Redemption - Leon Uris [73]
Their first child, Theobald, was followed in eighteen months by Rachael. They were the “royal” republican family.
Ireland would never be at a loss of an issue to contend so long as a British soldier remained on her soil. The caseload for Desmond was full, but legal fees for republican causes were scarce to nonexistent. However, Des seemed oblivious of the necessity to collect them. It was up to Atty’s acting and inherited income to keep the family larder full.
In those days he worked desperately to keep the Irish Party from going under after the crucifixion of Charles Stewart Parnell by political enemies, aided full-out by the Irish bishops. Parnell had the temerity to live with and have children by his beloved, Kitty O’She a, who was unable to divorce her perfidious husband.
He continued to struggle for an Irish Home Rule bill that would liberate the country, even partly. Des was one of the forces behind the Irish Party’s boycott of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
* * *
The Irish affront to the old queen, who still slept under the painting of her late husband and had his clothing laid out thirty-five years after his death, should have sounded a sobering note in England. The message was apparent. England’s first colony was neither integrated nor pacified after more than three centuries of occupation, hundreds of subversion laws, forced acts of union with the home island, a famine, and harsh measures reserved solely for the Irish.
Far from Ireland another, greater warning shot was fired, in the Transvaal of South Africa. Cecil Rhodes was the epitome of imperial man. In a bald-faced snatch at the Transvaal’s gold fields, he tried to incorporate two territories inhabited by Dutch Boers into a now-accepted “union” with Great Britain. It was resisted by Boer arms.
The British woke up to the realization that they had not engaged a modern army in nearly a century, since Napoleon, and were compelled to call in units from all over the empire until they had amassed a half-million men.
Although the Boer field army was a fraction of the size of the British force, their hit-and-run and ambush tactics compelled Lord Kitchener to subdue them in a most brutal manner, applying scorched earth tactics. He ordered massive numbers of Boers, mostly women and children, into what he termed “concentration camps,” where conditions were so deplorable that tens of thousands died of hunger and disease.
In Ireland, the plight of the Boers brought on vivid memories of the potato famine. In Dublin, Atty Fitzpatrick headed the country’s anti-British Transvaal Committee.
Although fine old Irish imperial brigades fought for the Crown, there were the usual bond of Irish volunteers on the other side.
Atty’s journalist pal Seamus O’Neill went to the Transvaal, writing for a world press association of Irish weeklies and magazines. He gained great note when he exposed the horrors of the Bloomfontein concentration camp.
Then Atty got unexpected news when another pregnancy announced itself. She would be one hip short to juggle her family on. Theo and Rachael carried placards as soon as they were able to walk, and their first words were not of Ma and Dad, but of Irish martyrs. It had worked well enough until Emma made her appearance.
Three wanes notwithstanding, it was not time for Atty to slow down because the Gaelic revival was in full bloom, having the new cause of the Boers to espouse. Words, the most dynamic, penetrating, sarcastic, and damning of all Irish weapons, rained from her stages, leapt from her occasional columns and from the speakers’ stands in torch-lit rallies.
As the British added the Transvaal to their empire, returning Irishmen reignited Ireland’s own struggle with the British.
A journalist named Arthur Griffith formed a new and aggressive political party called Sinn Fein, meaning “Ourselves Alone,” a first political step in disclaiming the inept Irish Party. They made their rallying cry, “HOME RULE!”
Desmond Fitzpatrick and the legal battle had been the first prong of the Irish assault. Arthur Griffith and the Sinn Fein Party