Inventing Ireland (28 page)

The Parnell tragedy of 1891 had not spelled the end of the Home Rule movement, nor the collapse of parliamentary agitation. The
Irish Party was badly split, but its members limped on: another attempt by Gladstone to introduce a Home Rule Bill in 1893 was defeated After 1895, the conservatives held power and unionists felt safe for the time being. A new leader,
John Redmond emerged to rebuild the Irish Party in 1900 and to regain its old following. Things seemed to progress smoothly enough, especially when the
Liberals were returned in 1906 with a strong likelihood that they would reopen the Irish question.

Beneath the calm unruffled surface of Irish political life, however, things were changing. A gifted journalist named
Arthur Griffith had become founder-editor of the
United Irishman
in 1899, a fiercely separatist paper which, though anti-militarist in ethos, called for a withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster. Arguing that the Act of Union in 1800 had been illegal – purchased by bribery and corruption – Griffith suggested that, instead of attending parliament, Irish representatives should join with local councillors in a native government. Power was not something to be given or withheld at the whim of the British: it was a force inherent in the community, a force which Irish leaders could take and use in its name.
¹
In 1903 Griffith formed his
National Council: and, along with groups such as the Gaelic League and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), it provided the nucleus for Griffith's Sinn Féin launched in 1908 (the title means "ourselves", indicative of self reliance). Many members of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood cultivated close friendships with Gaelic Leaguers (the Keating branch in Dublin was a hotbed of political revolutionaries)
²
and with members of Sinn Féin. But the appeal of the latter was limited for a long time, despite its pacifist programme and its declared allegiance to the British monarch: in a 1908 election in North Leitrim, it was beaten by a two-to-one margin by the parliamentary party. As late as 1912, Patrick Pearse was still capable of supporting the Home Rule movement
and its parliamentary party from a public platform. The House of Commons passed a Home Rule bill in that year, which the more conservative
House of Lords could not delay for more than two years. It seemed that by 1914 the deposed capital of Dublin would regain its own parliament.

These tortuous manoeuvrings were soon to be overtaken by a more volatile series of events. In
northern Ireland unionist opinion, outraged by the Home Rule bill, pledged itself to raise arms against its imposition. Guns were run into Larne and the
Ulster Volunteer Force was founded, to set up a provisional government in Ulster if need be. Almost a quarter of a million people signed the oath. The movement's leader was a Dublin lawyer,
Edward Carson, who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde (a fellow-graduate of Trinity College) at his
trial He was assured of the support of the
Conservative Party in England In these circumstances, the Liberal Prime Minister,
Asquith, persuaded Redmond that it would be foolish to coerce the unionists and wiser to retreat from his demand for Home Rule for the whole island Nationalists in the south viewed this development with dismay and, insisting that the northerners began what they would finish, they set up their own army called the
Irish Volunteers.

Meanwhile, urban unrest was growing. The Land Acts had permitted tenants to buy out holdings and food prices were high, so that rural Ireland seemed well content. In the cities, on the other hand things were bad: Dublin's poor were among the worst-fed and worst-housed in Ireland, and the death-rate was actually the worst of any major European city

To challenge these inequities, two Labour leaders, Jim Larkin and James Connolly, founded the
Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1908; and by 1913 its power had grown to such a degree that one of the city's foremost employers,
William Martin Murphy, resolved to break it. He welded hundreds of employers into a federation which locked out 24,000 members of the union. Over the eight months that followed families starved; other workers went on supportive strikes; there were mass-meetings, riots and deaths. An Irish Citizen Army was established under Connolly to protect the workers, whose insurrection was effectively crushed The Catholic hierarchy, on hearing that the children of some Dublin dockers were to be shipped to sympathetic families in England intervened to condemn the plan; and Larkin was widely denounced as a troublemaker. However, the new mood of agitation survived the Lock Out.
³

The outbreak of war in Europe changed everything. Home Rule was put on hold for its duration: it was to be the post-war reward for Redmond's support for England and for "plucky Catholic Belgium". Tens of thousands of Irishmen volunteered to fight (as they saw it) for the rights of small nations; other members of the Irish Volunteers felt in all conscience that this
was not their war. Among the IRB, members agreed that once again England's difficulty could be Ireland's opportunity: slowly but steadily it recruited more and more key members from
Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League. It already exercised the decisive influence in the Irish Volunteers.

