Beware the enthusiast from the margins of an identity who moves to the centre to redefine that identity. At its most extravagant, the phenomenon of the outsider siezing the centre is seen in the Austrian Adolf Hitler capturing the heart of Germany, and the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte becoming the embodiment of France. the Catholic Georgian Josef Djugashvili becoming Stalin, the last tsar of all the Russias.
But we have repeatedly seen a comparable process at work in the odd, tortured relationship between the English and the Irish. Was there a more quintessentially Englishman than Brendan Bracken, the Irishman who stood at Churchill's righthand side? Was the greatest English political philosopher of all time not Edmond Burke? And were Alanbrooke, Alexander, Auckinleck, Montgomery and even Wellington not even more British because of their Irishness?
James Larkin
And how much does an emphatic Irishness owe to a sense of not quite belonging? Patrick Pearse and Cathal Brugha both had English fathers. James Connolly was born in Edinburgh, James Larkin in Liverpool, each setting foot in Ireland for the first time only in adulthood, between them agreeing the consensual falsehood that they were both Dubliners.
"Irish" artists such as Micheal Mac Liammoir and Patrick O'Brian had not a trace of Irish blood in them. William Orpen and Francis Bacon did, but effectively denied it. Did Tom Barry, Sean O Faolain and Frank O'Connor owe at least some of the republican ardour to an oedipal rejection of fathers who had once proudly worn the uniform of the crown?
Sean Mac Stiofain had barely a molecule of Irishness in him - a grandmother of Northern unionist origins whom he did not know. Other than in the formation of Irish soccer teams, an identity based on a single grandparent would be perverse, even if it were simply of the trainspotting variety. But Mac Stiofain's version of identity was altogether more sinister. He wished to bring civil war to a land he knew nothing about; he wished to betray that which he professed to love.
Maybe that is the way of little corporals, a rank he had in common with Hitler and Bonaparte. They cannot covet the idea of a people without hating the reality of them. True tyrants are pathological misanthropes who embark upon great quests which cannot succeed. They are not searching for triumph but for failure, but such is their boundless energy and their ruthlessness with life that in the beginning, they can become extraordinarily successful. Since success is what they do not want, their self-loathing sometimes causes them to reject reasonable victory in pursuit of the utterly unattainable total victory. They fight because war gives them enemies, and they need enemies to prove how right they are to loathe themselves.
No military genius
Two of the three corporals were military geniuses. Sean Mac Stiofain was not. He was such a mediocrity that you really must wonder at the culture which could accept him into its ranks and make him its leader. Was it his sheer unrepentant nihilism which distinguished him? Was it his lack of regard for life or for any civilised values which gave him the edge in the competition for leadership of the Provisional IRA? In such a world, unprincipled, unfeeling ruthlessness is the lodestar, the quality all aspire to, but it is available only to a deracinated psychopath such as John Stephenson. Freed of family, of background, of a native community, he was free to concoct the myth of his choosing. The sheet was blank; draw upon it, John Stephenson. What he drew was Sean Mac Stiofain, a nerdy and conscienceless killer with a bogus accent, a bogus identity, a bogus name, a bogus religion, and even at times, a bogus eyepatch. This was his life's invention.
Under the fascist stewardship of this emotional and intellectual deviant, the IRA launched its terrible assault on Northern Ireland, the Northern unionist people, and the British state. It was an insane project, doomed to failure: yet such was the self-deluding mythology of Irish republicanism that it took a quarter-of-a-century of insensate and unproductive war for the intrinsic idiocy of the venture to become apparent to those who were leading it, and by then, Mac Stiofain was long gone from their number.
What did Mac Stiofain do in retirement? Did he think about the lives he had ruined, the graves he had filled, the once young men now grown middle aged in Stoke Mandeville, tubes keeping unwilling, paralysed flesh alive? Did those weeping widows, the crying, uncomprehending children, the disfigured virgins in their wheelchairs keening for the love they will never know - did they all troop accusingly through his dreams?
Showed no remorse
No. The creature invented by his greyly sordid imagination did not rise to the human heights of regret or grief, remorse or sorrow. Unfeelingly he took life, and unfeelingly he ceased to take it. It mattered not. He could have been crushing insects as he endlessly intoned the republican mantras which others needed to take life, though of course, he needed no such exculpation.
Creatures such as him triumphed in Napoleonic France, Lenin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Reich. They are everywhere in society, anoraks living out their dark fantasies over the internet, yearning for the right tide to lift their keel and draw them out to the broad oceans of murder. And consider this: in a different era, a man as vapidly conscienceless as Mac Stiofain might have been raised by the seas of circumstance into a national hero. The time of the tide is all.