When, after a long siege, the Greeks breach the defences of Troy, Aeneas must flee. He carries his father Anchises upon his back and leads his son Ascanius by the hand. Thus encumbered – thus empowered – he begins the epic journey whose object is to found the city of Rome.
The image of Aeneas and pater Anchises has been painted often, the story told many times. It is inscribed upon the psyche of Europe because it epitomizes the ancient Roman virtue pietas. Aeneas was ‘Pius Aeneas’.
Pietas means a reverence for tradition, and a reverence for the father at the heart of it. It is a way of looking to the past. It is also a virtue which informs a vision of the future.
The action of Richard Kearney’s novel Salvage is set in West Cork in the late 1930’s. An island lies off the coast, by Glandore and Union Hall to be precise. In the Irish language, and since time immemorial, it has been known as Oileán Bhríde, Brigid’s Island after the sixth century patroness saint (or ‘mother saint’) of Ireland.
It has a sacred stream with healing properties, and is a place of ancient pilgrimage, like Croke Patrick in County Mayo, if not on the same scale. The Ordnance Survey of the 1820’s called it Rabbit Island.
Maeve O’Sullivan, the teenage heroine of the story, is one of the few remaining inhabitants of the island. Her father, a farmer and fisherman, is a practitioner of what nowadays might be dismissed as folk medicine.
But his collection of special plants and herbs are intimately associated with Brigid’s sacred well and stream. He instructs Maeve in the ancient medical/spiritual knowledge of the island. And in the lore of Brigid generally. She is more than a saint. A pagan earth goddess. A spirit.
Maeve’s father dies. Her mother loses her reason. Society on the island collapses. Maeve moves to the mainland. Her friends Helen and Seamus,with whom she is in love,encourage her to integrate into a world dominated not by Brigid but by the Cork bourgeoisie.
Helen and Seamus betray her and break her heart. At no stage in the story does Maeve lose faith in her father and what he taught her.
In the final scene of the book – in a wonderful and affecting action of cleansing and rebirth – Maeve swims from the mainland back to her beloved island. She is her father’s daughter. She is Brigid’s daughter.
Semper et ubique fidelis: always and everywhere faithful.
The author Richard Kearney’s family on his father’s side lived in the nearby Union Hall district for generations. Salvage lovingly recreates, in some detail, that native ground. It is itself an expression of pietas.
John Calder spoke at the Abbey Theatre some years ago. The founder and director of Calder and Boyars had published a host of Nobel Prize winners, including Samuel Beckett. Calder stressed that Beckett’s early writing, his novels, had attained modest success. His reputation grew slowly…”Ideas take time” Calder explained.
Seamus Deane was born in Derry on February 9 1940. In 1972 he was lecturing in English in UCD, when I, aged nineteen, studied English and Latin there. One lecture of his stands out in my memory.
It had to do with Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Although there are no Irish characters in the story, Conrad records that the book issued out of the political milieu of late Victorian London in which the Fenian dynamitards featured.
Conrad’s labyrinthine plot focusses on a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The anarchist Verloc, his wife Winnie, her somewhat retarded brother Stevie head a cast of characters which includes European conspirators and the British police.
1972 was not short on political and military action.
Seamus weaved the novel into the historic tapestry of Victorian London, and demonstrated how it foreshadowed some of what was happening in 1972. He unveiled an idea: politics and literature are closely linked.
In 2021 that proposition might not cause a stir. In 50 years, its caught on. In UCD, in 1972, it was radical and novel. It struck me forcibly and changed how I viewed things. An image of the pale young man from Derry talking about Joseph Conrad remains with me.
Featured Image is of (from left to right) Seamus Deane, Ann Kearney, Richard Kearney, Imelda Healy, Marion Deane and Ronan Sheehan in c. 1985.
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Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through.
We were shocked. Some rushed from the library. Others, myself included, obeyed a caution from the librarian to stay put. My father’s office at 1 Clare Street faced onto South Leinster Street. When eventually I reached my mother by telephone, I learned he was OK. The blast had smashed all the windows in his office and knocked him over. Otherwise, he was unhurt.
Forty-five years on and no-one has been charged with an offence relating to the bombings. Every year there is a commemoration in Talbot Street, at the memorial there which bears the names of the dead. There have been judicial enquiries, books, newspaper articles, TV investigations but not, until now, a drama or fiction which centres on the Irish state’s largest ever crime, if you count all four explosions as one transaction.
I noted the omission ten years ago in a paper delivered to The Plato Centre TCD entitled ‘Robert Emmet and An Aesthetic Of The State.’ Why didn’t Irish writers write about the State and its institutions? Why didn’t they write about the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and the State’s role in that debacle?
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House offers a vision of the courts of chancery in 19th century England. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities offers a view of Wall Street in 20th century USA. Myriad British and American movies and T.V. series portray the operation of law, medicine, the army, the police and government.
In 2008, when I read my paper, the plain people of Ireland were confronted with a local and international banking crisis following the collapse of Lehman brothers in a tsunami of fraud. The terms of the banking crisis and the state’s role in it were novel and incomprehensible. Who, if anyone, should be explaining the anatomy of the swamp to the Irish people? Why not Irish writers?
History or Fiction?
A difficulty, which must have often presented itself to Frank Connolly in the writing of this novel – one which he handles adroitly – is the temptation to write history rather than fiction.
Various people and events loom large in the history of the bombings. General Frank Kitson for example, was in Belfast from 1970-1972, and his ‘Low Intensity Operations’ is the standard.
The British Army’s Textbook on Counter-Insurgency advocates, inter alia, the use of gangs and pseudo-gangs to ‘counter-terrorize the terrorists.’
Notably, on Friday the 21st July 1972, the Provisional IRA detonated twenty bombs at various locations in Belfast within the space of eighty minutes.
Liam Cosgrave was Taoiseach in May 1974. Patrick Cooney was Minister For Justice. Conor Cruise O’Brien was Minister For Posts and Telegraphs. Declan Costello was Attorney-General. These characters and events are close to the action of Conspiracy Of Lies, yet they are not called to the stage.
Liam Cosgrave, second from the left with U.S. Gerald President .
A fiction or drama which relates to actual people and actual events is primarily concerned with characters and telling a story about those characters. Thus Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins conveys the action of The War Of Independence through a romance, a love-triangle to be precise, in which Collins and his friend Harry Boland are rivals for the affection of Kitty Kiernan and subsequently compete for the hearts and minds of the Irish people in the dispute which arises over the Treaty.
Any romance needs a villain, a role fulfilled by Eamonn De Valera in that film. Sometimes there is tension between the requirements of the genre and historical facts. Did Harry Boland really die like Harry Lime in The Third Man in the sewers of the city?
Moreover, if Kitty Kiernan did look like Julia Roberts, then why bother with the Irish Republic? Was Eamon De Valera actually in the vicinity of Béal na Bláth in County Cork at the time of the ambush and complicit in the assassination?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s96v_DkOug0
Wedding Signal
A Conspiracy Of Lies offers romance against a background of bombings. Both Joe and Angie are scarred by the events, and Angie’s mother is virtually blinded by one bomb. Joe narrowly misses being blown up by another.
Both eventually get jobs in a Dublin restaurant where they chance upon information which points to the identity of the bombers and their accomplices. Their efforts to pursue the matter bring them into conflict with various institutions.
In a vividly realized scene, Joe is beaten up by the police. The villain is a corrupt cabinet minister who has taken a bribe from an oil company and is in cahoots with British intelligence agents, who are complicit in the bombings. Angie is arrested and charged with a serious offence. Facing a long prison sentence, she is spirited out of court by her supporters, ultimately reunited with Joe on the continent where the story ends.
A Shakespearean comedy ends with a wedding, signalling the renewal of society. The wedding of Joe and Angie is not meant to signal the renewal of Irish society, however, which is portrayed as corrupt, incompetent, divided, treacherous, dishonest, cowardly and incapable of dealing with a crisis like the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Instead it signals the survival of Joe and Angie, radicals who might be able to come up with a response.
Frank Connolly’s book is a carefully crafted, brave and challenging work which I think will feature on Irish Studies courses for some time to come.
Featured Image, courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive is of the wreckage caused by the third Dublin bomb (c. 5.32pm) at South Leinster Street (with Trinity College railings in the background), where two women were killed instantly. Seven more people would be killed when a fourth bomb exploded outside Greacan’s pub in Monaghan town at c. 6.58pm. https://www.dublincity.ie/library-galleries1/171?page=5
