July 31, 2010 came and went and with it my promise to offer some memories to Cecilia and the people Seamas loved for the website dedicated to keeping his memory alive and today, six and half months later,  I've come to the end of eliminating 1,256 read and unread e-mails, most of which were sent to me by friends in the movement, friends like Seamas, activists who spend their time organizing and encouraging people to participate in strikes, demos, marches, meetings, support gigs and debates, or informing the world of the horrors in Palestine, Tibet, England, France, Soudan, Ireland, or wherever else Mammon and his cohorts have laid their claws, and I felt in my tired, tired heart -so tired that I cracked recently and wrote a poem in a church in Valreas, a sort of prayer in which I begged God to take away Man's freewill, for a child dies of hunger every three and a half seconds- I felt and knew quand même that we are all Seamas, each in his or her own way, fighting the good fight as best we can, being true to our convictions as best we can, doing our best as he did his best, protected, blessed with that indestructible grin of his as he explained to the naive southerner I was, about what it meant to be in the movement against the Empire, about what it meant to take risks and how necessary it was for us all to pull together, there and then in Paris in the late 80s, as we ambled down Rue du Louvre, he in his duffle coat, I in my second-hand top-coat, on our way  to Tigh Johnny's with bundles of an t-Eireannachs in our bags (Johnny, another dearly departed friend, pulled us our pints and with a critical eye on the contributions in Irish, perused the Journal de l'Association irlandaise which Seamas helped to found), how necessary to pull together, to tract, to attract, to contract and put all our energy into making this world a better place, into taking on our collective shoulders the responsability for what is happening everywhere, and never to give up no matter how tired we feel, no matter how discouraged, to refuse that Rocardian philosophy that on ne peut pas accueillir toute la misère du monde, to wake up to our humanity, the humanity we discovered on leaving Ireland, l'Humanité we rejoiced in every year with the PCF and fellow-travellers at the big Fête, however many mistakes they and we made, no, nay, never, never to give up, just as Seamas never gave up, just as he never lacked courage even I imagine, at the last unutterably sinister moment of his life...

And so, like the Seamas we all are and  ever will be, we shall never give up. We shall overcome. Tiofcaidh ár lá, lá Fior Siochain, lá Ceartas, a day of True Peace, a day of Justice.

Dave Connaughton