I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Louis MacNeice

Escaping Lockdown with WB Yeats

Joseph M Hassett writes: Part of poetry’s magic is that words written in one era can speak directly to new readers in a subsequent age.

WB Yeats’s “The Stare’s Nest By My Window” is just such a poem. Written nearly a century ago, it speaks directly to the fear and anxiety we suffer while locked in ‑ physically and psychologically ‑ by Covid-19.Yeats experienced similar emotions in the summer of 1922 while isolated in his tower in rural Galway, surrounded by the violence and uncertainty of the Civil War.

His poem sets the scene in all too recognisable terms:

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty.

Yeats found the perfect metaphor to express the balm for which his circumstances cried out when he spotted an empty bird’s nest by his window: “O honey-bees,” he wrote, “Come build in the empty house of the stare.”

He elaborated on the origin of these lines in a note to the published version of the address he delivered upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature a year later. The honey-bees seem almost to have been willed into existence as an antidote to bitterness, unhappiness and uncertainty. He responded to these circumstances with “an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature”.

He told how a “stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole beside my window”. Presently, “a strange thing happened. I began to smell honey in places where honey could not be, at the end of a stone passage or at some windy turn of the road …” He wrote his plea to the honey-bees, he said, “out of the feeling of the moment”.

Yeats enwrapped his concluding invocation of the honey-bees in lines whose cadence and rhyme fix the plea in memory:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Seventy-two years after Yeats’s 1923 Nobel Lecture, Seamus Heaney used his own Nobel address to breathe new life into his predecessor’s metaphor. Heaney’s extensive discussion of “The Stare’s Nest by my Window” included a compelling observation on Yeats’s ability to distil the emotions surrounding an experience and preserve them in memorable language. “Yeats’s work’, he said, “does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.” Commenting on how the form of Yeats’s poem solidifies its meaning, Heaney instanced the way in which the trio of forces – “build”, “house” and “empty” – is “held in equilibrium by the triple rhyme of ‘fantasies’ and ‘enmities’ and ‘honey-bees”’.

The message so memorably encoded in Yeats’s poem has vital meaning today. Replacing bitter political fantasies with bee-like co-operation is the path to sweetness and light.

Eavan Boland’s 1967 poem “Yeats in Civil War” beautifully captures the earlier poet’s achievement. Preceded by an epigraph quoting his account of smelling honey in places where honey could not be, Boland’s poem addresses Yeats directly, first situating him closed in by his tower, then describing his miraculous escape via the creative imagination:

Somehow you arranged your escape
Aboard a spirit-ship which every day
Hoisted sail out of fire and rape,
And on that ship your mind was stowaway.

Her poem concludes:

… Whatever we may learn
You are its sum, struggling to survive ‑
A fantasy of honey your reprieve.

21/5/2020

Joseph Hassett’s new book, Yeats Now: Echoing into Life, will be published by Lilliput later this year. Image of Thoor Ballylee from yeatsthoorballylee.org

Sunningdale: Trundling On

Connal Parr writes: As an historian, as well as the grandson of one of the founding members of the SDLP (Paddy Devlin), I would like to add briefly to Hugh Logue’s recent exchange with John Swift, published in the Dublin Review of Books blog https://drb.ie/blog/the-critics/2020/05/05/sunningdale-and-the-council-of-ireland-an-exchange

Hugh should be aware that, whatever his equivocations, his quote was seized on by Loyalists opposed to Sunningdale and the power-sharing Executive. It was a serious misstep because it allowed such Unionists, some of whom did indeed object to power-sharing in and of itself, to justify their rejection of Sunningdale. Politics so often concerns framing, optics, persuasion and delivery. It was a gift to those who said ‘no’, and to this extent Swift was correct to pinpoint the speech in his initial review.

On May 19th, 2014, a conference on the UWC Strike took place at Queen’s University Belfast, with speakers including the late Glenn Barr (de facto leader of the stoppage), Ken Bloomfield, the late Maurice Hayes, Austin Currie and Nell McCafferty among others. As a co-organiser of the event, I arranged for the recording of the talks and discussions that followed, during which Barr commented:

Every time I got into any form of difficulty with the television interviewers about the Council of Ireland meaning nothing, I just used to point towards Hugh Logue. I said why don’t you ask Hugh Logue what the Council of Ireland means to him? It’s the ‘vehicle that’s going to trundle Unionists into a United Ireland’.

With characteristic insight and humour, Maurice Hayes immediately followed:

You know the interesting thing I often thought about that Glenny? Brian Faulkner came back from Sunningdale and said this was our bulwark for the Unionist people; “our bulwark” against being sucked into a united Ireland. Then Hugh Logue came out and said this is “the vehicle that will trundle us into a united Ireland” [sic]. You know the sad thing about it is? The Catholics believed Faulkner and the Loyalists believed Hugh Logue! (laughter). (Recordings available – https://sluggerotoole.com/2014/05/22/ulster-workers-council-strike-the-strike-which-brought-down-sunningdale/

For what it’s worth, my grandfather was the SDLP minister most wary of the Council of Ireland, in large part because he was aware that it would weaken Faulkner’s ability to sell the agreement to the Unionist base: “Look, we’ve got to catch ourselves on here. Brian Faulkner is being nailed to a cross. There is no way Faulkner can sell this” (Paddy Devlin, quoted in Barry White, John Hume [1984], p152). Hugh’s comment demonstrably made Faulkner’s position harder, hampering the settlement that Faulkner, Hume and my grandfather, among many others, helped negotiate.

1973 in Northern Ireland was a trying time for anyone, especially in public life. It is understandable that errors were made on all sides. As a man with a distinguished career of public service, Hugh Logue should be able to own his historical mistake.

See also https://drb.ie/blog/comment/2020/04/22/sf-and-violence-an-exchange

Memories of Eavan Boland

Richard Bourke writes: My memories of Eavan Boland are mostly rooted in the 1980s. For almost a decade I saw her regularly, up to every fortnight, in her Dublin home. It was a relatively brief portion of her seventy-five years, yet a formative period for me. And on reflection it must have been a key moment in Boland’s development. After I sent her an appreciative note about her fourth collection – In Her Own Image (1980) – she invited me to visit her just outside Dundrum, about a mile from my family home near Sandyford. It was a thrilling prospect for me, then just a teenager: an encounter with a dedicated writer. The experience, moreover, didn’t disappoint. Boland was open, serious and articulate. She had an acuteness and authority but remained generous and accommodating. Kevin Casey, her husband, was genial and witty. Boland was a Yeatsian, she informed me at that first meeting, and was less attracted by the work of TS Eliot. I preferred Eliot, though I stood corrected. From that date forward, as the decade progressed, we often sat in the kitchen or sitting room of her suburban house discussing her work or, more expansively, the literary past.

Often as her daughters played nearby in the neighbourhood, her compact three-bedroom house squatting under Dublin hills seemed to me a literary salon for two. Arriving there in the 1970s from the bustle of the town, she had shifted from the centre to the outskirts, leaving behind what she later called the “last European city”, which she also dubbed the ultimate “literary smallholding”. But she brought something of the enchantment of that smallholding with her, now encapsulated in a remoter and more compressed environment.

