in the heart of Dublin, Griffith was a hard-working artisan who married late due to his poverty, who then had two children whom he deeply loved. He was ready to compromise, including with unionists, but firm in his resolve that independence was Ireland’s right and that the Irish Free State was a stepping-stone towards greater things. ‘How time has justified the Irish Treaty,’ wrote the ambassador Michael MacWhite to W.T. Cosgrave as the Irish Free State became a republic in 1949. ‘We know now what Griffith meant when he wanted freedom to achieve freedom,’ he added.11 The fact of partition was already a reality when Griffith signed the agreement for a treaty and, contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, was not the immediate cause of de Valera’s resignation as president of a Dáil that then voted to accept the document that Griffith and Collins had signed in London.
Mother Ireland
A constellation of defeat, dependency, despondency and martyrdom – in the face of sometimes brutal imperialism – gave strength over centuries to the myth of Mother Ireland as a poor woman reduced to demanding the self-sacrifice of her sons for an almost hopeless cause. That woman, known as ‘My Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Kathleen Ni Houlihan’, ‘Shan Van Vocht’, ‘Éire/Erin’ etc., was both an object of desire and a pietà, whose beloved children’s blood watered a tree symbolising national regeneration or resurrection. For James Joyce’s Stephen, Ireland was ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.12 Griffith himself invoked regeneration by using the word ‘resurrection’ in the title of his key 1904 tract on the constitutional and economic salvation of Ireland (The Resurrection of Hungary), while the weekend that rebels chose for the ‘rising’ in 1916 was significantly that of the festival of Christ’s resurrection. In 1917 Yeats wrote of Ireland that ‘There’s nothing but our own red blood can make a right Rose Tree,’ while also expressing dismay that ‘a breath of politic words has withered our Rose Tree’. He was still singing in 1938, as he flirted with fascist ideas:
And yet who knows what’s yet to come?
For Patrick Pearse had said
That in every generation
Must Ireland’s blood be shed.
Griffith preferred ‘politic words’ to bloodshed, regarding them as an art and a democratic necessity rather than a withering disease. Yet, he was no pacifist, for he advocated defensive force and even countenanced attack where it was necessary. In 1914 he attended a key private meeting with Patrick Pearse and other future signatories of the 1916 proclamation and, as will be seen, agreed a broad strategy with them. He participated in the Howth gun-running of 1914 and later drilled dutifully with the rifle that he got there, although he was not at the barricades on Easter Monday 1916. He subsequently became acting president of the provisional government during the War of Independence, when de Valera went to America for eighteen months.
Griffith informed and guided the political consciousness of a cultural revival that had floated on an ocean of sentimental affection for the idea of Mother Ireland, or ‘Erin’ – that poor old woman worn down, but destined to come into her queenly inheritance and be rejuvenated: ‘There was much Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen poetry written,’ Mary Colum later remarked somewhat sarcastically of the period.13 Griffith himself was not adverse to idealising Ireland and Irish women when articulating his vision of an Ireland that he hoped would be self-sufficient, while also being less materialistic than England. However, his unifying emphasis was ultimately modern and pragmatic.
In an effort to explain the significance of Sinn Féin’s sensational victory at the polls in 1918, the Anglo-Irish anarchist Jack White offered a psychological interpretation inspired by the ‘subliminal uprush’ idea of pioneering psychologist Frederic H. Myers, who also influenced W.B. Yeats. White saw Sinn Féin’s function as one of ‘re-introducing pure emotion as a factor in Western world-politics’, which could only be prevented from ‘lapsing into hysteria’ by the restraints and objectives of organised labour. White’s well-intended theory ran the risk of once more casting ‘the Irish race’ (as he called it) as essentially the wild and ‘intuitive’ type.14 Griffith’s plan was not ‘pure emotion’ but was to harness national consciousness within national political structures such as existed elsewhere in Europe, taking advantage of an expanding electorate with its broader social base and with some women enfranchised for the first time in 1918. He wanted voters to accept the need for and benefit of self-reliant institutions rather than just venting their anger or lapsing into reliance on favours from the Westminster parliament. He wished to see people develop independently and, in that respect, attempted to exercise on a national level that which Carl Jung has represented as the centrally organising psychic function of a father.
In July 1922, as Ireland faced into civil war, the distinguished Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones also addressed non-political factors that might throw light on the political roots of the English–Irish conflict. He recognised the particularly rich variety of female names used by the Irish for Ireland, remarking that ‘the customary one of Erin … would content most countries’. The tradition of the Gaelic ‘aisling’ or dream poetry had fostered such variety. Jones wrote that ‘The complexes to which the idea of an island home tends to become attached are those relating to the idea of woman.’ He suggested that history might have been different had England ‘instead of ravishing Ireland as though she were a harlot, wooed her with the offer of an honorable alliance’.15 He also discerned Oedipal implications in the strong identification of the homeland as ‘mother’, and these are relevant to a consideration of the fate and reputation of anyone cast in the national role of ‘father of us all’.
In a gloss on Jones’ commentary, one Irish analyst in 1998 cautioned against seeing the dominance of the myth of Mother Ireland as some kind of deterministic or primary given. Cormac Gallagher related the myth to what he saw as a singular lack of Irish father figures. Instead, there are ‘sons and brothers who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend the honour of their mother’. He asked, with an eye perhaps to Freud’s key text on the biblical patriarch, ‘Where do we find an Irish Moses?’16 In doing so, he echoed the lament of Gaelic poets who identified Ireland’s plight with that of Israel.
For years after King William routed King James at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, many Irish regarded the possible return of a Jacobite king or prince as their best hope of salvation. The impoverished poet James Clarence Mangan, who died in 1849 and who intrigued not only Griffith but also Yeats and Joyce, ended his rendering of an old Jacobite song by praying that ‘He who stood by Moses, when his foes were fierce and strong’ might ‘show forth his might in saving Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan [i.e. Ireland]’. Gradually, Irish writers identified possible Irish versions of the biblical patriarch who had led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. Charles Stewart Parnell in particular but also Michael Davitt by Fanny Parnell were cast in this fantasy role.17 Another candidate was ‘Griffith’, albeit as Moses in the shape of a leader for an industrialised and democratic age, or even as a modern version of the Irish patriarch St Patrick, determined to drive out all snakes of faction and convert his people from UK parliamentarianism to Irish independence.
Ireland grapples with the serpent ‘Faction’ following the death of Parnell in October 1891 (Weekly National Press, 24 October 1891).
However, in Yeats’ influential play Kathleen Ni Houlihan, written with assistance from Lady Gregory and even ostensibly with some help from Griffith as will be seen, it was not sustained paternal leadership but the blood sacrifice of her children that was seen to redeem Mother Ireland. Indeed, relative to certain ‘typical examples’ of ‘innumerable’ identifications of Ireland as a woman that he cited (and for the selection of which he thanked one Violet Fitzgerald), Ernest Jones found the final scene of Yeats’ Kathleen Ni Houlihan to be for him ‘the most moving description of all’.18 Yeats himself later wondered if his words were responsible for sending men out to die in the Rising.
Following
