I think that we three are on the same wave-length; we beleive that Ruth
> pulled her punches regarding Pearse. I've been re-reading ''Triumph of
> Failure,' after nearly twenty years. She undermined Father Francis Shaw's
> credibility regarding a corrosive article on Pearse he had published in
> 1972, by insisting that Shaw made the same mistake as Pearse's
> propagandist's, and lost sight of Pearse as a human being.Only Ruth had
> discovered the ''real'' Pearse. I beg to differ; I think Shaw found the
> real Pearse that mattered regarding posterity, in all his Mitchelite/Hyde
> like reality.
>
> Ruth's accomplishment was very important; she removed Pearse from his
> iconic plane, and revealed indeed the human being: the real Pearse.
> However the real: Pearse was not only the gentle, cultural educational
> nationalist, but also the hate-filled, Mitchilite, who in fact went even
> further than Mitchel regarding his hatred of England, and Ireland's duty
> to punish her.Ruth also covers for Pearse in another respect. She gives
> Pearse the benefit of the doubt concerning Mitchel's pro-slavery rhetoric,
> and racism.She had no right to do this. At the very least she should have
> wrote, that on balance it is difficulty to accept that Pearse didn't know
> about Mitchel's notorious pro-slavery polemic, nor the death's of his two
> son's in the Confederate cause.The article will now of necessity, involve
> a degree of criticism of Ruth. She won't like it, but so be it.
>
> Pierce
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I would go along with this appraisal. Shaw was nearer the truth about
Pearse. I once described Pearse as a "psyhopath" in a letter and that to me
is nearest the truth. And I am not persuaded that it was the blood sacrifice
and martyrdom that did the trick. From what I have read, and it is quite a
lot, 1918 election was about a possibility of conscription, much
intimidation and personation and Redmond's death in 1918 did not help. What
do you think Pearse?
Paul Bew is interesting on 1916. He says that Garret FitzGerald's defence of
1916 is "accidental"The insurrectionists thought that through policies of
nationalist economics, radical agrarianism, compulsory Irish in schools a
Gaelic nation of 20 to 30 million people would be produced. As Arthur Green
argued later, if Ireland had remained in the UK "by 1980s it would have had
lower taxes, negligible public debt, better public services and migration as
low as Northern Ireland" (Irish Review 4 spring 1988). Green thought that
Ireland in the UK would have obtained agricultural protection and benefited
from rising public expenditure.
Now that the huge EU funds are drying up and the construction boom is
fading, we may be in for quite different times ahead.
Robin
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