At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the 81-year-old President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, delivered an address to the nation – largely scripted by the Taoiseach, de Valera, and Michael McDunphy, soon to become Director of the Bureau of Military History. It began by invoking the idea of freedom. ‘Up to twenty-five years ago we were a people without power in our own land. Twenty-five years ago, in Easter Week the chains that bound us began to be broken at last, and gradually they were thrown off, so that we here today are a free people.’1 Hyde, de Valera and McDunphy would not have been aware of how closely the words echoed Redmond’s long-ago speech at Wexford in 1915, proclaiming that ‘we today of our generation are a free people’, and tracing the incremental steps taken in that achievement; yet, even if they had recognized the echo, it would not have mattered to them. The revolutionaries and their inheritors had long ago repudiated the Home Rule definition of ‘freedom’ and the kind of national future envisaged by Redmond and his cohorts; their achievement had been to make it apparently irrelevant. The world had changed, and much had been forgotten or revised: the idea that the past contained alternative futures was not to be entertained.
Nonetheless, when witnessing or recalling the Irish revolution, the diaries and recollections of people such as Geraldine Plunkett, Rosamond Jacob, Mabel FitzGerald, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kevin O’Shiel and Muriel MacSwiney suggest a striking anomaly. These young people came from backgrounds of privilege but recalled living under a sense of national oppression – which hardly fitted the objective conditions of their lives. ‘Freedom’, however, has many meanings; and, as Madame Roland remarked on her way to the guillotine, many crimes are committed in its name. It was axiomatic for the revolutionary generation that they were not ‘free’. Many who fought in, for instance, James Connolly’s Citizen Army could have made the case that they were enslaved in terms of economic power – but very few actually articulated this. It is extremely striking how seldom a sense of economic or class grievance comes through the recollections recorded by the Bureau of Military History. Far more frequent are the traditional nostrums of Catholicism, historical victimhood, glorification of past struggles and resentment of English dominance. These were also the building-blocks of much constitutional-nationalist rhetoric. But what happened in the twenty-five years before 1916 was that the IPP seemed to lose credibility, in terms of this rhetoric, as Home Rule within the Empire advanced nearer, and a new generation appropriated the old battle-cries in the name of new concepts of ‘freedom’: though freedom is exactly what many of them seemed spectacularly to enjoy in their separate spheres of existence.
For people obsessed with history, and reclaiming it, this could conveniently be ignored; and the preoccupation with history is what united many of the disparate people whose lives and minds have been surveyed in this book. From their very different backgrounds, Rosamond Jacob and Michael Hayes made pilgrimages to the Dublin scenes of Edward FitzGerald’s arrest or Emmet’s execution; the profuse verbiage of serial romances in the Shan Van Vocht or pageant-scripts for Inghinidhe na hÉireann went back to hallowed historical themes in the national story; history lessons played a vital part in packing people into Gaelic League summer-schools and night classes; the powerfully mobilizing effect of the 1798 Centenary celebrations in 1898 recurs constantly. Individual revolutionaries pictured themselves as doing what their forefathers had done. The power of historical memory and historical reiteration in nationalist rhetoric has a special significance in this era. From the turn of the century, the Irish national struggle against English oppression in the past had to be stressed, re-enacted, resorted to more and more fervently – simply because the present was so different. By the turn of the twentieth century, English oppression manifested itself in ways that were historical and cultural rather than economic or political. Reforms in land tenure, taxation and local government had transformed Irish society, and a solid rural bourgeoisie was firmly in place. At least one ex-revolutionary, John Marcus O’Sullivan, admitted with relief in 1923 that this meant social revolution was never on the cards. ‘It is well for us that the two revolutions, through which we have passed in the last half-century, were separate in time; that, in fact, the agrarian revolution was largely at an end before the struggle for national independence became fully acute. Had the two coincided, the outlook would indeed be menacing.’2
But the short-circuiting of agrarian agitation did not mean that other revolutionary tendencies were similarly muffled. By the turn of the century the policies put in place by the British government, and apparently to be continued by its Home Rule spin-off, would – in the minds of young idealists – impose a materialistic, Anglophone, unspiritual, provincial identity on the island as a whole: ‘Anglicised, slavish and spineless’, as Liam de Róiste bemoaned in his 1905 diary.3 Later he reflected that he didn’t care whether a free Ireland was a republic, a monarchy or a socialist state, ‘so long as it is free from British rule’.4 When Patrick McCartan was making his overtures to Bolshevik fellow revolutionaries in 1917, he received a letter from his comrade Séamus O’Doherty which more elaborately spelled out the same message.
We cannot possibly, before the world, be put in the category of socialists as a nation but the socialist ideal is an ideal that makes for liberty for the individual and for the state and they are (the socialists) a force in every land that must and will be reasoned with . . . You go as a deputy from the nation and as you would and must speak for and defend the Orangemen of the North so you must speak for the socialists. The elements of the Nation don’t weigh internationally. It is the Nationalist (the true nationalist voice) and that only must be heard . . . No matter what issue it raises, the demand of the people is for Freedom, that is why I crossed out the paragraph in your letter where you say that if a majority of the People decided against us we would submit. I don’t of course believe that they would so decide but our convictions are not conditional. They are absolute.5
In one of his thoughtful essays on the recent upheavals written in the early 1920s, AE had surmised that the ‘fundamental cause of trouble between Great Britain and Ireland’, which had exploded into revolution, was not the historical record of exploitation and misgovernment so often instanced; it was ‘the psychological factor . . . which made the Irish regard the State which inflicted such things upon them as a tyranny by aliens’.6 This was no less the case when a more constructive style of government was embraced by the Liberal ethos of the early 1900s. Thus the revolutionary generation were, paradoxically, both empowered and alienated by their British rulers. One young revolutionary, telling the Bureau of Military History why he joined the Volunteers in 1914, expressed the feelings of many. ‘The whole Irish people seemed to have become English and nationality seemed to have become a mere thread that was ready to break and plunge Ireland into an abyss of slavery.’7
This is close to the concept of ‘actual slavery’ invoked by Geraldine Plunkett, though it would not have meant the same thing to her family’s army of domestic servants and urban tenants. But the dynamic power of nationalism trumped – as so often – a socio-economic analysis. In its pietistic aspects, it also trumped the secular, sceptical, pluralist instincts of the agnostics among the revolutionaries – as Rosamond Jacob continued to bewail in her diaries for decades, and as P. S. O’Hegarty and Bulmer Hobson found out in their subsequent lives as civil servants in de Valera’s Ireland. Above all, the independent-minded women who had claimed autonomy and glimpsed new horizons in organizations such as Inghinidhe na hÉireann, various suffrage societies and, eventually, Cumann na mBan found their futures severely limited when the revolutionary wheel had turned. Some, like Louie Bennett, Rosamond Jacob, Kathleen Lynn and Mary MacSwiney, would continue their work in labour organizations or medicine or education, while never fully recognizing the state that had emerged from the Treaty and the Civil War. Others, like the Ryan sisters, would become central figures of a new Irish establishment. A very few, such as Muriel MacSwiney, would go on looking for revolutions elsewhere, all their lives.
Muriel’s statement to the American Commission in 1920, quoted earlier, began ‘My parents are not quite like myself.’ The generation of 1916 can be seen as a self-conscious group of people, shaped by the circumstances of their time: Edwardian Ireland, with its odd mixture of social reforms, repressive tolerance, new ideas and an obsessive rediscovery of the past. Perhaps by 1912 the sense of a coming revolution, and a generation who conceived of themselves as bent on transformation, was established – even before the seismic events in Ulster and Europe that gave them their chance. For people like AE, the golden period of the revolutionary era was the decade from 1903 to 1913, when cultural enterprise and national revival went hand in hand – a period ended by the Ulster crisis and the wave of Volunteering. The actual fighting, particularly in the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War, was often undertaken by people from a somewhat different background, owing allegiance to more straightforwardly Fenian and rural-agitation traditions. But the quiet revolution in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s onwards had given them their chance. It is impossible not to speculate how different the new Free State would have been if it had enshrined more of the ideals, objectives, attitudes and eccentricities of the revolutionary generation – the educational ideas of Pearse, the organizational genius of MacDermott and Collins, the social egalitarianism of Connolly and Mellows, the cultural imagination of MacDonagh and Plunkett, the secularism of the Sheehy-Skeffingtons. Some of the survivors, as we have seen, were sharply conscious that the secular, anti-sectarian aspects of republicanism had given way to bigotry after 1916.
This kind of disillusionment commonly comes with age, but is perhaps inseparable from a post-revolutionary cast of mind. Writing a life of Constance Markievicz in 1934, Sean O’Faolain asked himself ‘if revolutionary movements ever move towards defined ends, whether all such movements are not in the main movements of emotion rather than thought, movements arising out of a dissatisfaction with things as they are but without any clear or detailed notion as to what will produce satisfaction in the end’.8 Writing about revolutionary idealism, Alexander Herzen remarked that ‘the submission of the individual to society – to the people – to humanity – to the idea – is a continuation of human sacrifice . . . What the purpose of the sacrifice was, was never so much as asked.’9 This thought is repeated in the closing stanzas of Yeats’s poem on Easter 1916:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever Green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Maud Gonne, sharp for her purposes, spotted this note of doubt, and smartly attacked her old friend for expressing it. She argued that the poem was unworthy of its subject, since ‘sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone’, adding that revolutionaries such as Pearse and MacDonagh were not ‘sterile fixed minds, each served Ireland, which was their share of the world . . . with varied faculties & vivid energy’, creating spiritual beauty through material failure.10 The argument has gone on from that day to this. But to ‘know the dream’ of the revolutionaries, it may help to strip back the layers of martyrology and posthumous rationalization, to get back before hindsight into that enclosed, self-referencing, hectic world where people lived before 1916, and to see how a generation developed, interacted and decided to make a revolution – which for many of them may not have been the revolution that they intended, or wanted.