Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  Frederick and Isabella have been seen as somewhat distant from their sons and daughters in their childhood years, but they must have worried when Kate was away, and how that worry, which is another name for love, must have been read by Kate between the lines of that bundle of letters, treasured over the long, long years.[17]

  Notes

  [1]Nell Gay, ‘The Pretty Ladies’, The Monitor (undated), p. 10.

  [2]In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [3]NGDPs.

  [4]Nell Gay, ‘The Pretty Ladies’, The Monitor (undated), p. 10.

  [5]Robert Lynd, The Times (London), 5 October 1892.

  [6]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, pp. 12–14; NGDPs.

  [7]In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [8]Ibid.

  [9] Courtesy of Margaret Byrne, Librarian, Incorporated Law Society.

  [10]NGDPs.

  [11]Courtesy of Madeleine Cooke; NGDPs.

  [12]NGDPs.

  [13]Jack Fitzsimons, Parish of Kilbeg, Kells Art Studios, 1974. By kind permission of the editor.

  [14]NGDPs.

  [15]Ibid.

  [16]Ibid.

  [17]Ibid.

  6 - Reviving an Old Culture

  The Gifford daughters still living in Ireland, Nellie, Grace, Kate, Muriel and ‘John’, were becoming increasingly part of a social metamorphosis, an extraordinary phenomenon. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, coming from several spheres of interest, from all walks of life and from everywhere in Ireland, there was a hankering after and a groping towards things Irish. The ‘hidden Ireland’ of the writer Daniel Corkery was being revealed, and Dark Rosaleen (Róisín Dubh) of the poet James Clarence Mangan was awakening from her slumbers. The folk memory held many appalling images in its béal oidis (oral tradition), ballads, poems and even on its yellow handkerchiefs – not figments of the imagination but facts, corroborated by annals and reputable historians down the years. In fact, Pádraig Pearse was to declare Ireland’s independence ‘In the name of God and of the dead generations.’

  Though the movement to which the Giffords became committed was essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, there had been repeated movements, armed and unarmed, to rescue Gaelic Ireland from the cultural extinction envisaged by her conquerors. ‘John’ was the first of Isabella’s daughters to engage in this Irish Ireland, though the threads from which were woven the fabric of Gifford republicanism were there long before the Irish Ireland movement impinged on their adult lives. There were Bridget’s ballads and poems, the knowledge that their grandfather, the Rev. Robert Nathaniel Burton, had died helping famine victims, their father’s stories of harrowing evictions during the Land War and their fraternisation with the servants who were anti-British. In fact many anti-British hands were rocking many cradles all over the Empire – because the servants were nearly always members of the conquered races. Then, too, there was the Gifford friendship with intellectuals such as Æ and James Stephens, as well as a questioning reaction to their mother’s determined stand regarding England’s superiority. Lastly, there was a distinctive withdrawal, recorded by ‘John’ and Nellie, but quite probably felt by their sisters too, from a voracious empire whose militant colonialism engorged greedily the lives of many of their brothers’ young classmates, leaving their womenfolk without fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

  It was curious that not one of the Gifford boys was even remotely touched by Irish patriotism. Their sister ‘John’ described them as a mixture of Fabian socialists and half-hearted unionists who remained so perhaps because they knew that those who did not conform to this political belief would be ostracised in the tennis club. There was also the further danger of career exclusion. Anyway, the three who went off to the wars were excluded geographically as well as ideologically, while Gerald Vere lay buried in Mount Jerome and Ernest showed no interest whatever in the national movement; nor did Gabriel, even when he went to America where the Gaelic movement was almost a sine qua non for mixing in Irish-American society and even though Ada, with whom he had always been close, was very much involved with her compatriots there. Gabriel contributed one curious little offering to Irish history, however. He did a sketch, pencil on paper, of his brother-in-law, Thomas MacDonagh, on 27 July 1912.