Francis Stuart, who lived in the vicinity, a stone’s throw from the Central Mental Hospital, which in those days was still called the Dundrum Asylum, once said to me that her move into the suburbs had been a mistake. What he meant was that the writer was unsuited to a domestic life. His model was Emily Brontë, and his idea was that the artist should be agitated and afflicted, removed from all the comforts of bourgeois existence. Boland certainly cherished middle class stability, but her creative ambition was driven by obsession. She once remarked that having committed everything to that cause she now had “nothing to lose”.

It was obvious that she pursued her vocation with devotion and sacrifice. She offered a model of constant determination. Being in her company opened a window on intellectual life, albeit viewed through a narrow lens. The culture she esteemed was exclusively literary, in the twentieth century sense of the term. Other pursuits were promptly relegated to the margins. Philosophy and history were overlooked or downgraded, as they were in the wider artistic milieu. Literature was looked on as a secular religion. Boland could be forbidding and aloof, but at that time she spoke loquaciously about her concerns: her anxiety to legitimise new subjects for the lyric, her relationship to exile and the national literature, the role of history in continuing to occlude forgotten pasts, her role as a woman writer.

After In Her Own Image came Night Feed (1982), and then The Journey (1986). They appeared against the backdrop of upheavals in politics and major shifts in Irish social life. It was a decade of recession and unemployment, leading inexorably to new waves of emigration. Massive borrowing to fund current expenditure had steadily escalated, bringing the country to the brink of bankruptcy. While Thatcher ruled Britain and Reagan the United States, corruption in high office in Ireland appeared systemic and ineradicable. During this period, birth control was subject to family planning restrictions, and there was a constitutional prohibition on divorce. Church attendance soared; homophobia was endemic. Briefly, with the 1981 hunger strikes, the Northern crisis threatened to engulf the South, poisoning the atmosphere even as it receded. A grim foreboding checked every expectation of improvement.

The situation was less ominous in the south Dublin suburbs. Boland had resigned from her post as a lecturer in Trinity College Dublin to devote herself to poetry and later to raise a family. By the time I came to know her, she radiated unstinting commitment to her craft. She also possessed considerable learning about its history. This fund of knowledge was matched by an inclusive taste. She could speak with equal eloquence about the Elizabethan lyric and Wallace Stevens; about Milton’s Lycidas and Samson Agonistes; about Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. She often returned to Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy, though the Augustans rarely – possibly never – figured. Wordsworth’s Prelude was a pinnacle, so too were the odes of Keats. Conversation ranged from “tragic vision” to the “poetic self” and the “ethics of aesthetics”.

Inevitably, contemporary poetry held a fascination for Boland, mainly British and American. William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and John Ashbery were touchstones. Adrienne Rich won her abiding admiration, though she rejected her separatism. Sylvia Plath, by comparison, she described as “flawed”. She treasured Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin, but not Ted Hughes. She was also keenly focused on the Irish scene – on Patrick Kavanagh and the early Thomas Kinsella, on Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney. She credited the artistry of Heaney above all, almost grudgingly impressed by the scale of his achievement. She pored over Station Island when it appeared in 1984 even as she noted the author’s aptitude as a literary politician. Her range of reference was therefore largely Anglophone, though I vividly recall her being impressed by John Banville’s appreciation of Paul Celan.

The approach to literature was different back then. The essays of TS Eliot were compulsory reading. People earnestly debated the “dissociation of sensibility”’ and discussed the nature of the “objective correlative”. Quasi-Nietzschean themes were picked up from the prose works of WB Yeats. AC Bradley was still widely read. Recognised authorities ranged from IA Richards to FR Leavis, from Cleanth Brooks to Kenneth Burke, from RP Blackmur to Northrop Frye. Technical discussion abounded, encompassing the appeal of iambic tetrameter and the demands of terza rima. Generic distinctions were equally foregrounded: epic, pastoral, elegy, lyric. The traditions of central European criticism were barely known. Georg Lukács was almost unheard of; Erich Heller was exotic. On the other hand, Irving Howe, MH Abrams and Lionel Trilling were distinguished figures. The Yale critics had yet to make their mark in Dublin: you read Harold Bloom but only the very early work.

Boland was never a hoarder of books: she endlessly lent them, and sometimes unloaded them. I borrowed Balzac’s Lost Illusions, Walter Jackson Bate’s biographies, studies by FO Matthiessen … At this distance I couldn’t manage to compile a full list. Soon I had my separate interests: in Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. I also collected the works of Sigmund Freud. However Boland was always focused specifically on literature. She once mentioned her father’s interest in Bergson but could hardly take it seriously. She accepted the accomplishments of Conor Cruise O’Brien but shared very few of his interests.

Over time I moved on to other things and only saw Eavan Boland intermittently – latterly, infrequently. My degree at University College Dublin opened new horizons. After graduate work at Oxford and Cambridge, I returned to lecture in Dublin for three years in 1990 and encountered Boland occasionally, often in the margins of events, for instance during the controversy surrounding the Field Day Anthology, when she was vocal in her protest against the lack of female writers. Then life took over, I was forced to emigrate from Ireland, and our contact trailed off. I last spoke to her after I attended a lecture she delivered in London in 2017. She had lost nothing of her signature dedication beneath what was now a cautious exterior. Thirty years had intervened since the era of my routine visits. I look back upon that spot of time as a personal rite of passage and Boland as an epitome of vision and fortitude.

5/5/2020

Image: writinguniversity.org

Italian Diary X

May 3rd

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
Anaïs Nin

John McCourt writes: Yesterday was a busy day. It was Alice’s birthday. We went “out” for dinner – as in we ate out on the terrace (wearing heavy jumpers and, in my case, a hat, as it was chilly enough). Earlier in the day, we teamed up with Conor and Laura and took part in an online quiz. One of the answers – I cannot remember the question – was funambolo, or tightrope walker.

Funambolismo, or tightrope walking, is a term that well describes what we are all going to be doing over the coming months. While none of us will be exactly walking a high wire we will all be seeking to find a sustainable balance as we gingerly try to get lives and livelihoods back up and running. So will our leaders, and it will be anything but easy.

As Italy prepares to loosen its lockdown measures tomorrow and to begin the fase due, uncertainty is very much in the air. The government, the regional governors and the city mayors, but equally owners and managers of businesses, big and small, are desperate not to get it wrong, not to risk excessively. It is not as if the enemy has been beaten out of sight. It has been slowed, but still lurks and can strike again. Which is what makes imagining and planning for the short and medium term so difficult, because the more people see progress the more they want to ignore rules and relax restrictions.

This is what Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, and one of the German government’s chief advisers on coronavirus, calls “the prevention paradox”: “In Germany, people see that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, and they don’t understand why their shops have to shut. […] For many Germans I’m the evil guy who is crippling the economy.” The risk is that medics and scientists, the very people who are trying to save lives against unprecedented attack, are now seen by a noisy minority as the enemy.

What is clear is that four and a half million Italians return to work tomorrow. After almost two months of silence, traffic will return to the streets as people head to and from work in manufacturing, fashion, textiles and wholesale suppliers. Sectors such as car and furniture manufacturing will return to productivity. From tomorrow we can also buy a new car or get our own car serviced (if it will start ‑ having being parked for sixty days in many cases). Most shops will remain closed for another two weeks as we take it step by step and hope the infection rate stays low. There are no magic cures but science has to stay central. We have to follow the analyses of our trained public health professionals as they treat the disease and fight to learn more about its methods of transmission.

