The summer 1972 issue of Studies published a lengthy and highly controversial article attacking Padraig Pearse as a destructive ideologue who had perverted the Christian message, especially in relation to sacrifice and redemption, to make it endorse the violent struggle for independence. The article was ‘The canon of Irish history: A challenge’, written by Fr Francis Shaw SJ who had died two years earlier, in 1970. The editor’s foreword to the article explains the circumstances.
The publication in this issue (Summer 1972) of a long essay by the late Father Francis Shaw, requires some explanation. The essay had its origin in a request to Father Shaw to contribute to a special number of Studies (Spring 1966) commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916. In response he wrote a long article – more than twice the average length for Studies. It was not published, however, because, as he himself wrote later: ‘It was judged, very understandably, that a critical study of this kind might be thought to be untimely and even inappropriate in what was in effect a commemorative issue.’ Nonetheless, Father Shaw did not abandon his topic. Long though the article had been, he subsequently added to it, re-ordering his material at the same time. This second version, dated August 1966 by the author, is the one which is published here.
It is the theme of the article which follows that insofar as this violence on one side seeks its inspiration in a certain interpretation of Ireland’s patriotic past it cannot be justified as either Christian or truly patriotic. The article does not probe the myths which have fed the fears of the other side, the fellow county men of Eoin MacNeill: these were the myths and fears which led to the Ulster Crisis of 1912 and are still active in the crisis of 1972. Neither set of false beliefs can bring anything other than latent or open violence and destruction to this country. There are men of peace of all shades of opinion, in both parts of Ireland, who are working to avoid this. They are the ones whose voice should be listened to now. Whatever the reasons, real or imaginary, for past and present grievances against any party involved in the Irish question today, it can be truly said, in Father Shaw’s concluding sentence: ‘There can be no more criminal disservice to Ireland than the determination to keep the fire of hatred burning.’
Due to both the length and academic import of this article, the original contents page has been included below, so as to give readers a sense of the structure and depth of Shaw’s piece. The excerpts included below have been taken from a selection of these ‘chapters’, as will be indicated by their various headings.
For further information on the life of Francis Shaw and additional context on ‘The Canon…’ (including its publication history and academic reception), we invite readers to visit Shaw’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.009565.v1).
Francis Shaw, ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 61, No. 242 (Summer, 1972), 113-153. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30087966
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THE CANON OF IRISH HISTORY – A CHALLENGE
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF PEARSE
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- i. The Main Themes
ii. Nationalism and Holiness
iii. The Founder of Separatism
iv. The Ideal of a Gaelic Ireland
a) Cu Chulainn
b) Colum Cille
c) The Gaelic League – ‘A Spent Force’
3. THE OLD TESTAMENT OF IRISH NATIONALITY
4. EASTER 1916 IN THE CONTEXT OF HISTORY
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- i. The Rising
ii. After 1916
iii. The Sword of Dividing
5. EPILOGUE
- The Irish and the English
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INTRODUCTION
In the right corner virgin Éire, virtuous and oppressed, in the left the bloody Saxon, the unique source of every Irish ill and malaise; round eight, the duration of each round a hundred years : this might be said to be the accepted mise en scene of the Rising of Easter Week, and it may be added that the seconds in the English corner are usually degenerate Irishmen. It is a straight story of black and white, of good ‘guys’ and bad. The truth of course is different; there are many qualifications and complexities and this essay is concerned with some of them.
Clarke, Pearse, MacDermott, MacDonagh, Colbert, Connolly, these names are known to all. Less well-known is the fact that these same names are those also of men who in Easter Week of 1916 were decorated, wounded or killed, fighting on the side of the British Crown forces in Ireland. Kilmainham jail, we were told, was the Irish Bastille: in 1916 it was empty, and had been unused for many years. In 1916 it was not necessary to storm the Irish Bastille or any other prison, because there were no prisoners to release. On Monday afternoon of Easter Week, 1916, notwithstanding the very recent attempt to bring in a consignment of arms from Germany, the highest ranking British officer on duty in Dublin was an adjutant. The city of Dublin was virtually unguarded: the routine guard on the General Post Office had rifles but no ammunition. These three curiosities of the Rising may serve as an introduction to the contention that the story of Easter Week is not as straightforward a tale as we are asked to believe.
One of the commonest occupations in the Ireland of today is the plying of sleeping dogs with tranquillizers. In this study of the Easter Rising in relation to Irish history an accepted view is challenged, a canon of history which has come into being, has been carefully fostered and was newly consecrated in the massive State-inspired and State-assisted Commemoration in 1966. The final seal on the Easter Rising is to be seen today on the walls of our schools in which the proclamation of Easter Monday is presented as the charter of our freedom and of our State.
The canon of history of which I speak stamps the generation of 1916 as nationally degenerate, a generation in need of redemption by the shedding of blood. It honours one group of Irishmen by denying honour to others whose merit is not less. In effect it teaches that only the Fenians and the separatists had the good of their country at heart, that all others were either deluded or in one degree or another sold to the enemy. This canon moulds the broad course of Irish history to a narrow pre-conceived pattern; it tells a story which is false and without foundation. It asks us to praise in others what we do not esteem or accept in ourselves. It condemns as being anti-Irish all who did not profess extremist nationalist doctrine, though it never explains how it is possible to be judged to be against your own people when the views you hold are those which they overwhelmingly support. This canon is more concerned with the labels and trappings of national politics than with the substance which wisely-used political action can bring. It sets more store on what people profess themselves to be than on what they are.
It is urged here that Irishmen of today owe it to their fathers and grandfathers to think again before accepting a facile judgment which charges a whole people with national apostasy. Pearse may have been entitled to judge as he did because he took his stand on the infallible teaching of Wolfe Tone, but those who do not admit Pearse’s premises should not endorse his conclusion. Further, Irishmen of today owe it to many generations of their countrymen to reject the myth in accordance with which the Rising of 1916 was, as it were, the beginning and the end of Ireland’s struggle for freedom. And those who will allow no credit for any achievement to the constitutionalists, but who insist that every good that was achieved was won by force of arms, are inclined to overlook the inconvenient truth that militarily the Rising was a complete failure, that all the arms and ammunition of the Volunteers throughout the whole country, which had been obtained with such difficulty, were handed over to the British authorities, and that when the fighting started again it had militarily to start from scratch.
In the commonly accepted view of Irish history the Irishman of today is asked to disown his own past. He is expected to censure as unpatriotic the common Irishmen who were not attracted by the new revolutionary ideas, but who adhered to an ancient tradition. Irishmen of today are invited at least implicitly to apologize for their fellow-countrymen who accepted loyally the serious guidance of the Church to which they belonged. Irishmen of today must despise as unmanly those of their own countrymen who preferred to solve problems, if possible, by peaceful rather than by violent means.
It is my contention that some attempt should be made to challenge this chain of error in Ireland’s history. The views expressed here may surprise many readers; I hope they will offend none. It is no tribute of honour to the brave men of 1916 to accept their words and their works in an unthinking and uncritical spirit. They were men who differed very widely from the vast majority of their own people, and they did not fear either controversy or contradiction. Sentiment is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty and sincerity. To examine and to re-examine the foundations of our political and national institutions is a duty never to be shirked. The ‘troubles’ of the decade which followed 1916 may be in part at least responsible for the fact that today, over fifty years after the Rising, there is no mature, comprehensive, objective study of the political philosophy and the ideals of the men of 1916…
…In 1916, half-a-dozen men decided what the nation should want…The action of Easter Week as seen in retrospect over a half-century stands in stark isolation. It had no strong link with the past: it was universally condemned by contemporaries: and the ideals which inspired it have not worn well; they have been quietly but firmly side-stepped by the Irish people: they are ideals which are proclaimed on the understanding that they remain as such. The ‘gallant allies in Europe’, the Germans, have won no special relationship with the Irish people, and our friends in America in 1916 could not prevent the Government of the United States from transmitting to Britain the secret documents of the Irish revolutionaries which were taken from the German Embassy in Washington. Within a few years of 1916 the Irish cause in America went up in the flames of a series of bitter personal feuds. And in the Second World War in spite of the protests of the Irish Government the Americans joined with the British in occupying the Six Counties of Northern Ireland while the American Ambassador in Dublin worked steadily to persuade his Government to violate the neutrality of the Twenty-six Counties, and the British Ambassador worked steadily to avert such a catastrophe.
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THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF PEARSE
I. THE MAIN THEMES
Leaving Connolly aside, there was only one of the signatories of the proclamation who set down in writing at any length his political and national doctrine and that was Patrick Pearse…Pearse was a man of complex character…He was neither profound in his thinking nor was he for the most part original.
…In the course of his life Pearse’s political views changed considerably; in the last three or four years of his life the rate of change accelerated rapidly. The progress was from moderate nationalist to extremist republican and separatist. One feels that by temperament Pearse was a conservative. In his religious beliefs he was strongly traditionalist. He was a revolutionary malgré lui. He wrote fiery words about shooting people; but he did not himself use any weapon; and we would be surprised if he had.
…In 1912 Pearse had spoken in favour of Home Rule at a public meeting in O’Connell Street, Dublin. Soon after that he became a wholehearted separatist; and in the last years of his life he became impatient with all who did not share his extremist views. In spite of the need for some circumspection, Pearse’s later political writings plainly have only one message: the separatism of Tone must be effected quickly, and this must be done by the use of physical force.
Tone had hoped that the ideal of complete separation could serve to unite the whole people of Ireland. In 1916 it must have been apparent that separation from England could only divide the nation more deeply. Even the most modest measure of Home Rule for the whole country was wholly unacceptable to the Carson-led Ulstermen. In 1914 an armed soldiery stood between Ireland and its destiny; but that body was not the British army; it was the Ulster Volunteers. Logically the Rising of 1916 should have been in Belfast, and it should have been directed against those who illegally and by the use of force opposed the acceptance by the Irish people of the considerable degree of self-determination for thirty-two counties which was being offered to them. But the Rising was not in Belfast; on the contrary, the north-east was not to be disturbed. In effect, this was perhaps the first time that partition was recognized by Dublin and the south. It is difficult to find anything which throws light on Pearse’s mind at this time about the effect of the Rising on the unity of Ireland. Both the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Volunteers were pledged to avoid any action which would cause disunity. On the fall of the dice which was cast in 1916 there were different possibilities, but amongst them the unity of Ireland did not figure.
‘To break the connection with England; the never-failing source of all our political evils.’ More than once Pearse declared that these words of Tone said all that needed to be said about the national objective. Though he said that nothing needed to be added to them, in fact Pearse did add two important themes. The first was the sanctity of nationalism, especially of Irish nationalism; with this may be joined the notion of the sacredness of warfare and blood-shedding. The second theme is that the new Ireland should be separated from England, not only politically and economically, but also culturally and linguistically: the new Ireland should be Gaelic as well as free.
We have come to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us … He was the greatest of Irish Nationalists; I believe he was the greatest of Irish men. And if I am right in this I am right in saying that we stand in the holiest place in Ireland, for it must be that the holiest sod of a nation’s soil is the sod where the greatest of her dead lies buried.
