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

ideas, images, and symbols provided Irish people with part of their sense of national identity. For this was a post-colonial society beset by manifold problems, but anxious nevertheless to achieve an independent and distinctive life. Part III of this book looks at how these conceptions and aspirations fared in the new social order that has been in the making in the last twenty years, following the economic revival of the early 1960s. But what also concerns me throughout is how social and cultural change are involved with one another. So the modernization of the last two decades in Ireland is seen to be in part the result of social and cultural factors that had been in the making since about the period of the Second World War, when the framework that had held together since independence began to disintegrate.

      It is this concern to measure change and account for it that determines the structure of the book. Part I explores in detail the social and the cultural life of the Irish Free State in its first decade. Despite some signs of change, there was a conservative continuum with pre-revolutionary Ireland, and minorities and critics in the new order had little chance to make their will felt. Part II considers both how and why that continuity was sustained well into the modern period, but detects social and cultural evidences of major change in embryo and analyzes the possible causes of these. Part III presents the social and cultural history of the last two decades in the Republic of Ireland as a period of striking change when set against the picture that Parts I and II have painted of the earlier years of independence.

      In Ireland intellectual, cultural, and social history are each infant disciplines. The writer who aspires to provide a study synthesizing the three areas is faced therefore with many insurmountable difficulties, not the least that much basic research has simply not yet been attempted. As a result, this book is very much a provisional and speculative sketch, with few pretensions to completeness in most areas. It is of course the danger of such sketches, particularly of recent and contemporary history, that they become mere caricatures. But without such attempts to chart the field, more fundamental research may not proceed as it must do if more assured works are to result in the future. It is as a preliminary mapping of the territory that I hope this book may prove useful.

      I am grateful to the work of those scholars and critics who have, despite the perils, ventured into the turbulent scas of twentieth-century Irish historical research. My considerable indebtedness to them is clearly evident in my notes and references. Some of them are my colleagues in Trinity College, and I am happy to record here my gratitude to them too for their efforts to respond to my often naive inquiries in the last few years. I am also grateful to Miss Geraldine Mangan and Miss Dee Jones, who typed the manuscript at various stages of its production. To my wife, Suzanne, who arranged many things so that this work might be completed, my gratitude is expressed in the dedication.

      T.B.

      Trinity College, Dublin, 1977–80

       PART I

      1922–32

       CHAPTER 1

       After the Revolution:Conservatism and Continuity

      Canonical texts of Irish separatist nationalism have often stressed the social and cultural advantages to be derived from Ireland’s independence from the United Kingdom. A free Ireland would embark upon a radically adventurous programme to restore the ancient language, to discover the vitality residual in a nation devastated by a colonial power, and would flower with new social and cultural forms, testaments to the as yet unrecognized genius of the Gael. Patrick Pearse, a martyr to the separatist cause in the Rising of Easter 1916, had prophesied in a vibrant flight of not entirely unrealistic idealism:

      A free Ireland would not, and could not, have hunger in her fertile vales and squalor in her cities. Ireland has resources to feed five times her population; a free Ireland would make those resources available. A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalize the railways and waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, would diminish extravagant expenditure (as on needless judges and policemen), would beautify the cities, would educate the workers (and also the nonworkers, who stand in direr need of it), would, in short, govern herself as no external power – nay, not even a government of angels and archangels could govern her.¹

      That the revolutionary possibilities of an independent Ireland as envisaged by Pearse were scarcely realized in Southern Ireland in the first decades of the Irish Free State, which came into being following the Treaty of 1921, should not perhaps surprise. The dissipation of revolutionary aspiration in post-revolutionary disillusionment is by now a commonplace of modern political history. That, however, a revolution fought on behalf of exhilarating ideals, ideals which had been crystallized in the heroic crucible of the Easter Rising, should have led to the establishment of an Irish state notable for a stultifying lack of social, cultural, and economic ambition is a matter which requires explanation. For the twenty-six counties of Southern Ireland which made up the Free State showed a prudent acquiescence before the inherited realities of the Irish social order and a conservative determination to shore up aspects of that order by repressive legislation where it seemed necessary.

      One explanation presents itself readily. The stagnant economic conditions which the Free State had inherited made nation-building of the kind Pearse had envisaged most difficult to execute. The beautification of the cities and the education of the workers could not proceed without an economic miracle that faith might generate but works in the form of major investment and bold enterprise would have had to sustain. Neither faith nor works could easily flourish in the insecure economic environment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, in the aftermath of a civil war.

      By 1920 the boom years of the First World War, when agricultural prices had been high, had given way to an economic recession made the more severe by the turbulent years of revolution and fratricidal strife which followed, until a measure of stability was restored in 1923, when the Civil War, which had broken out after the departure of the imperial power, drew to its unresolved close. The first years of the Free State, brought into existence by the Constitution of the Irish Free State Act in 1922 and approved in October of that year, were dogged by intense economic difficulty. This fact may in part account for the timorous prudence of the economic policies adopted by the new Irish administration which emerged after the election of August 1923. From the outset the government was confronted by harsh realities of a kind that might have discouraged the most vigorous of nation-builders. A serious strike of port workers lasted for six months in 1923 (cattle exports dropped by 60 percent during the strike); there was poor weather in 1923 and 1924. The summers “were harsh, gloomy and sunless, while the autumn and winter months were characterized by continuously heavy rains which kept the soil sodden throughout and caused extreme discomfort to grazing cattle.”² Indeed, not until 1925 was there a fine June to cheer the many farmers of agricultural Ireland.

      The economy that the Free State government had inherited and for which it assumed responsibility in these inauspicious circumstances had several major inherent defects. It was stable to the point of stagnantion: a developed infrastructure of railways and canals was not matched by an equivalent industrialization; the economy supported too many unproductive people – the old and young and a considerable professional class; there were few native industries of any size and such as there were (brewing, bacon-curing, creameries, biscuit-making, and woollens and worsteds) were productive of primary commodities and unable to provide a base for an industrial revolution. The gravest problem, however, was the country’s proximity to the United Kingdom with its advanced industrial economy, so that, as the historian Oliver MacDonagh has succinctly stated, “the Free State…was not so much…an undeveloped country, as…a pocket of undevelopment in an advanced region, such as the Maritime Provinces constitute in Canada as a whole or as Sicily does in Italy.”³