Faith and Fatherland: An Interview with Gerry McGeough

The Burkean sat down recently with veteran republican activist Gerry McGeough. McGeough has been a long-time stalwart of nationalism, republicanism, and an advocate for the Faith and tradition. Gerry has written a number of books and was previously the editor for the Hibernian magazine while also serving time in jails in the north, Germany, and the United States. 

Throughout the interview we covered the history of nationalism which formed the bedrock of Gerry’s experience and how it moulded the local character in Tyrone, we discussed the role of the Faith in both people’s personal lives and the life of the Irish Nation, and also where it is we think Irish nationalism must look.

Unfortunately, owing to the ever-present threat for nationalist views expressed to be used against individuals by our political enemies, a large portion of this interview had to be removed as a result of legal advice obtained. 

Indeed: “who dares to speak of ‘98?” 

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The Burkean: So if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and your background in republicanism and nationalism.

Gerry McGeough: Well my name is Gerry McGeough, I come from an area where our family has lived since the mid-1600s at least on record and possibly before that, and it is an area that is steeped in Irish nationalism and Catholicism. Not far from where we’re sitting there are the ruins of an old friary and that friary was established by Hugh O’Neill back in the late 1500s to give refuge to Franciscan friars in Armagh who had been ousted from their mother house. And it was a hotbed of rebellion for a number of generations, specifically in the 1640s when the 1641 rebellion broke out and the epicentre was essentially in this area. One of the friars, Tarlach Ó Mealláin, was instructed to keep a record of the rebellion and the course of the war, the 1641 war, and he did that and it was kept in a little journal called Cín Lae Uí Mhealláin, or locally known as Father O’Mallon’s Diaries.

The original exists still, it’s in Cork in the University of Cork but it’s a very flimsy item as you can imagine, how it survived the centuries is anyone’s guess. But it’s there and it’s written in the East Ulster dialect of Irish which has since died out, and it’s kept almost in a note form, and I think it was obviously intended he would write a book later or a wider report but it does give a blow-by-blow account of what was going on in the 1640s and it’s remarkable, from my point of view, to see how the Irish even though they had been brutally suppressed in the early 1600s by the Elizabethan armies and so forth, they still had a fight in them that was remarkable.

I mean. They were by no means beaten. And you see that martial spirit reflected in his writings and it was really only towards the end of the 1600s that they were finally beaten down, the Irish up in the north here. And this is a period in our history that really, really needs to be addressed. It has to be delved into to see how we went from being a very strong, staunchly independent Gaelic zone which was part of the wider Gaeldom that took in parts of Scotland in the Highlands and Islands and all the way down to the various pockets of resistance that existed throughout the south down to Munster. Nevertheless, the spirit shall we say, was preserved all down the generations and that Cín Lae Uí Mhealláin, when I was young people were speaking about it by the fireside. So we were well conscious and aware of it.

And of course, we were sitting only a few miles from where the battle of Benburb was fought and that was a tremendous battle, and in many ways encapsulates Irish history. But we won, the Irish Catholics won the battle fair and square and it would’ve taken just one more battle, and even British historians recognise this, but one more battle and we would’ve taken Ulster back again.

The Plantations would’ve been undone, and Ireland would’ve become an independent Kingdom. However, at Kilkenny, the ‘Anglo-Irish sect’ for want of a better term cut a deal with the English Royalists behind the backs of Eoghan Ruadh and Giovanni Rinuccini, who was the Pope’s Ambassador to Ireland, who was militantly pro-Irish and very strongly Catholic as you can imagine. And the armies, what’s called the Irish Army of Ulster, had to move south to move against their own so-called Confederates in the South who had cut a deal with the English and were undermining the whole struggle. So the outcome of that of course was that the enemy regained its foothold and its strength here in Ulster and the rest is history.

All of this is what was fed into me as a child and I was conscious of this from a very, very early age and growing up, I was born in ‘58, my mother was from Monaghan just across the border not many miles from here which was very common on both sides of the border it was a very interlinked community, and I remember once going down to see my grandmother and we couldn’t get across because the Moy bridge, the original bridge at Aughnacloy, had been blown up during the ‘56 campaign which was still ongoing and I remember seeing it lying in the river. And that was, I suppose my first real memories of the fact of the political instability which existed here. And the other one was the barracks at Aughnacloy nearby, around the doors and the windows were all sandbagged. Now that was almost quaint by comparison to what it was going to be like in 10 years’ time when it couldn’t be seen for fortifications and walls and wire and gun posts.

