Republican News · Thursday 26 June 2003

Empire speak unravelled

Rising of the Moon
By Ella O'Dwyer
Pluto Press
§25 (hardback)

This sounds like one of those unbelievable claims made in those junk mail promotions that drop through your door occasionally, but former POW, Coiste worker, academic and very obviously a dreamer of deep epics, Ella O'Dwyer, has written a book of immense incalculable magnitude and scope. The Rising of the Moon - The Language of Power is a work of literature, an impressive historical study and most importantly a significant contribution to modern republican thought. It is also an oddity in that it stands out as unique in modern republican writing.

Why is that when a republican writes a book today, it is an event in its own right? Republican history and struggle is filled with writers, from Tone's slavish devotion to his journals, letters and pamphlets to Davis, who established a paper, Connolly, who started more than one and then there is the glut of post-1920 memoirs. Many of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation were writers, poets, thinkers, not just Pearse and Connolly but also Plunkett and MacDonagh. But somewhere during the 20th century, republican writers became the exception, not the norm.

Adams and Morrison stand out today as writers, though Campbell and McKeown are catching up fast. Sands' prison writings must be one of the most important contributions to Irish literature in the latter half of the last century but along with Nor Meekly Serve My Time and Morrison's prison journal, these stand out as the recent exceptions to a lot of fallow ground.

Ernie O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound was considered an exceptional work of literature in the 1930s, when it was first published. Today, it stands head and shoulders above the pantheon of ghost written, PR driven celebrity biographies, as well as being a gripping historical account of a critical epoch. Where is its modern equivalent?

So when and why did we stop writing in the public sphere? Republicans are inveterate secret writers, emailers, texters and much much more but we don't seem to have much to say to that wider audience. Maybe it is because republicans are so much written about. We have lost count of the journalists whose careers have been boosted by writing about the secret this or that. Then there are the touts and mercenaries who rush to print. So why is there so little output from the republican mind today?

That question is perhaps too difficult to answer but Ella's work has recaptured the high ground and makes the tacky mercenary accounts of one man's war that litter the shelves of Waterstone's and Eason's seem that little bit more shabby, if that's possible. Funny that there are, it seems, no one woman's war accounts making it into print.

So what is The Rising of the Moon about? Well, it is an account of the language of power in relation to the experience of republican struggle. What it does is create three grids or viewpoints of modern history. The first is what the struggle has involved over the past 200 years or more. The next grid or vista is what people were writing about during these times. What impact was the conflict in Ireland having on Irish writers if any? Finally, there is the question of what and how republicans were writing about. How did these other viewpoints impact on republican thinking?

For example, O'Dwyer compares the writings and experience of Tone and Sands. She tells how, facing death, Sands wrote: "Foremost in my tortured mind is the thought that there can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish People as a unit to control their affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people."

Tone, also facing death nearly 200 years beforehand, wrote: "From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish Nation and felt convinced that while it lasted this country could never be free nor happy." In terms of their experience as prisoners, they also express similar sentiments.

This continuity or recreation of thought over time grips O'Dwyer, who also writes of how Yeats' experience of contemporary historical events drove him to produce great poetical works. Little did he know that when he wrote "The centre cannot hold", it would turn up on the front cover of An Phoblacht in 1992!

The book spins through authors and events with breathtaking pace. It is filled with the work of Beckett and it seems that the characters of his work have been some of Ella's closest companions over the past 20 years.

There is though, no room for Friel or Shaw or Joyce in this text. Not that this is a gap in the work. It is just one more unanswered question as to what the author deemed worthy of comment. It seems that some of the shells or stones that might interest other readers were cast back on the sand. Here they are replaced by comment, comparisons and analysis of the impact of Casement on Conrad or a hugely interesting analysis of Michael Farrell's Thy Tears Might Cease.

Perhaps the most interesting gem is the analysis of Lloyd George's threat of "terrible and immediate war" if Collins and the other four negotiators did not sign the 1922 Treaty. It transpired in the Dáil debates afterwards that two of the five had not been present when the threat was made, but such was and is sometimes the power of what O'Dwyer calls "empire speak", that it is Lloyd George's words that are remembered, not those of Eamon Duggan, the fifth member of the negotiating party. There are these and many more gems to be gleaned from this work.

Ella O'Dwyer's book is not an easy read. But why should it be? Why do we expect reading to be easy? This book demands your attention and when given it rewards, as each page is filled with nuggets of observation. It is the cartoons of Cormac in text. Yes it's challenging but sometimes we need a challenge.

Most importantly, O'Dwyer has beaten institutional academia at their own game, using their tools, their methods of analysis to produce a revolutionary text.

She has shown an incredible breadth of vision and has drawn a very large canvas for her work, but she has also shown up the limited vista of so much of modern academia in Ireland. Let's hope this is just the first instalment.

So sit back, concentrate, enjoy the journey and maybe bring a good dictionary. We all need safety nets.

