by Brian Cleary
When Ivan Yates rose to formally open the Byrne-Perry Summer School in Gorey at the end of June, the packed all was in exuberant mood. They had come from all over Ireland to hear what the scholars had to say to a modern audience about 1798. They were not disappointed.
Gorey was an apt venue. A United Irish society had been set up there in 1792. The School was aptly named too. Anthony Perry and Miles Byrne, were both prominent United Irishmen from the Gorey district. Perry, a Protestant, was a leading organiser in North Wexford. Surviving the pitchcap, he proved a fearless leader in the field and and met his death on the scaffold in Edenderry after the entire campaign. Byrne was an eighteen year old Catholic who fought right through the 1798 rising and was later involved in Emmet’s rising in 1803. He was to become a general in the army of France and a Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur. His autobiography is a superior source of information on the United Irish revolution in Wexford.
There is a tremendous air in County Wexford that at last they are getting at the real story of 1798. Modern historiography has re-established that the formidable Wexford rising was in fact the most successful theatre of United Irish revolution, managing to operate the first republic on the island of Ireland under a pluralist directorate of four Catholics and four Protestants. This staggering fact immediately affirms the modernity and contemporary relevance of these events and the importance attaching to their wider promulgation. The fledgling Wexford Republic was the central fact of 1798 in Wexford. We must reaffirm the reality of 1798, stripped of the distortion of propagandists. It was in fact a widely supported bid to introduce popular democracy into a pluralist Ireland operating as a republic. None of your hate-filled revisionist history this, but an exercise in objectivity that will create a space, a clearing in the forest of polemic, where the secular pluralism of two hundred years ago can be re-appropriated.
When Yates, a Protestant Irishman, spoke the opening words of welcome, of memory, of honour, of hope for the future, he spoke for everyone and for all denominations. Kevin Whelan, now visiting professor of Irish Studies at Boston College, gave the keynote lecture on the international impulses that conjoined in the United Irish movement. The impulse from the Scottish universities via the northern Presbyterians is a case in point. Then there were strands from Locke and Paine in England, from Franklin in America, and from the French political philosophers. This was a heady mix for the Protestant and Catholic revolutionaries at home, sick of ascendancy rule and the pompous posturing of its political dinosaurs in the exclusive Jurassic Park of a failed political entity.
Professor Tom Bartlett, now of UCD, gave a tremendous account of the career of Miles Byrne that stirred much discussion. He left us in no doubt as to the crucial importance of the Memoirs of Miles Byrne in any serious study of 1798. Professor Dan Gahan, of Evansville Illinois, placed the military campaign of the Wexford Armies in the overall context of a revolution that had collapsed at its centre – Dublin. This left Wexford looking as if it was some unconnected affair out on a limb. In fact, the plan had been that Dublin was to be taken by the United forced of the city with the help of Meath, Kildare and Wicklow – the surrounding contiguous counties. Wexford on the other hand was merely to take the county, isolate Duncannon Fort, and hold its hinterland for the revolution.
Professor W.J. Smyth, of Maynooth College, gave a timely paper on the history of the Orange Order, a body that has escaped any close scrutiny from Irish historians or media.
Next morning Chris McGimpsey was on time after driving from the north. It was good that he came. It is good to be talking together , even if only to indicate the dimension of the problem in Ireland. The siege mentality was evident, precluding the oxygen of change and adaptation: introversion and rejection its main characteristics. Even to attempt to reach out to it is to invite recoil behind the ‘British’ shield. Northern Protestants, and all Ireland, would benefit greatly if they would explore their own leading role in 1798 and the aspiration of sharing they themselves pioneered at that time. Why feel no more the glory of Dungannon Convention of . All people look back to positive models of their contribution to their own place.
The Protestant contribution to 1798 is such a model. It was a powerfully creative contribution at once developmental and decisive, and the biggest single Protestant contribution to the Irish nation of which they are part. Yet this whole episode has been expunged from their history. Why have Protestants allowed this to happen? Why has their response been what it is? What were the underlying uncertainties? Without correction of the causes for this process, there will be no redress. Those causes lie somewhere between British imperial policy and Irish Catholic revanchism. Throw in a sprinkle of Protestant proclivity to anti-Catholicism and you have all the ingredients that have brought us to this sorry pass. Yet the answers to our dilemma are all there in the example of the United Irish whose provenance we share. They had the courage and verve to try to go on forward into a future of their own creation on a basis agreeable to Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.
Paul Weber from Hamburg addressed the importance of the free city of Hamburg to the mobility of the United Irish within Europe when Britain, busy as ever protecting rights of people around the world was blockading the ports of France and the Netherlands. This broke exciting new ground and the work continues.
No summer school would be complete without field trips and night life. In this respect Gorey was supreme. For the two nights of the Summer School, the cabaret from the County Wexford Comhaltas Group was booked beyond capacity. The craic was mighty. The outstanding memory for me was Helen Kirwan singing Carroll Bán, the rare ballad of a Wexford Whiteboy hanged in 1775 at Kilmyshall near to Bunclody.
The tours brought the busloads of cognoscenti through Ferns, the ancient capital of Leinster, past the site of the skirmish at The Harrow, and on to Boolavogue where citizen Nicholas Furlong described the working out of the revolution at local level in what he describes as ‘the Bollavogue cocktail’. The field trip then scaled Oulart Hill with its panoramic view and dignified monumentation.
The School was expertly directed by Dr. Dáire Keogh and efficiently organised by the local committee, under the chairmanship od Revd. Walter Forde.
Next year’s Byrne-Perry School will treat of ‘The Women of ’98’.
Brian Cleary is the author of The Battle of Oulart Hill (The Past, 1995).