Looking back on pieces commissioned for the Irish Times to reflect on the 1916 Rising I have been struck with how unqualified many of the respondents have been. I don’t mean that they lacked university degrees.They had an embarrassment of them. BAs, MAs, PhDs. But they knew Sweet Fanny Adams about Easter Week as it happened, its inspiration, the conduct of the insurgents , or its immediate and more long-term consequences.
A prime example was the late novelist John McGahern, who had been a teacher. He wrote about the insurgents firing machine guns from the roof of the GPO. The insurgents never had any machine guns. And service rifles with magazines were as rare among them as hens’ teeth. Their most common weapon was a Mauser, single-shot rifle of 1871 vintage. A very few Peter-the- Painter semi-automatic “Parabellum” pistols were the nearest thing to machine guns which they had.
McGahern then pontificated on De Valera, whom he described as a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation. There were seven signatories, all of whom were shot dead by the British. De Valera played a leading role in twentieth century Ireland. But I’d be surprised if the most zealous Fianna Fail partisan ever claimed he rose from the dead.
One of McGahern’s novels was banned by the Censor. Unfairly, perhaps because it wasn’t touted as Gospel.But presenting fiction as history should be penalised. McGahern lost his job as a teacher – but for a lesser failure.
And, then, there’s, God save us all! Fintan O’Toole. Fintan remembered being 8 years old on the Rising’s Golden Jubilee in 1966 and seeing the movie The Magnificent Seven, starring Yul Brynner. But Brynner had more hairs on his head than O’Toole had clues about 1916 when his article appeared in 1991 on its 75th Anniversary. O’Toole knew little more about 1966.
The Irish Times reported on Easter Monday 1966 that over 900 insurgent veterans were present at the GPO for the Jubilee the previous day. Approximately half of all the insurgents who’d been “out” in Easter Week 1916. Cheering them on, for the Jubilee, were citizens – former “British Subjects” who remembered Ireland, before, during and after Easter Week 1916 and had had fifty years to reflect on it. These older citizens, their children and grandchildren had endorsed the Rising in every General Election from 1918 to 1965 -a fact whichhas not, to this day, occurred to Fintan O’Toole.
(As early as June 1916 Sir John Maxwell, wrote (in effect) that in six days fighting the insurgents had achieved more than the Irish Party had achieved in parliamentary manoeuvres in thirty five years and that if a General Election were called on the morrow “Sinn Fein” would sweep the board. Though Sinn Fein Fein had not staged the Rising, Nationalists who differed from John Redmond were known, generically as Sinn Feiners. Maxwell was the General who had crushed the rising in April 1916 and shot its leaders in May 1916. My sources is “Fatal Path” by Ronan Fanning.)
The IRISH TIMES carries a weekly column headed RITE AND REASON which might more aptly be called TRIPE AND TREASON. A couple of years back a retired Senior Civil Servant (from the IRISH CIVIL SERVICE!) wrote attacking the 1916 Rising because, in the 1960s he had suffered corporal punishment in Colaiste Mhuire under the Irish Christian Brothers in Dublin. Apparently he never met an Englishman who’d been to a Prep School or “Public School” as most Senior British Civil Servants, Judges and Top People have experienced them, nor read their memoirs or biographies.
Whilst Britain’s Navy was famously celebrated for “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” her Prep and Public schoolboys were subjected to Sodomy and the Lash whether they liked it or not. I’ve just read a memoir of Jeremy Paxman, and it reads like a transcription of Evelyn Waugh in some passages. And neither Paxman nor Waugh campaigned to denigrate their country’s cherished glories. I know Englishmen who went to prep schools or public schools and they suffered or witnessed the old customs until not long ago. And all schools, well into the 1970s had corporal punishment. In fact Ireland criminalised corporal punishment in schools before the UK did.
Friends of the Society of Jesus surely wept at Father Seumas Murphy S.J.’s contribution to RITE AND REASON. I don’t know whether celibate clerics can collectively be described as FAUX PAS, but that particular Professor of Philosophy, presented as a Wacky Scholar and not much of a Gentleman.
He was writing in 2016 and he started with corner-boy sneers at Pearse and the executed Insurgent leaders of 1916, He contrasted Pearse with Daniel O’Connell, to Pearse’s detriment, with the assertion that O’Connell had never shot a man.
Strange as it may seem I have never seen it claimed that Pearse shot anyone. The British Courtmartial which condemned him to death never
heard that charge. However every biography of Daniel O’Connell asserts that he killed John d’Esterre with a pistol shot in County Kildare in 1815 in a duel. O’Connell was a Barrister, a member of a scholarly profession, and considered himself a gentleman. His code of honour demanded he accept a challenge.
What code Seumas Murphy SJ follows I cannot imagine.
O’ Connell was arrested in Ostend later in 1815 on his way to meet another challenge, from Sir Robert Peel. It is suspected Peel arranged for O’Connell’s arrest, being not quite a gentleman.
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