IRISH MY ERSE!

From The Irish Democrat February 1989.

HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL

"Beware the Irishman's hero. He is raised up to be sacrificed. The roll-call of Irish heroes -Emmet, O'Connell, Parnell, Pearse, is a litany of dead kings brought down by a fetid mixture of jealously, perfidy and malice."

Professor Anthony Clare, Dublin-born and educated psychiatrist, writer and broadcaster, recently contributed a feature - "My Hero"  on John Hume to London's INDEPENDENT magazine, and started it with those words.As that magazine is primarily addressed to English minds I tested their effect on an English graduate in English.

She took it to  mean that Emmet, O'Connell and Pearse had been "brought down" by Irishmen.Of the four Parnell alone was a familiar name, as she had touched on his downfall and the affair of Kitty O'Shea some score and more years ago in school..

There's hardly need to remark to Irish Democrat readers, nor to anyone who had but elementary education in Ireland these past couple of centuries,  that Emmet died at the hands of an English executioner, that his fame did not precede but followed his death, that his image has been a revered icon since then, or that his fame travelled round the civilised world, celebrated by his poet (and historian) friend, Thomas Moore. His speech from the dock was part of the education of no less a man than Abraham Lincoln, no mean figure and no mean orator, as well as, of course, generations of Irishmen and women.

Pearse was brought down by the rifle bullets of an English firing squad, and only then did his name become a household one in Ireland. His name too is treasured in the hearts of most Irish people, though some pygmy begrudgers of the revisionest school would have it otherwise. Which leaves us with the more complex cases of O'Connell and Parnell.

It wasn't British gunfire that killed O'Connell, nor Irish jealousy and malice.He was 72 when he died and beyond contributing  further to his life's work for Ireland.Over a million younger Irish men, women and children were to die that year, or in the two surrounding years, in  fetid famine, cholera and typhus, from malign English landlordism. Despite the failings of O'Connell, enumerated in John Mitchel's Jail Journal, and Connolly's Labour in Irish History, and expanded upon by physical force Republicans and Gaelic Leaguers, O'Connell is remembered with warmth in Irish folk memory and the noblest sreets in Dublin and Limerick are named in his honour. I've yet to hear of any proposals to rescind such honours.

Which leaves us with Parnell and his early downfall and death.

'twas Irish humour,wet and dry

flung quicklime into Parnell's eye

wrote James Joyce, haunted by the bitterness of the Parnellite Split. That split was not edifying, any more than the split over the "Treaty" of 1921, but that's no reason why at this remove we should be blinded by quicklime.

Parnell was marked down for destruction by his English Tory enemies. When the forger Pigott and The Times were exposed over false allegations of inciting assassination, the Tories held in reserve the hitherto complaisant and estranged husband of Parnell's mistress, Captain O'Shea. It was then that Parnell's supposed English       allies, the Liberals, found that "the Nonconformist Conscience" of English Liberalism could not allow a political alliance with an Irish Party led by an adulterer. Only then, when Parnell's leadership was a political liability to the Irish cause, did the Irish Party seek his resignation. Parnell let his personal affairs cloud his judgement on a purely political matter and set in train the bitter and vindictive campaign against him, in which the Catholic clergy joined. The Catholic Church,old and wise in the ways of the world, has always given the widest latitude in private matters to politicians whom it regards useful. I can't recall a single instance of an Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Latin American politician knocked off his perch for fornication. But English speaking and traditionally Protestant England and the USA are less liberal in these matters.

The emphasis here on English involvement in the destruction in the lives and fortunes of Irish heroes is necessary, for elsewhere in the article Professor Clare declares of Hume-"His voice has consistently pleaded the cause of an Ireland in which the two main cultural traditions would be partners, not opponents, and where the paranoid obsession with Britain would be replaced by a positive commitment to Europe." But it is the British who insist on speaking of Londonderry. Derry's walls carry old guns iscribed by their donors, the London Livery Companies, and modern guns are carried there by living Englishmen. Given these facts "paranoia" is hardly the way to describe the concern with England, of the same city's (and Ireland's) Nationalist majority.The Loyalist minority, a majority in Derry's Waterside, have a road called " Sandringham Avenue"  in honour of a royal holiday place in Norfolk.

England's presence in Ireland will always invite the kicking of the Imperial posterior from the vertebrate natives, and the kissing of it by spineless crawlers.

Professor Clare presents a television series "Irish in Mind" on RTE. I  hope it doesn't drag Ireland, posterior-kissing, into the next century.

Donal Kennedy .  February 1989.

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