Val Doonican, and the Fight for Irish Freedom

Val Doonican did at least as much for Anglo-Irish relations as the Queen’s visit, that spurious rugby game in Croke Park, or the existence in material reality of Roy Maurice Keane, Junior. That fact is not widely known in this country, for different reasons, but it should be. Val Doonican is a hero, in his way, and should be celebrated as such.

Not even Val Doonican’s most ardent admirer could deny that the man was born square. Val Doonican was never cool. The jumpers, the rocking chairs, the songs – Delaney’s Donkey, Paddy McGinty’s Goat – no. There is no hipster willing to carry the charade through to that extent. But, in the long and troubled history of two islands in the North Atlantic, Val Doonican provided a bridge when it was needed.

We know there was huge emigration from Ireland to Britain during the war and after. We sing songs about it all the time. But what was that experience like, really? What was it like for someone who had grown up on the side of a mountain to find him or herself living in a terraced house in Blackburn, Lancashire?

There was a marvellous story in the Bullaí Máirtín collection called Peadaí Gaelach Eile, about a man about to go to London to make his fortune but who finds out just how much of a fish out of water he’s going to be before he even leaves home.

It was hard on that generation. They never liked to speak of it themselves, because it was humiliating for them. The current generation doesn’t like to think of it, because they seem to have trouble conceiving of people who are not themselves.

It’s interesting as well that the literature of those who built up and tore England down after the Second World War seems stronger in Irish than in English. Where are the English language equivalents of the navvying memoirs of Domhnall Mac Amhlaigh or Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé?

Nobody wanted to go on the record about how hard it was to come from rural poverty to a major industrial city. And nobody wants to think about the Irish being considered in England the way the Romanians are considered here. Dirty, stinking, going around in gangs, leaving their rubbish lying around, speaking gibberish, not to be trusted.

And then, in the mid-sixties, one of those dirty, stinking Irish people got himself a variety TV show on prime time with the BBC. He wasn’t dirty. He was very well turned out, always with his hair cut and clean and nice sweater on him. He sang comic songs with a twinkle in his eye.

And maybe, after watching the Val Doonican Show on TV, maybe some Englishman heard his Irish neighbours the next day and detected that trace of Doonican in them. Maybe the way they spoke wasn’t gibberish; maybe it was actually a lot like that chap on the television. I wonder could any of them sing songs as well?

What was Val Doonican worth to the Irish community in Britain in the ‘seventies, when the bombs were going off in Birmingham and Guilford and in the car park of the Houses of Parliament themselves? How reassuring was it for the ordinary British person to hear of Delaney’s Donkey winning the half-mile race after the newscaster had just told them that the IRA had just admitted responsibility for the bombing of another bar, resulting in five killed and seven maimed?

Yes, Val Doonican wasn’t very cool. No, Delaney’s Donkey isn’t quite Carrickfergus. But Val Doonican was, by all accounts, a very lovely man who asked for little from life and brought happiness and security to millions and millions. Very, very few of us will get to say that we we are brought to account on the Last Day. Suaimhneas síoraí na bhFlaithis dó.

What Exactly Are We Commemorating Here?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

It’s time to talk about 1916. It’s a pity that we have to talk about it at all, as the anniversary should be, in theory, like a second St Patrick’s Day at its very worst. But recent events and remarks in the press about inviting British Royals to attend whatever ceremonies will happen now beg the question what exactly is it that we’re commemorating, and what do we hope to achieve in that commemoration?

The momentum behind the idea of the British Royal Family being involved suggests that this hasn’t been thought through at all, and if we only learned one thing in recent years, we should have figured out that not thinking things through can only lead to trouble.

Fifty years ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, things were much clearer. The then President and Taoiseach were both active participants in 1916, and were going to push the boat out come what may.

Fifty years later, we are in a very different Ireland indeed. Thirty years of war in the North has made a lot of people ambivalent about nationalism. The continuing recession has made people bitter, and the continuing exposure of scandal-ridden state institutions as being deeply, deeply flawed eats away at national pride. The current government was elected to change all that in what felt like a culturally seismic election, and nothing has changed at all.

And through all this, Ireland’s warped relationship with the English now bubbles up again to distract further from the major work of repairing the country, ninety-four years after we were returned charge of it. England is Ireland’s frenemy, to use that useful phrase popularized by our sisters in the TV show Sex and the City.

We need them and we hate needing them. We insist that we are different because we are scared at how alike we are. We live and die with their soccer teams while lustily booing their soccer teams’ stars during the World Cup.

