In the next few days, I will be celebrating – if that is the word – my six years as an alcohol-free zone. I didn’t plan this lengthy sobriety, and it didn’t even arise from a drink problem. It was simply this: I had cancer and I had chemo. And the chemo is, effectively, a liquid that changes your mood and leaves you feeling bad in the morning (and perhaps even in the afternoon and again in the evening, not to speak of the night). I was grateful for the chemo, but I didn’t want any more funny liquids being poured into me, least of all by myself.

And what, in the first place, did alcohol ever do for me?

I suppose its great contribution to gaiety and wisdom is that it encourages you to talk when you clearly should be listening. 

And anyone who drinks will be consoled by the thought that even if non-drinkers like myself no longer get hangovers, we do, nonetheless, still wake up filled with mild guilt and dull anxiety.

Mine centres on the past, on the times I should have been listening and, instead, I started talking.

This week, I have been brooding on my encounters with Irish historians.

It was Cork. In the room were three history professors, two from Cork, all experts on the small matter of twentieth century Ireland; all men, all eloquent public figures. At least one of them was, in my view, rather pleased with himself.

There had been a day of lectures and discussions. Now we could relax. Since I was (a) not from Cork, (b) not a history professor, (c) only tangentially involved in the day’s proceedings, then I might have been expected to be silent or to ask them questions. Surely I would have benefited from the wisdom of these three men.

Three or four drinks later, I could not contain myself. I knew that once I started I would not be able to stop. I interrupted several conversations to ask the three historians when the term ‘The War of Independence’ was first used about the period 1918 to 1922 in Ireland. Who coined it? When was its very first use? When did it enter into common usage?

It might have been wise for all three to have simply admitted that they just didn’t know. (I knew they didn’t know. At that time - and perhaps even still - no one knew for sure.) Instead, they puffed a bit. One of their Cork accents seemed to increase in intensity. Another of them looked at me like I was a Provo. The third began a short lecture on the different terms that might be use for an insurgency of that kind, including how Finland treated the matter.

I asked again.

‘So, none of yez know?’

*

My next escapade with Irish historians was more than a decade later when there was a new breed of them. It was in Boston. One of the problems I had with alcohol was that it made me feel that I liked things I really didn’t like and it made me relish chaos, even of the mildest sort.

There had been – as there always seems to be – another conference on Irish history. Now, it was clear that the downtown bar we were in was going to close. Just in time, a very polite priest, an academic, who was in the company, suggested that we come back to the nearby manse, or the priests’ house, where there was a nice reception room, he said, a kind of parlour, and a big trolley filled with all types of liquor.

In the company were two historians who had done serious work on the statements made to the Bureau of Military History by 1,773 witnesses, people who had been involved in the revolution (or whatever you want to call it). These witness statement were collected by the Irish Army between 1947 and 1957 and then locked away in the Department of the Taoiseach until 2003.

These statements, some of them lengthy and detailed, represent a treasure trove for any historian attempting to create a narrative of events, or tracing the connection, say, between the Gaelic League and the IRB, or analyzing the role of women in the revolution.

Since these two historians, younger than I, had read every word of these witness statements, it would have made sense for me, since I had not read all of them, to ask questions and listen to the answers and then go home. But nights in Catholic presbyteries in Boston are never like that, it seems. I remember an argument about women priests, and realized that I had not heard such an argument for years. It was all tremendous fun.

I had something on my mind about the witness statements. Even the ones that were plain in style and factual and even gruff in tone seemed to me like performances. And performances of a new and interesting kind.

*

I am writing this now with the view that someone will read it.  The words I am keying in will appear online in the next week or so. Thus, setting the words down is an almost straightforward transaction, as much or as little as writing ever is. 

But imagine this: you were involved in the Irish Revolution, but that was thirty years ago. Then you were twenty; now you are fifty. Someone from the Irish Army comes and you make a statement about what you did, what you saw, what you felt. You can go into as much detail as you like. You can leave out anything you like. What you say is typed eventually and shown to you and you sign it. Then it is agreed that it will be locked away until well after you are dead. No one will read it while you are alive. It is for the future.

Obviously, this has dangers for the historian. No one is ever fully reliable. There could be a slip in the memory, or a deliberate way of finessing awkward details. The witness might be skilled at showing themselves in a particular light. But, since so many witnesses gave evidence and since there is so much corroborating information, then there are ways for the historian to sift and judge.

My interest, however, is in the question of style. Is there another way we could read these documents, alert to what we might call poetics rather than the politics. What style, what diction, what tone, what way with words do you use if you want to make the reader feel that you are setting down unadorned facts and that you should be believed. This is not literature, you say; it is evidence.

But it is not as simple a transaction as that. You are not writing for a reader in any simple way. First, you are speaking in the knowledge that what you are saying will be typed, given a formality. Also, it is personal witness to public events. And it will be held, like something invaluable and precious, and released only when the time is right. It is a kind of secular oracle.

