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

As the Path Continues

Dr Struan Kennedy writes: This year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which formally ended thirty years of the conflict known as the Troubles. Naturally there has been a series of events commemorating this significant milestone which have, just as understandably, celebrated the achievements of those involved in bringing about momentous change. However, while a distinct trend in the historiography favours a top-down approach, delivered by elite political actors, the project ‘Paving the Path to Peace: Civil Society and the Northern Irish Peace Process’ offers an alternative, complementary coverage.

By shifting the emphasis toward a more diverse range of actors, the project highlights the invaluable contribution of local grassroots organisations. It corrects any truncated view that peace rose up rather suddenly from limited and private negotiations. In truth peace emerged slowly and has its origins in the tireless work of a host of social movements who struggled and endured at some of the worst interfaces of the long conflict.

Along with a major publication, the project’s outputs included a one-day conference at The MAC in Belfast, which crystalised several crucial aspects of this important work. This short article picks out just four ideas that materialised from many other fascinating insights articulated by the diverse range of contributors. The knowledge and memory of the audience—including protagonists of civil society initiatives during the 1980s and 1990s—testified to the enduring strength of collective action. Additionally, the composition of the conference’s panels (not arranged according to strict themes) was representative of the multidisciplinary engagement and crossing of boundaries that occurs in civil society itself.

The first idea came from the first speaker, Alan McBride from the WAVE Trauma Centre, in the day’s opening panel: ‘Will I be heard? Trauma, Healing, Stories’. Fittingly enough Alan began with a story of bumping into a woman outside Asda many years ago who initiated conversation in a startling manner: ‘Oh are you OK, Alan son? Isn’t it awful … aren’t you just waiting to die?’ Momentarily unable to place the woman and taken aback by her question, Alan found himself absentmindedly agreeing with her before continuing his shopping. It wasn’t until waiting at the checkout that he remembered the woman’s name. Anne’s husband had been murdered in the 1970s and she had never fully recovered from this loss. Knowing that Alan had suffered similar bereavement—his wife, Sharon, being one of nine victims of the Shankill Road bombing in 1993—she perhaps wished to connect over this shared bond. Realising the impact of his words, Alan dashed back outside and stopped her car to amend his statement: ‘I don’t agree with you. I don’t want to die. I want to laugh, to love, to dance again. And I want that for you too.’

This anecdote gives us a powerful glimpse into the value of WAVE and other victims’ and survivors’ groups. On occasion it is necessary to resist the comfort of mutually reinforcing each other, especially if the view being reinforced is how bleak life is. Instead, Alan stressed the journey of working progressively and therapeutically with people to try and move them onto a space where they could eventually imagine the joy of living, laughing, and loving again. Some may feel an isolated anecdote is too specific, too much a micro-narrative, but from this we gain awareness of mental health issues on a macro, societal level.

A comprehensive study from 2011 found the prevalence of PTSD in Northern Ireland to be the highest of all countries that have produced comparable estimates including the USA, other Western European countries and countries that have experienced civil conflict in their recent history. Despite an estimated 61 per cent of the Northern Ireland adult population having experienced a traumatic event at some point in their lifetime, public spending on mental health is far lower there than in the rest of the UK. In England, some 12 per cent of the health budget is spent on mental health, compared with just 6 per cent in Northern Ireland.

From an intangible and private, albeit on a large-scale, problem we shift toward a very explicit and public challenge facing the region. Along with the series of separation barriers perpetuating residential segregation, the continued existence and operation of paramilitaries is perhaps the most obvious reminder of conflict. In addition to involvement in organised criminality such as drug-dealing and racketeering, the so-called ‘punishment attacks’ inflicted mostly on young men in their own communities is regarded as an affront to decency and the rule of law.

Through fearful coercion, paramilitaries appoint themselves an illegitimate justice system dispensing ‘punishment’ in the form of vicious beatings and shootings, usually for misdemeanours. This was the subject of Father Martin Magill’s talk as he represented the pressure group ‘Stop the Attacks’ who campaign against the impunity of paramilitaries as they carry out human rights abuses. This coalition of youth workers, clergy and faith leaders was inspired by earlier efforts like ‘Families Against Intimidation and Terror’ (FAIT), set up in 1990 by a mother whose son had been shot by a paramilitary organisation. Fr Magill also paid credit to the meticulous work of Prof Liam Kennedy, who produced the landmark report on paramilitary attacks on children and young people (under twenty-one) with the title ‘They Shoot Children Don’t They?’ back in 2001. Whilst Fr. Magill acknowledged a recent decrease in recorded attacks, he refused complacency stating that the thirty-three incidents last year were thirty-three too many and that the group’s ultimate objective was to be so successful that they put themselves out of business.

The scale of abuse was highlighted by reference to Andrew Madden’s article in the Belfast Telegraph which collated Freedom of Information requests from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. From April 10th, 1998, the day the Good Friday Agreement was signed, to February 2023 there were 3,259 assaults or shootings records; 349 of these victims were under the age of eighteen. Rather than simply quoting these shocking statistics, Fr Magill gave them a poignant and personal depth. The following descriptions of injuries were written in the utilitarian language of police reports but delivered with the measured pace of an orator. However quiet the room had been it seemed to fall even further into a horrified silence:

Suspected broken nose, cut requiring five stitches to nose, six stitches to inside upper lip, three stitches on small finger on right hand which is also broken and grazed to left side of head. The victim was male and aged twelve … Five gunshot wounds to right leg, two gunshot wounds to left leg, one gunshot wound to right elbow. The victim was male, aged eighteen.

The conference’s objective was not only to reflect on the darkness and ills of society but to illuminate hopeful strategies for change. With this in mind, Fr Magill ended with a radical but practical proposal inspired by the broadcaster Jim Deeds. It consisted of reimagining the uses of churches and other religious buildings. Underattended as they so often are, they could be opened up for people in need of food, shelter, childcare, education and refuge. The call to action was clear, that faith practitioners could and should do more to fulfil John’s Gospel chapter 10, verse 10: ‘I came that they may have life and have it to the full.’

The final two ideas were provided by Eileen Weir of the Shankill Women’s Centre, a hugely respected community development practitioner whose extensive experience was in keeping with the calibre of the conference. Weir contrasted normative piecemeal funding with long-term and sustainable investment. During an All-Island Women’s Forum, Head of Campaigns and Mobilisation Rachel Coyle censured this trend of underinvestment for exacerbating social exclusion across the island. Furthermore, it significantly diminishes organisations’ capacity for collective action, political analysis and supporting women’s representation and participation.

Weir was convinced that civic society had achieved more in keeping the peace than politicians. Given that the resultant stability has facilitated the tourism boom, Weir argued that any major business settling in Northern Ireland should take a charity of their choosing under their wing and invest in them.

The second point Weir stressed was the need to inspire young people to take up key roles in civil society to address persistent inequalities. They need to be involved in the politics of today and not of forty years ago. An older generation may have passed down trauma, but they can also pass on the skills and lessons they have learned. This mirrored the opening remarks by ‘Paving the Path’ project lead Dr Connal Parr: ‘we want new relationships and dialogues to emerge from today.’ To that objective, all panels were filmed and made available for public use as an educational resource. Such resources are required given the capricious nature of peace. Some of the milestones along its path can be uprooted, whether by paramilitary spoiler violence, political dysfunction, or deteriorating community relations. Therefore, progress made is not necessarily progress maintained. Indeed, there is plenty of paving yet to be done, as the path continues …

1/10/2023

Response to Maurice Earls

John Fanning writes: Maurice Earls’s thought-provoking essay ‘The State Of Us’ (February drb) is a valuable contribution to a much-needed debate on our future direction at a time when the world is drifting unsteadily towards an as yet unknown destination. The fall-out from the 2008 great recession is still reverberating and has been further complicated by the rise of populism in many previously established democracies, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and, overshadowing all, the impending climate crisis. Ireland is seen as an economic success, but this is largely based on our continuing ability to attract FDI especially from the US, a position wittily labelled by the author as the Hibernian Trading Platform. In querying whether we should have all our eggs in one basket Earls suggests that we need to pay more attention to developing indigenous businesses, especially in the agri-food category.                                                                                    He then widens the canvas by suggesting that we are experiencing symptoms of the general malaise affecting many western societies; ‘widespread discontent and structurally embedded inequality’.

The need for more indigenous businesses has been a cause of concern for many years, usually accompanied by a warning that our success in attracting FDI won’t last forever in spite of the fact that we are less dependent on a favourable tax regime to attract inward investment than ever. But there are additional social and cultural reasons why we need more successful home-grown businesses. It’s impossible to argue with that but over the past three decades we have seen the emergence of a number of very successful Irish businesses including CRH, Kerry Group, Glanbia, Ryanair, Paddy Power. They are all global leaders, and therein lies the rub: the majority of their employees and shareholders are now based overseas, which is the inevitable price we pay for being a small country. Unfortunately, most of these companies are currently considering transferring their stock market listings from Dublin to the New York exchange; an unfortunate example of the price of success. We could obviously do with more successful local businesses, particularly in the food and drink sectors, but Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland do have a wide range of imaginative support schemes and the pipeline for successful new businesses looks promising. Sales of Irish whiskey are predicted to overtake Scotch sales in the US by 2030, a position that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In anticipation of this turnaround, a plethora of new distilleries are appearing all over the country. It must also be acknowledged that we have a very successful economy, enjoying full employment and the younger generation is arguably the most entrepreneurially minded ever.

If all this sounds too Pollyannaish then it is time to turn to the second of Earls’s preoccupations: the widespread sense of discontent; here unfortunately the outlook is not so good. The only consolation is that we’re not alone, our discontent and alienation seem to be shared across Europe and much of the rest of the world and is now regularly broadened into a more general sense of Nietzschean ressentiment. A variety of reasons is advanced to account for this phenomenon, ranging from fear of more pandemics, increasing effects of climate change, the return of 1914-1918 style trench warfare on European soil, and above all the general insecurity caused by the Great Recession of 2008.

Earls rightly suggests that the real issue is the lack of any credible alternative to the neo-liberal economic order which failed so miserably fifteen years ago. The Left have been found wanting for at least fifty years, since the goal of a centrally planned economy proved impractical. Instead of presenting an alternative vision for society they have retreated down the rabbit hole of identity politics. The Right presented a simple and convincing narrative; we all want more prosperity (don’t we?) and the most effective way to ensure economic growth is to allow people’s natural competitive instinct free reign; individualism and competition will ensure prosperity for all (won’t it?). This societal goal was reiterated recently by David McWilliams in his weekly Irish Times column: ‘The purpose of 21st century Ireland is prosperity. We can argue over what prosperity means and in particular the success or otherwise of its distribution but there is little doubt that prosperity of the many is the socioeconomic goal of the Irish state. This is the purpose of the endeavour, the heart of the exercise.’

I examined the letters page of the Irish Times every day of the following week wondering if anyone would register even a smidgin of disagreement with this definitive assertion but failed to find any. But if this contention is true then there is no prospect of an end to our current discontent, alienation and ressentiment. Experience of the last thirty years has shown that a rise in prosperity will inevitably be accompanied by a further rise in inequality and although people may have a little extra to spend on more ‘stuff’ there is ample evidence that ‘the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions which vanish at the very moment they loom into view destroyed by the appetite that seeks them’.

Our obsession with economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon: it only began to trump all other considerations in the middle of the last century. Economics used to be a moral science concerned with the wider implications of the good life. We need to revive this idea. The belief that there is such a thing as a ‘good life’ has been key to all the world’s great civilisations: except our own. Before she died recently British philosopher Mary Midgley continually returned to this subject and in one of her last books made the following plea: ‘Our age is preoccupied with the vision of continually improving means rather than saving ourselves the trouble by reflecting on ends—we need to compare visions and articulate them more clearly and think them through.’

We should do the same.

1/10/2023

The Wars on Palestine

On May 22nd last, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University gave a talk at Maynooth University (and at Trinity College the next day) entitled ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’. Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a highly distinguished historian of the Middle East, with many books to his name, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, first published in 2020. Conor McCarthy, who organised the Maynooth talk, here introduces Khalidi’s main points, which warrant wide circulation:

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is maybe the best history of twentieth-century Palestine in a single short volume accessible to the general reader. But the book’s being pitched to a wide readership has not stopped its author from approaching his topic in an innovative manner. As Khalidi made clear, the book was motivated in part by what Edward Said famously called in Orientalism ‘the personal dimension’ to scholarship. Quoting Gramsci, Said argued that the development of ‘critical consciousness’ demanded that the scholar seek to ‘know himself’ by assembling an ‘inventory’ of the multitude of traces laid down in him by the historical process up to the point of writing. Accordingly, Rashid Khalidi, born in 1948, weaves his own family history into the embattled and at times fragmentary history of Palestine. But this autobiographical element is only one aspect of the original character of the book.

Many interested non-specialists in the history of Israel/Palestine will find their understanding of the region structured around various ‘wars’ ‑ most obviously, those of 1948, 1967 and 1982. But Khalidi widens the scope of this vision. Inverting Clausewitz’s maxim that war is diplomacy by other means, Khalidi suggests that war has been made on Palestine by means much broader than merely armed aggression. Rejecting models which see the struggle in Palestine as one between rival nationalisms, Palestinian and Israeli, he argues trenchantly that Palestine has suffered a succession of ‘declarations of war’. These came from multiple sources – the imperial powers (Britain, chiefly), the newer superpowers of the Cold War (the United States pre-eminently) as well as from Zionism and the state which it created. Khalidi notes how pre-1948 leaders of Zionism, especially those on the political right – he quotes Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual father of the Likud party now led by Binyamin Netanyahu ‑ were never less than clear that Zionism came to Palestine as a settler-colonial movement whose goal was the total transformation of Palestine into Eretz Israel.

The declarations of war of which Khalidi writes began with the Balfour Declaration, when in 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild telling him and the Zionist movement that Britain looked with favour on the creation of a ‘national home in Palestine for the Jewish people’. The Declaration had, in fact, been negotiated over months, with Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann invited by the British government to produce a draft proposal. Accordingly, and as Khalidi points out, we should not be surprised to find that the Declaration nowhere refers to Palestinians and can conceive of national rights in Palestine only for Jews. Khalidi reminds us that almost in parallel with the Balfour Declaration, British troops entered Palestine for the first time in 1917, and the path was prepared, as the First World War came to an end and the Ottoman empire was broken up, for Britain to achieve the League of Nations Mandate for the territory. Any illusions that the Mandate was to prepare for Arab self-determination in Palestine were debatable under the terms of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and were finally shattered by the incorporation of the Declaration into the preamble of the Mandate.

In other words, the Mandate was already a colonial apparatus, where Britain provided the ‘Iron Wall’(Jabotinsky’s formulation) behind which Jewish immigration to Palestine could take place and where the institutions of the nascent Jewish state – the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, the Histadrut, the various Zionist militias – could take form under British protection. When Palestinians rebelled against this process – in the 1920s and crucially in 1936-1939 – Britan beat them down with 100,000 troops and policemen, including cadres from the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans who had recently fought in the Irish War of Independence. Not merely this but under the Mandate, Britain trained Jewish militias to take part in counter-insurgency. Orde Wingate, with the permission of General Wavell, and in co-operation with the leaders of the Jewish Agency and of the Haganah, organised the Special Night Squads, which took part in the suppressions of the 1936 Palestinian revolt and whose members fed expertise back into the Zionist militias which would give them the advantage in the 1947-1949 war to come. Wingate was a pioneer in the dubious practices of late-colonial repression. He was also a mentor to Frank Kitson, expert on ‘low intensity warfare’ and often held to be the British army officer responsible for the Ballymurphy massacre of 1971. It is estimated that Britain killed, injured, imprisoned or exiled 17 per cent of the male Palestinian population during the Mandate years.

If the Balfour Declaration was a ‘declaration of war’ then so also, for Khalidi, was the UN General Assembly partition resolution, passed in November 1947. Palestinian rejection of the partition plan was then used by Israel as an excuse for ethnic cleansing in 1948 and to justify the assault on Palestine ever since. But the proposed plan was deeply imbalanced and unfair. By 1947, when the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine made its proposals, Jews still constituted only 33 per cent of the population of Palestine. In 1945 they owned only 6 per cent of the land. Yet the plan envisaged creating a Jewish state which would be allotted 55 per cent of the territory, and a Palestinian state with 45 per cent. Furthermore, the Jewish state was to have a massive and unstable Palestinian minority of 45%. An international regime was proposed for Jerusalem. Khalidi points out that the organisations of the Yishuv, such as the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, were consulted by UNSCOP, whereas Palestinian groups were not.

Resolution 181 was a ‘declaration of war’, since it clearly breached the principle of national self-determination codified in the new UN Charter. Any hope of Palestinian self-determination was fatally compromised by the Resolution. At the November vote in the General Assembly, the United States persuaded, bribed and bullied its junior allies into support. The USSR supported the Resolution too, as it believed that a ‘socialist’ Israel would be a bastion against the British empire in the Middle East. Britain abstained on the vote. The stage was thereby set for the 1947-1949 war, with fighting breaking out between Zionist and Palestinian militias within weeks of the UN vote. In March 1948, the Jewish guerillas went on the offensive, and Palestinian society and resistance largely collapsed. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled their homes, forced or intimidated out. Those who like to think that the Palestinian refugees left because of the intervention by the Arab states in May 1948 need to remember that 250,000 had been ethnically cleansed before any Arab regular forces were involved in the war.

Khalidi argues forcefully that ‘declarations of war’ were issued against Palestine also in 1967 and in 1982 – the Six Day War and the Lebanon war. In each case, he points out, Israeli offensives – the overwhelmingly successful and devastating destruction of the air forces and armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in June 1967, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian guerilla movements once and for all – were ‘greenlit’ by American political guidance. This is not to mention the fact that most later wars fought by Israel have been equipped by massive American military aid, often in contravention of American law, which stipulates that exported weapons can only be used for defensive purposes. The United States has become ever more clearly the metropole to which the Israel colonial movement is tied.

Looking for hints of hope, Khalidi is cautious. He notes the closeness of Israel to the United States just mentioned. He notes that Israeli society has moved further and further to the right since the accession of the Likud to power in 1977, and with the growth of the settler movement. Israel has never accepted the ‘two-state solution’, so beloved of Western leaders, and the population of illegal settlers continues to expand. He is equally clear-eyed about the fragmentation, disunity and lack of vision in the Palestinian leaderships, whether of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority under Abu Mazen, or of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.  Meanwhile those same Western leaders are mostly content to witness Palestinian disorganisation.

One area of hope lies in the fact that public opinion about Palestine in the United States is shifting, particularly among young Democrats and young American Jews, who are much more open to the Palestinian story than their parents’ generation was. This change in attitudes in the main metropole to Israel’s colonial project offers a hint of change to come, as the US might follow its own interests in the Middle East in a more realist fashion. Whether this change in attitudes is enough to override American great power manoeuvring remains to be seen.

28/07/2023

 

An Unconsummated Affair

James Williams writes: The novelist Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the best known of the fugitives seeking shelter in Ireland from the socialist storm brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1945. Fresh from the popular and financial success of his threnody for the Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was violently out of sympathy with the Attlee administration:

The French called the occupying German army ‘the grey lice’. That is precisely how I regard the occupying army of English socialist government.

Like Yeats, Waugh came from a middle class family and had a reverence for aristocratic lineages and ancestral seats. While he shared Yeats’s detestation of ‘the filthy modern tide’, he did not have the poet’s sometime regard for a peasantry untouched by that tide. In a letter to The Bell in July 1947 in response to a recent article on his work, Waugh acknowledged that ‘perhaps your reviewer is right in calling me a snob: that is to say I am happiest in the company of the European upper classes.’ England’s upper classes, he wrote elsewhere:

[are] the sole, finished product of what is thought to be English culture … they provided not only the statesmen and admirals and diplomats but also the cranks, aesthetes and revolutionaries; they formed our speech, they directed our artists and architects; they sent adventurous younger sons all over the world; they created and preserved our conceptions of honour and forbearance; all mention of the middle and lower classes might be expunged from our record and leave only trifling gaps.