How Does She Stand, pp. 53-4
There is no ambiguity here; nationalism and holiness are identical…But it is even more disturbing to find that consistently and deliberately and without reservation Pearse equates the patriot and the patriot-people with Christ. I accept without question the sincerity and the subjective reverence of Pearse in this matter, but one has to say that objectively this equation of the patriot with Christ is in conflict with the whole Christian tradition and, indeed, with the explicit teaching of Christ. The prayer of Pearse –
O King that was born
To set bondsmen free,
In the coming battle, Help the Gael!Christmas 1915, Plays etc. p. 340
– is aggressively unorthodox…The notion of expressing politico-national ideas in terms of the Christian faith became an obsession with Pearse, as when he writes: ‘Like a divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholicity, of apostolic succession’ (Ghosts, p. 226)…But it is when Pearse comes to speak of the nation rather than of the individual patriot that he seems to abandon all reserve and all restraint:
The people itself will perhaps be its own Messiah, the people labouring, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonizing and dying, to rise again immortal and impassible. For peoples are divine and are the only things that can properly be spoken of under figures drawn from the divine epos.
The Coming Revolution, (November 1913) p. 91-2
The people who wept in Gethsemane, who trod the sorrowful way, who died naked on a cross, who went down into hell, will rise again glorious and immortal, will sit on the right hand of God, and will come in the end to give judgment, a judge just and terrible.
The Sovereign People, p. 345
…The most frightening passage is in Peace and the Gael (p. 216); it was written in December 1915; it says:
The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth … It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country…
and to this is added the relevant gloss:
Ireland has not known the exhilaration of war for over a hundred years.
Peace and the Gael, pp. 216 and 217
I refrain from any comment on these passages. They speak for themselves. About this time, it is of interest to note, Casement was recording his horror at the suffering caused by the war.
This, it need scarcely be said, is not a Christ-like sentiment; but it is more important to say that it is most improbable that Colum Cille ever said anything of the kind. We know that in a period ranging from about four hundred years to some one thousand years after the life-time of the holy man, a huge mass of unauthentic verse was attributed to the saint. But in the case of Colum Cille we have an early Latin Life, that of Adomnán. There is nothing at all in that Life which would lead one to accept the phrase quoted by Pearse as authentic. Colum Cille was not troubled by national boundaries or by racial differences. He is shown by Adomnán, both while living and after his death, as a man as ready to help a Saxon king as he was to assist one of his own brethren.
From the century of Colum Cille we have a small amount, and from the next two centuries we have a considerable amount, of material in Latin or old Irish which tells us something of early Irish spirituality. I venture to say that in all this material one will look in vain for any utterance like that here attributed to Colum Cille. Columbanus was a contemporary of Colum Cille and fortunately a large portion of his writings have been preserved; but in these writings there is no trace of any sentiment remotely like that attributed to his fellow exile. The earliest Life of Colum Cille in Irish follows closely the Latin Life by Adomnán, and in it there is no hint of the saint’s excessive love for the Gael. On the contrary this Life begins with the words: ‘Leave thy country and thy land and thy neighbour in the flesh, and thine own fatherland for my sake,’ and this text of the Book of Genesis is expounded at length, and Colum Cille is lauded because he ‘fulfilled perfectly this benevolent counsel’ for he had ‘left the land of his birth for the love and fear of the Lord’.
The sentiment attributed to Colum Cille by Pearse belongs to the huge mass of apocrypha which unhappily became attached to this great saint. It appears first in a poem (or collection of verses) composed five hundred years or more after the saint’s time. In Ancient Irish Poetry, a book published in 1911, Kuno Meyer expressed the view that ‘the poem, like most of those ascribed to this saint, is late, belonging probably to the twelfth century’ (op. cit., p. 113). Colum Cille died in A.D. 597. The saint, there can be little doubt, loved his native land, but he left it for the love of Christ, peregrinari pro Christo volens. There is no need to depart from the simple truth, and a glorious one it is, that Colum Cille lived and died in voluntary exile for Christ. When Pearse declares that the educational ideal which produced Colum Cille was the ideal of dying from an excess of love for one’s own people and for one’s native land, he is flying in the face of all the evidence, placing himself in opposition not only to the ancient Irish tradition but to Christian tradition generally. Christ, we may repeat, did not live or die for one people; fortunately for us he lived and died for all men.
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…In 1912 the Gaelic League was still a growing and powerful force. In a wonderful way the ideals of this comprehensive movement had appealed to Irishmen of every creed and of every class. These worthy national and cultural ideals inspired especially the young, and we know that it was from the ranks of the Gaelic League that the national movements of the time drew many of their adherents. But the League had to be sacrificed on the altar of extremism and in the interest of the physical force movement. Pearse himself leaves us in no doubt about this. His words are clear:
Our Gaelic League education ought to have been a preparation for our complete living as Irish Nationalists …I have come to the conclusion that the Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, is a spent force; and I am glad of it…; I had and I hope that you all had an ulterior motive in joining the Gaelic League. We never meant to be Gaelic Leaguers and nothing more than Gaelic Leaguers. We meant to do something for Ireland…Our Gaelic League time was to be our tutelage…; we do not propose to remain schoolboys for ever.
The Coming Revolution, pp. 91-93
…The words of Pearse are plain. It is not even a question of relative values; the making through the Gaelic League of an Ireland culturally worthy of her past was for MacNeill an end towards which self-determination and political independence were a means; for Pearse the relation of end and means is reversed: the Gaelic League was a means to produce men ready to fight for political freedom.
In pursuit of his objective Pearse was ready to sacrifice even his close friends. He could tolerate no other view but his own. The Irishman who did not accept his doctrine was a coward, and in an unbelievably bitter judgment he declared: ‘But the [Gaelic] League was too busy with resolutions to think of revolution, and the only resolution that a member of the League could not come to was the resolution to be a man.’ (The Coming Revolution, p. 98, written in November 1913)
A few months earlier in that year, Pearse had bewailed the fact that ‘the exhilaration of fighting has gone out of Ireland’ and the passage which follows seems to suggest that fighting in itself is an end to be pursued:
When people say that Ireland will be happy when her mills throb and her harbours swarm with shipping, they are talking as foolishly as if one were to say of a lost saint or an unhappy lover: ‘That man will be happy again when he has a comfortable income.’ I know that Ireland will not be happy again until she recollects . . . that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet . . . an eternal gesture in Irish history.
The Story of a Success, pp.76 and 61
…The Rising of 1916 dealt a near-mortal blow to the Gaelic League. Pearse, as we have seen, was aware of this, but judged it necessary. He may have thought that the effect would be temporary, that the League would find its place again. Today, regrettably, we know that this was not to be. Today, for the most part, the Irish people have turned their backs equally on the romantic dream of Pearse and the realistic programme of Hyde and MacNeill. Yet, today, the people would do well to examine again the comprehensive cultural and national ideal which at one time gave promise of uniting all Irishmen of every creed and class and which was received with enthusiasm in every part of the land.
This ideal could still unite all who dwell in this island, for, in spite of changes in population, in creed and political thinking, there is no part of Ireland in which the common unity is not proclaimed in place-names, in history, legend and song, and in local heroes both secular and saintly, local heroes who nonetheless belong to the whole island and whose story cannot be told except against the historical backdrop of what was for so long an undivided land.
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I. THE RISING
The widespread idea that in 1916 the people of Ireland were sunken in an unpatriotic slumber could scarcely be further from the truth. The idea that for the first time in their history the Irish people had lost (or were about to lose) the consciousness of their national identity is equally false. The truth is that after so many centuries of determined if unconventional resistance to conquest, the people had unequivocally declared their determination to secure by the annulment of the Act of Union a very real measure of self-determination. The stage had been reached in which the quiet reality of Ireland’s nationhood and indestructible individuality, enduring though not unchanging, would no longer tolerate subjugation.
