on to the next story.
“I knew that a lot had been covered up. So when I went back to the States I took some time off and started looking into things,” he said.
In May 1991 Sloyan broke a number of stories about key aspects of Desert Storm like the fact that the biggest battle of the war started two days after the cease-fire. He also reported that a lot of Iraq’s best troops and their best tanks managed to get away, and how an aggressive campaign to assassinate Saddam had failed.
Sloyan also began to suspect that a lot more U.S. troops had been killed by so-called “friendly” fire than the armed services were admitting. During the summer he talked to families who had been misled about the cause of death of family members who had fought in the Gulf.
“I focused on the largest incident when seven men were killed by friendly fire, 40 wounded and five tanks destroyed in one night battle,” Sloyan said. He discovered that over half the deaths (52%) during the ground war were caused by friendly fire, the highest percentage of any campaign in U.S. military history.
It was while he was working on that story that he talked to some men who were involved in the initial breach of Iraqi lines in the desert. What he discovered made front pages around the world.
“Instead of the soldiers attacking the trenches they put tanks on either side of the trenches with big ploughs on the front that were supported from the rear by a Bradley fighting vehicle which could straddle the trenches. While the Bradley fired its machine gun into the trench line the tanks would plough sand into the trenches. So the Iraqis would either surrender, be killed, or be buried alive. And they did this for two days over 70 miles of trench line.”
Sloyan talked to the colonel in charge of the operation and asked him how many Iraqis had been buried alive. “‘How many, a couple of hundred?’ I asked. And he said, ‘Oh no, a lot more than hundreds.’ And I said, ‘Well how many,’ and he said, ‘For all I know we buried thousands.’ There was an infantry division there, which they estimated at 8,000 men, and 2,000 of them surrendered. What happened to the other 6,000 guys? Well… They didn’t lose a single American soldier in that operation because all the troops stayed in armored vehicles. It was very brutal, and it was what war was about. I wrote about the real face of war and that’s what they sought to hide. They were trying to make war acceptable.”
Sloyan blames the “pool system” of reporting organized by the Pentagon for the fact that Americans were kept in the dark about what was really happening during Desert Storm. “The press establishment was conned into the pool system. The big papers and the networks thought, ‘hell, we’ll get in the pools and screw these other guys and we’ll see everything and they won’t see anything and they’ll have to use our stuff.’ But the fact is that if you got in the pool you were screwed,” he said.
What happened at the breaching of the Iraqi trenches was a classic example. “There was a pool of five covering the breach, of UPI, CNN, a newspaper reporter, a stills photographer, and somebody else. But the commanding officer said, ‘Keep those guys back, I don’t want them seeing this.’ The pool got there two days later and they asked, ‘Where are the bodies?’ And the army said, ‘What bodies?’ And that’s how they did it. That’s how the vibrant, tough, defiant, vigorous fourth estate screwed itself. But I refused to participate as did a number of other reporters. I knew it was the kiss of death for a journalist.” The Pentagon effort to defeat journalism and keep the real war away from the American public succeeded brilliantly.
Sloyan agreed, but with one proviso. “Except to Newsday readers,” he said with obvious pride.
In 1955 Pat Sloyan enlisted out of high school into the army where he spent most of his time in Germany. “Because I could type I was given the job of putting out the battalion newspaper. I was taught journalism by a couple of guys who had degrees from Northwestern and Columbia.
After the army he worked for the Albany Times Union, the Baltimore News Post, UPI, Hearst Newspapers, and finally Newsday in 1974. For five years from 1981 to 86 Sloyan covered Europe and the Middle East. During that time he covered Ireland during the Hunger Strikes as well as some of the big international stories like the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Marine deaths in Beirut, the Falklands/Malvinas war, and the assassination of Anwar Sadat, for which he won the Association of Newspaper Publishers Award.
Pat Sloyan’s grandfather and four brothers left Knock in County Mayo to come to the United States. Three of them became cops (to keep the rest out of trouble it was said) and his grandfather got to own a small hotel on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. “I’ve a great picture of the five Sloyan brothers taken on St. Patrick’s Day – huge guys, big heads, big hands, big everything,” Sloyan said with a laugh.
Although he was born in Stamford, Connecticut, he lived all over (Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana, and Italy) because his father, James, built powerhouses. For a time they stayed in upstate New York where his mother, Annamae O’Brien, came from. “The place I’ve lived longest is the Washington, D.C. area where I’ve been based since I went to work for UPI in 1960,” he said.
Sloyan and his wife, Phyllis, have four children, Nora, Amy Louise, John, and Patrick.
Pat’s brother James, an actor, married Deirdre Lenihan, a first cousin of Brian Lenihan, the former Irish foreign minister who was defeated by Mary Robinson for the presidency of Ireland. Two of Sloyan’s cousins are prominent members of the Gardai (Irish police), one of whom, Tom Sloyan, is the county’s assistant commissioner. There is a lot of family still in Knock where the Sloyans visit from time to time.
Pat Sloyan has encountered what he describes as “great hostility” from the army establishment since his Desert Storm stories appeared last year.
“They’ve been conducting a smear campaign against me saying that my reporting had already been done in Army Times. I don’t pay it much mind, though.”
Besides winning the Pulitzer, Sloyan also won the George Polk Award – a prize for which both the broadcast and the print media compete – for his Desert Storm reports.
“I beat out the networks. That gave me a lot of pleasure. It’s good when an ink-stained wretch beats out the hairspray.”
Study of Famine Impact at Villanova University
An extensive study project on the effects of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s on the United States will be inaugurated in 1993 by the Irish Studies Program of Villanova University near Philadelphia.
The impact of the Famine on the demography, economic development, religion, and cultural outlook of America has only been partially studied in fragmentary fashion, according to historians. Most Irish Americans are only dimly aware of how deeply the influx of Famine refugees altered the country’s cities and social structure, compared to the high public consciousness of the Holocaust that enveloped European Jewry, according to Dr. James Murphy, who heads the Villanova program.
“This vast happening that so profoundly changed both Ireland and America is barely commemorated today, and our perception of it is limited, yet it is deeply influential in our history. We hope to sponsor a series of lectures by top scholars, an exhibit, a design competition for a monument, publication of scholarly work on the subject, and gatherings where a chronicle of remembrance for families who emigrated during that period can be compiled,” Dr. Murphy said.
No single economic and social calamity on this scale has affected America’s past so notably and yet remained so little regarded, Murphy argues.
Villanova University was founded by Augustinian priests of the Famine generation in 1843. The role of Augustinians in aiding Famine refugees and the remarkable response of Philadelphia’s Quaker community in carrying out Famine relief activities will be part of the record to be studied.
– By Dennis Clark
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the June 1992 issue of Irish America. ♦
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