I was always very conscious of this Irish nationalism but really it came alive I should say in 1966 when the fiftieth anniversary of 1916 Rising was being celebrated, and we watched a programme which, if you watch it later in life you’d almost squirm at how it was presented but back then for kids watching it, it was pretty avante-garde, it was the absolute cutting edge. It was a programme called “Insurrection” which each night, based on each day of Easter Week it was, would have reports based on what was happening, a mockumentary if you like of what was going on in the GPO, what was going on here and there and so on, but we were riveted to it as kids. And I was staying at my grandmother’s in North Monaghan, myself and all my cousins there were dozens of us, and each day the following day we would go out and re-enact the rebellion in granny’s hay shed. So we were already being pre-programmed for what was coming down the line as it were.

And of course a short time later there were the civil rights marches, 1968 the first civil rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon which was the local town here in this part of Tyrone, and my parents went to it and it was the starting point of what effectively became the Troubles. And, we were immediately politicised by a few things, a few weeks later we had Derry where the marchers there were batoned off the streets.

But even in the interim period, growing up you were conscious of the fact that we were very much second-class citizens. I think Jemmy Hope, the old United Irishman who was writing back in the 1840s which was 40 years or more since the ‘98 rebellion, said that unless you’d lived through those days, you couldn’t possibly begin to explain it to anyone else. And the same applies in this case too, we had a situation whereby our neighbours here, our Protestant neighbours were members of the B Specials, a so-called reserve police force but that’s not what it was at all, because you didn’t have to be intelligent to join, you didn’t have to be fit. 

You could be as short or tall or fat or thin as you liked, as long as you were a Protestant you were eligible, and they would stop us at night time, their own neighbours, and ask us who we were, where we were going and they wore these black uniforms and were very intimidating characters with their 303 rifles and their pistols. And you were made conscious from the very beginning that we were a monitored second-class citizen. And they referred to us derogatorily as the “minority community.” Despite the fact that in this area we would’ve been the majority but that’s neither here nor there.

So we had no rights at all and we were very conscious of that, we were very conscious of being pushed down and held down and we were getting no help from the South, so we did feel very much an isolated group of people. And I suppose in my grandparents’ generation they could never get their heads around the border, because it would be like going from Wexford into Carlow, or Carlow into Kilkenny, two normal counties, and then suddenly there’s a border between them. People found it very difficult to understand it and the older generation could never understand it and it was hard for us to understand how they in turn saw themselves as this very wide Catholic Nationalist community which stretched from West Cork all the way to Antrim, but now suddenly they’d been hived off because of Partition, and that they were an abandoned minority.

So that was a traumatic experience for all of them and we shared that effectively. And that’s why one big, big issue here that applies to us as Nationalists, and one of the reasons why I’m so strongly pro-life is that numbers count. Numbers. Where you have the numbers, you have control. And we didn’t have the numbers and I know what it’s like as a minority you got tramped over, and we were discriminated against at every level. Well into my teenage years at school, apart from being picked on by the British military at that stage, we knew that we were a minority in our own country and that’s something you have to be very conscious of.

When the Troubles broke out the whole place was rapidly militarised, and I mean rapidly militarised, it went from a fairly… Like okay you had the B Specials and all the rest of it but it was a very lowkey Police State at that stage, to one that was very much a blatant one. I remember the first British troops coming in and they were coming in with convoys with ferret armoured cars and Saracens and you name it, jeeps and lorries and the whole works. They were getting lost and didn’t know where they were, stopping in the middle of nowhere asking people where such and such a town was. They went into every nook and cranny, every little town and village they could get into to establish forts, and of course, the real reason was to keep us down.

But I want to make it clear that I didn’t join the Republican Movement, as some people say, because I was oppressed or because we were economically put down or anything. We were reasonably well off, we couldn’t complain in that regard. My parents worked hard and we were farmers, and what motivated me wasn’t because I got a kicking or because I was pushed around. I was motivated purely and utterly and completely and totally by patriotism, by what I had seen of the 1916 guys, of what I was aware of about the Nine Years War with Hugh O’Neill and the 1641 Uprising so to me it was a very classic case of “Here I am and Ireland is at war and it’s my duty to fight” and that was it. I was patriotic and I wanted to serve. There was no other motivation.