The Rising came eventually on Easter Monday 1916 and lasted less than a week. Patrick Pearse, appalled by the slaughter of civilians, surrendered on the Saturday after Easter: over three hundred citizens had been killed in bombardment and fighting, as well as over one hundred and thirty British soldiers and seventy rebels. Though dubbed a "Sinn Féin rebellion" in the British press, it was nothing of the kind. It involved sections of the Irish Volunteers (under Patrick Pearse) and of the
Irish Citizen Army (under James Connolly). The Pearse who by 1914 had concluded that the Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, was a spent force now wanted an Ireland not merely Gaelic, but free.

The Rising was probably doomed: but for Pearse and Connolly to strike was to win, since their gesture kept the spirit of nationhood alive. All the same, some of the rebels were jeered and spat upon by Dubliners irate at the ensuing wreckage. Many other Dubliners were reported in overseas papers, however, as warmly cheering rebel gallantry
⁴
It was the over-
reaction of the British authorities which gave the insurgents the retrospective status of people's heroes. Word leaked out about the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the pacifist and socialist, who had tried to prevent looting of bombed-out shops and who had been arrested and summarily shot. Even worse was the painfully protracted execution of fifteen rebel leaders between May 3 and 12, despite a strong consensus that they should have been treated as prisoners-of-war.
Martial law was imposed and 3,500 people were arrested more than twice the number which had actually taken part in the Rising. Those participants who were not shot were interned, along with other nationalists, in camps which became schools for the coming war.

By 1918 the war-weary British, whose military ranks had been depleted were threatening
conscription on a surly and mutinous Ireland Redmond had badly lost the initiative and misread the public mood about the war. Running on an anti-conscription ticket, Sinn Féin candidates swept all before them in the December elections, capturing 73 seats to the parliamentary party's 6. Their members applied Griffith's policy, set up their own parliament (
Dáil Éireann), proclaimed their allegiance to the republic of Pearse and Connolly, and began the programme of passive resistance decreed in the pages of the
United Irishman.
Alternative courts were set up without the paraphernalia of English wigs and gowns. In backrooms of public houses and in kitchens on outlying farms, an entirely illegal set of judges created a system in opposition to that of the British courts. They
helped restore self-esteem to a community anxious to curb the kind of violence which erupts in time of social disorder, and anxious also to project itself as ready for the responsibilities of self-government. Some of the punishments were rather unorthodox: banishment to another county, to an offshore island, even to England where one MP protested against the use of his country "as a sort of convict settlement for men deported by Sinn Féin".
⁵
By 1920 Under-Secretary Cope was admitting that these courts were doing far more to erode British rule than the assassination campaign spearheaded by Michael Collins.

The war of independence in which Collins played a leading part from 1919 to 1921 was a brutal affair. The rebels shot civil servants and policemen, raided and bombed barracks, ambushed the British forces and ranged across the countryside in "flying columns". Their opponents executed suspects without trial, terrorized republican families and, on several occasions, burned out entire townships or communities by way of reprisal for alleged disloyalty. (The notorious
Black-and-Tans were particularly guilty in this regard and are still hated in
Irish folk memory.) World opinion, especially that of Americans, was brought to bear on the British and in December 1921, after prolonged negotiations, they signed a Treaty with the Irish. This offered dominion status, but only to twenty-six southern counties: the six northern counties of Ulster would remain in British hands. Michael Collins, in his more optimistic moments, called it "the freedom to achieve freedom". In a darker mood, he privately conceded that in signing it he had signed his own death warrant.
⁶

One of the other signatories was Arthur Griffith: he persuaded a majority of the Dáil to ratify the Treaty by 14 votes to 57.
Éamon de Valera, the sole surviving commander from the Rising, argued that the Dáil had no right to do wrong. He and his followers opposed the oath of loyalty to the British crown. (Though, subsequently, they would claim to have also opposed the Treaty on the basis of its partitioning of Ireland, this featured much more briefly in the Treaty debate.) Instead of dominion status, de Valera proposed that Ireland have an
"external association" with the British Empire, thus being free to conduct itself as a republic in external affairs.

