It’s remarkable how many schoolteachers, poets, philosophers, and playwrights took up the cause of Irish freedom in the years before the Rising and through the Irish Civil War. Among the best and brightest of their generation, many were fighting not just for political independence from England but for something much deeper and harder to quantify — a complete metaphysical restoration of the Irish psyche after colonialism.
Thomas Ashe was an exemplar of this type. A revolutionary idealist with first-hand experience of the privations of Irish rural life, it’s no wonder he made common cause with men like his close friend, playwright Sean O’Casey, who was equally versed in the hardships of urban living.
Born in the Co Kerry Gaeltacht, Ashe had been a schoolteacher, a member of the Gaelic League, and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. Watching his tenant farmer father deal with threatening landlords and agents during his childhood had a profound effect on him. Equally impactful were the terrifying accounts he heard from still-living witnesses in his hometown about the suffering endured during the Great Hunger.
Reading *I Die in a Good Cause*, originally published in 1970, connects us with the great national narrative that once electrified Ashe himself. Author O Luing, born only a few months before Ashe’s death in 1917, reminds us of the enduring power of that legacy.
Thomas Ashe was only 32 when he died, following a so-called botched force-feeding while on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison. Ashe and his fellow revolutionary inmates had insisted on being categorized as political prisoners. Their hunger strikes began in the hope of securing this recognition.
As so often in the story of the struggle for Irish independence, much of Ashe’s legacy now comes from the lingering questions about who he would have been and what part he might have played in the wider national story had his promise not been so cruelly cut short.
There is more than a hint of reverence in this clear-eyed but celebratory telling. As long as there is an Ireland, it’s a story that will not age — and a book that will never be out of print.
https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/thomas-ashe