Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920) is no doubt the most iconic and “exemplary” of all hunger strikers, and back in the 1950s and 60s he was certainly an icon for us in the North Monastery, where both he and his murdered predecessor as Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain (1884-1920), had been pupils. What has most dimmed his glorious legend for me is the subseequent history of Republican hunger strikes, culminating in the “sacrifice” of ten men in their twenties in 1981.
But more generally, that recent history has raised deep questions about the ethos of what is now somewhat misleadingly called “the Irish Revolution,” and especially about its religious components. The glowing commemorations of 1966 still held to the unbroken founding myth fashioned by Pearse, and its “terrible beauty,” at a time when painful memories of the 1922-23 Civil War were fading. In 2016 peaceful commemoration was again possible, since the “Troubles” had been so satisfactorily wrapped up, to international acclaim, in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The GFA seems to have replaced the founding myth as the new consensus horizon of commemoration, which has changed its key from triumphalism to somcething like therapy. President Michael D. Higgins organized a seminar, “Macnamh,” in Áras an Uachtaráin on 4 December 2020, which presented commemoration as a talk of “comprehensive ethical public memory” in which “inclusivity takes centre stage” and which reaches reaching out in critical sympathy to all participants and victims of past conflicts as a dialogal and reflective practice to enhance Irish community today. The thirty years of civil strife and terrorism in the Six Counties, an unsightly gash in the texture of modern European history, are now almost as if they had never been (despite the fact that about sixty “peace walls” still stand in Belfast as a warning that much dangerous hostility remains). In addition to bending over individual cases of injury and grief, the new perspective subsumes the Troubles and preceding Irish conflicts into a broader history of empires and rebellions, a calming Aufhebung that is some way to T. S. Eliot’s Heraclitean view of the English Civil War: “United in the strife that divided them” (“Little Gidding”). When scholars and others from both sides of the historical divides discuss the shared past together, each side’s cherished story in enhanced by reception into an ecumenical vision, and universalized by connection with similar stories from other times and places.
How Ideologies Die
Looking back at 1920 from 2020 offers an education on how ideologies die, or at least change beyond recognition. Our history textbooks as children in the 1950s gave their penultimate pages to 1916 and the last page to modern Ireland: each picture celebrated wondrous success—the Shannon Electrification Scheme for instance—but the last picture of all was a blank map of Ireland, with the Union Jack planted in its north-east corner. The sacred cause of a United Ireland, thoroughly internalized, shone in our juvenile minds as we marched around piping ballads about Roddy McCorley (d. 1800) and Kevin Barry (1902-20). Well, now the Holy Grail may descend, thanks to Brexit and for dismal financial reasons, and perhaps in the form of a mere federation, if a Dublin parliament still feels unable to handle the tensions of the North. So do ideologies end, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” Or perhaps the cross-border exchanges that have been intensified since 1998 (and that resume the approach of Seán Lemass after the hiatus of the Troubles) will create sufficient mutual amity to make transition to a united Ireland a more serene and joyful event than could have been foreseen. In any case, the idea of fighting and dying for Ireland, which brought a tear to so many Irish eyes, and to even more American ones, is now so linked to the PIRA campaign of terror that this ricochets on the historical record all the way back. Bloody sacrifice that makes “a stone of the heart” (Yeats, “Easter, 1916”) has been desanctified and now we revisit scenes of past violence only to pity and deplore.
Before proceeding, let me dwell on the 1981 hunger strikes, which loom as a black cloud between us and Terence MacSwiney. They explicitly took as their motto MacSwiney’s words in his inaugural speech as Lord Mayor: “It is not those who can inflict the most. But those who can endure most who will conquer.” For MacSwiney this was a clear-eyed strategy, matured in previous imprisonments and through observation of other hunger strikers, and confirmed by the mass hunger strike of IRA prisoners that had ended with an amnesty on 14 April 1920. Moreover, he knew fully the mythic power of the role he was assuming, one well expressed by the budding Banbridge-born classicist E. R. Dodds (1893-1979) in a letter to the Manchester Guardian on 26 August: “Let him die and before the month is up he will be a legend, a symbol, a ghost haunting the secret thoughts of every Irishman. In Ireland a legend has the power of many bayonets; and ghosts live longer than men.”
As soon as MacSwiney was arrested he declared with preternatural decision that he would use the weapon of “hunger strike.” It is a strange weapon, belonging to the repertory of psychological warfare or a “war of nerves.” It provokes the authorities to violent reaction, as in the use of force feeding, which had already secured moral victories for the Suffragettes, the first hunger strikers in the British Empire. The hunger strike uses moral and emotional blackmail, showing up the authorities as lacking in empathy or even forcing them to fake displays of empathy, and pressuring the populace to total support of the self-martyred. Of course it must be accompanied by a skilful PR operation. Taoiseach Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) did not display much empathy to republican hunger strikers in the 1940s, but cut off the oxygen of publicity by censoring reports. The hunger strike of up to 8,000 republicans in ten prisons from 14 October to 23 November 1923 had likewise met little empathy from the new Government whose leaders knew all about the technique. The hunger strike is a rather friable tactic, since it can easily lose its force, as authorities become more adept at defusing it (as in the “cat and mouse” Temporary Discharges Act used against the Suffragettes, releasing hunger strikers when they grew weak and rearresting them when they recovered strength) or more brazen in facing it down, as Mrs Thatcher did, or even mocking it. It is easily demystified, becoming just another problem of prison discipline.
But MacSwiney’s famous utterance was not just the declaration of a strategy. It is suffused with religious associations. MacSwiney had a thirst for martyrdom reminiscent of some early Christians. He felt deep regret that he had not joined the Easter Rising, and remarked “Ah Cathal, the pain of Easter Week is properly dead at last.” Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” (as a somewhat muddled retrospective propaganda styled it) was the founding event of the Irish struggle for independence, but it was enacted quickly; he was executed on 3 May 1916, a few days after the insurrection of 24-29 April. MacSwiney’s was a prolonged agony of 74 days, and drew the whole world into meditation on this Passion of an Irish martyr. Pearse proceeded with no clerical support, but MacSwiney could claim he had the Church on his side. The Church at that time was strong, and universally respected, and its support was marked by reflective sobriety. Hagiography predominates massively in the literature on MacSwiney, his numinoous image eclipsing the history of his thought and his development, as well as questions about his militarism and the baleful later influence of his legendary self-martyrdom: one wonders if anyone thought of promoting his cause for Canonization; after all the last Austrian emperor, Charles I (1887-1922), was beatified by John Paul II in 2004 despite his approval of using poison gas in World War I.
The effort of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strikers to win church support was less successful. There had been some clerical sympathy with the earlier Long Kesh “dirty protest,” from Frs Raymond Murray and Denis Faul, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, and even the pacifist Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who led a delegation of 55 Americans to Long Kesh in June 1980, hoisting the protest to international recognition. Berrigan read Long Kesh in light of his own American prison experience, and his group may have been gulled by plausible IRA propaganda. The systematically organized spectacle of ten young men dying—the largest number ever reached in an Irish hunger strike—was too extreme to win the same degree of sympathy. Lots of priests attended the hunger strikers’ funerals, with IRA military salutes; but that did not necessarily indicate approval of the ends or means of the hunger strike. Their theology of blood sacrifice was no longer fresh and vigorous but had become a weird and archaic cult, which did not strike deep chords in the breasts of Irish citizens south of the Border, where the age of naive devotion was ending. For every group who clamoured for support of the hunger strikers an equal and opposite group arose to protest indignantly against any display of support. Meanwhile the bulk of the population reacted with irritation or indifference. Hunger strikers might be elected to Westminster or the Dáil, and streets might be named after the first of the ten victims in Paris and Teheran (and his name is the only one most people recall today), but these were very spotty gains. Thatcher’s victory was no doubt Pyrrhic, in that the hunger strike sparked a resurgence of violence. Yet had she granted the prisoners political status they and their tactics might now be canonized in Irish and English school textbooks as legitimate and exemplary, which despite the efforts of Sinn Féin they thankfully have not been.
