Patrick Pearse and the Easter Rebellion in
the Context of World War I
The recall of insurrection in songs, olden memories
and in various kinds of entertainment, in some instances, became a call to
further Rebellion.
Thomas Dwyer of Enniscorthy joined Na Fianna at
thirteen years of age; he recollected forty years later:--
“This club [at Mary Street, Enniscorthy] was the
breeding ground of rebellion, for here was installed into our youthful minds
the hatred of the Sassenach, and there grew in us a burning desire to see our
country freed from the chains of bondage. We were told how other Irishmen down
through the centuries had fought against overwhelming odds and died in a
glorious attempt to rid Irish soil of a foreign foe. We learned of the rebellions
of Owen Roe, or Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, of Rossa and the Fenians
and we longed for the day when we too might join in the fight against our
common enemy.”
Sean Whelan of St Senan’s recalled, also, many years
later:--
“Thanks to my mother’s great fund of Irish songs and
ballads, I was familiar with Ireland’s struggle for independence long before I
could read or write.”
The Ballymitty Mummers in January 1913 gave an
exhibition at Duncormack; the report stated:--“The Ballymitty boys are the
pioneers of the Irish style of mumming in this district and much credit is due
to them for their efforts in trying to make our rural amusements truly Irish.
It was the first time that we heard the Irish rhymes in this locality and the
history of our country, even in rhyme, seemed to reach the hearts of the
listeners. But, alas! how many there are who do not even know the history of
their country….” The mummers acted out a panorama of demi-divine figures, and
veritable giants, all alike and of an identical lineage:--St Columbkille, Brian
Boru, Art Mc Murrough, Owen Roe O’Neill, Patrick Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Lord
Edward Fitzgerald, John Kelly of Killanne, Michael Dwyer, Robert Emmet, and
Father John Murphy of Boolavogue. The short and simply written histories
published by the Young Ireland movement, circa 1850, led to a steady increase
in those who knew the history of their country: history then was meant,
exclusively, as an inspiration to Ireland’s struggle to be free.
Patrick Pearse wrote that the object of Na Fianna, founded
by Countess Marchievz and others in 1909, was “to train boys to fight Ireland’s
battle when they are men.” The name recalls ancient Irish mythology of
Cuchulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhaill—but Pearse affected to regard these
semi-divine figures as literally true. He, at the end of the list of the
military and related skills taught to the boys of Na Fianna, added—“and
opportunity is given to the older boys for bayonet and rifle practice.” His
ideal of perfect education was that of a master taking young boys into
fosterage (as in ancient Gaelic Ireland) with him and inspiring them into
selfless devotion to Ireland; he wrote: “To the old Irish the teacher was aite,
“fosterer”, the pupil was dalta “foster-child” the system was aiteachas
“fosterage”…” He returned repeatedly to ideals of intense male bonding and
camaraderie, appropriate to groups at war; Cuchulainn epitomized to him the
perfect paradigm of the boy warrior. His paradigm of education was of the
teacher as inspiring the pupils to learn: but I concur with Francis Mac Manus,
the novelist, that a child’s mind is fickle, confounding and elusive in
response to adult logic.
The Catholic variant of the Temperance movement, in
confluence with the 100th anniversary commemoration of 1798 in 1898,
placed a new stress on the 1798 Rebellion; its heroes and priest leaders in
resistance to satanic oppression of the Catholic people were presented as
examples to inspire the men and women of that time, to abstain from alcohol.
The ballads of P. J. Mc Caul were apt concert items. Nobody envisaged that the
gothic horrors of 1798 could be enacted anew—a correct calculation, as the
later events from 1916 to 1923 were minimal in comparison to 1798: thus the
license to fantasise, exaggerate and eschew tedious and contradicting details
was in free rein.
It is a mix of history, mythology, folk lore and
memories, in a time when people perceived an interplay of earthly figures and
heavenly phenomena. The heroes could not agree if they all met in heaven: for
example Hugh O’Neill and Owen Ruadh O’Neill fought to regain their Gaelic
Kingship; Wolfe Tone (as I read Kevin Whelan) was informed by French
revolutionary ideals of excising all tradition and replacing it with a system
based on reason and inherently secular, and the latter Irish revolutionaries
were influenced by democracy and social ideals.
Patrick Pearse heard of such lore from his great aunt
Margaret. His father was an English man, a sculptor of merit, and on his second
marriage; his mother was a Brady from Co. Meath, a family with connections to
the rebels of 1798.
The history of that era over estimated English
malevolence and by this unfair simplification contributed to creating
rebellion. The consensus on the causation of the 1798 Rebellion was expressed
by Fr Cowman O. S. A. at Bree in 1910:--
“The Rebellion was a piece of English statesmanship to
bring about the Act of Union. It was provoked by England in order to frighten
the landed gentry that they could only be safe under English protection.”
Robert Brennan wrote: -- “This rebellion was….deliberately fomented by
the British authorities who hoped to crush it easily and thus pave the way for
the destruction of the semi-independent Irish Parliament.”
The objective truth is that Lord Cornwallis on coming
to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in the summer of 1798 insisted that the Orange
Order had too much influence in the Dublin administration and were largely
culpable for the Insurrection of 1798. Lord Castlereagh sought to terminate the
Irish Parliament as he regarded it as a basis for Protestant oppression of the
Catholic community: union with Britain would ensure that the Catholic people of
Ireland would be afforded the same rights as British citizens. Ted Heath’s
introduction of direct rule in Northern Ireland is a parallel to Castlereagh’s
Act of Union. British policy as the nineteenth century advanced was to
gradually whittle away the residual Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
Robert Brennan correctly acknowledges the great
achievement of the Irish Parliamentary Party in having ownership of the land
transferred to the farmers by 1903 plus but is mistaken, as he writes of the
tenant farmer:--
“His occupation of the land depended entirely on the
goodwill of the landlord. He could be thrown out at any time. The rent he paid
could be raised every year and he had no redress or court of appeal.” Except
for tenants at will, this is all untrue and unfair. The tenant held his farm
under a lease at an agreed rent for a period of a number of years or and for a
life or lives; he could only be evicted if in arrears of rent; then a court
would have to grant the landlord a decree to evict. Later, The Land Commision
Courts fixed judicial rents well below what the landlord might want.
