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

at the reduced recitals of that troubled year, by 1925–26 35,780 attendances were registered at recitals and 11,002 at the lectures sponsored by the Society.¹⁶

      By contrast to the Royal Dublin Society, the condition of Trinity College, Dublin in the 1920s is a more accurate indicator of the isolated predicament of the Anglo-Irish and Protestant minority in the new state. That university had long been identified with the Protestant Ascendancy (although in the nineteenth century it had rather served the Irish Protestant middle class than the gentry, who often preferred Oxford and Cambridge for their sons) and in the years preceding independence had endured much nationalist obloquy on account of certain intemperate utterances by some of its best-known fellows, in particular, John Pentland Mahaffy, whose contemptuous attitude to nationalist Ireland was not to be easily forgotten or forgiven. Furthermore, the college was in somewhat straitened financial circumstances. A Royal Commission of 1920 had recommended that the college receive an annual subvention from the public purse, and a sum of £30,000 per annum had been designated for Trinity in the Government of Ireland Act of the same year, but the provisions of that act never became active in the South of Ireland, and although the provost of the college sought to have some such financial arrangement included in the Treaty of 1921, he was unsuccessful.¹⁷ So the 1920s found Trinity financially insecure, intellectually and socially remote for the most part from contemporary Irish concerns, and identified in the popular mind with the former, rejected ruling class. There were those, too, ready to express the profoundest ill-will toward the institution. An Eoin MacNeill, with a certain distress, might regret that the college was responsible, as the chief agent of English culture in Ireland, for that anglicization which had almost destroyed the authentic civilization of the country (the college awarded him an honorary degree in 1928). Others were even more vigorously opposed to the college, ready to see in the large crowds that gathered in College Green, in front of the college, on Armistice Day, the symbol of a surviving Ascendancy attitude to be identified with the college itself. That the first provost to be appointed after the foundation of the Free State was a Gaelic scholar (Dr. E. J. Gwynn was appointed in 1927) and that scholarly material on the Irish language and on Irish literature was published in the college’s house journal, Hermathena, could do only very little to reduce antagonism toward an institution which had before independence seemed to set its face against the ideal of Irish freedom.

      In the 1920s and 1930s Trinity suffered one of its bleakest periods. The buildings and grounds became dilapidated and a little unkempt. A sense of isolation and economic insecurity was not alleviated by much intellectual or imaginative enterprise. Many of the graduates sought their careers abroad, and the college was unable to play its part in the developing life of the Free State in the way the National University, particularly University College, Dublin, did. Indeed, the college in the centre of Dublin bore in its isolation and decline a striking resemblance in social terms to the Big Houses of the countryside – each symbolizing a ruling caste in the aftermath of its power.

      Many Anglo-Irish men and women chose simply to leave the country, preferring the secure if duller life of a villa on the English south-east coast to the strains of further anxiety and isolation in Ireland (and their departure meant that much of the fine furniture and many books and paintings that had escaped the fires of the Civil War went for sale and were bought by dealers from abroad). The period 1911–26 saw indeed a striking decline of about one-third in the Protestant population of the South of Ireland as a whole¹⁸ (in the same period the Catholic population declined by 2.2 percent), which must be accounted for not only by the lamentable losses endured by Protestant Ireland in the Great War but by the large numbers of landed families, Protestant professional men, former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, civil servants, and Protestant small farmers, who felt that the new Ireland was unlikely to provide a satisfactory home for themselves or their offspring. In the early 1930s one witness recorded the fact that in County Clare seventy Protestant landed families had left the country since 1919,¹⁹ leaving only a small remnant of their class and creed behind them. In other counties of the south and west the pattern was similar, if not quite so starkly etched.

      A sense of bitterness and betrayal accompanied these men and women into exile, together with a conviction that the new Ireland was, sadly, no place for them. Their feelings and attitude are, in fact, well represented in a volume of reminiscences by P. L. Dickinson published in 1929. Dickinson, a Dublin architect, in his book The Dublin of Yesterday, remembers his youth and young manhood in a city he reckons has now fallen into enemy hands. Fairly typical of the professional Dublin man who felt a kinship with Anglo-Ireland and the Protestant Ascendancy (his father was vicar of the important St. Anne’s Parish in Dublin, and his family had links with the gentry, while his paternal grandfather had been bishop of Meath), Dickinson had been educated in England before returning to a comfortable Dublin professional life in a social ambiance he found totally agreeable. He had wide contacts in Dublin’s literary, artistic, and medical worlds, numbering among his acquaintances John Pentland Mahaffy (he was secretary to Mahaffy in the Georgian Society founded in 1910), W. B. Yeats, whom he met in the Arts Club, where he enjoyed many sociable occasions, George Russell, Pádraic Colum, and Katherine Tynan. A man of broad views (he was sceptical about revealed religion and prepared to view monogamy as only one form of sexual arrangement), he felt by 1929 that Ireland was “largely ruled by a priesthood and atmosphere based on economic conditions of the medieval and early Renaissance period.”²⁰ It was no place for one of his class and outlook. He was particularly oppressed by the Gaelic enthusiasm:

      The Gael was a rung on the ladder, a rung which has long been overstepped. The modern movement in the new political entity – the Irish Free State – the modern movement back towards this Gaelic Hey-Day is pathetic: or if you wish it is comic; certainly it is useless. It cannot last – Ireland is politically and economically and, above all, socially, one with Great Britain; any such retrograde movement as an attempt at the compulsory revival of a dead language only becomes a local racial injury. It hurts every one a little; but it hurts the authors a lot. To those who, like myself have had to leave their native country owing to the acts of their fellow-countrymen, a perfectly dispassionate judgement of the situation must be a little difficult. I love Ireland; few people know it better. There is hardly a mile of its coastline or hills I have not walked. There is not a thought in me that does not want well-being for the land of my birth; yet there is no room today in their own land for thousands of Irishmen of similar views.²¹

      All that he now sees in Ireland are “the gestures of the child shaking itself free from its nurse” as he looks on with “a devoted but impotent love.”

      Some Anglo-Irishmen were unprepared to accept the position of isolated impotence or exile that seemed their lot in the new political dispensation. Men of substance like Lord Midleton and Andrew Jameson, who had played leading parts in the Irish Unionist Alliance which had attempted to project the Unionist cause in the years before independence, were willing to take places in the Seanad, ready to participate in government and to defend their social and economic position in the political arena (in fact, only Jameson was offered a seat). However, it was in the Dáil that the real legislative muscle was exercised, and although the government contained men who realized the new state could gain much from the former Ascendancy, there were also those, like Ernest Blythe, for a time Minister for Finance, who frankly admitted later of such as Midleton and Jameson, “We looked on them as the dregs of landlordism.”²² So a figure like the remarkable Bryan Cooper, Anglo-Irish landowner, former Unionist MP at Westminster and British army officer, who stood and was elected as an independent for the Free State Dáil, where he played a significant role in legislative business, finally in 1927 joining W. T. Cosgrave’s ruling party, must be seen, I think, as an exception to the rule that more usually saw Anglo-Irishmen and women quite remote from political life in this period. Cooper was probably unique as Anglo-Irishman in his adaptability and personal attractiveness, so while his participation in the Dáil, which was welcomed by various members of that house, can, as his biographer