My review of The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated by Paul Larkin, was published in today’s Irish Examiner (21 June, 2025). Here is the review:

The novels and short stories of Pontoppidan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917, reflect Danish political and cultural life from the perspective of social indignation and social realism. Yet they are leavened with brilliant satire and sarcasm to ridicule establishment hypocrisy. Such is the fluency of Larkin’s translation and his use of familiar idiom that the two novellas here are refreshing and a joy to read.

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Pastor Thorkild Müller, a hopeless theology student, is sent to the Greenland colony to proselytise and preach. It’s considered a lifelong exile for dunces. He is an unkempt, bearlike big man who has suffered much abuse and humiliation — but is not as slow-witted as he seems.

The ice, the fjords, the harshness of lonely winter and the revitalising light of summer, help form the man, bring him closer to god but closer still to the indigenous Intuit people whose simplicity and harmony with nature draws him intimately into their culture. This is vivid writing, reminiscent of Knut Hamsun on landscape, and Halldór Laxness on the comedy of life.

Müller goes native, marries, has children. It is many years later, after his wife dies, that he experiences the longing to go back to Denmark. There, his new parishioners are wary of the eccentric, uncouth, ill-dressed pastor who smells of fish, wandering the forests and hills, scaring the kids. But they come to love him and his down-to-earth spirituality. However, when he cancels tithes, a move which crosses the line, threatens order and his ecclesiastical superiors, the plot against him thickens and ‘the white bear’ has a choice to make.

Rebellion of a different type is the theme of the second novella, The Rearguard, which is here translated into English for the first time. For someone who was never involved in organised politics (but sympathising with the worker and peasant), Pontoppidan perceptively portrays the dogmatism of Danish painter, ‘Red Jørgen’ Hallager, who rails against cosmopolitan, conventional art in favour of ‘social realism’, a principle he holds dear, at great cost to all around him, including his frail and loving wife, Ursula. However, while it is faintly possible to admire the idealism of ‘Red Jørgen’, ultimately it is impossible to sympathise with him and his destructive rampages.

He follows Ursula to Rome, where her father, a connoisseur of the arts, State Councilor Branth — whom Hallager despises as the epitome of bourgeois society — swans with an expat ‘Nordic colony’ of cultural aesthetes, backslapping each other at their regular soirées.

In the marital apartment, which daddy paid for, naïve Ursula believes she can tame her new husband (‘you great, big barbarian wild man!’). She calls upon him to embrace the spectacular view from their balcony, the splendour of the spiritual capital, this centre of western civilisation. He, on the other hand, obsesses with his view that the world is dominated by the philistines and sell-outs — ‘Arch scoundrels, Mountebanks … Infamous hypocrites’ out to ‘bamboozle the people, all the better to rob them and the fruits of their labors, blind and keep them in misery.’ What drives him is a childhood grudge he bears against society because his father was falsely charged with embezzlement and imprisoned.

The most sympathetic and decent character is Thorkild Drehling, who secretly loves Ursula, and is a Hallager devotee who gave up a family fortune to be beside his hero, only to be also denounced by Hallager.

Regardless of who is ultimately right or wrong in determining what is art, if there ever can be such a conclusion, the fundamentalism of Hallager provides the dynamic for this sad, if not tragic and moral story.

NYRB, this month, is also publishing Pontoppidan’s masterpiece A Fortunate Man, again translated by Paul Larkin, another great addition to rediscovering overlooked or out-of-print works.

 

Writer, poet and ecopsychologist Anthony Hegarty’s review of Longlines by Caoilte Breatnach is published both here at Greenisland Press and on Caoilte’s website ^[2].

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JJ Hynes, a veteran of the Troubles in Derry and Belfast, has sacrificed his life, marriage, family to ‘the Cause’. Now he’s on the run in Holland where he finds refuge with survivors of the Dutch Resistance who are still haunted, like himself, by past memories of war. Within a year, JJ is called back, tasked with persuading comrades in the West of Ireland to back the ‘road to peace’, a process he wants to believe in.

The title, Longlines, is a great metaphor for the story. Long lines reaching back into the past . . . genealogies . . . threads going deep into who we are and where we come from individually and culturally. I used to set them as a teenager when my dad was unemployed in Lancashire. We called them ‘night-lines’.

For me, this is a kind of Odyssey . . . too grand a title, maybe; but it is a psycho/spiritual journey of the ‘hero’, JJ. A journey in which he searches for a self-identity, a transcendence of a past which is both violent and unfulfilling, a failed relationship, a son he does not know and a raw sense of injustice resulting in a hatred that eats out the soul. (My dad in some of his last words to his priest were that he wished he could be released from the deep hate he felt for the Orangemen in the North.)

But the hero represents, ‘plays out/acts out’ (as all heroes do in mythology), the cultural ambiance of the time: the attitudes, good and bad, of the cultural and national context in which the story is set.

I love the way his real name is revealed by Nora at the end: John Joe. It reminds me of Jacob fighting with the angel, which after the all-night struggle renames him ‘Israel’—not a good example in the present political horrors.

So the scene is set in the failed operation in Dublin where we have JJ in his role as an active IRA man and where we get introduced to characters we will meet importantly later. We learn of his relationship with Garvey and his commitment to ‘the Movement’. Then he goes on the run.

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JJ’s ‘on the run’ in the Netherlands is the start of his journey to some kind of eventual redemption and like all Vision-Quests or spiritual journeys he must arrive at a totally negative emptiness; to become ‘lost’ in the psychological and spiritual sense. So he gets in the fake taxi and is poisoned, mugged and robbed. Having lost the important ‘bag’ (or we might say ‘baggage’) he has no money, no ID, and slipping out from the hospital and the reaches of the embassy, he finds himself in a totally strange place and then he boards a train to nowhere with no ticket and no means of paying the fare. He gets off in the middle of this nowhere and stripped to this state of hopelessness, his story back can begin. Wonderful start!

I don’t really buy coincidence. I prefer the Jungian term, ‘Synchronicity’. A great Czech psychologist, Stanislav Grof, says that such seeming coincidences occur during states of ‘spiritual emergency’ and we should always see them as significant guides on the journey.

So JJ befriends two old men, Eric and Frans, ex-Dutch Resistance fighters from World War II! Then he is afflicted with an illness that virtually incapacitates him.

What I like about many of the events in the writing is a kind of reluctance to pursue or develop some of them. At first I found this irritating but then I saw it as part of the atmosphere of uncertainty, distrust and cover-up. Was the fake taxi driver a trap, a conspiracy; we do not know; it is not gone into. Is Eric genuine; and the doctor, Frans? And then he finds the Luger.

Eric’s story of course is a kind of sub plot of JJ’s condition; a man revenging a violent injustice, too. So, significantly, we don’t lose the story’s theme in this time of JJ’s incapacity.

Who identifies the hotel room in which JJ is nearly executed; is it the girl? We are not really told. And then there are the family secrets, made explicit yes, but to the family hidden for so long. Mikey’s homosexuality is a good example but also Frans’s friend is not really ‘outed’, as they say. These events are all partly hidden; not spoken of by the characters or implicitly by the author either. The incest is a good example. Again, I thought of them as longlines, cultural and personal at the same time.

