Pádraig Pearse - 'Ghosts' (Part Two)
(Eight minute read)
Today we republish the second part of ‘Ghosts’, an essay written by Pádraig Pearse in December 1915. ‘Ghosts’ is the first of a collection of four essays that Pearse wrote during the last six months of his life. The other three being, The Separatist Idea, The Spiritual Nation and The Sovereign People.
In the extract below Pearse explores the tradition of ‘sepratism’ that is interwoven through centuries of Irish history. Whenever an Irish leader such as Henry Grattan or Daniel O’Connell sought to compromise on the national question, they were repudiated by the generations that followed. And so too was Redmond in Pearse’s own time.
It will be conceded to me that the Irish who opposed the landing of the English in 1169 were Separatists. Else why oppose those who came to annex? It will be conceded that the twelve generations of the Irish nation, the ‘mere Irish’ of the English state-papers, who maintained a winning fight against English domination in Ireland from 1169 to 1509 (roughly speaking), were Separatist generations.
The Irish princes who brought over Edward Bruce and made him King of Ireland were plainly Separatists. The Mac Murrough who hammered the English for fifty years and twice out-generalled and out-fought an English king was obviously a Separatist.
The turbulence of Shane O’Neill becomes understandable when it is realised that he was a Separatist; Separatists are apt, from of old, to be cranky and sore-headed. The Fitzmaurice who brought the Spaniards to Smerwick Harbour was a mere Separatist: he was one of the pro-Spaniards of those days – Separatists are always pro-Something of which the English disapprove.
That proud dissembling O’Neill and that fiery O’Donnell who banded the Irish and the Anglo-Irish against the English, who brought the Spaniards to Kinsale, who fought the war that, but for a guide losing his way, would have been known as the Irish War of Separation, were, it will be granted, Separatists.
Rory O’More was uncommonly like a Separatist. Owen Roe O’Neill was admittedly a Separatist, the leader of the Separatist Party in the Confederation of Kilkenny. When O’Neill sent his veterans into the battle-gap at Benburb with the words ‘In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, charge for Ireland!’ the word ‘Ireland’ had for him a very definite meaning.
If Sarsfield fought technically for an English king, the popular literature of the day leaves no doubt that in the people’s mind he stood for Separation, and that it was not an English faction but the Irish nation that rallied behind the walls of Limerick. So, up to 1691 Ireland was Separatist.
During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century a miracle wrought itself. So does the germ of Separation inhere in the soil of Ireland that the very Cromwellians and Williamites were infected with it. The Palesmen began to realise themselves as part of the Irish nation, and in the fulness of time they declared themselves Separatists.
While this process was slowly accomplishing itself, the authentic voice of Ireland is to be sought in her literature. And that literature is a Separatist literature. The ‘secret songs’ of the dispossessed Irish are the most fiercely Separatist utterances in any literature. Not until Mitchel did Anglo-Irish literature catch up that Irish vehemence. The poet of the Roman Vision sang of the Ireland that was to be:
No man shall be bound unto England
Nor hold friendship with dour Scotsmen,
There shall be no place in Ireland for outlanders,
Nor any recognition for the English speech.
The prophetic voice of Mitchel seems to ring in this:
The world hath conquered, the wind hath scattered like dust
Alexander, Cæsar, and all that shared their sway,
Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth low, –
And even the English, perchance their hour will come!
An unknown poet, seeing the corpse of an Englishman hanging on a tree, sings:
Good is thy fruit, O tree!
The luck of thy fruit on every bough!
Would that the trees of Inisfail
Were full of thy fruit every day!
The poet of the Druimfhionn Donn Dílis cries:
The English I’d rend as I’d rend an old brogue,
And that’s how I’d win me the Druim-fhionn Donn Og!
I do not defend this blood-thirstiness any more than I apologise for it. I simply point it out as the note of a literature. Finally, when the poet of the Róisín Dubh declares that
The Erne shall rise in rude torrents, hills shall be rent,
The sea shall roll in red waves, and blood be poured out,
Every mountain glen in Ireland, and the bogs shall quake,
is it to be supposed that these apocalyptic disturbances are to usher in merely a statutory legislation subordinate to the imperial parliament at Westminster whose supreme authority over Ireland shall remain unimpaired ‘anything in this Act notwithstanding’?
The student of Irish affairs who does not know Irish literature is ignorant of the awful intensity of the Irish desire for Separation as he is ignorant of one of the chief forces which make Separation inevitable.
The first man who spoke, or seemed to speak, for Ireland and who was not a Separatist was Henry Grattan. And it was against Henry Grattan’s Constitution that Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen rose. Thus the Pale made common cause with the Gael and declared itself Separatist.
It will be conceded that Wolfe Tone was a Separatist: he is The Separatist. It will be conceded that Robert Emmet was a Separatist. O’Connell was not a Separatist: but, as the United Irishmen revolted against Grattan, Young Ireland revolted against O’Connell.
And Young Ireland, in its final development, was Separatist. To Young Ireland belong three of the great Separatist voices. After Young Ireland the Fenians; and it will be admitted that the Fenians were Separatists. They guarded themselves against future misrepresentation by calling themselves the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
It thus appears that Ireland has been Separatist up to the beginning of the generation that is now growing old. Separatism, in fact, is the national position. Whenever an Irish leader has taken up a position different from the national position he has been repudiated by the next generation. The United Irishmen repudiated Grattan. The Young Irelanders repudiated O’Connell. The Irish Volunteers have repudiated Mr. Redmond.