An historical footnote ...

When I started At Swim, early in the 1990s, the story of the Easter Rising was a forgotten back-alley of history. Now there are organised walking tours in Dublin commemorating it. Any number of books have been published on the subject in the last ten years, both fiction and history (as though the latter weren't the former). There are websites galore: just try googling "1916 easter rising dublin ireland" and you'll come up with more matches than you could reasonably wish for.

The Irish are often portrayed as a race preoccupied by history. Certainly this was true of my school years -- wonderfully sunny days consumed by the tedium of history classes. (Why does it never rain for double History on Thursday?) History, as I learnt it at school, was a series of calamities for the Irish and phlegmatic victories for the scheming British. (The poor Continentals looked on. They sent any number of expeditions to aid us, but they were strangely incapable of landing on our coasts. Those poor unhandy Continentals.) A particular historicism prevailed at school which was blatantly unhistorical. It ran something like this: because Ireland is the way she is, all things that happened before were designed to make her so. In some ways we're the luckiest nation on earth: we never have to blame ourselves for any of our faults: there's seven hundred years of occupation to blame instead. As a kid you soon catch on -- the hairs growing out of the teacher's ears help -- and you learn the deaf ear. What is the deaf ear? The receptance of detail, the loss of context. It's the same with vectors and Latin declensions: once you leave school, and the cramming stops, you wonder what on earth it was all about.

And so, history for me, and for many of my generation who schooled in the sixties and seventies, had no sense. Its purpose was little more than to prevent us from listening to music that wasn't Irish. Music we should have been listening to over a wonky wireless at the Forty Foot

But why this turnabout in the late Nineties? Well, I suppose the Celtic Tiger has had a hand. Prosperity can lead to reflection -- how did we get here, where did we come from, what have we lost on the way? People are asking these questions: it's only history that can answer them. And modern Ireland begins at Easter 1916. For good or ill, my country was born in that armed rising -- through what now would be termed terrorism.

But I'm not sure if any of this influenced me. (Well, of course, heaven forbid, our good author could not be influenced by any general trend.) I was an exile writing At Swim, living and working in London. My only real connection with modernised Ireland was the football matches, which I watched on tv, singing out to my neighbours' expressible joy the songs and refrains of Irish triumph. Isn't it odd how sporting triumph so often follows economical success? It's as though the gods, glancing at the leprachaun in his new designer suit, have seen him for the first time.

The truth was that I was a gay man. London in the eighties had allowed me that. Had allowed me far more than that, in fact. England opened it galleries, museums, libraries to me -- as liberally as it opened its pubs and nightclubs. It gave me dole when I needed it, and work when I wanted it. A churl would be ungrateful for that. In consequence I have come to despise the small-minded old-school anti-Englishness of some Irish people. An example: when I returned here in 2001, I couldn't get over the change in driving habits. Everything was rush and cut, hesitate a moment at a roundabout and horns were blaring behind you. What had happened to the easy motoring I remembered, people pulling in to let you pass, the kindness of it all? Well, the problem was easily resolved. Our car was English-registered. We re-registered it with Irish plates, and the old easy never-you-bother ways returned. That kind of racism drives me up the wall.

I was in London, and I was gay. People hearing my accent would sometimes ask, Are you Irish? No, I'd answer: I'm gay. But I wanted to be Irish as well. Somehow those two identities did not ring true. Not only did I not have a wife and seven children, but I didn't beat any of them up either -- not even on Sundays. (Such clichés, I have come to understand, are everyone's battling ground, no matter who or what you may be.) In At Swim I wanted to answer that question -- Are you Irish? -- with a most affirmative yes. Two Dublin boys, in their friendship, in their love for each other, would discover their country. A country, in the end, whose freedom was worth their fight.

Well, there's all that, of course. But nobody can deny that the enquiring eyes searching you from an old black-and-white print alure far far more than any technicolar flush-toned full-frontal. That's the gay man in me. You see, our history was not written. In consequence, all eyes enquire.

History Links

• Introducing Irish History: A Web-Text ... an introduction to Irish history using images, audio, maps, even interactive quizzes. The best intro I’ve come across on the web. From the Irish Literary Studies Department at Washington and Lee University.
• Ireland’s History in Maps. A surprisingly informative site.

• 1916 The Rising General background information.
• The Easter Rising from the BBC. Here you can “explore the events leading up to 1916, the Insurrection itself and its aftermath, through essays, photographs, sound archive, music and newspapers from the period.” A very good introduction.
• The Easter Rising, Dublin 1916 – a feature article from FirstWorldWar.com
• Contemporary postcards of the Easter Rising, ex IslandIreland.com.
• A Photo Tour of Easter Rising locations.
• And here's the real thing, The 1916 Historical Walking Tour of Dublin Next time you're in Dublin you can take this tour yourself. In the meantime, check out the website for a brief outline of people, organizations and events surrounding the Rising – often shady and always confusing. Shady and confusing, it should be remembered, as much to people at the time as to interested readers now.
• Fifty years on ... Dublin Flames Kindled A Nation’s Spirit from the Irish Independent 1966 anniversary supplement.

• A site from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association on Ireland and the Great War. (RDF was Mr Mack’s old regiment.)
• Kildare Observer

• The James Connolly Society of Canada and the United States – a document archive holding many of Connolly’s articles and speeches as published in his newspaper the Workers’ Republic.
• The Lock-Out – Dublin 1913 An overview of the general strike and Larkinism. (The Lock-Out was the Dublin strike which militarized the workers and which Doyler, in At Swim, wishes – and sometimes pretends – he took part in.)
• The Dublin Lock-Out from the BBC.
• The Dublin Lock-Out and Its Sequel – from the Workers’ Republic, 29 May 1915.

• Patrick Pearse: A Man – a website maintained by Rose Tempany-Pearse.
• Pearse’s writings – from CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts), online resource for Irish history, literature and politics, maintained by University College, Cork.

• something ...

A note on Irish

I thought it fun to provide here an introduction to Irish / Gaelic / Gaeilge. (Irish is the name we use most commonly in Ireland. Gaeilge is what Irish-speakers call it. Gaelic is the word foreigners tend to use.)

Here is a paragraph from the short story, Eoghainín na nÉan by Pádraig Mac Piarais (yes, the very same Patrick Pearse):

Bhí Eoghainín in airde ar an aill mhóir a bhí láimh le binn an tí, é socraithe go deas ar an mullach agus cúl bán a chinn le bun na fuinseoige a bhí á fhoscadh. Bhí a cheann crochta aige, agus é ag breathnú uaidh ó dheas. D'fhéach a mháthair suas air. B'fhacthas di go raibh a chuid gruaige ina h-ór buí san áit a raibh an ghrian ag scalladh ar a chloigeann.

A word-for-word transliteration of this would go (verb preceding noun, noun preceding adjective):

Was Little Owen in height on the cliff big that was to hand with gable of the house, him settled nicely on the summit and back pale of his head with base of the ash-tree that was at his sheltering. Was head raised at him and he at watch from him to the south. Looked his mother up on him. Was appearance to her that was his share of hair in her gold yellow in the place that was the sun at scald on his head.

Real English would render it this way:

Young Owen was high up the big cliff that was close by the gable of the house. He was settled nicely on the summit with the pale back of his head against the base of a sheltering ash tree. His head was raised and he was watching to the south. His mother looked up at him. It seemed to her that his hair was like yellow gold on the spot where the sun was burning down on his head.

What is interesting about this, at least for me, is that if you speak aloud the middle passage, the transliteration, in an irish accent – even in a pretend put-on Irish accent – it somehow loses its nonsense and begins, even, to make sense. Could it be that accent and language are more closely related than we think? Or could it just be that we expect nonsense from an Irish mouth? I really could not say.

Language Links

• Link to Learning Irish