A grotesque denial of bloodshed

On Sunday week, unless there is a last-minute outbreak of sanity, we will be treated to an extraordinary spectacle. Coinciding with the Fianna Fβil Ardfheis, the State will stage one of the most elaborate political ceremonies in its history.

After a religious service, the remains of 10 IRA men, recently exhumed from their graves near the perimeter wall of Mountjoy Prison, will be draped in tricolours and loaded into 10 hearses.

The cortege, accompanied by an Army motorcycle escort, will then move at walking pace through the north side of the city towards the Pro-Cathedral, stopping on the way at the Garden of Remembrance and the GPO.

From the cathedral, the procession will eventually move back to Glasnevin Cemetery, where to the accompaniment of the setting sun and an oration by the Taoiseach, the remains will be buried. The entire event will be relayed live on television. The President and the entire Cabinet will officiate.

In the official version and in one part of the truth, all of this is a simple act of humanity. Nobody deserves to lie in a prison yard, and the families of the 10 IRA men executed by the British in 1920 and 1921, among them the famous Kevin Barry, have every right to mourn their ancestors in hallowed ground. Nobody at all could object to the State helping the families to put these ghosts of history at rest.

Equally, however, nobody at all can deny the existence of a very specific Irish tradition of political funerals and martyrs. From the re-interment of Terence Bellew McManus onwards, militant Irish nationalists pioneered what might be called funerary propaganda.

As Patrick Pearse acknowledged in his oration at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa, to hold the graves of martyrs is to claim your rights as the true inheritor of the past.

There are reasons why Fianna Fβil imagined that this would be a good time to claim the grave of Kevin Barry. When the last State funeral (that of Jack Lynch) was one in which the oration for a Fianna Fβil Taoiseach was given by a politician from another party (Des O'Malley), the need for an emotive event in which the party can claim to be the nation goes deep.

When the recent past that is being disinterred at the tribunals gives off a stench of corruption, the temptation to skip back into an apparently more idealistic time is obvious. When the party is so ideologically bankrupt, the temptation to wrap its nakedness in the green flag is strong. And when Sinn FΘin is becoming a serious electoral threat, the desire to steal back the clothes it has borrowed is almost irresistible.

Yet even before the events of September 11th, an elaborate State funeral was a very bad idea. It was likely to achieve two things: sickening many citizens by its ghoulish cynicism and offering a great boost to those who want us to feel that the only difference between a terrorist and a patriot is the passage of time.

The official distinction that is being made between Kevin Barry and the contemporary IRA is that Kevin Barry was essentially a democrat fighting to uphold the mandate of the 1918 elections, which were won by Sinn FΘin. It doesn't really stand up.

Donal O'Donovan, Barry's nephew and author of the excellent Kevin Barry and His Time, recalls a conversation between Barry and his sister, Kathy. Barry had just taken the oath of allegiance to the newly established Dβil. "That's good", said Kathy, "now you're a real army." Barry's reply was "I don't know. Anyway, when this damned Dβil takes Dominion Home Rule, they needn't expect us to back them up."

Nor was Barry's short military career very far from what we would now call terrorism. In July 1920, he took part in a raid on the home in Aughavannnagh, County Wicklow of the elected Nationalist MP, Willie Redmond.

The following month, he was involved in an attack on a Church of Ireland rectory in Co Carlow. The clergyman fired a shotgun at his attackers from an upstairs window. The IRA men fired back but then left. "We decided," as one of Barry's fellow raiders later recalled, "not to go near the minister that night but to take him unawares" at some later time.

It should also be remembered that the September 1920 attack on British soldiers for which Kevin Barry was hanged was one in which civilians were recklessly endangered. The ambush was staged in a bakery off a busy city street. A bullet went through the window of the dairy next door, missing a baby in a pram by pure luck. Of the three soldiers who were killed, one, Matthew Whitehead, was, at 17, even younger than his killer, Kevin Barry.

None of this means that Kevin Barry was not a nice, bright, middle-class boy who, in normal times, would have ended up as a popular local GP and president of the rugby club. The State must acknowledge the circumstances of its own creation.

The elaborate act of piety that is being foisted on us is not, however, an act of acknowledgement. On the contrary, it is an act of denial, deliberately designed to sanitise the ambiguities of people like Kevin Barry whose idealistic certainty makes them reckless of other people's lives.

Before September 11th, that was a stupid mistake. After September 11th, it borders on the grotesque.

fotoole@irish-times.ie