1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Because he was Irish and had to be devoted to something, he replaced religion with a love of country. Mother Ireland instead of Mother Mary.

  At seventeen Henry had joined the local branch of the Wolfe Tone Club, named after the famous revolutionary and founder of the United Irishmen. In the Fíanna Fail Hall off Barrington Street he had listened as accolades were heaped on dead rebels and failed uprisings were held to be the pinnacle of Irish achievement. There were a few exciting demonstrations of weaponry and some patriotic sing-songs, but eventually Henry lost interest. Dead rebels. Failed risings. Nothing to show for it but songs that make grown men cry. He stopped attending the meetings.

  In his twenties he had taken an interest in politics but did not become actively involved. His experience with the Wolfe Tone Club had taught him he was not a joiner. He preferred to sit on the bank of a river and fish, or take long walks thinking. “Going for a little journey around the inside of my head,” he called it. When he wanted to explore the thoughts of someone else, he visited his local pub.

  Ireland’s pubs had two conversational topics: sport and politics. In the early twentieth century, politics ranked higher. Men with no power vented their frustration by arguing about power. Someone might say, “I agree with Arthur Griffith—monarchy is the most stable system. He says we should have a dual monarchy with two kings, one for Ireland and one for England. Like the government of Austro-Hungary.”

  “Home rule makes more sense to me,” Henry would respond, leaning forward over his pint of porter. “We governed ourselves for two thousand years and we can do it again.”

  “You’re right there, avic,”* agreed the man sitting next to him. “Local assemblies with representatives from every parish, that’s the way. The wearer best knows where the shoe pinches.”

  The barman joined in. “I’d settle for an Irish parliament. Not made up of Protestant lords and landlords, but ordinary people like us.”

  “Working within the larger framework of the British Empire, of course,” amended a thin man with the look of a schoolteacher about him. “That’s what home rule means.”

  “Why within the empire?” asked a craggy-featured laborer in a cloth cap. “Yer so-called Great Britain’s done shag-all fer me. We should be independent like the Americans.”

  An elderly man with a garrison accent said, “We’re doing all right with the government as it is.”

  “How can you say that?” Henry challenged. “Anything we have that’s worth having is taken from us. Our taxes are supporting a foreign monarchy and an army that’s used against us. Besides, laws designed for English people fit us no better than someone else’s shoes. Pass me one of those pickled eggs, will you? And I’ll tell you something for nothing: This country will never prosper until it has control over its own resources. Home rule would give us that.”

  “Give us?” The man in the cap snorted. “Them English never gave us anything worth anything and never will. If we ever get home rule, all the blood and juice’ll be drained out of it. Them politicians would see to that. Politics is behind everything, so it is,” he muttered darkly into his glass.

  Members of Parliament for Ireland belonged to either the Unionist Party or the Irish Parliamentary Party, usually just called the Irish Party. Although they represented a small Protestant minority in Ireland, the Unionists wielded considerable power in the British Parliament. A delicate balance of power existed in the House of Commons. The Liberals were anticolonialist, and at least in part, pacifist. The Conservatives, familiarly known as the Tories, were committed to maintaining the status quo, the militaristic empire responsible for the prosperity of the upper classes. To this end the Conservatives relied heavily upon the voting strength of Ireland’s Unionists.

  Unionists emphatically rejected home rule, claiming it would threaten the Act of Union that had been forced upon Ireland after the failed Rising of 1798. Unionists’ sense of identity depended upon being members of the ruling class. A democratically elected government in Ireland would give power to the huge Catholic majority. To Unionists this was unthinkable.

  Not all Protestants were Unionists, however, or members of the privileged class. Many working-class Protestants considered themselves as Irish as any Catholic and loved their country just as much.

  In opposition to the Unionists, the Irish Party claimed to represent the majority interest. Inheritors of Charles Stewart Parnell’s dream of home rule, they unfortunately possessed no leader strong enough to challenge the Unionists. As a result they usually rubber-stamped British policy.