For me, the Luger is almost as symbolic as the ‘longlines’. It represents the longline of violence in the entire story. Eric took the Luger from the Nazi captain who was responsible for the murder of his young wife. JJ takes it from the revenger Eric, and of course Finny (JJ’s sidekick) is envious of its possession. The dead Nazi soldiers have their own archetypal significance in the story of violence and recrimination. Mythologically, the Luger reminded me of King Arthur’s sword, which on his death had to be returned to the ‘lady of the lake’ whose arm comes up out of the water to catch it and draw it under, marking the end of a sequence of violence, a return to the unconscious history of the times.

There is always a kind of sexual transcendence in such journeys. The girl in Rotterdam is a dangerous error on JJ’s part, sexually-motivated, and JJ’s thoughts about Ashling, who we assume will be the redemptive lover in the end, are all transcended by Nora’s noble features in spite of her physical deformity. There is a joint cultural redemption here for both of them—Nora suffering from a cultural prejudice, as well as JJ’s identification as an IRA activist.

I have to comment on the end here: I know a lot about those lines; the fishhooks are lethal and on a longline you might have fifty of them all needing baiting. The tide can be frightening too if you don’t understand its cycles. But I will say no more in case I spoil the brilliant ending. It is like Dante’s Beatrice, the archetypal female redemptrix, gifted to stop the loss of bloodshed and culturally a symbol of a wounded land.

The author’s conclusion is a sound and solid mythological theme really well interpreted in his rendition.

Bravo!

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Tony Hegarty ^[4] is a writer, poet and ecopsychologist. His father and maternal grandparents hailed from County Derry.

The Irish-American writer Tim O’Grady recently wrote a review for the website of the current affairs magazine, Byline ^[5], which was also published by the Belfast Media Group and the Andersonstown News. His review was a forensic analysis of the television series, Say Nothing, and is a follow-up to his equally insightful review of the book on which the series is based and can be read here ^[6].

O’Grady was also interviewed by Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning on their podcast, Free Statism, and can be accessed here ^[7].

Here is his feature.

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THE HIT television series Say Nothing, currently streaming on Disney +, is informed by a sequence of sources that go back to a collection of secret tapes stored in a vault in an American college. They arrive to the television screen by way of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same title.

Radden Keefe, a staff writer at the New Yorker, read an obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times, which spoke of her bombing of London in 1973 on behalf of the IRA, her hunger strike and her participation many decades later in an oral history project nominally run by Boston College. It made him think about the psychological ramifications for individuals and communities of a long involvement in violent conflict, and wonder if there might be an article in it.

The article became book, became television series, with Radden Keefe as executive producer, all focusing on the intersecting lives of Price and her sister Marian, fellow IRA member Brendan Hughes, Sinn Féin Leader Gerry Adams and a widowed mother of ten named Jean McConville, who had been executed by the IRA on the grounds that she was an informer. Her children, who were left to fend for themselves, deny that she was an informer, as does the British state.

The Boston College Project was overseen by an Irish journalist named Ed Moloney, who hired Wilson McArthur to interview loyalists, and former IRA member Anthony McIntyre to interview republicans, all on the understanding that nothing would be made public until after their deaths. Police, soldiers and British administrators were not approached.

Moloney has what appears to an anti-Sinn Féin, anti-Adams agenda which he has elaborated in blogs, articles and a book on the IRA, though he denies any bias. McIntyre thought the peace process was a sell-out, was also hostile to Gerry Adams, and in the main chose for his interview subjects those with similar views, most notably Hughes and Price, both central characters in the television series.

Theirs was a minority view within the republican movement. Sinn Féin could have no meaningful place in the peace negotiations if they couldn’t deliver the assent of the IRA, several members of which went on to run for office and take part in government, among them Gerry Kelly, who was arrested with the Price sisters and joined them on hunger strike.

In his book, Radden Keefe writes that ‘for one reason or another’ McIntyre only sought out interviewees hostile to the Good Friday Agreement and to Adams in particular. He does not, in print at least, enquire further into what those reasons might be. In any event, in the television series, Price and Hughes misleadingly appear to be speaking for all. In this way, Moloney and McIntyre’s narrative has been processed through a seemingly unassailable academic institution and megaphoned out to the world through Radden Keefe’s book and TV show.

Moloney blew the cover on the Boston College Project when Brendan Hughes and loyalist David Ervine unexpectedly died and he published a book called Voices from the Grave, based on their interview material there. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) sensed an evidential treasure trove and successfully sued Boston College for access to the tapes. Once they had them, they charged a veteran republican with dementia, named Ivor Bell, who was one of McIntyre’s interviewees, with involvement in the killing of Jean McConville.

The judge listened to the tapes, said McIntyre had led Bell in his questioning, ruled them unreliable and therefore inadmissible, and directed the jury to return a Not Guilty verdict, adding that the tapes made it clear that McIntyre was ‘out to get’ Gerry Adams. Adams had been arrested at the same time as Bell in 2014 but had been held for a few days and released without charge long before Bell’s 2019 trial.

It was clear by then that the Boston College Project had turned Hughes and Price, among others, unwittingly into police informers. In their earlier lives, there had been nothing so damaging and hateful to them as a tout, and they devoted their energies to locating and eliminating them.

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The Boston College project was discredited as a dangerous fiasco that played out in public for all to see. Archivists lost the codes linking tapes to interviewees, the college’s Irish Studies department said the archive was a perfect model of how not to conduct an oral history project, and a History professor concluded that it tainted the college’s reputation through its lack of balance. It crashed and burned, literally so in the case of another participant, author and former republican prisoner Richard O’Rawe, who threw the transcript the college had returned to him into the fire and drank a glass of Bordeaux.

Had the project been allowed to stand, it would have given future scholars the impression that the only combatants were republicans and loyalists, with the un-interviewed British trying to keep the peace, and that resistance mortally wounds the psyche because your sacrifice is all for nothing as you get sold out by your leaders. This is a condition psychologist Jonathan Shay, who treated Vietnam War veterans, identified as Achilles Syndrome, because what haunted Achilles was not his experience of war but Agamemnon’s betrayal of him.

Radden Keefe writes in his book about the fatal ambiguities, unprofessionalism and chaos of the project, but ‘for one reason or another’ he doesn’t really question its agenda, and his series shows McIntyre as an honest and heroic seeker after the truth as he interviews Hughes and Price. Radden Keefe’s book won the Orwell Prize, was named by Time magazine as the #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year, was lauded by hundreds of influential people from Barack Obama to Dua Lipa and is presently mis-educating millions of uninformed television viewers about the nature of the conflict in Ireland.

I wondered about Radden Keefe as I read his book and watched his series. He attended numerous elite universities and spent a year working at the Pentagon. He is Irish-American, but writes that he didn’t ‘relate to the shamrock-and-Guinness clichés and the sentimental attitudes of tribal solidarity’ that might be thought typical of Irish America.

He’d not yet been born when the main events of his story took place. He had no more interest in the war in Ireland than in any other war in the news. Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes and Jean McConville were dead before he began writing and he is on record as saying he has never met Gerry Adams. He had, as his countrymen say, no skin in the game. It might have behoved him to keep himself out of the way when telling his story if he was to survive with any writerly authority intact. Yet he repeatedly intrudes with his opinions. When Dolours and Marian join the IRA they are entering ‘a cult of martyrdom’. When they are arrested and put themselves through a 208-day hunger strike that included forced feeding by a tube thrust through calipers, he writes, ‘There is a morbid but undeniable entertainment in watching a hunger strike unfold. . . [it’s] a sport for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France.’

