The election of 1932 was fought by the government of the Irish Free State in the most inauspicious of circumstances. The twenty-six counties of the Free State had been spared in the years 1929–31 the worst effects of the Great Depression as the country continued to export its livestock and livestock products at relatively stable prices, while the price of imports dropped sharply. But by late 1931 the world economic situation began to have serious repercussions on the Irish economy. Exports started to decline seriously, as did the prices they commanded. The government, forced to economic austerities and responding to a marked recrudescence in politically motivated violence on the part of the IRA by a draconian Public Safety Bill (1931), was in no position to present an appealing face to the Irish electorate. Nor had it ever been natural for the Cumann na nGaedheal administration to attempt a softening of its political profile in the interests of expediency. That sternly responsible body of men had rather preferred to outface the winds of circumstance with stoicism and a forbiddingly austere public aspect. And, as if to remind the electorate of the party’s essential nature, almost on the eve of the election the government decided to prosecute the Irish Press (the daily newspaper Mr. de Valera had founded as the journalistic organ of the Fianna Fáil party) for seditious libel before a military tribunal. On previous occasions such unbending legalism had served the party well, but the public was now less prepared to accept measures appropriate to the early days of the state and to a civil war, but odiously heavy-handed in a democracy beginning to feel and anxious to express a developing self-assurance. Dublin Opinion indeed, an influential humorous magazine, had pilloried the Cosgrave administration in its last months, reflecting a widespread mood.
Eamon de Valera came to power with a small parliamentary majority which largely depended on the support of the Labour Party. This change of power was in fact to install de Valera and his party in the seats of office for the next sixteen years, and the election therefore represented a major watershed in Irish political life. That the transition of power from the party victorious in the Civil War of a decade before to the party representative of much of the defeated republican faction was effected without violence and with a measure of dignity may in part have been because de Valera’s narrow majority gave hope that the interruption of Cumann na nGaedheal’s rule was only temporary. For no one in the circumstances of 1932 could have envisaged Fianna Fáil’s monopoly of Irish political life for the next decade and a half. Nevertheless, the peaceful acceptance of the people’s democratic will and the ordered change of government must also stand as evidence of a political maturity in the new state which could not easily have been forecast in 1922 or 1923.
Further evidence of the electorate’s developing self-confidence was the fact that de Valera’s political manifesto had included economic novelties that might well have given pause to an insecure populace, forcing it to prefer the familiar if unattractive economic doctrines of free trade as practised by W. T. Cosgrave and his ministers to the untried economic nationalism of de Valera’s programme. The fact that sufficient of the electorate opted for de Valera (though much of his support came from small farmers and small businessmen, who hoped to benefit in the new order) suggests that there was in the country sufficient national self-confidence, together perhaps with the feeling that economic realities both at home and abroad demanded novel measures, for a change of direction.
This de Valera swiftly set in motion. At the heart of his policy changes was a vision of what he hoped Ireland might eventually become – a genuinely independent, self-sufficient rural republic. Almost immediately de Valera set about reducing what he felt were the more offensive aspects of the Treaty of 1921, seeking to abolish the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, downgrading the role of the governor general (his power to withhold assent to bills, for example, was removed in 1933), and embarking upon what was to prove an extended campaign in which Ireland withheld certain annuities due to Britain under the terms of agreements entered into by the previous administration.
