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“Originally from west Kerry, Thomas Ashe was a schoolteacher in north County Dublin and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. During the 1916 Rising he commanded the Fingal Battalion of the Volunteers, who were tasked with destroying the communications network of the British establishment north of Dublin city. This culminated in the Battle of Ashbourne, where the tactics used were a precursor of the guerrilla warfare techniques that were to be so effective in the War of Independence. Ashe was sentenced to death alongside Éamon de Valera, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. He led a hunger strike in Lewes Prison in May 1917 and was released under a general amnesty in June. Ashe was re-arrested in August for a speech he made in Co. Longford. He was imprisoned in Mountjoy, where he went on hunger strike in September for prisoner-of-war status. He died on 25 September, having been force-fed by the prison authorities. Michael Collins delivered the oration at his funeral and the circumstances of his death and funeral became one of the key factors in tipping public opinion towards supporting the cause of the 1916 rebels. ### Review It’s remarkable how many schoolteachers, poets, philosophers and playwrights took up the cause of Irish freedom in the years before the Rising and on through the Irish Civil War. Among the best and brightest of their generation, what is certain is that many of them were fighting not just for political independence from England, but also for something much deeper, harder to quantify, a sort of complete metaphysical restoration of the Irish psyche. Thomas Ashe was an exemplar of the 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. Ashe, who was born in the Co. Kerry Gaeltacht, 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 in his childhood had a profound effect, as did the terrifying accounts he had heard in his youth about the suffering of the people during the Great Hunger (as reported to him by the still living witnesses in his home town). Reading this book, originally published in 1970, is to connect with the great national narrative that once electrified Ashe himself. 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 a legacy. Thomas Ashe was only 35 when he died (after a so-called botched force feeding while on hunger strike in Mountjoy prison). Ashe and his fellow revolutionary inmates had insisted they be categorized as political prisoners, and their hunger strikes had commenced in the hope of conceding the point. But as so often in the story of the struggle for Irish independence, much of Ashe’s legacy now comes to us from the lingering questions over who he would have been, what part he might have played in the wider national story, had his struggle had not been so cruelly cut short.
