I Don’t Bother Myself with Such Questions

The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic
by Ruth Dudley Edwards
Oneworld, 2016, 416 pages, £14.99
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James Connolly: My Search for the Man, the Myth and His Legacy
by Sean O’Callaghan
Arrow, 2015, 400 pages, $27.99

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Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising
by Robert Schmuhl
Oxford, 2016, 232 pages, $35.95 

In Don Watson’s extraordinary memoir Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002), he recounts the day he accompanied Keating during a trip to his Irish ancestral home of Tynagh in Galway in 1993. After Keating gave a speech before a rapt audience, they departed in a helicopter for the next function, and Watson remembered, “We rose above the sea of faces—the kind of faces we have not seen in Australia since the Great Depression—peering up as Paul Keating peered down, and no one could say what he was thinking.”

Many of us of a certain age wonder if the rest of the world looks on the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising of 1916 with the same sense of wonderment. Even though every country most likely has its founding myth and the binding grammar that it superficially supplies, one wonders about the cost of all this. Can it be right that an entire polity and culture consecrates itself to one single historical event the way the Republic of Ireland has done and does? Three new books on 1916 offer various insights into the event itself and into the complex legacies of Irish nationalism as articulated by the rebels who were executed after proclaiming a republic in Dublin one hundred years ago.

Ruth Dudley Edwards has written an elegant and affecting series of portraits of the seven men who signed the proclamation of the republic outside the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916. As the most sensitive and penetrating biographer to date of Patrick Pearse, the polemicist sans pareil amongst the notoriously eloquent signatories, Dudley Edwards does not disappoint in her latest effort. She shows conspicuous respect and sympathy for the sheer physical bravery of the GPO garrison. Her humane description of the Victorian-era prison ordeal of the rebel leader Tom Clarke in particular is as powerful as her account of the familial wreckage that the rebels left behind in their various domestic spheres after they were buried in quicklime graves after summary military trials following their destruction of the centre of Dublin.

She nonetheless argues that their burnt offering constituted a kind of loaded gun in Irish cultural life. It lay around for fifty years before being discharged during the Provisional IRA’s “armed struggle” against Ulster Protestants and the Irish and British security forces in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1994. The fact that the Rising’s most aggressive contemporary champions, Gerry Adams’s Sinn Féin, can finish third in the Republic of Ireland’s recent general election suggests that there is still considerable electoral valency in Pearse et al.  

Sean O’Callaghan’s insightful and intense critique of the Rising’s most important socialist martyr, James Connolly, lands some similarly powerful blows on the reputation of Ireland’s most venerated dialectical-materialist. O’Callaghan writes here as a former senior commander in the Provisional IRA’s operation in Northern Ireland, and as someone who became gradually revolted by the sadism and sectarianism of that organisation. Having tendered his services as an informer to the Irish police in the 1980s in the hope of thwarting his colleagues’ campaign, he writes here with an unusual, even unique degree of authority about the corrupting effect of the rebels’ polemics, with particular emphasis on Connolly.

O’Callaghan seems to have read everything Connolly wrote, and he reminds readers about the uglier aspects of his corpus. In particular, he is at pains to emphasise Connolly’s preoccupation with the supposed sexual deviancy of Irish-born soldiers in the British army and in the Irish police force before independence in 1921, a theme that takes up a considerable amount of space in his writings. His essay “The Immorality of Dublin” (1915) is a typical example of this disordered obsession:

But if the reader will take his stand any night at the corner of O’Connell Street and Bachelor’s Walk, of College Green or Dame Street, of Grafton Street, High Street and Christ Church Place, the Quays, Rathmines Road or Portobello Bridge, or a dozen other places where people congregate, he will see soldiers continually accosting and importuning girls and women, and policemen smilingly looking on.

We are also advised to take note of Connolly’s naivety about German imperialism—“a homo­geneous Empire of self-governing peoples”—his near-total inability to grasp the proletariat’s motivation during the Great War in France especially, and his marked lack of solidarity with other socialists, whether Irish, British, French, German or American. 

