Thomas Kettle

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Thomas Michael Kettle (1880 - September 9 1916) was an Irish writer, barrister, moderate (Home Rule Irish nationalist) politician, and economist.

He was born in Artane, County Dublin. He was educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, and at University College Dublin, where he served as auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He then studied to become a barrister, being called to the Irish Bar in 1905. In the same year he edited a newspaper, The Nationalist. In 1906 he was elected a Member of Parliament for the East Tyrone constituency, for the Irish Parliamentary Party. He visited the USA in the Irish Party interest.

In 1908 he was the first Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin. In 1910 he was re-elected as MP.

Having joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913 he was on an arms raising mission for then in Belgium when at the outbreak of World War I he was horrified by the German atrocities on the local civilian population. This experience resulted in his immediately returning to Ireland and siding with the National Volunteers and John Redmond's call to support the war effort. He recruited for the newly formed 16th (Irish) Division and following his convictions served with the 9th. Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers "to fight the barbarian".

As the news of the Easter Rising reached him he said "they have ruined it all, the dream of a free united Ireland in a free Europe".

He was killed in September 1916 at Ginchy in France, during the Battle of the Somme, previously having made the statement that he preferred to die out there for Ireland with his "Dubliners". A stone tablet commemorates him in the Island of Ireland Peace Park, Messines, Belgium.

Family

His father, Andrew Kettle, was a founder of the Irish National Land League. He married Mary Sheehy, daughter of David Sheehy, Irish Parliamentary Party Westminster MP, who was also, intriguingly, the brother of Father Eugene Sheehy, a priest who educated Eamon de Valera in Limerick. Through Mary's sisters he was connected by marriage to Francis Skeffington and Frank O'Brien, father of the iconoclast, Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Tom Kettle wrote a poem neglected in the anthologies and ignored by his biographer JLyons. It was called "Reason in Rhyme " in answer to an English plea to forget the past. According to Tom Kettle's friend, Robert Lynd, writing on hearing of Kettle's death at Guinchy on the Somme in 1916 described the poem as Kettle's testament to England,and said it expressed his mood to the last. (Incidentally Conor Cruise O'Brien married Robert Lynd's niece, and attended Lynd's funeral in 1949.) Tom Kettle's last mood contrasts somewhat with O'Brien's mood since O'Brien found new gods to worship.

REASON IN RHYME

Bond,from the toil of hate we may not cease; Free,we are free to be your friend; And when you make your banquet and we come, Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, Closing a battle, not forgetting it. With not a name to hide, This mate and mother of valiant 'rebels' dead Must come with all her history on her head. We keep the past for pride: No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb: No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers, No rudest man who died To tear your flag down in the bitter years, But shall have praise, and three times thrice again, When at the table men shall drink with men.

Bibliography

The Day's Burden, Studies, Literary and Political (1910)
Home Rule Finance. An Experiment in Justice (1911)
Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science (1911
The Open Secret of Ireland (1912)
Poems and Parodies (1912)
Irish Orators and Oratory (1915) editor
Battle Songs of the Irish Brigades (1915)
To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God (1916)
The Ways of War (1917), reasons for serving in WWI.
An Irishman's Calendar, edited by Mary Kettle
''German Autrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (1999) by
Profs. John Horne and Alan Kramer D.U.

External link

GALWAY OF THE RACES an anthology of the journalism of Robert Lynd. Lilliput Press 1990.

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