As for the working class:

I don’t know them, and I’m not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

Waugh’s quest for a home in Ireland spanned the years from 1945 to 1947 and was concentrated in the period from December 1946 to June 1947, during which he made three visits to the country. The first indication of his interest in moving to Ireland came in May 1945 when he wrote to his wife, Laura, to say that he was thinking of buying a castle about twenty miles from Arklow from a friend with an adjoining property. His wife seems not to have shared his enthusiasm for the move at this stage as several weeks later he told her that, unless she changed her mind, ‘I will not … make you live at a distance with a sea-crossing from your children’s school.’ As Waugh’s distaste for England’s new political and economic dispensation grew, his interest in relocating to Ireland returned. In October 1946, he made enquiries about purchasing Gormanston Castle in Co Meath – ‘1806 Gothic, fifteen bedrooms, chapel, seductive “unfinished ballroom”, 124-acre park’. The estate, which had been home to the Preston family since the fourteenth century, had been put up for sale by the widow of the sixteenth Viscount Gormanston. She had subsequently remarried and was anxious to sell the estate as it was in financial difficulty. Encouraged by positive reports from friends, Waugh decided to pursue his interest in the property. In a diary entry for November 9th,1946, he wrote:

Throughout the day constantly recurring thoughts of Ireland. Not so much of what I should find there as what I would shake off here … The certainty that England as a great power is done for, that the loss of possessions, the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce an increasing poverty; that this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive. As a bachelor I could contemplate all this in a detached manner, but it is no country in which to bring up children.

Waugh would not have been the writer he was, however, if he was not able occasionally to see past his congenital spleen. Two weeks later he wrote in his diary about an address he had given to a group of grammar school students:

Considering afterwards what I had said, it seemed to me that I simply gave vent to peevish and otiose complaints about modern times. To escape testiness – that is why I am going to Ireland.

Waugh travelled with his wife in early December 1946 and the couple visited Gormanston Castle on December 5th with Terence de Vere White, their newly appointed solicitor. According to one account, the visit yielded an encounter with a worker from the estate that could have come from one of Waugh’s early satiric novels. When Waugh remarked that it was sad to think of the place changing ownership after so many centuries, the farmhand replied that ‘his Lordship never came to this place but to kill somebody’. On receiving a valuation of £13,000 for the property along with an estimate that a further £5,000 would be needed for repairs, Waugh gave de Vere White instructions to bid for it at auction. In a comic twist that even he would have struggled to devise however, Waugh did not go through with the purchase. On the boat back to England, he read a report in an evening newspaper that Billy Butlin had bought a site for a holiday camp at Mosney, adjacent to Gormanston. Butlin, a former fairground operator, had opened his first holiday camp in England in 1936 and by 1947 had added four more. Along with Irish patrons, the Mosney camp was aimed at holidaymakers from Britain seeking respite from the food rationing still in force there. The news killed Waugh’s interest in Gormanston instantly. The levelling lower class world he loathed was tailing him to the retreat in which he had planned to escape it. The barbarians would be at his gates in bathing suits and with their buckets and spades. He would waken not to the sylvan sounds of birdsong but to the booming strains of ‘good morning campers’. Shortly after his return, he wrote to Nancy Mitford:

The Irish trip was enjoyable but unsuccessful. Gormanston Castle was vast and grim and haunted and I had decided to buy it when just in time the announcement appeared that Mr. Butlin has purchased a site within a mile of it for a Holiday Camp. Well you would have thought that an added attraction with your love of the mob but not so me so I was able to cancel the sale just in time.

Mitford replied that she was sorry about Gormanston, adding that even ‘I couldn’t stand Butlin quite so near though of course I’m glad to know that it exists.’ This was a common sentiment among the sniffier sort of English socialist. In 1948, the future leader of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, took part in an excursion organised by the National Union of Miners to one of Butlin’s camps near Scarborough where the party’s annual conference was being held. He wrote: ‘Very efficient, organised, pleasure holiday making. Everybody agreed they would not go there.’

Though the fearful prospect of a neighbouring holiday camp killed Waugh’s plan to purchase Gormanston, it did not end his interest in moving to Ireland. Immediately after his return to England in December 1946 he visited an estate agent to put his home at Piers Court in Gloucestershire on the market. Following a stay in America from late January to March 1947, he made a second visit to Ireland from April 29th to May 7th. During this trip, he viewed at least eight properties in Westmeath, Wicklow, Kilkenny, Carlow and Tipperary. One of the properties he visited, Lisnavagh House, a Gothic revival mansion in Carlow, caught his interest. He made a further trip with his wife in June 1947, when he again visited Lisnavagh and inspected several other properties. In late May, he wrote to John Betjeman that he had almost decided to purchase Lisnavagh. On June 1st, he wrote to another friend, Lady Mary Lygon: ‘Soon I will have paper printed with LISNAVAGH Co CARLOW on it.’ On June 4th, he told Penelope Betjeman that he was negotiating for the property. A week later he visited it again, noting in his diary that the agent for the house had tried to induce them not to purchase it, but that ‘Laura liked it and so did I’.

During a visit to Scandinavia from mid-August to early September 1947 however, Waugh abandoned his plan to settle in Ireland. He wrote of the decision in his diary:

During my tour I decided to abandon the idea of settling in Ireland. Reasons: (1) Noble. The Church in England needs me. (2) Ignoble. It would be bad for my reputation as a writer. (3) Indifferent. There is no reason to suppose life in Ireland would be more tolerable than here. My children must be English. I should become an anachronism. The Socialists are piling up repressive measures now. It would seem I was flying from them. If I am to be a national figure I must stay at home. The Americans would lose interest in an emigrant and the Irish would not be interested.

It was not a decision he would come to regret. Five years later, he wrote to Nancy Mitford:

Among the countless blessings I thank God for, my failure to find a home in Ireland comes first. Unless one is mad on fox hunting there is nothing to draw one. The houses, except for half a dozen famous ones, are very shoddy in building and they none of them have servants’ bedrooms because at the time they were built Irish servants slept on the kitchen floor. The peasants are malevolent. All their smiles are false as Hell. The priests are very suitable for them but not for foreigners. No coal at all. Awful incompetence everywhere. No native capable of doing the simplest job properly. No schools for children. Above all the certainty that once one pulls up roots & lives abroad there is no particular reason for living anywhere. Why not Jamaica? Why not Sicily? Why not California?

In a follow-up letter, he added: ‘More about Ireland.  You have no conception of their mole-like malice. Detraction is their passion.’

Given Waugh’s own propensity for mole-like malice and his passion for detraction, it can be said that, on these counts at least, he would have been quite at home in Ireland. Bibulous, curmudgeonly and quick to give and take offence, he would have found no lack of like spirits in the Irish literary world. On the evening of his visit to Gormanston in December 1946, he had gone to the Abbey theatre, but left after one act of ‘an unintelligible peasant comedy’. He would have remained similarly aloof from the play of Irish life and likely have come to loathe it. Waugh was still at the height of his powers in the late 1940s and 1950s, the years in which he wrote the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences. Had he moved here, we might have had a comic masterpiece to put alongside his friend Henry Green’s novel, Loving, about life above and below stairs in an Irish castle during World War Two. It was not to be however: Waugh was spared Ireland and Ireland was spared Waugh.

Sources for quotations

Michael Davie (ed). 1995. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Phoenix).
Mark Amory (ed). 1982. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (Penguin: Harmondsworth).
Selina Hastings. 1994. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson).
Patrick Comerford. 2016. ‘An insight into how Gormanston Castle has seen many changes over the centuries’, www.patrickcomerford.com/2016/10/an-insight-into-how-gormanston-castle.html .
Charlotte Mosley (ed) 2010. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (London: Penguin Classics).
David Kynaston. 2007. Austerity Britain 1945-1948: A World to Build (London: Bloomsbury).

11/07/2023

Victoria Amelina 1986-2023

Lia Mills writes: Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there. She had no time to waste; she was easy to love. Living the dangerous life of a war crimes researcher, gathering testimony from survivors of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and using her considerable intellectual and writing gifts to write searing, accurate reports, she knew she had a target on her back. Every time she visited recently liberated areas of her country near the front line she went into danger. We all knew the danger she was in but there was some unquenchable flame in her that made us believe that we’d see her again, that we’d be together in Ukraine when the war ended; that she’d come back to Ireland many times, bringing her son with her. It was an absolute certainty that we would read and hear more of her amazing work, including her ongoing project War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, and as much poetry as her hazardous, volatile circumstances allowed her to write.

I met her weeks after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. She came to Dublin to help a young friend to settle here. Her essay in English “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: A tale of two genocides, the Holocaust and the Holodomor” appeared soon afterwards in the Irish Times online. ‘Homo Oblivious’ featured in the Dublin Review of Books that July. These two vivid essays explain a lot about the intertwined families of Russia and Ukraine and about how state propaganda succeeds in blinding us to truth. Victoria gained many friends and admirers among Ireland’s readers and writers, further strengthened by her appearance in Smock Alley that October and a workshop in Pearse Street Library for Ukrainian children who had been displaced to Ireland by Putin’s war.

In an Irish PEN event at Smock Alley, supported by UNESCO City of Literature, a large audience listened with rapt attention while she spoke about her work. She talked about destruction she had witnessed, about life in Ukraine under attack and the disappearance – and presumed death – of her friend Volodymyr Vakulenko, who had been lifted and tortured by Russian soldiers. They were waiting, she said, for DNA results to confirm whether a body found in a mass grave was his. Imagine that.