Sometimes, the statements are plain and won’t yield easily to any high-falutin analysis. This makes me wonder, however, if we need this analysis all the more then, if plainness here really is plainness – this is what happened, this is when it happened, this is who else was there – or a kind of mask or disguise, or at least a form of rhetoric using a tone that must have been planned. Nothing in language comes naturally.

So, this is what was on my mind when I found myself in the company of these two Irish historians. It was late. As must be clear, my views on the material in the Bureau of Military History were half-baked, the sort of things an Irish fellow with some drink on him might collar you with late at night in a presbytery in Boston.

But it got worse. I suggested to one of the historians, the more potentially irascible of the two, that perhaps he and his colleagues might apply the theories of Saussure to the material in the Bureau of Military History rather than merely mining it for information.

I wish I could say that I was an expert on the theories of language associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and was ready to discuss my own deep reading in this matter and my original work on it. Even looking Saussure up now on Wikipedia, however, makes me shiver somewhat. I know that I read a book about him, a short book, in 1974, but that is hardly the point.

What is strange, or perhaps what is not strange at all, is that I grew more confident the more I spoke. And I was thus surprised when the historian simply stood up and walked away. He went home. He had no interest in listening to this nonsense.

*

Sober now, sober by day and by night, I brood on the 1,773 statements made to the Bureau of Military History. They were digitized in 2011 and are searchable. One useful way to study these statements is to look at the difference between how women and men spoke or wrote or whatever the in-between word between writing and speaking is.

And then there may be a need for even further categories as we examine the various tones that women contributors used. In her book ‘At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916’, Lucy McDiarmid offers a brilliant analysis of some of these statements, particularly those by women – wives, mothers, girlfriends, sisters - who had visited the leaders in their cells on the night before their execution. In his ‘Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923’, Roy Foster makes clear, in ways that are original and convincing, how the revolution was embraced by many who also wanted other forms of change – in how they lived, for example, and how they loved. 

*

Some of the women’s account of the period in the Bureau of Military History have more life in them, a more open sense of voice, than the majority of the men’s especially when the men are being po-faced and gruffly factual.

Mrs. Frank Fahy, for example, saw a goat during Easter Week 1916:

‘On Thursday I returned to the Four Courts. I was not long there when the Helga started to shell the place. I couldn't get back to Father Mathew Hall, the rifle firing was so great. I helped with the cooking etc. On Friday a goat strayed into the green of the Courts. I milked it so we had grand tea that evening, a change from condensed milk. On Friday night the rifle firing was not quite so bad. but the sky was all lit up.’

Áine Heron offers an image of hissing at a dance:

‘To my disappointment I came home on Good Friday night [1916]. On Saturday night there was a céili in No. 25 Parnell Square. Con Colbert was Master of Ceremonies. During the céili the band started. to play "Tipperary" and a couple who were strangers got up to dance to it. The whole audience started to hiss, and the couple, thinking they were being hissed at, sat down in embarrassment. But Con Colbert apologized to them, explaining that this air, which was associated with the War and the British army of occupation, was not allowed to be played at Irish functions.’

Or this from Mrs. Sidney Czira, sister of Grace Gifford:

‘I must recall a memorable Sunday night which was the last time I visited Russell's. Mrs. Dryhurst. who was Robert Lynd's mother-in-law and was a press correspondent in Dublin for certain papers and whom I had met through my brother, Ernest, whom she had met in Gaelic League circles in London, dressed up myself and my two sisters, Muriel and Grace, in various foreign showy costumes, Egyptian, Chinese, etc., and brought us down with her to Russells. When A.E. opened the door he was spellbound by the circus troupe that he saw on his doorstep. He asked Mrs. Dryhurst to introduce us to the company, which she did with a flourish, calling us Deirdre, Maeve or some such names.’

*

Often, when the evenings are long and everyone else is in a pub, I play games with the Bureau of Military History. I key in the word ‘hooley’ for example, and I get this from Robert Brennan, describing a night in south Wexford in Easter Week 1916:

‘During the evening, the neighbouring boys and girls dropped into Furlong's house and there was a real old fashioned hooley. If any of them feared disaster and woe from the coming events, they showed no sign of it. There was the care-free lightheartedness one always finds in a dance in the Irish countryside, the same good friendly repartee and even the same lugubrious songs. One boy sang an interminable ballad entitled "The Grand Dissolving View".’