Having described Gerry Adams as a gifted and intelligent strategist who’d endured imprisonment, torture and an assassination attempt and who ‘commanded respect and loyalty inside the walls of Long Kesh’, he suddenly, without explanation or evidence to support his change of heart, begins mid-book to deploy such phrases about him as ‘homespun whimsy mingled with armed insurrection, cake fairs with a dash of bloodshed’, or ‘well-heeled statesman . . . gliding along from one photo opportunity to the next . . . possessed of a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation’.

He offers no explanation for this extraordinary change of portrayal, but it obviously fits better with a ‘human drama’ about revolutionaries betrayed by an ambitious leader.

In his Acknowledgements, Radden Keefe thanks the Rockefeller Foundation for granting him the use of their retreat on the shores of Lake Como. Did he write such phrases there? Could he not resist the temptation to try to appear worldly, and above the people and situations he writes about? Did no one tell him that such snideness can appear borrowed and unearned and trivial beside the epoch-making, life-and-death events he describes, or that the discrediting of the Boston College Project places his book and series upon foundations flattered by the description ‘shaky’?

The attitude towards the peace process and Adams in his book and series come from Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price. They are shown to have been resourceful and ingenious and incalculably brave in their war. They went to prison, survived hunger strikes, came out and eventually retired from the struggle, while the struggle went on. No one questioned their right to do so, including Gerry Adams. They were welcomed and honoured by their community.

When it became clear that the peace process wasn’t going to deliver the free, independent, socialist republic Price and Hughes had fought for, they remembered what they’d suffered and made others suffer, became bitter and came to believe it had all been for nothing. Their alcoholism made their suffering worse. Gerry Adams became the focus for their distress. They blamed him for not saying he was in the IRA and for negotiating a deal that left the British in Ireland. They say this repeatedly in the television series, just as they did publicly in real life.

The former charge seems a red herring. Gerry Adams has no extant convictions. Why would he inculpate himself? If Dolours Price had been stopped in the Falls Road in 1972 and asked by the police if she was in the IRA, would she have said Yes? In his Boston College tape, Brendan Hughes can be heard saying, ‘I’ve never, ever admitted to being in the IRA. Until now.’ He did so with the assurance that no one would hear it until he died and was beyond prosecution.

The final three episodes of this nine-part series first take aim at Adams and then attempt to solve the mystery of Jean McConville’s death. In the early episodes, the actor Josh Finan portrays Adams as a thinker, a strategist who sees the larger picture beyond the immediate chaos of war, a point of stillness in the midst of a maelstrom. Michael Colgan takes over as the Adams of the peace process and makes him look cold, humourless, weak, shifty, calculating and fearful of being exposed. Hughes, his old friend and comrade, is shown being afforded only a few minutes in Adams’ office before being dispatched and later gives a speech about Adams being on a boat sailing forth while he and others who fought the war are left stuck in the mud with their psychic wounds and sense of betrayal. Price says Adams is only interested in political power, a Nobel medal, Armani suits and a big house. Viewers who don’t know otherwise might just go along for the ride.

What the series does not show is that before the 1981 hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, Hughes had called a hunger strike which lasted 53 days, but then cancelled it precipitously in confused circumstances, with calamitous effect on the prisoners’ campaign for political status; nor does it show that ten men elected to go on hunger strike after him and died, or that he stayed with Adams and his wife when he came out of prison and that the movement found him a house and a job, or that Price absented herself from the IRA command structure in Armagh prison when she was repatriated after winning her hunger strike and was then released early under Royal Prerogative of Mercy . Nor do we see all the commemorations, anniversaries, orations, coffin-bearing, pamphlet-writing and numerous gestures public and private participated in and conducted by Adams on behalf of IRA veterans, or the daily work he continues to do to advance the united Ireland that Hughes and Price fought for.

Both Hughes and Price talked and gave the names of comrades who were later arrested. We can see what they offered and what they endured for the movement. We as viewers can sympathise with them. But in later life, they would seem to have violated the oaths and practices of the organisation they signed up for. This may not have sat easily with them. If they were left behind by the ship, it is because they chose not to get on board.

The series arrives at its final moment with the execution of Jean McConville, an event much publicised and investigated but still unsolved. Radden Keefe says he found the elusive answer and the series shows Marian Price putting the bullet into the back of Jean McConville’s head. How does he know?

We see McIntyre asking Dolours Price about McConville and her asking for the tape machine to be switched off. We are made to presume that when we see Marian pulling the trigger that Dolours has told him that this is what happened. The book has McIntyre saying to Radden Keefe that he knows who killed Jean McConville and won’t tell, but that it was someone who was once offered the job of being Gerry Adams’ driver. Radden Keefe depicts himself having a Sherlock Holmes Eureka moment – ‘I sat bolt upright’ – when he happens to remember an obscure line in an old transcript that has Dolours mentioning that Marian was once asked if she’d drive for Gerry Adams, but declined.

The flimsiness of this evidence, given the stakes, is shocking. Scores of people might have declined to be Adams’ driver. Dolours once recounted being with him and others and when he offered them a lift, they all threw up their hands in unison and said, ‘No thanks!’, knowing he’d been a target for assassination nearly all his life.

The series takes some pains to dismiss similarly flawed evidence by having Dolours tell a journalist she knew Jean McConville was an informer because she’d been in a barracks identifying IRA suspects from behind a sheet and her red slippers could be seen. The journalist replies that many people might have such red slippers—she has some herself—and it doesn’t justify them being executed. It’s hearsay. McIntyre is the only source. If he can be said to know anything, it would only be something he’d heard from a person who can’t be cross-examined because she’s dead.

Radden Keefe himself points out the invalidity of the evidence he presents: ‘There must have been other people, over the years, who declined an offer to be Gerry Adams’s driver.’ But he then goes on to say, ‘The more I mulled over the suggestion that Marian Price was the third Unknown at the graveside and may [my italics] have fired the shot that ended Jean McConville’s life, the more it made sense.’ He knows nothing at all, but fingering Marian Price ‘makes sense’ to Radden Keefe and allows his project to be marketed as a ‘true crime story’, a ‘murder mystery’, and a ‘whodunnit’ that he alone has solved.

Marian Price still lives with her family in Belfast, as do several of Jean McConville’s children. Say Nothing shows her firing the gun that killed their mother. That this horrific act has been turned into public entertainment appals the McConville children, and they have publicly denounced the series. McIntyre laid the trail that led Radden Keefe to make this accusation against Marian. Why? Hard to say. Marian was maid of honour at McIntyre’s wedding. The evidence Radden Keefe presents is too slight to be taken seriously. More substantial evidence was dismissed by the judge as worthless in the Ivor Bell case. Recently, Marian began a case against Disney. It’s difficult to imagine a just court not finding in her favour.

What is Say Nothing for? It ‘entertains’.

It allows audiences to share in the derring-do of IRA operations, sympathize with victims and even perpetrators and feel they’ve understood something profound about the conflict known as the Troubles, all without their having to leave their sofas. It psycho-pathologises the North of Ireland. Where once there were ‘terrorists’, now there are broken and bitter shell-like creatures. A war zone has become a ward full of depressives. If you resist the state you will live with regret. It’s a convenient narrative for an imperialist. But while the war may have been futile, there should have been more of it because its end was a betrayal.

A little thought and inquiry and a visit to West Belfast would quickly dispel the picture put forward by this book and series.

What does Say Nothing say, then? It says nothing, beyond demonstrating the distortions of the truth indulged in in order to create a ‘hit’.

