My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

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  Even before they fired a shot, it became clear to those leading the Easter Rising that their revolutionary plot was botched. On the preceding Good Friday, Sir Roger Casement was captured off the coast of Kerry by British forces while trying to deliver twenty thousand German guns to Irish rebels. His capture alerted the head of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, to the plot unfolding among his men. The shock was horrible. The paramilitary he supposedly commanded was about to be hijacked by a tiny faction hell-bent on bloody rebellion. Some of the troops themselves didn’t know their planned “drills” that Easter Sunday would end in violence.

  MacNeill was not opposed to a violent rebellion in theory, but he took Casement’s capture as evidence that this rebellion would fail and so be immoral. He issued a countermanding order in the Sunday newspapers, informing all units of the Volunteers that drills and movements had been canceled that day. He also ordered Michael Joseph O’Rahilly to drive all over the country to give word that the Rising was off.

  In the heart of this moment, a father looks at his daughter, and is unmanned. Nora Connolly, then eighteen, went to see her father, James, the socialist commander of the Irish Citizen Army. “I said to him, ‘Daddy we’re not going to fight?’ He turned to me and two big tears rolled down his cheeks. He says, ‘If we don’t fight, Nora, we can only pray for an earthquake to come and swallow us and our shame.’”

  Funny thing about Connolly: Although he professed materialism, he believed that on a single moment of action he and his fellows would be judged. He was a socialist, but he had nothing of the wonk about him.

  The military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood settled on launching the Rising, even if just in Dublin, the next day. They had good reason to go ahead. When word got out about a canceled rebellion, the Volunteers would be suppressed. They had some flimsier reasons, like the hope that if they could hold out long enough, the whole country would be inspired to follow. But the decisive factor was that after all they had said and done, their sense of honor forbade them to go home. The cause of an independent Ireland was too dear and too fragile. It might be lost if they did not act in that hour.

  A year before, Pearse had given the oration at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa, the militant Irish nationalist who, decades earlier, had been part of the Fenian rebellions, a series of doomed attempts in the 1960s to win an Irish Republic through a campaign of violence in Ireland, England, and even the Americas. Before his death, Rossa spent years rotting in an English prison. Pearse’s panegyric connected the last several Irish rebellions together into an apostolic succession. And he placed his generation next in line after the Fenians:

  Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

  Pearse’s speech was heard far beyond the graveside. Men and boys recited it in train stations and alongside the pitch at hurling matches.

  Late on Easter Sunday, the O’Rahilly, as he was known, arrived at Liberty Hall covered in grime to beg Pearse and Connolly to desist. They heard his case but were not convinced. The next morning, when the sound of gunfire began to fill the city, the O’Rahilly presented himself in uniform. “It is madness, but it is glorious madness,” he said.

  As a piece of military planning, the Rising in Dublin gave plenty of evidence of having been drawn up by a poet. The rebels started digging trenches in St. Stephen’s Green on Monday morning, but trenches are of little use when surrounded by tall buildings. The Shelbourne Hotel was used by British marksmen to shoot out the rebels there. Many of the fighting men spent much of the Rising hunkered down in buildings, with no fight to join. Along with the glorious madness, there was the usual sort as well. A gunfight in a hospital ward full of moaning patients and quaking nuns. A British cavalry charge bearing down on commuters. Rebels begging Dublin’s poor not to disgrace Ireland’s great hour with their looting.

  Probably the worst disaster of planning was their failure to seize Dublin Castle, the seat of English rule for seven hundred years. Connolly’s Citizen Army made a little charge at it. They killed one man protecting the gate (an Irishman), but ran away under fire. Had they done even cursory snooping beforehand, they would have known that just six men guarded a castle whose capture would have been a grand symbolic victory.

  In the midst of the bumbling, there were moments of real daring. During the battle, two men, Michael Malone and Jim Grace, holed up in the bathroom of 25 Northumberland Road. Just these two pinned down a whole column of British reinforcements with sniper fire. Confused by the sounds of echoes and ricochets, the British thought they were being fired at by hundreds of men. A few more Irishmen came into the battle from a position on Mount Street. Finally, the British stormed number 25 and shot Malone. Grace escaped out the window. There were two hundred thirty British casualties to four Irish. You and I, not so long ago, stood on this very street watching people making their way home past number 25, unconscious that they were tromping through the site of Ireland’s Thermopylae.

  Why was the O’Rahilly inspired to report for duty by the sound of gunfire in Dublin? Why did the Irish come to accept this small revolutionary putsch as representative of their aspirations? The typical Irish attitude of self-deprecation, of gombeen self-abasement, is a dam holding back deep waters. The Rising dynamited that dam. The New York Times tells me the dead generations could not demur from the Rising launched in their name. In fact, I now know that the dead generations were clamoring for it.

