Sean O’Casey and the 1916 Easter Rising

This year the Irish Republic is celebrating 90 years since
the 1916 Easter Rising. With the passage of time, the way this event is marked
has changed. Nowadays it is presented as the indispensable precondition for the
pride and joy of today’s Irish bourgeoisie: the so-called Celtic Tiger. The ‘blood
sacrifice’ of long dead Irish patriots, and not the merciless exploitation of
the living labour of proletarians from all over the world, is being put forward
as the secret of the high growth rates of the modern Irish economy.

But while the themes of
this ritual commemoration change with the years, the basic idea propagated by
the ruling class in Ireland remains the same. This idea is that national
independence was the result of the unanimity of all classes, all the courageous
and ‘rebel’ forces of Irish society. Above all, the bourgeois mythology of the
Easter Rising sees it as a product of the unity between the nationalist and the
workers’ movements, represented by the two leaders of the insurrection against
British rule: Patrick Pearse at the head of the Irish Volunteers, and the
radical socialist James Connolly who commanded the militia called the Irish
Citizens Army.

In order to maintain this
myth, it is regularly forgotten that there was one labour leader of the time
who bitterly opposed the 1916 rising. This forgetfulness of the Irish
bourgeoisie (including its radical Sinn Fein and ‘Marxist’ wings) is all the
more striking, since that leader, Sean O’Casey, went on to become one of the
most important dramatists of the 20th century. His
most famous play, The Plough and the Stars, which today is generally
accepted as being one of the great works of modern world literature, is a
blistering denunciation of the Easter Rising. This play is a thorn in the flesh
of the Irish bourgeoisie, because it recalls the historic truth that not only O’Casey,
but the working class in Ireland refused to participate in or support the
rising.

The Plough and the Stars

The Irish Citizens Army was a militia set up during the six
month 1913 Dublin lockout to protect workers from the savagery of state
repression against transport workers’ militancy. The ‘Plough and the Stars’ was
the banner of the ICA. It was one of the workers’ movement’s most poetic flags.
The plough represents the turning over of the soil of capitalist society by the
class struggle, the patient work of planting the seeds of the future, but also
the imperious need to harvest their fruits when they are ripe. As for the
stars, they stand for the beauty and the loftiness of the goals and ideals of
the workers’ movement.

O’Casey’s play of the same
name is a furious indictment of the betrayal of these ideals through the
participation of the ICA in the 1916 nationalist insurrection. While the
fighting is going on in the city centre, the slum dwellers of Dublin are dying
of poverty and consumption. O’Casey shows that there was nothing in the alleged
high ideals of the nationalists which could morally uplift the workers and the
poor. He shows how, on the other side of the street from the buildings occupied
by the insurrectionists, the starving tenement dwellers appear, not in order to
support them, but to plunder the shops.

To express his indignation,
O’Casey employs a series of powerful images. The second act is set in a pub. Outside,
the meeting is taking place, where, on October 25th 1915, the ICA allied itself
with the Irish Volunteers. It is the moment of the betrayal of the Plough and
the Stars. But this scene takes place out of sight of the workers in the pub. All
we see and hear is the shadowy outline of the ‘voice in the window’ looming up
as in a nightmare, like a ghost from the dead, imposing itself on the living. It
is the voice of the nationalist leader Pearse, extolling the virtues of
sacrificing blood for the cause of the nation. ‘Inside’ on stage, the workers
are inflamed by this speech. The pub scene shows how the ruling class pulls the
workers off their class terrain by obscuring their material reality and
deadening their consciousness. While Pearse praises the heroism of patriotic
blood spilling, the intoxication this causes among those in the pub leads to a
series of brawls, a parody of capitalist competition. Far from opposing the
barbarism of the First World War, during which it took place, O’Casey shows how
the Easter Rising gave this barbarism another form. It became the first link in
a chain of war and terror leading, in the early 1920s, from the Irish War of
Independence against Britain, to the Civil War within the bourgeoisie of the
new Irish Free State. These events, introducing new levels of savagery,
announced much of what was to come during the 20th century,
especially in the course of ‘national liberation struggles.’

Centre stage in this scene
is the prostitute Rosie Redmond. The symbolism of this is unmistakable, since
the Anglo-Irish literary revival of the time loved to depict Ireland or Gaelic
nationalism as a woman (for instance in W.B.Yeats’ play Cathleen Ni Houlihan).

In Act Four, the men
playing cards on the lid of the coffin of one of the slum dwellers are a metaphor
for how the working people, by failing to fight for their own interests, become
helpless pawns in the power struggles of alien forces. O’Casey’s characters are
the victims, not the protagonists of history.

