Without context quotations attributed to individuals are bunk.
 
Why would anyone say of a British monarch  – “there’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo.”
 
I quote an unexplained line from “Ulysses as History”  by Daniel Mulhall, in the current
issue of History Ireland. It is a superb publication. But the article cited is unworthy of it
and its author, a distinguished former Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the United
States, Germany and Malaysia.
 
It would help the reader to know that Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, is set in 1904 the year
that Britain and France formed a conspiratorial pact to crush Germany. An Irishman
in the British Colonial Service, Roger Casement, was later to expose and denounce
its development as a crime against Europe and in 1915 the senior British Diplomat
in Christiana (Oslo) plotted and paid to have him murdered, more than a year before
that aim was accomplished in London.
 
The Conspiratorial Pact – the Entente Cordiale, was the latest news when the young and rather naive MP, David Lloyd George called on a former Prime Minister,Lord Rosebery, for a couple of days visit. Lloyd George recalled the occasion in the first lines of his War Memoirs which were to cover 1,100 pages.
 
“His first greeting to me was: ‘ Well I  suppose you are as pleased as the rest of them  with this French agreement?’  I assured him I was delighted that our snarling and scratching relations with France had come to an end at last. He replied: ‘You are all wrong.It means war with Germany in the end!’ “
 
It may be of interest that the year before the Entente that Erskine Childers, a convinced
Imperialist fuelled the coming catastrophes (virtually every international and intra-national squabble since arose from “the Great War”) with the outlandish yarn “The Riddle of the Sands.”
 
The Quotation from Ulysses has been attributed to Michael Cusack. one of the founders
 of the GAA. Cusack’s biographer, Marcus de Burca, disputes that and traces its origin to Richard Ellman, the American biographer of James Joyce.
 
Daniel Mulhall seems to attribute the decline in the fortunes of John Stanislaus Joyce to
the Parnellite split. I understand he was a bum who wasted inherited wealth.
He came from an industrious and wealthy builder’s family, and, some 65years ago I discovered a postcard sent from Fermoy to Kilkenny in 1904, showing the magnificent bridge over the river Blackwater built by his father, which still stands  The  postcard is now on permanent loan to the Thomas MacDonagh centre in Cloughjordan.
 
It was written in Irish to MacDonagh’s nine-year old God-daughter , Eibhlin Ni Cinneide
at The High School, Kilkenny, run by my Grandfather, Patrick Kennedy. The families had been next-door neighbours in Kilkenny. Also on display in the MacDonagh Centre are the awards for gallantry in the British forces earned by local men of Protestant families. I mention this because Daniel Mulhall has declared in Liverpool University that the gallantry of Irishmen who served in the British forces had been airbrushed out of   Irish History.
 
 It’s a pity Daniel Mulholland mentions only Tom Kettle amongst Joyce’s friends who
 suffered a violent death. Was not Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Ireland’s leading Pacifist
and champion of Women’s Suffrage, murdered by a British Officer, who went unpunished under the rule of Prime Minister Asquith , who believed that suffrage would
be a National Disaster. And John Redmond and John Dillon, the leader of Kettle’s party
equally anti-feminist.
 
A pity too that “Miss Ivors” in “THE DEAD” is not identified as Kathy Sheehy, future sister-in-law of the murdered Sheehy Skeffington, and future mother of Conor Cruise
O’Brien who as scholar and diplomat had a glittering career before falling from grace and greatness.
 
Joyce’s close friends included George Clancy, depicted as Micheal Davin in Portrait of
the Artist as a young man. He was elected Mayor of Limerick in 1921 and was
foully murdered  in his own home at night in front of his wife on 7th March by a British
Officer, who that same night murdered his immediate predecessor Michael O’Callaghan.
 
It is unlikely that Joyce was less aware or saddened by  the murder of  three of his friends by Crown Forces than that of a fourth in battle. Robert Lynd wrote a tribute to
Tom Kettle recalling, a poem “Reason in Rhyme” which he says  expresses Kettle’s 
 sentiments to the end.
 
In early 1922, before the Civil War, Desmond Fitzgerald called on Joyce in Paris, seeking approval to nominate him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though Joyce declined it does not seem that he was really alienated from the Sinn Fein struggle.
 
My Concerns with Daniel Mulhall’s slants on history have been raised in many of
my BLOGS OVER THE YEARS
 
“TOM KETTLE – A HOUSEHOLD NAME IN IRELAND?”
 
  “GALLIPOLI,  TWO GERMAN OFFICERS AND THE FOG OF MILITARY HISTORY”
 
   “SCHOOLS OF VIOLENCE, BROTHERS AND ARMS”
 
    “SERMONS IN STONES”