Machnamh 100 Seminar VI, entitled “Memory, History and Imagination”

“1922 – The Most Significant Year?” Machnamh 100 Seminar VI: Memory, History and Imagination

17th November, 2022

It is to be welcomed, that, during the period of our Machnamh 100 seminars, so much new work has been published on the period of the War of Independence, the Civil War and the early years of the establishment of the Free State, that would, some decades later, be declared the Irish Republic.

Among such is Ireland 22 edited by Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry, published by the Royal Irish Academy.

The 50 pieces from 50 contributors on 50 chosen themes of 1922 are an attractive invitation to reading below the surface of what was a most important, but horrific year, 1922.

The Irish Labour History Society’s Seeking No Honours on Tom Johnson published by Trade Union Forsa, is also essential for an understanding of the period, as is Colum Kenny’s work on Arthur Griffith. Both Tom Johnson and Arthur Griffith have been drawn out of neglect by such recent work.

1922 to 1925 is a defining period in much more than constitutional terms.

It is a period in which the rawness of division has exacted great hurt, a hurt that perhaps should be acknowledged before any attempts at narratives of State formation success are presented as singular accounts.

When Basil Chubb wrote many years ago of ‘Ireland a successful Democracy’ he was right, but the judgment was of an institutional success.

The period is significantly lessened in terms of non-violent possibilities by the absence of the idealistic or pragmatic leaders of the previous decade, such as Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, or, earlier again, James Connolly.

This is shown in how events fell out, events that were sometimes calculated, more often spontaneous or uncontrolled.

In terms of interpretation of events, this creates a complexity that cannot but be dealt with by a diversity of narratives and at several different levels.

Neither is working the relationship of memory to history any single challenge. Layers of memory wrestle with each other and from differing perspectives. It is an unending struggle, producing tentative but temporary conclusions.

In contemporary times those of us exercising imagination to recover the period, must seek to begin with the fullest bag of pencils we may have, to draw some semblance of what life was like in the struggle to come from under the blanket of empire – a smothering that had in its time sought its implementation by the forbidding of most rights to freedom, of belief, of speech in one of the oldest languages.

It had involved dispossession, debasement, all based on the assumption that those who were seeking freedom constituted a dangerous threat, that they were a lesser, backward, untrustworthy people, that could, at best, be but possessors of a quaint, but still dangerous, disposition.

Generation after generation of our ancestors lived through a complex set of exclusions and humiliations that should serve as a qualification of any contemporary hubris.

It is not the case that our ancestors were passive, in any simple Gramscian sense, that they did not know what the sources of exclusion or repression were. It is not any false consciousness that restrained them.

Something very real, important for the future, was being stored. It is a supressed experience of hurt, that based on humiliation, of being regarded as lesser. It is one that is transmitted through the generations.

The hurt, such as is inflicted, is not cast aside, forgotten, but imbued with anger, takes on a shape that enables it to be available for its catalytic release. James C. Scott has described such so well in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance using literary materials as well as ethnographic research.

It is a great challenge, beyond the task of inclusive integrating of acts of memory, the accepting of distance from what was painful, and seeking to do so with a rejection of any false palliative amnesia, recognising that our task is to live ethically in the present, create futures with possibilities.

There will be, no doubt, some who might suggest that creating pictures of the past to accommodate the present should appeal, but such will not suffice for any adequate response to present or future.

The acknowledgement of the role of myth is of an entirely different order.

By 1922, the Irish people were a wounded people. They had suffered the First World War, both in terms of participation and in resistance to conscription terms, many had died in the Great Flu, an election that had released a great energy and desire for change, that, had its result been accepted, would have made a War of Independence and an ensuing Civil War unnecessary.

The obduracy of imperial pressure, however, would require that the opportunities for peace be thrown aside, and such tragic folly would be repeated during the Civil War.

The year 1922, and its events, are ones of heroic commitment to their tasks, in the most difficult circumstances, on the part of many, but it is a year which is marked so deeply, not just by the failure of diplomacy, as indeed we are in our current times, but by the reliance on such a coercive force of unscrupulous practices, such as would prevent any peaceful departure from the gripping fingers of empire.

Empires, in so many settings, have shown that this would also be the experience of others of the colonised.

Security of tenancy-holding had given way to security of ownership.

“To Hell with Home Rule. It’s the land we are after”, George Bermingham was told in his day in the late 19th century in Mayo.

There is a violence that comes from land hunger. It is impossible to understand the events of 1922 and the year that followed without recognising the importance of the land issue.

The long journey from the 1880s in terms of land division was not over. In 1923 there were 114,000 untenanted farms, 3,125,000 acres of domain land, yet to be distributed.

The 1923 Land Act that was coming would offer reward to some, give an opening opportunity to some congests, but would, in its allocations too, exclude not just those regarded as still dangerous in 1923 – ‘irregulars’, many of whom would remain incarcerated until 1924, even though the arms surrender had been on May 24th 1923 – but exclusion included those too who were ‘on the wrong side’.

In my paper for Machnamh 5, I drew on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work on the Prison Diary of Joseph Campbell as a source for reflection on what those incarcerated discussed between May 24th 1923 and their release.

They had lost, would not get their jobs back, would not be getting land, and the ban on emigration to the U.S. by De Valera would not be lifted until July 1925.

I have a personal connection to the period. My father, uncles and aunt were activists in the War of Independence but my father and uncle were on opposite sides in the Civil War. My uncle was in the National Army, my father in Hut 3 in the Curragh Internment Camp.

Later applying for a small pension, my father wrote to the Pensions Board:

“I was in employment as a Grocer’s Assistant at a salary of £130 per year plus £50 for travelling after my release from internment camp.

A deputation [he mentions his previous employer] was approached and asked for me to be taken back in his employment. He refused to do so, with the result that I was idle until 1st August 1924 when I got a position as a junior assistant from Michael Nolan, Eyre St, Newbridge, at a salary of £50 per year indoor. At the time very few people would employ an ex-internee”.

What I have quoted was the signed statement of my father, John Higgins, dated 18th April 1935, in support of his application which he, like so many others, would repeat, for a military service pension.

The Pension Files contained in the National Archives record their long and exhausting battle for a small pension, which in my father’s case was eventually granted in 1956, almost 22 years after his first application, and just eight years before he died in December 1964.

Such was the bitter reality for many of the non-landed, the internees, who were now unemployed, too many perceived as "unemployable".

Their previous comrades in the newly emerging Irish State, were now estranged from them. A State was coming into being, one of which it would quickly become clear that it was modelling its administrative practices, not on any Michael Collins type of administrative radicalism, but on a mimesis of what it felt might be the excellences of imperial practices.

Ireland’s ongoing ‘Decade of Commemorations’ and our six Machnamh 100 seminars have sought, and it is welcome, to focus attention not only on the political and constitutional context of the events

of 1912–1923, but also on the wider experiences of war, conflict, the Great Flu, and the horrific political violence associated with land security and land hunger within Irish society, and not only that violence which was being imitated or reciprocated, but new forms of violence, including gendered violence. The period carries so many examples of cruel punishments as well as killings.

This broadening of scholarly perspectives beyond constitutional and military history has greatly enhanced our understanding of how conflict and war is experienced and registered as a cultural, social and emotional phenomenon within Ireland’s recent past, as Guy Beiner’s work has shown.

Among what remains to be given adequate space in the historical accounts are the efforts of those who sought peace – be it Archbishop Clune in the War of Independence, the Trade Union Movement, the Labour Party, the People’s Rights Association in Cork.

However, the security of land, its promise, the urge to acquire more, something far beyond sufficiency, is the dominant feature in the background.

There is a privileging in the period of the achievement of order, of a necessary coercive authority. It is one which would lead to State executions in response to assassinations.

This would in time have the outcome of a State with strong authoritarian tendency and practice, one that would cede control in key areas of policy to an authoritarian version of the Church.

Of those who put parliamentary process and peace first, contemporary writing is sparse.

One could not but have been moved when one read of a visit by young Jim Larkin and Barry Desmond to Tom and Marie Johnson, Tom a peace-pursuer and foundational parliamentarian, then retired. He was found living in straitened circumstances, no pension, broken TV set, struggling to heat his home.

This was the fate that befell the Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament of 1922.

The objective of achieving and maintaining a ‘respectability’, one sustained by having property, as a launching pad, was paramount; respectability of the name, of the immediate family, an essential aspect of the decision as to whether you were being really called for the dioceses.

The Christian Brothers to a large extent were left to source the missions.

For so many people in the 1920s, in diverse circumstances and in overt and covert ways, loss of dignity and humiliation were being experienced – be it those who were incarcerated, such as others had in national memory been enduringly symbolised in John Mitchell’s iconic Jail Journal, one of the most widely read books of its time.

Such loss of dignity could have results that were near irreparable and were transferable. It was not solely individuals who were affected. Loss of health, the consequences of life with Flying Columns, sleeping in dugouts, all had consequences that families were left to carry.

