'Grace' and the gunman's wife
The reimagining of Grace Gifford served to soothe republicans caught between cause and kin
‘Grace’ is a piece of music that is sometimes described with a wink and a nod as an ‘old Irish love song’. While ‘old’ is simply incorrect, it is not untrue that it is a love song. (For those who don’t know it, here’s the canonical version from Jim McCann.) The song gets a lot of exaggerated praise: as with many love songs, a great performance can be genuinely stunning, but equally a bad performance can leave you cringing. The only difference in quality between it and a hundred and one other love songs is that, if you grew up in the place and community I did, you have heard many different renditions of ‘Grace’ by many different performers, so you are more likely to have heard a great performance at some point.
The reason it’s performed so often is the same reason that people who call ‘Grace’ a love song do so with a wink and a nod. It’s more informative to say that ‘Grace’ is a rebel song—that is, a song romanticising physical-force Irish republicans.1 It tells the story of the marriage of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford, which took place in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol mere hours before Plunkett was executed. Plunkett was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and was sentenced to death for his role in the militarily-abortive but (as it would turn out) culturally-decisive rebellion of Easter 1916.
Plunkett was tried and executed within less than a week of his military defeat, and the couple spent all of ten minutes together in their married life. The story has undeniable emotional power, and the songwriters understood its potential. The chorus, which soars far above the rather prosaic verses (it can be challenging to sing if your range isn’t great, and you need confidence to pull it off), puts all its emphasis on the temporary and fragile nature of the marriage.
Oh Grace, just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger,
They’ll take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love for we must say goodbye.
Gifford and Plunkett were both only 28, members of Ireland’s ‘revolutionary generation’: the educated, urban young people who came of age into the political vacuum that followed the sudden fall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland’s ‘uncrowned king’. When you look back at photos, you can see the youth in Gifford’s face in particular (Plunkett’s health troubles prematurely aged him). It adds to the story’s power.
In Vivid Faces, his study of Plunkett and Gifford’s cohort, the historian Roy Foster observes an interesting tension. While the early phase of the Irish Revolution was largely guided by ideologues2 who were urbane, young, and often wealthy (Plunkett’s family in particular was very well-off), the fighting that decided the revolution’s outcome from 1919 to 1923 was carried out by a very different group altogether. This second group, who came to make up most of the mass of IRA fighters, were young (to be sure), but also rural, less well-educated, and less ideologically modern.
In being split like this, Ireland’s revolution is not unique: figures like the Abbé Sieyès or the Marquis de Condorcet or Georges Danton were hardly sans-culottes. Yet the split does create a difficulty, because Ireland (like many other countries) wants to tell a story of a revolution propelled forward by a unified democratic will, rising up from the people.3 As such, she can remember her elite revolutionary ideologues only with difficulty and distortions. It’s those distortions that I find most interesting in ‘Grace’.
The second verse of the song has Plunkett addressing his new wife:
Now I know it’s hard for you, my love, to ever understand
The love I bear for these brave men, my love for this dear land.
But when Pádraig4 called me to his side down in the GPO
I had to leave my own sick bed, to him I had to go.
The trope is relatively familiar: the loving but concerned wife, who cannot fully understand her husband’s fervour for a cause, and his need to try to reassure her. It fits what we expect the lover of a freedom fighter to be like; it fits the trope. But it does not fit Gifford, not at all.
Gifford’s story is fascinating: her parents were middle-class Rathmines unionists, yet she and three of her raised-Protestant sisters became prominent republicans and revolutionaries. They figured as symbols of the new generation; William Orpen’s 1907 portrait of Grace was simply titled ‘Young Ireland’. Grace’s sister Muriel also married an IRB leader, Thomas MacDonagh—although that marriage lasted a little longer (just over four years) before MacDonagh also faced the firing squad in 1916. Grace herself would do time in Kilmainham Gaol during the Irish Civil War, although unlike her husband she was not executed and lived until 1955.5 In the pre-revolutionary period Grace and her sisters encouraged each other’s radicalism and their mutual alienation from their family, with support also coming from other republican connections like Muriel’s husband and—indeed—Grace’s then-fiancé, Joseph Plunkett.
