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1931

GUESTS OF THE NATION

by Frank O'Connor, 1931
Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation," with its wonderfully ironic title, is one of the most memorable short stories
ever written about Ireland's struggle for political independence from England. Set during the Troubles, the
revolutionary period between the Easter Rising in 1916 and the signing of the Home Rule treaty at the end of 1921,
O'Connor's narrative of rebels and hostages reveals the conflicts not only between the Irish and their unwelcome
"guests" but also among the revolutionaries themselves.

Like many of O'Connor's stories, "Guests of the Nation," the title story of a 1931 collection, is told from the first-
person point of view to give the narrative the quality of oral storytelling. Unlike the typical O'Connor storyteller, who
narrates an event that has happened or been told to someone else, the narrator in "Guests of the Nation" is someone
who has taken part in an action so emotionally and morally disturbing that it has altered his life. Speaking with the
voice of his own Cork region while imitating the accents and expressions of the English hostages, O'Connor's narrator,
called Bonaparte by his fellow rebels, recounts his reluctant role in the execution of two English soldiers in retaliation
for the deaths of four Irish rebels. The success of the narrative, however, lies not so much in the description of the
event itself, common enough during the Troubles, but in O'Connor's intimate study of the humanity of the rebels and
their prisoners and of the personal ordeal experienced by the narrator.

"Guests of the Nation," one of several early O'Connor stories about the Irish gunman, reflects his own experiences
while fighting on the losing Republican side during the Irish Civil War. During the final days of the war O'Connor, while
suffering acutely from the constant danger of life on the run, was puzzled by the cold resourcefulness of some of his
companions, who actually appeared to enjoy the danger and the violence. Afterward, Daniel Corkery, O'Connor's
teacher and fellow short story writer, suggested that he had witnessed the critical moment in a revolution when
control shifts from the dreamers, those caught up in the ideal, to the professionals, those caught up in the political
expediency and emotion of the violence and killing.

In "Guests of the Nation" O'Connor develops this conflict between revolutionary attitudes in the strained relationship
between the narrator and Jeremiah Donovan, the experienced rebel who has the responsibility for carrying out the
battalion order to shoot the English prisoners. Their differences are played out as the narrator and his youthful
compatriot, Noble, become familiar with the Englishmen while they stand guard over them. When the narrator
eventually finds out that the prisoners are actually hostages, he bitterly complains to Donovan, only to be told that the
English have also held their Irish prisoners over a long period of time. This moral and emotional blindness—the
indifference to the closeness that has developed between Noble, the narrator, and their prisoners—is what most
clearly defines Jeremiah Donovan and what most troubles the narrator when he is finally told to carry out the
executions. While he recognizes the necessity of an act of reprisal—one of the executed rebels was 16 years old—the
narrator is deeply disturbed by the order to shoot two men whom he has come to regard more as companions than as
the enemy.

The most compelling scene in "Guests of the Nation" occurs when the English prisoners are taken to the end of a bog
where a hole has already been dug for their bodies. O'Connor's early narrative strategy of developing the personalities
of the two Englishmen now takes on dramatic force as Hawkins, the more garrulous of the prisoners, pleads for his
life. Before Donovan shoots him in the back of the neck, Hawkins even offers to join the rebels. After Hawkins is
executed, finished off with a shot fired by Bonaparte, the narrative shifts its attention to the usually taciturn Belcher,
whose words before his death, in sharp contrast to the bumbling and grotesque behavior of his executioners, take on
a dignity and humanity.

Once the executions and burial are over, Bonaparte and Noble return to the house used to hide the Englishmen,
thereby shifting the narrative back to the emotional and moral impact of the deaths on those closest to the prisoners.
While Noble and the old woman of the house fall to their knees in prayer, O'Connor's narrator goes outside to watch
the stars and listen to the dying shrieks of the birds. At the end of the story the narrator turns briefly to his own
emotional state immediately after the killings and to the effect of the deaths on his life ever since. He remembers
vividly that the executions and the praying figures seemed at a great physical distance from him and that he felt as
lonely as a lost child. He also confesses that he has never felt the same about anything since that night. Apparently
compelled to tell his story, O'Connor's rebel seems to recognize at the close of his narrative that this single, terrible
act of revolutionary violence destroyed his youth and left him permanently disillusioned and emotionally isolated from
the human condition, no matter what the cause.