Not all nationalists had the response James C. Scott describes of a stored response for future delivery.

Responses to authoritarianism old and new could take different forms. Interestingly, it was in their direct response to such breaches that was the distinctive feature of Fenianism within Nationalism.

It was said that Fenians could be identified by their “readiness to meet the eye of the priest, landlord or policeman”.

Fenians prided themselves on their self-respect and refusal to conform to traditional deference. Fenians were anti-aristocratic democrats who had forged links with English radicalism and harboured notions of just reforms, particularly agrarian.

However, overall, any egalitarian tendency was a weak light within the general nationalist movement.

In the prosecution of the fruits of its struggle, nationalism, as is found in so many cases of formal independence, would, in the administrative procedures, imperceptibly at times, take on Empire’s assumptions replacing the previous colonial authority with a new, but similar, version, one that bore authoritarian tendencies, for example, in notions of who constituted the ‘deserving’.

While it is true that, in many settings, the cold influence of Empire’s administrative practice was indeed in decline, the absence of equality as the driving force of an alternative, would give rise to a retained emphasis on status, respectability and, in terms of religion, one that offered not a spirituality, but rather required a piety in the service of docility and a further gendered inferiority.

The pension’s application process, to which those who had made the sacrifices that achieved independence were applying, was an insensitive rejection of such people, many of whom were sinking into poverty and ill-health.

It was in terms of bureaucratic oppression, one that was deeply humiliating, with requirements that were impossible to meet being inflicted on applicants, all done in an official, Chekhovian form of communication and judgmentalism, for example, interviews in Garda barracks, for an evaluation that suggested inferiority, something that can only be counted as a callous response to poverty in most cases.

Neither policy nor practice constituted a normative behaviour that had either egalitarianism or the necessary dignity of citizenship at its centre.

The values seen as necessary for the sustenance of status, respectability, repression, docility were assumed to be ones quite likely to be beyond that attainment of the lesser propertied. Economic weakness was seen as a corollary of moral weakness.

The 1920s were the foundation for a dreadful decade of the 1930s, a decade of repression, bigotry, inculcated fear, and, for many, flight, if one could.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the vacant spaces in the emerging Ireland were moved into by the Church. By the 1930s, the New Ireland was one in which perhaps vocationalism at best might be tolerated, seen as a mild, legitimate, ‘safe’ and an alternative to any dismantling of class or property-based order that might be advocated, discussed or allowed. It was one which might fit within the authoritarianism of Bishops.

An anti-intellectualism was rampant, particularly in the Church and its institutional presence. North-South exchanges descended into being competing excesses of sectarianism, were often brutal and offensive, reinforcing divisions, toxicity, any acceptable notions of ‘the Other’.

There were winners and losers then of the Civil War. They in their differing circumstances would form the basis of the new social strata: “The losers […] found it hard to get regular work in their old trades – or indeed communion at some altar rails”, as Declan Kiberd put it today.

The professions on the other hand were being re-peopled by families that would go on to create dynasties, and in cultural terms embrace ‘modernity’ as they saw it.

There was an oppositional intelligentsia stirring. Writers such as George Russell, Seán Ó Faoláin, Séan O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien all provided a counter-narrative.

Institutions such as the Gate Theatre became the centre for subversive writings. However, “literature”, as Declan Kiberd notes, “which had helped invent Ireland now found itself often censored by the very country it helped to create”.

The Censorship of Films Act 1923 was an early arrival. Under the Censorship of Films Act (1923), a censorship film certificate could be denied for public exhibition if it was deemed to be indecent, obscene or blasphemous, or contrary to public morality.

Under this regime, more than 2,500 films were banned, and over 11,000 films were cut by film censors between the 1920s and the 1980s.

The first Film Censor, James Montgomery, declared that he acted as a “moral sieve”, and used the Ten Commandments as his guide.

Then, too, the moral attitudes of the Committee on Evil Literature (1926) Report permeated the first Censorship of Publications Act (1929).

Sexuality, reproduction and matters relating to the corporal, all were of the greatest concern to the Irish censors, and censorship enshrined an ideology that was deeply suspicious of the uncovered body,

sight of flesh, expressions of human complexity and beauty.

Censorship, as Peter Martin has noted, had its moral entrepreneurs, who, with an energy they suggested was drawn from divine sources, went from creating moral panics to legislative victories over any expression of sensibility or, ‘Heaven save us’, something sexual:

“The first organised campaigns began in 1911 in Limerick and swiftly spread to Dublin and then around the country.

Campaigners were mostly Catholic, members of confraternities, vigilance associations and other groups of laymen and priests. They received support from the hierarchy, but their passion came from their own values which blended piety with a middle-class puritanism that would have been familiar to their British or Unionist equivalents”.

Censorship was too part of a wider exclusionary manifesto in the new State, one that focused its energies too on differentiating Irishness from Britishness.

When it was discovered, for example, that the incoming Mayo County Librarian Letitia Dunbar-Harrison was a Protestant whose alma mater was Trinity College, the controversy resulted in her position becoming untenable, a Protestant putting a book into a Catholic child’s hands!

While cinema was considered suspect, crossroads dancing, seen initially as a far healthier pastime and was promoted, yet, by 1934 it too would have to go, requiring a clerically controlled alternative.

The strict segregation of the sexes was a remarkable feature of the Irish countryside of the time, as was being noted by several visiting anthropologists and journalists.

Those who could no longer, for whatever reason, remain in the repressive environment of 1920s’ and 1930s’ Ireland emigrated, mostly to England, and were termed “lost souls” in some of the editorials of the Irish daily newspapers.

It was the legislative atmosphere of the 1920s that laid the foundations for all of the extremism of the 1930s which would become a decade of misery, exclusion and subjugation for so many.

As we reflect back on the early years of the new State, we should consider too the price we have all paid from an unethical memory.

If memory is both the recall of a historical experience and carries the accrual of layers of meaning through which the events have been repeatedly reconstructed, these layers of memory were to be left orphaned for so many decades in the newly independent Ireland, resulting in so much lost opportunity.

Thankfully, there now is a rich scholarship, but we should never forget those who had to plough what was the lonely furrow.

As we look to the future, I believe it is one in which we can muster hope for the citizens of this country. The search for, and identification of, a common ground built on a shared humanity is our best hope.

A reflection has been made, now the work is handed over. All are welcome to come forward.

The process of ethical recall, with which we have been engaged through these six seminars of Machnamh 100 over the past two years, the reflection we have made, as well as other commemorative events, can aid us all in this, our shared journey together, towards an emancipatory future, one that is marked by inclusivity, diversity, possibility, and a sharing of memory in conditions of peace – in a diverse Republic of which we can all be proud, be always open to revise, make better.

Beir beannacht.

Ideas, Memory, Imagination - Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame

17th Nov, 2022

Early in 2016, I got a phone-call from The Irish Times. Two of my great-uncle Edward Keegan’s 1916 medals had gone on sale in New York; and though the newspaper wished to purchase, its directors very considerately wanted to check that this was acceptable to the Keegan family. Edward had been dismissed from the paper after the Rising and The Irish Times would like to make amends.

I phoned my aunt Maura, the oldest surviving Keegan and younger sister of my dead mother; and, after some debate, we agreed that it was a nice idea - especially as the newspaper would put the medals on display. On the same day that the medals were unveiled in Tara Street, Edward’s name was added, with those of the Pearse brothers, Tom MacDonagh and Sean Connolly to a memorial plaque in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre. Edward had so impressed W B Yeats with his acting that he’d been offered a full-time post in the theatre; but his wife, who had children also to consider, thought W B a bit flakey and urged her husband to hold onto his reliable job in the ads section of The Irish Times.  Edward was shot through the lung in hand-to-hand fighting in the South Dublin Union and never again enjoyed full health. His family probably had to pawn the medals. In a gesture of kindness, the Abbey gave him a job as assistant stage manager which he had at the time of his death in 1938. In the years before that, he did much voluntary work advancing the case for pensions for forgotten veterans of the Rising.

Like his brothers Joe and Thomas (my maternal grandfather), he had been a member of the Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band and its associated hurling club, as well as of the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League and of the Irish Volunteers. And, like each brother, he took no part in the Civil War, regarding it as a disaster that former friends should kill one another on the basis of rather abstract arguments.

In this the Keegans were fairly typrical of the 1916 generation, surprisingly few of whom fought in Cogadh na gCarad. Instead, they returned to the cultural activities which had first brought them into the national movement.

The Abbey plaque was the brainchild of Stephen Rea, who said a few gentle words at its unveiling. The later event at The Irish Times was rather different---there was a brief mention of Edward Keegan, after which an academic historian spoke for over thirty-five minutes on the importance of Cumann na nGael\Fine Gael in the establishment and consolidation of the state.

