Desmond Ryan was one of independent Ireland’s earliest and finest historians. One of Patrick Pearse’s initial 40 students of St Enda’s, he afterwards taught in the school and became Pearse’s secretary. During the Easter Rising he served under Pearse in the GPO. In A Man Called Pearse (1919), he created the hagiographic image of “a perfect man, whose faults were the mere defects of his straight and rigid virtues”. He also wrote the first biography of James Connolly, whose republican socialism strongly influenced his own political outlook.
Deeply disillusioned by the Irish Civil War, Ryan moved to London and worked as a journalist but continued to write about the historic period of upheaval through which he had lived, taking a mainly biographical approach.
Remembering Sion begins with Ryan’s arrival in Dublin from London as a boy in 1906 and ends with his return to Dublin in 1932 from 10 years’ exile in London. He recalls all the key figures – Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, Griffith, Markievicz, Larkin, Yeats, Collins, de Valera – as they walked the streets and met at and addressed meetings and demonstrations. He uses his diaries from the period but also resorts to artistic licence to amalgamate characters and recreate imagined conversations.
“Most impressive for its passages of lyrical impressionist reminiscence, [in it] he modified his youthful assessment of Pearse, acknowledging defects of character and judgement, while still asserting the man’s ultimate greatness,” says Ryan’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
In a lecture he gave to the Irish Literary Society in London in autumn 1934, Ryan said he “released most of the pent-up feelings of 25 years” in the book. “It is not harping or brooding on the past but ridding ourselves of the past, blowing off the worst and retaining the best, and getting the picture and the experience of the past in proportion.”
Ryan’s striving for accurate detail and fair assessment is all the more remarkable and praiseworthy when one recalls how close he was to such emotionally divisive and overwhelming events. The book gives an unforgettable perspective on an extraordinary time.
