Organic Words

Organic Words

Selected Prose

Hugh McFadden

Limerick Writers’ Centre Publishing

Limerick – Ireland

Copyright © Hugh McFadden 2019

First published in Ireland by

The Limerick Writers’ Centre

12 Barrington Street Limerick, Ireland

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Book Design: Lotte Bender

Cover Concept: Joe Taylor

Front Cover Image: Daigh Rooney, 2004

Photo of Author in Chair (Back Cover and Content): Niall Hartnett

(niall.hartnett@gmail.com)

Ebook Formatting: Máire Baragry

Managing Editor: Dominic Taylor

Available as an e-book at www.smashwords.com

ACIP catalogue number for this publication is available from The British Library

Published with the assistance of Dublin City Arts Office

Words in Ireland, if not always ‘certain good’, are definitely certain meaningful and sometimes certain loaded

‘These Islands’, Books Ireland, October 2011, No 333).

For my brother Noel

&

The McFadden family

CONTENTS

Introduction to Elegies & Epiphanies

Part 1: History & Politics

The Phoenix Flame

Strange Take-Over

Civil Rights Demand

Home Thoughts from Abroad

Daniel O’Connell: Man and Myth

The Role of the Liberator

Them and Us ̶ ‘States of Mind’

A Short History of Ireland

Mixing It: ‘Political Violence in Ireland’

The Many Lusts of Henry VIII

FitzGerald in Revolt

Nationalist to the backbone (AE)

Evaluating AE

Editor of Genius

Dublin’s Watershed: 1913 Lockout

Dirty Old Dublin: ‘A Capital in Conflict’

Strumpet City

Neutrality ̶ A State Policy or Moral Principle?

Ambitious venture has too many blind spots

Battle for the Rising

Women of the Rising

The Poet and Politics

Part 2: In Memoriam

Death of a Poet, letter

His passing like that of a friend

Padraic Colum: A poet’s centenary

Pat Layde’s varied career

Akhmatova: revered and reviled

The Blood of a Poet

The day Ian discovered the magic & mystery of Lorca

John Jordan: An Appreciation

Literary magazines salute John Jordan

Introduction to Crystal Clear

Introduction to John Jordan Selected Poems

The Door on the Latch: Poetry Ireland in the 1960s

Paddy O’Brien dies in Dublin

Poet’s wish is granted

Poet’s brother ‘is behaving like a child’

Many mourn noted lawyer

Clockwork Orange writer dies

Editor of Myles and Kavanagh dies

Part 3: Bohemian Days

Into the Mystic with Kavanagh

Remembering PK and JJ

Kavanagh: Beyond the Celtic Mist

Bad Times for Poetry

Bohemian Baggotonia

Two famous writers to read here this weekend

Ginsberg on the Irish Beat

American Art Beat

Death of top Irish poet

Part 4: Poetry Readings

Watching the mid-day glow

The Frost is All Over

Fifty Years of Irish Poetry

Durcan reading suits stage

Getting Merry on Paul Durcan

Derry poet’s low-key reading

Poetry merges East and West

Montague poems known and new

Russian rose to his ‘gala’ billing.

Praise be to Beckett’s poetry…

Alliance lit up by poets ..

James Plunkett’s gift to the nation

Exhibition of artist’s books

Urban Songbird………………

Heaney favourite for Nobel Prize.

Literary Landscape ……

Literary Landscape II …

Poetry: Reading It, Writing It, Publishing It

Creators: The Fire i’ the Flint…

Flowing Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry

Part 5: Joyce, Beckett & Flann

Plurabelle prepares to meet her Bloom

Joyceful trail in the master’s footsteps

Carl Jung’s letter to James Joyce on Ulysses

Poor Old Man: Sad Tales of Shem

Shem’s dogsbody: Beckett’s dark epistles

Silence Gladly: Sam Spade.

A genuine patina of melancholy

Fantasy & Culture: Flann & Myles

Compact overview of great Irish writers

Essential Hartnett: Autumn Poetry

Selected Poems: Michael Hartnett

Some Memories of Michael Hartnett

Letter to Irish Times on Michael Hartnett

John F. Deane

Part 6: Play Reviews

Visions in a Derry Graveyard..

Don’t Wash Your Hands of This Play

Thriller with style to bank upon.

Dramatic Insight

Part 7: Prose Fiction

Books in Brief: The Whore’s Child

Kerry Gold

Night in Tunisia

Novelist lashed our hypocrisy

Periodicals: The Bell

History of Irish Writing

Of Other Days: Thomas Moore

Matters of Life and Death: Bernard McLaverty

Montague Memories

Who’s Out?

Into his kingdom: John McGahern

‘Our own fastidious John Jordan’

Catholic Ghosts

Part 8: Anthologies & Non-Fiction

From the Nine Counties

Might & Main: Irish Poetry

These Islands: Modern Irish & Scottish Poetry

Versions: ‘After the Irish’

Part 9: Medicine & Literature

Body and Soul

Birth of Science: Alchemy, Medicine & Print

Part 10: Prose: Non-Fiction

The Book’s the Thing

Print Culture

Clerics (Days of Deference)

A Question of Identity: Trinity & UCD merger plan

The Pale at Prayer: St Patrick’s Cathedral

The History of Dr. Steevens’ Hospital

Heritage: Newgrange

Otherness (A Place Apart)

Donegal: ‘The Pride of All’

Hunger, Silence: Mapping Famine

Part 11: Clarke & Kinsella

Austin Clarke honoured

Clarke: from gaslight to space-age

Austin Clarke Remembered

Two Cities: Thomas Kinsella

Summer Poetry: A Modest Proposal

Poets in Prose

Down All the Dublin Days

War and Word: Kinsella’s Selected Poems

Part 12: Northern Voices

The Shaping of Consciousnes

The Road Taken (made all the difference)

Of Love and War: Reading Michael Longley

One Wide Expanse: Longley's Realms of Gold

Ciaran Carson: Intoxicating Tour de Force

Variations (‘For All We Know’)

Odour of Sanity

Medbh McGuckian: Wild Strawberries

Poets in Prose: Seamus Heaney

Gerald Dawe

Points West

Loaded Landscape: Francis Harvey

Gone...but not forgotten.

Part 13: Poetry & Criticism

Third Force: Hidden Poetry

Secular Eden: A Kind of Afterlife

In the Mood: Macdara Woods

Inner Eye: Watchful Poet

Richness of many poetries

Paddy Bushe

Transcendent (Nature through a Lens)

A Sense of Immanence: Kerry Hardie

Catherine Phil MacCarthy

The Poet as Critic: Dennis O’Driscoll

Forging a Conscience

Boogie on Burgh Quay

War and Peace

Patrick Kavanagh & John Jordan and their Circle

Friel Obituary

W.B. Yeats: Magus of the Literary Revival

Joyce and the law dissected with forensic skill

Aeneas as Bloom's guide in Monto

Sovereign Ireland’s dead and gone?

The Collected Epistles of Flann, 'an uncontestable character'

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Limerick Writers’ Centre

Introduction to Elegies & Epiphanies*

Don’t Explain, sang Billie Holiday, who has been one of my favourite jazz/blues singers since the time when the first of these poems was written, back in the Sixties. So, taking my cue from Lady Day and from the artist Georges Braque who once said, In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained, this author does not intend to offer any close reading of these verses, or any textual analysis. Instead, an extended biographical note and a few thoughts on the life and times should suffice to set a backdrop to frame the reading.

One of my very first memories is of examining a gas mask and finding its strange shamanic ‘face’ fascinating, in the way a young child finds interesting the everyday objects found around the house…the ‘thing-in-itself’, or noumenon, of things. The time was wartime, as it so often is (somewhere or other). In this case it was the Second World War, although at a remove. The place was Derry/Londonderry/Doire Colum Cille, as it is variously known. Like Van the Man, this writer was one of the war children.

Another very early memory was of taking part in an air-raid drill, at the top of Bridge Street, possibly in the old school that used to stand beside the brow of that hilly street in the centre of the Maiden City. My family lived nearby. The eerie sound of an air-raid siren has stayed in my memory ever since. Another moment recalled from that time is of sliding down a snow-covered Bridge Street on a home-made sled or sledge towards the bottom of the road that led to the wide River Foyle.

Recently, talking to Robert Greacen about our background and early life, both of us agreed that we had a number of things in common. Both of us were born in Derry and lived t

here for the first few years of childhood, although in different decades…in his case the time was the 1920s, whereas in mine it was the 1940s. Both of us were removed from our native city while still very young and taken to live with a grandmother: he to his maternal grandmother in Belfast, whereas I went with my dying father to live with my paternal grandmother in Falcarragh, Co. Donegal, for a few years. A moment snatched out of that passionate transitory is recalled in the verse ‘January Promise’, in this collection. And my paternal grandmother is recalled in the verse ‘Wake-Up Call’, set in the location of my next home, Terenure, on the south side of Dublin.

It was to the quiet streets of Terenure that some of my father’s family, including my brother and I moved in the late 1940s. The driver of the car in which we arrived in Dublin was admonished to watch out for the tram-tracks as we passed Nelson’s Pillar and headed south over O’Connell Bridge.

In this new location, my Northern accent was remarked upon with curiosity by the local children, who eventually became playmates. It was my first realisation of the separateness of North and South.

My formal education at primary and secondary level was conducted at Synge Street, C.B.S. in Dublin. After a year spent working in a financial institution at the beginning of the Sixties, University College Dublin opened its doors to me in Earlsfort Terrace. It was here that I took a B.A. degree in History and Politics, and an M.A. in Modern History…and tutored in History. In between time, London called. From the heart of the Hibernian Metropolis to the heart of London: my wife, Elizabeth, and I lived there in the mid-Sixties and again in the early Seventies. See my take in this collection on ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, entitled ‘Sixties Flashbacks’.

In the best tradition of biographical notes for many writers, this restless soul has worked in a variety of occupations, in Dublin and London…from bank official and college tutor to barman and wages clerk; from history researcher, editorial assistant and teacher, to a photographer’s assistant in the ‘Blow-Up’ days of London. In late 1973 I returned from a stint teaching in a grammar school in Middlesex to take up a staff position in the late Irish Press newspaper. There, this writer worked as a journalist and sometime literary columnist until the Press Group locked out its staff in May 1995.

My career as a literary journalist pre-dated my Burgh Quay days and has outlived the publishing house that once stood on that quay between the Scotch House and The White Horse. (Remembering how we stood.)

Apart from the Irish Press papers, my reviews, articles and poems have appeared in a range of newspapers and magazines, including: Aquarius, The Belfast Review, Broadsheet, The Cork Review, Cyphers, Hibernia, The Irish Independent, The Irish Times, Irish University Review, Poetry Ireland Newsletter, Poetry Ireland Review, The Sunday Tribune, and The Times (London).

Since 1995, there have been stints lecturing on journalism…and getting out my poems. A second collection, Pieces of Time, was published last year in Belfast by Lapwing. My first collection, Cities of Mirrors, was published by Beaver Row Press in Dublin in the Eighties. In the last few years, also, some of my time has been spent editing the work of my friend and mentor, John Jordan, the renowned literary critic and U.C.D. academic, poet and short-story writer who edited the famous Dublin literary magazine of the Sixties, Poetry Ireland, and its successor in the Eighties, Poetry Ireland Review. Later this year, Lilliput Press in Dublin will publish John Jordan’s Selected Prose, which I have edited. This will complete my editing of his work: in 1991, Dedalus Press published his Collected Poems; and in the same year Poolbeg Press published his Collected Stories.

