1916 (16 page)

During Easter week Dunne travels from Dublin back to Flanders. In actuality this would have been an improbable feat, but in context it is a rewarding literary manoeuvre which allows Barry to counterpoint the similarities, and the differences, of Irish soldiering at home and abroad, as well as the challenge which the Rising offered in 1916 to notions of patriotism and national allegiance. One fellow infantryman, a nationalist who is later executed for disobeying orders, tells him: ‘I came out to fight for a country that doesn’t exist, and now, Willie, mark my words, it never will.’
⁴⁸
So it is for Willie, too. He observes the widening distance ‘between the site of war and the site of home’,
⁴⁹
a phrase which in Barry’s text irresistibly reminds us not only of Pierre Nora’s
lieux de mémoire
but Jay Winter’s contemplative exploration of the cultural history of the Great War in
Sites of memory; sites of mourning
.
⁵⁰
In 1918, after another leave in Dublin, Willie Dunne finds himself happy to be going back to the war. The front line, among his friends, is the only place for him: ‘He knew he had no country now.’
⁵¹

This may well have been the case in 1918 – Willie Dunne had no country
then
– but it seems to me self-evidently the case that, in the early twenty first century, Willie Dunne
does
have ‘a country’ now, a country which is mature enough and ‘grown up’ enough to accommodate and accept a plurality of experiences, allegiances, and even identities, within what Garret FitzGerald has called ‘our Irish Pantheon’. Writing in the aftermath of the unveiling of the Island of Ireland peace tower in 1998 he wrote: ‘nationalist Ireland now has the capacity to understand and accept the points of view of both the majority and the minority of nationalists in August 1914.’ There is no longer any need, he continued, to take sides, ‘to identify with either Redmond or Pearse. Both played valid roles and can now be accepted side by side in our Irish Pantheon.’ The Irish state, he concluded, has ‘reached maturity’.
⁵²
This is a worthy conclusion, but perhaps FitzGerald over-anticipated full maturity a little, for surely there should be room in ‘our Irish Pantheon’ for more than just Redmond and Pearse, exemplars of but two of Ireland’s plural political traditions.

It might be that the ‘long revolution’ (as it is sometimes characterised) which we might contemplate in this anniversary year of 2006 is not some narrowly political matter, but a revolution in
comprehension
, bringing us to an understanding of Ireland’s past which comprehends (and I use that term in its plural meanings) and legitimately accepts the Ireland of nationalists (of whatever stripe), the Ireland of unionists, and the Ireland of those with no particular political commitment at all.

Perhaps now is the time to look sceptically at the militarised and militaristic
mode
of 1914–18, which provided the
moment
for the corrosive violence of 1916, both in Ireland and on the continent. If we must sustain a
memory
of that time, it should be one that counts the considerable costs, both political and human. The political costs were decidedly long-lasting in an Ireland where the violence of the wartime years and immediately following polarised opinions and embedded lethal animosities across the island. But, above all, there were the human costs, the lives of Irish people cut short by this violence. So it should be that those who lie in Arbour Hill, or in the ‘silent cities’ maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission along the western front, or Glasnevin, or even Grangegorman military cemetery in Dublin, where some of the Irish soldiers of 1916 rest, might be remembered and commemorated, not as representatives of separate and antagonistic groups (which they may well have been), but together, as Irish, pure and simple.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was known during the Irish revolution mostly by repute and it died amidst great controversy. Unlike the Sinn Féin party or the Irish Volunteers, it was a secret and revolutionary movement that had a long history. Today it is usually remembered for two reasons only: organising the 1916 Rising and producing the charismatic revolutionary leader Michael Collins. The IRB and its political traditions did not begin in 1916 or in 1919, however, but rather during the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, at no stage during the early twentieth century did the IRB’s membership reach even a tenth of what it had been during the earlier period. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of the IRB’s veteran figures maintained that, although its motives were the subject of wild speculation by many people during 1922, ‘none of these people know anything about it, about its organisation or its aims or its work’:

