Wolfe Tone and the Rituals of Republicanism

FIRST THERE IS SALLINS. SALLINS IS A SMALL village in Kildare. There are humpback bridges at either end of the village. Go over the humpback at the northern end and, curving off to the left, there's a couple of miles of typical country road. Then a sharp right onto a lesser road. Up this for a few hundred yards. By Gene Kerrigan

On the right there's a graveyard. Crosses, stones, trees, bushes, the usual stuff. There's a wall in the middle of the field. The kind of wall against which wreaths are laid. The field slopes down from the wall and here and there the earth has sunk, where coffins have collapsed. To the right of the wall there's a rostrum. This is a permanent fixture. This graveyard is designed not merely for the dead but for the living too. This is This is where people stand when they're saying things about the beliefs and traditions of Wolfe "Tone. This is Bodenstown.

The place has the virtue of simplicity, the mystique of prosaic surroundings given significance by the presence of a fragment of history .

Wolfe Tone died in 1798. He was 35. He may be buried here at Bodenstown. No one knows for sure.

Get your Bobby Sands T-Shirt. Or your souveniers from the Kesh, Records, tapes, posters and papers, ice cream, burgers and chips. When the Provos come to Sallins in June there is a carnival. There are families here, the sun shines, it's a day out. Bus loads come from North and South. There is the air of unashamed republicanism which exists in the Catholic ghettoes of the North - but no helicopter above, no weapons pregnant with plastic bullets.

The Provo ceremony is a day of celebration, starting with an early bus journey, then the march to the grave, the speeches, the dossing in the sun, the eating and drinking and then another bus journey home.

At the other end of the scale, the Fianna Fail ritual in October is a more confined affair. The ceremony itself lasts little more than half an hour. The Provos gather in a field at Sallins and march the couple of miles to the graveyard. Fianna Fail come in smaller groups directly to the graveeyard, then form up on the-road outside and march the few yards back into the site.

Sallins is awash with people when the Provos come. It hardly notices the Fianna Fail event. For Fianna Fail the occasion is a solemn ritual, almost perfunctory. The Provos can wear the solemn mask, too - and wear it literally hbut festivities predominate. Almost all of the drawings and engravings of Tone that survive show him wearing a limp but mischievous grin.

THEOBALD WOLFE TONE WAS BORN IN DUBLIN on June 20 1763, the eldest of sixteen children - only five of whom survived childhood - born to Margaret and Peter Tone. Peter had a coachmaking business, the family was middle class and Church ofIreland. As such, the family was part of the establishment caste and Theo started off with all the privileges an aspiring gent could wish.

Theo was a lazy kid. He waltzed into Trinity College and dossed. He took a shot at acting. At the age of 22 he eloped with 15 year old Matilda Witherington. They shared a deep and genuine love until his death. But Theo was a bit of a lad. He was aiming to be a barrister and part of the training was to spend two years at the Middle Temple in London. Leaving Matilda and a daughter born a few months earlier to stay at his father's house in Bodensstown, he set off for London at Christmas 1786 and had a fine old time. He hated studying law, as he would later hate practicing it, and spent more time socialising than studying. "At the age of four-and-twenty", he wrote, "with a tolerrable figure and address, in an idle and luxurious capital, it will not be supposed I was without adventures with the fair sex". Tellers of Wolfe Tone's tale sometimes find it expedient to insert three dots here and there in this passage, leaving out (or instance his noting that "Englishmen neglect their wives exceedingly in many essential circumstances" and the fact that he "did not fail to profit" from that neglect, that he sought to "render myself agreeable" to as many neglected wives as possible, forming "in conseequence several delightful connexions". Tone was considerrably less bashful about this aspect of his life than are his apostles.

He had never been backward in coming forward and his pursuit of women at least partly accounts for his life-long infatuation with military uniforms. "Being, at this time, approaching to seventeen years of age, it will not be thought incredible that woman began to appear lovely in my eyes, and I very wisely thought that a red coat and cockade, with a pair of gold epaulettes, would aid me considerably in my approaches to the objects of my adorations."

