Sacrifice of the blood

Richard West

This is the first of three studies in terrorism and politics. They arise from recent visits by Richard West to Ireland, Lebanon and Cyprus.

ADublin publisher recently had the idea of bringing out the complete letters of Patrick Pearse, who led the 1916 Easter Ris- ing ,Ibut after a look at the contents' decided that this would be bad for the Republic of Ireland's reputation. The letters ap- parently showed most clearly what had been long suspected, that Pearse, the man who wanted 'a sacrifice of the blood', had a morbid, erotic obsession with wounded and dying young men. The Irishwoman who told me this story about the letters made further comments on Pearse, the hero of the Republic whose name now graces a Dublin railway station and one of the longest streets in the city. In view of what she had said, I ventured to air my own sug- gestion that Pearse with his Easter Rising had done what Hitler was later to do in the Munich rising of 1923; to start a revolution that had no chance of immediate success but which would at the same time make a 'sacrifice of the blood' and produce its mar- tyrs, and lead in time to the winning of power. 'You will forgive me', I said 'for comparing Pearse with Hitler.' The Irishwoman paused for a minute and answered: 'I think you're being unfair to Hitler.'

She went on to damn the IRA, from its inception to the present day, in far stronger terms than one ever hears from an English person. In particular she abhorred those re-

cent martyrs, the H-Block hunger-strikers in Northern Ireland. The 'sacrifice' of their own lives she found even more obscene than the taking of other people's lives, and she said that other Irish people had reacted in the same way. She went on to say in the strongest terms possible that the IRA of the present time are in no way different from terrorists and indeed hunger-strikers during the 'troubles' from 1916 to 1923.

The BBC has been re-showing the series of television films on Ireland by Robert Kee, including the interviews with some an- cient, chuckling gunmen who proudly re- count to the camera the murders they car- ried out against Englishmen in their youth. I was in Northern Ireland just after this in- stalment was shown for the first time, at a time when, coincidentally, the IRA had just carried out a series of murders of unarmed Protestants in southern Armagh and Fer- managh. I wonder if Mr Kee or the BBC understood just how much upset and anger was caused by that programme among Pro- testants and decent Catholics. The IRA and supporters loved the whole BBC series. The instalment was especially harmful because of the charm and humour shown by these old men. This reinforced the illusion that terrorists 60 years ago were somehow dif- ferent from those we see on television to- day, for instance the sneering IRA murderess who appeared on Panorama recently to boast of her role in the 'execu- tion' of British soldiers in Belfast.

But they are not a different sort of peo- ple. Many Irish people (probably more Irish than English people) are coming to see that

