Liam O’Flaherty missed the Easter Rising by a number of weeks. Claiming to have grown tired of waiting for revolution, he signed up in the Spring of 1916 to fight in the First World War. He was rewarded for his service with serious injury and a lifelong affliction of what would now probably be called PTSD.
O’Flaherty then proceeded to miss the War of Independence while working and travelling around the Americas. While in the United States he developed a taste for socialism, getting involved with the Wobblies and joining the Communist Party.
He eventually returned to Ireland and finally tasted a bit of revolution, but even this he did in his own distinct way.
In January 1922 — in those few months between the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the outbreak of the Civil War – O’Flaherty led an army of unemployed men in seizing the Rotunda and declaring a Soviet, holding his position for a number of days.
It was only after this that his writing career took off, and he was to become one of the most consistent voices critical of the new Irish Free State.
Inis Mór
O’Flaherty was born on Inis Mór off the west coast of Galway in 1896. He was a true radical his entire life, but was often unstable and difficult to pin down. He drank heavily and frequently fell out with friends and peers.
He was bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the Irish revolution, and frequently attacked those who had greedily seized power in its aftermath. His novel The House of Gold criticised these new elites and, as if proving his point, it was promptly banned — the first ever novel to fall victim to the new Censorship of Publications Board.
As an Aran Islander and Irish speaker, O’Flaherty was particularly disappointed in those politicians, artists, and intellectuals who had so readily romanticised rural Ireland only to throw it under the bus once their time to rule had come.
The distant West had become a powerful symbol for a variety of actors during the early twentieth century, and was at the centre of debates about what Ireland was and what it should be.
On the one hand of this debate you had the romantic nationalists such as Daniel Corkery and D. P. Moran, closely associated with the Gaelic revival and a form of reactionary cultural nationalism. These men saw the West as a repository of a pure, untouched Irishness, uncorrupted by the evils of modernity and colonialism.
On the other side of the debate, you had the literary revivalists such as Yeats and J. M. Synge. These writers pushed back against an overly romanticised view of Irishness, hoping instead to reveal Irish nationalism as multi-faceted, cosmopolitan, and forward-thinking.
For O’Flaherty, both of these attempts at depicting rural Ireland rang false.
Peasants
Pick up a book of O’Flaherty’s short stories and you will not find a rural Ireland populated with the innocent, idealised peasant figure found in De Valera’s ‘The Ireland That We Dreamed Of’ speech, virtuous and pure. But nor will you find the mystic and wild peasantry found in Yeats and Synge.
Both schools of thought viewed the West through a distorted lens, mediated by different myths, but myths nonetheless.
When Synge’s Playboy debuted, it was met by riots and widespread condemnation from romantic nationalists, who were repulsed by the negative depiction of dear old rural Ireland.
In other circles, Synge was lauded for his ability to see through these romantic notions of the Irish peasantry to the brutal reality beneath.
But Synge’s islands, described by Declan Kiberd as a “sort of anarchist commune”, are also romanticised, even if for different ends.
O’Flaherty, with the benefit of being a realist writer and actually being from the Aran Islands, was able to depict rural Ireland as it actually was.
Patsa
O’Flaherty’s stories come with an implicit critique of all of those who would use the West for their own political agenda.
Take his short story ‘Patsa’, for example, about a grotesque islander who routinely humiliates and abuses his wife. As Patsa lays dying, he swallows all of his gold to keep his wife from inheriting it, one final act of pettiness and greed.
Patsa’s island has recently been discovered by the revivalists, or “the new school of European mysticism”, easily read as a swipe at Yeats and Synge. Patsa proves adept at milking these cultural tourists dry by deceptively “affecting the grin of an idiot”.
If Synge came to the islands and found the violence-loving morons found in The Playboy of the Western World, then, according to O’Flaherty, this was only because the islanders knew how to give the customer what he wanted.
Patsa is not depicted as an aberration but as the personification of Irish capitalism and greed, his “stinking carcass” — with eyes both “small and green” — embodying “all the vices and perversions which our ancient community has accumulated through the centuries”.
Modernity and capitalism are not, as the romantic nationalists and many contemporary leftists would have it, recent intrusions on a past rural utopia. The west of Ireland has long been integrated into the global economic system, primarily as a supplier of agricultural produce to Britain and its colonies.
The Red Petticoat
Elsewhere in O’Flaherty’s stories the peasantry are depicted as pragmatic economic actors, just like everybody else. In ‘A Red Petticoat’, for instance, a mother comforts her starving children with poems, songs, and stories. Oral folktales here are depicted not as a romantic quality of rural Irish life but as the entertainment of choice for those who are poor, bored, and starving.
The matriarch resorts to blackmail and duplicity to feed her family, a far cry from the virtuous and frugal peasant woman of Irish nationalist myth. Poverty to O’Flaherty was a condition of intense indignity, not a sign of moral purity.
Poverty was especially intense on the islands from which O’Flaherty hailed. Despite the constant praise of rural Ireland from its nationalist leaders, the early decades of the Free State saw a decimation of island life.
New market forces in post-independence Ireland increasingly rendered life on the islands unliveable, and little state assistance was forthcoming.
As the locals fled to the mainland, tourists began flocking the other way. Today, with the proliferation of Airbnb in the Gaeltacht regions, this pattern is far from having been reversed.
O’Flaherty’s frustration with the Free State’s policy towards the islands is exemplified most powerfully in his story ‘Galway Bay’, which follows an elderly islander travelling by boat to the mainland to sell a cow.
One tourist proclaims the beauty of the islands (“No wonder we are a race of poets with such a galaxy of beauty!”) while another pressures the old man to pose for a photograph that makes it look as though he is telling a story to a group of her friends.
The old man recognises that his world is vanishing, and he lashes out in frustration. At one point he clashes with a local Garda sergeant, whom he tells, “We didn’t care about the English peelers in the old days, and we care less about De Valera’s Civic Guards”.
De Valera, a central figure in the rhetorical promotion of the West as something central to Irish national identity, is reduced to nothing more than another agent of oppressive state control.
A Lifelong Socialist
O’Flaherty was a lifelong socialist and nationalist but became disillusioned with the republican movement as time went on.
Despite praising the Rising as “the most glorious gesture in the history of our country”, he later wondered — given the state of mid-century Ireland, with all of its poverty and repression — if all that death and trauma had been worth it.
His nationalism was based on questions of land and class, and he had little time for Irish nationalism’s conjuring of a mythical Gaelic past. “It is very doubtful if there ever was a Gaelic civilisation of any consequence”, he wrote, “but the only civilisation to which the Gaelic conquerors of this country seem to have been addicted was fighting, drunkenness, incest and chess playing”.
He was deeply critical of all of those who enthusiastically seized power in the 26 counties post-independence, from the clergy to the “gombeen men”: new indigenous elites. For this combative stance, he was roundly censored and derided.
To these critics, he had but one parting wish:
“May they be devoured by the archdevil’s itch without a broken bottle within a thousand leagues to scratch their ulcerated haunches.”
