Remembering the Revolution

The 1916 Rebellion, rather than commencing the revolution that eventually brought about the partition of Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, brought an end to a period of political experimentation and exploration. In the hiatus between Britain’s suppression of the Rising and Sinn Féin’s extraordinary victory in the 1918 General Election, a new generation of separatist nationalists came to the fore, whose political and intellectual development owed little to the pre-war activism characterised by cultural revivalism, the women’s suffrage campaign, the co-operative movement, socialism and, more broadly, civic ideals. Or so, to varying degrees, thought the principal protagonists of Frances Flanagan’s fascinating analysis of how the Irish revolution was remembered in the inter-war years. Although differing on much, Eimar O’Duffy, P.S. O’Hegarty, George Russell and Desmond Ryan generally concurred that Irish nationalism lost its way either in the immediate run-up to the Easter Rising or in its long and bloody aftermath of revolution and civil war. All were seemingly compelled to make sense of the revolution through writing, each having a powerful sense that they could see through to the essential quality of the revolutionary experience. Their backgrounds and trajectories, as Flanagan shows, were nonetheless quite distinct. O’Duffy, author of The Wasted Island (1919), had repudiated his imperialist and pro-home rule background for cultural revivalism; he deeply regretted the Rising as a retrograde act that entrenched rather than healed Ireland’s divisions. O’Hegarty, a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the pre-war years, found himself on the wrong side of the faction that planned the Rising but still argued that it catalysed a national awakening, ensuring no shot need have been fired afterwards. George Russell, mystic, cultural revivalist and leading figure in the pre-war co-operative movement, articulated an irenic account of the revolution, suggesting that its exceptional nature effectively exonerated all protagonists of responsibility for their actions. Desmond Ryan, pupil at Patrick Pearse’s school, chronicled the revolution through a series of character studies which emphasised the heroism and self-sacrifice of the revolutionaries irrespective of their political differences. In middle age, Ryan’s boyhood infatuation with Pearse faded, and he too developed a subtle, autobiographical response to the effects of revolution and political violence

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