The Rev. James Gordon, Rector of Killegney parish,
wrote of his parish in 1814:--
“The poorer classes are industrious and quiet in
general, not however, averse to Rebellion if opportunity should occur; they are
in extreme subjection to the priests and go to chapel in all kinds of weather.”
The Irish while disposed to experience Rebellion vicariously in pageant, song,
populist and magical history, folk memories, and mumming rhymes were
essentially passive—as Rev. Gordon so deftly pointed out—in their espousal of
revolt: most would go along with Rebellion, if started, but few would psyche
themselves to initiate Rebellion. Peadar Kearney told of Patrick Pearse
asserting to a meeting in Dublin on March 2nd 1912 that “a rifle
should be made as familiar to the hands of an Irishman as a hurley”. Mr Kearney
(the author of the Irish National Anthem) wrote that those present were growing
uneasy as the evening advanced when it dawned on them that Pearse was determined
to carry out his policy.”
Eamonn de Valera wrote, in a letter, of his misgivings
about joining the Volunteers as he was a married man; he knew that his decision
meant certain participation in war, with the risk of death. Captain Sean
Sinnott speaking in July 1915 at Wexford outlined the mindset of the
Volunteers:--
“if it was necessary they would give their lives in
proof of the faith that was in them (applause). The road they were on led to
honour and everything that made a man. As a great contemporary Irishman had
said before the goal was reached many would have fallen….but if they were
craven enough to let that thought deter them they would be unworthy of their
glorious ancestors who had battled so bravely for the race and the sod.”
Young Sinnott was in phlegmatic acceptance of the high
risk of death but not purposely seeking it. Patrick Pearse by contrast, sought martyrdom
as a mystical imperative on him: he wrote poetically of setting his face to the
road before him, to the deed he must do— and the death he must die. He did not anticipate
martyrdom by random chance but as the outcome of a deliberate plan on his part.
In his writings, he focuses on the image of one man alone by his martyrdom
redeeming the Irish nation; he expressly compared that sacrifice to that of
Calvary. Pearse’s alter ego, Mac Dara, in the drama The “Singer” proclaims:--“I
will take no pike. I will go into the battle with bare hands. I will stand up
before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree.” In 1915 he
wrote:--“like divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of
sanctity, of Catholicity, of apostolic succession.” According to the old style
catechism, the true Church was one, holy, Catholic and apostolic. At
Enniscorthy on March 9th 1916, Pearse spoke of nationality as more
ancient than any empire and will outlast all empires; he spoke of valley
periods in our nationality as when “some good man redeems us by sacrifice”. The
stress is on a single man. Robert Emmett was one of the “martyrs” whose “Christ
like death” redeemed Ireland” post 1800. He nominated Republican separatists
Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, John Mitchell and James Fintan Lalor as the “four
great minds” and “Apostles of Irish Nationhood”. In another context he
described them as the four evangelists of Irish Nationality. Pearse
conceptualised Irish Nationality as a replication of the Catholic faith and
sought to identify a perfect symmetry between both. He did not address the
pedantic but contradicting detail that Wolfe Tone sought the replacement of
religion with a secular identity. The Volunteers and indeed the I. R. B. men
were fervently Catholic as evidenced by the urgency with which they sought
confession before military engagement but I do not think that they would have
defined their faith in the grandiose model of Pearse. Close to Easter 1916
Pearse wrote of having to appease the ghosts of Irish nationality, the long
dead heroes and martyrs calling on him “to do a big thing”. The ambiguity here
is whether this is a manner of speaking or a sense of genuine psychic intrusion
of extra-temporal messages. Pearse wrote that John Mitchell “did really hold
converse with God.”
Anglophobia or visceral hatred of England, the
English, the Gall, the Sassenach was a deep emotion in early twentieth century
society. On the last Sunday night of
February 1913, the local school-master Mr J. Breen N. T. lectured to the
Bree Branch of the Gaelic League, at St Aidan’ Hall on Red Hugh O’Donnell. The
report of it includes this astounding narrative:--
“The lecturer explained how when O’Donnell went down
to drive the English out of Connaught the means he had of distinguishing the
Irish from the English was by the Irish language. All who could not speak the
Irish language he put to death.”
I hope that the famous patriot did not carry out such
a massacre.
The comparatively moderate Peter Ffrench M. P. for
south Co. Wexford, in June 1906 recorded 1798 in terms of persecution and
vengeance by the Gael:--
“The pitch-cap, the triangle, the lash, and other
unheard of cruelties were requisitioned and at last the people of Wexford, like
all other Celts—because when you tread on the Celt he is likely to take a
terrible vengeance—after their submission to such cruelties and indignities
rushed to arms.” Earlier in his speech Mr Ffrench exulted in the image of “the
charge of pikemen with England’s scarlet soldiers running before them”.
The persecutions of the Reformation and the related
Penal Laws in Ireland were a gothic remembrance of the demonic character of
England:--Fr Kelly, a young professor at St Peter’s College, preached in Ferns
in February 1907:--
“The early Christians of Rome suffered untold things
at the hands of the Pagan emperors but I believe in my heart that their
sufferings for the Faith were not to be compared with those endured by the
Irish people at the hands of England in those dreadful years”. He added:--
“Vinegar Hill beyond there in the distance is a silent
witness to the eyes of that vain, hopeless struggle of the weak against the
strong.”