A bitter election was fought on the issue in June 1922, with 58 pro-Treatyites returned, 36 against, 17 for Labour, and 17 representing other groups including farmers. A
civil war of unparalleled bitterness then ensued in which brother fought brother and men who had recently been comrades against a foreign enemy now killed and executed former friends. Michael Collins died as he had predicted by an assassin's bullet, but not before he had laid the basis for a national army By then Arthur Griffith was also dead from exhaustion and ill-health. The republican "die-hards"
held out until May 1923, but were comprehensively defeated. Many escaped to the United States, where a remarkable number rapidly achieved great success in business: others, under their leader Eamon de Valera, bided their time at home, while the new
Cumann na nGaedheal government wielded power.

The British, for their part, were quite convinced that
Lloyd George, the "Welsh Wizard", had solved the Irish question: but this was not so. A six-county state had left the unionists with precisely what they had sought to avoid: a home-rule parliament in Belfast. They had taken just six counties in the shrewd belief that this was as much as they could reasonably hope to hold for a permanent, built-in Protestant majority. The result was a one-party state, structured upon religious apartheid in the words of one of its leaders "a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state".
⁷
The freedom purchased by Griffith and Collins, though they might have been forgiven for not fully foreseeing the consequences, had been bought at the expense of the northern nationalist minority. Lloyd George, far from solving the Irish question, hadn't even managed to change it.
⁸

One summer Sunday, late in the nineteenth century, the poet and mystic George Russell stood on the esplanade at Bray and preached about the return of ancient Irish heroes. As it happened, among his auditors was that Standish James O'Grady whose
History of Ireland: Heroic Period
(1878-80) had made the exploits of Cuchulain available in English to a national readership. His object had been to provide in the ancient heroes exemplars who might reanimate the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy. "I desire", he wrote in his preface, "to make this heroic period once again a portion of the imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in the minds of our people as they once were".
¹
Watching Russell share this explosive information with a more downmarket audience of weekend holidaymakers, O'Grady felt a pang of dismay and foreboding: but there was nothing he could do to recall the genie back to the bottle.

It did not take him long to sense what would happen when Cuchulain was appropriated as a role-model by the clerks and schoolmasters massed before him. "We have now a literary movement, it is not very important", he declared: "it will be followed by a political movement, that will not be very important; then must come a military movement, that will be important indeed".
²
O'Grady was but the first among many writers to witness with amazement what might happen when images and ideas crafted with care in the study took fire in someone else's head, and did so with an intensity which could express itself only in direct action. Years later, W. B. Yeats would ask "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?"
³
The conditions for theorizing a revolution were indeed no different from those for starting one. After it was over, Russell would gravely but proudly admit the link between the idea and the action: "What was in Patrick Pearse's soul when he fought in
Easter Week but an imagination, and the chief imagination which inspired him was that of a hero who stood against a
host ... I who knew how deep was Pearse's love for the Cuchulain whom O'Grady discovered or invented, remembered after Easter Week that he had been solitary against a great host in imagination with Cuchulain, long before circumstance permitted him to stand for his nation with so few companions against so great a power".
⁴
And in lines from a late poem, Yeats asked a ringing question:

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement replied?
⁵

– and the answer was in due time: India, Egypt, Nigeria, and so on.

