The Informer

Liam O'Flaherty served with the Irish Guards on the Western Front and was seriously wounded at Langemarck in 1917. Following the war, he travelled widely and became involved in the Communist movement while in the United States. When he returned to Ireland in 1921, he participated in Marxist revolutionary activity and his 1925 novel The Informer focuses more on Marxist militancy than on separatism.

The two central characters, Gypo Nolan and Frankie Mc Phillip, former members of the Revolutionary Organisation. The leadership of the organisation investigate the death of Mc Phillip in a police raid and seek to prove that Nolan was the informer. Nolan fluctuates between drunken stupor and paranoia.

There is little reference to the First World War in the novel. In one scene, an old woman speaks of her admiration for Gypo: "I wish I had a son like ye. Me own Jimmy, Lord have Mercy on him, was killed in the big war. He was the boy that could bate the polis!" She clung to a memory of her son’s courage, not so much in warfare but in resisting authority: "I seen him wan night an' it took six o' them to pull him off a coal-cart an' he holdin' on to the horse's reins all the time with wan hand while he was fightin' them with th' other."

Whereas the prevailing attitude among the working-class people of Dublin was that violence was necessary, Mary, Frankie’s sister, has come to a different perspective: "Before, when I used to read in the papers about a man being shot [in a punishment killing], I used to think it was right but it's a different thing when a man you know does a thing like that. Frankie killed a man too, Lord Have Mercy on him. Oh God, have pity on us all. Why can't we have peace? Why must we be killing one another? Why?"