One day, Helena Sheehan was asked by a group of DCU students recording a vox-pop, “What is the most important lesson you have learned from life?”
“The importance of worldview,” she replied.
This review details the memoirs of three people who committed to their take on a better world. Each subject’s political gravity falls to the left, though they differ in the means and platforms employed to tilt the world towards what they imagined as a better future.
A question to ask of any political memoir is: does it reveal new information or expand our understanding of existing ideas? It is perhaps Gerry Adams who responds most succinctly to this question in an introduction to Rita: “It is an incomplete memoir. There are gaps. It ends too soon.”
Rita O’Hare was born and grew up in a divided society. She became a significant figure in the Provisional republican movement. She was shot, exiled, imprisoned and an extradition warrant for attempted murder was outstanding until her recent death.
These “gaps” may be explained by O’Hare’s declining health as she composed the memoir (indeed the prose unspools towards the end), but there are areas of interest left unexcavated. While a reader might understand why our subject would adopt a defensive posture, it would have been interesting to meet O’Hare in a more reflective mood.
The confluence of these memoirs is the authors’ commitment to a cause and their tenacity in actioning their worldview
Perhaps more enlightening is Jimmy Kelly’s account of a lifelong commitment to trade unionism, most significantly his involvement with Waterford Crystal and his success in the European Court of Human Rights in securing pension protection legislation. The emphasis is autobiographical more so than historical, but our author makes a convincing case for the power of trade unionism in working towards intersectional social justice.
Helena Sheehan, a Marxist academic philosopher, adopts a seamless narrative in blending memoir, history and academic discourse but I am unconvinced of the merit of this merging of genres. Sheehan’s assertive prose assumes a degree of familiarity. If you don’t already know your glasnost from your perestroika, this is not the book for you.
The confluence of these memoirs is the authors’ commitment to a cause and their tenacity in actioning their worldview. In each case, I imagine their readers will be familiar with them, their cause and the characters that occupy these worlds, whether that is through a shared worldview or not. For those who aren’t, the lens may be too narrow.
Bells and whistles might seem a little gauche when it comes to leftist causes, but with each memoir, a tighter edit and investment in graphic design wouldn’t have gone amiss.