—Richard F. Peterson

http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/06/21/the-big-house-and-the-irish-revolution/#.XA-oslVKjIU

The Big House and the Irish Revolution

Late on January 29, 1923, Lady Mayo was eating dinner with
her husband, Lord Mayo, at their palatial home, Palmerstown
house, in the Kildare countryside.
Times were unsettled; civil war was still fitfully raging between
the anti-Treaty guerrillas of the IRA and the troops of the Irish
Free State government. In an effort to stamp out the guerrillas’
will to resist, the Government had embarked on a policy of
widespread executions. That day, six IRA men had been shot by
firing squad at the military base at the Curragh.
Out of the darkness of the country night, a party of armed men
approached Palmerstown House and knocked on the door. The
butler refused to let them in but the men – anti-Treaty
Moore Hall, Mayo, destroyed in February 1923
guerrillas – barged their way through the servants’ entrance.
Bursting into the dining room, they told Lord and Lady Mayo
they were going to burn the house in reprisal for the executions of their men that day at the Curragh.
They asked the Earl if he was a Free State Senator and he confirmed he was. ‘Are you going to shoot me?’ he
asked the man covering him with a service rifle. “No, my lord: we are not going to shoot you, but we have our
orders to burn the building.” “It is only right to say”, Lord Mayo recalled, “that the raiders were excessively
polite”.
Still, they gave the pair only 20 minutes to remove valuables before they poured petrol in each room and set the
house alight. By the time Free State troops and a fire brigade unit arrived from Newbridge, the house was
already, ‘a flaming furnace’. By the following morning, the mansion, built in 1877, was ‘gutted’.

The Big House and the Irish revolution

The ‘Big House’ or country mansion of the Anglo-Irish landed
class, was a target of republicans throughout the Irish revolution of
1919-23.
A total of 275 were burned out, blown up or otherwise destroyed
between 1920 and 1923. Of these, by far the greatest number,
199, were destroyed, not during the conflict against the British,
but in the period of intra-nationalist civil war between 1922-1923.
The Irish nationalist narrative had always maintained that the land
of Ireland had been stolen from its rightful, native Irish and
Catholic, owners by the alien “Protestant Ascendancy” in the 15
and 1600s. Even more deeply ingrained in the popular psyche were the land struggles of the 19 th century, aimed
first at establishing security for tenant farmers and eventually at a transfer of land ownership from landlord to
tenant. In 1914, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s organ Irish Freedom still wrote of the land system as
comprising of, “robbery, fraud and hatred of the people”.
Once British protection had been withdrawn, the most radical elements of the nationalist revolution, in the anti-
Treaty IRA, took the opportunity to sweep away the symbols of the old order in the countryside.
The War of Independence
As early as 1918, IRA organiser Ernie O’Malley had his Volunteers train in The Irish nationalist
demesne grounds to, “rid them of their inherent respect for the owners. Even narrative had always
yet their fathers touched their hats to the gentry and the sergeant of the maintained that the
police”.
land of Ireland had
During the confrontation between the British and the IRA in 1919-1921, the
Big House was made a target in reprisal for British burning of republicans’ been stolen from its
houses. In June 1921, an order to burn loyalist houses in retaliation for British rightful, native Irish
reprisals was issued by IRA GHQ. and Catholic, owners
As a result, the local seat of the Ascendancy was often burned because the by the alien
republicans assumed that the old landed class were loyalists. Lord Listowel’s “Protestant
residence Convamore, for instance, was destroyed in April 1921 in retaliation
for the destruction of the houses of six republicans and because he was, the Ascendancy”
attackers alleged, ‘aggressively anti-Irish’.
In April 1921, north Cork IRA leader, Liam Lynch, enraged by the
destruction of several houses in reprisal for an IRA ambush declared,
‘six big houses and castles of their friends, the Imperialists will go up
for this’.
Near Athlone in July 1921, the IRA burned Moydrum Castle, in
reprisal for the burning of several homes of their sympathisers –
itself a response to an IRA ambush. One Volunteer recalled, “An
order was received from headquarters that a similar number of
houses belonging to Loyalists or British supporters were to be
burned by us as a counter-reprisal. Brigade headquarters, however,
IRA guerrillas from Cork no. 1 Brigade decided to burn Moydrum Castle instead … Moydrum Castle was
the residence of Lord and Lady Castlemaine … a member of the
British House of Lords and was always an opponent of Irish National aspirations.”
A total of 30 Big Houses were burned in 1920 and another 46 in the first half of 1921, mostly in the conflict’s
heartland of Munster, in counties Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, Clare and Limerick.
The logic behind the burnings was clear; the old Ascendancy class were the backbone of the British presence in
Ireland, destroying their palatial seats also hurt the British state, by forcing them to allocate troops and police to
protect the gentry and also by undermining the deference some still felt for the old landed families.
Republicans seem to have taken gleeful pleasure in demonstrating the equality between the charred remains of
their own houses, burned by British forces and those of the ‘castles’ of the ‘imperialists’.
However, in 1919-21, the country mansions were generally attacked as specific reprisals, and not made the
subject of a concerted campaign as they were in 1922-1923.

The blitz on the Big Houses

During the period of civil war between Pro-Treaty (Free State) and Anti-Treaty In 1919-21, the country
(Republican) factions in June 1922-April 1923, 199 Big Houses went up in
mansions were
flames – over three times as many as in 1919-1921. There was also a
generally attacked as
difference in geography from the earlier period. In the civil war, burnings
were more common in Leinster than in Munster. In the civil war, the only specific reprisals
county in Leinster with no burnings was Laois (then Queens County).
Republican commander Con Moloney ordered in July 1922, just after the
outbreak of Civil War, that Unionist property should be commandeered to
accommodate their men and some Big Houses were destroyed or damaged during the opening phase of the war,
in which the Anti-Treaty fighters were driven from their fixed position around the country. Nobles’ houses were
also used as billets by both Pro-Treaty and Anti-Treaty forces.
Edith Somerville described how on one occasion soldiers ‘used a Rembrandt as dart board’, while the Earl of
Ossory stayed in his castle to prevent republicans destroying it and saw it retaken by pro-Treaty forces.
Considerable damage was done to the castle in the fighting; paintings were
damaged, antiques were destroyed and windows smashed. Destroying the Big
However the most intense assault on the Big House came in early 1923. By Houses was easy for
then the anti-Treaty campaign had been reduced to a localised and small-
the Anti-Treaty IRA to
scale guerrilla affair, fought by ever-dwindling bands, coordinated very loosely
by a clandestine leadership under Liam Lynch, which Free State forces hunted do at a time when
from safe house to safe house. their military
A Free State Army report of 21 January 1923 states, “with depleted numbers, capability was
lack of resources and unified control and almost complete ineffectiveness weakening
from a military standpoint, their [Anti-Treaty IRA] policy of military action is
slowly changing to one of sheer destruction and obstruction of the civil
government.”
The Minster for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan, wrote to Prime Minister WT Cosgrave; “House Burning [among Anti-
Treaty Guerrillas] has become a matter of course”.
Why did the Anti-Treatyites embark on a concentrated campaign against the Big House in early 1923? One
reason was simply that it was easy to do at a time when their military capability was seeping away. Another, the
stated reason, that it was reprisal against the political elite of the Free State for the execution of Republicans.
Thirty seven of the houses destroyed were those of Senators, of whom about 20 were old landed families.
The Senate was the State’s upper house. The Senators were a soft target, many of them came from outside of
the Nationalist, Catholic community and they were scattered around the country – difficult for the Free State to
protect. Many had previously been unionists, Lord Glenavy for instance, chairman of the Senate, had helped
Edward Carson to form a unionists ‘provisional government in 1912 to resist Home Rule. Attacking them was less
likely to attract public outrage than killing directly elected
nationalist TDs [members of the Dail or Parliament].
Less likely also to provoke lethal reprisals from the
Government. When Sean Hales TD was gunned down in Dublin
in December 1922, the Government immediately had four
imprisoned republican leaders shot by firing squad in
retaliation.
But the campaign against the senators is only a partial
explanation of the burnings. Most of the landed class were not
senators and some of those burned out – such as Horace
Plunkett, – were social reformers and even nationalists of a
sort.
Ardtully Castle, burned in 1922. 1

