1 Padraig Pearse

Perhaps something most people in Ireland can agree upon, albeit for a host of different and often contradictory reasons, is that the undoing of national independence probably began with its genesis in the Easter Week of 1916. There is a school of thought, for example, holding that the Easter Rising was a misconceived folly, a pre-emptive strike that sought to achieve by force what was already in train. There is even a view – a ludicrous view, to put it frankly – that the Rising was an unwarranted attack on Irish ‘democracy’, being unapproved by a majority of the people in the occupied Dublin of the time.

More recently, Padraig Pearse and the other leaders of 1916 have been blamed for the outbreak of conflict in the north of Ireland in the late 1960s – a few years after the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Rising in 1966. It should go without saying, of course, that the 1969 uprising in the North did not occur as a result of northern nationalists rediscovering their myth of destiny, but because a relatively small group of protestors, seeking to draw attention to the wholesale discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, had been brutally stamped upon by the unionist establishment.

Latter-day analyses of Ireland’s historical condition mostly agree that they blame 1916 for everything that came after it, while extending no credit for its achievement and no consideration of the fact that none of the leaders was in a position to control what happened afterwards.

Padraig Pearse has become a much caricatured figure in modern Ireland, his understanding of the nature of freedom being largely unappreciated by those who inherited the benefits. This vision is to be found in many of Pearse’s poems – now disparaged by the modern literati – and other writings. In a series of essays written not long before the Rising, for example, Pearse outlined in detail the specifications of true independence, and the process by which it would be attained. The essays are rigorous and clear, and leave very little room for ambiguity about what the author saw as being necessary.

In one of these, ‘The Murder Machine’, about the effects of the English education system in Ireland, Pearse outlined the precise nature of the psychological effects of the colonial process. This was some fifty years before the groundbreaking works of the great Caribbean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who exposed the interior workings of the colonial machine in his classic works about the effects of French colonialism in Algeria.

Pearse perceived that the ‘murder machine’ had, in effect, created in Ireland the conditions of slavery. English rule in Ireland, he contended, had ‘aimed at the substitution for men and women with “Things”. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.’

True independence, Pearse wrote in another essay, ‘The Spiritual Nation’, ‘requires spiritual and intellectual independence as its basis, or it tends to become unstable, a thing resting merely on interests which change with time and circumstances’.

He and the other leaders of the 1916 Rising were clear that the project of Independence must be a spiritual and psychological, as much as a political or cultural, process. Like Fanon, they intuited that only a superficial understanding of this necessary transformation could result in a disaster. But, following their execution, such elevated notions were replaced with more mundane understandings.

Without these deeper insights, everything seems simple: surely you simply undo what has been done to you? It takes a long time to perceive that such undoing is impossible without causing everything to unravel. The indigenous culture, having been interrupted, lacks a definitive sense of its own nature or direction. It still exists, but in an altered form, and cannot simply be decontaminated and reconditioned for a new phase of existence. The collective mindset is affected by a series of paradoxical conditions. On the one hand, there is a desire to purge everything alien; on the other, there is the unavoidable fact that the mindset itself has been infiltrated by alien influences, the most insidious of which is a tendency to imitate. The native wishes to redefine himself, not merely in contradistinction to his historical abuser, but in a manner that will bear witness to his authentic self; and yet, this authentic self can no longer be located, because it has been altered by the influence of the colonizer, whom the native has been conditioned to perceive as the most worthy subject of emulation. The native has been convinced, unbeknownst to himself, that his authentic self is a worthless thing, and that his only salvation resides in imitating his master, whom, at a conscious level, he imagines himself to despise. Who, then, is in charge? What is the nature of authenticity? What is to be made of the liberated native’s determination to again become ‘himself ’, if his sense of direction is provided by the indoctrination he has received?

Such understandings of the scale of the task that lay ahead were lost to the work of the firing squads. Thus, the very moments that provoked the surge towards freedom also began its undoing. The momentum was created but the intelligence that had already defined the freedom project not as a political or economic process, but as a spiritual rebirthing and a psychological recasting, was lost. What remained was the crudest understanding of what required to be done. The inevitable outcome was a failure of intellectual and psychological reintegration, which spawned a mishmash of confused and inauthentic identities. On the one hand, driven by the unattainable desire for a reclaimed authenticity, there began an era defined by protectionism and backlash, a ritualistic purging of everything ‘alien’ and, therefore, false. At the other extreme, governed by the self-hatred inculcated by the colonizer, there developed a repugnance and mistrust of everything indigenous. Most of this remains unresolved.

The first, perhaps the most enduring, catastrophe of independent Ireland, then, is that all the thought, all the insight that had inspired those who led the burst for freedom, ended up in pools of blood in the yard of Kilmainham Gaol. In getting themselves shot, Pearse and the other great leaders of 1916 denied posterity the intelligence they might have brought to the independence project, and instead left Ireland to the tender mercies of the literalists and crawthumpers who had been far too cunning to fall foul of firing squads.