Dunne Rebellions

Memoir, Memory and 1798
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84351-234-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 367 Seiten

This is a new, extended edition of an unusual book, which generated considerable interest and controversy when it was first published in 2004, and won the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize the following year. In its original form it had three elements, a memoir giving the author's intellectual and political formation and his family connection to 1798 in Wexford, a critique of the bicentenary of the rebellion and of writing about it, and a detailed account of the pivotal battle of New Ross and the massacre nearby at Scullabogue. The new edition adds a fourth layer of exploration, analysing the reception of the book, by historians, by those involved in the bicentenary, and by the many individuals who wrote to the author. The most unusual response came from the Ryan Commission on child abuse, which explored with the author his experiences as a junior member of the Irish Christian Brothers, and quoted him extensively in its report. The new chapter focuses on the theme common to all of these responses, the conflict between emotional identification with a community's history and the evidence for contrary realities.

TOM DUNNE is Professor Emeritus of History, and part-time Lecturer in Art History at University College Cork.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dunne, Tom

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

The Child

My mother was a romantic, at least in relation to the story of her family and her childhood. She had an intense nostalgia for ‘the old days’, when people were happy even though poor, when neighbours constantly visited, doors weren’t locked, and life was simple. When her own children moved away and settled elsewhere she warned that the friendships formed in these new surroundings could never be as important or as lasting as the ties of family. Her stories of her own family were vivid and exciting. Leaving aside the ancestor killed in 1798, and his relationship to Edmund Rice, these focused mainly on her father, John. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1850, shortly after his parents emigrated there from New Ross, he was brought back to Ireland, aged eight, by his mother, on the death of his father. The rest of his long life, he told stories of kangaroos and Chinamen, of the six-month voyage back, and of gold nuggets his father had acquired in the goldfields and which his mother is said to have used later to set him up on an independent basis. His parents hardly emigrated, as my mother believed, ‘for an adventure’, but because his father was the third son and had to make his own way. The widow returned with her three sons, aged eight, four and two, to a family dominated by their grandfather, who lived for another five years and who had himself been eight years old when his father was killed in 1798. The longevity of her father and his grandfather brought the Rebellion very close to my mother – who was, in effect, at just one remove from the boy who had seen his father killed.

I remember no stories of her father’s life after his return to Ireland until he married at fifty, nor is it clear how they lived. His mother (formerly Margaret Murphy, with her own connections to 1798, being a grandniece of the famous Father John Murphy) had, seemingly, bought house property in the Irishtown of New Ross and elsewhere, and it was, perhaps, because this ensured the future of her eldest son that his younger brother Michael inherited the family’s share of the grandfather’s property and business. In any case, when my grandfather married in 1900, he lived first on the farm at Ballymacar, just outside the town, which, according to family tradition, his mother had purchased with gold, and which also had 1798 associations, having been then the house of the parish priest of Cushinstown; there is a tradition of rebels getting Communion there before the battle of New Ross. When my grandfather’s unmarried brother Michael died fourteen years later and added heroically to a family reputation for charity by leaving a considerable part of his property in trust for the poor of the town, my grandfather was able to purchase part of it back. It was to be his last positive contribution to the family’s fortune. Shortly before that, he had inherited his mother’s property, and then the portion of his brother’s not left to charity.

