Independence war Archives - Village Magazine

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Discovering Casement

by Paul R Hyde 5 October, 2016 0 Comments

It is today widely believed that between Casement’s arrest and execution in 1916 the Black Diaries now held in the UK National Archives were clandestinely shown to in uential persons in order to disarm appeals for his reprieve. This belief was once again articulated by law professor Sean McConville on 2 June, 1916 at a Casement event in London when he stated to a TV audience of millions “…the diaries were circulated in London … Blackwell … was circulating these diaries at a time when Casement’s fate had not nally been decided …”. The original sources of this belief, however, are the books written by Rene MacColl BL, Reid, Roger Sawyer, Brian Inglis and Séamus Ó Síocháin. These volumes comprise more than 2,000 pages and at an average of two years of research for each study, we have around ten years research. Strangely, in these 2,000 pages there is not a single verifiable instance recorded of the diaries in the National Archives being shown to anyone in that period. How can this be? It is not credible that these authors of research overlooked this crucial aspect after ten years. If they found instances of the diaries being shown in that period, then it seems they withheld that vital information from their readers. Since this is not credible, we must assume that none of them found any instance of the diaries being shown in that period. It is well attested that typescript pages were circulated in that period and that a large quantity of these eventually found their way to Singleton-Gates who published them in Paris in 1959. But Casement did not type those pages. What would constitute a proof of authenticity of the diaries held in the National Archives? There are no witnesses to Casement’s authorship and there have been no rigorous and impartial scientific tests. The only evidence that has been adduced in favour of authenticity is a resemblance in handwriting. The attempts at corroboration in July 1916 are not evidence of authorship. But perhaps the question about authenticity is a false trail. In the period from 25 April to 3 August the British authorities claimed to be in possession of the five bound volumes now held in the UK National Archives. However, there is no verifiable record that these volumes were shown to anyone in that period. Rather than show the diaries, the Intelligence chiefs had decided to prepare typescript pages and to show these to influential persons, journalists, editors, politicians, churchmen and others. They told these persons that the typescript pages were authentic copies of original diaries written by Casement. They failed to provide any proof that the typescript pages were copies of anything written by anyone. The proof which they did not provide would have been exhibition of the bound volume diaries now in the UK National Archives. No explanation has ever been proposed for this failure. Today there are five bound volumes in the UK National Archives. Their existence today does not prove their existence in the period 25 April to 3 August 1916. That the bound volume diaries were not shown in that period means there was some impediment to showing them. The protagonists – Blackwell, Thomson, Hall, Smith and others – had the strongest of motives for showing the bound volume diaries which they said had been discovered but they did not do so. The impediment certainly existed and it was such that these powerful men neither jointly nor singly could overcome it. Therefore it was out-with their joint power to show the bound volume diaries in that period. This circumstance indicates that the impediment could not have been overcome by anyone in England at that time – not even by the monarch. In this regard these powerful men had touched the limit of theirhuman power. The question is therefore not about forgery or authenticity but about the material existence of the bound volume diaries at that time. The absence of verifiable evidence that the bound volume diaries existed before August 3, 1916 means that questions about authenticity are meaningless. What first requires to be proved is their existence in that period before August 3. Those who claim the typescripts were true copies have now had 100 years to produce evidence of the existence of the bound volumes in that period. That they have not produced the necessary evidence indicates that they too have been unable to overcome the impediment which defeated their powerful predecessors, Thomson, Smith, Hall etc. In these circumstances an impartial court of law would decide to act as if the bound volume diaries did not exist at that timeand would dismiss a case for their authenticity as being un-tryable. The case for the typescripts being copies at that time could not be tested or proved without verifiable independent evidence that the bound volumes existed before August 3. Thus the case in favour of the material existence of the bound volume diaries before August 3 rests entirely on the word of Thomson, Hall, Blackwell, Smith and others and these are the people who at that time were circulating typescripts which depicted Casement as “addicted to the grossest sodomitical practices”. These persons can only be considered as hostile witnesses by virtue of their uncontested behaviour. There are no neutral witnesses who testified to seeing at that time any of the bound-volume diaries now in the UK National Archives. Absence of proof of existence of the bound volumes at that time entails that no proof of their authenticity can be derived. That no proof of authenticity can be derived entails that – until such proof of existence is provided – the veracity or falsity of the typescripts cannot be considered. Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat; the onus of proof rests on the accuser, not on the defence. If questions about authenticity are meaningless due to lack of conclusive evidence after 100 years, claims favouring authenticity do not rest upon verifiable facts or upon independent testimony. Therefore such claims rest upon