The couple’s letters to each other are now in the public domain. They show genuine and heartfelt love, but also ideological alignment on the republican cause. I am fascinated by one of Plunkett’s last letters to Gifford, sent on Holy Saturday 1916, two days before the rebellion began.
My Darling Sweetheart,
I got your dear letter by luck as I was going out at 9 this morning and have not a minute to collect my thoughts since now 2.45 p.m. I am writing this at above address. Here is a little gun that should only be used to protect yourself. To fire it push up the small bar under the word ‘Safe’ and pull the trigger—but not unless you mean to shoot. Here is some money for you too and all my love forever.
Xxxxxxxxxxxx Joe xxx
Two themes call out to me in this letter, every time I read it. The first is youth—not only Gifford’s youth and immaturity (although that is obvious in the way the instructions for using the gun are given) but Plunkett’s also. The mass of kisses, the address, the rapid writing style: this is young love. The second theme, that hits you like a tonne of bricks once you get past the layer of youth, is the casualness of revolutionary violence. Gifford receives a gun by post, with very brief instructions, with total disregard on Plunkett’s part for the weight of presenting such a violent instrument. Plunkett and Gifford both take for granted that violence is coming, yet there is no hint of fear.
Of course, the youthful love and the ideological violence were not actually in tension for Plunkett or Gifford: they reinforced each other. The letter is a window into the world of the revolutionary generation, whose youthful radicalism paved the way for Irish independence.
But it is crucial that both Gifford and Plunkett were members of this generation, of the cohort that Patrick Pearse spoke about in his famous graveside oration for O’Donovan Rossa: the ‘new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme.’ In 1916, Pearse summoned Plunkett to his side alongside Cú Chulainn, whereas Gifford did not fight. But she was no less committed, no less ideological, and (indeed) no less interesting than her husband. It is, if anything, quite offensive to her memory to pretend that she could not even understand her husband’s ‘love for this dear land’.
So why does ‘Grace’ reposition her, transform her into a trope? Well, I cannot claim any insight into the minds of the O’Meara brothers who wrote the song in 1985. I think it’s not unlikely that they were motivated by sheer disregard for female historical figures, a simple lack of interest in Gifford’s life outside of her role as Plunkett’s beloved. But I do have a suggestion as to why this portrayal of Gifford ‘stuck’, why a song that refigured her and Plunkett’s relationship in this way became so powerful and so well-known in the 1980s.
See, the Northern Irish Troubles started in the late 1960s, and the Provisional IRA was founded in 1969, with their membership spiking in the early 1970s. The Provos recruited largely from working-class Catholic communities, and overwhelmingly recruited young men: the mean age of recruits between 1969 and 1976 was just over 22, and the median recruit was under 20.6 In 1972, the Provisional IRA’s delegation to meet NI Secretary Willie Whitelaw for secret talks in London (an important leadership task if ever there was one) included Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, both in their early twenties—McGuiness was younger then than I am now.
But as the ‘long war’ continued, the IRA’s membership aged. Of course, recruitment continued after the early 1970s, but it slowed significantly, and (indeed) Provisionals who joined in later periods were generally recruited at an older age.7 The result was that, by the mid-1980s, men in their mid- or even late 30s were present at all levels of the IRA. Many had gotten married, and many who were already married at time of recruitment had gotten more serious about it. Children were regularly being born to IRA men.
And this created a problem, both individually for those men and for the IRA as a whole. Family dynamics create pressures and obligations that exert a strong gravitational pull. This goes for ordinary people, but it goes doubly for terrorists. No doubt many of these men found themselves with wives who genuinely could not understand their dangerous, violent patriotism. And many others had wives who did understand it, even sympathised with it, but looked with fear on the possibility of years spent without a husband—children raised without a father—if death or imprisonment were to arrive. And that fear could well have rattled around the gunmen’s heads too.