We hear some modern-day Shinners talking about how men died so we could have abortion clinics. No. That’s wrong. That was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Or that men died so homosexuals could marry each other, no. Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, there was nothing as appalling to the people here of East Tyrone as the whole concept of homosexuality which was associated with the English so-called “upper”  class and British intelligence and was a perversion associated with them. And now they’ve managed to make it so that everyone seems to think this is quite alright, well I haven’t changed my principles and that is a decadence aimed at undermining our society and our whole nationalism, just as abortion is aimed at undermining our numbers. Because if you bring British abortion clinics and introduce them, with the collaboration of Sinn Féin and English politicians, into Nationalist towns what happens? The majority we have finally gotten, and I believe Catholic Nationalists are finally in the majority, but we have finally gotten to that stage and what do they do? They start cutting down our numbers so they will drop precipitously. So this is something every Irish nationalist should oppose, tooth and nail without any reservations and without any apology. That form of Weimar decadence will not build the Irish Nation, at all.

And you know what really annoys me is that there are men who I know, courageous men, men who took on the British Army, who were willing to fight them, and who had a backbone. And they’re shivering in their boots because some shrill little feminist with a degree in Gender Studies screams at them that they must support abortion, instead of standing up and telling her or him as it may be to sit down and be quiet. They should be defending the rights of our unborn Irish children. If we can’t defend our Irish children, we don’t deserve to have a Nation. It’s as simple as that.

But the day will come when the veterans, who were young men and women in their teens and twenties who fought the British, will be recognised as the greatest of the Nation. Those were young men and young women who have been shamefully neglected, shamefully maltreated, particularly by the Party that built itself on their backs. Sinn Féin is an absolute and utter and total and complete disgrace. Sinn Féin is shouting about the rights of transvestites, about the rights of homosexuals, about the rights of abortionists, they’re not standing up for the rights of the unborn and above all else, they’re not standing up for the rights of the men and women who fought for Irish freedom against the British War Machine. That’s an absolute blight on their record.

As a patriot I have not changed. I believe that the Irish Nation depends on the Irish people itself and that we must have a strong Nation but that to have a strong Nation we need a strong people. And our people don’t know their own history, they’ve been deliberately denied that. Once you study and understand our own history and where we came from, we cannot be anything other than a patriot.

I’m a qualified teacher and I remember when I was going through the teacher training in Dublin, instead of having young kids do projects on Pádraig Pearse or Eoghan Ruadh or Brian Boru or some great patriotic hero, they were doing them on idiots like Bono and Gay Byrne. Doing your project on Gay Byrne, in the name of God why? And I’d had many an argument with them and the people in charge of it said they were following European directives, and of course, they were, the European Union wants to get rid of all sparks of nationalism in every member country so we could forget our past and become members of the new regime.

Patriots cannot be anything other than nationalistic. We cannot be internationalist or Marxist, because Marxism is contradictory to Irish nationalism or any other nationalism, it is an internationalism that defies and wants to crush down on the locals. It did it in the Soviet Union where all the local nationalities were suppressed, and it wasn’t a happy time for all concerned. We must be proud of our own Nation, and the Irish Nation as far as I can see is at a very low ebb because there’s not a spark of patriotism out there. It’s in certain people here and there, but it’s not being allowed to be developed or expressed. As soon as it is expressed things start to change. That’s why they’re silencing so many people, cancelling people, and you name it, like controlling the political parties that might’ve had a chance of bringing nationalism to the fore.

