Madam, – Fintan O’Toole, in the extract from his new book Ship of Fools (Weekend Review, October 24th), writes about the age-old republican impulses behind the acquisitions by Irish property developers of British properties. He writes: “But if you listened hard, you could hear, unspoken but implied, the famous (and surely apocryphal) reply of a republican activist asked in the early 20th century by an English reporter what the aims of Sinn Féin were: “Vingince, bejasus!”.
The republican activist who uttered these words was my maternal grandfather Paudeen O’Keeffe, the general secretary of Sinn Féin from 1917 to 1922. He had fought in an outpost of the GPO in 1916 (Clerys) and was interned in Frongoch. It was soon after his release and his appointment as general secretary that an English journalist plied him with so many insistent questions on the lines of “what are the practical aims of this movement?” and got so many unsatisfactory answers that in the end, he said in some slight exasperation: “Mr O’Keeffe, would you at least say what exactly you yourself want?” At this, my grandfather, a small, dark, restless man with a fine pair of eyes and a waspish tongue, banged the desk with his fist and roared: “Vingeance, bejasus, vingeance!” This interview took place in the Sinn Féin offices at 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin.
My grandfather, who had no interest in acquiring wealth or in personal gain and was a very frugal person, would, I’m pretty sure, be exasperated, at the very least, to be compared in any way with latter-day Irish property developers, especially the greedy ones with republican impulses. I’m fairly annoyed, but not surprised, that he, who played a key role in the reorganisation of Sinn Féin before the 1918 general election (he was also elected TD), has been demoted, yet again, to the rank of mere activist and that one of his numerous famous (in my family at any rate) remarks has been called into question 36 years after his death. Is there no end to revisionism? – Yours, etc,