The Banshees

Went to a movie theater today for the first time since early 2020 and saw The Banshees of Inisherin.  Very good and very dark, in some ways even darker than In Bruges.  The film looks lovely, shot on two islands off the west coast of Ireland, which is good because the story deals with some dark emotions, though often injected with humor.  Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan are splendid.

The movie is set in April 1923 and there are occasional references to the ongoing Irish Civil War, at least twice we can hear gunfire and explosions across the passage separating the island from the Irish mainland.  I realized that at least one of the themes of the movie was as commentary on that Civil War, which occurred between June 1922 and May 1923, and left bitter scars on Irish society that took decades to erase.

The Civil War occurred because of an oath.  From shortly after the end of WW1 until the summer of 1922, the Irish rebels had fought a non-conventional war in order to end several hundred years of English occupation.   Britain eventually agreed to negotiate and after months of talks in London an agreement was reached (Winston Churchill was one of the British negotiators).  While it was short of full independence for the entire island (leaving six northern counties in Britain) and created what was to be called a Irish Free State, within the British Empire and, most importantly, requiring an oath of allegiance to King George V, as the King in Ireland, not King of the United Kingdom.  It was this oath that led to a split within the Irish revolutionaries, the Free Staters supporting it, however reluctantly, and seeing the Free State as the first step towards inevitable independence, while the Irish Republican Army saw the oath as a repudiation of all its principles.

War broke out between the factions in late June.  It was brutal, devolving into murders and executions.  The Banshees starts with a seeming inconsequential conflict over not much of anything and escalates from there, despite the wishes of the principals, as they are carried along by sticking by their principles.  Prior to the Civil War, two rebels, Michael Collins and Harry Boland, were very close friends but Collins was Chairman of the Irish Provisional Government of the Free State and supported the oath, while Boland opposed the treaty with England.  On July 31, 1922 Boland was shot by Free State soldiers attempting to arrest him and died the next day.  Collins attended his funeral.  Three weeks later, Collins was dead, killed in an ambush.  All over an oath.  An oath that ended friendships, that led to friends killing friends, that led to decades of bitterness, and delayed economic development.  An oath that meant nothing in the longer-term.  Under the 1931 Statute of Westminster all British dominions, including the Irish Free State, became effectively independent and the oath of allegiance was dropped by the Free State shortly thereafter, without reaction from Britain.  In 1937 a new constitution was adopted, in which the Irish Free State disappeared to be replaced by the nation of Ireland, a constitutional Republic.  By its setting in the midst of the Civil War, I think writer and director Martin McDonagh, also considered Ireland's leading playwright, meant to make that statement. 

But there are other themes also running through the film, and the interview with Gleeson and Farrell below explores one of them, as does this movie review. Worth seeing.  Just be ready for it.

NOTE:  It turns out the downside of being back in a movie theater is having to watch so many awful trailers, all played at top volume, and varying in quality from boring, to "seen it before", to repellent.

Moore Hall

I recently wrote about the novel The Year of the French.  Important characters in the book (and in the revolt of 1798) were the George and John Moore, brothers, Catholics, and landed aristocracy in County Mayo.  When the French landed, young John, an ardent supporter of Irish independence, was named "President of the Government of the Province of Connaught" by General Humbert.  When the rebellion quickly collapsed John faced the death penalty but was saved by the behind the scenes intervention of his older brother who had influential friends in London, instead being sentenced to transport to Australia.  Unfortunately John took ill before he could leave Ireland and died at Waterford.

Moore Hall remained in the family into the 20th century.  During the Irish Civil War, George Augustus Moore supported entering into the treaty with England and the creation of the Irish Free State.  Anti-treaty forces burned down Moore Hall on February 1, 1923.

I've come across this photo of the ruins of Moore Hall, which now stands in a large public park, on the twitter feed of Abandoned Places.