  One of Ireland’s younger historians, Fearghal McGarry, examines the testimonies of common people who participated in and witnessed the Rising. Men and women of all classes had been formed by nationalist histories and songs of rebellion. Many of them grew up with pictures of nationalist heroes like Wolfe Tone in their homes. “Thanks to my mother’s great fund of Irish songs and ballads, I was familiar with Ireland’s struggle for independence long before I could read or write,” said one man, one among millions. The Rising resonated with the ancient, near-liturgical repeatings of Irish history. The Gaelic clans that fought the Normans, the confederacy that battled the Tudors, the Fenians who launched themselves at the empire. These were all the antetypes, anticipating a rebellion that would one day succeed. A ballad history of songs and stories taught the Irish to know their deliverers when they came.

  One of the obstacles for Irish nationalists was that the status of being a “beaten race” caused the Irish not to take their country all that seriously, at least in public. You could sing the old songs in private, but being a “mad Irishman” was treated as an affectation. And yet, here in this one place were serious-looking Irishmen, and elevated words about Irish history. C. S. Andrews recalled the effect on his teenage imagination of seeing the Volunteers at O’Donovan Rossa’s graveside commemoration and in demonstrations in the autumn of 1915:

  For me they were a wonderful sight. I was sure that they were going to set Ireland free and avenge the Croppies of ’98, and I was reminded that one of the few successes of the ’67 Fenian Rising was at Stepaside and Glencullen where the manoeuvres were taking place. I lay in a field under the Three Rock Mountain gazing over the beautiful countryside and imagining British battleships steaming into the bay and being blown to bits by guns which, in my imagination, I placed at strategic points around the hills.

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  There was resistance to this romantic view, of course. Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” is not really about the way the rebels had “changed, changed utterly” the living stream of
Irish history, but how the view of the men who had been in the Rising had been changed by the fight. These once-annoying zealots and poets were now martyrs. “What if excess of love bewildered them till they died?” Yeats asked.

  An excess of love? I think there is something about human nature, or everyday life, that makes us suspect that whatever is real lacks meaning. And whatever is meaningful is not grounded in reality. We are tempted to think we are simply deluding ourselves, bewildered, and imposing our dreamed-up ideas on matter, which is indifferent. That suspicion may be operating in the background when we lazily dismiss a political idea as mere narrative. It is working behind and through all that stupid baby advice that gives up on describing a parent’s love as it is, and instead searches for some social statistic to justify it. It works on us when we put so many layers of ideology between ourselves and the past. As if the one lesson of history is that the past has nothing to teach us. Yeats could imagine a love of Ireland that inspired men to worship her through his stage plays. But to actually die for her seemed to him excessive. A woman Yeats loved understood the Rising better, and rebuked him with her judgment: “Tragic dignity has returned to Ireland.”

  We are used to conceiving of the nation almost exclusively as an administrative unit. A nation is measured by its GDP, its merit is discovered in how it lands on international rankings for this or that policy deliverable. A nation may have a language, but the priority is to learn the lingua franca of global business. Our idea of doing something for the nation is reduced to something almost exclusively technical. Policy wonks are the acknowledged legislators of our world.

  But there is nothing technical about the Rising. I see in the Rising that a nation cannot live its life as a mere administrative district or as a shopping mall; nations have souls. It’s a virtue when poetry colonizes our politics, even if today the situation is reversed. The life of a nation is never reducible to mere technocracy, just as the home cannot be, no matter how much we try to make it so. I see that nationality is something you do, even with your body, even with your death. I see that a history of plunder does not oblige those plundered to despair; it obliges them to hope, and to act on that hope.

  By the time they surrendered on Friday, Dublin had the look of desolation. The British soldiers were appalled to discover the small number of men who had put up such a fight against them. And they were nonetheless impressed by the military bearing and dignity of the rebels. The Volunteers took pride in themselves, marching in columns, led by their officers, many of whom had given them a kind of valedictory speech at the end. “We have won what we have fought for,” Éamonn Ceannt said to his group. “You may not see it now, but you will see it soon.” A wonk would never recognize that a losing fight can be a victory in itself. Perhaps only an Irishman can see it. “We were satisfied that all things that were possible had been done. There was nothing to be ashamed of.” Yes, in the eyes of many of the onlookers, the Dubliners who spat on them, it was madness. Glorious nonetheless.

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  While marching into the custody of British soldiers, some of the Irish Volunteers saw the body of the O’Rahilly. There on Moore Street, lying in his own blood, was the man who had traveled the country, carrying with him the calculated view, the wonk’s view. And yet, he let himself be converted from ambivalence to action. Knowing what was next for him, he found a letter from his own son in his pocket and wrote on the back of it:

  Written after I was shot—Darling Nancy, I was shot leading a rush up Moore Street took refuge in a doorway. While I was there I heard the men pointing out where I was & I made a bolt for the lane I am in now. I got more [than] one bullet I think. Tons and tons of love dearie to you & to the boys & to Nell & Anna. It was a good fight anyhow.