Richard Kearney acutely noted the desperation behind the IRA’s attempt to supplement the ballot and the bullet with religious fanaticism. “The republican hunger-strikers sought to escape their actual paralysis by realigning their plight with a mythico-religious tradition of renewal-through-sacrifice…. It was something which operated largely as a pre-reflective password of the tribe, frequently escaping critical analysis… a mythic logic which claimed that defeat is victory, failure is triumph, past is present… a highly structured and strategic method of combining contraries which secular reason keeps rigidly apart.” This line of inquiry has not been sufficiently followed up, but instead a thin representation of the mythico-religious aspect (as in the case of Pearse) has been ritually invoked either to celebrate or to demonize.
Seamus Heaney remarked about Conor Cruise O’Brien: “I think the obstinate voice of rationalist humanism is important. If we lose that we lose everything, don’t we? I believe that Conor Cruise O’Brien did an utterly necessary job in rebuking all easy thought about the Protestant Community in the North.” The deep nationalism and Irish archetypes that Seamus Deane accused O’Brien of failing to take into account have much less purchase on the Irish people forty years on, and their power was waning even then, pari passu with that of Irish Catholicism. The 1979 visit of John Paul II was called at the time, and often since, “the last hurrah” of Irish Catholicism. The Pope addressed the gunmen: “On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence…. Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.” This went unheeded or was bandied about as a pollitical football. But the IRA itself was a waning force, personified by “that devious, cowardly, death-dealing little generalissimo Seamus Twomey.” Its mishmash of brutal terrorism, a decaying sacrificial cultism, and a veneer of progressive policy was an ’ ory brew that citizens of what IRA propaganda branded “the Quisling state” (viz. the Republic of Ireland) found increasingly nauseous. Martin McGuinness’s deluded bid for the Irish Presidency in 2011 can have left few illusions as to where the Irish people eventually stood. Thirty years of bloodshed and terror had achieved precisely nothing, or less than nothing, except perhaps to confirm Yeats’s diagnoses: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare“ (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”); “Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start” (“Remorse for Intemperate Speech”).
Mayor and Bishop
The churchman most associated with MacSwiney’s hunger strike was his bishop, Daniel Cohalan (1858-1952), who visited him in August 1920, as well as the hunger strikers in Cork, where Mick Fitzgerald died on October 17 and Joe Murphy on October 25, the same day as MacSwiney. MacSwiney’s funeral ceremonies were attended by several archbishops and bishops in Southwark and Cork (a Dublin ceremony was thwarted by the government shipping his body directly to Cork, but Archbishop Willliam Walsh presided over a Requiem Mass instead). Three years earlier, Thomas Ashe (1885-1917), killed by force feeding in Mountjoy Prison, had been given a funeral in the Pro-Cathedral, in the presence of Archbishop Walsh, an event that no doubt gave aid and comfort to future hunger strikers. (Ashe’s well-known poem shows how the Catholic devotional revoluion and the Celtic literary revival both fuelled sacrificial piety: “Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord! For the cause of Roisin Dubh.”) MacSwiney’s funeral was an internationally resonant demonstration of the Church’s support for a self-sacrificing son. “Mourners in Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Manchester held symbolic, mock funerals with empty caskets.” Requiem masses were held for MacSwiney before large congretations in Buenos Aires (“attended by many of the most distinguished personalities in the country, politicians, military officers, diplomats, high civil servants, clergy and many deputies and senators”) and in a dozen other towns in Argentina. One might say that MacSwiney’s hunger strike to the death, unlike any before or since, became an ecclesial event. That must have blown the scruples of churlish moral theologians out of the water. But after the lessons of the century since then some critical distance may be permitted. The Church of that time was not in all respects a model of enlightenment: consider the ferocious anti-Modernist crackdown that had been raging since 1907, and the uncritical embrace of the extravagances of Fatima (1917). As to the world at large, the Great War, despite its stunning literary yield, is now regarded as a mistake and utterly futile. It formed the backdrop to the 1916 Insurrection, which some would now see as a mistake within a mistake. The prelates who held back from celebrating MacSwiney’s heroism may emerge as the wiser ones from today’s vantage. They include Cardinal Francis Bourne of Westminster and Benedict XV (Pope from 3 September 1914 to 22 January 1922), who according to the British representative Count de Salis, “was convinced that MacSwiney must have taken food to survive for so long” and “expressed surprise at the excessive ostentation of the funeral. ‘There was a certain element of farce with it all” (Stuart Mews). Msgr Hagan deplored that Benedict, “immersed in ‘his one hobby, that of extending and consolidating diplomatic relations,’” saw the Irish struggle as “nothing more than a needless disturbance of the harmonious relations which otherwise could exist undisturbed between the Holy See and the Empire” (Patrick Murray).
