Bygone era brought alive
Sunset on the Window Panes
The Bogman
By Walter Macken
Published by Brandon
Price 6.99 (pb) each
By Aengus O Snodaigh
THE REISSUING of Irish literary classics is continuing apace, with most of
the best-known titles available once more to the general public. A welcome
development is the republishing of the other, lesser-known, works of the
famous Irish authors; Bram Stoker, Liam O'Flaherty and Walter Macken.
Like many, I knew Walter Macken's writing through reading as a teenager the
fabulous trilogy: Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People and The Scorching
Wind. I was captivated and delved deeper, reading his Rain on the Wind when
I was 15.
When Sunset on the Window Panes and The Bogman arrived for review I
spirited them away and read them with pleasure while on the sunny beaches
of foreign shores this summer. My companions thought I was being ignorant
as I wouldn't put them down. The stories have many similarities, which in
some ways detracts from them when reading them one after another, but all
the same I was captivated.
Both books deal with rural Ireland and the constraints a closed society
puts on its inhabitants. How the characters rebel yet are part of it. The
little secrets of life which are hidden away by the people or the community
for fear of upsetting the equilibrium of their way of life, though hard,
are brought to the surface. The struggle of independence against the common
good.
The rural community of bygone years is brought alive by Macken's
descriptions and characters. There are many lessons which can be extracted
for today's society, both rural and urban, the dangers of
narrow-mindedness or single-mindedness, the fear of change or the
destructiveness of secrets.
The Right Stuff
The Real Rights of Man
By Noel Thompson
Published by Pluto Press
Price: £14.85 (paperback)
This week, workers at Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann, National Irish Bank and Irish hospitals are all engaged in some form of struggle with their employers. All are on some part of the industrial relations treadmill that puts workers and employers in a seemingly neverending cycle of claim and counter claim.
Noel Thompson's book, The Real Rights of Man, puts these workplace struggles in the centre of a dispute not just about who gets paid what but about whose rights are being denied by whom.
The Real Rights of Man opens up a forgotten chapter in European history. It looks at how a range of writers, now forgotten, emphasised in the period 1775 to 1850 the need for the economic rights of individuals to be delivered alongside their political ones.
The book gets its title from a pamphlet published in 1793 by Thomas Spence. Spence believed that Paine had missed the point in his work. The real rights of humanity must be, according to Thompson, ``grounded in economic power''. Without that, political rights were devoid of significance.
Spence believed that by following Paine's theory, people were erecting a ``false tree of liberty''. This ``shall so animate the people with their display of the specious, but partial Rights of Man, that the multitudes shall arise and great convulsions shall be in many countries... And governments shall be overthrown, but oppression shall still remain''.
Time has shown that Spence has a point, but mainstream 20th Century society has overlooked Spence and elevated Paine. There is no Penguin Classic for Spence but you can get Paine's Rights of Man with ease.
In fact, of all the writers included in this text, from Spence to William Ogilvie, William Cobbett, Thomas Hodgskin, Robert Owen and William Thompson, John Bray and John Francis Gray and the Chartists - Owen is the only one whose work you can still walk into a bookshop and buy.
It is an ironic endorsement of Thompson's argument, when you consider that Owen, of all these writers, was the only one who was also an employer and factory owner. Had he `just' been a writer on the left, would we still be reading his theories today?
Thompson's book is a very readable journey through a forgotten past. The resonances it has for the world we live in today are striking. The history of political struggle is often taught in our schools as a journey to a sepia-toned past. The denial of an individual's rights stems from Dickens' London or Nazi Germany. It could not be found in the Kodak-coloured reality of the late 20th century.
Reading Thompson's text, you realise that the struggles of these writers in the late 18th and 19th century are in many cases carbon copies of struggles waged by the disinherited, the discriminated against, the disempowered and the disenfranchised today.
Instead of living in a world where economic rights are king, we live in a world where people fret about smokers rights or the rights of the feckless slacker or the rights of children to affordable sportswear of their favourite soccer team.
Why, because there is a massive articulation of the ultimately meaningless rights and a complete ignorance of the need for basic economic equality. Thompson's book provides an important economic lesson from the past that makes the inequality and denial of rights in the present much more clearly understandable.