I found this in some ways strange, in some ways not. In recent years, the Decade of Commemorations was dominated by speakers from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, neither of which actually existed in the period 1912-1922. It was as if these latecomers to the feast were obsessed with inserting themselves into the narrative; and when more recently the time came to commemorate the Civil War, the joint presence of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael speakers at Béal na mBláth was seen as a sign of maturity and a great break-through into open-heartedness. The bipolar theory that veterans of the war of Independence had all taken one side or the other in the Civil War was seen as axiomatic, as the two parties which emerged from that war jockeyed their representatives into self-congratulatory positions.

The role of the Labour party leader Tom Johnson in seeking peace between the belligerents scarcely received a mention. Nor did the part played by the Labour movement in many other events commemorated (the agonised non-participation in 1918 election; the Soviet established in Limerick in 1919; ongoing agitation for rights of women and children). A private security firm had been hired, with no sense of irony, to control and monitor crowds which marked the anniversary of the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913. It was all too remeniscent of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s remark, during the 1966 commemorations, that the two major parties were in danger of commemorating themselves to death. Although I live in Clontarf, I do not recall any major public event at Tom Johnson’s grave in the local cemetery; or any mention that his suggestion that the rights of children, which had featured in the radical ideas of the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil 1919, be written into the 1922 Constitution.

In a previous Machtnamh paper, President Higgins has recalled how Tom Johnson’s condemnation of non-judicial executions “brought him not any thanks but death-threats from Liam Lynch on behalf of the anti-Treatyites”.  The reluctance to reproduce many of the radical ideas of the Easter Proclamation or Democratic Programme in subsequent Constitutions was probably based on the notion that ideas were dangerous. People often blamed the Civil War on hair-splitting exponents of abstract notions. Such an allergy to radical, challenging new ideas was amplified, especially when they were supported by female intellectuals. Although Maud Gonne and Mary MacSwiney won reputations as “unmanageable revolutionaries”, most women of the period wanted peace; and confined their gestures to sending papers and tobacco to comfort men in jail, sometimes helping a person on the run to find a dug-out in which to hide.

The role of women in trying to broker a peace in 1922---“republicans without malice” as Augusta Gregory called them----proved futile. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington has written of how, when she went to plead with Collins, she found only “a man with a touch of the dictator” whose ideal Ireland was a replica of the British state, “with the usual soldier’s contempt for civilians, particularly women, though these had often risked their lives to help him”. Lady Gregory’s deputation to Kevin O’Higgins got short shrift, derided as “hysterical young women who ought to be playing five-finger exercises or helping their mothers with the brasses”.

What, then, was the Civil War all about? Hardly the North, which many felt Collins intended to invade and reclaim. Or was it the Oath of Allegiance? Hardly that either, except for those extreme idealists who lacked patience to wait for expanded versions of freedom---they could have sworn the Oath as an empty coercive formula and forgotten it. The Civil war may have drawn in such idealists, but also the sort of male who had by 1922 become convinced that alternative organisations of militancy were not available and had come to regard a state of war as normal. It is significant that wherever the British went they created a cult around the world of soldierhood; and when they withdrew from a country, they often left conditions ripe for civil strife. Of course in any but a strictly military sense, it’s often difficult to assign a specific date to a civil war---in the Irish case there were internal divisions well before 1922; and these were still played out in attempts by Fianna Fáil to dominate the 1966 memorial events or by Fine Gael to make similar efforts to link their party traditions to key moments in the Decade of Commemoration.

The British often withdrew precipitately before they had trained the colonised people in the art of government (although it’s only fair to add that the civil service witnessed a fairly seamless transition). George Russell, cooperator and poet, foresaw the forthcoming political crisis in civic politics as early as 1916:

“There is a danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more

advanced than the moral qualities which alone can secure the success of a               

revolt. These intellectual and moral qualities---the skill to organise, the               

wisdom to control large undertakings, are not natural gifts but the result               

of experience”.

It was of such qualities that W B Yeats was thinking, perhaps, when he composed the closing question of his poem Leda and the Swan---if Leda is the perennial Irish girl and the Swan a version of the invading power, the question makes a sudden political sense:    

               Did she put on his knowledge with his power

               Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

The girl has “feeling”, the Swan “knowledge”---the poem a reworking of a story of rape and brutal withdrawal. That final question could be asking: when the Irish took over “power”from the empire, did they also take on the centuries-honed skills of self-government (“knowledge”). The indifferent beak----whose violence is captured in the monosyllabic plosives of “beak” and “drop”----becomes Yeats’s judgement on the callous suddenness of an ill-prepared British withdrawal----something that would be repeated in India, Cyprus etc etc.

So is this closer to what the Civil War was about? “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry”, said Yeats, perhaps thinking of what Ernie O’Malley called “the lyric phase” of the revolution; “but from the quarrel with others we make prose”---that bitter, hard-edged realism which led to appalling atrocities by Free Stater and Republican, and the burning-out of many decent people such as Horace Plunkett at just that point when he intended to bequeath his house to the nation. George Russell said that from the idealism of Yeats, Ireland had followed Joyce and O’Flaherty into an exploration of the sewers: a perhaps inevitable antidote. Joyce was made inevitable by the poetry of Yeats; for the lyric phase was bound sooner or later to contain the essential criticism of the poetry to which it adhered.

As to the rhetoric which characterised all of these events, the robust integrity of the Treaty Debates might be considered the last, high-voltage expression of the nation’s quarrel with itself---on citizens’ rights, social democracy, cultural self-determination. That disputants capable of such eloquence should soon be at war with one another was a calamity indeed. Yet there hangs over that intense debate a sense of uncertainty. Its speakers had sought various dreams of which they could not fully speak; they could speak only of having sought them. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, their Ireland was becoming an answer to a question which had not yet been fully asked; the disputants, in the words of Patrick O’Farrell, were looking not so much for an answer as for a meaning to their question.

Back in 1916 the rebels had played a role: assuming a republic in order to prove its existence, many had behaved like actors----indeed, many like Edward Keegan were actors. The problem was like that defined a generation earlier by Oscar Wilde: “the first duty in life is to adopt a pose: what the second is nobody has yet found out”. Had the contributors to the Treaty Debates any real agreement as to what they were fighting for? Land, undoubtedly, for many of the poorer participants, like the Keegans, had been evicted in earlier decades from a family farm. But beyond that? When Tomás Ó Criomhthain asked fellow-islanders on the Blasket in Allagar na hInse “abair an focal republic i nGaoluinn” (say the word republic in Irish), his interlocutors found that they had none: “agus is beag a chuir a soláthar imní ach oiread oraibh”(and it’s little its attainment worried you either), was Tomás’s laconic raply.

The burning-out of Protestant houses seldom had a sectarian dimension----its exponents just wanted the return of their land. Compared with Russia, few enough big houses got burned in the War of Independence----more were torched in the Civil War, often by persons who expected to obtain more land for their farms. But many perpetrators, half-apologetic for what they were doing, helped the aristocrats to save family heirlooms. (Other more crude operatives simply looted them). Catholic landlords were shot too, because their land was also felt to have been stolen in the past from its rightful owners.

Doubtless, many Protestants who left for England felt no longer welcome in Ireland or loved-----and the closing of their houses and final abandonment of their demesnes removed good jobs from many (both Catholic and Protestant).  But again, there is complexity here too. My TCD room-mate’s grandfather was a doctor in Greystones and Dalkey, who served in Crown forces and was wounded in World War One; but who also cared for the local poor, often without charge. When his name was added to a list of men to be assassinated, members of the local IRA alerted him and kept him in a hidden place until the danger had passed. His family and descendants lived on happily in Ireland.

But these were frenetic times. The sheer effort expended in expelling the British from 26 counties (not to mention fighting for small countries in World War One and the Black-and-Tan Terror) left everyone exhausted and in no condition to reimagine the national condition. A majority wearily accepted the Treaty as the freedom to win further freedom. Great things were done in the early years of the state, such as building a power station, or broadcasting the first live sporting event, or improving the housing supply; but the old imperial capital Dublin was not replaced by a different city and attitudes to schooling hardly changed at all. If anything, things went backward. Pearse’s idea of a child-centred, arts-and-craft education made way for a dismal imitation of English schools, with their rote-learning and corporal punishment designed to bring rebellious individualists into line. It was no surprise that many lapsed back onto the received old forms----with imperial postboxes painted green and British guns, once aimed at Easter rebels, now borrowed to shoot out the rebels in the Four Courts.

In all of this there is what Erich Fromm would later call “the fear of freedom”. The bleakness of freedom could seem lonely indeed, unconsciously projected (perhaps) by the sheer blankness that made the map of Ireland seem empty on the first Free State postage stamps. Bernard Shaw captured this sense of baffled vacancy when he wrote in The Irish Statesman in 1928: “When we were given a free hand to make good, we found ourselves with a shock that has taken all the moral pluck out of us as completely as shell-shock. We can recover ourselves only by forcing ourselves to face new ideas”.  Meanwhile, the people, cowed by a rule-obsessed ecclesiocracy, behaved like apple-lickers---people who, if tempted in the Garden of Eden, would (in the words of Seán O’Faoláin) have licked rather than bitten the apple”.