The motifs of vengeance and armed and holy resistance,
albeit ineffectual, are present in both Mr Ffrench’s and Fr Kelly’s words; but
I opine that their words were not a prescription for renewed war. Patrick
Pearse in hyperbolic enlargement of this populist hatred of England transformed
it to apocalypse, holy war, and metaphysical excitement:--
“Ireland has not known the exhilaration of war for
over a hundred years…When war comes to Ireland, she must welcome it as she
would welcome the Angel of God….Ireland will not find Christ’s peace until she
has taken Christ’s sword….Christ’s peace is lovely in its coming….But it is
heralded by terrific messengers; seraphim and cherubim blow trumpets of war
before it.”
On January 6th
1910, (Twelfth Night) Fr Cowman O. S. A. Dungarvan delivered a lecture at Bree
Hall on the 1798 Rebellion: the introduction by Bree Parish Priest Fr Patrick
Sheil was, ironically, much more interesting than the lecture:--
“That night he [Fr Cowman] was to speak on a subject
which he [Fr Sheil] was sure they would be all delighted to hear—the ’98
movement (hear, hear). They all recollected the magnificent manner in which Fr
Cowman had dealt with the ’48 movement and when he (Rev. Chairman) recollected
that lecture he felt inclined to hope that the audience would not become
intoxicated with Father Cowman’s eloquence when dealing with the ’98 movement.
It might be too dangerous added the Canon, with a funny twinkle in his eyes, and perhaps after hearing Father Cowman’s
eloquence some of you will imagine that you are back in the old days when our
grandfathers took the field in defence of Faith and Fatherland. We are all
proud of the men of ’98 (cheers); we are proud of our ancestors who had the
courage to come into the field and stand up as courageous men against
oppression and tyranny (hear, hear). …The men of today are carrying on the same
fight but by different methods. We are not called on to take the field and,
indeed, considering our position, it would not be wise to do so, especially,
considering our unarmed condition. We would not have any chance in an armed
conflict. At present, however, we have what we know as constitutional
agitation….”
Fr Sheil’s analogy of intoxication is intriguingly
similar to that of Patrick Pearse who wrote that planning an insurrection was
better than a draught of wine! Significantly, Fr Sheil in his advocacy of the
Irish Party policy of Home Rule had to stress their inability to win by force
of arms.
The classic theory of nationalism postulated that each
nation had a special purpose: the implication is that Providence (or God)
created each nation. A passionate
Republican asserted in the summer of 1915 that—“God had given Ireland a clearly
marked frontier, girded by the ocean and He has never ordained that the people
of this island should be a subject race (applause).” Irish Catholicism at that
time was fixated on a vision of Ireland as divinely purposed to become a
spiritual empire, engaged in mega missionary campaigns to propagate the
Catholic faith across the globe. Canon Michael Murphy Parish Priest of
Cloughbawn recalled that at least twelve of the priests of the diocese of
Ferns—himself included—were supportive of the Easter Rebellion of 1916; Fr
Murphy provided his car for gun running a few weeks before the Rebellion.
Priests like Fr Martin Ryan of Tomcoole were excited by the new nationalism anticipating that an
independent Ireland would seal off Anglicisation—the code for sexual license
and bestiality, urban and industrial mores, religious indifference, alcoholism,
modernism and evil literature etc et al: Patrick Pearse wrote that his school
struck at the roots of Anglicisation.
At a meeting to further the project of erecting a
memorial to the men of 1798, Peter Ffrench M. P. for south Co. Wexford and a
naïve of Bannow—where the Normans first came—addressed the issue of the nature
of the Gaelic race, albeit with a local reference:--
“Now my friends, said Mr Ffrench, you have often heard
that the people of Wexford are not of the Celtic race. They say we are Normans,
or French, or Anglo-Saxon—anything but Celtic. A strong race like the Celts
never loses its individuality by mingling with other races (cheers). Those who
have studied the racial problem say that mongrels all die out and after a few
generations the strong race is just as pure as it was at first.” Mr Ffrench
then outlined a truly bizarre and vague proof that the Irish people remained a
Celtic race, in essence:--“And the conduct of the men of ’98 is proof of the
theory, for characteristic of the Celt is patience, sincerity and an excessive
love of justice and that love of justice sometimes leads him to an amount of
submission that almost appears to be slavishness....”He outlined his imagined
scenario of 1798 to obligingly prove that they responded and fought as
Celts—even if they had Norman blood!
The history of ancient Ireland is less mystic than
simply misty, unclear, the details remotely inaccessible. There may have been
several other migrations to Ireland apart from the coming of the Celtic or
Gaelic races; but the Gaelic language seems to have been preponderant. The
Celts could have killed off previous settlers.
I think that the Normans liquidated most of the native inhabitants in
the baronies of Forth and Bargy. The Statutes of Kilkenny and the Statutes of
Galway were enacted to deter the Normans or new English from adopting the
Gaelic language, customs and culture. The situation of the Normans or old
English was inverted by the Reformation, when England broke with the Church of
Rome. The Normans in Ireland clung tenaciously to the Catholic faith. The wars
of the Reformation were catastrophic for them; after Cromwell’s invasion their
entire lands were confiscated and new proprietors—Puritan and
Protestant—acquired them. These men were termed the new English. Afterwards the
old English and the Gaelic peoples in Ireland became coalesced into the one
entity, perceived as Irish and Catholic. One may deduce that the old English
became Gaelic but the counter-argument is that the eventual emergence of
English as the vernacular in this country is a possible index to the endurance
of the Norman or old English culture.
The analogy of an archaeological dig is most apt to
describe the endeavours of a host of radical organisations in late nineteenth
century Ireland to retrieve the mystical essence of an ancient Gaelic civilisation.
The Gaelic language was conceptualised as divinely inspired, and, at least, as
the mind of Ireland and its people, probably its soul. Fr Patrick Kavanagh O.