This last aspect of de Valera’s programme became linked with his economic policy, which was to establish national self-sufficiency through the erection of high tariff walls. From the beginning of his first period of office de Valera set himself to the raising of tariffs. A contemporary commentator remarked in horror as the new administration revealed its hand:
If a Glasgow Communist and a die-hard tariff reformer were merged into a single personality and, having somehow managed to escape certification, became Minister of Finance in the Irish Free State, the result would probably be somewhat similar to the budget introduced in the Dáil…by Mr. Seán MacEntee.1
Ironically, de Valera’s relish for tariffs was made the more easy to satisfy since the British government’s response to the withholding of the annuities was to establish tariffs on Irish agricultural produce, provoking in return further Irish tariffs on British goods so that the two countries entered on a state of economic warfare. Speaking in Paris in September 1933 de Valera declared that his policy was to “abolish free trade.”2 By the mid-1930s he had gone a fair distance toward achieving this costly aim. For costly indeed it was. The cattle trade suffered particularly as exports fell from 775,000 in 1929 to 500,000 in 1934, while exports as a whole fell somewhat less sharply. But de Valera and his party, as well as the many small farmers and budding small industrialists who supported his policy, returning him to power with an overall majority in 1933 when he called a snap election, felt these sacrifices were necessary to achieve social changes in the country. As F. S. L. Lyons succinctly states it, the tariff policy, reinforced by the economic war, was
…a serious and prolonged attempt to redress the balance between the different sectors of the economy – to free the countryside from the dominance of the cattleman, to extend the area of tillage, to develop home industries and thus provide employment for those who might otherwise be obliged to emigrate.3
Crucial to de Valera’s programme was the creation and success of native industries behind the tariff walls he had so single-mindedly established. Strenuous efforts were made to encourage private investment, but despite the protection that the tariff walls provided, private Irish capital investment proved almost as shy as it had done under Cosgrave’s administration. By default, the state was forced to increase its involvement in Irish manufacturing industry, in the building of houses, and in the provision of services such as air transport through the mechanism that had begun to provide many rural Irish homes with electric light since the Shannon electrical scheme of the 1920s, the state-sponsored body. Furthermore, in the countryside the Land Commission built large numbers of small houses (costing about £350 each) thereby creating employment, while the Housing Act of 1932 brought central government into the support of local authorities’ policies to such a degree that the Act “amounted to a public works policy.”4
These various measures were blessed with some modest success. Employment in industry rose from 110,588 in 1931 to 166,513 in 1938, and industrial output rose by 40 percent between 1931 and 1936.5 But Irish industry was faced with certain structural problems that made it unlikely that success could be more than modest in such a protectionist environment. The home market was too small to allow new Irish industries to expand to any significant degree, while increasing their export business was difficult both because as small companies they found it hard to compete in international markets and because their costs were high. That the growth of native industry in the 1930s was scarcely sufficient to compensate in terms of national income for the export losses suffered by traditional Irish export business such as brewing and biscuit-making (which encountered British tariffs) was in itself regrettable enough. That this unremarkable industrial growth was bought at the expense of severe disruption in Irish agriculture as the cattle trade endured a near catastrophe which could not easily be ameliorated by any transition to productive tillage farming makes one question both the wisdom of de Valera’s protectionist economics and the reasons why his policies received the undoubted support that they did.
That the economic nationalism of de Valera in the 1930s did receive sufficient support can perhaps be explained by the fact that the protectionist policies pursued were not only in the interests of native industries and the creation of employment but because they also played a part in an economic war against the old enemy, England. The sacrifices demanded could be extolled in a crudely nationalistic rhetoric. In addition, one can perhaps account for their acceptance, particularly among the many small farmers from whom Fianna Fáil received its most fervent support, by the fact that there was in much of the country a deep urge toward self-sufficiency, a conviction that the life of an Irish small farm represented a purity and decency of life that could set Ireland apart from the more commercial societies that surrounded her. In de Valera’s own mind, the ideas and attitudes of the Irish Ireland movement, with its emphasis on the national distinctiveness of the Gaelic way of life, extolled in newspaper articles, in pastoral letters in the churches, in poetry, and in literary polemic, became closely identified with the life of the Irish small farm. For de Valera, despite his attempts to encourage Irish industry, enthusiastically shared Irish Ireland’s vision of national possibility, preferring an Ireland of frugal, God-fearing country folk to any absorption of the country into industrial Europe. In 1933 in Paris when he set himself to the task of “abolishing free trade”, it was in hopes of a rural renewal based on small farm life: “to provide work for the 30,000 young people who formerly would have emigrated, to build 10,000 houses and divide half a million acres within five years. Every thirty acres of land would represent a new family.”6 Ten years later in a famous St. Patrick’s Day broadcast to the Irish people, that vision of an Irish idyll could still seem appropriate matter for the nation’s reflection:
That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.7
The dominant ideology in the country was therefore in favour of achieving and maintaining as much self-sufficient Irish independence as was possible. The prevailing republican creed, which was propounded in schoolrooms, in newspapers, on political platforms, assumed that the ancient Gaelic Irish nation had finally thrown off the thrall of foreign subjugation and that her true destiny lay in cultivating her national distinctiveness as assiduously as possible. Economic nationalism was therefore but one aspect of a prevailing ethos.
