'Old Blue i' (from the archives): Strange Paradoxes of the National Romance

A reflection sparked by the 2001 state funerals of Kevin Barry, and nine other executed IRA prisoners, hitherto buried in unconsecrated ground inside the walls of Mountjoy prison.

(Originally published October 2001)

The iconography of patriotism was so strong in Ireland up until the present generation that it is almost impossible for those who experienced it to agree about the essential nature of this country with those who did not. Those of us born before the early 1960s have one version of Ireland; those born afterwards, if they think about ‘Ireland’ at all, think about an entirely different place. 

I was contemplating this in the context of the row about the state funerals for Kevin Barry and the other patriots who were reinterred yesterday with appropriate full honours. It strikes me that those who spoke out against the honouring of the patriots in this way were seeking to align themselves with the new Ireland that began in the 1960s rather than the Ireland that exists in the imagination of many of those who were born before that.

That may seem an obvious and nondescript statement, but it can be taken a little further. Because those opposed to yesterday’s event are mostly, in terms of chronological age at least, products of the pre-1960s Ireland, there is an interesting dimension to their opposition which has been missed.

Although I fundamentally disagree with theiir analysis, I place many of those who oppose Irish republicanism as among the bravest and most idealistic people of the present generation. I say without irony that I have been impressed by the way people like Kevin Myers, Fintan O’Toole, Eoghan Harris and others have put their money where their mouths were. It has taken considerable courage to oppose the Provisional IRA in recent decades. But I have been struck also by the possibility that at least some of their anger may derive from a sense of frustration that the tradition of Irish heroic patriotism had been stolen from them.

All of us who went to school during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were imbued — mainly by teaching priests and brothers — with a profound sense of patriotism, and moreover, with a very distinct image of what that patriotism might look and sound like. 

When you begin to think about it, you realise that, for example, the present-day leaders of Sinn Féin and those who have so robustly opposed them are cut, in a sense, from the same cloth. The Provisional leaders, in the way they dress, speak and carry themselves, resemble self-created latter-day versions of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. More correctly, they are like composites of our present-day understanding of what those seven men might have been like. Gerry Adams, for example, has the stern, avuncular asceticism, with the merest hint of zealotry, that we might ascribe to a Padraic Pearse, as well as the sense of engaged energy and keen political intelligence we'd maybe associate with a James Connolly — and also, of course, the literary ambition identifiable with a Thomas McDonogh. For all that the 1916 leaders have been dehumanised by decades of mythologising and revisionism, Adams could sit down in the midst of our image of them, and seem quite plausible. It is as though we have created him, and he has created himself, in the stereotypical image of Irish patriotism.

But the astonishing thing is that the same might be said about those who have set themselves so trenchantly against republicanism with its present-day big R. Media commentators of his approximate age-group, whether opposed to or supporting him, resemble Gerry Adams much more than they resemble young Irishmen born since the middle-’60s. 

I include myself in this navel-gazing analysis. Those of us who were inculcated with the values of the Irish revolution, and had our belief-systems consolidated by the anniversary celebrations of 1966, hold in common certain concepts of patriotism, loyalty, solidarity and heroism which are utterly alien to people a decade or two younger than us. Take at random a number of the names of those who have engaged in these debates about the legitimacy of revolution now or in the past — myself, Kevin Myers, Tom McGurk, Fintan O’Toole, Eoghan Harris, Damien Kiberd and, say, Eamon Dunphy, and reflect on how closely such a group might resemble an unconsciously-imagined recreation of the group which signed the Proclamation. We have in common a deep seriousness about the importance of these matters, a strong sense of an ideal which is either elevated or debased by various events or actions; and a demeanour of earnestness which makes us all appear at least a little ridiculous in the eyes of younger people. In a sense, then, those of us who seek to address the new, post-’60s Ireland, rather than the old one they claim to be detached from, are fooling nobody, perhaps not even themselves. 

All of us are seeking to resolve the same conundrum: How do we reconcile our acquired understanding of nobility, honour and patriotism with what we have witnessed during recent decades of the frequent barbarism of the Provisional IRA? In seeking to square this circle, some have taken the path of rationalisation, others that of renunciation. If the Provos had never happened, all of us might over the past weekend have been united on a single platform, extolling the virtues and majesties of the Irish revolution, safely removed from it by the guts of a century. 

In truth, no definitive conclusion is possible, because circles cannot be squared. None of us, in truth, is capable of comprehending the full meaning of the insinuation into our national romance of the latter-day grievances of a relatively small minority in a separated province. We have in common that we have lost our heroes and are all, in our differing ways, bereft.