Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Those opponents often found themselves sharing common ground and platforms in the United States, where exiled Irish nationalists were heartened by the support of Indians who studied their methods. The Home Rule agitation mounted by Shyamaji in India in 1905 followed the Irish example, and from that year onwards the Gaelic American and Clan na Gael journals carried extensive coverage of India. In 1907, the Irish Parliamentary Party rejected a British offer of severely limited autonomy. Aurobindo Ghosh, a radical leader of the Indian National Congress and editor of Bande Mataram, praised the party's refusal to be bought: "Instead of a separate nationality with its own culture, language, government, the Irish would have ended up by becoming a big English county governed by a magnified and glorified parish council".5 He urged his fellow-Indians to follow this unappeasable policy. Some of those who took his advice journeyed to England, in order to organize Indian militants: when a number of these were jailed, Maud Gonne and Sinn Féin advised their comrades on the logistics of mounting a rescue operation. The coaching cannot have been very thorough, since the van attacked by the Indians proved quite empty.

  These alliances grew even stronger in the heady years of 1919 and 1920. Irish and Indians shared platforms across the United States, protesting against the deportation of Indian nationalists. The Ghadar Party – an organization of Indian workers in the US which wished by armed force to destroy the British Raj – presented Éamon de Valera with an engraved sword and an Irish flag: and on 28 February 1920 de Valera delivered a trenchant speech in New York at a meeting of Friends of the Freedom of India. Taking courage from the American example, he reminded his audience of Washington's message to the patriots of Ireland: "your cause is identical with mine", adding the inflection "Patriots of India, your cause is identical with ours".6 He hoped that the ties which by then bound Ireland and America would soon bind Ireland to India; and, though the different conditions might call forth a variation in tactics, he urged immediate revolt: "We in Ireland, comparatively small in numbers, close to the heart of Britain's imperial power, have never despaired. You, people of India, remote from her, a continent in yourselves, seventy times as numerous as we are, surely you will not despair!"

  De Valera scoffed at arguments that England went to Ireland or India "to teach them the way of prosperity and civilization". "When or where", he asked, "has the British Empire shown such altruism?" Rather these colonies were drained of wealth and food: the famines which plagued India in consequence might be unimaginable to Americans but were well understood in Ireland; and the massacre of unarmed civilians by General Dyer at Amritsar in 1919 "is nothing new to us". No Irishman needed a book to tell him what went on in India: he had only to consider the history of his native land, he said, to know that famine was the weapon used to kill off a people whose burgeoning population struck fear into the hearts of imperial administrators. Those who attributed poverty to native laziness had tried the same device on Ireland and had fooled nobody. De Valera pronounced himself unimpressed by claims, such as those advanced by Bernard Shaw, that it was only the British upper-class which was to blame. "The common citizen's vote it is that maintains his government in power", he averred, and if they fail to change their rulers, "they are guilty with the others", whatever their protestations of democratic government.

  Americans should put pressure on trade union leaders, for "the rule of the people by a foreign despot is a terrible thing, but the rule of a people by a foreign democracy is the worst of all, for it is the most irresponsible of all". He commended a study of the Irish revival to his Indian friends: the lesson was that moral force alone would never convince the British unless backed up by physical force. He ended ringingly: "we swear friendship tonight; and we send our common greetings and our pledges to our brothers in Egypt and in Persia, and tell them also that their cause is our cause".7

  The following month, a large party of Indian Hindus in native dress walked in the St. Patrick's Day parades of New York: and Irish sailors on the high seas carried messages and intelligence between Indian nationalists at home and abroad.8 In the years that followed, groups like the Women's Irish Education League of San Francisco, founded after a visit by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, led boycotts of British ships and organized meetings for Indian speakers. There was a mixture of idealism and pragmatism in these alliances: many Irish were still convinced that British rule in India was the obstacle to the freedom of other colonial peoples, including themselves. Not all Irish nationalists were happy with this: though radicals like Liam Mellows sought to develop contacts, others (according to a British intelligence report) had "a poor opinion of the Indian extremists and decline to work with them".9

  If many – perhaps a majority of– Irish writers and nationalists were slow to identify with movements elsewhere, this was because their minds were unresponsive to the comparative method, having been attuned to the revivalist idea that the Irish were unique, "like no other race on earth". The British authorities, of course, were under no such illusions and cabinet minutes from 1919 onwards recorded fears that if the Irish case were conceded, the flames of revolt would be fanned in India and elsewhere. Moreover, certain members of the cabinet, notably H. A. L. Fisher, grew frustrated by Lloyd George's obsession with Ireland in 1921 and lamented that the Prime Minister was neglecting the case of Egypt, during the negotiations late in that year of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.10 After the Treaty had been secured, The Round Table predicted that the Egyptians and Indians now had every excuse for thinking that the English would concede to persistent clamour; and it warned that unless the English closed their ears, they would lose the empire and deserve to lose it.11 During the previous summer, in private sessions of the Dáil debates in Dublin, Sean T. O'Kelly reported messages of congratulation from Poland, Turkey, India and Egypt: the Indians and Egyptians, in particular, accompanied their message with requests for advice on methods.12

  Those Indian overtures came hard upon the mutiny of a group of Irish soldiers in the Connaught Rangers during June of the previous year, 1920, at the Wellington Barracks, Jullundur. News of the burning of rural Irish towns and proscription of hurling matches prompted one soldier, Joe Hawes, to tell his comrades that "we were doing in India what the British forces were doing in Ireland".13 Refusing to parade, about thirty members of "C" company shouted "up the rebels!" Their tearful commanding officer reminded them in an eloquent speech of their great reputation, won over thirty-three years; but Hawes stepped forward to say that while those exploits had been done for England, this latest one for Ireland would be counted the greatest honour of all. They said they would soldier no more "until all British troops had been removed from Ireland" and they flew a makeshift tricolour. The authorities were fearful that Indian nationalists, on hearing of this turn of events, might be emboldened to attack the British.

  The Punjab was then in a state of tension and the killings at Amritsar were fresh in the popular memory. At the end of June, there were three hundred and ninety Irish mutineers by official estimate, and though they refused to file in on command from one of their British officers, they responded with discipline to the instructions of James Daly, who had stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the detachment. They were subsequently removed, bedraggled but defiant, in bullock carts, carrying with them all their possessions in boxes, on which perched their pet monkey, cockatoos and parrots. Told that they could have no effect on policy and that their persistence would ruin their careers, they took pause, but Daly assured them that what they had done would be reported in every newspaper and emulated by the other Irish regiments in the army. An attempt to detach and execute the ringleaders was prevented by an elderly Roman Catholic priest who interposed himself, beseeching the general to hold fire. Later, however, after a courtmartial, five were condemned to death, two to life and two to twenty years' imprisonment, one for fifteen years, and so on. Some of the death sentences were commuted, but Daly was shot. "What harm?" he wrote home to his Westmeath mother in a last letter on 19 February 1921: "it is all
for Ireland". He refused a morphine injection and an eye-bandage, telling his firing-squad that "some day the men in the cells over there may be free". Thirteen bullets cut him to bits, so that fragments of his flesh and bone stuck into the wall behind; but Hawes and the others reassembled the body as best they could for burial.

  It seems that none of these men had any contact with Indian nationalists, and the mutineers who survived said that they had never thought to make any: but word soon got through. A Poona journal, praising these patriotic soldiers, contrasted them with the Indian troops who had "shot down their innocent countrymen and children at the order of General Dyer". A Delhi paper commented approvingly that "the Irish people can preserve their honour, defy the orders of the Government, and defeat its unjust aims".14 The British intelligence network thought it likely that de Valera's speech in New York urging Indian-Irish collaboration might have motivated the men, but it seems unlikely that newspapers carrying this speech could have come into their possession.