  On the political fringes were parties such as Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin.1 Sinn féin, sinn féin amháin—Ourselves, ourselves alone—had been a battle cry of the Wild Geese, the exiled Irish fighting in the armies of Spain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Later it became a motto of the Gaelic League. A friend suggested the phrase to Griffith because it summed up his philosophy of national self-reliance.2

  In 1905 Griffith began publishing a daily newspaper called Sinn Féin. In its pages he urged the diversification of the Irish economy and the achievement of social and economic reform through peaceful protest. His proposal for a dual monarchy was intended to accommodate both nationalist and unionist traditions.

  A small political party formed around Griffith’s philosophy. Adopting the name Sinn Féin, they attracted little enthusiasm outside their own circle and had no seats in Parliament.

  But someone took notice of Sinn Féin.

  In 1858 James Stephens, veteran of an aborted rebellion ten years earlier, had met in Dublin with like-minded friends to found a secret society sworn to bring about an independent Irish Republic through force of arms. At the same time John O’Mahony in New York had organized an American counterpart. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, commonly known as the Fenians after the legendary army of Fionn mac Cumhaill, was denounced by the Catholic Church and undermined by informers—usually paid spies in the service of the British government. But the Brotherhood did not go away.

  After a century of unparalleled imperial expansion, in 1899 the British Empire declared war on the Boers of South Africa—settlers of Dutch or Huguenot descent—in order to seize their lands, diamonds, and gold. The Boers raised armies among the native South African population and fought back. For a while it looked as if they might win. Britain finally prevailed in 1902, leaving twenty-seven thousand burnt-out farmhouses in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, thirty thousand Boer women and children dead of neglect in imperial concentration camps, and, although such casualties were neither counted nor mentioned in the newspapers, innumerable black victims rotting in the African sun.

  The Boers’ near-successful defiance of the world’s mightiest military power gave the IRB hope. Britain was not invincible. An Irish Republic might succeed where the Boer republics had not.

  With the formation of Sinn Féin, the IRB saw its opportunity for a political voice in Ireland. In the first decade of the twentieth century there was a growing scent of nationalism in the Irish air.

  To add to the brew bubbling in the cauldron, workers were beginning to demand the decent pay and conditions that had always been denied them. Labor and management were headed for open conflict. In 1912 Henry had summed up the situation in the last article he wrote while working for the Limerick Leader: “Ireland has no strong voice to demand justice for her people in Westminster or anywhere else. Frustrated on every level, the ordinary Irish man and woman feels the pressure mounting inexorably. Living in this country is like watching a fatal accident about to happen.”

  The leader of the Ulster Unionist Party was Sir Edward Carson, who as a barrister had defended the Marquess of Queensberry in the famous trial that made public the homosexuality of Oscar Wilde—an avowed supporter of home rule—and resulted in Wilde’s imprisonment. In 1913, just when it looked as if a home rule bill might pass, Carson created a militia called the Ulster Volunteer Force, whose avowed purpose was to resist home rule through force of arms.


  “The UVF openly parade through the streets of Belfast with rifle and cannon,” Henry wrote for his new editor at the Independent, “while their political leaders scream anti-Catholic slogans and give dire warning of the dangers of ‘Rome Rule.’ The drums bang and the Union flags wave and thousands of weapons gleam in the sun. The threat of physical force is as palpable as a clenched fist.”

  The threat succeeded. The home rule bill was deferred yet again. Unionists gloated. Nationalists learned.

  The Irish Republican Brotherhood began quietly infiltrating Sinn Féin. Arthur Griffith’s moral force was joined by the Fenian doctrine of physical force.

  A home rule bill finally was placed on the statute books in 1914, but implementation was immediately postponed “for security reasons.” The Irish were promised that home rule would go into effect when the Great War was over…or some time thereafter. “When pigs fly,” Henry and his Dublin colleagues commented sourly to one another in the Oval Bar.

  That same year the Irish Volunteer Corps was formed as a counterbalance to the UVF.

  Henry Mooney had stood beside Ned Halloran on the Dublin quays as a troop of the new Volunteers marched past. Although they were ill equipped and improperly drilled, their faces shone with conviction. They were inspired and led by men who had lost faith in the “postdated check” of home rule. Men who wanted something more for Ireland.

  Full independence.

  Yes! Henry’s heart had cried. But he saw the Volunteers as a symbol rather than a viable option. There was something faintly ludicrous about a mix-’em-gather-’em of office clerks and farm boys challenging the might of Great Britain.

  Henry’s colleagues at the Independent had taken a different view. Several had joined the Sinn Féin Party; others had joined the Volunteers. “If nationalists stick together, anything’s possible,” they enthused, “even a republic. But we’ll have to get it the way the Americans got theirs—armed force, that’s all the British respect.”

  Ned Halloran had enrolled in the Volunteers. When the Rising came, Henry Mooney had not shouldered a rifle and marched out to face death and glory with him. Henry agreed with Arthur Griffith: Irish nationalists would better serve their country through constructive political action.

  But because he wanted to see Ireland free as much as any man, Henry had helped the rebels in every way he could short of fighting. To explain their position to those who called them cowards and traitors, he wrote: “It takes a great deal of courage to seek independence. The abused child, no matter how bullied and beaten, still clings to its mother’s skirts.

  “But we are not England’s natural children. The Irish had a discrete identity and a rich, sophisticated culture long before English opportunists invaded this island. Not content with their land’s resources, they seized upon ours. This is the pattern of imperialists; consider England’s model and teacher, Rome. Beware of those who recognize no one’s rights but their own. The time has come to separate ourselves from them and their influence.”

  In 1916 Henry had done more than write articles for newspapers. He had passed along information gleaned from his journalistic sources, and in the end he had rescued Ned Halloran with a large lie and a forged press pass.

  KNOWLEDGE of those contributions did not ease the ache in his heart now—his heart, at war with his rational mind. His heart told him he had stood aside while better, braver men died for what he too believed in.

  Meeting his eyes in the mirror, Henry Mooney knew he would be a happier man if he could count himself among the number who had marched out on Easter Monday to certain failure. In memory he watched the Volunteers stride past once more and did what he wished he had done on the day: He lifted his hat to them.

  “MAM’S keeping to her room until after the knackers come,” Pauline told her brother when he entered the kitchen.

  Hannah Mooney’s children glanced toward the ceiling as if their mother’s reproof were seeping through the plaster. Then Alice said to Henry, “Mam better not catch you wearing your hat in the house. You’ll get us all in trouble. Or don’t you care?”

  “Stop whining,” Pauline told her sister automatically. “Why are you wearing your hat, Henry?”

  “I’m not very hungry this morning, so I’m going into town to see if the Leader will buy my ‘One Year After the Rising’ piece.”

  “And what about this breakfast I cooked you?” Pauline demanded to know. “Well…please yourself, but bring back a loaf of sugar when you come. I forgot how much you waste in your tea. Oh…your old bicycle’s still in the shed, you know. A tire’s gone flat—you’ll need to patch it.”

  As Henry stepped out the door he saw the knacker’s wagon coming up the road, pulled by a pair of draft horses who were oblivious to their cargo of livestock carcasses. Their vision was restricted by leather blinkers. They kept their eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  The head of a horse hung over one side of the wagon, swinging on its slender neck like the clapper on a bell. A fine saddle horse, once. Elegant head. Someone’s pride and joy, no doubt, Henry thought. Now black blood oozed in thick drops from its tongue.

  Henry turned on his heel and went back inside. “Polly, send the knacker away while I find some old clothes to put on. I’m going to bury Flossie in the orchard.”

  It was past noon before Henry finally went into town. There was no rain, but a chill wind was blowing off the Shannon estuary. Shards of ice rimed the edges of the ruts in the road, dangerous for a bicycle with a clumsily patched tire. He dismounted and walked, wheeling the bicycle beside him while he took a boyish delight in stepping on the frozen ruts and hearing them crunch.

