Arensberg and Kimball employed the term “familism” to describe the social structure they observed in the Irish countryside in the 1930s. They employed this term to characterise the mode of life of mostly small farmers engaged in raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, whose wives were responsible, in a strict division of labour, for the domestic economy of the house, for the poultry, milking, and dairying. The father was the dominant figure in the family, making all economic decisions, not even allowing his fully grown sons to handle money when produce was to be sold at the local fair in the town. A male child was exclusively looked after by his mother until his first communion was taken in the church at seven years of age. Then he came under the charge of his father and was in the company of his older brothers during that extraordinary “boyhood” which might well last until his fortieth or fiftieth year if he was the favoured heir and had not been forced into emigration or a job in the town.

Daughters of the household learned the ways of farm domesticity from their mothers until the time came for them to receive offers of marriage or to seek a life elsewhere. Marriage was a complicated process in which a matchmaker played a part in the subtle economic valuations that were necessary before the favoured son who would inherit the farm could be allowed to introduce a new bride to the household. Sometimes the introduction of the new woman to the household was effected at the moment when it was possible for the farmer to hand over the main responsibility for the farm to his heir (the old age pension allowed for this possibility when the farmer turned seventy), and when this occurred it was perhaps easier to avoid the tensions which must often have developed between mother and daughter-in-law. The centre of the house was the kitchen, and when the old couple “retired”, they ceased sleeping in that room and moved to a small room at the west of the house, where the family heirlooms, pictures, and religious symbols were displayed. As the anthropologists report, “They move in among the symbols of family unity, among the religious symbols of the house, into surroundings of a certain religious or sacred character.”¹² Their hierarchical position was maintained. The father could still occupy the nearest chair to the fire with the older men when they came to visit, and the old couple achieved an almost patriarchal status as the grandchildren were born. The society was strictly hierarchical, and the family unit was its fundamental organizing principle.

Co-operation in farming work between different farmers did exist in a system known as “cooring,” but this was not a sign of any collectivist impulse. Rather, it was a deeply felt system of obligation in the exchange of services and implements between individual households. The only interruption to this strictly familist social system was the help proffered to individuals who could not be expected to reciprocate in any way. A widow, for example, trying to keep her farm together with the help of hired hands, could expect a local family to help her out at harvest time, but again the impulse was not at all collectivist, but, in such instances, charitable. In Arensberg and Kimball’s succinct summary, ‘Economic endeavour, both upon the individual farms and in the form of co-operation between farms, is controlled through the operation of social forces springing from the family.”¹³

The sons and daughters who could find no significant role in this system had a limited number of choices open to them. They might seek jobs in a nearby town, they might aspire to join one of the professions, or they might emigrate. An option firmly closed to them was the choice of finding a fulfiling role at home, for by the 1920s it was increasingly unlikely that they could final rural occupations that would allow them to stay in the district of their birth. Many of the rural trades and crafts that had flourished in nineteenth-century Ireland had declined in the face of competition from mass-produced goods, and the craftsmen and women of the countryside instead of being absorbed, as such people were in other European countries, by an industrial revolution in which their technical abilities were useful, had been forced into emigration. So even if the sons and daughters of farmers had been willing to accept the loss of social status entailed in following a rural trade, the opportunities to do so were rapidly diminishing and a future as a craftsman or craftswoman would have seemed as bleak as that of an unmarried son or daughter about the farm.

A job in the town usually meant the grocery trade to which a young man became indentured as an assistant until such time as he was able to set up business on his own account, often upon marriage to a farmer’s daughter. The farmer helped with the initial capital required in the form of a dowry. Daughters were also so indentured and might have hoped in time to make a sound marriage within the trade. As exact an awareness of economic responsibilities attended the marital arrangements in the world of provisions and weighing scales as it did in the world of acreage and cattle. The values and familist social structures of the farm world were transferred to the shop and town, thereby ensuring that the cultural and political influence of the small and strong farmers in the country was augmented by that of the grocers and small traders of the town.

For those sons and daughters of farmers who chose to enter one of the professions through attendance at a seminary, at a college of the National University, or at a teachers’ training college, the chances were slim that they could make their lives in their native parishes or indeed that they could even pursue their careers in a rural setting. By the 1920s only a few opportunities remained for a rural professional life in the priesthood and in the legal, medical, and teaching professions. If a boy or a girl wished to avoid emigration, a move to an Irish town or city was almost imperative where, in the trades, professions, and state service, they bore with them the values so indelibly etched upon their personalities by a rural Irish childhood.