  The Gifford sisters made up for this lack of interest. They were in the thick of the new phenomenon. Their father Frederick expressed the disbelief of fathers everywhere when, if one or other of them stayed at home in the evening, he asked bemusedly whether they were ill or if anything was the matter.

  On a not-untypical day, the poet Seumas O’Sullivan invited them to the Martello Tower at Sandycove where he, Oliver St John Gogarty and Arthur Griffith were having a holiday. Griffith, normally shy and even asocial, was relaxed and happy as he rowed the lady guests around Scotsman’s Bay. In return, when they were staying in a farmhouse in Avoca, County Wicklow, they invited O’Sullivan and Griffith down for a visit. Griffith was delighted with the ten-year-old son of the farm because he knew so much Irish history, and, on his return to Dublin, he sent the boy a copy of John Mitchel’s Jail Journal, one of the great classics of Irish republicanism.[1]

  Evenings might be spent at céilís or at the Abbey Theatre. ‘John’s’ description of the Abbey in those early days makes it sound like a village hall. They knew many in the audience: the Yeats family, those they had met in District Justice Reddin’s home and the home of Æ, and those who were becoming known to them through ‘John’s’ political writings. In fact, if a non-acquaintance arrived, it was unusual. They bought seats in the cheaper ‘pit’, but if they wanted to talk during the interval to someone who had a seat in the grander stalls, they simply lifted the dividing rope and settled down beside the friend.

  ‘John’ was contributing to an Ireland which had already, for some time, been seeking its cultural roots. Douglas Hyde, who was later to become the first uachtarán (president) of the twenty-six-county Free State, found a deep interest in the Irish language; Bunting and Joyce rescued the old Irish music; the interest of Petrie, Stokes, Wilde and Burton lay in the archaeological stone treasures of Ireland’s ancient past; Lady Augusta Gregory, excited by the resurrected tales of Celtic mythology, wanted to immortalise them in a national theatre, while W. B. Yeats’ aim was to enshrine them in his plays and verse. This was all going on while the china teacups tinkled delicately during afternoon ‘at homes’ such as those of Isabella Gifford. Anglo-Irish ladies still basked in the belief that they had a civilising influence on a conquered race close enough to barbarism and at best fit only to be their servants. But other descendants of those who had ruthlessly created the Anglo-Irish Protestant state were questioning the superiority theory on which their arrogance and domination had been based. The people whom their forebears had savagely conquered had a language with both the clarity of inflected speech and an embarrassment of riches in descriptive vocabulary, as any student of Gaelic literature will know.

  As well as the Anglo-Irish devotees (who also included Edward Martyn, George Moore and Æ), native scholars such as Eugene O’Curry, Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire and Father Dineen were also painstakingly conserving, in grammatical and dictionary form, the old language – the vessel of all that had been Ireland, good and bad, before the predatory invasions. John O’Donovan’s Grammar of the Irish Language and Annals of the Four Masters were milestones. Eugene O’Curry, a native Irish speaker from County Clare, with no formal education, had inspired Petrie, Stokes, Todd and others with his extraordinary knowledge of ancient Irish civilisation. The newly established Catholic University of Dublin appointed him to the Chair of Archaeology and Irish Literature. His essays on Tara and on Irish round towers were world acclaimed, and he opened doors to the study of the history, literature and laws of his people.

  A list of ‘Celtic’ societies which were established during the nineteenth century will give some idea of the depth and scope of interest of the time’s Gaelic reawakening: the Ossianic Society, the Iberno-Celtic Society
, the Gaelic Union, the Ulster Gaelic Society, the Gaelic League, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. The Gaelic League increased from forty-three branches in 1897 to 600 in 1904, with a membership of 50,000. Some of the other organisations could be seen as dilettante groups, interested in old language treasures and lost artefacts, but as the century progressed the aims shifted towards language rehabilitation, and entwined inextricably with these newer groups were political as well as linguistic yearnings, despite the misgivings of a few.

