Sunday, August 12, 2012

ERIN GO BRAGH!

Jerry Harkins


My friend Hugh Kearney is an Irishman. He lives in the north and, like many people in this post-global economy, engages in several different trades to earn his daily bread. Among other things, he owns a small knitwear factory and a one-horse taxicab service in Derry. I met him a couple of years ago when Joyce and I engaged him to show us around neighboring Donegal, one of the twenty-six traditional counties of the Republic. [1] He is smart, well informed, articulate and charming. One afternoon, we were driving along the A5 near Lifford. I knew we had crossed the international border but had seen no sign of any kind. During the second round of The Troubles, roughly the 30-year period beginning in 1969, Lifford had been an IRA staging area. It is a town of fewer than fifteen hundred souls but enjoys a strategic location at the juncture of two rivers which come together to form the River Foyle which flows into Lough Foyle and thence into the North Atlantic. I asked Hugh where the checkpoint had been during The Troubles. After giving it some thought, he said, “You know, I don’t remember.”

Amazing. After 827 years of English colonial rule, Irish independence had come at great cost. The endgame—the final bloody 83 years—began on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 and finally died of exhaustion on the effective date of the Good Friday Agreement, December 2, 1999. In the intervening years, the people suffered through two long periods of guerilla and civil war—The Troubles. The first eruption of violence was mostly in the south, the more recent in the north. From 1969 to 1999, the fighting was about whether the six counties of Northern Ireland would continue to be part of Great Britain or would be reunited with the Republic. Protestants account for about 46% of the population of the six northern counties and Catholics for about 40%. The Protestants have been living there in large numbers since the early years of the seventeenth century when their ancestors were “planted” in confiscated lands in the aftermath of the Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls. Violence then became the order of the day for four hundred years. In the final phase, three thousand were killed, most of them innocent by-standers. Relative to the population of Ireland, that’s the equivalent of about 350,000 deaths in the United States, roughly equivalent to the death rate from AIDS in the United States since 1981. Most of the casualties on both sides were innocent civilians. IRA and Unionist raids were routinely launched through the no man’s land between Lifford and Derry. And now Hugh couldn’t remember where the border was and, of course, still is. For the first time I thought maybe the Agreement will hold. The picture of President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth shaking hands in Dublin on May 17, 2012, was a moment of hope for the whole world. Coincidentally, it was National Famine Memorial Day. The following month, the Queen shook the hand of Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the Provisional IRA, in Belfast. Maybe.

I love Ireland and all things Irish. I think I know its agonizing history as well as anyone born in America. I accept unconditionally the heritage of its saints and scholars, its bards and poets. I understand the evils of English imperialism. I can recite fifteen hundred years of betrayal by the Roman Catholic Church. I rage against the pretensions and affectations of the Orange heirs of Cromwell’s genocide and that of his successors during the Great Hunger of 1845-52. In my heart of hearts, I also sense the flaws in the Irish soul that contributed mightily to Irish unhappiness.

Elsewhere I have written [2] “Irish-Americans tend to come in two flavors: those who know and care little about the heritage and those who possess vast amounts of misinformation to which they are ready to swear.” The Irish themselves know more but they work hard to suppress it. They often project the image of a hail-fellow-well-met complete with ruddy-cheeks, a huge smile and sparkling eyes. This is far from the truth even if it is infinitely to be preferred to the nineteenth century No Nothing version of a stoop-shouldered, unshaven hooligan, half man, half ape, dragging his knuckles behind him. The real Irish persona is more nuanced and much less accessible. Even the immortal Eugene O’Neill had trouble describing the Irish character. Two of his best efforts are Con Melody (A Touch of the Poet) with his delusions of ineffable sadness and James Tyrone (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), the tinker’s King Lear betrayed by cardboard children. Both are simultaneously petty and grandiose, melancholic and phlegmatic, victimized by life and circumstance. They are not appealing characters but are sympathetic nonetheless. You can’t help loving a barkeep with illusions who moans, “I’m done — finished — no future but the past.” O’Neill had a rococo fascination with disintegration and decay. His Irishmen are simply observing what they see as a great universal truth that others, those with lesser histories, cannot bear to reflect on. William Butler Yeats said it explicitly. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” [3] The gleeman in his poetic short story “The Crucifixion Of The Outcast” dies horribly for the crime of telling truth to power. The gleeman is, of course, Every Artist and especially Yeats himself who wrote his own epitaph. “Cast a cold Eye
/ On Life, on Death. /
Horseman, pass by!”

