8

Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century 1904 and Michael O’Riordan, Catholicity and Progress in Ireland (1905)

In 1904–05 Max Weber published in the form of two journal articles his famous long essay, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, later to be translated into English by Talcott Parsons in 1930 as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Apparently as a complete coincidence, the ideas advanced by the German thinker were also aired almost simultaneously by two Irish writers, Horace Plunkett and Michael O’Riordan, almost certainly because such ideas were virtually intellectual commonplaces at the time: the central notion was that there is a connection between certain varieties of the Christian religion and the pursuit of capitalist material objectives. Weber argued that there was a close sociological connection between certain ascetic varieties of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. The belief that work, rather than being the curse of Adam, was actually spiritually fulfilling, was itself a main inspiration of capitalist accumulation rather than any old-fashioned and simple greed for gold (auri sacra fames). This asceticism, associated in mediaeval Catholicism mainly with monasticism (laborare et orare), in the hands of Protestant reformers became forced into everyday life in an essentially unprecedented and unique way, peculiar to Europe and the West and hitherto unknown to mankind.1 This asceticism was particularly to be associated with Pietism and Calvinism rather than Lutheranism, ‘the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his life in this world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a mediaeval writer’.2

Horace Plunkett (1854–1932) was of aristocratic Protestant unionist stock and was educated in Eton and Oxford. He latched on early to the idea of cooperative organisation for Irish farmers, a class which had recently been created by the effective expropriation of the Irish aristocratic landowners and constituted a half-million smallholders and middle-sized ‘ranchers’ on the island of Ireland. For health reasons he spent a good deal of time doing some ‘real’ ranching in Wyoming and was struck by the huge challenge American efficiency in farming would pose in the near future for small farmers in Ireland and in Europe generally. From 1891 on he tried stubbornly to spread the practical ideas of cooperative farming in Ireland, despite much resistance from local vested interests. He was also a believer in education and scientific innovation as keys to the progress of Irish agriculture. His unionist politics weakened him and rendered him untrustworthy in the minds of some nationalists, and he was forced out of parliamentary politics in 1907. His 1904 book, Ireland in the New Century, didn’t help his political career, as his uncomplimentary views on Irish character and the alleged hostility of Catholicism to industrialism became widely touted against him.3

Plunkett’s book coincides with the Weberian piece, but the ideas in both were ‘in the air’ and even commonplace in the intellectual world of the late nineteenth century. Plunkett focuses on Irish character in a way that is still fascinating a century later. A key idea he focuses on first of all is the Irish attitude to ‘home’. He claims that in his time there was ‘a singular and significant void in the Irish conception of home’.4 He would not have noticed it, he remarked, had it not been pointed out as a source of hindrance to social and economic development:

It is not the physical environment and comfort of an orderly home that enchain and attract minds still dominated, more or less unconsciously, by the associations and common interests of the primitive clan, but rather the sense of human neighbourhood and kinship which the individual finds in the community. Indeed the Irish peasant scarcely seems to have a home in the sense in which an Englishman understands the word. If he love the place of his habitation he does not endeavour to improve or to adorn it, or to make it in any sense a reflection of his own mind and taste. He treats life as if he were a mere sojourner upon earth whose true home is somewhere else, a fact often attributed to his intense faith in the unseen, but which I regard as not merely due to this cause, but also, and in a large measure, as the natural outcome of historical conditions … What the Irishman is really attached to in Ireland is not a home but a social order. The pleasant amenities, the courtesies, the leisureliness, the associations of religion, and the familiar faces of the neighbours, whose ways and minds are like his and very unlike those of any other people; these are the things to which he clings in Ireland and which he remembers in exile.5

This attitude toward home and community explains much of the history of the Irish in America. They gravitated naturally to the cities, and set up ghetto communities that echoed their ancestral villages or rural townlands back home. He tells the reader an anecdote of a daughter of a small farmer in Galway who, by her age brought up the rear of a ‘long-tailed’ family, was offered a comfortable home on a farm thirty miles away. She chose instead to go to New York ‘because it is nearer’.6 She preferred to be with her relatives and friends in America in a tenement building rather than be elsewhere in Galway with ‘strangers’ who were unrelated to her. Anyone who knows modern Ireland will recognise this trait immediately, and the immobility of labour to which it is closely connected. One’s own extended family ‘out foreign’ is closer than non-family parts of Ireland.

A second somewhat crippling trait of the Irish mind according to Plunkett was its obsession with politics. Irish people had an almost magical faith in political nationalism. Home Rule would make some miraculous transformation of Irish realities immediately possible. A certain millennial style of thought had long been common in Ireland, going back to the days of Whiteboyism and the prophecies of Malachy, Colmcille and various other mainly fictional worthies whose scribblings impressed mightily some of the peasantry. The moral to be drawn by Irish political leaders was that one of the worst legacies of centuries of misgovernment was the almost unconscious belief that law-making by a friendly and locally elected legislature could ‘provide an escape from the physical and mental toil imposed through our first parents upon all nations for all time’.7 Irish people were very politically adept and well-informed about their leaders, but there was a ‘follow-the-leader’ syndrome in Irish political culture by which the leader had a heroic character ascribed to him by the voters; commonly the leader was regarded as a kind of mysterious and benign genius. Parnell and O’Connell are the obvious examples here, but the cults of Lord Edward Fitzgerald or Wolfe Tone presumably occurred to Plunkett as well. The Irish had an extraordinary ability to organise themselves for mass politics, but very little ability to reason politically and separate out policies which made practical sense from those which were really visionary rhetoric. In our own time the exaggerated cults of such genuinely able, but commonly heroised, men as Michael Collins, Seán Lemass or Eamon de Valera make Plunkett’s insight seem prophetic:

