The New Year brings with it a crop of anniversaries that remind us both of Ireland’s achievements and its tragedies. Clustering in 2004 are the significant dates of some of Ireland’s greatest writers, and dates that bring gloomy reminders of the bloody cost of the country’s political division. It is the 100th anniversary of an Irish novelist’s first stroll out with the woman who would become his wife, a walkabout around his native city of Dublin that would be transfigured by his imagination into the basis of “Ulysses,” one of the 20th century’s literary masterpieces.
Fifty years later, three Irish writers, Tony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan, would take a pilgrimage to the spots made famous in Joyce’s masterpiece, and launch a tradition that has been celebrated ever since from Dublin to New York. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the conversion of a music hall that housed the Mechanic’s Institute in Abbey Street into one of the world’s leading theaters. The footlights of Abbey Theatre’s 20-foot-square stage were first switched on in December 1904.
Two of Ireland’s finest writers were born that year, Kavanagh himself and the short story writer and novelist Michael McLaverty. Both were born in Monaghan, which Kavanagh would immortalize in the bleak verse of “The Great Hunger.” McLaverty would move to Rathlin Island and then Belfast, using both as the backdrops for his finest work.
This year also marks important anniversaries in the political history of Ireland. 1904 saw the publication of a series of articles by Arthur Griffith advocating the abandonment of participation in the Westminster parliament and the establishment of a national assembly in Dublin. The next year, they would form the founding principles of a new party, Sinn Fein, which within 13 years would shake the Irish political establishment and challenge British rule in Ireland.
A hundred years ago an Irishman was born in Paris of parents who were celebrated both in Ireland’s literary history and in her political struggle. Sean McBride was the son of Maud Gonne McBride and John McBride. His mother was immortalized in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and his father achieved immortality also — thanks to a British army firing squad, which executed him for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. McBride himself would leave his own mark on the Irish political scene, as chief of staff of the IRA, an Irish government minister and later as a Nobel peace prizewinner.
2004 will see the anniversaries of events that remain as milestones in the history of the recent conflict in the north of Ireland. It will be 30 years since the first attempt to construct a power-sharing executive and devolved government as a solution to the Northern Ireland crisis was brought down through loyalist intimidation and violence, including a brutal series of bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. This coming November will mark the 30th anniversary of one of the most vicious incidents in the history of the conflict — the bombings of two pubs in Birmingham which left 21 people dead. The following month will mark the 30th anniversary of the formation of one of the most violent and unpredictable republican splinter groups — the Irish National Liberation Army.
It will be 10 years since a Chinook helicopter crashed into the side of a Scottish hill, wiping out a large portion of the upper echelons of the Northern Ireland intelligence services and shifting the balance of power in the struggle for dominance between Special Branch and MI5. Just over three months later, there was cause for happier commemoration — the unilateral ceasefire the IRA declared on Aug. 31, 1994, which launched the Irish peace process. Ten years later, in spite of crisis after crisis, that process is still viewed by most as the best hope in a generation for finding a solution to a conflict that was once seen as intractable.
June 16, 1904: A date
with literary history
Had James Joyce not been stood up on his first date with Nora Barnacle, the worldwide literary event known as Bloomsday would be two days earlier. The 14th of June had been the date that Jim, aged 22, and Nora, 20, had fixed for their first stroll out together. But Jim was left standing in Merrion Square outside the house once occupied by the Wilde family, whistling to wind and hoping in vain that the crop of brown hair he was watching would turn out to be Nora’s. When she failed to show up, he arranged to meet her on the 16. This time, she was as good as her word. For Joyce, the event was so important that he set “Ulysses,” his greatest novel, on that same day. Probably no author in history has invested his first date with such literary significance. 1n 1954, when “Ulysses” which had been published in 1922, was still unobtainable in Joyce’s native land, thanks to censorship laws, Cronin, O’Nolan and Kavanagh, paid a visit to the Martello tower in Sandycove, where the novel opens. Cronin was at the time an up-and-coming poet and assistant editor of the Irish literary magazine The Bell. The other two were already established writers — Kavanagh as Ireland’s leading poet and O’Nolan as one of the 20th century’s most original comic novelists (though at the time he was only recognized as such by a very few). But little did they realize that their modest stroll in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom the hero of “Ulysses” would become such a celebrated literary anniversary.