Rising of the Moon is available from Sinn Féin bookstores and from www.sinnfeinbookshop.com

BY ROBBIE SMYTH

Frank Ryan revisited

Frank Ryan
by Fearghal McGarry
Life and Times: No. 17
Historical Association of Ireland
§9.99

This new biography on Frank Ryan is of particular relevance to republicans, as Ryan was one of the main ideologues in the history of the republican movement. He advocated that the movement should adopt a political strategy with a military strategy as an adjunct to it if it was required. He also advocated that the social question was very central to the struggle against British imperialism and native Irish capitalism, but also with the international struggle against capitalism, imperialism and fascism - the reactionary fad of the 1930s.

Fearghal McGarry's book is the latest biography of the Life and Times series on famous Irish historical personalities and the times they lived in. In his biography of Frank Ryan, he divides his life into four periods.

The first period is concerned with his upbringing in Knocklong, Co Limerick; his tentative involvment with the republican movement during the Tan War in his early teenage years; his membership of the IRA in the 1920s; and his growing awareness of social injustice.

The second period deals with his coming of age as a socialist republican - in the tradition of James Connolly and Liam Mellows - and his association with other likeminded revolutionaries such as Peadar O'Donnell and George Gilmore. Together, they formed the Republican Congress, founded to implement a more politicised movement with a strong left-wing social analysis.

The third period deals with his anti-fascist phase when he confronted the Irish fascist Blueshirts and organised an Irish brigade to fight for the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. There they fought against a coalition of right-wing conservative reactionaries (landlords, clergy, army officers, etc.) who threatened a fascist takeover and an annulment of any democratic system.

The 1930s was a politiclly turbulent decade, where the forces of left and right were increasingly at loggerheads as class conflict came to the fore following the Depression in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. It also witnessed the rise of fascism throughout Europe and Ireland itself was on the brink of a fascist takeover. In Ireland, this was successfully countered by the IRA and the mobilised working class. The book charts Frank Ryan's involvement in the political upheavals of his day.

Following an attempted fascist coup d'etat in Spain in July 1936, political opinion all over Europe became polarised on the issue of the Spanish Civil War. The democratic republican government - consisting of democrats, socialists, communists, etc - fought against a reactionary coalition of landowners, the catholic church and the military officer class. The latter coalition formed the basis of Spanish fascism - as well as their helpers from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and a contingent of Irish fascist Blueshirts. McGarry prefers to call them nationalists, which is a rather hollow neutral term, when they were quite clearly fascist. International brigades were raised all over Europe and beyond in defence of the republic, and it was the Connolly Column organised by Frank Ryan that was the Irish contribution to this effort.

The book charts quite successfully the essence of his life and the analysis is quite reliable and factual up until the period when Ryan was captured by Italian fascists in March 1938. After that, the analysis in the book becomes deeply flawed.

McGarry refers to this fourth period of Ryan's life as his "collaborator" years, when he was held captive, first by the Spanish fascists and then by the Nazis in Germany. McGarry doesn't offer any firm evidence of this collaboration and acknowledges himself with availability of historical records in Berlin that "Ryan's presence in Berlin did not prove as damaging as feared [by left-wing Irish republicans]". Nonetheless, McGarry persists in referring to this period as his collaborating years.

The truth of the matter is that Ryan acted as an intermediary between the IRA and Nazi Germany while he was held captive by the latter. Furthermore, nobody (not even McGarry) can suggest that he in any way betrayed his comrades in the International brigades, his socialist beliefs or his commited opposition to British imperialism. It is a fact that Frank Ryan was almost universally held in high esteem by those who knew him, be they his friends, his comrades or even his many opponents - the vast majority of whom testified to his high character and his unbending commitment to his beliefs.

The book is a useful account of Frank Ryan's life, but some of the analysis and the conclusion should be treated with a pinch of salt.

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How Dublin was built

Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs

By Ruth McManus

The Making of Dublin City series

Editors: Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms

Four Courts Press

§25 paperback/§45 hardback

This book is the second in the three-book The Making of Dublin City series, jointly edited by Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms, and written by Ruth McManus. It is a thematic survey of the development of Dublin City in the years 1910-1940, when the inner suburb were developed and built. It charts the public housing developments of well-known suburbs such as Crumlin, Drimnagh, Kimmage, Inchicore, Marino, Cabra, Donnycarney, Drumcondra, Gaedhealtacht Park as well as private housing developments in Clontarf, Glasnevin, Whitehall, Blackrock, Mount Merrion, etc.

This period was important, as it initiated a period of public housing development in response to the intolerable living conditions in most of Dublin's slums - a largely inadequate response, but a response nonetheless. To a certain extent, the book deals with the conflict of interest between public versus private development and how their priorities and aims differed. The book deals with themes such as planning the city, the corporation taking on the role as developer, Dublin Corporation public housing schemes, public utilities and semi-private developers, private developers and the various builders involved.

The book is well endowed with maps, illustrations, figures, tables, etc, with about 500 pages of text. However, not all of it is necessary or relevent to the subject matter at hand, which makes this work quite cumbersome at times. It would seem that little proper editing was done on the book and that it was rushed out for a particular deadline. The style of the book is also very academic, which doesn't make it easy general reading.

However, those with an interest in local history and who are interested in the physical history of their neighbourhoods - for those who live in the areas covered in this book - will find this book useful and informative. Who knows, you could even use some of the facts in this book to impress your drinking companeros down at the local boozer (not that you need to be accurate!). One would have to have a committed interest in local history to invest in a copy of this book, though, as the paperback edition will set you back §25.