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

April 2016 4 1

of Anglicisation.

These were common anxieties among almost

all Irish nationalists.

A recurring theme in Gaelic League publica-

tions was that the Irish, by abandoning their

native language, had become deﬁcient and

deformed and no longer real men. As one turn-

of-the-century Gaelic Leaguer said, if the Irish

continued to speak only English, then “we can

never be perfect men, full and strong men, able

to do a true man’s part for God and Fatherland”.

The movement to revive the Irish language was

thus imagined as a process of reasserting a

puriﬁed male power and was often associated

with a recovery of sovereignty and strength.

When the Irish Volunteers were established

in 1912, many of their founding members had

already imbibed the thinking that saw national

revival and masculine revival as two parts of a

broader whole. Writing in the Irish Republican

Brotherhood’s Irish Freedom newspaper in July

1912, Ernest Blythe, a government minister in

the 1920s, discussed the contribution that the

Volunteers would make to healthy Irish mascu-

linity. While he criticised the weak “ﬂabby men”

that predominated in Ireland, he also spoke of

a subterranean manliness still surviving, he

said, thanks to both militant nationalists “but

also those whose thoughts have gone no fur-

ther than the running and leaping and hurling

which they delighted in”. The future Irishmen,

whom physical-culture and physical-force

enthusiasts such as these would birth, would

be noticeable by their “mighty lungs and mus-

cled frames”. The Volunteers were “the rebirth

of manhood unto this Nation”. Their muscular

masculinity would replace the ﬂabby weakness

of Ireland under British rule. Talk of masculine

power continued to circulate in the years after

the Rising. Indeed, Ernie O’Malley, a medical

student turned IRA soldier, later remembered

that one positive effect of the war was that the

“familiar stage-Irishman had disappeared”,

replaced by the conﬁdent, armed men of the

IRA.

The rhetoric of heroic men standing together

for the national interest, also lent itself to sup-

pressing the ‘wrong’ kind of politics. A 1921

pamphlet on 'The Labour Problem' published

by the Sinn Féin-allied Cumann Léigheachtaí an

Phobhail presented socialism as an intrusion

into the national fraternity of men: “Labour… is

like a virulent foreign element in the social

system… whatever else we are, capitalist or

worker or neither, we are all Irishmen interested

beyond anything else in the welfare of our

common country, and as an Irishman speaking

to Irishmen I put it that these industrial con-

ﬂicts, if continued, will inevitably impair, if not

utterly destroy, our common country”. Femi-

nism was denounced in almost the exact same

terms.

The tourism-friendly version of Irish national-

ism that has featured in the 'Decade of

Commemorations' has received a large dose of

justiﬁed criticism. With the government pro-

moting an image of romantic, if depoliticised

Irish rebels, it is worth remembering, ﬁrst, how

much Irish nationalism was a product of the

encounter with British colonialism. Second, the

State that emerged from this national struggle

was noticeably coercive, particularly when it

came to female citizens or left-wing politics.

Masculinity, and the nationalist desire to

create a harmonious nation of muscular men,

was central to all of that. Masculinity matters.

Aidan Joseph Beatty is Scholar-in-Residence at

the School of Canadian Irish Studies, Concor-

dia University, Montreal and author of

'Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism,

1884-1938'.

aidanbeatty.com

‘Labour… is like a virulent

foreign element in the

social system… industrial

conﬂicts will inevitably

impair our common

country

A real man?