 Good evening. We are delighted to welcome the Irish Ambassador, his Excellency, Daniel Moll Hall, his wife, Greta. We are also very privileged to have as our guest of honour this evening, Shivano Casey. Your Excellency, you hail originally from Waterford and completed your degree and postgraduate academic studies at the University College in Cork. Mae'r cyfnod yma yn 1970, yw'r cyfnod fydd yn enw'r cyfnod ymlaen i'r cyrfaith diplomatic. Mae'r prydau ymlaen i'r Prifysgol y Llyfriddor Ffyrnololololololololololololololololololololololol! Fe wnaeth hynny sydd ymlaen i Milaysia, Vietnam, Tylland, Berlin, a'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod ar gyfer London. Rydyn ni'n symud yma ymlaen i'r cyfnod yma i Irish drama, a ymddai'r llech yma ymlaen i'r Well, thank you very much, first of all, for the invitation and it's wonderful to be here in the presence of Sean O'Casey. I hesitate to talk about your father in your presence because I'm no expert at all really on Sean O'Casey except that I've read all the plays and I reread them over the weekend. And actually this lecture comes from my time in Germany when there's a wonderful man called Professor Hermann Reall. And if you haven't met him, you should meet him. He's a leading scholar in the world on SWIFT. And he runs a centre called the Aireland Prize Centre for SWIFT Studies at the University of Munster. And I, of course, being a Munster man myself, I was attracted by the idea of going to the University of Munster, so I did. And I made a joke about having studied where Finbar taught at Munster Laurel and now I was going to try and teach Munster something. But anyway, this wonderful man, Professor Reall, invited me to visit the University and I brought along a Yates Exhibition and I opened the Exhibition. And I gave a talk on Yates and not content with that, he, the following year, said, Well, you must come and give free lectures at the University and I said, OK, fine if you like, why not? And I thought, well, what are we going to do? So the three lectures I gave were one on Yates and Yates and Irish History, James Joyce's Ireland, or James Joyce's and 20th Century Ireland, or James Joyce's Portland of 20th Century Ireland. And then the third lecture I gave was Sean O'Casey's History Place. And I wrote the first two of these lectures fully and I have the full text, but I didn't have time to write the third one, so I had to deliver it with a few notes, so I've revisited those notes in the last few weeks when I heard I was coming here. And I, even on my holidays there over Christmas, I had my very old copy of O'Casey's Place. It was actually, it's all for a shilling, I don't know where it's all for a shilling. I didn't think I ever bought a book that was sold for a shilling, but anyway, it originally belonged to somebody called McCready and was bought in 1957, so that shows you how old this book, I think I bought this when I was a student, so I do have a long standing interest in O'Casey's work, but I've never really written much about it. Anyway, I decided that why did I want to talk about O'Casey's History Place, because I had this idea that the three plays, The Shadow of a Gunman, Journal of the Paycock and The Planet Stars, are kind of like an Irish equivalent of Shakespeare's History Place. And of course, if you read the three plays, you will see quite a few references to O'Casey, and indeed, sorry, to Shakespeare in the place, and indeed, at one point, there's a quotation from Richard III, which is one of Shakespeare's History Place. So I had this fanciful idea that these could be the equivalent of Shakespeare's History Place, but dealing with a period of Irish history much shorter, of course, than the period that the History Place deal with. So I'm not a professional academic at all, but I probably, if I hadn't ended up in this job, I probably would have ended up somehow in academia, I suppose. In fact, I was once described by Boris Johnson in The Spectator as an amateur historian. Now I'm not sure whether that was meant to be a compliment or an insult, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, I was mentioned in that way, and so I suppose if the Mayor of London, in regard to as an amateur historian, that's probably something to talk about, but that was long before he was Mayor of London, that was when I was a youngish diplomat in Brussels, and Boris Johnson was the correspondent for the telegraph there. What I really want to talk about tonight is the whole idea of the drama of history, and I've always been fascinated really by the intersection between history and literature. My thesis was on Yates and George Russell, essentially, and I've written quite a bit about Yates and Joyce, and it's always been in that kind of area of what is the intersection between literature and history. And probably no other Irish writer of the 20th century captures that overlap in the way that Sean O'Casey in The Three Great Plays does. First of all, I want to say that history is not normally a drama. History is kind of more of a long extended prose work, and it's good that most of the time history is dull because when people are involved in the drama of history, it's normally not a