So, that’s the pen picture. This writer has always been something of an exile on main street, whether the location is North or South, Dublin or London…always from somewhere else. After more than half-a-century living in Dublin, or returning to it from other locations, I’m still a Northerner, of sorts. One with an accent modified by being in close proximity to Dubliners: but not really a Dubliner, despite my accent ̶ a person whose experience has been shaped by living in both parts of this island of possibilities. Here are some memories, some epiphanies; and some elegies for friends who have gone across the great divide.

*Elegies & Epiphanies: Selected Poems. Hugh McFadden. Lagan Press, Belfast, 2005.

***

Part 1: History and Politics

The Phoenix Flame

(Hibernia, May 16, 1969 p.12)

One can only welcome the recollections of a man to whom life was greater than any cause, even the cause of country. John O’Leary exhibits none of the characteristic faults of many revolutionaries and reminds us that a man can devote his life to an unsuccessful campaign and still retain a sense of honour, a sense of proportion and a sense of humour. Maoists take note.

This work* was first published in 1896 at a time when Irish nationalism seemed to be in the doldrums. Parnell was dead and the Home Rule question had been shelved in a political limbo. Twenty years had to pass before the Sinn Fein rebellion was to confound Yeats’s lament that Romantic Ireland had accompanied O’Leary to the grave. Fenianism seemed to have collapsed in the abortive rising of 1867. But the spirit that O’Leary embodied in his life, and which is apparent in his writings, had simply gone underground; and it survived half a century of patient waiting, to emerge again when the moment was opportune.

The author points out in his preface to the two-volume work that he was not attempting to write a history of Fenianism, but simply his recollections of it, supplemented by source material provided by other Fenian leaders, notably Thomas Clarke Luby. However, O’Leary gives his own impressions of events and his opinions of men, and these are especially valuable as a first-hand source of information about the early phase of the movement, which ended with the arrest of the leaders in the autumn of 1865.

Volume one begins with a rambling account of O’Leary’s conversion to the positive nationalism of Thomas Davis. The failure of the Young Ireland rebellion and the fiasco of the Pope’s Brass Band only served to burden O’Leary in his conviction that any future revolutionary activity should be organised on a conspiratorial basis after the fashion of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. He was now more than ever convinced of the opinion that ’we could get from England nothing but what we could wring from her’.

And so he was already intellectually prepared for the new departure of Stephens in 1858. The following year saw his first active participation in Fenian affairs, when he was sent by Stephens on a fund-raising campaign to the United States. From material supplied largely by Luby, he recounts the early work of organisation in Ireland, the sojourn in Paris and the various trips from Ireland to America.

These recollections are indispensable for their portraits of the Fenian leaders, especially the descriptions of Stephens’s character. O’Leary’s admiration for ‘the Captain’ did not prevent him from viewing the man with detachment. One can begin to understand the many facets of this enigmatic personality, his ability to command respect from the rank and file, the theatrical quality which made him a leader, and the egocentricity which prevented him from gaining the complete trust of Mitchel, O’Brien and O’Mahony.

The subject matter of volume two is O’Leary’s editorial work for the Fenian newspaper, The Irish People. This venture was the high-water mark in his life and earned him a twenty-year sentence for treason in 1865. The narrative ends, therefore, without an account of the events immediately preceding the actual rising; but this chapter of Fenianism is already documented by other writers. The Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism provides a study of the origins of the movement, a portrait of its leaders and an insight into the mind of one of Plutarch’s people. Although it is occasionally repetitive and discursive, it still remains a fascinating source for the student of Irish nationalism.

*The Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. John O’Leary. 2 vols. Irish University Press, 1969.

***

Strange Take-over

(Hibernia, November 7, 1969)

Firstly, the casual reader may be struck by the curious title of Mr. Carswell’s new volume, The Descent on England*. The professional historian, on the other hand, will notice that the cover design does not show King Billy, who shares the frontispiece with Bentinck’s Logistical Diagram. Obviously, this study of the English (‘Glorious’) Revolution of 1688 has been conceived as a modern reappraisal of a complex subject. It is quite coincidental, though fortuitous, that the sash has been dry-cleaned, the drum be-draped and the oul’ Orange tune updated.

The author sets out the logic of his methodology in the preface. The subject matter he describes as ‘this astonishing episode which opens the Augustan age of Britain and Britain’s role as a world power’. It will be noted that the Battle of the Boyne is listed in the index under Boyne, battle of, 220, 227, 230. In other words, Mr. Carswell’s study is shaped, though negatively, by the curious paradox which he submits as having influenced former works on the revolution: hence the sub-title.

It is true that classical accounts of 1688 have tended to concentrate on the political and constitutional elements involved in what was often regarded as an internal English affair. The present work attempts to show the European background of power politics and diplomacy which preceded the invasion. Of course, it is also a tale of intrigue, both lay and clerical, military strategy and accident. Notwithstanding the use made of the parliamentary canvass of James II, much research remains to be done on that luckless uncle and his unfortunate allies.

Finally, a word of caution: it may be necessary to supplement this volume with a reading of other texts, if one is to comprehend the economic and social factors involved in William’s take-over of England. But the reader may well find the book interesting, and that is recommendation enough.

*The Descent on England. A study of the English Revolution of 1688 and its European Background. John Carswell. Barrie and Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1969.

***

Civil Rights Demand

(The Times, August 22, 1969, p. 7)

Sir, J. C. Beckett’s letter today* is an excellent example of an experienced historian analysing a problem in abstract terms. On the surface, his argument is closely reasoned and convincing. It ignores one crucial point. In the words of James Joyce _ History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. Mr Beckett does not realise that the Irish nightmare continues to keep both British and Irish in a state of deep slumber and that the dream will be broken by violence.

