Who rallied their bravest and best
When Ireland was broken in Wexford
And looked for revenge to the West.21
Rooney’s ballad was popular, soon acquiring something of the cachet of a traditional folk song. James Joyce is thought to allude to him and to it in Ulysses – ‘that minstrel boy of the wild wet west’, and ‘We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at Killala.’22
Moral Pollution
Rooney promoted the Irish language and Gaelic culture at a time when employees worked six days a week. He frequently finished work on a Saturday, took a train to address a meeting on Sunday, came back to Dublin again by the night mail, and was at his job again on Monday morning.23 The Liverpool Mercury praised him, because ‘Working ten hours a day as a railway clerk, he taught classes of men, women and children every evening, produced literature of a lasting kind, and refused a single penny of recompense.’24 Given the currency of British jingoism then, and the very British syllabi in many Irish schools where Irish history might go untaught, it is not surprising that he tried to persuade young people to read works by Irish authors, both Catholic and Protestant. In explaining his position as early as 1889 in a paper read to the Irish Fireside Club, he had indicated that the Irish writers whom he had in mind included Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and Lady Wilde.25
Griffith and Rooney also helped Maud Gonne and a group of women who founded in 1900 Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), with not only Griffith and Rooney joining them on the initial organising committee but also, as Gonne recalled, ‘the sisters of both and Willie Rooney’s fianceé, Maire Kil[l]een’.26 Rooney confessed ‘I am not an advocate of the “political woman” or the “woman’s rights” specimen, but I think that the best interests of the nation could be benefited if the women of Ireland were educated, as their brothers should be, to the needs and capabilities of the country.’27 He also wrote for the Shan Van Vocht paper edited by Alice Milligan and Anna Johnston.28
Rooney’s poems are of his time, the era of Rudyard Kipling and others whose particular form of earnestness and chauvinism seem very dated now. In the United Irishman Kipling was characterised as ‘the Poet of the Empire’ and repeatedly mocked.29 Rooney was the poet of the nation. He could be bluntly priggish, castigating (for example) ‘all the drivil and dirt of cockneydom’ that was imported from England and that Irish people bought when their own country did not support even one native comic paper. He condemned the Dublin evening papers for retailing ‘the doings of American widows or English aristocrats’ and lamented ‘the immoral and unnatural ideas which underlie’ modern society plays.30 Rooney was, said a contemporary:
The first public voice raised insistently against the moral pollution of the London music-hall ditties … Indeed, everything which weakened the moral fibre of our people found him its sworn foe … the sheer beauty and simplicity of his character was known to all who had the good fortune to enjoy his friendship … Almost always he was gay in company, but when a scoffer at female goodness, a juggler of words of dubious double meaning … obtruded himself, a solemn and stern rebuke awaited him from the high-minded William Rooney.31
In a preface to the collection of Rooney’s poems, it was said that ‘His aim was to write such verse and prose as would appeal to the average Irish man or woman, and all his work, whether in prose or verse was written with the one object – that of strengthening and perpetuating the feeling of Irish nationhood in its highest form, in the minds and hearts of the people.’32 In reviewing that collection of poetry, James Joyce thought that Rooney ‘might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy’, although Joyce left the word ‘patriotism’ unsaid.33 Joyce later echoed himself in Ulysses; ‘I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.’
In 1909, in his brief introduction to a separate volume of some of Rooney’s prose from the United Irishman, Seumas MacManus noted ‘These are not the laboriously polished essays of one whose mission was the making of literature, but the outspoken words of a deeply-in-earnest man.’34
Typhoid
Rooney fell ill on 2 March 1901 and died two months later at home in North Strand, in his twenty-eighth year and ‘to the inexpressible grief of his parents and friends’.35 To the last his busy brain planned cultural initiatives: ‘If I were well,’ he said on his deathbed, ‘we should surprise everyone … we would teach every singer a song that was never heard in Dublin before. I know where to get airs and words.’36 The United Irishman reported ‘as we sat by his bedside, with a wistful smile he told us, quoting from a poem of Denis Florence McCarthy’s, that he was weary waiting for the May. And the May brought him death, as he knew it would, although we had hoped and prayed it might bring him health.’37 A death certificate records the cause of his death on 6 May 1901 as typhoid, a hazard then of the Dublin tenements.38
Griffith never doubted Rooney’s value to the national movement, and his immediate response to Rooney’s death was immensely emotional. He confessed ‘I came to build my hopes for Ireland on him, and to regard him as the destined regenerator of his people.’ He recalled that Rooney had ‘stayed with the peasant in his sheiling [a small, rough structure] and learned from him the old folk-stories and folk-songs which are now becoming known to us’.39 He added ‘As a man and as an Irishman, his life was beautiful.’40
If Griffith was in love with Rooney, nothing indicates that his love was other than platonic. Griffith was to describe him as the ‘best friend’ he ever had.41 In the next issue of the United Irishman, its editor admitted ‘we have scarcely looked at our correspondents’ letters for the last few days. In the presence of the calamity that has befallen the national cause, we have neither time nor heart to deal with other subjects.’ Rooney was ‘dead in the spring of life – a martyr to his passionate love of our unhappy country’, and ‘It seemed impossible to us that he could die.’42
When Griffith mourned Rooney’s passing he was, as William Murphy notes, ‘unstinting (well past the point of hyperbole) in his praise’.43 The pages of the United Irishman were decked out with black mourning borders or rules, as they had been when James Stephens ‘the greatest Irishman of the century’ died one month earlier.44 On 21 May 1901, W.B. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that the death ‘has plunged everybody onto gloom. Griffith has had to go to hospital for a week, so much did it affect him’.45 Maud Gonne wrote:
In Boston, I got a cable from Griffith, telling of Willie Rooney’s death. It was a great blow … He was Griffith’s greatest friend and helper in the paper. His loss was irreparable; I wondered if Griffith would be able to carry on without him … In Philadelphia I got a short, broken-hearted letter from Griffith. Rooney … had a cold and should have stayed in bed, but he had meetings in the West for the weekend and insisted on going. He came back very ill and never recovered. He was engaged to be married to Marie Killeen, one of the executive of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a dark girl who, in our tableaux vivants, looked very beautiful as the Dark Rosaleen. He had done a lot to help our women’s organisation.46
In St Louis she received another letter, Griffith ‘begging me not to stay too long in America as I was badly needed in Dublin’.47 On 26 October 1901, in the United Irishman, Griffith wrote of Rooney that ‘[we] feel every hour of our lives his loss’. Michael Collins, just ten years old when Rooney died, later acknowledged his role in the national movement. As the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922, Collins wrote glowingly of him.48
‘Those Big Words’
Griffith’s United Irishman gave publicity to James Joyce’s early essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, which warned that ‘the artist, though he may employ the crowd,
