The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (2 page)

‘The Vikings loved to compete. They competed about almost anything. Who could travel the furthest, who was the bravest in battle, who could eat the most and who drank the most. Competition was actually the key element in this society, so it was important for the local chieftain or the petty kings to be able to give good gifts to their followers and friends, or to throw big parties. But there was not a lot of wealth in Norway so I think that one of the main reasons they actually left for Ireland was just to plunder some Irish monasteries and churches, steal the goods and bring them back to Norway.’ These Vikings changed their spots with the passing of years, becoming traders and settlers, establishing Ireland’s most important cities and ports, and becoming entangled in the power struggles of Irish kings. Near my home village of Ardmore in County Waterford lies the fishing port of Helvick Head. Driving there last summer with a Swedish friend, I noticed a look of puzzlement on her face.

‘Why do you have a Scandinavian village name here?’ she asked. ‘You know it “means where the rocks come down to the water”?’

‘The Vikings settled that place,’ I replied. She was genuinely astonished. Lest anybody think we Irish are alone in often failing to grasp the international dimension to our history, my friend, an educated woman who grew up in a fishing village that had likely been founded by Vikings, knew nothing of the impact of her ancestors. Other Norsemen would found the mighty kingdom of Normandy. These iron-clad warriors, who developed the use of cavalry to humble armies as far away as Sicily, would impose their will on the English and the Irish.

With the arrival of the Anglo–Normans came a long conquest that ushered in a new language, system of laws, parliament, the division of the land into thirty-two counties, and a reshaping of the landscape into the patchwork pattern of fields we see today. As Norman knights became Irish dynasts, the relationship with the local Gaelic chiefs changed; for all their immense power on the battlefield and the scope of their political and cultural influence, the Anglo–Normans could never feel entirely confident of their identity, hence the laws, described in detail in this book, aimed at achieving separation between Gael and settler. In crude terms there would never, with the exception of the Ulster plantation, be enough settlers to achieve a complete cultural separateness. Even in Ulster, some similarities between the world of the Scots settlers and that of the native Irish were inevitable, given the long history of trade and migration between the northeast part of Ireland and Scotland, and the dependence of the planters on native labour supply.

As a child growing up in the Republic of Ireland, I was aware that I lived on a divided island. I knew that three of my grandparents received pensions from the State for their service in the IRA during the fight against the British between 1919–1922, and that after that conflict they had taken the side of Michael Collins in the civil war. It was only later that I became aware of the complex nature of familial attachments and allegiances. My paternal great-grandfather, whose son had fought for the IRA, spent his life as a loyal servant of the British Empire. Sergeant Patrick Hassett joined the Royal Irish Constabulary from a poor farming family in County Clare and served all over Ireland, including Belfast, before retiring on the king’s pension. He died in 1921, just as his son took up arms against the empire.

The stories I was told as a child cast the struggle with the British in a manichaean framework. My heroes were Cúchulainn and Patrick Pearse, and I saw the ancient Celtic warrior and the modern revolutionary as part of an unbroken chain of resistance to foreign invasion. One of my earliest recollections is of the great parade through Dublin on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rebellion.

My memories of that particular day survive as a handful of images. Somewhere beyond the heads of the crowd a band was playing. I begged my father to lift me up so that I could see what was happening. As I was borne on to his shoulders, I saw soldiers marching past and the music became louder. There were lines of old men with medals on the opposite side of the street. I remember that they all seemed to be wearing hats.

I was five years old, so I have no recollection at all of what my father might have said, how he would have explained the scene to me. It would be several years before I discovered that he had brought me to witness the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Easter Rising of 1916. Looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, from an Ireland traumatized by financial crisis and loss of economic sovereignty, it is difficult to convey the great surge of patriotic sentiment inspired by the anniversary.

As an old schoolteacher of mine, Bean Ui Cleirigh, put it: ‘We all felt as if we were walking two feet taller, as if we really had taken our place on the stage of nations.’ Bean Ui Cleirigh was the kindly headmistress of a school founded by the sisters of Patrick Pearse, the most famous of the rebel leaders executed by the British. We were taught through the medium of Irish, and the history we learned stressed the sufferings of the Irish and their ultimate triumph over the foreign invaders. We had also been visited at school by the President, Éamon de Valera, a veteran of 1916, who only escaped execution because he had been born in America.

Now it is possible to see that great celebration of revolution as a ceremonial coda to the story of the revolutionary generation. The Ireland de Valera had known and that he had devoted his life to shaping was changing rapidly. International Ireland had been reborn. The soldiers I watched marching down O’Connell Street on that Easter Sunday in 1966 belonged to an army that had recently taken part in its first United Nations missions; the Catholic Church in Ireland, so long the bastion of conservative clergy, was experiencing the effects of the liberalizing agenda of Pope John XXIII and his Second Vatican Council; the economy was expanding under the leadership of a former revolutionary turned technocrat Seán Lemass, who had replaced the ageing and nearly blind de Valera in 1959; and the country had applied to join the European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union.

My father was a romantic nationalist. His was the Ireland of lost battles and sad poems, of martyred heroes like Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. He recited stories of Cúchulainn and the Knights of the Red Branch to me at bedtime, and as an actor he won awards for his television portrayals of rebel heroes. Yet for all his attachment to the Ireland of martyrs he welcomed the change. The Ireland of 1966 was noticeably more self-confident and outward looking than the country in which he had grown up. My father was born in the immediate aftermath of a civil war in which an estimated 4000 people were killed, a conflict characterized by fratricidal atrocity and bitterness that of which endured well into my own generation. He came to adulthood during the economic stagnation, strict religiosity and cultural claustrophobia that permeated the newly independent Irish State. Eamonn Keane was ten years old when, on St Patrick’s Day 1935, President de Valera spoke on radio to remind his people that as well as being Gaelic, ‘since the coming of St Patrick, Ireland has been a Christian and a Catholic nation, she remains a Catholic nation’. Of this single-identity nation the poet Louis MacNeice, an Ulster Protestant, witheringly observed:

Let the school-children fumble their sums in a half-dead language;

Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums;

Let the games be played in Gaelic.
¹

But MacNeice was clear-eyed and objective enough to recognize that in Unionist-ruled Ulster there existed another land of small horizons.

Free speech nipped in the bud,

The minority always guilty.

Why should I want to go back

To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

The blots on your page are so black

That they cannot be covered with shamrock.

MacNeice published his great poem ‘Autumn Journal’ in 1940 as Europe was convulsed by war. His bitter tone needs to be understood in the context of its time. MacNeice nurtured the anguish of the exiled intellectual for whom Ireland represented both a prison and an inspiration. In this respect he followed a tradition of exiled Irish writers, including Samuel Beckett and James Joyce; indeed, the latter famously wrote of Ireland as ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.

For MacNeice the imagination needed distance if it were to be unfettered. Yet Ireland and its preoccupations followed him. He believed that the Irish, north and south, had become trapped in a narrative of atavistic slogans: ‘A Nation Once Again’ or ‘No Surrender’. Identity was defined in ever narrowing circles of Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or loyalist, Irish or British. Take your pick according to tribe. The debate about an Irishness that might transcend such proscribed identities or even be a mixture of them, or a view of identity that might at least embrace the complexities of our history, was a long way into the future. The ground has widened now, the shrill voices of certainty are less voluble, but it is still a painstaking work in progress.

Earlier I described Irish internationalism as something ‘reborn’. In fact the period of our isolation from the mainstream of world affairs was comparatively short, and it was almost overwhelmingly a psychological rather than a physical drawing inwards, beginning for both northern and southern states after 1922, and continuing in the south until the arrival of Lemass as taoiseach in 1959. My own speculation, based on my experience of other warravaged nations, is that the men who took over the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State after the civil war were, besides being inherently conservative, too exhausted by the physical and moral cost of the conflict to have a vision that extended beyond creating stability and balancing the books. The country was broken, the bitterness coursed through every political debate, and the people could justifiably wonder what freedom had brought them.

Yet even in that period, Ireland was not isolated on the international stage. The Free State government was actively engaged in the politics of the British Commonwealth, and even during World War II, Irish neutrality did not mean the country was entirely unaware or untouched by the great catastrophe unfolding across the seas. After the declaration of a republic in 1949, the country pursued an assertively independent foreign policy, gaining UN membership in 1955 and upsetting her American allies by declaring support for Chinese membership of the UN. During this period, Irish towns and villages witnessed the departure of hundreds of thousands of people for Britain and America. But when these emigrants returned on holiday visits they brought accounts of other worlds and ways of living. Along with the celebrated ‘American parcel’ and its flashy ties, button-down-collar shirts and loud check trousers, came uncles and aunts who described tantalizing freedoms in the cities across the ocean.

For all the efforts of the censors, the customs men could not search every bag or blockade the ships and planes that brought in books that were morally dubious in the eyes of the Church or the ‘Committee on Evil Literature’ established by the government in 1926. Nor could the likes of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin, a self-appointed moral conscience of the nation, stifle the minds of writers such as Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), whose comic masterpieces included
An Beal Bocht
(
The Poor Mouth
, 1941), a merciless satire written in Irish about stereotypes of native misery and the Gaelic language ideologues whom the writer loathed. A representative sequence involves a Gaelic revivalist from Dublin addressing the country folk at a festival.

Gaels! It delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. I’m Gaelic from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet…If we’re truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and reviles the Gaels. There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.

In
The Hard Life
(1961) O’Brien reflected on, among other things, Irish piety and the lack of a proper public toilet for women in central Dublin. One of the principal figures is a sanctimonious German Jesuit by the name of Father Kurt Fahrt, who is taunted throughout by the fractious figure of Mr Collopy, who believes the matter of proper facilities for women should be placed before the pope in Rome. It is anarchic, surreal and brave, and belonged to a decidedly European post-modernist tradition.

The pace of change accelerated throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Television had arrived in 1961, the same year I was born. Until then, dissent was articulated by a comparatively small intellectual elite whose views rarely reached beyond a limited audience. But the cultural commissars of the republic could not control the flow of debate on television and radio.

I did not grow up in the tyrannical isolation of General Franco’s Spain, and was part of the first Irish generation that could travel widely simply for the ‘experience’ as distinct from economic necessity. I recall the pride of seeing Van Morrison – who embraces British and Irish identities – walk on to a stage in America and be greeted for what he was: one of the great figures of twentieth-century music.

The sense of coming from an ‘international island’ was something I experienced in ways both profound and seemingly trivial: the victory of the singer Dana in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970; the importation of American blues to Cork city by
our
local guitar legend, Rory Gallagher; the arrival of the first non-white pupils at my school later in the mid 1970s. They had come on scholarships organized by Irish missionary brothers, who had gone to the West Indies during the heyday of British imperialism. Our headmaster, Brother Jerome Kelly, was one of the most far-sighted men I have known. He went to the West Indies as a missionary, having grown up on a poor farm in one of the most remote parts of Ireland, a place in which I doubt a black or brown face was ever seen.