  Added to all this, at a non-scholarly level, young people were joining the Gaelic Athletic Association to play Gaelic football and hurling. They no longer needed to subject themselves to the almost inevitable racial blackballing at local tennis clubs by the Planter classes. Céilís were held in church halls, at crossroads and in kitchens, with jigs, reels, the ‘High Caul Cap’ and ‘The Walls of Limerick’.

  The Gifford sisters were very much part of this Celtic buzz. Nellie Gifford has left her own description of the movement:

  Nothing distinctively Irish was too small or too vast for the sweeping enthusiasm of the Gaels of this period. Funds were raised by Irish concerts, and songs written to sing at them. Many of these were comic songs with a sting in them for the anti-Irish men or women. Learning Gaelic was stiff going, especially to scholars who had been working all day, so these night classes generally finished with an Irish dance … Irish girls induced sometimes reluctant boyfriends to these dances, hoping by easy stages to coax them to learn the language. Everyone was anxious to teach any visitor the various Irish dance steps …

  An Englishman visiting Ireland about twenty-five years ago found a great, an almost feverish, activity all over the country for forwarding the use of Gaelic. Those pioneers for the language realised that, after all, it was the great poverty of the Irish that was the first greatest stumbling block to putting the Gaelic language back in Ireland. And so with an enthusiasm and amount of self-sacrifice they shouldered, not merely the language question, but the whole structure of Irish life which was at that time a badly-copied form of an out-of-date English model.[2]

  As well as all this, the dancing Celtic feet were not only active at the céilí. On the sports fields too they were happily used in the national games of hurling, football, rounders, camogie and handball under the aegis of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which flourished and spread its activities to every parish in Ireland. With that native-games ethos came also its language, music, song, ‘Buy Irish’ campaign and, above all, political independence.[3]

  Maud Clare, who was a member of Cumann na mBan (the Women’s Association), described the enthusiasm:

  You would get up in the morning and think ‘what will I do for Ireland today? Will they ask me to carry a dispatch? Will I go to the Irish class tonight?’ It was exciting – a dream we all had about a free Ireland and an Irish Ireland – our own again.[4]

  ‘John’ Gifford described The O’Rahilly, head of his old Kerry clan and later a founding member of the Irish Volunteers, when he returned from America a wealthy man:

  The O’Rahilly made himself the employee of his country and no wage-earner ever served a master so diligently and incessantly as this head of a kingdom … He was well-known in every part of Ireland for driving his own gluaisteán, as he called his car … on behalf of the Gaelic League, Sinn Féin and the Irish Industrial Revival.[5]

  Other descriptions of this gradual change in ordinary Irish society, as well as in some pockets of the intellectual Anglo-Irish class, cover such phenomena as the street meetings to educate the people as to what was going on and also the encouragement of Irish industry, which found chief expression in Aonach na Nollaig, a Christmas fair held in the Rotunda in Dublin, at which goods of Irish manufacture only were sold. The language classes, debating societies, concerts and distribution of pamphlets were all directed towards an Ireland increasingly aware of its past and planning its future.

  A very human reflection on the Irish Ireland movement, after it had developed an armed faction and spilled over into the War of Independence, came from one member of Cumann na mBan when describing how she came to be involved. Eileen Walsh’s eldest brother, Phillip, who had bought her first piano for his young sister, was in the IRA, and an English sniper’s bullet was to cost him his life in Dublin’s North King Street during the 1916 Rising. Eileen was only sixteen when it happened, but she joined Cumann na mBan so that she could carry guns for ‘the boys’. ‘We did that to help the movement,’ she said, ‘and in my case to remember Phillip. We used to go to céilís too, but that was to meet the fellas.’[6]And who would deny that tentative courtships and romantic attachments, as well as military alliances, have their place in the future of an embryonic nation, even though that nation was, as yet, still a dream in Irish minds.

  Notes

  [1] Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 44.

  [2]NGDPs.

  [3]Joseph F. Foyle, Using Our Gaelic Games, Thurles: The Nationalist Newspaper Co. Ltd., 1968, pp. 5, 40.

  [4]In conversation with Maud Clare.

  [5]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, pp. 54–55.

  [6]In conversation with Eileen Walsh’s daughter.

  7 - The Mighty Pen

  Young journalist ‘John Brennan’ became a part of what was, effectively, a propaganda machine for the early enthusiasts of the movement. Words being traditionally mightier than swords, the plethora of nationalist written and oral matter worked its formative qualities on the minds of some of those not yet converted.

  In 1891, the first bilingual Irish–English weekly paper had been launched by the Gaelic League, but there had been, for more than 100 years, pro-Irish literature in English. The 1848 rebellion of the Young Irelanders, while sparse on physical confrontation, had been rich in words – in prose, poems and ballads – many of which were being recalled in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century. People were beginning to feel, indeed, ‘A Nation Once Again’, in Thomas Davis’ famous words. After the aborted rising of Robert Emmet in 1803, his speech from the dock had been quickly circulated. It was now reprinted. The Ascendancy literary awakening, led by Hyde, Gregory, Yeats and Synge, was also subtly and unconsciously feeding Irish nationalist aspirations. In America, the septuagenarian Fenian, John Devoy, in The Gaelic American, and Patrick Ford, in his Irish World, were proposing new directions for Irish politics. At home there were old reliables such as the pro-Redmond Freeman’s Journal and saucy newcomers such as the magazine Bean na hÉireann (Woman of Ireland), familiarly called The Bean (pronounced ban) and published by Inghínidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) under the editorship of Helena Molony, lifelong friend of ‘John’ Gifford. It was a monthly magazine that circulated freely in Ireland and in the USA, and discussed matters of social and national interest. It was called ‘the women’s magazine which men read’ and attracted contributions from Stephens, Æ, Griffith, Markievicz, Colum, Plunkett, Sir Roger Casement, Katharine Tynan and Maud Gonne (all unpaid, like its staff). ‘John’ Gifford was an enthusiastic contributor, as well as a member of the editorial staff.

  Katharine Tynan submitted a serial in which an English officer was to marry the girlfriend of his foe – a gallant United Irishman who had been fatally wounded in the fight for Irish freedom – but the editor of Bean na hÉireann rewrote the ending, reviving the dying United Irishman and whisking him off, pale but alive, to claim his bride from the English enemy.[1]In the 1908 Christmas number, Susan Mitchell’s anti-conscription ballad about the Irish boy in Carrick workhouse who was conscripted into Her Majesty’s army, ‘for the glory of the Empire’, appeared. In the same issue, Padraic Colum’s anti-English play The Saxon Shilling was also published, and, nurturing the same enlistment antipathy, in a later issue of November 1910 Arthur Griffith also argued against conscription:

  The strength of England lies in her armed forces. Guns and battleships are useless to a nation which cannot procure men of courage and intelligence to work them … Without a large Irish contingent i
n the British army that army would be of no more use in serious warfare than an armed police.

  The Boer War had erupted in 1899, and the Irish republican media vociferously supported the Boers and rejected any conscription in Ireland to fight these farmers who, like themselves, wanted a republic. On the one hand, there was this anti-conscription propaganda in the Irish Ireland press, but on the other there was also The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the evening papers lauding the Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond, the aims of the British Empire and its need to conscript in Ireland.

  Even a short list of further Irish Ireland publications gives some idea of the flood of anti-English propaganda:

  The Leader (editor D. P. Moran)

  The Gaelic Athlete

  The Irish Felon

  The Irish Penny Journal

  The Nation

  The Irish Review (editors Professor Heuston and Joseph Plunkett [suppressed])

  An Claidheamh Soluis (editor Pádraig Pearse)

  A secret detective report from Dublin Castle on another republican paper, The Spark, named as its owner and editor respectively Máire Perolz of 10 North Great Georges Street and Countess Markievicz of 49B Leinster Road, Rathmines (both friends of the Giffords). The Irish Ireland press was being watched.