S. F., the famous historian of 1798, in Wexford town in late 1903, spoke of the
Gaelic League:--
“The mind of a nation followed the language and it the
latter [were] lost the National mind could not long survive….So it was, too,
with the Irish language, the tongue of Ireland’s ancient kings, its bards and
brehons. The language of ancient Ireland was written on the face of nature,
itself; it was written on our hills and dales, in the names of our townlands
and parishes. If the very soil of our country is thus eloquent of our language
and our past, how can we be silent and forgetful of the tongue in which our
story is enshrined?....If we are to think with Irish minds, why should we not
speak with Irish tongues?”
In late October 1914, Padraig Kehoe of Enniscorthy, in
a lecture on Thomas Davis, quoted the oft quoted imperative of his subject:--
“A people without a language of its own is only half a
nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories—tis a sure
barrier and more important than frontier, fortress or river.”
In his blazing oration at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral on
August 1st 1915, Pearse defined the Gaelic issue as a red line one:
not merely Gaelic but free as well; not merely free but Gaelic as well. Pearse,
to the chagrin of the more extreme Republicans and Gaelic League exponents had
given a tepid support, in 1912 to John Redmond’s Home Rule project: his
reasoning was that with Home Rule the Board of National Education would be
swept away and Gaeilge would be systematically taught in the national schools. His fellow signatory of the Easter Rebellion
Proclamation, Thomas Mc Donagh—and one time teacher at Pearse’s schools—maybe
as befitted a Professor of English Literature disagreed with the conventional
thinking that Irish people could only properly express themselves in the Gaelic
tongue, as they had done for aeons. Mc Donagh insisted that as English had
become the vernacular, it was now natural for them to speak in the English
language. He had inadvertently anticipated the stubborn inertia of generations
of children in twentieth century Ireland towards the Gaelic language. A speaker
at a meeting in New Ross in June 1906 depicted a historic proximity to a fully
Gaelic society:--“They had it on the authority of a Potter—an Englishman—….that
at the Enniscorthy fair of 1814, the transactions were conducted almost
entirely in the native tongue.” As time moved onwards, the inertia towards Gaelige
increased. There may have been a disconnection between the high aspirations of
the Gaelic revival and quotidian Irish society.
The focus was excitedly back in time: Pearse waxed
lyrical of finding in mediaeval civilisation some “rich and beautiful organisations
with an art and a culture and a religion in every man’s house, though for such
a thing we have to search out some sequestered people living by a desolate
sea-shore or in a high forgotten valley among lonely hills—a hamlet of Iar
Connacht…” Mr de Valera’s derided radio broadcast in circa 1943 about the
comely maidens dancing at the cross-roads is resonant with this social vision
of Pearse.
Mazzini, the Italian nationalist ideologue, opined
that a nation is formed of those who will it to be a nation; not necessarily of
a single race. The Ulster Protestants
not only did not will to participate in the Irish nation but on the contrary,
in January 1913, Sir Edward Carson and James Craig set up the Ulster Volunteer
Force to defend Ulster against Home Rule,
as nearly won by John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party. The
implication was that Home Rule could be imposed only by a military crushing of
Ulster’s armed dissent; something any British government would find an
unpalatable task. In response, in November 1913, the Irish Volunteers were
founded, in Dublin “to secure the rights and liberties common to all the people
of Ireland.” Young nationalist men poured with gusto into the Volunteers; they
were almost invariably of a radical mind-set, certainly at variance with Mr
Redmond’s imperial philosophy. In effect, the Volunteers were set up by the I.
R. B. who sought to present the movement as something wider: hence they imposed
as its commander Eoin Mac Neill, a northern who was a Professor of Early Irish
history in Dublin, essentially a moderate and inoffensive man. In late 1913,
the obvious purpose of the Volunteers was to protect a Home Rule settlement
from the Ulster Volunteer Force. Nationalists, of all hues, engaged in
circumlocutions and rhetorical sleights of hand to avoid directly addressing
the Ulster question: the sheer intractability of it may have psychologically
disposed them to avoid seeing this elephant in the room. In July 1914, John
Redmond wrote a euphemistic letter to the Dublin Corporation:--
“I would…. regard it as a great calamity if the
coercion of any section of the Irish people were to accompany the inauguration
of a free Parliament in Ireland and, while I….never shall advise the Irish
people to be consenting parties to any settlement involving the permanent
division of Ireland I…am ready to make large concessions to win the hearty
assent of all sections of Irishmen to a settlement which will bring liberty to
all.” Mr Redmond, most absurdly, did not despair of a settlement by the general
assent of all Irishmen!
Patrick Pearse’s response was a deliberate
misinterpretation of the Ulster Volunteers as a prelude to express his total
theory of war:--
“A thing that stands demonstrable is that Nationhood
is not achieved otherwise than in arms….I am glad that the North has “begun”. I
am glad that the Orangemen have armed for it is a goodly thing to see arms in
Irish hands. I should like to see the A. O. H. armed. I should like to see the
Transport workers armed. I should like to see any and every body of Irish
citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the sight of arms, to the use of
arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but
bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing and the nation which regards
it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more
horrible than bloodshed and slavery is one of them.”
One afternoon in the old university, Dr Liam de Paor,
in reply to my query, meant to provoke him, replied politely that Pearse was
greatly influenced by the English romantics; recent research confirms that
Pearse’s writings are resonant with themes and phrases from the English
Romantics. These writers glorified the experience of war, as both a defiance of
society’s conventions and verities and a masculine vindication of one’s
aspirations.
They were part of a zeitgeist that prevailed across
the Europe of that era. I am unsure if Pearse was influenced by them or if he
was seeking in their theories arguments to psyche both himself and others to
Rebellion in Ireland.
The obvious riposte to John Burton’s argument of
Redmond’s Home Rule as not involving bloodshed is that the latter directed
young Irish men to, in his rhetoric, sacrifice themselves in the war against
Germany, “wherever the firing line extended”. Pearse’s reaction to the Great
War, as expressed at Christmas 1915 was astonishing:--
“The last sixteen months have been the most glorious
in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth…. The old heart of
the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such
august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions
of lives given gladly for love of country.”
James Connolly, unaware of the identity of the author,
rejoined that only a blithering idiot could believe such things. One scholar
suggests that the phrase, “red wine of the battlefield” is re-working of
another in a poem written by Rupert Brooke, one of the Romantics, who died in
May 1915, a war victim. The two lines in question read:--
“But dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These
laid the
World away: poured out the red Sweet wine of youth….”
Recent research suggests a touch of Darwinian Theory
that darkens the effect of Pearse’s writings. Yeats’s reference to a terrible beauty
evokes the Romantic canon.
These theories may have dovetailed with the
traditional I. R. B. and separatist nationalist conviction that tiny groups if
sufficiently motivated were morally entitled—perhaps obliged—to enter into
Rebellion. While Ireland was suffused with a culture of Rebellion, which the
multitudes wished to encounter in a vicarious manner, only tiny groups were
able to psyche themselves to embark on actual Rebellion. Requirements of
majority approval were of necessity eschewed.
A tribute to Captain Sean Sinnott in Wexford town in
July 1915 was informative on these issues:--“The captain headed a section of
what had been called a discontented minority….The Fenians had been no doubt a
minority…There would be always discontented minorities until Ireland was free,
and as long as the discontented minorities had men like Captain Sean Sinnott to
lead them the cause of Ireland was safe; beaten they might be, they could never
be dishonoured.” The rationale of a failed Rebellion as justified if it merely
kept faith with Ireland’s insurrectionary tradition is there.
The Fenian uprising of 1867 was planned by the Irish
Republican Brotherhood; the acronym is I. R. B., a secret organisation, fixated
on ending the English presence in Ireland. They may, possibly, have continuity
with the White Feet and White Boys.
In the summer of 1914, John Redmond demanded to
nominate 25 members of the Volunteer executive, effectively a majority; the movement
caved in to his demand. In August 1914, in Mr Grey’s memorable phrase the
lights went out all over Europe as the Great War broke out.
Henry Kissinger wrote that that Germany was so strong
that the other European countries had to combine in resistance to it. On
September 20th 1914 John Redmond at Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow
pledged the Volunteers to participate in the Imperial forces. Amidst an angry
controversy, most of the Volunteers seceded and formed the pro-Redmond National
Volunteers; the residue, about 10 per cent of the estimated 181,000, remained
under Mac Neill, retaining the name Irish Volunteers. I believe that the main
motivation for those who enlisted was the prospect that their sacrifice would
both guarantee an All Ireland Home rule settlement and demonstrate that an
independent Ireland would support Britain, in all eventualities: the rhetoric
was an evocation of Ireland’s history, an appeal to heroism and idealisation of
war. The suspension of Home Rule, at the outset of the war, in the context of
the grinding and futile horror of the war quickly extinguished this
enthusiasm. The plight of Belgium, as
the Germans devastated it, attracted little interest in the Irish Catholic
community; the community of Belgian nuns at Merton, Bree was proof of horror in
Belgium; this report from the Echo July 24 1915 indicates minimal Irish
Catholic attention:--
“The Rev. Gaston Brohee of Thurin who is in this
country….to raise funds for the destitute Belgians, gave two most interesting
lectures on the 16th inst. in Killegney parish, one in the afternoon
in the Killegney School, the other at 8pm in the Clonroche Hall, kindly placed
at his disposal by Mr and Mrs Mullany. The attendance was large and there was a
liberal response. Father Brohee was the guest of the Rector, Rev. Canon
Macbeth.”
The Hall referred to was the shop owned by Pat
Mullany, ex member of the R. I. C. Catholic Belgium was, ironically, the
concern of the Protestant clergy and former policemen.
In late September 1914, the Supreme Council of the I.
R. B. decided that before the World War ended that it should take armed action.
I. R. B. men were at the commanding positions of the Irish Volunteers with a
few exceptions and one most important one:--Eoin Mac Neill remained as Chief of
Staff. 1916.
Tom Clarke enjoined absolute secrecy about the having
of the Rebellion on Easter Sunday. Joseph Plunkett and Sean Mac Diarmuida
forged a document supposedly from Dublin Castle revealing a plan to arrest all
the leaders of the Volunteers. Late in Holy Week Mac Neill was told that it was
a forgery and had an angry encounter on Holy Thursday night with Pearse—Mrs
Pearse was alarmed by the shouting of both men at each other. On Good Friday
Pearse, Mac Diarmuida and Plunkett convinced Mac Neill that Casement and the
Germans were to land at Kerry, with a massive quantity of arms and guns;
therefore a Rebellion was inevitable. The English who had deciphered the German
radio code knew of the intended landing; on Saturday, Mac Neill was informed of
Casement’s arrest; late on the Saturday night he put advertisements in the
Sunday Independent cancelling all manoeuvres on that day. These parades were
intended as a cover for the Rebellion. Mac Neill, in words indicative of his
attitude to Rebellion, told Pearse that he would do as his conscience and
common sense bade him. In March 1916, Eoin Mac Neill prepared a memorandum to
charge Pearse with having surreal mystical concepts of Ireland but at the
meeting of the Volunteers he lost his nerve and did not present it. In it he
wrote:--
“our country is not poetical abstraction as some of us….in
the exercise of our highly developed capacity for figurative thoughts, are
sometimes apt to imagine—with the help of our patriotic literature. There is no
such person as Kathleen Ni Uaillachain or Roisin Dubh or the Sean Bhean Bhocht
who is calling upon us to serve her. What we call our country is the Irish
nation which is a concrete and visible reality.”
Mac Neill focussed on the obvious dilemma of aspirant
Rebels: the absence of “deep and widespread discontent. We have only to look
around us in the streets to realise that no such condition at present exists in
Ireland. A few of us, a small proportion, who think about the evils of English
government in Ireland, are always discontented.” The fiasco of the commands and
counter-commands before Easter Monday and, indeed, the later tragic splits
arose from this disagreement about the existence of Kathleen Ni Uaillachain.