So we are back to Wilde’s question: what was that second idea, after the initial pose was abandonded? Some 1916 rebels thought they had got closer to it. Tom MacDonagh said that the mystic “seeks to express the things of God that are made known to him in no language”. This might be an explanation of the British complaint that whenever they came up with an answer, the Irish changed the question. That was because they had no real idea as to exactly what the question was---some sort of mystical republic beyond description in any available language. James Joyce spoke of the “uncreated conscience” of the race and said that the Irish middle class had yet to be made. Pearse, being Pearse, went farther:

               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?

This assigns a key role to the Unconscious, an imaginative surplus to be revealed only in the future…. in the Ireland of the coming times. Hamlet was a play known well to many rebels, in the course of which the Player King says:

               But orderly to end where I begun

               Our wills and faces do so contrary run

               That our devices still are overthrown;

               Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

The deed subverts its intended outcome; and the Unconscious does its will, bringing the people to a place they never expected to be. Or, as another Shakespearean king says “No thought is contented”, for it will seek its object in the strange and the new. If the people had known their destination to begin with, they would never have needed to go there.

One needs a self to narrate one’s story, but how can one presume to know a self until after the story is told? How can you represent the new in a language shop-soiled with messy precedents—the unknown in terms of the known? The fuzzy font of the Easter Proclamation represents the problem, as did O’Casey in keeping his rebels mostly offstage. The same question was put by W B Yeats in his play Resurrection: “What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if at that moment when knowledge or order seem complete that something appears?”

I’ve noted that civil wars tend not to start or end on exact dates. Before she died, Joan Didion observed that the United States version was not yet over but carried forward into modern times by Trump’s hatred of Obama. One could say the same about the competitive behaviour of civil war parties in Ireland.

The effects of our Civil War have been massive. Silence was one. Emotional breakdown another----see McGahern’s Amongst Women for samples. Exile was a common reaction. Though de Valera accused emigrants of apostasy, many went to the US where their business skills flourished at a time when Ireland badly stood in need of such gifts. How often did one see a van bearing a name like “FX Brennan Est 1927” in New York and lament the loss to an Ireland filled with timid professional men, cautious professional men and few risk-taking entrepreneurs. As for the ranchers who replaced landlords, their role had been anticipated and foretold over a hundred years earlier, when Thady Quirk took over Castle Rackrent on terms most favourable to every middle-man who followed him.

Indeed the Civil War had multiple antecedents---if we wished, we could find them as far back as that internal strife of the twelfth century which led to the invasion of Ireland.

An amazing number of intellectuals, whether participant or not, were so disgusted by the vicious civil strife that they opted for various forms of emigration. Flann Campbell went to the US in 1925 and effectively founded Irish Studies there after the collapse of his marriage---Fordham University amalgamated his school into its English Department in 1932 and he stayed until 1939. Seán Ó Faoláin left for literary study and teaching at Harvard. Prison had allowed such figures to rethink their nationalist politics, as Frank O’Connor illustrated in his story “Guests of the Nation”, about the plight of men forced to kill those who have become their friends.

The losers of the Civil War were often socially disgraced and many found it hard to get regular work in their old trades----or indeed communion at some altar rails. Most were landless labourers and some went into the small-time pub trade. Not for them a large farm of rolling acres after the Land Acts. Yet the revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe after 1918 led them to understand that they were persons of consequence in their own right.

John McGahern, however, did not regard 1922 as a significant date: it was simply, he said, a moment when responsibility for managing the decline of  a rural Ireland passed from one elite to another. The emerging grazier class was more interested in land ownership than in land use….. and in securing enough affluence to place a son in a diocesan college or make another offspring an apprentice solicitor ----- people “killed with respectability” who could be relied upon to promote the appropriate ideology.

There were few to speak for the landless labourers—who left in great numbers. His utter lack of interest in the radical ideas of the Democratic Programme of 1919 meant that de Valera got fewer votes than he might have done in the early years of Fianna Fáil. Allegations that he was a Bolshevik put paid to all that. His idolator and biographer Dorothy McArdle finally rebuked him for timidity in 1937, lamenting in a letter that Ireland was now a necropolis.

By then George Russell, editor of The Irish Statesman, had decamped to England (where he helped P L Travers craft the tale of Mary Poppins) and thence to the US where he advised the administration during the “dustbowl years” on the merits of rural cooperation. His friend, Stephen MacKenna, the great translator of Plotinus, companion of Synge and editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, had also left for England. More than one in two persons born in the island afer 1900 were gone by the 1930s. What is remarkable is that so many with vibrant minds stayed---and made things so much better in the 1960s, with expressions of cultural self-belief linked to programmes for economic development.

Independence created immense possibilities for a country denied self-government for more than a century; but this exciting thought was tempered by the sense that things had changed mainly so that they could remain the same.  The Civil War had led to a distrust of anyone who made an idea or a scheme the basis for action. Science was not greatly esteemed in most schools; nor was literature, which had helped invent Ireland but now found itself often censored by the very country it helped to create. Science and poetry were all very well in their place, the authorities implied, but it was a subordinate place and “one could have too much of that kind of thing”.

The idea of a rights-based secular society which informed the Proclamation of 1916 and the Democratic Programme of 1919 was replaced by a narrowly-defined ethnic nationalism, notably in the 1937 Constitution. The Irish language ceased to feel like a recoverable gift and to many schoolchildren appeared more in the guise of a threat. Interdictions in schools tended to be barked out in the native language; and religion was reduced to a set of rules rather than a version of imaginative possibility.  “If we had more real religion, we might have less morals”, lamented W B Yeats; but few people really understood what he meant. The study of the Catechism of Catholic Doctrine and of the intricacies of grammar in the Irish language took up many hours of the school day. Teachers were encouraged to see themselves as the non-commissioned officers of the official church.

 As Ireland hovered between sovereign status and empire affiliate, it found itself caught in a posture of waiting----for full republican sovereignty, social democracy, economic lift-off, even spiritual renewal. “Do you believe in a life to come?” asks one of Beckett’s characters in Endgame, a play staged in 1957,  only to be told “Mine was always that”.  It would be many more decades before the full fruits of independence would be tasted in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, but even then only by a lucky minority.

Bibliography

Siobhra Aiken, Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War, Irish Academic Press 2022

Terence Dooley, Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution, Yale University Press 2022

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin ed., Joseph Campbell’s Prison Diary 1922-1923, Cork University Press 2001

Patrick O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Question, Oxford University Press 1971

Memory and Imagination mediated for a 'mass' audience - Lelia Doolan

17th November, 2022

Over fifty years ago, we used to do the politics programme, 7 Days, every Monday night on RTÉ. With proper ructions on occasion. We were off the air for the summer and I was on a holiday in Camp, Co. Kerry when on August 20th, 1968, the Warsaw Pact countries, led by the Soviet Union, (now Russia), rolled tanks and troops into Czechoslovakia, into Prague, to put a stop to the gentle rebirth of freedoms and an end to Dubćek’s reforms. I remember lying out to get a signal in those starlit nights listening to news on shortwave radio from New York, to the meetings of the United Nations. The Czech plenipotentiary came to plead with his global compatriots to come to their aid. On that crackly radio, his voice was urgent and emotional and his words were most affecting. I was riveted. I could see those tanks, the horror of the people, the suddenness. It is still an unforgettable moment to me -- the shock of war. We’re all too familiar with it today, with the sounds and the images from the heart-rending scenes in Ukraine.

What would it have been like more than fifty years earlier, to hear on radio when the gunboat Helga came up the Liffey to put an end to our declaration of a free and independent republic? There was no United Nations to appeal to, then; few enough to hear, except by word of mouth, that fearful, poetic and resolute, strangely elated moment. Most people were unaware. There were no moving cameras to follow every awesome moment. James Stephens walked the streets to and from his office, writing about what he saw in his simple, graphic, calm way. Maire Comerford circled the cut-off city, enchanted and frustrated.

The Rising. The risen people. It is an emotional image. I would have been as riveted by the dream of those passionate poets and unexpected soldiers -- and as caught up in those later moments of ghastly retribution - the executions. They changed everything. And then the War of Independence, the Treaty and its debates. What would it have been like to see the the Four Courts under siege, the tragedy of comrade against comrade. And our emerging slightly Free State. The amputated North of Ireland. A League of Nations reject until 1923. Few phones, little radio but morse code; photographers, yes; and contending headlines and propaganda.

Michael Collins, then eighteen years old, sat in the London offices of the British Civil Service, opposite my father, two years his junior in 1908. Michael was already a member of the IRB, the secret Fenian army who rose from the Famine and became the brotherhood that finally created what Nuala O’Faolain called “our damp little shambles of a democracy”.

