Life
Author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s Soul (London:
Picador 1996), 400pp.
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Quotations
Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s Soul (London: Picador
1996): ‘As in the psychology of informing, this republican tenet
of martyrdom is heavily influenced by the rites and liturgy of Irish of
Catholicism. Catholic schoolchildren are daily taught that ‘Christ
died for our sins’ and thus saved the human race. Christ's followers,
his aposdes and saints, are venerated for upholding and dying for, being
martyred for, the true faith. For republicans, dying for Ireland is a
sacrificial act akin to those religious acts of Christian witness. Patriotism
and self-sacrifice are synonymous and rooted deeply in the very fountainhead
of modern republicanism, the men of Easter Week, the spiritual fathers
of the current Irish Republic. […]; Pearse seemed to believe the
Rising was a necessary blood sacnfice to sting the conscience of the vast,
indifferent Irish majonty. On the same day, 1 May 1916, two days before
his execution, Pearse wrote a poem, “A Mother Speaks”, in which he made
the comparison between himself and the martyred Jesus Christ explicit[:] “Dear Mary, that didst see thy first-born Son/Go forth to die amid the
scorn of men/For whom He died,/Receive my first-born son into thy arms,/Who
also hath gone out to die for men,/And keep him by thee till I come to
him./Dear Mary, I have shared thy sorrow,/And soon shall share thy joy.”
/Pearse ran towards his own death in a drama of his own making. The Easter
Rising was a political crucifixion with Pearse as Christ and Dublin as
a modern-day Calvary. The British unconsciously, and predictably, fulfilled
their role as the ignorant Romans and in the aftermath duly lined Pearse
up against a wall in Kilmainham Jail, shot him, and completed the cycle.
Pearse was a dangerous fanatic, a romantic with a callous disregard for
the human consequences of his idealism. But he was right about his own
martyrdom and the decisive symbolic power of the Easter Rising. Pearse's
blood sacrifice transmognfied republican political fortunes and created
the state of the Irish Republic. His martyrdom was both a blind denial
of the existing political realiq of Crown rule in Ireland and an affirmation
of the mythic republic to be. The manner of his death would inspire a
select handful, scattered across the succeeding unborn generations, to
take arms, kill and die gloriously in, and for, Ireland./For Irish Republicans,
martyrdom is also a means of psychologically reordering the chain of defeat,
the never ending stream of rebel failures, the dead volunteers, the blunders,
the apathy of the vast Irish majority and the betrayals from within, inflicted
upon them. It is a way of abstracting the war away from its grim, atavistic,
pedestrian necessity and recasting it in the mould of Pearse's glorious
Republic to be. […]’ (339-40.)
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