`On or about December 1910 human nature changed," wrote Virginia Woolf. She was referring to an art exhibition in London. It took the sort of liberties with the human form which the guns and bombs of the Great War would soon take with actual bodies on European battlefields. Confronted with mass graves which mocked the very notion of individual dignity, D.H. Lawrence wrote: "it was in 1915 that the old world ended".
Ireland played its part in this strange race to modernity, although the decade began quietly enough. The Abbey Theatre continued to offer the avant-garde plays of Yeats and Synge, but these proved far less popular than the social comedies of Augusta Gregory. The Gaelic League offered adult education in Irish to men and women who mingled freely at its summer schools. It was the Irish equivalent of the Fabians, those English socialists and suffragettes who cycled into the countryside and held weekend seminars about the need to reform society.
Out in Rathfarnham, Patrick Pearse ran an all-Irish school, St Enda's. It was based equally on the child-centred techniques of Maria Montessori and on Gaelic tradition. Even militant socialists sent their sons to the college. (Jim Larkin, later in the decade, told his son that it would be a prelude to "finishing school" in Moscow.) At St Enda's, according to one of its students, "Cuchulain was an important, if invisible, member of staff".
A cult of Cuchulain had emerged in the previous decade, thanks to the writings of Yeats, Gregory and Pearse. Though described as the epic hero of the ancient Gael, Cuchulain was also a rather Edwardian figure. He was famed for knocking the heads from enemies in single combat and, ultimately, for dying strapped to a post, like the image of the crucified Jesus. Combining pagan energy and Christ-like suffering in this way, he was somewhat reminiscent of the "muscular Christians" produced at Eton and Rugby, a sort of English public schoolboy in drag.
It was only after graduates of St Enda's began to emulate the hero in realpolitik that the myth acquired a new set of meanings. What these might be was hinted at by Pearse one prize-day in St Enda's, when the winner of a poetry competition was rewarded not with the latest slim volume of Yeats but a gleaming new rifle.
Nevertheless, the country remained outwardly calm in the first few years. Sinn Fein had been founded by Arthur Griffith in 1908, but its appeal remained limited: it lost an election by a two-to-one majority to the Irish Parliamentary Party in that year. John Redmond, leader of the parliamentarians, had every reason to believe that he and his colleagues were about to become the shapers of a new Ireland. As late as 1912, Patrick Pearse was still a rather minor speaker on Home Rule platforms, and in that year the House of Commons promised a parliament to Dublin within 24 months.
Outraged unionists ran guns into Larne and founded the Ulster Volunteer Force, threatening to set up a provisional government in Ulster, if the need arose. Almost a quarter of a million signed the Covenant. Confronted with this, Redmond agreed that it would be foolish to compel the unionists and wiser to retreat from the demand for Home Rule for the whole island. Militant nationalists, insisting that "the north began" the militarisation process, set up their own rival army, the Irish Volunteers.
The farmers, well secured by the Land Acts of earlier decades, were enjoying great prosperity because of high food prices. In the cities, however, many were hungry. Dublin slums had the highest mortality rates in Europe: and many tenement owners were well-to-do Catholic businessmen. The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, founded by James Connolly and Jim Larkin, wielded more and more influence, to such a degree that one of the city's foremost capitalists, William Martin Murphy, formed an employers' federation and locked out 24,000 of its members.
The next eight months witnessed starvation, rioting and the establishment by Connolly of a Citizen Army; but the workers were crushed. Larkin was now the leader of a united working class, however, and the Irish Worker sold in tens of thousands.
The war in mainland Europe changed everything. Home Rule was postponed yet again, being now held out as a post-war reward for loyalty in the conflict. Tens of thousands of Irishmen volunteered to fight (as they saw it) for the rights of small nations, their own included. Many never returned, but the casualties of the Ulster Division at the Somme were perhaps the most horrific of all.
Back home, men like Desmond FitzGerald worried that the very notion of "Ireland" was being erased in a conflict which was not really being conducted in the people's interest. Nationalists were as shocked as everyone else by the loss of lives. The Rising, which came on Easter Monday 1916, was among other things an attempt to take Ireland out of the Great War and to remind citizens that they had a cause of their own. Though dubbed the "Sinn Fein rebellion", it was led by the Volunteers and Citizen Army.
The Proclamation of the Republic was phrased in radical language. It addressed "Irishmen and Irishwomen" at a time when women in most European countries were still excluded from the franchise. Over 70 women fought as soldiers in the Citizen Army, and the rebels named Hannah Sheehy Skeffington as a minister of the new government in the event of a victory. She would have been the first female government minister in the world, an honour which eventually fell to Alexandra Kollontai in Russia.