This morning I notice in the Sunday Telegraph: “Primary schools to reopen in June as part of blueprint to ‘unlock’ Britain”. Good luck with that.

Here in Italy, by contrast, the schools minister said yesterday (to general dismay) that even if schools opened in September (which is still not definite), it would be on some kind of rotating basis, with half the class in school one day and the other half following from home and vice versa the next day. This to try to impose some kind of social distancing on children. It is not clear if the minister was simply thinking aloud or if this is a plan.

On the subject of thinking aloud, we’ve had far too much of that from several leaders around the world. Anyone reading from Ireland will have seen the sterile and useless kerfuffle over the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s, reaching for his notes when asked some detailed questions on television the other night. He had earlier announced that Ireland had extended its lockdown for another two weeks up to May 18th, after which it would introduce a phased, five-stage exit over three months. Sounds sensible and measured.

The “comedian” Oliver Callan (a regular presenter on RTÉ radio and contributor of “serious” articles to mainstream Irish newspapers), commented on Twitter:

BREAKING: The Robot has addressed the nation. Never before has anyone spoken so woodenly. So slowly. And. Said. So little. He tried to smile and do the empathy thing, it did not go well. The autocue fought the robot, and won. #Leovaradkar

This from a commentator who tweeted some weeks ago: “Absolutely no need to cancel St Patrick’s Day parade. The risk of contracting Covid-19 remains very, very low … It’s a shame people love to be dramatic, and secretly long for panic.”

Varadkar, though far from perfect, was right to reach for his notes. The devil is in the detail of the coming phases of dealing with Covid-19. Spoofing and improvising have been shown to have dangerous consequences elsewhere and they add to the Barnum and Bailey sense of circus and of chaos that we have seen in the White House whose occupant seems perfect proof of HL Mencken’s maxim “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

Oliver Callan is just another hurler on the ditch, a backseat driver, a sideshow. The bigger message is that we all need to be careful where we get our information from into the future because as restrictions loosen we will increasingly have to assume individual responsibility and to make decisions that will inevitably raise our levels of exposure to risk. Life has to go on or we just wither.

Which doesn’t mean we all have to become trapeze artists or take up other circus roles, although it might be fun to think of our leaders for some of these.

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, would be the best candidate for chair-balancing, a feat in which an acrobat balances on top of several chairs which themselves are balanced on other objects and could collapse at any time. He has proved remarkably adept at maintaining his balance as others seek to pull the legs from under him.

Trump would clearly like to be cast as the circus strongman or even the lion-tamer, but qualifies only as the clown, even if proper clowns are intentionally funny. What I would really like to see him try out is a special orange version of the “hair hang”, an aerial circus act in which performers are suspended by their hair and assume a variety of acrobatic poses. Equally, he would be a good candidate for the human cannonball (in which a person is ejected at speed into the air from a specially designed cannon). But I’m not sure a powerful enough cannon exists and so we’ll save this trick for Bolsonaro (being careful to guarantee no soft landing in a pool of water or a safety net).

Boris Johnson looked for a while as if he was headed for the wall of death but managed to complete an adroit and sudden U-turn. He spent his time on a bed of nails and is finally, I suppose, qualified for the role of circus contortionist or escape artist. Harry Houdini has nothing on him.

Dr Fauci tried hard but repeatedly failed to succeed in the role of circus ventriloquist-in-chief. Despite help from Dr Birx, he never managed to create the illusion that his voice was coming from elsewhere else, from the mouth of a puppeteered prop, commonly known as the dummy. Sadly in this case, the White House dummy refused to play ball and took on a life and a script all of his own making.

The circus needs an impresario or manager so we’ll give that task to scientist Angela Merkel, who has proven not only that she counts but also that she can count. With Leo as her assistant. Perhaps they can convince Donald Trump to try out for several exciting new roles. The very stable genius might start with a little sword-swallowing. Failing that, there is always snake-charming. And if even that doesn’t work the great Trumpino can have one last try at becoming the human firecracker, a stunt in which a person attaches large quantities of firecrackers to themselves which are then ignited. It might prove even more effective than Dettol or bleach.

Given that phase two officially kicks in tomorrow in Italy and that I have been making a spectacle of myself for two months now, I feel that my circus animals might be beginning to desert me and that it is time to give the diary a rest for a while. I do so hoping that we are all on the right road and knowing that if we use our heads we will all pull through this together. Now we have to keep the faith and stay steadfast knowing that in time a new blossoming will come.

Image: Santa Creus Festival in Figueras – the Circus (1921), by Salvador Dali

Truth Above Everything

Frank Mac Gabhann writes: This decade of centenaries has thus far passed with barely a mention of James Creed Meredith, a man largely unknown outside his family and even to relatively few lawyers and historians. This should not be the case. Not only was he a High, then Supreme Court judge, he was also one of the great sprinters of his generation, a member of the Irish Volunteers and a 1914 gun-runner, president of the Supreme Court set up by Dáil Éireann during the War of Independence who championed Brehon Law, a philosopher, a translator of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (still in print a century later with his commentaries and read by philosophers and students alike), a novelist and playwright who late in life became a Quaker. One wonders how many Irish lawyers of today could even read Kant, much less translate him.

Meredith was born in 1875 in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin of a prominent family that was serving the Church of Ireland, if not the British empire, well, with many clergymen among its ranks. His father, of the same name, practised as a barrister and was the deputy grand master of the Masonic Lodge of Ireland and even today there a lodge in Belfast bearing his name. His portrait in his Masonic robes still hangs in the Masonic Hall in Molesworth Street in Dublin. He was knighted by the British monarch and even invited to the coronation of 1910. He was appointed secretary of the new Royal University of Ireland, which may have had something to do with his son enrolling as a philosophy student there. The young Meredith was awarded a BA and subsequently an MA, as well as the gold medal in mental philosophy. He also studied at Trinity College, where he was awarded another gold medal. He qualified as a barrister in 1901. In 1911 Oxford University published his translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In 1895, while at Trinity, he was the Irish champion at the 100, 220 and 440 yard events and the following year won the British championship at the quarter mile. At the time of his death Meredith was considered one of the greatest Irish quarter-milers of all time.

He was a member, with Tom Kettle, of the intellectually fertile Young Ireland branch (the only branch that allowed women to join) of the United Irish League. Perhaps Meredith the philosopher was reading Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: up to now philosophy has only interpreted the world ‑ the point is to change it. For Meredith now began to marry theory with praxis ‑ practice. By 1913 he was a convinced Irish nationalist and engagé. He joined the Irish Volunteers at its inception, although it is not known whether he wore the uniform. He was one of the organisers of the Howth and Kilcoole gun-running in the summer of 1914 and persuaded Dr Thomas Myles to use his yacht, the Chotay, which he helped to crew, to smuggle the guns to Kilcoole. He was one of John Redmond’s added nominees to the national committee of the Volunteers. Despite being a nominee of Redmond, he worked actively with the Republican members, according to Bulmer Hobson. Immediately following the British declaration of war on August 3rd, Meredith called a meeting at his own home in Dublin for the following evening, at which Seán Mac Diarmada, Bulmer Hobson and some Redmond nominees attended, to discuss how Ireland should respond. When Seán Fitzgibbon arrived late with the news that Redmond had pledged Irish support for the war the night before in the House of Commons, “Meredith was so annoyed that he could not discuss the matter”, according to Fitzgibbon.

