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Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (1924)

Daniel Corkery (1878–1968) had multiple aims in writing The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century. His account of the place of poetry in the lives of a downtrodden people sought to rescue the Gaelic revival from pedants within and its enemies without. He wished to recover the memory of a vanished Gaelic civilisation, one that he believed found expression in the poetic culture of ordinary people rather than that of its elites, from the destruction it encountered in the wake of the seventeenth century. This was an Ireland that was hidden not just from the twentieth century but from post seventeenth-century English-speaking historians and travel writers. In doing so he wished to challenge the ‘slave mind’ legacies of what he termed ‘the Ascendency’s creed’ and its belief that the native Irish were a lesser breed and anything of theirs (‘except their land and their gold!’) was therefore of little value: ‘If they have had a language and a literature it cannot have been anything but a patois used by the hillmen amongst themselves; and as for their literature, the less said the better.’1 In a 1983 article, Seamus Heaney wrote of Corkery’s centrality to his own intellectual and poetic formation. He described how The Hidden Ireland had helped to realign his own sense of belonging in the face of the gulf he experienced whilst growing up between the official British culture and the local anthropological one. Corkery’s message, for Heaney was succinct; ‘We were robbed,’ he said. ‘We lost what makes us what we are. We had lost the indigenous Gaelic civilisation and he evoked that civilisation with elegiac nostalgia.’ 2

In The Hidden Ireland Corkery argued that a noble Munster Gaelic tradition, exemplified in its poetry, managed to survive the ravages of the seventeenth century and the Penal Law era that followed. The eighteenth-century peasant poets, he argued, were the lineal descendants of the old bardic line, the proud possessors of an aristocratic tradition of literature and living proof in their day of an indomitable Irishness. The topic of their poetry was often the reduced circumstances they lived in following the decline of their Gaelic noble patrons. These Gaelic houses, according to Corkery, were in some ways similar to Planter ones yet possessed certain notes of their own; ‘freer contact with Europe, a culture over and above that which they shared with their neighbours, a sense of historic continuity, a closeness to the land, to the very pulse of it, that those Planter houses could not even dream about’. Corkery proclaimed the native superiority of the bardic schools to the European type of university where the main study was of the Roman Law – ‘the relic of a dead empire’ – and the literature of dead languages. By contrast, the history that was taught in the bardic schools was ‘that of Ireland, namely the Brehon Law system; the language was that of Ireland, the literature that of Ireland – and through the medium of the native language were all subjects taught’.

To his opponents, most notably Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faoláin, Corkery’s account of the Gaelic past was a misrepresentation that fuelled post-independence isolationism, censorship and puritanism. Corkery, who had trained as a carpenter, had been a father figure, literary mentor and role model to both. Much of what both wrote about nationalism, censorship and conservatism were reactions against ideas influentially espoused in The Hidden Ireland. O’Faoláin argued in King of the Beggars that the bardic tradition of the eighteenth century was intensely anti-realistic.3 Their poetic convention was one of exaggerated effusive praise of patrons, their palaces and the gifts they bestowed. It was never for things like pennies or bacon, which the poets would be lucky to get, but for ‘silks, wines, jewels, steeds, cloaks, gold in abundance, silver and arms for heroes’. Later it became one that bewailed the loss of patronage. The cast of these poems, O’Faoláin emphasised, were the bards themselves and the aristocrats they identified with, but ‘never once a peasant’. The bards praised by Corkery were, at best, hapless men out of tune with their times. At their worst, they were a craven lot and fantasists to boot. Whilst his people starved in windowless hovels, the poet Aodhagán O’Rahilly fantastically listed over and over, the glories of erstwhile great houses; ‘glories in which we do not find one homely detail, a thing we could take for fact, one item to make us feel that we are not been taken by the hand into a complete dream-world’.4 The literary value of such poetry was not an issue but it had nothing to say about the actual culture within which it was produced:

It means either that these semi-popular poets had nothing to say to the people that was related to their real political and social condition; or else it means that the people were themselves living in a conventional attitude of mind, asked for and desired no realistic songs, had no wish for a faithful image of their appalling conditions – were, in one word sleep-walking. 5

The now destitute last official poet of one family cited by Corkery wrote:

My craft being withered with

change of law in Ireland,

O grief that I must henceforth

take to brewing!

Another replied:

O Tadgh, understanding that you

are for the brewing,

I for a space will go skimming the milk.

A good proportion of the verses cited by Corkery contained laments for the reduced living conditions of their authors. He also gave many examples of the kinds of verses such poets had formally been commissioned to write, including a 1698 elegy written by O’Rahilly (to Diarmuid Ó Laoghaire of Killeen near Killarney, who served in a Jacobite regiment) which was structured on the following plan:

1.The terror caused by his death (about 12 lines).

2.The man himself (about 20 lines).

3.Genealogical matter (about 50 lines).

4.His prowess in sport and learning (about 8 lines).

5.The places known to bewail him (about 10 lines).

6.The fairy Women of the Gael bewail him (about 13 lines).

7.The rivers and mountains of Munster weep for him (about 20 lines).

8.The gifts bestowed upon him at birth (about 20 lines).

9.His hospitable house is now desolate (about 20 lines).

10.His people now defenceless; his wife’s desolation (about 16 lines).

11.The women will weep him. All Munster will do so. I myself till death will weep him (8 lines).

12.The envoi (20 lines).

In the aftermath of the Williamite conquest such genealogical elegies to Big House Gaelic patrons became redundant. But O’Rahilly was one of the inventors of a new genre, the aisling (vision poem), where the Spéir-bhean or spirit of Ireland appeared as a majestic and radiant woman to bewail the exile of the Stuart Pretender. In this convention the poet lamented the condition of Ireland rather than his own sorrowful state. Typically the poet fell into a sleep whilst bemoaning the woe that had overtaken the Gael. He then dreamt of a beautiful woman, wondered if she might be Deirdre of the Sorrows or Helen of Troy only to find that she was Erin, waiting for her true consort to return to the throne from exile beyond the seas. For all the limits of this stock scenario Corkery argued that the aisling, as known and recited by ill-clad and half-starved peasants, exemplified the lineage of a thousand years of literary culture, and an appreciation of beauty amongst a people discounted by their English-speaking masters as senseless brutes.

In Corkery’s pantheon O’Rahilly was the Dante of Munster. He devoted a chapter to the case for excluding Brian Merriman, author of Cúirt an Mheadhon Oídhche (The Midnight Court) – one of the greatest poems in Irish – from his canon. The Midnight Court was a fantastical bawdy satire on peasant society, its priests and its cuckolds; as captured in Frank O’Connor’s translation published 21 years after The Hidden Ireland, but banned soon after by the Irish censor:

Down with marriage! Tis out of date,

It exhausts the stock and cripples the state.

The priest has failed with whip and blinker,

Now give a chance to Tom the Tinker,

And mix and mash in nature’s can

The tinker and the gentleman;

Let lovers in every lane extended,

Follow their whim as God intended,

And in their pleasure bring to birth

The morning glory of the earth.6

Corkery excluded Merriman from the hidden Ireland he claimed as the authentic model for Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism. The banning of O’Connor’s translation of The Midnight Court in 1946 and indeed of twentieth-century writings about rural Ireland such as The Tailor and Ansty owed much to the dominance of the nation-building project Corkery championed. In The Hidden Ireland he laboured the technical objection that County Clare where Merriman resided should properly be considered part of Connaught. Clare Irish was that of Munster, but County Clare was separated from the rest of the province by the River Shannon. Corkery argued that Merriman’s sensibility was modern (definitely a bad thing in his view). Corkery lambasted Merriman’s lack of bardic refinement and judged Merriman’s much praised opening descriptions of east Clare to be commonplace. As translated by Frank O’Connor this was hardly the case:

When I looked at Lough Graney my heart grew bright,

Ploughed lands and green in the morning light,

Mountains in ranks with crimson borders

Peering about their neighbour’s shoulders.7

O’Connor, in his foreword to his 1945 translation objected to Corkery’s ‘sneer’ at Merriman. He depicted him instead as an independent intellectual who drew on contemporary English verse to produce an authentic piece of Gaelic literature rooted in the spoken Irish of Clare rather than the sanitised literary Irish extolled by Corkery as exemplifying the true heritage of Gaelic culture. In a telling anecdote, O’Faoláin recalled when he was Corkery’s protégé, being allowed to look at a copy of Ulysses which Corkery kept in a locked drawer. When The Hidden Ireland was published O’Faoláin objected to Corkery’s idealisation of uneducated peasant culture as the model for independent Ireland when, in his view, Ireland had its own cosmopolitan European tradition and a place in world literature to build upon.

Corkery stood on the literary culture wing of post-colonial nationalism. The Hidden Ireland spoke to the same historiographical claims as did James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History and various nationalist histories of Ireland preoccupied with the destruction of Gaelic Ireland. The idealisation of pre-seventeenth-century culture as a template for twentieth-century Ireland was taken seriously by nationalists and anti-liberals of different stripes. In the rhetoric of the time this variously meant turning back the clock on the Reformation to achieve a Catholic Restoration as well as cultural de-colonisation by means of a Gaelic Restoration – or both. In this context, cultural nationalists and Catholic conservatives found common cause against the foreign ideas that, from their various perspectives, had subordinated the Irish people to an imported modernity. In its crudest form the conflict was one between isolationists who sought to protect Ireland’s authentic culture, however understood, from outside contamination and their intellectual opponents.

BF

Notes

1Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century [1970] (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970).

2Seamus Heaney, ‘Forked Tongues, Ceilís and Incubators’, Fortnight, 197 (September 1983).

3Sean O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Liberator (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1980).

4Ibid.

5O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars, p.25.

6Frank O’Connor (trans.), The Midnight Court by Brian Merriman [1945] (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1989).

7Ibid.