IT IS called the physical force school and it emerged formally, and poisonously 150 years this week. From the beginning, of course, it was wrongly named physical force is a euphemism for murder. If, from the outset, it had been called the murder school of Irish independence, no doubt it would have perished within days of coming into existence. But it was not and the heirs of a worthless tradition of murder, which has yielded Ireland nothing in the past century and a half, remain with us still.
The moral basis of the murder school was delineated pretty well by John Mitchel. The vengeance I seek is the righting of my country's wrong, which includes my own. Ireland, indeed, needs vengeance, but this is public vengeance, public justice. England is truly a great public criminal. England all England, operating through her government, through her organised and effectual public opinion, press, platform, parliament, parliament has done, is doing and means to do, grievous wrong to Ireland. She must be punished, that punishment will, as I believe, come upon her by and through Ireland, and so Ireland will be avenged.
That is as pretty a summation of the psychopathology of the terrorist as you can find anywhere the personalisation of a political injustice so that ego becomes one with the nation the demonisation of an entire species, in this case the English vengeance becomes a therapy and national requirement, and the transformation of political will into a weapon of punishment, designed to do hurt to people, and be morally sure of the rightness of that hurt. It, is, of course, a detailed refutation of the Gospels to which most practitioners of the physical force school have purported to follow but what matter.
Loss of greatness
Paradoxically, it was Daniel O Connell's greatness which enabled the Young Irelanders to make the inroads which they did within the body of Irish nationalism. He was such a towering giant, impassioned, eloquent, brave and the match of any who opposed him, that Irish people could be forgiven for thinking that in his absence, they were doomed to being leaderless helots. In that context, violence was the panacea for the plain man, the man of no property it was the recourse of the powerless.
It was logically and intellectually wrong. Worse, it suggests a belief in the congenital inferiority of the people of Ireland - that those who lead Ireland and the Irish must necessarily be of lesser mettle than those they must do business with. O'Connell did not believe that. More to the point, he tried to ensure that after his death, others would not believe it.
The Young Irelanders were clearly an attractive and ardent bunch, and dangerously wrong headed. They themselves did not use violence, and planned no violence when O Connell insisted, that they conform to the principle of non violence, enunciated as follows: "All political amelioration ... ought to be sought for, and can be sought tot successfully, only by peaceable, legal and constitutional means, to the utter exclusion of any other," though this principle did not prohibit "necessary defence against unjust aggression on the part of a domestic government or a foreign enemy.
The problem about the Young Irelanders was, that they talked violence, they justified it in the eyes of their uneducated listeners, they larded political language with violent words, so that political debate became in fused with the language of war. The resonances live on, even amongst the constitutional of today the warriors of destiny owe much of what they are to the cabbalistic incantations of the Young Irelanders of 150 years ago.
Same necessary journey
The journey Fianna Fail had to make is the journey required of all those who have dabbled in violence for Ireland. To be constructive, to achieve real progress, to form a state which reflects the will and aspirations of the Irish people, has required people to abandon the gun. As I have said on countless occasions before, and no doubt will continue to say into the future, nothing achieved by violent means between 1916 to 1922 could not have been achieved by patient, boring talks.
And that is the charm of violence. Whatever it is, it is not boring. Most young males who have been in a gunfight find the experience exhilarating. Military formations create bonds the death in action of a comrade deepens the grievance and intensifies the emotional commitment to the fray. Bodies call upon bodies; funerals demand more funerals; and Moloch's appetite grows the more he is fed.
Ordinary people become terrorists - not psychopaths, not the disordered and sad, not the criminally insane. I have liked most of the IRA members I have met - not many, it is true, in recent years. And because they call upon a tradition of gun law, few if any of them feel any remorse for what they have done.
Is that not a terrible thing, knowing what we know about the dreadful things done by the IRA, that there is no genuine shame over their deeds? Does that not suggest that this is a tradition, as intractable and a pathological as anti semitism in Germany? No doubt it has not managed the cataclysm of the Holocaust: but what it has, in common with National Socialism is that it suspends the precepts of decency, of right to life and to livelihood, which lay at the heart of Western civilisation.
Common failure
Daniel O'Connell knew this and knew moreover that his people had only recently been wooed from the fatal embrace with violence in 1798. That was why he forced the show down with, the Young Irelanders, to eliminate, once and for all, the tradition which glorified violence and which studiedly rejected the Sermon on the Mount. He tailed, as we know. Others followed the Young Irelanders - John O'Leary, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse - all cited Thomas Davis as an inspiration. Yet all failed to achieve what they wanted when using the methods glorified by the Young Irelanders. Success has come only from using the methods of Daniel O'Connell, outlined 150 years ago this week, and yet remembered imperfectly to this day.