The Irish Bishops referred in October 1920 to “hunger strikers, who think nothing of their lives if they can do anything for Ireland in the sad plight to which the rule of the stranger has reduced her” (Padraig Corkery). Cohalan wrote to The Times on 28 August: “To add a personal touch, let me add I have visited the Lord Mayor of Cork in prison.To put it mildly, I was scrupulously careful against saying anything that would confirm him in his resolution to continue the hunger strike.” To the Cork Examiner on 11 November he wrote: “If the Hunger Strike in Cork Gaol is not called off these self-sacrificing men will pass away one after another without impressing the world any more than it has been impressed already. The continuance of the Hunger Strike will only lead to a waste of human life.” The aura of self-sacrifice covered a multitude of sins, and led bishops to a moral liberalism and a spirit of dialogue that they were never to show on such matters as divorce, abortion, and sexual behaviour. Bishop Colahan “reasoned that the three deaths [Fitzgerald, Murphy, and MacSwiney] had secured for the Irish cause both a moral victory and international attention, and that any further deaths would be a futile waste of life.” “It is clear that, during the War of Independence, Bishop Cohalan viewed the hunger strike not as an act of suicide but as a legitimate act of defence against an aggressor. Such an action could be justified once it was not futile. In the case of MacSwiney the benefits were, in his understanding, immediate and weighty. The later hunger strikes of this period [during the War of Independence] met with his disapproval, not because he judged them to be wrong per se but because, in his understanding, they lacked proportionate reason.”
When the IRA ambushed a mobile Auxiliary patrol at Dillon’s Cross in Cork on 11 December 1920, killing a British officer, the Auxiliaries’ retaliation for this, and for the killing of seventeen Auxiliaries in the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November (a gaisce mór for Tom Barry), included murdering two IRA men in their beds and burning down the centre of the city, perhaps the most ruinous event in its history. The next morning Bishop Cohalan issued a decree stating that anyone taking part in an ambush was guilty of murder and would be excommunicated. Then on the Fourth Sunday of Advent he issued a “Pastoral Letter in the Aftermath of the Burning of Cork.” While arguing that the existing mode of Government had “no sanction in the moral law,” and was the “rule of might over right,” he added: “Though resistance to unlawful oppression may be lawful theoretically and in the abstract, it may be wrong in practice.” He counseled his flock to “bear this period of persecution patiently” and “above all avoid the terrible crime of taking human life.” This was in line with what the entire hierarchy had said in October, and was an effort to halt a cycle of tit for tat murders. A Sinn Féin member of Cork City Corporation Councillor Ó Cuill attacked the bishop: “He stands now only where his people [the clergy] always stood—in the wrong.” Kevin O’Higgins (1892-1927) wrote in March 1921: “Justice is vindicated on earth by the patient and dignified sufferings of people like them [his father, then imprisoned] rather than the mean-spirited effusions of the Bishop of Cork and many of his colleagues.” He also claimed: “Probably not since the persecutions of the early Christians has human nature risen to finer heights in endurance for an ideal than in Ireland today.” But “it was that very mindset which O’Higgins was to denounce a year later.”
