Lens-Artists Photo Challenge – The Future

Thanks to AC for her Future challenge; well worth a look.

“Study the past if you would define the future.”

Confucius uttered a mouthful when he came out with that one, MB is thinking.

MB is not sure how Confucious kept coming out with those wise one-liners. Maybe the yak milk.

Who knows?

Good old Confucius.

Anyway.

MB was perusing the general election pre-result tallies back in his Irish homeland earlier today. Sinn Fein (‘ourselves alone’ in Irish Gaelic language) looks like being the largest political party for the first time in the history of the Republic of Ireland.

SF was the political arm of the IRA during the period of the ‘Troubles’, as the Irish refer to the period when more than 3,000 people were violently killed, between 1968 and 1998. If anybody said back then that SF would be the largest party in Ireland only 22 years later, most would not have believed it. Too much violent baggage, assassinations, the whiff of cordite, punishment squads in their majority neighborhood in Northern Ireland, which in truth meant knee-capping wayward kids, or occasionally killing them, by accident or otherwise.

SF would argue that they, with their IRA cousins, were the true heirs to the old IRA who fought the British and ultimately gained Irish independence in 1921. Two more modern parties have stronger claims to that title in MB’s opinion, however, but both now smaller parties than SF it seems.

But anyway…………….

On the Sunday before Christmas each year, back in MB’s HX homeland, there is a wreath-laying memorial service for five members of the old IRA from the 1920s era. The five were shot dead when British forces, who controlled Ireland at that time, ambushed the event. The Brits had gotten a tip-off that a fund-raising dance was going to be held in a  grand old local manor house on St Stephens night (‘Boxing Day’ as the Brits refer to it), in aid of the IRA/Irish Independence cause.

So in MBs HX homeland, that episode of the local past is relived, year in year out. One older attendee made the comment to MB at the recent December event, however, that the attendees are getting older and older and he wonders if the event will still be taking place in, say, ten years hence.

Who knows?

The following are two shots taken by MB at the most recent event. The past is evident in the inscriptions on the headstone. And in that past, much of Ireland’s future was written.

Clever old Confucius!