Meredith is believed to have drafted the constitution of the Volunteers some months later, with its declared objective, “To secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the people of Ireland”. This is lawyer-speak, probably just vague enough to escape the rigours of the wartime Defence of the Realm regulations. In 1915 he published in a prestigious philosophical quarterly in the US the Kantian essay “Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Neutrality”, where he sets out both his anger at the war then raging and his views on pacifism. There is no record of his attitude towards the Easter Rising the following year. However, he did testify as a witness for the defence in the court-martial of Eoin MacNeill following the Rising. As late as July 1917 he was still involved to some degree with the Irish Parliamentary Party during a by-election for South Dublin, then a unionist stronghold. Republicans did not field a candidate in that by-election as the East Clare by-election was being held four days later. Meredith harboured the vain hope that the last-gasp, ill-fated Irish Convention that began that month might provide a way forward.

It is unclear exactly when, but at some stage after the overwhelming victory of Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election Meredith crossed the Rubicon and nailed his colours firmly to the armed independence struggle. He became president of the Supreme Court of the republican Dáil courts, the “chief justice” of the Irish Republic that functioned during the War of Independence. He defied the Irish Bar, which was not exactly stocked with patriots at the time. The Bar had forbidden barristers to appear in Republican courts. Those who did risked not simply the Bar’s sanction but also a different sanction from the Black and Tans, who were armed with more than summonses for professional misconduct. In one case heard by Meredith, he preferred Brehon law over common law in ruling that the father of a child born out of wedlock was required to pay maintenance in respect of that child. This ruling was followed thereafter in all Republican courts. With the winding up of the Dáil courts he was appointed chief judicial commissioner, deciding the disposition of those cases.

When the provisional government decided to set up a British-style judiciary in 1924, there was no room for Meredith on the new three-member Supreme Court, the “Protestant seat” going to Gerald FitzGibbon, a unionist, in order to allay Southern unionist fears. Nor was there any room for a judge there to follow his Brehon example. A child born out of wedlock in the new Irish Free State reverted to being a filius nullius, a son of nobody, a baby whom the natural father could lawfully neglect. The new set-up was, in effect, demoting Meredith to the newly created High Court.

As there were effectively no vacancies until 1936, he had to wait until then to be promoted to the expanded five-member Supreme Court, joining FitzGibbon there. The unionist FitzGibbon never forgave Meredith for being a Protestant republican and, just before his retirement in 1938, FitzGibbon, without notice to Meredith, launched an unfair and wholly unwarranted attack on his fellow judge in a written judgement. According to the late Adrian Hardiman, this attack was unique in modern Irish judicial history, though typical of FitzGibbon’s vindictive style to one whom, according to Meredith’s family, he may have considered a traitor to his class and perhaps even to his religion. Meredith, by 1938 the good Quaker, did not reply in kind to the attack and turned the other cheek. Apparently alone among all the superior court judges, FitzGibbon is not recorded as attending Meredith’s funeral in 1942.

FitzGibbon had already fallen out with Hugh Kennedy, the first chief justice, without whose recommendation the decade before to the provisional government, he would never have been even considered for the bench. FitzGibbon gave judgement, reported in 1934, in a case involving a minor whose ancestors included a deputy lieutenant and a high sheriff and whose grandfather had owned 25,000 acres in Co Clare in the nineteenth century. FitzGibbon lamented that “the policy of successive Governments . . . has transferred the land [of his grandfather] to its occupiers”. He went on to comment on the possibilities of the minor carrying on the tradition of his class in Ireland to seek “distinguished service and exalted position in the colonies” of the British empire. FitzGibbon had the extraordinary effrontery in a judgement in 1935 to ridicule the state of which he was one of the chief magistrates, referring to “ . . . this other Eden semi-paradise, this precious stone, set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Saor Stát”, after Shakespeare. Not only is this unique in Irish judicial history, it is all but unthinkable in civilised legal exegesis anywhere.

It may be remembered that FitzGibbon’s father, of the same name, was a judge and loyal servant of the British empire for nearly half a century until he died in 1909. He was well known and despised by most Irish people and for that reason appears in Ulysses, whose action takes place in 1904, when the elder FitzGibbon was still sitting as a judge and dispensing justice. James Joyce playfully slid in a possible double meaning reference concerning him in the Aeolus episode. The elder Fitzgibbon’s father, also of the same name, had been perhaps the most bigoted lawyer in Ireland in the nineteenth century, publishing absurd sectarian drivel about Catholicism and about how fortunate the Irish people were during the nineteenth century to be ruled by Englishmen.

In the meantime Meredith had published in 1928 a translation of Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgement with notes and analyses, as he had with the earlier translation. He chaired numerous state commissions, including that on the Army mutiny of 1924. He was appointed by the League of Nations in 1934 to supervise a plebiscite in the Saar Basin in still-occupied Germany. He also wrote three plays (including one entitled The Heckled Unionist) and contributed to a plethora of intellectual and literary journals, both Irish and British. His utopian, visionary, philosophical, science-fiction novel The Rainbow in the Valley is a story of visitors to western China, including a thinly disguised, at times whimsical, Meredith. They communicate by radio with Mars and discuss Freud, Aristotle, Hegel and Kant. as well as language, the partition of Ireland, the League of Nations, and politics in general, given the gathering war clouds in Europe. We learn that there has not been a war on Mars for 10,000 years. Even Éamon de Valera and Eoin O’Duffy get a mention, the former telling a joke about the latter. The narrator relates an incident about himself in 1920 going out of his way to avoid being forced by the British military to take off his hat during the passing by of a military funeral procession on the Dublin quays for the detectives shot by the IRA on Bloody Sunday, and how it led to a quarrel with a lifelong friend. The thought occurs that perhaps the comment elsewhere of the narrator, “I have the greatest respect for pacifist theories, but I value Truth above everything”, is Meredith’s credo. Unfortunately for the book’s dissemination, its publication coincided with the outbreak of the world war, although even in times of peace Kantian novels top few bestseller lists.

One of Meredith’s cases was the custody battle between Muriel MacSwiney, Terence MacSwiney’s widow, and Mary MacSwiney, his sister, over his daughter, Máire, born in 1918. MacSwiney, lord mayor of Cork and IRA commandant there, had died on hunger strike in London in 1920, with worldwide publicity. MacSwiney, in his will, had appointed his sister to be joint guardian of his daughter. After the civil war, during which both women took the anti-treaty side, Muriel left for the continent with her daughter. She became involved in leftist politics there. In 1932 Mary, her aunt, went to Germany and, with the daughter’s agreement, effectively kidnapped the minor and raced with her by taxi to the Austrian border and then back to Cork. By this point the child had forgotten both her English and Irish, and had had, as she later wrote, “an erratic upbringing, moving from place to place”. Meredith had to determine which woman would have custody of the fourteen-year-old girl. Both sides fought the case bitterly over several months. Meredith decided to speak with the girl privately in his chambers. By then she understood some English. He asked her with whom she would like to live. She replied, “My aunt”. Meredith awarded custody to the aunt.

An interesting aside to the case is that for a time she and her aunt were furnished with Garda protection as there was evidence that Muriel was trying to “re-kidnap” her. She recalled later her aunt’s discomfiture: she was a diehard Republican who never accepted the legitimacy of the Free State, yet was being protected by their police. Mary MacSwiney, it may be remembered, was one of the seven surviving abstentionist Sinn Féin TDs from the Second Dáil who in 1938 purported to delegate the authority of the Irish Republic to the Army Council of the IRA. This was, presumably, their version of apostolic succession which, according to Irish Republican mythology, converted the IRA Army Council into the legitimate “de jure Government of the Irish Republic”.

Meredith’s grandson, Rowan Gillespie, is one of Ireland’s finest sculptors, whose work includes the famine statues on the Dublin quays and the dolmen in Blackrock. Proclamation, the sculpture outside Kilmainham Jail, is a tribute both to the vision of the 1916 leaders and to the vision of his grandfather. Meredith died in 1942. Athlete, philosopher, revolutionary, jurist, he is now barely remembered. He deserves better.

5/5/2020

Sunningdale and the Council of Ireland: an Exchange

Hugh Logue writes:

Dear Editors
For many years I have enjoyed your journal, not least the erudite contributions of our esteemed ambassadors. Not so, in the current issue 121, April 2020, where I am misquoted and misrepresented by your reviewer, John Swift, in “The Long Road to Peace”. He reviews Inside Accounts: Volume I and Inside Accounts: Volume II by Graham Spencer. Your journal is one of opinion, but it is also regarded as a journal of record. Hence this letter.

He quotes me as saying “The Council of Ireland is the vehicle in which the unionists will be trundled into a United Ireland.” Coercion or what? What was said, in the 1973 speech after the Sunningdale Agreement, was that “The Council of Ireland is the vehicle that will trundle through to deliver a United Ireland. The speed that vehicle moves at depends on the Unionist population.” Consent or what?

In the NI Assembly on December 14th, 1973 the Unionist Assembly member John Laird had the good grace, when the matter was raised, to accept that it was a United Ireland, but by consent of the people of the North of Ireland. (The Official Record, NI Assembly, Vol 1, July 31st to December 19th, 1973). The Irish Times of October 30th, 1997 records same.

SDLP policy in 1973, then as now, was Irish unity by consent. The Irish government policy in 1973, then as now, was Irish unity by consent.

Your reviewer goes further, stating that “opinions of this sort gave powerful ammunition to unionist opponents of Sunningdale and Faulkner”.

I knew Brian Faulkner. He shook my hand on my first day in Stormont in June 1973 to recognise that I, then, was the youngest ever elected member to Stormont, a distinction he said that he once held. Never, in public nor in private, did he indicate that his position or the power-sharing government was undermined by the speech. Rather, Brian Faulkner held the view quoted: “Certainly I was convinced all along that the outcry against the Council of Ireland was only a useful red herring ‑ the real opposition was to sharing of power”, as chronicled by Noel Dorr in his superb book Sunningdale: The Search for Peace In Northern Ireland. Noel Dorr lists at least five cogent reasons for Sunningdale not succeeding, and my speech is not one of them. The misquoted text is not in the book being reviewed but was dragged in by your reviewer. Dorr repeats his reasons in the interview in Inside Accounts Vol I. David Bleakley, in his 1974 contemporaneous biography Faulkner, shared a number of Dorr’s reasons, as does Robert Ramsay, Faulkner’s private secretary, in his account, Ringside Seats, published in 2009.

Seamus Mallon’s marvellous memoir A Shared Home Place is lauded by Mr Swift. It may have escaped him that Mallon in his memoir defends the refusal of a few of us in the SDLP to give way on an Irish Dimension in May 1974 when this was demanded by the British government.

The reviewer is particularly taken by what Mallon called “his Maya Angelou speech” at the Waterfront Hall alongside Clinton, Blair, Ahern and Trimble in September 1998. Seamus, with characteristic generosity, acknowledged who drafted the speech.

Mr Swift admonishes the author of Inside Accounts: Volumes I and II in his review for “inaccuracies” and for being “occasionally clumsy”. Perhaps the reviewer might reflect on his own accuracy.

John Swift responds:

Hugh Logue’s main point is a good one. I should have researched his Trinity College speech more thoroughly and it would have been better to include his view that the speed at which Sunningdale delivers a United Ireland depends on the Unionist population. That said, I was following the one-sentence summary of his position as reported in CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet, under “Sunningdale”), IBIS Working Paper No 82, 2007 by PJ McLoughlin, the essay by McGarry and O’Leary in the study “Power Sharing” by McCulloch and McGarry (2017), TP Coogan’s “Ireland in the 20th Century” (2004) and others.

It is a mistake to think that, in my review, I questioned the insistence of the SDLP and of the Irish government that the Council of Ireland must form part of any settlement. And I note that the Trinity College speech took place not in December 1973 as mentioned, but in mid-January, 1974, after 1) the formation of the Ulster Army Council (UAC), after 2) the vote of the Ulster Unionist Council rejecting the Council of Ireland as proposed at Sunningdale (by a vote of 427 to 374 only), and 3) after the resignation of Brian Faulkner.

Mr Logue will have seen that I share his analysis of the early 1970s, that I fully agree with his (and Noel Dorr’s) opinion that extreme loyalism was as much against power-sharing as it was against the Council of Ireland, and that I quote Dorr in detail on the five major reasons why Sunningdale failed. I understand he also agrees with Dorr on these.

See also the exchange between Philip McGarry and John Swift: https://drb.ie/blog/comment/2020/04/22/sf-and-violence-an-exchange

Italian Diary IX

May 2nd

— Could you make a hole in another pint?
— Could a swim duck? says I.
James Joyce, Ulysses

John McCourt writes: What we are all missing at this time is not so much the extraordinary ‑ those necessary occasional escapes from the rhythms, habits and challenges of our daily lives ‑ as the ordinary and the everyday that we were so used to complaining about, what Seamus Heaney calls “the unregarded data of the usual life” (in an account of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry). AE Housman is one of many poets who described the weariness of routine:

Yonder See the Morning

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.

One of the ordinary day-to-day things that is out of reach now is the trip to the barber or the hairdresser and this is a challenge for many people. Call me old-fashioned but I disapprove of small children with long hair and favour a well-kempt head even during lockdown. So yesterday I decided it was time to take action and give Enrico a necessary haircut. Alice, somewhat reluctantly, agreed and Enrico, having no choice in the matter, and not quite knowing whether to laugh or cry, went along with it.

To be fair to me, I do have some haircutting history. Back in 1984, during my brief foray into the Jesuit novitiate, all haircutting was in-house. I immediately volunteered and learned my trade on the six sitting victims who had nowhere to hide. I was not much of a believer in the scissors but preferred the electric clipper or trimmer. You set the length you want and off you go cutting all before you. On one occasion, having completed a successful and rather neat haircut, the suddenly emboldened client asked if I might also trim his beard, a beard that had been grown and nurtured with great care and attention over many months. That, as Brendan Behan wrote, was where Aughrim was lost. As I soon found out, it takes but the slightest slip of the hand to put a gaping hole in a beard. The poor man was close to tears as I tried to repair the damage by evening things up. He was left with little more than stubble.

Then, ten years later, I lost my hair. It all happened quickly enough but I do remember being out for dinner with the Da in Dublin. My father had had a stroke many years earlier and this had removed whatever inhibitions he had ever had (not many), even though ,or perhaps because ,ordinary speech was such a huge effort for him after that. He had the words but could not get them out. Although sometimes he did.

