Cindy Sheehan's Irish Interview & the story behind the story

[veggiemama]

After much effort--and sitting on this interview for nearly a month--no Irish print media have deigned to publish, although there was an agreement with a very left-leaning popular weekly that shall remain nameless. The reason for the media embargo here in Eire is probably due to the mention of the still unmentionable Laila Alataar and the current Minister for Justice's quote from ten years ago. I submit it here in hopes that both Irish citizens and Irish-Americans will get a chance to read it and learn just how Casey Sheehan's story brings this brutal war home to Ireland.

~~~~~

Sheehan to Sheehan

By RONAN SHEEHAN

Ronan: Welcome to Dublin!

Cindy: Thank you. It's nice to be here. I wish I could stay longer and it was under better circumstances.

Ronan: We wish you could, too. Cindy, my name is Ronan Sheehan, and I come from Dublin, and my family come from Dublin--on my father's side for a few generations, then from Kerry, and on my mother's side for many generations, and believe it or not, we can go back in law to the sixteenth century.

Cindy: Wow!

Ronan: That's a lot of law cases. My father was a lawyer, four of five of his sons are lawyers, my sister Kathy's a theologian and my son Luke just qualified from Trinity in Biblical Studies. But we're all Sheehans, and when we saw you on television, we wanted to know what happened to one of us. In Dublin, there is a church called the Pro-Cathedral which is the chief Catholic church, and on the front of that church there is an inscription from the St. John's Gospel: Perhibere testimonium vertitate--"bear witness to the truth"; we Sheehans would like to know what happened to our kinsman, our brother; would you care to give us your testimony?

Cindy: Casey was 24 years old when he was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. He was . . . the Sheehans' can be very proud of Casey. He was an altar boy for 10 years; he was an Eagle Scout; he wanted to be a Deacon in the Catholic Church--we all thought he would be a priest, but he wanted to get married and have children. He was a virgin when he died; he wanted to save that for his wife on their wedding night as a wedding present; he often told me that, and I though that was a real amazing thing. You know in the United States, that's not usual, even if boys stay virgins, they don't usually talk about it. I know a lot of kids in the U.S. lie about their sexual conquests just to say that they've had them. But Casey was very adamant. He said it was against his moral beliefs to have pre-marital sex.

He was a big brother to Andy, Carly, and Jane; he wanted to be a Chaplain's Assistant in the military, but when he got to bootcamp, they said that specialty was filled, so he would have to be a humvee mechanic or a cook, and he chose to be a humvee mechanic--and that's what his specialty was the day he was killed in Iraq.

He cam through Shannon when he was going to Iran, and there was an employee there who noticed his name, and so they talked about the Sheehan family name, where they came from, that they were law enforcement officers in Ireland. We had basically known a lot of that, but it was nice that someone took the time to be kind to Casey.

Ronan: So he was identified in Shannon because of his name?

Cindy: (weeping). Yes. I wonder if she thought that he was going to be killed. But she knows because someone from The Irish Times talked to her about it. I wonder if those people in Shannon think about it--which ones of those kids are going to come back in a body back, and how many innocent Iraqis are they going to kill before they are killed?

But Casey was proud to be an Irish-Catholic, proud to be an American, and he was a good boy. He volunteered on the mission that killed him. He wanted to go save his buddies.

~~~~~~

http://counterpunch.org/sheehan01102006.html

I have permission from the author for the entire interview to be posted anywhere. If anyone needs to verify that, email me at [e-mail]

Slan!

[Lerkfish]

1. thanks for posting this!

great interview.

what a salt of the earth family are the sheehans, at least mother and son.

[stellanoir]

2. wows

great interview. thanks for posting it.

[veggiemama]

3. Your most welcome!

Here's another piece by the other Sheehan--Ronan--you might enjoy. It's a splendid review of Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilization" with a uniquely Irish twist. Again, the motive is to make Ireland live up to its self-proclaimed--and formerly deserved--status as THE human rights voice of Europe. Given the daily shenanigans at Shannon Airport and Baldonnel Airfield, Ireland--and anyone who wants bragging rights to Irish ancestry--needs some reminding of Irish history.

The "Sunday Independent" requires a login, so use bugmenot, but here's snippage and linkage:

~~~~~

http://tinyurl.com/a4zro

ROBERT Fisk's magnum opus is the fruit of a lifetime's work in
journalism in the Middle East, effectively from the Sixties to the
present day.

Every statement is rooted in actual experience - whether of the
landscape itself, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the plains of
Lebanon; his experience of war; or his experience of a vast range of
individuals, from British and American spies to Osama Bin Laden.

From time to time, Fisk makes an analogy with the experiences of his
father, Bill, in the First World War. And he frequently refers to
Ireland - after all, he is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin.

The Iraq invasion was, from its outset, of major concern to the Irish
people, despite the Government's efforts to play it down. Our role in
the ghastly policy of "extraordinary rendition" is now directly
confronting the Government - because other European countries, led by
Germany, are raising it.

It seems apposite, therefore, for the purpose of this review, to
concentrate upon some of the aspects of the Middle East which Fisk
considers touch upon Ireland.

The English and Americans today seek to perpetrate a legal fraud upon
the people of Iraq which is similar to that perpetrated by their
ancestors upon the people of Ireland and other countries.

Desperate to cloak their illegal invasion and the crimes which attend
it with legitimacy, the occupiers force a puppet government to sign a
declaration or an agreement with them to the effect that the actions
of the army of occupation are not subject to Iraqi law and neither are
the actions of their various camp followers - ex-SAS men disguised as
security contractors, Texas oil-riggers disguised as Iraqi oil
riggers.

In this context, it is no felony to kill an Iraqi. It is interesting
that the Iraqi official in Basra who had recently ordered the arrest
of SAS men - only to see the jail in which they were held demolished
by a British tank - refused to comply with the Britishlegal fraud.

He affirmed his, and therefore his people's, authority by ordering
their re-arrest.

Wylie's Irish Land Law records that Ireland was the first country to
which the English Common Law system was exported. Many 13th-Century
cases were decided upon the basis that "it is no felony to kill an
Irishman".

Fisk's penultimate chapter follows the build-up to the invasion,
especially the US posturing at the United Nations. The UN Security
Council alone could have sanctioned the invasion. It emphatically did
not do so. The invasion was illegal, and remains so.