Shooting Sports in Ireland

[tipoc]

Back in June I was on vacation in Ireland when the following article appeared in The Irish Times. The Irish Times is published in Dublin and occupies the same place there that the all St. Journal, N.Y. Times or the Washington Post occupy here. The article is on Ireland's prospects for a medal in the Olympics in the shooting sports but touches on shooting in Ireland in general. Interesting reading.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2008/0613/1213262331226.html

In Dublin's Trinity College I noticed a bulletin board listing the campus clubs listing meeting times and contacts, among them was the rifles and shooters club.

While driving cross country I noted several times roadsigns directing folks to local ranges.

In Galway I dropped by the this store, Duffy's.

http://www.shoot.ie/index.php?main_page=index&zenid=d41d1f6fcdb8c1175f2e2a0b2fced9be

Note the price of ammo and handguns. 1.00 Euro = about 1.30 U.S.D.

Unfortunately I didn't have time on this trip to talk to many shooters or do any shooting. Next time I hope.

tipoc

 

[green country shooter]

I was on a hiking trip there with some Swiss folks once and we got to talking about reloading and the virtues of different calibers. I thought the Irish were going to stroke out or call the police! Many of them seemed terrified of even discussing firearms and I could tell they thought of me very differently after I admitted owing firearms.

 

[Prince Yamato]

"Sports shooters in Ireland are not a gun-lobby group, like those that exist in the US," says Cahill. "We don't believe that we have a right to bear arms. We recognise that it is a privilege to carry a firearm and a privilege to represent our country in this long-established and well-recognised sporting field."

 

[mainmech48]

Looks as if having the Brits dominate, brutalize, plunder and exploit them for nearly 700 years didn't do much for my cousins but leave them with an engrained "subject" mentality and a blueprint for keeping it.

 

[tipoc]

Looks as if having the Brits dominate, brutalize, plunder and exploit them for nearly 700 years didn't do much for my cousins but leave them with an engrained "subject" mentality and a blueprint for keeping it.

You overlook a bit of history. The Irish have never failed to get ahold of weapons when they felt the need to have them. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the war for independence against England that followed it, as well as a few battles off and on since have tended to show that. "subject" mentality? There may be more of that here than there.

Gun laws throughout most of Europe suck and the prices of guns and ammo suck, but the attentive reader will note, that in Ireland at least, there is still a bit o' shooting going on and a tradition of it.

tipoc

 

[tinygnat219]

"Sports shooters in Ireland are not a gun-lobby group, like those that exist in the US," says Cahill. "We don't believe that we have a right to bear arms. We recognise that it is a privilege to carry a firearm and a privilege to represent our country in this long-established and well-recognised sporting field."

This is why the English kept rolling over them until 1921 when the Brits were tired of war and the Irish actually got smart at the bargaining table and accepted the loss of Ulster (well, mostly except for those perky lads called the IRA).

I have a cousin in Dublin who is a Garda, our equivalent of a Police officer. They aren't armed, only certain "special" response squads are, and even then with .38 SPL revolvers. When she visited the US and saw Fairfax County Police officers with the AR-15s in the police car, and the handgun on the hip, she was astonished. When I told her that I collected firearms, her face visibly paled. We then spent the next couple of hours discussing why.

It's definitely interesting!

 

[mainmech48]

With respect, the bits of history that you're overlooking are a good deal more significant and profound, IMO.

They usually did manage to obtain some weapons, true. But vanishingly seldom enough of them to support more than sporadic, loosely organized and quickly crushed uprisings and a largely ineffective guerilla resistance that ended up spanning centuries.

The Easter Rising lasted how long? And how many troops did they have there in the General Post Office and in the streets of Dublin?

And what percentage of the arms they did manage to get were "modern" enough to vie with the SMLEs, Maxims, Vickers and artillery of the English garrison?

And how many of them could boast more than perhaps one bandoleer of ammo for their weapon?

And how many people were there who demonstrated that their support for what Pierce, McDermot, McBride and the other gallant men in there were attempting went deeper than the songs and rhetoric on their lips by actually taking up their own weapons, of whatever sort, and going to stand with them?

In the 1920's had the English not just squandered the better part of an entire generation of their men in the course of WWI, had escalating problems in other, more lucrative portions of a global empire to contend with and an agreement in which they retained control and dominion over the only part of Ireland where they had huge capital investments in productive industry and infrastructure, they'd most likely still be there, IMO.

Wait one. They still are, aren't they?

Songs, poetry and stirring speeches alone never freed anyone. Unless a would-be "revolutionary" has the means, the willingness to use them and to die, if necessary, rather than continue living under the yoke it just doesn't happen.

