A poem by Liam O’Flaherty on the hunger strike of Sean McCaughey was found and recently published by the historian Spencer J. Weinreich in the magazine Éire Ireland of the Irish-American Cultural Institute. Here, Eoghan Mac Cormaic, himself a writer on Irish political prisoners, looks at the story.
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As someone who would happily vanish into a pile of old books and documents, following words at a whim, and allowing imagination to steer investigation I used to take great delight in any rare opportunity to visit the National Library. In advance of the visit I’d search and wander through online book titles, surnames, places—mainly prisons as I was researching prison newspapers and prison diaries—and on arrival there would always be a feeling of excitement as some folder or file, probably unopened in years, would be handed over into my trust for the short duration of my visit.
Some visits produced pure gold: handling handwritten prison poetry by Traolach Mc Suibhne (Terence MacSwiney) while he was interned in Lincoln Prison after his arrest for the so-called German Plot. Mac Suibhne’s Irish language articles appeared in the prison paper, The Insect. On another visit I found a missing ‘supplement’ of four pages from the Crumlin Road Jail paper Jail Birds, hidden away in a file containing ballads and poetry from outside the prisons.
I can, then, imagine the excitement that Spencer J. Weinreich must have felt when he uncovered for the first time in decades a previously unpublished poem written by Liam O’Flaherty from over eighty years ago, a handwritten draft version of a poem in praise of the hunger striker Seán Mac Eachaidh / Sean McCaughey.
Sean McCaughey
Spencer Weinreich has recently published a lengthy treatise of the poem and also an attempt at deciphering a fascinating mysterious note written on the reverse side of the page from the poem which he used to help date the poem, and in turn identify the author and recipient of the note. It is an interesting quest and Weinreich deserves credit for his educated speculation as to who originally had the copy of the poem.
The poem opens with the lines Ní bheidh Mac Eachaidh / sean go deo and for the purpose of his article he has named the untitled poem Ní bheidh Mac Eachaidh. Weinreich, a Harvard scholar of history, points out that the eleven-line poem is unusual as O’Flaherty is only known to have written three other poems, giving over most of his writing to prose and fiction. The fact that the poem is in Irish and that its subject matter is nationalist and political are also matters of intrigue since the majority of the Aran islander’s work was in English. He also avoided political writing, despite the fact that one title he is perhaps most remembered for is The Informer, a supposedly fictional story steeped in republican allegory and metaphor.
Other titles like The Assassin and The Sniper show O’Flaherty as a close observer, if not a participant in revolutionary activities and he did indeed take part in the Civil War on the republican side.
While he may have claimed to eschew political writing at times in his life, the poem Ní bheidh Mac Eachaidh is, on the other hand, unpretentious and unapologetic in its homage to the bravery of Mac Eachaidh, who died a horrific and lonely death in Portlaoise Prison after five days of a hunger strike followed by seventeen days of a hunger and thirst strike.
For almost five years Seán McCaughey had been on the blanket protest in Portlaoise, during which time he was denied visits, exercise, parcels, papers or association with his fellow prisoners. The barbarity McCaughey and his comrades endured were so bad that at a hurried inquest the day after his death the prison medical officer admitted that he wouldn’t keep a dog in such conditions, conditions it must be remembered that were approved by a Fianna Fáil government and inflicted on some prisoners, including Tomás Mac Curtain whose own family members had died in the struggle for freedom less than twenty-five years earlier.
In spite of all the censorship and attempts to criminalise the prisoners in Arbour Hill, the Curragh, Mountjoy and Portlaoise, during those years (and of course the parallel unionist-government treatment of republican prisoners in Crumlin Road, Derry, and Armagh jails and on the prison ship Al Rawdah) a movement in support of the prisoners slowly grew. Seán McCaughey’s hunger strike was marked with protests in support of his demands. A hunger strike during the same period by a republican prisoner in Crumlin Road, David Fleming, also gathered support in spite of the conditions at the time in the immediate aftermath of World War II emergency powers.
Weinreich lists protest from Mayo to Manhattan and support from union leaders, some opposition politicians, and former Tan War exiles in the US. O’Flaherty himself spent the world war years in America and arrived back in Ireland just two days before Seán Mc Caughey’s death. He was likely caught up in the media coverage of the final days of the hunger strike in the press, where, as Weinreich has discovered, stories from his own pen were published on pages beside reports of McCaughey’s death.
‘The men of art’, wrote Bobby Sands, ‘have lost their hearts, they dream within their dreams.’ Writing in the Irish News twenty-five years after the hunger strike, Jim Gibney, casting an eye back on the times agrees: ‘Faced by the stench and challenge of the H-Blocks and Armagh Women’s Prison their pens lay dormant, their canvasses blank,’ wrote Gibney, although acknowledging that there was ‘an honourable minority who did bear witness to the horrors inside the prisons holding political prisoners.’
Bobby Sands, no doubt, would have raised the same criticism of the men and women of art in 1940s Ireland where so few would brave the wrath of the two partitioned governments, and this is what makes O’Flaherty’s poem stand out.
Political and immediate the poem praises the courage of the hunger striker, deplores the wretched conditions of his death, places him in (or above) the pantheon of Irish heroes and in its finale predicts that in time the Irish people will take him to their hearts.
It should be noted, however, that while the poem can now be read, and in retrospect that O’Flaherty can be seen as sympathetic and in awe of McCaughey’s courage and death, the reality is that the poem lay unseen and unpublished for eight decades, was not included by O’Flaherty in any collections and indeed at a time when he had access to the press as an established writer, seems not to have been offered up for publication or for public use in criticising the government that had allowed Seán Mac Eachaidh and other hunger strikers to die.
The worth of the poem then, to me, is questionable but here are the lines O’Flaherty wrote and Spencer Weinreich’s translation of them.
Ní bheidh Mac Eachaidh sean go deo
Mar cailleadh é le grádh
Agus cia go raibh a chorp bocht
Suarach ar uair a bháis
de bhárr ocras toilteanach
Bhí croí agus anam ann
níos ailne na bhí in aon naomh riamh
de fuair bás ar son na h-Éireann
Ar mhacaire an chatha
Tá Dia leis indiu
Beidh Éire leis amaireach.
McCaughey will never be old
For he was lost to love
And although his poor body was
Wretched when he died
Because of a chosen hunger
There was a heart and a soul in him
more beautiful than was in any saint before him
Who died for Ireland’s sake
upon the field of battle.
God is with him today.
Ireland will be with him tomorrow.