December 1904:
Lights! Action! Riot!
Six months after Jim and Nora’s first date, the Irish Literary Theater, founded five years earlier by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, settled down in its permanent home in Abbey Street, a few yards from the River Liffey. During its first two decades it would provide the stage for new and daring Irish drama, including the work of Yeats, J.M. Synge and Sean O’Casey. For some it was too daring — the first performance of Synge’s “Playboy of The Western World” set off a riot, as did O’Casey’s “The Plough and The Stars.”
Stony gray fields and cruel
streets: Kavanagh and McLaverty
Monaghan, Dublin, Rathlin Island, Belfast, these are the spots where the psychic dramas of two of Ireland’s finest writers were played out during the first decades of the last century. Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) and Michael McLaverty (1904-92) were faithful to the fields, laneways and streets where they were raised. Faithful, but discerning, aware intensely how a place can mould the men and women who inhabit it. In a series of poems, beginning with “The Ploughman and other Poems” (1936) Kavanagh brought the bleakness and the harsh beauty of his native county to life, introducing a note of stark realism into the images of country live that had been popularized during the Irish literary renaissance of the previous decades. “The Great Hunger,” regarded as his masterpiece, appeared in 1942, with its unwavering evocation of the bleak, loveless lives of the rural poor. Kavanagh was also the author of two novels, and scraped out a living as a literary journalist in Dublin in the 1950s and ’60s where he liked to hold court in various pubs around the city, especially The Bailey in Duke Street.
Beginning in 1939, McLaverty published eight novels and two acclaimed collections of short stories, “The White Mare” (1943) and “The Game Cock” (1947). Among his novels, his first two, “Call My Brother Back” (1939) and “Lost Fields” (1942) are his most outstanding. The streets of Belfast during the Troubles of the 1920s are recreated with precision in “Call My Brother Back,” as are the bare fields and rocky shores of Rathlin in “Lost Fields”. McLaverty spent most of his life as a teacher and headmaster in Belfast, avoiding the literary limelight, living and working with quiet dedication.
Political turning points
In late 1904, when Arthur Griffith (1871-1922) drew parallels between the political situation of Hungary and that of Ireland in a series of pamphlets, he could not have foreseen that the political party that they would give rise to, Sinn Fein, would become identified with some of the very things to which he was opposed. Griffith had advocated a constitutional monarch for Ireland, and passive resistance to English rule. Yet, within a few years, Sinn Fein had become identified with violent republicanism and later, revolutionary socialism. Ninety years later, Sinn Fein, having gone through another transformation, would help bring about the IRA’s unilateral ceasefire and launch the Northern Ireland peace process.
Between those dates, Ireland would see a lot of political and Troubles’ anniversaries come an go as the conflict raged north of the border. Thirty years ago it saw the first experiment in power sharing collapse, and a rash of horrific bombings in Dublin, Monaghan, and Birmingham as the conflict spread beyond the six counties. Led by Seamus Costello (1939-1977), defiant members of the Official IRA would split away to form the INLA whose aim was to combine revolutionary politics with violent republicanism, only in the end to be consumed by its own internal conflicts.
Ten years ago, the countdown began to bring the conflict to an end. The same year, another, behind-the-scenes, conflict for dominance in the intelligence field involving the RUC Special Branch and Britain’s MI5 was irreversibly affected when a the Chinook helicopter carrying Northern Ireland top spooks slammed into the Mull of Kintyre. Some of police’s most ardent opponents to granting MI5 dominance died in that accident. A decade later, the controversy still rages as to what caused the crash that helped shape the security policy of the British in ways that are still hidden behind the veil of covert operations.
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