So enamoured of the military life was Tone that before entering Trinity he had sought to join the British army in order to fight against the American revolutionaries and was prevented only by the obstinacy of his father. In London in 1788, his dossing days coming to an end, dreading the thought of returning to Ireland to practice law, receiving news of his father's bankruptcy, he tried to enlist in the army to go carry a musket in India. Only the fact that the army had sent out its quota of squaddies for that year prevented him becoming a British colonist. He was 25, with just ten years left of his life.

"'HEN CHARLIE HAUGHEY WENT TO THE microPhone at Bodenstown on October 16 he said that, "True to the memory of Wolfe Tone, we in Fianna Fail will always strive and work with dedication and sinncerity ... " And on June 12 Proinsias de Rossa went to the microphone and spoke of the Workers' Party's "committment to the philosophy of Tone ... " Gerry Adams, on June 19, hoped that the Provos would "prove ourselves worthy of the legacy of Theobald Wolfe Tone".

Patrick Pearse called Bodenstown "the holiest place in Ireland". On the wall above the supposed grave of Tone there is an inscription, a quote from Pearse.

" ... thinker and doer, dreamer of the immortal dream and doer of the immortal deed, we owe to this dead man more than we can ever repay him ... to his teaching we owe it that there is such a thing as Irish nationalism, and to the memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the memory of '98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland. "

This is nonsense. Tone-played a small part in the growth of nationalism and didn't nerve his generation to do anyything.

The certainty with which Tone's "memory", "philosoophy" and "legacy" are called up by the various strands of republicanism which make their way to Bodenstown PFianna Fail,Provos, Workers' Party, IRSP - is belied by the confused, tentative and sometimes contradictory course of Tone's life and politics.

BACK IN DUBLIN AT THE END OF 1788 TONE aok a shot at the legal world. His father had fallen on hard times but Tone was able to borrow £500 from his wife's grandfather. He soon grew fed up with the law. "As the law grew every day more and more disgustful, to which my want of success contributed ... I turned my attention to politics, and, as one or two of my friends had written pamphlets with success, I determined to try my hand on a pamphlet."

Which he did, with success. He signed his Review of the Conduct of Administration during the Seventh Session of Parliament "An Independent Irish Whig". So pleased with the pamphlet were the Whigs that they retained him as counsel, which netted him eighty guineas. (In comparison, his father's wage, as Inspector of Globes for the Dublin Paving Board, a position he was lucky to achieve after his financial collapse, was £50 a year.)

Tone was an ambitious man. He wanted to be someone, to achieve something. For a long time he wasn't too partiicular what that was. In London in 1788 his ambition took him in a strange direction for one revered as "the father of Irish republicanism". He approached the Prime Minister, William Pitt, with a plan to colonise the Hawaiian islands.

Under Tone's plan, he and his brother William would lead a force of colonists who would take the islands from the natives and use them as a base to harass Spanish shippping. "I hope to see the colony yet a terror to Spain and the pride of England. I hope that a fortress called after your name (Pitt's) may perpetuate your glory when other less splendid, though not less useful, parts of your administraation are, if they can ever be, forgotten."

Pitt wasn't buying, despite the blarney, but the plan gives some insight into Tone's politics just ten years before the '98 Rising. "My idea is to construct a settlement on somewhat of a feudal plan; to reward military exertions by donations of land; to train the rising generation to arms and adventure; to create a small but impenetrable nation of soldiers, an army of sinew and bone, where every man should have a property, and spirit and skill of arms to defend it; to temper the savage ferocity of the natives by the arts of European culture and the mild precepts of the Christian religion ... "

Cromwell couldn't have put it better.

This was not a passing whim. Tone expressed bitterness at Pitt ignoring his plan. In 1790, eight years before the Rising, he put the plan forward again, this time to the Duke of Richmond. The Duke praised the plan and advised Tone to send it to the Home Office. Tone's reply: "I beg leave to return my most grateful thanks for a condescension so very unexpected and unmerited that I know not in what words to express my sense of your goodness ... I shall ever retain the deepest sense of your Grace's condescension to so obscure and humble an individual as myself."

Less than two years before his death, in December 1796, Tone made a passing reference to "my scheme", significant only in that even at that late date he still considered such imperialism consistent with his republicanism. In the final months before his return to Ireland and death in 1798 Tone cheerfully considered the possibility of joining Napoleon's planned imperialistic adventures in India or Egypt.