of 1916-23; that Pearse's 'sacrifice of In` blood' was a primal terrorist act; 11131 Easter 1916 was not only a crime but have been a calamitous blunder. Wes! Republic of Ireland founded on terror bey ter not founded at all? This shocking (lAtie tion was posed most forcefully in 17'.. when a learned Irish review called Stud0 compiling essays to mark the 50th anaire. sary of the Rising, approached Father Fran cis Shaw, a Jesuit priest who was then Prcri fessor of Early and Mediaeval Irish at University College, Dublin. The editor °' Studies turned down the essay, which 05 not published till 1972 when Fr Shaw °Is. dead. In that year, after 'Bloody Sat and the burning down of the British r"': bassy in Dublin, Pearse was idolised never before by Republican Irishmen Fr Shaw's essay appeared as treasonable' Yet Fr Shaw wrote only the truth, ja gentlest language. He pointed out, 0,1" c:tf. ample, that Pearse and his friends haa of tually no support from the Pe°P,.le Ireland: 'On Monday afternoon of gas, Week, 1916, notwithstanding the verY "of cent attempt to bring in a consigunielliA arms from Germany, the highest NO; British officer on duty in Dublin was ali.:01 jutant. The city of Dublin was yid" the unguarded: the routine guard dri ato General Post Office had rifles but a°, nr; munition.' Since there was no pression, the rebels had to provoke it scuds murder. Meanwhile hundreds of thousarl.0 of Irishmen were fighting and dYing Englishmen in the war against GertuarlY:sh Writing in 1966, before the latest Ifrioof troubles, Fr Shaw nevertheless made con. that the Easter Rising was certain to and tagonise the Northern Protestants the Catholic majority of Ireland: possibly calculated to split them from 'In 1916 it must have been apPare-,-.6de nt British .11) separation from Ireland could onlY os the nation more deeply. Even the "'the modest measure of Home Rule for the whole country was unacceptable to ,iej Carson-led Ulstermen. In 1914 an arrio destiny; stood between Ireland an :fish it waswthaas that bthoedy uwiasstenrotvtehiewtreehlars„ Army;y; bLeoegniciaallyBetihfaestRising of 1916 should P But did Patrick Pearse really wallio; united Ireland? Or did he, as Fr Shaw soo. gested, want hatred and terror and Woo shed for their own sake? 'I kn°wrote, Ireland will not be happy,' Pearse Wre of 'until she recollects that laughing battle or a young man that is going into batt; be climbing to a gibbet.' A few years earl] _r15,5 had written, in words that recall Ye3rder stirring but dangerous poem: 'It is r1111.41e and death that make possible the te/I1 i5 beautiful thing we call physical life. Alttie quite wrong to suggest that Pearse and Easter rebels were wanting to save Yusforn Irishmen from the shambles of the Werftten Front. On the contrary, Pearse had vi wen late in 1915: 'The last 16 months have "-of the most glorious in the his EuroPe...The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with red wine of the bat- Like Hitler, Pearse was sentimen- tal and maudlin concerning children theugh, unlike Hitler, his taste ran to boys ether than girls. He gushed of the child Cuehulainn: 'That "small, dark, sad boy, comeliest of the boys of Eire", shy and Modest in a boy's winning way, with a boy's aloofness and a boy's mystery.' Understandably, Fr Shaw resented most °,1 all Pearse's creepy and blasphemous ef- tOrts to join the name of Christ to those of 111.s murderous Fenians: `The people Itself twill Perhaps be its own Messiah, the people ,anbouring, scourged, crowned with thorns, and and dying, to rise again immortal `rid impassable.' As Fr Shaw so rightly said ;hhis essay:`...The Irish people (in 1916) .ad Plainly chosen the broadly constitu- !°aal mode of obtaining national objec- `ves. On the contrary, following the lead of Wolfe Tone and the Fenians, Pearse, one tee. Is, would not have been satisfied to at- hln independence by peaceful means. He ulka, (I come to believe that the purgation of ood-letting was necessary.' Did Pearse ,and his fellows even really desire an in- tlePendent, united Ireland? Was it the end .uat.iustified the means, or the means that Justified the end? verl Fr Shaw allowed himself the emotive phrase that in 1916 `an armed s °IcherY stood between Ireland and its d Y .eStinl.,.

But did Ireland, or any country, kInally have a destiny? Was it really true,

Inaplied for instance by the Robert Kee tkurns, that all Irish history was leading up to fue bloody events of 1916, and separation observe Britain? Nothing is easier than to b serve what has happened and then work hack in time to prove why it was destined to of this Karl Marx was the arch-historian th tots school; but it is worth pointing out triat. Marx's theory, though most convinc- h 8 In giving a reason for what had already `

naapPened, proved utterly wrong when it nie to predicting the future.

Three hundred years ago, when the British r r Isles were rent by wars concerning the tglon and constitutional forms, I doubt ahat. an would seriously have predicted h." Independent, united Ireland. Certainly netland, north and south, became sadly in- Cved in the three-way battle between the and he Presbyterians. Twice in the century In the early 1650s, then in the late 1680s these 01, wars were fought more in Ireland r,n on the larger island. But no one sup- posed at the time that the issue was Irish in- ‘,F;endence. The famous invasion by belaitiati of Orange was launched in order to to 'log James II and stop him returning life `-n gland. It was also a part of William's bet.:1°11g war against France which then, as thelre and after, was using the Irish against to glish. Even religion scarcely came in- of Ivt since the Pope at the time was the foe ofnrance and the stalwart ally of William of Orange. The bells of St Peter's were rung ter William's victory at the Boyne.

At this time, it was Scotland, not Ireland, that seemed in danger of once more split- ting away from the other islanders. Scotland had for centuries had its own king, ruling a quite definable nation-state from the ancient capital, Edinburgh. In- deed England and Scotland were first truly united, in 1603, under a Scottish king, James VI — and I of England. In the subse- quent century, till the Act of Union, Scotland three times threatened to break away and form a separate Presbyterian state. Even during the 18th century, Scotland twice invaded England, on these occasions in the cause of the Roman Catholic Stuarts.

Ireland, during the 18th century, could not be described as docile, but what rebellion there was (such as the rising of 1798) came almost exclusively from the Presbyterian Ulstermen. The dream or fan- tasy of an independent Ireland (pace Robert Kee) became substantial only during the 19th century when nationalism and revolu- tion and terrorism were becoming popular all over the continent. Yet even during the 19th century, and into the 20th century, there was more unrest and apparent danger of revolution in England, Wales and above all Scotland than ever there was in Ireland. The Highland clearances were at the time, and quite rightly, regarded as more cruel and unjust than anything done to the Irish peasants, whose suffering in the famine was not man-made.

