I must have been around seventeen when I realized I had
never seen my grandfathers in the same room together. They were both quite old
by then and this behavior had been going on for well over fifty years.
One lived on a stately farm less than a mile outside town –
now sadly buried beneath estates full of houses – the other, a headstone maker,
occupied a big old barracks of a house near Wexford’s Selskar Abbey.
The cattle dealer drove into town most mornings for a shave,
and a whiskey in The Wren’s Nest; he passed close to the headstone maker’s
yard, yet their paths never seemed to cross.
By the same token, I never heard either of them say an
unkind word about each other.
Lest you think this tale somewhat odd, there were many similar
stories in the Ireland of my childhood. Most had their genesis in the brutal civil
war of 1922-23.
This one, however, began some years earlier, yet it retains a
certain resonance.
You see, the cattle dealer was a follower of John Redmond,
leader of the Home Rule Party and a local Member of the British Parliament,
while the headstone maker was an admirer of Seán MacDiarmada, one of the
leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
In a major parliamentary victory in 1914, the bookish,
uncharismatic Redmond gained Home Rule for Ireland – something that Daniel
O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell failed to do in their legendary careers.
Alas, that August the “war to end all wars” broke out
between the Allies – Britain, France and Russia – and the Central Powers of
Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
Redmond’s allies in the British Government prevailed upon him
to postpone enactment of Home Rule until the war ended. Redmond advised Irish
men to enlist in the British Army in a show of good will.
It was commonly expected that the war would be over by
Christmas 1914 and that the young men would return matured and all the better
for their great adventure; however it stretched on until 1918 and over 40 million
people would perish in the years of combat.
One of them was my grand uncle, John Kirwan, aged 22, the
cattle dealer’s only brother. Thus did the lofty affairs of Europe play out on
the narrow provincial streets of Wexford.
John was among 59,247 British soldiers killed at the Battle
of Loos over a couple of days in the Autumn of 1915 - in what was later deemed a
suicidal advance towards the German lines.
He’s buried somewhere over there – another undistinguished
pawn in the “great game.”
His death, however, had grave repercussions in Wexford.
John’s mother, my great-grandmother, was consumed with grief and in the
whispered words of my granny, “she lost her senses.”
Apparently she would accost other returned soldiers on the
street and demand why they survived while “my John” did not.
My grandfather never spoke about the loss of his brother. He
was a taciturn man at best, and I can only imagine that the event deepened his
somewhat pessimistic take on life.
The headstone maker always spoke kindly of John Kirwan, and
admired his athletic prowess and general character; though he would usually sigh
about “the great mistake” such a fine man had made in joining the British Army.
For my grandfather Hughes was a supporter of the 1916
Uprising – a minority group in the Home Rule citadel of Wexford.
My grandfather Kirwan considered this “suicidal debacle” the
ultimate “stab in the back” to the young Wexford men off fighting the Great
War.
John Kirwan considered himself to be no less an Irish
patriot than any republican; he gave up his life in a foreign land to achieve
Home Rule for Ireland.
Alas for him and the thousands of other Home Rule Irish dead
and injured, they were essentially written out of history, for they became an
inconvenient fact in the new 26 County Free State where the Republican sacrifice
of 1916 was venerated.
Every year, however, on Poppy Day they
were uneasily celebrated and memorialized in the streets of Wexford, on a day
you can be certain that my two grandfathers took more than usual care not to
meet.