  The air was sweet with turf smoke. Pale banners billowed from every chimney. As Henry passed a mud-walled cabin with a thatched roof, a woman leaning on the half-door gave him a friendly nod. Farther along the road he met a gap-toothed farmer in a grimy suit and a cap. The man tilted his head in salute. “Desperate day.”

  “Desperate,” Henry agreed, walking on.

  Apart from Dublin, Ireland was rural; even towns like Limerick and Cork, which called themselves cities, revolved around a rural economy and were governed by seasonal rhythms. Weather was the common concern. To acknowledge atmospheric conditions was to acknowledge life itself.

  The houses began to huddle closer together, staring at those across the road with tribal suspicion. Country gave way to town, thatched roofs to slate, rutted mud to cobbled paving. Gray buildings, gray skies, gray diffident faces. A garrison town with its back to the river, Limerick guarded its deprivations like treasures.

  As he neared the center of town, Henry saw photographs of the bishop of Limerick displayed in flyspecked shop windows like a national hero.3 The pictures were invariably framed with tricolor ribbon. The bright bit of color made a statement all its own.

  The office of the Limerick Leader on O’Connell Street was comfortably familiar. Henry’s eyes were drawn to one battered desk in particular, and a chair whose uneven legs he had cursed many a time. “I don’t have time to talk about your article right now,” the editor told him, pushing up his eyeshade, “because there’s a big story coming over the telegraph. Can you call in tomorrow? Wee’ll have a good ould natter then.”

  “What big story? Something to do with the war in Europe?”

  “Not this time, at least not directly. Tsar Nicholas of Russia has abdicated. Gone like spit in the fire.” He clapped his hands together for emphasis, and several of the men in the office glanced up.

  Henry felt a moment of disorientation, as if he had slipped on the ice. The tsar claimed to rule through the direct authority of God. How in hell could he abdicate?

  Could God abdicate? Could he wash his hands of the lot of us and walk away? I wouldn’t blame him.

  As he was leaving the newspaper offices, Henry saw a squad of British soldiers come marching up the street with rifles on their shoulders. Some of the soldiers looked very young.

  The Irish Volunteers had been so very, very young.

 
THAT evening Henry went to his room to write a letter to Ned Halloran in Dublin. To avoid calling attention to Ned, he put Síle’s maiden name on the envelope.

  “The Russians are staging a revolution themselves,” he wrote, “that seems every bit as muddled and confused as ours. It is expected that the tsar’s cousin King George will grant Nicholas and his family sanctuary in England. I pray no harm will come to them in the meantime, and that the Russian revolutionaries prove as chivalrous as our own.

  “I found a quote from a Captain Brereton of the British forces, who was captured and held prisoner in the Four Courts during the Rising. You will appreciate this, Ned. After his release, Brereton reported of the Irish Volunteers, ‘They were not out for massacre, for burning or for loot. They observed all the rules of civilized warfare and fought clean. They treated their prisoners with the utmost courtesy and consideration; in fact they proved by their conduct that they were men of education incapable of acts of brutality.’4

  “I hope we can hold to that, Ned. As long as we do, the world will support us. Then when the war in Europe is over, we can ask the peace conference to support the cause of Irish independence.

  “In the meantime, you must take care of yourself. I understand how restless you are, but head wounds need a long time to heal and you cannot afford another relapse. Stay indoors as much as you can, and don’t attract notice. Remember, you’re not just a farmer’s son from County Clare anymore. You were Pearse’s personal courier in the General Post Office and privy to information the British still would like to get their hands on. But you have Síle and little Precious to consider now, so keep out of trouble for their sakes.”

  Henry folded the letter, then sat tapping it against his chin, wondering if he had wasted his words. Ned Halloran was not the same boy he had been before Easter Week. There was a simmering anger in him.