It was Victoria who searched Vakulenko’s garden with his father and found the diary he had buried there. She described taking photos of each page with her phone and sending them immediately, page by page, to a literary museum for safe-keeping. ‘In case anything happened.’ Each page sent and retrieved constitutes a victory for the preservation of Ukrainian culture.

She spoke such appalling truths in a calm and almost understated way, knowing the power of plain speaking. She wanted us to know what is happening in her country, to her country. She emphasised that Ukrainians are not downtrodden and have no appetite for defeat. On the contrary, they do their absolute best to live their lives as fully and normally as possible. She spoke with obvious joy of a rock concert she had attended, where people stayed outdoors during an air-raid alarm to sing and smoke and drink wine, showing Russia that, against all the odds, Ukraine is alive; Ukrainians are alive.” They will sing, dance, laugh (and eat pizza) if they damn well want to.

In Pearse Street library two days later, the atmosphere was completely different. Speaking in Ukrainian, Victoria talked Ukrainian children through her most recent book, Ten Ways for an Excavator to Save the World (Ееесторії екскаватора Еки). She encouraged them to join in activities, finding their way through a maze on a page; drawing and colouring in the characters. A party atmosphere was generated by library staff, with cake, biscuits and soft drinks for the children and their grateful mothers. There were even party bags. Victoria was at the effervescent heart of it all, with her gorgeous smile and enough time and energy to talk to everyone. No one present could have guessed that on the way in to town she’d fallen asleep in the car, exhausted by her demanding schedule and the effort of constantly switching roles, from investigator to international traveller; reporting events and conditions in Ukraine to people in luckier European countries. For once I was glad of the heavy traffic that day; it allowed her to sleep a little longer.

Victoria lived on the nineteenth floor of her apartment building in Kyiv. She liked sitting out on her balcony watching over the city. When I wrote to ask how she was managing to climb all those stairs during a power cut, she replied: Well, the nineteenth floor isn’t such a problem; but it would be nice to have either heating or electricity 🙂 In Smock Alley, she’d told a popular joke, which I’ve since heard from other Ukrainians: ‘We’d rather live without electricity for the rest of our lives than live with electricity under the Russians.’

Her essay title “Homo Oblivious” is a reference to a popular Ukrainian term, homo sovieticus. It refers to generations whose parents, to protect them, didn’t speak about the horrors, fears, or restrictions of a repressive era, or of the life that preceded it – a Ukrainian version of ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’. The language, history and religion Victoria’s generation were taught in schools is one hundred per cent the official, authoritarian, pro-Russian version. Until recently, these generations knew nothing of their true past.

Homo Sovieticus sounds irreversible, a life sentence, as though such an identity were inscribed in one’s genes. In fact, this isn’t about genes; it’s about false memories and malleable identities. It is about accepting lies in order to survive and prosper while forgetting the truth of the past. It is about them being the easiest prey to the post-truth era deceptions. So the cycle of lies and forgetting never breaks.

The Ukrainians of today have broken that cycle. They have reclaimed their own language; they know their own history; they know about Stalin’s Holdomor (famine) and about the twentieth century murders and disappearances of hundreds of Ukrainian artists and writers (“the lost renaissance”). They have no intention of submitting to Russian control. This is the culture of resistance that Victoria embraced so passionately and to which she dedicated the last years of her life.

A gifted young Ukrainian novelist (for adults and children), the facts of her successes and awards and her transition to her wartime life as not only a war crimes investigator but also an unofficial ambassador for her country are easy to find, online and in print. She was also a campaigner for the recognition of Crimes of Aggression (which would make it possible to punish leaders and decision-makers who initiate or authorise illegal wars, as distinct from soldiers who carry out those orders).

Many beautiful, true words have been written about her, along with some which, though well-meaning, are inaccurate. I worry that the weight and repetition of truths and half-truths will smother her, flatten her memory somehow; that they’ll shape her into a beautiful but two-dimensional patriotic hero but miss her vitality, her laugh, her courage and compassion, her love of all things literary, her gift for friendship and for joy in dark times. Reportage – including this piece – exposes her memory to the dangers of lies and distortions written by Russian sympathisers and agents, facilitated by the internet. My instinct, now, is to save the feelings we have for the friend we remember; to keep her memory and her legacy safe where she left them, in our hearts, where nothing bad can ever happen to her.

Victoria Amelina in the Dublin Review of Books: https://drb.ie/articles/homo-oblivious/

13/07/202

Photograph with permission from Victoria and from her publisher, Askold Melnyczuk of Arrowsmith Press. The Arrowsmith website, https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/, has links to a series of conversations with Ukrainian writers: ‘For the Record’.

 

How to Disappear

 Katrina Goldstone writes, In January 1987, Stella Jackson, who wrote under the pen name, Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, put a halt to her proposed memoir, declaring it unlikely she would ever manage to finish it. She had only reached the period of the late 1940s, in a life that would span from 1908 -1992. Despite her ardent literary ambitions, she published only one novel in her lifetime, The Green Cravat, about Lord Edward Fitzgerald and 1798, and wrote a handful of plays which were never performed. In her obituary in Saothar, the Labour History journal, the novel was alluded to as receiving ‘many favourable reviews.’   Yet, throughout the obituary by friends Edmund and Ruth Frow, Jackson was still defined in relation to the more famous men in her life. This was nothing new. Jackson was a woman well used to be being cast into the shadows, or to being defined in relation to men – her father, historian T.A. Jackson,  her lover Ewart Milne and less frequently Cork writer Patrick Galvin who was her husband, albeit only for a very short time.  Sometimes, though, a more brutal erasure occurred. In Ewart Milne’s timeline in the Festshrift in honour of his 80th birthday, the chronology for the wartime years from 1939-41, summarized the period in an anodyne line about  staying  ‘with friends in Wicklow and Co. Cork’. In fact, Milne had returned to Ireland in 1939, in the company of Stella Jackson, just at the outbreak of war. The two had first met in the rickety offices of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, at 26 New Oxford Street, at the height of those heady days of hope that Republican Spain might strike a hammer blow to fascism. That turned out to be a mirage, but did not prevent  numerous witnesses to history, both  famous and obscure, from recalling the rollercoaster of literary commitment in the frenzied atmosphere of Thirties literary circles. For many years it was Spender and Auden who hogged the Thirties literary limelight, but in the last 20 years their prominence has been challenged in lit crit circles. Accounts like Jackson’s unpublished memoir are still rare, written from a day to day activist viewpoint, by a working class woman and idiosyncratic Leftist, with a passion both for Ireland, and for some of Ireland’s literary menfolk. She was also ahead of the Confessional pack with her blunt attitude. Jackson’s candid depictions of messy liaisons, bouts of depression and the predatory nature of some avowedly Leftist males all make for a vivid portrait of the Leftist woman’s progress in the Thirties.  She also became an accidental tourist in Ireland’s literary circles. Her memoir, whilst focusing on the Thirties and war years, also contains a lively depiction of a forgotten milieu in Irish letters, that of a small group of artists, writers and poets who espoused antifascist causes and the principle of internationalism. The affair with Milne would be an entree into this rambunctious interconnecting group of friends and political comrades, interlocking circles which included Sean and May Keating, Edward Sheehy, (of Ireland Today,) artist Harry Kernoff, Leslie Daiken, Jack and Mina Carney, Margaret Barrington and Muriel MacSwiney amongst others. Jackson’s sojourn in wartime Ireland would be brutally curtailed when she was unceremoniously removed by Gardai from the house she shared with Milne and  deported back to England in the summer of 1941.

Jackson described her first meeting with Milne, and the circuitous course of the love affair as part of her voluminious unpublished memoir, Flotsam and Jetsam: Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s Daughter. The ‘revolutionary’ in question was T.A. Jackson, (always known as Tommy) one of the founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, leading Marxist historian of the interwar years, and an ardent supporter of the Irish independence struggle. Tommy Jackson passed on his devotion to Ireland to his daughter Stella and schooled her well in the politics and history of the country.  As she put it “I was suckled, weaned, [and] reared on the Dialectic and on Irish history.”

Jackson defined herself, in typical self-deprecating manner, as “a crazy mixed up classless intellectual.” She was also was a kind of British “red diaper baby.” She was brought up with her sister Vivien, in a staunch communist household, where the reality of midnight flits or lack of food corresponded with the periods of her father’s intermittent employment. Vivien Morton recalled one incident when the two girls went off to school one morning and returned to discover they had neither home nor possessions, as the bailiffs had removed “every book, every childish treasure.”

Stella Jackson represents herself as a back room figure in Thirties political circles, though Barbara Castle, Labour Party’s ‘Red Queen’ for one, thought she should stand for Parliament.  Jackson and Castle, then Barbara Betts shred digs in the 1930s. Jackson  began the task of committing her memoir to paper, in the Eighties. It was not her first foray into serious writing. Her only novel, The Green Cravat, about Lord Edward Fitzgerald, had been published in 1959, and re published in 1970. Amongst the flimsy pages of her manuscript, there is a letter from Lord Killanin, of Four Provinces Films, which indicates  a brief flurry of interest in adapting her book for the big screen, though Killanin wryly mused that Hollywood’s interest in historical films rarely went beyond “Madame Pompadour.”

On arrival in Ireland in the autumn of 1939, Milne and Jackson were inducted into a hectic round of socializing centred in and around County Wicklow and environs. They lodged first with Edward Sheehy, former literary editor of Ireland Today, the main left- liberal publication from 1936 till its closure in 1938. Jackson claims on her first visit she was shown a row of bushes outside and told that was what there was in the way of sanitation. The couple also became friendly with artist Sean Keating and his wife May, who drew interconnecting groups of artists, writers, poets and political activists into their circle. Jackson described  packed parties and heated cultural discussions, in the Keatings’ home. She was forcibly struck by the lively engagement with literature and poetry.

“It was extraordinary to me – after England, where I had never known anyone to have any knowledge of current poetry-writing – that everyone seemed to be au fait with every kind of literary activity ( even people who themselves  were by no means writers) and that any poem in any provincial little magazine by a new name  was immediately discussed and criticized and as much as possible discovered about the writer. Seemingly Ireland was indeed a land of literary culture, and also its close-knit intellectual community had much more than a normal endowment of curiosity.” The observation might seem slightly condescending in tone, but Jackson had a genuine knowledge and appreciation for Irish history and culture.

