Review: The Scrap, by Gene Kerrigan: Ploughed under the stars

The Scrap

Author: Gene Kerrigan

ISBN-13: 978-1781620359

Publisher: Doubleday Ireland

Guideline Price: €12.99

The names of Charlie Saurin and Boss Shields are not emblazoned in popular memory like Éamon de Valera and WT Cosgrave. But all four men are linked by being 1919 insurrectionists who were picked to be executed, accepted their fate and, at the final moment, were reprieved.

De Valera and Cosgrave were selected by Gen John Maxwell as part of his plans to stamp out the mistakenly termed “dangerous Sinn Féiners”. They were reprieved when British politicians grew fearful of public fury.

Having fought their way out of the GPO, Saurin and Shields were among seven handpicked young men, approved of by Patrick Pearse, to undertake a suicide mission from a loft overlooking Moore Lane. They were ordered to be prepared to give their lives by charging at a British barricade as a diversionary tactic, so that the machine guns would be aimed at them when the remaining rebels stampeded towards the same barricade.

Perhaps Pearse was haunted by their faces after he left the loft where they waited to carry out their mission. Or perhaps it was the sight of corpses of elderly civilians, massacred when trying to flee the horror being visited upon their homes in Moore Lane. But Pearse cancelled plans for their suicide mission and Saurin and Shields were reprieved when news reached the loft that Pearse had agreed surrender terms.

De Valera and Cosgrave moulded political dynasties out of reputations garnered from that week, despite de Valera’s only real contribution to the Rising being his banning of women from his outpost. In this he put down a marker, that – notwithstanding declarations of equality in the Proclamation – women would know their place in any Ireland he presided over.

As for Saurin and Shields, both of whom never considered the option of shying away from seemingly certain death, neither gained little from their actions over Easter Week.

Arthur “Boss” Shields was a 20-year-old Abbey Theatre actor who, amid the bewildering counter-orders on Easter Monday, he briefly left his small band of confused fellow volunteers from F Company, 2nd Battalion, in Fairview. His destination: the Abbey, where he checked if he was needed for a matinee that afternoon before collecting a rifle hidden under the stage.

Charlie Saurin was a 20-year-old student. Others gathered in Fairview that morning included Harry Colley, a rate collector whose son would be thwarted for the leadership of Fianna Fáil; Harry Boland, Michael Collins's best friend, who would reject the treaty and die from a Free State bullet; and Oscar Traynor, a professional soccer player who, four decades later, defied John Charles McQuaid by helping to stage a soccer international against communist Yugoslavia and then tried to kowtow back into McQuaid's favour by suppressing a Pike Theatre production of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo.

There was also the company captain, Frank Henderson, who remained troubled all his life by some of the brutal tactics later employed by Collins.

Fairview focus

Many studies of the Rising focus on its planning or the intrigues and blind spots of some leaders who imagined that no capitalist empire would shell the property of fellow capitalists. But in an already crowded market, Gene Kerrigan’s book stands out by focusing on those volunteers who gathered in Fairview on Easter Monday, unsure if the Rising would occur.

The cohesion of this close-knit company was shattered by the contradictory orders. Soon they were scattered in the confusion of a revolution utterly different to what its leaders planned.

Kerrigan uses a journalist’s research skills and a thriller writer’s pacing to chronicle the Rising through their eyes – or, to be precise, the accounts they provided to the Bureau of Military History, which remained sealed until the last survivor died. Therefore, in this telling the leaders only have walk-on parts, when their paths intersect with the F Company volunteers.

After intense fighting for days, Harry Colley was so seriously wounded in Gloucester Street that medics wrongly told him he would die. The Rising virtually passed by half of F Company in Jacob’s Biscuit factory, with the British content to leave them penned in while they tackled more important targets. They see Maj John McBride’s frustration at being barely able to fire a shot because the British don’t bother attacking. His words foretold the future: “Some of you may live to fight again and, if you do, take the open country for it and avoid a death trap like this.”

Other F Company volunteers, such as Saurin, Shields and Traynor, end up in the blazing heart of the GPO, witnessing the determination of an exhausted Tom Clarke and the agony and courage of the wounded James Connolly. They witness the undoubted bravery of that bizarre figure, sword-carrying Joseph Mary Plunkett, he of the lunatic ambition to install an obscure German prince as a Gaelic-speaking King of Ireland.

As Kerrigan points out, the insurrectionists had no shared vision of a future Ireland. Realists such as Collins and Séan Lemass had as little interest in Plunkett’s Germanic king as they had in Connolly or Michael Mallin’s dreams of socialism, or the sort of anti-Semitic, right-wing state that the brave but racially toxic WJ Brennan-Whitmore yearned for.

Only seven men signed the Proclamation, one under duress because he found the notion of equal rights for women repugnant. What primarily united the volunteers was a desire to topple the status quo.

Perhaps the bravest figure encountered by F Company isn’t Irish or Republican, but an English Citizen’s Army volunteer absent from most rolls of honour. His name was John Neale, but most survivors just called him “the Cockney Socialist”. Whoever he was, he fought to the last bullet for a socialist utopia that his comrades, while respecting him, had no interest in.

These normally forgotten figures make Kerrigan’s book essential reading. He provides a minimum of political context and only blunt summaries of the leaders’ characters. His mastery lies in the telling detail and in bringing minor characters into the light. We see evil in the psychopathic British army officer, John Bowen-Colthurst, who murdered Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and other innocent men, but also gallantry on both sides.

And there is immense human decency in the civilians caught up in a nightmare – civilians whose deaths outnumbered that of combatants. This is exemplified in the courage of nurses from a nearby hospital who risked their lives to step out into the fighting on Mount Street Bridge, making both sides cease fire as they carried the wounded to safety.

O'Brien Press has a fine series of biographies of the executed leaders. Paul O'Brien's 1916 in Focus series provide more detailed accounts of each battle, some of which Kerrigan ignores because of F Company's non-involvement. The Royal Irish Academy's 1916 Portraits and Lives succinctly sums up the main players, and many historical studies give far greater historical analysis of Easter Week.

Yet few are as readable as The Scrap, even if the absence of footnotes might annoy historians. But with his novelist's eye and democratic insistence on every character being afforded equal weight, Kerrigan directly brings us into the terrifying mayhem facing a group of ordinary volunteers during a week that left a city in flames – and a slow fuse burning under a seemingly invincible empire.

Dermot Bolger's That Which Is Suddenly Precious: New & Selected Poems has just been published