If this is to be avoided the legitimate demands of the civil rights movement must be granted immediately. In other words, Westminster must cease to act unofficially and, instead, Parliament must be recalled, Stormont abolished and impartial observers must ensure that the will of the Irish people is seen to be satisfied.

Ireland includes men of every persuasion within its boundaries. The British Press have given coverage to most of these political points of view. Unfortunately, it has forgotten that any solution to the Irish crisis will depend on the good will of the nation, both North and South. Dublin exists and will have a determining influence on the course of Irish history.

The British should not be surprised to find that the desire for freedom is at least as strong in Ireland today as it was 50 years ago. Irishmen are not unlike Czechs and Slovaks.

Yours,

HUGH McFADDEN

43 Harrington Gardens,

Kensington, S.W.7. Aug 21.

* This letter to The Times in London came only a week after the ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in Derry, Northern Ireland, and was written in response to a letter that was published in The Times on Thursday August 21 from the Queen’s University, Belfast, historian Professor J.C. Beckett, who wrote inter alia: …The attitude of successive governments in Dublin has been equally unrealistic. They have maintained continuous propaganda, in Great Britain and elsewhere, against Partition; but they have made no effort at all to remove the prejudices or calm the fears of Ulster unionists. On the contrary, their policies at home and abroad, together with their claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland, have done more than anything else to strengthen and consolidate the Unionist party.

***

Home Thoughts from Abroad

(Unpublished MS, April 1973)

I suppose that a Sunday night in April is as good a time as any other to sit in a flat in northwest London and think about being Irish in John Bull’s first island. Not that I consider myself typical of anything other than myself. The day, 15th April 1973, was pleasant enough. Warm sunshine made its second definitive entrance of the year: the first one was false and caught the buds in the nap on Primrose Hill. They have just begun to recover, as I noticed when I strolled there that morning and smelt the new-mown grass. Perhaps the scent was responsible for my flight of thought across the water to that other island. Anyway, Spring is Spring, even the second time around.

On my way to the Hill I passed number 23 Fitzroy Road, a three-storey over basement, neo-Georgian, house where a blue London County Council plaque informs the horseless traveller that here lived William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist. I cast a cold eye on the dusty, off-white, façade and noted the yellow and orange zodiacal sun-sign in the first-floor window; and the single wilted daffodil in the window box. It must have been a cosy town house in his day, before the area began to decline into flatland, before the graffiti was written on the gable-wall at the end of the street: ‘Spurs are great’, ‘Love’, several unknown names, a swastika, ‘N.F.’, and some four-letter words.

Urban renewal has begun in this district, which means that builders are tearing the insides out of many of the houses, turning the area into a chessboard of gaping interiors interspersed with newly painted, chic, abodes for the rich ‘trendies’ who are moving in. And one has to be relatively rich to buy any of these houses now, as an estate agent’s catalogue informed me: ‘£21,500 ̶ Gloucester Avenue, N.W.1. Two bedrooms, reception, kitchen and bathroom’. Yes, that will buy you a flat here. I passed by.

Before I reached Primrose Hill I bought my usual two Sunday newspapers: one Irish and one quality (sic) British. That was sufficient entertainment for the day, enough for any but the prurient and addicted. Why did I glance first at the British paper? Perhaps I did so because it was as likely to feature any ‘hard’ news on Irish ‘subversive’ activities as the home product. There was no sensational headline on Irish affairs that day, no expose of the ‘Troubles’ or the troubled. I looked in vain for any account on the front page of the Irish paper of the previous day’s ‘massive swoop by over 500 police on more than 100 Irish homes in London and five other British cities’ ̶ not a word. There was a headline story of an insane triple killing of infants in Worcester, Lancashire, and a headline on the ‘Farm Tax Row’ ̶ proposals to tax the profits of farmers in Ireland. Eternal news.

I found what I was looking for in a side column of the London paper: ‘Priest Accused in Bomb Plot’, and ‘Man on Secrets Charge’ ̶ two small ‘fillers’ with the barest details of the names and the charges. I wondered what the coverage would be like in any British paper in the unlikely event of the situation being reversed in terms of nationality: ‘Over 500 Gardai Swoop on More Than 100 British Homes in Éire’.

But the British are the lawmakers supreme, even if they are not always the keepers of such laws! What does that instruction say inside the cover of my green, harp-imprinted passport: ‘The Minister for External Affairs of Ireland requests all whom it may concern to allow the bearer, a citizen of Ireland, to pass freely and without hindrance and to afford the bearer all necessary assistance and protection’. The wording is out of date, of course, now that the Department is known as Foreign Affairs. The words are in Irish, English and French: I carry it when I go on holiday.

But the day was too good to spend reading newsprint, as I lay on the grass, lord of Primrose Hill, and surveyed the scene; with the usual parkland noises of birdsong, dogbark, children’s shouts, as background. The Hill is situated between the expensive brickland of St. John’s Wood and the more ‘homely’ concrete of Camden Town, although such adjectival descriptions are strictly relative. Looking east, over Regent’s Park, one can see the steeples of the new religion, Harry Hyam’s high-rise office blocks and the G.P.O. Tower, looming above the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I was strategically placed to consider the city. Behind me, to the north-west, lay Hampstead and, to the west, the largest Irish constituency in Britain, Willesden (which includes Kilburn and Cricklewood). If one follows the ring-road of Regent’s Park one comes to the exclusive terraces built by John Nash to commemorate Beau Brummell’s friend, the Prince Regent. Across the road from the Hill is the entrance to the London Zoo ̶ a coincidence.

