Anyone trying to measure the extent to which people’s memory of historical events can change over time could hardly do better than to study two books by the republican activist and writer PS O’Hegarty.
In 1952, he published A History of Ireland Under the Union, a straightforward nationalist "story of a people coming out of captivity". This unclouded vision was dramatically different from the account of the Irish revolution, The Victory of Sinn Féin, which he had published 30 years earlier. It was a ferocious polemic filled with what Frances Flanagan calls "O'Hegarty's sense of the revolution as having constituted a catastrophic breach with civilisation".
The reception of the two books was equally different: whereas the earlier one was met by a mixture of bafflement and dismay, the later one was rapidly adopted as a school textbook.
Distance had no doubt adjusted O’Hergarty’s perspective, along perhaps with his post-Treaty career as a civil servant. He himself would have claimed that decades of careful research had improved his understanding. And the “internal inconsistencies and maniacal tone” of the earlier book were definite weaknesses. But for all its technical flaws, its raw ferocity surely brought it closer to the truth.
That would certainly seem to be Flanagan’s view. She sets O’Hegarty alongside three other writers whose reassessment of the revolutionary experience after 1921 was sceptical if not outright dystopian. They span a generation: George Russell was some 12 years older than O’Hegarty; Eimar O’Duffy and Desmond Ryan, 13 years younger.
Her skilful and persuasive opening survey of writing about the revolution locates them alongside other, perhaps nowadays better-known writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Seán Ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor. Their view of the struggle for independence diverged sharply from the orthodox picture of national unity (and national virtue), and recognised the complexity and moral ambiguity of the republican guerrilla campaign.
All were memorably dismissed by the IRA veteran Dan Breen as “moderates, gasbags and renegades”.
Mainstream Russell, universally known by his nom de plume, AE, was a long-time friend of WB Yeats and famous as a mystic, poet and advocate of the agricultural co-operative movement. His funeral, in 1935, was a major event, with a mile-long procession and an aircraft fly-past.
O’Hegarty was a central figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood before 1916, and later became a respected compiler of research on the revolution.
Ryan, who had been with Pearse in the GPO in 1916, became a newspaper reporter and writer.
Stonyhurst-educated O’Duffy was an officer in the pre-1916 Irish Volunteers, as well as writing military analyses. He went with Eoin MacNeill for his famous showdown with Patrick Pearse over the planned insurrection, and was present when the countermanding order was issued.
None carried a gun after 1916. O'Hegarty, whose brother became a very effective IRA commander in Cork, ran a Dublin bookshop. Ryan was responsible for the "blood column" in the Freeman's Journal, describing the war's casualties. O'Duffy ostentatiously abandoned his link with the Volunteers, in protest at the sidelining of Bulmer Hobson after 1916, though he returned to edit the National Army newspaper in 1922.
His extraordinary semi-fictional The Wasted Island, published in 1919, restored Hobson, in the guise of Stephen Ward, to his central role in the revolutionary movement, a practical visionary who insisted that national independence would be worth little unless it was accompanied by economic reconstruction. O'Duffy's condemnation of the rising was total, and his vision of its impact deeply pessimistic.
All diverged from the nationalist mainstream by virtue of thinking through their ideas of what the nation should be.
O’Hegarty preached “anti-political-priestism”, believing that a secular nationalism could bring all denominations in: the crucial thing was to avoid “anything which would help to identify Nationalism today with Catholicism”. Russell, who (laudably) admired Kropotkin, believed that only co-operation, restructuring Irish society around small agricultural units, could reconcile tradition and modernity.
Russell, who thought in the very long term (AE signified aeon), came to see the true revolutionaries as his generation of artists and writers rather than the people who fought the war of independence.
O’Hegarty also insisted that “revolutions are not made in a week, or a year, or 10 years”, nor were they made by “rude and unlettered mobs”: revolution was a cultural process. He argued that the real bearers of the armed struggle were civilians (like himself), terrorised by both sides, rather than fighters, and warned that militarism had “become a fetish” that “must be cast aside, otherwise we shall perish beneath the weight of its oppression”.
Ryan's semi-fictional The Invisible Army of 1932 made clear that neither side in the war could claim the moral high ground. It showed an IRA that was quite different from the army's carefully-constructed self-image. Ryan's revolution, as Flanagan notes, "was full of mistakes, accidents, inexperience, and terrified young men making amateurish decisions". Its leitmotiv was the loss of all capacity for feeling in the face of "a thousand tragedies compressed into five years which history books would never mention". Piety Russell never grasped the limits of his power to convince people of his epic sense of historical development. Yeats judged his wartime poems "extraordinarily bad". Yet he was probably most representative in his contradictory response to 1916, admiring the rebel leaders while believing that violence was the wrong path to revolution.
O'Duffy's Wasted Island and O'Hegarty's Victory of Sinn Féin were too idiosyncratic to persuade many others, but the success of Ryan's books in the 1920s and 1930s shows there was an audience for a more nuanced and ambivalent view of the revolution. Though the "faith and fatherland" interpretation was always present, it was perhaps only after the appearance in 1931 of the Louis Le Roux biography of Pearse (which Ryan, who gave Le Roux access to his papers to write it, found dangerously uncritical) that piety really took over the national narrative.
Dr Flanagan’s book is based on a doctoral research thesis, and it is something of a pity that the austere conventions of the Oxford Historical Monographs series deprive it of the benefit of illustrations. Where personality plays such a central part, images can really add a dimension.
Not all of her protagonists are as familiar as AE – the “hairy fairy” who, as she notes, was a famous sight on the Dublin streets, with his voluminous beard flowing in the wind as he “sailed down Merrion Square like some lordly ship”. Even so, her lively writing and significant argument should gain her readers outside the academic world.
Charles Townshend's Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion is now in paperback