The policy of language revival was pursued with perhaps an even greater dogmatism than during Cosgrave’s administrations. In 1934 Thomas Derrig, the Minister for Education, demanded swifter progress in the revival of Irish and reached an agreement with the Irish National Teachers’ Organization which allowed for a greater concentration on Irish in schools at the expense of standards in other subjects, including English. Rural science ceased to be an obligatory subject in the curriculum. In the face of this intensification of the linguistic crusade in the schools, in 1936 the INTO was prepared at its annual congress to adopt a resolution which recognized a widespread belief that “the use of a teaching medium other than the home language of the child in the primary schools of Saorstat Eireann is educationally unsound.”8 It was, however, unlikely that Derrig would have paid much attention to such opinion. Already in the Dáil in 1935 he had dismissed even Irish parents, as having no right to be consulted on the language policy in the schools – “I cannot see that parents as a body can decide this matter.”9
The 1930s also saw the elevation of Irish traditional music (a rich inheritance inadequately recognized during the cultural revival in the years before independence) to a position in official esteem, second only to the Irish language as Derrig declared in March 1937 at the Dublin Feis. Irish folk music, in such a view, was an expression of the nation’s mind. Accordingly the musical tradition was celebrated in terms that echoed Irish Ireland’s attachment to the Irish language. Passages like the following became the staple of cultural polemic:
That set of values which makes the Irish mind different looks out at us clearly from our old music – its idiom having in some subtle way the idiom of the Irish mind, its rhythms, its intervals, its speeds, its build have not been chosen arbitrarily, but are what they are because they are the musical expression, the musical equivalent of Irish thought and its modes.
…the Irish idiom expresses deep things that have not been expressed by Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Elgar or Sibelius – by any of the great composers.10
The theme of Irish tradition was staunchly reiterated in reviews of plays, exhibitions, and concerts. An attitude of xenophobic suspicion often greeted any manifestation of what appeared to reflect cosmopolitan standards. An almost Stalinist antagonism to modernism, to surrealism, free verse, symbolism, and the modern cinema was combined with prudery (the 1930s saw opposition to paintings of nudes being exhibited in the National Gallery in Dublin) and a deep reverence for the Irish past.
Devout attachment to the past undoubtedly had its positive aspects in the 1930s. It bore fruit, for example, in the work of the Irish Folklore Commission. In 1927 Ireland’s first folklore society, An Cumann le Béaloideas Eireann, had begun its work. In 1930 the government gave a grant to a committee appointed by the Folklore Society and by the Royal Irish Academy, which was constituted as the Irish Folklore Institute. Within a few years this body became the Irish Folklore Commission (1935). Almost at the last moment before swift change overtook the countryside, these bodies, particularly the Folklore Commission, collected and recorded evidence of a vast repository of folklore and folktale before they began to vanish from memory. Equally zealous in its scientific attachment to the past, the Irish Manuscript Commission, from its foundation in 1928, made efforts to see that documentary evidence of Ireland’s experience was located, preserved, and published, making known its findings in its periodical publication Analecta Hibernica. This publication, together with the commission’s facsimiles of important manuscripts and its republication of standard out-of-print historical works, helped in the development of modern, scientific historical studies in Ireland which date only from the early decades of the twentieth century. The establishment of the periodical Irish Historical Studies (first published in 1938) was a major turning point, as it provided a focus for disciplined, academic historical research in the country.