good thing for those who live through it. So the first decade of the 20th century, the world was a fairly dull place, but people were pretty happy, I suppose, overall, at least in European and North American societies. And it was a kind of a golden era, a mewn belly-pock and all of that. The second decade of the 20th century was a very dramatic decade, but frankly, it's not one you'd want to have lived through because a lot of people didn't manage it because of the terrible things that happened during that decade. And including in Ireland, of course, where we... I always think that we forget that the Irish Revolution occurred in an international context, which was a context of global war, but certainly war on a grand scale, on a scale never before seen in human history. So we shouldn't forget the fact that the Irish Revolution occurred in that broader European context. But I would ask you to cast your mind back to the year 1904. Now that was a year when it was the year of the Russo-Japanese War. It was also the year when Roger Casement won international renown by exposing Belgian atrocities in the Congo. And why do I ask you to turn the clock back to 1904? Because that was the last year when the three great writers of Ireland's 20th century walked the streets of Dublin at the same time. Because WWE 8s was frequently in Ireland during 1904 because he was preparing for the launch of the Abbey Theatre in December of that year. James Joyce lived in Ireland throughout 1904 until the 9th of October when he left, and only to come back on two subsequent occasions to Ireland. Sean O'Casey, of course, lived in Ireland throughout that year and until the mid-20s when he moved to London. So I suppose what this encourages us to do is to sort of compare and contrast the three Irish writers who walked the streets of Dublin during that year and might easily have met. There's no record that they did, although who knows they may well have sat in the same pub or met on the street. So they had contrasting backgrounds and contrasting attitudes, I would say, towards the Ireland of their time. Joyce always regarded it with the sort of wariness of the young esthete who didn't really want to get entangled in Irish and wanted to fly the nets of nationality, religion and language in order to forge in the smithy of my soul but outside of Ireland the uncreated conscience of my race as he put it in the portrait of the artist as a young man. And WB Yates was constantly back and forth and I think that the difference between Joyce and Yates, Joyce obviously kept a distance from Irish events, was fascinated by them, by the way, but from a distance and was wary of entanglement. Yates was sort of a Olympian figure who could kind of march above the drama of history and write occasional lyric masterpieces to sort of comment. But most of his writing had other preoccupations, although an impressive amount of it dealt with the drama of Irish history during that decade between 1913 and 1922. So the point I want to make is that in 1904 when the three writers were living in Dublin at the same time, Ireland was a relatively quiet place, even if there were new nationalist movements that were emerging but as yet these national movements posed no threat whatsoever to the ascendancy of the Irish party which had dominated Irish politics for 40 years at that stage and was dominated for another 12 years. However, if you turn the clock forward to 1914, whose centenary we currently are marking, you find it totally changed Ireland because you have four armed militias on the go. You have the Ulster volunteers, the National volunteers, the Irish volunteers and the Irish citizen army. So a small country with what at that time maybe five million people with four armed militias during the rounds, marching up and down and threatening all kinds of things. So it was far from tranquil country at that stage. And indeed in 1914 the biggest threat to European peace was not in Bosnia but rather in Ireland where civil war appeared to be or there was some kind of possibility of a serious conflict breaking out about Irish homeroom. So 1914 Ireland was already a fairly turbulent place but nothing like it became in the following ten years that you had Ireland moving from in 1914 being a discontented part of the British Empire moving towards homeroom in 1922. Ireland becomes an independent country, at least the southern part of Ireland becomes an independent country and is already involved in a rather dreadful civil war. So that decade which we're currently commemorating was a really dramatic decade in Irish history. So the drama of history, if you like, visited Ireland during the years between 1913 and 1922 and I believe that in Sean O'Casey the drama of Irish history found its dramatist and this is I think an important thing to recognise as part of this paper. That's one of my main points about O'Casey, is that he became the dramatist of the Irish Revolution and I want to explain a little bit about what I mean by that and what implications it has. So his achievement was, if you think about that decade, I'm very conscious of the fact that the decade we're now commemorating was a decade of political excitement but it