Customer Reviews

The Most Distressful Country (Green Flag) (v. 1)

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This is the second book in a three-volume series on Irish nationalism. And having finished it, I'm sorry to have to say I will not be reading the other two books.

Leaving aside the viscous prose which one wades through like glue (it seemed to take forever to finish less than 300 pages), it is the author's undisguised condescension and historical bias which torpedoes the book's credibility. One would think that an Englishman writing about Ireland's struggle for liberation from English rule would exercise caution for fear of accusations of a jaundiced retelling. But not Kee.

Right from the beginning we are told that the early Fenians 'looked like fools or mountebanks or worse' [p. 8]; the Young Ireland movement was characterised by 'fatally preoccupying illusions' [p. 9]; James Stephens' exhibited 'a curious strain of bombast and incompetence' [p. 16]; popular sympathy with rebels 'was emotional and confused rather than expressive of identity with specific political aims' [p. 44]; one of Yeats' speeches on Irish nationalism is 'cliche-ridden' [p. 128]; on the cultural revival Kee follows D.P. Moran's dicta and states that 'Irishmen had gone in for clatter and claptrap which they miscalled nationality, playing the fool throughout the century like a lot of hysterical old women' [p. 137]; Irish sympathy with the Boers' liberation struggle is sardonically described as the inclination of 'a Dublin mob to riot in favour of the Transvaal Committee' [p. 148]; Arthur Griffith's great book on The Resurrection of Hungary is explained 'at often tedious length and with some dubious historical interpretation' [p. 154]; Griffith himself was 'sometimes narrow-minded ...lacking in humour [and] ... rather gauche' [p. 156/7]; the Fenians in America are 'extremists' [p. 175]; with regards to the IRB's planned rising, Kee ventriloquizes that 'to the overwhelming majority of the Irish people it would have seemed impractical and childish nonsense' [p. 234], later referred to as a 'hare-brained scheme' [p. 241]; the 1916 Rising itself is snottily described as a 'republic in the Post Office' [p. 253]; there are knowingly snide references to 'the nebulous cause that was Ireland's' [p. 48]; note the scare quotes placed around the key word in Kee's reference to 'Gaelic, the "national" language' [p. 108]; it's even necessary to pettily remind the reader than the patriot Countess Markievicz pronounced 'Ireland' as 'ahland' [p. 161]; and why is Joseph Chamberlain described as being '*understandably* ... bewildered by the term Irish nationalism'? [p. 93]

There is some particularly squalid weasel-wording surrounding the 1914 shooting of civilians at Bachelor's Walk in Dublin. The reader is informed that 'no soldier fired more than two rounds' (imagine Colonel Dyer presenting that rationale following Amristar) and that 'within a fortnight a government commission concluded that the actions of the troops had been "tainted with illegality" and specifically censured the troops for lack of control and discipline. This does not exactly square with a picture of tyrannical repressive government.' [p. 215] Were there prison sentences? Fines? Dismissals? Even compensation for the victims' families? Of course, none of these were forthcoming after the Bachelor's Walk killings, and Kee is studiously silent on that fact. His first instinct is to grasp at the exculpatory straw.

All of the standard English cliches are here: the alleged drunkenness, disorganisation and condign misery of the mere Irish. And throughout the book there seems to be a sly attempt to persuade the reader that the Irish really weren't interested in their own nationalism in the first place: time and again Kee's Procrustean analysis proceeds as though all *true* nationalist movements are rigidly consistent even throughout a centuries-long history and are not subject to crests and troughs of popular support, vicissitudes often influenced by economic conditions or more quotidian considerations. Moreover, there are some silly mistakes made. The mythical Celtic warrior Fionn MacCumhaill, for example, is at one point referred to as 'Fiona' (a girl's name) [p. 14] and the author describes Kildare as being 'in the centre of Ireland' [p. 191] when a glance at his own map would have confirmed that Kildare is separated from the coast only by Dublin.

