Hillside Men

Roy Foster

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual by Richard English
Oxford, 284 pp, £25.00, March 1998, ISBN 0 01 982059 3

W.B. Yeats Liked to think (and write) that the insurrection of Easter 1916 was ignited by a generation of cultural revolutionaries; and it did indeed bear – in retrospect at least – some resemblance to a revolution of the intellectuals. But the towering figures among Irish writers during the long upheaval from the Fin de Siècle to the Thirties lived aside from the world of the insurrectionists. The latter were rarely writers and the books they produced are undistinguished. Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland and Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom have their charms, but there was no Herzen or Trotsky capable of distilling the Irish revolutionary mentality and experience into a classic memoir: except for Ernie O’Malley.

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Vol. 20 No. 14 · 16 July 1998 » Roy Foster » Hillside Men (print version)
pages 12-13 | 3978 words

Letters

From Michael Ward

I was glad to learn that someone has finally written a book about Ernie O’Malley. As Roy Foster points out (LRB, 16 July), On Another Man’s Wound is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Irish literature; and what Richard English calls ‘the enraptured style of politics’ is central to any proper understanding of Irish Republicanism.

On 9 December 1920 O’Malley was captured by Innistogue auxiliaries, bound with ropes, questioned and sentenced to be shot at dawn. When he refused to answer questions, men wearing boots stamped on his bare feet, breaking his toes, jabbed his sides with bayonets and threatened to bayonet him to death. Taken to Dublin Castle to be questioned, he was half-throttled and beaten until unable to stand. He was shown a revolver and told he had three minutes to live. There was no bullet in the revolver but O’Malley gave no information in any case. He was sent to Kilmainham Prison in such a condition that comrades who saw him there did not know who he was. As Dorothy MacCordle points out, the pages recounting this in cident were suppressed when On Another Man’s Wound was published in 1936. Although you would hardly think so from reading historians – including Irish historians who ought to know better – Ireland had already been partitioned when O’Malley was captured.

O’Malley’s later life confirms that although he was, to some degree, a realist, he remained a convinced Irish Republican until his death; and he did not mean what so many journalists, academics and intellectuals mean by ‘realism’, which today has become a euphemism for cowardice, worship of money and power, and the worst kind of nihilistic lack of belief. There is nothing wrong with ‘revising’ history if the intention is to correct mistakes and extend one’s understanding. But with some Irish and British historians today, rewriting Irish history recalls the procedures of Stalinist sycophants like Zhdanov and Fadayev.

Michael Ward
Oldham