Why not a loyalist woman as the symbol of the ‘new Ireland’? Why not Bessie Burgess?

I was in Galway last month to see the brilliant production by the Druid theatre company of Sean O’Casey’s classic play set during the 1916 Rising: The Plough and the Stars. This is the tragic story of Jack Clitheroe, who abandons his young wife Nora to fight with the Irish Citizen Army: he is killed and she goes mad with grief. But it is also a fabulous comedy performed by the inhabitants of a poverty-stricken Dublin tenement, led by a raucous, drunken carpenter, Fluther Good, and a loyalist street fruit-vendor, Bessie Burgess.

This is a pacifist and socialist play in its portrayal of the pointlessness of nationalist violence and the effects of that violence on poor people. The author of the definitive O’Casey biography, Christopher Murray, says that without a doubt it is his greatest play. “It is the one with the greatest intensity, the one which most ambitiously addresses the human comedy at the point where violent public events suddenly transform it into tragedy.” It is no coincidence that it has been performed all over the world, in dozens of languages.

Born a Protestant, O’Casey was formerly a fierce nationalist: a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic League and secretary of the workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army. But the great Dublin lock-out of 1913, led by Jim Larkin, convinced him that that the cause of labour took precedence over the cause of Irish freedom, and he was bitterly critical of Larkin’s successor, James Connolly, for bringing the Citizen Army out to fight alongside Padraic Pearse’s rump Irish Volunteers in Easter Week 1916. O’Casey believed that (in Professor Murray’s words) the Rising was “the root of a succession of wars and acts of terror succeeded by the civil war of 1922-23” I would add that the succession continued into the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ of 1968-1998. He also believed – and wasn’t he right? – that it laid the foundations for the conservative, bourgeois Free State six years later.

In Galway, for the first time (and I must have seen The Plough and the Stars three or four times), I was struck by a new thought: the centrality to the play (along with Nora Clitheroe and Fluther Good) of the working-class Protestant woman, Bessie Burgess (beautifully played by Hilda Fay). She is an unashamed loyalist, singing ‘Rule Britannia’, bemoaning her soldier son coming back from the Western Front with a shattered arm, and taunting the women of the house for “cuddlin their boys into th’ sheddin’ of blood. Fillin’ their minds with fairy tales that had no beginnin’, but, please God, ‘ll have a bloody quick endin’!

In the end she is one of the few heroes of the piece (albeit a flawed, human hero). She dies courageously, after being shot trying to pull Nora away from a dangerously exposed window. But she also shows generosity, tenderness and extraordinary love and kindness (as well as being an aggressive harridan when she’s roused). She is the one who gives the dying consumptive girl Mollser a mug of milk. She mothers, nurses and protects Nora, taking her into her own cramped apartment when the young deserted wife is on the verge of madness.

So here is my unlikely proposal. Bessie Burgess should be held up as a symbol for the ‘new Ireland’: a Protestant loyalist woman who embodies the heroic values of courage, fortitude and kindness that we will badly need if we are going to forge a harmonious and peaceful Ireland in the years ahead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful and amazing if the ‘new Ireland’ were to have a unionist woman as one of its symbolic figures? There could be a Bessie Burgess stamp and a Bessie Burgess festival. And a Bessie Burgess playwriting competition: is it totally outlandish to suggest that one of our talented young woman playwrights might even write a play around a Belfast Protestant version of Betty who might represent a vision of reconciliation in Northern Ireland and Ireland? I can think of a few possible models: the Shankill Road community worker, the late May Blood; the East Belfast Irish language activist, Linda Ervine; or even that great, pro-Irish moderating force on her extremist husband, Eileen Paisley.

Because the ‘new Ireland’ will need some new reconciling symbols if any element of Ulster unionism is going to feel any smidgen of loyalty to it. Some traditional symbols are clearly too embedded in Irish nationalist iconography to be changed. The tricolour, with its white ‘peace line’ between the Green and the Orange, has come to be seen as an entirely hostile banner by most unionists because of its expropriation by the IRA. However, very few people in the present Republic will be prepared to give it up.