Despite the flurry of  socialising, there were also quieter moments in the Sheehy household. Through the Sheehys, the couple met Margaret Barrington, who would become  quasi-landlady to the pair. Barrington was known to friends as Meta or Mita O’Flaherty. Her novel My Cousin Justin had been recently published. Barrington, could be said to be as well known for the notoriety of leaving her husband Edmund Curtis for Liam O’Flaherty, as she was for her novel. The three moved together to Leap, County Cork, Barrington acting as scatty landlady. According to Jackson, they formed an amiable household with everyone dedicated to writing in some form or another. She painted a cosy picture of domesticity despite the deprivations, Barrington writing in one room, and Milne writing in another. Although Jackson carried out tasks such as proofreading, it was during her stay in Ireland that she first hit on the idea of a book of her own, while she read up on the 1798 rebellion in the local library. She had dreamed of being a writer from childhood, but her larger than life father had monopolised the Writer in the family label, and her emotionally fragile mother vehemently disparaged her literary ambitions.  While in County Cork, Jackson awaited the publication of her pamphlet on Partition, written under the pseudonym John Hawkins, and sponsored by the Fabian Society. She agreed to write under the pseudonym of “John Hawkins”, as her own name in Left circles would be well known, and she would inevitably be associated with the “elder daughter of the notorious communist and vehement Marxist propagandist Jackson”.  She had previously conducted research through Ireland, North and South, doing interviews, and also canvassed opinion from some Irish in Britain groups. When the pamphlet, entitled The Irish Question Today, was published, it garnered reviews in The Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cork Examiner, Belfast Telegraph, Irish News, New Statesman, Economist, Spectator and other periodicals. Lulled into a false sense of security, because she had received no unwarranted official attention after the pamphlet’s publication, Jackson, wrote to John Parker, Labour MP, in the House of Commons, describing the scare stories and “invasion-talk” circulating at that point in 1941 in the Cork area. Two days after posting the letter, in the small hours of the morning, thunderous knocking awakened all in the household – Milne, Jackson and Meta O’Flaherty – and the two officers of the Garda Síochána  who had loudly demanded entry presented Jackson with a deportation order, issued by the Minister for Justice, Gerry Boland, on account of “infringement of neutrality” Jackson  believed – naively perhaps – that it was the pamphlet, rather the information she shared in the letter, that was the reason for her arrest. She was transported to Dublin and kept in a cell in Mountjoy Prison overnight, not allowed any legal representation before being deported to England. Despite attempts by May Keating and members of the Irish Labour Party to intercede, the order was not rescinded. According to Jackson, her deportation “made front page news in the Irish newspapers”. Her time in Ireland in the late Thirties and Forties, which she looked back on as a “genuine idyll”, had another unexpected outcome which enhanced her own rather fragile sense of self-worth. In Ireland, few people knew her father, thus she was not regarded as an “extrapolation of Tommy’s … At long long last I began having a clear sense of identity, a proper perception of myself as a separate person, and I gained greatly in confidence”..

Stella Jackson’s memoir is not an archival find that reveals the neglect  or erasure of a prodigious literary talent as such. Yet what lends the memoir heft and significance lies its record of key cultural and social details, an original and unusual account of Thirties leftist circles told by a woman on the Left with a complex relationship to left wing groups, offering a different slant or  interpretation of Leftist and anti fascist politics in the Thirties and Forties. Jackson moved in diverse leftist circles including those connected to labour council politics- she sat  the council for St Pancras- and the cluster of groups that emerged in Britain in support of Republican Spain. She was always assumed to follow the same political ideology as her father. Her strenuous denials of this were greeted more often than not with knowing looks or nods. She wrote with humour about those maladroit assumptions in an opinion piece for the Spectator in the 1970s, entitled ‘The Wearing of the Red.’

As in her own life where her political allegiances were constantly misinterpreted, so too, the memoir. It may well have been interpreted as insufficiently in one camp or another. Her candid account of her liaisons, frontline dispatches about Thirties sexual politics, and her honesty about her abortion, might have seemed to be all of a piece with  feminist reworkings of the genre of autobiography, and to guarantee interest from a feminist imprint. But then there is the at times abject expression of adoration of Milne.  The revelations of shabby behaviour from some  Leftist men in her circles would have struck a discordant note amongst the traditional, sometimes hagiographic male dominated narratives of Thirties left wing activism, ruling out interest from radical presses. Her timing seems to have been off, too. She started writing the memoir in the Thatcherite Eighties, not an auspicious decade to pen memories of radical leftwing politics in the Thirties. Ten years or 15 years earlier and her memoir may well have struck a chord with new audiences hungry for reminisces on the Thirties or narratives about the Spanish Civil War. There is a short note from Jackson within the manuscript pages, with a list of dates and incidents that need to be corrected, indicating that there may have been an other editorial eye, but again this is supposition and conjecture. The truth is that it is now impossible to know the trajectory or fate of the memoir manuscript.

The title of the memoir encapsulates at a lifelong dilemma for Jackson.  Others, often categorized her as an adjunct to a more prominent male – first her father, the Revolutionary, and then Milne in the years when he was garnering attention in literary circles in Dublin and London. The death of Milne in 1987, with whom she was re united after his wife Thelma died,  put an abrupt end to her attempt to set the record straight on her own behalf. Yet Jackson’s memoir offers an intimate snapshot of a vibrant countercultural scene in Ireland, and in the London of the interwar period and war years.  Jackson may have set out to assert autonomy over the narrative of her life, to break out of the shadow of the men whose experiences were deemed to be more significant than hers, but she accidentally also managed  to document a rich cultural episode in Irish literary history, which until now has been almost entirely forgotten. The Thirties is an orphan decade in the history of the Irish Free State, its tumult, violence and stark social change, lost amidst the  copious high drama accounts of the  historical era of Independence struggle through to the contested territory of the Second World war and neutrality. Thanks to Jackson,  and the other writers in the Daiken circle, we can begin to construct a clearer record of what Irish writers and artists were doing and thinking in the late Thirties and Forties, and how their opinions and actions chimed with a broader  internationalist, antifascist moment.

Originally published January 2021

Notes on Sources

This blog is adapted from the chapter on women writers in the book Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art Exile and War by Katrina Goldstone ( Routledge) to be published 30 December 2020. It is a study of a number of writers and artists in the circle of Irish Jewish writer Leslie Daiken, and their political and cultural engagement at home and abroad during the Thirties.

Katrina Goldstone is an independent researcher and writer, who writes about cultural diversity and aspects of Jewish history and culture/ Contact: [email protected]

Obituary Stella Hagan Fitzthomas, Saothar Vol 18, 1993 p 12.

Our History pamphlet, no 73 T. A. JACKSON. a centenary appreciation by Vivien Morton and Stuart MacIntyre.

This blog was originally published in January 2021

Emigrants and Émigrés

James Williams writes: In the years after World War Two, hundreds of thousands of Irish people migrated to Britain. In all, almost one in six of the population quit the country in the 1950s as Ireland shared with East Germany the unenviable distinction of being the only countries in Europe whose population declined over the decade. The huddled masses of poor and tired yearning to be free who packed the boats to England in these years came predominantly from the small farms of the countryside and the working class of Ireland’s towns and cities. The push for their exodus came from the poverty, stagnation and coercive clerical control that characterised post-Independence Ireland. The pull came from the job opportunities presented by Britain’s postwar reconstruction, the benefits offered by its new welfare state and the greater freedoms possible in an urban and more secular society. Frank O’Connor’s claim that ‘every Irishman’s private life begins in Holyhead’ was even more true for Irish women. Exceptionally among European migration flows, more women than men emigrated from Ireland in the late 1940s.

As the Irish flocked to the country against whose rule they had rebelled a quarter of a century earlier, a select band of British patricians were returning to the country that had risen up against their rule. In one of history’s odder ironies, Ireland’s revolution had ended up creating a congenial refuge for Britain’s reactionaries. The economic underdevelopment, social conservatism and scant welfare state that drove women and men of no property or prospects out of Ireland in these years drew in a disaffected segment of the British squirearchy. As Sally Phipps wrote in her biography of her mother, Molly Keane:

The election of a Labour Government [in 1945] created a new form of refugee. The Conservative hunting English flooded to Ireland to escape Attlee’s taxes, a possibly revolutionary regime and food rationing. They needed cream and beef and Georgian houses to rent or buy.

Those seeking asylum in Ireland from high taxes, foreign exchange controls and what they saw as the hostile social and political order of postwar Britain included Sir Alfred Chester Beatty and Sir Alfred Beit. Beatty was accorded favourable exchange control facilities to relocate here, and he and Beit were later granted honorary Irish citizenship. As we will see in Part 2 of this blog, the writer Evelyn Waugh, who referred to the postwar Labour administration as the ‘Attlee terror’ and the ‘occupying army of English socialist government’, also came close to joining this British flight of the earls. For this disgruntled troop of malcontents, the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s remained unspoiled by economic and social change and offered sanctuary from the pernicious forces that had laid waste to England’s once green and pleasant land.

In John Betjeman’s view, Ireland was a country that ‘was never subjected to a nineteenth century’ and which had ‘fortunately escaped the industrialism which changed the face of England’. Should ‘a man wish to live in the 18th century, let him take with him what capital he has left, and buy one of those hundreds of empty Georgian mansions in the remote parts of Ireland’. According to Harold Macmillan, a regular visitor to the Lismore estate of his sister-in-law, the duchess of Devonshire, Ireland was ‘the only happy country left in Europe’, one where ‘nothing seems to have changed’, and which was ‘just like England when I was young’. For Oswald Mosley, who bought Clonfert Palace in Galway in 1951 and was also a frequent visitor to the Lismore estate of his Devonshire sister-in-law, Ireland was a free country while England had become ‘an Island Prison’. For Edward Sackville West, brother of the more famous Vita, who set up home in Tipperary in the 1950s, Ireland shared with Portugal ‘the same backwaters quality & the same equally warm, intensely religious peasantry’. Nancy Mitford’s inventory of Ireland’s attractions for Evelyn Waugh struck similar notes:

Never have I seen a country so much made for somebody as it is for you. The terribly silly politeness of lower classes so miserable that they long for any sort of menial task at £1 a week, the emptiness, the uncompromising Roman Catholicism, the pretty houses of the date you like best … the neighbours all low brow and armigerous & all 100 miles away, the cold wetness, the low income tax, really I could go on for ever.

