About twenty years ago I was given a present of a BBC Diary.
It listed Holy Days and Feast Days for Christians, Jews, Moslems
and other denominations, and the countries where they were public
days of rest. Virtually all Western Europeans had public days of rest
which coincided with Catholic Holidays of Obligation. That included
Secular and anti-Clerical France. As I well knew having attended Mass
when bands were playing in the streets outside in an apparent attempt
to irritate the faithful.
This phenomenon was unknown in De Valera’s Ireland, where only
Christmas Day was shared with other Europeans as a day free from
servile work. St Patrick’s Day was a Holy Day of our own and a day
free from servile work. While I lived there the pubs were closed on that day,
the result of a campaign by Conradh na Gaeilge in the 1890s. In
Johannesburg’s Soweto, young Africans suppressed the Shebeens
to speed the destruction of the Apartheid regime.
I write this on 29th June dedicated to the commemoration of St Peter and
St Paul.
As I was at a Christian Brothers’ School I had the day off in but my
father, who worked for the State, did not, on this date in 1949.
My father, an engineer, worked as an Inspector with the Land Commission.
His territory covered all of the counties of Wicklow and Wexford and some
of County Carlow. Often he would take me, alone, or with my four siblings
along for the ride, He had, for some time, an 1934 model Y, Baby Ford. When
it gave up the ghost, hire cars had not been around. So although he had a very
modest salary he would hire a car AND DRIVER and claim expenses.
Some car and an even more interesting driver. The Car was a gleaming Dodge
V8 about 18 feet long, and as we got out of it we probably appeared to the locals
as Lords’ bastards. In the villages they kept British Summer time in June but in
the mountains, perhaps 3 miles away. they calculated times by the sun – like
the men who built Newgrange.
Anyhow the Driver, Maurice Collins had been an IRB man, in on the planning
of the 1916 Rising. The more Senior IRB man Bulmer Hobson had been left
out of the planning and Maurice had been ordered to hold him at pistol point
but in the confusion had been left with that task after the Rising started. Maurice
had been relieved of that duty by Sean T O’Ceallaigh, who was President of Ireland
from 1945 to 1959. The Provisional Government of Easter Week intended, if militarily successful, to appoint Sean T as President because he was an elected Alderman of Dublin Corporation with financial and administrative experience.
Sean T was a very dapper man and had ordered from his tailor a beautiful officer’s uniform befitting his rank in the Volunteers. The tailor did not complete it and O’Ceallaigh escaped during the first round-up of Insurgents, and thus avoided a firing squad.
His memoir, in Irish, is brilliantly and hilariously written.
During the ‘Tan War Maurice Collins kept a tobacco shop cum guerrilla post office
in Parnell Street. Messages from and for Micheal Collins’s intelligence unit warning
of enemy plans and indicating which agents should be shot landed on his desk which
had a concealed drawer designed by the master builder Batt O’Connor, who was a TD.
Batt employed as a Carpenter, Sean Moylan, whose memoir reveals one of the most
humane, clever, balanced and brave men to grace this planet. Sean Moylan was elected
to the Second Dail Eireann, and was later a Fianna Fail Minister for Education.
On 29 June 1950 I first heard the word Korea where war had broken out, as Maurice Collins and my father discussed it.
Maurice gave an account of his revolutionary career to the Bureau of Military History.
I don’t think he took sides over the Articles of Agreement, Lloyd George’s gangster
offer which some Irish delegates couldn’t refuse.
At one time during the war of Independence Maurice Collins promised his Maker that he would abstain from meat on Wednesdays (as well as Fridays) if he survived a crisis.
He honoured his pledge.
Further reflections on a saner Ireland to follow.
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