Editor:
This Kinawley Fenian — and great admirer of George Washington, God bless him, for having kicked King George III out of America 250 years ago this July Fourth, with significant help of the Irish in America —welcomes Gordon Lyons, DUP Minister, into the Fenian Brotherhood (founded in New York in 1858).
He has progressed from being the GAA Communities Minister to full Fenianism.
I hereby nominate him to receive the Freedom of Kinawley Parish.
Little did I realize when I met Gordon at the Northern Ireland Bureau St. Patrick’s Day breakfast two years ago that this pleasant young man was on an iconic personal quest of rediscovery with regard to radical Fenianism - and bringing the Orange Order with him!
Let it be immediately remembered here that George Washington also stood for kicking England out Ireland and publicly expressed his admiration and encouragement for Irish rebels and that at that time there was no such racist, anti-Catholic, and artificial construct as “Northern Ireland” when everyone knew that Donegal was the most northern county in Ireland and that Ulster contained nine counties, not six.
Now admittedly, Gordon may be spending a bit too much money in helping the Orange Order to celebrate England’s most devastating defeat, but, come on now, let’s give the man a break and attribute it to the typical fervor of the recent convert.
Washington and the framers of the American Constitution were not just kicking a king out of America—they were rejecting the whole corrupt, undemocratic concept of a hereditary king or queen and the absurd, irreligious idea that the king or queen by right becomes the head/governor of an Established Church, as did wife-killer Henry VIII, he of the famous phrase "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" ( popular mnemonic device used to remember the fates of King Henry VIII's six wives).
You see, the framers of the American Constitution knew that by very definition, an Established Church would mean discriminating against many people, and there would have to be corrupt laws to protect that Church, as in England, like the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), in which a Roman Catholic is specifically excluded from succession to the throne.
And the Framers of the American Constitution knew that inevitably that would mean there would be a clause prohibiting a Black person being President of the United States, and they would have to tell the Big Lie, “It’s not because he is Black, it’s because a Black cannot be head/governor of the American Established Church”… And the President of the USA would have to swear as King Charles solemnly did to defend “Protestant succession to the American Presidency.”
Tony Blair, after he left prime ministerial office, and current prime minister Keir Starmer, years before he assumed office, both publicly declared that excluding Catholics by law from succession to the Thrones is blatant discrimination. Will Gordon Lyons and the Orange Order do likewise?
Fr. Sean McManus Washington, D.C.
The writer is founder and president of the Irish National Caucus