The Experience of the burnings

Another possible explanation for the arson campaign was to drum up popular support in the countryside by
attacking and humbling the class who had once been masters of the country.
Certainly, much of the rural population had traditionally seen the “landlord” as an oppressive, alien ruling caste
and there is little evidence of widespread sympathy for the victims of the campaign.
Crowds often came to loot the burnt-out mansions. After the burning of the Big House at Derreen, Kerry,
“crowds of every description [came]…pulling, hauling, fighting for what they could take. The house is absolutely
destroyed, the doors all smashed, every particle of furniture taken”. Similarly at Glenfarne, Leitrim, “the people
came with carts and carried away… everything that was portable…so that only the roof was left and the roof
went eventually.”

The campaign against Senators and the Big Houses was undoubtedly traumatic for those affected. George
Moore, for instance, had to watch in February 1923 as a group of armed men demanded the keys to his mansion
at Moore Hall and proceeded to set fire and lay bombs that destroyed the house and his beloved library. He
remembered, “I could do nothing but stand by with the same feelings that one has when standing beside the
open grave of a very dear friend.”
But at the same time, the campaign was largely limited to violence against
property rather than people. There were no massacres of the civilian Compared to the
“enemies of the republic”, no mass graves were filled up, no wholesale attacks on the gentry
displacement either of Free State supporters or of former loyalists took place.
during the Russian
There is also, in the accounts of the burnings, a curious air of deference about
the guerrillas. Earl Mayo, during the burning of Palmerstown House, thought Revolution, the Irish
the raiders were, ‘excessively polite’. experience was
Patrick Campbell recalled that during the burning of the house of his almost gentlemanly
grandfather (Lord Glenavy, Chairman of Senate) at Christmas time 1922, his
mother ordered the IRA men to first save the children’s’ toys;
“ ‘Me train’, I cried, ‘Don’t let them burn me train!’‘Of course they won’t’, said my mother. She rounded on two
of the men. ‘You’, she said, ‘go to the cupboard in the children’s bedroom and take out all the parcels you can
find. And look out for the doll’s house, it’s fragile’. They shuffled their feet, deeply embarrassed. Several other
men were throwing petrol around the hall. ‘Well, go on’, my mother shouted at them. ‘And leave your silly guns
on the table, nobody’ll touch them’. By the time the first whoosh of petrol flame poured out of the windows, she
had five of the men working for her, running out with armfuls of books, pictures, ornaments and our Christmas
toys.”
Compared to, for instance, the attacks on the homes of the Russian gentry during the revolution of 1917-18,
when the Bolsheviks urged the peasantry to, ‘loot the looters’, and the gentry themselves were often beaten or
killed, the Irish affair looks almost gentlemanly.

