Song Lyric of the Day (Black 47, on Michael Collins)

“We fought against each other, two brothers steeped in blood

But I never doubted that your heart was broken in the flood

And though we had to shoot you down in golden Béal na Blath

I always knew that Ireland lost her greatest son of all.”—Larry Kirwan, “The Big Fellah,” performed by Black 47 on their Home of the Brave CD (1994)

Like their song “Bobby Kennedy,” the tribute by Black 47 to Michael Collins examines, with vast historical awareness that matches its songwriting craft, a legendarily tough, surprisingly vulnerable leader struck down before he could fulfill his potential. 

And, as with RFK, the fate of Collins’ country was altered fundamentally when “The Big Fellah” was ambushed on this date in 1922.

Those of Irish descent are likely to look at both Collins and Kennedy with a mixture of Celtic romanticism and Greek fatalism. Both men died much too soon—RFK at 42, Collins a decade younger. And both had seemingly courted death by brushing off warnings by aides to be more careful.

The Béal na Blath allusion in the song comes from Gaelic: “Mouth of Flowers.” It beckons with all the soft seductiveness of death itself in its early stages. 

Indeed, the Irish revolutionary leader, now commander-in-chief of the National Army of the new Irish Free State, couldn’t conceive that this valley in the county that he called home would contain people in any way hostile to him.

Two lines from “Bobby Kennedy” could be inserted, almost as appropriately, into “Big Fellah”: “Don't get mad, just get even/Keep on going though your heart is bleeding.” 

The reference is obvious in the song about Kennedy—Bobby’s searing sorrow over the assassination of brother Jack—and, in Collins’ case, it applies to someone he regarded as close to a brother: his comrade in arms Harry Boland. They split over the free state issue, but when Collins heard of Boland’s death in the Irish Civil War, he burst out weeping at the news.

The loss of two men so young and full of life as Kennedy and Collins, along with tumultuous struggles that engaged them at the time of their deaths, may account as much as any other factor for the conspiracy theories that flourished after their deaths. You can take your pick who wanted Bobby dead: the Mafia, the Teamsters, LBJ, etc. Such was Britain’s longstanding spying on the Irish that many Collins partisans believed he had been set up by the British Secret Service. 

Probably the most vivid demonstration of a different line came from a Catholic priest in Cork who delivered a stinging sermon about Eamon de Valera's part in the unfolding events: "There was a scowling face at a window looking out over that lonely valley and de Valera could tell who it was."

RFK and Collins have also inspired countless ruminations on what might have transpired, both for themselves and their countries, had they not been struck down by bullets. 

Bobby, his partisans think, would have kept the Democratic Party from fracturing into the “New Politics” factions that championed his opponent in the primaries, Gene McCarthy, and the old guard of labor unions and blue-collar ethnic groups. Thus, he would have defeated Richard Nixon for the Presidency in November 1968. He would have pulled America out of Vietnam more quickly, and, of course, there would not have been a Watergate.

With Collins, the speculation is based on less wishful thinking. He would have sought, far more than the old boss who had become his opponent over Ireland’s treaty with Britain, Eamon de Valera, to ameliorate divisions between Protestants and Catholics. 

Just as crucially, the onetime Minister of Finance for the Irish revolutionary movement had far-reaching, specific development ideas that would have steered the nation away from both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. 

In short, Ireland would not be afflicted with what became its characteristics over the next four decades dominated by de Valera, according to Tim Pat Coogan’s 1992 biography of Collins, The Man Who Made Ireland: “Bitterness, cynicism, disillusionment, emigration, censorship, clericalism and stagnation.”

The image here comes from John Lavery’s painting Michael Collins (Love of Ireland), in the Dublin City Gallery, Hugh Lane.

This Day in Photography History (Death of Dorothea Lange, Who Documented Depression-Era America and DeValera’s Ireland)

October 11, 1965—Dorothea Lange, who created tightly composed, fiercely compassionate images that struck at the conscience of Americans as the photographer of poverty-stricken rural Americans during the Great Depression and interned Japanese-Americans(Nisei) after Pearl Harbor, died of esophageal cancer at age 70.

Time and again, Lange – well-educated, urban, of German Protestant stock –photographed subjects whose backgrounds in almost no way resembled her own. No leap of the imagination was required for me to view her as the champion of the disadvantaged and despised – a Joan of Arc with a camera, if you will.

All the more surprising, then, when I discovered that in the fall of 1954, on an assignment for Life Magazine, Lange had taken photographs of Ireland – especially County Clare, the western coastal region where my father was born and spent his first 31 years. Suddenly, a photographer whose work had interested me on a largely dispassionate historical level had reached me in a place much closer – psychologically and spiritually, if not geographically – to home.

