President does us a service with reflection on troubled past
Michael D Higgins’ Machnamh 100 initiative creates a space for a thoughtful engagement with the violence of our history, writes
ON Wednesday, May 6, 1981, the Detroit Free Press sent reporter Bob Emmers to the Gaelic League club in Michigan Avenue to get local reaction to events in Ireland. There, at the end of the bar, Emmers found an old man drinking whiskey and pulling on Lucky Strikes, the smoke slowly curling above him.
Opposite him on the wall was a greying poster of the 1916 Proclamation with portraits of its seven signatories. Surveying the dim lounge, Emmers saw another face, that of Bobby Sands, laughing up from fliers scattered around the bar; they carried details of a memorial service — he had died the previous day at 27 years of age.
The old man was George McCallion, who, in 1925, aged 27, had arrived in Detroit from Derry. The League had been established five years earlier.
Detroit’s population had doubled over the previous decade, from 465,766 in 1910 to 933,678 in 1920, becoming the US’s fourth-largest city after New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Many of the newcomers were Irish, lured by the car factories. In the 1920s, Detroit’s population grew by 58pc, hitting 1,568,662 in 1930 and continued rising until 1950 when it reached 1,849,568. Thereafter it creaked into rust-belt decline.
George McCallion had seen the rise and fall of ‘motown’ and, in Ireland’s late 20th century Troubles, a tragedy long foretold.
McCallion was one of 11 children born to Mary Ann Deeney (1863–1953) and James McCallion (1848–1923), a stonemason. A sibling died in infancy, and in the 1920s all but one of the remaining 10 emigrated, eight settling between Dearborn and Detroit; their mother joined those in Michigan in 1928.
On that day in 1981, McCallion told Emmers he had come to Detroit to find work, which was true. However, it had been politics that made it hard for him to get a job at home. McCallion and a younger brother, Joseph Alphonsus (Alfie in Ireland, but Joe in America), and an older one, Patrick, had been active republicans in the 1910s and early 1920s. They had fought — the Tans and Tommies, and the Treaty — and, after their defeat, the south was as cold a house as the North.
In truth, all the McCallions were republicans. In October 1920, when the British army found weapons near their home in Berry Street, George and five brothers were arrested together. They passed their time in the cells singing.
George did not mention that incident to Emmers, but on a day when “it was all Irish republican talk” at the bar, the past was close to the present. So he did tell of how, in 1917, he had joined the Derry battalion of the IRA and taken part in attacks on British convoys and barracks in 1919–21. He told, too, as many IRA-men used to tell, a self-deprecating yarn about his lack of arms and training, when he went out to fight an empire.
“I remember one time,” he said. “We went over into Donegal to attack this police barrack. There was about six of us. Now we didn’t have many guns but we did have the dynamite and we tied it on a board and pushed it up against the barrack wall, thinking we’d blow up half of it.
“But it only went up in flames, and the police came out shootin’ at us and we had to run like hell.”
McCallion might have told Emmers a lot more. He might have told him how, in 1922, he had been the officer commanding IRA units that occupied Skeog House, a mansion near the Derry-Donegal county line, which had recently become “the Border”. There, at Skeog, he proved himself a man of no mean resolve.
At 4pm on Friday, July 7, Free State troops threw a cordon around the mansion and sent a courier, under a white flag, with a message demanding its surrender. The courier returned with a succinct reply: “In receipt of your demand to surrender barracks to your men. I wish to inform you that, as soldiers of Ireland and the Irish Republic, we will defend the barracks and the cause for which we stand till the last. Signed: George McCallion.”
A seven-hour gun battle ensued, with the attackers using Lewis guns in efforts to dislodge the republicans. Finally, at 11pm, white flags were hoisted. The 49 men and one woman marched out with their hands above their heads — they had exhausted their ammunition. Their only casualty was George McCallion, who was “severely wounded”.
In 1981 Detroit’s Irish community included supporters and critics of the Provisional IRA, with many of the latter ascribing to the notion, pushed by influential opinion-makers in Ireland, that the “men of violence” of the early 1900s were morally superior to those of the late 1900s.
On that day in the League, McCallion was critical of the Provisionals, yet not from any qualm about violence.
“But the fighting over there now, I don’t like the way it’s done,” he told Emmers. “The Provos don’t seem to be of much value. In my day there were no kids in the IRA.”
News reports showing children rioting may have prompted that
remark. Certainly, it is the reflection of an old man. His brother Alfie wrote a memoir detailing his own ideological formation: he became politically conscious in childhood, joined the IRB at 15 and, at 16, the Volunteers. A faded photo of Terence MacSwiney was passed up the bar. “There was a famous man,” McCallion told
Emmers, “He knew what it was about.” He was alluding, the reporter averred, to the hunger striker’s dictum: “It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.”
And so, on that day in 1981, when the world’s gaze turned to Ireland as it had turned when MacSwiney died in 1920, an old man in Detroit sat transfixed by similarities, discomfited by differences, real and imagined, between past and present.
In youth, he had apprehended that his generation’s failure to resolve matters meant war would come again to Ireland; and then, when that war did come, when he was old and far away, he understood it would be a long war.
“The Treaty of 1921 was a bad treaty,” McCallion told the man from the Free Press, “and I am still bitter about it. It’s going to go on and on.”
The fight in his youth and the fight in his old age were the same fight, he was saying. Clear to him was the pity of it all — young people dying when he, who had seen it all, could see where it would end: a conference table and a treaty or, treaty being a dirty word, an agreement, to repair the injustice that had issued from the “bad treaty” that sent him to Skeog House in 1922.
Not all who, in youth, fought with George McCallion against the British and lived to an old age viewed their fight as the same as that of the Provisionals. Nor, indeed, did all who fought with McCallion in the Tan War have the same understanding of the Civil War.
Most obviously, many took the other side, and much as he was bitter about the Treaty, there were many of them bitter about the actions of him and his associates.
Commemoration seldom makes great history. However, last November, President Michael D Higgins launched Machnamh 100, a series of reflections by scholars on the War of Independence, the Treaty negotiations, the Civil War and Partition; they can be viewed online.
In developing this series, he is making space, in a thicket of centenaries, for a reflection on the violence of our past that is not simply what the critic David Lloyd once called the “issueless tribute of remembrance”.
In doing so, he has done us all, North and south, a great service.
‘He told too a self-deprecating yarn about his lack of arms and training when they went out to fight an empire’