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I
am a bold undaunted youth, Joe Brady is my name,
From the chapel of North Anne Street one Sunday as
I came,
All to my surprise who should I espy but Moreno and
Cockade;
Says one unto the other: "Here comes our Fenian
blade".
I
did not know the reason why they ordered me to stand,
I did not know the reason why they gave me such a
command.
But when I saw James Carey there, I knew I was betrayed.
I'll face death before dishonour and die a Fenian
blade.
They
marched me up North Anne Street without the least
delay,
The people passed me on the path, it filled them with
dismay.
My sister cried, "I see you Joe, if old Mallon
gives me lave,
Keep up your heart for Ireland like a true-born Fenian
Blade.
It
happened in the Phoenix Park all in the month of May,
Lord Cavendish and Burke came out for to see the polo
play.
James Carey gave the signal and his handkerchief he
waved,
Then he gave full information against our Fenian blades.
It
was in Kilmainham Prison the Invincibles were hung.
Mrs Kelly she stood there all in mourning for her
son.
She threw back her shawl and said to all:
"Though he fills a lime-pit grave,
My son was no informer and he died a Fenian blade."
That's
"Joe Brady", a song collected by, though
on the evidence of the closing couplet quite possibly
written by, the bould Brendan Behan. "He died
a Fenian blade", says Mrs Kelly. A blade was
a term for a dashing young man; but a blade was also
the instrument that Mrs Kelly's son and his comrades
used to cut down two of the most prominent members
of the British state in Ireland. On the evening of
6th May 1882 Lord Frederick Cavendish, recently appointed
Chief Secretary for Ireland and just arrived in the
country, and his Under-Secretary, T. H. Burke, were
set upon by a band of assassins while they were walking
in the Phoenix Park in Dublin and hacked to death
with twelve-inch long surgical knives. The killers
belonged to a secret society, the Irish National Invincibles
-- more commonly simply, "the Invincibles"
-- composed mostly of former IRB men operating independently
of IRB centre. An IRB statement issued after the deed
stated that the men who had carried out "this
execution...deserve well of their country".
Parnell
at once expressed his shock at the killings, and offered
to resign from leadership of the Irish National Party.
Well, now. Parnell, like any great politician, held
his cards tight to his chest. Was he really so shocked
by the killings that he was prepared to cast away
his life's work, and resign from political life? It's
unlikely. But it was clearly in his interest to persuade
Gladstone of just this. Whatever of Parnell's inner
relationship to the affair, the short-term fallout
in the public world was predictable: a halt to progress
on the constitutional front, an increase in coercion.
The long-term impact? Nix. For the British knew full
well that they must engage with the constitutional
arm of Irish nationalism, or wage in Ireland low-intensity
warfare, to use the term of another era, for the foreseeable
future. Gladstone, being a statesman in the true sense
of the term, chose the former alternative. So, Parnell
owed his power and influence not only to his great
gifts, undeniable as those were, and to the mass movement
which he led; but also to the dark shadow that ever
loomed behind, too tall and imposing to be cast by
him or any one man: the shadow of the gunman.
What
does this teach us today? Well, first and foremost,
it should be a lesson to those who criticise the current
leadership of the Republican movement. The crucial
weakness of the dissident argument is simply that
it rejects a vital lesson of Irish history which the
Phoenix Park affair throws into stark relief: the
mutual dependence between the pike in the thatch and
the orator in the House or on the doorstep. Take the
central event of modern Irish history: the Easter
Rising. 1916 and its aftermath did not spring fully-formed
from the head of Zeus Mac Cronos; on the contrary,
it took 40 years of preparation, a stretch of time
that encompassed the struggles of the Land League,
and of the Irish party in Westminster, the propaganda
of the Sinn Féiners, and the hard slog of the
enthusiasts poring over Father O'Growney's Irish language
primer. The Army of the day, the IRB or Fenians, were
initially distrustful of all such measures, regarding
them as half-hearted and reformist; but they grew
to trust in Parnell and Davitt sufficiently to maintain
a working relationship, to "give them a chance".
And in time, the social changes wrought by Davitt
and Parnell would be vital, damming up the waters
in which the fish of 1919-21 could swim. Conversely,
Parnell was able to build up the Home Rule movement
precisely because, looming at his back and menacing
all his interlocutors, was ever the shadow of the
gunman. Yet this shadow would have been of no avail
had he not been able to represent himself and his
movement as the one force that could control the violence.
As
the home rule movement burgeoned, it grew beyond itself
in a process for which there is no word in English.
Hegel called it "Aufheben": the movement
in which a higher form of thought or being supersedes
a lower form, and yet preserves what is true in the
lower. It was as Parnell had said:
"But
no man has the right to say to his country, "thus
far shalt thou go and no further", and we have
never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the
progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall".
And
so in the aftermath of 1916, the message of the hard-liners,
an Ireland united, Gaelic and free, came to be the
vision of a goodly portion of the people also.
Conversely,
when the movement that had been "a forty years
a-growing" was derailed and defeated by the British
-- and their Irish allies North & South -- in
the 1922-23 period, it had repercussions that have
lasted up to the present day. In contrast to the decades
before the Easter Rising, there was after the Treaty
no cultural, economic and political movement dedicated
to the cause of real independence for Ireland. The
army was left to carry the banner alone. They made
a sterling attempt; but their isolated effort, because
isolated, was not enough. What limited success they
did achieve over the last few decades illustrates,
by its very limitation, that no armed wing, no matter
how dedicated and sophisticated, can substitute itself
indefinitely for the Irish people -- no more than
the Bolsheviks could substitute for the working class
in Russia.
Today,
both régimes in Ireland, the neo-colonial gang
in the South and the British administration in the
North, have been forced despite themselves to deal
with Sinn Féin because of the threat from the
IRA, which despite their best efforts has not been
defeated. On the other hand, a military victory by
that same IRA was never on the cards. We were never
going to see on our television screens dramatic live
coverage of the last British helicopter taking off
from the roof of Stormont, a dishevelled David Trimble
clinging desperately to the runners, as the 1st Republican
Armoured Division closed in on all sides. Belfast
is not Saigon. It was not in the ambit of the IRA,
it never has been in the power of the physical force
movement in Ireland, to deliver the full programme
in one fell swoop. It might have been better that
way; but it was not to be. The military campaign which
flared up from the ashes in 1969 and ceased without
defeat (a milestone in Irish history, by the way)
in 1997 is not the be-and and end-all, the last flutter
of the dying flame, even if it did not deliver all
that it promised. Just as the failure to achieve the
goals of the proclamation doesn't make the sacrifice
of 1916 pointless; nor the turn to constitutional
methods render the exemplary efforts of 1848 and 1867
irrelevant; so the settlement today must not be seen
as negating the struggles of the Volunteers, but as
building on them.
The
peace process may be, if the Irish so chose, the beginning
of a new national movement, a clarion call to those
who would fulfil at last the ancient dream: "Ireland
for the Irish, the land for the people". If we
would see that dream reality, then we must build a
movement that, without rejecting the armed struggle
in principle, recognises that real and lasting success
can only be the outcome of a long economic, cultural
and political struggle. Let us not, then, be disheartened
by the failure of the Volunteers to gain all they
aspired to. They have laid the groundwork; it is up
to us to build on it.
You
can read Paul Dunne's weblog here: The
Shamrockshire Eagle
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