Poison Ivy – Frank McNally on the controversial origins of an annual Parnellite commemoration

When the ivy leaf was first formally adopted as a tribute to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell, a year after his death, the gesture was not universally appreciated.
On the contrary, in an Ireland still bitterly divided by the Kitty O’Shea divorce case, “Ivy Day”, as October 6th, 1892, had been designated by Parnellites, was considered a provocation by supporters of his rival, TM Healy.
Flashpoints included Catholic-run schools. “At St Mary’s College, Rathmines,” reported the Evening Herald, “a number of children were obliged under pain of severe punishment to discard the Ivy Leaf which they wore in honour of the dead Chief.”
Children having ivy pinned to their lapels by parents was a running theme. The Herald also reported the complaint of a man in Harolds Cross whose son “had been stopped in the streets by one of the curates of the district . . . [and] obliged to remove from his coat the ivy leaf which his father had placed there”.
Some religious orders were more zealous than others. A Mrs Teresa Boyle from Dublin’s Leeson Street wrote to the newspapers complaining about the treatment of her three ivy-wearing daughters by Sacred Heart nuns:
“They had hardly crossed the threshold of the convent . . . when Sister Mary Agnes pulled the ivy from their buttonholes, trampled it under foot and kicked it into the street. The children were all slapped and scolded and told that ‘the Convent of the Sacred Heart was not the place to wear Kitty O’Shea’s emblem’.”
Women had also been prominent in promoting the tribute. “The Ladies’ Parnell Grave Committee” appealed through the press to their “friends in the country” to send “packages of Ivy Leaves, small or large”, for use by those planning to attend the first-anniversary commemoration in Glasnevin.
The Healyite Freeman’s Journal, meanwhile, joined the detractors.
It noted scornfully that Ivy Day was an Irish imitation of Primrose Day, an annual commemoration for the British Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.
But whereas the primrose was Disraeli’s favourite flower, the Journal pointed out, Parnell “detested” all things green.
In any case, claimed the newspaper after the event, the first Ivy Day had fallen flat:
“The imitation of the fantastic foolery of the Primrose was boomed for all it was worth in the factionist organs, but the result was abject failure. The ivy leaves were left to cover hollow trees and crumbling walls instead of hollow passion and a crumbling cause.”
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Posterity tends to disagree. The October 6th commemoration took off sufficiently in subsequent years to be immortalised in James Joyce’s short story Ivy Day in the Committee Room, set in 1904.
And if somewhat reduced by the passage of 13 decades, it still inspires such events as the Ivy Day Symposium, which started on Friday in Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, and continues Saturday.
But this weekend also marks the anniversary of another great Irishman, Brian O’Nolan, who was born 20 years (minus a day) after Parnell’s death.
The coincidence can’t have been lost on him. In a 1957 column for this newspaper, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, Ivy Day inspired him to combine two of his favourite subjects: pedantry and disparagement of Joyce.
In fairness, his criticism of Joyce was more usually directed at the industry Ulysses and Finnegans Wake had spawned, especially in American academia.
And this was a view held at least as strongly by O’Nolan’s friend and occasional stand-in, Niall Montgomery, so that especially in columns of the late 1950s, it can be hard to be tell which of them of them is complaining.
In any case, one of Myles’s slyer, reductionist tactics involved suggesting that Joyce’s greatest talent was a genius for producing note-perfect Dublin dialogue.
To this end, he claimed in 1957 to have had an “appalling shock” when reading a new Penguin edition of Dubliners and seeing that the editors (presumably tone-deaf ones in London) had introduced an unintended comma to the speech of one of Joyce’s characters.
This alleged atrocity occurred in the Ivy Day story, where the election canvassers are drinking stout and Mr Lyons asks which of two bottles is his. “This, lad,” replies Mr Henchy.
“That comma after ‘this’ really did horrify me,” Myles pretended.
“It would undoubtedly have killed Joyce himself had he not taken the precaution of dying [already]. He would have fallen into a comma and wasted away, his face to the wall, disdaining a teaspoon of brandy proffered by the like of Mr Stuart Gilbert.”
In another column, from 1959, it was Myles’s turn to capture speech as heard in Dublin pubs, when he had a character noting that “last Sahurda was the wan hundred and thirteenth [anniversary] of Parnell’s birth”.
I mention that otherwise unremarkable passage here only because this Sahurda marks the wan hundred and thirteenth anniversary of O’Nolan’s birth.
Meanwhile, speaking of synchronicity, the still-annual Ivy Day wreath-laying now takes place on the nearest Sunday to Parnell’s anniversary.
But October 6th, 2024, is a Sunday, of course. Taoiseach Simon Harris will do the honours in Glasnevin at noon.