RTÉ documentary

The Irish examiner has a look at the RTÉ documentary on the life of Kevin O’Higgins.

Assassinated strongman was not the Free State’s chief executionerRyle Dwyer writes:

“The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields,” Patrick Pearse wrote in December 1915. “Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country.”

Now I won’t suggest that the man who wrote that blasphemous twaddle about the First World War was “a blithering idiot”, but James Connolly did. And I wouldn’t disagree.

and among disturbing revelations about various murders and massacres, including Higgins’ agony at the execution of a former comrade, who had been best man at his wedding only a year before being shot,

He was authorised by the Dáil to execute those captured in possession of illegal weapons. Otherwise, he warned, members of the Free State army would take it upon themselves “to execute people in an unauthorised way”.