Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Incidentally, a note here about Parnell’s name—Charles Stewart Parnell. Stewart was a family name and spelled differently from the “S-T-U-A-R-T” of Bonny Prince Charlie, that poxy old dipsomaniac who came across from France to Scotland, ignored the advice of the most hardheaded people on this earth, namely the Scottish clan leaders, and fought a futile war. And when his cause was lost in seventeen-forty-five—as it was always going to be—he had to be smuggled away out of Scotland disguised as a woman. Very appropriate.

  Not like our fellow here at all. Our Charles Stewart had a sharp political eye, and he knew perfectly well that in Ireland the source of power always had been and always would be—land. Before he ran for election, he had been observing the ground-roots political movements, and among all the splinters and rebels and passionate groups, the feelings—and all politics come from feelings—the feelings were clearly definable in two ways: revolution and land reform.

  Parnell had enough sense to know that armed revolution had little enough chance of success against so mighty a power—this was by now the huge British Empire. But the land factor embodied a great deal of useful thought and feeling, and that’s the direction he took: political agitation with a weather eye on those who would use arms. In eighteen-seventy-nine, four years after his first election, he helped found something called the Land League. At more or less the same time he consorted with chosen agitators—the Fenians, who openly preached the violent removal of England from Ireland. Parnell knew the value of having a cake without yet eating it.

  Not enough understanding exists regarding land and its place in the Irish soul. There’s a primitive feeling for acreage on this island; there always was, there always will be. A man will still kill for a field more than he’ll kill for money, revenge, or a woman.

  Maybe it was the losing of the land that caused that passion in us—especially losing it to foreigners who just came in and took it. I think that connection was always there: I think our deepest ancestors who wrestled patches of soil from the Atlantic and then felled the forests and opened up the interior of the island—I think they built that gut passion into our spirit. After all, in some of our earliest and wildest mythologies, our gods mated with the earth, and our ancestors chose to lie in the earth after they died.

  The losses, the evictions, the colonizations, simply intensified our land hunger. So the Land League knew what it was doing emotionally; it was politicizing this visceral issue. And it knew what it was doing intellectually; by then English landlordism—most of it absentee, by which I mean they ran their estates from tall houses in fashionable London—had become so corrupt that someone needed to speak of reforms. Here, a great advantage existed; almost any reforms would have seemed reasonable to any outside eyes, because the existing systems were so unfair.

  The outside eyes that the Land Leaguers wanted to catch were, of course, American—that’s where the money was likely to come from in the long term, because politics costs money, and revolution costs even more. Now, thanks to the new Irish-American generations, all they had to do was cry “unfair” loud enough in Ireland, and the cry would be heard across the Atlantic.

  So—what was unfair? It was unfair that no Irishman knew what day or hour he might be thrown off the land that he farmed. Mark you, this was land he probably once owned, and for which he now paid a steep rent. A lot of the imported settlers—what we call planters—had left in fear, and the landlords had to have someone who worked the land, so they got the local Irish to tenant the estates.

  It was unfair too that such a tenant farmer’s rent could be jacked up sky-high at a moment’s notice and bear no relationship whatever to the yield from the land. And—he was expected to pay his rent out of that yield. And it was unfair that a man could never expect to own the land he tilled year in, year out. In any reasonable eyes, as I say, these facts were unfair—especially if you were an embittered Irish emigrant looking back from the chunk of prairie you had just been given free by the American government. Who the Yanks took it from is not a subject I care to get into.

  This is a good moment to build a bit of context. I love context—it’s the spine of history. We’re addressing in this summer school “Victorian Ireland,” and we can assume that we mean the period the little old German lassie was on the throne, eighteen-thirty-seven to nineteen-hundred and one. An Irish landlord, Lord Castlebar, met Queen Victoria at a gathering in London one day, and he said to her, “Upon my soul Madam, your face is awful familiar but I can’t put a name to you.” Excuse the digression.

