January 3rd 2016

Having had a little poke at the present day ‘shinners’ it must be conceded that 1916 did have a very serious side to it. I believe its lasting appeal will be the utter hopelessness of what was attempted by the unprepared and totally inadequate against the might of the British Empire. Nobody knew this better than the insurgents be they the Irish Citizens Army, The Volunteers or any other brand of martyr. It is impossible in retrospect to get a balanced picture of the Rising and the reaction it got at the time from the general public. My opinion is that one has to be informed from a source that was neither black nor white but contained the two sides of the same biscuit. Very few balanced opinions exist. The nearest I have come to this balance is in two novels of fiction set in that timeframe.

In 1965, “The Red and the Green” was published by Iris Murdoch. The principal characters are Pat, an Irish revolutionary, and his first cousin Andrew, an officer in the British Army. There are a number of interesting side characters but the cousins occupy centre stage. I believe the book is very well written and as unbiased as you might expect from an Irish author. I have chosen some passages to demonstrate what I mean. In describing why the Rising took place Murdoch uses one of the minor characters to explain;

‘It was a reminder that people can’t be enslaved forever. Tyrannies end because sooner or later people begin automatically to hit back. That’s the only thing which really impresses the tyrant and makes him give way. Freedom belongs to human nature and it can’t vanish from the earth. Even though we forgot the details of the fight, the fight goes on, and men have to be ready to go down among the details that are forgotten. And whenever it’s the turn of a country, however small, to rise against its tyrants, it represents the oppressed peoples of the whole world’.

George Bernard Shaw was an outspoken critic of all warfare. Uniquely Shaw remains the only recipient of both The Nobel Prize for Literature and an Academy Award. In his opinion of the 1916 Rising Shaw was as critical as in any other conflict of war despite the fact that he was a Dubliner. Shaw likened the conflict to an encounter ‘between a pram and a Pickford’s van’. Shaw wrote an article in the New York Times which was totally derisive of Irish nationalism.  “Irish nonsense about Ireland” was the heading of the article and in it Shaw commented;

‘I invite America to contemplate the spectacle of a few manifesto-writing stalwarts from the decimated population of a tiny green island at the back of Godspeed, claiming its national right to confront the world with its own army, its own fleet, its own tariff, and its own language which not five per cent of its population could speak or read or write even if they wanted to’.  At least he was consistent!

Murdoch relates in her novel;

“The history of Ireland was such a tale of misery and wretchedness, enough to make the angels howl and stamp their golden feet. England had destroyed Ireland slowly and casually, without malice, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it again. Was there under Heaven no tribunal where such a wrong could be set to right and where the voices of the starved dead could mount into a mighty tempest at last? Were the young men wrong to imagine that an Ireland set free by its own righteous anger would be an unimaginably different place”?

To the vast Majority of Irish people the supreme hero of 1916 was undoubtedly Padraig Pearse. The fact that Pearse was the signatory who actually read out the Proclamation probably added to his reputation.

In 1913 he was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and joined the supreme council at the invitation of Thomas Clarke who was destined to become another signatory of the ‘Proclamation’. Ironically, Clarke was an Englishman from Hampshire whose father was a sergeant in the British Army.

Murdoch in ‘The Red and the Green’ uses Pat Dumay, one of the novel’s principals, to give an opinion of Pearse that is not totally laudatory. On reflecting on Pearse Pat gives his opinion;

“Pearse troubled Pat, attracted, annoyed and disturbed him. He had first met Pearse in connection with the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, and he had heard him speak at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa. He recognised there the power of a pure spirit the sheer selfless strength which was in the end the only that Pat bowed to. Hundreds of things about Pearse irritated him. The man was given to all kinds of infantile nonsense. He romanticized Ireland’s heroic past, which he peopled not only with Red Branch Knights, but also with ghosts and fairies and leprechauns in which he himself seemed to believe. He was a blatant admirer of Napoleon, an alleged lock of whose hair he fatuously displayed to his friends. He also romanticized war in a way which Pat found alien and undignified, babbling about the ‘red wine of the battlefields warming the heart of the earth’ and other rubbish of this sort. But nevertheless he was something of a great man and Pat was emotionally troubled by him in a way he could not entirely understand and would often have been glad to be rid of”.

Iris Murdoch

So we see that Iris Murdoch tried to maintain balance in her various descriptions of her fictional characters and events around the time of the insurrection. Much of her stance probably stems from the fact that her father was a Presbyterian and an officer in the British Army while her mother was middle class Church of Ireland. Iris was born in Dublin but spent all of her life in England which also inevitably accounts for the standpoint of her views about Ireland and matters Irish.