The military committee, an elite within the I. R. B.,
forced through the Rebellion by gulling Mac Neill; some of the Volunteers
thought they were on parade but the news that were in a Rebellion, at last,
would have elated them!
In the Proclamation “Ireland” is presented in
figurative mode as a mother, a divinity; her tradition of nationhood comes from
God and she summons “her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” The
word “children” is used in metaphorical mode: Ireland would surely not call
school-children to arms, as the late Justice Adrian Hardiman attested. The
Proclamation addresses “Irish men and Irish women” rather than using the
generic “Irish men”: I opine that this was a gesture tilted at Cumann Na mBan,
the organisation established by Countess Marchievz of young women to aid the Volunteers, and who
were in the G. P. O. It places the
Easter Rebellion in a direct continuum with six previous revolts in the past three
hundred years, a Rebellion in every generation; making it a nationalist
document, in purpose.
It is comparatively radical in its guarantee of equal
rights and opportunities to all its citizens plus religious and civil liberty.
Connolly may have influenced these promises but my understanding is that
Connolly believed that this nationalist Rebellion might be followed by a
socialist or Marxian revolution. Marxist theory anticipated a series of
revolutions, with a final workers revolt leading to a workers state. On January
19, 1916, Pearse, Joe Plunkett and Sean Mac Diarmuida took Connolly away and
over three days persuaded him not to proceed with the Citizen’s Army into an
absurd and miniscule Rebellion: his decision to join the Citizen’s Army with
the Volunteers in the Easter Rebellion incurred the envenomed castigation of
Sean O’Casey, who felt it should be used only in a Marxist Revolution, such as
that of Lenin in Russia in 1917. O’Casey wrote a series of dramas pouring
vitriol on Connolly in the G. P. O.: neither the rural dramatic groups who
staged these plays nor their audiences ever understood the bitter anti-Easter
1916 message in them.
The phrase “cherishing all the children of the nation
equally” is wrongly parsed. The word “children” is not to be taken literally;
the next phrase adjoining it “and oblivious of the differences carefully
fostered by an alien Government which have divided a minority from the majority
in the past” is code for the interminable nationalist charge that the religious
and sectarian conflicts in Ireland were an artificial contrivance of British
policy. “Children” in this context denoted the rival denominations of Catholic
and Protestant in Ireland who are metaphorical children of Ireland, a divine
mother. In effect this is Pearse’s invitation to the Ulster Protestants to join
the Republic: it is disingenuous and is, certainly, hyper optimism! The Ulster
problem bewildered both John Redmond and Patrick Pearse.
This figurative speech is resonant with common usage
of that time. At a Home Rule demonstration in Enniscorthy in May 1914, Fr
Robert Fitzhenry Adm., declared:--
“The day had come, he hoped, when the doctrine of hate
and strife, too long preached and published by those who would keep Ireland
divided would no longer be listened to in Ireland (applause)….the day had come
when Ireland and her dear children would unite together in brotherly love to
work for the greatness and grandeur of their beloved motherland.”
The past is a foreign country: the men and women of
Easter 1916 could not imagine let alone contemplate the mega productive
capacity of modern states and related vast public expenditure on public
services, the libertarianism and ever expanding agendas of latter times. The Pearse
brothers rode on bicycles to the G. P. O.
The final reference to the august destiny to which the
Irish nation is called explicitly assumes a divine patent in the creation of
the Irish nation. Speaking in Enniscorthy on March 9th 1916 Pearse
castigated those unable to discern “in the nation the image and likeness of
God.”
Pearse tended to invert or at least amend the tilt of
comparatively small events into proofs of a vast abstract theory. Emmet’s
Revolt and the Fenian rising of 1867 were very limited escapades; and the 1848
Rebellion involved the eccentric William Smith O’Brien’s affray in the Widow Mc
Cormack’s cabbage patch in Ballinagarry, Co. Tipperary. The Irish Citizen Army
was composed of poor labouring men, some of whom were malnourished, some unable
to afford a uniform and a few of them armed with pikes. Sean Sinnott was
forging pikes in Wexford pre-Easter 1916. The grandiose allusion to “gallant
allies in Europe” may have strengthened the case of conspiracy with the
Germans, supposedly required under the Defence of the Realm Act to condemn the
leaders of the Rebellion to death subsequently. On a point of fact, Roger
Casement came back on Good Friday to persuade the I.R. B. to call off the
Rebellion as he was convinced that the Germans had no serious interest in an
Irish involvement.
Conversely one may regard this tendency of Pearse to
inflate the narrative of abject scenarios as his peculiar genius: his
rhetorical power and superb facility of expression induced Tom Clarke to
promote him as the leader of the coming Rebellion. Michael Collins was of an
opposite opinion: he wrote of the communiqués of Pearse as semi-poetic
statements and the G. P. O. as like a Greek tragedy. My caveat here is that
Collins, while most affable, tended to criticism of colleagues and later
bombarded Mr de Valera with complaints about shortcomings of other ministers in
the First Dail Government.
The Proclamation asserted that Ireland “now strikes in
full confidence of victory.” The consensus of all historians is that the Easter
Rebellion could not have succeeded militarily. Many years ago I sought to
explicate with Professor Pat O’Farrell why the Bolsheviks, a tiny group of
terrorists, hiving off from another tiny group, seized and held power in Russia
in 1917. The outright collapse of the Russian army in the ongoing World War certainly
facilitated this extraordinary revolution. My contention is that if the British
army were either defeated or like the Russian one simply disintegrated then the
I. R. B. Rebellion might have succeeded.
Patrick Pearse, and others like Tom Clarke and Sean
Mac Diarmuida, would have regarded the fact of making a Rebellion a triumph in
itself: Pearse saw an imperative of each generation rising in national revolt.
