Ronan Guilfoyle on the music for his grandfather - a 1916 Rising veteran

Alan O’Riordan talks to musician Ronan Guilfoyle about a piece he wrote to commemorate his grandfather — a 1916 veteran who was in Collins’s ‘squad’

IN THIS centenary year, there are many looking back at grandparents and great grandparents, and considering their lives, and even their roles, in 1916 and what came after.

Ronan Guilfoyle, the jazz musician, is one such. His grandfather, Joe Guilfoyle, played a more dramatic role than most, first as an idealistic teenager in the Rising, then, later, as a member of the ‘Squad’, Michael Collins’s band of intelligence operatives.

Guilfoyle is marking the centenary year with A Shy-Going Boy, a suite of music dedicated to the man. “My grandfather died when I was about 13 or 14 and I knew him as this dignified, good-humoured, quietly spoken man,” he says. “I knew vaguely that he’d been involved in the 1916 Rising, but didn’t really know much about his activities in the War of Independence. It’s funny because my family is totally apolitical and when I found out later the extent of his involvement with some very historical events and the birth of the State, it seems extraordinary that my family was like that.”

Guilfoyle’s aim with the piece, he says, is to try to reconcile these two people: his soft-spoken grandfather and a man who, decades before, was one of a group of men who pulled Alan Bell, a British magistrate from a tram and shot him dead.

“He was at the end of some sharp stuff,” says Guilfoyle, “So, I guess what I’m trying to do is to make some sense of these two sides of this person: the person I knew and the person he was in his youth. But I’m not saying he was necessarily a different person: there’s a lot to be thought about in how people will come to do life or death things for what they believe in, people who in another situation are very gentle, quiet people.”

Guilfoyle notes that many of those who came through the Civil War years became reticent about all that went before, as a way of coping, a way of rebuilding and moving on. His grandfather was no different.

He contrasts the relative simplicity of the equation for a boy of 17 joining the Rising — “fighting to free your country” — with what came after. “The War of Independence probably had a similar simplicity for him, but the Civil War changed all that so much.”

Guilfoyle aims to achieve something of that nuance in the various moods of his suite’s eight parts.

“Each part has a different title,” he says. “One is called ‘A Dog With Two Tails’ and this comes from a talk that he gave where he talks about marching up and down with the rest of them: ‘Talk about a dog with two tails,’ he says. That’s how excited he was: a 15-year-old marching up and down with a gun, delighted with himself. So that’s one part of it, but what he’s carrying in his arms is designed to kill people. So, that piece starts off very buoyant, very upbeat, but it mutates into a darker thing.”

The piece also incorporates selections from this recorded memoir, and dramatised excerpts from a short written memoir. Guilfoyle is conscious of his role as an artist in this year of celebration and commemoration — he doesn’t come to easy conclusions.

“I think I’ve learned about the nuances of Irish history,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a simple revolution. When I was in school it was a simple story of the most glorious week in Irish history. Pearse was a saint, fighting for freedom against the perfidious British.

“I don’t have a very high regard for him to be honest, but I look at it today and I think, if Pearse hadn’t been a maniac — which I think he was, such a zealot, with this suicide mentality – if he hadn’t done that, would Dublin be like Birmingham now? My view of the Rising has changed through research.”

The fact that Guilfoyle sees both sides of the equation is reflected in his music. “The music I’ve written is not straightforward. There’s a lot of complexity and duality in it.”

A Shy-Going Boy has its premiere at the Triskel, Cork, tomorrow