Children of the revolution

Amid the racket from all the music stages at the Electric Picnic on Saturday, I just about heard a poetry reading in the literary tent, during which Paul Muldoon performed one of his own catchier numbers, Anseo.

A three-verse reflection on the cyclicality of violence, the poem is set in his Armagh primary school, circa 1960, and plays on the image of the morning roll call to which the title word is central.

Verse one introduces the main protagonist, Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, whose name hints at inherited political values and also – maybe – at the reason for the frequent absences that earn him beatings from the schoolmaster, via sticks he is himself required to fetch in hedgerows.

Verse two hints at the hardening of this young “Ward-of-court”, as he takes to whittling down sally and hazel rods for his own punishment, even carving his initials on one before handing it over.

Hence verse three – the kicker – wherein, years later, the former school absentee has honed himself into an adult called Joe Ward, and is “Quartermaster, Commandant” at a republican training camp, where his duties include supervising the roll call.

I’d like to say I stayed for the entire, hour-long reading, which also included Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, with sung contributions from Iarla Ó Lionáird. But I didn’t, because of course the Electric Picnic is not all about poetry.

If fact, it invariably clashes with at least one important GAA match. And this year it clashed with two.

So there was nothing for it on Saturday (and Sunday) afternoon but to make the arduous trek out of the picnic arena, through the family camping areas, and down the Timahoe Road into the village, to join the other sport-loving refugees in Dunnes Pub.

And it was on the way back to the family campsite, later, that I stopped to read the inscription on an imposing monument, also family-themed, erected as it was, in 1958, to “a brave father and two worthy sons”. The father was Thomas O’Higgins, a local doctor, now mainly remembered because of those sons, Thomas jnr and Kevin, both of whom made names in politics.

The former was a founding member of the Blueshirts. He also served as minister for defence in the first inter-party coalition. But it was his younger brother Kevin who, for good or bad, secured the family’s lasting fame.

Although he once described himself as being among “the most conservative-minded revolutionaries ever”, Kevin O’Higgins was doomed to become a prime exemplar of the moral of the aforementioned poem. As minister for justice during the Civil War, he presided – reluctantly at first, but without remorse – over the execution of 77 anti-treaty republicans, including Rory O’Connor, who had been best man at his wedding.

In reprisal, the anti-treaty faction shot his father – Thomas snr – dead and burned the family home. Not content with that, in 1927 they assassinated O’Higgins himself.

Thus violence begot violence, although in a happier twist on the Anseo theme, O'Higgins's death did at least advance the cause of parliamentary democracy, precipitating the crisis that forced Fianna Fáil into the Dáil.

It’s always tempting, however futile, to wonder what our slain revolutionaries would have made of the modern Ireland they helped create. Not much, probably.

Perhaps the only thing uniting the different republican factions would be disappointment at the messy reality of independence, although O’Higgins was obviously more of a pragmatist in that regard.

But it’s especially entertaining (if only to me) to speculate on what he or his Blueshirts-founding brother might have made of the annual rock festival that now invades their village every summer.

Who knows? Maybe Kevin O’Higgins would have enjoyed the spectacle. As a student, he managed to get himself expelled from Maynooth College, for either smoking or drinking – or both.

Against which, during his short career in government, he made the reform of public morality a priority – believing that the Irish variant of human nature needed an especially strong guiding hand.

At any rate, if his ghost was hovering over the festival, it probably steered clear of the literary tent. O’Higgins’s most famous quotation was a two-word dismissal of the democratic programme of the first Dáil. “Mostly poetry,” he called it, although his contempt may have been more directed towards its socialist leanings than the mere lyricism of the content.

@FrankmcnallyIT