The rebels did indeed set headlines for men and women in those far-flung places: and the Soviet revolutionary V. I.
Lenin had predicted as much when he wrote in 1914 that a blow against the British Empire in Ireland was of "a hundred times more significance than a blow of equal weight in Asia or in Africa".
⁶
English socialists were inclined to the rather patronizing belief that freedom could only be won by the colonies
after
they had gained power in the mother country. It never struck them that the fastest advances towards modernization might come from the periphery. But in 1916, along with the Irish insurrection, came attempts at rebellion in French
Annam and the German Cameroons. The Irish were, if anything, ahead of their time, as Lenin later remarked: "The misfortune of the Irish is that they rose prematurely, when the European revolt of the proletariat had not yet matured". The world-historical events which might thereby have ensued have been spelled out by Conor Cruise O'Brien: had the rebels waited until 1918, when the country was united against the threat of conscription, a Rising then with mass support would have called forth a British reign of terror, with the inevitable consequence of mutinies by Irish troops on the western front. By then, as a matter of fact, mass mutiny had taken Russia right out of the war, and the morale of both British and French armies was very low: so it would at least have been a possibility that the European ruling order might have collapsed.
⁷
James Connolly had foretold that "a pin in the hands of a child could pierce
the
heart of a giant". In the event, though the European order remained intact, the global order of British imperialism did not: those members of the British cabinet who saw the long-term implications for places like India and Egypt had their fears confirmed.

With hindsight, it is easy to see the 1916 rebels as an early instance of a decolonizing élite, and to advance the now-familiar analysis of
economic frustrations and curtailed career opportunities which made the colony a factory of grievances. Modern educational reforms had produced a
cadre
of native intellectuals, not all of whom, by any means, could be drawn into the work of empire: but they also threw up new kinds of official, half-ashamed of the force by which they ruled. These self-doubts were sometimes visible to their more astute and restive subjects, and this had the effect of encouraging rather than mollifying rebels, who won more and more influential converts like Roger Casement and
Erskine Childers over from the imperial side.
⁸
On Easter Monday 1916, when the rebels struck, the highest-ranking British officer on duty was an adjutant and the routine guards at the General Post Office had rifles but no ammunition.

Critics of the "irrarionalism" of the 1916 leaders point to the relative prosperity of Ireland during the years of the Great War, when high food prices caused large sections of the economy to boom. This is to forget, however, that revolution more often comes not in the darkest days of oppression so much as at a time when people have the luxury of being able to stand back a moment from their own condition and make a shrewd assessment of it. The leaders of the Easter Rebellion were many of them well-to-do: it would be hard to assign a strictly economic motive to the involvement of a headmaster such as Pearse, a university don like MacDonagh, or a son of Count Plunkett. Nonetheless, the ordinary Dubliners who marched behind them had known the consequences of dire recession in a city of chronic unemployment, and for them the high food prices were yet another outrage. The grievances of many rebels
were
economic and, as always, such men and women were glad to find leaders who could give them a spiritual and moral explanation. The frustrations of
all
the fighters were cultural: they wanted a land in which Gaelic traditions would be fully honoured. On that point, also, George Russell was an astute guide: just a year after the Rising, he accounted for its significance to still-baffled officials. Empires, he complained, destroy native culture, achieving "the substitution therefore of a culture which has its value mainly for the people who created it, but is as alien to our race as the mood of the scientist is to the artist or poet".
⁹

Despite his cheerful pragmatism as a shaper of the agricultural cooperative movement, Russell could never cast the Rising in simply economistic terms: to him it was exactly the reverse, a plea for spirit as against dull matter, for imagination against empiricism (which to him seemed but a synonym for
imperialism). The energy of life was its desire for expression: but the forms proffered by England, however
well-intended, just did not fit. There is remarkably little anti-English sentiment in the writings of the
Easter rebels for all that. Many of them revered particular English poets – Pearse admired and even imitated Wordsworth; MacDonagh wrote a fine thesis on
Thomas Campion and devoted his very last class at University College Dublin to the virtues of Jane Austen, before marching out to prepare for insurrection; and Joseph Plunkett learned much from
Francis Thompson. What they rejected was not England but the British imperial system, which denied expressive freedom to its colonial subjects. It was for this reason that Yeats said that "no Irish voice has been lifted up in praise of that Imperialism which is ... but a more painted and flaunting materialism; because Ireland has taken sides for ever with the poor in spirit who shall inherit the earth".
¹⁰

The
1916 leaders have often been accused of glorifying violence but, apart from one notorious speech by Pearse, they must have been the gentlest revolutionaries in modern history. They rose in the conviction that further involvement by Irish people in the Great War would lead to far more bloodshed than their Rising, which they hoped would take Ireland out of the war altogether. The British saw their action as treachery and shot its leaders as casually as they shot daily deserters on the western front. It took George Bernard Shaw to remind them that they should, under international law, have treated the men as prisoners-of-war: "An Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do if it be their misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans".
¹¹
By the time he had written that,
sixteen men were executed: and Yeats captured the new mood.

