2/9/23

From the Easter Rebellion reading program, despite it not being really about the Eastern Rebellion. Instead, it’s about the poetic and literary inspiration behind the Eastern Rebellion, attempting to explain how a bunch of poets and political theorists found themselves defending the Dublin Post Office against the British Army. Quite good although quaintly dated (published 1967). The quaint part is scattered through the text, where Thompson, from the vantage point of 1967, explains how the Irish struggle and the deaths of the Easter rebels somehow prefigures the eventual triumph of the State. OTOH, the biographies of the participants really do resonate dimly today; young men, underemployed for their education and sexually repressed by their religious beliefs engage in an almost deliberately incompetent suicidal act; he also makes the observation that revolutions take place not when repression is worse, but just when things are starting to get better, and is generally not led by the lowest strata of society but (in his words) “the bottom of the top and the top of the bottom”. Thus Thompson really was a prophet although he didn’t realize what he was prophesying.


Thompson starts with a background to the events, going back about 50 years or so, and explaining how various national, literary, language and agricultural reform movements coalesced into a military rebellion. His short explanation of how the House of Lords lost its veto power over Home Rule and the subsequent conservative backlash (“playing the Orange card”) cleared up a lot of things for me.


Thompson then segues into capsule biographies of the major participants at the Post Office. Their poetry is uninspired (well, it’s better than anything I could possibly write, though). It’s William Butler Yeats, who didn’t have any part in the rising, who has the creepiest stanzas:


All that I have done and said

Now that I am old and ill

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right
Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?


Yeats is thinking of his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan and wondering whether it did inspire people to go out and die for Ireland. Perhaps; art sometimes does have that power. Pearse, in particular, was famous for bloodthirsty speeches – Thompson cites one in particular with the chilling lines:

“We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.”


Four years later Lieutenant-Colonel Ferguson-Smith gave the following advice to the Royal Irish Constabulary (the Black and Tans):


“You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties sometime.”


Padraic Pearse was executed by firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising on May 3, 1916; Ferguson-Smith was assassinated in his club in 1920, shortly after making the statement above.


Like all the histories of the Easter Rising I’ve read, Thomson gives the rebels all the print; there’s no mention of the British soldiers killed, or of the fact that more Dublin civilians were killed than rebels and British combined. He does suggest that the firing-squad execution of the rising leaders was a mistake on the part of the British; it turned them from fanatics who had devastated Dublin in what was essentially a terrorist act to martyrs for the cause of Irish independence. Thompson suggests the correct strategy on the part of the British would have been a formal trial; the defendants would have looked ridiculous and ridicule is crushing to revolutionaries. The executions allowed Michael Collins, released later in 1916, lead what was essentially the world’s first terrorist campaign (and, so far, the only successful one) which culminated in Irish independence (Collins, of course, was later killed himself. There was a lot of that going around in Ireland).


Interesting; inspires me to go out and read more of Yeats, Synge, O’Casey and the other Irish writers of the time. ( )