After the Rising: Centenary Edition

Preface to the Centenary Edition

Preface to the Centenary Edition

Isabel Allende once said, ‘Write what should not be forgotten’. That’s my guiding principle as a writer.

I grew up in a village in the south-eastern corner of Ireland, called Murrintown. Back then it was tiny—no more than a handful of houses, a church, a post office, and our shop and pub—but small as it was, an unspoken divide separated its few families.

As children, we knew who was one of ‘us’. Nobody put into words who or what ‘we’ were, but we carried the divide within us. We were born it and we passed it on, all without knowing why. As I grew into my teens, I began to wonder why.

I discovered that the divide centered around whether a family voted for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, the two organizations have dominated party politics in the Republic of Ireland since the foundation of the state. Yet the more I learned about them, the more these opponents looked the same. Both patriarchal, both pietistically Roman Catholic, both right of centre. Both ignoring most of what I—a young, left-leaning, progressive woman—thought important.

Their division could be traced back to an event called the Irish Civil War that had happened fifty years before. I had heard whispers of this war but been taught nothing about it. Our school history books were full of our glorious Easter 1916 Rising against British rule, of the glorious War of Independence of 1918 to ’21, of our glorious admission into the League of Nations in 1924. But the Civil War of 1922/23? That was a blank page. And, as my father’s uncle had been killed in that war, murdered the whispers under the blank page alleged, that was the one I wanted to know more about.

Was it true that he’d been shot dead by his best friend, a ‘Free Stater’ who’d supported the (partial) independence treaty with Britain? That he’d been killed because he was what Staters called an ‘Irregular’, opposed to the treaty? That he and others in my family had fought on after the independence war was over, trying to destabilise the fledgling state?

His sister, my great-aunt Agnes, lived with us. Passionately republican and passionately Fianna Fáil—her proudest boast was that De Valera once slept in our house—she evaded all my questions but she did show me two pictures. One of her in uniform, holding up the badge that said she had been a member of Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary unit that had also fought against the British, and after the peace talks, against the treaty. And one of her dead brother. Yes, he’d been shot in the Civil War.

But why?

No answer. The pictures were silently returned, with a tragic air, into their yellowing envelope, and solemnly replaced in her dressing-table drawer.

I turned to my parents. How could this have happened? How could two men who'd been close friends growing up, comrades in the War of Independence of 1921, have become murderous enemies a year later? And what part had my Auntie Ag played in it all? My persistent questions went unanswered. Nobody knew anything. Least said, soonest mended. Whatever you say, say nothing.

Some day, I told my friend who sat beside me in school, I was going to write a book about all this. Then I grew up, and rejected it all—the public, nationalist politics and the private family history. I left home, went to university, found feminism and a different way of thinking about everything.

When you reject something, though, you're not indifferent—as I learned when, approaching middle-age, I set about fulfilling that long-ago vow to my friend, and beginning that long-promised book. By then I’d been working as a features journalist for a decade, so I began to interview people who’d been alive in that time (Auntie Ag was long dead).

I turned to old County Wexford newspapers, old documents in libraries and archives, old books written by those who’d been part of the conflicts of that time. I began to make notes. And somewhere along the line, research and memory gave way to imagination. I never did find out what really happened to my great-uncle but it ceased to matter. It turned out that I was writing a novel.

The story of another family, the Devereux-Parles, similar-but-different to mine. And another progressive young woman, Jo Devereux, similar-but-different to me, tracing her family history back to a similar-but-different event.

What happened to Jo, her ancestors and descendants, grew into a three-volume saga, After the Rising, Before the Fall and In the Hour, covering the lives of five generations of women, across two continents. Throughout, there are three time frames—ancestor time (1920s to 1950s), past time (1960s to 80s), and present time (1990s to 2020s)—and the story is told by moving backwards and forwards across this one hundred years of modern Irish life, at home and abroad.

Today, as I write this preface, Ireland is more than half-way through a ten-year program commemorating “the many significant centenaries” of the decade from 1913 to 1923”, including the suffrage movement, the trade union struggles, the Easter Rising of 1916, the foundation of the Irish Free State, and they promise, the Civil War. So it felt timely to re-release a centenary edition of the first two volumes of this Irish trilogy in advance of publishing the third and final book of this story.

As I look back over the writing of this trilogy, I see now why it had to be a novel. Only fiction could recreate those people who’d been wiped out of the history books. I hope they, and their way of life, will live again for you as you read.

And only the inventions of fiction could contain the truths of that time—and its ambivalent legacy. This love story, this family murder mystery, this belated-coming-of-age tale, explores intimate wars of all kinds—but especially the struggle between the urge for freedom and the longing for belonging.

It releases some of the secrets and lies that were interred by Ireland in its new, partitioned nation. But don’t expect it to “solve” everything, or to leave no loose ends. That isn’t how it happens after a rising.

Orna Ross, London, 2020.

Plash: Nora