Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

The broadcast concluded with a call to Ireland to undertake the new mission “of helping to save Western Civilization” from the scourge of materialism:

In this day, if Ireland is faithful to her mission – and please God she will be, if as of old she recalls men to forgotten truths, if she places before them the ideals of justice, of order, of freedom rightly used, of Christian brotherhood – then indeed she can do the world a service as great as that which she rendered in the time of Columcille and Columbanus, because the need of our time is no whit less.

You sometimes hear Ireland charged with a narrow and intolerant nationalism, but Ireland today has no dearer hope than this: that, true to her holiest traditions, she should humbly serve the truth, and help by truth to save the world.²⁸

Undoubtedly this idealistic vision of the Irishman’s burden helped to reconcile many a young man to the sacrifices of priesthood as he contemplated the depressing secular opportunities of independent Ireland. Indeed, since the 1920s Ireland has sent numerous missionaries abroad to serve the church not only in the English-speaking world, but in Africa, Asia, and South America. By 1965 there were to be ninety-two mission-sending bodies in Ireland,²⁹ and by 1970 the Irish church maintained “6,000 missionaries – 4,000 of them in full-time socio-economic occupation – in twenty-five African, twenty-six Asian and twenty-six Latin-American countries – evidence of a primitive energy or expansive potential in the religious life of a people.”³⁰

A clear demonstration of the internationalism of Irish Catholic life was provided by the remarkable enthusiasm generated in Ireland by the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. Dublin had experienced a great demonstration of popular piety in 1929, when the centenary of Catholic Emancipation had brought half a million people to a mass celebrated in the Phoenix Park, but the month of June 1932 saw an even more extraordinary manifestation of Irish Catholic feeling in Dublin. Crowds gathered in such numbers that it is tempting to see in the occasion itself a triumphant demonstration by the Irish Catholic nation in honour of the victories won in the long years of struggle since emancipation which had reached a climax in independence. Special buildings were erected to accommodate the great influx of pilgrims; 127 special trains brought the pious to the city. For the entire week of the congress the Irish Independent, the most clerically minded of the national dailies, was in a state of very great excitement as it hailed the arrival of church dignitaries, including eleven cardinals from forty countries. The arrival of the papal legate, Cardinal Lauri, was headlined by the Independent as “The Greatest Welcome in Irish History.” There were special candlelit masses held in the Phoenix Park, for men, for women, and for children. Four thousand people were received at a state reception in St. Patrick’s Hall in Dublin Castle and twenty thousand people attended a garden party in the grounds of Blackrock College at the invitation of the Irish hierarchy. The week culminated with a mass in the Phoenix Park, where a crowd of over a million people heard Count John McCormack sing Franck’s Panis Angelicus and a papal message broadcast. For a moment Dublin must have seemed the centre of Christendom and Ireland truly a part of a worldwide community.

Those million people came from the remotest districts in Kerry and from the mountain fastnesses of Donegal; from Canada and the United States, from the Argentine and other South American countries; from the Fiji islands, from Australia and New Zealand; from India; from Malta; and from all the countries of Europe.³¹

Writing in the Round Table a correspondent reported, “It was essentially an Irish celebration, a hosting of the Gael from every country under the sun.”³²

The church, therefore, provided for the needs of the Irish people in these particular ways. Occupying a role in Irish life that made it an integral part of that life, it enjoyed the unswerving loyalty of the great mass of the people. In the 1920s it used that authoritative position in Irish society to preach a sexual morality of severe restrictiveness, confirming the mores and attitudes of a nation of farmers and shopkeepers, denouncing all developments in society that might have threatened a rigid conformism in a strictly enforced sexual code.

The hierarchy was much distressed in the 1920s by the threats posed to what it sought to confirm as traditional Irish morality by the cinema, the English newspaper, and the cheap magazine, by the new dances that became fashionable in Ireland as elsewhere in the postwar period, by provocative female fashions, and even by the innocent company-keeping of the countryside at parties and ceilidhes. All occasions of sin were to be forsworn in the interests of an intensely regular life. A joint pastoral of the Irish hierarchy issued in 1927 expressed the Irish church’s mind directly.