The combined force of these two social groups in modern Ireland, the farmers and the tradesmen, together with such of their offspring as could find roles in the professions, was enormously influential in fashioning the political, social, and cultural moulds of the independent state. Their economic prudence, their necessarily puritanical, repressive sexual mores and nationalistic conservatism, encouraged by a priesthood and hierarchy drawn considerably from their number, largely determined the kind of country which emerged in the first decades of independence.

The role of the Irish Catholic church in directing Irish life into the narrow channels of a Jansenistic puritanism has, as was mentioned, been proffered by commentators as one explanation for the fact that so many people for so long in Ireland were able to behave as if those troublesome but exhilarating manifestations of human nature, passion, sexual aspiration, and the erotic principle itself, had been quite excised from the Irish experience. While social historians have been able to provide alternative, rather more credible accounts of a process whereby a society of farmers and shopkeepers developed, resolutely determined to restrain sexuality in the interests of economic realism, the contribution of the church as the institution which aided the process must also be assessed.

A study of the main developments within Irish Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a prerequisite for any informed understanding of the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. The great nineteenth-century struggles in the Irish church between the centralizing, apparently ultramontanist party led by that organizational genius, the first Irish Cardinal, Paul Cullen, and older, local, more independent forms of Catholicism had been resolved in favour of a church loyal to Rome. Concurrent with this political conflict within the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic church had occurred a remarkable devotional revolution whereby continental expressions of piety were introduced to an Ireland which adopted them with an astonishing enthusiasm, so that the texture of modern Irish religious life owes much to the period 1850–75 when that revolution was in large part effected. It was in those twenty-five years that the great mass of Irishmen and women were confirmed in loyalty to the modern Roman church and were provided with the symbols and institutions which might maintain and express that loyalty, which was a source of wonder to many a commentator on modern Irish affairs. The celebration of the mass was regularized (in pre-Famine Ireland the shortage of churches had led to a practice known as “stations”, whereby the priest celebrated mass in various houses in his parish), and new devotions were introduced – the rosary, forty hours, perpetual adoration, novenas, blessed altars, Via Crucis, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines, processions, and retreats. It was the period when popular piety began to express itself in beads, scapulars, religious medals, and holy pictures, and open religious feeling, as one historian has commented, was “organized in order to communalize and regularize practice under a spiritual director.”¹⁴ This organization included societies, confraternities, and sodalities. A programme of church-building was undertaken (in 1865 there were 1,842 churches, in 1906 2,417),¹⁵ and sound investments were made in land and property so that by the beginning of our period, reflecting on the piety of the people and on the rich inheritance of buildings and investment bequeathed by the nineteenth-century church, it should have been possible for the Irish hierarchy to feel serenely confident about its position in Irish life.

The hierarchy in the first few years of the Irish Free State, despite the inheritance of the nineteenth century, was nevertheless rather pessimistic about the future. The troubled years from 1912 to 1923 had often placed the hierarchy in very difficult political positions. During the Civil War the bishops had antagonized the republicans through their support of the Free State government, and they were disturbed by what they thought were signs of an unravelling moral fabric in a society which had experienced revolution and warfare and which was riskily open to the influence of rapidly developing mass media. Their concern was premature, however, for the great majority of the faithful were to remain loyal to the church practice of the devotional revolution until the late 1960s. Neither the political stance of the hierarchy during the Civil War nor the influence of an increasingly libertarian climate outside Ireland disturbed the religious devotion of Ireland’s Catholic believers. That it was maintained well into the modern period is attributable not only to the power of the church’s apologetic but also to the ways in which Irish Catholicism was precisely adapted to Irish social reality in the period.

Crucial to the institutional and popular achievements of the church in the period following the Famine until the 1960s was the role played by Catholicism in confirming a sense of national identity. The church, with her formally regularized rites and practices, offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were enduring a protracted decline. And the Catholic faith was peculiarly suited to play a role in that nationalist awakening. Bound up in the past with the traditional Gaelic way of life to which the Famine had largely put paid, historically associated with the repression of the eighteenth century, when the native priesthood had heroically resisted the proscription of their faith, permeated with that profound sense of the supernatural which had characterized the countryside for centuries, Catholicism was richly endowed with attributes appropriate to its modern role in the nation’s life. Strengthened by the Roman vigour of the devotional revolution, given a distinct tincture of Victorian respectability by the new discipline imposed on popular expressions of piety, the Catholic faith of the majority of the Irish people became therefore intimately linked with national feeling. Accordingly, from the years of the devotional revolution onward Irish Catholicism increasingly became a badge of national identity at a time when the church also felt able to propound doctrines that enshrined the rights of private property. In a nation where nationalist aspiration was so often rooted in the farmer’s rigorous attachment to his land, all this was to help ensure the church’s continued role in Irish life, even though at difficult moments during the Land War and the War of Independence ecclesiastics felt obliged to oppose the tactics employed by political activists.

