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

Eoin MacNeill, by contrast, made more of the noble, natural piety of the people and was disinclined to venerate the masculine virtues or berate weakness. But his sense of Irish identity was no less developed. His vision was of a historic Irish rural Christian civilization, chaste and learned, which must be allowed to express its rich life in the present. Corkery felt able to identify with even greater precision the forces which preoccupy a properly Irish racial mind. They are, as he defines them in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, (1) religion, (2) nationalism, (3) the land. Unless, his exclusive creed asserts, a writer is imaginatively absorbed by at least one of these preoccupations he is, Corkery assures us, not to be considered an Irish writer; he does not express the reality of Irish life. Irish identity, therefore, poses no problems for Corkery. His conception of an essential Irish mind, as of an authentic Irish literature, is equally categorical – it must express a clear-sighted sanity, an intellectual order where wit controls intensity of feeling, realism tempers imagination, intelligence the affections; the truly Irish mind must exhibit the virtues of classicism:

      This core of hardness is scarcely ever lacking to the Gaelic poet; track him right down the centuries, and one never finds it missing. It is intellectual in its nature: hard-headed and clear-sighted, witty at its best, prosaic when not eager; and to its universality in the truly Gaelic world is due the fact that one can turn over the pages of the Gaelic book of poetry, century after century, without coming on any set of verses that one could speak of as sentimental.²⁹

      Such intellectual assurance with its implicit prescriptive zeal is a characteristic of Irish Ireland’s writings, and it suggests the degree to which in desiring a flowering of the Irish intellect the writers knew what to expect. That individual blooms of creativity are unlikely to obey such prescriptive imperatives is a signally salutary fact that Irish Ireland weighed rather too little.

      I have argued that a genuinely radical and attractive humanism had fired much of the pre-revolutionary enthusiasm for the Irish language and its revival and that some of this feeling survived into the post-independence period. I have argued further that in the early years of the Irish Free State the proponents of Gaelic revival and the supporters of Irish Ireland, in general possessing no real social programme, tended to express the need for language revival in terms of conservation and of a despairingly authoritarian control of a society that was becoming increasingly anglicized. The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seen as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement. This, I think, becomes even clearer when we consider the relationship between the Irish Ireland ideology and the exclusivist cultural and social pressures which bore fruit in the enactment of the Censorship Bill of 1929.

      A recurrent intellectual motif in the writings of Irish Ireland’s thinkers is the provision of historical accounts of Ireland’s European uniqueness. The authentic Gaelic life which must be the basis of an Irish resurgence in the twentieth century, the argument runs, is a way of life that has traditionally escaped the universalizing forces that have disturbed local life throughout most of the rest of Europe. Ireland, it seems, escaped the imperial, legalistic dominance of Rome and the essentially artificial cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance. It is true that Gaelic Ireland was threatened by the inheritors of Renaissance and Enlightenment civilization, by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, but Ireland, driven underground, did not absorb the alien values. The hidden Ireland survived beyond the power of the Protestant Ascendancy’s Big Houses and the British government official, maintaining its essential character and a brotherhood of feeling with the local life of pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation Catholic Europe.

      There was, therefore, in the Irish Ireland movement a cultural equivalent of the political doctrine of Sinn Féin (Ourselves) in an imaginative attachment to the local and a belief that history had allowed that local life a protracted protection from alien influences. It was a short step from such thinking to the belief that cultural protectionism might enable Ireland to sustain her unique identity and to a draconian censorship as means of providing that protection.

      Of course, not all those associated with the Irish Ireland movement took that step, and it would be quite wrong to identify the Irish Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 solely with cultural exclusivism. Many countries in the early twentieth century felt that the accelerating pace of publications, particularly of cheap newspapers and magazines, created a social problem that they could not ignore. A Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature set up by the Free State Minister for Justice in 1926, which prepared the way for the eventual bill, found it could seek guidance from the example of eleven countries and states where statutes relating to obscene publications were in force. The problem such publications created had indeed been the subject of an international convention for the suppression of the circulation of and traffic in obscene publications, organized by the League of Nations in 1923. A responsible government in the 1920s in almost any country would have felt that there was nothing unusual about the enactment of a bill to censor certain publications and to protect populations from pornography.

      It was clear, too, from the report of the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature and from the Dáil and Senate debates on the issue that efforts were made by the legislators to distinguish the merely pornographic from works which might possess literary merit. Indeed, a good deal of the firepower of the bill was aimed not at literary works but at the many imported popular newspapers and magazines that were considered unsavory and at works which recommended, or provided information on, birth control.

      There were signs, nevertheless, that an Irish Censorship Bill might represent something more stringent than a government’s rational attempt to suppress the more vicious forms of pornographic publication. These perhaps account for the alarm that the mere proposal of the bill aroused (as we shall see) in the minds of most Irish writers of the time. Much of the public demand for the bill was orchestrated not by members of the political parties but by Irish Vigilance Societies (the Irish Vigilance Association had been founded in 1911 by the Dominican Order) and by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (founded in 1899, among whose aims was the effort “to combat the pernicious influence of infidel and immoral publications by the circulation of good, cheap and popular Catholic literature”).³⁰ It might reasonably have been feared that such bodies, in a country where the mass of the population was encouraged by the church to observe a peculiarly repressive sexual code, would press for a censorship policy expressing not literary and aesthetic but strict Catholic moral values.

      Furthermore, a prevailing note sounded in the writings and speeches of those calling for a censorship bill was the notion that all evil in literary and journalistic matters derived from abroad, particularly from England. It was, therefore, the business of an Irish legislature to protect Irish life from the impure external influences and to help build up a healthy, clean-minded Catholic Irish civilization. It must protect that supposedly distinctive Irish religious life and practice that, sometimes associated with the Irish language and the Gaelic way of life, comprised national identity. It was at this point that the interests of those who sought censorship from moralistic impulses alone and the interests of those, like the Irish Irelanders, who desired cultural protectionism, met and often overlapped. An example of such an overlap is provided in the demand by a certain Father R. S. Devane, SJ, for a tariff on imported literature and journalism. Father Devane was a Dublin priest who had been strenuous in his efforts to arouse public support for the cause of censorship of indecent and obscene publications. He had met with Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State’s Minister for Justice, in 1925 to put, on behalf of an organization to which he belonged, the Priests’ Social Guild, the case for a censorship bill, and he was the only private individual who presented evidence before the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature established by O’Higgins in 1926. In 1927, in the Jesuit periodical Studies, Father Devane went a step further, arguing for high tariffs on imported publications in the following terms:

      We are at present engaged in an heroic effort to revive our national language, national customs, national values, national culture. These objects cannot be achieved without a cheap, healthy and independent native press. In the face of English competition such a press is an impossibility…Against such propaganda of the English language and English ideas the present effort at national revival looks