I WENT down to Kilmainham Gaol last week, went to an exhibition called Guns and Chiffon, about the women who were prisoners in the gaol between 1916 and 1923, when it closed as a prison. And I went to the opening, so as to say a silent farewell to the President, Mrs Robinson, as president.
I wanted to formalise my own goodbye to her to arrange it on the high symbolic level I was conscious of when I watched her inauguration on television. I chose a place where brave women willingly suffered in the hope that there would be an independent Ireland with such things as a president.
The desire to go over some of what she has meant, this one last time, was satisfied. The President, who was 53 that day, stood beside the sprightly figure of the exprisoner and last living member of Cumann na mBan, Teresa O'Connell, who is 98. And on the other side was the beautiful young Sinead McCoole, who has already published a life of Lady Lavery and who put this exhibition together, and who is still in her 20s.
Very satisfying altogether, the occasion was, for a woman who grew up under a president de Valera - who regretted afterwards that he had prevented women from joining the fighters at Boland's Mill, because his men wasted their valuable time cooking.
The occasion, however, could not be entirely swathed in sentimentality. The reason, after all, women wanted to get in to Boland's Mill - and did get into the GPO and the City Hall and so on - was not just to assist their brothers in killing, but to kill themselves.
Countess Markievicz's neat little gun lies beside her wedding veil in a case in the exhibition. Margaret Skinnider was a private in the Irish Citizen Army. She joined the snipers on the roof of the College of Surgeons. "It was good to be in action," she wrote afterwards. "More than once I saw the man I aimed at fall.
The walls of the cells where women were imprisoned are covered with their deeply moving graffiti proverbs in English and Irish, drawings of the Tricolour, a pencilled record on the rough plaster of the weather glimpsed through a tiny, high window. But the motif of Cumann na mBan still startles. It is a rifle, with the Cumann's initials intertwined.
The iconography is exactly that of the gable wall murals of the Bogside and the Falls Road. Why wouldn't it be? It is what the IRA deliberately borrowed. The legacy of the women of the Rising is alive in at least two places. One is, certainly, in the conscious dignity of self government, as symbolised by the President. The other is wherever at this moment nationalist girls or women are studying their bomb circuitry or their maps and timetables.
We were, at the opening of the exhibition, in a familiar bind. Mrs Robinson faced it as well as she could. Because violence continues on the island, she said, a violence "unhelpful to all our purposes", we cannot be imaginatively and emotionally open to the women of the fight for independence and to what in their time and place they perceived as their "moral purpose". (I hope I paraphrase her remarks correctly.)
She said it was about time we matured into a more balanced way of looking at the matter. How very sad it was that we could not praise the Kilmainham women with more open hearts.
THIS is all very well, but it doesn't really help with the nuances of the situation. After all, some IRA woman planning a murder at this minute may well have - almost certainly does have - the perception that what she is doing has a "moral purpose".
But we don't, on the whole, accept the IRA's perceptions as other than at best unconsciously and at worst deliberately deranged. Yet we never call the men and women of 1916 deranged. We believe we can clearly see that they were selfless idealists. It is beyond us to see that someone who blasts children and shoppers and cleaning women to shards of flesh is also, possibly, selfless, and also undeniably an idealist, in that a "united Ireland" does not belong to the world of the real.
This paradox is intolerable to some people, and drives them into arguments that have no virtue except tidiness. That the men and women who fought for independence were moral lepers is one such argument: They were immoral not to have waited for Home Rule. That argument at least gets nationalists then and now into the same line. So of course does the argument that the present IRA is the legitimate heir of the people who made the Rising.
But most of us are stuck with making distinctions. An armed struggle against British rule was all right then, here, but it is not all right now, there, in the North. This is what I believe myself, and I can give the usual reasons about mandate, presence or absence of alternative forms of action, relative degrees of oppression etc. But I'm never going to entirely trust myself not to have arrived at so comfortable a conclusion even if there weren't any arguments for it. The President's "maturity" is beyond me.
In the world outside the gaol, two of Sinn Fein's candidates in this general election are women. They're heirs to the revolutionary women, too. I'd think twice before giving a vote to a Sinn Fe in candidate. I'd be afraid that their politics are North directed, when I want to use my vote to shape this Republic. Even when the individual is a valued community worker, I'd wonder why he or she chooses Sinn Fein of all parties to adhere to.
As for women, I'd be afraid Sinn Fein is secretly run by a male cabal. .. Suddenly, I see my own place in history. I'm probably using the very words of my cautious, suspicious forebears. The ones who always supported the status quo.
Better not go on about the revolutionary women, I suppose. Next thing, someone will call me a Provo. Better to pull the veil back down over these difficulties, over other difficulties. Most of the women, for instance, who were incarcerated in Kilmainham were put there by us, by the Free State, in the Civil War. In 1923 over 300 women and girls aged between 12 and 70 were imprisoned.
Better not go on about that, either, because these are Fianna Fail heroines, not Fine Gael ones, and there's an election on.
Morning Ireland's report managed to obscure the issue of who did what to whom and when by calling the whole period "the turbulent years that surrounded the foundation of the State". And maybe some fridge is a not an altogether bad thing when it comes to these topics.
Mrs Robinson rejoiced that the exhibition reclaims women who were written out of history from that silence. But though it puts their achievements and their heroism on the record, it can't give us a way of talking about them. There are more kinds of silence than one.