O’Connell’s great work in freeing Roman Catholic Ireland from the domination of the Protestant oligarchy showed the people the power of combination, but his methods can hardly be said to have fostered political thought. The efforts in this direction of men like Gavan Duffy, Davis and Lucas were neutralised by the Famine, the after effects of which also did much to thwart Butt’s attempts to develop serious public opinion amongst a people whose political education had been so long delayed. The prospect of any early fruition of such efforts vanished with the revolutionary agrarian propaganda, and independent thinking – so necessary in the modern democratic state – never replaced the old leader-following habit which continued until the climax was reached under Parnell.8

The Irish had the right man, so what did the principles matter? Plunkett argues that in political life the Irish had very great physical courage, but little real moral bravery: an unwillingness to stand out from the crowd and dissent in a way that might be useful but unpopular. The Irish thus had a fixed belief that aggressive agitation was the best way to force a British government to concede reform.

The third feature of the Irish was, of course, their religiosity. Religion was, Plunkett observed, more dominant an element in daily life than in any other country he could think of, and ministers of religion had extraordinary authority; an authority willingly accepted and obeyed normally by the vast majority of the population. This situation is one which the clergy did not themselves create, and they were as much a product of historical forces as were their congregations. If the British were to make religious toleration a mainstay of their polity, Catholicism and its basic claim to control the education of the children of the faithful would have to be respected and accepted by a tolerant and enlightened government. The Irish were divided, he argued, into two ‘sections’, Catholics and Protestants. Protestantism was centred on Ulster and its industrial towns, whereas Catholicism tended to be associated with farming in the other three provinces of Ireland. Bigotry existed on both sides, although most Irish people were able to live and let live quite happily. Protestantism was associated with relative wealth and absence of a lassitude in regard to work, the latter being commonly a feature of Catholics. In a famous quotation Plunkett remarks:

Roman Catholicism strikes an outsider as being in some of its tendencies non-economic, if not actually anti-economic. These tendencies have, of course, much fuller play when they act on a people whose education has (through no fault of their own) been retarded or stunted. … I am simply adverting to what has appeared to me, in the course of my experience in Ireland, to be a defect in the industrial character of Roman Catholics which, however caused, seems to me to have been intensified by their religion. The reliance of that religion on authority, its repression of individuality, and its complete shifting of what I may call the moral centre of gravity to a future existence – to mention no other characteristics – appear to me to be calculated, unless supplemented by other influences, to check the qualities of initiative and self-reliance, especially among a people whose lack of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its supreme virtue.9

Plunkett conceded that Catholicism had often intervened benignly in economic life, and he instanced in particular the creation of craft guilds in mediaeval times and the suppression of slavery. However, since the Reformation, Catholic countries had remained poorer, more agrarian and less advanced generally than Protestant countries. Exceptions existed to this general pattern he admitted, notably in Belgium, northern France, parts of Germany, Austria and northern Italy. He further admitted that Catholics in Ireland were for centuries deprived of any opportunity to engage in economic activity of an advanced capitalist nature. Further, the abnormally great power of the Catholic clergy had not been abused as it might well have been. Catholic toleration of Protestants in their midst was impressive, he readily conceded.

However, the clergy had been far too eager to use the donations of their willing faithful on huge and expensive churches, clearly in reaction to the impoverished little side-street ‘mass houses’ or caves in mountainsides where they had been forced to observe their sacred rites in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, in a poor country with a declining population, the multiplication of prosperous monasteries and convents, involving an enormous annual expenditure, most of it coming out of the pockets of poor people, seemed anomalous, he argued. Many of these organisations did good work in supplying cheap education to the poor and caring for the sick and destitute. Unfortunately, this had commonly the effect of denying to the people instruction by laypeople directly aware of the economic and social worlds in which ordinary people had to live. All this had a noticeable effect on the general character of the Catholic people of the country:

The impartial observer will, I fear, find amongst the majority of our people a striking lack of self-reliance and moral courage; an entire lack of serious thought on public questions; a listlessness and apathy in regard to economic improvement which amount to a form of fatalism; and, in backward districts, a survival of superstition, which saps all strength of will and purpose – and all this too amongst a people singularly gifted with good qualities of mind and heart.10

This, of course, was the argument which was to enrage many Catholics, whether lay or clerical. A year later, Father Michael O’Riordan was to publish a book-length rebuttal of Plunkett.11 O’Riordan was the son of a prosperous farmer in Limerick, evidently intelligent and energetic. His education was in the local national school and diocesan seminary, and he spent years in Rome at various third-level institutions and some time in London. The rest of his working life was spent in St Munchin’s in Limerick City and he became a well-known propagandist for the Catholic and nationalist causes in Ireland. He later became a conspicuous contributor to The Catholic Bulletin, an extremist magazine known to history mainly for specialising in anti-Semitic blood libel stories.