But there was no public medium to help us know the dreams and hopes of all those Irish language and literary enthusiasts, the trades unionists and suffragettes, those young military and sportspeople - - what did they have in common? How were we to know?  Were all their aims compatible? Did they meet everyone's aspirations?

Was it freedom to run their own affairs? Of course. A more equal society? Less poverty? A fair-minded country that gave everyone a chance to flourish?

Or was it about a bit more land for me? A decent job? A bigger farm? A bigger shop? My son the priest? A new life of respectablity? Bernadette McAliskey used to say: it’s always about land

The women of Citizen Army and Volunteers, the Suffrage movement and the majority of Cumann na mBan members had the bad manners to believe in the rhetoric and ideas of the Proclamation of the Republic in 1916 and in the Democratic Programme. They believed that the republic would be built on new, Irish-structured organisations and systems to suit the innate creativity and eccentric idealism of the Irish, different from English bureaucracy, maybe, with a more open spirituality based on an earlier, less mysogonistic catholicism and the centuries-old generosity of broad swathes of Irish citizens. But those men who had survived the Rising and terms in prison, described these womanly bad manners as shrill and unbending. Would the existence of a contemporary media have offered a different view?

Maybe I’m foolish to believe that the inclusion of a woman among the plenipotentiaries could have led to a more generally acceptable outcome. What about the involvement of figures like Mary MacSwiney in the Treaty negotiations? Her intellect and force of character, or the down-to-earth imperiousness of the Countess could have resisted the bullying of Churchill and Birkenhead and the wiliness of Lloyd George. But it was left to young Irish women’s shorthand excellence, not to their arguments. Maybe this was the beginning of the exclusion of women from public life, after a British civil service model? Mary MacSwiney’s grand nephew, Cathal MacSwiney Brugha, spoke about his aunt in a recent documentary by the Cork film collective, Frameworks and local historians called Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times. He revealed that she had wanted to go to London for the negotiations – but people like Collins and Griffiths rejected her. Too argumentative…

It did not take long for women’s roles in the Revolution as messengers, combatants, spies and intelligence officers, despatch riders, jailbirds, organisers of rallies and protests, hunger strikers, writers, educators and full-time providers of safe houses, to be scrubbed from the record until a new generation of scholars and historians led by the likes of Margaret MacCurtain, Margaret Ward and others, began to set the record straight. No mass media at work there to balance that record - until after the events. For instance, it was last May when we had an opportunity to see and taste the dreams and heartbreak of the seven women survivors of the leaders in the documetary on RTÉ – Forgotten: Widows of The Irish Revolution. Sé Merry Doyle’s The Rebel Doctor has kept alive for us the life’s work of Kathleen Lynn, great saviour of poor children and their penniless mothers.

So how, in earlier times, were those days and aspirations conveyed to every citizen?

Four years after the end of the Civil War, the independent Irish radio station 2RN went on air – situated high up in the shoulder of the GPO. It became Radio Éireann, within the Department of Posts and Telegraphs – beloved of farmers for weather forecasts, and saving the dry battery for Mícheál Ó hEithir and the great pictures he made of hurling matches; dear to those who loved the radio play on Sunday nights, and the Kilfenora Céilí Band…the poultry instructor, the Making and Mending man.

Later, in the early fifties until 1964, Gael Linn, the inventive Irish language promoters, produced a fortnightly newsreel of Irish life, Amharc Éireann, by Colm Ó Laoghaire, with Jim Mulkerns. They were so popular that the Rank film organisation agreed to show the newsreels in all their cinemas. Gael Linn was one of those who offered their services to run an Irish television service but was unsuccessful…

The State’s belief in the efficacy of the advance factory idea led to the establishment of Ardmore Film Studios in 1958, to welcome American films and promote the Abbey Theatre and Irish actors. It was the brainchild of Emmet Dalton, recovered veteran of the Civil War, Michael Collins’ friend. It was less welcome to Irish film-makers and activists like Louis Marcus and Tiernan MacBride who thought supporting Ireland’s own film-makers should be our first priority. One of the early films there, in 1959 was Shake Hands With The Devil, a big action film, from a 1933 novel by Rearden Conner. It was set in the War of Independence at the start of the Black and Tan era and ended with the Truce. It starred James Cagney as a slightly believable IRA commandant and Trinity College medical professor, with Michael Redgrave as Michael Collins – the General. It had a huge cast of great Irish actors. Cyril Cusack as a philosopher and Irish language poet on the run is a lovely mystical thread in the tweedy mix! It was an undeniably pro-Treaty document, showing that the anti-Treaty argument was far too unrealistic, far too extreme. Not a word about any socialist dimension to those days, however…

In a sense, that was left to Saoirse? - with a question mark - George Morrison’s monumental, tragic sequel in 1961 to the more hopeful Mise Éire, a hymn to patriotic romanticism with Seán Ó Riada’s majestic score.

And then, that same year, Irish television. Understandably, as with the earlier thinking of Collins and Griffith – and then De Valera and John Charles McQuaid - in 1959, Michael Hilliard was able to declare in the Dáil “This television service will not be run by Beelzebub but by nine responsible people" – no irony that the nine responsible people were eight men and one woman – at least better than the Council of State where there was not a single woman in 1966.

Nevertheless, as in literature, there were enough creative souls to draw attention to the anomalies and corruptions as well as to the marvels of the State. Nowadays, many tell their stories through independent television and film companies and collectives outside rather than within RTÉ. But starting back then, the absolutist position of the religious, political and cultural male elites who looked after censorship of films and books, the policing and imprisoning of young pregnant women in loveless institutions and the villainy of corrupt businessmen became slowly more obvious to the watching public… Mary Raftery on TV, Marian Finucane and Katie Hannon on radio, among others, have told the hard truths about our democracy.

In general, though, as with the foundation of the State and many matters Irish, television was that strange child of ambiguous creativity, pinioned between national intelligence and national pragmatism – political and commercial forces. Too dangerous to leave broadcasting to the broadcasters…

And then came the commemorations. Like Yeats’s question “did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” we might ask the same of RTÉ’s 1966 anniversary programming: John Bowman, here present, records it as somewhat alarming that RTÉ’s Authority and senior editorial team had decided that the commemoration was to be shown “as a nationalist rather than a socialist” event and that the approach in programming would be ‘idealistic and emotional’ rather than ‘interpretive and analytical’. There were eight “newsreels” transmitted every night, reports and reconstructions of what would have happened each day of the conflict, called Insurrection! written by Hugh Leonard. They were stirring reminders of the nation’s aspirations. There is good reason to reflect on the perceived influence these high octane dramas had on the subsequent civil rights movements and then on the openly armed hostilities in Northern Ireland – the ‘unfinished’ business - meaning unfinished military business…

However, these newsreels were balanced by thoughtful interviews with descendants and relations of the executed signatories and combatants. Most memorable and affecting among these was the remembrance of Nora Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly’s daughter. She recalled the night before her father was executed. Her mother and she, as eldest daughter, were called to see him in Dublin Castle. He greeted them and said ‘Well Lily, I suppose you know what this means’ and she said ‘but your life, James, your beautiful life’ and he replied: ‘but wasn’t it a full life and isn’t this a good end!’. It was a moment of real feeling. Without media, those moments and their insights would have been lost to our imaginations. It made broadcasting a valuable addition to Irish conversation.

And, still later,  RTÉ’s great production by Tony Barry of James Plunkett Kelly’s Strumpet City did remind people that there had been a Larkin and a Connolly and Irish women and men socialists at war with Church and commerce associated with nationalist pretenders. The many strands of Irish life and class were not forever with O’Leary in the grave.

So how well have our public media worked in informing, educating and entertaining the mass about the Decade of Centenaries?

I incline to the theory that there is no such thing as the mass – rather there are overlapping families of interest and attention, some with a similar intentionality – like all those varied, complicated parties, striving for Irish liberty. What is undeniable is certain people’s propensity to manipulation by elites…

Nowadays, the mass, in effect, is a carefully delineated order of groups and sub-groups -- to whom to sell things: ideas, wants, aspirations. In the old days, it was the Church who generally held the cards of totalitarian cultural power; the national illusion is that these cards are held by government and opposition. The reality nowadays is that corporations and their electronic voices and technologically uniform structures rule everything.

The last of the State’s public media supports, TG4, opened in 1996, a lively and innovative addition to our media. Like every Irish broadcaster, it has engaged with the decade of commemorations. TG4 have broadcast programmes about Tom Barry, Dan Breen, Ernie O’Malley, films on women’s role and, directly on the Civil War – an independent film by Jerry O’Callaghan is to be shown in December - Marú in Íarthar Chorcaí – Cogadh Saoirse no Cogadh Seicteach? (Massacre in West Cork – Civil War or Sectarian War?).

RTÉ TV’s Nationwide has done almost thirty short pieces since 2016 – historical reconstructions and remembrances, mostly by the redoubtable Donal Byrne. All  commemorative events have been covered live and online by RTÉ.

