Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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