There’s a story, the truth of which I cannot confirm (although the Atlantic reported it), but which I love too much not to mention here. It’s about Yasser Arafat’s plan to shut down Black September, the elite terrorist unit within the PLO who (inter alia) carried out the Munich massacre. The PLO leadership knew that directly ordering Black September to stand down would only cause them to cut their ties from the rest of the PLO and go rogue, so strong was their fervour and commitment to the cause. So instead, they aimed to give the terrorists ‘a reason to live rather than to die’. They invited Black September to a mixer with a hundred attractive young Palestinian women, and offered money, a job, and a Beirut apartment to any couple who got married and had kids. Within a couple of years, the Black September members were refusing to do even routine non-violent jobs overseas for the PLO, for fear of losing all that they held dear.
This was what success looked like for the PLO, when its goal was to stand down a terrorist cell. The goal of the 1980s IRA was very different, yet it faced a similar situation: too many men married with kids. This tension between family and cause is no small part of the story for why the IRA became less violent over time, why its attacks were fewer and less deadly when they happened, why ‘touts’ became more common.
Now, Plunkett and Gifford felt no such tension between family and cause; they had already rejected their respective parents, and found a new family in each other, wholly committed to the cause of the revolution. Their youth and ideological purity allowed them to synthesise love and nationalism. But many who had joined the Provisional IRA as angry young men in the late 1960s or early 1970s were facing that tension in the 1980s and even more so into the 1990s.
‘Grace’ refigured Plunkett into a role model for these men. Plunkett’s love for Gifford was true, so true that it motivated him to write mystic poetry, so true that committing to it was the last thing he did. Yet, as the song tells it, he put his country first. Fighting at Pearse’s side was for him a matter of practical necessity: he simply ‘had’ to go and fight, there was no other option, his love for Ireland was too strong and too beautiful.
‘Grace’ thus attributes to Plunkett the attitude that James Joyce (himself a heterodox and self-exiled member of Ireland’s revolutionary generation) put into the mouth of Davin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
[A] man’s country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.
Joyce might have added, ‘or a lover’.
This was not the attitude of the real-life Plunkett, or his real-life wife. For them there was no practical conflict between love, mysticism, and nationalism, and they therefore had no need to put one of them ‘first’. But by the 1980s, many Provos were subject to exactly this conflict; they had to choose what to prioritise. Into this context came ‘Grace’, a song that refigured Joseph Plunkett—already an Irish republican martyr—into a role model for men facing this difficulty: his wife could not understand the cause, and his love for her was true, yet he put Ireland first and died for his country.
This story was not true. But it didn’t need to be true to be a good enough story, both for the men who individually faced this problem and for the republican movement as a whole. Whether its writers intended it to or not, it filled a niche in the republican movement; and I think that has been a major part of its popularity.
This is why, if you don’t fancy the McCann version linked above, you can also listen to ‘Grace’ as performed by Celtic fans during a match against Rangers.
I use the word ‘ideologues’ with absolutely no derogatory intent or political snobbishness. I just mean that these young revolutionaries were driven primarily by sincere, deeply-held, somewhat systematic ideas.
As it happens, Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA are often able accommodate this aspect of Irish history into their historiography much better than anyone else, given their comfort with provisional democracy. This does not apply in this case, though, as discussed below.
There is absolutely no consistency in the spelling or indeed pronunciation of the Irish version of Patrick Pearse’s name, so don’t @ me.
If you go to Kilmainham today you can see, in the cell that Gifford was placed in, a recreation of a Madonna and Child that she painted directly on the walls of that cell.
Data from Paul Gill and John Horgan, ‘Who Were the Volunteers? The Shifting Sociological and Operational Profile of 1240 Provisional Irish Republican Army Members’, Terrorism and Political Violence 25.
Same source as note 6.