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Charles Lysaght
The Churchill Project - Hillsdale College > Charles Lysaght
Remembrances: A Young Irishman at Sir Winston’s Funeral
05
Oct
2023
1
By CHARLES LYSAGHT
“Unlike many Irish children of my generation, I was brought up to admire Winston Churchill. My father, although nationalist enough, always uttered his name with reverence. He believed that he had saved us as well as the British from the evil Hitler. Churchill’s defiant orations, received at home in those perilous years on our crackling Telefunken wireless, had made a deep impression.”
Great Contemporaries: Eamon de Valera and a Long, Fraught Relationship
22
Jan
2021
By CHARLES LYSAGHT
Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.