was also a decade of literary excitement in the sense that he had published three major collections plus an autobiography. Joyce published all of his great work, Dubliners in 1914, Porter of the Artists in 1916 and Ulysses in 1921. And then Sean O'Casey didn't publish his great works during the decade but they were all set during the decade. So in the sense it was an extension of that decade when O'Casey's works were published and performed. So his achievement was very considerable and his three great plays, it seems to me, they have to be viewed along with the play by the Western World as the indispensable classics of 20th century Irish drama and they are still played in Ireland to great enthusiasm. Now although the plays are normally referred to as his Dublin plays, as I said earlier, I tend to think of them as his history plays. And this is because they deal with the three formative events of Irish history, Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. There are no three events in 20th century Irish history more important than those three events. And O'Casey's plays, I mean it's not like, I mean okay you could say that WB8's the Eastern 1916 is about the Easter Rising, 1919 I suppose is about the War of Independence and meditation in the time of the Civil War is about the Civil War. But there was just part of a much more extensive yetian output in those years. But here you have three plays that are absolutely focused on those three great events in Irish history. So O'Casey's three plays cannot be divorced in my view from the real events they depict. As his biographer has put it, Irish history underpinned O'Casey's dramaturgy. But of course the important thing is that to O'Casey and to Yates these events were not history, they were current affairs, they were things, they were events that they experienced. But I think the difference between O'Casey and Yates and Joyce was that O'Casey's was a passionate observer of these events with a personal and political conviction with regard to the events he was dramatising. This I think distinguishes him from Joyce and even from Yates, both of whom tended to cast the colder eye on contemporary political developments. Sorry, O'Casey was more actively, far more actively engaged with the main currents of nationalist Ireland during these years than either Yates or Joyce. By the time 1916 came around, Yates was more or less a disillusioned romantic nationalist who had sort of lost his enthusiasm and it was rekindled by the Easter Rising sort of disillusionment set in again in the 1920s. But O'Casey lived in Ireland throughout these years whereas Joyce was in exile throughout this period and Yates was a perennial migrant between Britain and Ireland. The other point I would make is that while Yates was a writer who became involved in various national movements during the 1890s and these movements did influence his writing, I think in the case of O'Casey, political involvement or activism preceded and fired his creative writing. His life was shaped, it seems to me, by his engagement in the various movements that provided inspiration for Ireland's independent struggle, the Gaelic League, the Irish Republic and Brotherhood, the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. I mean, you know, if you had to pick out the great movements of early 20th century Ireland, those were the ones. The only one he wasn't involved in and this is an important point was the Irish Volunteers. He had a negative and hostile appreciation of the volunteers and that really, in a way, also shaped his work. But the other four movements, the Gaelic League devoted to reviving the Irish language, the Irish Republic and Brotherhood, Secret Society devoted to creating an Irish Republic which eventually orchestrated the Easter Rising in 1916 and the Gaelic Athletic Association, still today one of the pillars of Irish national identity and an extraordinary movement whose achievements I think should not be underrated. So in the early years of the 20th century, O'Casey threw himself into learning the Irish language and he became a dedicated member of the Gaelic League. Let me just tell you that O'Casey was, in a way, at the beginning of the 20th century, in a way he was a product of the zeitgeist of that time in Ireland, this Irish Ireland identity which O'Casey had, I think, along with the people who were involved in the Easter Rising and in the subsequent stages of the Irish Revolution. So in his early writings, O'Casey, just like the others, like D.P. Moran and William Rooney and Yates in the 1890s, he made extravagant claims about Ireland's future. I'll just give you one quote that will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. He said at one stage, Ireland never will be a slave to commercialism. Her glens and valleys will never be furnace-burned. In her language, national and dramatic revival, she has turned her back on Mamon. Now, those of you who know Irish history will probably be able to detect in that the same strain that 40 years later, 30 years later, it comes out in Devil Air's famous speech on St Patrick's Day in 1943, when she saw Ireland as the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, who