In February 1926 at the
fourth performance of this play at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre there was a riot. The
freshly installed ruling class immediately understood that the very foundations
of the new state were being threatened by this demolition of the 1916 myth, the
‘crucifixion and resurrection’ of the Irish nation. In the fourth book of his
autobiography, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, O’Casey was later to recall
how he was abused by the widows of the 1916 rebels that night when leaving the
theatre. One of them shouted: “I’d like you to know that there isn’t a
prostitute in Ireland from one end of it to th’ other”.

The author emigrated to
London a month after the riot. (Had he remained, he could have witnessed the
public burning of Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of his play Juno and the
Paycock in Limerick in 1930, three years before Nazi book burning began in
Germany).

Long before, he had become
a persona non grata in Dublin because of his position on the Easter Rising. Within
the play itself, O’Casey ironically deals with his own public image. The character
who puts forward the opinion of the author is a cowardly, dogmatic armchair
tenement revolutionist called the Covey (a Dublin word for a smart alec, a know
all). It‘s him who declares that the ICA has disgraced the Plough and the Stars
by taking part in a middle class nationalist revolution, who terms the speech
of Pearse “dope” and who criticises the British socialist soldier Stoddard for
having abandoned internationalism in the face of the world war.

O’Casey and the workers’ movement

The play The Plough and the Stars is the crowning
point of a remarkable transformation in the artistic development and in the
world views of Sean O’Casey. At the beginning, he was the author of propaganda
plays full of complex argumentation (in the style of his celebrated Dublin
contemporary George Bernard Shaw), but generally considered to be of little
artistic value. In the first half of the 1920s he produced, almost overnight,
three great dramas, the so-called Dublin trilogy. These were historical plays
of a contemporary nature, each dealing scathingly with a major event: The
Shadow of a Gunman (the IRA war against British rule), Juno and the
Paycock (the Irish Civil War), and The Plough and the Stars. Thereafter,
his plays rarely attained the same artistic quality again. This puzzling
development has led people to speak of ‘The O’Casey enigma’. Irish nationalists
have tried to explain the relative decline of his creativity from the 1930s on
through his emigration, as if he could not produce great art without having his
‘native soil’ under his feet. But soon after moving to London, O’Casey did
write another powerful historical play, The Silver Tassie. It is based
on his experience as a patient in a Dublin hospital (being treated for ailments
which directly resulted from his poverty), where he shared rooms with many of
the maimed victims of First World War then raging. It is a furious condemnation
of imperialist war (which the state-subsidised Abbey Theatre refused to perform).

In reality, O’Casey’s
flowering was possible because of the ideas which inspired him at the time – those
brought forward by the upsurge of workers’ struggles on the eve of the First
World War, and their confirmation through the proletarian revolt against the
war, above all the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. He was one of the
first to put the lives of working class people at the centre of world
literature, showing the wealth and diversity of their personalities. He was
perhaps the first to put the language of the tenements on the stage. He delighted
in the magical fantasy, the irresistible rhythm and the baroque exaggerations
of the Dublin slum dwellers, recognising how they used rhetoric in order to
enrich their bleak lives and gain a sense of self dignity.

In this sense, his artistic
development is inseparable from the changes in his general world view. At the
onset, O’Casey was a fanatical Irish republican nationalist. Born into an
educated, but poverty-stricken family, he had only three years of school
education, and became an undernourished unskilled labourer. At the time, the
infant mortality rate in Dublin was higher than in Moscow or Calcutta. Despite
a serious eye ailment, he educated himself, becoming an avid reader of
literature. At an early age, he became an activist in the Gaelic League, the
Irish Republican Brotherhood and other nationalist groupings. But because of
his situation as a worker, it was almost inevitable that his artistic
development would largely depend on the evolution of the socialist movement. It
was the development of the proletarian struggle which brought his creative
sensitivity to the surface, just as his later artistic decline was linked to
the perversion of its principles with the defeat of the world revolution in the
1920s (O’Casey became an unapologetic Stalinist).

1913: Dress rehearsal for revolution

When O’Casey himself was eighteen, he was sacked for
refusing to take off his cap while being paid his wages. In 1911, he was
inspired by the great railway strike of the British proletariat. But what won
him over to the workers’ movement was the great labour conflict in Dublin in 1913.
For one thing, it coincided with the arrival (from Liverpool) of Jim Larkin,
the leader of the 1913 movement. Larkin revealed to O’Casey that revolutionary
socialism was something very different from a trade union mentality. In Larkin’s
vision, the proletariat was fighting, not only for food and drink and shelter,
but for true humanity, for access to music and nature, education and science,
as indispensable moments towards a new world. As O’Casey would later write,
Larkin “brought poetry into the workers’ fight for a better life”.

