Feckers (2 page)

The continuing avoidance of this self-awareness also made it essential that we did not think too deeply. Excessive self-reflection might lead us to gaze into the true nature of our history, and this might occasion a psychic reaction that would be impossible to predict or control. It was better, then, that we think about things at only the most superficial levels, and find ways of policing the thinking of our countrymen wherever possible. This is why almost everything that is said at a public level in Ireland is some kind of knee-jerk reaction against the most immediate interpretation of the most superficial facts. Nobody looks to history, to a deeper understanding of patterns that might still be holding Irish society in their grip.

This collection, in an attempt to shine a light on those patterns still evident in Irish society, will concentrate on the period, and people, of Ireland’s independence, essentially the near-century since the final drive for sovereignty was started by the Easter Rising of 1916. A few figures pre-date this period, but usually because of some residual influence to be detected in the Ireland of today. If we are to discuss the entity that is present-day Ireland, it is to these ‘feckers’ we look in order to define our collective life and endeavours as a free nation. For these, I would argue, are the feckers who fecked up Ireland in as many ways as there are definitions of the word.

1
Padraig Pearse

P
erhaps something most people in Ireland can agree upon, albeit for a host of different and often contradictory reasons, is that the undoing of national independence probably began with its genesis in the Easter Week of 1916. There is a school of thought, for example, holding that the Easter Rising was a misconceived folly, a pre-emptive strike that sought to achieve by force what was already in train. There is even a view – a ludicrous view, to put it frankly – that the Rising was an unwarranted attack on Irish ‘democracy’, being unapproved by a majority of the people in the occupied Dublin of the time.

More recently, Padraig Pearse and the other leaders of 1916 have been blamed for the outbreak of conflict in the north of Ireland in the late 1960s – a few years after the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Rising in 1966. It should go without saying, of course, that the 1969 uprising in the North did not occur as a result of northern nationalists rediscovering their myth of destiny, but because a relatively small group of protestors, seeking to draw attention to the wholesale discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, had been brutally stamped upon by the unionist establishment.

Latter-day analyses of Ireland’s historical condition mostly agree that they blame 1916 for everything that came after it, while extending no credit for its achievement and no consideration of the fact that none of the leaders was in a position to control what happened afterwards.

Padraig Pearse has become a much caricatured figure in modern Ireland, his understanding of the nature of freedom being largely unappreciated by those who inherited the benefits. This vision is to be found in many of Pearse’s poems – now disparaged by the modern literati – and other writings. In a series of essays written not long before the Rising, for example, Pearse outlined in detail the specifications of true independence, and the process by which it would be attained. The essays are rigorous and clear, and leave very little room for ambiguity about what the author saw as being necessary.

In one of these, ‘The Murder Machine’, about the effects of the English education system in Ireland, Pearse outlined the precise nature of the psychological effects of the colonial process. This was some fifty years before the groundbreaking works of the great Caribbean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who exposed the interior workings of the colonial machine in his classic works about the effects of French colonialism in Algeria.

Pearse perceived that the ‘murder machine’ had, in effect, created in Ireland the conditions of slavery. English rule in Ireland, he contended, had ‘aimed at the substitution for men and women with “Things”. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.’

True independence, Pearse wrote in another essay, ‘The Spiritual Nation’, ‘requires spiritual and intellectual independence as its basis, or it tends to become unstable, a thing resting merely on interests which change with time and circumstances’.

He and the other leaders of the 1916 Rising were clear that the project of Independence must be a spiritual and psychological, as much as a political or cultural, process. Like Fanon, they intuited that only a superficial understanding of this necessary transformation could result in a disaster. But, following their execution, such elevated notions were replaced with more mundane understandings.

Without these deeper insights, everything seems simple: surely you simply undo what has been done to you? It takes a long time to perceive that such undoing is impossible without causing everything to unravel. The indigenous culture, having been interrupted, lacks a definitive sense of its own nature or direction. It still exists, but in an altered form, and cannot simply be decontaminated and reconditioned for a new phase of existence. The collective mindset is affected by a series of paradoxical conditions. On the one hand, there is a desire to purge everything alien; on the other, there is the unavoidable fact that the mindset itself has been infiltrated by alien influences, the most insidious of which is a tendency to imitate. The native wishes to redefine himself, not merely in contradistinction to his historical abuser, but in a manner that will bear witness to his authentic self; and yet, this authentic self can no longer be located, because it has been altered by the influence of the colonizer, whom the native has been conditioned to perceive as the most worthy subject of emulation. The native has been convinced, unbeknownst to himself, that his authentic self is a worthless thing, and that his only salvation resides in imitating his master, whom, at a conscious level, he imagines himself to despise. Who, then, is in charge? What is the nature of authenticity? What is to be made of the liberated native’s determination to again become ‘himself ’, if his sense of direction is provided by the indoctrination he has received?

Such understandings of the scale of the task that lay ahead were lost to the work of the firing squads. Thus, the very moments that provoked the surge towards freedom also began its undoing. The momentum was created but the intelligence that had already defined the freedom project not as a political or economic process, but as a spiritual rebirthing and a psychological recasting, was lost. What remained was the crudest understanding of what required to be done. The inevitable outcome was a failure of intellectual and psychological reintegration, which spawned a mishmash of confused and inauthentic identities. On the one hand, driven by the unattainable desire for a reclaimed authenticity, there began an era defined by protectionism and backlash, a ritualistic purging of everything ‘alien’ and, therefore, false. At the other extreme, governed by the self-hatred inculcated by the colonizer, there developed a repugnance and mistrust of everything indigenous. Most of this remains unresolved.