  It must also be remembered that, as British soldiers who had taken an oath of allegiance to the crown, the mutineers were in the strange position of being seen as "legitimate targets" by Irish republican gunmen, who actually killed dozens of ex-servicemen in the year after the mutiny. Some of the convicted mutineers, from their prisons back in England, appealed for leniency and early release, so that they might join the Free State army and assist the fight against de Valera's republicans in the Civil War. Not all who returned joined the army, or were even asked to do so. Cynics wondered if these men were patriots at all or merely disorderly crown recruits, but their subsequent tales of the brutality which they endured in English jails confirmed their status as folk heroes.

  After the Civil War of 1922–3, the republicans tried to organize further contacts with other nationalist movements. In 1924, Sean T. O'Kelly told the Friends of the Freedom of India in New York that if the great empires found it advantageous to keep in touch with one another, their victims should too. As a representative of the Irish Republic in Paris during the World Peace Conference, he had tried "to form some kind of association" involving Ireland, India, Egypt and others,15 but had received little support from any but the Egyptians. One reason, O'Kelly added sarcastically, was that India was represented by British officials and "a tamed Indian Prince or two in their train just to add a little dash of appropriate colour to the delegation". He was equally scathing about English administrators, dressed in Mohammedan garments for the purpose of convincing a gullible public that they represented the Arab peoples: "it was most humiliating to any honest person to see how all these great peoples of the East were treated". Even more distressing to O'Kelly was the refusal of the tamed Indian delegation "to risk being tarnished by even momentary association with an Irish rebel".

  In a tone of high irony, O'Kelly went on to praise England's self-sacrificing mission in Ireland and India, and to mock the claim of their poor benighted peoples that "they had a highly developed educational system of their own and a distinct culture with a written as well as an oral literature of their own, thousands of years before the English". With robust sarcasm, he parodied the official theory: "it was for our good that England decried our language and our ancient literature and Anglicized or banned our schools and our colleges and our universities". He hoped that it would not take the Indians or the Egyptians as long as it had taken the Irish to learn the necessary lessons of such treatment, and so he quoted Tagore:

  To hold India forever is an impossibility,

  It is against the law of the universe.

  Even the tree has to part with its fruits . . .

  and again:

  Brother, do not be discouraged for God slumbers not nor sleeps.

  The tighter the knot the shorter will be your period of bondage . . .

  O'Kelly apologized to Indians and Egyptians for those of Irish background who had assisted in their oppression and "formed the backbone of the invading and destroying armies".16 He promised to make amends for wrongs done by English regiments bearing such names as Connaught Rangers, Munster Fuseliers, Dublin Fuseliers, Inniskillens and so on. He also regretted the collaboration in the British administration of India by Irishmen who lacked the excuse of most soldiers that "what they did they did in ignorance, not in malice". Many soldiers, he conceded, had joined up as an alternative to starvation, only to find themselves used against their fellow-countrymen. He asked why India, "with a cultural history second to that of no nation in the world", should submit to mere military might; and he recalled for them the words of Terence MacSwiney, whose message, he believed, was taken up by Tagore:

  If you expect to live and to command respect in this world,

  First be prepared to give your lives for your mother . . .

  The notion was most famously developed by Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote of Ireland in 1921: "I would like the reader to believe with me that it is not the blood that the Irishmen have taken which has given them what appears to be their liberty. But it is the gallons of blood they have willingly given themselves. It is not the fear of losing more lives that has compelled a reluctant offer from England, but it is the shame of any further imposition of agony upon a people that loves its liberty above everything else. It is the magnitude of the Irish sacrifice which has been the deciding factor".17

  In his concluding remarks to the Friends of the Freedom of India, O'Kelly warned that the British loved to foster internal divisions in order to weaken the emerging nation: so Mohammedan, Hindu and Christian must sink their differences in the common name of Indian (a deliberate echo, there, of Wolfe Tone). Even more important was the moral and spiritual revolution then being led by Gandhi, he averred: "the soldiers who are engaged in the intellectual battle must lead and mark out the way for the army engaged in the physical conflict with the enemy".18 And he ended his address as de Valera had commenced his, by placing both movements under the auspices of the American Revolution: as Thomas Jefferson had invented America, they were now about the work of inventing India and Ireland.

