Requiem for a lost legion

IT'S WRONG TO SAY, AS PEOPLE USUALLY do, that the Irish are obsessed with history. There are vast swathes of their past that they are quite happy to let moulder away. The hundreds of thousands of Southern Irish who put on a British uniform in either of the World Wars were, until recently, at best unremembered, at worst attacked and spat upon every Remembrance Day, their sacrifice left in an enduring no-man's land, effectively ignored by historians.

If that's changing, it's thanks largely to writers such as Sebastian Barry, the 50-year-old Irish poet, playwright and novelist whose A Long, Long Way is shortlisted for the 50,000 Man Booker Prize on Monday. In it, he tells the story of Willie Dunne, a Dublin builder still in his teens, in love, and ferociously ignorant of politics when he volunteers to serve in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1915.

Come 1916, and everything is changed utterly . The Easter Rising reduces much of central Dublin to rubble and that great Irish army, now on the wrong side of history, to officially sanctioned oblivion. At home on leave, Willie sees British dragoons, in full 19th-century plumage, charge down Sackville Street towards the General Post Office, before they and their horses are felled by gunfire. After marching half a mile to the south, past the Georgian grandeur of Merrion Square, he is ordered to fire on his fellow Irishmen.

And so back to Flanders, to mud, gas attacks (one killed 800 Irish just eight days after the Easter Rising), a slaughter so savage that three-mile advances cost 300,000 casualties: everything screams out the futility of war. But what Willie and his comrades suffer goes beyond futility, beyond consolation and all reasoning. If all this is for a flag, whose flag? If for a country, whose country? Whose tomorrows? Whose freedoms? For Willie Dunne and the Royal Dublins, all the easier answers had gone up in the smoke above the rebels' base in the Dublin GPO.

My own grandfather, a gentle, Yorkshire weaver, was a corporal in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, so as I followed the fictional Willie Dunne through the war years, I was also following my grandfather through battles that he never talked to me about. After he died, though, I discovered a hardback notebook in which he wrote about what it was to advance by night through a makeshift cemetery that was being shelled. (Born at the end of the century before last, he didn't put it like that: "You can imagine our distress," he writes quietly.)

Barry is a poet and playwright as well as a novelist - a far rarer combination than you might think - and all three talents fuse in A Long, Long Way, which is at times almost unbearably moving.

Yet when we meet in a Dublin hotel within shooting distance of Willie Dunne's moment of truth, I start to realise how wide Barry's work aims, both in its internal links and eternal purposes.

We have, for example, seen Willie Dunne before. In Barry's world-conquering play The Steward of Christendom (1995), he was the ghost who appeared briefly to his father as he lay dying in a county asylum. In the play, Willie sings Ave Maria, sweet-voiced and full of innocence; in the novel, he does the same. In both, the father is Dublin's chief superintendent of police, just as Barry's own great-grandfather had been, Queen Victoria's law and order chief among the then not quite so rebellious Paddies. When he gave him a speech in which he said he loved the queen more than his own wife, Barry once said, "I felt as though I was writing historical pornography."

And so, at the time, he almost was. The whole notion that masses of Irishmen willingly served Britain, took advantage of its empire, and lived contented lives untroubled by whose face was on their postage stamps, was until the last decade or so a historical truth that could not be admitted. The bravery and the blood sacrifice of the Easter Rising - especially the execution of ringleaders that followed it - retrospectively eclipsed the story of those who had stayed loyal, trusting in Britain's promise to finally deliver Irish home rule at the war's end and volunteering to fight in that war in order to bring it about more speedily.

Victorious, Irish republicans created a country in their own image. For all its manifold virtues, it was also inward-looking, devout, and riddled with hypocrisy. Even in the late 1970s, it was still a claustrophobically restrictive place, not the kind of open, confident, fully European country it is today. As soon as Barry had finished university, he was away travelling, living in Paris and Paros and a few points in between, slowly serving a writer's apprenticeship. "Isn't your own country good enough for you?" his nationalist grandfather asked, puzzled.

He wondered. His own country hadn't been good enough for quite a few people in his family already. They'd been Irish, proud of it even, but some of them had fought for Britain too. His mother's father, for example, son of a tailor on the Sligo asylum, had been a major with the Royal Engineers in the Second World War. Growing up in Dublin, the young Barry had shared a bedroom with him: the stories he'd told "were the source of my childhood dreams". Long after he died, Barry wrote about him in his play Our Lady of Sligo. "Even though he had seemed to me eccentric and somewhat ridiculous, that allowed me to love him again. Just because he represented something that was long gone didn't mean it didn't have its own poetry."

His great-grandfather cast an even longer shadow. James Patrick Dunne, the Steward of Christendom himself, had grown up on an estate in South Co Wicklow, "just a song away" from the rectory where Barry himself now lives with his actress wife Alison and their three children. James Patrick had left the estate, where his family had been stewards for six generations, to join the Dublin police, and he had risen through the ranks to its top job. In the great Dublin lock-out of 1913 he had been in charge of putting down a riot that left four workers dead. "That's the key weight of history on our family," sighs Barry. "There's blood on the ground in front of him."

In The Steward of Christendom, as in A Long, Long Way, Barry doesn't make excuses: he's not a revisionist out to redeem his great-grandfather's reputation; rather, he aims to understand his country's complexity. "I just wanted to paint in these missing panels in our family history for the sake of completeness, on the gimcrack theory that if you could complete a family in some way you could complete a country."

The Ireland he wanted to live in would own up to all of its contradictions. There'd be room in it for people like his wife's family, Dublin Presbyterians and proud Irish too but still dutifully watching the Queen's broadcast on Christmas Day. His Ireland would be open, tolerant, multi-cultural, like the primary school in London he'd been to for four years. It hadn't taught him to read, even by the age of nine, but he still looks back on it fondly.

So he started A Long, Long Way, and peopled it with characters he knew: the builder he worked with on his Wicklow house would be the company sergeant major; James Patrick would flit in from the family photo album to be Willie's stern father, the man he always aimed to impress. Willie's sister Annie Dunne, Barry's real-life great-aunt, would come back, in her childhood, from the novel he wrote that bears her name. Jesse Kirwan, the republican who chooses to be shot by the British rather than serve in their army after the Rising had been quelled, comes in from Barry's play, Prayers of Sherkin. And so on down the line, through the books and the family albums, a steadily building web of interconnectedness in the best Irish conversational tradition, an argument from history slowly taking shape.

"Ireland and England are like twins sundered at birth," says Barry. "This book is a kind of whistled song, a calling out, saying, look what we have in common. These things won't unite us, but they do bind us, and we should pay them heed."

For all those Irish who fought for Britain, A Long, Long Way is a fitting, long overdue monument. On my way to meet Barry I walked past the bust to the nationalist poet Tom Kettle in St Stephen's Green. He was in Flanders when news of the Easter Rising came through, and realised straight away what it meant, that he and his friends would be forever damned as traitors to Ireland. He had a young daughter, Betty, and the last three lines of the sonnet he wrote to her, knowing that he would probably be killed in battle, are inscribed underneath his statue. At first the Irish authorities had tried to ban them. Sebastian Barry reads them to me:

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

Died not for flag nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream born in a herdsman's shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

There are tears in his eyes when he finishes. And, I must admit, in mine too.

A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber, price 12.99.