But what about pledging a referendum to insert into the Irish Constitution a clause recognising the loyalty to the British monarchy of a significant minority of people on the island? Will Irish people be prepared to make such a generous gesture of inclusion to the monarchy-loving unionists – to make the ‘new Ireland’ a tiny bit more British in order to make it a warmer house for them? Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy understands the need for this. He wrote last month: “The question of a new united Ireland that is, in order to reflect and accommodate the allegiances of Northern Ireland’s unionist/loyalist community, a bit more British than the current Republic is, you might think, an important part of any discussion about that subject. But it is one that many enthusiasts for national reunification with the fourth green field seem unwilling to contemplate.”¹

And what about adopting the unifying rugby anthem, ‘Ireland’s Call’, as our national song, given that it is already sung enthusiastically by followers of that all-island game from the Protestant and unionist North? It’s an artless little jingle, but even so, it’s surely more appropriate to our times than the militaristic early 20th century dirge that we all sing at the moment.

Here’s a better idea. Let’s have an all-Ireland competition to compose a new anthem alongside the Betty Burgess playwriting contest. Let’s encourage writers and composers to look to the anthems of some of the other small European republics which are the same vintage as ourselves, countries like the Czech Republic and Finland. The Czech anthem is full of lines glorying in the peace and beauty of its countryside: “Midst the rocks sigh fragrant pine groves/Orchards decked in spring’s array/Scenes of paradise display.”

The Finns proclaim: “No hidden vale, no wavewashed strand/is loved, as is our native North/Our own forefathers’ earth.” In sharp contrast, what do we in Ireland have to offer in the third decade of the 21st century, with bloody war again in the East and climate catastrophe threatening the marvellous planet that is our common home? “Mid cannon’s roar and rifle’s peal/We’ll chant a soldier’s song”, we sing mindlessly (me along with everyone else) in Croke Park and the Aviva. It’s not as though those two countries haven’t also suffered from war and oppression: shortly after independence in 1918, Finland went through a horrific six-month civil war in which 36,000 people were killed (1,600 died in our equivalent); and what was then Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis and later invaded by the Soviet Union.

What I’m proposing is that the leaders and people of the Republic should make a couple of large, unilateral gestures of welcome and generosity to the beleaguered unionist people of the North to begin to show that we really want them as part of a new all-Ireland polity and society. We should not leave such gestures to be part of the hard-nosed negotiations that will inevitably have to accompany an eventual Border Poll, but offer them some open-hearted assurance in the near future that they need have no fear of joining with us to build that new society on the island.

My friend Frank Schnittger believes such gestures would be pointless, not impressing the unionists and giving the unfortunate impression that we want to return to becoming more like Britain (and the kind of old-fashioned, imperialist Britain that too many unionists hanker after).² He may be right about the first point, although I hope not – I believe a small but increasing number of people of Ulster unionist stock are beginning to look at closer relations with the confident, prosperous Republic with new eyes since Brexit. They are already impressed by the practical, mutually beneficial cross-border projects set in motion by Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative.

He is certainly not right about the second. Trying to understand and accommodate unionists in order to help them move towards a peaceful, harmonious future in Ireland does not have to dilute our Irishness in any way. My wise friend, Bob Collins, who knows Northern Ireland well from his time as head of the Equality Commission there, put it well at a British-Irish Association conference a few years ago.  “For those nationalists in the Republic (and not everyone in the Republic is a 32 county nationalist) who desire a united Ireland, the first step on any road that may conceivably lead to the achievement of their goal is to get to know unionists, to come to understand their Britishness, to recognise and value their traditions and, gradually, to seek to persuade them, by their words and by their deeds, that they have in mind a future democracy that would respect and protect Britishness with the same fervour and commitment as they would respect and protect Irishness. That is not the work of a referendum campaign, nor of five years leading up to a referendum. It is the work of at least a generation. And that is only the beginning. Not to realise that is not to want a united Ireland that would be worth having.”

DruidO’Casey will be performed at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast from 5 – 19 August 2023. Book tickets here…

¹ ‘A united Ireland would have to be a bit more British’, Irish Times, 15 July

² Recent Comment on blog: ‘A United Ireland will have to include unionists – so let’s get on with the difficult task of including them’, 16 January 2023