Once upon a time, it was Ireland that bailed out Europe – well, sort of. PADDY AGNEWhas the first in a brief series
THE WELL-DOCUMENTED Irish road to Rome is a long and winding one. Long before the Flight of the Earls O’Neill and O’Donnell in 1607, Irish pilgrims and priests had been beating a steady track to the Eternal City.
Medieval monks, legates on diplomatic business, St Malachy and St Laurence O’Toole to attend Lateran Councils, and Franciscan friars in the holy years of the 14th and 15th centuries are just some of the more obvious Irish visitors to Rome.
Inevitably, it was not always a happy jaunt. After all, the princes O’Neill and O’Donnell both lie buried in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum Hill, right beside Villa Spada, the former Irish Embassy to the Holy See and current embassy to the Italian state.
The Liberator himself, Daniel O’Connell, did not even make it all the way, dying in a Genoa hotel room in 1847 while on a pilgrimage to Rome, as a sick and enfeebled 71-year-old. The ailing Liberator, however, had ordered that his heart be taken to Rome, leaving those oft-quoted instructions – “My body to Ireland, My heart to Rome and My soul to God”. A monument in the Irish Pontifical College in Rome still commemorates that bequest.
In more recent times, James Joyce was less than happy in Rome during a seven-month stay in 1906-1907.
Even if there are those critics such as Giorgio Melchiori who claim that Joyce’s Roman “sojourn” bears witness to the “extreme alertness of his intellectual life”, many Joycean scholars point to his last letter from Rome as proof that the lonely, 24-year-old Joyce was only too happy to leave: “ . . . to continue as I am at present would certainly mean my mental extinction. It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me . . . ”
While all of the above is, of course, more than well known and documented, what about the Roman connections of Count Patrick Keyes O’Clery, the conservative Home Rule MP for Wexford? He was one of about 1,000 Irishmen who fought with the “Zuavi” army that attempted to defend Pope Pius IX against Garibaldi, his “bersaglieri” and the encroaching tide of an ill-defined Italian unification (Il Risorgimento).
As an 18-year-old, “The O’Clery” fought with the French-Papal (Zuavi) army against Garibaldi at the 1867 Battle of Mentana. Three years later, O’Clery was in the US, when word reached him that Garibaldi and friends were on their way to Rome, ready to do some serious damage to the notion of the Holy See as a temporal power.
Once more, he answered the cause, apparently managing to get back to Rome in time to play his part in a futile defence of the gates of Porta Pia in 1870, an event that not only marked the capture of Rome (and a serious “re-dimensioning” for the Vatican) but also arguably the final act in the long drawn-out process of Italian unification.
The O’Clery seems to have made a habit of picking the losing side. His time as MP for Wexford came to an end in 1880 when, at the end of a rough election campaign, he lost his seat to the Parnellite, Garret Byrne.
That was another "campaign" where the support of the Catholic Church probably did him no favours. For his pains, however, the O'Clery received a papal knighthood in 1903 from pope Leo XIII. O'Clery did, however, leave a fascinating record of his Italian experiences in two books – Revolution of the barricadesand the Making of Italy.
Looked at today, some of his observations seem uncannily modern. “In 1865, the chief tax collector in Palermo made off with 70,000 francs; in Turin that year they discovered a finance ministry official busy printing government bonds but he was acquitted; then in 1866, we had the scandal surrounding those civil servants who were meant to sell off church property; in Naples a senior police officer was arrested because he had siphoned off funds intended for the public purse. I could go on to infinity, listing cases like this . . .”
Intriguingly, O’Clery also points out that under the new united Italy regime, taxes had increased: “In 1859, average taxation in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was 14 francs per capita. By 1866, under the new regime, taxes had gone up to 28 francs per capita, double what the ‘oppressed’ Neapolitan people had been paying prior to the arrival of the ‘liberator’ Garibaldi.”
If, in hindsight, one is tempted to conclude that as such as O’Clery ended up fighting on the “wrong” side, listen to O’Clery’s description of the day, sometime after the capture of Rome, when the pope’s Zuavi army was disbanded: “When all the soldiers were lined up, facing the Vatican and ready to go Colonel Allet stepped forward and, with a voice wracked with emotion, he shouted, ‘My children, long live Pius IX’. That prompted a huge roar of approval from the troops. Then just at that moment, the pope appeared on his balcony and raising his hands to heaven, he said, ‘May God bless my faithful children’. The enthusiasm of that supreme moment was indescribable.”
In her book, the Irish And English In Italy's Risorgimento, writer Mary Jane Cryan tells the tale of "The Last Crusade" or those 1,000 plus Irishmen who made up the St Patrick's Brigade which fought for the pope. She suggests they belong to the same tradition as the "Wild Geese", the mercenaries in (Catholic) armies across Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
All the more proof that the road to Rome is indeed long and winding.