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was alleged to have sexually assaulted Iseult, he says that she burst into his room one morning when he had ‘the chamber pot in [his] hand’.
    The court rejected the immorality charges against MacBride, accepting only one charge of drunkenness. Maud Gonne was awarded sole guardianship of Seaghan, with John entitled to visiting rights every Monday at the home of the mother. Heartbroken at the outcome, MacBride exercised his visiting rights on a couple of extremely tense occasions, and eventually returned to Dublin. He would never see his son again. Gonne, in a calculated effort to distance Seaghan from his father, insisted that his first language be French; thus Sean MacBride’s lifelong hallmark French accent.
    Major MacBride’s involvement in the Rising appears to have been accidental. He was not a member of the formal republican leadership, his military distinction arising mainly from his formation of the Irish Brigade to assist the Boers in 1900. He told his court martial on 4 May 1916 that he had left his lodgings in Glenageary on the morning of Easter Monday, and gone into town to meet his brother, who was coming to Dublin to get married. On St Stephen’s Green, he saw a band of Irish Volunteers, who told him that a Republic was about to be declared. ‘I considered it my duty to join them,’ he said. He was made second-in-command of a battalion at Jacob’s factory.
    MacBride was sentenced to death on 4 May and shot the following morning.
    Kevin Christopher Higgins, in a poem about the execution, ‘How He Died’, quoted words attributed to MacBride addressing his firing squad: ‘Let you rest well o’ nights; myself will do it for one!/And tell them nobody cried!’
    MacBride, a fearless and heroic soldier, went to his death the victim of what would only many decades later become known as parental alienation syndrome. Although his son was to become one of the central figures in the life of the Irish nation over the coming century, he referred to his father in public or in writing on only a couple of occasions, none of them any more than a perfunctory reference to a man for whom he appeared to have no store of affection. It is therefore perhaps appropriate that his mother, elevated by the poetry of one of the giants of world literature, has become an icon of a society in which, on a daily basis, mothers are enabled by the State to stand between fathers and children, and encouraged to see the next generation of Irish citizens as their own personal property.

3 Arthur Guinness
    I n 2009, Guinness celebrated its 250th anniversary with a load of hoo-hah and humbug. There were posters all over Dublin, allegedly the birthplace of the world-famous alcoholic drink, and advertising campaigns running in every medium inviting citizens to ‘raise a glass to Arthur’. Newspapers who had profited much over the years from advertising campaigns by the company ran fawning articles and editorials paying tribute to ‘the pint of plain’.
    But ‘stout’ was actually invented not in Dublin, but in London, and was copied by Arthur Guinness when the standard ale he was purveying began to decline in popularity. Arthur Guinness’s first brewery was in Leixlip, County Kildare, established in 1756, with a £100 inheritance from his godfather. He later passed on the business to his brother and in 1759 opened up a brewery in St James’s Gate in Dublin. It would be several decades before Guinness began to brew stout. The word ‘stout’, incidentally, was also created in London, originally as an adjective to describe a dark ale called porter. Later on, it became the popular term for the drink.
    It wasn’t until much later that Guinness was spoken of as the Irish national drink. According to the historian Cormac O’Grada, it was only in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of the Famine, that ‘stout’ began to become popular outside the capital. A major factor in the success of the brand was the spread of temperance