Ruth Dudley Edwards appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to promote ‘The Seven; The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic’ in the centenary year of what is taken as the Irish Republic’s foundation.
Few modern nations can have had such mixed parentage as that of Ireland, a point Dudley Edwards’ work makes clear; even by concentrating on seven of the sixteen signatories of the declaration of an Irish Republic, Dudley Edwards shows even these could hardly be declared to be of one mind. The nature of those minds forms the substance of Dudley Edwards’ work.
Tom Clarke, perhaps the hardest of the hard liners, by Dudley Edwards’ account at least, was, in her estimation, quite simply ‘nuts’. His prison experiences may in part account for this, as well as distancing him from the more nuanced, perhaps ‘realistic’ views of some of his colleagues, but Dudley Edwards will have none of this. All of them, in her view, were delusional at best and some even more disturbed.
Dudley Edwards’ work draws heavily on other sources, as any such work must, but her judgements are very much her own. What she brings to a familiar topic, however, is an ability to analyse individuals, yet discern the strands in each that drew such disparate souls toward one another.
A dislike of sectarian exceptionalisms, political infighting and a search for something better, and perhaps a more dramatic expression of their shared nationalism seems to have touched all of them, and Dudley Edwards’ diagnosis that ‘war fever’, albeit in a somewhat different form from that which affected the rest of Europe’s populations, took her subjects in its grip may have more than a little truth to it.
It was probably no different in essence from the enthusiasm that prompted so many Irish and Ulster Volunteers to enlist, forming battalions that would be decimated in the 1916 offensives on the Western Front, and perhaps sparing Ireland from worse violence than that which ensued in the wake of independence.
That is simple speculation, but beyond what documents and physical evidence may show, inference is often all we have. If ‘The Seven’ makes us think a little harder and deeper about what took these men and those they led ‘out to be slaughtered’ it will have done its work.
The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic