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

in the crudest possible terms. J. J. Walsh, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, informed a meeting in 1926: “There was no doubt that a country without a language was not a country at all. At best it was a province,” declaring roundly:

      They were told that the teaching of Irish was compulsory, but the teaching of everything else in school-life was equally so. They knew that the majority of children learned because there was no alternative. Therefore the talk of ramming the subject down their throats was all nonsense…This country had for centuries been dosed with compulsory English to the entire exclusion of their native tongue, and the people who now complain of compulsory Irish were whole-hog backers of that English policy.²³

      D. P. Moran in his editorials in the Leader issued a repetitive barrage of dogmatic statement, which was echoed in periodicals such as Fáinne an Lae (The Dawning of the Day), and intensified by anti-Protestant bigotry, in the zealous pages of the Catholic Bulletin. That monthly periodical had been established in 1911 chiefly to warn the Catholic faithful of the dangers of immoral literature, but it quickly became dedicated to waging cultural and psychological war against the malign influence of Protestant Anglo-Ireland. Professor T. Corcoran was a frequent anonymous contributor. The direct, brutal tone of the following passage is characteristic of the journal’s literary style. Here the Bulletin in 1924 editorializes on a suggestion that modern Irish nationality is a synthesis:

      The Irish nation is the Gaelic nation; its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the Gael. All other elements have no place in Irish national life, literature and tradition, save as far as they are assimilated into the very substance of Gaelic speech, life and thought. The Irish nation is not a racial synthesis at all; synthesis is not a vital process, and only what is vital is admissible in analogies bearing on the nature of the living Irish nation, speech, literature and tradition. We are not a national conglomerate, not a national patchwork specimen; the poetry or life of what Aodh de Blacam calls Belfast can only be Irish by being assimilated by Gaelic literature into Gaelic literature.²⁴

      The intemperance here is in part that of anti-Protestant bigotry (the Bulletin knew that the remnants of Protestant Anglo-Ireland would be offended by such Irish Ireland dogma) but it is also, one suspects, as so often in Irish Ireland propaganda, the fruit of frustration.

      In the more thoughtful attempts of Irish Ireland’s writers to propose a genuinely Irish philosophy of national life one can hear conservative and authoritarian notes drowning the radical strains of their message as, in an increasingly hopeless linguistic situation, they sought to protect the language without any broad social vision of how this could be done. This revealed itself in two ways: in a tendency to venerate national life at the expense of individual expression and in a highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity. The work of Daniel Corkery in the 1920s and early 1930s supplies a fascinating example of how the humanistic ideals of Irish Ireland could be swamped by a conservative’s vision of the nation’s life in just the way I am suggesting.

      Before the War of Independence Daniel Corkery had been a moderately well-known Irish novelist and short story writer who had espoused the cause of Gaelic revival with quiet conviction. His novel The Threshold of Quiet (1917) is a sensitive study of provincial frustration, concentrating on the dismal, unfulfilled lives of a group of young Corkmen. A gravely earnest reflection on the quiet desperation of lives lived without achievements of any major kind, it is a fine expression of his serious-minded, pedagogic cultural and social concern. The War of Independence and particularly the death of his close friend Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of Cork, after a long hunger strike, seems to have affected Corkery deeply, sharpening his didacticism and quickening his sense of national outrage and need. In the 1920s and early 1930s his writings became increasingly polemical and dogmatic as, from his position as professor of English at University College, Cork, he sought to direct the course of Irish writing and education into properly national channels. Corkery justified the rigour of his stance in the following terms:

      In a country that for long has been afflicted with an ascendancy, an alien ascendancy at that, national movements are a necessity: they are an effort to attain to the normal. The vital-minded among the nation’s children answer to the impulse: they are quickest to become conscious of how far away everything has strayed from the natural and native. They search and search after that native standard that has been so long discarded: they dig and dig; and one may think of them as beginning every morning’s work with…“I invoke the land of Ireland.”²⁵

      One notes here how political history is allowed to justify a unity of national purpose which might interfere with individual perception and expression. A search for the “native standard” is necessary if the country is to become “normal.” So in the contortions of his cultural study of the dramatist John Synge, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (as the critic labours to discover why despite his origins in the alien Ascendancy Synge nevertheless manages to be a good dramatist), one finds the humanistic strain in Corkery’s thinking, his educationalist’s concern for enhancing individual experience, drowned by notes of a nationalist’s celebration of the nation’s will. In denying Anglo-Irish writers of the Literary Revival artistic membership of the Irish nation, he comments:

      If one approaches “Celtic Revival” poetry as an exotic, then one is in a mood to appreciate its subtle rhythms, and its quiet tones; but if one continues to live within the Irish seas, travelling the roads of the land, then the white-walled houses, the farming life, the hill-top chapel, the memorial cross above some peasant’s grave – memorable only because he died for his country – impressing themselves as the living pieties of life must impress themselves, upon the imagination, growing into it, dominating it, all this poetry becomes after a time little else than an impertinence.²⁶

      Key words here are “must impress themselves,” “growing into it, dominating it.” The truly national imagination will, in Corkery’s sense of things, be consciously or unconsciously submissive to the great forces of the Irish being, will be dominated by them. His criticism of much Anglo-Irish writing is that the great forces “that work their will in the consciousness of the Irish people have found little or no expression in it.”²⁷ “Work their will” is a telling phrase, and it does not surprise that when Corkery casts about in his book for a representative Irish Ireland moment he chooses not some individual activity, nor some occasion of personal expression but a crowd of 30,000 people at a hurling match in Munster, comprising a body of sentiment that he feels Anglo-Irish writers could not comprehend. In such passages Corkery exhibits how easy it is for a sensitive humanist with a proper appreciation of the individual to allow himself the gratification afforded in the contemplation and veneration of the national will and of the people imagined as a mass movement.

      D. P. Moran had, as we noted, assured his fellow countrymen in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland that the nation he envisaged would stimulate “the free and full development of every individual.” At revealing moments in his writings Corkery made evident that he was unwilling in the country’s abnormal state to allow such liberty to writers. Rather, they must obey a national imperative, must in the interests of a truly Irish identity allow the nation to work its will on them, must serve as the seedbeds of the future. Such thinking has an authoritarian ring to it. It is the intellectual equivalent of Irish Ireland’s propagandist dogmatism coexisting uneasily with the educationalist’s vision of humane fulfilment that also stirs Corkery’s imagination.

      Furthermore Corkery was sure, like most of his fellows in the movement, what Irish identity would be like if it was allowed a fertile soil in which to flower. Various supporters of the movement differed about this, but they shared the conviction that they knew. D. P. Moran was vigorously certain that to be truly Irish would be to cultivate masculinity, in a “racy Irish atmosphere” where the Celtic note of melancholy would be derided as an alien absurdity. He aspired to “making the people sober, moderate, masculine and thereby paving the way for industrial advancement and economic reform.”²⁸