  A beaten race does not produce men like this.

  It’s almost impossible to describe the effect on me to even read about deeds like this. I cannot imagine the effect on others who saw the Volunteers marching so manfully into the hands of their captors. You can’t help but ask yourself, Would I do the same? Perhaps that is a boyish thought, like those of C.S. Andrews.

  There is a way of doing things that is, in itself, persuasive. Sometimes just doing them is its own argument. You can look at the Rising and the cultural revival and say that Irish nationalism, like many nationalisms, is an ideological technology for gaining sovereignty. But that seems to me to take things to a level of abstraction that makes them false. Ireland is a nation. We know this because the English treated it like a foreign country despite an act of union. Ireland is a nation because men in uniforms marched and died for it. Ireland will be recognized as a republic because Patrick Pearse and the signatories declared it so, and died to make it so.

  All the nationalist ballads that men sung aloud might have made them feel silly in the years before the Rising. But it was these ballads that allowed them to know when tragic dignity returned to Ireland.

  A rebel of an earlier generation, Thomas Davis, saw exactly how it would work.

  A Ballad History is welcome to childhood, from its rhymes, its high colouring, and its aptness to memory. As we grow into boyhood, the violent passions, the vague hopes, the romantic sorrow of patriot ballads are in tune with our fitful and luxuriant feelings. In manhood we prize the condensed narrative, the grave firmness, the critical art, and the political sway of ballads. And in old age they are doubly dear; the companions and reminders of our life, the toys and teachers of our children and grandchildren.

  These men and women allowed themselves to be refashioned from something outside themselves. They were ambitious men, of course, but they let the words and deeds of the past weigh on them and refashion them. When two men hide in a bathroom and pin down a column of soldiers, when a man joins the glorious madness of a doomed battle to preserve the pride of his nationality, when men march happily into the hands of their captors, and commend the executors, a dying nation rises to life.

  Could self-made men do this? Or men who are clever, but think nobility itself a delusion? Could it be done by men who suspected that the world and what we do in it is, at bottom, meaningless?

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  I’ve only in the last year come to understand the weight of your words to me. I brought my daughter home just two weeks ago; you welcomed me into your home for the first time just last year. My wife and I told ourselves we would go to Ireland and do it like tourists. I had told her about how beautiful the west of the country was. How much Galway and the Aran Islands had impressed themselves on me in my childhood. In some ways, we would retrace my mother’s trips around the island. I stood in the harbor where the Irish resistance was beaten in 1602. We toured around the ruins at the Rock of Cashel, where in 1843 three hundred thousand Irish men and women gathered to demand repeal of Ireland’s union with Great Britain. In town, with you, we passed by the sites of the Rising.

  All of that would have been good enough. But we took you up on the new offer to stay with you part of the time. My half brother vacated his bedroom so that the two of us could pile in. You had always written to me to tell me of my siblings and how they were getting on in life. And you passed on their greetings and best wishes for me. I never knew whether to believe it. But now, for the first time, I saw that on the wall of their childhood home there were pictures of me. My sisters explained to me, around your table, how their friends and teachers often thought they were making something up, with their talk of an American brother. On your refrigerator was a picture of all of us together, on that night the Yankees lost it all in New York. Our first dinner as a family. At night, you’d walk us down the hill, and we’d all tuck into your local haunts. Your friends would greet you, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, you introduced me. “This is my son Michael,” from America. Maybe they’d raise an eyebrow. Or joke about what other secrets you might be keeping. And then, each and every one would say what Irish people so often said to
Yanks who arrive in their midst: “Welcome home.”

  I didn’t yet feel like I had any right to Ireland as home. The distance that opened up between us on the hurling pitch has haunted me ever since. But, as I bound around our little home, amidst the anonymous suburbs of New York, with this treasure in my arms, I am singing these songs, about deeds done on the Shannon’s waves, or in the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra, and the distance is starting to close.

  And something else is transformed now too. You’d missed my baptism, as you would miss all those events marking my life. But when your granddaughter was born, you got the call within the first hours. You heard her crying. I told you the songs I sang. And you told me that your father, the grandfather I never knew, would appreciate that I sang “The Patriot Game,” the one featuring his home county. And soon you’ll be here for her baptism, and she’ll learn to speak the words “granddad” and “Ireland” in full certainty that these names are real, close, and that they are a source of shelter and love for her.

  Your son,

  Michael

  VI

  Father Tongue

  A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. . . . To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest.