On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel Page B

apart from the rest of Ireland—but not entirely so.
    In November 1919, the islanders learned thatÉamon de Valera, a leader of the 1916 Rising, was in California, raising money for the nationalist cause. What would freedom mean? asked Séamaisín, in one of Tomás’s vignettes. “One crowned King of England and another crowned King of Ireland—that,” said Tomás, “is something you’ll never see, Diarmaid, solong as the sun is in the sky. If there is a crown on a King in Ireland it will be England’s crown he will have to wear.”
    “I hope you’re proved wrong!” said Diarmaid Bán.
    In the spring of 1920, Tomás noted the death of the Mayor of Cork, shot by British soldiers.
    Then, a little later: “A currach has come in with the news that every train in Ireland was halted.”Food was scarce. Men were dying in a hunger strike. Serious fighting was expected.
    July 1921 brought talk ofhome rule, following a truce in the Anglo-Irish War. Negotiations were to follow inLondon.
    In fact, the years of Brian’s visits and Tomás’s
Island Cross-Talk
stories corresponded to the most tumultuous time in Ireland’s recent history. The 1916 Rising, today an iconic moment in Ireland’s struggle to become itself, began when a fewIrish republicans took over Dublin’s General Post Office and declared a provisional government. “Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”
    It was lofty talk, and most Irish didn’t at first pay it heed. But then the leaders of the rebellion were summarily executed by the British; martyrs all, they became. Public opinion shifted. A general election two years later brought loud calls for independence from the Crown. Elected Members ofParliament representing Ireland convened an Irish Parliament, or Dáil, and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The British refused to accept its legitimacy, touching off theWar of Independence that ground on from January 1919 to July 1921. Among the British ranks were seven thousand soldiers, recruited by advertisements in Britain as willing to take on a “rough and dangerous task.” They were furnished with dark-green and khaki uniforms that led them to be called the Black and Tans. They proved notorious for their brutality.
    The truce in July 1921 was followed by a treaty in December. It called for the British to leave Ireland;Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom; members of a new Irish parliament to swear allegiance to the British Crown. Irish opinion split. Brother divided against brother. The resultingcivil war between pro- and anti-treaty forces was as terrible as the War of Independence, took more lives, and in the scale of its atrocities was just as cruel.
    On the first day of January 1923, Tomás concluded
Island Cross-Talk.
“I am writing this at the start of the New Year in God’s name, and if we spent the Old Year well, may we spend the New Year seven times better.… Since our people throughout Ireland cannot understand each other, may God grant the grace of understanding to them before the year is long gone.”
    In May, a cease-fire ended the civil war.
    In August, the first elections of the Irish Free State were held.
    Late that month,George Thomson, straight from King’s College, Cambridge, and bound for the Blaskets, arrived in Dingle while elections were in progress, arousing the suspicions of Irish police.

Chapter 4
Nice Boy with a Camera
[1923]
    A few months before he left for Ireland,George Thomson had finished up his first yearat King’s College, among the oldest and most storied ofCambridge University’s two dozen or so colleges, founded in 1441. A scholarship student in classics,he occupied rooms looking out onto Chetwynd Court, adjacent to a classroom whose leaded-glass windows whispered church as much as college. Above him lived anotherclassicist,