A self-limiting revolution
As even the likes of IRA leader Ernie O’Malley acknowledged, the actual power of
the Ascendancy class was largely a thing of the past by the 1920s. “I cycled past
many a broken-down demesne wall, once the sign of an entrenched ascendancy,
now the symbol of passing order…Virtue and strength was going from the leeches
who had sucked life from the people”.
The 1903 Wyndham Act had subsidised Irish tenants with British government loans,
repayable over 70 years, to buy out their landlords. Whereas in 1870, 97% of land
was owned by landlords and 50% by just 750 families, by 1916, 70% of Irish farmers
owned their own land. These reforms, which amounted to a peaceful revolution in
land-holding in Ireland, took the sting out of the land question and largely explain why there was so little violence
against the persons, as opposed to the property of the old landed class in 1919-1923.
There was indeed a great deal of rural class conflict during the Irish revolution. The years 1919-1920 saw a wave
of agrarian agitation in the west of Ireland, where cattle were “driven” off the land of big graziers, which was
then occupied by poor farmers, indeed some of the Volunteers early actions in some areas were attacks on
landlords, rent collectors or “land grabbers”.
The civil war of 1922-23 was, for people such as Patrick Hogan, the first Free State Minister for Agriculture, in
fact, a contest between ‘order’ and ‘anarchy in the countryside. Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs,
cited over 500 seizures of land by tenant farmers, burning of landlords’ property and a labour dispute in Kildare
where shots had been exchanged.
Part of the Free State Army, organized in a “Special Infantry Corps” was used to put down agrarian agitation
across the country and a wave of strikes by agricultural labourers across south Leinster and north Munster.
The Republicans for their part made some noises about social revolution. Ernie O’Malley approvingly quoted a
programme that, “Under the Republic all industry will be controlled by the state for the workers’ and farmers’
benefit…all banks will be operated by the state…the lands of the aristocracy will be seized and divided”.
But the Anti-Treaty IRA adopted nothing so radical as their objective. And in reality, the “aristocracy” no longer
controlled the land anyway. The Republicans never took an active part in the various class struggles that broke
out between ranchers and small farmers, or between farmers and labourers – all of whom were predominantly
Catholic and nationalist. Instead they concentrated their ire on the mostly defunct Anglo-Irish landed class.
Why this was so telling us something important about the Irish revolution, its origins and perceived purpose. Self-
government for Ireland, in the form of Home Rule, was already on offer from the British government since 1912
– albeit limited to control of domestic affairs under the Empire. Land reform
had already been implemented, though the landed class had been amply The assault on the Big
compensated. Houses was an
The recourse to arms on behalf of Irish nationalists was essentially about
attempt to
speeding up these processes but also changing their meaning. Ireland would
not be a grateful self –governing dominion under the crown, it would be an symbolically destroy
independent republic. Land redistribution was not an enlightened reform but the colonial past and
a partial correction of a historic injustice. to show that the
The importance of such symbolism – viewed as a kind of correction of history revolution was not
– was what made the Treaty, a backsliding from the Republic where the King over.
of England was head of state and where Ireland was a dominion under the
Empire, so hard for many republican activists to accept.
The civil war of 1922-23 was in this sense, the Irish ‘Thermidor’ – that stage in a revolution where the more
moderate forces step back from the most radical elements and suppress those former comrades who refuse to
compromise.
The assault on the Big Houses in early 1923 only makes sense in this context – as the Anti-Treatyites attempt to
show that the revolution was not over. That they were determined not to accept a settlement where the likes of
Lord Glenavy presided over the Senate and determined to blot out the reminders of what they thought of as the
British colonial past.

Conclusion
As a military tactic, the burning campaign of early 1923 was inconsequential to the outcome of the Civil
War. Ernie O’Malley, by then imprisoned, wrote, “I see the necessity for burning but it does not go hand in hand
with fighting; it will eventually react on us”.
In the campaign against the British, burning Big Houses may have deterred reprisals against republicans’ homes.
In the intra-nationalist phase of the conflict, the Free State forces, who had excellent intelligence on their former
comrades, did not have to resort to reprisals against property (revenge killings of republicans were another
matter). Burning down the houses of the old landed class made no difference to Free State’s ability to round up
and intern anti-Treaty fighters.
The revolution’s legacy to the land question, as in many other areas, was profoundly ambiguous. The Pro-Treaty
side, inheritors of the moderate revolutionary tradition – conciliatory to Britain, legalistic and socially
conservative – not only put down those who wanted to continue the nationalist revolution, they also made
peace with the former Ascendancy class. Lord Glenavy, for instance served in the Senate until 1928.
Lord Mayo was compensated by the Free State in 1925 for the destruction of his mansion at Palmerstown house
to the tune of £15,000.
On the other hand, one of the first major acts of the Free State was to set up a Land Commission for the
compulsory purchase of land, “for the purpose of relieving congestion”, in order to drain the remaining venom
from the land question. And when the Cumann na nGaedheal had to decide in 1930 on what qualified as a
National Monument, to be afforded state protection, the Big Houses were specifically excluded.
As for the republicans, once they entered power by democratic means in 1932, they set about recreating the
Irish state in their own image. The Senate, with its grandee representatives was abolished. Land annuities,
repayments to the British government for the land reforms of the early 20th century, were stopped. Eventually
around 10% of the money owed was paid as a final settlement in 1938.
Today, in a very different Ireland, the power of the Big House, even as a symbol, is largely gone. In Mayo there is
a campaign to restore Moore Hall, burned out in February 1923, as a cultural site and tourist attraction. We
have, perhaps, come full circle.