As O’Callaghan sketches his career, Connolly emerges as a kind of poster boy for the cannibalistic element in extreme left-wing politics. Indeed, O’Callaghan’s analysis reads at times like an Irish version of T.J. Clark’s dismissal of early-twentieth-century socialism as a bagatelle whose “roots lay in Jacobinism and the imagery of the sects—and it was always on the verge of reverting to chiliastic rant”.

Robert Schmuhl takes an altogether more relaxed, Irish-American approach to the Easter Rising in his extended essay on the relationship between Irish nationalism and American realities as personified by the resolutely Presbyterian President Wilson, who apparently spoke as if (Irish) self-determination was something that could be diluted at whim by the dictates of (British) national security, Ireland being a matter of domestic UK housekeeping so far as he was concerned, a Hibernian Alabama, so to speak.

Schmuhl invites his readers to savour the implied critique provided by President Kennedy in his celebrated (and mawkish) address to the Irish Parliament in 1963 which concentrated on the dignity of small nations. Those of us who were born long after the events detailed in these three books may struggle to grasp the force of this, considering what we know about Kennedy’s treatment of Castro, Diem, Lumumba and Trujillo, but this simply emphasises the generational divide that comes into relief when an entire polity bets everything on one event.

Dudley Edwards and O’Callaghan are hard-nosed about Easter 1916, while Schmuhl’s reconstruction of Irish-American opinion assumes the integrity and inevitability of some sort of violent nationalist insurrection in the Ireland of the Great War. Arguably, however, these polemical differences serve to mask a common theme in all three accounts. Each book here assumes the continued relevance and vitality of the Rising in Irish national life. Dudley Edwards and O’Callaghan deplore the way it supplied the grammar and symbolism of the Provisional IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland, a campaign that killed more innocent Catholic civilians than all the security forces combined. And Schmuhl writes as if the kind of nationalism offered by Pearse and Connolly was unremarkable by twentieth-century standards, its provincialism, sectarianism and paranoia notwithstanding.

An alternative approach to this problem, indeed to the entire problem of an explicitly “historical” approach to national life and culture, lies half-buried in O’Callaghan’s passionate coda. Writing as someone who killed repeatedly while under the spell of Connolly’s so-called synthesis between nationalism and socialism, O’Callaghan has apparently thought himself out of that whole cosmos. He quotes Vaclav Havel to effect. During an interview that saw him heckled about his links to Czech nationalists of Pearse’s era, Havel said:

Personally I don’t bother myself with such questions … If I had lived during the national revival in the nineteenth century, my Czechness might still have been a matter of personal choice, and I might have tormented myself with the question of whether it was “worth the effort”. The problem of whether we should develop the nation or simply give up on it is not something that I have to solve. These matters have already been decided by others. In any case I have other worries. And the main worry is one common to all people everywhere: how to deal with one’s life, how to bear and sort out one’s dilemmas, whether they be human, existential, moral or civic … I have nothing against historical parallels and meditations on the tendencies of our national history … it only bothers me when they are used to distract our attention from the living, human, moral and political dilemmas of the time, for, if we were to solve or deal with these, we would be making our own national history and ultimately giving it some kind of meaning.

These words resonate at a time when the contemporary economic and social needs of the Republic of Ireland are so staggering in the aftermath of our recent financial collapse that even our best minds groan under their collective weight. O’Callaghan’s hat-tip to Havel is a reminder, if one was needed, that none of the martyrs could have grasped the dynamics of a confederal arrangement like the European Union, let alone the inadequacy of self-determination as a conceptual guide to the modern world.

The more books that are published about the rebels, the more they seem to be mired in the debates of a bygone era. The idealism and bravery of the rebels do not quite reach the youngest generation in contemporary Ireland, those of us who cherish the sentiments invoked by Paul Keating (and Don Watson) during his own address to the Irish Parliament in 1994. Citing the Corkman Seán Ó Faoláin’s definition of liberty in his book The Irish, Keating spoke movingly of a resolutely non-historical definition of liberty, one that aspired not just to “comfort but of gaiety and tolerance and a great pity and a free mind and a free heart and a full life”. These absorbing books show that we are not yet free men and women of that city beautiful.