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A Kind of RepublicanAuthor(s): Richard EnglishSource: Fortnight, No. 290, Supplement: Radical Ulsters (Dec., 1990), pp. 10-11Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25552667 .

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^^^^B operating in its near-human

^^^^^Ukjjl sympathies:

^mm\uW-W\ H Daybreak spread wearily over

^Lm^LmAm" mm tne mountains to the east< and

^Lw^LWKAwU crept down into the misty waste. ^^^

A thin breeze chilled the ebb

tide. Loose bodyless clouds released a drizzle of

rain. Inniscara Island shivered in the cold-lipped Atlantic, indifferent to a dawn that was lifeless.

From such an opening, it is quite plain that this

is not going to be a romantic story of the island

of Inniscara, as seen by a Synge or even as

might be painted by a Paul Henry, but a forbid

ding land where death and starvation are easier

than living and the full warmth of existence will never last long. Here is none other than a

place of struggle and the end of the struggle will

always be death. Mary Doogan will starve so

that her children will eat and they, in their turn, will have to sacrifice for the future. All in the

world is in a forward motion, though never in a

simple or over-optimistic way. The future

His community can be

seen to act, when at its

best and most united, in ways which

reinforce the deep sense

of sharing and

belonging

comes, but on the back of the sacrifices and

sufferings of the present. This remained his theme throughout all the

novels. Man is always seen in the harsh sur

vival conditions of the rugged north-west of

Ireland where, in time, all will run back to a

savage natural state, easily able to destroy the

little people who have a temporary hold on the

vulnerable pockets of land between rock and

sea. Perhaps O'Donnell's best and most opti mistic view of this world of survival is to be

seen in The Big Windows, the novel he pub lished in 1955, 30 years after his first novel,

Storm. Returning to the time of his own birth

(1893) for the setting of his novel in an isolated

glen in Donegal, words of Scots origin (like

slap for 'a breach, an opening', whang for 'a

thong', sib for 'related to') are cheek-by-jowl in a beautiful balancing of realism and ideal

ism, with words of Irish origin (like bacan for

'hook or hinge', scraw for 'a turf cut from a

field'). This language is one of the ways that

you recognise you have entered a different

culture, where you have to learn the customs,

ways and traditions of a folk, to see them in

operation, and you are thereby introduced to

the complex network of interrelationships of

kin, obligation and the common bonds of need

which makes up a tightly-knit community. What binds a people together, their deepest

'religion' (using that word in its original sig nificance as 'binding together') is human need.

His community can be seen to act, when at its

best and most united, in ways which reinforce

the deep sense of sharing and belonging, and

The Big Windows takes us into moments of

potential danger, where a people shows it be

lieves it will survive only by bonding together against any change, against all that is new.

O' Donnell' s novel aims to show that change is coming and can be coped with, but at a price.

The 'newness' and the bringer of change is the

new wife brought in from an apparently differ

ent community?the island?into the moun

tain people of the glen. There are two possible

ways of going: either the newcomer blends, over time, into the existing community which

will close around her (as the mountain will

close around the little fields unless constantly driven back), or she will bring change (and possible dislocation) to the community. But

she must be perceived as potentially like the

people whom she comes to live among. No one

who is perceived as totally alien can achieve

change. The doctor who visits the glen late in

the story can only be a vehicle for significant

change if he is seen as not too remote from the

people. He wears "a two-peak cap and riding breeches and a home-spun coat" and his first

words to the glen's folk are, importantly, ad

dressed to the whole community: "Is the whole

glen having this child?"

Brigid, the new wife, is potentially a disrup tive force, and the putting in of "the big win

dows" in the cabin walls will represent a pow erful challenge to the established habits of

thought and behaviour of a hitherto stable

community. O'Donnell's optimism shows in

that, first, we can have a lone woman who

cannot be browbeaten or defeated by the com

munity but whose natural aristocracy of man

ner is able to charm nearly everyone, including her very demanding mother-in-law with whom

she has to live, by her natural goodness, kind

liness, courage and great inner strengths. Sec

ond, given the apparent stability ofthe commu

nity which must be able to absorb changes, we

witness in the novel small but significant ad

justments to a modern world whose ripples reach even into the deep glens of Donegal. The

heroine is allowed by her husband to summon

the doctor for the birth of their first child, against all custom and tradition, but this allows

the other women to lament the dead babies

which, it is implied, the attendance of a doctor

would have kept alive, and infant mortality is a

topic which can now be discussed.