Life, he wrote, battens on death and the blood of the killed and martyred
insurgents would serve as mystical nourishment to a coming generation to fight
anew. Tom Clarke was exultant all through Easter Week. At Rossa’s funeral in
August 1915 Pearse proclaimed that while Ireland held the graves of the Fenian
dead Ireland un-free would never be at peace; he spoke of his own generation as
baptized anew in the Fenian faith.
During the World War I and later in World War II, the
British shelled ahead of their soldiers, presumably to conserve the lives of
their soldiers. Brigadier General William Lowe, as—initially—Commander of the
British forces deployed from the Curragh, used artillery against the rebel
strongholds and simultaneously, destroyed connections between them. The inferno
in the G. P. O. was fearful and on the Saturday night as the surrendered rebels
squatted on the green area in front of the Rotunda Hospital, Sean Mac Diarmuida
kept shouting in his sleep, “the fire, the fire”.
James Connolly lectured his Citizen Army on street
fighting tactics and theorised that urban warfare could enable a rebel force to
defy a conventional, bigger and better armed army. I opine that both Connolly
and Pearse did not sufficiently ponder on the certainty that urban warfare
would involve injury and death to innocent civilians. For some obscure reason
of honour, the men of Easter Week did not seek to escape as the Rebellion
ended.
The courtesy of Brigadier Lowe to the rebel leaders
was extraordinary. When Patrick Pearse petulantly charged him not to accuse him
of telling a lie, General Lowe immediately apologised. Lowe exchanged military
salutes with Tom Mc Donagh. The two men sat in Lowe’s car for an hour, as the
Brigadier persuaded him to surrender. Lowe apologised to Nurse Elizabeth
Farrell, who liaised with the rival forces at the surrender, for his soldiers
strip-searching her and had money confiscated from her returned to her. She was
with Pearse as he surrendered to Lowe. He may have seen the rebels as genuine
idealists.
The execution of Mac Diarmuida and death of Tom Ashe
in 1917 left Mick Collins in control of the I. R. B. who became the bulk of the
army of the First Dail from 1919 onwards. They depended mainly on financial
support from the Irish Diaspora in America. Mick Collins never believed that these
freedom fighters could defeat the British army and later wrote that the
Republican army was never able to drive the British forces out of any part of
Ireland and that in many parts the Republican army had no presence at all. His
calculation was that the Volunteer military actions would induce the British
Government to negotiate with Sinn Fein. Dr Ronan Fanning wrote recently that
the ambush at Kilmichael, Co. Cork had a searing effect on the British cabinet;
Dr Fanning argues that the Anglo-Irish Treaty was an enormous advance on the
provisions of the Home Rule Bill offered to John Redmond. Collins felt that he
had, also, signed his death warrant in signing this Treaty. I believe that the
Anglo Irish Treaty facilitated the entry into the political limelight of the
representatives of a historically submerged and hidden mass of people: maybe
the Sinn Fein struggle was a contention within Irish society? To the
revolutionary mind-set, independence achieved by political negotiation would be
prosaic; that achieved by armed revolt was poetic—the craved for apotheosis to
centuries of struggle.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty was therefore a compromise from
the absolute demands and mystical aspirations of Easter 1916: the present Irish
State was legally established by that Treaty. Those who, like Pearse, believed
that the Irish nation was of divine patent could not accept the oath to the
British Monarch but their armed defiance of the Free State administration was
ill-fated and doomed: Ireland was fatigued with war, revolts, private armies
and public ones, killings and destruction. When Mick Collins was assassinated
at Beal Na mBlath in his native Co. Cork in August 1922, the Republican
prisoners at Mountjoy fell on their knees and recited the Rosary: it was sure
testimony to the insanity of the Civil War. Dr Fanning has written that Mr de
Valera’s rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty was a serious blemish on an
otherwise proud record of public service. Mr de Valera’s entry to the Dail in
1927 represented his succumbing to compromise, maybe nigh to Mac Neill’s common
sense!
Major General John Grenfell Maxwell was given “plenary
power to proclaim martial law over the whole of the country.” It does seem that
Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith intended, that with respect for probity and
legality, that Maxwell should have “a pretty free hand to deal with the
insurgents.” The executions haunted Maxwell for the rest of his life, the
latter part spent of it spent doing charity work. He wrote to his wife that he
was detested in Ireland. He charged that Mr Asquith had hung him out to dry. I
think that he was not really fit to be at large! One authority writes: “A pit
lined with quicklime had been commissioned by General Maxwell immediately
following his arrival from London” on Thursday, the 27th of April.
Three of those executed were in immediate proximity to death anyway: James
Connolly was dying from gangrene in the wounded leg; Joseph Mary Plunkett was
dying of tuberculosis and Tom Clarke appeared beset by terminal illness. Willie
Pearse, while he had inherited his father’s talent as a sculptor was—in my
opinion—mentally challenged and harmless. The executions of all four were
equally obscene and unnecessary. Maxwell rejected a request by Pearse that he
accept his admission of full responsibility for the Rising in lieu of executing
his men. The deceased Justice Adrian Hardiman has asserted that under the
Defence of the Realm Act (DORA to use the acronym), there was no evidence of
collusion with the Germans, as required, to bring in death sentences. That may
be legal pedantry: courts Martials are never strictly legal and, besides, the
allusion to the gallant German allies in the Proclamation probably prompted
Maxwell to rely on DORA. Pearse, in a post script, in a letter to his mother
referred to German support.
On Easter Monday evening on his return to 10 Downing
Street, Mr Asquith was told of a Rebellion in Dublin; as he ascended the stairs
he sarcastically remarked—“That is something”. As Irish and international anger
(especially that of America) mounted and as John Redmond and John Dillon—the
latter making a ferocious speech against the executions in the House of Commons—protested,
Mr Asquith became alarmed and tried to persuade Maxwell to act more leniently,
without success. Britain was eager to persuade America to join with them in the
Great War—the executions did not help that purpose. Maxwell was fixed on
executing the entire leadership echelon of Sinn Fein, perhaps over 60
executions. Some days later, Mr Asquith came to Dublin and ordered Maxwell to
halt the executions and even then he persisted in executing James Connolly and
Sean Mac Diarmuida. The loss of the lives of British soldiers in the Rebellion
may have weighed on his mind, leaving him with a sense of obligation to avenge
them. The soldiers who comprised the firing squads—some possibly teenagers—were
traumatised by the task and the guns in their shaking arms waved like fields of
corn in the wind. Maxwell was, undoubtedly, mindful that England was fighting
for its own survival, at that time preparing for the hellish Battle of the
Somme.
