New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Act 2 of Hinterland centres on Jack’s father-fed neurosis and Johnny’s affair with Connie, the woman whom the audience recognized as Terry Keane. The act opens with Jack trying to hang himself. When Daisy comes in on this scene, she says to her husband: ‘Listen, you can be the king that ruined his country but I won’t let you be the father that ruined his son.’ And it is this sense that the personal is all that matters that impels Hinterland, with Daisy as a sort of chorus, musing always on the career of her husband as a father rather than as a party leader. His neglect of his son is offered as an event that supersedes politics, but stands for the rot at the heart of the public realm as well:

You were running for office, or running the country. Ah, yes. But it denies something at the heart of life. At the heart of families, of countries, of political parties even. If that slight signal [that the child in need gives out] is not attended to, there is really no family, party or country. Because the oldest law on earth has been violated.

Thus Barry subtly works the connection between a man who calls himself ‘the father of the nation’ and the domestic father, insisting on the failure of the latter as a poison that infects the nation. But he is also using elements in the career and personality of Charles Haughey as a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache. This might seem, as it did to some of the Abbey audience at the discussion, a sort of confusing battle between private and public, an invasion of Haughey’s privacy and the privacy of his wife and children, a distortion of the facts for mere artistic purposes, a dishonest and misleading play on public affairs while all the time masking a personal, private pain. Many of these accusations that were made about the play missed the point, which is that all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication. There is simply no other way of doing it. Most plays, novels and stories use the same stealthy process. Barry, by stealing Haughey, simply exposed an age-old system. Fiction, by its very nature, is a form of deceit. Hinterland inhabits beautifully and controversially the interstices between the world as we know it, raw and shapeless, and the world as imagined, tested richly and suggestively by private and hidden experience.

Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe

1

It seemed beyond belief that our neighbour Seamus Doyle, who tended roses, and his wife, Gretta, who went to Mass every day, had once led a revolution, that he had been sentenced to death by the British, and that she had, with two other women, raised the Tricolour, the Irish flag, over one of the main buildings of the southern town of Enniscorthy in the 1916 Rising. It seemed even more astonishing that Marion Stokes had been one of the other flag-raisers; she came to our house every evening during Easter Week 1966 to watch a drama on television about the events of fifty years earlier.

She was the least likely ex-terrorist you could imagine, polite and sedate and distantly smiling. My uncle, who fought in the subsequent War of Independence and went on a hunger strike in prison during the Irish Civil War, also gave not a hint in his manners and his attitudes that he had, when he was young, taken on the might of the British Empire in pursuit of a dream that those around him viewed as foolish and fanatical.

The third woman who put up the flag in the town in 1916, Una Bolger, was married to Robert Brennan, one of the leaders of the Rising; he later became Irish ambassador to Washington and a close associate of Eamon de Valera. (Their daughter was the novelist and short-story writer Maeve Brennan, who wrote for the New Yorker for many years.) Una’s brother Jim Bolger, also involved in the struggle against the British, was Roddy Doyle’s grandfather, the father of Ita, who tells her story and that of her family in Rory & Ita, which Doyle edited for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

The story of the revolutionary generation in Ireland remains complex and powerful and difficult to tell. My uncle, who died in 1995, confined himself to chance remarks and jokes on these matters; I have no memory of our neighbours, who took part in the Rising, discussing their years as revolutionaries in private conversations. They were quiet and conservative people; their years of living dangerously made them grumpy, it seemed to me, rather than garrulous. But since the IRA ceasefires of the late 1990s, the commemoration of what happened has become easier now that the events are not re-enacted in Northern Ireland on a daily basis. When the Enniscorthy Echo, the local newspaper, celebrated its centenary, it produced a supplement with articles proudly stating that it was ‘once a hive of nationalists’, printing a photograph of Robert Brennan in paramilitary uniform, his wife standing behind him, and articles about Jim Bolger’s arrest for sedition in 1915 and my uncle’s hunger strike. All three worked for the newspaper, which, its centenary edition stated proudly, ‘assumed a notorious reputation with the authorities’ in the decade before the creation of the Irish Free State.

In the 1940s, the Irish government asked those involved in the Rising and the War of Independence to write down their memories, which would be locked away until an indeterminate time in the future. More than seventeen hundred obliged, including Seamus Doyle and Robert Brennan. In March of this year, the archive was opened for the first time to scholars and researchers. Having read a sample of the accounts from Enniscorthy, including the memoirs of Doyle and Brennan, full of flat statement and unadorned prose, I found it fascinating to imagine the conditions under which the statements were written. These men sat down to record their memories in the relative comfort of neutral Ireland, in domestic harmony, in a world about which no one will ever, it seems, need to take further statements to lock away. Seamus Doyle must have walked in from his rose garden and sat quietly at a table in the front room of his semi-detached house to describe a meeting in prison with Patrick Pearse, who had led the 1916 Rising, shortly before Pearse’s execution. ‘He rose quickly when the door was opened and came forward to meet us and shook hands with us. He appeared to be physically exhausted but spiritually exultant… When the soldier was out of the cell Pearse whispered to us, “Hide the arms, they will be wanted later.” We then bid him goodbye.’

‘On the inception of the new state,’ Roddy Doyle writes in Rory & Ita, ‘Jim Bolger became a civil servant, at the Department of External Affairs… His first task was to sit outside a room with a gun while the new Minister, Gavan Duffy, was inside the room.’ Ita, Roddy’s mother, remembers that her father ‘never lost the idea of what he had fought for, but he wasn’t a diehard’. By the time she was born in 1925, three years after the foundation of the state, her father was working by day and studying accountancy at night. Roddy Doyle’s father was born in 1923 and was called Rory, the Irish for Roderick, after the patriot Rory O’Connor. O’Connor was one of four leaders, one from each province, taken out and shot a year earlier by the Irish Free State forces in the beginning of a series of reprisals in the Civil War. These executions caused immense bitterness among the opponents, led by Eamon de Valera, of the 1921 treaty with the British, which left the North behind under British control. In 1936 the poet Austin Clarke wrote:

They are the spit of virtue now,
Prating of law and honour
But we remember how they shot
Rory O’Connor.

Rory Doyle’s own father, as a member of the IRA, was involved in burning down the Custom House in Dublin in 1921, but did not take part in the Civil War, although two of his brothers fought on opposite sides, one being killed in the war. ‘He couldn’t face up to fighting the men he’d been with; he just couldn’t do it,’ Rory remembers, ‘but he was still close to the Republican fellows who were causing the trouble.’ In 1926 his father joined Fianna Fail, the party founded by de Valera, which held power in Ireland for much of the time between 1932 and recently.