Again, the doctor on his visit objects to the

closeness ofthe dunghill to the house. Eventu

ally it is moved back, but we witness the strains

of accomodating new practices and ideas being eased by the kind of heroine and hero whom the

novelist provides, both ready for change, both

able to bring their community to accept changes for the better. Here lies the faith in ordinary

people who can find within themselves those

inner resources necessary for any leader of any state or organisation, and the novelist never

allows Tom and Brigid a single moment of real

malice or egotism or self-seeking. They are

perfect leaders of their community. But O'Donnell shows that a community

orders itself by unspoken laws, by rites and

customs which, however apparently barbarous

and even pagan, cement a people together:

Brigid, who heals the conjunctivitis of the old leader of the community with her breast-milk

accompanied by a prayer she has inherited, will

be seen by the reader to be related both to the

great St Brigid who healed and to the Celtic

triple goddess Brigid, out of whom she was

created.

O'Donnell's values emerge from the very first page ofthe novel, when the island commu

nity is gathering to bid farewell to its young woman going off to live with a stranger in a

strange place. We learn to accept that a group of

neighbours thinks and acts conceitedly as one,

that there are customs and sayings which gov ern all of life, that 'the island' is the unit which

must be safeguarded, and that the individual

functions within a supportive network: "for the

island, attentive to all things that touched its

people, had a saying that the girl who went forth

in tears got good reason for tears before life had

finished with her". Such a world of wholeness, ofthe continuities of joy, suffering, parting and

arrival, marriages and death, with an affirma

tion of human solidarity in the face of all that

undermines us, is the world of one of Ireland's

greatest regional novelists, and someone who

richly deserves our attention.

FRANCIS DOHERTY is senior lecturer in English and head of department at the University of Keele

A kind of

republican

RICHARD ENGLISH surveys O'Donnell's writing in the light of his politics

m HAVE NEVER looked on myself as a I writer?my pen was just a weapon." So

I claimed Peadar O'Donnell, yet it was a

I slightly strange assertion giveli the immense time and energy he devoted to his

writing. Seven novels, one play, three autobio

graphical works and a huge number of other

pieces (articles, pamphlets, short stories) sug

gest that O'Donnell does deserve to be consid

ered as a writer, even if he was reluctant to

claim the description. Born in 1893 in Co Donegal, O'Donnell's

activities during his long life included teach

ing, creative writing, trade union work,

10

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-\ ^ r

A drawing of Peadar O'Donnell by Sean O'Sullivan

prominent involvement with the republican movement, the infamous espousal of Irish

socialist projects, participation in international

radical movements and the pioneering within

Ireland of internationally celebrated causes (the Vietnam War, apartheid and nuclear weap

ons). In short, O'Donnell was a republican Renaissance Man, a polymathic Irish dissident.

In his plays and novels, Peadar O'Donnell

repeatedly highlights the social deprivation

experienced by his characters. His works are

set in rural and island communities in his native

Donegal, based upon people with whom he was

intimately familiar. Poverty and hunger afflict

the Doogans (Islanders) and the Dalachs

(Adrigoole), and painful deprivation is simi

larly present in Wrack and The Big Windows.

Small fanners and impoverished fishing com

munities, emigrants and migrants, social claus

trophobia and economic hardship?these are

the foundations on which O'Donnell's fic

tional edifice is built. But he is not content to

allow his people quietly to sink into economic

damnation. Just as his recognition of social

suffering developed from first-hand knowl

edge of the communities in question, so his

faith in the possibility of social redemption

grew out of a belief in the resilience and inher

ent 'neighbourliness' of those who were

disadvantaged. Storm, Islanders, Wrack, and

Proud Island contain illustrations of physical

bravery and many of O'Donnell's characters

display emotional toughness in their commit

ment to community, to family, to culture famil

iar but threatened. His fictional creations (or

portrayals) often unite as neighbours, ruggedly

dealing with tragedy and difficulty by means of

communal strength. In this respect, O'Donnell is only partially

convincing, for his characters are sometimes

portrayed in such mawkish, romantic or heroic

terms that they lose some credibility. The ideal

isation of certain figures?Charlie Doogan

(Islanders) or The Knife (The Knife)?mars

much ofthe writing, as does the author's didac

tic zeal. As with John Steinbeck, who also

focused much attention on migrant workers,

O'Donnell is most successful as a creative

writer when he is least overt in his attempts to

proselytise. The Big Windows is the least didactic of his works, the one in which there is