The transformed public feeling after Easter 1916 has
been universally ascribed to repulsion at Maxwell’s executions; conversely one
may argue that this transformation is proof of Professor Pat O’Farrell’s thesis
that any Rebellion in Ireland would be approved. Professor O’Farrell argued
that the contemptuous allusion by Trinity College Provost Mahaffy to “a man
named Pearse” shortly before the Rebellion was an objective measure of his
status then: martyrdom elevated him into the Pantheon of Irish heroes—with a
guarantee of acclaim both from contemporary society and (as he wrote to his
mother), also from posterity. Rebellion, if actually entered on, was a certain
road to celebrity, to use a latter day parlance. He told his pupils of the
words ascribed to the ancient Gaelic hero, Cuchulainn—“I care not though I were
to live but one day and one night, if only my fame and deeds live after me.”
This may be a parallel immortality to that of the religious promise of eternal
life. The erection of statutes with a sculpted likeness of the celebrated
hero—a phenomenon of that era—served as constant reminders of demised heroes—a
metaphorical life after death.
The Easter Rebellion was described by the media and the
British authorities as the Sinn Fein Rebellion—even if it was, in fact, an I.
R. B. rebellion. The mistake is more apparent than real: the Sinn Fein
movement, initiated by the diminutive and solemn journalist Arthur Griffith
while professing the founder’s eccentric principles of a dual monarchy and
abstention from Westminster, was at the level of local units, replete with
young men of belligerent and insurrectionary intent, most of them I. R. B. or
tilting that way. The I. R. B. was a secret organisation but Sinn Fein was
lawful and public; so bellicose young people could associate openly in it. As
the commandment at Mount Street bridge where the massacre of the Sherwood
Foresters occurred, and as one who would have been executed if Mr Asquith had
not arrived in time to prevent any more executions, Eamonn de Valera, in the
aftermath of the Rebellion became iconic and in the populist superstition,
arrayed in the aura of semi-divinity.[his actual name was Edward, later changed
to Eamonn] He became President of a re-organised Sinn Fein, as Mr Griffith
ceded the Presidency of Sinn Fein to him. Patrick Pearse wrote that the old
Fenian O’Donovan Rossa “was incapable of compromise”; in Pearse’s mind that was
the acid test of a revolutionary—that he should not compromise.
Eamonn de Valera was, by his admission, neither a
doctrinaire Republican nor a revolutionary. A mathematician and of masterly
political calculation, he placed Sinn Fein in the post Rebellion period in
discrete compromise from the absolutist aspirations of the Proclamation and,
indeed, from Pearse’s more extreme prescriptions. When Eoin Mac Neill was
brought into the prison where other Sinn Fein prisoners were, De Valera
instantly commanded all his fellow inmates to give Mac Neill a military salute:
in part de Valera was maintaining strict military etiquette (soldiers saluting
their commander-in-chief); in another sense, he was seeking via total
inclusiveness, a broad national unity. There would have to an implication of
compromise in his gesture to Mac Neill. (Michael Collins, like another I. R. B.
leader the executed Sean Mac Diarmuida, resented the re-integration of Mac
Neill). The post Rebellion Sinn Fein did not morph into a violent revolutionary
movement, in terms of its basic principles: Griffith’s old prescription that
the elected members for the Irish constituencies, in the election for the
Westminster Parliament, should instead establish a native Dail in Dublin, was
applied after Sinn Fein won a majority of the seats in the December 1918 election.
Eamonn de Valera headed a new government elected by Dail Eireann, as much
theoretical as real. Much was made of sending representatives to the post war
international peace conference in Paris in 1919, to plead the case for Irish
freedom. The pitch of the Sinn Fein campaign in the 1918 election was suffused
with ambiguity: there was an atmosphere of war but Sinn Fein did not ask for
specific retrospective approval of Easter 1916—maybe that was implied—and did
not seek a mandate to enter on a war with the British authorities. Arthur
Griffith did not approve of military action; even during the war of
Independence, when he was a minister in de Valera’s Government he opposed these
hostilities. Mr de Valera conceptualised the struggle as essentially political
and even metaphysical: he sounded as uncoiled from a design in the Book of
Kells, often obfuscating even to himself. He invariably outlined seven
centuries of Irish oppression in formal discussions; during the truce negations
in 1921, Mr Lloyd George, the Prime Minister told his secretary Tom Jones, that
after two days they were making progress as they had now reached the Norman
invasion.
From 1919 onwards local units of the Volunteers—mainly
the I. R. B.—uneasy at the excessive political direction, as they saw it, of
the Sinn Fein movement, took the initiative in terrorist actions. Collins’s
control of them was never total; besides Cathal Brugha, as minister for
defence, sought, with little success, to have all Volunteers take an oath of
loyalty to him as members of the Irish Republican army, to stress the control
of the Dail. The I. R. B. out of loyalty to Collins took the pro-Treaty side in
the Civil War: their ferocious fighting instincts are one explanation of the
ruthless Free State campaign. Ironically Mick Collins was faintly squeamish
about taking human life: he prevaricated about having British spies shot,
sending them repeated warnings to clear out. Once he went to London in late
1921, he was set on a settlement, with little relish for committing the
Volunteers to more war and killings. Mr de Valera may have seen the rejection
of the Anglo-Irish Treaty as involving a resumption of the struggle on a political and
metaphysical level—an obfuscation of the ugly, blood spilling nature of war.
