Aidan Beatty

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

ABSTRACT This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.

The Genders of Nationalist Space

This chapter begins with an end: the 1915 funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Born in 1831, O’Donovan Rossa was a veteran of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a famously satirical journalist who had mostly lived in exile in New York since his release from prison in 1871.2 On 29 June 1915 he died at St Vincent’s Hospital on Staten Island and another IRB ’exile’, John Devoy, took charge of his funeral arrangements. Notwithstanding O’Donovan Rossa’s wishes to be buried alongside his father in his native Rosscarbery in West Cork, Devoy orchestrated to have his Fenian comrade interred in the more suitably nationalist surroundings of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. The funeral, on 1 August 1915, took on all the trappings of an official state event. It provided Pearse with the occasion for his famous speech on ‘our Fenian dead’. It brought together the various radical factions of Irish politics who, a year later, would execute the Rising. It was, in many ways, a dress rehearsal for the Rising itself. It was also, though, an event pregnant with a gendered conception of nationalist space. Devoy’s immediate call for a publicly supported funeral, for instance, neatly welded the erotic to the nationalist in its description of O’Donovan Rossa’s return to an Irish space: ‘It was always his fond hope, his heartfelt wish that his remains should be borne across the seas to his beloved Ireland, and that he should be laid to rest upon the bosom of that land which he loved so well; that his ashes should mingle with the ashes of his forefathers, while his spirit wandered freely among the hills and glens of his beloved Erin.’3 The return of O’Donovan Rossa’s body for burial in his homeland reiterated the almost sacral centrality of Irish soil. His burial in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery served to place him, quite literally, alongside other dead (mostly male) patriots. It also reaffirmed Dublin’s centrality, over and above rural backwaters like West Cork.4

Fianna Fáil, Masculinity and the Economics of National Salvation

This chapter begins with a fairy tale. ‘Once upon a time, there lived in Ireland a man who grew wheat.’ At first, this man lived a harmonious and autarchic life, selling his crops to the other men of Ireland, who, in turn, ‘made boots and clothes for him.’ Unfortunately, though, this peaceful all-male economy was soon destroyed by the market forces of international capitalism. The land had become a dumping ground for cheaply made foreign goods and the men of Ireland ‘ceased to get a livelihood out of the trade, and they grew thin’, whilst international capitalists grew fat. Emigration increased, but this only exasperated the situation. Those who left found work overseas producing mountains of commodities, which were added to the cheap goods already flooding into Ireland, all to the benefit of the same foreign capitalists. Those men that had stayed in Ireland, because they lacked the money to leave, sank further into despair. Then, one day, there appeared a prophet in a top hat, a very thinly veiled W.T. Cosgrave, who promised to save the men of Ireland. Cosgrave, however, was not only a devious Free State politician, he was also a weak man. He was secretly in league with ‘the Knights of the Compass and Square and Ring’ (i.e., the Freemasons) and he grovelled before them. And they rejoiced at the terrible work he had done, opening up Ireland ever more to their rapacious capitalism. Meanwhile, the remaining men of Ireland, now languishing in a workhouse, were moving from despair to anger. They had begun to see the solution to their problems. If the men of Ireland could all be provided with their own means of production, they could make enough to provide for themselves and their families. As the wheat farmer observed, while looking at the rich farm land outside the workhouse, ‘I could have grown good food for ye all, and it’s not here I’d be to-night, with a shoemaker and his toes sticking out, and a tailor with no seat in his breeches, swilling watery German porridge and eating watery Russian bread.’ Indeed, like all fairy tales, this one also had a happy ending: ‘IRISHMEN! Let us end that story! Henceforth we will utilise the resources God gave us to provide a livelihood for our own people in our own land. VOTE FIANNA FAIL.’2

Regulating Sex, Gender and Leisure in the Irish Free State

The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, borrowing from the signal work of Max Weber, argues for the idea of a ‘unique “fingerprint” that distinguishes each state-society complex and is created through interaction between the state and civil society.’2 In the case of Israel, Kimmerling talks of the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine as a ‘state in the making’. A direct result of the existence of this proto-state, he feels, was that after 1948, ‘the boundaries between “state” (i.e., the central political institutions) and “society” (non-political but exclusive ethnic institutions) were completely blurred, as institutionalization of political organizations and leadership intensified social control and surveillance.’ Kimmerling thus identifies the essence of the Israeli ‘fingerprint’ as being determined by state–society relations that predated the formal birth of the state. This led, he feels, to a situation wherein the Israeli state sought to impose its dominance in society by forging alliances with those groups that would help it maintain its initially fragile hegemony.3

Time, Gender and the Politics of National Liberation, 1916–1923

On 21 January 1919, the same day that Sinn Fein established an independent Irish parliament, Dail Eireann, a small group of local nationalists acting on their own initiative, attacked and killed two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) constables escorting workmen and dynamite at a quarry in Soloheadbeg in South Tipperary. The ambush at Soloheadbeg has often been seen as the starting point of the Irish War of Independence.2 In his memoirs of his experiences during this war, Dan Breen offered a lively account of his role as one of the leaders at Soloheadbeg. As well as weaving a romanticised account of an Irish rebel and his adventures on the run from British forces, Breen makes another, slightly more subtle point. Discussing the ambush, Breen is keen to point out that here at Soloheadbeg, ‘Brian Boru and his brother Mahon fought their first great battle with the Danes in 968, when Brian with his gallant army of Tipperary men and Clare men routed the invaders’.3 Dan Breen and his comrades are clearly only the latest in a long line of ‘gallant’ Irish men fighting unwelcome invaders in this part of the country. Fleeing from Soloheadbeg, Breen and his comrades hid in the Galtee Mountains that ‘have ever been the refuge of the Tipperary “felon”’.4 Indeed, when the violence of the ambush was condemned by mainstream opinion ‘our only consoling thought was that the men of [17]98, the Fenians of [18]67 and the men of 1916 were condemned in their day.’5 On a later raid, to rescue a captured comrade, Sean Hogan, Breen talked of how they passed ‘on the very same road by which Patrick Sarsfield rode on that moonlit night two hundred years before when his sabre brought terror to Dutch William’s troops.’ Belabouring his point, Breen even suggested that Hogan was descended from Galloping Hogan, ‘another Tipperary Outlaw.’ Breen claimed it was Sean Treacy, his closest friend in the raiding party, who ‘loved his Irish history’, that reminded them of this glorious episode.6

National Sovereignty, Male Power and the Irish Language

In the spring of 1914, fearing for the future of St Enda’s College (his perennially cash-strapped nationalist hothouse) Patrick Pearse agreed to go on an extended trip to the US, hoping there to gain funds from wealthy nationalist-minded Irish-Americans. The trip was partly organised through the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an organisation Pearse had just joined and his involvement with which would lead, two years later, to his execution.2