THE PROVOS HAD A COLOUR PARTY OF 28 MARRching to Bodenstown this year, a couple of thousand people trailing behind. Twenty-five men in the colour party, three women. Clasping hands in a U formation, thirteen heavies formed a rearguard around the back of the colour party, just in case.

The colour party wore masks and paramilitary uniforms.

Others wore black woollen masks and jumpers. It was very warm. Several times the parade stopped and a man with a jerry-can of water passed among the colour party and the band behind them. "Is anyone feeling weak?" Face masks were pulled up and water gulped.

The wind was blowing, rain threatening, when Fianna Fail marched in October. It used to be that everyone marrched in June, as near to Tone's birthday as possible, but with the various republican splits June was running out of Sundays. Fianna Fail pushed the event back to later in the year to try to win back some of the dwindling crowds.

Ned Brennan, terror of the Dublin Theatre Festival, was the Fianna Fail colour party, complete with beret. The short march in from the roadway was conducted with due solemnity, Chief Marshall of the parade, Captain Jack O'Carroll, directing proceedings by megaphone.

In the graveyard back in June the Provo paramilitaries broke into groups, lay around on the grass. A few pulled the masks out from their faces and with great agility lit cigarettes. Holding the mask out away from the mouth, puffs of smoke coming down from under the wool.

THE UNITED IRISHMEN DIDN'T START OUT TO get involved in a Rising. It was a mild political moveement with no cohesive policy - certainly it did not adopt Tone's politics, nor was he its founder.

The Irish parliament was subordinate to the English government. This suited the Ascendancy, the Church of freland "Protestants who were the landowners. It didn't suit the Presbyterians - the Dissenters - who believed that '.'we are ruled by Englishmen and the servants of Englishhmen, filled, as to commerce and politics, with the shorttsighted and ignorant prejudice of their country."

Still less did it suit the Catholics. Although the clauses of the Penal Laws which suppressed religious practice had lapsed and other reforms had been instituted, the Catholics were still suffering under the direst conditions. All were politically impotent and the peasants were economically thrashed.

There were three responses to the oppression: the Pressbyterians sought electoral reform and easing of the resstraints on commerce; the middle class Catholics sought social and political reforms; and the Catholic peasants sought to burn, stomp and pike their oppressors where they could get away with it.

Tone tried to link up the first two responses. He, like many others, was affected by the French revolution of 1789. When, in February 1791, Tom Paine's Rights of Man appeared Tone was greatly influenced by it and began to see things (in Ireland, anyway, whatever about Hawaii) in terms of aristocracy versus democracy. In September 1791 he wrote his best pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.

Tone's belief was that the wealthy Protestants would best achieve electoral reform and a freeing of their commmerce by linking their demands with the demand for Cathoolic emancipation. "No reform is practicable that shall not include the Catholics." His linking of the two causes was primarily tactical and had nothing to do with anti-sectarian idealism. However, Tone was not sectarian and had a genuine belief in the irrelevance of religious background. politically, it just didn't matter. Not that Tone cared for Catholicism as a religion. He regarded its rituals as "superrstition". Priests were "men of low birth, low feelings, low habits, and no education". When Napolean subdued the Pope and exacted tribute Tone exulted: "I am heartily glad that old Priest is at last laid under contribution in his turn. Many a long century he and his predecessors have been fleecing all Europe, but the day of retribution is come at last."

Nor was Tone's argument on behalf of the Catholics a result of any personal experience of the iniquities of the Ascendancy system - at the time he wrote the pamphlet he had never to his knowledge met a single Catholic.

At the end of 1791 Tone played a role in the formation of the Society of the United Irishmen. His strategy of linking the demands of Catholic emancipation and elecctoral reform were not very welcome in the Society. There was fear that Catholicism was not compatible with free thinking republicanism.

The United Irishmen represented the pressure of the business classes seeking to exert itself against the old arisstocracy. A study of the Dublin Society at the time of Tone's involvement showed that 52% were businessmen or shopkeepers and 46% were professional or artisans. There were no labourers involved.

THEY COME TO THE MICROPHONE AT BODENSStown and speak of Wolfe Tone and each one takes what he wants, needs, from Tone's politics. For Proinsias de Rossa 'of the Workers' Party it is Tone's radicalism. Tone was the one, after all, who went to the "men of no property" for his support.

FRIDAY 17 JANUARY 1794, ENNISKILLEN. TONE goes for a stroll in the park with his best friend, Tom Russell, another United Irishman. (Frank MacDermot, Tone's most comprehensive biographer, found a scrap of Russell's diary.) Both Tone and Russell are depressed. Nothing is stirring, the United Irishmen are in the dolldrums, the previous August there had been talk of dissbanding. Tone erupts in anger - the North are cowards and braggarts. There is "nothing to be expected from this country except from the sans culottes, who are too ignoorant for any thinking man to wish to see in power."

Sans culottes is a political term from the French revoluution. It means literally "without trousers", the masses. Those who - as we might say today - haven't a behind in their trousers. The men of no property.

Tone never sought the support of the men of no properrty, never supported their demands. His political life was bound up solely with the men of property - he implied that if they didn't take action the men of no property would.

He protested the exclusion of "the whole body of the Catholic gentry" from parliament. In describing the Norrthern Star, edited by United Irishman Samuel Neilson, he remarked, "The Catholics everywhere throughout Ireland (I mean the leading Catholics) were, of course, subscribers." (As. well they might be: the paper strongly opposed the trade unions then emerging.) Tone's class consciousness came out even in a description of his neighbours when he lived in America: "Of all the people I have met here the Irish are incontestably the most offensive. If you meet : a confirmed blackguard you may be sure he is Irish; you will of course observe I speak of the lower orders."

In seeking rights for Catholics he was aware of Protesstant fears and suggested limiting the franchise to the better off: "Thus will you at one stroke purge yourselves of the gross and feculent mass which contaminates the Protestant interest, and restore their natural and just weight to the sound and respectable part of the Catholic community, without throwing into their hands so much power as might enable them to dictate the law."

Neither was Tone the stalwart republican of mythology - not until the final period, when his vision was of an Ireland taken from the clutches of England by the republiicans of France. From Argument on Behalf of the Catholics:

"I do not mean to derogate from the due exertion of his Majesty's perogative: lowe him allegiance and if occasion should require it I would be ready, cheerfully, to spill my blood in his service ... Surely this is no question of loyalty. The King of England is King also of Ireland ... he cannot be offended that each of his Kingdoms should, by all honourable and just means, increase their own ability, to render him the service due to him."

GERRY ADAMS COMES TO THE MICROPHONE AT Bodenstown to lay claim to the tradition of Wolfe Tone. He speaks of that romantic vision of Tone and his

comrades gathering at McArt's Fort on the summit of Cave Hill in Belfast, pledging never to rest until Ireland is free. What was Tone doing at McArt's Fort?

APRIL 1794. THE REVEREND WILLIAM JACKSON, a French agent, arrived in Dublin seeking to stir up trouble.

By then Tone had distanced himself from the United Irishmen. He claimed to have left the Society in May 1793. The probable reason for putting some space between himmself and the Society was his employment, from mid 1792, as secretary to the Catholic Committee, the middle class ' body pushing for reform. It wouldn't do for a man in his position to be connected with a doubtful organisation.

However, Tone's friends were still active United Irishhmen and he mixed with the organisation. Jackson, the French spy, wanted a memorandum on the political balance of forces which would be useful to the French. Tone wrote one, recommending an invasion. Jackson's companion, John Cockayne, was an English spy. Jackson was arrested (and committed suicide in the dock before they could senntence him to death), another of those involved, Hamilton Rowan, fled the country. Tone wasn't touched.

"I felt the necessity of taking immediate and decided measures to extricate myself. I therefore went to a gentleeman, high in confidence of the then Administration, and told him at once fairly every step I had taken."

Tone made a deal. He wouldn't testify against Jackson or anyone else but would make a full statement of everyything that had happened. He would also, given time to arrange his affairs, leave the country for America.

The deal was not made public and some eyebrows were raised when Tone remained free - even though his name came up frequently at Jackson's trial and his part in the affair was known. Tone believed he had acted honourably and went out of his way to appear publicly during the trial in order to show he had nothing to hide.

He and his family spent a month in Belfast from May 1795, on their way into exile in America. His United Irishman friends had no doubt he had acted honourably and treated him to a series of picnics, carousings and genneral jollities prior to his departure. It was on one of these outings that the pledge at McArt's Fort was made. Tone had just.three years left to live and his political career in Ireland was over.