For O’Casey, this was a
revelation. In Ireland at the time, to be Catholic was considered synonymous
with being poor and Irish, Protestant with being rich and English. But O’Casey
came from a Protestant background. The intensity of his original nationalism,
the changing of his name (he was born John Casey) were probably motivated by
feelings of guilt or inferiority. That all of this was of no importance, was an
insight which he experienced as a liberation.

But of course it was also
the bitterness of the 1913 conflict itself which transformed the outlook of
Sean O’Casey. This was the nearest Irish society to date has come to an open
class war between labour and capital. For the first time ever, there was an
open split between the proletariat and Irish nationalism. In book 3 of his
autobiography Drums under the Windows, O’Casey reminds us that the Irish
Volunteers were “streaked with employers who had openly tried to starve the
women and children of the workers, followed meekly by scabs and blacklegs from
the lower elements among the workers themselves, and many of them saw in this
agitation a plumrose path to good jobs, now held in Ireland by the younger sons
of the English well-to-do.” As for that other major nationalist force in
Ireland, the Catholic Church, its priests staged pitched battles to prevent
children of locked out families being sent to England to be fed and taken care
of by “pagan” i.e. socialist families. Drums under the Windows narrates
how a married couple from a militant Catholic lay organisation came to the
strike headquarters in Liberty Hall to appeal to the ‘religious faith’ of the
workers. “Asked by Connolly if the Knight and his Dame would take five
children into their home suite home, the pair were silent; asked if they would
take two, they were still silent; and turning away to go out, before they could
be asked if they would take one”.

It became clear that the
only supporter of the Irish wage labourers was the international proletariat,
in particular the English workers. Living reality had thus demonstrated that
the old marxist formula no longer applied, according to which the English and
the Irish workers could only act together in the perspective of national
separation.

In a sense, Ireland, like
the Russian Empire, had experienced in 1913 a kind of ‘1905’ of its own: a
dress rehearsal for the proletarian revolution. Such pre-revolutionary battles
are an essential part of the preparation for the struggle for power. This was
well understood by the marxist Left in the period after the mass strikes and
soviets in Russia in 1905. This is why Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek
denounced the prevention of such ‘dress rehearsals’ by the Socialist Party in
Germany at that time not only as cowardice, but as the beginning of betrayal.

But in Ireland, 1913 was
not the prelude to socialist revolution. In this sense, its evolution resembled
not that of the Russian Empire, but a specific part of it: Poland. The Polish
proletariat had participated magnificently in the mass strikes of 1905. But in
Poland, as in Ireland, when the moment was ripe for the world revolution, the
workers were derailed by the establishment of a nation state.

O’Casey and Connolly on insurrection

As secretary of the Strikers Relief Committee in 1913, O’Casey
had been in charge of the fund raising for the families of the workers locked
out. After the defeat of the strike in January 1914, he was one of the first to
propose a re-organisation of the workers’ self-defence militia, the ICA, on a
permanent basis – and was elected honorary secretary of the new Army Council. Since
open class conflicts were over for the moment, this policy only made sense in
the perspective of the preparation for armed insurrection. The outbreak of
imperialist world war the same year only confirmed this perspective.

But what was to be the
nature of this insurrection: socialist or nationalist? The ICA was a
proletarian militia. But its very name - Irish Citizens Army - reflected the
dead weight of Irish nationalism, which the struggle of 1913 had only partly
overcome. With the outbreak of the ‘Great War’, within the workers’s
organisations there was a revival in the influence of radical nationalism.

The First World War, which
ushered in the epoch of decadent capitalism, was a historical frontier at
almost every level, including the psychological one. We can take the example of
Patrick Pearse, the ‘commander in chief’ of the 1916 rising. Although an extreme
patriot, he was known for the nobility of his character, and his progressive
ideas about education. But after the world war broke out, he gave a series of
public speeches which can only be described as insane. He became a nationalist
in the fullest sense of the word, rejoicing in the sacrifice of the young lives
of all the warring nations, claiming that this blood being spilt was
like wine cleansing the soil of Europe.

It is significant that
James Connolly was soon to fall for the spell of this atavistic vision of blood
sacrifice. Connolly had always belonged to the left wing of the Socialist
International. Born in Edinburgh into horrific poverty, with hardly any
schooling, like O’Casey a self educated worker of considerable learning, he was
a man of deep convictions and great personal courage. Nevertheless, the
collapse of the International and the madness of the world war profoundly
destabilised him. From 1915 on, he began to publicly announce a coming
insurrection in the workers’ press, bringing the ICA militants out for military
exercises such as the storming of public buildings under the eyes of the
British authorities. In the end, it was Connolly who was urging the Irish
Volunteers to no longer postpone the rising, saying that otherwise he would go
ahead on his own with his 200 ICA ‘soldiers’.

