Enigmas of Sacrifice: A critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin insurrection of 1916
by W.J. McCormack
(Michigan State University Press, €20.16 pb / €43.91hb)
Thomas J. Morrissey
Among the varieties of information in Enigmas of Sacrifice is the list of books in Joseph Plunkett’s personal library, which occupies 13 pages in Mr McCormack’s first appendix. They display some unexpected features. There are many works on Egypt, its history, archaeology, art, religion and, among other indications of special interest to Plunkett are books on psychology, on world religions, on electric wave telegraphy, and the works of G.K. Chesterton – his favourite author.
The library also includes some 40 items on military tactics, firearms, and explosives.
Another Appendix carries the names of authors and articles in the Irish Review, which Plunkett (pictured) helped to publish from 1911-1914. The 42 issues bear the names of most of the well-known Irish writers of the period. Among frequent contributors, apart from Plunkett himself, were – Thomas MacDonagh, P.H. Pearse, George Russell, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Thomas Bodkin, Frederick Ryan and Lord Dunsany. The frontispiece of a number of issues was by Jack B. Yeats, while Nathaniel Hone, William Orpen, Augustus John and John Lavery were also cajoled to provide frontispieces.
Research
From the list of Plunkett’s books, and material of his that the Plunkett family presented to the National Library, W.J. McCormack embarked on extensive research across a range of manuscripts and writings in an effort to find sources, other than the New Testament, for the idea of the blood sacrifice of 1916 as propounded by Pearse and adopted by Connolly and Plunkett.
He proposes that the insurrection owed much to contemporary right-wing French nationalism, especially in its religious doctrine of sacrifice; but his investigation was unable to find evidence for this. Other avenues were explored with similar effect.
Plunkett, during one of his many illnesses, arising from what he termed “physiological bronchitis”, was mentioned as reading Plato, Plotinus, Henry James, St Teresa, Wordsworth and the thriller-writer E. Philip Oppenheim.
Plunkett’s interest in certain philosophers, and the presence among his books of Kant’s Critique of Reason, works by Henry James, and an article in the Irish Review on William Bergson, encouraged McCormack to explore the possible influence of these and other thinkers on Plunkett and the leaders of the insurrection.
Again, the research found little or no evidence, though one or two less involved nationalists were found to have considerable knowledge of Kant and Hegel. All in all, in his studies and research, W.J. McCormack appears to have got much enjoyment in endeavouring “to choose likely zones for excavation” that “can assist in releasing us from the rituals of commemoration according to the rites of nationalism”.
When the author abandons philosophy for historical evidence, he is less at home. He mentions that in April 1916, Joseph Plunkett swore his father, Count Plunkett, into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) as a requirement before sending him as an emissary to Pope Benedict to ask his blessing on the rising.
McCormack observes that there appeared to be no evidence of such a mission. Whatever about induction into the IRB, the fact of the mission was confirmed by Msgr Michael Curran, secretary to the Archbishop of Dublin, and the material was published in the present reviewer’s biography William J. Walsh. Archbishop of Dublin, 1841-1921 (Dublin, 2000).
Again, there is a disappointing and unscholarly lapse in his reading of Irish history in the 1920s and 1930s. “Authoritarianism emerged as elsewhere in Europe. But the Irish model located its oppressive and reactionary engine within the Catholic Church rather than in a powerful state. The State complied, especially in legislation dealing with generation – that is, divorce, birth control, abortion, and the discussion of these topics in print or other media. Religion pervaded every aspect of policy” and every government department.
Apart from the frequent mistake of reading back into history the circumstances of the present, it does not seem to have occurred to Mr McCormack that a Church could only have such “authoritarian” power because the people supported the situation, and did not see themselves as subjected to “an oppressive and reactionary” regime engineered by the Church.
When the people elected a new government in 1932, there was no demand for change in the role of religion. A careful study, moreover, of Church history in the 1920s and 1930s indicates how limited was Church influence when it came to nationalist issues, labour issues, or the “pursuit of pleasure” in the 1920s.
Failty
Apart from such passing frailty, and the absence of any real examination of the role of his Christian faith in Plunkett’s life, this is a book that has something for most people.
Some of it will be too abstract and unfamiliar for the general reader, but even then such a reader will find many aspects that throw fresh light on the insurrection and especially, of course, on Joseph Plunkett: his broken education, his poor health and his fractured home life in which his mother, who owned and controlled the family money, was self-centred, domineering, and exerted physical and emotional violence towards her children.
A week and sickly Joseph was sent off to boarding school at the age of eight! Her husband seems to have played little part in family matters.
What influence, if any, did this background have on creating Joseph the revolutionary? And what exactly triggered Plunkett’s change from a dilettante to a committed revolutionary remains unanswered.