None of these people know anything about the way in which the movement they have ruined was made, about the hard, unpaid, untrumpeted work of common unpretentious men of all ages in the years between the rise of Parnell and the election of 1918. Revolutionary movements do not rise up from the ground in a night, or in a year, or in ten years. The seed has to be sown over a long series of years.
¹

Historians have traditionally seen the nineteenth century IRB (popularly known as ‘the Fenians’) as having been important only during the era of strained Anglo-American relations between 1862 and 1872.
²
Most famously, the (British infiltrated) ‘Fenian Brotherhood’ in America attempted to take control of the IRB in Ireland, ultimately forcing a two day abortive struggle to take place in March 1867 between the police and unarmed IRB followers in Dublin and Cork.
³
This led to mass arrests and sensational trials, thereby causing what was termed ‘Fenianism’ to capture the public imagination. However, throughout the mid- to late-nineteenth
century, the IRB was usually able to maintain a following of about 40,000 men, a figure equal to the membership of those confederate clubs which had provided most IRB founders with their baptism of fire in 1848.
⁴
This continuing relevance of the IRB after 1872 was reflected by the fact that various Irish politicians, who were eager to capture the middle ground of Irish public opinion, looked for the IRB’s assistance in asserting their political influence during the 1870s and 1880s.

The IRB remained in a peak organisational condition up until the spring of 1884. At that time, however, having succeeded in infiltrating and heavily compromising Clan na Gael (the IRB’s Irish-American supporting body), British intelligence was able to pounce on the IRB, seize its documentation (including its account books) and arrest or imprison several of its leaders.
⁵
Over the next six months, while Dublin Castle held the IRB’s chief organiser, P.N. Fitzgerald, in custody, Parnell negotiated with the Catholic bishops, giving them an effective right of veto over the Irish party’s policies and choice of candidates, while the Catholic hierarchy in turn formally declared in October 1884 that they recognised the Irish party as the church’s mouthpiece in British politics.
⁶
Simultaneously, aristocratic Ulster tories revived the moribund Orange Order, created an ‘Ulster party’ in opposition to the ‘Irish party’ at Westminster, and were able to persuade the powerless, lower middle or working class Presbyterian community in Ulster (which had in the past been inclined towards republicanism) to join the Orange Order
en masse
as a means of expressing their distaste for the clerically-controlled Irish party.
⁷
This polarised Irish society and political representation on both religious and north-south grounds, giving birth to what would later be described as the ‘two Irelands’. Indeed, while the home rule episode of 1886 would be often presented as a triumph of Irish nationalism, there is much evidence to support a directly contrary view. Michael Davitt argued that the suppression of the democratically governed Land League and the rise of a National League controlled by an unaccountable committee led by Parnell and the Catholic bishops was actually a counter-revolution, causing the
demise
of Irish nationalism.
⁸
While Parnellite historiography dismissed this claim of Davitt as a personal prejudice, it reflected a much broader school of thought.

Unlike the rest of Europe, nineteenth century Ireland did not experience its greatest democratic upheaval in 1848 but rather during the Land League revolution of 1879–81, in which the IRB played a leading role. Indeed, the IRB reached its peak overall strength, in a numerical, financial
and military sense, at this time, with nearly 40,000 members, much funding and almost 10,000 firearms. The Home Rule League of the parliamentary classes, by contrast, had only a few hundred members, little funding and very limited popular support.
⁹
Furthermore, in so far as Parnell or the British government attempted to contain the situation in Ireland after 1881 or 1884 through agreement with the church, the counter-revolution identified by Davitt certainly followed a comparable pattern to similar counter-revolutions which historians have identified as having taken place across Europe in the wake of the democratic upheavals of 1848 – many of which helped to maintain the political institutions of the
ancien régime
in Europe right up until 1918.
¹⁰
Indeed, not without reason, one historian has typified the post-1886 high political consensus established regarding Ireland as a concordat-like arrangement, designed to make the Catholic community the future bedrock of the Union in Ireland.
¹¹
Certainly, it was at the British government’s request that the bishops formally declared their total support for the undefined concept of home rule in February 1886 after Prime Minister Gladstone promised that his traditionally anti-Catholic Liberal party would begin working with Parnell’s party in advancing the educational programme of the church. This ensured that Catholic Ireland, although obviously not nationalist Ireland, could henceforth rely on both of the leading British political parties to champion its interests.
¹²
Like the bills his Liberal party would later introduce in 1893 and 1912, Gladstone’s home rule bill of 1886 would not have lessened the sovereignty of Westminster over Ireland in any way.
¹³
The Catholic church and Parnell’s party needed to sell the home rule idea to the Irish public thereafter, however, so that the Liberal party would keep to its promise to support Catholic interests.