Veneration of the past, however, more commonly expressed itself in a crude distaste for the dangerous symptoms of modernism. The mood of much contemporary journalism and comment is caught therefore in this wearyingly representative and complacent passage: “It is…a comforting thought that the steady stream of tradition still moves on, indifferent to these squalls, and it is heartening to remember that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”11 The population at large was protected from the incursions of alien modern thought and art forms not only by the admonitory fulminations of such critics, but of course, by the Censorship Board, ably assisted as it was by the zeal of the customs. A list of the books by modern English, European, and Irish authors banned in the 1930s as being in general tendency indecent now makes surprising reading. Between the years 1930 and 1939 some 1,200 books and some 140 periodicals fell foul of the censors’ displeasure. Only the Irish Times, a few individuals, and some of the Irish writers who had suffered at the hands of the board mounted any opposition to this apparent act of suppression. By contrast, there were highly influential individuals and bodies ready to complain that the censorship policy had been prosecuted with insufficient rigour. The Catholic Truth Society in 1937 appointed a committee to recommend changes in the Censorship Act. The members, including the future bishops of Kilmore and Galway and a future member of the Censorship Board itself (C. J. Joyce, appointed in 1946), concluded that the act did not allow for sufficient censorship and was tardy in its operations.
It would be unwise perhaps to rest too large a cultural thesis upon the activities of the Censorship Board. We have seen how in the 1920s the passing of a censorship act would have struck most Irish men and women as an entirely rational measure and how prevailing nationalist and moral assumptions met in the demands for action in this area. To explain why the act was implemented in such an all-encompassing fashion, one need look no further than the precise mechanics of its operation as they developed. Customs officials or concerned individuals sent suspicious works to the board, where they were first read by a permanent official who marked passages that he thought infringed the act. The board was then presented with these marked volumes for final judgment. It is likely that in the pressure of business, books were banned simply on the basis of the marked passages, rather than upon consideration of the general tendency of the works. The censorship of so many modern classics in the period might be readily explained therefore in terms of administrative inertia rather than by anything more sinister. And a blasé view of the effect of the censorship would acknowledge that the period between the book’s publication and its banning allowed a reader who really wanted to get hold of it ample opportunity to do so. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the censorship policy was prosecuted in a society where the written word was taken very seriously, where even the religious affiliation of a librarian could be a matter of scandal and controversy.12 In 1930, in a famous incident, the Mayo Library Committee had refused to confirm the appointment of a Protestant, a woman educated at Trinity College, Dublin, to a position as county librarian. In the Dáil in June 1931, where the issue was extensively debated, de Valera touched on the power that the written word represented:
If it is a mere passive position of handing down books that are asked for, then the librarian has no particular duty for which religion should be regarded as a qualification, but if the librarian goes round to the homes of the people trying to interest them in books, sees the children in the schools and asks these children to bring home certain books, or asks what books their parents would like to read, if it is active work of a propagandist educational character – and I believe it to be such, if it is to be of any value at all and worth the money spent on it – then I say the people of Mayo, in a country where, I think – I forget the figures – over 98 percent of the population is Catholic, are justified in insisting on a Catholic librarian.13
It may well have been that de Valera, in opportunist fashion, was here attempting to suggest that Fianna Fáil was not to be outdone by Cosgrave’s party in its respect for religious obligations. But such overt religious discrimination was rare in the Irish Free State, where genuine efforts were made to respect, if not always to accommodate, religious minorities, and it is striking that it was the possibility of unsuitable literature reaching the citizens of Mayo that should have stimulated such an unguarded reaction from the normally cautious de Valera. However, the outspokenness with which de Valera espoused a Catholic position in the controversy was merely an uncharacteristically direct expression of his almost instinctual association of Catholicism with the Irish way of life. For the independent Irish life that independence would allow to develop freely would, in de Valera’s view, be Catholic as well as Gaelic. His government, when it came to power, was zealous in its efforts to ensure that Catholic morality should be enforced by legislation and that public life, state occasions, the opening of factories, new housing estates, and the like should be blessed by an official clerical presence. In 1933 a tax was imposed on imported newspapers to the satisfaction of moralists who had inveighed for years against the depredations of the English “gutter press.” And in 1935 the sale and importation of artificial contraceptives were made illegal.