…At Easter of 1916 the infamous Kilmainham jail had for long been out of use. This was due mainly to Nathan’s reluctance to use any really oppressive measures; but another significant reason was mentioned more than once by Nathan himself in his evidence before the Hardinge Commission. Nathan complained that outside Dublin it was virtually impossible to get the magistrates to convict Sinn Feiners, and nowhere was it possible to get these men convicted by a jury…As well, it should, I think, in fairness be kept in mind that the rebellion of 1916 took place at a time when tension was high and emotion inflamed on another level, that of world-war, of ‘the rape of Belgium’, and of the same general anti¬-German feeling which was that of the great majority of Irish people in the war of 1939-44.
…During Easter Week 1916, Pearse spoke of the Rising as something which ‘had saved Ireland’s honour’; but to me it is in no wise obvious that Ireland’s honour had ever been compromised. Pearse was thinking of his own and the preceding generation. Unless one confuses the Pale with Ireland, it cannot be said that the Act of Union had compromised the nation’s honour. The grandfathers of those who were young in 1916 had seen their country slowly and painfully emerge from her lowest hour, from the greatest catastrophe which had ever fallen on a much-afflicted land. They had crept out of the horror of the Famine as ever indomitable and undefeated; and with a substantial degree of religious freedom already, if but recently, achieved they had set their face to the next item on the national agenda, the war for the land. In this their achievement had been splendid, and in 1916 the condition of the Irish ‘peasant’ was better than that of his fellow in Britain. Considerable progress had been made in education, and in the important matter of electoral reform.
Ireland in 1916 was a democracy. Without any change in the electoral system, in 1917 and 1918 the people were able to elect their own representatives and determine a national policy. In the generation immediately preceding that of 1916 the people of Ireland had received with much enthusiasm the patriotic and national message of the Gaelic League. And finally the three years before 1916 had seen the spectacular success of the founding and wide development of the Volunteers. The people, it might be said, were moving always towards an ultimate goal of independence or self-determination, but at their own pace and in their own way.
…A half-century, it may be said, is too near to a historic event for objective and comprehensive judging. But there is another element which must be taken into account. It is possible that never a half-century has seen such rapid and deep transformation in human thought as have the fifty years between 1916 and today. The revolution of 1916 was very much a fruit of the rise of nationalism, of extreme nationalism; and it was, too, set in a time in which war and martial triumph were in favour. Today the world is discarding extreme nationalism as a negative and divisive force and today the horror of warfare pursued to its logical end of total destruction has inclined men to view all warfare as barbarous.
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THE IRISH AND THE ENGLISH
…The Irish, I feel, have never been in danger of becoming English. They may have imitated English manners but they did not ape them. Notwithstanding the might of Britain in the world the Irish never thought of the English as being superior to them. And today I do not think that we are in any danger of becoming English, to the loss of our individuality. In truth that is not where the danger lies. The danger today is a very real one, but it threatens England equally with Ireland. It is the danger of the triumph of a common cosmopolitan vulgarity which threatens all cultural standards and the individuality of peoples everywhere.
The finest ‘definition’ of Irish nationality which I know is that of Michael Collins. It is cited by Frank O’Connor, who gives P. S. O’Hegarty as his authority. Collins said:
I stand for an Irish civilization based on the people and embodying and maintaining the things, their habits, ways of thought, customs, that make them different-the sort of life I was brought up in…Once, years ago, a crowd of us were going along the Shepherd’s Bush Road when out of a lane came a chap with a donkey-just the sort of donkey and just the sort of cart that they have at home. He came out quite suddenly and abruptly, and we all stood and cheered him. Nobody who has not been an exile will understand me, but I stand for that.’
The Big Fellow. Revised Edition, 1965, p. 6., quoting P. S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, 1924, p. 139
Ireland and Britain are two islands placed by God’s creation beside one another. The paths of their respective histories have of necessity constantly crossed: in a sense they have always got in one another’s way, and their relationship throughout the centuries has not been happy. In fact the events of 1916 and of the years which followed did close a chapter in a long history of strife, and it is time that we as a Christian people should forget the past. There can surely be no more criminal disservice to Ireland than the determination to keep the fire of hatred burning.
August 1966