the greatest narratorial distance, and easily his

best literary offering. But O'Donnell's desire to convert was an

integral part of the man. In this sense, his pen was indeed "a weapon". The object of his fight was to revolutionise Irish society to realise his

socialist republican aspirations. Through or

ganisations such as Saor Eire (established in

1931) and the Republican Congress (set up in

1934), O'Donnell sought to achieve an Ireland

united, independent and socialist. Indeed, his

life was dedicated to this project. He was im

pressively tireless in his attempts to galvanise

people into action on what he perceived to be

the interwoven issues of national and social

emancipation. He occasionally worked in harmony with

the existing governmental structures. During the late 1930s, he was made official liaison

officer between the British and Irish govern ments and Irish migrant labourers, successfully

obtaining concessions for the latter. In the early

1940s, he worked as a welfare officer with the

Department of Industry and Commerce, and,

between 1948 and 1954, he was a member of

the government's Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems. But his over

riding aim was the destruction of the existing structures of Irish society and their replace

ment with a new, socialist order. He was em

phatically a revolutionary rather than a re

former. Saor Eire and the Republican Congress bore witness to this, as did his latter-day asser

tion that "in order to make any changes that are

worthwhile, you've got to endanger or change the structures which constitute capitalism".

Such radical aspirations brought O'Don

nell into regular conflict with members of the

Catholic clergy. His land annuities campaign

(which began during the 1920s) shared with Saor Eire and the Republican Congress the

unfortunate distinction of being attacked by Catholic spokesmen. O'Donnell was keen to

point out that a religious cloak often obscured

the political views being expressed by the clergy. He also sought to highlight the existence of

sympathetic clerics: as O'Donnell himself

commented, clerical pronouncements on poli tics often reflected rather than moulded lay

opinion. They tended in many cases to be a

function rather than a cause of the social ethos

which prevailed. Peadar O'Donnell's problem was that the

social ethos or atmosphere in Ireland was so

inimical to his projects. The private ownership ethic so prevalent in rural Ireland was deeply hostile to any programme deemed to smack of

social or co-operative ownership. O'Donnell's

own statements on the land were ambiguous. At times, he seemed to trumpet the merits of

small-farm, private ownership while at others

he implied that collective farming was the

superior model. This tension reflected the di

lemma Irish socialists faced on this issue.

The complex problems presented by parti tion and the hostility of the Catholic Church (and Catholic ethos) further explain the failure

of O'Donnell's many socialist republican cam

paigns. The separatist ground ^^^^H was for the main part cap- H*JjS^LmAm tured by de Valera, whose B jfl^^^l constitutional, socially-con- Hf'^B^^H servative nationalism made

^L~^^^^H pragmatic virtue out of 26- HbVIHh county necessity. O'Donnell claimed that de

Valera had "no sense of people in his body" and

that he looked out "over our industrial prob lems with the frugal standards of a peasant, or

a monk". Yet de Valera's claim?"whenever I

wanted to know what the Irish people wanted I

had only to examine my own heart and it told

me straight off what the Irish people wanted"?

proved sufficiently true to sustain him in power for many years. O'Donnell's comparable claim?"I know that I know the insides of the

minds of the mass of the folk in rural Ireland:

my thoughts are distilled out of their lives"?

appears less convincing. For his imaginative and articulate dissidence failed to resonate with

enough people in Ireland and he found himself the high priest of a dynamic yet marginalised and powerless cult.

RICHARD ENGLISH, lecturer in Irish politics at Queen's University, is writing a biography of Ernie O'Malley

FORTNIGHT EDUCATIONAL TRUST

This supplement is the first in a series produced by the Fortnight Educational Trust, which has

been established with the assistance of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Northern Ireland Voluntary

Trust. One of its aims is to draw

attention to those broad cultural

and social issues which lack

adequate discussion in Ireland.

Fortnight Educational Trust will also organise conferences and

seminars and produce educational materials. The first

conference, Voyages of

Discovery, on emigration, takes

place next month (see advertisement in the main

magazine).

We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Arts

Council of Northern Ireland in the production of this supplement. The next

supplement, on sexuality, will be

published with February's Fortnight

Series editor: DAMIAN SMYTH Conference organiser/ administrator: TESS HURSON Educational materials: CHRIS MOFFAT

11

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