Three letters from Sean O’Casey to Desmond Greaves
[The three letters below from Sean O’Casey to Desmond Greaves are in the Greaves documentary archive, to be deposited in due course in the National Library of Ireland. They were previously published, together with five other letters from O’Casey that he sent to others, in “Saothar No.20, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society”, in 1995. These letters were not known to David Krause, who published a four-volume edition of “The Letters of Sean O’Casey” between 1975 and 1992 (Macmillan and Catholic University of America Press)
The first of the three letters, written in 1957, was a reply to a request from Desmond Greaves asking whether Casey would answer some questions relevant to Greaves’s research for his biography of Connolly, which was published in 1961 as “The Life and Times of James Connolly”.]
17 December 1957
Torquay, Devon
Desmond Greaves Esq.
Dear Desmond Greaves,
Better write the questions to me and make them as few as possible – my one good eye is pretty painful and I have to limit writing and typing as much as possible. Hasn’t Nora Connolly O’Brien gone to California to write the life of her father? You know that the execution of Connolly has set a halo around him. In my days it wasn’t Connollyism that shook Ireland (and England too), but Larkinism. Now all that he did has been safety mummified in the wrappings of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno; and you or no one else will ever get him out of it.
All good wishes,
Sean O’Casey
– – –
[The second letter, written in January 1958, is a reply to the questions Greaves sent him, relating to Connolly’s service in the British Army as a young man and the attitude of the ITGWU Executive to the Citizen Army’s tenure of Liberty Hall in the lead-up to the Rising. O’Casey’s statement here that Connolly “never liked me” and that he did not like Connolly are interesting, although in one of the other letters in the “Saothar” article cited above, O’Casey acknowledged that “Connolly was true to the workers.” In this letter O’Casey, who tended to counterpose socialism to nationalism, “Larkinism” to “Connollyism”, repeats his often expressed view that by taking part in 1916 Connolly showed that he had “lost interest in the Labour movement”. In his book “Sean O’Casey, Politics and Art” Desmond Greaves showed that O’Casey never expressed such views while Connolly was alive and that they developed later, in the atmosphere of disillusionment following the Treaty and Civil War, when O’Casey wrote the plays that made him famous. It is, of course, about as sensible to elevate O’Casey’s views as a political theorist, as it is to judge the importance of Connolly by his verses.]
10 Jan.1958
Torquay, Devon
Desmond Greaves, Esq.
Dear Desmond,
Your letter was “as damned a piece of crabbed penmanship as ever I saw”. My one good eye is bad; but I made out the gist of it.
- I haven’t an idea whether Connolly was or was not in the British Army. Connolly was close regarding himself to all, and he never liked me. However, he couldn’t have been a Regular – 1st and 2ndBattalions – for his bowed legs would have had him rejected. Then one had to be without a blemish to be taken; one tooth gone would ensure rejection. If he was in the Army, it must have been the militia, so could never have gone to India. They never went on ‘foreign service’. Many unemployed joined them. It meant months of free housing and food, and a bounty at dismissal when drill was over. They were paid off at Linen Hall, a military headquarters then. I never spoke about him, even to Jim.
- It may have been. The Committee were very much afraid of the ICA, and Connolly’s connection with it. They didn’t want a clash with the B. Authorities and they knew, or guessed, Connolly was bent on one. It is like Connolly that he might obligingly suggest the interference of the ‘Army’ á la the French Revolution; and the ICA may have invaded the Committee room. Whether they would have used their bayonets, I don’t know; but, perhaps, it was a pity they didn’t – on some of them.
- Don’t know again. Connolly did give all his time to the ICA, and lost all interest in the Union; even, in my opinion, in the Labour Movement itself.
Sorry, I can’t help you,
As ever
Seán
– – –
[The third letter, written in June 1958, is a response to an appeal from Greaves for money for the work of the Connolly Association. O’Casey sent a donation and indicates in the accompanying letter his attitude to the late 1950s IRA Border Campaign that was then in full spate, and to the Protestant Unionists of the Six Counties.]
13 June 1958
Torquay, Devon
Dear Desmond,
Enclosed check of £2-0-0. They are going the wrong way about getting the Northern Protestants to come home. How can we expect them to come into a state governed by a Bench of Bishops? Are they to come into a Freedom that won’t let anyone say a word against clericalism unless the word’s a whisper, and the whisper is completely cupped with both hands as it comes from the mouth? Yet, these misguided youngsters shoot or blow up other Irishmen, Catholics and Protestants, and seem to glory in it.
It is a rotten policy, and keeps the Ulster Protestant hardhearted, and sends him deeper into his den. Long ago, I suggested Irish Governments should invite the Orangemen to hold a Twelfth Parade in Dublin, to show that the Orangeman was reckoned as Irish as anyone else. They are; but we refuse to let them be Irish unless they, too, look upon every Bishop’s word as proceeding from the mouth of God.
The Ulstermen are the true Irish republicans.
All good wishes,
yours,
Sean O’Casey