To a great many who read this the name of William Rooney and his work will be quite unfamiliar. In the nine years which have elapsed since his death much has changed in Ireland; the self-conscious and self-dependent spirit of nationality for which he lived and died has grown enormously, and the mighty movement which we call ‘Irish Ireland,’ that movement each ramification of which he saw in its cradle and zealously fostered, that movement now overshadows the land, comprising within it vast numbers who ten or twelve years back, when Rooney’s work was being done, had no thoughts for the insane proposals of an inane journal called the United Irishman. In those days its writers and readers were writ down as unpractical lunatics, dreamers, rhetoricians, boys, or castle spies. The change in public opinion since then has been radical, and the careful student of Irish Ireland journalism will here and there come across some references to the life and work of Rooney. Of his early comrades many are happily still alive and working, but unfortunately without the inspiring influence which he exerted on them in many cases; some of them have followed him to the grave, and his life is still unwritten, nay, so far as we know, unattempted, while every year adds to the possibility of essential facts being forgotten and lost; and to the possibility of his life, when it is written, being fragmentary and incomplete. This present notice is an attempt to give some idea of his life and work, so far as these can be gathered from the materials available to one who did not know Rooney.
Mr. Arthur Griffith, who is not lavish of his praise, writes thus of Rooney:—
‘When I say that William Rooney, had he lived, would have become, perhaps, the greatest leader Ireland has known, I am aware that to those who did not know the man, and who have little knowledge of his character and his work, my saying so will appear the extravagance of one in whom friendship overrules judgment. Nevertheless I believe it to be absolutely true. Rooney was the greatest Irishman whom I have known or whom I can ever expect to know.’
Until the full history of Rooney’s life, and of the work which he accomplished in the early pioneer days of Irish Ireland is written, it is impossible for us to agree or disagree with this estimate, telling though it be from one of the calmest appraisers of men. It was the tragedy of Rooney’s life and work that both ended just when the hardest of the work was almost over, that he did not live to see the first firm storeys of the edifice he had done so much to build. Until his life is written, then, we who did not know him can only judge him by his work in various national journals and by glimpses caught here and there in the writings of his comrades. But even these, unsatisfactory though they are at best, give us an insight into the manner of man he was.
In all respects save one Rooney started life at a disadvantage; his people were poor; he had to commence to earn his bread at the age of twelve years, and the higher training and the facilities for study and development which all previous Irish leaders in the constructive intellectual sense have had were totally denied him. But he had one advantage which made up for them, and which conclusively establishes the necessity for patriotic education; his father and mother were conscious nationalists, nationalists of the school of Tone and Davis and Mitchel, who trained the boy up not alone to be a nationalist—as most of us are trained in one way or another—but to understand Nationalism and to differentiate between it and West Britonism, between lip patriotism and working patriotism, between principle and compromise. From his earliest years he had but one passion, one ambition, to serve Ireland to the utmost of his capacity, and to that he sacrificed everything for which man ordinarily lives, wealth, comfort, wild oats, happiness perhaps, everything which appertained to him personally was as nought when placed in the scales against what he conceived to be the right thing to do for the country. It is a truism that no man can at the same time serve himself and serve any great cause; one or the other must take precedence; and in Rooney’s time it was much more of a fact than it is to-day that he who serves Ireland, if he does not cease at the same time from serving himself, must at any rate be prepared to let his own concerns go by the board when national affairs are involved, must give his personality in the cause. Rooney’s whole life was one of self-sacrifice for the cause which he had undertaken, and his own personality was so much in the background of his work that when he died none save his intimate friends realised that his death meant almost the same to the movement as did that of Davis to the Young Ireland movement.
