Down by the Liffeyside: My grandfather wrote Amhrán na bhFiann

Down by the Liffeyside

Author: Colbert Kearney

ISBN-13: 9781999997069

Publisher: Somerville Press

Guideline Price: €17

“Misery memoir” has unfortunately become the standard genre for personal histories. Frank McCourt has a lot to answer for. Colbert Kearney’s affectionate account of his family background should, therefore come as a relief, for it is a “happiness memoir”.

In fact he remarks that “Con and Maisie [his parents] ensured that none of their children would ever be in a position to write a misery memoir.”

But happiness is much more difficult to describe than misery, not least because it is usually devoid of incident. Nothing went wrong, but there are undertones suggesting that childhood was a trauma waiting to happen.

One wishes something really unpleasant might have interrupted this apparently idyllic childhood. If disaster, shame, cruelty, bigotry and injustice are absent, what can be left? Happy days. Sunshine. Harmony. But there is a haunting presence in Colbert Kearney’s story: his grandfather, Peadar Kearney (1883-1942), author of The Soldier’s Song which, in the 1933 words of Fine Gael TD Tom O’Higgins, was “on the lips of the people when they came into their own”.

Kearney’s memoir is uneven in the sense that his account of the happy times is punctuated by tantalising glimpses of his grandfather. In the background of his childhood were the twin issues of republicanism and Catholicism. “I was an Irish nationalist and a Catholic before I knew it . . . I acquired from Con the assumption that to be truly Irish was to be a fervent nationalist . . . The ultimate proof of our independence would be the revival of the Irish language.”

One senses that the compelling reference to “the mysteries of identity” into which Colbert’s father tried to initiate him, such as attendance at Croke Park as part of “the national fervour”, are areas towards which he does not wish to do more than point.

Wodehouse and Joyce

Young Colbert could not have discovered PG Wodehouse as a “favourite author” if he had remained within the unquestioning mindset of Irish republicanism. Another author whose work allowed him to question this heritage was James Joyce, whose Dubliners he discovered as a schoolboy: he calls it “literature as heroin. One fix and I was instantly and helplessly hooked.”

Connections with the Bourke and Behan families might have loomed much larger than they do: PJ Bourke, who established the theatrical costumier in Dublin’s Dame Street, was Peadar Kearney’s brother-in-law, and father of Seamus de Burca, Kearney’s biographer. Brendan Behan was Peadar Kearney’s nephew and, in effect, Colbert’s uncle.

There are also vignettes of theatre and cinema history which one wishes had been spelled out more fully. Peadar Kearney had worked in the Abbey Theatre and his son, Con, was a lighting engineer at the Queen’s, and the Torch (in Capel Street), and later a projectionist at the Carlton and Savoy cinemas in Dublin, the Ritz in Ballsbridge and the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire. For a time he worked with Anew McMaster’s touring theatre company.

The happiest moment in the story is when Brendan Behan describes young Colbert as “the first of his seed, breed or generation to attend a secondary school other than a Borstal”. This was the same Behan who, in Colbert’s eyes, was “a Rabelais”.

Despite Joyce and “uncle Rabelais”, Colbert was still “shocked” by undergraduate promiscuity and marijuana smoking at UCD in the 1960s, so protected had his childhood been in Inchicore and Finglas.

Catholic hierarchy

Colbert Kearney clearly set out to honour his parents, yet the reader is continually drawn in another direction: the tension between the “cult” (as he calls it) of Peadar Kearney as a nationalist hero and the reality, a mismatch between Con’s unquestioning reverence for Peadar Kearney and insistence on his “absolute independence of mind”.

Con was blind to “any domestic detail that might sully his [father’s] public reputation” – for example his lack of respect for the Catholic hierarchy and his transfer of allegiance to Michael Collins and Fine Gael. Yet this “independence of mind” points to a Joycean refusal to subscribe to any persuasion in which he could not believe.

It seems that the family were embarrassed by this ambivalence, as if it somehow diminished his stature as a republican. So much so that the 1957 biography by Seamus de Burca whitewashes many aspects of his life, including his heavy drinking.

From a literary and historical point of view, the 40-page appendix, A Soldier’s Songs, describing Peadar Kearney’s career, is the most valuable part of the book. The ambivalence of the IRB man who took the Free State side in the civil war and yet sold A Soldier’s Song to Fianna Fáil for the equivalent of €50,000 is worth a study in itself.

As a private conversation with himself, Colbert Kearney’s memoir does not convince. As a footnote to Irish republican and nationalist history, it has considerable merit.