Ireland, I’ve always argued, had its destiny derailed at Clontarf. I believe the death of Brian Boru and his son and grandson, really was a massive setback and that’s a thousand years ago. So we still haven’t gotten back on track and we need to have a centralised Nation, and we also need to consider from an economic point of view that the island of Ireland is only one-ninth of the national territory which stretches way out into the Atlantic which apart from the marine life includes huge deposits of minerals and wealth of that nature which needs to be exploited not by the European Union but by the Irish Nation. But for some reason or other, we have failed to grasp the fact that we should be a maritime Nation. Right, we’re not living in the middle of Europe or the middle of Africa, we’re living on the edge of the Atlantic, which I think has a lot to do with what happened to Brian Boru and the fact he never got to build a navy. We have failed to become a maritime Nation and that’s where our focus should be, on the seas around us. That is the economic future for all our people. And the question is of course “well how do we get there” and we need a spark for rekindling the national spirit within the people. And vitally important, and Boru recognised this, is that the sovereignty of the Nation is inextricably linked to the Faith of the Nation, the Catholic Faith. Without a Christian ethos, we’re nothing and history speaks for itself. Ireland was a pagan country where all kinds of abominations were performed up until the time of St Patrick. Christianity stopped all this and effectively codified civilisation through the Brehon Laws. Christianity brought the essence of civilisation to the Irish Nation and gave us a concept of nationhood that we still draw upon.

But now we see at every turn they’re trying to abandon the Catholic Faith, to take God out of the equation and also rewriting history – people saying we were oppressed by the Catholic Church, what planet were these people on? They were not oppressed, the Church was oppressed and suppressed for centuries through Penal laws but the priests stood with the people. Priests who were hunted down like wolves hung, drawn, and quartered when the time came, and they still stood with the people which is what brought the Faith so close to the people. The people refused the soup. Had they become Protestants they could have gotten on economically but they didn’t, they stuck with the Faith, and now with this current generation they can’t get away from the Faith fast enough and have now resorted to the barbarity of human sacrifice through abortion, and all other kinds of perversion imaginable. So that is not good, the Irish Nation is not in a good state, North or South. To be united under those circumstances would be pointless to be quite frank. As a Northerner and someone who has fought for Irish unity all my life, I would be absolutely appalled at becoming part of the regime in the south because it’s just the antithesis of everything that I stand for.

The very first thing that needs to happen in the event of a united Ireland would be another referendum on abortion and on homosexual marriage, I call it Satanic marriage because it is a perversion of Christian marriage. All of those things need to be re-examined and overhauled before we get the Nation back on track again. So that’s my opening statement.

The Burkean: We were talking about Benburb and how it moulded the character of yourself and locals here. My own grandfather would walk his children around town in Dublin pointing out historic nationalist and republican landmarks, and most people seem to have lost that, to have lost their connection to the English language version of their history nevermind the Irish language version. Do you think it’s that Anglicisation of Ireland through the language first, that has led to the rot within our society?

McGeough: Yes. Absolutely. The Irish language in many respects was a barrier and protected us, protected our ancestors anyhow. When we have no linguistic barrier, we are immediately susceptible to the culture of another country. One thing I find absolutely appalling is the obsession Irish people have with three things: English soccer, English soap operas, and the English so-called royal family. Now if they’d trouble understanding the English language that obsession would be a lot weaker and we’d be much more proud of our own rich culture and our own rich heritage and rich history. And it’s remarkable that Irish nationalism has survived at all, that the Irish have maintained that sense of separateness, but the language is crucial. And once it gets lost, not just is the language lost but also the history that goes with it, the various placenames and why they’re given those names and the figures associated with them, that all becomes lost. And I think that’s a huge tragedy and it is a national scandal. And we can make all kinds of excuses for us losing our language but at the end of the day, people stopped speaking it.  And we were ashamed of it.

I was once told by an old friend of mine, who has since died God rest him, who was a great Gaeilgeoir and a great Republican, and a strong Catholic. He used to go around Tyrone when Irish was still spoken in Tyrone, in fact, I met one of the last native speakers back in the late 1970s but he travelled around in the 30s and 40s by bicycle trying to locate Irish speakers and at one stage he was shot by the B Specials.

They used to periodically take potshots at people as target practice knowing they were Catholics. He was wounded in his leg and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. But anyway he was on one occasion up in Carrickmore, which is up in the centre of the county, on Good Friday and looked around to see if there were any native speakers, there had been a lot of old speakers in that region. And he saw an old lady coming down from the Creggan district towards Chapel for Good Friday. She was wearing a shawl and was a very old woman so he went up to her and said “An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?” and she immediately recoiled and said “Indeed I have not!” She was absolutely repelled. But the fact is she understood and she’d used English with the Irish structure “I have not.” But because the language had become so associated with poverty and backwardness and stupidity, she was affronted to be addressed as an Irish speaker, she was denying it. And of course, that was common enough across the country, people were denying their roots. That’s why it disappeared like snow off a ditch, in a rapid way in a short space of time. And that’s such a tragedy.