His work for Ireland commenced early, and his thoughts, even the first shy, beautiful, immature thoughts of the youth, that look like dreams to us in after years when we look back on them, these in Rooney’s case were for Ireland also. His comrades have placed it on record that he was never known to have a strong interest in anything else but his country and its salvation, the ways and the means. Towards the end of the eighties, when he was fifteen or sixteen, a number of Irish Fireside Clubs for boys and girls and young people were started by Miss Rose Kavanagh, and Rooney was one of the earliest members. Thence to the day of his death he was connected with all the leagues and clubs and organisations which carried on in Ireland the old uncompromising spirit of nationality, which looked then irrevocably buried. It is easy now to come into a branch of Sinn Féin or the Gaelic League or the Industrial Development Association, so easy in fact that many who would join them if they were unpopular keep away from them from an uneasy feeling that they are a waste of time; but in Rooney’s time things were different. Then very few men dared to preach that Parliamentarian politics were not the last thing in Nationalism, that Parnellism was a compromise and was killing the nation, that there could be no nation without a language, that the insidious wings of England’s attack on the Irish nation were her attacks upon the minds and imaginations of the people; all these things, with which we are now familiar, were the things which formed the basis of Rooney’s Nationalism, the things about which he built his life, the things which he preached in all his clubs and all his organisations, and not only preached them but practiced them. A great wave of national blindless then overspread the country, and the raucous voice of the demagogue orator drowned everything else; there was then no United Irishman to co-ordinate and organise separatist opinion, and what separatist opinion there was was isolated, surrounded, laughed at by the great noisy current of Parliamentarian boastfulness, and sometimes almost losing faith in itself. We who nowadays have two separatist journals to place our faith before the people, to give us light and leading, can hardly realise what it meant in those days to be a separatist, to feel that Parliamentarianism was hopelessly and wickedly wrong, to feel a torrent of thoughts come tumbling at the brain and yet no words, but this must have been the lot of hundreds during the eighties and the greater part of the nineties when the Home Rule delusion held sway in the land. Personally, I can vividly remember how the advent of the United Irishman came to me with the heaviness and bewilderingness of wine, with the sense of comradeship, with hope and confidence, with the dawn of a new interest in life; the certainty, at the end, the dazzling certainty that there were still in the country men who worked away at the old ideal of Tone and Mitchel, men who would neither compromise nor bend, men who preached the old faith in tones that bespoke sincerity and confidence, knowledge and determination. That it was the publication of the United Irishman which rendered the present movement possible, for it at once organised and concentrated, educated and invigorated, the isolated separatists who till then had neither knowledge of each other’s existence nor means of testing their faith in the light of the general faith of the nation. Since that day the movement has not always progressed, but it has never been in danger.
And it is because I remember so vividly my own helplessness, and doubts, and want of working enthusiasm, in these years that I feel what an exceptional man it was who worked through those blackest years, starting club after club upon rigidly uncompromising lines, and preferring to see them break up rather than compromise any essential principle, never faltering, never regretting, never despairing, building up out of the boys of his own age the movement which since has gone so far. Starting at the age of fifteen he kept on organising, educating, preaching, writing; the full measure of his strenuous, drudging life in these early years can only be guessed at, but the fruit of it all came later. This first club of Rooney’s in 1888 held the first language class held in Dublin in modern times, and Rooney was one of its best and most enthusiastic students; so that thus early he laid his grip upon what we now recognise as one of the most important of national essentials. Indeed he mastered the language so as to read and write it fluently, a fact which might have had very beneficial results to the political movement as it afterwards developed, had Rooney lived to insist, as he would have done, on the value of the language being borne in mind practically as well as theoretically. From club to club, in the eighties and nineties, Rooney went, working cheerfully and consistently, and gathering around him an ever-increasing number of young men and women, attracted by his personality, fired by his enthusiasm, and working by his example. And at length, in the beginning of 1893 he founded the Celtic Literary Society, out of which much was to grow. Into it he threw himself with all his strength and all his enthusiasm, read papers, contributed voluminously to its monthly manuscript journal, taught Irish classes, moulded the national development of all those who came into contact with him, and took advantage of every possible occurrence which seemed to offer new help to save the nation. His activities were enormous, in addition to his work in the Celtic, he, as a member of the Young Ireland League, helped to organise excursions to historic spots—Tone’s grave, the grave of Niall Glunduff, and others; and in committee pushed forward the need for studying and utilising the Libraries Bill: and when ’98 came, he was one of the most active workers in the Dublin Society. And all this, remember, was done in addition to a minimum working day of ten hours in order to earn his bread.
Some of the incidents one hears give glimpses of his passionate energy. In these years he was the first man to go into the country places and preach Nationalism in Irish to the Irish speakers; it was a common custom with him to rush down to a meeting in the West on a Saturday night, speak at it in Irish on Sunday, and return to his work on Monday morning. And at times he stayed up all night when there was work to be done and no other way to do it; the evening, perhaps, at a ceilidh or a committee meeting, or some other needful public work, then talking and planning and writing articles in the Celtic rooms till the small hours of the morning, then home, not to sleep, but to take a bath and breakfast, and set out for the day’s bread-earning. And one incident which was told me gives one a glimpse of the man as he was:—He came into the rooms one night to find some of the members playing cards around a table. He neither remonstrated nor argued, but, with his eyes blazing and his face stern, threw the cards into the fire, kicked over the table, and pointed to the door. The culprits fled, and after that no member ever dared do a thing to bring the anger into Rooney’s eyes. The culprits in the present incident all returned to the ranks, confessing they would rather do anything than bring his contempt upon them again, and while he lived the Society was a model of national work and patriotism. He had the tolerant, winning personality of the Nationalist who moulds himself on Davis, and coupled with it he had the sternness of Mitchel on matters of principle, and the combination worked admirably in these early days and built up, steadily if slowly, the force which was to blossom out in the United Irishman.