Neither O’Neill nor Yeats were scientists although both often seemed to be adherents of a theory of social entropy, the idea that social systems tend to decay toward anarchy. The former’s “The Emperor Jones” is an example of Irish disillusion even if its protagonist happens to be an African-American con man. Jones is a Faust figure who announces, “I’se after de coin, an I lays my Jesus on de shelf for de time bein’.” There is no evidence that O’Neill ever had an interest in Irish history or politics but Jones does bear a striking resemblance to Éamon de Valera who, at the time O’Neill was working on Jones, was in the United States, supposedly raising money for the IRA. De Valera, too, sold his soul to the devil in the form of the Catholic hierarchy to promote his turgid fantasy of Ireland as a pastoral Utopia. Yeats’ young man/old man O’Driscoll of “The Host of the Air” is a very different treatment of a similar theme. The subject is an elderly Irish Everyman overwhelmed by the forces of mythic religion. He dreams of gaining and then losing a beautiful young bride before he awakes to find the piper still piping away. [4] “And never was piping so sad, / and never was piping so gay.”

It is a constricted view of life which is not present in the ancient mythology nor in what we know of either the old Druidic religion or the Pealgian Christianity that prevailed in Ireland until the twelfth century. I might like to think the gene came from the sun-deprived Scandinavian berserkers who raided the Irish coasts from 795 until they were finally defeated by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014. One thinks of the Norwegian Ibsen and the Swede Strindberg. In his Nobel Prize lecture, O’Neill refers to the latter as the “greatest genius of all modern dramatists.” Good Lord, that’s a depressing thought even if O’Neill was being uncharacteristically polite to his hosts in Stockholm. Ibsen, of course, invented the tragic melodrama and was an influence on all the modern Irish writers, not only O’Neill but also on Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and that quintessential Irishman, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

The Irish persona begins with a moral view of the world that holds optimism to be a mortal sin. When an Irish person comments on the fine weather, the proper response is “Aye, we’ll surely pay for it tomorrow.” The more glorious the weather becomes, the more dour the forecast. The Irish understand perfectly why the Holy Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss. That this is the best of all possible worlds is not so much false doctrine as it is simply too depressing to contemplate.

It is not a clinical depression. Rather it is a matter of establishing a psychic distance from the rigors of life about which nothing can be done. It is a curious blend of the melancholic and the phlegmatic arising from powerlessness. As Yeats put it, “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” To understand this, you must know the kind of suffering the Irish endured for most of a millennium. A good example: on the morning of December 15, 1882, the English hanged Myles Joyce for a murder he had not committed. Everyone involved knew he was innocent. The Police Supervisor and the Crown Prosecutor, Peter O’Brien, were notorious liars, the Judge was a political hack, the witnesses were paid perjurers, the first court-appointed defense attorney was a drunk, the second a decent man but one who lived in fear of the authorities. Neither spoke Irish and Joyce spoke no English. The interpreter was a fool. He would listen to a long, detailed answer given by the defendant and simply report, “He says ‘No’ Your Worship.” Even the hangman, one William Marwood, was incompetent. Having incorrectly placed the noose, he tried to reach down through the trap and kick the victim in the head. When that didn’t work, Joyce took several minutes to strangle to death. A grisly end to an entirely grisly affair.

And typical. British justice in the colonies was never inhibited much by scrupulosity. And in a nation that executed men, women and children for 220 different crimes, a certain ennui attends even the most egregious of injustices. The martyrdom of Myles Joyce is important not because he was innocent which, of course, he was but because his case was so typical. The system of justice in the colonies was built upon a foundation of capriciousness. Your overlords could do anything they wanted for any reason or no reason whatsoever. You are living in a Wonderland where the Queen can issue her death warrant, “Off with his head!” at random or can order Alice to play a game of croquet with live flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls. It is both effective terror and deliberate strategy. Yes, deliberate. England, after all, invented the common law; it just never bothered with it in governing its colonies.

