Today is Hiroshima Day: the day humankind, represented by a United States President, went mad and incinerated a city filled with humans in Hiroshima Japan.
A few days later the same President revisited a similar holocaust on another Japanese city, Nagasaki.
It was the ultimate act of madness of a world that believed in violence and war,
Today in Dublin's Merrion Square we recalled Hiroshima at a cherry tree planted there in 1980.
Important speeches were made by important people and sad music played.
The speech of Patrick Comerford, former Quaker and reporter for the Irish Times, now a Church of Ireland minister, was particularly impressive.
He gave credit for the nuclear arms pause, such as it is, to activists like the Greenham Common women and he praised the US activists who disagreed with and opposed Trump.
Two of them were listening - Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff - who are on long time bail in Ireland having entered Shannon airport, airside, in order to inspect a US plane carrying armed troops to war. Also listening was Colm Roddy
Ken and Tarak are US Veterans for Peace having served respectively in Vietnam and Iraq.
In this era of Irish State commemorations of the violence that helped to create and give legitimacy to the Irish State itself, it could be all too easy to forget the basic evil of all wars and killing.
It is a mistake to praise some evil deeds of our own past and simultaneously condemn the evil deeds of others, admittedly more enormous,.
Hiroshima is a historic reminder to us not to make this mistake.
Tarak and Ken are living reminders of the same danger.
Both of these Veterans are now confined within the shores and borders of our Republic.
Thay may not visit Northern Ireland. They may not enter any of our airports. Apart from that they are free to roam. And roam they do.
The high court Judge who refused them permission yo visit their homes and their loved ones in the USA has done a service to the cause they believe in.
For while they are here they are revitalising the anti-war movement in all its manifestations,
With them we can talk about our friends in the USA, friends like the Kings Bay Ploughshares, Kathy Kelly, Martha Hennessy,, Liz McAlister, Carmen Trotta and others who struggle against nuclear war threats over there.
And on this day I always recall with honour the name of Mordechai Vanunu, The Israeli whistleblower who spent 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing that his country had surreptitiously become a nuclear power against international rules but never monitored or investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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