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Telling the story of Easter 1916

by Harry Browne 3 April, 2016 0 Comments

Patrick Pearse loved his students not wisely but too well, if you know what I mean – what with writing poems about kissing them on the mouth and relocating his school from the healthy hustle-bustle of Ranelagh to dark woodlands in Rathfarnham. Oh, and his students didn’t necessarily reciprocate the affection: a teenage James Joyce dropped out of Pearse’s UCD Irish-language lessons because the teacher was an ideological bore. That’s just a sample of the titbits you’d pick up from Colm Tóibín’s long essay on 1916 in the London Review of Books, arguably this season’s archetypal commemorative/explanatory text from Ireland’s media/ intellectual establishment. Whether you regard it as barrel-scraping to discredit the Rising or an exemplary eye for the telling detail is a matter of taste – if you’re like me, you might reckon it’s a bit of both – but one can’t help but notice the contrast between Tóibín’s forensic litany of Fenian foibles and failings and his breezy flypast of, say, World War I. In the writer’s brief telling, the war was on the verge of Bringing Us All Together, something Pearse and the boyos couldn’t abide and wouldn’t permit: “Britain was merely the supposed enemy. The population of the two countries spoke the same language after all, and had the same education system. Many Irish people moved back and forth between Ireland and England seeking work; many in Ireland also had family in England. While most in the south of Ireland actively or tacitly supported Home Rule, Home Rule was postponed until the war ended. It looked as though the two islands were going to join forces in the war effort. (More than 200,000 Irishmen eventually volunteered in the First World War. Although conscription was threatened in Ireland, it was never actually introduced.)” Recall that Tóibín is addressing, in part, an international audience that may be getting its first substantial account of the Rising, that his article is billed as “Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916”; this audience will hear nothing from him of the consequences for Home Rule of the Ulster crisis, of Irish carnage in the war, nor of the massive, life-saving popular movement that arose in part from the Rising to resist conscription in Ireland, conscription that was not merely ‘threatened’, but introduced in legislation. Some contexts are, it seems, more worthy of contextualising than others. As the brilliant blogger Richard McAleavey writes: “Questions about whether Pádraig Pearse, say, was a fanatic, or a repressed paedophile even, are intended to psychopathologise any kind of radical political action or thought. They are intended to draw attention away from consideration of the real material conditions and political considerations that produced the Rising, lest they might be used to draw the wrong kind of parallels in the present”. Material conditions? In 17,000 words, Colm Tóibín’s only mention of Dublin’s infamous slums is in a quote from arch-revisionist historian David Fitzpatrick, who says the rebels must have staged the ght in the midst of the city’s poor to ensure maximum casualties among them – as though it were the rebels who loaded the shells into the Helga’s guns, or the rebels who went house to house in North King Street murdering young men. These and other aspects of, shall we say, imperial ‘agency’ have been largely neglected throughout recent commemoration and coverage, in favour of relentless scrutiny of the Rising’s leaders. Just below the achingly familiar debate about the Easter Rising – was it an act of visionary heroism or an act of perverse terrorism? – there lurks a more interesting series of questions about its relationship to what came after. And those are the questions that can lead us beyond dry argument and actually help us understand who commemorates what in the Ireland of 2016, and how those commemorations have played out and continue to play out in the state and corporate media. Thus you can be on either side of the heroism/terrorism split and still hold (tightly or otherwise) any of the following views: (1) the state(s) in which we reside today can be understood as a direct and roughly intentional outcome of the Rising and its guiding lights; OR (2) Ireland over the last century has been a fumbling, contingent, contradictory and ultimately limited effort to fulfil the Republic of 1916; OR (3) the Irish revolution launched at Easter 1916 was firmly defeated in the Treaty and thereafter by an elite that concealed its continuity with the ancien régime behind reluctant memorials to supposed revolutionary heroes. (There are other positional alternatives and variations on all points of the political spectrum but these seem to me to be the major tendencies.) Official and media Ireland prefers to hold and host tiresome debates about the Rising itself (Kevin Myers? Bob Geldof? Really?) rather than any really clear exploration of where we live today in relation to it. Positions number 1 and 2 are generally implied rather than directly stated, with a little frisson of excitement when the likes of Michael D. Higgins suggests that the truth may lean further towards 2 than 1 – a sort of “a lot done, more to do” view of a Republic that still awaits its full and complete child-cherishing achievement. In mainstream media, position 3 – that there was a successful counter-revolution – is almost unthinkable, or at least unspeakable, residing outside the realm of acceptable discussion. And yet it seems to me that it lurks with influence on both the right and left wings of Irish politics. The more or less overt Redmondism of John Bruton and other conservatives – often more Redmondite than Redmond himself – contains an implied celebration of the ‘restoration’ of constitutionalism in Ireland, coloured by regret over militant republicanism’s recrudescence in the Northern Troubles, but not reliant on that regret for its critique of the rebels of 1916-21. The left-wing, pro-Rising version of position 3, alleging that there was a successful counter-revolution in Ireland, is more openly and interestingly embraced. Important gures on

