It’s remarkable how many schoolteachers, poets, philosophers, and playwrights took up the cause of Irish freedom in the years before the Rising and throughout the Irish Civil War. Among the best and brightest of their generation, many were fighting not just for political independence from England, but also 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, as well as 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 left a profound impact on him. Equally influential were the terrifying accounts he heard about the suffering endured by the people during the Great Hunger, as recounted by still-living witnesses in his hometown.
Reading *I Die in a Good Cause*, originally published in 1970, connects us with the great national narrative that once electrified Ashe himself. The author, O Luing, was born only a few months before Ashe’s death in 1917, and his book reminds us of the enduring power of Ashe’s legacy.
Thomas Ashe was only 32 when he died after a so-called botched force-feeding during a hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison. Ashe and his fellow revolutionary inmates had insisted on being categorized as political prisoners. Their hunger strikes were meant to secure this concession, but—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 yet celebratory account. 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