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Timothy O’Grady is the author of four works of non-fiction and three novels, I Could Read the Sky (with photographs by Steve Pyke), Light and Motherland. His forthcoming novel, Monaghan ^[12], deals with issues related to the legacy of violence, and will be published in Spring 2025 by Unbound. You can pre-order a copy here ^[12].

 

I wrote this tribute to Native American Indian Leonard Peltier in 2003 as he entered his twenty-eighth year of imprisonment. I included the feature in my 2004 book, Rebel Columns, and sent Leonard a signed copy with a personalised dedication but the prison authorities would not let him receive it.

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IN Culturlann restaurant on Friday a Cork woman stopped and asked me if I was Danny Morrison. She said she wrote often to Leonard Peltier and had sent him my books, and he liked my writings. I felt very humbled to be appreciated by such a great person as Leonard Peltier who has been in jail for twenty-seven years, falsely imprisoned for killing two FBI agents.

In 1998 he wrote: ‘This is the twenty-third year of my imprisonment for a crime I didn’t commit. I’m now fifty-four years old. I’ve been in here since I was thirty-one. I’ve been told I have to live out two lifetime sentences plus seven years before I get out of prison in the year 2041. By then I’ll be ninety-seven. I don’t think I’ll make it.’ (From: Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance.)

What is happening today to the Palestinian people—a nation being destroyed before our eyes by a militarily superior force which supports seizure of territory and colonised settlements, and which limits the Palestinians to ‘reservations’—is exactly what happened to the native peoples of North America as a result of European colonisation beginning with Columbus. Throughout the nineteenth century, treaties, which the US Congress signed with the Native American Indians, were each in turn repudiated as the greed and demand of the colonisers became insatiable.

In 1968 the American Indian Movement (AIM) was formed to combat police brutality, high unemployment and federal government policies.

Leonard Peltier was born into poverty in a reservation in North Dakota. He had thirteen brothers and sisters. At the age of eight he was taken from his family and sent to a boarding school, run by the US government. Students were forbidden to speak their native languages and suffered physical and psychological abuse. His reservation had been chosen as a testing ground for the government’s new termination policy of forcing Indians off their reservations and into the cities, by withdrawing, for example, benefits, including food assistance, to those who remained on the land.

He became an organiser and fought Native Land Claim issues, then joined the AIM. In 1972 he occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington in the Trail of Broken Treaties’ protest.

IN December 1890 the great leader Sitting Bull, who had defeated General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, was shot dead, allegedly resisting arrest. Fearing further reprisals his followers fled but a few days later, three hundred and fifty Sioux, consisting of 120 men and 230 women and children, were rounded up and placed in a camp on Wounded Knee Creek. An order was given to disarm them. During a fracas a shot was fired and the federal troops killed 153 and wounded 44 people, half of whom were unarmed women and children. Survivors were pursued and butchered by US troops. Twenty-three soldiers from the Seventh Calvary were later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for slaughtering these defenceless Indians.

IN February 1973 a group of armed members of the Sioux nation, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organisation and the AIM reclaimed Wounded Knee and for the first time in decades ruled themselves and celebrated death, marriage and birth in their traditional manner. Supporters arrived daily from all over the country, slipping past Federal marshals and the National Guard. They demanded an investigation into the Bureau of Indian Affairs, corruption and the misuse of tribal funds. Food supplies and electricity were cut off and there was daily, heavy gunfire. Twelve Indians were captured by the FBI and were ‘disappeared’ and never seen again. After the 71-day occupation there were 1200 arrests.

Following the siege there was a three-year ‘Reign of Terror’ on the reservations, instigated by the FBI in collusion with vigilantes of the pro-government tribal council, and which resulted in over sixty members or sympathisers of the AIM being assassinated.

These were the preceding circumstances in June 1975 when Leonard Peltier was asked to help protect the people of Pine Ridge Reservation against attack. Two FBI undercover agents chased a pickup truck onto the reservation and there was a shoot-out during which they and a young Native American were killed. Three people were brought to trial. Two, Bob Robideau and Darrell Butler, were eventually acquitted on grounds of self-defence. Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on the strength of an extradition warrant, which contained an affadavit from Myrtle Poor Bear. She said she was his girlfriend and saw him shoot the agents at close range.

After he was extradited the prosecution withdrew Myrtle Poor Bear’s evidence. It turned out that she wasn’t his girlfriend, had never met Peltier and wasn’t present at the scene of the shooting. Furthermore, the judge barred her from testifying for the defence on the grounds of mental incompetence. Three teenage Native witnesses testified against Peltier, all admitting later that the FBI had threatened and forced them. Still, they did not identify him as the gunman. During the trial the FBI withheld important documents from the judge, jury and the defence, which showed that the casings from the bullets used to kill the two agents did not come from the gun tied to Peltier.

Leonard Peltier was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment to run consecutively and has been imprisoned for the past twenty-seven years. All of his appeals have been denied and because he will not admit to the murders the parole board refuses to consider him for temporary release and says that it will review his case in 2008. His appeals attorney is former US Attorney General Ramsay Clark, a man who walked on the Falls Road in Belfast in 1981 in support of the H-Block hunger strikers.

Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu and the European Parliament, amongst others, have all called for his release but the US authorities are merciless. Hopes were high that Bill Clinton would issue him a presidential pardon when he left office in 2001. But instead he pardoned fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, who had been living in Switzerland avoiding indictments on charges of racketeering, tax evasion and trading with Iran in violation of a US embargo.

Peltier responded: ‘We can see who was granted clemency and why. The big donors to the President’s campaign [a reference to Rich’s wife, Denise] were able to buy justice, something we just couldn’t afford.’

In prison he has established himself as a poet and prose writer and author of a moving biography, and as a talented artist, portraying the culture and history of his people. Despite suffering from diabetes, a heart condition and a stroke, which has left him partially blind in one eye, he remains unrepentant and unbroken.

‘My people’s struggle to survive inspires my own struggle to survive. Each of us must be a survivor.’

His role has been as a symbol of his suffering people.

‘In the Indian Way, the political and the spiritual are one and the same. You can’t believe one thing and do another. What you believe and what you do are the same thing. In the Indian Way, if you see your people suffering, helping them is an absolute necessity. It’s not a social act of charity or welfare assistance: it’s a spiritual act, a holy deed.’

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Martin Neary’s book, Madogue Memories, about his life in east Mayo, the perennial toil of maintaining the land, his having to seek work in England to support his small holding, is told with great humility and charm but with a certain melancholia. In his evocative storytelling some parts of it reminded me of that bestselling memoir from the late 1980s, Alice Taylor’s To School Through The Fields.

I met Martin recently in Ballina where the fiftieth anniversary of the death of hunger striker Michael Gaughan was marked by a number of events. Physically, the weight of time has bent this eighty-one-year old’s back a bit, but his story is an uplifting little eulogy to all those people whose lives he touched and theirs his. And what a memory he has, even though it clearly pains him the few times he can’t put a name on someone from six decades ago.

There is a fine Foreword to the book by his friend Gerry Murray who praises Martin, a republican and socialist, for bequeathing his homestead to the people of his parish, his beloved community, when he dies. He is also one of the few people who has been granted the right to be buried on his own land.

