Writing the Rising in Rome: ‘Gals and guns’

Following a screening of RTÉ’s Rebellion at the Writing the Rising conference held last weekend at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the Università Roma Tre, author and academic Colin Teevan talked about the novelty of having women as protagonists in his TV drama series and how the combination of “Gals and Guns” had been unexpectedly crucial in getting the show picked up by Sundance TV in the US.

The Rome event was part of the Ireland 1916 Centenary Programme, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Ireland 2016: Global and Diaspora Fund and by Culture Ireland.

Of course the same “Gals and Guns” combination played an equally crucial role in the very real event that was the 1916 Rising. One of the novelties of how 1916 is being remembered in this centenary year is that the important role of Irish women is being belatedly written back into our understanding.

Despite the fact that the 1916 proclamation guaranteed equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens, “without distinction of sex”, women were for the most part marginalised by the 1916 leaders and sent off to do what Joan Fitzgerald (granddaughter of Mabel and Desmond Fitzgerald) termed “womeny” roles (cooking, nursing, and, at most, carrying messages) as part of Cumann na mBan, and they were later written out of subsequent narrative accounts.

The Catholic Bulletin led the way with a series of hagiographic biographies of the men who died for Ireland, while forgetting the role of women. It is the hard slog of cultural historians in the archives that is allowing women to emerge. Notable new publications include, among others, Lucy McDiarmid’s At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916; Sinéad McCoole’s Easter Widows; and Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923.

In Rome, Kirsty Lusk, who recently co-edited Scotland and the Easter Rising, Fresh Perspectives on 1916 with Willy Maley, spoke movingly about Nora Connolly O’Brien and Margaret Skinnider, who commanded a small group of men in Easter week, was shot and injured but later denied a pension because it was only intended for “soldiers as generally understood in the masculine sense” (as can be seen in records from the Military Pensions Archive).

Generational conflict

On being asked why the television series was called Rebellion (and not Insurrection or The Rising) Teevan revealed that he saw 1916 as part of a bigger, global revolution that involved not just the rights of nations but also demanded greater equality on class and gender grounds (a promise utterly denied in the decades of conservatism that followed 1916 in Ireland). An initial working title for the series had been “Generation”, a term which neatly conjures up the generational nature of what happened in 1916 (as is also suggested in Foster’s book title).

1916 was of course a decision to take up arms and assert Irish sovereignty and independence but it was also part of a generational revolution that took place across Europe and, in a decade, dismantled the ramshackle regimes governing the continent (a subject this, which surely is intensely relevant in the Europe of today, which sometimes seems as alien to its younger generations as the ancien régimes did in the years leading up to the first World War).

In Ireland it saw younger people take centre stage, frustrated at the failure of John Redmond’s generation to deliver what it had for so long promised – Home Rule (Redmond turned 60 in 1916). The Rising was a shattering blow to his lifelong commitment to a constitutional path to change and it resulted in his Irish Party being swept aside in favour of Sinn Féin.

The political upheavals in Ireland and elsewhere would have their counterpart in literature with Modernist writers rejecting the traditions that held good through the nineteenth century for more radical forms of expression. It is no coincidence that James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also first appeared in 1916. Although he would be loath to admit it, Joyce too – in Trieste and Zurich – was an exiled member of an Irish revolutionary generation that rejected the status quo and the stagnation that is distilled in Joyce’s term “paralysis” – especially if, as this Rome conference showed, the revolution was every bit as much a cultural event as it was a political one.

Remembering revolution

Part of Joyce’s revolution was against WB Yeats and his generation but what emerged from two talks on “Easter 1916” (by Brazil-based Irish writer, Patrick Holloway, and by Roy Foster) is that Yeats triumphantly got his own back on the generation of Pearse, McDonagh and the others, who were closer to Joyce in age. Yeats successively re-inscribed himself into the 1916 event that had caught him entirely by surprise and continues today to feature as its key interpreter. His complex articulation of his own struggle to come to terms with what happened in 1916 is still the most valuable means that we possess today to come to terms with the moral and political complexities of the act of violence that gave birth to the Irish State.

1916 and its violence would haunt Yeats as it has haunted successive generations of Irish people, north and south, since. Yeats was already cautious about Pearse, whom he considered “a dangerous man”, all too taken by “the vertigo of self-sacrifice” which was not, tragically, a feature unique to Irishmen of his generation but could be easily seen elsewhere in Britain and Europe where the ideal of dying young and ardently was often idealised (also in mainstream conscription campaigns for the first World War).

Yeats’s personal struggle offers a formidable vehicle for Irish people everywhere to come to terms with what initially seemed a gallant but doomed week of sacrifice, violence, loss of life and destruction. Poet Stephen McKenna witnessed that “the Irish simply listened or shrugged their shoulders or sniggered” when Pearse read the proclamation. The “terribly beauty” of which Yeats speaks became possible only because of the foolhardy harshness of the British reprisals, which saw to it that the Irish State would soon become a reality.

There is much truth in the assertion made by Bobby McDonagh, Ireland’s Ambassador to Italy (whose grandmother played a leading role in Cumann na mBan), that the tricolour would not be flying over Villa Spada, the Irish Embassy in Rome – or elsewhere, for that matter, but for 1916.

There is truth too that we are still learning to read and interpret this world-changing event and that much new understanding remains to be mined from the cultural writings – and especially the revolutionary theatre that emerged in but soon spread beyond the Abbey and which, at a stroke, turned into such a theatrical revolution (Fearghal McGarry’s The Abbey Theatre and Easter 1916 illustrates this powerfully).

Equally, our current culture can still be nourished and challenged by an analysis of the waves of remembrance that have greeted each major anniversary of 1916 but which also, as Roisin Higgins reminded the conference, are every bit as revelatory of their own times as they are of the times they seek to remember.

John McCourt is the author of Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland