Kettle’s men are still second class citizens
A hundred years ago tonight, Lieutenant Thomas Kettle of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers wrote his best known poem, a poem that captures a sense of loss and of being misunderstood; a poem that anticipates a version of the history of Ireland where he and those who fought in the Great War would be pushed to the margins of history. Tom Kettle had a moment of prescience as he sat in a trench on 4th September 1916 and wrote, “To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God”
In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor –
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
Among Tom Kettle’s men were many from the city of Dublin. Men who had joined the army not for flag or king or emperor, but because they had been able to find no regular work since the 1913 lockout, or who lived in such poverty that even army life seemed attractive. Poverty in Dublin was extreme, tens of thousands living in appalling tenement accommodation, infant mortality running at 142 per 1,000 births (i.e. one baby in seven died), tuberculosis being rife in the poor districts; what is surprising is that social unrest in Dublin was not greater.
Perhaps the working class men who came home from the Western Front might have hoped for better things, might have hoped that in the new Ireland that came in 1922, the working classes would not be overlooked. The constitutional question had been settled by Irish independence, now there was the opportunity to deal with the types of political issue that were paramount in most European countries. Instead, the 1921 Treaty brought a civil war and the formation of pro- and anti-treaty parties. Working class people organized, but never achieved the level of influence necessary to ensure the issues affecting them were addressed.
The sacrifices of September 1916 did nothing for the Dublin poor – “we fools,” wrote Tom Kettle. A hundred years later, he would have seen no reason to change his opinion.
Sometimes things can be hard to explain, sometimes not so much.
Recently Callan put up a monument to the people from the area that died in WW1. It came in two general components, a incised list and a figure of a British soldier in the uniform of the Royal Irish Regiment. While I truly doubt anyone has an issue with the list of names, the figure is another matter entirely. And it’s actually a rather good little statue reminiscent of the Canadian 1 div in Langemark. But just not for Ireland.
But to address your post. The dead of WW1 are caught in that nasty crux between the social structure then, and the subsequent political evolution. But in the UK you have issues too. There because officialdom took over the ‘memory’ of the war many with very different attitudes were forced out of country areas to the cities. Of course many of the cohort that saw WW1 as a war of lions lead by asses became staunch labour organisers and delivered a short lived Labour led government in 1924, brought down by the Liberals, more of less ending them.
I think that there are still men from the most marginalised communities who would sign up with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers today. The gap between their lives and the lives of the richest in our society is probably wider now than it was a century ago.
Yes, of course. They wouldn’t have any choice in the matter. It would be the army or starve. But that’s my point about social attitudes being unchanged. Their grandchildren are those the John Lundrigan (wrong spelling but I can’t find the correct) refers having met visiting their fathers and mothers in Mountjoy and then as night follows day are in themselves in their own right.
Through the good offices of my good lady, who for ten years acted as chaplain to Mountjoy Prison, I had John Lonergan to speak once in my last parish. He told of how when the new women’s prison was near completion he was approached by a woman prisoner who asked that when the gate to the old female wing was closed for the last time, she might be able to do it.
“I’m the governor,” he said, “why should you close the gate and not me?”
“Because, Mr Lonergan, my mammy was a prisoner here and I am, and all my sisters, except one, have been as well.”
John Lonergan said he had made inquiry about the sister who had not been there, she was still only fifteen, he felt sure her time would come.
The cycles of poverty continue unbroken.