It is time to move on to other subjects, other narratives; but let me conclude the prevailing narrative of recent weeks - remembrance. I have been quite astonished by the numbers of people who have been finally describing to me their grief and hurt at the public denial of what a previous generation of Irishmen suffered - too many, indeed, for me to be able to reply to them quickly; for which, sincere apologies.
Most writers couldn't possibly have known the men they told me about, yet the grief for them seems to have been passed on in discrete packages at the hearthside, undiscussed outside the family, yet retaining a remarkable vigour, almost like the secret religion of recusants. Many Irish people have patiently kept faith with their dead through the generations until the fate which consumed them could finally be installed in a new national narrative. And the hurt remains for many, who ask: what about the many Irish dead of the Royal Navy, the Royal Flying Corps - are they not to be commemorated by the Naval Service and the Air Corps of today? No doubt that too will come to pass.
Editing process
The interesting question is not how the Irish dead of the Great War could have been forgotten, but rather: how did Irish consciousness routinely exclude so much that was real from the national narrative? Because the vast and voluntary sacrifice of the Great War is only part of the post-Independence editing process. Personal censorship, the air-brushing-out of the publicly inappropriate, seems to have been a primary force in Irish life until quite recently. An almost inhumanly virtuous self-image was concocted, buttressed by interlocking and powerful taboos which made shame a powerful, and probably decisive, social engine.
TB, homosexuality, VD, mental illness, child-abuse, illegitimacy, the Civil War, familial violence, alcoholism and service of the Crown were just some of the shame-subjects that could not be discussed. On the other hand, a sanitised participation in 1916 and the War of Independence was almost de rigueur in the prevalent narrative, which had many authors, but one pre-eminently: Edward Coll, its true laureate.
Edward Coll was a most unfortunate lad. He was probably illegitimate; he was certainly abandoned by his mother within a couple of years of his birth, and he was left with his uncle, a cold and unloving bachelor who disapproved of all childhood games. Hannie, the one aunt with whom he had formed a bond, then left him too, going off to join his mother, who was to return briefly when Edward was five. She looked him over, and despite his pleas to take him with her, then departed to her new husband in the US.
Loveless home
So Edward Coll was raised in a bleak, loveless home by an uncle who made him work through a childhood-less childhood. When he was 13 Hannie returned to nurse her mother, Edward's grandmother, through her terminal illness; she then abandoned Edward yet again, and yet again Edward's pleas to be allowed to join her and his mother were ignored.
What child could have survived such rejection, such loveless-ness, undamaged? His alienation was so profound that when he was sent away to boarding school at the age of 15, he rejoiced at having left home, and actually asked to spend Christmas at the college. Is it all that surprising that a youngster so starved of love should in adulthood have understood little of other people, even as he invented an entirely new moral world for himself, which drew upon the ancient, mythic virtues of a largely imagined tribe?
Edward Coll (the name with which he entered his national school rolls, Coll being his mother's family name), reinvented himself and by the time he reached full adulthood he was known as Eamon de Valera. There was probably no "de Valera" father. No record of him has been found. He, like so much of Eamon de Valera, was probably imagined. Edward was most likely fathered by Thomas Atkinson, the son of a local grandee for whom his mother Catherine worked. Eamon de Valera could just as easily have been Edward Atkinson.
Fianna Fail
De Valera's true genius lay not so much in inventing himself, which he did with remarkable success, but in finding and expressing a narrative for his country which appealed to so many people. We know that narrative by the name Fianna Fail; but the narrative was so mythically compelling that its essential features were mirrored by those of the opposing political tribe, Fine Gael. Tacitly, the political consensus created a discourse which was as remarkable for what it excluded as for what it included, and this was made possible because the Irish people were already in the habit of imagining out such realities as TB, sex and alcoholism from their own lives. Thirty-five thousand dead soldiers were just another hurdle in the great national amnesia steeplechase handicap.
It is easy and not particularly helpful to demonise de Valera in all this. He created a narrative which both pleased him and which people wanted to hear; and, given his horrendous childhood, who can blame him? What is interesting is the power of that narrative, and how tenaciously so much of it was guarded by Dev's heirs. This year has seen the formal winding-up of that narrative by the only people who had power over it, its guardians within Fianna Fail. Edward Coll's tale is finally done.