As for the Civil War itself -- Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins is concerned in large part with the Civil War and the roles of Collins and de Valera within it. He recently said that he believes his treatment of Dev was not fair. For me it was the playing of de Valera by the overly nasal, sadly departed, actor, Alan Rickman that did a lot of the damage. Independent documentaries like The Limits of Liberty take on the State’s conduct of the ideals of the Rising and examine the extent to which we have carried them out – concluding that we have not yet realised those dreams. In Keepers of the Flame, a full length feature documentary, there is poignant evidence from some of the descendants of those thousands overlooked and impoverished for following the republican vision of their ancestors.

But chief among Civil War film work and challenges to our national sensitivities, must be Ken Loach’s unapologetically socialist The Wind that Shakes the Barley. In one scene at Mass, the priest thunders the bishops’ belief in the virtues of the Treaty and its promise of peace - against the leftwing obduracy of the anti-Treaty attitude – “I suppose next ye’ll want to nationalise the twelve apostles!”

It is good to remember a major challenge in all film and documentary work. It is essentially expensive. It is essentially group work. As a small country, we cannot achieve the total financing of a feature or a documentary. It generally takes four or five - or more - financial partners. It is tedious, hard work. Nowadays, more and more, the State’s application requirements can run to 45 pages of questions. The mania for reams of defence documentation is all-pervasive. It takes a major effort to maintain a creative spark. The armies of administrators, each with an opinion, a criticism, a small bit of power, believe, as in days of old, that each one has a divine right to wield that power.

No wonder people under forty rarely look at television nowadays. Social media, the often hateful shorthand of social encounters, and drama series on other media publishers, are the draw. Do ancient viewers still switch on the Late Late Show on Fridays, knowing from Wednesday morning who will be there – repeated ad nauseum during the programme itself to insult the audience’s intelligence - and to fill advertising slots.

There is forever, thank god, beyond hierarchies of silly class and power abuses, the awkwardly independent and charmingly irrepressible Irish genius for ad hoc arrangements for difficult truth-telling.

Yeats will always remind me of the persistent emotion of civil war at the tower at Ballylee, of daily life itself:

            We are closed in and the key is turned

            On our uncertainty

One of the most compelling Civil War memories this year is of Martin McDonagh’s moving, brutal and hilarious The Banshees of Inisherin; the loving eccentricity of character, the rending of friendship, the self-mutilation and tragedy that ensues. In the vast grandeur of our countryside, that kind of remembering is thought-provoking, ethical, magnanimous.

Memory, myth and history: what is transmitted and what is suppressed - Angela Bourke

17th November, 2022

A Uachtaráin, a Dhaoine Uaisle, a Chairde,

Is mór liom an onóir agus an ócáid, agus mé thar a bheith buíoch den Uachtarán Higgins as a chuireadh teacht chuig Áras an Uactaráin agus píosa cainte a dhéanamh libh.

When that terrible explosion devastated Creeslough, Co. Donegal, last month, people rushed to the scene, co-ordinating their practical and personal resources to rescue the injured and offer comfort. President Higgins cut short his official business in Strasbourg and arrived without delay. He embraced the bereaved, and listened. He remained there until the last victim was laid to rest. When he spoke in public he expressed gratitude that people in ever widening circles across this island and beyond were ‘… able to reveal their feelings and that their hearts are breaking.’ 

‘Being able to take the grief of other people into ourselves’, the President said in Creeslough, shows ‘a very important aspect of character, of a person, of a community and of a people.’                             

Reading this in The Irish Times, I was grateful, because for so long in this country, revealing that your heart was breaking was unthinkable, at least in hegemonic middle-class culture. I thought of the bean chaointe, the traditional lamenter of the dead, whom so many visitors described before the Great Famine, as did John Synge, early in the 20th century, in The Aran Islands. She wasted no time in getting to the place of death; she took the grief into herself.[1]

To leave a dead person unlamented, people said, was to treat their body like the carcass of a cow or a horse: as less than human. For a man of any standing not to be keened by several women was a disgrace: a stain on a family’s reputation. A long, bespoke, sung poem, on the other hand, extemporised over the body from the traditional stock-in-trade of the oral tradition, was an honour and something to treasure, and remember.[2] Most of the texts we possess were written down long after being composed in performance, transcribed from women who’d memorised them, and had filled any gaps in the wording from their own familiarity with the practice. All keens follow the same pattern, but no two are quite alike, and many are unique.  

Before the Famine, all the women in a household might be expected to range themselves around a dead body, or above a grave, to lift their arms above their heads and move back and forth, raising ‘the Irish cry’: a loud, repeated, drawn-out Óchón ó! or Olagón! Those are sounds the body makes, sobbing and groaning, when the worst has happened, and words won’t come. It seems that this theatrical performance triggered a conditioned reflex, as mourners and neighbours gathered in large numbers, and each newcomer joined in the weeping and wailing. Still, not every woman could compose the kind of poem we call a caoineadh.

The noted bean chaointe was a solo artist, and a community therapist. She expressed the distress, disorientation, affection and fury people felt, now that life had been changed forever by the loss of this person. Her raised voice, active body and loosened hair, the words and melody she chose from a large shared stock that she carried in memory, constituted the caoineadh, anglicised as ‘keen’. Traditional phrases and themes offer praise or vituperation, depending on whom they address. They describe grand hospitality, flourishing crops, thoroughbred horses, silver-hilted swords: even if the deceased had no such resources. They use images we might associate with horror films, to confront the physical reality of decomposition. The performance, like a tragic drama, must have had a huge therapeutic effect, allowing people in attendance to ‘reveal the grief they feel, and that their hearts are breaking’, as the President said in Creeslough.[3]

A mourner at a wake or funeral might not always be heartbroken, but everybody has had experience of grief, and it may be a consolation if their community can acknowledge that. Better too, perhaps, if the horror-movie images appear in the mind’s eye while you’re in company, when all attention is on what has been lost, and others are around to hold you.

Traditional keeners didn’t just praise the dead; they used their position to call out injustice, dishonesty, abuse, avarice and oppression—as oral poets have done since Homer’s time, and before. Sometimes they were even hired to publicise political meetings.

During the last three decades, as awful revelations have emerged about the conduct of our institutions and of trusted individuals, Irish artists have taken up the bean chaointe’s toolkit to express grief and anger at some of the atrocities that have come to light, and deal with other kinds of trauma.

Sinéad O’Connor called herself a keener 30 years ago, when she used her fame to cry out against the physical and sexual abuse of children, in church-run institutions and in families—and suffered severe punishment for doing so.[4] Alanna O’Kelly had returned from London by then, after postgraduate study at the Slade School of Art. She’d already begun exploring Irish   identity, language and the Famine, using her own keening voice alongside installation, video and painting. Official commemoration of the Famine’s 150th anniversary in the mid-1990s favoured academic approaches, but in O’Kelly’s work, later acquired by Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim, for its Workhouse Attic, the sound of her keening accompanied video of her breast milk moving through bathwater, asserting woman’s authority and perspective much as the bean chaointe used to.[5]

And younger artists have taken up caoineadh as vocal art. Michelle Collins, who completed a 2014 MA in Norway on ‘de-ritualisation and re-ritualisation’ of caoineadh in Ireland, last year facilitated workshops with Marymount University Hospital and Hospice in her native Cork to support its Service for Older People.[6] In Galway, starting on Nollaig na mBan (6 January) 2014, Ceara Conway brought asylum seekers together with local people for public condemnation and lamenting of the Direct Provision system, by candlelight. This year, she has gone back, as Sinéad O’Connor did for a while, to old songs of grief, mostly from Connemara, reinterpreting them for these times.[7]

Even people with no Irish are learning to sing those songs. Some, who have spent their lives insisting they don’t know any Irish—like Hungarians with Russian, after the Soviet Union fell, because it was compulsory, and they’d hated it—are discovering that there may be something in it after all. This year too, the National Gallery has honoured the heroic Catherine Corless, once dismissed as a ‘local historian’, by purchasing Paul MacCormaic’s fine 2021 portrait of her.[8]

Thirty years ago Cormac Ó Gráda drew attention to the ‘sanitized and apologetic approach to the Famine’ among Irish-based historians, contrasting it with work by scholars in the US. He noted too that ‘a leading Dublin academic’ had derided Robert Kee’s 1980 television documentary Famine, as ‘lending succor to terrorism.’[9]

Teaching at American universities around that time, I met many Irish-Americans. What struck me was the difference in social memory between the people I was meeting and what was familiar to me at home—from people I knew, from spending time in Gaeltacht areas, reading Gaeltacht autobiographies, and going through manuscripts of what’s now the National Folklore Collection (NFC).