It is true, one must point out, that nationalist ideologues, at least from the time of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, always strove to define Irishness in more comprehensive terms than the merely religious, seeking national distinctiveness in language and culture. But despite brief periods when enthuasiasm for Gaelic revival showed some signs of translating itself into a major social force, transcending sectarian divisions (in the first decade of the twentieth century), Irish nationalists sometimes found themselves acutely embarrassed by the lack of immediately obvious marks of Irish identity apart from a devout, loyal Catholicism. Indeed, some of the strenuous efforts made on behalf of the Irish language were perhaps partially rooted in such embarrassment.

By contrast, few efforts were required for most of the twentieth century to develop Catholicism as a mark of national distinctiveness; the church was incontrovertibly part of Irish reality and the practice of religion an evident feature of national life. In 1926, 92.6 percent of the population of the Irish Free State were returned as Catholic in the census. From all the impressionistic evidence available, we can assume that the great majority of their number were regular in their duties and obligations. Sir Horace Plunkett must be representative of the many writers who have looked on Irish piety in the twentieth century and wondered. “In no other country probably,” he wrote in 1904, “is religion so dominant an element in the daily life of the people as in Ireland.”¹⁶

The Irish church was also successful because in spite of its ultramontanist tendencies, it was a national church in the sense that it drew its bishops from its priesthood and its priesthood in the main from the people. It therefore offered opportunities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for preferment and power in a society that had hitherto had little chance to avail itself of the one or to exercise the other.

This statement requires some expansion. Almost all observers of religious life in the latter half of nineteenth-century Ireland are agreed that during this period, significant numbers of the sons of farmers and shopkeepers were entering the national seminary at Maynooth, County Kildare, to study for the priesthood, as they were in other ecclesiastical colleges in the country. Furthermore, literary and journalistic sources suggest that the social tone of Maynooth in this period and in the early twentieth century was somewhat boisterous and uncultivated, dominated as it was by young men from the land, and that the education provided was rather less than culturally enlarging in its anti-intellectualism and sexual prudery, confirming the rural values in which so many young men had been reared. It seems many a farmer’s son emulated William Carleton’s hero Denis O’Shaughnessy, taking the road to Maynooth with more success than he. Gerald O’Donovan’s interesting novel Father Ralph allows us a glimpse of Maynooth in the 1890s (it is important to remember that priests trained in this period would have exercised their ministry well into the 1930s). The novel, largely autobiographical, recounts the progress of a young boy of a wealthy Catholic family (they have houses in Dublin and in the country) from days of cloistered piety as a child to the tough practicalities of priesthood in a depressed Irish village. Ralph O’Brien at Maynooth discovers the intellectual poverty of the theological education offered in the 1890s.

During the few free days before the arrival of the general body of students Ralph…explored the College: the poky, ill-supplied divisional libraries, without catalogue, order, or classification, or any book that one wanted to read; the rather fine College library, not quite as despicable as the admirer of Marie Corelli found it, but still pitifully unrepresentative of any general culture.¹⁷

Ralph finds theological speculation of any kind dismissed by professors and students alike, all religious mystery apparently comprehended in a facile scholasticism. The best among them have a simple uninquiring faith, while the worst employ orthodoxy as a means of personal advancement in the church. For the religious thinker there is nothing:

After a lecture in dogmatic theology by Father Malone, who demolished all the thinkers of four centuries with an axiom culled from Aquinas, delivered in a loud self-satisfied voice and accompanied by much table-thumping, Ralph often sat in his room, limp and confused, hopeless of his own future and of the future of the Church…

Ralph once ventured an opinion contradictory of Dunlea’s notes. The Professor flushed angrily, but said suavely – “What is good enough for St Thomas and me ought to satisfy you Mr O’Brien. I’d advise you to read my notes carefully. They contain everything necessary to be known on the subject.”

That evening during study Ralph read these meagre notes, the fine flower of Maynooth teaching, a superficial application of a knowledge theory to religion that carried no conviction. If this book was the best Maynooth could do, why had he wasted the best years of his life there? It reduced God to a series of abstractions, unreal and meaningless.¹⁸

The upper-class Ralph O’Brien also finds himself socially ill at ease in a church that appears to be dominated by the acquisitive prudery of farmer and shopkeeper. Both Father Ralph and a later O’Donovan novel, Vocations (1921), describe a social order in which church, farmer, grocer, and gombeen publican comprise a corrupt and corrupting alliance, intent on social advancement.