His attitude towards the Gaelic League was the attitude of every man who looks on it as only a part of the big movement, not as an end in itself. From the beginning he was with it, attended its meetings, worked on its committees, provided it with songs and with suggestions for sgoiruidheachtanna—in these early years he was a never-failing mine of information on Irish songs, and learned music, by some process which none of his friends could discover, so as to be able to note it down—and yet differed from the policy of the League. The essence of his language philosophy is given in the following extract from one of his articles:—
‘Now, the idea of a non-political organisation for the promotion of a charity, or some such work, is decidedly necessary, but it is a mistake for such an organisation as that which has charged itself with the promotion of Irish nationality. Besides, politics can be construed into anything bearing on the relations between us and Britain, and the Gaelic League, carrying out this view, by refusing to take part in the commemoration of the anniversary of ’98, took up a position occupied by every anti-Irish and West British individual in the country. Politics in Ireland are in no sense to be compared with politics elsewhere. In France or in Germany every group of politicians is Nationalist before anything else, in England it is the same; but in Ireland the line may roughly be divided between those who believe in an Irish Nation and those who do not.’
That is, of course, the only rational view of the question.
Numbers of his poems and articles in the Seanchaidhe were printed in the Shan Van Vocht of Belfast, which, edited by Alice Milligan and Ethna Carbery, did very good work in the years 1896, ’97, and ’98; but it was in the columns of the United Irishman that Rooney’s most distinctive work was done, and that he was able to place before the country his national faith, his plans and hopes, in the completeness with which they had come to him, through the years of work and thought. For two years after its appearance the All Ireland columns of the paper were written week by week by Rooney, and in the body of the paper he wrote articles and poems under no less than eleven different signatures. Hardly a week is there without an article by him, and in many cases there are two articles and a poem to his credit. All this after ten hours a day bread-earning and side by side with his committee and public work, and with a vast quantity of reading; for he made it his special task early, and persevered in it to the end, to make himself thoroughly acquainted with all forms of Irish thought, and he was familiar with the work of those writers of English who are in any sense Irish in outlook or in genius as perhaps no man of his time, and certainly of his years, was; and familiar also with the modern Irish literature which was springing up. His All Ireland notes and jottings contain a notice, critical and scholarly, of every Irish publication published. And in the two short years of life that remained to him during the existence of the United Irishman, he and it accomplished their most fruitful work in practical propaganda in the founding of Cumann na nGaedheal.
In its first year the United Irishman co-ordinated and strengthened separatist opinion all over Ireland, bound it together, gave it voice and gave it hope, gave it food for thought, stirred up deep currents everywhere. The best Irish intellects of the day were amongst its contributors, and there are frequent articles by W. B. Yeats, John Eglinton, Fred Ryan, ‘A.E.,’ and many others. And after a year’s work the necessity for a common organisation, to still further strengthen the movement, made itself felt, and in the correspondence columns of the paper many letters appeared, from many minds, urging the combination of the existing clubs and societies with a national organisation, which was effected at a convention from the various national bodies on the 26th November, 1900, with William Rooney in the chair, and delegates from all parts of Ireland. It was a misfortune for the organisation, and for Ireland, that Rooney should have died so soon after its formation and that the organisation was thus deprived of his leadership and counsel when it stood most in need of it. For now, with the hardest part of the work accomplished, with the drudgery and the bitterness of the early years past, with a national organisation and a national journal capable of almost any development, with a rising tide of nationalism all over the country, fate decided that Rooney’s work was done and that the reins must drop from his hands.
He had the choice of husbanding his strength and spreading it over a number of years, or of concentrating the whole of it upon a few short years, and he chose the latter. In March, 1901, he was taken ill, and on the 6th May he died, leaving his comrades as stunned as were those of Davis at his death. I do not know what his illness was, I believe it was some kind of a fever, but the doctors who attended him said he had worked so hard that he could not possibly live. And so he passed out of our midst, but not out of our remembrance, at the age of 27, having tried and accomplished for his country in his short life a stupendous amount of work of all kinds.
LUCAN.