And as long as a people choose to view owning the best means by which they might defend their lives, families, nation and property or resist tyranny as a "privilege" they are the servants of whatever the "system de jour" may be, not it's masters.

And if they refuse to learn that from their own history, they never will be.

 

[tipoc]

It's easy to reduce the history of a given nation to who had the most guns when. Easy but wrong. Guns are always secondary to the politics of the masses when it comes to war and revolutions. Handguns and rifles generally don't win either.

Ireland is an interesting place with a rich history that deserves study. If the read the article I posted above and note what else I said you can see that shooting is a part of the Irish landscape. Yep they have some rotten laws. But to equate the statement of one fella from one association with the whole picture and the whole people seems a mistake. Kinda like taking a quote from the Mayor of D.C. and equating that with the U.S.

Now if you're bitter that the Irish didn't get rid of the Brits centurys ago and that Ulster is still partly under their thumb...Imagine the ire of Puerto Ricans.

tipoc

 

[green country shooter]

Here's a good book on the rebellion in western Ireland:

"Tans, Terror, and Troubles: Kerry's real fighting story 1913-1923," by T. Ryle Dwyer.

(Kerry means county Kerry, not John Kerry, though that's the county he's named after.)

One point I noticed in this book is that rural Irishmen had shotguns and used them to shoot police and paramilitaries and get better weapons. One other way they got some guns is that an American movie company was filming a war movie there and just left the guns when the movie was done!

 

[mainmech48]

The first members of my family to arrive on these shores were transported in the late 17th century as indentured servants after being on the losing end of The Battle of the Boyne.

Some more were added after the Confiscations, and more still by the Great Famine and the way that the English chose to "deal" with that.

So I guess I am a little "bitter", illogical as it may seem. But, FWIW, there were still bars in our neighborhood that wouldn't serve Bushmill's whiskey, passed the hat "for the lads" and businesses that kept a jar on the counter for "Northern Relief" until I left in the late '70's, so I suppose much of it might've come from through osmosis of a sort.

The people of Puerto Rico have had several opportunities to opt to exchange their Commonwealth status for either Statehood or full autonomy over the last 50 years.

All have been overwhelmingly defeated in favor of retaining the status quo. How much "ire" would that suggest to you?

 

[Geordie]

Ignorant

Why not serve Bushmills? What are/were the political inferences?
Thanks

 

[tipoc]

mainmech48,

I mentioned P.R. because despite a record of fighting for it's independence, first against the Spanish and later the U.S., it's economic dependency on the U.S. and class and social divisions there have played a role, as they did in Ireland in the pace of the struggle for independence. A larger role than who has how many guns when. I'm not making a direct parallel either, there isn't one.

Social revolutions are messy things. It would be easy if one side lined up and said "we are for independence and freedom" and the other side lined up and said "we are for being slaves to the British" but it didn't work that way and never does. It was much more complex and more interesting.

The taking of the GPO and the proclamation of independence from a military point of view are worth criticism, but they played a much larger role as a part of a social movement. Not unlike the attack on the Moncada barracks in Cuba decades later.

Pick up a copy of the movie "The Wind That Shook the Barley" for an idea of the internal debates and forces at play in the 1916- 21 period. Some good guns in that flick as well.

At any rate there are websites listed in the article above to the Irish shooting organizations and the point of this thread is that folks who want to know more about the shooting sports over there, and the obstacles they face and their sucesses, can get in touch with Irish shooters of various stripes and discuss this and other things with them directly. You can ask them about Bushmills as well.

tipoc

 

[mainmech48]

They refused to serve Bushmill's whiskey because its HQ is in Belfast and the distillery is Protestant-owned. Most of the folks who owned and patronized those establishments came from, and had family living in, Ulster or another of the counties in the North.

Very few people can hold onto their grudges as tightly or for as long as the Irish. Nor cherish them as dearly, IMO.

I've seen the film, and if anything it did do a good deal to dispel any remaining romantic illusions I might've had from a lifetime of being regaled about the saintly altruism of Mr. DeValera et al in song and story.

When it comes to fostering economic dependency, creating new sets of class and social division or the cynical exploitation of pre-exisiting ones as a matter of policy in the interests of imposing and maintaining dominion, nobody can hold a candle to the Brits. As far as Imperialism goes, what forays the US ever made into that territory were even briefer than they were inept by comparison.

The people of Puerto Rico have chosen to remain "economically dependant" upon the US rather than pay their own way for over half a century now. Seems to me that any ill will they're harboring over the disparities of class and social divisions or the relative distribution of the various benefits and revenues they receive there (including numerous social welfare, educational and economic development programs funded by the US tax monies which they are exempt from paying) should be directed to a mirror for redress.

