An Irishman's Diary

IVY DAY passed almost unnoticed earlier this week, as it generally does these days. Perhaps only in 2016, the next major anniversary of Parnell’s death – 125 years – will commemorations reach anything like the extent they did in the decades after his demise. But in one sense at least, the decline in Ivy Day observances is itself a mark of respect to the fallen Chief. Because, notoriously for an “uncrowned king of Ireland”, Parnell hated the colour green.

More precisely he dreaded it, as a guarantee of bad fortune. His other superstitions included magpies and the number 13. But green was a special case. “How could you expect a country to have luck that has green as its national colour?” he once asked.

More understandably, Parnell also had a morbid aversion to death and the ceremonies surrounding it. This seems to have dated from his trauma as a teenager experiencing the sudden loss of both his father and maternal grandmother. But combined with a schooling in England, it meant that, as his biographer FSL Lyons noted: “The adult Charles united in his person two formidable obstacles to political success in Ireland – an English accent and an intense dislike of funerals.”

So, not that his luck could have disimproved any further by then, you have to wonder what would Parnell have made of the first Ivy Day in 1892: when, a year after his death, thousands marched on Glasnevin Cemetery, adopting the symbol that a single mourner had plucked from the graveyard wall 12 months earlier, to protest their loyalty and show where they stood on the bitter split.

Men wore it in their lapels, women in their hats. Parnellite cab drivers even decorated their horses with it. According to The Irish Times: “It was a strange sight, and the enormous display of the green emblem must have been some answer to a different section of the nationalists who have been asserting in a confident manner that Parnellism is a thing of the past.”

Had their somewhat neurotic hero witnessed it, he might have concluded that it was no wonder he was dead. But if not reconciled to the spectacle, he would at least have been used to it by then. Here’s Lyons again, quoting and commenting on contemporary accounts of a Parnellite rally in Navan, during an earlier October, 1879: “Thousands showed bay leaves in their hats or green ribbons in their button-holes. Hundreds wore handsome green scarves [an abomination to Parnell, but they could not be expected to know that] . . .” Although he sometimes exaggerated it for comic effect, Parnell’s superstition seems to have run particularly rampant during his famous stay in Kilmainham Gaol, when female supporters oppressed him with gifts of “green scarves, green cardigans, green smoking caps, green counterpanes”, none of which he would touch.

His triskaidekaphobia also flared up there, to the extent that, after striking out a clause in a draft bill to amend the 1881 Land Act, “he reinstated it the moment he realised its deletion would reduce the number of clauses to the detested 13”.

The prison experience brought out his latent hypochondria too. Not without reason, because although the chief secretary, “Buckshot” Forster, ameliorated the Land Leaguers’ conditions with various privileges (for example allowing them meet freely in Parnell’s cell – the most comfortable room available – where they could eat meals ordered in from a restaurant) the jail was still a cold, damp, and unhealthy place.

Thus when his fellow inmate, the journalist William Smith O’Brien, mentioned over dinner one evening how he had earlier received a note from his sub-editor saying that two of the latter’s children were down with scarlet fever, the news sent Parnell into a near-panic: “My God, O’Brien,” he cried. “What did you do with the letter?”

The note had to be fetched from the journalist’s pocket and thrown into the fire. Then, under Parnell’s supervision, the urgency of which amused everyone present except himself, O’Brien had to wash his hands thoroughly. Only then did the Chief return to dinner with a satisfied look. “Buckshot is not going to get rid of us as cheaply as that,” he declared.

On the subject of colour, O’Brien found Parnell incorrigible. When the former pointed out that the use of green to represent Ireland was a modern fad, dating only to the United Irishmen, before which movement the national symbol was blue, Parnell responded smiling: “It’s just the same – blue is more than half green.” But his dread of all things green was genuine, O’Brien thought, and “arose, in my judgement, chiefly from a fear of arsenical poisoning”. Consequently, as the journalist recorded, well-meaning female admirers turned Parnell’s prison spell into a bigger ordeal than it should have been.

One woman made him “a superb eiderdown quilt, covered with green satin, with his monogram worked in gold bullion – a present worthy of a king”. But the lovely present never rested on Parnell’s bed: “It was hidden away carefully underneath a press, where [. . .] the mice soon tarnished its glory.” O’Brien continued: “Lady devotees sent him innumerable other marks of homage worked in the dangerous colour: embroidered smoking caps, tea-cosys, and even bright green hosiery. The latter he insisted resolutely on destroying; the others he distributed freely among his brother-prisoners, until every man [. . .] except himself had his green tasselled turban and green woollen vests . . .”

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com