There was “a fundamental shift between 1921 and 1923 in [Cohalan’s] moral analysis of violent resistance and the hunger strikes that formed part of it.” When Cohalan refused Christian burial to hunger striker Denis Barry who died on 20 November 1923, Terence MacSwiney’s sister Mary commented in the Cork Examiner that the bishop’s new view of hunger strikes as suicide, never permissible, “if true today, must have been equally true three years ago, when he officiated with all the honour that the Church can pay to a faithful son, at the obsequies of another hunger striker.” She herself had been on hunger strike since her arrest on November 4 and her “heroic struggle” was acclaimed by Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne, resulting in her release on 20 November, a damaging loss of face for the Free State government. The “Republican Women of Cork” denounced to the Pope Cohalan’s politicization of Confirmation addresses. The turbulent Fr Michael O’Flanagan said he’d prefer to “go to Heaven with Denis Barry than to hell at the head of a procession of high ecclesiastics.” But hunger-strike heroics had lost their lustre and the Civil War gave them a context less prepossessing than the “glorious years” of fighting British rule. Yet Cohalan “could have employed the theological framework he had previously used, which accepted hunger strikes as moral in certain circumstances…. The hunger strike could now be described as an act of tyranny against the legitimate government of Ireland rather than as an act of defence against an unjust aggressor” (Padraig Corkery).
An alternative view is offered by James Healy, SJ: “When faced with a bad hunger-strike the easiest condemnatory language to use for an ensuing death is that appropriate for suicide since ‘everyone’ knows that suicide is wrong.” Or it may be that the Bishop Cohalan did not regard the 1923 hunger strike, which collapsed embarrassingly, as worthy of serious political analysis and thought it more logical to treat its handful of fatalities as rather foolish cases of suicide. (The Civil War had ended in May, so this rumpus had less weighty political significance.) “Privately, Cohalan was much less assured of the moral rectitude of his treatment of Barry”; he wrote to Bishop Foley of Kildare and Leighlin that he had dealt with the matter “in foro externo in relation to the public life of the Church,” but “if Barry got the last Sacraments, and as the strike is ended, I might reconsider the question” (Patrick Murray). The apparent inconsistencies in epicopal response indicate that despite their high conception of their authority and its scope the bishops were swayed by changing circumstance, as witness also the difference between Cardinal Michael Logue’s (1840-1924) judgement on Michael Collins (1890-1922) and his Squad in 1920: “No object would excuse them, no hearts, unless hardened and steeled against pity, would tolerate their cruelty,” and his acclaim of the dead Collins in 1922 as “a young patriot brave and wise.” Logue’s “settled contempt for Republicans and their activities,” contributed to the failure of the Vatican legate Salvatore Luzio’s visit to Ireland from 19 March to 5 May 1923. The Vatican was jostled by both sides, seeking its legitimation of the new government or its recognition of the right to rise in arms against it.
George Sweeney, indulging the regrettable tendency of many writers to regard all moral discussions as politically motivated, claims that before 1922 that bishops did not condemn militant republicanism for fear of alienating their flock, but now they had become “more confident and condemnatory.” “In return for the Church’s support, [William T.] Cosgrave’s [1880-1965] government agreed to abide by the decisions of the Catholic Church in matters of morality and not to interfere with the hierarchy’s control of education,” and this in Sweeney’s view influenced Cohalan’s changed stance. But surely this underestimates the great difference between a fight for Ireland’s independence and a fight against Ireland’s new government? Since Cohalan’s interventions are all in the pastoral mode, with little systematic exposition of his principles, he may not have seen the need to explain his change of framework, or may not even have been fully conscious of it; the bishops as a body had swung firmly against the Republicans and behind the Government, as shown by their pastoral letter of 10 October 1922: “All who in contravention of this teaching, participate in such crimes are guilty of grievous sins and may not be absolved in Confession nor admitted to the Holy Communion if they persist in such evil courses.” Their strong support for the government made them reluctant to speak out against the 81 official executions, amounting to state terror, that included 11 teenagers and 45 men in their twenties, from 17 November 1922 to 3 May 1923. “Although the executions were opposed in private by various bishops,” it remains the case that “to the end of the conflict there is no record of a specific Episcopal condemnation of any of the Free State misdemeanours during the civil war” (Bill Kissane). An appeal to the Vatican against the Bishops’ Pastoral “failed to reverse the Catholic Church’s attitude to the republicans who remained blamed for all the destructiveness of the civil war” (Kissane).
