HEROES, and good causes with them, have taken a hammering in this terrible century. Monolithic sets of moral certitudes, whether old ones like Christianity or new ones like Communism often seem to have been smashed to rubble.
In the ideological wasteland of our fin de siecle, one shining monument, illusion or not, is still visible to many people of, many nations. Like all the best causes, it seems, it was a lost one, untainted by the exercise of power after victory - though not entirely unstained by the exercise of power in the process of defeat.
The Second Spanish Republic, despite its well-documented failures, still incarnates the romantic spirit of socialism in liberty for numerous leftists and democrats all over the world. Those who had the privilege of defending that Republic in arms still inspire awe, and even envy, among those of us who never had that singular opportunity.
Clear definitions
The English poet Stephen Spender, who was among them, has recalled that his philosophy tutor at Cambridge told him it was the only Good Cause of his time, the only moment when Good (represented by Spanish democracy) and Evil (represented by Spanish and international fascism) were clearly distinguishable. Six decades later, it still looks like that to many people.
That much was very evident in the warm and emotional applause last Wednesday night, when the Dublin Council of Trades Unions paid its tribute to the five survivors of the 145 Irish volunteers: Michael O'Riordan, Peter O'Connor, Bob Doyle, Eugene Downing, and Maurice Levitas, the first three of whom were present for the simple but moving ceremony.
They entered the Con Lehane Hall proudly holding aloft the flag of the Republic they had defended, to be greeted by Ray Doyle of the Work and Play Band, singing Christy Moore's Viva la Quinta Brigada, the first verse of which is reproduced above. "Thank you," he concluded quietly, "for the privilege of honouring the living and the dead."
John Carr, the DCTU president, welcomed them with a speech which might have been written in 1937, so closely did it stick to the rhetoric of the official Communist version of Spanish Civil War history. But it was a speech of reparation, to men and women who had been vilified by many of their trade union colleagues in the 1930s. The generosity of his tribute brought tears to the eyes of the elderly brigadistas.
Clouded issue
Not only did they fight for Spain, he said, but they "represented a stand against the greatest capitalist and church-led onslaught this country has ever experienced." He recalled "the shameful Christian Front alliance, spurred on by the capitalist and religious press, which used religion to cloud the issue of the Civil War."
By a curious coincidence, the ceremony was preceded by a passionate DCTU debate on the place of religion in education in contemporary Ireland, a subject the volunteers must have imagined would have been settled, once and for all, many years earlier.
Curiously, too, it was on Christmas Eve 60 years ago that most of the Irish contingent saw their first action with the International Brigades. They were rushed to plug the gaps as General Franco's rebel forced tried to encircle Madrid, seat of the democratically elected Republican government by an advancing through the Jarama valley.
That offensive was halted, at a necessary cost to the Brigades. They would play a crucial role in several other major battles, but in 1938 the Republic sent them home, for a variety of motives. At farewell parade in Barcelona, La Pasionaria, the legendary communist orator, told the survivors: "When the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, come back to our side."
Last month, for the second time since democracy was restored in Spain, the surviving "volunteers for liberty" were asked to accept formally that invitation, and went back to Madrid, Barcelona and Guernicato be honoured by the Spanish, Catalan and Basque parliaments, and to revisit the sites where they had left so many comrades in Spanish soil (at least 59 of the Irish brigadistas were killed, an above-average rate, even in a war where losses were routinely devastating).
Responding to John Carr's speech, Michael O'Riordan, himself a lifelong communist and author of Connolly Column, a history of the Irish contingent, said that, wonderful as the experience of that return to Spain had been, he felt that the DCTU presentation represented a final and appropriate homecoming. The council, he recalled, had been the natural home where many of his comrades had learned their trade union apprenticeship.
Basic principle
They had gone to fight, he said, on the basic principle that is an injury to all but also as a national revolutionary and patriotic duty to cleanse the name of Ireland, besmirched by the [pro-fascist] Christian Front." Happily, it seems that Ireland is a more tolerant place today, for O'Riordan then admitted, smiling ironically, that his next speaking engagement would be in Maynooth college.
Peter O'Connor told us that his days in Spain were "the proudest moments in my life, fighting for the finest cause of all, the liberation of mankind".
The last words, however, must be O'Riordan's, who borrowed La Pasinaria's most famous phrase to conclude, warning against the persistence of fascism today: "No Pasaran - not in 1936; not now; not ever". Here was a man who, for good or ill, has kept the faith.