were satisfied with frugal comfort. This is, O'Casey, whatever it is, that period, it's 1930, and Devil Air, 30 years later, the same ideas. And if you read through early 20th century Irish writers into intellectuals, they all had the same being there. Ireland was a special place. Yates, I can quote from one of his things in the 1890s. Ireland is one of the seven ffountains in the garden of the world's imagination, you know? But they were, again, they were products of their time because this was something you could probably find in various parts of Europe as well, extravagant claims for the uniqueness of individual national identities. So, at this point, I think, O'Casey considered that his trade union convictions and his Gaelic aspirations could be combined and reconciled. And the rest of his life in Ireland was, I suppose, sort of a sad discovery, that reconciliation between the Gaelic and the labour strands of his identity could not be achieved as readily as he might have imagined in the first decade or so of the 20th century. So his passion for the Irish language drew him into political and, you know, revolutionary activity. And he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. But, however, I think his fundamental involvement that shaped his work and his life was his involvement in the Irish Labour movement. And I actually would see the three plays as a labour history of the Irish Revolution. That's how I would depict them. So he was involved in the lock-out of 1913, but perhaps the defining moment in O'Casey's life, I've already referred to this obliquely, was when in 1914 he resigned from the Citizen Army on account of a dispute. He had a dispute, and the dispute was essentially about his disdain for the Irish volunteers. So he left the Irish Citizen Army because the Citizen Army brought Constance Markiewicz onto the board of the Citizen Army, and O'Casey thought that this was fundamentally a mistake. And he didn't, of course, Markiewicz was the one later mythologised by WB8 in Cool Park in Balli Lea, you know, the two girls won a gazelle and all that. But for O'Casey it wasn't that she was an Anglo-Irish princess that bothered him. It was the fact that she was coming into the Citizen Army from the Irish volunteers, and therefore he considered her as somebody who didn't belong in the Irish Citizen Army, because his view was that Irish workers should not be seduced into joining the volunteers because he regarded the Irish volunteers as a bourgeois movement, and he said that because that movement will always oppose national aspirations that may be opposite to their monetary and commercial interests. So he saw the Irish volunteers as essentially full of people who had taken a position against the workers in the Dublin lockout of 1913. So in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, which O'Casey didn't take part in, although he had been a founding member of the Citizen Army, he'd left the Citizen Army by the time the Rising broke out. He published a pamphlet in 1917 on Thomas Ash, and O'Casey regarded Ash as, quote, a true Republican and a firm and convinced advocate of the rights of Labour. So it was what appealed to him about Ash, was that Ash combined the Republicanism and the Labour identity. O'Casey, I think, began to challenge the conventional view of the Easter Rising at an early date. In his history of the Irish Citizen Army, published in 1919, he was critical of James Connolly for making, quote, the high creed of Irish nationalism his daily rosary while going silent on, quote, the higher creed of international humanity, end quote. Thus he said Irish Labour had lost a leader. Now at this stage, O'Casey had not given up on the Sinn Fein movement because he believed that, quote, he had tinged the Sinn Fein movement with a brighter colour, end quote, and thus strengthened it. He felt that the Irish Labour movement was fundamentally democratic, but far from being national. And he urged Irish Labour leaders to become Irish if they wished to win the confidence and support of the Irish working class. So at a very early stage, he realised that the tide of history was moving in the direction of an Irish national consciousness that would sweep all before it. And he felt that the Labour movement needed to, which he was a devoted member of, needed to become an integral part of that and therefore that Irish Labour leaders needed to become more thoroughly Irish because he felt that the Irish Labour movement was a little bit like a pale reflection of the English trade union movement. Now I think the shadow of a gunman represents a further evolution of O'Casey's reflections on Irish, on Ireland's revolution. It's set during the War of Independence. And as with the other two great plays, it takes place in a tenement house in one of the poorer quarters of Dublin. The play's characters are the inhabitants of the tenement. They include Seamus Shields and Donald Davern. Now Shields and Davern seem to me to be two kind of figures that represent two particular strands in early 20th century Irish life. Davern is the romantic poet who could he almost be Yates, I think. He's sort of this kind of dreamy romantic poet and his views on poetry read very much like those of Yates. I quote, to the poet, the end of life is the life that he creates for himself, which is a great quote and that could easily have been said by WB Yates. And then Seamus represents a more kind of cynical brand of nationalism. He's a very devout Catholic and he believes that the country has gone mad. As he puts it, quote, petrol is their holy water. Their mass is a burning building. Their creed is, I believe, I believe in the gun almighty maker of heaven and earth. By the way, that parody also comes up in Ulysses with, I believe in Robert Scourger. This is a parody of the creed. Seamus believes in the freedom of Ireland, but he draws a line when he hears, quote, the gunmen blown about dying for the people when it's the people that are dying for the gunmen. So he has this kind of cynical attitude towards the whole revolutionary struggle. As in all of O'Casey's plays, the dialogue between the characters is lively. And when I was in Munster, when I ran out of text after I'd used up my notes, I just went through the play and read it and it's fantastic. The plays are hilarious. The language reminds me of Ulysses, by the way. I'll just give you an example here now. The dialogue reminds me of the dialogue in Joyce's Ulysses. For example, Mr Henderson describes Mr Gallagher as, quote, as dacent and honest and quiet a man as you meet in a day's walk. That reminds me of the quote from Ulysses, the dacentest little man that ever wore a hat. You have the same kind of reverend Dublin dialogue. Now, I'm not from Dublin, so I only heard this by... Actually, my grandfather was from Dublin. He was a little bit like that as well, so I think I probably have heard a little bit of this stuff. But that's the Dublin approach to life and flair for language that makes Ulysses such a great book is also to be found throughout these plays, actually. Anyway, in the shot of a gunman you've all read it, but it's, you know, Davern and Seamus, when they discover a bag of guns in their apartment and they accept the offer of a neighbour, Minnie, to keep the guns in her own apartment where to suppose the British soldiers will not conduct a search. The soldiers do conduct a search and Minnie is arrested and eventually killed. So it's a play where Davern plays up being a gunman because he says, what's the harm in being a shadow of a gunman? You know, I'm getting the reputation of being a gunman and therefore attracting this younger woman, Minnie, to him. And Minnie, of course, pays the penalty. She dies as a result of her innocent delusions while the cynical Seamus and the weak-willed dreamer, Davern, both come through. So there's a certain commentary there, I think, on the whole ethos of revolution. Now, I regard Juno and the Peacock as Ocasey's greatest achievement. Set in the Civil War is strong in terms of plot, character and language. And for me, Juno, a boy, is Ocasey's most powerfully drawn and most sympathetic character. And, of course, it's interesting that a lot of the women characters in Ocasey are actually extremely well drawn and sympathetic characters where a lot of the men tend to be, I'm afraid, guys near due wells, are people suffering from various forms of delusion and usually connected with a bravado and with having had a few too many drinks. So, I mean, I just love some of the lines. In fact, last year, I was invited to the English theatre in Berlin to do some readings, Marys de Ritw, and I read some of the quotes from Juno and the Peacock, and the German audience just loved it. And it's fantastic. It's so poetic, really, the whole. I mean, the language is poetic while at the same time being down-to-earth and humorous. I mean, for example, I'd love the line where Juno Boyle, the heroine of the play, where her daughter says, there's no God in my home, there's no God, because he wouldn't do these things to us if there was a God. And she says, these things have nothing to do with the will of God. What can God do again, the stupidity of men? And then this great line, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh, take away this murder and hate and give us that own eternal love. It's fantastic, and that's why I really think that Juno is the greatest Irish play of the 20th century. So anyway, Juno steps up, it seems to me, the critique of Revolutionary Ireland. It's dismissive of the cult of patriotic death. I mean, it's extraordinary that within years, really, of the events of Easter Rising and its aftermath, of independence, that O'Casey is already just questioning the whole idea of sacrifice, of the kind that was, even I remember, in 1966, when we were marking the 50th anniversary of Easter Rising, that cult of the sacrificial leaders of the Rising was really very strong, and we were sort of, I mean, they were the names that chilled, but that still in our childish play, to quote you into the different context. But Juno says, quote, it's nearly time we had a little less respect for the dead and a little more regard for the living, and that's the sort of essential critique that runs through Juno. And he extracts great comic relief from the inebriated fraudulent bravado of Captain Boyle and Jocker. Captain Boyle says, I