The Burkean: We were talking about abortion, the collapse of Irish families, the collapse of numbers. Do you think they’re symptoms of the rot within, the dying of a species? Abortion is legal in Turkey but there’s not widespread abortion, do you think that the internationalisation of the Irish people is what’s causing our demise, or is there something else that’s merely a symptom of?

McGeough: It’s one of the factors there’s no doubt about it. When that so-called abortion referendum, the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, in the south took place and all those people were applauding the massacre of unborn children that was about to happen, was appalling. It doesn’t even bear thinking about. But a friend of mine was telling me “now we’re so proud, now we can be just like the rest of the Europeans.” I mean where do you even begin to address the likes of that? So we’re now like the rest of the Europeans, we can kill our own children and make ourselves extinct within a couple of generations is basically what they were saying.

Keep in mind the English have been trying to exterminate the Irish, to exterminate us native Irish, since they came here effectively. And they were using dungeon and fire and sword, famine and plague. Emigration was the greatest weapon they’d ever had, and emigration was what killed off the Irish language and sped up its total decline. We didn’t learn that lesson and now we’ve turned around and the English are laughing because we are now doing to ourselves what they’ve been trying to do to us for centuries which was to wipe us out, the generations yet unborn. There’ll be no brave young Irish patriots coming forward to fight for the country when they’re lying cut up in a bucket at some abortion clinic. There’s more to the whole psychology behind it and there’s a spiritual dimension to it.

When people start killing their own children, they have given up. There is no sense of them having nationhood anymore. They really rejected everything when they rejected God and became possessed by the demonic. And this is a huge victory for Hell. 

People can say what they like but I make no apology for being a Catholic, a traditional Catholic, and I see a spiritual war taking place all around us. Not just here in Ireland but right across the world, and this is because the Faith has weakened, the defences we had, the True Faith, are breaking down and the demonic is flooding in. Nothing that happens on this Earth happens on its own, it has happened already in the spiritual realm. This is why people like myself are gathering together and are going out and spiritually taking the fight against the enemy. We are going out praying the Rosary, which is our greatest weapon, in towns and villages right across the north of Ireland at the moment, but elsewhere in the south too. We have been down to the Hill of Slane quite recently and other cities and towns across Ireland. And that’s going to increase because this is part of spiritual warfare. We won’t have the Irish Nation ever until we restore the balance. Well, until there’s a victory over the demonic.

St Patrick chased out the snakes and that wasn’t just symbolic, and nor was it just not symbolic, a lot of the neo-Pagan groups are going to Croagh Patrick and the Hill of Tara and bringing snakes with them and reintroducing nighttime rituals like fire burnings and witchcraft because they’re trying to bring back the demonic which existed here prior to St Patrick where our ancestors were wallowing in darkness. So we have to overcome that, to bring back the light of Christianity which was a powerful and a good thing. The mission of the Irish Nation is to evangelise, it is our mission to be a light for the world. Here we are with a tiny little country with a sparse population back in the 500s, we had missionaries everywhere. We re-Christianised Europe going as far east as Ukraine, and from Italy to Iceland. Everywhere in the known world, you had Irish missionaries establishing monasteries and re-Christianising the local kingdoms, and they were doing a great job because we had the power of Christ behind us.

The Anglo-Saxons considered the Celts, the Irish Gaels, as their older brothers in Christ. And it’s not widely known but there was actually a good relationship between the Gaels and the old Anglo-Saxons. Harald Godwin, the guy who was shot in the eye at Hastings, he was on the run for a number of years and where were they on the run? Dublin. They were on the run in Ireland and they had strong contacts in Ireland, they weren’t the problem it was the Normans who were the problem who came in and caused all the trouble for everybody. That’s neither here nor there but it’s worth keeping in mind that the Irish were seen as a bastion of civilisation and Christianity and that’s exactly what we were.

