The descendants’ Rising: memories and stories rebels passed on to their families

When I was a child, my mother often spoke about her “forgettery”: the unconscious realm to which she dispatched all of her uncomfortable or discordant memories. Admittedly, these usually included such things as the respectively inconsequential squabbles between her offspring. Nonetheless, I was intrigued at the concept of an antithesis to memory. Why should one want to consciously edit experience? With age comes the understanding that a “forgettery”, as a psychological construct, is essential to human wellbeing. We forget because we are afraid, guilty or confused, and the obliteration of troubling memories affords a peace of mind that is fundamental to our successfully functioning as part of a family – or a community.

Thus began my fascination with the concept of “memory” – how it is composed, edited, transmitted and received. Memory became both the source and subject of my PhD thesis in 2009. In the penultimate chapter I explored the significance of oral tradition in the construction of the collective memory of Robert Emmet, and my primary source material was a collection of oral history recordings compiled by my father, Maurice O’Keeffe, for the Irish Life and Lore series.

Three years later, in 2012, Maurice O’Keeffe received sponsorship from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht to undertake a new collection of oral history interviews – this time with the descendants of the participants in the 1916 Rising. He traversed the country to meet with and interview these custodians of memory, the caretakers of stories which, like the medals and faded photographs, have been handed down from one generation to the next. They generously shared their stories of the men and women at the barricades in Church Street and North King Street, on the roof of the GPO, standing with Thomas Ashe at Ashbourne and with The O’Rahilly in Moore Street. Each of the interviewees spoke from their own family’s unique perspective, but their recollections resonate with many Irish families and, as such, are as important an emblem of that complex period in Irish history as any official act of commemoration.

The final collection of 100 interviews represented a rich archive of inherited memory, and offered an opportunity for this historian to construct a collective retelling of Easter Week and to engage with the emotional and material legacies of 1916 for the children and grandchildren of the participants.

Conscious of the recent revolution in the abundance and availability of primary source material relating to the 1916 Rising – particularly the Bureau of Military History witness statements and pension files – I proposed to mine three different layers of memory. The first layer comprises eyewitness accounts of the 1916 Rising; the second is provided by those who recount the stories told to them by their parents and grandparents; and the final layer comes from those family members who never knew the people about whom they speak, but share inherited memories, reimagined and diluted by distance.

During the research and transcription process, it became clear that my mother’s philosophy is one to which most of the “Rising generation” subscribed. The phrase “he never really spoke about it” was an oft-repeated refrain and so many of the interviewees from the second generation expressed regret at the passing of a parent and the realisation that they knew only part of the story. The veterans of Easter Week had shared what they deemed to be “suitable” or “worthy” and relegated to their “forgettery” those uncomfortable aspects of their revolutionary pasts which they felt, for various reasons, were better forgotten. Those experiences, which were not consciously erased, were prone to the distortions of human memory: fragmentation that comes with the passing of time and the influence of subsequent experience and social conditioning, in however mediated a way. And so, far from being handed down with timeless veracity from one generation to the next, the first-hand recollections of the Rising and its aftermath were redacted and revised, and were passed on piecemeal to the second generation.

I quickly realised that the real value of the oral history collection lay less in its potential for yielding an unvarnished truth about the revolutionary period, and more in its revelations about the different ways in which families have attempted to assimilate and make sense of their shared history.

An additional layer of interpretation was applied by the third generation, for whom the lines of family history intersect more visibly with the national narrative. Theirs is perhaps a more complex inheritance, because their understanding is influenced as much by academic analysis and public memorialisation as by an ancestor’s account of the past. While each of the interviews was individual and unique, similar threads were evident in the tapestries of inherited memory. The introductory chapter therefore became an exploration of how memories of the revolutionary period were transferred from one generation to the next, the motives for remembering and forgetting Easter Week, and the long-term impact of political activism on the participants and their families.

The second chapter provides context for the 1890-1923 period and the remaining chapters are organised according to the dominant themes in the interviews. In some cases, the interviewees prioritised their relatives’ roles at a particular location during the Rising, while, in others, the circumstances of an antecedent’s death took precedence. The dominant voices in the book are those of the interviewees, which, for the sake of coherency and continuity, are bolstered by documentary evidence and first-hand accounts drawn from the witness statements submitted to the BMH in the 1940s and 50s.

The chapter on the executed leaders includes, for example, the voices of Michael Mallin’s son, Joseph, who recalled his mother’s emotional and financial struggles in the aftermath of his father’s execution, and those of Joseph Plunkett’s nephews who described childhoods disturbed by the echoes of war and by a parent’s imprisonment. Thomas MacDonagh’s granddaughter, Éamonn Ceannt’s grand-niece, Patrick Pearse’s grand-nephews and James Connolly’s great-grandson are more distantly removed from the personality and the period, but they retold their relatives’ stories in a way that was vividly real and emotionally charged.

The descendants of the men for whom the GPO and the Four Courts represented focal points for memory traced their relatives’ different paths to revolution, and offered an insight into their distinct personal and political afterlives. Many of their stories diverge at the surrender and again at the signing of the Anglo Irish Treaty in 1921, and represent the complex cocktail of allegiances during the revolutionary period.

The last chapter tells the story of Easter Week from the perspective of the descendants of ICA Captain Sean Connolly, Michael J O’Rahilly and others, who fell in the heat of battle in 1916. Their families were bequeathed with a more visceral inherited memory of rebellion, and the interviewees described the bittersweet legacy of Easter Week.

Collectively, the stories represent a unique access point to that troubled period in Irish history. They humanise and contextualise the participants in rebellion, and offer the universal reference points that are a mother’s fierce protectiveness of her child, a son’s respect for his father, and a family’s collective grief at the loss of a loved one.

While historians are often frustrated by a dearth of primary source material, my difficulty lay in the abundance of choice. The multitude of memories and anecdotes in the oral history collection meant that my first draft, much to my editor’s dismay, ran to over 200,000 words; and so began the brutal and painstaking process of selective editing. I knew that I would have to jettison almost half of what I had written, prioritising variety of experience over finer detail. The restrictive word count demanded disciplined detachment from the stories in which – I must confess – I had become so invested. I had spent more than a year listening to these shared narratives: transcripting, researching, smiling at domestic memories, and wincing at articulated – and sometimes unarticulated – pain. Throughout the writing process I was acutely aware of my privileged access to the storehouse of family memory, and applying the scalpel to that corpus of memory was one of the most difficult aspects of the project.

The result was To Speak of Easter Week, which offers, I hope, a representative cross-section of experience. From a son’s memory of his father, to a great-grand-son’s awareness of his family’s sacrifice, it traces the emotional inheritance as well as the political consequences of the 1916 Rising into the 21st century.

Originally from Tralee in Co Kerry, Helene O’Keeffe studied history in University College Cork and was awarded a PhD in modern Irish history in 2009. She teaches history in St Angela’s College in Cork city. To Speak of Easter Week was supported by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and published by Mercier Press