  Despite these manifold contacts with Indian nationalists, it would be unwise to infer that a united anti-imperial front was ever a serious possibility. The vast distance between Ireland and India militated against it – it is significant that many of the contacts were made on US soil and publicized before largely American audiences. The evidence all suggests that the Indians were far more likely to proclaim their solidarity with the Irish than vice versa. De Valera and O'Kelly were uncomfortably aware that within the tradition of Irish nationalism was a strain of white triumphalism, which ran from John Mitchel to Arthur Griffith and which would never countenance such a solidarity. Even more depressing was the fact that an otherwise advanced thinker such as James Connolly did not develop a generalized anti-racist or anti-imperialist philosophy. Immediate realities in Scotland and Ireland were just too pressing.

  All of which may help to explain why many Irish leaders and artists, having glimpsed the potentials of a global alliance with other emerging peoples, could so easily forget them in the drive to Europeanize the emerging Irish state.19

  INVENTING IRELANDS

  INVENTING IRELANDS

  Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Justice in the first government of the Free State, described his colleagues as probably the most conservative revolutionaries in history. They were autocratic in the way that military men often are. They were anxious not only to secure the state against internal attack but also to demonstrate to the British and the wider world that they could govern with discipline and authority. Just how conservative they were may be seen in their suppression of the Dáil Courts which had been set up during the War of Independence in 1920. Though the work of the courts was dangerous, complex and ill-rewarded, the lawyers and clerks who risked all to do it were seldom thanked by the militarists. Even if the republican side had won the Civil War, there is reason to doubt whether they would have treated the courts more tenderly than did Cumann na nGaedheal. Well before the Treaty, Cathal Brugha, that most stern of
republican leaders, had no doubt that through the medium of the courts power was passing into the hands of ordinary people from the military élite: and he thoroughly disapproved of the development. Here was a graphic example of the kind of distorted and undemocratic thinking possible only to those who had fetishized the use of arms and neglected to consider the important cultural aspects of the campaign for freedom.1

  This neglect would in time permit the politicians of the Free State government to retain as much power as possible for themselves by winding up the Dáil Courts. The "retreat from revolution" had already begun. Soon judges and lawyers would once again be donning the gowns and wigs of the British system; and the newly-liberated people would be employing the unmodified devices of the old regime upon themselves. War and civil war appeared to have drained all energy and imagination away: there was precious little left with which to reimagine the national condition.

  There was, if anything, less freedom in post-independence Ireland, for the reason that the previous attempt to arraign the enemy without gave way to a new campaign against the heretic within. The censorship of films (1923) and of publications (1929) was a symptom of a wider censorious-ness, of a kind which would be found in many infant states as they sought to outlaw the impure and to keep their culture unadulterated by "corrupt" foreign influences. Among the first books to appear on the lists under ban were Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Family Limitation by Margaret Sanger, Wise Parenthood by Marie Stopes and The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin. They would soon be joined by works from the pens of the foremost contemporary Irish writers, for whom it became a perverse badge of honour (as well as a guarantee of reduced income) to be given a censorship number. The red-light districts of Dublin, so raucously celebrated in the writings of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty, were closed down by religious campaigners: at one of their final soirées, a famous harlot whirled and danced before the company like a dervish, her skirts rising higher and higher until they revealed a pair of knickers beneath, in the defiant green-white-and-orange of the tricolour of the mythical Irish republic.