done my bit in Easter week and it's quite clear from the rest of the play that he was probably nowhere near anything that involved any kind of sacrifice during Easter week, but he has this kind of pumped up sort of bravado when it comes to the memories of Easter week. And even, of course, the staunch trade unionist, Jerry Divine, comes out poorly when he abandons Mary when he discovers she's pregnant. And then, of course, you have Bentham, who's this teacher and theosophist. By the way, theosophy was a very popular new age religion in Ireland in the first 20 years of the 20th century. And Bentham also abandons Mary. Having father or child, he disappears when the money that's supposed to come to the Boyle family turns out not to be on the way at all. It's been a sort of a sad delusion that there's a lot of money coming from a cousin of Captain Boyle. By the way, he's not a captain. He simply had one or two short trips on a merchant vessel but managed to call himself captain throughout the rest of his life. Of course, the main theosophist, of course, in early 20th century Ireland was George Russell, another great figure and I think a supporter of Sean O'Casey's who published some of his work in the 1920s in the Irish statesman and indeed in the Irish homestead as well, where Joyce published his first short stories. Joyce, of course, being Joyce, I think referred to it as the pigs paper because it was a paper that was designed to appeal to people in rural Ireland who were members of rural cooperatives. Anyway, the final point I want to make is about the Plough and the Stars. This is where O'Casey gets around to grappling with the seminal event in modern Irish history at Easter Rising in 1916. As one of O'Casey's biographers puts it, the writing shaped his imagination. It helped to make him into a great playwright. Although O'Casey was one of the founders of the Citizen Army, he didn't fight in 1916. This play is set in November 1915 and during Easter week. Someone else has said that by missing out on direct involvement in the Rising quote, O'Casey failed in the world of action and turned aside to justify himself in the world of art end quote. I'm not sure, but it's an interesting quote at least from a North American scholar who wrote the imagination of an insurrection in the 1970s, 60s. The Plough and the Stars is the most politically strident of O'Casey's history plays. This is because it was the last of the plays to be written and by the time of its composition, O'Casey had become a firm critic of the Irish Revolution. He had fallen out with those who had brought this independent Ireland into being. He wrote quote, they have turned Ireland into a huge crystal ball in which they see visions and over which they dream dreams. Passionate Irish speaker himself in the 1920s, he was sharply attacking the idea of compulsory Irish in schools arguing that the attachment to the Irish language by political leaders was quote, fancy fraud and a gigantic sham end quote. As with O'Casey's earlier plays, the occupants of the tenement are the main characters and the play has many elements characteristic of O'Casey's work. Vivid characters, animated dialogue and the homespun philosopher in Flute or Good after a few drinks observes, I think we ought to have as greater regard for religion as we can so as to keep it out of as many things as possible. So that's Flute or his kind of homespun philosophy of a kind you get in Ulysses as well and throughout O'Casey's plays it seems to me. The Covey who's a sort of a dedicated socialist expresses something of O'Casey's own beliefs I would imagine when he insisted he does not want the workers flag, the Plough and the Stars to be associated with the national struggle because quote, it's a labour flag and was never meant for politics. It's a flag that should only be used when we're building the barricades to fight for a workers republic end quote. So whereas Yates moulds over the rising heroic dimension, the terrible beauty that changed everything, O'Casey's take on events in 1916 is quite different. I would say it's mock heroic. I would say it's a mock heroic play. It's full of mock heroism and you have a deliberately anti-heroic figure like Rosie Redman who's a prostitute who dismisses the fight for freedom quote, a freedom that wouldn't be worth winning in a raffle end quote. She finds it heartbreaking that young fellas are thinking of anything or admiring anything but silk transparent stockings shone off the shape of a little lassie's leg. So that's her kind of dismissive attitude towards revolutionary struggle. Nor a clear the row, another strong woman character who tries to prevent her husband from taking part in the rising, she talks about me who risked more for love than they would risk for hate. That's her attitude that she's sort of devoted to. A bit like Leopold Bloom, you know, and love is, you know, the opposite of hate is love. So the plough with its irreverent take on the Easter Rising caused trouble in the Abbey Theatre with Morgan and Hannah Shea Skeffington, whom, ironically, they led the charge against the plough. And ironically, of course, Sean O'Casey had lionized Hannah Shea Skeffington's husband, a