HOW the ghost of Katherine Tynan must have stirred when all of an April evening the Irish Rugby Football Union sent in bulldozers to level the farm buildings and outhouses of the Tynan family home at Whitehall near Tallaght - and how symbolic that deed of destruction was.
For in the classical prescription of such things, it should have been the forces of demotic populism - as represented by a property developer or a Fianna Fail backed housing development - which should have brought Whitehall so close to irreversible doom.
Instead, it was the IRFU - an institution which Katherine Tynan and her husband, Henry Albert Hinkson, would probably have identified with (in those days) as a sporting expression of Irish unionism. Nothing in Irish life is simple. Katherine Tynan tends to be remembered within the nationalistic iconography as the woman whose home was once forum to the leaders of the growing Celtic Revival movement - and not just in just cultural terms.
Parnell, Davitt and O'Leary were visitors to Whitehall, as were W.B. Yeats, George Russell and Lady Gregory. But in her heart, Katherine Tynan really belonged to a species which has no visible expression today; she was, if you like, a Home Rule Unionist, a Loyal Separatist, a woman and artist who cherished her Irishness, and longed for self government, but still felt herself comfortable within the United Kingdom, different but the same.
Caught out
She, like so many of her type, Protestant and Catholic, were caught out by the storm which was to so complicate identity, loyalty and national preference.
In the end, she perhaps influenced by her unionist husband, Henry Hinkson RM in Claremorris - seems to have plumped for the Union flag rather than the Tricolour, but never abandoning her Irishness or her sense of separateness. Hers, after all, was largely a melodious form of the constitutional nationalism which the Conservative and Unionist establishment had declined to listen to; and when a voice, repeatedly and reasonable uttered, is repeatedly and reasonably unheard, the sound which will replace it will sooner or later be of musketry.
That musketry when it came not merely caused immense distress to Irish patrinionists such - as Katherine Tynan - it fairly clobbered the people who were the snorting forbears of those who sent in the bulldozers, all of an April evening last week
Among the first victims of the musketry of Easter 1916 was Mr H. Browning, president of the IRFU, who was shot dead by insurgents at Mount Street Bridge. Many other members of the IRFU were with Browning that day on the route march of that slightly ridiculous organisation, the Georgius Rex, who declared their loyalty to the king by regularly marching, unarmed, to Ticknock and back, and who were shot down for their loyalty.
Browning had helped raise "D" Company of footballers of the Dublin Fusiliers, many of whom, having served in Gallipoli, were back in Dublin, and would soon be fighting against the insurgents who had just murdered the president of the IRFU. Those rugby playing Dublin Fusiliers had first gathered at the outset of war in Lansdowne Road nearly two years before; and it was to build a replacement for the Lansdowne Road stadium that the IRFU three years ago bought the acres which enclose Katherine Tynan's house. And what might seem an unaccountable act of cultural barbarism by the IRFU today could also be seen as mere evidence of the way history moves on, and the hand which levels the final wall is, in fact, only concluding a process which had begun long before.
Outpaced by history
Sixteen years ago, Caroline Walsh visited Whitehall for this newspaper. Its resident then was a farmer who, like the house he lived in, had been outpaced by history. Where once there had been winding country lanes and singing streams which inspired Katherine Tynan to write her lovely hymn, Sheep and Lambs, there were housing estates, wire fences, motorways, junctions. His fields were constantly intruded on by gangs of youths. A farming life had become impossible there.
What possessed the IRFU to think it might be an appropriate place to build a successor to the Lansdowne Road stadium, I cannot say. Much of what the IRFU does is mystifying. It forbids, for example, the sale of food or drink inside Lansdowne Road before or during a rugby match, thereby showing a contemptuous indifference for both the extra revenue resulting and for the comfort of spectators. That it should buy a plot of land with such a historic building on it which it would then have to demolish would make no sense for most organisations: it is all of a piece in IRFU logic - which is no logic at all.
Planning refused
The IRFU sought planning permission to demolish the house; and surprise, surprise, planning permission was refused. And equally, surprise surprise, the house then passed into a period of neglect which prompted South Dublin County Council on March 25th to issue an instruction to the IRFU to make the premises safe and secure the buildings against trespass; failure to comply would, it warned, attract a £2,000 fine.
It looks as if the IRFU is looking at a £2,000 fine, for its bulldozer deeds then merely destroyed what had become dangerous, but did not conserve it; and the site remains open, much to the anger of local residents in Kingswood. To no avail either, because the lords of IRFU are now looking elsewhere for their international stadium, which will most probably not now be on Whitehall.
Idiocy, but the absence of that idiocy does not mean Whitehall was going to be saved - for who today actually wants to run the place? Who wants to put money into it, surrounded by estates and threatened by vandalism as it now is? What actual political and financial will is there to restore what is now a ruin and run it successfully? We know the answer to these questions; and I think, alas, we must accept the inevitable.