But the people weakened in 600-700, monasteries started turning on one another and raiding each other and fighting each other and all sort of decadence crept back in again especially amongst the so-called aristocracy and the outcome was that we were scourged against by the Vikings. We had them for two hundred years and we all know what they did. Sometimes they take it as a bit of a laugh but it was certainly no fun at the time, the Vikings really were a brutal outfit. There’s a disease that’s prevalent among Irish people around the world and it’s found in Ireland, Scotland, England, and the east coast of America, and also in Denmark and southern Sweden because so many Irish slaves were brought there to end their days in brutality by the Vikings. Dublin was one of the greatest slave metropolises in the Viking world. There was at any one time a thousand slaves sitting waiting to be sold into North Africa or wherever it was they were to end up. But this triggered a disease – something to do with the liver but it’s unpronounceable for me at the minute and has to do with iron. It’s due to the stress from that period and a lot of Irish people and families still have it.

Anyhow when we were beginning to get back on track again and the Faith was re-established with various Synods one way or another, low and behold the aristocratic people get involved in decadence again post-Brian Boru and we were hit with the Anglo-Normans and we all know what happened with them. We’d just about gotten over that and the Plantations came next, all kinds of scourges and all kinds of chastisements came because the Irish people turned their backs on God, and it’s only when we turn back again and become involved and identify strongly with our Christian roots that we begin to flourish as a Nation. And the most powerful expression of that is the one that happened in the late 1800s onwards.

Now various rebellions took place like 1798 which was Masonic. Those guys, the United Irishmen, were heavily involved in Freemasonry. Henry Munro was the President of his local Masonic lodge in Lisburn and the rest were all the same, they didn’t have good plans for the Nation. 1848 was something similar and the Fenians of course were heavily involved in the conspiratorial Masonic politics of Europe at the time.

Only afterward, only when Catholic Emancipation had taken place and slowly the Catholic Church began to get a handle on things and restore the Faith where Churches were established, barns gave way to chapels and there was a flowering of cathedrals built from the 1850s onwards. We saw then schools were established by the Christian Brothers and they’ve been given a bad name now but the Christian Brothers were very patriotic. And they put the Ireland First mentality into their students and these men went on to become the heroes of 1916 and the 1920s. So there was absolutely no coincidence here, the Catholic Faith was heavily established, people were praying the Rosary and going to Mass, the Faith was strong and the Nationality came with it. And the only successful rebellion or Rising we had, or partially successful, was the 1916-20’s period onwards where we achieved a measure of independence which had been unthinkable before that.

The Burkean: When you look at the execution of Kevin Barry where young women were praying the Rosary and then you see the young women applauding abortion, how do you see us restoring that sense of morality or spirituality? Is it going to be pockets of people who practice amongst themselves and try to survive the tide, or is there a proactive role?

McGeough: Well one of the first things I think will happen is there’s going to be a huge chastisement, and that’s coming. I’m saying that not as a mystic but as a historian, it is coming. You can see the straws in the wind with this coronavirus and the rest of it, whether it’s real is neither here nor there but the restrictions are very real and we see economically things are getting very dodgy. That’s going to get infinitely worse in the coming months and years ahead. You are going to see a serious economic catastrophe, particularly in the south of Ireland and this will bring people’s minds to focus a bit more on the hereafter.

But that on its own is probably not enough, it has to be coupled with being proactive in the Faith. That’s why there are groups of us now getting out there. For example, there’s a men’s rosary in Newry there a few weeks ago and there was one in Derry there a few weeks before that. And this is where men are going out in large numbers and kneeling down in the squares of local towns and praying the Rosary. And they’re saying we’re the heads of our families, we are the husbands, we are the fathers and we have to give leadership through our Faith under the protection and mantle of our Lady and the Holy Family. And we’re the ones that have to take the lead here, we have to be the ones to say to young people that it is wrong what you’re doing. The lifestyles that you’re leading are completely wrong. They are decadent and are going to lead to your utter destruction, not only your physical self but your eternal soul, and people need to be made aware of that. We’re only on this Earth for a short space of time. A lot of people seem to get the opinion that they’re not going anywhere, that they’re just going to be worm meat, or if they’re going anywhere in the hereafter it’s just going to be a happy-clappy party place. That’s not the case. Each and every individual will face their own judgment and stand before the Throne of God. The Devil will be there with a full record of all their sins and our Lady will be there trying to defend them and they will have to give an account of their lives and of every sin they committed and every sin they didn’t. Happily, it must be said, if you go to confessions those sins are eradicated, the Devil is unable to read them but you still pay a price for them and that price will be paid in purgatory. But people shouldn’t think “well okay I’ll be in purgatory” but you won’t be okay there either. You’ll still be suffering and want to get out of there as fast as you can. But you can’t do that without the prayers of us – so we should be praying for the holy souls in purgatory, for family members who have died, and friends or even enemies. And we need to pray. Especially the Rosary.