Irish-Americans I met spoke about ‘the Potato Famine’, injustice, poverty, mental illness and alcoholism. But the Famine was hardly mentioned in Ireland, nor was poverty, though people donated generously to famine relief in Africa. I knew next to nothing about our Famine. Clearly, different stories had been told on either side of the Atlantic. What is transmitted and what is suppressed doesn’t only depend on which stories people tell, however; it depends also on what people are willing to hear. It has been obvious here since the 1990s that people were telling their stories, over and over, but that they weren’t being listened to—and weren’t being believed. Misogyny was at work, of course, because so many of the people telling the stories were female, or poor, or both. Now, though, men who attended some of the country’s most prestigious schools are coming forward with the pain they’ve carried for decades. A myth can either be a story that’s completely wrong, or it can be a treasured narrative that tells a community how things came to be the way they are. Either way, it occupies a place somewhere between memory and history, and merits looking at.

Since the Famine commemorations of the mid-’90s, I’ve come across many statements that ‘Nobody died here’, though quite a few accounts mention a place ten miles away, where ‘things were very bad.’ And yet when radio producer Cathal Póirtéir went through the NFC manuscripts, in search of material to make documentaries for RTÉ, he found stories of land-grabbing farmers, land agents and gombeen men, who abused and cheated the starving poor. And I recall reading about a farming family who fed new milk to their pigs, while destitute people starved in their boundary ditches.

Póirtéir published books in English and Irish on his research. His excellent Introduction to  some 500 items in English discusses historians’ reluctance to engage with the folklore record as evidence. That may be based on a false premise, he suggests, ‘that the folklore of the Famine, by dint of its nature as folklore, carries a nationalist interpretation of the causes, events and effects of the calamity’; he had found both unionist and nationalist views expressed in the manuscripts, however.[10]

Famine had been a major issue during the Land War, when the west of Ireland was again experiencing hunger and deprivation after hard, wet winters and bad harvests. By then, though, among strong farmers and big shopkeepers in particular, the Great Hunger was best forgotten.

That class was doing well in the late 19th century, and the country was recovering, despite agrarian outrages in various places. Contracts for supplying bread or meal or coffins to a workhouse had been lucrative; the English language and the Catholic church were in the ascendant; railways were extending across the country, and newly middle-class Catholics were cultivating respectability.[11] They dressed well, wore shoes, read newspapers, and sometimes books, avoided rough speech, kept a parlour for special occasions, sent their daughters to convent boarding schools, and in the case of the farmers, aspired to have ‘a bull in the field, a pump in the yard, and a son in Maynooth.’ They were careful whom their children married, and many of their offspring remained single, leaving large legacies to the church. A great many young women entered convents. If their parents could afford to send a fine piano or equivalent with them as ‘dowry’, they became choir sisters. Girls from poorer households became lay sisters, who did the heavy work.[12]

Poorer households in this rural society were those of small farmers and farm labourers. That second group was considered inferior, its members badly exploited until the 1960s, and most of their children emigrated. The people who could not be spoken of were the cottiers, living in pitiable conditions since the potato became established as a subsistence food, and the population of the poor and marginalised exploded. When the potatoes failed, there was no slack in the system, so the Irish-speaking casual labourers and beggars were the first to starve and to die of various diseases. They threw up shelters against ditches for themselves, their children, their hens and pig, if those hadn’t been sold. Sometimes a landlord or a charitable organisation packed them into ships and ‘emigrated them’. Huge numbers died at sea, or just after reaching Québec. But the land they left meant more for farmers and graziers. Historian Breandán Mac Suibhne, now of University of Galway, broke one silence in 2017 with The end of outrage, where he carefully traces names that disappeared in the 19th century from his own home townland in southwest Donegal.[13]

For the new middle class, strongest east of the Shannon, caoineadh became embarrassing after the Famine, as did bare feet, and speaking Irish. Good manners required women in particular to disavow the body and sexuality, never to give in to strong emotion. Caoineadh, by contrast, spoke frankly of the body and sexuality, the bean chaointe sometimes baring her breasts as well as her feet, loosening her hair.  

When a woman called Alma Curtin asked a little girl in Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry, in 1893 about speaking Irish, the child’s reply was that she didn’t like to speak it, because it was ‘so common in itself’. Alma was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Vermont, visiting with her husband, Jeremiah Curtin, collecting tales and legends to publish in English. The little girl was from a big farm nearby; she used to visit the Americans, bringing gifts of butter, potatoes or honey.

My paternal grandfather was born on that kind of farm in Co. Kilkenny. Úna Bolger, mother of the New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan, came from another, in Co. Wexford.[14] Both got married early in the 20th century, neither to the kind of person their parents might have chosen for them.

Robert Brennan’s mother kept a small shop in Wexford town; his father had been a pig-dealer. Bob became a journalist, and met his wife in nationalist circles. Both took part in the Rising in Enniscorthy, and he spent much of the next two years in various jails. Early in 1918, when Sinn Féin set up a Propaganda Department in anticipation of an end to the Great War, and an election, Éamon de Valera invited him to be its Director, at £3 a week. The Brennans moved to Dublin with their two young daughters, renting a house from Count Plunkett.  

Their third daughter, Deirdre (Derry), was born that October, and three years later, while the plenipotentiaries were in London, the Brennans bought a small house in Ranelagh. Maeve turned five on the day before the Treaty was ratified in 1922, and her father went on the run, yet again. In 1934, when de Valera sent him to Washington, the whole family went too. Maeve was 17.

On 24 October 1953 The New Yorker published ‘The Day We Got Our Own Back’, by Maeve Brennan. Deceptively brief and simple, as though told by a five-year-old, though no child could have written it, its action begins soon after that fifth birthday. Úna is alone with her younger daughters in their new house in Ranelagh when a Free State search party arrives. Derry is upstairs, sick in bed. Downstairs, one man tries to get Maeve to say where her father is, until her mother, a tiny, quiet woman, flies at him.

When the men left, Maeve writes, she was ‘spellbound with gratitude, excitement, and astonishment that the strange man had included me.’ But the story isn’t over, and a second raid a year later raises it into three dimensions, like a house inside a bottle, allowing many points of view. This second raid, when the soldiers wrecked the house, illustrates what Declan told us about men ‘addicted to fighting’, and also what he quoted from Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, about ‘the usual soldier’s contempt for civilians, particularly women, though these had often risked their lives to help him.’ One of them got his comeuppance, though, when he tried to look up the chimney, and brought down a load of soot on himself and on the carpet. Úna, whom her daughter usually portrayed as timid, anxious and houseproud, ‘laughed as though her heart would break.’  

I could say a great deal more about Maeve Brennan and the stories she set in that house, with their silences, and her characters’ powerful, unspoken feelings.[15] She died in 1993 in a nursing home in Long Island, where The New Yorker, apparently, had placed her, after she became a danger to herself. She exemplified the ‘silence, emotional breakdown, and exile’ Declan identified among the ‘massive’ effects of the Civil War. Neither she nor her sister Derry could abide de Valera, after all he had inflicted on their family.

 

Machnamh 100 - Fergal Keane

17th November, 2022

My words today are the consequence of witness. They come from what I have seen and what I have heard. The long conversations with the survivors of violence, but also with the perpetrators. Traumatic memory is not confined to those on whom violence was inflicted.

I have spent much of my lifetime away at the wars. Most frequently civil wars: the scenes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, man-made starvation.

I have gone into the noise and fury of battle, and afterwards into the anguished, complex silences, and I have explored the necessary fictions that men and women construct to protect their minds from the consequences of the violence they have wrought.

I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing – no cruelty, no indignity – human beings are not capable of inflicting upon each other. But I am also convinced that humanity in extremis is capable of immense generosity – of that which might help bind wounds and lay foundations that help us to move away from the possibility of a return to violence.

I believe that in order to heal the wounds of war, we must heed the pain of others. We must do it especially, when they belong to what in divided societies we see as the ‘other’ side.

Above all, we must look on the atrocities of the past – whoever carried them out – with clear eyes. To heed is to see things as they actually were.

The body parts shovelled from the ground after the IRA bombs on Bloody Friday.

The mutilated remains of the victims of the Shankill Butchers found in Belfast laneways.

The dying man, bleeding out from a paratroopers bullet on Bloody Sunday.

To heal, is to acknowledge and be respectful towards the pain of others as well as to our own.

As a consequence, I am impatient with keyboard warriors, barroom balladeers, and social media’s manipulative liars. I fear the ease with which it is possible to create narratives that offer us comforting fictions about the true nature of killing.

My words for you today are a personal reflection. I do not speak on behalf of anybody. And my experience of reporting on atrocity has taught me not to believe that anything I say can make much, if any, difference to the course of violent events. I am familiar with moral injury: in my own case the fear that held me paralysed in Rwanda in 1994. To want to intervene, but to be too terrified for one’s own safety to take the risk. I can speak to you now at some distance in time from the wars I have witnessed. Yet they live with me in everyday trauma. In vivid detail. I think of Brian Friel’s line from ‘Translations’: To remember everything is a form of madness.