The first, perhaps the most enduring, catastrophe of independent Ireland, then, is that all the thought, all the insight that had inspired those who led the burst for freedom, ended up in pools of blood in the yard of Kilmainham Gaol. In getting themselves shot, Pearse and the other great leaders of 1916 denied posterity the intelligence they might have brought to the independence project, and instead left Ireland to the tender mercies of the literalists and crawthumpers who had been far too cunning to fall foul of firing squads.

2
Maud Gonne

M
ajor John MacBride, executed for his part in the Rising of Easter Week 1916, is remembered mainly by his characterization by W. B. Yeats in the poem ‘Easter 1916’ as a ‘drunken vainglorious lout’. These three words have come to outweigh the glories and sacrifices of his life and death. There are many lies in Irish poetry, but this is probably the worst.

Until recently, accounts of the domestic conflict between MacBride and his wife, Maud Gonne, which gave rise to the Yeats smear, told an entirely one-sided version of events. In the course of divorce and custody proceedings arising from the breakdown of their disastrous marriage, Gonne accused MacBride of drunkenness, cruelty, violence, infidelity and immorality. In addition to Yeats’s writings, published accounts of their relationship by historians and biographers, infatuated beyond reason or fairness by the Yeats legend, repeated the prejudices and untruths arising from Gonne’s version and Yeats’s determination to believe it.

Not until Anthony J. Jordan’s 2000 book,
The Yeats-Gonne-MacBride Triangle
, did Major MacBride’s side of the story become widely available, and this has been largely ignored. Jordan undertook the simple endeavour of visiting the National Library of Ireland to read Major MacBride’s papers, bequeathed to the State by the family with whom MacBride had been staying before his death. The content of these is interrogative of any sense of complacency we may have about what we have come to ‘know’ about history and how we ‘remember’ the three pivotal Irish figures comprising this triangle.

The immorality charges, including the allegation that MacBride indecently molested his wife’s eleven-year-old daughter, Iseult Gonne, and committed adultery with her half-sister, eighteen-year-old Eileen Wilson, are rebutted in MacBride’s version. By his own admission, marrying Gonne was foolish. ‘I gave her a name that was free from stain and reproach and she was unable to appreciate it once she had succeeded in inducing me to marry her.’ Gonne became pregnant soon after their wedding in Paris in 1903 and gave birth in January 1904 to a son, Seaghan, later Sean MacBride, the eminent IRA chief of staff, lawyer and human rights activist. Major MacBride was determined his son should grow up in Ireland, but his wife had other ideas. She issued MacBride with an ultimatum: either he would admit the charge of indecency, renounce rights to his son and emigrate to America, or he would face an action for criminal assault.

There is every indication that, far from the injured heroine of popular mythology, Maud Gonne was a cunning manipulator, who, on deciding to divorce her husband, manufactured the evidence to banish him not just from her own life but also from that of his son, using Yeats as her Chief Minister of Propaganda. Yeats had an obvious vested interest in condemning MacBride: he was in love with Gonne and devastated by her marriage.

In the ensuing divorce proceedings in Paris, a close friend and confidante of Maud Gonne’s gave evidence on behalf of MacBride, saying Gonne had spoken to her in the warmest terms of her husband just weeks before the proceedings began. To one charge, that of sexual assault on a cook, MacBride responded: ‘If I wanted a woman I had plenty of money in my pocket and would have no difficulty in making a suitable choice in Paris, without trying to rape a hideously ugly old cook in my wife’s house.’ A midwife said she had seen MacBride ‘kissing’ Eileen Wilson, with whom MacBride said he had never been alone in the house. Of a servant who claimed to have found sperm marks on Eileen Wilson’s bedclothes, MacBride declared: ‘It is incomprehensible how this woman (an unmarried woman) can swear positively, as she does, that the marks on Eileen Wilson’s linen were spots of sperm.’ MacBride also pointed out that Eileen Wilson and Iseult Gonne slept in the same room. Of the incident in which he was alleged to have sexually assaulted Iseult, he says that she burst into his room one morning when he had ‘the chamber pot in [his] hand’.

The court rejected the immorality charges against MacBride, accepting only one charge of drunkenness. Maud Gonne was awarded sole guardianship of Seaghan, with John entitled to visiting rights every Monday at the home of the mother. Heartbroken at the outcome, MacBride exercised his visiting rights on a couple of extremely tense occasions, and eventually returned to Dublin. He would never see his son again. Gonne, in a calculated effort to distance Seaghan from his father, insisted that his first language be French; thus Sean MacBride’s lifelong hallmark French accent.

Major MacBride’s involvement in the Rising appears to have been accidental. He was not a member of the formal republican leadership, his military distinction arising mainly from his formation of the Irish Brigade to assist the Boers in 1900. He told his court martial on 4 May 1916 that he had left his lodgings in Glenageary on the morning of Easter Monday, and gone into town to meet his brother, who was coming to Dublin to get married. On St Stephen’s Green, he saw a band of Irish Volunteers, who told him that a Republic was about to be declared. ‘I considered it my duty to join them,’ he said. He was made second-in-command of a battalion at Jacob’s factory.

MacBride was sentenced to death on 4 May and shot the following morning.