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Yes to history, no to commemoration

by Ivana Bacik 3 April, 2016 0 Comments

Commemorations for the centenary of the 1916 Rising are well underway. This anniversary is being marked in a much less sanitised way than previous significant Easter Week commemorations. This is very welcome. For far too long, ceremonies celebrating the 1916 Rising were based on a highly simplified, monochrome account of history: Rebels good, Brits bad, civilians ignored. We did not see pictures of dead bodies. Few official accounts mentioned the deaths of women and children caught in the crossfire. This time around, things are different. The vital research work of many historians and others has contributed greatly to the generation of this more complex understanding of the 1916 Rising. We now know that approximately 488 people were killed during Easter Week. Of these, 40 were children, and over 200 were civilians. There were about 120 British soldiers killed, and 60 rebels. These numbers are as significant as the numbers we have traditionally associated with commemorations marking Easter Week: the seven signatories of the Proclamation, and the 16 men executed. It is timely to reflect on four key themes which should shape, and to some extent are shaping, the centenary commemoration process: de-militarisation; contextualisation; inclusivity; and humanisation. Commemorations should not be over-militaristic, nor should any death or killing be ‘celebrated’. This is even more necessary in the wake of the recent Brussels atrocity which showed the immense human tragedy of mixing religion, politics and violence. The events organised throughout Dublin for Easter Monday under the ‘Reflecting the Rising’ banner were far more in keeping with an inclusive spirit of commemoration, than the military parade that took place on Easter Sunday. In a similar spirit, commemorations should reflect the context of the time. The rise of important social movements, in particular the trade union and suffragette movements, as well the Irish cultural revival, should be marked alongside the nationalist struggle. The commemorations must be inclusive. Where official ceremonies include religious services, these must be carried out with respect for humanists, atheists and people of minority religions. Similarly, commemorations must be inclusive of both women and men. We now know, from the great work of feminist historians, that 77 women involved in the 1916 Rising were arrested along with their male colleagues at the end of Easter Week. Inclusivity also means remembering the many thousands of Irishmen who fought and died in World War I, but whose lives and deaths were not officially commemorated for many decades after independence. Commemorations must become humanised. It is welcome to see this happening in this centenary year. Many official and unofficial events have incorporated the telling of individual eye-witness accounts: some noble, some tragic, some humorous, and some poignant. These include stories like that of Catherine Byrne, who jumped through a side window of the GPO to join the male Volunteers inside. They include that of two-year old Sean Foster, who was shot dead in crossfire while being wheeled in a pram by his mother Katie on Church Street, and whose father had died on the Western Front the year before. In bringing these stories to the fore, we come closer to realising the past and to remembering the dead in a respectful and inclusive way. It is very welcome to see these four themes informing the 2016 commemoration process. Yet it appears that they are not embraced universally. The Glasnevin Cemetery Trust has carried out hugely important work in compiling accurate data on all the 488 people killed during the 1916 Rising. It is constructing a Necrology wall to mark all of their deaths in a non-judgemental fashion. It is unfortunate that some of the 1916 Relatives Association do not support this approach to commemoration. And that there was some scuffling at the recent unveiling. It seems that, for them, even 100 years on, there is still a hierarchy of grief. Those who still seek to elevate some deaths over others are themselves harking back to the old monochrome view of Easter Week. Their view should not prevail. The reality is that the concept of ‘commemoration’ is always problematic. Ultimately, we should not seek to replace ‘history’ with ‘commemoration’. Commemoration is a largely artificial concept, itself tending towards sanitisation. History is messy, complex, ambiguous and contradictory. The history of the 1916 Rising should be marked and remembered in a way that is appropriate to that reality. Accurate historical research, inclusive contextualised events, and vivid eye-witness accounts should replace empty commemorative ceremonies. Our process of marking the 1916 Rising should be de-sanitised, to reflect the real complexity of the history of the struggle for Irish independence. Ivana Bacik

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Nationalists as Real Men

by Aidan Joseph Beatty 3 April, 2016 0 Comments

In 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, presenting 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 Parliamentary 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; imagining the nation as a male fraternity was a convenient way to dismiss feminism or socialism as divisive ideologies 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”. Anglicised 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 of Anglicisation. These were common anxieties among almost all Irish nationalists. A recurring theme in Gaelic League publications was that the Irish, by abandoning their native language, had become de cient 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 masculinity. While he criticised the weak “ abby 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 further 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 muscled frames”. The Volunteers were “the rebirth of manhood unto this Nation”. Their muscular masculinity would replace the abby 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 suppressing 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 conflicts, if continued, will inevitably impair, if not utterly destroy, our common country”. Feminism was denounced in almost the exact same terms. The tourism-friendly version of Irish nationalism that has featured in the ‘Decade of Commemorations’ has received a large dose of justified criticism. With the government promoting 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 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

