“Resistance to the Act of Union will always remain for us, as long as that Act lasts, a sacred duty; and the methods of resistance will remain for us merely a question of expediency.
Resistance by force of arms would be absolutely justifiable if it were possible.”
The words were those of John Redmond. They surprised me when I found them today in Dorothy Macardle’s “IRISH REPUBLIC” a masterful chronicle of the years 1911-1925, which I have dipped into but never read in full.
The words should not have surprised me, for one of Redmond’s followers, Tom Kettle, when raising funds for the party in America had shared a platform in New York’s Carnegie Hall with the Dynamitard Terrorist O’Donovan Rossa and Edward O’Meagher Condon. O’Meagher Condon had stood in the dock with Allen,Larkin and O’Brien, hanged for the Smashing of the Van in Manchester in 1867.
It’s a small world, for I met Tom Kettle’s brother Charles Kettle, in the Land Commision HQ in Dublin when he worked as an engineer, as did my father who was a much younger man.
Tom Kettle’s wife was the sister of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s mother. The Cruiser and I were fellow-travellers on the Hill of Howth Tram. Tom Kettle’s poem “Reason in Rhyme” praises terrorism, The Cruiser wrote defending terrorism used by subjugated people against their oppressors. Tom Kettle, like John Redmond, thought the road to Irish Home Rule would best be served by wading through the blood of Germans, Austrians, Turks and others who never harmed Ireland. Redmond fell to German bullets in France in 1916. But not before one of his wife’s sisters was made a widow when her husband, Ireland’s most prominent pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was murdered on the orders of Captain Bowen-Colthurst in Portobello Barracks, Dublin. The murdered man was Ireland’s leading feminist and had added his wife’s family name “Sheehy” to his own. My maternal grandmother had relations called Skeffington in the North of Ireland and I strongly suspect a family connection.
Dorothy Macardle was a near neighbour of ours on the Hill of Howth and some furniture of hers was bought at an auction when she died. Had she been of another gender she would have been described as a Renaissance man. She was on hunger strike and assaulted during the Civil war: a poet, playwright, teacher, internationalist humanitarian, and broadcaster. Some of her work of fiction were successful films and are occasionally screened on British TV. But her furniture suggests that she gave most of her earnings to charity.
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