My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

  Revisionism hardly begins to describe the way Ireland’s national story was demolished and rebuilt. Irish historians speculated that Patrick Pearse was erotically attracted to the boys of his school, putting at least the hint of child abuse at the beginning of Ireland’s story. Irish journalists chased after World War I veterans, telling us they’d been unjustly neglected in favor of the Easter Rising. Thirty years of the IRA campaign in Ulster had had an effect, and those who detested modern Sinn Fein were firm in their resolve to tear down the national mythology that inspired the “men of violence.” With this came a renewed scrutiny of Ireland’s postindependence institutions, the mother and baby homes, industrial schools, and the Magdalene laundries. Liam Neeson played Michael Collins in the movie, and he was sainted in it, not because of his innovations in urban guerrilla warfare, but because he was willing to stand behind an imperfect compromise with Great Britain. How on the mark for the time! My boyhood understanding of Irish history, a people coming out of captivity, now got a chuckle from serious historians. They informed us in their soft Dublin accents, “We’re all revisionists now.”

  You yourself share in the prevailing Irish attitude of our time. You tell me that Ireland was a “dark” country until just recently. Nothing open. Nothing going on. The food was poor. How the Church lorded it over everyone. Explaining it to me, in generalities, you even pulled your coat tighter to symbolize the chill you felt just thinking about the place. Now Ireland had a real nightlife. There was more opportunity for jobs. You could get divorced now, which could make getting married in the first place a bit easier. Beneath this, I got the sense that the falling price of travel had made Irish life easier on the Irish, who were, in Yeats’s phrase, “a worldwide Nation, always growing Sorrow!”

  The demolition job on old Ireland and its nationalist myths certainly rhymed with my own life, which at that time was thick with skepticism for everything received. Even as a teenager I could feel this sense of boundlessness and abundance; this giddy feeling that there were almost no limits to what I could do, that I was bounding forward on an ever-increasing standard of living. And what good could come from zealotry? Absolute claims in religion and politics always ended in disaster, didn’t they? What you had to do was to slip through the already loose grip of taboos and superstitions of the past, and the world was at your feet.

  And we were already well on our way. The faeries were back in the muck somewhere in the Aran Islands, irrelevant. Religion was a pastime for those who wanted or needed something to do, but there was plenty to be done. The men of the Rising were intransigent fanatics in their day, and transformed by death into tyrants over the present. It was as if there were an all too obvious lesson in the air. In America the peace dividend translated into a long boom. We now lived in new construction, a townhouse more than twice the size of my childhood home. In Ireland the ceasefire in the North helped make the conditions for a Celtic Tiger economy. You expanded your house, too.

  Now was the time to be preoccupied with the important things: obtaining good grades, filling out a suitable roster of extracurricular activities. Activity itself was good enough, no need for actual achievements. These would yield acceptance to a good college and the very successful life that was obviously just on the other side of any degree. And you even gave me a foretaste of this yourself. Your letters came to me still, and in the most mercenary way, I looked forward to them.

  Cutting my mother out resulted in a peace dividend for me. For every birthday and for Christmas, you wrote a fat check made out to me personally. The very unofficial arrangement of child support became something more like child indulgence. I can’t remember many of the stories you relayed in these letters, but even now twenty years later I can recall the typical amounts filled in on the checks. None of us were rich, by the standards of even our own towns, but these were fat times. These checks, and the sense of prosperity around us, made it feel like I was being let in on the great facts of the adult world. What matters is bread on the table. Ireland had a pretty iffy record as an independent nation, but it was unbeatable as a brand for products. We had put away the foolish fairy tales about ourselves, and now we told a story about prosperity.

  * * *

  —

  Telling a story at all changes your relationship to the events you are describing. My mother and I, in trying to deny how helpless we sometimes felt, distorted the stories we told each other about you. She and I let our emotional needs twist the truth. Perhaps I’m doing the same thing now in my desire to connect with my roots. Nations can do the same thing. Some of the mythology that grew around the Rising obviously served to rally and moralize the Irish through the difficulties and trials of establishing the independence proclaimed by the heroes of 1916. But priorities change. The great imperative twenty-five years ago was peace on the island, so the Irish told stories that downplayed the militancy of Irish nationalism. Now the imperative is inclusion, so the story conveniently omits the stuff about nation and sacrifice and loyalty.

  Let’s grant for a moment that we are all revisionists now. That we all retell stories in light of our motives. The next question would be: What are your motives? What does this retold story do to the people hearing it, or to the person telling it? If we want noble things in life, we will pull those noble things out of our history and experience. If we are cynics, we will see plenty of justification for our cynicism.

  A false motive might produce a false history, something Ireland has seen plenty of. There were the antiquarians who believed the Irish language came unscathed from Babel. There is the false nationalist history in which all the invasions of Ireland were crimes of the English. Some older Irish people I’ve run into will recall with surprise the moment they learned that the Normans, who invaded in 1169, spoke a form of French. They were shocked to learn that Pope Alexander III essentially deeded Ireland to King Henry II.

  Then there is the false history of Ireland imposed by the English, a kind of nonhistory. In it, Ireland is merely a tangle of rude peoples waiting for English intervention, for English invention of the Irish. And no one thanked them for it.

  Have you noticed how modern Irish pols talk about Ireland’s past whenever an important English person is thought to be in earshot? They rely on clichés about “our tangled history” or “our shared history.” Maybe that is expedient. But it’s false. Sharing was not the intention of the English or the Irish until very, very recently. Ireland’s modern history began not with persuasion and unity but with plunder.

  This robbery was not just the seizure of land, it was an attempt to take from the Irish their ability to define or know themselves, to confiscate their language, their culture, even their character. When the English were not expropriating Irish wealth and murdering Irish people, they were Anglicizing them, making them believe that they should be grateful for the intervention. This vision of Irish incompetence is internalized in many Irish minds to this day. In many ways, it provides the emotional motor for those revisionists who make grand pronouncements about how Ireland is nothing but a failure. To rebel against England, an Irishman first rebels against this lie.

  An outstanding example of such a rebel is Eoin MacNeill, a professor and leader of the Irish Volunteers whose own story has been distorted by political ambitions. He’s been made a false villain by Irish republicans for his order to delay the Rising. He’s sometimes been championed falsely as a hero of peace for the same. The truth is that Eoin MacNeill, both as scholar and rebel, recovered for the Irish the dignity of their own history.

  MacNeill was born in 1867, making him older than most of the other men involved in the Rising. As a professor of Early Irish History at the new University College Dublin, he uncovered the story of a Gaelic civilization that waxed as continental Europe went into its Dark Age. He did not brag outrageously, as Thomas Cahill does, that the Irish saved civilization, but it is impossible to imagine Cahill’s bragging without MacNeill’s work. His training in the language
gave him the ability to do the forensic work of tying together Ireland’s collections of genealogies with its collections of annals.

  The story he found was not one of bumbling failure. MacNeill documented the fact that while the Roman Empire collapsed on the Continent, and gave way to fledgling Germanic states, Gaelic civilization flourished in Ireland. It developed a post-Latin literature in the Irish language well ahead of other European languages. Religious men who spoke and wrote in Irish founded monasteries as far away as Mainz in Germany and Bobbio in Italy. MacNeill, almost singlehandedly, had debunked the Irish legend-tellers. The sentimental stories, the ones that made a good product, could be set aside, and replaced with something better, something real.

  What strikes me about MacNeill is the sheer energy behind his toiling, and his ability to resist these mysteriously twinned temptations. To despair of his nation’s history, or to turn it into some cheap product. He traveled the country giving lectures on Irish history. He founded an Irish language printing press business in 1902, and suffered heavy losses with it. He was a journalist, contributing work to several societies dedicated to Ireland’s cultural and Gaelic renaissance at the turn of the century.

  That was his response to the robbery of Ireland: tireless work. He did not lie about the past for reasons of propaganda, like some of his corevolutionaries did. He did not let the bleakness one finds in history cause him to indulge in self-dramatized despair. He worked to describe Ireland to itself, to recover its memory, and to recover its language. He is as much a national hero as any man who fought in the Rising.

  MacNeill’s enemy was not just the English, of course, but the lassitude of the Irish. This is one of the least understood aspects about political nationalism, and I’m surprised this misunderstanding could even grow up in Ireland. Nationalism usually does not spring from the meatheaded conviction that one’s nation is best in every way, but from something like a panicked realization that nobody in authority or around you is taking the nation seriously, that everyone is engaged in some private enterprise, while the common inheritance is being threatened or robbed. It might put on a mask of invincibility, but it does so in full fearful knowledge of the nation’s vulnerability.

  MacNeill never put down his books while pursuing a greater level of self-understanding for his nation. And this, in turn, meant that when the time came, he found himself ready to lead men who might one day fight for Ireland’s freedom. He was able to warn his compatriots against letting slogans do their thinking for them, and criticized those who were “really impelled by a sense of . . . fatalism, or by an instinct of satisfying their own emotions, or escaping from a difficult and complex and trying situation.”

  Was MacNeill’s story of Ireland motivated? Yes, it was. But he somehow resisted the temptation to let his desires and psychological needs fatally distort his perception. Instead he tries to get to the truth as best he can. And this attempt to recover an accurate understanding of his nation, and his place in its history, doesn’t paralyze him, but makes him all the more willing to act and to act bravely.

  He is an example for our age, I think, and for us personally. As I try to plumb our history in these letters, I don’t want to give in to despair on the one side, or an undemanding sentimentality on the other. We cannot help but bring our desires and our ambitions to our understandings, and so I think the only solution is to make sure we desire what is right and good.

  Since I’ve begun considering the problem of revision and motivation, I’ve been going through my mother’s old letters to you. Each one contains this remarkable and brave performance. She would start with the updates, the news. Michael is on to this or that. And then she would lay into you. She would explain, in vivid detail, how every arrangement you proposed, every gesture you offered, was inadequate to the situation at hand. But then, before she came to the end, she would shift her tone. She tried to morally coerce you into “giving it a shot,” because you owed it to me. At the same time, she would distill her anger into something more fragrant, a hint at a depth of feeling she still had for you. Your curse was in being so easy to love.

  Over the years, I notice she shifted to warning you to keep a distance. It was too hard for me, she said, to have a father drop in once every few years. But in truth she was protecting herself as well. And, noticing her feelings, I recruited myself into the project, giving you years of stony silence.

  How will we explain this curious detail about our lives to your grandchild when she comes into this world? How will she come to understand that one grandfather lives twenty minutes up the road and is there in every picture of his daughter’s life, while another granddad lives three thousand miles away and has left so little trace in his son’s life beyond a great pile of words? Your letters, which contain the updates on your household, your thoughts on the passing seasons. Like MacNeill, I’ve learned to decode this wealth of documented evidence. And I’m afraid that I had it all wrong, that these letters, which I once passed over so casually, brim with longing—longing for me—just as my mother’s did for you. That is our history.

  Your son,

  Michael

  III

  Who Made Me

  For men improve with the years;

  And yet, and yet,

  Is this my dream, or the truth?

  O would that we had met

  When I had my burning youth!

  —W. B. Yeats, “Men Improve with the Years”

  Dear Father,

  We feel like we are getting to know this child already, the way she turns over or dances for us as the doctor shakes her awake to observe her on the ultrasound. I had this fear that she would look up at me, and I would be charged with telling her who she was. I’m starting to realize that the fear is hotter the other way. I fear she will look up at me, and I will helplessly reveal who I am, with all my faults becoming plainer to her each day.

  We’re in for it, they tell us, about parenthood. We are getting tired of everyone warning us that the struggles of a new baby will leave us so tired. War metaphors abound. Other parents are “veterans” on their way back from the front lines. An adorable tiny rocking hammock is recast as “the essential weapon” to deploy. If it’s a battle to raise a child, we need reinforcements.

  I suppose you get reinforcement. Not only extended family and friends, but the larger culture raises and forms your children, whether you’d want it or not. A home is a refuge, but it still sits within something larger, a homeland, or a culture. In your absence, my mother had given me this familiarity with Ireland’s story and the high ideals of its national history. And then, this larger culture around her, and I began to deconstruct that story, and it nudged me along in efforts to deconstruct it as well. Deconstruction of this sort was just the thing to do.

  A culture is a funny thing. Somehow it is this collective personality that is constantly feeding you information about itself. It ranks and reranks everything in life—people, objects, and ideas. It turns articles of clothing into symbols of high or low status. It suggests certain ideas and dismisses others. Its judgments become so familiar that it exists like a voice in your head. And yet it is impossible to explain exactly how this happens.

  A culture feeds you even the terms on which you would resist it. The culture that encouraged us to deconstruct the ideals and taboos of Ireland’s past because, as Ireland’s former Taoiseach John Bruton put it, they have “an unhealthy hold upon the living” was the same culture that told me that by doing so, by doing what everyone else was doing, we were defining life on our own terms, and for ourselves.

  So what were our background cultures? Our boyhoods could not have been more different. You had five siblings and two parents at home. You grew up in a tight two-up, two-down in Donnycarney and the streets had hundreds of children in them. The schools that were built to handle this were called “industrial.” One of the most infamous of these, Artane, cast its shadow into your neighborhood. I
n summers you were sent to your grandparents in Monaghan, to avoid the training in criminality available just out your door. Fathers were deputized by God to rule their homes. The Catholic Church of your youth was a spiritual empire, sending Irish emissaries across the sea. It spoke Latin, threw incense generously, and ran the world as you knew it, because the unquenchable fire of hell burbled beneath everything. People you knew would be genuinely afraid of receiving Holy Communion unworthily.

  The heroes of the Easter Rising were still venerated as saints. When you were a child, Ireland’s president and a hero of the rebellion laid a wreath at the jail where his comrades were condemned to death and killed. The life of the nation was serious business. The adult world throbbed with authority and frequently abused it. Maybe Ireland would be poor, but it would be sanctified and creative. This was what one of Ireland’s leading writers calls the myth of Holy Catholic Ireland, a myth that shaped your childhood. A myth that Ireland has spent the last three decades dismantling. The last artifacts of it are eagerly chucked away.

  That world was as distant from mine as medieval France is. I grew up an only child with a single mother. I lived in a series of American suburbs, one seemingly more prosperous than the next. There were dozens of kids in the neighborhoods, not hundreds, and nothing as exciting as criminality. The Church was a friendly ghost. Nobody feared approaching for Communion. God would be merciful, surely. If you were unusually curious and asked about the apparent change of attitude, you would be assured that many theologians thought Hell was empty.

  When I was a child the nation’s president disclosed to us his preference in underwear for a laugh. The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as practicable. At every turn my mother, my teachers, and the Church just sort of gave up and gave in to whatever I wanted. They seemed grateful when a child wasn’t difficult. The constant message of authority figures was that I should be true to myself. I should do what I loved, and I could love whatever I liked. I was the authority. In the benighted past somewhere, there was pain and misery, but baby boomers had largely corrected this for us in their titanic generational battles. This, I would call the myth of liberation. I was raised on this mythology, and it ordered the world around me. The future ought to be bright. This was the end of history, and wasn’t it good?