I thought about the Irish in Britain. What was the figure from the 1971 Census for Irish-born residents of London: 600,000 or so? That figure of about 50,000 who gave their country of origin simply as Ireland puzzled the statisticians here, who seemed undecided whether to include them with the figures for ‘citizens of the Republic of Ireland’. Altogether, a sobering thought for the Monday Club, National Front people to consider: not to mention our own political parties. Also a sobering statistic, if one credits it, was the percentage recently quoted by the Irish Post in an opinion poll of Irish here on their voting preferences, if they were in a position to vote at the next [Irish] general election in February: 40% favoured Sinn Fein. Surely emigration has been a safety valve for Ireland!

I thought about the ‘derelicts’, as the fashionable sociologists call them; the Irish ‘derelicts’ lost in the familiar jungle of Camden Town or Cricklewood during the ‘holy hours’ when the pubs are shut. Red-faced, red-eyed and white-haired, they sway along the footpaths: the younger ones with frayed shirt open and baggy trousers; the older ones burdened down with shabby woollen overcoats, hands reaching out to ‘touch’ the sober citizens. Images of the old Irish tramp being booted out at the start of the film, The Clockwork Orange, came to mind. Of course, there are quite a few Irish who made it, some even to middle-class, semi-detached, suburbia, before the inflation of property exploitation. There is the Irish Club in Eaton Square, as well as the Irish Centre in Camden Town. If one walks into a pub such as the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge one can meet young, well-dressed, émigrés with just the right hint of a brogue: one can do so, if one wishes.

But I wondered why the Irishman is still the ‘Paddy’ here, notwithstanding. Why do jokes about Irishmen run jokes about Pakistanis a close second in the popularity stakes of British comedians? One of the more apposite that I heard lately was: What do the initials W.I.M.P.E.Y.* stand for? Answer: ‘We Import More Paddies Every Year’. Why have so many Irish not made it here, in the social and economic sense, whereas in America they have succeeded, at least materially? There is a significant, qualitative, difference between the terms Irish-American and Irish-British. Distance gives one perspective, if one wishes to see.

I thought about the past few weeks in Ireland. I remembered the answer that Alec Douglas Home, then Prime Minister, gave to my question about discrimination against the minority in Northern Ireland, at an election rally in Chiswick in 1964. The reply went something like this: Questions on Northern Ireland should properly be addressed to the appropriate authorities there, since Westminster is not responsible for internal affairs in Ulster; and, I do not accept your allegation. Times change, somewhat.

I reflected also on the unguarded welcome generally given by minority politicians to the troops who went to Northern Ireland in August 1969. That temporary ‘peace keeping operation’ went wrong somewhere. We should have known that the 1970 general election result in Britain was going to cause considerable trouble. I knew it, when the Falls Road was put under military curfew in that same summer. I wondered why so few others seemed to grasp the significance of that crucial watershed ̶ when Kitsonian military strategy replaced the ambiguous policies of Callaghan. Sometimes, time does not heal.

But I was not morose, that Sunday evening, sitting in my N.W.1. flat listening to Radio London. The programme was a weekly one for Indian and Pakistani listeners, in Hindi and Urdu. The soothing sitar music was as near as one could get on that station to traditional Irish music ̶ it brought out my Indo-European origins. I thought about a relative of mine, Irish-bred and educated, who has worked as an executive with an Irish semi-state body here for some years. Shortly after Bloody Sunday in Derry I visited him in his Mayfair office and, in the course of a conversation about events at home, he exclaimed: Do you really think that those 13 people were unarmed? I told him that I did: just that.

One of the good ideas he had was that the transmitting power of Raidió Éireann should be boosted so that people here could keep in touch with home news. I wonder how many would listen?

How can I answer the question which one of my cockney pupils asked me in a history class I was teaching, on hearing that I was Irish: Wot side you on, sir ̶ Catlick or Prodstant? I had been attempting to disclose, for the first time in their experience, some of the mysteries of Irish history, in particular the events of 1798 and the Act of Union. How does one overcome the almost complete ignorance shown by English people regarding Ireland, as manifested in the absence of any coverage of Irish affairs in standard English school texts? How does one overcome the almost unspoken prejudice against things Irish, in British popular culture?

Indeed, how does one explain Irish nationalism to a semi-literate cockney who imbibes British jingoism almost as naturally as he once imbibed his free-school milk, before ‘milk-snatcher’ Thatcher took it away from him? For English nationalism ̶ disguised as a benevolent belief that British is best and that every other nationality is racially inferior ̶ is still rampant in this land, despite the naïve talk of a classless culture which was fashionable a few years ago. One has only to read the writings of the prophets on the Underground walls to see that is so, although the indigenous commuter seems totally oblivious, secure behind his copy of The Daily Telegraph or Express.

My day ended with a viewing of the B.B.C. News, which showed a brief film clip of the commemoration march in Belfast for Joe McCann, the Official Sinn Féin man who was shot dead by the British army near his home last April. The commentator remarked on the presence of McCann’s Irish wolfhound at the head of the parade ̶ presumably he recognised something foreign, or was it a subconscious memory of the Irish Guards? Later, on the midnight news, I heard that a man named Robert Millen, a Protestant member of a Republican Club in Belfast, had been assassinated in McClure Street. The fact that he was a Protestant was duly noted by the newsreader.

* Wimpey, a major construction company had a large Irish workforce. Wimpey employed so many Irish labourers in the years following World War II that the name, according to a certain type of comedian, was said to stand for 'We Import More Paddies Every Year'.

***

Daniel O’Connell: Man and Myth*

(The Irish Press, August 6, 1975, p.9)

Daniel O’Connell is variously remembered as ‘The Liberator’, the leader with the greatest mass following in nineteenth-century Europe, the Counsellor who could drive a coach and four through any Act of Parliament, the man who brought the priest into Irish politics, the ruffianly Irish demagogue of the English imagination as expressed in racist Punch cartoons, the Irish leader who presided over the decline of the Gaelic language and, after a lifetime of struggle for Emancipation and Repeal of the Union, died in the midst of the tragedy of the Great Famine.

