Sinn Fein’s An Phoblacht Magazine

Sinn Fein’s Matt Treacy in the An Phoblacht Magazine hailed the very anti-republican play Shadow of a Gunman as a “Brilliant evocation of O’Casey masterpiece” when it played in the New Theatre, in Dublin a few years ago. “It is a superb play and probably the only one of the Dublin trilogy – that also comprises Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, – that republicans would not find fault with O’Casey’s representation of the period from an ideological point of view” he unbelievably proclaims, just to show us how far Sinn Fein have now moved from any legitimate version of republicanism.The three plays also use comedy and farce against the working-class poor to ridicule their support for Connolly and Pearse and Republicans in the same way that Bernard Manning used anti-Irish jokes during the recent Troubles and as Punch magazine used it historically against the Irish in general. They are stupid drunkards, corrupt and backward untermench, we simply cannot empathise with such creatures. And as with all racial stereotyping, it has a deadly purpose behind the belly laughs; these people are subhuman, not like us. And that makes it easier for the British Army to kill them. A recent article I saw mentioned that when young British soldiers, snipers and others, were required to kill Irish Republicans and sympathising and often random civilians, they had real difficulty. But they got over it with Bernard Manning’s assistance, as well as the help and sympathy of their commanders, of course.That reactionary reviewer in An Phoblacht Magazine, Matt Treacy, recounts:

“Parts of Sean O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman are extremely funny and this was brilliantly evoked by the cast of the New Theatre where the play is enjoying an extended run. But apart from being a comic masterpiece it has elements of pathos and tragedy. Amusement at the characters’ false bravado abruptly ends when news of Minnie’s arrest and death become known. Strangely some of the audience still thought this was funny! Whether through drink or lack of empathy I am not certain. What O’Casey does, however, is present the stark reality of the war raging outside on the streets of Dublin. That must have had a powerful impact in 1923.”

Minnie had hidden the Mills bombs to save her fancy man, the bogus IRA fugitive, the British Army found them, she was arrested and, “shot while trying to escape”, the standard British Army coverup story when they murdered Republican prisoners. And the “powerful impact” of the play was to assure the reactionary Dublin middle classes that they were now safe from revolution. Of course, it was “lack of empathy”, that is what O’Casey’s three plays are all about.But he does want us to understand that:

“There is evidence of what later emerged as O’Casey’s ‘pacifism’ but which in reality was a rejection of revolutionary violence at least in an Irish context. At one point Shields declares that the people are dying for the gunmen. Not difficult then to see why his work was attempted to be incorporated into the anti-republican propaganda offensive of the 1970s and ‘80s. Dismissed at the time by one cynic of my acquaintance as the “Why O’Casey would have supported extradition” school of literary criticism. But like all great works of literature and drama, O’Casey’s best plays have outlived differing interpretations and survive as more than just a record of the times he sought to portray. Director Ronan Wilmot, the cast and the New Theatre are to be congratulated on reviving the Shadow and hopefully will go on to stage more classics.”

Treacy was not the naive idiot I first assumed, killing Republicans in the Shadow of a Gunman was not such a bad thing and he really should have understood who laughed at this and why. However, a reviewer in the Irish Examiner, Padraic Killeen, in July 2015, found about the same production that, “The Shadow of a Gunman is arguably the most pessimistic (of the trilogy), in that it pitches Irish revolution itself as something on the very edge of farce”. Somewhat to the left of Sean Treacy and Gerry Adams.Cumann Na nGaelhedh 1932 election poster using O’Casey’s play to threaten Republicans. They lost the election and De Valera’s Fianna Fail won.This play was produced in 1926, three years after the Civil War and 10 after the 1916 uprising. It was his third play featuring life in Dublin tenements, The Shadow of a Gunman  was the first in 1923, when the Civil War was winding down to the defeat of the Republic and the counter-revolutionary reaction that engulphed Ireland as a consequence was rampant, with clerical fascist prelates in alliance with British stooge agents in Cumann na nGaedheal imposing black reaction on the population at large and on the Dublin working class in particular. O’Casey mercilessly lampooned Republicans and their working-class supporters in the 1924 Juno and the Paycock, to the delight of middle-class Dublin reaction. It is just one big piss-take of contempt for the working-class poor from start to finish.A revolutionary movement contains within at all aspects of human liberation. It is an uprising of all the oppressed, in their diversity and in their unity. The Irish revolution of 1916 to 1923 was no different to the Russian Revolution in that respect except it took place in a colony of Britain. The outcome was a neo-colony in the south and a very repressive colony in the north.O’Casey, who ended up almost in the same right-wing place politically as WB Yates, both retained the Protestant Ascendancy attitude of their origins. For O’Casey romantic nationalism and Larkin’s syndicalism was OK to fight for an improvement in the situation of workers; however defeating British imperialism was a step entirely too far and as for combining both as Connolly tried; well O’Casey saw, or hoped, that was impossible and viewed the prospect with horror; that is the central political theme of the Plough and Stars and that is why it continues to delight reaction ever since.The politics of Stalinism in the USSR were perfectly compatible with his reactionary outlook in the 30s and 40s; he was Uncle Joe’s biggest fan in the artistic world. Yeats went from romantic, mystical Irish nationalism to neo-fascism against the working class also and the threat of communism. A whole generation of intellectuals did try heroically in those years to fight the oppressors as they saw them, Larkin against capitalism without understanding imperialism and Yeats against British imperialism without understanding socialism. Some, like the Gore-Booth sisters, the militant suffragettes like Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard and Connolly tried to combine all oppression. O’Casey never tried again after he lost that motion against Constance Markievicz in July 1914. That was why he became the favourite of the reactionary middle class in Dublin and then the whole British Empire after the global working class suffered their first serious defeats after the Russian Revolution, in the early to mid-1920s in Italy, Hungary, Germany, and Ireland.