Review: Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art

ISR 26

Life for All Campaign — to end the violence, the discrimination, and the deprivation in Northern Ireland.

However the policies of the last ten years have failed, and it is now clear that the aims of A Better Life for All cannot be achieved until there is a commitment to end British rule. This is the only policy which has not been tried, and the only one which deals with the cause as well as the symptoms of the Irish problem.’

The letter went on to endorse a recent statement made by Michael Mullen, the General Secretary of the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union, who argued that: ‘... Once Britain declares in favour, not of instant withdrawal, but gradual disengagement, a tremendous ~ cee Roganet a aE ae impulse will be given to negotiation and reconciliation.’ An additional argument used by the PCLCS concerned the threat to democratic rights in the UK which comes from the experience of the British military in the techniques of ‘low intensity operations’ in Ireland i.e.

policing a rebellious and disaffected population. All these points were drawn out at length in the speech of the mover of the PCLCS resolution. In the ensuing debate, all but one of the delegates gave endorsement to the resolution, including the spokesperson for the Regional Executive Council. In the subsequent card-vote, the resolution was carried by a margin of 10:1 in favour (1,012 for: 101 against).

In his speech at the end of the conference, the Chairman of the London Labour Party, Arthur Latham, described this as a significant decision and stated that he hoped the Labour Party in London would continue to pursue the subject of Ireland over the coming months. The PCLCS resolution will be raised at other Regional Conferences in the near future. These include the Southern Regional Conference (22-23rd March, in Margate); the Labour Women’s Conference (11-13th May, Malvern); and the Eastern Region Conference (21st June, Stevenage). No doubt the success at the London conference will raise expectations that more and more sections of the labour movement will be won to the argument in favour of British withdrawal from Ireland.

ts Don Flynn Reviews What about Sean O’Casey? Protestant/ Unionist/Irish Irelander/Republican/ Larkinite/Elite Artist/Agnostic/ Communist. He was all of these things, and more besides, but he was always a political novice. C. Desmond Greaves sifts all the evidence, and comes up with a very clear picture of O’Casey and his politics. First some facts about O’Casey to contrast with what is generally believed.

One, he never lived in a slum, his MK family always had their own rooms, ** unlike the worst of the Dublin poor in the 1890s, when 4 or 5 families shared one room! Two, in the Life Story O’Casey changed the sequence of events to suit himself, or for dramatic effect, and he was so bad on dates that he even got the year of his mother’s death wrong! The Dublin wags saw the Life Story as O’Casey rewriting his life.

Three, O’Casey claims to have ‘taught himself to read when he was fourteen’, yet he was able to learn the part of the king in a scene from Sean O’Casey: Politics and Art by C. Desmond Greaves _ Richard II when he was eleven, and ' by that time he was mixing with actors.

Not bad for a kid from the slums in the 1890s! But who could blame him for , boosting himself when, ill at ease, he ’ was in the company of Dublin’s ’ literary giants, for whom life was so easy. Then again, as Greaves points out, we always have to be on the lookout for what O’Casey says, for ‘divilment’. Before 1916 O’Casey had resigned from the Irish Republican Brotherhood, because they would not throw in their lot with Labour, and from the Citizen Army because he could not agree to Constance Markievicz being a member of the Women’s Volunteers (Cumann na mBan) and the Citizen Army; mind you, he’d always disliked her.

O’Casey could only hold one idea in his head at a time, and even after 1916 he was stuck at ‘iron hearted * Trade Unionism’. There was no chance of him understanding what Connolly was about, he had no political (Lawrence and Wishart, 1979).

perermensavannae — MAT education, Sean O’Casey, the selfstyled ‘working class rebel who put socialism first’, was well to the right of Connolly, and it took him another 25 years to reach socialism!

Easter 1916 O’Casey took no part in 1916, he was looking after his ailing mother. In any case, though he was prepared to die in a strike, he would not do so fora national revolt — or so he said. Nevertheless many of those killed in Dublin were his friends, and he was shattered, feeling the need to justify his absence.

He even said, ‘I heard about the Revolution, and tried to stop it’, but there is no evidence of his trying, and who would have listened to him anyway? Easter 1916 haunted O’Casey for years, as Greaves puts it, ‘the dead men were always hammering on his door’. In 1917 O’Casey praised the Revolution, but by 1919 ‘it was alla terrible mistake’, and ‘the teachings of the pacifist Sheehy-Skeffington would have a greater influence than that of Connolly’. So, what sort of plays did O’Casey write given his lack of political : awareness? The three Irish plays Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock were written during the Counter Revolution, a time of deep despair.

All three plays showed a negative attitude to 1916, the people were seen as standing apart, and even hostile to the rebels. But worse, in The Plough and the Stars O’Casey has Nora Clitheroe say to her husband as he puts on his Citizen Army uniform, ‘Your vanity will be the ruin of you, ee ee