When I mentioned that program “Insurrection” one of the most outstanding segments in it was when a number of 1916 IRA volunteers were fighting off the British and during a respite they knelt and prayed the Rosary. It was what gave them the strength they needed to hold out against the British navy as well as the British army for a whole week in burning buildings in Dublin. What a courageous fight they put up. We cannot begin to believe it. And they were staunch Catholics these men, they weren’t ashamed to be seen with rosary beads in one hand and the rifle in the other. And we have to bring that mentality back to the Nation again.

People need to be told that the use of contraception is a mortal sin, that divorce is a mortal sin, that abortion is a mortal sin, all these things. And it’s not easy, it’s not easy, but we have to do it. And when individuals get themselves right and families get their act together, the Nation will then make itself strong again.

The biggest outfit who needs to be seriously reprimanded here, seriously and utterly reprimanded in a scathingly harsh manner is the Catholic Church itself, particularly the hierarchy and here in Ireland. They have failed abysmally in their duty. And they are the ones who will pay a big price in the afterlife and who will face the toughest judgment of all because they have led the Catholic people astray. They have refused to give us proper teaching, proper Catechism. So you have people running around who call themselves Catholic who haven’t a clue and are committing mortal sins left, right, and centre and are unaware of it. And you can’t get confessions, you have to go quite long distances. So I’m very much a proponent for bringing back the traditional Latin Mass and all the reverence and ritual that goes with it, and regular confessions and regular Communion on the tongue, kneeling down receiving on the tongue by a priest. And all that will help the restoration of the Nation.

I go to Latin Mass and while you won’t have any trouble finding a pew in a normal Mass in the local chapels you’ll struggle to find a place to sit in the others with squads of children running about just like the old days with a powerful sense of Irishness that is palpable. So I’ve no doubt in my mind that the Faith and the Nationhood are interlinked.

What do we want a secular Ireland for? Secularism is the religion of Freemasonry. Even Hollywood when they’re presenting Ireland, it’s not atheists or Hindus or Muslims or an Imam, but it’s Catholic. This is a Catholic country and that’s how it must remain. And once we restore our allegiance to the Faith, the Nation will come with it. We have to oust the British, we have to oust the Europeans.

The Burkean: There’s a very bleak picture painted when we look at abortion, the prescription of medications to young people when you see the abject degeneracy people engage in. When you look at the replacement of our own people, Dublin is utterly unrecognisable to what it was 20 years ago. A lot of people on our side become jaded or depressed by the state of affairs but I think it comes down ultimately to one question – “Do you think we can win?”

McGeough: Absolutely yes. By the grace of God. There is absolutely no reason for us to be down about it. If you study Irish history there have been times in the past when Ireland has been down and beaten. For example in Dublin, I think it’s Whitefriar Church. There’s a statue there, Our Lady of Dublin, a very beautiful statue made from oak wood as I recall. And that statue for generations lay face down in the mud where it was used as a pig trough following the Reformation. English Protestants in Dublin pulled it down from its original Church, it was burned but obviously didn’t burn entirely, and the back of it was scraped out into the shape of a trough and it lay face down in a yard somewhere in Dublin where the pigs ate out of it.

Keep in mind in the 1700s the old establishment, the Protestant Ascendancy, said they’d have “superstition” as they called the Catholic Faith, eradicated by the end of the 1700s. Well, they’re gone and their ruined houses lie around the country but the Catholic Faith came roaring back again. Priests had to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, and people were put to the sword and grinding poverty was the order of the day but it survived and was resurrected again. And Our Lady herself, that particular statue, resurrected also and is still sitting where it is now. I don’t doubt that there are people, not Ascendancy Protestants but baptised lapsed Catholics who have become anti-Catholic. And they’re the real threat now, they’re the ones that have turned on the Faith with a vengeance. They don’t understand their own history and are blinded by their own filthy lifestyles that they want everyone else to be dragged into the gutter with them. So they might pull her down again but she’ll be put back up again in a few generations if it comes to that.