One would like to think that after the better part of a millenium a people would've already decided whether they'd collected enough martyrs, injustices and oppression to warrant their complete attention.

Didn't W.B. Yeats ask the very question in "Easter, 1916"? IMO, the real tragedy of the thing wasn't so much in what happened, but in that after all of the blood, toil, tears and sweat of those centuries it still took so large and dramatic a sacrifice to finally shake enough people off of the fences and commit "their lives, their fortune and their sacred honor" to the cause.

What continues to baffle and astonish me is that they've clung to so many of the institutions and, particularly, the mindsets that kept them in a state of virtual serfdom for so long.

Cliche though it may be, armed people are citizens; unarmed people are subjects. Only the names and titles of their masters have changed.

 

[MCMXI]

When it comes to fostering economic dependency, creating new sets of class and social division or the cynical exploitation of pre-exisiting ones as a matter of policy in the interests of imposing and maintaining dominion, nobody can hold a candle to the Brits.

For the record, Brits = English, Scottish and Welsh so you might want to modify that or risk lumping two other "oppressed" nations in with the supposed oppressors.

Again for the record, the British Isles have been conquered, raped and pillaged since the dawn of time by such noble sorts as the Vikings, Romans and Saxons ... to name but a few.

 

[mainmech48]

Yes, and that's how they learned to do it so well. Their formula was the sum of their experiences, in both tactics and brutality.

They saw what had worked for the Celts on the Picts, the Romans on the Celts, the various Angles, Saxons, Jutes et alia in displacing the remnants of the Roman colonials and surviving Celts who, incidentally became known as the "Welsh" (from the Anglo-Saxon word for "foreigner" and the "Scots" from the name of a Celtic tribe, the "Scotti"), the Danish and Norwegian Vikings and their Norman descendants from Gaul used on them and the sum of those became the 'blueprint' they used in building their own Imperium.

Personally, I don't see where combining the most effective tactics used to rape, pillage, and conquer your own people and using them on anyone else makes one the smallest bit more "noble" than they, nor in any way justifies or excuses the effort.

 

[tipoc]

The term "Brits" pretty much refers to the English. They did,of course make liberal use of colonial troops when they went into battle. The fuel for Scottish and Welsh nationalism these days has been the second class status of these two nations as part of "Briton".

I meant this thread to be a note for folks who wanted to learn a bit more about shooting in Ireland and as a way for folks to get in touch with some Irish shooters. I hope to get back there in a couple of years and look to hook up with a few shooters and learn what they shoot. The gun store I visited was well stocked with CZs and Sigs. Road signs adversitised the routes to local shooting ranges, that alone was different from here. I want to learn a bit more.

Now Irish history is interesting and complex, as the history of most places is.
No film can take the place of serious study but "The Wind That Shook The Barley" gives a good snapshot of a piece of time.

I've seen the film, and if anything it did do a good deal to dispel any remaining romantic illusions I might've had from a lifetime of being regaled about the saintly altruism of Mr. DeValera et al in song and story.

That seems to me to be a good thing. A critical point in the film is when a landlord is brought before a Republican court for unjustly evicting a tenant. The court rules against the landlord who protests that he is a good Republican. One group of Republicans lets the landlord go and sets him free. The others protest that they have just undermined the authority of the court and of the revolution by doing so. They answer that as the landlord supplies them with money for arms he must be released as he is critical to their efforts. In a nutshell this is the story of a failure of leadership of both Collins and DeValera and of the divisions which led to the civil war following independence and of the fate of Ulster. As one character says later in the film "It's not what you are against that defines you, it's what you are for."

Direct British colonialism fell. It took time, particularly as the Tories, in particular though not alone, were hell bent not to give up an inch of the Empire.

I tend to think the U.S. is the imperialist power against which others are measured and has been for the last century. Direct rule of other nations is expensive and unnecessary. A "friendly" government, with the local dependent ruling class firmly holding the reins, in power allows business to be transacted and money to flow. Much easier and more profitable. Only the occasional military intervention to "defend democracy" and "our national interests" and to keep competing nations in their place is needed. Also useful that it is done without the open appearance of doing so.

For 700 hundred years one of the greatest colonial powers on earth could not assimilate the Irish nor stop their constant rebellions nor keep them from singing and writing poetry about it. A fella could be proud of that or look at it all as a big failure. The latter is quite fashionable. Cynicism is always helpful in that it allows a fella to look wise while relieving them from the hard work of figuring out what to do next.

tipoc