A reevaluation of Lange’s career seemed in order. It involved not devaluing her justly acclaimed output, but more clearly understanding its wellspring: her ability to penetrate, without prejudice or condescension, the lives of disparate groups who seldom shared her ethnicity, spiritual outlook, urban sensibility, or educational level.

Many of the best of the 2,400 images from Lange’s Life assignment appeared in Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1996), by Gerry Mullins. The images inspired an artist in another medium, Irish-American film director Deirdre Lynch, to retrace her steps in the 1998 documentary, Photos to Send. (Amazingly, forty-four years after Lange’s assignments, Lynch found many of her original subjects still alive.)

The “Celtic Tiger” and Culture
Lynch’s retracing of Lange’s steps occurred when Ireland was well-launched into a commercial and creative flowering. Suddenly, Celtic had become not just cool but sexy. The growth of a highly educated young population, entrance into the European Community, and a less punitive tax structure produced a “Celtic Tiger” that was the envy of other European economies. Cheap airfares helped fanned tourism and exposure to continental visitors and workers resulted in a more cosmopolitan outlook. Novelists and playwrights such as Roddy Doyle and Martin McDonough won international acclaim, filmmakers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan brought luster to the native moviemaking industry, and Riverdance became a transatlantic phenomenon. At the same time, revelations about priest sex abuse and the “Magdalene laundries” (asylums for “fallen women” run by nuns, where the young women were held for years in conditions of extreme cruelty) so rocked confidence in the clergy that it became commonplace to speak of “post-Catholic Ireland.”

The images from Lange’s Irish sojourn differ in tone not only from this environment, but also from the Technicolor scenery and picturesque inhabitants of John Ford’s classic film The Quiet Man or the often gritty, priest-ridden misery of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. In contrast to these other depictions of mid-century Ireland, Lange portrays a country facing difficult challenges with an ancestral faith and a hard-won dignity. In her striking portraits of young and old, she presents a visual counterpart to William Blake’s songs of innocence and experience.

DeValera’s Ireland—and My Family’s
At the time of these photos, Ireland was still largely under the influence of its longtime leader, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon de Valera. Only six years before, it finally became an independent republic, capping 32 years that featured, at various points, rebellion, civil war, neutrality during WWII, and half-steps and compromises toward nationhood. Perhaps because of its agonizing birth struggle, Ireland remained uncertain—abroad, subservient in trade with Great Britain; at home, puritanical enough to enact strict obscenity laws that often drove its best creative artists to distraction or exile.

In Western Ireland, land remained of central importance – sustaining life, but often not in abundance. The experience of my father and his six siblings was not uncommon. My paternal grandfather owned approximately 50 acres, but they were seldom fertile to yield enough for all of the family. As a result, several of the children were lent out to childless couples – relatives or neighbors – to bring in more money.

Subtly and unsentimentally, Lange uses linear perspective in “Country Road” (see the photograph accompanying this post) to suggest the physical and psychic toll wrought by the economically and socially constricting environment that induced my father and so many of his siblings to journey beyond their ancestral home.

Anatomy of a Photograph
One lone habitation appears in this image: a white farmhouse, much like the one my father grew up in, with a thatch roof – a substitute for the slate roof that people in their circumstances could not afford at the time, but that their descendants can.

Nearly half of this photograph consists of foreground, and not a particularly appealing one at that: an unpaved bohereen, or “small road.” The most visible form of plant life is not a crop, but roadside turf – a metaphor for the hardness of life. Not a single automobile is in sight, in keeping with an era when auto ownership was more unusual than it is now. In the distance stretch rolling hills – the kind with spectacular emerald vistas featured on millions of postcards. Here, however, the hills appear small against the road, and the beauty of the wet, limy soil has been muted into more monochromatic shadings. (Lange might have used a heavily colored filter over the lens to lighten the green grass and darken the blue sky.)

The dark hat and overcoat of the old man in the photo imply the damp Irish climate. The figure is walking away from the brightest point in the photograph, the farmhouse –and, given the longtime Irish predilection for emigration, one can’t be sure that he’s not leaving for good. In fact, his weatherbeaten attire recalls that of Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps in a tragicomedy that premiered only a year before the publication of this photo – Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman expatriated to France.

Combined with the fact that this figure is all alone against an all-encompassing background, this picture could be viewed at first as highly foreboding – except that it is redeemed by what local photographer and Lange assistant Dennis Wylde called “God’s light.” Moreover, the walker is traveling along a road that significantly widens ahead of him – an element of incurable hope.

“Country Road” is central for appreciating the physical and emotional environment Lange was trying to recreate through film. It also exemplifies one of her best-known summaries of art as photography: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

The other photos from Lange’s brief but highly creative Irish sojourn, like this one, demonstrate a love of the problematic, yet simple Irish tradition – a way of life now under assault, in a manner that neither the photographer nor her subjects could guess at the time, from every conceivable direction.

