Mixing up the Republic - Frank McNally on the sad end of a Blasket hero

At a seminar in Áras an Uachtaráin on Thursday, as the President and others grappled with the meaning of Irish independence 100 years on, there was a pithy contribution from the Blasket Islands writer Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

He was being channelled by keynote speaker Declan Kiberd, who quoted a passage from the book Allagar na hInse (“Island Cross-talk”) in which Ó Criomhthain asked his fellow Blasketeers to say the word “republic” in Irish.

It was no surprise to him when they could not find a suitable equivalent. He quipped: “agus is beag a chuir a soláthar imní ach oiread oraibh” (“and it’s little its attainment worried you either”.)

As Kiberd reminded us, the Great Blasket was a kingdom rather than a republic. But paradoxically, its king was always elected. So it was an egalitarian monarchy, if such a thing is possible.

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I’ll come back to Machnamh 100, as the Áras event was headlined, next week. But by pure serendipity, I have also this week been reading a book called On An Irish Island. Which although published in the US, concerns the same Great Blasket, with Ó Criomhthain also looming large.

The author, Robert Kanigel, is a New Yorker, and when his book first appeared in 2013, it passed me by, as it seems to have done most people in this country. I am reading it now only because it was gifted to me by a Google-employed Kerryman in California recently.

And although I thought I was familiar with most of the characters who helped create the Blasket school of literature a century ago, including Englishman Robin Flower and the Norwegian Carl Marstrander, it is Kanigel who had to remind me of the crucial but sad role played by one Brian Kelly, from Killarney.

All but forgotten today, Kelly’s life story (1889-1936) is something of a Greek tragedy. A brilliant scholar, from a well-off family and educated at Clongowes and Trinity College, he could have achieved great things in independent Ireland.

But the seeds of his downfall may have been sown when, as a postgraduate student in first World War Germany, he was arrested and interned.

The man who freed him eventually was Sir Roger Casement, in Germany on a revolutionary mission. And as he did with Irish military prisoners of war, Casement then tried to recruit Kelly to the nationalist cause.

But the latter refused and, instead, when he returned to Ireland in 1915, provided the British authorities with a report about Casement, whom he considered unhinged.

According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, this was given on condition it not be used in evidence. Even so, Casement had become a martyr to Irish republicanism by the time Kelly arrived on the Great Blasket in April 1917, seeking Irish lessons.

By royal appointment of the Blasket king, Ó Criomhthain was the man usually delegated to teach Irish to visiting scholars.

He had previously done so for Marstrander and Flower, whose interest helped build Ó Criomhthain’s sense of himself as the island intellectual and a man with interesting things to say.

But it was Kelly who now convinced him that he should commit his thoughts to paper, that there were people far beyond Ireland who might be interested in reading them.

And so it happened. Furnished by Kelly with pen, paper, and books by Gorky and others, Ó Criomhthain became a writer, first via a diary and finally in his great memoir An t-Oileánach (“The Islandman”), which opened the way for other Blasket writers, including Peig Sayers.

This should have made Kelly, or Ó Ceallaigh as he had become known, a hero in the new Free State.

But it didn’t, somehow. Perhaps knowledge of his contribution to British intelligence on the now sainted Casement followed him. Whatever the reasons, his career in independent Ireland did not thrive.

He was briefly a junior inspector of national schools in 1918-9 but lost the job. He then sought a secondary school inspectorship in 1924, before withdrawing the application.

Even his efforts to get Ó Criomhthain into print, having first persuade him to write, were a failure. It fell to someone else to secure a publisher. Although he lived long enough to, Ó Ceallaigh may never have seen Ó Criomhthain’s books.

His later years are bleakly obscure. The last recorded sighting of him by friends was in a Berlin railway station in 1927. By the time of his death, from Polio in 1936, he was living in Yugoslavia.

His is said to have been a “lonely, introverted man” in later years. And however it influenced others, he himself must have been haunted by his peripheral but damning role in 1916. According to the DIB, quoting Muiris MacConghail, “knowledge that his statement on Casement was still in Dublin Castle may have weighed heavily on his mind”.