O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?

You say that we should still the land
Till Germany's overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh's bony thumb?
¹²

To the British this Rising among a people who had not even experienced compulsory conscription seemed utterly inexplicable. To those Irish writers who sought to account for it in artistic terms, it appeared at first to be indescribable in any available language. This was initially a problem for the rebels themselves: how to express the unknown in terms of the known? MacDonagh and Plunkett's studies of mystic authors and poets take on an extra significance in this light, as if both men were hoping to find in the mystic's texts a solution to the technical problem. Indeed, MacDonagh wrote in
The Irish Review
of the challenge confronting "the mystic who has to express in terms of sense and wit the things of God that are made known to him in no language".
¹³
The rebels, likewise, sought a dream of which they could not directly speak: they could only speak of having sought it. The invention that was the
Irish Republic was initially visible only to those who were the agents of freedom glimpsed as an abstract vision before it could be realized in history. In his poem "The Fool", Pearse contemplated a point from which all outlines of the republic would become visible:

O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?
What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?
¹⁴

From that vantage-point, many texts by Wilde, Shaw,
Yeats, Synge and dozens of others might be seen to have represented, years earlier, a complex of ideas which found their fullest expression in the Rising of 1916. Yeats was the first knowingly to divine that connection when he told the young George Russell "absorb Ireland and her tragedy and you will be the poet of the people, perhaps the poet of a new insurrection".
¹⁵
Ironically, in the event, Yeats himself filled the role which he had reserved for his friend. His play
Cathleen ní Houlihan
(1902) cast the beautiful nationalist Maud Gonne in the part of a withered hag who would only walk again like a radiant young queen if young men were willing to kill and die for her. To the republican insurrectionist
P. S. O'Hegarty, the drama became at once "a sort of sacrament", to the rebel Countess Markievicz "a kind of gospel".
¹⁶
The Rising, when it came, was therefore seen by many as a foredoomed classical tragedy, whose
denouement
was both inevitable and unpredictable, prophesied and yet surprising. Though it remained mysterious to many, the event was long in the gestation.

Year one of the revolutionists' calendar was 1893, because it marked
the foundation of the Gaelic League. Even more striking than this, however, was the aura of the 1890s which clung to the characters caught up in the crisis, for many had been impressionable adolescents in the
aesthetic decade. The rebels, Wilde-like, opted to invest their genius in their life and only their talent in their work, for they offered their lives to the public as works of art. Seeing themselves as martyrs for beauty, they aestheticized their sacrifice. Most of all, they followed the gospel which asserted "the triumph of failure", the notion that whoever lost his life would save it. This idea underlies Thomas Mac-Donagh's play
When the Dawn is Come
and Pearse's
The Singer,
whose hero says:

One man can free a people as one man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on a tree.
¹⁷

Equally, Joseph Plunkett's poem "The Little Black Rose Shall be Red at Last" reworks the bardic image of Ireland as
róisín dubh
(dark róisín) into a nineties-ish mode:

Because we share our sorrows and our joys
And all your dear and intimate thoughts are mine
We shall not fear the trumpets and the noise
Of battle, for we know our dreams divine,
And when my heart is pillowed on your heart
And ebb and flowing of their passionate flood
Shall beat in concord love through every part
Of brain and body – when at last the blood
O'er leaps the final barrier to find
Only one source whereon to spend its strength,
And we two lovers, long but one in mind
And soul, are made one flesh at length;
Praise God, if mis my blood fulfils the doom
When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom.
¹⁸

Here the Gaelic conceit of a ruler married to the land, whose relation is mediated by the poet, is replaced by the image of a poet whose body bleeds into the earth. This sexual congress will restore new life even though he dies, like the victim of a fertility rite, in the act. In his devotion to the Romantic Image which at once discloses and withholds its meanings, Plunkett provided yet another example of the age's
penchant for the half-said thing, the symbol radiant with partially-articulated possibility.