Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923
Roy Foster powerfully describes the cultural and political ferment in early 20th Century Ireland, mining the letters and diaries of the ‘revolutionary generation’ – the young nationalist writers, artists and agitators who came to prominence during those years of upheaval.
These documents are not ‘misted by hindsight’ and Foster’s familiarity with, and intelligent use of them gives his narrative freshness and immediacy. The ‘vivid faces’ from Yeats’s poem Easter 1916 tell their story here.
The revolutionaries included Catholics, Protestants, atheists and agnostics; they espoused many causes – feminism, socialism, vegetarianism, anticlericalism – but what they had in common was a deep interest in Irish history and culture, and a passionate conviction that only independence would preserve national identity.
Not for them the plodding constitutionalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which they regarded as stuffy and irrelevant. In their newsletters and propaganda sheets the revolutionaries demanded a break from Britain. Many expected, and some hoped, that the break would be violent.
Why did young people from prosperous families, who arguably had a stake in the established order, rebel against it?
One of Foster’s themes is the pronounced generational conflict of the time. Educated, well-travelled and impatient for change, many of the revolutionaries identified their parents’ views and attitudes with the past and repudiated them; they refused to conform, or do what was expected of them. Alice Milligan and Bulmer Hobson, two prominent nationalist agitators, were northern Protestants from upper-class unionist backgrounds. Ernie O’Malley, a daring and uncompromising IRA commander, gave up his medical studies, and left his comfortable home, to join the fight.
There were many more.
Generally speaking, Catholics were more exposed to nationalist influences than Protestants; younger priests tended to be sympathetic to separatism; and the schools run by the Christian Brothers, the order that educated generations of Irish Catholics, were often nationalist in ethos.
Generation
The revolutionary generation saw separatism as the gateway to a freer, better society. It was certainly the gateway to an active social life.
The rallies, the long summer nights in the West, the dances and the plays gave young people a chance to make new friends and political contacts. For some, socialising was perhaps more important than politics. Radical culture, Foster suggests, attracted sexual dissidents such as lesbians because it created opportunities for them to meet and gave them pathways out of isolation. Without it, many lives would not have intersected.
Wars followed the yearned-for uprising. The violence – and the hunger-strikes, score-settling and destruction – shocked people who had called for a war of liberation without considering what it would entail; shock turned to disillusionment when a puritan conservative state emerged after the years that had been ‘so alive’, as Peadar O’Donnell put it. He, Sean O’Faolain, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington were among the most vocal and active dissidents in the New Ireland, but their dissent would never be as clamorous and confident as that of the pre-revolutionary era.
Vivid Faces brilliantly evokes a hectic and exciting period in Irish history, a period that ended with the dashing of the hopes of a generation.