This Day in Irish History (Dublin’s Easter Rising)

April 24, 1916—A mistake-filled operation even before it started, Ireland’s Easter Rising should have ended the same way that the Fenian uprising and other rebellions had in the past—with the cause of independence no further advanced than before.

Instead, the British government, in a war against a German foe it regularly accused of ruthlessness, resorted to such a brutal crackdown that Irish opinion turned decisively from Home Rule to a separate republic.

In the years following Patrick Pearse’s Easter Monday declaration of the republic in front of an astonished, even amused, noontime crowd at Dublin’s General Post Office, patriotic myth-making obscured how much went wrong before and during the uprising by the ragtag band of rebels.

The long litany of errors can be fairly quickly gleaned from reading Tim Pat Coogan’s Eamon De Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland, Terry Golway’s For the Cause of Liberty: A Thousand Years of Ireland’s Heroes, and David Fitzpatrick’s essay in A Military History of Ireland, edited by Thomas Barrett and Keith Jeffrey:* Sir Roger Casement, on a mission to secure arms from Germany, was captured when he stepped ashore from a submarine, just days before the planned revolt.
* The captain of the German boat carrying the arms shipment, the Aud, ordered the boat scuttled after it was intercepted by the British Navy, depriving the rebels of crucial arms and ammunition.
* Austin Stack, who was supposed to handle the arms landing, rushed to the barracks where Casement was supposed to be—only to get arrested himself.
* Eoin MacNeill, commanding the Irish Volunteers, issued an order calling off all maneuvers after learning of Casement’s capture—assuring that, when Patrick Pearse and other rebel leaders decided to go ahead with their plans anyway, they would only have 130 men to guard the approaches to the city rather than the 500 originally envisioned and needed. His countermanding of the uprising order also meant that the rebellion would be confined to central Dublin rather than spread across the country.
* British intelligence had intercepted telegrams between the rebels’ American fundraiser, John Devoy, the German Embassy in Washington, and Berlin, so they knew something was afoot.
* James Connolly, leading the Irish Citizen Army, was so hellbent on staging his own rebellion while the British remained at war with Germany that Pearse and his compatriots in the Irish Republican Brotherhood went along with the idea, figuring that the British would crack down on them anyway before their operations began.
* Connolly, a Marxist, argued—insanely—that Britain’s commitment to capitalism was so total that it would never fire on property in Dublin.
* The chief strategist for the rebels, poet Joseph Mary Plunkett, was fascinated by military history, but had no practical experience whatsoever with tactics or strategy. Moreover, he was in no physical shape to lead anything at the time, having undergone an operation for glandular tuberculosis only days before the uprising. In fact, the only rebel leader with any military experience at all was Connolly.
* The rebels never had a plan for taking Dublin Castle, Britain’s nerve center in the city.
* By establishing headquarters in the General Post Office, the rebels all but guaranteed collateral damage to surrounding civilians, shops, and housing—and a furious reaction by the populace when it became involved in the crossfire.
* Pearse led the rebellion not just with a country divided over independence, but at that point willing to wait for Home Rule.

The combined republican force of a little less than 1,800 stood no chance against the British 20,000. When the smoke cleared and Pearse surrendered five days later, 64 rebels had been killed in action versus 103 killed and 357 wounded for the British. Worse off were the civilians caught in the middle, as 300 ended up dead, hundreds more wounded, and central Dublin a wreck. (The photo accompanying this blog post shows the devastation at the GPO, the rebels’ headquarters.)

Predictably given the carnage that resulted, the civilians initially turned on the rebels who had instigated the rebellion. As the captured rebels were marched off to jail, onlookers jeered “Shoot the traitors!” and “Mad dogs!”

And then the British, ignoring the warning by Irish Parliamentary Party Leader John Redmond that mass executions “might be disastrous in the extreme,” proceeded to do just that. After martial law was declared, more than a hundred rebels were condemned to death.

Executions began on May 3 and included two or three at a time, usually in grisly or arbitrary fashion. Willy Pearse’s principal offense was that he was Patrick’s brother. The TB-ridden Plunkett was married only minutes before he died. Polio-lamed Sean MacDiarmida was given no reprieve. Connolly, his leg shattered in the fighting, had to be carried on a stretcher and propped up in a chair to face the firing squad.

By this time, nine days later, Irish public opinion had swerved so decisively against the British that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered an end to the executions. Not, however, before the occupying forces made two final mistakes. They decided only to imprison a former London clerk who had served as Plunkett’s aide-de-camp.

In another instance, they pondered the choice between executing Connolly and another prisoner. Sir John Maxwell, commander of British forces, asked Judge Evelyn Wylie about the latter, “Is he someone important?”

“No,” Wylie answered. “He is a schoolmaster who was taken at Boland’s Mill.”

Reprieves were granted to the former clerk and former schoolmaster, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. They became the Crown’s most implacable enemies in Ireland in the years ahead—and, in the end, tragically, their own as well.