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

that the best of our people were driven by Cromwell to hell or Connacht. Many of our race are living on the seaboard where Cromwell drove them. They are men and women of the toughest fibre. They have been for generations fighting with the sea, fighting with the weather, fighting with the mountains. They are indeed the survival of the fittest. Give them but half a chance and they are the seeds of a great race…it will save the historical Irish Nation for it will preserve for all time the fountain-source from which future generations can draw for ever.¹¹

      Before the 1920s most literary studies of the Irish-speaking districts and of the west had been cast as voyages of discovery. John Millington Synge’s classic The Aran Islands (1907) is both representative and apogee of the tradition. In such treatments the structural movement of the work is a journey from the bourgeois world of self to an almost prelapsarian innocence and community which the writer can enter or, as in John Synge’s work, employ to highlight his own Romantic, melancholic alienation. In 1941 Seán O’Faoláin remembered his own introduction to the western island in 1918 in terms that powerfully evoke the imaginative attraction of this region to generations of Irish men and women. It was a release from self into community, and escape from prose to poetry, from complexity to simplicity:

      It was like taking off one’s clothes for a swim naked in some mountain-pool. Nobody who has not had this sensation of suddenly “belonging” somewhere – of finding the lap of the lost mother – can understand what a release the discovery of Gaelic Ireland meant to modern Ireland. I know that not for years and years did I get free of this heavenly bond of an ancient, lyrical, permanent, continuous immemorial self, symbolized by the lonely mountains, the virginal lakes, the traditional language, the simple, certain, uncomplex modes of life, that world of the lost childhood of my race where I, too, became for a while eternally young.¹²

      Recollecting such bliss, the writer admitted to a “terrible nostalgia for that old content, that old symbolism, that sense of being as woven into a pattern of life as a grain of dust in a piece of homespun.”¹³

      In the 1920s a number of literary works were published which attempted a more realistic treatment of the western island and the Gaeltacht, in a tradition that had begun with the short stories of the Irish-language writer Pádraic Ó Conaire and of Seumas O’Kelly. These were works of fictional realism written by men who know the Gaeltacht intimately. Novels such as Peadar O’Donnell’s Islanders (1928) and Adrigoole (1929) and Liam O’Flaherty’s Thy Neighbour’s Wife (1923) are works therefore not of romantic discovery but essays in rural naturalism and social criticism. What is striking about the work of both these writers, who wrote their novels with a vigorous socialist concern to unmask social injustice in the Irish countryside through literary realism, is that they both seem tempted by the vision of an Irish rural world that exists beyond political reality. At moments the Irish rural scene in both their works is allowed to occupy the same primal, essentially mythic territory as it does in the conceptions of purely nationalist ideologues. In both O’Donnell’s and O’Flaherty’s writings there are passages of epic writing therefore which obtrude in their realistic settings. At such moments class politics and social analysis give way before an apprehension of the west as a place of fundamental natural forces, of human figures set passively or heroically against landscapes of stone, rock, and sea in a way that makes their works less radical than they perhaps thought they were. There is implicit therefore in their writings a sense that Gaelic Ireland in the west is the authentic heroic Ireland in a way that confirms rather than contradicts the conventional image of the west as “certain set apart.” The power of this conventional image was perhaps so great that it affected as intelligent a social commentator as Peadar O’Donnell and overwhelmed the turbulent anger of Liam O’Flaherty’s social criticism.

      So in the 1920s the sense of the western island and of the west as specially significant in Irish life became a cultural commonplace. Even an English visitor in 1924 fell under its spell:

      The West is different. Its spirit was used by the intellectuals in the late struggle but it was never theirs. It seems to come from some primitive elemental force which smoulders on, like a turf fire, long after such movements have spent themselves. It is a permanent factor to the existence of which no Irish statesman can safely shut his eyes.¹⁴

      The Northern Protestant naturalist R. Lloyd Praeger could declare:

      If I wished to show anyone the best thing in Ireland I would take him to Aran. Those grey ledges of limestone, rain-beaten and storm-swept, are different from anything else. The strangeness of the scene, the charm of the people (I don’t refer to the rabble that meets the steamer), the beauty of the sea and sky, the wealth of both pagan and Christian antiquities…all these help to make a sojourn in Aran a thing never to be forgotten.¹⁵

      When in November 1927, forty fishermen were drowned in a storm off the west coast, even the Irish Statesman which had, as we shall see, its own reasons to reject the primacy of Gaelic civilization in Irish life, responded to the disaster in elegiac terms, aligning the journal uneasily with all those who thought the west the cradle of Irish civilization:

      But the trawlers in which modern fishermen elsewhere go out to sea seem safe almost as the land compared with these frail curraghs which visitors to the west of Ireland see dancing on the waters. As one watched these curraghs and the fishermen on that rocky coast seemed almost like contemporaries of the first men who adventured on the seas, their Gaelic language and their curraghs alike survivals from ancient centuries. These western fishermen are a very fine type, full of character and vitality, and Gaelic enthusiasts from contact with these vestiges of the Gaelic past have tried to conjure up an image of the Gaelic world when the tide of life was high in its heart.¹⁶

      The vision of the western island as the primal source of the nation’s being received further confirmation in 1929 with the publication of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s work An tOileánach (The Islandman). Works of this kind, in which an islander’s reminiscences were recorded in written form by researchers and literary men and are then translated, came in a few brief years to comprise almost a modern Irish subgenre. The Islandman (the English translation) is one of the finest examples of this type of work, exhibiting a strong narrative sense and swift economy of style and discourse. A sense of an almost Homeric, heroically charged zest emerges from a keenly objective record of island life.¹⁷ For any who might be inclined to doubt the primal rural superiority of the western world in Irish reality these accounts of work, feasting, death, play, fighting, and drinking could be proffered as ready proof. For in the pages of The Islandman it seems we are seeing island life not through the eyes of literary discovery or nationalist wish-fulfilment but from the cottages and currachs of the islands themselves. The work has an exhilarating freshness about it, an impression of fundamental things, a sense of origins.

      In the difficult years of reconstruction after the Civil War, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Free State government made few conscious attempts other than the encouragement of Gaelic revival to project a cultural image of the nation despite the resources they had inherited and might have exploited systematically. A direct espousal of rural civilization was to be the cultural contribution of Mr. de Valera in the following decade. The government granted an annual subsidy to the Abbey Theatre in 1925, to an Irish-language theatre, An Taibhdhearc, in Galway in 1928, and established a publishing venture named An Gúm in 1926 for the publication of books in Irish. Apart from these fairly minimal gestures the government seemed content to approve, where it did not simply ignore, the work of writers who dwelt in a conservative and nationalistic fashion on rural aspects of the country’s life, while establishing a Censorship Board which would, it transpired, repress writings which might disturb conventional moral sensitivities.

      But almost as if to confirm the symbolic significance of rural images in the cultural life of the state, in 1927 the Minister for Finance received the recommendation of the Irish Coinage