Archdeacon Thomas Duggan (1890-1961), my Parish Priest in Ballyphehane from 1957 to 1961, who died in Lima as a member of the Cork Mission to Peru at the end of 1961, turns out to have been a significant agent in the events of the so-called Irish Revolution, as Fr Carthach McCarthy relates. “My generation at Maynooth embraced the ideals of Easter Week 1916, with a hundred percent fervour,” Duggan recalled, but he was not a passive observer of this: “An ardent Republican, Thomas had many close associates within the hierarchy of Sinn Fein and was well known to promote their ideals at Maynooth.” In 1919, after serving as a chaplain in World War I, “on his return to the Cork Diocese, he was appointed as Secretary to Bishop Cohalan. The relationship began well, but soon deterioriated due to what the Bishop perceived as Thomas’ ardent republicanism. As a senior cleric in a position where he had to navigate a delicate path due to the impact of the War of Independence, the Bishop felt that he could not rely on Thomas’ unwavering support and dispensed with his services.” The 1920 hunger strike at Cork Jail was an opportunity for action: Duggan became Assistant Chaplain at the Jail and “when Mick Fitzgerald died on 19 October 1920 after 67 days on hunger strike, Thomas was at his bedside. As further men died, Thomas became unconvinced over the efficacy of this tactic and was instrumental in efforts to have the hunger strike stopped.” Nor was his sympathy confined to the spiritual: “A plan was hatched to blow the walls of the prison to free many of the prisoners. By his own admission, Thomas became involved in smuggling weapons and guncotton into the prison to facilitate the escape attempt.” But in the Civil War Duggan was a peacemaker: “As a confidant of both Tom Barry and Michael Collins, Thomas played an important role in trying to mediate between the warring factions in the Irish Civil War, taking a neutral position between the Pro and Anti-Treaty forces.”
[ ‘The enigma that was Archdeacon Tom Duggan OBE MC, Chaplain to the Forces,’ WW1ResearchIreland.com, 12 March 2020; see Carthach MacCarthy, Archdeacon Tom Duggan: In Peace and in War (Dublin: Blackwater, 1994). Tom Barry (1897-1980) is another local hero who might abide our question. In the War of Independence, as he recounts in his long-selling Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Press, 1949; republished by Anvil Books 1993 and Mercier Press 2013) his unit shot dead sixteen civilians accused of informing in the first six months of 1921, nine of whom were Protestants. However, he assures us, “the majority of the West Cork Protestants lived at peace throughout the entire struggle and were not interfered with by the IRA.” His unit also carried out reprisal killings of captured British soldiers in response to the execution of IRA Volunteers, a situation immortalized in Frank O’Connor’s chilling story of 1931, “Guests of the Nation.” “Barry would assert in later life that he opposed both the 1930s bombing campaign in England and IRA contacts with Nazi Germany. In fact, in January 1937 he had taken a trip to Germany seeking German support, which was assured to him subject to the condition that the IRA limit its actions to British military installations once war was declared. Financing was to be arranged through the Clann na Gael in the USA. The Army Convention in April 1938 adopted Seán Russell's S-Plan instead. Barry resigned as chief of staff as a result, but remained in contact with German agents at least to February 1939” (Wikipedia).
Moral Theology Between Justice and Suicide
Moral theology, though pursued with integrity by the participants in its debates, was inevitably exploited by political agents both in 1917-23 and in 1981. Catholic priests urged prisoners in Mountjoy to end their hunger strike, using the arguments against suicide. Todd Andrews (1901-1985) recalled: “I had a visit from the prison chaplain… he warned me that I was wilfully endangering my life which was an immoral act totally forbidden by the Commandments.… The chaplain was doing the dirty work required by his British employers” (C. S. Andrews). Some moral theologians stretched the principle of double effect to cover hunger strikes, Like the maiden who leaps from a tower to avoid a fate worse than death, a hunger striker is not directly willing his own death but some other end. This proportionalist reasoning seems to have seduced Bishop Cohalan in his earlier phase. But the moral prohibition of suicide proves a rather durable objection, for we meet it again in a letter from Cardinal Basil Hume to Bishop Edward Daly of Derry in 1981: “a hunger strike to death is a form of violence to one’s self and violence leads to violence.” After Bobby Sands’ death the Irish Bishops stated that “there is some dispute about whether or not political hunger striking is suicide, or more precisely, about the circumstances in which it is suicide.” In both periods the suicide theme became a rabbit-hole or a quagmire. Theologian Maria Power remarks that in 1981 the Church “needed to create a balance between its teaching and prophetic functions. When it came to the hunger strikes, the church didn’t achieve the balance necessary. It became side-tracked by points of moral theology regarding the issue of suicide, and in doing so allowed these to obscure the real issue of justice.” But did justice obviously require that perpetrators of terrorist acts be given political status? And again, the “real issue” may lie in the fanatical theology of the hunger strikers, which the focus on suicide has the slight merit of partially deflating. But it is true that Irish bishops generally have made too much of moral theology and canon law, at the expense of theological imagination.
The debate on the moral issue a century back includes some sparring between Canon John Waters, chaplain at Mountjoy Prison (he accompanied Kevin Barry to the scaffold), and Maynooth professor Patrick Cleary (1886-1970), who as an early member of the Columban Missionaries was to become Bishop of Nancheng in China. Cleary warns the Canon “that no man should be allowed to fling about the epithets ‘suicide’ and ‘criminal’ without proving to the hilt that he is justified in doing so.” A hunger strike may be not only licit but obligatory: “if a big national issue is at stake, which would be very materially benefited by a strong protest against injustice, and which, on the other hand, would be seriously compromised by even an apparent admission of guilt, it would seem that in these circumstances disobedience might be not only a right but even an obligation.” So sacred is the obligation that the principle of double effect easily takes care of the incidental damage inflicted on himself by the prisoner: “It may be that incidentally the same act may result in the death of the striker: the principle is conserved not by the death but by the refusal to acknowledge the prison chains.” Brendan O Cathaoir says that Cleary “defended Terence MacSwiney theologically during his 74 day hunger strike. Dr Cleary supported the hunger strike as a protest against British policy, but not to death.” But in the essay quoted he does defend the strike unto death, and rejects Canon Waters’ moral distinction between the “limited, non-fatal strike” and the fatal one and his claim that “whilst the danger which results from temporary abstinence is indirect that which results from continued abstinence becomes direct.” A Jesuit theologian, Patrick J. Gannon, wrote: “No hungerstriker aims at death.... His object is to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear upon an unjust aggressor.... There is nothing here of the mentality of suicide.”
Canon Waters saw the Mountjoy hunger strikers as emboldened by theologians’ assurances of the legitimacy of their action. Harried bishops, such as John Vaughan, auxiliary bishop of Salford, yearned for a clear determination from the Vatican, a Roma locuta est moment, but it was not forthcoming, and the morality of the hunger strike remains murky to this day. Perhaps there are transgressive and subversive actions that cannot be mapped unambiguously by the moralist, and that it is of their essence to remain disturbingly unmapped. One thinks of Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” or even of Luther’s words to Melanchthon: pecca fortiter, sed crede fortius (sin strongly, but believe more strongly). Such is the fringe region into which hunger strikes take us, and it is one that can never be clarified or normalized in the light of common day. Gannon took a bold step in this direction: “Sincere good faith redeems from guilt an act that may perhaps harmonise but ill with the divine law. That the Irish hunger-strikers are in this disposition is too evident to need elaboration.”