These latter days have witnessed, among many other unpleasant sights, a loosening of the bonds of parental authority, a disregard for the discipline of the home, and a general impatience under restraint that drives youth to neglect the sacred claims of authority and follow its own capricious ways…The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress – all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race.³³

Pearse’s programme for an independent Ireland, with which we began, had envisaged an economic, social, and cultural flowering as a necessary effect of freedom. I have suggested that economic stagnation combined with social and religious conservatism in a highly homogeneous, essentially rural society to ensure that the first decades of independence in the Irish Free State could scarcely meet Pearse’s ambitions for a free Ireland (though the Pearse who precipitated the Irish revolution by his courageous self-sacrifice in 1916 would, one suspects, have found both partition and the treaty entirely repugnant, acceptance of the Free State a betrayal of the separatist faith). Undoubtedly another force was at work – the influence exerted on the country by the terrible inheritance of the civil war which followed the Treaty of 1921. In a small country made disastrously smaller by a border that had set six of its counties adrift, memories of those tragic months and the bitterness they fed perverted much goodwill and idealism, soured many personal relationships, tore at the heart of aspiration. And it would be wrong too to ignore the fact, to which J. H. Whyte alerted us, that it might be wise to see Irish cultural and social conservatism reflected most obviously in the Censorship of Films Act of 1923, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929, and the motion of 1925 making divorce legislation impossible as merely a more extreme form of a general phenomenon “among the more traditionally-minded people all over the world”³⁴ in the aftermath of the Great War. But the fact remains that Irish repressiveness, whatever its cause, was extreme in those first crucial decades and that it severely stunted the cultural and social development of a country which a protracted colonial mismanagement had left in desperate need of revival in both spheres.

By the 1920s the depressed state of cultural and social life in most of Ireland was a theme of some ancestry in the writing of social commentators. Sir William Wilde in 1853 in his Irish Popular Superstitions had lamented the decline of folk tradition in the wake of the Famine, sketching a grim picture of rural desolation:

The old forms and customs, too, are becoming obliterated; the festivals are unobserved, and the rustic festivities neglected or forgotten; the bowlings, the cakes and the prinkums (the peasants’ balls and routs), do not often take place when starvation and pestilence stalk over a country, many parts of which appear as if a destroying army had but recently passed through it.³⁵

Later, such writers as Sir Horace Plunkett in Ireland in the New Century (1904), W. P. Ryan in The Pope’s Green Island (1912), and Filson Young in Ireland at the Cross Roads (1903) reflected on the dismal conditions of Irish civilization. By the 1920s the attractions of the dance hall and the craze for jazz that so disturbed the bishops had done much to put the remnants of Gaelic ways into the shadows. In the 1920s George Russell, the poet, visionary, and social activist, in his journal the Irish Statesman (of which we shall hear more) frequently expressed his profound depression at the spectacle of an Irish rural world without cultural hope or energy. Writing in 1924 he declared:

Nothing in Ireland so wakens in us the sense of stagnant or defeated life as to walk at night in a country district and to find here and there little knots of young men by a gate, seated on a wall, under the shelter of a tree, sometimes silent, sometimes engaged in desultory conversation, sometimes playing cards or pitch and toss. Life is in a backwater with them. Every now and then one drops out of these groups. He has gone to America. The sense of stagnation or depression becomes a little deeper with those who remain, and then another and another breaks away, flying from the stagnant life to where they believe life has fullness. The vast majority of those who go acquit themselves well in their new surroundings. They adjust themselves rapidly to American standards and become energetic and progressive citizens. Their stagnant life in rural Ireland was not due to any lethargy, mental or physical. They had no opportunity for vital expansion. Where, in the vast majority of cases, could they meet except in the lanes? There was no village hall, no library, no gymnasium, no village choir, no place to dance except the roadside.³⁶

