Pádraig Pearse - 'Ghosts' (Part One)
(Ten minute read)
‘Ghosts’ is the first of a collection of four essays written by Pádraig Pearse during the last six months of his life. The other three being, The Separatist Idea, The Spiritual Nation and The Sovereign People.
Pearse finished Ghosts on Christmas Day, 1915. Through this essay Pearse explores the separatist ideal from the time of the first Norman invasion in 1169, right up to the time of writing. In doing so, he includes quotations from Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, Fintan Lalor, John Mitchell and Charles Stewart Parnell. It is the spirit of these ‘ghosts’ that Pearse invokes to awaken the spirit of freedom within his living readers.
We have broken Ghosts into four parts, with part one below. The remaining three parts will be published over the next three weeks.
Preface
Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed a trust to us living men. Ghosts are troublesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.
Of the shade of the Norwegian dramatist I beg forgiveness for a plagiaristic, but inevitable title.
P. H. PEARSE.
ST. ENDA’S COLLEGE, RATHFARNHAM, Christmas Day, 1915.
Ghosts
There has been nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation. Other generations have failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, failing ignobly, some man among them has redeemed them from infamy by the splendour of his protest.
But the failure of the last generation has been mean and shameful, and no man has arisen from it to say or do a splendid thing in virtue of which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode is squalid. It will remain the one sickening chapter in a story which, gallant or sorrowful, has everywhere else some exaltation of pride.
‘Is mairg do ghní go holc agus bhíos bocht ina dhiaidh,’ says the Irish proverb. ‘Woe to him that doeth evil and is poor after it.’. The men who have led Ireland for twenty-five years have done evil, and they are bankrupt.
They are bankrupt in policy, bankrupt in credit, bankrupt now even in words. They have nothing to propose to Ireland, no way of wisdom, no counsel of courage. When they speak they speak only untruth and blasphemy. Their utterances are no longer the utterances of men. They are the mumblings and the gibberings of lost souls.
One finds oneself wondering what sin these men have been guilty of that so great a shame should come upon them. Is it that they are punished with loss of manhood because in their youth they committed a crime against manhood?. . .Does the ghost of Parnell hunt them to their damnation?
Even had the men themselves been less base, their failure would have been inevitable. When one thinks over the matter for a little one sees that they have built upon an untruth. They have conceived of nationality as a material thing, whereas it is a spiritual thing.
They have made the same mistake that a man would make if he were to forget that he has an immortal soul. They have not recognised in their people the image and likeness of God. Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dishonour on pain of eternal perdition.
They have thought of nationality as a thing to be negotiated about as men negotiate about a tariff or about a trade route, rather than as an immediate jewel to be preserved at all peril, a thing so sacred that it may not be brought into the market places at all or spoken of where men traffic.
He who builds on lies rears only lies. The untruth that nationality is corporeal, a thing defined by statutes and guaranteed by mutual interests, is at the base of the untruth that freedom, which is the condition of a hale nationality, is a status to be conceded rather than a glory to be achieved; and of the other untruth that it can ever be lawful in the interest of empire, in the interest of wealth, in the interest of quiet living, to forego the right to freedom.
The contrary is the truth. Freedom, being a spiritual necessity, transcends all corporeal necessities, and when freedom is being considered interests should not be spoken of. Or, if the terms of the counting house be the ones that are best understood, let us put it that it is the highest interest of a nation to be free.
Like a divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholicity, of apostolic succession. Of unity, for it contemplates the nation as one; of sanctity, for it is holy in itself and in those who serve it; of catholicity, for it embraces all the men and women of the nation; of apostolic succession, for it, or the aspiration after it, passes down from generation to generation from the nation’s fathers.
A nation’s fundamental idea of freedom is not affected by the accidents of time and circumstance. It does not vary with the centuries, or with the comings and goings of men or of empires. The substance of truth does not change, nor does the substance of freedom.
Yesterday’s definition of both the one and the other is to-day’s definition and will be to-morrow’s. As the body of truth which a true church teaches can neither be increased nor diminished – though truth implicit in the first definition may be made explicit in later definitions – so a true definition of freedom remains constant; it cannot be added to or subtracted from or varied in its essentials, though things implicit in it may be made explicit by a later definition.
If the definition can be varied in its essentials, or added to, or subtracted from, it was not a true definition in the first instance.
To be concrete, if we to-day are fighting for something either greater than or less than the thing our fathers fought for, either our fathers did not fight for freedom at all, or we are not fighting for freedom. If I do not hold the faith of Tone, and if Tone was not a heretic, then I am.
