After Robert Hugh Benson terrified readers with his 1907 dystopian novel Lord of the World, he offered a more optimistic vision of the future in Dawn of All (1911). In Benson's daydream, Ireland gains independence, but emigration leaves the island the sole possession of the clergy and Ireland becomes one enormous monastic enclosure. Ireland's real social life moves to her colonies, especially Australia, which is now entirely Irish and Catholic. In his first book, My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home, the National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty is another Irishman in exile. As Dougherty contemplates the ideals of the 1916 Easter Rising, he writes letters to the Irish father who would not rise to raise him.
Dougherty is inspired not by Benson's English fantasy, but by the Gaelic revival of the late nineteenth century and the movement's nationalist poet Patrick Pearse. During the Easter Rising, Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic: “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” Looking forward a century, Pearse imagined Ireland in 2005. He hoped to drain the swamp—literally—by drying the bogs and warming the island, along with restoring the Irish language. Dougherty's mother, raising him alone in America, spent her scarce time and money on language classes for her son to maintain a linguistic link with home, even humbling herself to request Irish-language books from his estranged father. As a married man, Dougherty resumes his study, sacrificing a new father's most precious resource—sleep—to add nightly a few more words to his Irish vocabulary.
As a personal act of filial piety, this is admirable, and the importance of a language set apart for a particular people and purpose is also obvious for the Catholic Church, whose use of Latin in her liturgy is a mark of her antiquity and endurance. But among the Irish diaspora, the late Australian poet Les Murray's shrug at Sydney's 1798 Irish Rebellion monument in “A Walk with O'Connor” is the more common experience:
At Waverley, where the gravestones stop at the brink,
murmuring words, to the rebel's tomb we went,
an exile's barrow of Erin-go-bragh and pride
in grey-green cement:
we examined the harps, the hounds, the lists of the brave
and, reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried
to guess what it meant
then, drifting away,
translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby
in our discontent.
Murray is describing a waypoint on “the Quest that summons all men.” After being “raised in a way that seemed to make [him] an ex-Catholic,” Dougherty, too, eventually found his way back to his Catholic faith. With its personal but not self-absorbed style, Dougherty's story is a worthy companion to Sohrab Ahmari's recent spiritual memoir From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (2019). It is also reminiscent of Carlos Eire's modern classic Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2004).
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