Originally Posted by Seanie Lemass

Emigration you mean? That is certainly true. But what were the politics of the radical element? Ernie O'Malley for instance had a photograph of Mussolini in his cell in Kilmainham during the Civil war. Rory O'Connor also admired the Italians. You just don't know what republican radicalism might have amounted to! Lemass was one of most left wing of anti Treaty leadership.

Link/proof ?

Some years back I blogged on the essence of what this thread may have been intended to address: why did the likes of Seán O'Faoláin fall out of love with de Valera? That was prompted by the serendipitous discovery of a copy of The Bell .

Permit me to repeat myself (with improvements).
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Seán O'Faoláin and Peadar O'Donnell founded the The Bell in 1940. O'Faoláin was the editor until 1946, and O'Donnell continued it until 1954. Anyone with the complete series has a compendium of Irish writing by authors of stature (and some neophytes): Paddy Kavanagh, Mary Lavin, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Brendan Behan, Denis Johnson, and many more.

The magazine achieved an importance that was crucial. Imagine an early Granta transported to the Liffey's quays, struggling with ferocious censorship, championing social and ideological change against clerical and institutional conservatism, perpetually underfinanced, and under paper rationing.

The moment of its foundation was itself significant, following de Valera's new Constitution and contemporary of the intellectual and political "know-nothing" isolation that went with the Neutrality policy.

O'Faoláin was born in 1900, the son of an RIC man in Cork. He was seized by the enthusiasm of the Irish League, and became an IRA man in the War of Independence. He achieved a world view through study at Harvard and a time in London. When he returned to Ireland it was with the conscious intent to wake:

... this sleeping country, these sleeping fields, those sleeping villages.

His hopes for the accession to power of de Valera in 1932 were soon disillusioned. In 1938 O'Faoláin published King of the Beggars, and with it challenged the romantic nationalist dream of the rustic nation of Gaels and Catholics.

O'Faoláin's most immediate target was his former teacher, Daniel Corkery, the Professor of English at UCC, who sought to channel Irish education and writing into a sterile and conservative nationalism:

In a country that for long has been afflicted with an ascendancy, an alien ascendancy at that, national movements are a necessity: they are an effort to attain the normal.

For Corkery the "normal" was not the world of Yeats, Synge and O'Casey, but a narrow and inbred culture:

If one approaches 'Celtic Revival' poetry as an exotic, then one is in a mood to appreciate its subtle rhythms and its quiet tones; but if one continues to live within the Irish seas, travelling the roads of land, then the white-walled houses, the farming life, the hill-top chapel, the memorial cross above some peasant's grave -- memorable only because he died for his country -- impressing themselves as the living pieties of life must impress themselves, upon the imagination, growing into it, dominating it, all this poetry becomes after a time little else than an impertinence.

From 1931, still in print and frequently cited, usually as an awful warning (present company not excepted).

O'Faoláin saw Gaelic Ireland dead at Vinegar Hill, and irrelevant to the emancipation achieved over the century since Daniel O'Connell:

... the Irish fisherman and the Irish farmer and the Irish townsman is the result of about one hundred and fifty years of struggle. And that, for history, is long enough for us. To us, Ireland is beginning, where to Corkery it is continuing. We have a sense of time, of background: we know the value of the Gaelic tongue to extend our vision of Irish life, to deepen and enrich it: we know that an old cromlech in a field can dilate our imaginations with a sense of what was, what might have been, and what is not; but we cannot see the man ploughing against the sky in an aura of antiquity.

O'Faoláin was far ahead of his time. He had a happy prescience (as in this extract from October 1936) which is only being now achieved:

English-speaking, in European dress, affected by European thought, part of the European economy, of the rags and tatters who rose with O'Connell to win under Mick Collins -- in a word this modern Anglo-Ireland.

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I now await in full expectation that there will be the usual bigoted howls of incomprehension of what O'Faoláin meant by that last phrase. It will neatly mark out those with a disconnect between brain and mouth.

Originally Posted by Analyzer

I reckon that O'Faolain missed something big. The Gombeen Factor.

No offence, Anayzer, but if you think O'Faolain missed the Gombeen factor and didn't study the power structures of his day, you clearly don't know very much about him!

what exactly was the alternative some hodge podge socialists? I cant see any scenario where a modern , or intellectually robust consititution would have been enacted followed by enlightened institutions of state. One way or another an petty insular and conservative State was on the cards.

I have never really bought into the idea that the Irish Revolution was some radical project hijacked by conservatives. Ireland for the most part was made up of conservative Catholic rural dwellers and SF wasn't a radical party instead it was wide coalition built around the Irish Question rather than any real social vision. I don't think it could have gone as far as some of the posters on this thread wished it had done.

Originally Posted by mary_queen_of_the_gael

Newshound: Links to daily newspaper articles about Northern Ireland Here is one of McCann's good articles on 1916 (as well as on The Billy Boys and their anti Red anti RC antics)

Analyzer: The problem is there are no organised radicals left. The hamster did not eat them. Bertie Ahern and Stormont did

You are making another good point, this time about republicanism which was one thing in France and is another thing in Ireland, whose politics has a lot of the Peronistas about it.

" one of McCann's good articles on 1916 " Well now says it all about your politics pal, McCann from the Socialist W@nkers Party who believe in a " Ireland as part of a free and voluntary socialist federation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales."

Like McCann you get your facts and analysis from, the Komrades on the ' mainland ' I suppose Which is it, the Communist Party of Britain, Millitant or whichever bunch of Trots/crackpots ???

Originally Posted by Windowshopper

I have never really bought into the idea that the Irish Revolution was some radical project hijacked by conservatives. Ireland for the most part was made up of conservative Catholic rural dwellers and SF wasn't a radical party instead it was wide coalition built around the Irish Question rather than any real social vision. I don't think it could have gone as far as some of the posters on this thread wished it had done.

i'd agree , it was get the brits out, with a few dreamers thrown in. The urban rural mix was strongly in favour of rural and they were very conservative and essentially allied to the church at the time.

Originally Posted by just_society3

Aren't O'Faoilean's comments from this documentary? A brilliant summary by an Irish journalist who moved to Manchester, Peter Lennon.

Looking at this I see an absorbtion with laziness, and self-sympathy. The critique itself is uninspiring, and full of moaning.

Unfortunately this is the starting point of a lot of the critique that is offerred for why stuff does not work in the institutional state.

I mean China has an urbanized peasantry, and it achieved 8% growth rates for over two decades.

To be honest O'Faolain's "urbanized peasantry" jibe is rooted in a lot of the failed intellectual constructs that cause the problem. The Jesuit educated lazybots who decry the peasantry or even an urbanized peasantry for being a disappointment whilst they themselves sit on their arses.

The strange thing is that the critique itself is loaded up with the sort of contempt that is undermining any form of societal harmony, and is straight out of gombeenism.


We need to go above this also. We need to go above the various absurd roadmaps provided which only ensure a continued espression of state unaccountability, power, and institutionalized privelege.

Originally Posted by mary_queen_of_the_gael

I replied to the op, not to your post.

Bead rattling? The 1916 garrison spent most of the week in the GPO saying the Rosary.

To find the revolutionary stepping stone, you are left with pebbles: Connolly, Mellowes (tenuous) Republican Congress, SFWP (maybe)

The revolutionary windbags are just that, windbags.
It is like discussing katie Taylor and you saying: but she is no good at writing poems in Sanskrit.
She us a boxer, so we measure her on that.
The 1916 people and others were, for the most part, Irish bead rattling Catholics so judge them on that, not on your fantasies.

And this from a fella who quotes Eammon McCannn !!!!!!

Originally Posted by PO'Neill

Link/proof ?

Do you think I made it up


It is mentioned in the book of prison letters by O'Malley. Published about 10 years ago.