Ghostly manor abandoned in County Mayo, #Ireland ... pic.twitter.com/gqZjqkYnWH

— Abandoned Places (@abandonedspaces) February 14, 2021

The Year Of The French

 "Our life has been a house with the door bolted and the shutters fastened tight"

In late August 1798, three French warships sailed into a harbor on the coast of Mayo, a poor isolated country in the northwest of Ireland.  About a thousand soldiers disembarked under the command of General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, an illiterate trader of animal skins from the Vosges who rose in the tumult of the French Revolution and brutally suppressed the Vendee uprising.

The expedition fulfilled the wishes of many Irish exiles who had pleaded with the French Directory for an invasion to liberate the island from the British (an earlier expedition in 1796 by a large French invasion force thwarted by ill winds off the south coast of Ireland).  

Humbert's first landing was to be followed by a second, larger fleet carrying several thousand French soldiers, a fleet that never arrived.

Attracting a crew of a couple of thousand Irish, mostly peasants or landless and armed primarily with pikes, Humbert embarked on an 18-day campaign into the island at first winning unexpected success in battle before Lord Cornwallis captured Humbert and his French and massacred most of the Irish.

Humbert had been too late and landed in the wrong place.  A much larger Irish revolt erupted in May in the south of the island with its organizers, the Society of United Irishmen, counting on French support which did not arrive before the revolt was ultimately suppressed by the British in July with much brutality on both sides and between Catholics and Protestants.

It was these events that led 1798 to be referred to by Gaelic speakers as The Year of the French.

The tale of the Mayo uprising, of those caught up in it, Catholic and Protestant alike and the long sordid history of Britain in Ireland is the subject of Thomas Flanagan's magnificent novel, The Year of the French.  Published in 1979 and recipient of multiple awards, I read it in the 1980s and just completed rereading the book.  This is not a military narrative, rather a beautifully and poetically written story of the people caught up in the events.  Many of the characters are those prominent in the uprising and its suppression, most of whom died in its course or were executed after (the captured Humbert was exchanged and resumed his military career, fell out with Napoleon and emigrated to America, setting himself up in New Orleans, where in January 1815 he encouraged the French community to assist the American army in resisting the British attack, and carried a rifle at the Battle of New Orleans for which he received the thanks of General Andrew Jackson).

We also meet invented characters such as the itinerant Gaelic poet, schoolmaster and drunk Owen MacCarthy who, though ambivalent, finds himself entangled in the uprising.

Flanagan portrays all his characters in full and with sympathy or at least understanding and makes us understand the course of Irish history that led to this tragedy and of the conflicting motivations of all parties.  What some were fighting for was never quite clear and for others it was a romantic vision of Ireland detached for reality.  For a thoughtful exposition on the themes of the novel and the inherent conflicts among the rebels read this piece.  

And, above all, we have Flanagan's lovely writing.

The author's view of the events can be seen in the conclusion of one of his narrators, a Protestant minister in Killala, prisoner of the rebels during the uprising, whose life is saved by Ferdy McDonnell, the Catholic leader of the militia in town.  The minister after reflecting on his reading of Gibbon who makes the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

"Each cause and reason is locked securely into place.  And over all the mighty drama presides the awesome authority of Gibbon's splendid language, his unimpassioned rationality . . . Great was Rome and catastrophic was its fall, but great too is the energy of the historian's mind, the cool deliberation of his judgment.

But then!  We put the volume upon the table, and go out for a stroll in the garden or to visit a sick parishioner or perhaps only to pare our nails, and doubt seeps in . . .  Perhaps it had not been like that at all.  Perhaps all had been chaos, chance, ill-luck, perhaps even Providence . . .  Perhaps it is not Rome that we have seen, but Gibbon's imagination bestowed capriciously upon the past . . ."

The words at the top of the post are uttered by Ferdy McDonnell as he ends a discussion with the minister and are proceeded by this comment from the minister, "It was as though he hated history itself".   It is this tortured history, from which there seems no escape, that Flanagan makes us feel in our bones.

Thomas Flanagan was an American professor of literature and The Year of the French his first novel, published when he was 56.  He went on to write two more volumes, both concerning Irish history, The Tenants of Time about the Fenian uprising of the 1870s and The End of the Hunt regarding the Irish War of Independence in 1920-21.  Both are fine books though neither rises quite to the literary and evocative heights of The Year of the French.