In the popular imagination of his own time, O’Connell was thought of by the Irish peasantry as a chieftain, a man of destiny. The folklore which surrounded him during his lifetime saw him in a Gaelic, somewhat fantastical light: popular Kerry legend claimed that his birth was accompanied by strange phenomena, lightning and storms, a disturbance of nature. Later legend, in the form of street ballads, extolled his prodigious energy and sexual prowess ̶ immortalised by the misleading charge of W.B. Yeats, who told the Seanad that ‘it was said about O’Connell, in his own day, that you could not throw a stick over the workhouse wall without hitting one of his children’.

O’Connell has been out of favour among some Irish historians for decades now. Indeed, he seems today to be even more controversial than Charles Stuart Parnell, who is remembered by readers of James Joyce and Yeats as a romantic figure. O’Connell is rejected by the Republican tradition and forgotten by the constitutionalists. Yet, he can easily be seen both as a father figure of a type of proto-nationalism and as the originator of democratic constitutionalism, in the literal sense.

He was a complex figure of his age, moulded in the rational optimism of his youth, shaped by the privileged position of his family ̶ relatively wealthy landowners cum merchants cum smugglers cum moneylenders ̶ trained in the law in both London and Dublin after an early education in France.

His letters show him to have been an intelligent, precocious youth. Yet he was more concerned, it might appear, about his career training in London and the relations between England and France than he was about conditions in Ireland; although occasional references reveal that he understood some of the distress of the country, which he describes in March 1798 as ‘distracted’ ̶ a state which is partly the consequence of the ferment which reigns all over Europe but chiefly, I fear, the result of the weakness and cruelty’ of the British administration.

Yet the only reference in the extant letters of 1798 to the momentous events of that year is an observation that a barrister named Atkinson has been rejected as a ‘memorialist’ by the Irish Benchers because he belonged to the Society of United Irishmen ̶ in a letter to his benefactor uncle, ‘Hunting Cap’, seeking money for his equipment and uniform in the Lawyers’ Yeomanry Corps. Membership of the Volunteer Corps may have been simply a token gesture, or bravado, or a following of the example of his fellow students, but no doubt the young O’Connell appreciated its value in the furtherance of his career.

One of the first judgements on political events concerns the Robert Emmet Rising: Young Emmet merits and will suffer the severest punishment... a man who could coolly prepare so much bloodshed, so many murders ̶ and such horrors of every kind, has ceased to be an object of compassion.

And yet O’Connell could have compassion for those unfortunate enough to fall victim to the harsh laws of the age; his advocacy and defence of the underdog in assizes throughout the country made his reputation secure, even before he embarked on his crusade for Emancipation.

Notwithstanding the current fashion to attempt to belittle the importance of the Emancipation Act (even at the cost of the 40-shilling freehold vote), the genius of his organisational work cannot be denied. Moreover, the 1829 Act had tremendous importance politically; and in the national psyche it released the masses from a deep inferiority complex.

It is true, of course, that he began the involvement of the local Catholic clergy in politics ̶ such was the level of repression of his fellow-countrymen that it probably would have been impossible to organise a mass movement without them. Contemporary anti-clericals who bemoan the manner in which Maynooth (College) was founded might also remember that O’Connell led the campaign against the British veto of Irish Episcopal appointments.

It is also true that O’Connell espoused religious freedom as a principle ̶ the cause of (religious) emancipation in Britain and the colonies is in his debt ̶ he advocated the separation of Church and State, and even sought the abolition of the temporal power of the Pope. His friends in Britain included rationalists and free-thinkers as well as liberals: Bentham, Ricardo, Wilberforce, John Wilkes, as well as Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith.

Together with these reformers O’Connell campaigned for the Great reform Act of 1832, for universal manhood suffrage, the abolition of slavery, better conditions for the urban poor, and the repeal of the Corn Laws.

However, the paradoxes remain. Completely opposed to the use of physical force by Irish nationalists, he praised the violent revolutions in South America and even allowed his son to enlist in the service of an Irish Brigade which went to fight on behalf of Simón Bolivar’s revolution. Concerned about the state of the peasantry, he himself was part of the landlord system, although comparatively benevolent, if paternalistically patronising to the lower orders of society.

Although he sought better conditions for the urban worker, he was highly suspicious of the combination of workers and distrustful of trades unions, possibly because he recognised the threat they might pose to his political control in Dublin. Aware of the danger of ‘Orangeism’, yet naive enough to allow himself to be insulted by Orangemen in Belfast; class-conscious yet rejected by elements of ‘society’ (especially in Britain) as a rabble-rouser’, he was the dominant political figure of his age, but failed to transcend it.

Those with only a casual knowledge of Irish history, and swayed by the current opinion, could easily believe that O’Connell’s star set with his death. His decade of struggle in the 1830s for ‘good government’ could be seen as misguided, a prologue to the gargantuan defeat of his attempts to win Repeal (of the Union) ̶ the abiding image of this analysis would be the ironic stance of O’Connell on Clontarf (‘Monster Meeting), surrounded by hundreds of thousands of supporters, impotent in the face of the intransigence of British parliamentary ‘imperialism’.

Yet this picture of O’Connell is superficial. It must be judged against the background of the abyss from which he raised his countrymen. We must remember the successful defence lawyer and political organiser, the formidable debater in a hostile House of Commons; once, turning to Sir Robert Peel (later Prime Minister), whom he nicknamed ‘Orange Peel’, he likened his smile to the reflection of moonlight on the silver nameplate on a coffin.

