The Pearse brothers were doers, declared my chum Damien Kiberd at the recent opening of their restored family home. There can be no arguing with that, at least with regard to Patrick Pearse: the insurrection which he masterminded killed hundreds of Dublin's citizens, wrecked its centre, and unleashed a glorification of violence which has regularly surfaced since. Oh yes, Patrick was a doer all right: he did for so many people's lives.
What else did Pearse achieve which has lasted? What did he do that was successful? In what way did he enrich the Irish people? What is his imperishable contribution which has made this island a happier, more productive place? What else is his enduring monument? What goals did he set himself which were realised by his generation or by those which accepted his mantle?
Blood sacrifice
He achieved nothing - other, that is, than to create a diseased and enduring culture of murderous conspiracy and blood sacrifice. He was a fanatic who knew nothing about democracy and cared even less about it: he certainly never tried it out, never presented himself to the electorate to see whether they approved of him and his ideas. He was a failure in life and in death. After 80 years of concerted linguistic social engineering, we are probably seeing the last generation of native Irish-speaking children in those few, and fast-shrinking Gaeltacht areas. Irish will soon be spoken as Latin was in medieval Europe, a learned language of a cultured elite. But it will not be the language of the soil or shop or playground. The great scheme to produce a remote and self-reliant Gaelic society ended in tragic failure, but only after millions of Irish people had fled this dismal experiment in cultural Albanianism.
Damien listed the six commandments of respectable Ireland of the time. One of these was: "Thou shalt not engage in trade or manufacture lest thy hands become grimy." I'm unaware of any endeavour by Pearse to inculcate mechanical skills amongst his pupils, but no matter. If Pearse was critical of the Ireland of his time, what intelligent contemporary was not? Senia Paseta, in her splendid Before the Revolution (Cork University Press), has provided us with a brilliant insight into Ireland's Catholic elite at the start of the last century - an elite which was indeed obsessed with gentility, within a broader culture which was almost demented in its disdain for industry. She quotes D.P. Moran (whose disagreeable xenophobia should not be allowed to detract from the pertinence of many of his observations) on this very matter:
"The picture which the bishop of Limerick drew of the young Irish clerk with 12 shillings a week and a cigarette in his mouth looking down on a tradesman with £2 a week is the best concise history of modern industrial Ireland yet published."
Impoverished pride
The young Irish clerk, once transformed into a political Gael, is in fact the personification of Pearse's vision for Ireland, in which impoverished pride was better than grubby practicality. Pearse talked and wrote reactionary codswallop which appealed to the cocky clerical classes - which would have been just fine if he had contented himself with words. He didn't. He got it into his head that he had the right to start bumping people off in the centre of Dublin in pursuit of this selfsame reactionary codswallop.
But did he not start a debate about Ireland's future? No, he didn't - that had long been under way. Senia quotes Patrick Heffernan's pertinent observations on this: "The narrow, atavistic and reactionary section of Ireland of today will, doubtless, sneer at us as `shawneens' and West Britons but at the time we regarded ourselves as Irish Europeans, cosmopolitans and citizens of the world, who hoped to find in a liberalised and democratic British Empire, in which Ireland occupied her worthy place, a metier in which we could lead satisfying lives, and perhaps contribute a share, great or small, to human progress and human civilisation." We now know that Patrick Heffernan was naive: the British empire could not be both imperial and democratic. But at least in his naivety he ordered no-one to be shot; at least in his naivety, he remained within the law; at least in his naivety, he left none of the pagan falsehoods with which Pearse infected Irish political life.
Not a democrat
Pearse's pomps and dreams are dead. Yet he still attracts admirers, people I know and like, such as Bertie Ahern, Robert Ballagh and Damien Kiberd. Why? Was he a democrat? No, he was not. Did he like peace? No, he revelled in war. Was he a practical man? No, he worshipped a mythical past, which was to be the blueprint of a future and bankrupt Ireland. Was he a political purist? No, he allied himself with a regime which had put Belgium to the sword, and which had meticulously butchered hundreds, perhaps thousands of Belgian civilians in a pre-ordained policy of subjugation by massacre. Most of all, was he a republican? Emphatically not: no true republican would have shown so little regard for democracy or for the lives of the plain people of Dublin that he did in embarking upon the murderous recklessness of 1916.
In every sense, he was a blundering fool, a child in a firework factory. So what was it about this man which appeals to today's democrats? Was his almost Oedipal loathing of England sufficient to elevate him to sainthood? And is that, at heart, the core of the Pearse cult?