In his columns Russell and others lamented the lack of bookshops in the country and doubted “whether a single literary man in Ireland could make the income of an agricultural labourer by royalties on sales of his books among his own countrymen, however famous he may be abroad.”³⁷ Sean O’Casey, for example, regretted the absolute gulf between Ireland’s working class and the world of high culture, enquiring rather plaintively, “And why should the docker reading Anatole France or the carter reading Yeats be a laughter-provoking conception?”³⁸ Stephen Gwynn, the essayist, pondering whether an Irish writer had any sense of an audience, could reach no hopeful conclusion, opining sadly “men – and women – in Ireland read very little,” and, “talk is their literature.”³⁹

One of the places in which that literature was produced was the public house, a meeting place Russell, the tee-totaler, apparently could not bring himself to mention in his evocation of the deprivations of rural life. In his omission he neglected one of the more notable aspects of the Irish scene. In 1925 the Irish government commissioned a report on various matters relating to alcohol in the state. Their report presented a picture likely to give pause to the most libertarian. In the commission’s opinion there were 191 towns or villages where the number of public houses was excessive. Russell commented indignantly even as the commission was about its work:

It is merely absurd that a country struggling desperately to find its feet should attempt to maintain in proportion to its population, twice as many licensed houses as England and three times as many as Scotland. The statistics for individual towns are still more startling. In Charlestown and Ballaghadereen every third house is licensed to sell liquor; Ballyhaunis, with a total population of a thousand, has a drink shop for every twenty of its inhabitants, and Strokestown and Mohill run it close with one for every twenty-six. We wish Mr. Kevin O’Higgins had informed the Commission how many of these towns can boast a book-shop, a gymnasium, a public swimming-bath, or a village hall. Throughout the greater part of a rural Ireland such things are still looked on as ridiculous luxuries, and the mark of social progress is demonstrated by the opening of two public houses where one would normally suffice.⁴⁰

Russell would have found it difficult, as an ascetic idealist, to see anything but stagnation and cultural deprivation in a country where the only social expressions of large numbers of the population appeared to be talk, drink, and sociability. He saw, too, in emigration primarily social disintegration, not the painful dedication of the family to the inherited plot. He was surely right, however, in detecting in the extraordinary dependence on alcohol in the country and in the perennial emigration, sure signs of social waste, of opportunities neglected, and possibility frustrated.

In 1925 an American journalist travelled throughout Ireland and in his volume of observations managed a greater optimism about the country’s cultural future than Russell could achieve as the 1920s progressed. He wrote in hope, recognizing, however, that cultural life in Ireland depended much on isolated individuals:

At Enniscorthy it came to me very conclusively that scattered all about Ireland there is a small, highly-educated intellectual middle class which does not coincide with the moneyed people nor with the fox-hunting people at all – a class which, quietly living its own life and unobtrusively going its own way, is not often observed by the stranger. Nevertheless, it adds a very necessary leaven to the mind-life of Ireland, and it does not, as one of the ladies at the hotel said of herself “live to bloom unseen.” For those good and excellent people scattered over the face of Ireland, whose habits of mind force them to a certain solitude, may accept as a rather enheartening certainty the thought that when they sit alone playing Wagner instead of bridge or reading Joseph Conrad instead of someone’s palm, they are taking a place with honor in the community life of their country. There will be shy people at the gate to listen, and there will be those in the library to receive the book. Ireland will grow slowly into its new life…and there will be an increasing number of those who will look up eagerly toward better things.⁴¹

Some of what follows in this book reflects on the experience of such solitary people and on their work to generate cultural and intellectual revival. Their experience did not bear out the confidence of this prophecy. The repressiveness, conservatism, and deprivation of Irish life in general, like the country’s economic poverty, did not, unhappily, admit of such inevitable amelioration.