Catholicity and Progress in Ireland is an impassioned investigation into the historical causes of Irish backwardness and lethargy that constitutes a frontal attack on Plunkett’s position. Ireland was subjected to legalised looting for two centuries, its land being stolen in the seventeenth century and its people forced by law to pay tithes to a church whose beliefs they did not share. At the same time the Irish people, overwhelmingly Catholic in faith, were prohibited by law from pursuing the kinds of profession or trade that might have made them able to tolerate tithing and other exactions. In the eighteenth century, any Irish export trade to Britain which showed signs of competing successfully against its English equivalent was tariffed or even forbidden to engage in export trade anywhere in the Empire or even planet-wide. He quotes Lecky, a Protestant historian unsympathetic to the Catholic case:

The English, however, were still unsatisfied. The Irish woollen manufactures had already been excluded by the Navigation Act from the whole Colonial market; they had been virtually excluded from England itself, by duties amounting to prohibition. A law of crushing severity, enacted by the English Parliament in 1699, completed the work and prohibited the Irish from exporting their manufactured wool to any other country whatever. So ended the fairest promise Ireland had ever known of becoming a prosperous and happy country. The ruin was absolute and final.12

Many Irish skilled workers, both Protestant and Catholic, were forced by this measure to emigrate to France, Spain or the German states. Their ‘simpler, more economically minded’ religion did not help the Protestants, who shared the ruin of both communities. Again, the landlords were permitted to increase rents if a tenant tried to improve his holding by extending his cottage or increasing his output. Inevitably, since the fruits of his labour were denied him, he ceased to labour. Such was the obvious historical origin of a certain Irish listlessness. O’Riordan remarks politely that it was a pity that Horace Plunkett, a distinguished and evidently well-meaning man, should have lent his voice to a chorus of denunciation of a people whose condition was so obviously the result of generations of mismanagement, bigotry and class selfishness.13 An angry passage summarises what seems to have been his gut feeling about the country’s wretched history:

The fatalism which [Plunkett] has found among the people was caused by the insurmountable barrier which the law built up between them and all industrial improvement. Even a drowning man strikes out as long as he has hope to reach the shore, but he sinks helplessly to the bottom when all hope is gone. Their fatalism arose not from the inexorable laws of nature, but from the inexorable laws of man. It is true they were under the power of three fates. They had their Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, in misgovernment, in landlordism and in Protestantism; their only ray of hope and spring of happiness came from that Catholic faith to which their critics trace all their woes.14

On top of all this, O’Riordan also remarks acidly that Plunkett had the temerity to complain when Irish Catholics, confined by law to shopkeeping and other ‘ignoble’ trades, at length put together enough money to replace the churches that had been stolen from them two centuries earlier. Much of this money actually came from rich people in Ireland and America, as well as coming from the pennies of the poor. To condemn them for this admirable attempt at restitution, O’Riordan felt, was impertinent. A French observer of an earlier time (Gustave de Beaumont in his L’Irlande of 1839, 1863 edition with addendum) had referred in 1863 to that Protestant mixture of institutionalised exploitation and traditional contempt toward Catholics in Ireland as a studied ‘insolence’. Employment in the public service in Ireland was subject for some time to what a later generation would term a glass ceiling. No Catholic needed in many cases even apply for senior employment in the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the armed forces or many professions and, in any case, if actually employed needed not to expect promotion beyond a humble level. Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century was, despite land reform and rationalisation of the bureaucracy, still governed overwhelmingly by Protestant officials. Reform was coming, but very slowly and reluctantly. Catholics emigrated, for obvious reasons. They could exercise their talents and abilities elsewhere in a way that was effectively forbidden them in Ireland. No Catholic religious prohibition or disregard inhibited them outside the Island of Ireland, so why should such an alleged prohibition or disregard magically disappear once they left the country? Plunkett seems to have had no real answer to such questions, reflecting as they did the anger of the Catholic hierarchy and of nationalists in general.15

TG

Notes

1Max Weber, ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus’, Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vols XX, XXI (1904–05); trans. Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Unwin, 1930).
See in general, with more emphasis on the problem of usury than on asceticism, R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [1926] (London: Murray, 1936).

2Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin, 1930), p.88.

3Dictionary of Irish Biography, (Cambridge and Dublin: Cambridge University Press and Royal Irish Academy, 2009), Vol. 8, pp.180–82.

4Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), p.53.

5Ibid., pp.54–5.

6Ibid., p.58.

7Ibid., p.61.

8Ibid., pp.77–8.

9Ibid., pp.101–2.

10Ibid., p.110.

11M. O’Riordan, Catholicity and Progress in Ireland [1905] (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1906).

12Ibid., pp.142–3.

13Ibid., p.359.

14Ibid., p.258.

15Patrick Long, Dictionary of Irish Biography, Vol. 7, pp.879–80.