Pal o’ Me Heart

David Halperin

• At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
  Scribner, 572 pp, £6.99, July 2002, ISBN 0 7432 0714 9

A great Irish lady, her disgraced nephew and a young priest with strong Republican sympathies are driving through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1916. ‘They were speaking of patriots, Dublin associations of famous rebels, ancient and modern.’ Merrion Square evokes the memory of a distinguished Irishman whom the English put on trial. His enemies bullied and corrupted the witnesses against him, the newspapers denounced him, his friends deserted him. ‘His conviction was inevitable. But from the dock he gave a celebrated speech that defied to the heavens the traductions of his adversaries.’ News of the hero’s arrest prompted an exodus of ‘like-minded gentlemen’ to France. ‘Flight of the earls,’ the priest comments, always quick to seize on the historical paradigm: ‘the Wild Geese who chose to serve in exile than suffer the alien yoke at home. It is history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose history? Exemplary as this Irish martyr may be, the priest is unable to identify him because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde.