Confronting the legacy of the Troubles in Rebel Cork
Despite the passage of time, many Cork people remain cold and hard about the past, claims John-Paul McCarthy
IN his moving memoir, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, former South African Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs talks about the difference between knowledge and acknowledgment.
Knowledge involves possessing information, Sachs explains sadly, or being aware of facts. Acknowledgment is more elusive, since this involves an acceptance not only of gaunt facts, but of their emotional significance.
I got a masterclass in this important distinction a week ago while participating in a public debate in Cork City Hall, organised by the teachers in my old Gaelscoil at the North Monastery.
If only from listening to endless tapes of Niall Toibin as a teenager, I was always dimly aware of a certain hard, provincial coldness that has always been characteristic of Cork City.
Even in my Leaving Cert year, I remember gagging slightly when first confronted by Sean O Riordain's poem Fill Aris, with its mean-spirited attack on Shelley, Keats and Shakespeare, and its glorification of the semi-feudal scarcities of west Kerry.
Large doses of Daniel Corkery's nakedly sectarian prose in university only added to a growing sense that that precocious hater was quite correct when he proclaimed in The Leader in 1909 that the city's cultural motto should be rendered 'Death in Life'.
The debate last Friday week about the legacy of the city's most resonant martyrs, Lord Mayors MacCurtain and MacSwiney, helped me to savour the emotional reality of Corkery's abstract insight.
Already feeling more than a little manipulated by the newsreel footage of both mayoral funerals that preceded the public debate, I wasn't in any mood to be outflanked in my home town.
While chairman Pat Cox expertly ejected the drunks who wandered in from the quays, I did my best to wheel the heaviest historical guns into place and to fire them directly.
I cited Tom Garvin on the intellectual vulnerabilities of the MacCurtain-MacSwiney generation, and also reminded the house that many violent men who survived the 1916-21 period were privately warped by shame and regret at the things they had done.
There is a fairly vibrant tradition of shame within Cork City itself, one whose glum adherents would probably be astonished at the manner in which some people today describe the mayhem of 1919-21 as if it was all inevitable and unambiguously legitimate.
When confronted by an audience who seemed to treat the funeral footage as a kind of audio-visual foreplay, one has to dig deep, and call on Fenian titans like PS O'Hegarty, an old Mon boy himself, who wrote about the descent into savagery in Cork City after 1916, and whose own IRA brother kidnapped a journalist in protest at uncongenial press coverage.
I told the crowd about O'Hegarty's essential book, The Victory of Sinn Fein.
Here, O'Hegarty recalled a bitter confrontation with Cork City's No 1 Brigade in 1920, having been apprised of some looming plan that he considered "fiendish and indefensible" and which he tried to sabotage by appealing to the invertebrate principle of Dail supremacy.
Gerard Murphy's chilling account of the various sectarian "disappearances" within the city between 1921 and 1922 rings true when set side by side with O'Hegarty's suggestion of moral collapse.
Murphy's book, The Year of Disappearances, exudes just the kind of menace that suffuses the prose of two other Cork men I summoned up that night, Frank O'Connor and Sean O Faolain.
Some audience members looked less than pleased when the discussion turned to the precise tactics used after 1919.
They didn't want to discuss the dirty war against both Protestant "spies and informers" and against the city's mainly Catholic police force, many of whom were brutally murdered in broad daylight. No one in City Hall seemed to care very much either when the house was reminded of the humanity de Valera himself expressed when he was asked to re-read some of his peevish speeches on the RIC in the 1970s.
This should not have surprised me too much, though.
After all, Tomas MacCurtain's son murdered a Special Branch detective in the city in 1940, and came within a whisker of being hanged. Terry MacSwiney's immortal words were, of course, an injunction to suffer indignity rather than inflict it, an ethos emphatically not shared by his comrades.
Then again, the hard men in Cork who were embittered by missing 1916 never fully respected playwrights like poor Terry. Failure was mine alone when Cox called time. The line held fast against my armada of remorse.
Those opposing me were impervious to the petitions of O'Hegarty, de Valera, Hubert Butler, O'Connor, O Faolain and Bishop Colahan of Cork who said in 1923 that "Protestants have suffered severely during the period of civil war in the south".
Like the young John McGahern in his wish to be a priest, some seem to have chosen "the death in life" that is the lot of professional mourners.
Of our city beautiful they are not yet freemen.
JP McCarthy holds a PhD in history from Oxford
Originally published in
