Nationalists as Real Men - Village Magazine

4 0 April 2016

1916

n 1909 Patrick Pearse wrote a short six-verse Irish-

language poem, 'A Mhic Bhig na gCleas', translated

into English as 'Little Lad of the Tricks'. A relatively

disposable piece, it has since gone on to have an

infamous status; proof for many that Pearse had

dark sexual proclivities:

… Raise your comely head

Till I kiss your mouth:

If either of us is the better of that

I am the better of it.

There is a fragrance in your kiss

That I have not found yet

In the kisses of women

Or in the honey of their bodies…

Ruth Dudley Edwards’ 1979 revisionist biography,

'The Triumph of Failure' makes much of this poem, pre-

senting it as evidence of Pearse’s supressed tendencies.

And later works have echoed her, to the point that the

trope of Pearse-as-Paedophile is now standard fare

among Irish historians. Similar speculations have also

been made about Eoin O’Duffy and even about Michael

Collins.

Such tabloid innuendos, though, ignore a central

truth about Irish nationalists in the early years of the

twentieth century: masculinity mattered for them. Not

in the sense of private peccadilloes, but as a key part

of their public ideology. Masculinity did much work for

organisations like Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers,

allowing them, as it did, to imagine what national

sovereignty and the end of British colonial rule would

look like. It allowed them to analyse that British rule as

an effeminising inﬂuence on Irish men. And it allowed

them to attack opponents, such as the Irish Parliamen-

tary Party, as unmanly traitors. The heavy emphasis on

masculinity also does much to explain how and why

women and leftists were systematically frustrated in

their efforts to inﬂuence the national movement; imag-

ining the nation as a male fraternity was a convenient

way to dismiss feminism or socialism as divisive ideolo-

gies that pitted brother against brother.

In another of Pearse’s most famous texts, 'The

Murder Machine', the educator-nationalist railed

against the British state schools in Ireland (the

“machine”). And in a telling passage, Pearse denounced

the contemporary school system as worse than “an

edict for the general castration of Irish males”. Angli-

cised Irishmen, he said, are “not slaves merely, but very

eunuchs”. For Pearse, Irish men had been emasculated

by British colonialism and by the slow parallel process

Pearse-as-Paedophile is

now standard fare among

Irish historians. Similarly Eoin

O’Duffy and Michael Collins

Nationalists

as Real Men

Why feminism and socialism

have been systematically

frustrated in their efforts to

inﬂuence the national movement

by Aidan Joseph

Beatty

Pearse: a real man