It was, it must be stressed, politically expedient for Fianna Fáil to be seen as dutifully recognizing the authority of the hierarchy and attentive to matters of social morality, since many of its members had endured episcopal condemnation when as Republicans they rejected the Treaty of 1921 and had taken up arms against the Free State government. But the frank piety of de Valera’s broadcast speeches in the 1930s suggests that he scarcely found the necessary accommodation of the state with the church anything other than gratifying. In a St. Patrick’s day broadcast (de Valera had swiftly realized the value of radio as a political instrument) to the United States in 1935 he was unambiguous in his identification of Catholic Ireland with the Irish nation:
Since the coming of St. Patrick, fifteen hundred years ago, Ireland has been a Christian and a Catholic nation. All the ruthless attempts made through the centuries to force her from this allegiance have not shaken her faith. She remains a Catholic nation.14
So the 1930s, if anything, deepened the conservatism of Irish life that we have explored in earlier chapters. To cultural and religious protectionism at their most draconian in the censorship policy was added the official encouragement of economic nationalism as a force sustaining the structure of an essentially rural society dominated by the social, cultural, and political will of the farmers and their offspring. In the period 1926 to 1936 the population of towns throughout the country grew only very slightly, some of them even experiencing a loss of inhabitants, while the population as a whole remained almost stable (1926, 2,971,992; 1936, 2,968,420; a decline of 0.12 percent). Only Dublin city increased its population in any marked way from 394,089 to 472,935 while Cork’s population rose somewhat, from 78,490 to 93,322, indicating a measure of internal emigration to the cities in a society where the population of most small towns remained almost static. Emigration rates stayed high (at a net figure of about 6 per 1,000 of the population for the period 1926–46, western areas suffering the most) though now England rather than the United States was the customary destination. This change which had been in the making since independence was hastened in 1930, when the United States began to apply stringent immigrant quotas. The percentage of single persons in most age-groups also remained high. Clearly, postponed marriage and emigration allowed Irish society to maintain the social profile established in the second half of the nineteenth century well into the modern period. It is true, emigration had lessened for a brief period in the first half of the decade, particularly when the American Depression and the new regulations closed the door of opportunity in that country, increasing unemployment at home (by 1935 it was 133,000, twice what it had been in 1926), but by the end of the 1930s the rate of emigration had quickened once more, draining off what disenchantment with the social order a rising population of unemployed young people might have generated.
Indeed, apart from the largely unsuccessful effort to shift Irish agriculture from pasturage to tillage and to encourage native industry, Fianna Fáil showed no real evidence of any revolutionary desire to change Irish society fundamentally (as some of their critics had feared they might do) in the 1930s. The party was willing to support some new forms of modest state welfare (unemployment assistance was instituted in 1933) and to become centrally involved in house-building and the creation of employment, but no pressing necessity for a full-scale alteration in the order of things seemed apparent. Some social changes certainly occurred as the inevitable outcome of technical developments abroad. The middle-class family motor-car, for example, began to become more common than it had been in the 1920s. In 1931 there were 4,455 new registrations of private motor vehicles; by 1936 this figure had risen to 8,111 and in 1937 over 10,000 officially registered new motor vehicles took to the roads (in 1937 209 people died in road accidents).15
Radio began to become more popular as a form of home entertainment. In the 1920s broadcasts from the national radio station (which began broadcasting from Dublin in 1926 and from Cork in 1927) had been of very low power and had been heard in only a small part of the country. From 1933 onward when the high-powered station had been opened in Athlone, radio broadcasts were much more widely available. The number of licences issued rose sharply in the 1930s from 50,500 in 1935 to 62,200 in 1936 to 100,000 in 1937 (the peak of licences issued in one year was reached in 1941 at 183,000).16 It must also be remembered that many Irish people saw little reason to purchase a licence in order to enjoy the new benefits of radio ownership, for in 1938 the Post Office in a drive against pirates found 25,000 such. There were probably many more. But despite the increased numbers of radios in the country and the wider availability of Irish broadcasts, the majority of licences issued at the end of the 1930s still went to people in the Dublin region (in 1939, of 166,275 licences issued, 40 percent were to people in Dublin and its neighbourhood; very few were issued to people in Connacht or Ulster). Whether Dublin was simply more law-abiding or more addicted to the pleasures of the new medium than the rest of the country cannot be said. Countryside, town, and city were, however, alike addicted in the 1930s, as were the masses throughout the English-speaking world, to the Hollywood film. In village hall and city cinema in Ireland the 1930s was the decade of an enthusiastic discovery of celluloid dreams from California. But change, even when these technological novelties are admitted, was scarcely a dominant characteristic of years when Irish life continued to find its most appropriate expression in moulds shaped in the late nineteenth century.