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Anti-bloodshed brothers

by Frank Connolly 2 March, 2016 0 Comments

Much is made of the choice made by James Connolly to join the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) with the Irish Volunteers led by Pádraig Pearse for the Easter Rising in 1916. Across the British and European Left, notably but not exclusively among those on the side of the allies in World War I, there was a mixture of horror and disdain at the Irish merger of socialism and nationalism into a revolutionary force. Within the ICA itself there was some opposition to any collusion by socialists with the nationalists with one of its founders, Sean O’Casey, to the fore in condemning Connolly whom he described, retrospectively, in 1919, as having “stepped from the narrow byway of Irish Socialism onto the broad and crowded highway of Irish nationalism”. For many years since, and particularly since the outbreak of conflict in the North in the late 1960s, Connolly’s decision to join the military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and to set a date for the Rising after a three-day secret meeting with Pearse, Sean MacDiarmada and Joseph Plunkett in January 1919 has been the subject of much criticism, including by many on the Left. However, in the light of so much recorded material including the invaluable statements of participants to the Bureau of Military History becoming available since then, the rationale behind Connolly’s decision, however reluctant, has become much clearer. Equally, the motivation and coherence of Pearse and his comrades in the Volunteers in striking a blow for freedom is also now more credible than many of their detractors would allow. In 1915 Connolly did use the words “blithering idiot” to describe anyone who would celebrate the “red wine of the battlefields” – comments widely believed to have been in response to Pearse’s exhortations. He said: “No, we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching and the world is sick of such teaching”. He was referring to a Victorian tradition in literature and poetry which was widespread in Ireland and Britain as well as in mainstream, including socialist, European thinking which glorified blood sacrifice and martyrdom. What is more important though is the practical opposition of Pearse and Connolly to the actual blood sacrifice which saw hundreds of thousands of young men wasting their lives on the killing fields of Flanders and beyond in an imperialist war. For this was the central reason why both men found common cause in the Spring of 1916. As President Michael D Higgins said at a commemoration for the ICA in Áras an Uachtaráin at Easter: “The suggestion that, when WWI broke out, James Connolly scrapped his faith in socialism to embrace pure nationalism is contradicted by Connolly’s writing and journalism both before and after 1914. James Connolly was deeply concerned with the context of turmoil in Europe and the world, whose revolutionary potential was, in his view, being squandered in defence of imperialist adventurism. In Connolly’s estimation, a blow against Empire was a clearing of the ground for future socialist struggle. It is important, therefore, not to rush to judgement on what James Connolly’s motivations were for orchestrating a joint action with the Volunteers. One can understand how, in despair at the collapse of his and other socialists’ internationalist hopes after the outbreak of the War, appalled by the breakdown of the international proletariat into nationalities which were slaughtering each other on the Western Front and in the Middle East, James Connolly resolved to seize the opportunity of the war to strike a blow again the British Empire”. At the secret meeting in January 1916, Connolly accepted an invitation to join the IRB council and agree a date for the Easter Rising while conscious of the ideological differences that existed between the ICA and the nationalists of both the Irish Volunteers and the larger force of nationalists under John Redmond. Connolly had worked with the trade union movement against the capitalists in the US, and on return to Ireland led the Dublin workers against the brutal onslaught by employers, some of whom were prominent in the nationalist movement during the 1913 Lockout. That struggle led directly to the creation of the ICA the constitution of which influenced key sentiments of the 1916 Proclamation including its call for equality for women and children and “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”. Further, Connolly was an internationalist who understood that the world war was essentially a contest between the great powers over global resources. Pearse clearly shared more in common with this perspective than many of his former nationalist allies as he agreed to include the progressive thinking of the ICA in the Proclamation he drafted and read at the GPO, a document that had of course been printed by union labour in Liberty Hall the night previously. Redmond on the other hand was prepared to encourage tens of thousands of young, mainly impoverished, Irishmen to their deaths in the imperialist war in order to gain advantage for his wealthy compatriots through the fading promise of limited home rule. As President Higgins remarked, “the ranks of mainstream nationalists, and particularly those of the Irish Parliamentary Party, comprised a significant number of industrialists and graziers who were happy to secure the advantages of a political independence within the Empire but who would resist economic, social, or as both O’Casey and Synge would learn, cultural, innovation”. Many of those who fought heroically with the Irish Volunteers during Easter Week went on to reveal just how divergent their view of the type of Ireland they were ghting for was from their comrades in the ICA, and indeed many in Cumann na mBan. Some of those drafting the 1922 Constitution of the Free State just six years later described how the proposed inclusion of Pearse’s words on equality was dismissed as “Bolshevist” by the British authorities