And of course for the English, the Irish are just a detail, like a bothersome bumble-bee at a picnic. The English are traumatised by the loss of their Empire, their national identity and, if things go Alex Sammond’s way in October, a good big slice of their United Kingdom itself. They really can’t make time for the Irish not knowing how to feel about Steven Gerrard.

Ireland isn’t the only country to have won a kind of freedom from the English. The United States of America did so as long ago as 1776. British Prime Ministers and Monarchs have visited the United States in official capacities many times since, but I don’t remember any of those Prime Ministers or Monarchs being asked to make goms of themselves at any Fourth of July celebrations.

India – another country where the British thought partition would be an answer – celebrates her Independence on the 15th of August. You will see His Royal Highness the Prince Harry buying beasts at the Fair in Belmullet on that day before you will see the Indian Government feeling the need to invite a Royal to India to confirm that there are no hard feelings, no, really.

Because isn’t that what this invitation is about, really? To reassure ourselves that we are still loved by our betters? There is no other way to explain it. It’s got nothing to with the dead generations from which Ireland derives her long tradition of nationhood, is it?

There’s an argument to be made that the idea of the nation state is a fading one, and the growth of the superpowers – the USA, a United States of Europe / European Federation, Russia, China and the rest, with individual national identities being to the super-state what Ballina is to Mayo, or what Mayo used to be to Ireland, is the way of future.

The future has a tendency to happen whether or not we’re prepared for it. The problem with a 1916 Commemoration Invitation to a British Royal is that such an invitation isn’t looking to that future.

If it were, the invitation would be to Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi and Francois Hollande (we’d have to give Hollande a +1 of course, rather than name his partner – you know what that fella’s like). But nobody’s talking about inviting our current and future partners. The invitation is to our former rulers, who still loom so large in our heads.

Why is that? Why, after ninety years, have we not learned to stand alone? And why, in the spurious “decade of commemoration,” aren’t we talking about the reasons that the Rising happened in the first place? What place will that long tradition of nationhood referred to in the Proclamation have when we celebrate its hundredth anniversary?

Liam Ó Briain, who later went on to become a Professor of Romance Languages in UCD, wrote a memoir, Cuimhní Cinn, of his own time in the Rising as a young man. Ó Briain was stationed on St Stephen’s Green West, near the Royal College of Surgeons. One night, he led a squad of men to raid some nearby premises to see what they could loot to use as barricades.

One of the troops found some old, thick books and suggested they be used, as they were thick enough to be as good as sandbags. Ó Briain examined the books – they were annals of the monasteries, the old books like the Book of Leinster and the Book of Ulster, which contains the first written history of Cúchulainn.

“We can’t use them lads,” Ó Briain told the men. “If we’re fighting this war for anything, we’re fighting for those books.”

The Government hopes to have a role for the British Royal Family at the 1916 Commemoration, and ideally they’re hoping that the Royals will be represented by the heir to the throne himself. What role will those old books have, the old books that Liam Ó Briain thought justified having a Rising in the first place? Or are we still standing by the gate, waiting for a nod from Sir as he rides by? Will the Irish stand there forever?

The Army That Didn't Shoot Its Deserters

There is a story brewing in the media that the Irish state was somehow negligent in its treatment of deserters from the Irish army during the Second World War. The opposite is the case; the fact that the soldiers did not suffer capital punishment, or do not now have the threat of capital punishment hanging over them, was and is an act of profound clemency.

Being in the army isn’t like another job. The risk of death is part of parcel of soldiering. So how then do ask a man to go and do something that might get him killed?

You can’t have a company of soldiers who hold discussions on what we’ll do next. George Orwell wrote eloquently in Homage to Catalonia how hard it was to run a war with an army which rejected power structures, and would only act after full democratic discussion had been carried out – by which time the Falange were five miles inside the lines and cutting the Republicans to ribbons.

When a soldier is given an order he or she has to snap to it, and think about it after, if it all. This is especially true in wartime, when the risk of death or dismemberment is only a moment away. And one of the ways that armies since Alexander have maintained the discipline necessary to hold the line, to put your duty ahead of the need to secure your own welfare, was to execute you if you didn’t.

Whatever chance you had in battle, you had no chance against a firing squad. Therefore, they went over the top at Ypres and Passchendaele and all those other hellholes. It was the only way they could.

When soldiers deserted the Irish army during the Second World War, or the Emergency if you like, they were liable for a death sentence. The current bleating about them not being given heroes’ welcomes is nonsense. To not shoot the men was an act of profound clemency, taking into account many of the different factors at play. The Government can’t let acts of desertion slide, but to have shot them would have been too much.