But we have to start with getting out in public, praying the Rosary, getting outside these abortion clinics, and doing what we can to prevent these women from killing their own children. Politically, working against those parties that advocate abortion and all the other decadences. We must put pressure on the Catholic hierarchy to get its act together and behave like a Catholic hierarchy instead of a social movement and they need to be preaching the Faith again. The Faith will not be extinguished in this country, it cannot possibly happen. It might decline into small pockets here and there but it’ll come roaring back again. I am absolutely optimistic and I see the growing numbers in the circles in which I mix, of people who are becoming dedicated to the Faith who were not considered exemplary Catholics in the past including myself on that one, but who have held onto the Faith and it is beginning to grow inside them again.

What you said is absolutely correct, once you brought in something as shameful and sinful and murderous as abortion, and made it a law, there will be consequences. And the consequences are the complete and utter collapse of the society around it. Because when you don’t respect the unborn, you don’t respect anybody. Be it yourself or the people around you. So it’s inevitable given the cheapening and degrading of life around us. And it’s up to us as Irish patriots to defend those Irish children. What sort an army wouldn’t defend its own children? These are our unborn children and we have to see ourselves as people who are effectively soldiers of Ireland.

Those of us who fought in the Troubles know that our duty still stands. We have to stand up for Ireland and Ireland is its people. And if you can’t defend its weakest and most vulnerable, then what’s the point?

And excoriate all those who are sitting shaking for their own careers who won’t open their mouths. I simply do not understand the cowardice of people who I would’ve considered comrades at one time, who will not get up and say enough is enough and tell some of these Johnny come lately carpetbaggers who are out for their careers that these types of policies are unacceptable. This is not a slaughterhouse of a country, it is a Nation and you can’t build a Nation without having children.

I would emphasise again that nobody should be despairing but we do have to focus and decide where we’re at and where we’re going and what we actually stand for. Now I make no bones about it and I’m sure I’ll be ridiculed about it but I really couldn’t care less because I’m only concerned about the answer I’ll give before the Throne of God. It’s reckoned we’re judged within an earthly hour of our temporal deaths. I want to be in a position to say what I did, I don’t care what people will say about me now because they’ll be answering the same themselves.

It’s important that everyone think about that and focus on eternity and where you’re going for eternity. And also based on what we have done here now, we can do some good while we’re still alive. We can pray for our Nation, we can pray for our people, we can pray for the courage needed to stand up for the principles we believe in. And I believe so many of our people really do at heart believe in the principles of their Catholic faith and the principles of their Irish nationhood and nationalism but they’re terrified and scared and they have to get over that fear. So people like myself going out and praying in public and taking the ridicule which we offer up to Christ for the sins of others, we’ll take all that. It’s not a big problem. Do all that and it will set the ball rolling. 1916 didn’t happen out of nowhere but it was the culmination of the ongoing process of something that was happening beforehand and that’s of course where the Faith was strong. Where people were praying the Rosary in public and going to Mass and doing Devotions and not ashamed to be doing it but we’re proud to be doing it and proud to be Catholic.

We need to get back to that mentality and when we do that this will be a great Nation and we also need to get over this dependency culture that “we can’t survive on our own, we need to be part of Europe” or “we can’t survive on our own we need to be part of Britain.” No, we don’t. We don’t need those outfits at all, not anywhere near us.

What we need to do is establish our own independence on this island nation and take control of our seas and skies and all around us because that is part of our Nation. Our young people must be raised as patriots and told they must do their best for their country and stick hard to the Faith.

We are in a mess now socially no question about it but we can get out of it and we’ll do that by praying and by acting. Never give up on your principles, never give up on your Faith and be proud of those who have gone before us because people have gone through an awful lot in the past. Our direct bloodline ancestors suffered an awful lot to hold onto what we are now squandering in our current generations and that’s appalling. That’s an awful thing, but we must pass it on to the future generations and we must have future generations to pass on to. The crime of abortion has to be ended and those responsible for it will have brought before a tribunal for crimes against humanity. Sin é.