Martin was an only child and when he was five his father, Martin Snr, a former IRA veteran, and an atheist, died. From his bedroom the child hears the Rosary being said for the first time and thinks that his father would not have approved of his mother sending for the priest, nor of the subsequent Requiem Mass which is also the first time Martin has darkened the doors of a chapel. On the subject of death, he is now quite philosophical: ‘Summer follows winter and bad weather follows good weather.’

He only hears that there is a thing called ‘religion’ when he starts school—‘the church was in charge of everything’—and is introduced to the catechism.

‘[S]eeing that the teachers and priests and shopkeepers said it was true I believed them.’ Hilariously, he concludes that after learning how to be good, ‘I knew that all my friends and people I liked were going to hell . . . I had heard the guards in Charlestown (there were about eight of them) were heavy drinkers so they hadn’t a hope … I was brain-washed for the next fifteen years.’

In his childhood days, which took in the Emergency (WWII) and rationing, there were few cars on the roads. Indeed, his aunt is terrified the first time she is a passenger in one. (The first time he is on a boat is going to England for seasonal work in his early twenties and it is also in England that he experiences using a lift or the first time.) He remembers his granny smoking a pipe; the carpenter and blacksmith building a wheel for a barrow; seeing a tomato for the first time; and remembers that he first prize in the school high jump was a (quite useless) holy picture!

‘[E]very thing is new to a child and that may be why we remember so much from our childhood.’

OASIS
Among his neighbours was Kate Gallagher whose husband John ‘may have been delicate because he used to eat town bread. When Kate would invite someone in for tea she would say, “Come in and I will give you a piece of John’s loaf.”’

Kate’s grandniece, Maggie O’Brien, came to live with her before she was married. Maggie is the grandmother of Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis.

Irish lives are marred by the sadness of emigration, the emigrant always hopeful that someday the native might return to the homeplace, But as Gerry Murray writes: ‘very few returned, some were never heard of again.’ Big families of up to ten or twelve children saw all but one son or daughter depart for the USA or England, leaving that one person behind to till the land—and even then still relying on remittances in that precious registered letter which kept the wolf from the door.

When Martin surveys his surroundings now he sees lots of new houses but from every ruin and fallen gable wall this man, this recorder of times past, remembers the folk who were born and lived here, ‘most of whom are now long dead, but were a mighty force in their time.’ He can trace his paternal family roots back to 1818, a time of ongoing agrarian unrest when the Ribbonmen defended tenant farmers and rural workers.

As an only child he was expected to take over the farm but to support it he also had to do seasonal work in England, often for four months each winter, in a sugar beet factory, work he liked and which despite long shifts he found ‘easier’ than a long day in the bog or long days’ hay making, but he was never tempted to stay. He was amazed to see over hundreds of cows grazing in fields in Shropshire whereas in Mayo it would be just five or six beasts. Back home, in Charlestown, the people would stand around and gossip, whereas ‘in Wellington everyone was in a hurry.’

While he was away a neighbour would cut a bank of turf for his elderly mother and others would look after the hay, potatoes and oats.

He also joined the old FCA (An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil) which was later integrated into the Army Reserve but back then was a local defence force which could be called upon to serve during emergencies. He enjoyed its esprit de corp and made many friends. His interest in politics dates from the 1950s when he learnt of partition and followed the election campaigns of political prisoners in Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Mid-Ulster who, upon being successfully elected, were immediately unseated by unionist electoral courts.

Martin Neary carries an aura of immense peace and ease, a man with no regrets, which is a rare thing.

‘I settled into life as a full-time farmer, following the rhythms of the year. Between the fields I had walked as a child and those I had bought and reclaimed, I knew every inch of my farm. I knew that I was doing the best I could do with it. I took good care of my cattle and they provided me with a livelihood. I had good neighbours and friends. Although the work was hard and the hours long there was a contentment and an independence which might not have been available in a different way of life.’

We are so glad he stayed and chronicled his and his Mayo people’s journey through the quotidian of their not insignificant histories!

An abbreviated version of this feature has already appeared online but this is a much fuller piece by the Galway-based lecturer and writer, Jenny Farrell, who is also an Associate Editor of Culture Matters. The sixtieth anniversary of Seán O’Casey’s death fell on 18 September,  just past. Here, Jenny Farrell explores O’Casey’s works, resistance to his message, and the primacy of the playwright over the director in the interpretation of his writing.

Jenny Farrell

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Seán O’Casey was the first English-speaking dramatist of international significance to emerge from the proletariat. His proletarian consciousness made his plays a significant part of Irish and international theatre history, securing their enduring relevance. O’Casey was not only a talented playwright but also a committed political activist. This dimension was not just a backdrop to his works but central to his creative output, and is crucial to understanding his work. O’Casey saw his plays not merely as artistic creations but as weapons in the fight to create a new, truly humane society.

In the years before O’Casey turned to writing, he was deeply involved in national and class struggles in Ireland—as a proponent of Irish-speaking culture, a militant trade unionist, and a socialist activist. These experiences shaped his worldview. While politics defined O’Casey’s life, the craft of writing became equally important to him. Alongside influences like the legendary trade union leader Jim Larkin, Shakespeare and Charles Darwin, his fellow Dubliner Bernard Shaw had a lifelong impact on him, shaping his understanding of the connection between drama and politics. Shaw’s blend of sharp wit and creative humour was to become a hallmark of O’Casey’s own writing. Shaw had supported the locked-out Dublin workers in 1913 and spoke out against the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. O’Casey later stated that Shaw and Larkin were the two figures who most influenced his move to the left.

Despite his prolific output, O’Casey is known in Ireland and the English-speaking world almost exclusively for his Dublin Trilogy. These plays, with their portrayal of the working class as politically immature, were met with hostility by revolutionaries, particularly The Plough and the Stars. The later rejection of The Silver Tassie by Yeats in 1928 further contributed to O’Casey leaving Ireland permanently and moving to England, despite the role his plays had played in saving the Abbey Theatre from financial ruin at the beginning of the decade.

The establishment took issue with O’Casey’s thematic choices — his candid and satirical depiction of the church-state relationship in the Irish Free State in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy or The Bishop’s Bonfire; his examination of the 1929 economic crisis in Within the Gates; and his backing of the Spanish Republic in The Star Turns Red, where he highlighted the link between church and fascism— all of which were deeply objectionable to the Irish establishment. They distanced themselves from O’Casey, and although some of his later plays, like the acclaimed 1955 production of The Drums of Father Ned at the Gaiety Theatre, were occasionally performed, these works seldom saw the stage.

This stood in stark contrast to O’Casey’s reception in the socialist countries. The USSR celebrated his work and his plays were frequently staged. As early as 1925, O’Casey was in contact with the Soviet cultural establishment and also met and admired Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. His support for the Soviet Union grew stronger during and after World War II. His plays were performed not only in major theatres but also by working-class theatre groups across the country. In Germany, O’Casey was already known by 1931. After 1945, O’Casey was performed in both German states. In West Germany there were disturbances during the performance of The Silver Tassie in 1953 over its anti-war message, and in 1968 the audience disrupted the staging of The Star Turns Red. In East Germany, however, O’Casey found very fertile ground at the Berliner Ensemble and the Deutsches Theater, and numerous other theatres throughout the republic also staged his plays. O’Casey was one of the most performed Western playwrights in the GDR.

ENGLAND
After moving to England, O’Casey remained politically active. In addition to writing plays, he worked closely with the London-based Unity Theatre, associated with the CPGB Daily Worker in the late 1930s. He expressed solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the Soviet Union, and in the early 1950s, he called for support of the Stockholm Appeal of the World Peace Council to ban the nuclear bomb, among other activities.