In his mid-fifties, therefore, he was a man of considerable wealth, owning three farms and (according to my mother) thirteen houses. When he died, forty years later, most of it was gone. A man of great charm, he kept open house, did no work, and, it was said, drank a bottle of whiskey a day. My mother, always protective of him, was open about his alcoholism, but stressed that he ‘never got drunk’, was foolish but always kind and good-humoured. Only in her final years did she hint at the grimmer reality of his occasional violence and the fear in which they all lived of this lovable patriarch turning suddenly and unpredictably into a monster. This was the untold story that shaped her life, and still shapes mine. I believe that it was this that led to such a powerful emphasis on family and to such insistence on a romantic memory of childhood, and that made her so determined to achieve independence and control in her own life. Only in recent years, as her children became more aware of the hurt, vulnerable child she had been, did we come to terms properly with the complex way she had related to us: immensely supportive of our ambitions and independence, and at the same time finding it hard to accept that this would give us different attitudes and values from her own. In particular, the religious faith that had been the main consolation of her life took the form of a dogmatic orthodoxy. She was the most literal-minded and traditional Catholic I’ve ever known; her moral universe was black and white, and shaped by pre-Vatican II certainties. Yet, while often shocked at the criticisms we voiced, she was respectful of the choices we made and very supportive, for example, when I, my brother John and my sister Rosaleen in turn left the various religious orders we had joined. But we also felt strongly that there were limits to her tolerance, and a number of us concealed from her our break with Catholicism. The greatest legacy of her father’s alcoholism may have been some stunting of the ability to express negative emotions, and most of us found it impossible to confront her on any emotive issue. Challenged, she became hurt and withdrawn in a way I found devastating. My family thus lacked the emotional safety valve of the usual rows and conflicts, and it was to take me many years to realize that it is better in one’s personal life to express anger and explore difference than to suppress such feelings.

Perhaps I also inherit from my mother not only a fascination with the past, but the urge to redefine it. She reinvented a father who was a benign presence and much-loved local character (perhaps after he had reinvented himself). His old age became the second romantic period of his life and the other subject of her stories, featuring his dapper, youthful appearance and his remarkable health up to his death at ninety-five. ‘If he hadn’t gone out into the yard on a frosty night and caught pneumonia, he’d be alive to this day,’ she once told me, waving aside my calculation that that would have made him 130 years old. What I didn’t then understand was that he never died in her mind; up to the time she herself died, his memory and his legacy shaped her view of the world.

By comparison, her mother was a shadowy, saintly figure, whose father, James Gantley, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, seemed more vivid to me as a child. His story features another heroic legend: his death, also from pneumonia, being ascribed by my mother to his attempts to help a poor woman who had run away in the depths of winter to escape an abusive husband. Why this story may have appealed so strongly to her only strikes me now. She was very pleased when I told her that a discussion at a conference of Irish historians I had attended had revealed that virtually everyone present had an RIC ancestor. ‘They were very go-ahead,’ was her astute comment.

Her father’s legacy made her successfully independent, from an unpromising start, when she left school early to ‘serve her time’ in a shoe shop. Twelve years later, aged twenty-seven, she opened her own shop with a £100 bank loan guaranteed by an uncle. This was an unusual step for a young woman at that time, even one who was already, though secretly, engaged to a ‘strong’ farmer. After she married and my father joined her in the business, it continued to operate under her name, J. Rice. ‘We didn’t want to confuse the customers,’ was her explanation, but that name over the door was always a matter of pride to her, a sign not only of her own success, but of continuity with the family tradition of business in the town since the late eighteenth century. Remaining so publicly a Rice linked her also to Ballymacar, her childhood home, which we visited regularly and heard about daily. So powerful was its meaning for her that when her brother in his old age sold it to a neighbour, and not to another family member as she had wished, she didn’t speak to him for years. By then she was not only retired from business but had sold the shop, after accepting stoically that none of her six children wanted to take it over.

My father’s story seemed less glamorous, rooted as it was in a rural community where his ancestors had farmed for over three hundred years. He had little interest in the family history and no nostalgia for his childhood. Indeed, as it appeared in the stories told by himself and his brothers, it was a life of physical hardship and dour duty, presided over by an authoritarian and remote father. I am named after him as tradition dictated. When my father was sixteen his mother died, and with a father who seemed unable to communicate except to give orders he came to rely on his older sisters, May and Peg, and to form an intense friendship with his brothers, Jim, John and Nick, which was to last all of their lives. Their father, Thomas Dunne, also had other resources. He had always been bookish and will appear later in this account as the author of romantic nationalist verse, celebrating the 1798 heroes that came from his district. Up to his death, he spent every Sunday in a back room, drawing and writing in a series of notebooks, only two of which survive. He was, his sons agreed, a hopeless farmer, despite his meticulous field maps and his records of crop rotation. In the wider community, however, he was different: gregarious, and prominent in local politics, he was secretary of the local Land League and ultimately a Poor Law Guardian. Even in his old age, he was known to his sons, as well as his neighbours, as ‘the Guardian’, a name that suited their image of him.

He in turn was ruled by his brother...