  In every new development it attempts, Irish history has a strange way of summarizing all its previous existence. This is what I mean by context. Over the centuries, the following major phases shaped the country into which Parnell was born. The twelfth century brought the Normans under Strongbow and King Henry the Second. They weren’t long here when they enacted laws to take over Irish land and keep their identities separate from the natives. That happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with such measures as the Statutes of Kilkenny and the taking of land to give to Norman barons so that they could settle here and have power.

  And at the same time they tried by law to keep the sides apart, conqueror and conquered, so that the Irish would lose their identities as the new rulers became more and more widespread; domination by assimilation.

  But that backfired; in fact, it went the other way. No matter what was tried, the Normans soon became indistinguishable from the Irish—especially the old Irish families. So, we had the next wave of English attempts to keep the island under control, again with land measures being the motive force. In the late fifteen hundreds and on into the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, the English monarch and the Parliament sent in ordinary English and Scottish families to take over the Irish lands. So numerous were they that London hoped they would outbreed and in time wipe out the native Irish. They underestimated our breeding powers. That’s why the Irish are so loved by the Vatican—we can always be relied upon to turn out lots and lots of little Catholics.

  At the same time the colonizers attacked the Irish identity once more—outlawing the religion and the language and the possibility of ownership or education.

  To counter these recurring measures, recurring skirmishes of uprisings broke out—and don’t let anyone tell you they were much more than that. In almost every generation since the Battle of the Boyne, some individual or some handful of men have had a go at being heroes. Seventeen-ninety-eight remains the most colorful example, when brave men with pikes and pitchforks took on soldiers with guns, mostly in county Wexford. Five years later, Robert Emmett, a handsome romantic lad, tried it here in Dublin and got hanged at the age of twenty-five. That stopped his gallop. Then, to show the Irish that there were other possibilities, along came Daniel O’Connell, with big shoulders, big brain, and big talk.

  What O’Connell knew and what Parnell observed—and this was the cleverness of both men—was this pattern of failure on both sides. The English hadn’t succeeded in their different eradication attempts, which ranged from assimilation to would-be genocide, because somehow the Irish clung on to who they were. And the Irish failed to throw them out because the country was simply too small to get anywhere by force of arms.

  So: from the Irish point of view a political system had to be laid down—O’Connell had proved that we’re among the world’s most effective talkers. Given the volatile nature of the Irish, there would have to be guns somewhere too. But O’Connell and Parnell knew that someone else could—and surely would—look after that. O’Connell, therefore, sought to restore identity through the abolition of the Penal Laws and the restoration of ordinary decent rights to the Irish people. And Parnell sought to get them back some measure of control over their land.

  That’s what I mean by everything in Ireland always summarizing what went before.

  All-right-very-well-so: those are the contexts and core values through which to view Charles Stewart Parnell. After all that, what is there to say about him? There�
��s a lot to be said, even outside of the romantic fact that he was that most interesting of figures—a man who acquired great power and then allowed it to slip away.

  We know he was a man who could get himself elected—that’s a politician for you. And we know that once elected, he used his power to get a broader base—he commanded the Irish party of politicians at the English Parliament in the House of Commons in London. And that added unmistakable power to the way in which the Irish could have a say in governing themselves; Parnell was capable of disrupting the whole parliamentary debating system on which England so prided herself.

  He also did something that makes me personally fond of him—he caused a word to be entered into the English language. Parnell and his Land League associates wanted to develop a system of civil disobedience, and they worked out that a policy of ostracization might prove very effective. But the word ostracism was always going to prove difficult for a people whose first language was not yet English. So they needed a different word, a headline term.

  There was a property on the east side of Lough Mask in county Mayo owned by the absentee Lord Erne and managed out of Ballinrobe by an Englishman with a very bad name for cruelty—and this man’s name was the word Parnell made into an everyday word.

