3 8 April 2016
1916
Paean to culturally rich,
politically limited patriots
1916 was inspired but we soon descended
into illiberalism, patriarchy and aversion to
planning and property tax
by John Gormley
Pearse,described by one of his
admirers as a "bit of a pose", may have
been comfortable with the bizarre
pageantry of the GPO, but he lacked
the skills of a military commander
April 2016 3 9
T
he paperback version of 'Handbook of
the Irish Revival' was recently
launched at Notre Dame’s O’Connell
House, to coincide with their St Pat-
rick’s day festivities and, of course,
the commemoration of the 1916 Rising.
The volume, an anthology of Irish Cultural and
Political Writings 1891-1922, is beautifully pro-
duced by Abbey Theatre Press with the look and
feel of a hardback though it is very reasonably
priced at just €15. As the Abbey director-turned-
publisher, Fiach Mac Conghail, reveals in his
introduction, the book arose from the 'Theatre
of Memory' Symposium in 2014. During the con-
cluding session Declan Kiberd lamented the
fact that so few of the original writings of the
Irish Revival were readily accessible. It’s to Mac
Conghail’s enduring credit that he rose to the
challenge by facilitating Kiberd and his co-edi-
tor PJ Mathews.
Kiberd, though not a professional historian,
has emerged as one of the most authoritative
voices on the 1916 Rising, providing us with the
clearest insights into the complex and some-
times confused intellectual world of the
revolutionaries. He has always contended that
for Romantics like Pearse and MacDonagh, both
keenly interested in English literature, the Rising
was a piece of theatre that could only end in
their own deaths. Pearse who was described by
one of his admirers as a "bit of a pose" may have
been comfortable with the bizarre pageantry of
the GPO, but he lacked the skills of a military
commander. A prolific writer in both English and
Irish, he features regularly in the anthology.
It’s a digest of essays and articles, pam-
phlets, songs and poetry - most of them no
more than two pages long - from the great
names such as Yeats, Synge, Joyce and some of
the lesser known but also influential. Each of
the chapters is accompanied by an introduction
in much larger font. Indeed, the overall design
of the book makes it very appealing. No sooner
have you read one chapter than you immedi-
ately want more. It’s a book for the serious
academic or the ordinary punter who wishes to
dip into writings of the period to get a flavour of
the zeitgeist.
As you read it you get the sense, as the intro-
duction states, that these were men and women
who “lived intensely in the present moment;
took ideas more seriously than their own
careers; and contributed brilliantly to debate”.
That selflessness, brilliance and intensity is
perhaps best reflected in the writings of Con-
nolly, whose prose can hardly contain his
obvious passion.
Take for an example this sentence from his
1897 essay ‘Erin’s Hope’: “Recognise the right
of all to an equal opportunity to develop to their
fullest capacity all the powers and capabilities
inherent in them by guaranteeing to all our
countrymen and women, the weak as well as
the strong, the simple as well as the cunning,
the honest equally with the unscrupulous, the
fullest, and most abundant human life intelli-
gently-organised society can confer upon any
of its members”. What it lacks in Orwellian pre-
cision it makes up for it in its obvious fervour.
This passage is taken from the chapter enti-
tled ‘Militarism and Modernism’ whose
introduction identifies the reason for the cul-
tural and political malaise that would soon
envelop the new state. “Militarism began to
trump modernism”, the authors observe- the
men of the the Rising, war of independence and
the civil war were better suited to military
affairs then forging a modern democratic state:
“Mass suffrage came to many areas but soon
declined into mere electoralism, as political
leaders whose consciousness had been formed
more through soldiering than through cultural
action, offered ever more dogmatic, ever less
thoughtful analyses”.
It is easy to 'idealise the idealists' at this
remove, but it would be foolish to forget that
our new State was governed for its first fifty
years by the men - the women were written out
- of 1916. Socially and economically our new
state was illiberal and stagnant, a failed state
dominated by the Catholic church. So while this
book shows that those who inspired the Rising
may have been enlightened, it could also be
argued that they were in many ways obstruc-
tions to progress. The new State was
patriarchal, consigning women to the home and
discriminating against them in the workplace.
It must have been a disappointment to the
women who had campaigned for universal suf-
frage such as Eva Gore Booth. In her poem
'Women's Rights' from 1906 she portrays male
dominance as contravening the natural order:
Men have got their towers and walls,
We have cliffs and waterfalls.
Oh, whatever men may do
Ours is the gold air and the blue.
Men have got their pomp and pride -
All the green world is on our side’.
The new State's attitude to the Rising has
been at times ambivalent. We have moved
swiftly from commemoration to revisionism
back to celebration. We have also moved from
isolated nationalism to become the most glo-
balised country in the world, without pausing
for breath or even adequate reflection. The
transformation has been staggering. Ireland,
the country that its citizens wanted to leave,
and whose citizens emigrated in droves, is
now a favoured destination for migrants. From
the end of the Second World War up the start
of the 1960s we were the only state in Europe
that experienced population decline. Now one
in eight people is a non-national in a popula-
tion that has grown steadily.
This new Ireland is closer to Boston than
Berlin and has, as perhaps might be expected,
even turned its back on some British virtues.
The British tried with some success to intro-
duce a system of planning for urban and rural
areas. One only has to contrast the British
countryside with its beautifully planned towns
and villages with the free-for-all in Ireland, to
know that independence embraces the free-
dom to make a mess of things. And though
there are many who wouldn't change a thing,
this strain of individualism is unhealthy in a
State that is not just unplanned but saw fit to
enter the new millennium with neither prop-
erty tax nor water rates, and many of whose
most radical still unfortunately fight them.
If the publishers are considering future edi-
tions, they might address some shortcomings:
there's no index, something that can be fixed
with decent publishing software; the authors
also seem to have strayed from their original
remit by including writings from the 1940s and
1950s when the new State was already up and
faltering; finally, there are no contributions here
'as Gaeilge': an oversight, given that the revival
of the language was a major motivating factor
for many of the revolutionaries. But these are
quibbles. Overall, this is a must-read, stimulat-
ing compendium for anyone with an interest in
this period of our history and culture.
They lived intensely in the
present moment; took ideas
more seriously than their
own careers; and contributed
brilliantly to debate

Loading

© 2015 Village Magazine

Back to Top