When I keyed in the word ‘mackerel’ just because it came into my head, I found an account by Michael O’Donoghue, later President of the GAA, of a journey by boat across Donegal Bay during the War of Independence. The crew has been forced at gunpoint to take O’Donoghue to his destination: 

‘I lay down in the bottom of the boat. I felt superlatively miserable. An overpowering impulse to vomit and to vomit seized me. I lifted up my head and let it hang over the gunwale with my mouth open trying vainly to heave something, anything, up from my tortured stomach. Nothing came. As I lay there in anguished misery, the thought struck me of the extraordinary danger of my position. Here was I, being taken across Donegal Bay by a crew of hardy fishermen commandeered at the point of my revolver lying athwart the bottom of the boat utterly prostrate with seasickness end quite helpless against assault or attack. How easy it would be for my embittered crew to sling me overboard and to go back to their mackerel fishing. Even as I thought this, I felt in my woebegone state that it would be a relief to be tossed out into the waves. I would not give a damn if they did; and if they tried, I don't think I'd have offered any resistance, I felt so feeble and dejected in mind and spirit and body.’

As I was about to go to bed one night recently, I thought of the word ‘elephant’. (I don’t know why.) And when I went to my laptop and keyed it into the search box of the Bureau, I found that it came up seven times in the witness statements.

Daniel F. O’Shaughnessy, for example: ‘All through 1915 things were at a dead end and there was about as much notice taken of MacNeill's Volunteers by the general public as an elephant would take of a fly on his back.’

Or Patrick Butler: ‘The machine gun was a white elephant for the moment for, while it fired .303 ammunition, of which we had a fairly good supply, we had no plates for it, and without them it could not be used.’

James Maloney, from Limerick, makes mention of ‘an elephant gun’, but it was the paragraph before this that caught my eye and sobered me up a bit: 

‘One night in October, 1920, with Edward Maloney I came home for a change of shirts. We had got on to the road coming towards, the house. It was dark and Mike O'Donnell coming from work warned us that some of the British were coming down after him in the company of girls. Mike was surprised when we decided to remain put. One of the British was the “Mad Sergeant". It was decided this little ruffian should die. Having changed shirts, we followed the Britishers. The "Mad Sergeant" was held up and got some of his own medicine. Afterwards he was noticeably quieter.’

What’s strange about this paragraph is the sentence: ‘It was decided that this little ruffian should die.’ Did Maloney actually say that? It sounds like something you might write, or the sort of phrase you might come across in a cowboy novel. What did Maloney look like when he said this? Had he planned this sentence? Did the stenographer smile? It is unlike Maloney’s style in the rest of his long statement.

I wished I was back in Boston so I could ask our two historians what they think about ‘this little ruffian.’ (Incidentally, Simon Dedalus has this to say about Buck Mulligan in ‘Ulysses’: ‘That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all over Dublin.’ Later in the book, Bob Doran, on hearing of the death of Paddy Dignam, expresses his view of Christ Our Lord: ‘He’s a bloody ruffian I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.’)

Incidentally (also), the word ‘ruffian’ is used nine times altogether in the statements. Once, it is used by Michael Collins. This is reported by Thomas Pugh, who also writes of a night in 1917, during the by-election in Clare: ‘We stopped in Dalys' of Limerick at night. The four were Seán Nunan, Dan McCarthy, Peadar Clancy and myself. I do not know what was the idea behind it, I considered it very macabre, but they told us next morning that the bed in which Peadar Clancy had slept the night before had been slept in, from time to time, by all the men who had been executed [in 1916]. It was a shocking thing in view of what happened afterwards.’

Dalys’ of Limerick was, I presume, the house of Edward Daly, executed in 1916, and his sister Kathleen, widow of Tom Clarke. The shocking thing afterwards was the shooting dead in custody of Peadar Clancy in 1920. (By the way, it is not impossible that the bed was, in fact, slept in by all or most of the men executed in 1916. On visits to Limerick, it would have been customary for them to stay with the Dalys.)

Peadar Clancy gave his name to Clancy Barracks in Islandbridge and also, more recently, to Clancy Quay, which, wikipedia tells us, ‘is a residential development of houses and apartments in Islandbridge, Dublin, Ireland. The development and surrounds originally housed an artillery barracks, known as Islandbridge Barracks and later Clancy Barracks, before closing in 1998. In 2021 it was the largest private rental complex in Ireland with over 845 units.’

Incidentally, speaking of the word ‘ruffian’, Thomas Pugh has something interesting to say about his role in that East Clare by-election of 1917 when Eamon de Valera was running against a man called Paddy Lynch of the Irish Parliamentary Party. It is the only account I can find – I may be wrong – where someone who gives a statement to the Bureau admits to tampering with votes: ‘There were two representatives for each candidate,’ Pughs states, ‘and I was one of the counters for de Valera. Each vote was taken out and the representatives agreed as to whether it was for Lynch or for de Valera. I had got used to kidding the censors in Frongoch, I used to steal things from under their noses, and when the votes were being counted after the election I codded them several times. I would often take a Lynch vote and count it for de Valera - any that would be a bit doubtful. Michael Collins was standing behind me and said to me, "You are a bally ruffian."’

Colm Tóibín (June 2024)