In other religious traditions too, self-immolation may inspire awe, but it is not canonized as a normal ethical action. The spate of self-immolations by Tibetan monks since 1998 was denounced by lamas and also by western Buddhists, but not by the Dalai Lama, whose followers at Dharmasala, [who] insist that ‘what qualifies the violence of the suicidal act is its motivation. If you commit suicide because of your personal lot, that can be considered violence; but if you commit suicide in the name of the freedom of six million people, then it is not violence.’At the Rinzai Zen monastery, Zenryûji, I saw a monument to the wartime self-sacrifice of the Kamikaze pilots, also admired by Donald Trump; but who would dare raise the principles of their action into a universal moral imperative? How free and voluntary was this sacrifice? The young men, even if sustained by fanaticism and esprit de corps, were pawns in a military strategy (the same may be true of the 1981 Long Kesh strikers). The monks who burnt themselves in Vietnam had American imitators: Alice Herz, aged 82, in Detroit on 16 March 1965; Norman Morrison, a Quaker, outside the Pentagon on 2 November; Roger Allen La Port outside the UN building in New York on 10 November; Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles on 15 October 1967. On 19 January 1969, the Czech student Jan Palach immolated himself in protest at Soviet repression, and on 13 January 1998 Alfredo Ormando inflicted fatal burns on himself in St Peter’s Square in protest against church homophobia. The Vatican comment can be summed up in the words, “Quid ad nos?” (Mt 27:4). Did these expensive gestures, now forgotten, make a deep impression on anyone? Self-immolation easily misfires and is dismissed as futile. If its aim is not well thought out or if its audience is misjudged it can become a grisly farce, as with the seppuku of novelist Mishima Yukio (1925-1970). Today hunger striking seems to have become a routine form of protest, carried out with the deftness of Mahatma Gandhi, whose numerous hunger strikes were mostly relatively short fasts. Consider Olan Horne, Massachusetts, who vowed to “stop eating until the Vatican acknowledges it received pleas for help from local families riven by clergy sexual abuse.” He fast lasted less than nearly a week, and received no Vatican notice. “This wasn't about me killing myself,” he said. “I had the ability to not eat for a week.” Or consider Fr Gary Graf, Chicago, who, with the blessing of Archbishop Blaise Cupich, embarked on a hunger strike on behalf of Dreamers (undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children). “Yes, it’s dramatic,” he explained; “It’s a way in which we pray for our political leaders and invite them to do their jobs.” A strong man, Graf could sustain his six week fast, but without the threat of dying the hunger strike becomes almost an athletic feat. Refashioned as an approved symbolic gesture, a spiritual exercise, it scarcely troubles impervious state authorities. One recalls that the Church reduced the ancient Irish custom of fasting against a debtor to “a ritual hunger strike that began at sundown and ended at sunrise.” The hunger-strike unto death is also a cultic sacrificial ritual, which 1. “makes a virtue of necessity,” as a weapon of the powerless; 2. “it can demonstrate legitimacy,” establishing “the importance and truth of a cause”; 3. “it flatters the followers of a cause by linking them with the heroic”; 4. “the cult caters for the needs of machismo and masochism,” giving Catholic asceticism and glorification of suffering an unorthodox twist. On this last point psychoanalysis finds an ample field of application, from Alfred Adler on “the masculine protest” to Freud and Theodor Reik on the dynamics of masochism. That no deep study on these lines exists suggests that the whole area is surrounded by a taboo, as if it were an untouchable sacral action.
[For a critique of the Provisional IRA as the chief agent of the Troubles, whose campaign of terror aborted the progressive movements of hte 1960s, see Liam Kennedy, Who Was Responsible for the Troubles}? The Northern Ireland Conflict (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Such books are no doubt still seen as traiterous by bien-pensant IRA sympathizers even though Islamist atrocities have robbed terrorism of much of its charm.]
Conclusion
In the vitriolic arguments kindled by Irish Republican violence, the Irish Catholic Church is often denounced from both sides, either as playing footsie with the gunmen, or as siding with the authorities in an opportunistic way. From this little survey, it seems to me that the Church has been divided and undecided at many junctures in the history, and that there has been no settled policy either for or against the Republican “cause.” Church leaders can always be relied on to denounce unjust violence and to uphold the sacredness of human life. In the Troubles they failed to produce a coherent and nuanced vision of the situation, but oscillated between abstract denunciations of violence and empathy not only with its victims but with its perpetrators. It did not emerge from the period with its moral authority enhanced, and its role in the Good Friday Agreement does not seem to have been a key one. In the 1920s similar division and oscillation may be observed. In both periods this allowed perpetrators of violence to dismiss church authorities or to hear them selectively. This is a sad and disappointing conclusion, but after all the entire chronicle of Irish political violence, much as we have tried to glorify it in song and story (and film), is a sad and disappointing one. That is why the Irish Republic has been gradually reinforcing alternative foundations for its identity, with a focus on literary and musical culture, European connections, soft power, and a broader and more disinterested view of the entire Irish past. Whatever renewal the Church can expect will be contingent on its creative engagement with this emergent post-ideological Ireland.
[Forthcoming with documentation in a volume edited by Dermot Keogh on international reactions to the events in Ireland a century ago.]