A quarter of a century after the War of Independence and the Civil War had seen the destruction of hundreds of the houses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and a decade after an ‘Economic War’ between the two states, Ireland had become a haven for the more backward-looking elements of Britain’s elite. In 1947, just two years after his public spat with de Valera over Irish neutrality, Churchill gave a sanguine appraisal of the state of affairs in his country’s nearest neighbour:

… they are much more friendly to us than they used to be. They have built up a cultured Roman Catholic system in the South. There has been no anarchy or confusion. They are getting more happy and prosperous. The bitter past is fading.

Many of those living in the Ireland of the time would not have shared Churchill’s view that they were becoming happier and more prosperous. For some, the scale of the flight to Britain called the very achievement of independence into question. Sean O’Faolain, an IRA combatant in the War of Independence, wrote:

We always maintained in Ireland that this national loss of blood … was entirely due to foreign misrule. We promised ourselves and the world that once we got a native government we would soon put a stop to all that … We had to face the bitter truth that something more than foreign misrule is involved. We had to pick rock salt out of our sores when we discovered simultaneously that while our own people were vanishing from Ireland the English were coming back to it in droves: in full flight from the austerities of socialist England, they were buying up houses and farms in every part of the country.

In Amongst Women, John McGahern would give forceful expression to this view of the futility of the fight for independence in the figure of the one-time freedom fighter Michael Moran:

What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.

Speaking in Belfast in 1984, the veteran republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell recounted a telephone conversation he had had with Éamon De Valera during the latter’s presidency. ‘You’ve got to remember Dev,’ said O’Donnell, ‘that damn nearly a million Irish people left there while you were Taoiseach.’ ‘Ah, be fair now,’ replied de Valera, ‘if you’d been in my place there’d have been emigration too.’ ‘That’s quite true,’ O’Donnell claims to have countered, ‘if I had been in your place there’d have been a great many people who would have left the country. But they would not have been the same people!’

Given the scale of emigration and population decline in the 1940s and 1950s, it is little surprise that the spectre of the ‘vanishing Irish’ was much discussed and fretted over. With characteristic crabbiness, Patrick Kavanagh greeted the prospect of national extinction with equanimity. When the American writer Nelson Algren commented to him that it was sad to think that the Irish were vanishing, Kavanagh replied that ‘it was too good to be true’. Fr. Patrick Noonan, a contributor to a widely debated collection of essays on the phenomenon, took a less contrarian and more alarmist view:

Unless immediate and drastic measures are taken, the Irish race will either disappear altogether or continue to survive only as an enervated minority in a planted country. Already, Ireland has become the land of promise for many adventurous or tax-fleeing foreigners who eagerly purchase the lands and property vacated by the emigrant.

The Inter-Party overnment that took office in February 1948 responded to the twin trends of outward migration to, and inward migration from, Britain by establishing a Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems and imposing a 25 per cent stamp duty on property purchases by foreigners. The commission sat from 1948 to 1954. Its report was long on analysis but short on solutions. In the second half of the 1950s, emigration hit even higher levels than in the first half of the decade. The Catholic church responded with a call to prayer. A ‘prayer for emigrants’ issued by the hierarchy in the 1950s sought divine assistance to keep emigrants ‘loyal to their faith, free from sin and faithful to all their family ties’. Ireland might have gained independence and declared itself a republic, but what the historian Thomas Bartlett has called the post-Famine order of ‘faith, farm, family and farewell’ would stay in place for some time to come.

A further instalment of this blog will follow shortly.

19/06/2023

Sources for quotations
Huw Wheldon (ed). 1962. ‘Frank O’Connor’ in Monitor: An Anthology (London: Macdonald & Co.).
Sally Phipps. 2017. Molly Keane: A Life (London: Virago).
John Betjeman. 1934. Ghastly Good Taste (London: Chapman & Hall).
Charles Lysaght. ‘Dear Brendan and Master Harold’, in Richard Aldous and Sabine Lee (eds). 1999. Macmillan: Aspects of a Political Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
Maurice Walsh. ‘Mosley in Ireland’. The Dublin Review No. 26, Spring 2007.
Charlotte Mosley (ed). 2010. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (London: Penguin Classics).
Winston Churchill. ‘The Dream’ in John Gross (ed). 1991. The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Sean O’Faolain, ‘Love Among the Irish’ and Patrick B Noonan CSSp, ‘Why Few Irish Marry’, in JA O’Brien (ed) 1953. The Vanishing Irish (London: Allen).Richard English. ‘Green on red: two case studies in early twentieth century Irish republican thought’ in D. George Boyce et al (eds). 1993. Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge).
Nelson Algren. 2011. ‘The Banjaxed Land: You Have Your People and I Have Mine’ in Algren at Sea: Travel Writings (New York: Seven Stories Press).
Thomas Bartlett. Ireland: A History, 2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Forgetting to Remember

Sean Byrne writes: In recent commemorations of the Civil War, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have all accepted that atrocities were committed by both sides during that conflict. Yet none of those parties have mentioned the ruthless suppression by the new state of the struggles by workers to better their wretched conditions during the War of Independence and Civil War. It is particularly surprising that Sinn Féin has not mentioned those struggles as the party used claim to seek the establishment of a ‘thirty-two-county socialist republic’. (The word ‘socialist’ was not, however, used in Sinn Féin literature seeking funds in the USA.) The Democratic Programme of the First Dáil in 1919, ratified by Sinn Féin after their victory in the 1918 election, also set out socialist principles, but those principles were only accepted by Sinn Féin in acknowledgement of Labour’s decision not to field candidates in the 1918 election, leading to a Sinn Féin majority, and Sinn Féin had no intention of implementing them.

From the 1880s to 1916, the campaign for Home Rule had been synonymous with the struggle of farmers to gain ownership of the land they worked. But some in the republican movement were uncomfortable with that link, fearing that the land question might distract from the struggle for independence. During the War of Independence there were seizures of land by impoverished farmers, mainly in the West of Ireland. Sinn Féin courts tried to resolve those disputes and, in many cases, returned the seized land to its original owners. The republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell stated that the IRA was used to control the impoverished small farmers and labourers who identified their own struggle for land with the national struggle. O’Donnell believed that the suppression of land seizures was authorised by the Sinn Féin leadership because they had gained middle class support, which they did not wish to jeopardise for the sake of landless labourers in the West of Ireland.

If by revolution is meant the overturning of political and economic institutions, the War of Independence and Civil War led to regime change rather than revolution. This was acknowledged by Kevin O Higgins when he said that the leaders of the new Irish state were the most conservative revolutionaries in history. But, to the alarm of Sinn Féin leaders, during the period 1919 to 1923 there were outbreaks of real class struggle. In 1918, 10,000 people gathered in Dublin to acclaim the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1920 Labour Party congress ‘unanimously affirmed workers’ rights to control food production, distribution and pricing, and called for the abolition of the wages system’. Possibly inspired by this rhetoric, in 1919 agricultural labourers in Meath struck for better wages and conditions in a struggle marked by considerable violence, including driving of cattle off farms, damage to crops, disruption of auctions and the derailing of a special train carrying cattle to Belfast.

Between 1919 and 1922 there were over eighty workplace occupations as workers resisted employers’ attempts to cut wages and jobs in response to the economic recession at the end of the First World War. The first and most successful soviet was organised in the unlikely location of Monaghan Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, in 1919. As a trade union organiser, Peadar O’Donnell led the strikers and took over as director of the hospital, where staff had been working ninety-three hours a week and were obliged to stay in the hospital between shifts. The staff were supported by the patients and a reduction in working hours and a pay increase were successfully negotiated. (The Monaghan Asylum soviet was wonderfully depicted in the opera Elsewhere written by Michael Gallen and performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1921.) A soviet organised in Limerick in 1919, in response to the city being put under martial law during the War of Independence, was largely a nationalist protest rather than an act of socialist revolution and ended when the lord mayor of Limerick and the Catholic bishop intervened.

In 1922 and 1923 there were eight strikes by farm labourers, involving over a thousand workers. The Free State government used the army to ruthlessly suppress the strikes. A company of special infantrymen was established whose first task, in June 1923, was to break up a strike by agricultural labourers in Waterford. The special infantrymen guarded property and protected strike-breakers. Martial law and a curfew were imposed in East Waterford and picketers and union officials were imprisoned. Farm labourers also struck in Kildare and the strike was put down by the special infantrymen supported by farmer vigilante groups calling themselves ‘White Guards’ in homage to the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian civil war.

In response to agitation by farmers on uneconomic farms and the farm labourers’ strikes, the Free State government in 1923 gave the Land Commission the power to compulsorily acquire and redistribute land. This redistribution placated the smallest farmers, who got enough land to subsist, though not enough to become commercial farmers. Historian Terence Dooley has shown that between 1923 and 1948 very few farmers received redistributed land who were not members of Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael clubs or Fianna Fáil cumainn. This naked partisanship may explain why the government has refused to release the records of the Land Commission, which ceased operations in 1987. Some farm labourers received small patches of redistributed land to supplement their starvation wages but most emigrated, fleeing exploitation.

