History as literature : the 1916 Easter Rising

In the 1968 issue of the New Statesman immediately prior to Easter, the Irish poet W.R. Rodgers contributed an article, "Ireland and her Past.“ He began it with an anecdote. In 646, in the battle of Moira, one of the most famous battles of the north of Ireland, Cenn Faelad, a descendant of the high kings, received a sore blow on the head. So severe was the blow, says the Irish Chronicler, "that his brain of forgetting was stricken out of him." After that he remembered everything. "And he fitted a pattern of poetry to these matters and wrote them on slates and tablets." Rodgers comments shortly, "It sums up, in a way, the condition of Ireland." The point is readily conceded. A fascination for remembering, for the past, seems to be the national hazard of being Irish. It takes a multitude of forms: the traditions of folklore and superstition, the strength of ancient shibboleths and alliances, rural lothness to abandon ancient agricultural methods, the recurrence, common in Irish politics, of surnames from another generation. The whole Gaelic revival and its relative success was based on this interest in the past. Naturally such a fascination is thoroughly ambivalent; the finest elements of Irish culture are preserved and treasured (probably), but so also are the worst. The No Popery parades of Ulster are even more sacrosanct than the Georgian mansions of Dublin. The I.R.A. seems to be as durable as the Irish language. For good or bad the past clings. There is an old Gaelic adage that Sean O'Paolain quotes several times in his first novel, A Nest of Single Folk. “The dead man's grip." it runs, "is stronger than Samson alive.