O'Flaherty V.C.

O'Flaherty V.C.
Written by	George Bernard Shaw
Date premiered	17 February 1917
Place premiered	Belgium, officers of the Royal Flying Corps
Original language	English
Subject	An Irish soldier in the British army gets conflicting responses when he returns home
Genre	satire
Setting	Ireland

O'Flaherty V.C., A Recruiting Pamphlet (1915) is a comic one-act play written during World War I by George Bernard Shaw. The plot is about an Irish soldier in the British army returning home after winning the Victoria Cross. The play was written at a time when the British government was attempting to promote recruitment in Ireland, while many Irish republicans expressed opposition to a war to defend the British Empire.

Dennis O'Flaherty, winner of the Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery, has returned home to his local village to take part in a recruitment campaign. In conversation with General Pearce Madigan, the local squire, O'Flaherty admits that he had not told his Fenian mother that he would be fighting for the British side in the war, not against it. Madigan says he must explain to her why the war is being fought, and that even Republicans should help in the struggle against German oppression. O'Flaherty says he's no idea why the war is being fought, he just joined up to get away from home, but one thing he's become convinced of is that patriotism is part of the problem: "You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race". His mother appears, horrified to discover he's being fighting for the British. But she's even more horrified when Dennis' girlfriend, Teresa, arrives, expecting that the V.C. comes with a large payout in cash. She's dismayed to learn that the government may only give him a pension if he is wounded first. Still, she thinks it will be worth it, even if he does have to be badly wounded. Dennis says he's sick of life in provincial Ireland. Since he's experienced France, he never wants to come back. He hopes he can get a French wife. Teresa is outraged. When Mrs O'Flaherty discovers that her son gave Teresa a valuable gold watch, she launches into a tirade and the two women berate each other mercilessly. O'Flaherty says he can't wait to get back to the peace and quiet of the trenches. General Madigan sympathises, commenting, "Do you think that we should have got an army without conscription if domestic life had been as happy as people say it is?"

In the preface Shaw argues that most soldiers do not enlist for patriotic reasons, but through a desire for adventure, or to get away from a restricted life. This is especially true of the Irish, since an Irishman's hopes and opportunities depend on "getting out of Ireland". He adds that recruitment was nevertheless at a low ebb in 1915, as it had been "badly bungled... The Irish were for the most part Roman Catholics and loyal Irishmen, which means that from the English point of view they were heretics and rebels." Shaw said that he gave his character a self-serving girlfriend and a harridan of a mother ("a Volumnia of the potato-patch") in order to emphasise the kind of petty oppression from which poor youths fled to join up.

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