Before the Fall: Centenary Edition

Preface to the Centenary Edition

Preface to the Centenary Edition

This is the second book in a trilogy about an Irish family and an unsolved murder in the past that causes great suffering in the present. Before the Fall picks up where After the Rising left off and continues to be narrated by Jo Devereux in the same hot summer of 1995. We now know who killed Barney, Jo’s great-uncle—or we think we do—but who killed the person who killed him?

The answer plunges Jo back into Rory’s arms and further under the surface story of nationalist politics she’s been bequeathed, into a the far more primal struggle: that between men and women.

For a century the 1920s civil war conflict in Ireland has been known as ‘The War of The Brothers’ but in this book, I wanted to pay tribute to the sisters: the many women who, in the words of Jo’s Granny Peg and my own Auntie Ag, also ‘did their bit’ for the independence struggle. And also the experience of the many women and men who, like Jo, like me and my family, find they cannot live on the island of Ireland, for whatever reason—but are none the less Irish for that.

People emigrate from their home for all kinds of reasons. Jo cannot find love and a decent life within the legacy of what happened in the 1920s. She moves to London then to San Francisco in search of a life she can occupy and lands herself into the heart of the s****l politics—and the AIDs epidemic—of the 1980s.

There she discovers that politics is not just the nationalist struggle she’s rejected, but the encoding of all kinds of power relations. Colonial politics, constitutional politics, diaspora politics, s****l politics, class politics, race politics, gender politics: all rise from the same root. In all cases, denial and suppression leads to destruction. There she also get to grips with another aspect of her inheritance: alcoholism.

Her gender and addiction struggles mirror her ancestors’ national and intra-national struggles.

Jo painstakingly articulates aspects of the female experience which never should be, yet so often are, forgotten. And she comes up against a key question for any progressive person: why does the push for positive, creative change so often disintegrate into negative, destructive conflict. That’s what happened in the Irish Civil War, that’s what’s happening in the TERF and BIPOC and BAME wars that are playing out online today, that’s what’s happening when a sensitive soul gets lost in addiction.

As Jo puts it: “Rebellion has an energy that sweeps people up but what happens after the rising?” Her bid for escape and her getting lost in alcohol are inter-connected, just as the Irish Easter Rising and Civil War were inter-connected. You can't talk about one without the other. You can’t claim the glory of the Rising if you ignore the shame of what followed. You can’t walk away from your past, you must accept it as you work for a finer future.

And so we come to now. How Ireland commemorates those years of 1922 and 1923, and what grew out of them, a hundred years on will be telling. The commemoration of the 1916 Rising has been both praised for being “well organised, sensitive, dignified and inclusive”, and also criticised for the opposite: glorifying a “narrow concept of Irishness.” 1 Which is it? Both, of course. And the only way to prevent conflict around two opposing sides on this is to allow all the other voices to be also heard, so that we see the larger truth beyond the nationalist story.

The Rising was a theatre of insurrection, inspiring the “terrible beauty”2 of violent rebellion for a century, while simultaneously generating pride in a newborn nation. The Civil War was a less complex, but more terrible affair. A kitchen conflict. Far more everyday, far more personal, and far more frightening for that.

And far more relevant to the Ireland of the 2020s, as Brexit politics energise the prospect of a united Ireland, as advances in women’s and l***q+ rights teach us something about relatively peaceful revolution, as the never-ending movements of emigration and immigration show up our notions of nation.

The question for us in these centenary years is: what might we now imagine into being, as a dispersed and diverse people, scattered across the globe but united by this strange, slippery, scintillating identity, this being Irish? What new ways await us? And what value does our learning, our positive, creative change, have for others?

So I offer this story about the people of Mucknamore, this murder mystery that is also a love story, as my contribution to the multitude of voices, from within and outside the Irish identity, that we need to hear.

Orna Ross, London, 2020.

1 Dennis Kennedy. 2016. “Pride in ‘inclusive’ 1916 commemoration rings hollow”. Irish Times.

2 WB Yeats. 1921. “Easter 1916”

Plash: Norah