CHAPTER 2
An Irish Ireland:Language and Literature

Political life in the newly independent Irish Free State, even in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, reflected in obvious ways the essential conservatism of the predominantly rural Irish electorate. Law and order were rigorously maintained and the books carefully balanced. The party in power, composed in the main of elements of the Sinn Féin party that had accepted the Treaty of 1921, quickly won the support of those sections of the Irish community most likely to benefit from stability – the businessmen and merchants, the larger farmers and shopkeepers, the remnants of Anglo-Ireland anxious for security, and the kind of middle-class men and women who had earlier put their trust in respectable politicians of the Irish parliamentary party. The ruling Cumann na nGaedheal party had the support of the major national dailies, the Irish Independent, Cork Examiner, and Irish Times and of the churches. As the IRA and the republican diehards maintained an opposition that always threatened and occasionally generated violence, a general shift to the right was widely accepted by an Irish public that sought peaceful stability after a period of intense uncertainty. As one historian succinctly stated it, “Cumann na nGaedheal’s basic attitude differed little from that of the British Conservative Party between 1895 and 1905: a well-governed Ireland would receive positive economic benefits from its association with Britain and quickly forget old passions and hatreds.”¹ The government emphasized the benefits in terms of national prestige to be derived from membership of the Commonwealth while pressing ahead with the diplomatic arrangements that helped define the possibilities in that dominion status which had constituted in Michael Collins’ view a steppingstone to freedom.

Perhaps it is less than just to regret the social and cultural pusillanimity of the Free State government in the 1920s, anxious as it was to provide a sound, conservative administration in perilous times. That the state managed to survive at all is in itself remarkable. A viciously fought civil war had left in its wake a recalcitrant minority implacably opposed to the elected government. At least until 1927 when Eamon de Valera, who had led the anti-Treaty faction into the Civil War, accepted the role of parliamentary opposition for the political party he had founded in 1926, Fianna Fáil (Warriors of Fál, or Ireland), the threat from the IRA to the new institutions of the state could by no means be discounted. After the assassination in 1927 of one of the government’s most active young ministers, Kevin O’Higgins, it seemed necessary to pass an extreme Public Safety Act, as it did once again following republican violence and intimidation in 1931. Furthermore, the government was forced in 1925 to absorb that drastic shock to nationalist sensibility and aspiration, the leak of the Boundary Commission Report on the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. That report, if it had been accepted by the British government would, it appeared, have proved a crippling blow to nationalist hopes that the Northern semi-state established against the Irish majority’s wishes in 1920, would be required to cede so much territory to the Irish Free State that it would become untenable. Rather, it transpired that the Free State itself might lose a portion of its territory to Northern Ireland, gaining little. In seeking to prevent the publication and acceptance of the report, the Free State government found itself a scarcely enthusiastic signatory in London in December 1925 to a tripartite agreement accepting the territorial status quo, thereby providing much ammunition to those who saw the establishment of a thirty-two-county republic as the only legitimate if unrealizable Irish political ideal.

The resolve and courage (which extended in such difficult conditions to the creation of an unarmed police force to replace the old Royal Irish Constabulary) with which the Free State government managed the affairs of state, establishing and protecting democratic institutions, must in fairness be reckoned to its credit. That little that was remarkable was attempted in the social or in the cultural spheres is perhaps not surprising, since survival occupied most people’s minds. Yet the revolution had been fought for more than administrative efficiency and a balanced budget, and it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for those diehard republicans who thought the revolution betrayed in the 1920s, while one admires the stern-minded determination of the government in its efforts to establish and maintain public order.

But it could scarcely have been otherwise. A government with its “power-base firmly established among instinctively conservative and prosperous middle-class elements of society,”² was, in a society marked by a general conservatism, hardly likely, whatever one might have hoped, to have embarked upon many social, economic, and cultural experiments in such difficult times. That the government did in fact strenuously commit itself in such unlikely conditions to one radical policy – the apparently revolutionary policy of language revival – must seem initially, in such a context, difficult to explain. This particular commitment, however, quickly becomes comprehensible when one realizes that the government, anxious to establish its legitimacy in the face of the republican’s uncompromising zeal, had, in language revival, a cause of unexceptionable nationalist authenticity. However, the government’s dedication to the cause of language revival was by no means simply self-interested. Indeed to suggest that its espousal of this policy was anything more than very slightly opportunistic would be to ignore how profoundly the Irish revolutionary movement that had led to the independence of the Free State had been affected by the revivalist ideology of the Gaelic League and the enthusiasm it generated.

The Gaelic League (founded in 1893 to propagate knowledge of and interest in the language) had been a nursery for active members of Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers of 1916. The ideology so ably broadcast by the League had moreover achieved a measure of acceptance in the country at large. Accordingly, when a Free State government was formed it contained members of the Gaelic League and individuals sympathetic to the aims of what had been perhaps the best-supported, most vital cultural movement of the preceding thirty years. In fact, the state’s first Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeill, who had been the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers when the Easter Rising took place (against his advice as it happened), was professor of early Irish history at University College, Dublin, and a Gaelic scholar who had become known in the early years of the century as a devoted worker for the Gaelic League. It was in fact he who had coproposed a series of recommendations on education at an Ard-Fheis of the League in 1913 which had sought to have Irish taught to all pupils in National Schools and to exclude from teachers’ training colleges individuals who lacked sound knowledge of the language.

The first Dáil in 1919, after the major Sinn Féin electoral successes of 1918, had created a Ministry for Irish, and as the new state was founded, the Gaelic League could be reasonably sure that any government emerging from only a section of the former Sinn Féin party would have the revival of Irish as one of its central concerns. So, an announcement of the government’s achievements and policies published in November 1924 included amid much matter on farming, drainage, rates, electricity, and railways, the following declaration:

The Organisation and the Government are pledged to coordinate, democratize and Gaelicize our education. In each of these aims great progress has already been made. It is now possible for the child of the poorest parents to pass from one end of the educational ladder to the other, and the Irish language has been restored to its own place in Irish education. In addition, the condition of that important class, the Secondary Teachers, has been improved. The Organisation and Government intend to devote special attention to the problem of safeguarding the Language in the Gaeltacht by improving economic conditions in the Gaeltacht and developing Educational Institutions therein.³

The references to democratization referred here to the government’s replacement of the intermediate and national education commissions by civil servants, thus, as one educational historian has it, “substituting for an academic and professional oligarchy, an unfettered bureaucracy”⁴ and the adoption of a system of government support for secondary schools on the basis of capitation grants for each child following approved courses. A system of incremental salary scales was also introduced, making teachers less dependent on local managements. The twenties saw, however, very little change in the Irish educational system, and certainly the claims that Irish education was being democratized ring rather hollow. For the state was content to maintain almost the entire educational structure bequeathed to it by the imperial authorities with its class-conscious, religiously managed secondary schools, its technical sphere generally thought socially inferior to the more academic institutions, and its universities almost the sole preserve of students from propertied or professional backgrounds. What was effected was a strengthening of the control of education by a central bureaucracy.

The gaelicization of education was, in contrast, systematically attempted. It was determined that all teachers leaving training colleges should be expected to have a knowledge of Irish; preparatory boarding schools were established to prepare young people for careers in the teaching profession which would emphasize the language; school inspectors were required to study Irish, and no further appointments were offered to individuals who lacked proficiency in Irish; Irish was made compulsory for scholarships in the Intermediate and Leaving Certificates in the secondary schools; and financial and other encouragements were offered to schools and individuals alike to use Irish more frequently. But it was in the primary or National Schools that the linguistic policy was prosecuted most vigorously. In its initial stages this linguistic effort was presided over by Professor Eoin MacNeill, whose commitment to education as a means to revive Irish civilization (which for him included the Irish language) was made clear in a series of articles published while he was Minister for Education, in the Irish Statesman in 1925. There he asserted:

Nationality, in the best sense, is the form and kind of civilization developed by a particular people and distinctive of that people. So understood, nationality needs no apologist…I believe in the capacity of the Irish people, if they clear their minds, for building up an Irish civilization. I hold that the chief function of an Irish State and of an Irish Government is to subserve that work. I hold that the principal duty of an Irish Government in its educational policy is to subserve that work. I am willing to discuss how this can best be done, but not discuss how it can be done without.⁵

The National School teachers were enlisted in this crusade, their role to clear the minds of the nation’s children through intense exposure to the Irish language.

Eoin MacNeill himself had a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of language to society than many others who supported revival, and he well understood that to depend on the schools alone to revive Irish would be unwise. But it was his ironic fate, busy as he was with other matters of state, to preside over the legislative steps that made such a dependence possible. In the absence of any coherent social and economic policy, particularly in relation to the Irish-speaking districts that remained, this dependence was, as events were to prove, almost entirely misguided. The schools alone could not perform a linguistic miracle while the social order was undisturbed by any revolutionary energies.

Theoretical justification for this linguistic onslaught on the schools was supplied by the very influential professor of education at University College, Dublin, Father T. Corcoran, SJ. His claim to eminence in historical studies was work on the hedge schools of penal times (when education for Catholics was offered in barns and even out-of-doors by many dedicated spirits) and on the apparently baneful influence on the Irish language of the British-imposed National School system of the nineteenth century. It was his simplistic belief that what the National Schools had wrongfully done, they could now undo. He was certain that the National Board of Education had been “fatal to the national use of vernacular Irish”⁶ as he sought to ‘reverse a change that was made fully practicable only by the prolonged misuse of the schools.”⁷ In 1920 the Irish National Teachers’ Organization (INTO) at its annual congress, conscious that the Gaelic League had already set out a series of proposals for the gaelicization of the National Schools, responded by establishing a conference to consider its own position. Professor Corcoran, “while declining to act as a member…intimated that it would have at its disposal the benefit of his advice and experience.”⁸ He was available therefore as a consultant to the congress when it suggested in 1921 that all singing in the National Schools should be in Irish, that instruction in history and geography, which were taught from the third standard onward, should be through Irish, and that one hour a day should be spent in direct language acquisition. Such draconian measures meant that other subjects had to be eliminated from the programme. So, in Irish National Schools, drawing, elementary science, hygiene, nature study, and most domestic studies were dispensed with in favour of the language. Furthermore it was proposed that all teaching in the first two, or infant grades, should be in Irish. The new programme was accepted and set in motion in April 1922.

Patrick Pearse, in a famous phrase, had once castigated the imposition of an educational programme on children by an external authority as “the murder machine.” Professor Corcoran was disinclined to see any analogy in the policies he encouraged. He was persuaded that because non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States could be taught English in grade schools, although it was not the language of the home, so in Ireland children from English-speaking homes could receive instruction in all subjects in Irish at school. The obvious point that European immigrants’ children in the United States were being introduced to the language of the wider community while in Ireland children certainly were not, apparently did not weigh with him. Nor indeed, one imagines, did the fact that children might endure some emotional and mental distress in their efforts to cope with the linguistic obstacle course he was setting them, for his vision of the educational experience had little room for such concepts as pleasure or the joy of learning. His dismal creed was formulated in dispiriting terms: “All true education must progressively combine effort with mere interest: it is the effort that enobles and makes worthily human.”⁹ Policies were developed to retrain teachers to take part in this educational enterprise; special courses were arranged for teachers to increase their knowledge of Irish; individuals whose mother tongue was Irish were encouraged to enter the teaching profession at the Irish-speaking preparatory colleges, even if they displayed few other pedagogic aptitudes. As Professor Corcoran had it: “From the national point of view, even mediocre quality in a boy or girl of fourteen years, if the Irish vernacular command is present, makes that prospective teacher highly valuable.”¹⁰