Like Brecht and other socialist and communist authors, O’Casey did not view theatre as merely a place for entertainment or escapism. His plays were intended to contribute to the emancipation of the Irish and the working population as a whole, to mobilise the necessary forces to create a truly human society. He achieved this without compromising the artistic value of his dramas. In the inseparable unity of his art with his political thought, the political content of O’Casey’s works did not diminish their artistic quality but rather strengthened them and produced a profound aesthetic effect.

Brecht’s epic theatre managed to bring the German playwright’s revolutionary political views and innovative theatre aesthetics to global influence. His practice of using the distancing effect to provoke critical thinking secured him a permanent place in the world of theatre. In contrast, Seán O’Casey’s influence remained relatively limited. Unlike Brecht, O’Casey’s dramas are more tied to the specific social and political struggles of the Irish people. However, O’Casey’s ability to integrate these profound and generalisable themes into his dramas is a key reason for the enduring significance of his works. While his plays are firmly rooted in the social and political realities of Ireland during his time, the underlying ideas — such as the fight against oppression, the quest for social justice, and the pursuit of human dignity — address universal human experiences that remain relevant in other contexts and at other times.

THE MATERIAL
O’Casey attached fundamental importance to the written word in his dramas. He believed that the text, as written by the playwright, is the central element of any theatre production and should not be seen as mere raw material to be altered at the director’s whim. For him, the text was the foundation on which the entire theatrical realisation is based, and he saw the task of staging as accurately and effectively implementing the artistic content contained in the text. This position is also underscored by his detailed stage directions, which show that he had clear ideas about how certain scenes, dialogues, and characters should appear, viewing the theatrical performance as an extension and realisation of the written word, not as its transformation or reinterpretation.

In his early works, particularly in the Dublin Trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars), O’Casey’s realism is distinctly traditional. However, later, O’Casey began to develop his style further and experiment with new forms of artistic modernism. Examples of this can be found in plays like The Silver Tassie, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, or Red Roses for Me, where O’Casey uses complex symbolic imagery and fantastical scenarios to explore reality. This way, O’Casey’s later works expand and deepen his artistic expression without losing their connection to reality. He created a more complex and richer theatrical language, allowing him to convey deep human and social themes in new and powerful ways.

REVOLUTION
One of the recurring themes in O’Casey’s work is the question of revolution. While in his early Dublin plays, especially after the loss of their leadership in 1916 through execution by the British colonial power, he controversially considered the Irish working class not yet ready for revolutionary change, his later works explore the potential for fundamental change. A look at his second last work, Figuro in the Night (1961), illustrates this.

The thematic focus of O’Casey’s play Figuro in the Night lies on revolution and liberation. The play is set in a new suburb of Dublin, flanked by two monuments — one commemorating the fallen Irish who served in the British Army during World War I, the other honouring those who died for Irish liberation. Both monuments document death.

The arrival of a third sculpture, a ‘Manneken Pis’ statue in the city centre (in O’Connell Street), introduces a new note. The cheerful figure causes a stir and celebrates natural human needs. In O’Casey’s play, it becomes a catalyst for a revolutionary uprising, where the people — especially the youth — overthrow the old order in a joyful, almost carnivalesque manner. The playwright uses this figure to portray the joy of human bodily functions and zest for life, highlighting the central importance of vitality and renewal for revolution and liberation. He focuses on the human dimension of the revolution, emphasising the liberation and reintegration into the nature of the whole person. This revolutionary vision emerges as a necessary antidote to the despair and life-denial of the contemporary world, offering hope and a strategic perspective for revolutionaries. The play is also a polemic against writers like George Orwell, who portrayed revolution negatively; instead, O’Casey celebrates it as a carnival of life.

Figuro in the Night uses imagination and the fantastic to depict a moment of complete social upheaval, in which the rules of society are turned upside down, and the creative imagination of the masses is unleashed. The tension in the play lies in the conflict between suppressed human needs and the inhibiting forces of false consciousness, with the former eventually undermining the latter to achieve liberation.

SENSUALITY
The uprising of the humanised senses, particularly sensuality, is thus central to O’Casey’s portrayal of human liberation. This sensuality, which has evolved throughout history, forms the core of humanity, deeply rooted in the masses, and cannot be indefinitely suppressed by restrictive moral constraints. O’Casey uses sexuality as a potent symbol for the broader, deeply rooted liberation of humanity, without absolutising it as the ultimate goal. The sensual relationship between women and men becomes the measure of humanity’s progress, intertwining the natural with the human. This aligns with Marx’s view ‘the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore demonstrates the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human or the extent to which his human essence has become a natural essence for him, the extent to which his human nature has become nature for him.’ (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts)

The drama explores how internal subversion, even small signs of change, can lead to significant transformations. The young women, particularly the girl in the opening scene, are catalysts for this change, expressing the new spirit through song. This suggests a generational shift, with the younger generation refusing to repeat the mistakes of their elders. The folksong ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be’, with its image of blue ribbons that a young man is to bring home from the fair for his sweetheart, runs as a leitmotif throughout the play.

The older characters, represented by the Old Man and Old Woman, may outwardly resist but are also influenced by the rising vitality of life. Although their liberation is incomplete, it represents a partial victory of sensuality even in those most attached to the old ways. Their speech, laced with references to popular songs and love ballads, subtly undermines their supposed disdain for sensuality, embodying a resurgence of human expression and rebellion against repression. Through rhythmic and poetic language, O’Casey expresses this upheaval, with the Old Woman particularly challenging traditional roles and presenting a growing revolutionary perspective on human progress.

Thus, the world depicted in the play, despite its degeneration, is not portrayed as dead but rather as ripe for revolution, with the sensual-emotional uprising serving as a catalyst for broader changes. The drama suggests that life is full of potential for change, needing only the right spark.

The Korean War had ended, Vietnam was on the brink of war, the national liberation movements were underway in Africa, and Cuba had liberated itself through revolution in 1959. The dystopias of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) had portrayed revolution negatively. O’Casey took the opposite view: setting his play in Ireland, he envisions such liberation as a carnival of life, as people finally achieving a social order that is commensurate with their needs.

By portraying the themes of revolution, transformation, and the power of human nature, O’Casey shows how pent-up energies and suppressed human instincts are unleashed during a spontaneous festival, embodying a broader social upheaval. O’Casey often uses communal festivities as focal points in his plays. However, unlike earlier celebrations, often controlled by oppressive forces such as the church or state, this festivity is secular, rooted in pagan traditions, and represents a genuine carnival of life. The connection to pagan roots is particularly evident in how this fountain of life can be traced back to a tradition of pagan water god worship, associated with ecstatic rituals that were initially suppressed and the wells later appropriated by the Catholic Church. Here, they reclaim their rights, and people seamlessly identify with this source of life.

This upheaval transforms a subdued suburban area into a blooming garden, symbolising humanity’s return to a new Eden. This Eden, unlike the Christian Garden of Eden, is one that humanity regains after experiencing and overcoming hardships. It is a place full of vitality and joy, where humanity takes its destiny into its own hands.

In contrast to the world depicted in The Plough and the Stars, where insurrection is portrayed as a distant event that brought only destruction and despair to the people, this later work shows a revolution in which the people actively participate. This upheaval, with its emphasis on the joy of life, brings profound and lasting changes to human relationships, a recurrent theme in O’Casey’s work.