The impulse to seek self-sufficiency which characterized the 1930s, representatively expressed in the attitudes and policies of de Valera, was, it is necessary to stress, a noble one. It was idealism that stimulated it into life and sustained it through a decade when the international situation suggested that only a vigorous national self-confidence would allow for survival. At its most positive the urge toward self-sufficiency reflected a belief in Irish life, in its dignity and potential, and in the value of a secure, self-confident national identity. That such idealism could be maintained only by ignoring the dismal facts of emigration, economic stagnation, individual inhibition, and lack of fulfiling opportunity was its crippling flaw, akin to that contradiction at the heart of Irish Ireland’s attitudes to the revival of Irish that we noted earlier.
As in the 1920s, it was primarily writers who mounted the most coherent criticisms of the ruling ideology and the prevailing climate and conditions of the period. The most immediate victims of the censorship, it was likely that they should feel a peculiar antipathy to the society that adjudged their work obscene. Among them, such writers as Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, and Seán O’Faoláin, all of whom had fought in the liberation struggle and whose works had attracted or were to attract the censor’s interdict, expressed a deep disillusionment about the kind of Ireland that independence had inaugurated. Frank O’Connor, writing in 1942, is entirely representative of the distaste they all felt in the 1930s:
After the success of the Revolution…Irish society began to revert to type. All the forces that had made for national dignity, that had united Catholic and Protestant, aristocrats like Constance Markievicz, Labour revolutionists like Connolly and writers like Æ, began to disintegrate rapidly, and Ireland became more than ever sectarian, utilitarian, the two nearly always go together, vulgar and provincial…Every year that has passed, particularly since de Valera’s rise to power, has strengthened the grip of the gombeen man, of the religious secret societies like the Knights of Columbanus, of the illiterate censorships…The significant fact about it is that there is no idealistic opposition which would enable us to measure the extent of the damage.17
The writers, particularly Seán O’Faoláin, took it upon themselves to provide that necessary opposition, despite the herculean nature of the task.
A degree of disenchantment might certainly have been expected in the new Ireland as in most post-revolutionary societies. And later O’Faoláin himself, in his autobiography Vive Moi! (1965), was to identify his own youthful iconoclasm with that of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, thereby reducing its significance by implication – the attitudes he expressed then were only what might have been expected, the mature O’Faoláin benignly implies. But this late retrospective tolerance on his part does little justice to the substance and quality of O’Faoláin’s earlier critical assault on post-revolutionary Ireland, which was both intellectually based and vigorously argued. Rather it tends to soften in memory what was in fact a protracted campaign of opposition waged against their society by Irish writers, in which O’Faoláin played a commanding role.