  In the summer of eighteen-eighty, the Land League asked several of its members to approach this agent and ask for a reduction in their rents. You can imagine the response—the agent gave them short shrift, angry contempt, and instead of a reduction, a crude and immediate increase. This was exactly what Parnell had foreseen—and actually wanted—from this rude, despotic steward.

  So: the Land League instructed all the steward’s neighbors to withdraw all services; they stopped working on his land, in his household, on all of the properties he managed; they refused to deliver his letters, sell him anything in the shops, saddle his horse, wash his crockery, or, most important of all, help with the harvest on which the estates depended for a slice of his income. The distracted agent brought in teams of Protestant laborers from northern counties, but that made the harvest impossibly expensive, and eventually the agent went back to England, his tail between his legs.

  The man’s name was—Charles Cunningham Boycott. And his name became a practice that is known to this day—to boycott someone means to cut them off from all essential services, to ostracize them within their own society. Some of you who live here may recall a recent murder investigation where no perpetrator was found. But the local people made up their own minds as to who had done it, and they boycotted a certain man and his family, and he had to leave the neighborhood.

  The word ostracism, by the way, comes from an old Greek social rite. Its root word is os, “bone”; it has a cousin in the word oyster, and when the Greeks wanted to banish someone, they wrote his name on a shell or a bone or a shard, and that’s where ostracism comes from.

  In nineteenth-century Ireland, the ostracism known as the boycott went on to form the basis of an effective political campaign. For example, if a landlord evicted a tenant farmer for nonpayment of rent, no other farmer would work that land. I myself saw a case of the same thing ten years ago where a bank foreclosed on a farm and nobody turned up to the auction. And the auctioneers knew too that whoever bought that place might well be boycotted in the locality. In Ireland history never ends.

  Captain Boycott left Ireland in the autumn of eighteen-eighty. Charles Stewart Parnell was riding high—intelligent, magnetic, astute, and increasingly powerful. He drove the Irish members of Parliament in London like a cattleman with a herd; he spoke brilliantly, and he was followed by admirers everywhere he went.

  But he had a colleague whose wife was a beauty, the wondrous Kitty O’Shea, and she began to flutter her eyelashes at him. Handkerchief-pandkerchief followed. There was tumbling in the hay, bosoms heaved, palms grew sweaty—and bang! The word got out; they’re tumbling in the hay! Parnell is introducing her to Fagan, a good old Dublin slang term for the compelling act of reproducing the species.

  And we all know what happened next. Parnell’s core followers were Irish Catholics, at their most devout since having permission restored to them to practice their religion. And they disliked adultery and divorce, two factors of life that now came into Parnell’s life as friskily as a donkey will trot through an open gate into a fresh meadow.

  The word got out. Mr. Kitty O’Shea was pushed out of the nest, and Charles Stewart Parnell, because he married a divorcée and lost the Catholic vote, went to his doom in a featherbed. Thus, between the sheets, ended the parliamentary career of the uncrowned king of Ireland.

  In the laughter, a nun jumped up from her bench and began to leave the lecture theater; a second nun followed her, blushing and muttering. Ronan had hidden himself by sinking low in the hindmost of the packed benches and keeping his hands studiously tented to his face—but the nuns’ departure exposed him to Ryle’s attention.

  The professor, long the star of every summer school and much loved for his salty views, looked at Ronan. Then he looked—then he looked again. To everybody’s astonishment, he bounded crane-legged up the steps.

  “The beard won’t hide you. It is you, isn’t it?”

  Ronan nodded, suddenly in tears.

  “Don’t move out of this seat, O’Mara. Not a muscle. I want to talk to you.”

  Ryle returned to his podium. “I’ll take some questions, and you can ask me anything you like. Even about hanky-panky.”

  He replied at some length to a statement about the Land War and the secret societies who slaughtered landlords’ cattle in the fields and crippled their horses by cutting the tendons in the hocks.

  “If you like, you can see it as symbolic. They were hobbling the conveyances and the power of the British Empire. You could also see it as cruelty to animals.”

  Another questioner asked how lurid had been the accounts of Parnell’s dalliance.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’d think of as lurid, but there was no doubt that shanks were bared and people bounced around a bit, if that’s what you mean.”

  This proved too salty for some more students, who weren’t even nuns. The class, all mature, began to disperse, to the sadness of the many who relished the salty prof. When the last one had gone, Ryle raced long-legged again up to Ronan’s seat and directed him along the bench to make room. “You heard it, so?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “And is that why you’re here?”

  “Sir, I didn’t know you were lecturing.”

  “No, you fool! I’m not talking about the bloody lecture!”

  “Sir—I came—I came because I want to get things back in order.”

  “What about the bloody announcement?”

  “Sir—what announcement?” T. Bartlett Ryle took off his glasses and wiped his face like a monkey.

  “God Almighty! Listen. D’you know when you’re waiting for the wireless news to come on at half past six in the evening? Haven’t you ever heard announced ‘Will So-and-So, believed to be traveling in Cork and Kerry, please contact the nearest police station for an urgent message.’ They put out one for you too—it said, ‘Will Ronan O’Mara contact the nearest police station.’ Or maybe lunatic asylum? Where were you, driving everybody mad with worry? Your mother’s nearly demented.”

  “She’s not my mother.”

  “Ah—is that what did it? You found out?”

  “No. I only found out two days ago.”

  “Well, it took you long enough.”

  “Has everyone always known except me?!”

  “Explode all you like—this is Ireland; no family worth the name is without a secret. And you should know that in this country a secret is something that everyone else knows.”

  “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “If this is how you handle things, I wouldn’t blame them for not telling you.”

  “Sir, it isn’t fair!”

  “Stop shouting. And fair is a body pigment, that’s all it is. Where were you? Why didn’t you write to your moth
er?”

  Ronan sank back. “I was—all over the country.”

  “Bloody thoughtless of you. What are you going to do now?”

  “What should I do?” T. Bartlett Ryle said, “Are you expecting me to tell you? If you are, you’ll have a long wait.”

  “But—you’re a teacher.”

  “A farmer can’t sow potatoes on hard ground.”

  Ronan subsided. “What should I do?”

  Ryle clapped his hands. “That’s a dangerous thing—asking me for advice. I could keep you here all day, giving you advice. But I’d say, for a start, go home and apologize to your mother and your aunt. And”—he leaned forward for emphasis—“it doesn’t matter which is which.”

  “I don’t, I can’t—understand any of this.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out for you. You’re eighteen, and I’m told you came into a lot of money when your father died, and then you behaved without an ounce of consideration for the two women who brought you up. You took off around the country like a tinker and never so much as sent a postcard or made a phone call. You walked out of what is thought one of the best history faculties in western Europe, even if I say so myself. And in this college we could fill your place fifteen times over with people who’d behave better.”

  The professor stood up; Ronan rose with him.

  “O’Mara, if you waste the gifts you have, I’ll personally scourge you. That’s a warning.”

  Ronan hoisted his rucksack feebly. “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll say, ‘Good man.’ Now go and mend the holes in your life. And do it decently, for Christ’s sake. Don’t act like a boor. Piss out any vinegar in your bloodstream. No one meant you any harm.”

  At Kingsbridge the platforms echoed to the clank of shunting. Not more than ten people boarded the train. Ronan slumped in a deserted carriage, still wincing at Ryle’s remarks. Bloody thoughtless. Don’t act like a boor. Without an ounce of consideration. Thank God the train’s empty. Rode this train with Kate. Kate! What’s she going to say? And Mother—or Not-Mother? Jesus God! What to do? Right! If they attack—attack them. But if they don’t attack? They deserve some punishment. Perhaps a coolness. Or—wait and see? Will they tell the whole story? Will they tell? What will they say?