Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

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

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.