late husband who was killed during 1916 as, you know, the great lost labour leader, a connolly was the, you know, was the lost leader and that Skeffington was the real deal when it came to having the potential to be a great leader of Ireland. Now Yates, of course, jumped to O'Casey's defence and his artistic hot air found common ground with O'Casey's acerbic revisionism. So my final point is that O'Casey was a revisionist, was one of the first revisionists when it came to Irish history. You could say that he was the first revisionist. I mean, in Yates, there is a sort of a hint of this. For example, in East Ireland 16, where he says, was it a useless death after all for England, may keep faith for all that is done and said, he sort of had this ambivalence. But essentially Yates' poem about Easter Rising is a heroic poem with a sort of a tinge of ambivalence built into it. But in O'Casey's case, I think you could say he was a third-going revisionist when it came to the Irish Revolution. I mean, the plough makes use of a well-known speech by Patrick Pierce in order to allow the Covey to say, the only war that is worth fighting is the war for economic emancipation. And if I'm right that the Covey is a kind of a version of a character representing the early O'Casey, then it's an interesting comment by the Covey. Now, two further points I want to make. First of all, it's not surprising really that O'Casey's depiction of the Rising caused offence. After all, the plough was performed a decade, the decade after the events that it depicted, and only a few years after the state came into being. So in most countries in the world, newly independent countries, the leaderships are very sensitive and not really that keen on criticism for good reason. They're trying to stabilise and bed down the state, and in this case, of course, there was a threat of insurrection against the state from those who had lost the Civil War. So it seems to me that although the plough was opposed, it did not prevent it from running in what was Ireland's National Theatre and from being revived repeatedly in the years that followed. It seems to me that it was not surprising that the plough met a resistance, but it was a good thing that we did have a contrarian view of Ireland's revolutionary period at this early stage, because I think that the contrarian view of O'Casey and of Yates, and Sean O'Fwellon later on, and Paddor O'Donnell and others, who kind of, if you like, took on the state and tried to act as a corrective to what otherwise could have been somewhat more... Well, I think that there was a sort of a nationalistic, a monolithic nationalistic view of the world, and this is entirely understandable in the early 1920s and indeed into the 30s and 40s. There was a new state, and there was a certain kind of orthodoxy which was developed very quickly, very early on, and it seems to me that it was good for us as a nation that we had an alternative view, even if it wasn't listened to or was criticised and was censored in many cases. I think it was good that we had this contrarian view on the part of a number of distinguished writers who wrote brilliantly and who didn't accept the mainstream view of things and, in the case of O'Casey, challenged the entire ethos that underpinned the revolutionary movement. So how do I therefore assess O'Casey's analysis, which is effectively that Connolly took the Labour movement and brought it astray and that the Citizen Army became a sort of an underling to the kind of Irish volunteers and the IRB view of the world? Well, I would say that I would go back to O'Casey's interim thesis in the history of the Irish Citizen Army, where he said that the involvement in Easter Week did make a difference. The involvement of the Citizen Army in Easter Week did make a difference. I can recall the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising that the actual image of Connolly, as one of the leaders of the Rising, did soften somewhat the kind of Gaelic-Catholic narrative that was the prevailing orthodoxy in the Irish state at that time. And looking back, it seems to me that the one thing we can be very proud of is that Ireland avoided the temptations of atavistic nationalism in our state. And, for example, the terminal event to me in independent Ireland was the handover of power in 1932 from the victors in the Civil War to those who had lost. And the peaceful transfer of power and the avoidance of popular right-wing ideologies that took root in continental Europe during the 1930s. I mean, there was a sort of an attempt at a fascist movement in Ireland, but it lasted only a very short time and ran out of steam very, very quickly. And I think we can sort of attribute that success in avoiding that kind of right-wing ubernationalistic populism to the influence of the kind of memory of Connolly and others who were on that sort of, that side of the equation, if you like, in 1922. And it seems to me that, with his three great plays, O' Casey reshaped the drama of history, the drama of Irish history, into a compelling critique of the Irish Revolution, which was a good thing that we had in the early years of independence, it seems to me. Thank you very much.