Contemporary Irish
historians, such as his latest biographer Donal Nevan, have gone to some pains
to show that Connolly did not share the vision of Pearse of a blood sacrifice. They
cite the series of articles on “Insurrection and Warfare” which Connolly wrote
in 1915, as proof that he believed that the 1916 rising had a real chance of
success. And indeed, this series represents an important contribution to the
marxist study of military strategy. For instance, in his article on the Moscow
insurrection of 1905, one of the points highlighted is that it was not
militarily defeated, but “melted away as suddenly as it had taken form” as
soon as it became clear that neither the workers in St. Petersburg nor the
peasantry were following its lead. They melted into the protecting proletarian
masses around them.

But in one of the
controversies within the ICA between O’Casey and Connolly before 1916, the
latter defended the opposite viewpoint. This concerned whether or not to
purchase uniforms. Clearly, it was O’Casey who defended the proletarian
standpoint of the Moscow insurrectionists, according to which the combatants
avoid a lost cause battle in order to preserve their forces. “If we flaunt
signs of what we are, and what we do, we’ll get it on the head and round the
neck. As for a uniform – that would be the worst of all…Caught in a dangerous
corner, there would be a chance in your workaday clothes. You could slip among
the throng, carelessly, with few the wiser.” (Quoted in Drums under the
Windows). Indeed, O’Casey challenged Connolly to a public debate, and
submitted an article on the issue – which was never published.

The blood sacrifice of 1916

O’Casey resigned from the Irish Citizens Army after his
motion was defeated forbidding double membership in the ICA and the Irish
Volunteers. Soon after, Larkin left for the United States (where he
participated in the founding of the Communist Party of America in 1919). From
then on, O’Casey and Delia Larkin became increasingly isolated in their
opposition to the course taken by Connolly. As O’Casey put it in his History
of the Irish Citizens Army (1919) “Liberty Hall was no longer the
Headquarters of the Irish Labour movement, but the centre of Irish national
disaffection.”

The road to the 1916 Rising
was now open. But this road was not followed by the Irish proletariat, which
had launched itself into the defence of its class interests in face of the war.
Some of the last articles Connolly wrote before his tragic death were devoted
to this question. He refers to the strikes of the Dublin dockers, construction
and gas workers, and to labour conflicts in Cork, Tralee, Sligo, Kingstown (Dun
Laoghaire) and other centres. He also writes about the great strike of the
munitions workers in the Glasgow area. But Connolly never once appealed to the
Irish workers to join the Easter Rising, or even to go on strike in sympathy. And
when he led the occupation of the General Post Office on Easter Monday, the
first thing he did was to turn out the employees there at gunpoint. He knew
perfectly well that proletariat of Dublin, still furious about the 1913 events,
would have nothing to do with a nationalist upheaval. And it was this attitude
of the workers which was to give O’Casey the strength to write his great
dramatic trilogy.

In the end, it was the
symbolism of the blood sacrifice of 1916 which overpowered the autonomous
workers movement in Ireland for years to come. For blood sacrifice it was. The
previous day, the official leadership of the Irish Volunteers had publicly
cancelled the rising, after the attempt to land German arms had failed (a
detail which shows to what extent it was part of the international imperialist
rivalries). The insurrection was carried through by a small minority against
all the odds, in order to oblige the British authorities to execute its leaders.
It was a modern version of the myth of crucifixion and resurrection, which is
why it had to take place at Easter. It overpowered Connolly himself. We know
from his private correspondence that Connolly was an atheist, although towards
the outside he would sometimes denied this in order not to alienate the more
religious layers of workers. But all the evidence indicates that he died as a
devout Catholic.

It was through creating
feelings of guilt towards the heroes allegedly left in the lurch that the class
consciousness of the proletariat was deadened. As O’Casey put it: “They had
helped God to rouse up Ireland: let the whole people answer for them now, for
evermore.”

Why was O’Casey able to
resist this? He was less of a theoretician than Connolly. Even on the national
question, he was not necessarily clearer than those around him. But he felt
profoundly attached to what he understood as the human dimension of the workers’
struggle, to the forces celebrating the dignity of mankind and the importance
of life even in the face of death.

1916 announced much of what
decadent capitalism had in store for society. Because it has led mankind into a
dead end, capitalism has enforced the burden of the past weighing like a
nightmare on the brains of the living. Because it alone holds the perspective
of a future society, the revolutionary proletariat has no use for the
glorification of guilt, sacrifice or death.

Dombrovski 1/3/6