As I lowered my head to begin to eat my soup, I heard from across the table, loudly: “Jaysus! You’re losing your effing hair.” It sounded like an accusation. Everyone in the restaurant heard it with me and I wanted the ground to swallow me up. “It’s not exactly my fault,” I objected, admitting that I was getting thin on top. But he had already started chuckling (along with several of the other customers).

Shortly afterwards I took the plunge and bought the trimmer and become a full-time skinner. I never looked back and when Liam and Eoin were small, I was their barber. They got the zero haircut in summer and as close as during the rest of the year. To call it a sensible haircut would be an understatement. And it saved a fortune.

Enrico had the good sense to insist that he did not want to be left bald at eight. So I managed to achieve what might be called a tidy haircut. All was going well until his mother suggested it could be a bit shorter. Maybe I could do a kind of a gentle fade along the back and sides. Something approaching the Ronaldo look. Needless to say, between Enrico twitching and my being less than convinced by this attempt to fade and shade, the slight shortening at the back became quite radical. This morning Enrico, who, like the rest of us, luckily cannot see the back of his own head, is exhibiting the perfect bowl haircut, even if the bowl is slightly chipped here and there. Sure it will grow back.

Another of the ordinary things we are all missing are bars, coffee shops, ice cream parlours, pubs, restaurants, all staple parts of our social diet, wherever we are. And we are wondering when and how ‑ and if ‑ they will reopen. With social distancing and a third of the usual clientele what is a pizza or a pint likely to cost?

Ulysses, written during the dark years of World War One when all normality was suspended, is the book that more than any other proclaims the importance of the quotidian and celebrates the extraordinary in flawed ordinary lives. While well aware of the dangers of drink, Joyce captured quotidian pub life in Dublin like no other (except perhaps Flann O’Brien). How many pub habitués or even occasional drinkers would not now concur with this affirmation?

“Ah! Ow! Don’t be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint.” And, pint downed, conclude “Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.”

Joyce had a brilliant capacity to describe pub life and pub “characters” like Bob Doran, who appeared in his story “The Boarding House”, where he is harried into marriage to Polly Mooney by her mother, who “dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat”. Doran soon finds himself trapped in an unhappy marriage and appears, unhappily, snoring in the corner of Barney Kiernan’s pub many years later in Ulysses:

Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney’s snug, squeezed up with the laughing, and who was si,tting up there in the corner that I hadn’t seen snoring drunk, blind to the world only Bob Doran.

The men later discuss the recently defunct Paddy Dignam, whose funeral took place earlier in the day. But Alf Bergan is convinced he has just seen him on the street:

— How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf?
— I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel Street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that …
— You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?
— With Dignam, says Alf.
— Is it Paddy? says Joe.
— Yes, says Alf. Why?
— Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe.
— Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf.
— Ay, says Joe.
— Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.
— Who’s dead? says Bob Doran.
— You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.
— What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five … What? … and Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s … What? Dignam dead?
— What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about …?
— Dead! says Alf. He’s no more dead than you are.
— Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.
— Paddy? says Alf.
— Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.
— Good Christ! says Alf.
Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.

Bob Doran does not take the news well:

— Who said Christ is good?
— I beg your parsnips, says Alf.
— Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy Dignam?
— Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He’s over all his troubles.
But Bob Doran shouts out of him.
— He’s a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.
Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they didn’t want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob Doran starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you’re there.
— The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.

Joyce celebrated everyday life (and death) in all its aspects with grace and great humour but also with cutting realism. The Cyclops episode owes much to his father and his friends and to the Dublin that he left behind. But there is no sign of sentimentality. Joyce achieved perspective from afar, from what he calls “the safe side of distance”.

Today most of us are living at a distance from our usual lives. There is not a thing wrong with allowing ourselves to wallow a little in our now suspended habitual, in celebrating the routine ordinariness of our usual lives and with wanting a little of them back.

At the same time, as we live through these difficult and challenging days and weeks, there is equally no harm in realising how lucky we have been in our now frozen “normality”, an everyday normality that we will, nonetheless, have to somewhat reinvent as we emerge from this crisis in the months and years ahead. This enforced distance can help us gain the necessary perspective to understand what is vital and what is not, what we took for ordinary but really will have to be extraordinary from now on.

Blighted

Maurice Earls writes: The fungal blight which arrived in Ireland in the Autumn of 1845 travelled on winds from the east. Although it attacked potatoes, rather than humans, it led indirectly to a great deal more deaths than the cholera epidemic which had raged in the 1830s.

The disease began a five-year period of famine, in which around one million people died, mostly poor people. It was a horrific time of epidemic, starvation and flight. But the long-term changes were, arguably, even more socially destructive than the horrendous event itself.

If we take it that the primary social function of any economy is to support the population in which it is based, we can say that an extended period of economic failure began in 1845. There was no V-shaped recovery, nor even a U-shaped one, but rather a protracted decline over twelve long decades. Government policy through the nineteenth century ensured that this was so.

The fall in population did not cease with the disappearance of the blight and the return of good harvests. Rather, it persisted year-in and year-out. People continued emigrating out of the country because the economy could not provide them with a living. The history of Ireland, from roughly 1850 to the 1960s, is the grim story of a losing struggle against a decline so remorseless it posed and existential threat to the future of the Irish people. It is impossible to make sense of that lengthy period without reference to this overarching reality.

For various reasons people can be slow to recognise a disaster unfolding before their eyes. In Ireland in the autumn of 1845 there were quite a few wishful thinkers.

On October 21st the Mayo Constitution referring to the potato as “this necessary article of food” reported:

We have made enquiries of persons from different parts of this county relative to the disease which is said to have attacked the potato, but could not learn from any one individual that he had seen it either in his own potatoes or in those of any of his neighbours …While there is, doubtless, some truth in the statements published about the extent and progress of the disease, we believe they are greatly aggravated.

On October 22nd the Kilkenny Journal reported on the blight in a similar tone:

Since our last publication, we have made diligent enquiries on the subject, and we are happy to state that we are confirmed in the views which we formerly expressed that the ravages of the disease are not near so great as some alarmists imagine.

There were also some confidently expressed remedies on offer. On October 20th it was reported, for example, that in Carlow the experience of several farmers was that if diseased potatoes unfit for human consumption were exposed “to the action of the air” for several days, they were found to be suitable for eating. And in a letter sent to the Southern Reporter, Horace Townsend stated that in some of his fields one-third of the crop was affected and in others only one-tenth tainted. He recommended separating the good roots from the diseased and keeping the good ones in pits or indoors covered in lime. He also said that diseased potatoes could be eaten, if the affected parts were cut away and the remainder boiled, adding “ I have as yet seen no potato so far gone as to be useless” and concluding “I have every hope that the dread of scarcity is much overstated”.

The Newry Telegraph reported that areas where accounts of the disease had been considerable were now only exhibiting “very trifling symptoms of its presence”. The Banner of Ulster declared that in the worst possible case, one-half of the crop would comprise “edible roots”.

The reality of subsistence peasant agriculture was somehow missed in this commentary. The rural poor had no accumulated resources to fall back on. A loss of half the crop or less would be an immediate disaster for a class, which is thought to have numbered around two million people.