None of the events described here are mentioned in the official timeline of the ‘decade of centenaries’. Before that decade ends, at the end of this year, the government might consider acknowledging in some way that among the new Irish state’s earliest acts were the suppression of the efforts of some of its poorest citizens to improve their lot. It is also worth remembering that in 1924 minister for industry and commerce Patrick McGilligan stated that, while Irish people ‘may have to die of starvation’, the state had no responsibility to keep them alive. As Milan Kundera wrote: ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

7/5/2023

The Songs Remain

Robin Wilkinson writes: When shooting In Bruges in 2008 the director did daily battle with the studio on matters from the storyboard to the lighting of individual scenes. He won that war and the resulting gem was very much his own, in every sense a Martin McDonagh film, as is The Banshees of Inisherin. Since Bruges, he has always obtained final cut in his contracts, ensuring a smooth passage from pen to screen. He does not allow his actors to improvise and he tends to stay with the ones he knows and trusts, in his Irish films at least. He wrote the The Banshees with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell very much in mind and several actors from his 2004 short film Six Shooter return in The Banshees, along with Gleeson, eighteen years later.

Nevertheless, every artist or writer yields control when their painting is displayed or their book published. And once released, films lives their own lives, whether the director has the final cut or not. In a global business like cinema the firmest intentions may well escape the hugely diverse audiences who see foreign films through the prisms of their own language and culture. I happened to see The Banshees of Inisherin in Lyon, the French city famous for gastronomy and the invention of cinema. In 1895 the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière shot the first film in what is now the rue du premier film. Emerging from Les Banshees d’Inisherin at the Cinéma Lumière, I could not help wondering whether I’d seen the same film as the lyonnais audience, given my English-Irish origins and passing familiarity with banshees and fiddle music.

At home or abroad, directors and leading actors are often required to explain their characters and story, whereas poets and painters, out of choice or otherwise, tend to stand back and let their creations speak for themselves. Samuel Beckett, for example, would never elucidate the non-appearance of Godot and his friend Jack Yeats was famously reluctant to discuss the meaning of his enigmatic late paintings. The creative moment was to remain sub rosa (secret), hence the pink paper rose he attached to his easel and the title of a 1943 work, This Grand Conversation Was Under the Rose. Although Martin McDonagh gives interviews and answers questions about his work, he does not go in for public introspection. As director, he rarely divulges his grand conversations with the writer.

His fictional island of Inisherin sounds like one of the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway, but it also represents Ireland itself: inish means a small island, erin echoes Éirinn or Eire, and the two main characters, Pádraic and Colm, probably owe their names to Saint Patrick and Saint Columba. The opening sequence sets the scene and the tone: a rainbow glistens in the background as a smiling Pádraic Súilleabháin walks the stone-walled lanes of Inisherin, past thatched cottages and beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary. He is blessed indeed, but then his closest friend announces: ‘I just don’t like you no more.’ The sensitive studied performances of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson make the end-of-a-friendship story so compelling that it seems to leave room for little else.

Until Pádraic checks his calendar and notices, with relief, that yesterday was April Fools’ Day. However, the year is 1923, the dark days of the Civil War pitting the provisional government of the Irish Free State against the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army. The so-called ‘irregulars’ were defeated, leaving the country bitter and divided for generations to come. For any audience unacquainted with 1923 and Ireland’s troubled past, the historical background plays second or even third fiddle, but the dialogue resonates all the more powerfully when it speaks to the tale of two friends and the tale of two Irelands at one and the same time.

Whichever tale one hears, the title of the film poses a conundrum. Who or what are the banshees? Why so many? There appears to be just the one, Mrs McCormick, a wizened hag who haunts the rocky roads and cliffs. Banshees were supposed to announce the death of a loved one by wailing but as Colm remarks, the banshees on Inisherin ‘just sit back quietly, amused, and observe’. Sitting outside the post office, Mrs McCormick looks on in silence as the postmistress paints her red postbox green. The devil is in the telling detail: as the death tally mounted in 1922, the Irish Free State was bringing out the first postage stamps marked Éire and the imperial red postboxes were being repainted in emerald green.

On one of the occasions that Mrs McCormick crosses Pádraic’s path, she foresees death coming to the island ‑ a ‘death by suicide in cold water’ and a second one. Cross-cutting will later juxtapose a body floating in a lake and the prone figure of Pádraic snuffing out a candle, as if laying to rest his former blessed self ‑ like so many of his countrymen when hostilities tore the country apart. And Mrs McCormick is still there, sitting and watching, when Pádraic and Colm seal their parting of the ways. She stands for all the banshees on the mainland, sitting and watching.

If all war is an affront to humanity, there is something even more terrible about a country at war with itself. The wounds heal slowly, if ever, as the histories of America and Ireland attest. Images of suicide or self-harm come to mind, but can the historical analogy account for Colm’s threat to cut off one finger and then four more if Pádraic does not leave him in peace? Audiences that remember In Bruges or The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) will also remember that McDonagh’s characters do not do things by halves. Colm chooses to lose the fingers of his left hand, his fiddle hand, precisely because he is a right-handed fiddler. Had he been a painter, he would have put out his eyes. In other words, the fiddler embraces his worst nightmare, which suggests that there is much more than friendship and Ireland at stake.

It has dawned upon Colm that life is passing and thus far he has achieved nothing that will remain when he is gone. Rather than fritter and waste his remaining hours and days, he discards his happy-go-lucky friend in order to compose a great tune, one that will last. The three stages of Colm’s creative struggle provide the third thread of the plot. His initial efforts end in failure and depression; then he manages to compose the first part of a beautiful melancholy tune; after cutting off one finger, he plays through the pain to add an equally satisfying second part; he eventually finishes his miniature masterpiece and then commits the irreparable act, ensuring that his first great tune will be his last. The fiddler’s crisis of creation brings suffering and elation in roughly equal measures and ends with the symbolic suicide of the artist.

Significantly, McDonagh gave the same title ‑ The Banshees of Inisherin ‑ to his film and to his fiddler’s tune (composed by Brendan Gleeson, who also performs it). The mise en abyme suggests that the fictional tale of conflicted composition mirrors the making of the film. That last conversation remains under the rose, but the musician’s story is up on the screen, asking to be understood. Colm comes across as a solitary brooding figure, prone to anger and despair, who spends long moments staring into the fire. He shows all the ambition and self-doubt of the Romantic artist. By choosing Mozart and Beethoven as his models, the fiddler all but guarantees that the composer will fall short. And when we eventually leave Colm, he looks out to sea as he ‘whistles his tune a few moments, then lets it drift away to nothing’ (McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022). Can this be his enduring masterpiece?

One night in the bar, Colm is lauding the genius of Mozart when Pádraic, full of local whiskey and Dutch courage, cuts him off in full flow: ‘“Yet” he says, like he’s English!’ The jibe hits home because of course no self-respecting Irish fiddler wants to sound English, in 1923 or 2023, but also because Colm’s aspirations are quite out of keeping with the ethos of traditional musicians. There are few known composers because the tunes were learned by ear and passed down from one generation to the next. That sense of a living tradition is felt by the rapt audience of an earlier music session where a local woman sings a few verses of ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’, an Irish-Scottish folk song often ascribed to The Pogues. Like most traditional songs, it has been performed by many generations of musicians and different versions can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century. In other words, the singers and fiddlers come and go while the songs and tunes remain. In embracing the Romantic conception of the individual artist striving for originality and individual recognition, Colm is out of tune.

Seen from the outside, Colm’s cottage blends easily into the picturesque landscape but the dark interior, oddly adorned with primitive masks and oriental puppets, tells a different story. The light enters through a small window and in that window hangs a black Celtic picture frame. The picture itself remains unseen or out of focus for most of the film. Finally, when Pádraic peers through the window for the last time, the camera accompanies his gaze and shows an old pen-and-ink drawing. The artist is Jack Yeats and the title, written ‘in the plate’, identifies the standing figure as The Shanachie or seanchaí, a traditional Irish story-teller.

An Post used this same drawing for a 1997 stamp commemorating Irish folklore but The Shanachie first appeared in a 1913 issue of A Broadside. This was a monthly publication which associated Jack Yeats’s illustrations with Irish poems, ballads and song-sheets, all hand-printed at Cuala Press, an arts and crafts cooperative managed by the Yeats sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, with the support of their elder brother, William Butler Yeats. In the seven years he spent contributing to the Cuala Broadsides, Jack the younger brother created, almost single-handedly, the enduring images of Western Irish life, tinged with romance and reminiscence: low cottages and drystone walls, race meetings and fair days, swarthy seamen and wandering ballad-sellers, galloping horses and trotting donkeys. Unlike Paul Henry, Yeats used the landscapes as a backdrop for his emblematic Irish characters. Although The Banshees is set in 1923, the island is as free from encroaching modernity as was the idealised West of Jack Yeats. Our first impressions ‑ the Inisherin characters, the cottages and animals, the ever-present drystone walls ‑ match the vision of Yeats and the Celtic Revival, a readymade imagery reused here to conjure up the pre-civil war dream of a new Ireland.

A second visual source adds later colour. If you sent or received a postcard from Ireland in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century, chances are that the sky and sea were improbable shades of blue, the grass was greener than green, and some figure in the landscape would be wearing a bright red sweater or yellow jacket. They were the work of an enterprising English photographer named John Hinde whose colour-enhanced photographs sent this ideal Ireland all over the world. Pádraic’s sister Siobhan, the least insular of all the islanders by a country mile, wears first a red coat and then a bright yellow one (with a Tara brooch) so she stands out prettily against the blue sky and scenic landscapes, like one of John Hinde’s red-skirted colleens from the 1960s. The postcard cinematography suggests that this 1920s Inisherin is a recreated time and place, filtered through rose-tinted hindsight, or as Mrs McCormick foresees, a short-lived utopia.

But what of The Shanachie glimpsed through the window of Colm Doherty’s cottage? He wears worn black clothes and a wide-brimmed hat, much like Colm, and stands with his back to the blazing fireplace, like an old-time story-teller facing his rapt listeners, but in spite of the resemblance, Colm is neither Jack Yeats’s Shanachie nor WB’s merry ‘Fiddler of Dooney’.

