Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland

Conor Cruise O'Brien has spent many years combating the mystical nationalism that insists on a unified Roman Catholic Ireland. The citizens of the Republic and the Catholics of Ulster (not to speak of the Irish-Americans!) may not consciously condone the IRA and its methods, but their tacit approval (and sometimes more) of the aims of this terrorist organization is what keeps it going. By foregrounding this issue, O'Brien is doing that which is unpopular North and South, but needs to be done. My hat is off to him.This is a personal account of the "troubles" that the Irish have inflicted on each other (with some help from the English) from Wolfe Tone (1798) on. The author spends the last third of the book discussing the current mess in Ulster - current, that is, as of 1995. CC O'Brien has been involved in various of the governments of the Republic of Ireland over the years, as well as working in the UN and being an intellectual-at-large in this country and elsewhere. He is a lapsed Catholic whose aunt Hanna was a well-known Irish Republican activist after the Easter Rising of 1916. It is his thesis that virtually everything in Irish politics that came after 1916 can be explained by reference to the sacral character of the deaths of Connolly, MacBride and others, but particularly of Patrick Pearse, who foretold his death on that occasion in prophetic and religious language that cast himself in the part of the Savior who would be a sacrifice for his country's freedom. These deaths haunt the Irish Catholics still, and those that hear most clearly the "ancestral voices" and their calls for blood in service of the nation are deferred to by those more moderate, for whom the voices are dim.Actually, I picked up this book to better understand some references in James Joyce. I was not disappointed. Much of the family conversation in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" becomes more clear: the time of the novel was just about the turn of the century, not long after the fall of Parnell (almost wrote "the Fall"), when battle lines were being drawn between Catholics and Protestants, and Catholics and Catholics. As a bonus O'Brien talks about WB Yeats and Maud Gonne and their roles in the events of the early part of the century, particularly Yeats's play "Cathleen ni Houlihan", which became a touchstone of Republican patriotism thereafter. Although Yeats got out of that mystical form of country-worship, and was repudiated by the Catholic sectarians who wanted an Irish AND Catholic nation, his play was retained as an evocative piece of propaganda.This book is charming and personal, mixing family memoir with formal history. O'Brien has written other things on this painful subject of the intersection of religion and politics (I enjoyed "The Siege" when I read it a dozen years ago), but this is closer to home for him, and I found the metaphor of the "ancestral voices" to be telling: it explains a lot. (In particular, I now have a hope of understanding the movie

I lived in Ireland for over twenty years, starting from just before the time of the 'Troubles'. In all that time, and since, it is my sincere opinion that no-one has talked as much sense about Ireland as Conor Cruise O'Brien. Sadly, he's been much reviled for it. Happily, he's never let that stop him.Dr O'Brien recently published his autobiography, 'Memoir', which hints gently at an awareness of his own mortality (he's 82 this year). I guess that after he's gone then many folks will realise what they had in the 'Cruiser'. Don't wait on this event, dear reader ! (And anyway, it might not be for a long while yet, the Guinness is VERY good in Dublin, you know!)To cut a long bit of blarney short - read this book.