Nobody would deny that the citizens of the Republic of Ireland (I always think of those words in inverted commas) form a distinct nation: distinct, that is, from the English, the Welsh and the Scots. The Dutchman G.J. Renier ably summed up the differences in his classic The English: Are They Human? He explained in his preface that he did not intend to discuss 'the Scots, proud, intelligent, religious and un- fathomable. Nor... the Welsh, minute, musical, clever and temperamental. I am not writing about the charming, untruthful, bloodthirsty and unreliable Irish. I shall be exclusively concerned with the English, the unintellectual, restricted, stubborn, steady, Pragmatic, silent and reliable English.' Although writing in 1931, ten years after Southern Ireland's secession, Renier assumed that the Irish had a natural relationship with the other three nations, or four if one included the Scottish-Irish Ulstermen. The English, by far the most populous of the nations within these islands, have always been singled out as an enemy by the angry Irish: as far back as 1641, the Ulster Catholics tried at first to spare the Scots from the massacre they imposed on the English settlers. Yet oddly enough the English have always felt a special affinity with the Irish, whom they seem to like more than the Welsh and Scots. We, the English, admire but do not entirely trust the Welsh; we did not feel very welcome there, even before people started burning our houses. We like and admire the Scots, but, if we are honest, have to admit that we fear them.

The biannual visits of Scottish football sup- porters cause more terror in London than any amount of IRA bombs.

In fact the atrocities by the IRA seem never to have produced any hatred of Irish people as such. I have not noticed any; more to the point, my wife, who is Irish, has not noticed any. We English quite right- ly do not associate the IRA with Paddy the colleague, barman and neighbour.

Usually, after an IRA bomb outrage, some Conservative MP will call for the abolition of votes for Irish citizens in this country; but nobody really cares. The fact is that (pace Robert Kee) we do not think of the Irish as foreigners, like for example the Indians or the Jamaicans. The friendly feel- ing applies specifically to the southern Irish. The English feel for the Ulster people the same mixture of awe and terror they feel for the Scots. And oddly enough many southern Irishmen, even including ad- vocates of a united Ireland, do not actually like the northern Irish, even the Catholics whom they regard as dour and harsh. Though I say it who should not, I think that the southern Irish return the special affec- tion felt for them by the English. The two people complement one another because of their very differences; the two temper- aments match. Economic necessity is not enough to explain the huge migration of Irish people to England, especially during the years since independence. It was Thackeray who remarked on `that which seems to be pretty unsparingly exercised in Ireland by those natives who have it, the right of looking down with scorn upon all persons who have not had the opportunity of quitting the mother country and in- habiting England for a while'. This was Thackeray's sneering way of explaining the very natural yearning of Irishmen to escape for a time the excessive cosiness of a small society where almost everyone is related, and everyone knows each other's business. We, the English, admire and envy just that sense of community; we want to escape the isolation and loneliness of a big city.

As I say, the two peoples need each other. And this kind of relationship is best achieved in some kind of loose federation of kindred nations such as the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. In an excellent re- cent television film on Connemara, we saw a man who had just returned from London saying that even if you spent most of your life in England, you still remained Irish, but `after three months in the States you're a bloody Yank'. I am sure this is right. The English, the Scots and the Welsh have kept their nationhood largely because they are also part of a larger entity, the United Kingdom. The southern Irish, paradoxical- ly, seem to be losing some of their lrishness since they became the Republic of Ireland. Now it is Belfast not Dublin that strikes the English visitor as an exotic, exciting city; while Dublin is vandalised, criminalised, suburbanised. A terrible Birmingham is born.

It is just because the Irish and English get on well together that Pearse, the proto-Nazi homosexual sadist, saw it was necessary to start his revolt. Only murder, that 'sacrifice of the blood', could provoke the hatred necessary to found the Republic of Ireland. And yet it did not work. The English and Irish did not come to hate one another. The failure of English people to turn on the Irish people for bomb explosions must vex the IRA. We remain good friends.

I do not suggest that Ireland and England should once more be joined under the crown. The time has passed. The Irish are too much crazed with 'republican' fantasies to see how happy they might be under the Queen. The English do not want to write off the damage done to the post office. We all, however, know that England and Ireland, and Scotland and Wales as well, would be better off without the gunmen of Patrick Pearse.