O’Donovan, a supporter of the Irish cooperative movement founded by Sir Horace Plunkett, and keenly interested in rural renewal, presents the church as an institution dedicated neither to spirituality nor the intellectual enhancement of the faith, but to material and social advantage. Other much less tendentious commentators suggest that his portrait of Maynooth as intellectually deficient and the church as lacking a constructive social vision was not wholly unfounded. Canon Sheehan, the priestly novelist and a really sympathetic observer of Irish ecclesiastical life, remembered in an unfinished manuscript his own days at Maynooth in the 1870s, where he was distressed by a prevailing careerism evident in such current phrases as “respectable position in the Church,” “high and well-merited dignities,” “right of promotion,” “getting a better parish,” “a poor living,” concluding:

Only too soon will the young Levite learn to despise the self-effacement, the shy and retiring sensitiveness, the gentleness and humility that are such bright and beautiful ornaments of a real priestly character: and only too soon will he set his heart upon those vulgar and artificial preferments which the world prizes, but God and His angels loathe and laugh at.¹⁹

It was his judgment too that

…the general verdict on our Irish Ecclesiastical Colleges is that they impart learning but not culture – that they send out learned men, but men devoid of the graces, the “sweetness and light” of modern civilization.²⁰

Considering their future careers, Sheehan could remark, “It may be questioned whether, in view of their mission and calling, this is not for the best,” but in 1897 he was moved to call for a Christian cultural revival in Ireland led by a well-educated priesthood, writing in terms that suggest the enormous changes such a revival would require:

Some of us, not altogether dreamers and idealists, believe it quite possible to make the Irish race as cultured, refined, and purified by the influence of Christian teachings as she was in the days of Aidan and Columba…

But to carry out this destiny, Ireland needs above all the services of a priesthood, learned, zealous, and disciplined into the solidarity of aim and principle, which alone can make it formidable and successful.²¹

Sheehan admired the unshakable piety of the Irish poor in a way that O’Donovan could not easily do. He valued “the gentle courtesy, the patience under trial, the faces transfigured by suffering – these characteristics of our Celtic and Catholic peasantry,” and he felt himself keenly alive to “the self-sacrifice, the devotion to duty, the fidelity to their flocks, which have always characterized the Irish priest.”²² Nevertheless, his comments on the social ambition of the clergy and their lack of humane culture tend to confirm rather than contradict O’Donovan’s much more astringent analysis.

A church without intellectual or cultural ambitions of any remarkable kind was unlikely to attract to its service the most creative and imaginative members of society. Rather, it offered career opportunities to many who might have found intellectual or cultural demands upon them even more difficult to meet than the obedience, discipline, and administrative ability that were required of them by a powerfully authoritative church. Accordingly, in the first decades of the Irish Free State the church was unhappily notable in the main for lack of interest in artistic and cultural activity. The early years of the Catholic Revival in the later nineteenth century had, it is true, stimulated a good deal of architectural enthusiasm in the church, as many churches were built, some in the Hiberno-Romanesque style at the one time expressing the general medievalism of late Victorian culture and, more strikingly, attempting to establish a continuity with pre-Conquest Ireland which gratified nationalist sensibilities, but by the 1920s this style had become rather hackneyed and most church architecture and art (with the exception of some stained glass) were undistinguished. An exhibition of Irish ecclesiastical art during Dublin Civic Week in 1929 drew from George Russell’s paper, the Irish Statesman, the regretful conclusion that “none of the Churches has thought it important to give their clergy an education in good taste as well as in dogmas,” and, that where some “natural good taste or love of the arts” does exist in the churches, “that appreciation is individual. It owes nothing to a traditional policy of the Churches.”

One comes away with the feeling that quality is of no importance, beauty is of no importance, anything is good enough for God and for his worshippers. We have bright brass vulgarities, a gaudy lustre seeming to be the only thing required, not exquisite craftsmanship, but commercialized work turned out with no more reverence than one would turn out boots or shoes.²³

Lest it be thought such a melancholy estimate of Irish ecclesiastical art was solely a response of the theosophist George Russell, it can be noted that a correspondent of the Irish Independent in 1932, casting about for examples of modern Irish churches which, because of their undoubted beauty and use of Irish art might reflect glory on the Irish church in the year of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, could think of only two, the Honan Hostel Chapel in Cork (1916) and Loughrea Cathedral (1904).