The older characters in the play have a distorted perception of reality. They see the vibrant transformation of the world around them as decline and fear change. Yet, despite their resistance, their physical senses betray them, and they involuntarily become participants in the revolution they seem to reject. While the corrupt journalists — the Blind and the Deaf — cannot grasp the transformative power of the revolution, the old men, despite their weaknesses, are ultimately touched by it.

The character of the Birdlike Lad embodies the union of human and nature and serves as a messenger connecting the local events of the play with a broader revolutionary context. He emphasises that the uprising is not confined to one place but spreads universally, even reaching the highest power structures in the form of the bishops, who now themselves sing love songs. ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be’, referenced repeatedly in song, speech, and images of blue ribbons, receives a completely new ending at the drama’s conclusion. The song’s story is finished, the young lover — both in the song and in ‘reality’ — brings the longed-for blue hair ribbons from the market for his beloved, who then invites him into her home. The longing is fulfilled, becomes reality, on stage.

The play ends with the consolidation of the revolution. The ecstatic energy of the initial uprising gives way to a new order, expressed through the characters forming an organised, majestic dance. This transformation from chaos to order reflects the merging of discipline with the poetry of life, suggesting that the rebellion has established a new, harmonious social order.

Thus, Figuro in the Night portrays the revolution in O’Casey’s play as a powerful, transformative force that liberates suppressed human energies, revitalises society, and reclaims a new Eden. Ultimately, the play offers a hopeful vision of human renewal and the possibility of a life-affirming social order.

(Books consulted: Jack Mitchell, The Essential O’Casey, International Publishers, NY, 1980; Paul O’Brien, Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer, Cork University Press, 2023)

LINKS
Cock-a-doodle Dandy ^[15]reviewed by Jenny Farrell in Culture Matters, 28 September, 2022
Shadow of a Gunman ^[16]reviewed by Jenny Farrell in People’s World, 3 April 3, 2023
Sean O’Casey’s three revolutionary plays ^[17] staged in New York and Ann Arbor reviewed by Jenny Farrell in People’s World, 3 October, 2023
Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer ^[18] by Paul O’Brien reviewed by Jenny Farrell in People’s World, 27 October, 2023

 

Just read More Tales About Life, Love & Death by Paul Marauder, a collection of poems and flash fiction dedicated to the struggle of the Palestinian people and their suffering in Gaza.

The writing is potent, visceral and personal, often in the first-person, and also deals with addiction, alienation, relationships, and the demons that assault the vulnerable and the sensitive. It is about much more than ‘the ordinary pain of being alive’, to quote Baudelaire.

There is a poignant and wry little story which despite being about a robbery actually relieves much of the surrounding titles. A squad of Na Fianna Éireann rob a bus driver to finance new shirts and clothes they need to march in the Belfast Easter Sunday parade. Our young callow hero imagines the admiration and love there would follow were he to die for Ireland, the girls that would pine after his memory. But in a moment of bathos he goes to watch ‘Top of the Pops’ (which is, of course, English) and is mesmerised and astonished by David Bowie (who is, of course, English) singing ‘Starman’ and he thinks about becoming a pop star instead of a martyr. Or—unsaid—that that would be easier. The author, in real life, actually went on to discover liberation in punk music and was a guitarist with the punk band The Parasites who featured in the seminal 1978 film Shell Shock Rock ^[19] about the music scene in Belfast.

Marauder’s style is highly original—and raw to the point of painful and sad—and you can see the influence of Bokowski and Shane McGowan. (In an interview with the Andersonstown News he also says that Bobby Sands’ writing has inspired him.)

I loved his poem ‘Thank Gawd’ about personal disillusionment when the writer declares the notion of God as a ‘gawd damn’ waste of time and himself as part of one great universe:

There is no need to surrender our will to a celestial dictator
So God I bid you safe journey back into the space you came out of off
The empty space between the ears
where mankind imagined you into its DNA
You can hitch a ride on the next cosmic ray coming your way
Don’t forget to pack your capriciousness your misogyny your
Mythology into your space case for your journey to where nothing
Exists
So you’ll feel right at home
The next cosmic ray is due soon so make sure you’re on it

His powerful poem ‘Dust & Blood’ is about those poor people of this earth in Gaza being crushed into dust by the butcher of humankind, Israel, supported by all those western hypocrites who along with Israel are the epitome of evil:

But all that we can pull
alive from the rubble are painful
Emotions
Raw & vengeful
That fill our hearts with
Anguish
&
Despair
And
A hatred
for those
Evil
Bloodthirsty
Murdering
Zionist butchers
that will never ever disappear
It is a hatred
That will consume us
Forever

Marauder has quite a unique voice making powerful statements about life and love but, crucially, the violence in our midst, exploiting our weakness and apparent helplessness, out to destroy a nation, a people, and all their children…

The recently published book—Rita—A Memoir—was reviewed in the Morning Star, the left-wing British daily newspaper which focuses on social, political and trade union issues. The reviewer is Richard Rudkin who served with the British Army in the North in the 1970s:

AS a former British soldier who was in the North of Ireland in the early 1970s, I have read many accounts from those involved in the Troubles, including former military personnel. Every now and again, a book emerges that stands out from the rest. Rita — A Memoir is one such book.

The life of Rita O’Hare was a remarkable one. Born in 1943 to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father who joined the Communist Party in his teens, Rita grew up in the middle-class area of Andersonstown, West Belfast.

Married at just 17 and becoming a mother soon after, Rita tells us of her extraordinary life that took her on a journey from working in a bakery in Belfast, being forced into political exile, playing a key role in the peace-process which led to the Good Friday agreement, and her time working in Washington where she was on first name terms with American presidents, politicians and movie stars, and the no small matter of meeting Nelson Mandela.

Drawn into the Troubles by the injustice she witnessed all around her, despite being a mother, Rita talks about how she had to make a stand against injustice and denial of basic human rights to Catholics.

However, in 1970, to quote Rita’s own words, she reached a “now or never” moment. Having witnessed the brutality the British army inflicted on members of her community, along with the destruction and theft of property during the search of their homes, Rita reached the conclusion that peaceful protest was not going to achieve anything and chose to make a stand and joined the IRA.

Rita experienced her first spell in prison in 1971. Her crime was attending a peaceful protest at a court dressed in a combat jacket in support of several young men who were charged with wearing the same item of clothing and carrying a hurling stick, which carried an automatic six-month prison sentence. In the same year, Rita was almost killed after being shot three times by the British Army, sustaining serious injuries.

Shortly after Rita fled south she attended a press conference on 24 January 1972 addressed by the seven IRA Volunteers who had just escaped from the prison ship, The Maidstone. Pictured, (left-to-right) Tommy Toland, Thomas ‘Tucker’ Kane, Tommy Gorman, IRA Chief of Staff Sean McStiofain, Rita, Joe Cahill, Martin Taylor, Peter Rodgers, Sean Convery, and Jim Bryson: PA archive

On every page Rita’s voice comes through as an intelligent principled woman, who made her decisions in the firm belief that everything she did and every sacrifice she made (and there were many) wasn’t for herself, but to make Ireland better and a more equal place for those who followed her. I also sensed the sadness of how her commitment to that cause impacted on her family, especially when her arrest in 1971, for her alleged involvement with the attempted murder of a British army warrant officer, resulted in Rita skipping bail and crossing the border to the Republic of Ireland with her family, knowing a return to the UK would result in her immediate arrest.