Take another example, the hanging of Kevin Barry, an 18-year old member of the IRA. On September 20, 1920 he participated in an attack on an armed British truck in order to gain the weapons it was carrying. Three British soldiers were killed in an ensuing firefight and Barry and his comrades were captured. No one ever claimed he had fired the fatal shots or, indeed, any shot. But he was not an innocent bystander like Myles Joyce. Under torture, he refused to cooperate with the authorities and said he was ready to give his life asking only that he be shot like a soldier. Because of the worldwide condemnation that followed the execution of the 1916 rebels, the English had actually commuted many death sentences in the previous four years. The Irish public expected the same clemency would be granted to Barry. But no. As part of a keep-them-guessing strategy, they hanged him on November 1. They said he was a murderer not a soldier. A minor indignity you may think until you know that the British Parliament had passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act in August, effectively declaring martial law throughout the country. The insurrection was explicitly recognized as a war and the IRA as an army.

To the Irish, that war had been a constant fact of life ever since King Henry II had conquered it in the twelfth century. At first, he sent over his lieutenant, Richard de Clare, Strongbow, who conquered Cork easily and promptly seized 70 Irish defenders, broke their knee caps and tossed them into the Celtic Sea. When Strongbow proved less than reliable, Henry made a personal appearance in 1171 and forced the Irish church to bow to Canterbury and Rome at the Council of Cashel the following year. All this may have had something to do with Henry’s need to placate Pope Alexander III who was still vexed over the death of Becket two years earlier.

This sad story gives rise to the question of why the English ever thought they had a right to rule Ireland. The answer is simple: the Pope, Alexander’s predecessor, Adrian IV, had issued a bull giving Henry the right to hold Ireland and “secure” it in order to, “... teach rude and ignorant peoples the truth of the Christian faith against heresy.” He didn’t say exactly what heresy but it may have been related to the fact that Adrian was an Englishman, the only English Pope in history. In case you wonder why he thought he had the right to give Ireland to England, he was relying on the Donation of Constantine, a fourth century document in which the Roman Emperor had declared every Christian island to be the property of the Papacy. The so-called donation was a twelfth century forgery and Adrian certainly knew it. [5]

One more example before we return to the effects of British barbarity. Between 1787 and 1868, 161,000 human beings, almost all of them Irish Catholics, were “transported” to Australia, mostly for life, for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder. Another 60,000 were sent to Barbados and a relative handful were sent to Canada. Many wives committed small thefts in order to be transported and have a possibility of finding their previously transported husbands. The women and their children would spend seven years in Her Britannic Majesty’s Female Factory in Paramatta outside Sydney. They were rented out to settlers as slaves, in the fields and in the master’s bed. Again, the worst of it was the capriciousness. A crime might or might not be prosecuted. No actual crime was necessary, only the government’s need to set an example of its power. Everyone had a brother or sister or friend who had been extracted from the community and it was, as it was intended to be, demoralizing. Often, the British targeted victims specifically to create maximum misery. Not knowing when, where, why or against whom the law would strike made transportation one of the most sophisticated forms of terrorism. At times, the rumors and myths exceeded even the worst of the actual products of English ingenuity.

We will skip over the genocide committed by Oliver Cromwell and the ensuing 200-year reign of the penal laws which, among other things, made it a capital offense to be a priest or to teach a Catholic child to read. We will not discuss the land “clearances” under which Irish farmers were evicted from their tiny sharecropping tenancies so British overlords could enhance their hunting preserves. We will take it for granted that the English government deliberately exacerbated the potato famine by requiring Irish farmers to export virtually all other cash crops and seeking to prevent the donation of American corn. Suffice it to note that British colonialism everywhere was barbaric, nowhere more so than in Ireland. But the difference in Ireland, was that it lasted four hundred years longer than it did anywhere else. It was not The Holocaust. Nor was it the ten million Africans taken into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But it was massive, indisputable, egregious evil and it had an incalculable effect on the Irish psyche.

It is why the Irish allowed their clergy to abuse thousands of their children and young people, sexually and otherwise, for a hundred and fifty years. Everybody knew something was very wrong. Men, women and children routinely “disappeared.” Even the clergy who did not participate in the debauchery knew. The bishops were addicted to the cash flow.

Colonialism explains, too, the estrangement between the people and their civic institutions. The history of modern Ireland is very largely the history of government blundering, sometimes comical, sometimes serious, sometimes tragic. [6] In the 1920’s, one faction assassinated Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, the only two leaders who had the courage, intelligence and skills to lead a successful transition from colonialism. They turned to de Valera who led them from one economic disaster to another. His insistence on Irish neutrality during World War II was a moral failure of epic dimension. His obsequious subservience to the teaching of corrupt bishops stifled social development down to the present day. The citizenry accepts all this either because they are tired of turmoil or because, after so long a time, they simply do not know how to govern themselves. It is said that after centuries of serfdom Russians yearn for strong government and strong moral guidance from the church. In Ireland, most people seem not to care one way or the other.

Stereotyping is a seductive fallacy. It is both a cause and an effect of bias and it supports distortions of both evidence and common sense. It is therefore important to note that there are obvious exceptions to every allegation in this essay. The Irish political class and the electorate have, for example, produced several recent Presidents that have performed brilliantly on the world stage. The arts continue to flourish as they have for millennia. Today’s young people are among the best educated on earth. The workforce is highly productive and, during the era of the Celtic Tiger of recent memory, the country had a higher standard of living than did any nation in the E.U. except Germany. It has at long last risen up in outrage against the sexual abuse of its children by the clergy and has begun the process of breaking the bonds of subservience to the ungodly church of Rome. Thus, perhaps, the Irish are at a hinge of their history.

C. G. Jung wrote about a “collective unconscious” that operates both universally in the community of all humans and particularly within cultural and national populations. Eugene O’Neill was much taken by this theory. The Emperor Jones is a precise if fictional treatment of it. As Jones tries to escape from those rebelling against his rule, he regresses through the history of his people, exposing one layer after another of the African experience from slavery all the way back to the formless fears of pre-history. It is a compelling and frightening journey. I take Jones as the original inspiration for O’Neill’s projected but not completed nine-play series A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. What might an explicitly Irish version of Jones have experienced? A reader gets tantalizing hints in the two and a half plays he did finish, plays that introduce us to both Con Melody and James Tyrone, those much-beset Irishmen mentioned above. Melody’s refrain about having no future but the past takes on new poignancy in light of Jones’ encounter with the past. If you listen carefully, unlike Jones, the poor dumb sot likes it that way. His mantra expresses his understanding that perhaps he shouldn’t but he can’t help himself. All the alternatives, especially the future, are confusion and humiliation.

But now the Irish are legally free and, to some extent at least, emotionally free. Free of London and free of Rome, they are on their way to writing their own history and shaping their own future. They can look with pride and hope to what their diaspora has achieved. They can take heart and instruction from what South Africa has wrought from its Truth and Reconciliation Commission and what they themselves have learned from their Good Friday Agreement. That Hugh Kearney has forgotten where the checkpoint was is living proof that Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

Erin go bragh!

Notes

1. As with so much of what is Irish, the number of counties in the Republic is a matter of some dispute. Twenty-six is the number mentioned in the 1921 treaty but apparently both sides forgot that County Tipperary had been split in two in 1838. In 1994, the government struck Dublin from the list and added three new counties. In 2001, it decided to elevate five city councils to the rank of county councils. Naturally the five included Dublin. In any event, it now seems there are two County Corks one of which is the county seat of the other. Or maybe not. Maybe also the right number is thirty-three.

2. “Greenhorns and Narrowbacks,” jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenhorns-and-narrowbacks-jerry.html

3. “The Second Coming,” 1919. He is talking explicitly about the effects of World War I but, to an Irish poet, the main effect of the war was the glorious folly of the Easter uprising of 1916. The Host of the title is the “piper piping away” which, I believe, is a metaphor for the church beguiling poor O’Driscoll with visions of a wife and a life he never had a chance of living.

4. The whole scheme with the exception of the actual forgery may have been the work of John of Salisbury, a scholar who desperately needed to get back into the good graces of King Henry. It worked. John went on to a notable career as Secretary to Thomas Becket and, later, the first bishop of Chartres.

5. These are fighting words and not necessarily entirely objective ones. Interested readers will have no difficulty tracking down a full range of opinions. They could do worse than to begin by consulting Tim Pat Coogan’s books, especially Eamon de Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland (Barnes & Noble, 1999) and Ireland in the Twentieth Century, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

6. Jung wrote, “In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” See:  The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43 Princeton University Press, 1981.