If then the Irishman was faithful to his church because it secured for him a sense of national identity, gave spiritual sanction to his hold on the land, and provided for his sons and daughters respected positions in society without the need for developed intellectual or cultural endowments, it is important to recognize that there was a further altogether more remarkable element in the attachment, which accounts for an important strand in modern Irish cultural history. For many Irish men and women the church was an international institution which allowed their small country a significant role on a world stage. This sense of belonging to a worldwide religious community was curiously linked to the internationalism of Irish nationalist feeling in the early twentieth century. For the phrase “the Irish race” that resounds through many nationalist utterances in the first two decades of the century was understood to refer not only to the inhabitants of the island but to the “nation beyond the seas,” “the Greater Ireland,” that vast number of Irish Catholic men and women scattered abroad (in the United States alone in 1920 there resided over four million people who could claim at least one Irish-born parent) who comprised an Irish diaspora. Indeed, it may not be unjust to see in both Irish nationalism and Catholicism of the period an effort to provide a counterweight to the international vision of British imperialism. If Britain had its material empire, the Irish could assert their dignity in terms of a patriotism and a Catholic spirituality which both transcended the island itself. Nationalist and Catholic propaganda of the period often echoes the rhetoric and tones of Victorian and Edwardian imperial celebration, and the Ireland that escaped the most cataclysmic effects of the First World War on the Victorian and Edwardian frames of mind continued to think in this oddly imperial manner until well into the 1930s. In this mode of thought, Ireland as a Catholic nation has a peculiar destiny in human affairs.

A writer in 1937, for example, reminiscing on St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, managed a rhetoric which suggests the return of a Victorian British imperial official to his public school, seeing on the playing fields of Eton or in Rugby Chapel the destiny of nations:

In this place of memories one is apt for many fancies. To see the oak stalls in the College Chapel, darkening a little with the years, is to think of all who have been students there before my time and since. With no effort I can slip from the moorings of Past and Present, and see in this moment all rolled in one. The slowly moving line of priests down through the College Chapel is never-ending; it goes into the four provinces of Ireland; it crosses the seas into neighbouring England and Scotland, and the greater seas into the Americas and Australia and Africa and China; it covers the whole earth; it goes wherever man has gone, into the remotest regions of the world; it is unbroken, it is ever renewing itself at the High Altar in Maynooth…Some there were who prayed for a place in that endless line. They had counted the weeks and the days, even to an ordination day that never dawned for them. “Each in his narrow cell for ever laid”, they are the tenants of the plot, sheltered by yew trees, beyond the noises of the Park. A double row of little marble headstones, a double row of graves all facing one way; they lie like soldiers taking their rest.²⁴

That such feeling, in a book that another writer, celebrating the hundred and fiftieth year of the college, called “a sort of second breviary…the Maynooth classic,”²⁵ represented a significant element in the imaginative life of the early decades of independence is evidenced by the fact that Eamon de Valera, on 6 February 1933, shortly after his accession to executive power, chose to open a new high-power broadcasting station at Athlone with a speech to the nation which made special reference to Ireland’s historic Christian destiny. He was responding in the speech to the accusation that modern Irish nationalism was insular and intolerant. He began with an evocation of the glories of Ireland’s Christian past. The new broadcasting station would, he informed his listeners, who in fact included many dignitaries in Rome,

…enable the world to hear the voice of one of the oldest, and in many respects, one of the greatest of the nations. Ireland has much to seek from the rest of the world, and much to give back in return. Her gifts are the fruit of special qualities of mind and heart, developed by centuries of eventful history. Alone among the countries of Western Europe, Ireland never came under the sway of Imperial Rome…

Because she was independent of the Empire, Ireland escaped the anarchy that followed its fall. Because she was Christian, she was able to take the lead in christianizing and civilizing the barbarian hordes that had overrun Britain and the West of Europe. This lead she retained until the task was accomplished and Europe had entered into the glory of the Middle Ages.²⁶

An opportunity now existed, declared de Valera, for Ireland to repeat her earlier triumph:

During most of this great missionary period, Ireland was harassed by Norse invaders. Heathens and barbarians themselves, they attacked the centres of Christianity and culture, and succeeded in great measure in disorganizing both. That Ireland in such circumstances continued the work of the apostolate in Europe is an eloquent proof of the zeal of her people, a zeal gloriously manifested once more in modern times in North America and Australia and in the mission fields of Africa and China.²⁷

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