Object of offering, object of ire

NOTE: This post originally appeared on our program's blog, Murray State's Irish Literature Study Abroad, as an assignment about an object we found interesting.

The Yank's offering at Collins' grave.

A few times a year, an American woman calling herself “The Yank” visits the Glasnevin Cemetery to deliver a bright red flower, an American flag and a one-sentence note at the monument to Irish patriot Michael Collins.

Her offerings and pilgrimages to Collins’ grave are noteworthy but not extraordinary because the Irish are constantly refreshing the plot in which Collins is buried with potted plants and bouquets. Nearly 100 years after Collins was assassinated, he still commands loyalty and admiration.

A few sections of the cemetery away sits the grave of Eamon de Valera, Collins’ contemporary who became a longtime leader of Ireland.

De Valera’s grave, in contrast, was sparse. No flowers. No flags. Just gravel and a modest stone cross that was meant, initially, for his child before it became his grave marker too.

Some of us wondered why it was so understated for someone who spent 10 years as Taoiseach (or prime minister) and 14 years as Ireland’s third president.

My theory is that perhaps de Valera didn’t think he’d ever need a grave because he was a survivor. 

He was the only male leader of the 1916 Easter Rising to escape execution. I say male because women played a huge role in the planning and fighting, and seemed at the time to be moving rapidly toward equality. 

The Countess Markievicz was a key leader.

As we have learned, the Proclamation of the Republic is the first such document in the world to specifically reference women. It starts: "Irishmen and Irishwomen ..."  And many of the Rising’s commanders, such as labor leader James Connolly, were feminists. “Win the women to your cause and your cause is secure,” Connolly famously said.

The British refused to kill the women who participated in the six-day-long uprising. But the other 14 rebel leaders were shot. (The Brits didn’t consider the 25-year-old Collins, who was aide de camp to Joseph Mary Plunkett, enough of a threat, so they sent him to a prison camp in Wales.)

De Valera was a political survivor as well. Because he was the highest-ranking rebel still alive, he filled the power vacuum after the Rising and heading into the Irish War for Independence in 1919. The Irish guerrilla tactics proved so effective against the more powerful British, that the two sides set out to negotiate a treaty in 1921 that would effectively split Ireland creating a free country across most of the island but leaving six counties in the north under British rule (or "continued occupation" as our tour guide at Glasnevin Cemetery put it).

The treaty wasn't popular but did pass.

Here’s where de Valera showed what kind of political survivor he was. Instead negotiating a treaty that would inevitably have to involve concessions, de Valera sent Collins to do it.

And Collins paid the price with his life. The treaty sparked a civil war, and de Valera gave himself cover by denouncing the treaty’s terms. Collins, in August 1922, was assassinated in an ambush while leading a patrol in his home county of Cork.

De Valera would go on to play a key role in undoing much of the gender equality that many of his fellow rebel leaders sought because he allowed the church to essentially set social policy. 

The grave of the well-mourned Collins.

First it was a slow recession of rights – women, who briefly served as judges during the “shadow” government before independence, suddenly were excluded from juries and high-level government jobs, as Dr. Mary McAuliffe, University College of Dublin gender history professor, told our class. As the church and government blended, “respectability” became the standard and radical women were “demonized,” McAuliffe said.

Throughout our studies and travels, we've heard repeatedly that the Ireland of the 20th Century likely didn't resemble what the 1916 Rising leaders seemed to envision. And that brings us back to the note that “The Yank” lays at Micheal Collins’ grave. Our tour guide at Glasnevin said it contains a simple message that piques the imagination:

“Michael, who knows what might have been.”

Maybe there is something mystical about this island's poetry

It might be easy to forget when reading earlier posts, but I am, in fact, in Ireland to study. And during the course of doing one of my assignments, I seemed to have a coincidental encounter that I can't quite explain but for which I am quite grateful.

The Proclamation.

You see, in addition to getting a heavy dose of writers like James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, we're also studying the 1916 Easter Rising. That rebellion came after seven poets, writers and labor leaders drafted the Proclamation of the Irish Republic – the Irish equivalent of the Declaration of Independence – and Patrick Pearse read it from steps of the General Post Office building April 24, 1916.

The document called for a provisional government of the Irish Republic – an illegal move in the eyes of the occupying British, which led to violence. And despite fierce resistance by about 1,300 members of the Volunteer Irish Army throughout Easter week, the Brits sent reinforcements and ultimately crushed the rebels.

Look at this angel's elbow. It has a bullet from 1916.

Then, as occupying forces so often do, the British overplayed their hands. They executed the leaders of the rebellion, including signatories of the Proclamation. That aroused the sympathies and outrage of a nation, and after the Irish war of independence in 1922, the southern 2/3 of the island became its own country.

So, with that context, each of us got to select a prominent player in the Rising. I chose Joseph Mary Plunkett, one of the signatories of the proclamation, an organizer of the rising, a poet and former editor of the literary publication The Irish Review. Our assignment was to write a blog post to provide a little sketch about our person. I gravitated toward Plunkett because he was a kind of journalist. Then he kept getting more interesting the more I read about him. But I couldn't find many of his own writings.

Straight out of The Neverending Story.

When we got to Galway on Thursday, we had time to wander the shops downtown, so I walked into Charlie Byrne's bookshop in search of a book by Frank O'Connor, the writer on whom I'm doing my final project. I perused the wall of Irish books, many of them used, some of them decades old. No luck.

So I went through the rest of the bookshop. After about 20 minutes, I thought about leaving. But something seemed to nag at me. I went back to that Irish book section and started looking at the lower shelves. That's when, to my astonishment, I found an original copy of the book of Plunkett's poems published in 1916 – after his execution.

Not bad for 20 Euros, huh?

It's full of his poems and an essay he wrote in 1914 while editing The Irish Review. And Plunkett's sister, Geraldine Plunkett, wrote the foreword and not only gave her brother's biography but also critiqued his work, including a succinct, no-nonsense review of Joseph's first book of poems. ("Although there are a good many immature and defective poems in it, it is rather remarkable for a first book." That's some sibling honesty.)

When I brought it up to the register, the shopkeeper said he was so glad to see someone buy it. He said he had recently come into possession of it and brought it to a book fair in Dublin the previous weekend thinking that someone would surely snap it up amid the 100th anniversary of the Rising. He said he was close to selling to someone, but the prospective buyer backed out.

"It must be meant to be for you then," he told me.

I don't know that I believe in fate, but I certainly believe in good (true) stories.

Plunkett's wife Grace drew this picture a month after they married and the British executed Joseph. You can read my blog post about Plunkett on our program's blog, Murray State Irish Literature Study Abroad.