Though one ballad recalls how he got his coat-tails wet wading out in Kingstown Harbour to welcome Queen Victoria, others remember how he travelled ̶ like Paul Revere ̶ on horseback through the night to defend a hapless client. It would be misleading to see him only as the old man of his final portrait, enveloped in the darkness of approaching death and surrounded by the terrible doom of the Famine.

The limitations which social, economic and political realities set on his career do not mark the limits of his success as a man ̶ he should be remembered, warts and all.

*This was one of two articles commissioned by the Editor of The Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell.

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The Role of the Liberator*

(The Irish Press, November 3rd, 1984)

Few of the major characters in Irish history have been as controversial as Daniel O’Connell. While he was lionised in his lifetime by his multitudinous supporters, his reputation was assailed after death by several generations of Irish nationalists.

He has been regarded as the ‘Liberator’ of Ireland, and as the founding father of constitutional nationalism. By others, from the Young Irelanders to the physical force Republicans, he has been disparaged as a demagogic opportunist who betrayed ‘the cause’ when he called off the Monster Meeting for Repeal at Clontarf.

Since the bicentenary in 1975 of his birth, O’Connell’s reputation has undergone a reappraisal by historians and political writers. A more balanced view of his achievements and a better understanding of his personality has emerged, based largely on a study of his voluminous correspondence, which was published during the 1970s.

Here I should disclose an interest. I was one of two editorial researchers who assisted Professor Maurice R. O’Connell in the editing of the Correspondence, upon which Chenevix Trench draws heavily for the biography under review.

It is a timely work. The bicentennial did produce a number of good, scholarly, articles on O’Connell; but 1975 also saw the publication of a pot-boiler, O’Connell and His World, by R. Dudley Edwards, which did not show evidence that recent research had been fully assimilated.

So, there has been a need until now for a biography which took account of the disparate research, not only on O’Connell, but also on the age in which he lived, and which he influenced so much ̶ a biography accessible to the general reader. To a great extent, Chenevix Trench has met that need. One can overlook the occasional usage of infelicitous colloquial expressions and, indeed, the somewhat exaggerated claims made for O’Connell in the Foreword and Preface, since the author has been largely successful in marrying a lively narrative style with the frequent use of quotations.

Academic historians, however, may fault his decision not to give source references for some of the anecdotes on O’Connell’s life which he relates. Trench’s main achievement is to set O’Connell in the context of his family background, his social milieu and the intellectual influences of his age. He reminds us that O’Connell was a product of the late 18th century.

Much has been made of O’Connell’s rejection of physical force. This has often been misinterpreted as being the expression of a principled pacifism. Trench’s work reminds us that O’Connell was a pragmatist in this, as in so many other beliefs. He rightly discounts the widely-propagated myth that O’Connell’s rejection of violence stemmed from revulsion at witnessing incidents in France after the revolution there. It was the failure of the armed uprising of 1798 which led O’Connell to reject force as a means of achieving political change. He blamed the Rising of ’98 for the loss of an Irish parliament.

We are reminded also that ‘The Liberator’ enlisted in the Lawyers’ Artillery Corps in 1797 to defend the realm against the threat of a French invasion which, he believed, would have ‘shook the foundations of all property and destroyed our profession (the Law) root and branch’. In his journal, in December 1796, he wrote: The Irish people are not yet sufficiently enlightened to be able to bear the sun of freedom.

However, he had no hesitation in allowing his son, Morgan, to join an Irish Legion raised by an adventurer, John Devereux, to help Simón Bolivár to liberate Venezuela from Spanish rule. Military service, in fact, was in the family’s tradition. One uncle died for King George in the Seven Years’ War, while another fought for King Louis and became a full general in the French army.

So, O’Connell was very much a product of his social background, though to some extent he rose above it through force of will and intelligence. He was a landowner and, by all accounts, a humane landlord. He saw himself as the heir of an old Catholic landlord gentry.

He was always conscious of the rule of law, though he excelled in bending that rule to his own advantage and to that of his grateful legal clients. One of the best chapters in the book recounts with obvious admiration the legendary carer of O’Connell as the Counsellor at the Bar ̶ he was the first defence lawyer of his time and much of the folklore by which he was generally remembered relates to his ability to ‘drive a coach and four through any Act of Parliament’

*The Great Dan: A Biography of Daniel O’Connell. Charles Chenevix Trench. Jonathan Cape, London, 1984.

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Them and Us: States of Mind

(The Irish Press, December 10, 1983)

This latest work* from Prof. MacDonagh, head of the Department of History at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Australian National University, and author of Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath (1977), is an eclectic study of the ambiguities, dualism, cross-purposes and double meanings at the heart of Anglo-Irish relationships since the time of Grattan’s Parliament.

It is dedicated to thinking about history rather than to history per se, and as such is a courageous attempt to break the logjam of received opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Prof. MacDonagh begins with an examination of the time-frame of modern Irish historiography, whose birth he dates at 1790, with the publication of Rev. Edward Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland signalling the fact that the Irish past had become an arena for current political conflict.

The cause was the rise of a Catholic middle-class and their agitation for relief from the Penal Laws through the campaign of the Catholic Committee. The interpretation of pre-conquest history became a battleground between Catholic intellectuals, who saw the course of past events in terms of degeneration from a golden age, and Protestant antiquarians who began to see it as an emergence from barbarism.

On the one hand the struggle for Emancipation was validated by a timeless appeal to natural rights and fundamental law: on the other hand, the Protestant-Unionist counterview relied on a developmental and, ironically, Whiggish interpretation.

Prof. MacDonagh gives himself the task of searching out and fixing the different sets of assumptions and different meanings attached to words as used by nationalist and unionist ̶ British apologists ̶ to highlight how the Irish do not forget and the British do not remember.