The reality of the situation as it was in the Ireland twenty years after Independence is not being taken into account in the current debate. The chief spin is that Ireland was somehow morally bankrupt in not fighting Hitler. Well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty vision, isn’t it?

In 1938 the British did everything in their power to appease Hitler. Time Magazine named Der Fuhrer their Man of the Year. The USA, guardians of liberty, did not declare war on Germany until Germany declared war on the USA first. There are all manner of evils taking place in the world now, in countries run by evil people.

Hands up everyone who thinks its time to send to troops to Zimbabwe, to stop Robert Mugabe slaughtering his people just as Hitler slaughtered the Jews. And hands up everyone who thinks that’s ever going to happen. Wars are always about politics first, morality a distant second.

Besides. Even if Ireland had entered the war, it’s greatest threat to its own sovereignty was from the British, as Churchill made clear in 1945. He remarked that “if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish for ever from this earth.” If Churchill had come to close quarters with Mr de Valera, as he wished to do, would the Irish soldiers have then re-deserted to rejoin their own army, or would they have happily invaded away, secure that they were Morally Right?

De Valera’s famous condolence visit to the German embassy on the death of Hitler is always used as a stick with which to beat him. What is not brought up as often is that De Valera’s sending of the Dublin Fire Brigade to Belfast was a breach of neutrality. It was one of many other breaches. To say that the Government of the day were morally bankrupt in their attitude to Hitler is not true. They provided as much tacit support as they could under the reality of their own time and situation.

The headline in this Irish Times story describes the deserters as the “soldiers who left to fight Hitler.” However, if you read the story, you realise, as you may have suspected all along, that they left for money. They took the King’s shilling, as generations had before them.

We should never forget our history, but we shouldn’t try to rewrite it to suit modern agendas. More luck to the museum in Boyle that commemorates the Devil’s Own Connaught Rangers. The best of people took that shilling, because they had no other choice.

Paddy and Tom Clancy, of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem fame, served with the RAF in India. A man married to your correspondent’s mother’s cousin was in the RAF during the war. Good luck to them all. Starving for a principle is no way to live.

What is problematic is the current campaign to rewrite history and pretend that things happened that didn’t happen at all, or judge historical events out of their context. We were told that it was “too soon” for Martin McGuinness to be President of Ireland seventeen years after the IRA ceasefire. Yet eighteen years was not too soon for Ireland to fight alongside the army that hanged Kevin Barry and burned Cork, in the opinion of this “pardon the deserters” movement.

The “moral argument” that Hitler had to be stopped was not apparent to Neville Chamberlain, the editors of Time magazine or the United States in the 1930s, and none of their cities looked like Cork after the British Army went playing with matches.

De Valera’s sending of the fire brigades to Belfast is a bigger deal than the empty formula of the Herr Hempel visit. To berate the Irish state for its actions during the war is nonsense, and based on spin and second-guessing. As for the deserters, they got their shilling and they didn’t get a bullet when they came back home. They’re ahead of the game.

Britain's Changing Attitudes to Death

Thomas Gray is not considered one of the great poets in English in the same way that Milton or Byron or Tennyson are, but it all came together for him when he wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray’s Elegy is one of the great poems in the language, if not any language.

London’s mayor Boris Johnson was writing recently in the Telegraph about what a joy it is to learn poetry by heart and if that’s your thing Gray’s Elegy should be on your shortlist. It’s a good poem to learn because it sticks to classical models of rhyme and meter. So when you recite it the rhythm of the thing is clear and distinct, and very pleasing to the ear.

As for the poem’s reflection on the death that awaits us all, Gray’s Elegy is unsurpassed. Samuel Johnson wrote that "the Churchyard abounds in images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." It’s very much just what the doctor ordered.

And the poem became enormously popular enormously quickly. Eight years after the Elegy was published, the British were laying siege to Montcalm’s French garrison at Quebec. They weren’t getting much change, until General James Wolfe decided on a daring attack up some cliffs that the French didn’t think were assailable, and therefore did not defend as tightly as other parts of the redoubt. As the assault party sailed for the cliffs, Wolfe recited Gray’s Elegy in its entirety to his fellow officers, to keep spirits up.

That’s General Wolfe in the picture above, as famously painted by Benjamin West. As you can see, although he took Quebec Wolfe paid for it with his life. Churchill like to quip during the Second World War that if any Briton doubted his patriotism, he should be told that “Wolfe took Quebec.” You may safely bet your life that Churchill could quote Gray’s Elegy in its entirety also.

It’s now two hundred and fifty years since Wolfe recited Thomas Gray's most famous poem before taking Quebec. News coming from Britain today about another path of glory that’s lead but to the grave shows just how much that country has changed.





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