CHARLIE HAUGHEY HAD LAID THE WREATH, made the speech and come down from the microphone to stand between Jim Tunney and Niall Andrews. Everyybody was applauding. David Andrews was standing behind Haughey and slightly to his right.. He kept his hands in his pockets. It was a cold day. There were some kids behind Haughey. Suddenly Haughey was turning, turning round to pat the kids on the head, turning ... and David Andrews took his hands out of his pockets, began clapping.

TONE SPENT A SHORT TIME IN AMERICA AND then, at the beginning of 1796, went to France, where he soon got a commission in the French army. (Except for the few months involvement with the United Irishmen, all of Tone's political activity - whether with the Catholic Committee or the French army - was in a professional capacity: it was how he made his living.) France and England had been at war since 1793 and Ireland was a natural possibility for invasion, a way of getting at the Brits. Tone spent his time in France lobbying for an invasion.

Events in Ireland moved at a very fast pace. The peasants, treated like animals, were striking back. Militarist groups, whipped into existence by the oppression, had existed for years - Whiteboys, Rightboys, Defenders - and now such militancy was increasing. They were non-sectarian, killing and burning landlords whether Protestant or Catholic. Although influenced by the French revolution they were not particularly republican or separatist. They just wanted their oppressors off their backs. Unlike the United Irishmen they were not pushing a new political line - merely reactting with appropriate savagery to the old one. Common land was being fenced off, peasants were being cleared off the land to make way for cattle as the landowners switched from tillage to the more profitable pasture, large tithes and rentswere being extracted.

Where Catholic and Protestant peasant organisations existed in the same area sectarianism sometimes arose, fuelled by competition or suspicion. In September 1795 the Orange Order was founded. In 1796 the Administration formed a yoemanry corps to put down revolt. It was inntended to be non-sectarian but became almost exclusively Protestant - a kind of prototype of the UDR.

The United Irishmen had been suppressed and reformed as an underground organisation. It drifted more towards republicanism and militarism, attracted far bigger numbers than in Tone's time and made some connections with the peasant Defenders and with the trade unions who were fighting their own battles for existence in the cities.

The mixture had to explode. When it did, in the spring of 1798, it was uncoordinated, leaderless, savage and doomed to failure. The Ascendency exacted a terrible revenge and no one could count the deaths - it was someething between 30,000 and 50,000.

The French sent too little and too late. When Tone sailed back on an expedition in October 1798 the Rising had already been crushed and there wasn't much point in it. His ship was taken captive even before/he reached land. He could have hid among the ranks, tried to evade notice, but he wasn't like that. He gave himself up to certain death as a traitor to the crown.

His speech from the dock distorted the truth ("From my earliest youth I have regarded the connexion between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation") and yet it was in a larger sense honest - he was not making an autobiographical statement but a ringing call to repubblicanism. "I am aware of the fate which awaits me and scorn equally the tone of complaint and that of suppliication." He insisted on wearing his French uniform and asked only that he be given a soldier's death by gunfire instead of hanging. This was refused. His brother Matthew had fought with Humbert's army and had a month earlier been hanged. Tone was given the same cell and there found a razor, possibly Matthew's. Hours before he was due to hang he cut his throat, did it badly and took a week to die.

THE WREATH-LAYING IS DONE, THE RITUALS of republicanism finished. The graveyard with its stage and rostrum waits for next year's parades. Tone was singled out to be fashioned into myth because so much is known about him. He was an excellent writer - vivid, humourous, self-mocking - and his son collected his writings in a judiciously edited work. Much of his own. description of his politics was written towards the end of his life and is adjusted accordingly. But he wasn't plannning on being a myth and his writings are honest enough to show a confused, idealistic, pragmatic, ambitious and, in the end, brave man wrestling with inexorable forces, playing a minor role, true to his class, an imaginative and advanced political thinker for the time that was in it.

His reduction to a stereotype, to which republicans of all strands can with straight faces pay homage, reveals a need for simple heroes and simple villains and a denial of the complexity of politics. And facilitates a similar reducction to stereotype today. When de Rossa, Adams and Haughey seek legitimacy for their politics in a mythical "legacy" they obscure and deny the very real roots and interests from which those politics spring. •