The chaotic, dysfunctional and unsustainable character of the rural economy at the time was not something everyone was inclined to acknowledge. It was, nevertheless, a regular political theme in the 1840s and had been for some time before.

The Repeal movement, which dominated Irish politics at the time, blamed the landlord class for the disastrous condition of the rural poor. O’Connell’s supporters declared repeatedly that the peasantry was grossly oppressed, in particular families being open to eviction on the whim of a landlord, without compensation for any improvements made to their holding. Repealers argued that the order prevailing in rural Ireland was unsustainable and the prospect of mass starvation and death would have tended to confirm their analysis. It is possible that some comfortable farmers and landlords may have been disinclined to accept that things were quite that bad and might have been inclined to downplay the approaching apocalypse.

Others were less circumspect. The Repeal critique of landlord management of the countryside and its inhabitants was voiced at many political gatherings in the 1840s, including a massive public meeting held in Tralee in 1845 just before the onset of the disease was widely known. One of the speakers, John Lynch, a solicitor, declared that the laws between landlords and tenants, which he described as “class legislation”, were made by landlords to serve the interests of landlords. He proposed a resolution to the meeting:

That among the foremost evils resulting from the Act of Union is the uncertainty of the tenure of land in Ireland and that this meeting records its conviction that the British parliament is incapable and unwilling to legislate for its remedy.

Seconding the resolution, Rev Eugene O’Sullivan, who came to the meeting attended by a company of peasant farmers, “ a long line of hardy mountaineers”, referred to landlord clearances ‑ the practice used to empty land of tenants in order to facilitate the shift from tillage to more profitable pasture. He said that he had

witnessed the system of extermination; the evils springing from such a system were frightful to contemplate – whole districts depopulated ‑ countless families reduced from a condition of comparative wealth to misery ‑ and the creatures of God’s own likeness treated with greater barbarity than if they had belonged to the brute creation – and cast from the spot where they drew the first breath of life to some wretched hovel, forgotten and disconsolate till death put a period to their existence.

For Repealers, an independent legislature was the only answer to such evils.

If when the blight arrived some observers were slow to appreciate the disaster descending on the people, others were more perceptive. Very Rev Dr McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, who, it seems safe to assume, was a supporter of the campaign for legislative independence, apprehended the gravity of the situation from the outset and had no difficulty in spelling out the human, moral and political implications. In a letter to the pro Repeal Freeman’s Journal, he wrote:

On my most minute inspection of the state of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale, is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined, and testimony the most solemn I can tender, that in the great bulk of those fields, all the potatoes sizeable enough to be sent to the table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields, very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease. With starvation at our doors grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death, the soon and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.
For their respective inhabitants England, Scotland, Holland, Germany are taking early the necessary precautions ‑ getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal government. Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone … Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers. Infinitely more precious in the eyes of reason ‑ in the adorable eye of the Omnipotent Creator, is the life of the last and least of human beings than the whole united property of the entire universe. The appalling character of the crisis renders delicacy but criminal and imperatively calls for the timely and explicit notice of principles that will not fail to prove terrible arms in the hands of a neglected, abandoned starving people.

Dr McEvoy, in his grim forebodings and apocalyptic fear, was closer to the truth than the sanguine rationalists quoted in the newspapers, but McEvoy, like many others, overestimated the likelihood of mass rebellion, and even this great clerical friend of the poor could hardly have contemplated the depth of social, economic and cultural destruction which would persist and deepen over the following century and beyond.

It was politics that turned a disease of potatoes and tomatoes into famine, and it was politics which ensured its disastrous aftereffects would disfigure numerous future generations.

3/5/2020

Eavan Boland 1944-2020

Gerald Dawe writes: An abiding image when I think of Eavan Boland. It is 1980 or so and we are sitting in the lounge of a friend’s house in Galway overlooking the bay and the Claddagh. The sunlight is streaming in and filling the room, where several artists, poets and supporters are foregathered in advance of Eavan’s reading for the Galway Arts Festival, then in its infancy. The room is light-filled and Eavan is talking with that wonderful forthright, no-nonsense, inquiring tone of voice that would influence so many she touched over many, many years – as a broadcaster (if memory serves me right, she took over from Seamus Heaney on RTÉ’s poetry programme in the 1970s), as a workshop leader, as a lecturer and a contributor to numerous television and radio programmes. But primarily, of course, as a poet.

Many tributes will be made and more will justly follow celebrating her role in promoting the poetry of contemporary Irish women and of her critical engagement with the ideas of tradition and nationalism in Irish society. What may not be so well charted is her very early engagement with the impact of the Northern Troubles on the Irish republic as it was actually happening. In 1974 she moderated a roundtable encounter “The Clash of Identities”, which was published in The Irish Times. It was way ahead of its time in drawing into the conversation those who were involved in the violence as well as fellow-poets and novelists and it showed what could be done, or, at least, attempted, if and when people sat down and discussed issues with each other. A belief, I can only speculate now, which lay at the core of Eavan’s intellectual life and I think this is important to note. Because in many ways she marked a new direction in herself for Irish poetry in the way she married the critical intelligence to the creative instinct.

One needs only look at the sheer volume of review material she produced from the mid-1960s to realise the extent of her fascination for literature, primarily poetry and poetry criticism, but also the energy she brought to meeting with readers and writers in a seemingly tireless journeying across the countryside to attend readings and writers’ groups. Around the same time as that Galway Arts event I recall collecting Eavan from the carpark in what was then UCG (University College Galway) one morning. She had left Dublin early so that she would be on time to address a group of visiting students attending a summer school. Nothing would stop her, after the session went off in a blaze of applause, but to turn the car around and head back to Dundrum. Eavan set the standard many of those drawn to her passion and intellectual brilliance sought to follow, myself included. The poems I particularly treasure come from books of that time and a little later, such as The War Horse (1975), In Her Own Image (1980), featuring the artwork of Constance Short, the immaculate dreamscapes of Night Feed (1982), the powerful and impressive The Journey (1987) and the culmination of this period of her writing in Outside History (1990) and In A Time of Violence (1994). In 1985 I had the temerity to ask Eavan would she join the editorial board of Krino, a literary review we were establishing in Galway. Not only did she say yes but on my request contributed a new essay, “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma”. It was duly published in the first issue in spring 1986 and would become part of Eavan’s critically ground-breaking book, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995).

As an editor and as a translator Eavan Boland contributed immensely to the cross-currents of poetic and intellectual exchanges between Ireland, the UK and increasingly more from the mid-1990s, the US. I associate her poetry with a view and vision, precarious, troubled yet also calm, such as one finds in the numerous artists she and her poetry gravitated towards and celebrate. Eavan Boland’s poetry, whether in the long substantial poems like “The Journey” or in the sequences addressing her sense of nationhood through the voice of the women’s struggle, resolve into a voice that is unmistakable and utterly its own:

but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend

the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery,
and language borrows from ambition –

and how I fell asleep
oblivious to

the planets clouding over in the skies,
the slow decline of the spring moon,
the songs crying out their ironies.
(“The Achill Woman”)

Image: Poetry Foundation

Italian Diary VIII

April 25th

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell reviewing Bertrand Russell in 1939

John McCourt writes: When James Joyce’s works first appeared, they were seen by some, mostly by those who did not actually read them, as dangerous filth, full of “leprous and scabrous horrors”. Those who read them were painted as being part of a “dirty and degraded cult”.