If Tone said ‘ BREAK the connection with England,’ and if I say ‘MAINTAIN the connection with England,’ I may be preaching a saner (as I am certainly preaching a safer) gospel than his, but I am obviously not preaching the same gospel.
Now what Tone taught, and the fathers of our national faith before and after Tone, is ascertainable. It stands recorded. It has fulness, it has clarity, the sufficiency and the definiteness of dogma. It lives in great and memorable phrases, a grandiose national faith. They, too, have left us their Credo.
The Irish mind is the clearest mind that has ever applied itself to the consideration of nationality and of national freedom. A chance phrase of Keating’s might almost stand as a definition. He spoke of Ireland as ‘domhan beag innti féin’, a little world in herself.
It was characteristic of Irish speaking men that when they thought of the Irish nation they thought less of its outer forms and pomps than of the inner thing which was its soul. They recognised that the Irish life was the thing that mattered, and that, the Irish life dead, the Irish nation was dead.
But they recognised that freedom was the essential condition of a vigorous Irish life. And for freedom they raised their ranns; for freedom they stood in battle through five bloody centuries.
Irish nationality is an ancient spiritual tradition, one of the oldest and most august traditions in the world. Politically, Ireland’s claim has been for freedom in order to the full and perpetual life of that tradition. The generations of Ireland have gone into battle for no other thing. To the Irish mind for more than a thousand years freedom has had but one definition.
It has meant not a limited freedom, a freedom conditioned by the interests of another nation, a freedom compatible with the suzerain authority of a foreign parliament, but absolute freedom, the sovereign control of Irish destinies. It has meant not the freedom of a class, but the freedom of a people. It has meant not the freedom of a geographical fragment of Ireland, but the freedom of all Ireland, of every sod of Ireland.
And the freedom thus defined has seemed to the Irish the most desirable of all earthly things. They have valued it more than land, more than wealth, more than ease, more than empire.
Fearr bheith i mbarraibh fuairbheann
I bhfeitheamh shuainghearr ghrinnmhear,
Ag seilg troda ar fhéinn eachtrann
‘Gá bhfuil fearann bhur sinnsear,
said Angus Mac Daighre O’Daly. ‘Better to be on the tops of the old teens keeping watch, short of sleep yet gladsome, urging fight against the foreign soldiery that hold your fathers’ land.’ And Fearflatha O’Gnive spoke for the generations that preferred exile to slavery:
Má thug an deonughadh dhi
Sacsa nua darbh’ ainm Éire
Bheith re a linn-si i láimh bíodhbhadh,
Do’n inse is cáir ceileabhradh.
‘If thou hast consented (O God) that there be a new England named Ireland, to be ever in the grip of a foe then to this isle we must bid farewell.’
I make the contention that the national demand of Ireland is fixed and determined; that that demand has been made by every generation; that we of this generation receive it as a trust from our fathers; that we are bound by it; that we have not the right to alter it or to abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any undertaking made in the name of Ireland to accept in full satisfaction of Ireland’s claim anything less than the generations of Ireland have stood for is null and void, binding on Ireland neither by the law of God nor by the law of nations.
A nation can bind itself by treaty to do or to forego specific things, as a man can bind himself by contract; but no treaty which places a nation’s body and soul in the power of another nation, no treaty which abnegates a nation’s nationhood, is binding on that nation, any more than a contract of perpetual slavery is binding on an individual.
If in a drunken frolic or in mere abject unmanliness I sell myself and my posterity to a slaveholder to have and to hold as a chattel property to himself and his heirs, am I bound by the contract? Are my children bound by it? Can any legal contract make a wrong thing binding? And if not, can a contract executed in my name, but without my express or implied authority, make a wrong thing binding on me and on my children’s children?
Ireland’s historic claim is for Separation. Ireland has authorised no man to abate that claim. The man who, in the name of Ireland, accepts as ‘a final settlement’ anything less by one fraction of an iota than Separation from England will be repudiated by the new generation as surely as O’Connell was repudiated by the generation that came after him.
The man who, in return for the promise of a thing which is not merely less than Separation, but which denies Separation and proclaims the Union perpetual, the man who, in return for this, declares peace between Ireland and England and sacrifices to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of fifty thousand Irishmen, is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation, that one can only say of him that it were better for that man (as it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born.
I have proved this terrible infidelity against a living Irishman, against all who have supported him, against the majority of Irishmen who are now past middle life, if I can establish that the historic claim of Ireland has been for Separation. And I proceed to establish this.