In chapter two, ‘Place’, the author shows how it came to be accepted that Irish domicile alone created Irish nationality, and that this nationality was supposed to dwarf religious and political differences. So, O’Connell, Butt, Parnell and Redmond could disregard reality and set their sights on the restoration of an Irish parliament in College Green. So, today, we have the 1937 Constitution claiming jurisdiction over all of the island ̶ official dogma flying in the face of de facto real politik.

And English people are not alone in performing mental about-turns when required by selfish interest: in this century, increasingly, the southern Irish have come to see the north-east of the country as another, alien, country; while their northern counterparts can be British or Ulster citizens as they see fit.

The third area examined by Prof. MacDonagh is property, and how British and Irish attitudes to the land question were often at cross-purposes. The British, as usual, saw the peasantry as lawless and feckless. They had no concept of the multi-legal communality idea of land held by the peasants, which originally did not envisage the elimination of landlordism. The author is astute on O’Connell in this chapter and the succeeding one, ‘Politics Pacific’. O’Connell’s use of a demand for a repeal as a cloak for gaining piecemeal reform is well charted.

He is also illuminating on the often-contradictory political pronouncements of the Catholic clergy and their ambiguity on the nationalist question. Of course, they epitomised the colonial dilemma, a double one in their case of London and Rome.

The chapter entitled ‘The Politics’ of Gaelic’ may be the most controversial one, at least among the ranks of official, bureaucratic nationalist Ireland. How the Dublin authorities are able to deceive themselves in an irrational belief that they are serious on the question of the ‘First Language’ is trenchantly discussed.

But it is in the final chapters that the heart of the book lies. We see, again, how British policy turned itself inside-out over the Union; how ‘Ulster’ progressed from ‘bitterly opposing Home Rule to accepting it for the Six Counties, provided that Stormont was ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’...and how Irish nationalism sacrificed the Northern minority while expending energy on the Oath of Allegiance and constitutional acrobatics.

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*States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980. Oliver MacDonagh. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1983.

A Short History of Ireland

(The Irish Press, December 10, 1983)

John O’Beirne Ranelagh’s A Short History of Ireland* seems to be aimed largely at a British readership. As such, it can meet a very real need for a concise chronology of Irish events.

A good deal of work has gone into this compilation, which is written in a clear, simple, language. It is somewhat uneven in that half of the length is devoted to modern times (events since the start of the Home Rule movement).

As is to be expected, the author writes well on the struggle for independence and particularly on the IRB-IRA.

If one accepts his claim that Marxism is dead and that politics, not economics, is the key to understanding history, then one will accept his rationalisations. However, other readers may have some difficulty in reconciling this view with a satisfying explanation for the effects of Poynings’ Law, not to mention British policy on ‘The Great Hunger’.

*A Short History of Ireland. John O’Beirne Ranelagh. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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Mixing it

(The Irish Press, January 28, 1984)

There is a relentless and repetitive character to the nature of Anglo-Irish relationships which predates the Union and survives today in London’s policy on Northern Ireland. It is the constant oscillation between coercion and conciliation on Britain’s part, and negotiation and the threat, or use, of violence on the Irish side. In British eyes the logjam is due to a refusal by the Irish to accept the ‘reasonable’ legislation and commitment to ‘order’ of Westminster, the mother of parliaments; while the Irish continue to see the crux of the problem as the illegitimacy of British claims to sovereignty in Ireland.

Charles Townshend, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Keele and the author of The British Campaign in Ireland 1919-1921, set out in the present work* to give a very detailed narrative of the symbiosis of British rule in Ireland and violent resistance to it. In his Preface he makes clear that he has no pretensions towards interpretative originality, and he eschews analysis in favour of the presentation of ‘historical detail’.

In fact, of course, it is impossible to write a totally objective account of any history without elements of analysis, or without a bias of selectivity. So, it is not surprising that subjective interpretation of the source material is evident in his work, although the ubiquity of quotations and footnotes bears witness to his intention to ‘allow the evidence to speak as much as possible for itself’. Moreover, the author feels compelled in the Epilogue to agonise over the philosophical question of the nature of violence itself and its relationship to the legitimacy of the State.

My first reaction on reading the sub-title of the book was to ask: Why 1848? It seems to have been chosen as the starting point as much to fit in with the current belief of British academics that this date is a watershed in the ‘modernisation’ of British society, as for internal Irish reasons.

The rationale seems to be that such a framework will allow a comparison between Britain and Ireland of the manner in which the two societies adapted to ‘modernity’ ̶ how consensus and acceptance of the democratic political process developed in Britain, and how such a process was resisted and thwarted in Ireland.

It also allows Townshend to divide neatly the incidence of violence in Ireland into ‘politically illiterate’ agrarian violence of secret societies such as the Ribbonmen, and a second category of ‘proactive political violence’ which he allocates to Fenian nationalists after Young Ireland, and to ‘loyalists in Ulster’ somewhat later.

I find this framework unsatisfactory, even from the viewpoint of setting out a handy framework for methodology. It means that the Tithe War is not included in the study of agrarian violence, apart from perfunctory references at the outset.

But more importantly it eliminates entirely any study of British rule in Ireland during the career of O’Connell. Therefore, the birth of Irish democratic politics is ignored ̶ it is as though the great originality of his (O’Connell’s) work to create an Irish political consensus for constitutional action had not existed: which creates the impression, of course, that the Irish problem was essentially the question of violence.

So, Repeal of the Union is not deemed to be relevant: indeed, the legitimacy of the Act of Union is unquestioned. Such matters as the Union, as well as the United Irishmen and 1798, are relegated to the pre-modern limbo of the ‘politically illiterate’ agrarian world.

This timescale allows Townshend to use a chronological concept of events, juxtaposing the self-congratulatory beneficial development of law-and-order consensus in Britain to the supposed Irish propensity for disorder. Townshend does allow, however, that Irish agrarian violence was a reaction against the contractual English law, particularly that of property.

The importance of custom among the peasantry is acknowledged, even