Dying for Ireland and the faith

“Dying for Ireland and the faith” is a recurring demand in the McCourt children’s world, where patriotic martyrdom and religious sacrifice are taught as glorious while disease, hunger, and a father’s drinking shape the family’s actual losses. The memoir’s irony gathers force as the children are asked to rehearse death for Ireland or the Church, yet struggle for pennies, food, and a life beyond deprivation.

Two rival lessons in martyrdom

At school, the master prepares the children for First Confession and First Communion by requiring them to learn the catechism, distinguish right from wrong, and be ready to die for the Faith. The lesson presents religious instruction not only as a guide to conduct but as preparation for sacrifice. Its language meets a parallel lesson at home: the father says that dying for Ireland is glorious. The child narrator sets the two claims beside one another and wonders whether anyone in the world would like the children to live.

That question is sharpened by the family’s dead children. The narrator wonders whether his dead brothers and sister died for Ireland or the Faith. His father says they were too young to die for anything; his mother attributes their deaths to disease and starvation, and to the father’s never having a job. The disagreement turns the adults’ heroic language against the material facts of family loss. The children have not died for a national or religious cause: they have died amid poverty and illness. When the father responds by putting on his cap and going for a long walk, the argument remains unresolved.

The Friday Penny and the household ritual

One night the father comes upstairs stumbling and making a speech about how everyone must die for Ireland. He lights a match, lights the candle beside his wife’s bed, holds it above his head, and marches around the room singing a patriotic song. The Hannons bang on the adjoining wall; his wife calls him a disgrace and asks why he does not leave the house. The candle and song give the scene the shape of a solemn procession, but the disturbance is also domestic: a crying child wakes, neighbors protest, and the mother is sobbing with a coat over her mouth.

The father then turns the lesson into a bargain. Holding up a penny, he tells the boys to get out of bed, line up like soldiers, and promise to die for Ireland in exchange for their Friday Penny. The offer makes the contrast between lofty sacrifice and immediate need unmistakable: the children want the coin, but neither boy will make the promise to get it. The father sways, puts the penny back in his pocket, and is told he cannot sleep in the bed that night. He goes downstairs and sleeps in a chair. In the morning he misses work, loses his cement-factory job, and the family is back on the dole. The episode links the patriotic performance not to heroic action but to a lost night, a lost job, and renewed dependence on relief.

The repeated performance and its price

The candlelit scene is one form of a pattern that returns on Thursdays, when the father collects his dole money at the Labour Exchange. A man may suggest going for a pint; the father agrees to just one, but by the end of the night all the money is gone. He comes home singing, wakes the children, and makes them line up to promise that they will die for Ireland when the call comes. The pledge is not a one-time speech: it recurs after the monthly relief payment has been spent drinking.

The children know the songs, including “Kevin Barry,” “Roddy McCorley,” and “The Boys of Wexford,” and sing them in hopes that their father may have a penny or two left over for sweets. Sometimes he calls three-year-old Michael the best singer and gives him the coin. The older boys, aged eight and nine, wonder why their readiness to die and their knowledge of all the songs do not earn the money, while the youngest gets it for toffee. For them, the penny is more than a prize: it is a small, practical benefit attached to an adult ritual whose promised reward is sacrifice.

The narrator also recalls a countervoice to the songs. Mikey Molloy’s father says anyone who wants to die for Ireland is a donkey’s arse; the narrator adds that men have been dying for Ireland for as long as anyone can remember, while the country remains in its present condition. He recalls that Padraig Pearse was shot by the English in Dublin in 1916 and was understood to expect the whole world to die with him. These remarks puncture the idea that patriotic death automatically produces a better Ireland, and give the children grounds to question what the songs ask them to admire.

Meanwhile, the father’s drinking brings a quieter consequence. After he spends the dole, the mother will not speak to him, and the children know they are not supposed to speak to him either. The silence can last from Friday to Monday; even Michael runs to his mother when his father tries to lift him onto his lap. If there is no coal or turf to boil tea, the father drinks water from a jam jar and says good water is all a man needs. The repeated pledge to die for Ireland thus sits beside the daily cost of the “bad thing”: money gone, the household cold, and affection suspended.

Confirmation and the refusal of the child’s future

As he prepares for Confirmation at ten, the narrator encounters the religious claim in a more elaborate form. Mr. O’Dea teaches that Sanctifying Grace is a pearl of great price, bought by Jesus through his death, and that Confirmation makes the children part of Divinity. He lists the Gifts of the Holy Ghost and tells the boys that they will become soldiers of the Church, entitled to die as martyrs if Ireland is invaded by Protestants, Muslims, or other people called heathens. The national and religious demands now converge: the boy is told to prepare for death both as an Irish patriot and as a defender of the Church.

Mikey Molloy rejects the demand as a fabrication adults use to frighten children. He says he would not die for Ireland or the Faith, though he might die for his mother. His answer replaces two abstractions with a personal bond, while the narrator’s own earlier question—whether anyone wants the children to live—remains the measure of the adults’ teaching. The Confirmation lesson is also set against the practical anticipation of “The Collection,” when the children make their rounds of lanes and back streets for cakes, sweets, and money. Even a religious milestone has a material side, just as the promised martyrdom is repeatedly shadowed by poverty.

Significance

The recurring demand exposes a gulf between adult ideals and children’s circumstances. Patriotism arrives as songs, speeches, and a father’s soldierly line-up; religious sacrifice arrives through school lessons and preparation for the sacraments. Yet the family’s dead are explained through disease, starvation, and unemployment, while the living children are made to depend on dole money and the chance of a penny for toffee. The contrast makes the rhetoric of noble death feel less like a path toward freedom or holiness than a demand imposed on children whose immediate need is to live.

The repeated pledge also binds together national identity, religious discipline, and the father’s destructive drinking without making them equivalent. The songs and catechism supply different authorities for sacrifice, but in the household their language returns most insistently when the dole has been spent and the father comes home drunk. Against that repetition, the children’s refusals, their interest in sweets, and Mikey’s choice of his mother stand as modest assertions of life. The memoir gives no heroic resolution; it leaves the demand exposed to the question the child narrator asks, and to the family’s concrete record of what deprivation has already taken.