IT doesn’t delay the expiration of copyright (Front page report, yesterday), which derives from the date of Peader Kearney’s death. But there is A plausible case that the national anthem is slightly younger – and its origins more exotic – than is generally believed. If the theory is true, our gallant allies in Europe may even have played a part in its composition, albeit indirectly.
The song is usually said to have been written in 1907. In fact, that date received a literal stamp of approval in 2007, when An Post marked the centenary. This despite a statement by Kearney himself, made in 1926 when he was transferring copyright, during which he suggests the song was written “early in 1910” or the end of 1909.
Amhrán na bhFiann(as it was not then known) appears to have had a long gestation in any case, so maybe that explains the discrepancy. But the issue is important to at least one Dubliner – Frank Murray, from Glenageary – because if the 1909/10 date is accepted, then a restaurant owned by his French-born maternal grandfather becomes the anthem's birthplace.
In fact, Kearney’s biographer, Seamus de Burca, while taking the 1907 date as fact and suggesting the song was probably written in Kearney’s home in Dominick Street, lent some support to the restaurant theory. Writing half a century later, he quoted the by-then-dead writer as having said that much of the anthem was composed “in the Swiss Cafe, a basement restaurant at the corner of O’Connell Street and North Earl Street, where Burton’s now is”.
This was “a favourite rendezvous of those serious-minded young men who were planning to fight for the national cause some day,” De Burca adds. “The melody was laboriously picked out on the cafe piano, note by note. So we can say that the Irish national anthem was born in the Swiss Cafe.” The problem is that there was no Swiss Cafe on that corner. What there was, until 1909, was the Sackville Cafe. This was certainly a favourite rendezvous for serious-minded young men, and women too. Regular newspaper notices mention it hosting meetings of such bodies as the “Dublin Parliamentary Debating
Society” and the “Dickens Fellowship (Dublin Branch)”. In 1908, the Dickens group even held a “progressive whist party” – whatever that was – there.
But the Sackville Cafe closed in 1909. Its lease was advertised in The Irish Timesthat September. And some time between then and the following April, the premises reopened as the Restaurant Continental, under the management of one Camille Fauvin, Frank Murray's grandfather.
Fauvin had been born in a village south of Paris in 1859, emigrated to England aged 17 and from there moved to Dublin to become chef at the Kildare Street club. By the early 1900s he also had a sideline selling “Fauvin Sauce and Pressed Beef”, with a series of press advertisements including one aimed at the crowds attending the famous Gordon Bennett Motor Race of 1903.
And despite somehow not being mentioned in Ulysses(although the Bennett race inspired a Joycean short story), M Fauvin had clearly done well. So much so that now, in 1910, he was able to open his own restaurant "in the heart of Dublin", as the ads said, beside Nelson's Pillar and diagonally opposite the GPO.
Whatever about the Sackville Cafe, the Restaurant Continental appears to have been more interested in gourmets than in serious-minded young men. Progressive whist does not seem to have featured either. But in other ways, the business was ahead of its time.
It boasted that French, Spanish, and Italian were spoken on the premises as well as English. And the heirloom that first inspired Murray to start researching the family history was one of the cafe’s “take-away” bags, for diners unable to finish a meal.
The business’s telegram address read simply “Gourmet, Dublin”. It also sold cigars. And if a customer wanted alcohol, staff would happily fetch it for them from around the corner in Nagle’s public house.
So was this forward and outward-looking establishment the scene of the national anthem’s composition? Well, it might be nice to think so and, in Kearney’s chronology, the dates fit.
Here, however, the evidence becomes scanty: reduced to such hints that, for example, Camille Fauvin’s daughter Elsie used to play piano on the premises, that she had among her possessions a copy of De Burca’s book, and that in the margins she corrected his mention of the “Swiss Cafe” with “should read Restaurant Continental”.
There’s not much else to go on. And after all, maybe Kearney himself was wrong about the dates and it was on the old Sackville Cafe’s piano that his notes were picked out.
Either way, the tale was to have a bitter-sweet twist during the fight to which the Soldier's Songlooked forward. Being in the heart of Dublin was not always a good thing. And in time, the ashes from which the Republic and its anthem would rise included not just the GPO's but those of the Restaurant Continental too.
Like much of the street, it was burned down during Easter Week. It may have been looted as well. Elsie Fauvin had a bleakly comic memory of a woman “sitting on a dead horse” near the cafe and “trying on shoes she had taken from a broken shop window”. The shoes were probably from Tyler’s, which once gave the corner its name.
Another witness – in the GPO – reported seeing a woman pushing “a piano on a trolley” down the street. This could have come from anywhere, of course. But Frank Murray can’t help wondering if it was the piano from the Restaurant Continental. And if it was, it may also have been the one on which the future national anthem was composed.