A corollary of this dedication to Home Rule was Hearne’s rejection of Sinn Féin and its policies. He regarded them as impractical and unattainable – the advocacy of a republic, in particular, a delusion – when considered against the practicality and attainability of Home Rule which was on the statute book. Believing Sinn Féin’s revolutionary proposals and methods to be damaging to Irish national interests, he promoted the primacy of the constitutional agenda. However, he had no illusions about, and was very critical of, English policy towards Ireland and condemned the attitude of the government. He articulated the language that was already fully developed within the Home Rule movement and used during the crises of 1914 and 1916–18 against what was regarded as a succession of English betrayals. Like many advocates of Home Rule, he was steeped in the bellicosity of language, sense of victimhood, glorification of struggle, identification of the movement’s enemies and antipathy to England which suffused provincial nationalist orthodoxy.111 John Hearne thus revealed himself as a typically robust nationalist in the constitutional, Redmondite tradition.
His engagement in politics affords us also some insight into his personality. He showed himself to be more than able to involve himself in the rough and tumble of a very tempestuous election campaign. The particularly embittered nature of the electioneering did not seem to bother him. Indeed, he himself contributed to the heat engendered by the contest by excoriating, even eviscerating, the Sinn Féin opposition. What emerges from a consideration of his political involvement is a man of determined views, convinced of their integrity, trenchant in their expression and lucid in their enunciation.
It is interesting to remember that Hearne was campaigning for Home Rule and Captain William Redmond while Éamon de Valera was on the opposite side, supporting Sinn Féin and an Irish republic. Hearne attacked with deliberate vitriol the party led by the man with whom he was to work so closely in the 1930s. To one of his antagonists in the crucial election in Waterford in 1918, de Valera later entrusted one of his most important concerns – a new constitution. This is a fascinating and dramatic illustration of how political circumstances change with the passage of time.
John Hearne and the revolutionary generation
Scholars have studied the revolutionary generation, the men and women who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising and those inspired by it, who rejected Home Rule and constitutional politics. Roy Foster surveyed the lives and beliefs of some of this generation, born roughly between the 1870s and the 1890s.112 In an earlier study, Tom Garvin considered the revolutionary elite who constructed the independent Irish state and their political formation in the years 1890–1914.113 There is an overlap in both studies in terms of personnel and time frame. What emerges from both is a fascinating political portrait of some of Hearne’s contemporaries. ‘The fact remains that during this era enough people – especially young people – changed their minds about political possibilities to bring about a revolution against the old order, which included not only government by Britain but the constitutionalism of the previous generation.’114 In considering these studies and the generation they examine, light can be shed on the political formation of Hearne and why he, in contrast with others, continued to espouse the cause of Home Rule.
A central tenet of this generation of revolution was their alienation from British rule and rejection of Home Rule. Constitutional nationalism was spurned and self-government, as promoted by John Redmond, regarded as ‘a corrupt and exhausted compromise’115 which would impose on Ireland ‘a grubby, materialist, collaborationist, Anglicised identity’.116 As the person most associated with it, Redmond was utterly scorned, as was his party. Patrick Maume has commented that ‘it is a shock to rediscover the ferocity and extent of contemporary separatist invective denouncing Redmond as a conscious traitor who was deliberately selling Ireland and sending her to destruction’.117 When Seán T. O’Kelly spoke of the need to rid the country of the Irish Parliamentary Party ‘incubus’,118 he was articulating a common view of those disposed to revolutionary means.
The previous generation was often perceived as the enemy, every bit as much as the British government and the Irish Parliamentary Party were. Patrick Pearse declared that ‘there has been nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation’,119 and there were those who agreed with him. ‘For radical nationalists … the previous generation had sold the pass to craven constitutionalism, by deciding that the Fenian agenda of achieving separation from Britain through physical force was outmoded and opting for parliamentary agitation instead.’120 What was emerging was a new generation alienated ‘not only from British rule but from the values and ambitions of their parents, and finally from the alternative offered by the constitutional Irish Parliamentary Party’.121
Members of the new generation felt like this because they were frustrated, their education often leaving them to face limited opportunities.122 Feeling also excluded from political power, they began to critically assess the status quo and became intent on self-transformation.123 After the 1916 rebellion, the police were convinced that many of the local leaders were people who turned to revolutionary politics in a society that offered them little opportunity.124 Garvin has observed: ‘In Yeats’ classic phrase many of them indeed possessed great hatred and suffered from little room; little room was accorded them by Irish society or by the Anglo-Irish establishment and great hatred was commonly the consequence.’125 In their assessment and rejection of the status quo there was also impatience with the power of the Catholic Church.126
On Hearne’s part, there was no rejection of Home Rule or of the previous generation. As we have seen, he and his father figured prominently in the Home Rule movement in Waterford. He promoted the same politics as his father. He was not impatient with the Catholic Church; on the contrary, he had been a seminarian for many years. It would seem that he did not feel or share in the frustration of the revolutionary generation. He did not experience ‘great hatred’ because he did not experience ‘little room’; his personal circumstances, because of the status and position enjoyed by his family, offered him the opportunity of a meaningful role in society. Crucially, there was also the influence of his father. Foster has noted that, in the life stories of many revolutionaries in this era, as confided to the Bureau of Military History in the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of a family member who provided a powerful nationalist conditioning was emphasised.127 Richard Hearne provided a different but no less powerful conditioning for his son. John Hearne grew up in a home where Home Rule politics were a central part of family life; and just as some learned revolution in and from their families, he learned constitutionalism.
He also shared things in common with the revolutionary generation. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, who may have influenced his nationalism. He could be robustly critical of the British government. He wanted freedom for his country and saw Home Rule as giving this. He was a nationalist, a representative of the 23 per cent who voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1918 election. John Hearne serves as a reminder that not all voters subscribed to the Sinn Féin version of nationalism; there were significant numbers who were recusants. This minority was to be silenced and marginalised in the years 1919–21, but their silence must not be allowed to obscure the fact of their existence.
John Hearne and the ‘lost generation’
Among those silenced and marginalised were many of the Catholic university elite who had expected to be leaders in a Home Rule Ireland. Their circumstances have been studied by Senia Pašeta.128 These young men and women were self-consciously preparing themselves for important roles in a self-governing country129 and expressed, confidently and regularly, their expectation that one day they would compose Ireland’s ruling class.130 Economist George O’Brien (1892–1973) commented:
We