By promising to cherish all the children of the nation equally, the rebels prefigured a welfare state, decades before the implementation of such a thing in Scandinavian countries or in post-war Britain.
SOME of the insurgents wished to restore Gaelic values, but their understanding of "tradition" was revolutionary. They saw it in terms of despised or forgotten moments of their people's past, moments still filled with unused potentials which could be tapped for a better future. Pearse may have summoned Cuchulain to his side, but only to validate that dream of a welfare state. A revolutionary departure could be presented as a reassuring revival.
All innovations were thus giftwrapped in the rhetoric of the past, the better to secure a hearing in a tradition-minded country. So Connolly soothed fears of socialism with the claim in The Reconquest of Ireland that it would simply be a return to the Gaelic system of landholding, except that now the government rather than the chieftain would hold land in the name of the entire community.
By a similar method, working through the second half of the decade, the writer James Joyce giftwrapped Ulysses, the most subversive prose-work of the century, in the framework of one of Europe's oldest tales, The Odyssey of Homer. Like his political counterparts, he rejected the idea of a contradiction between past and future, between the archaic and the avant-garde.
Ulysses, a pacifist celebration of the womanly man Leopold Bloom, was another form of protest against the Great War. Contrary to those propagandists who saw the war as an heroic pursuit of extreme sensations, his book celebrated everyday life and recommended the middle range of experience. That attitude is far easier to understand now than the statement of Sigmund Freud in 1915 that, with the coming of mass graves, life had become "interesting once again".
At this distance, the ethos and images surrounding the Easter Rising and the Somme seem almost identical. The idea that it was sweet and decorous to die for country links the poetry of Pearse to that of Rupert Brooke; and the mediocrity of life in later decades would be blamed on the loss of the best and brightest of a generation - either to the British firingsquads or to the machine-guns of Europe. For half a century after that event, the memory of the Irish who died in the first World War was all but extirpated from the official record of the 26 counties; and for the next quarter-century the 1916 rebels were victims of a somewhat similar mixture of forgetfulness and disparagement.
"The misfortune of the Irish," said the Soviet leader Lenin, "was that they rose too soon, before the revolt of the European proletariat had matured." Writing in The Irish Times commemorative supplement in 1966, Conor Cruise O'Brien agreed. Had the rebels waited until 1918, he said, they would have found a country united against the threat of conscription. Then a rising with mass support could have led to mutinies by Irish troops across the western front, with the likelihood of copycat reactions by other soldiers and the imminent collapse of the European order. Connolly's prophecy - that "a pin in the hands of a child might pierce the heart of a giant" - could have been fulfilled.
What happened was interesting enough. Sinn Fein captured 73 seats in the 1918 election, as against the Parliamentary Party's six. Sinn Fein did this, not through a pro-violence policy, but as the party which most openly opposed conscription into an unpopular war. That is the real source of the principle of Irish neutrality. It also suggests that Sinn Fein prospers at the polls when it is a peace party and suffers when implicated in violence.
The policy of Arthur Griffith was now applied and a parliament convened which proclaimed allegiance to the republic of Pearse and Connolly. Sinn Fein set up a virtual republic, whose alternative courts abolished the British paraphernalia of wigs and gowns. In kitchens and bars across the countryside, an illegal set of judges and lawyers ran a system in opposition to that of the British courts, restoring self-esteem to communities anxious to curb the kind of thuggery which exists in time of social disorder. There may be a lesson for today's Sinn Fein in that too.
THE democratic programme of the Dail of 1919 was in keeping with the wave of social democracy then sweeping through many parts of Europe. The old gang who had led the young with deceitful rhetoric into a useless war were discredited, and all forms of authority were challenged as deference declined. By April 1920, Irish workers organised a political strike in support of 100 republican prisoners who were fasting for political status. Within a single day, they produced an organisation so awesome that the government preferred to concede to them than see such self-confidence develop. "A continuation of the fight which ended yesterday," said The Irish Times, "might have witnessed the establishment of soviets of workmen in all parts of Ireland." Trade unionists were no longer pleading for concessions: they now asserted that workers, as chief producers of wealth, were superior persons in their own right.
The radical potentials opened up in this decade were achieved, but only in the arts. Across Europe, the 1920s provided instances of how to liquidate a revolution. In Ireland, the Dail Courts were wound down by politicians who sought as much power as possible for themselves. Soon, judges and lawyers would sport the old wigs and gowns of the British system, and the newly-liberated people would be taught to employ the unmodified mechanisms of the old colonial order upon themselves in an independent state. War and civil war would leave people so exhausted that they had little energy with which to re-imagine the national condition. The "retreat from revolution" had begun. Human nature hadn't changed all that much: and the persistence of the ancien regime was the most remarkable thing of all.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD and author of Inventing Ireland
