Vivid Faces by R. F. Foster

Author:R. F. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

A republican poster makes the case that the Free State represents a restoration of the ancien régime.

8

Reckoning

The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown on to the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.

– Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (2006)1

I

Between the Easter Rising and the end of the world war, the face of Irish politics had changed, and the surviving revolutionaries had taken charge; but they did not present a united front. Nor was the future fixed. In the aftermath of the Rising, Seán T. O’Kelly was outraged at the efforts made by the Plunketts to emerge as a kind of First Family of republican politics, with the elderly Count pushed hard as a leader of a ‘Liberty League’ intended to take over the reconstructed Sinn Féin movement. O’Kelly believed that he was being manipulated by the influential Sinn Féin cleric Father Michael O’Flanagan, who wanted to become ‘boss and political dictator’ of Ireland, using Plunkett as his instrument and exploiting the martyred Joseph Plunkett’s reputation. Though O’Flanagan was reconstructing himself as quickly as anybody else in these bewildering times, his unsupportive attitude in 1916 was held against him (he had allegedly referred to the GPO garrison as ‘murderers’ who should be allowed to burn to death). ‘And whoever heard tell of Countess Plunkett as a political leader?’2 The one thing that united the revolutionaries was the need, as O’Kelly put it, to ‘rid the country of the Party incubus’. Mary MacSwiney similarly feared the revival of a Home Rule agenda, on the basis of agreeing to Partition, and dreaded the thought of Redmond emerging at a post-war peace conference as Prime Minister of Ireland. ‘Better martial law and General Maxwell.’3 As ever, the one thing that the comrades could agree upon was that the real enemy was the Irish Parliamentary Party.

To their relief the Redmondites’ fate was sealed by the failure of the British government (now headed by Lloyd George) to impose a form of Home Rule after the Rising. This abortive effort was compounded by the looming prospect of introducing conscription for Ireland, and the inept coercion measures introduced from Dublin Castle at the behest of the bone-headed military commander, Field Marshal Lord French (who would be appointed Lord Lieutenant in May 1918), enthusiastically rounding up respectable supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party along with supposed radicals. As early as June 1916, the change in the public mood was noted by no less an authority than General Maxwell himself:

There is a growing feeling that out of rebellion more has been got than by constitutional methods, hence Mr Redmond’s power is on the wane, therefore this desire to curry favour with the people on the part of M.

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