But among this gallery of putative wastrels there must surely be at least one worthwhile Irishman? And indeed there is: the one person for whom Kee reserves uncritical praise is Edward Carson, dogged opponent of Irish Home Rule, reactionary demagogue, and probably the greatest opponent of Irish nationalism to come from within Ireland itself. The sole dominion in which Carson is today regarded with any reverence is the moribund world of Ulster Unionism (his statute can be seen outside Stormont, gesticulating angrily). It was he who was proximately responsible for the partition of Ireland and the creation of an artificial and wilfully discriminatory statelet whose overarching raison d'etre was hatred for fellow Irishmen simply because they were Catholics. Today the Unionists of Northern Ireland (whose lower birth rate dooms them to become outpopulated by nationalists within decades) cling to the vestiges of a long-dead British Empire while the Republic's future - by contrast - is solid and progressive. In short, it was obvious even when Kee was writing his book in the mid-seventies that Carson was a figure who had been left fossilised by the march of history, but that did not prevent him from confecting the following encomium. Carson 'was no blind reactionary', we are informed. Rather, Kee gushes that:

'Courage, single-mindedness, clear-sightedness and determination, but above all unquestionable and unflinching honesty of purpose were his salient characteristics ... he was an Irishman whose devotion to the country of his birth was as great as his devotion to its union with the rest of the British Isles'. [p. 169] Leaving aside the offensive anachrony of labelling Ireland a 'British Isle', even a cursory glance at the record is enough to dismiss this casuistry. Carson was about as dedicated to the 'country of his birth' as the French novelist Camus was to his 'native' Algeria. Quite how anyone who worked as hard as Carson did to squash even the mildest of Irish endeavours at national self-determination could be regarded as 'dedicated to his country' is never explained. Kee informs us that 'he had shown some personal courage in expressing his disdain for the mob at Mitchelstown on a day when three people were killed there by the RIC' [p. 170] - disdain for victims of state violence presumably being one of Carson's more 'courageous' traits. (Most squalidly, Kee remarks that Carson had 'made his name' at the bar in Ireland but is careful not to mention that he did so largely by exposing to an intolerant society the homosexuality of the much-admired Oscar Wilde and thereby ruining him.) In the end, however, Carson was unable to stop the march of history and was left, Arafat-like, within the vestiges of a shrunken sectarian statelet. Thus ended the career of Kee's only worthwhile Irishman. He ruined Ireland's territorial integrity, and all for a Unionist cause that had no long-term future.

Why did Kee do it? Why take the trouble to write a mean-spirited and condescending book about a small, defenseless and largely uninfluential nation? (At every turn one senses Kee fossicking through the archives and gleefully jotting down every incriminating quote or titbit of history: any historical counter-points too bulky to ignore he hurriedly undercuts - and does it too frequently to cover his agenda.) The answer lies in the introduction to the first volume, where Kee incautiously describes Ireland's liberation as being the first disastrous step in the unravelling of the British Empire. In Latin, this fallacy is known as 'sic hoc ergo propter hoc' - the belief that because event x happens *after* event y, it must be *because* of event y. So we are invited by implication to imagine that had the inconsiderate Irish not asserted their rights to independence, the British Empire would have lived on like the thousand year Reich (ignoring the fact that every other European colonial power's empires had deliquesced completely within decades of Irish independence). Leaving aside that this ragged analysis accidentally *blames* the Irish for helping those other millions of people come out from under the English jackboot (liberation from imperialist rule being surely an unwelcome development), it is a historical fantasy - and the most egregious form of victim-blaming - to pretend that the fulcrum holding the entire British Empire together was located among the mere Irish, and that because this one small screw fell out, the whole apparatus came asunder. This is the one bitter sticking point which Kee seemingly cannot swallow - that despite all the difficulties, all the suffering, and all Kee's anachronistic re-rationalizing, the Irish nation is today a geographical and political fact, and virtually all Irishmen are proud of it. Thus the Irish nationalist project, despite numerous setbacks and disappointments, has been a story of heroism, considerable self-sacrifice, and triumph against the odds. Kee could never bring himself to recognize that.

The complex politics of the Irish revolt against the English is brought into a new light by Robert Kee. Kee manages to describe the failures and successes of Irish nationalism over the centuries in an exceedingly readable book. The Green Flag consists of three volumes ending in 1973 and so does not cover the recent conflict. It is still one of the best books ever written on Irish history.