The resurgence of interest in 1916 may seem like a new phenomenon, but, looking back, the signs were there 10 years ago when Neil Jordan's film about Michael Collins was released. Like the sea change of opinion after the Rising itself, the interest has long roots in the cultural undergrowth.
Desmond FitzGerald was one of the most fascinating figures of the Irish revolution. Born in London of Irish parents, he joined the Imagist group of poets who included TE Hulme, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle and later Ezra Pound. He became involved with the Gaelic League in London and in 1913, the year these memoirs begin, went to live in Co Kerry with his wife, Mabel, and their two sons.
FitzGerald's memoirs were first published in 1968, more than 20 years after his early death. The reissue is timely, as it is a beautifully written and thoughtful account of the period up to Easter 1916. For FitzGerald and the other radical nationalists of his generation, Ireland before 1916 filled them with intense frustration and anger. It was a "lifeless corpse", supine, passive, prepared to accept the crumbs of Home Rule. Since 1968 we can place FitzGerald's generation in its wider European context, thanks to the work of Robert Wohl, Tom Garvin and others. It was a generation born into an era of unprecedented technological and social change, at odds with their parents, restless, and coming increasingly to believe that war would be a catharsis for their spiritual malaise. The older FitzGerald, sadder and wiser, looks back at that younger self, contemptuous of constitutionalists such as John Dillon ("To our unimaginative youth it seemed unworthy of Irish freedom that it should be won other than by the sword").
FitzGerald's account of Easter week in the GPO is wonderfully vivid: he describes the confusion of the days before the Rising, the black humour, the endless dissecting of the plans and where they had gone wrong. Joseph Plunkett "appallingly ill" but very cheerful, "Tommy" MacDonagh assuring FitzGerald that the British would never bombard Dublin, O'Rahilly's last words to FitzGerald ("Fancy missing this and then catching cold running for a tram"). Finally Pearse, his face etched with "a sense of great tragedy".
The leaders knew they could not expect much support from the people. They also knew their lives would be forfeit. But as FitzGerald wrote: "I doubt if the loneliness of that act will be realised . . . I do not think that any future generation will realise how unimaginable it was to see our flag go up over the Post Office. The fact that what was impossible then is so ordinary that we should not notice it today is the success of Easter Week."
FitzGerald's memoirs were to have included the period up to the Civil War, but he died before completing them. In the foreword FitzGerald's sons, Fergus and Garret, observe that their father did not want to write an autobiography "in the normal sense"; he was reluctant to report events in which he did not participate and to write anything "hurtful" about other people. These statements are slightly disingenuous. From the evidence of FitzGerald's own papers (a superb collection now in the UCD archives), we know that he played an influential role in several key books on the revolutionary period, notably Terence de Vere White's biography of Kevin O'Higgins and Padraic Colum's biography of Arthur Griffith (whom FitzGerald considered the greatest influence on his generation).
But the most remarkable absence from the book is that of FitzGerald's wife, Mabel, who was a republican, a Fabian and a feminist. In the foreword her sons note that the minimal references to her are "intriguing" and that FitzGerald describes her "in the most detached manner possible". In the correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, published in an appendix to this book, she emerges as a more forceful and interesting personality than her husband. Did Desmond perhaps realise this?
Deirdre McMahon lectures in history at Mary Immaculate College Limerick
Desmond's Rising: Memoirs 1913 to Easter 1916 By Desmond FitzGerald, with a foreword by Garret FitzGerald Liberties Press, 240pp. €13.99