Rita remained true to her political beliefs and principles whether it was enduring the harshness of the prison system, editing of the republican paper An Phoblacht (The Republic), being Sinn Féin’s director of publicity, or her role as Sinn Féin representative in Washington, a post Rita held for almost 20 years.

It would be hard for Rita O’Hare to detail all she had achieved in her life in the 177 pages that makes up this book, and I have no doubt that if Rita had not lost her battle with cancer in March 2023 while in the process of writing, there would be so much more. And so, the almost impossible task of completing the memoir fell on the shoulders of her friend, the former republican prisoner and acclaimed writer Danny Morrison, to complete the book. A challenging task which he has achieved by making it impossible to distinguish Rita’s voice from his own.

This book is more than just a memoir. It is an important record of how one ordinary woman said: “No. Enough is enough,” and despite almost losing her life and risking her freedom, continued to fight, work, and campaign for an Ireland that was inclusive for everyone.

Former blanket man and H-Block prisoner, Eoghan Mac Cormaic’s latest book, Captive Columns, was recently reviewed by Kevin Mullan in the Derry Journal. Here is the review:

Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic’s new history of the underground prison press provides an overview of republican jail communications from the days of the Fenians up to the Good Friday Agreement. Captive Columns: An Underground Prison Press 1865-2000 is the Derry man’s sixth publication and looks at the jail literature produced in over sixty titles over the period surveyed.

The Galway-based republican served fifteen years in jail and was on the blanket protest at a time when ten of his comrades died on hunger strike. He began writing poems on toilet and cigarette paper, with some of the works smuggled out of jail and published in Republican News before they appeared in his 2023 collection the pen behind the wire.

His compelling new study surveys the entire history of republican jail literature from 1865 to 2000.

It cannot but reference, of course, the Tyrone Fenian and later Easter Rising leader, Tom Clarke’s seminal, Glimpses of an Irish Prison Felon’s Life, which, published posthumously in 1922, provides key insights into his experience as a republican prisoner and his efforts to maintain lines of communication in English jails in the late nineteenth century.

Mr Mac Cormaic relates how Clarke first published and circulated The Irish Felon in Chatham prison.

‘Not a trace remains of The Irish Felon today, except in the pages of Tom Clarke’s memoir . . . The Irish Felon was a digest without news but . . . served a greater purpose than any newspaper. [It] raised morale, and validated the publishers, and the readers as people apart,’ writes Mr Mac Cormaic.

Fast forward to the period after the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution and the book examines a series of jail publications produced in the Derry and Belfast jails between 1924 and 1970.

A chapter entitled ‘Legion of the Rearguard’ sheds light on a series of newspapers circulated in the prisons.

Faoi Ghlas (Locked Up) was started in 1939 and reported during a period when nearly 200 prisoners were transferred from Derry Jail to the Al Rawdah prison ship in Strangford Lough.

‘Around 170 prisoners had been bussed from Derry Jail in September 1941 to the boat, moored off Killyleagh, where they were joined by 30 or 40 more from Crumlin Road. Living conditions, food and medical care were all grim and one prisoner, Jack Gaffney (who had been OC in Derry Jail before the move) died of medical neglect when he fell from a bunk.

‘Another ten prisoners would die in the months and years later. Seán Dolan, from Derry, died in October 1942, just eight months after his spell on the Al Rawdah,’ writes Mr Mac Cormaic.

After Faoi Ghlas came An Drithleog (The Spark), the newsletter of a sub-committee of the same name established by the Cumann Gaelach in Derry Jail. The book recounts how Seán Dolan died in October 1942 just eight months after his spell on the prison ship the Al Rawdah. The new paper faced a quandary when it lost its editor in unusual circumstances in 1943.

‘On March 20, 1943, the editor Breandán Ó Baoighill, was one of twenty-one prisoners who dramatically escaped from Derry Jail. The prisoners had tunnelled from a ground floor cell, going down eighteen feet below the eighteenth-century jail walls, digging through an old graveyard and passing under a coffin to emerge in a coal shed in Harding Street,’ the book relates.

Pádraig Ó Gallchobair agreed to take over but An Drithleog was soon replaced by the short-lived An Freamh (The Root).

‘[Ó Gallchobair] asked the committee of Cumann Gaelach to take on the responsibility for the paper. The committee agreed, but changed the name of the paper yet again, to An Chuis (The Cause). To attract articles a writing competition was announced with a prize of twenty cigarettes.’

The last number of the Derry prison paper appeared in August 1944 after which ‘internees were once more manacled together and driven in buses back to Belfast, guarded by greater numbers of B-Specials than there were of prisoners on each bus’.

A later chapter, ‘Last Editions 1970-2000’, covers some of the republican papers that appeared in the 1970s including An Giall (The Hostage) and The Free Derry News. The former was produced in 1975 in the cages at Magilligan.

‘An Giall had the conventional mix of light-hearted camp banter, some Irish language content, and some serious articles too, but it was a properly printed paper with the content smuggled out and the finished paper smuggled back into the jail on a monthly basis.

‘The paper was usually edited by whichever POW had been elected as the public relations officer of the prisoners. Derry’s Séamus Keenan had succeeded Seosamh Ó Donnaile as editor and in time he would followed after his release by Laurence Arbuckle,’ the book explains.

The Free Derry News, though printed and circulated on the outside, followed the situation within Magilligan closely.

‘In 1975 a republican newssheet in Derry, The Free Derry News, began allocation a page or two each week to prisoner news, mainly from Magilligan, including extracts from An Giall.

‘In August the Derry newssheet printed, in full, the lead article from An Giall which looked at whether the IRA ceasefire/truce currently in place would hold, after leading republican Daithí Ó Conaill was arrested by the Gardaí,’ Mr Mac Cormaic writes.

The paper, we are informed, carried regular coverage of the Derry republican Billy Page’s campaign for political status. In the mid-1970s Mr Page, was one of a small group of prisoners sentenced to ‘Detention at the Secretary of State’s Pleasure’, the book relates.

An Giall, circulated outside Magilligan in Derry and Donegal, but was another paper with a short existence.

‘In 1977 the prison paper was absorbed into the weekly Republican News – a page being reserved for prison updates—and An Giall ceased to exist as a separate entity. It would have ceased anyway because in January 1978 Magillian’s political prisoners were all transferred to Long Kesh,’ Mr Mac Cormaic says.

Captive Columns, published by Greenisland Press, is generally available in most bookshops but can be purchased (£16 /  €18) from:
An Fhuiseog/The Lark Store, 51/53 Falls Road, Belfast – www.thelarkstore.ie ^[20]
Sinn Fein Bookshop, 58 Parnell Square, Dublin – www.sinnfeinbookshop.com ^[21]
An Ceathrú Póilí, An Chulturlann, 216 Falls Road, Belfast – www.anceathrupoili.com/en ^[22]

Award-winning writer and playwright Hugo Hamilton has praised this first novel from Caoilte Breatnach. Hugo wrote:

‘Longlines is a powerful encounter with recent Irish history. A thrilling novel of escape and redemption. An IRA man on the run from the past returns to Ireland to get involved in the peace process. In beautifully crafted prose, it tells the story of the Northern Troubles and the collective change of heart in which a country moves from its violent past into a place of hope and optimism. A fantastic read and a huge achievement. I loved the character envying the grass growing, along with so many other wonderful observations.’