I don’t write, report, speak because I think I will draw people back from the brink, or remotely imagine that the words of a reporter will pierce the mental armour of those who have spent years rationalizing to themselves the necessity of killing. I am here because I believe that the act of witness has rights of its own. That what I report can join with the voices of others who try to stand outside the clamour of conflict and offer true stories that might become part of a larger institutional memory.

I am here because of the President’s generous invitation, because I believe this series of conversations, while rooted in the past, can inspire a dialogue about the present which has as its hallmarks generosity, compassion and honesty. And these values, heeded in the heart and mind, might shape an Ireland in which we can talk of healing.                              

ii.

I shouldn’t have needed a psychiatrist to tell me that family history and the history of the island on which I grew up were part of what sent me to explore the trauma of others.

But when he did I was greatly relieved. Because until then I had wondered whether my relentless returning to scenes of violence was not perverse or, as one well-meaning older relative asked me once: ‘what do you want going into all that old stuff for?’

It is a good question for today.

The reason I go into the ‘old stuff’ – and whether that is the stuff of the 1920s, or of the nineteen seventies or eighties, is because it lives with me: in the memory of the stories I heard, and the Troubles I myself reported. It is central to the[FK1]  shaping of this island now.

I was not the first of my family to experience the terror of war.

My grandmother Hannah Purtill was fifteen when the Irish Revolution began. By the time the fighting stopped, seven years later, I believe she had been changed by what she witnessed on country lanes and on the streets of Listowel.

War in north Kerry was…the broken corpses of comrades after torture, the blood of a policeman congealing in a gutter, the revolver pointed towards her head in a threat of execution, and night after night waiting for a battering on the door. 

As a member of Cumann na mBan my grandmother Hannah spied and smuggled messages and weapons.

Heading into the winter of 1920/21 an atmosphere of terror envelopes north Kerry. The guerrillas attack a police patrol; a village is raided and burned in retaliation. Prisoners are tied to the front of lorries as human shields to forestall ambush. Others are dragged behind vehicles along country roads, leaving them battered to a pulp. One is tied to a horse and dragged across the countryside. Savage beatings of anybody suspected of IRA allegiances are routine. Many in the ranks of the newly arrived Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries are men already brutalised by years of horror on the Western front.

People are fingered by IRA intelligence as spies, then abducted and shot dead, their bodies left on the roadside with signs proclaiming: ‘Spies Beware of the IRA’. Two police are kidnapped in north Kerry and tortured. They are released but five weeks later one suffers a mental breakdown and cuts his throat. There are bodies bleeding out on the street, bodies buried in bogs where they will never be found, lying from one century to the next deep in the peat; there are bodies that are still alive being beaten and kicked in the cells of the police barracks or, like the young trainee priest home on leave for Christmas, battered to death in the town square.

The IRA shoots District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan of the RIC. He is a father of three young children. He lives a few minutes up the street from the Keane family home on Church Street, where my grandmother would go to visit her future in-laws. His wife Mary – known to her family as May[FK2]  - sees the blood flowing from his ruined head. She dies within a year. May[FK3]  is broken by grief. O’Sullivan’s movements to and from the police barracks on Church Street have been tracked by spies. As one of the assassins remarks: ‘We had been informed of his regular movements by a number of scouts in Listowel who had been put on his trail as soon as the order was received.’[i] It is as simple and irrevocable as that.

Four local IRA men walking along the road outside Listowel are picked up by the Tans, badly beaten and then lined up before a firing squad and shot. Despite being wounded, one runs for his life and survives to tell the tale. My grandmother, Hannah Purtill, is among the group of women detailed with making sure the dead men are given a decent burial in accordance with the rights of the Church, and the customs of the country. A Cumann na mBan member who witnesses the arrival of the bodies at Tralee barracks recalls that the face of one, a fine young fellow whom I knew personally, was all smashed in.’

Some of the[FK4]  women tending the bodies are verbally abused and beaten. They find the dead men dumped in a shed used by the police for storing turf. They wash and clean them. How easy to write that, and then stopping myself and imagining these countrywomen painstakingly cleaning away the blood and gore, how that imprints on the mind and the spirit.  

When a retired local policeman, James Kane, is killed by the IRA as a suspected informer, his family is boycotted. They are refused service in shops and forced to walk long distances because no taxi will take them. A brass nameplate is removed from their front door. They live among people who wished to erase their presence.

In the British National Archives I read the letters of Kane’s traumatised children and feel shame at the hatred that engulfed some in our town. James’s daughter Elizabeth was, like my grandmother, a draper’s assistant in Listowel. After the killing ‘the staff refused to work with her’ despite her having been an employee for fifteen years. She could not find another job.[ii] ‘After our father’s death,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘people whom we looked on as our friends turned their back on us and at one particular social entertainment (the first I attended in the town after our father’s death) I was the only girl ignored.’

A younger sister had a nervous breakdown and became ‘a complete wreck’. The adult Kane children became destitute and were evicted from their home in the centre of town. Eventually they scattered from the story of Listowel. When Elizabeth’s lawyers wrote to a local solicitor to try and gather evidence in support of her claim for compensation, they were told that ‘there is a great reluctance to admit having taken part in a boycott of this kind, or on the part of anybody to give evidence against neighbours … all parties in Ireland are anxious to forget the troubles of the years 1921, 1922 and banish them as a hideous nightmare’.

But in the minds of the traumatised there is no banishing. Down the generations the trauma goes.

I think of Tobias O’Sullivan, RIC, whose killing was one of the most infamous in the Revolutionary war in Kerry. Yet when I asked a relative why their experience of the war had not been written into the national narrative, I was told: “Nobody ever asked.” Yet the pain of what had been done reverberates for his descendants to this day.

Last year, I sat with the son of Jack Ahern, one of Tobias’ assassins. When I ask about his father, Seán’s eyes fill with tears. He struggles to accept that his kind, warm-hearted, hard-working father could have killed in cold blood. ‘I mean how could you live with that? To walk up behind a man and shoot him in the back of the head in front of his wife and child?’ The seventy-five-year-old son of a long-dead gunman carries the trauma of what his father had done over a hundred years before.

In my grandmother’s house Tobias O’Sullivan became a ghost story told by my father, a green figure – nameless - who stalked the house after dark. Trauma present yet ethereal, mediated through story telling. He was a dead British soldier I was told, a ghost who would wander forever. But did my father know that he was in fact an Irish policeman? That he was gunned down by men who were comrades in arms and friends of my people? There was too much that was – to my inquiring child’s mind - unknown. 

My early knowledge of the Revolutionary period was shaped by my father’s stories, by what I heard in a Listowel kitchen. My father was one of life’s romantics. When he was picked to play the role of a hero of 1798 rebellion in the RTÉ film ‘When do you Die Friend’ his performance won a Jacobs Award. That was in 1966[FK5]  - fifty years after the Revolution and three years before the war erupted in the north and our commemorations could never be the same again. Never so simple, so lacking in nuance, so embedded in the narrative of origin constructed in the exhausted aftermath of the Civil War.

For those who were[FK6]  the families of the dead of our Revolution – on all sides – there was no healing space. The war of independence gave way to the Civil War, and that in turn led some to the horrifying realisation of the savagery we were capable of inflicting on each other without any help from the British. Later on we sang the rebel songs. We kept to the safe lines of memorialisation dictated from on high. Our remembering was not an exchange between survivors and descendants. In truth I can think of very few countries where it has been.

We did not speak openly of mental wounds. Then the Troubles came.

It was not until years later, when I found myself at the scene of shootings, bombings, assassinations, funerals that the meaning of violence, the human dimension in all its blood, body parts…its tears and empty stares…came home to me. There in Belfast, Lurgan, Derry, and in small towns and villages, and again in Rwanda, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Colombia, Congo, and so many more, my hatred of war hardened.

I also saw in South Africa, and in smaller localised initiatives in the Balkans and the Middle East, attempts to heal through processes of truth telling. I am a firm believer in the power of communities addressing what Seamus Heaney called the tragedy of ‘neighbourly murder’ through mediated exchanges.

But I am especially concerned today with leaders. My experience has convinced me that for leaders to confront the trauma of the past they must speak with generosity – particularly leaders[FK7] , on whatever side, who represent those who bear responsibility for some of that violence.  The greatest, most transformative leadership involves humility. It means setting to one side justifications, blaming, politicking, whataboutery, and speaking directly to the pain of those who still live with the trauma of the murdered father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter.

It means openly acknowledging the pain caused, seeing it from the side of those still suffering with the legacy of violence. It means that we must pay full attention to the pain caused by words, gestures, slogans, chants. This is a universal responsibility for political leaders, as is the imperative of creating mechanisms that honestly address the actions of all those – out of uniform or in uniform - who took part in violence.  

We cannot have a partitioning of concern for victims according to partisan loyalties. In relation to the conflict on this island, leaders need to heed the pain of families of Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, Warrington, Loughinisland, Enniskillen and so many more places. To do so is to prove that we are learning the lessons offered by the past, so that to paraphrase the words of Van Morrison, the healing can begin[FK8] .