Before the English conquest, shanachies were the chroniclers of kingly households but after the defeat of the Irish nobles, they became the historians and entertainers of ordinary rural communities, passing down a broad repertoire of oral tales. In The Aran Islands (published in 1906 with illustrations by his friend Jack Yeats) John Millington Synge relates his first-hand experience of life on the three islands. Some of the most memorable pages concern Synge’s friendship with Pat Dirane, the old storyteller he listened to in the McDonough cottage on Inishmaan. One senses a deep affinity between the young Anglo-Irish writer and the Gaelic-speaking storyteller whose tales, translated into English, become part of Synge’s written narrative. The author dispenses with quotation marks but signals the end of each embedded tale with Pat Dirane’s simple words: ‘That is my story.’

There is an intriguing parallel between Synge’s experience and that of the English writer and art critic John Berger (1926-2017) ,who lived for many years in a remote part of Haute Savoie in the French Alps. He too became friends with the local storyteller and wondered about their unlikely complicity: ‘And suddenly I realised what it was. It was his recognition of our equal intelligence; we are both historians of our time. We both see how events fit together’ (‘The story-teller’, Landscapes, 2016). According to Berger, the role of the storyteller is not only to entertain but, more profoundly, to give voice to the village’s portrait of itself. I suspect that Synge and Yeats would have agreed with this appreciation.

As a cultivated musician worried about his own legacy, Colm does not share the shanachie’s vocation, nor does anyone else on the island. With mischievous irony, the plot has each and every character telling tales and spilling the beans, spitefully or inadvertently, and provoking terrible unforeseen consequences. With all the satirical verve of Jonathan Swift, McDonagh takes special aim at the proprietress of the island’s shop/post office, a busybody whose insatiable craving for gruesome ‘stories’ points to the very absence of any bona fide storyteller on Inisherin. Phone-hacking and other dark arts spring to mind as Mrs O’Riordan steams open letters and badgers every customer for the most morbid ‘news’ ‑ a tabloid travesty of shanachie storytelling.

The real storyteller turns out to be the Londoner who chose to place The Shanachie in Colm’s window. In 1998, McDonagh told Fintan O’Toole about the third play of his Aran Islands trilogy: “It isn’t as good as the other two, but it’s all about the Irish story-tellers, the seanchaís.” Although never published or performed, it had a name: The Banshees of Inisheer. Yeats’s Shanachie becomes a discreet epitaph for the play that never was.

If the unstaged play was about Irish storytellers, the film is Irish storytelling. It makes abundant use of American Western techniques like shooting (with the camera) through doorways and windows, but the screenplay is still very much an Irish story, as was In Bruges ‑ the gallows humour and grotesques, the ironic plot reversals, the tragicomic consequences of carefully hatched plans, telltale signs of Irish storytelling from Tristram Shandy through to The Playboy, and not forgetting the Irish-American Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor.

Synge claimed to have found the subject of his Playboy of the Western World in a story he overheard on Inishmaan about “a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in a passion, and then fled to this island where the natives hid him from the police”. McDonagh in turn has us all thinking, hoping, perhaps dreaming, that the hapless Dominic, also beaten and battered about by a tyrannical father, might just follow in the footsteps of Christy Mahon or the Connaught man, felling his father and climbing down the beanstalk and escaping on a ship to America.

Like any gifted storyteller, McDonagh takes the tale handed down and makes it very much his own. In the centuries before storytelling became subject to copyright law, shanachies would borrow their material without so much as a word of acknowledgement. Did they or their illiterate listeners care a jot about provenance or authorship? The first copyright law in Britain came into force in 1710, just eleven years before Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Was Swift the only begetter of Gulliver’s Travels or just the first writer to put them down on paper?

And could there be some provenance behind the shot of a dejected Pádraic sitting in his kitchen and talking away to his pony? In the fourth part of his travels, Gulliver arrives in the country of the Houyhnhnms (pronounced either hoo-IN-ums or HWIN-ums but no one today really knows), a species of civilised horse who cohabit, reluctantly, with a race of bestial humanoids known as Yahoos. When Gulliver eventually finds his way back to England, he is so disgusted with “Yahoo-kind” that he stays at home, spending hours every day conversing with his horses, who “understand him tolerably well”.

That may or may not be another story.

 

Ronald Blythe: 1922-2023

Enda O’Doherty writes: Ronald Blythe, who died on January 14th aged one hundred, was best known for Akenfield, his study, published in 1969, of the life, over three generations, of an English village. Akenfield became an instant classic and was made into a film by Sir Peter Hall. The place Akenfield did not actually exist but seems to have been largely based on the village of Charsfield in Essex, near where Blythe was brought up and where he carried out most of his research, listening to the reminiscences of the villagers as they talked about the old rural England and its ways which were fast disappearing with the arrival of the modernity and relative prosperity of the 1960s.

Blythe’s father, who had fought in the First World War at Gallipoli, was a farm labourer, as had been his forefathers, stretching back through the generations. Blythe left school aged fourteen. When war was declared he was conscripted into the army but soon sent home again after being found to be unfit for service – his extreme gentleness seems to have been the problem: he could not be made into a soldier.

He found work as a reference librarian in Colchester and was gradually introduced into a local set of writers, painters, musicians and bohemians, which eventually included John Nash, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and Patricia Highsmith. When Nash died in 1977 he left Blythe his farmhouse, at Wormingford, near Colchester. He lived there for the next forty-five years, writing many more books and contributing a regular column to the Anglican newspaper the Church Times. He also served as a lay reader in a number of parishes in East Anglia. His biographer, Ian Collins, tells us that Blythe had remarkable night vision … ‘He loved night walking, looking at the stars, talking to his owls and the badgers in his garden … He thought his fellow man and woman heroic, faintly comic and endlessly lovable.’ Collins also emphasises the difficulties Blythe overcame to become a successful writer, first the poverty of his family background, second his homosexuality: ‘Until he was 45, when the ban on homosexuality was lifted in 1967, he was deemed a criminal, which militated against stable relationships.’ As is evident from his writing on the poverty and exploitation that was endemic in a rural England some might be inclined to see as idyllic, Ronald Blythe was a man of the left, and also a pacifist.

The Dublin Review of Books had occasion once before to refer to Blythe in connection with a visit Jeremy Paxman made to the Hay Festival at Kells to speak about the First World War. ‘Traditional images reinforce the view that the Great War was a pointless waste of life. So why did the nation fight so willingly and endure suffering for so long?’ Paxman wrote. A useful question but perhaps an at least partial answer to it could be found in the extreme poverty that was then found in rural England, from which the army drew a lot of its troops for the war. The long quotation – I think it’s worth the length – is from ‘Leonard Thompson’, a seventy-one-year-old farmworker in Akenfield.

There were ten of us in the family and as my father was a farm labourer earning 13s. a week you can just imagine how we lived. I will tell you the first thing that I remember. It was when I was three – about 1899. We were all sitting round the fire waiting for my soldier brother to come home – he was the eldest boy in the family … This young man came in, and it was the first time I had seen him. He wore a red coat and looked very lively. Mother got up and kissed him but Father just sat and said, ‘How are you?’ Then we had tea, all of us staring at my brother. It was dark, it was the winter-time. A few days later he walked away and my mother stood right out in the middle of the road, watching. He was going to fight in South Africa. He walked smartly down the lane until his red coat was no bigger than a poppy. Then the tree hid him. We never saw him again. He went all through the war but caught enteric fever afterwards and died. He was twenty-one …
Our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, and we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers went out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s. …
Our parents and all the cottage people were very religious and very patriotic. The patriotic songs and the church hymns seemed equally holy. They took our breath away. The boys marched through the village singing … and their faces would look sincere and important. It was all ‘my country’ – country, country, country. You heard nothing else. There was no music in the village then except at the chapel or the church and our family liked it so much that we hurried from one to the other to hear all we could. People like us, who went where we fancied on a Sunday, were called ‘Devil-dodgers’ … People believed in religion then, which I think was a good thing because if they hadn’t got religion there would have been a revolution. Nobody would have stuck it. Religion disciplined us and gave us the strength to put up with things. The parson was very respected. He could do what he liked with us when he felt like it. One day he came to our house and told my eldest sister, who was eleven, to leave school. ‘I think you needn’t finish,’ he said. ‘You can go and be maid to old Mrs Barney Wickes, now she has lost her husband.’ Mrs Barney Wickes was blind and my sister was paid a penny a day out of Parish Relief to look after her …
The school was useless. The farmers came and took boys away from it when they felt like it, the parson raided it for servants. The teacher was a respectable woman who did her best. Sometimes she would bring the Daily Graphic down and show us the news. I looked forward to leaving school so that I could get educated. I knew that education was in books, not in school: there were no books there. I was a child when I left but I already knew that our ‘learning’ was rubbish, that our food was rubbish and that I should end as rubbish if I didn’t look out …
The farmer was a dealer. I stayed with him a year and four months and was paid 4s.6d. a week. And then I got into a hell of a row. I’d driven a flock of sheep from Ipswich and the next morning they found that one had died. The farmer was in a terrible stew. He ran down the field and met my mother on her way to chapel and told her all about it. I had driven the sheep too hard, he said. ‘And you drive boys too hard!’ said my mother – she had no fear at all. Well, the truth of the matter is that she said a lot of things she’d only thought until then, and so I left the farm. It must seem that there was war between farmers and their men in those days. I think there was, particularly in Suffolk. These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their lives’ strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. Fourteen young men left the village in 1909 – 11 to join the army. There wasn’t a recruiting drive, they just escaped …
I returned to my old farm at Akenfield for 11s. a week, but I was unsettled. When the farmer stopped my pay because it was raining and we couldn’t thrash, I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army.’ … We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling …
In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech …
We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th. I was now a machine-gunner in the Third Essex Regiment. A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms …
We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the River Clyde, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole in it and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there – on the Hellespont! – waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fêtes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting into a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear. Nobody had mentioned this. I was very shocked. I thought of Suffolk and it seemed a happy place for the first time.

5/02/2023

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