An underlying aim of the ‘new departure’ programme of 1878, and a perpetual hope of the IRB, had been that Irish MPs in Westminster would withdraw from the British imperial parliament and make a stand for Irish independence. The IRB would back up such an action in the form of a citizens’ defence force, akin to the Irish Volunteers of 1780–2, the first supposed champions of civic virtue in Ireland.
¹⁴
This did not, however, occur until 1918. Indeed, up until that time, very many Catholics evidently desired nothing more than the creation of an Irish society that would be structured according to Catholic social doctrine, with the church in greater control of education matters – something that was perfectly possible to achieve under British rule.
¹⁵
This is essentially why Irish Catholic MPs, from the days of Daniel O’Connell to those of John Redmond, joined the
church in denouncing Irish nationalist revolutionaries as men who were advocating a sinful creed of ‘forceful’ (or actual and physical) resistance to a just political order, which was based on the moral force of the British constitution, as well as the principle of ‘a brighter and better future for Ireland, and for England’, guided by ‘thrice-blessed signs of peace and hope. The future is with God’.
¹⁶

Under the Union, the church and Catholic MPs in Westminster encouraged the Irish public to view itself as belonging to a ‘Catholic country’ or a ‘Catholic nation’. Their actual motive in doing so, however, was to ensure that a primary sense of identification by Catholics with their religion could make them
immune
to the revolutionary or secular ideology of political nationalism, which was considered by the church to be a godless mammon, born out of the French Revolution. It was also naturally opposed by Irish MPs at Westminster since the rise of sedition in Ireland would cut the ground out from under their feet. The claim of Thomas Meagher, the creator of the Irish republican tricolour in 1848, and thereafter the IRB, that an Irish nationalist politics could never come into being until the Irish political community began to assert its complete independence from the Catholic church was based upon just such a reading of the situation.
¹⁷
Indeed, it was a condition of continued existence of Maynooth College after 1795 that all entrants had to take an oath to suppress sedition in Ireland.

The IRB slowly but surely disintegrated after 1884 for various reasons. The most important of these were the activities of British intelligence (which virtually controlled Clan na Gael’s treasury), the great risk in remaining a member of the IRB after the amount of evidence produced against it by the Irish party and the British government at the
Times
commission, and the effects of the Catholic church’s perpetual proscription of the IRB. Indeed, many who left the IRB at this time evidently did so to avoid the fate of most Fenian figures of the nineteenth century who had been baptised Catholics but never abandoned the republican movement or its seditious Irish nationalist goals. This was to be excommunicated, socially blacklisted (often leading to unemployment or emigration) and, ultimately, denied the last rites and buried in an unmarked grave – this practice being the primary reason why the IRB felt it necessary to launch a tradition of looking after their deceased comrades’ graves, as well as the well-being of the widows and children of the Fenian dead. As a result of all these setbacks, by the time Tom Clarke (who first joined the IRB in 1878) was sent to Ireland by John Devoy in the wake of P.N. Fitzgerald’s
death and burial in an unmarked grave in October 1907, the IRB had been reduced to a tiny organisation of little more than 1,000 members.
¹⁸