In the United States, Francis Talbot SJ wrote an essay entitled “Ulysses the Dirty” in which he claimed that only a lapsed Catholic “with an incurably diseased mind could be so diabolically venomous toward God, toward the Blessed Sacrament, toward the Virgin Mary”. Small wonder then that Charles Duff, best known for his books A Handbook of Hanging and James Joyce and the Plain Reader, would suggest that: “The good Roman Catholic who reads him requires disinfection afterwards, if the Joycean darts are not to leave septic lacerations.”

In the1960s, when Hugh Leonard’s Stephen D, a highly accomplished and hugely successful adaptation of Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was performed in Dublin (it premiered in London because the Abbey Theatre did not want anything to do with it), one appalled theatregoer felt the need to write to The Irish Times to vent her horror at what she had seen. She was, she said,

sickened, disgusted and appalled at the whole theme. God – the Creator of human beings and of all things – is mocked, sneered at and jibes are thrown at the Jesuits. This adaptation of two books by James Joyce is openly blasphemous and in very bad taste.

The letter-writer, who signed him/herself “Low-Brow”, was not without a sense of humour however, and included a PS that read:

a note on the programme tells me that “This theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeyes Fluid and Cooper’s Aerosol” – a thoughtful precaution taken by the management in the interests of their patrons, but, unfortunately, it does not affect the mind.

Jeyes Fluid does not affect the mind, unless of course, you drink it or inject it. It is, as it says on the label, a brand of disinfectant fluid for external use only, so drinking it is not such a great idea. In fact it is such a bad idea to drink disinfectant that Lysol and Dettol yesterday had to issue a statement to state the absolute obvious, to say that you should NOT inject its products into your veins or drink it. “Under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body.” This warning became necessary because the president of the United States had said researchers should try putting disinfectant into coronavirus patients’ bodies.

Like most of Trump’s ideas this was not original. The Guardian reports that the leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump earlier this week. According to The Guardian, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”. Which was essentially Trump’s line the other night when he touted the capacities of bleach against coronavirus: it “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!” He went on to say: “Is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

Grenon’s Genesis II is “a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a ‘miracle cure’ in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, ‘miracle mineral solution’, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/Aids as well as autism. Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it.”

Trump’s dangerous comments came shortly after the US Food and Drug Administration obtained a federal court order barring Genesis II from selling what was described as “an unproven and potentially harmful treatment for Covid-19”.

Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic” in his remarks, but there was nothing at all to suggest that he was not in earnest when he made them. Trump supporters still refuse to acknowledge that there is something wrong here. Their standard response is summarised over on Twitter as follows: “He didn’t say that, and if he did, he didn’t mean that. And if he did, you ‘understand it. And if you did, it’s not a big deal, and if it is, others have said worse.” And so on he goes, peddling “cures” like some medieval travelling salesman. Let’s not forget the man who died in March in Arizona after consuming fish tank cleaner because Trump had claimed the chloroquine (a chemical found in the cleaner) could be a “game-changer”. It was.

So while Dettol was on Trump’s mind yesterday, many world leaders gathered for a virtual summit hosted by the World Health Organisation, which pledged to intensify co-operation in the search for a coronavirus vaccine and to share research, treatment and medicines across the globe. The United States, which has suspended funding to the WHO, did not take part. So here’s the thing. We are dealing with a pandemic: an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population. The term derives from late Latin “pandemus” (pan – “all” + dēmos – people).

Now, if that was not bad enough then we have, running the world’s most important country, an “amadán” or “Ludramán”, or one who pretends to be. In Cork they’d call him a langer, in the rest of Ireland, an eejit, a gobshite, a total flute, a jinnet or a right bollix.

But there are no words that go far enough and I’m not going to descend to using ones that might be more fitting to the occupant of the White House. He plays the jinnet or the simpleton, but there’s a nastiness and a callousness about him that is hard to convey in words. In normal times, having him where he is would be problematic, but having him where he is in these times, risks adding pandemonium to pandemic. Pandemonium is a “place of uproar and disorder” of “wild, lawless confusion” and this is a version of the chaos that Trump is unleashing on the United States.

While I, like everyone, worried that Europe would buckle or splinter, it is, albeit slowly, putting together a reasonably united approach to this calamity. It is not perfect and there will be lots more rows, but somehow the centre is holding, just. Suddenly the United States looks more vulnerable as individual states and even individual cities increasingly go it alone and Washington, with its major agencies debilitated by the president, looks increasingly irrelevant and incapable of doing anything but whipping up dissent.

Within a day of the president declaring his power to be “total”, a handful of governors joined together to co-ordinate plans for restarting their economies in the hope of reducing the risks of jeopardising the health of their citizens. On the West Coast the leaders of California, Washington and Oregon agreed to work in tandem while on the Eas” the governors of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Delaware took similar steps. Trump calls this “Mutiny On The Bounty”. He would do well to remember that that did not end too well for Captain Bligh.

Far from the Bounty, Trump’s White House seems to resemble more the Pandæmonium of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, that is, the place of all demons, the palace built in the middle of Hell, “the high capital of Satan and all his peers”. Hell for Milton in Paradise Lost is “one great furnace” whose flames offer “no light, but rather darkness visible”:

The dismal Situation waste and wilde,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d […]

History shows us that no matter how dismal the situation (or the situation room), there is always light, however faint, at the end of the tunnel.

Today, April 25th, we celebrate the 75th festa della liberazione ‑ Liberation Day. It marks the fall of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and the end of the Nazi occupation in Italy in 1945. Liberation was not won without a huge struggle which gathered force when Italy entered into an armistice with the Allies in 1943 and tens of thousands of Italians joined the resistance movement united against Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. After two years of fighting and thousands of deaths, in April 1945, the Resistance movement liberated several Italian cities including Bologna, Parma, Reggio, Emilia, and, on the final day of uprising, Milan and Turin. The anthem of the resistance is the famous “Bella Ciao”. Today it is a national holiday not much liked by fascists and populists, in fact Matteo Salvini refuses to acknowledge the public holiday while Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) argue that we should commemorate the victims of Covid-19 as well as “all victims of all wars” rather than the liberation of Italy.

Sometimes we cling onto history only by our fingertips.

In normal times, the president of Italy would visit the Ardeatine Caves to commemorate the 335 Romans who were massacred there by Nazi soldiers in 1944. Those who lost their lives in the struggle for liberation are celebrated as is the importance of resistance, a quality needed in great quantities once again today. Just as Italy fought and rose from ashes and desperation in the 1940s so too it and all our countries will rise again in the months and years to come.

Image: Trump as sorcerer’s apprentice in The Washington Times

Una mattina mi son svegliato
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
una mattina mi son svegliato
e ho trovato l’invasor.
O partigiano, portami via
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao ciao
o partigiano, portami via
ché mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio, da partigiano
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
e se io muoio, da partigiano
tu mi devi seppellir.
Mi seppellirai, lassù in montagna
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
mi seppellirai, lassù in montagna
sotto l’ombra di un bel fior.
E le genti, che passeranno
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
e le genti, che passeranno
ti diranno “Che bel fior”.
È questo è il fiore, del partigiano
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao

Image: Trump as Sorcerer’s Apprentice in The Washington Times

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