BY ROBBIE MacGABHANN
Keeping the Faith
Towards a Celtic Church
Glandore Publishing - £1.50
MONAGHAN-BORN Heber Mac Mahon was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1642. He was the type of cleric that I, a Tyrone Catholic, could respect and admire.
Devoted to his faith and homeland he acted as a counsellor to General Eoghan Rua O Néill in the 1640s, and was chosen to lead the Gaelic Irish army in Ulster in the wake of O Néill's untimely death. Wounded and captured by Cromwellian troops after the battle of Scarrifhollis, in Donegal, he was executed at Enniskillen in September 1650.
Mac Mahon, like the 19th century Archbishop of Tuam, John Mac Hale, was the sort of Irish bishop one could be proud of.
The same, alas, can hardly be said of a more recent Down and Connor incumbent - Cahal Daly. Almost single-handedly, he succeeded in alienating huge swathes of republican and nationalist faithful from the church they were otherwise devoted to. Had his sundry pronouncements been perceived as even-handed and sincerely gospel based, he may have been given the benefit of the doubt, but they were often so blatantly pro-British and anti-republican that the stench of hypocrisy drove countless members of some of the most loyal Catholic communities in Ireland from their church.
This hypocrisy and bias is all the more apparent given the Hierarchy's evident awareness and duplicitous mishandling of the appalling scandals in the church which have shaken the most faithful of us in recent years.
The spirit of God continues to move among the people, however, and rather than abandon the faith which has sustained our ancestors, many Irish Christians are seeking renewal and revival through examining the spiritually rich history of the Celtic Church, and blending this with contemporary experience the true love of God without exclusion, distaining the errors of Celtic Tiger greed, corruption, social injustice and contempt for the environment in the process.
In March of this year, a conference was held at the Conway Mill in Belfast under the auspices of `Peoples' Theology', to discuss the meaning of the journey towards a Celtic Church. Papers were presented by Dr Dara O'Hagan, who gave an excellent analysis of the relationship between Irish Catholicism and Irish republicanism in the 1980s and 1990s, Anne Monaghan, Fr Joe McVeigh and Fr Des Wilson.
Each speech was followed by discussion from the floor, and the seminar has now been usefully collated into a booklet, Towards a Celtic Church, published by Glandore.
I found Fr McVeigh's piece on the simplicity of worship particularly inspiring, and both he and Fr Wilson emphasise the importance of the Gaelic language and Celtic symbolism in the liturgy.
ne Monaghan provides a fascinating insight into the concept of restorative justice and its role in Celtic society. Fr Wilson's historical understanding and appreciation of other religions and belief systems and their contemporary relevance is impressive. Towards a Celtic Church is both thought-provoking and enlightening but I will admit to feelings of unease here and there with the occasional tract that was at variance with my own more orthodox Catholicism. Those more versed in theology than I can draw their own conclusions. Towards a Celtic Church is well worth the read. Get it and keep the Faith.
By Gerry McGeough
Learning the ropes
Sinn Féin Youth Education Pack
Available from Ógra Shinn Féin,
44 Parnell Square,
Dublin 1.
CHÉ GUEVARA could have well been talking about Ógra Sinn Féin when he wrote:''It is rewarding to see the conversion into true institutions which have vigour and authority among the masses, of those organisations which began on a small scale and were gradually transformed through daily work and contact with the masses into powerful manifestations of the revolutionary movement of today.''
The growth of Ógra Shinn Féin, from a small band of individuals to the largest and most vibrant political youth organisation in the country, is testament to the work of the members in this organisation. This group has built a reputation for holding educational events, so it is no surprise that it has produced a radical and comprehensive political educational pact for its young members.
The document is divided into three distinct sections, covering a wide range of political, social, economic and cultural issues. The first introduces Ógra Shinn Féin by outlining the aims, structure and the responsibilities members take on when they join the organisation. This section includes a detailed definition of republican ideals and an enlightening essay on the workings of socialism. It also contains a useful piece on the rights of the individual.
Section two outlines the history of the Republican Movement. One essay examines the history and background of Sinn Féin while another pamphlet introduces the reader to the writings of various republican leaders throughout Irish history.
The last section of the educational pack acquaints the new members with the social policies that Ógra Shinn Féin campaigns for. Refreshing in its content, the pack covers many social issues that are relevant to young people, from the drugs issue to information on Travellers and racism. This is a well-researched and informative collection of material and should provide essential reading for any activist, old or new.
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