OPINION:We must rebuild civic confidence by not only speaking of patriotism, but by promoting its practice, writes Elaine Byrne
TO LOVE your country is to touch her history. Only then does history become real, only then do you appreciate how alive inside Ireland is. In times of uncertainty, such as these, you can hear the possibility of hope and history rhyming.
This week, I tried to understand my country by visiting and listening to her dead.
Daniel O'Connell rests in a crypt inside the imposing tower at the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery. His beautiful polished oak casket, adorned with rich gilt mountings, is encased above ground in a stone tomb. The Camden Street stonemasons that carved the arches of his tomb in Celtic ornament also crafted a solitary crest of the O'Connell family arms.
The table of the tomb, made from Kilkenny marble, has a Latin inscription which translates as "Daniel O'Connell, of Ireland, the Liberator, to the seat of the Apostles going, on the 15th of May, 1847 at Genoa, fell asleep in the Lord, having lived 71 years. RIP."
At the west end of the altar tomb, between the pierced stone panels, it is possible to touch his cold, cold casket.
I stood there in the stillness, full of hesitancy, and remembered the first day
I worked in our family undertaking business. "Do not to fear the dead," I was told. "The body may be in the coffin but the soul is somewhere else now."
Then I thought back to O'Connell's ancestral home at Derrynane in Kerry, now a museum, when I stared in disbelief at his hairbrush, still I think containing loose hairs. Overwhelmed by curiosty, I sought out his portrait at the National Gallery, to meet him up close. On some sort of journey then, I visited his Dublin home on Merrion Square and read his speeches out loud.
Compelled to, I quietly touched his casket and said hello. Daniel O'Connell was real. He brushed his hair like anybody else. The extraordinary things this politician did for Ireland were not just old stories in history books.
There are many new ways to experience history. Last week, the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) launched their Digital Humanities Observatory. This project facilitates technological access to rare documents, images and recordings for wider public consumption and includes the Doegen archive, which contains the voices of Irish speakers across Ireland.
The Doegen archive revealed a previously unknown 1928 recording of WT Cosgrave, the then president of the Irish Free State Executive. The RIA invited Liam Cosgrave, taoiseach in 1973-1977, to listen to his father's brief speech.
Liam Cosgrave kindly let me listen with him. His father's tone was deliberate, with a hint of hesitation towards what would have been unfamiliar technology. WT said he was just back from Paris having signed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy.
When we took off the headphones, Liam Cosgrave smiled. He was eight-years-old when his father was in Paris. He was smiling because he was thinking back to when his father had returned from America, on similar government duty, bringing back presents of wristwatches for him and his brother. Like O'Connell, WT Cosgrave had lived, he had a voice, and those grainy black-and-white television pictures of him seemed more colourful now.
One half of the Fianna Fáil general secretary's office is occupied by a magnificent solid mahogany table.
When I first sat there the worn character of the woodgrain suggested that there was something special about its history. Éamon de Valera here made his decisions which established Fianna Fáil and brought them into government in 1932.
Maybe de Valera returned to this very place in 1945 to draft his brilliant seven-minute reply to Winston Churchill. Broadcast on Irish radio, de Valera's neutrality speech ended with the words: "A small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul."
That word, soul, haunted me all week.
What is Ireland's soul? What is the essence of our country? What do we as a people believe in? If patriotism is the commitment to the values of a country, we should define those values. We are living through a period of stunning history, too close to events to appreciate their full significance. Things will not be as they were before, that is all we do know.
Irish public life has been demoralised by challenges to public trust. We must rebuild civic confidence by not only speaking of patriotism, but by promoting its practice. A National Citizenship Day is one such way.
This week celebrates the old Irish Samhain pagan festival. The Celtic New Year marks the end of the summer.
In dark silence comes whisperings of new beginnings as the seeds begin to stir below the ground. The Festival of the Dead is upon us. Celebrate our patriots by evoking their memory.
At former president Patrick Hillery's graveside oration earlier this year, then taoiseach Bertie Ahern repeated Seán Lemass's evocative words: "Patriotism, as I understand it, is a combination of love of country, pride in its history, traditions and culture, and a determination to add to its prestige and achievements."
We will find that again.