Seán O’Faoláin, who was born in 1900, the son of a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Cork, had been caught up as a youth in the enthusiasm of the Gaelic League, that nursery of freedom fighters, and had graduated to membership of the IRA and action in the War of Independence. By the 1930s, however, following a period of study at Harvard University and of residence in London, he had returned to Ireland determined, as he put it later in his autobiography, to write of his own land, “this sleeping country, these sleeping fields, those sleeping villages.” Initially he had hoped that the change of government which had brought de Valera to power in 1932 might do something to disturb the unrealistic dreams of the sleeping country, but he quickly came to believe that de Valera was himself a powerful soporific. For he preached just those nationalistic doctrines of an ancient Gaelic and Catholic nation rooted in the Irish Irelanders’ vision of an unbroken Irish tradition which must be restored to its former glory that O’Faoláin considered a romantic distraction from urgent, practical social business that lay to hand. In a series of articles and books, including perhaps his finest work, King of the Beggars (1938), O’Faoláin offered a radically different interpretation of recent Irish history. His fundamental thesis was that Gaelic Ireland had died in the eighteenth century and that there was little point in trying to resurrect it. Gaelic Ireland had collapsed under a persecution which it could not endure because it had grown effete and weak, clinging to aristocracy and hierarchy in a world moving inexorably toward democracy. The modern Ireland that the twentieth century had inherited was not the outcome of many centuries of Gaelic and Catholic civilization but the fruit of the democratic victories won by Daniel O’Connell in the nineteenth century. With great vigour O’Faoláin denounced all those who thought otherwise. Daniel Corkery bore the particular brunt of a disillusionment bred of the fact that he had been O’Faoláin’s first mentor:
To us the Irish fisherman and the Irish farmer and the Irish townsman is the result of about one hundred and fifty years of struggle. And that, for history, is long enough for us. To us, Ireland is beginning, where to Corkery it is continuing. We have a sense of time, of background: we know the value of the Gaelic tongue to extend our vision of Irish life, to deepen it and enrich it: we know that an old cromlech in a field can dilate our imaginations with a sense of what was, what might have been, and what is not; but we cannot see the man ploughing against the sky in an aura of antiquity.18
How O’Faoláin could in fact see him was as the descendant of a vast number of disenfranchised helots whom Daniel O’Connell had taken and moulded into a democratic nation by the force of his practical, utilitarian, unsentimental will. In King of the Beggars O’Faoláin presented O’Connell as a more appropriate model for twentieth-century Ireland than any figure drawn from the sagas or the mists of Celtic antiquity. O’Connell – Benthamite, English-speaking, and philosophic about the loss of Gaelic, liberally conscious of the differing roles of church and state – was a figure to inspire a new Ireland rather than the heroic ideal of Cuchulain or of the sacrificial victims of 1916. Ireland’s role was now to cast off the sleep-walking dreams that nationalistic rhetoric and ideology induced and to recognize her true nature as a nation fashioned in the mind of the Great Liberator:
He is interesting in a hundred ways, but in no way more interesting than in this – that he was the greatest of all Irish realists who knew that if he could but once define, he would thereby create. He did define, and he did create. He thought a democracy and it rose. He defined himself, and his people became him. He imagined a future and the road appeared. He left his successors nothing to do but to follow him.19
O’Faoláin’s writings were immediately recognized as a powerful critique of prevailing ideology and of the version of history that sustained it. Professor Michael Tierney, a former Cumann na nGaedheal TD and professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, who introduced a series of articles in Studies, the Irish Jesuit periodical, which responded in 1938 to King of the Beggars, admitted the energy and skill of O’Faoláin’s work. He acknowledged:
He has done us a very valuable service in going to the roots of our present society and compelling us to study and ponder on our destiny as a people. In many ways the future of our political, social and educational systems must depend on whether or not we agree with what he has said about the significance of O’Connell.20
Tierney disagreed with O’Faoláin’s analysis – as did the three other contributors to the Studies symposium. It was Tierney who put the case against O’Faoláin most searchingly. Recognizing much truth in O’Faoláin’s analysis, he questioned in distress:
The significance of Mr. O’Faoláin’s book is that it once more raises clearly and frankly the dilemma that inexorably faces modern Ireland. Are we bound to rely for all our culture upon an incongruous mixture of etiolated Catholicism, Puritanical individualism, and commercial utility, or is there no hope of our being able to obtain some light from our vanished Gaelic past to brighten our gloom?21
O’Faoláin’s reply to those who asked such questions throughout his career was simple and direct. To pose them is to have ideas above one’s station, to give in to a massive “inferiority complex with regard to the actuality of the Ireland in which we live.” People like Tierney
…hate the truth because they have not enough personal courage to be what we all are – the descendants, English-speaking, in European dress, affected by European thought, part of the European economy, of the rags and tatters who rose with O’Connell to win under Mick Collins – in a word this modern Anglo-Ireland.22
In his own novels and short stories, as did other writers who published novels and collections of short stories in the 1930s, O’Faoláin tried to attend to the realities of Irish life, allowing an unvarnished portrait to appear. In his short stories, as in Frank O’Connor’s and later in Mary Lavin’s work, we see an Irish provincial world, in Cork, in the small towns, in the countryside, where inhibition is disguised as economic prudence, land hunger and stolid conservatism as patriotic duty, subservience to church authority as piety. It is a world where intimacies, moments of personal fulfilment, seem wrested from an unyielding oppression. The emotional climate of the Irish short story, particularly in O’Faoláin, O’Connor, and Mary Lavin, is one where passion and encounter are matters of fleeting privacies, where disillusionment dogs individual hope and disappointment enforces bitter submission. The Irish short story of the 1930s and 1940s registered a social reality that flew in the face of nationalistic self-congratulation. Instead of de Valera’s Gaelic Eden and the uncomplicated satisfactions of Ireland free, the writers revealed a mediocre, dishevelled, often neurotic and depressed petit-bourgeois society that atrophied for want of a liberating idea. O’Faoláin’s image for it, as it was James Joyce’s before him, is the entire landscape of Ireland shrouded in snow: “under that white shroud, covering the whole of Ireland, life was lying broken and hardly breathing.”23
There was a sense nevertheless in which the writers and the politicians were not in fundamental disagreement. They may have differed on the historical basis of contemporary Irish society and disagreed profoundly in their conscious assessment of the quality of Irish life, but they shared a faith that the Irish future would depend on Irish invention and on a commitment to the essential worth of Irish experience. In de Valera this faith was expressed in a naive, direct idealism, in a version of pastoral and an economic nationalism that could not but attract impatient criticism. In the work of O’Faoláin and the other short story writers, by contrast it was expressed almost unconsciously in the quality of the writing itself. For despite the uncompromisingly bleak portrait of Irish society in the aftermath of civil war that the short story writers provide, the Irish short story – as Seamus Deane has remarked of modern Irish literature as a whole – registers alienation; it is not a literature of alienation.24 Suggestive of speech in its prose rhythms, and in its ready acceptance of anecdote and discursive digression, it has seemed, although the authors learned in part from the Russian and French practitioners of the form, a literary form intimately involved with Irish life, peculiarly adapted to its rhythms and moods. Reminiscent of the tradition of Gaelic storytelling, it has seemed an art richly receptive to the racy pleasure of Irish conversation. Furthermore, its unquestioning dependence on traditional narrative techniques, eschewing as it does modish experimentation, implies the writers’ own innate conservatism. They are of their people in spite of themselves. The Irish short story of the 1930s and 1940s therefore was an enactment of humanist faith in the Irish reality that it explored ostensibly as a condition of hopeless privation. It took for granted that an Irish art would have Ireland as its primary matter, and it addressed itself to its subject in a manner that unselfconsciously bore witness to the vitality of Irish discourse.
There were those in the Ireland of the 1930s who did not share this faith in an Irish self-sufficiency which de Valera urged in speech and in policy and the short story writers perhaps unconsciously made manifest in subject matter and manner. To these others it seemed that Irish survival as a nation could be assured in the midst of international crisis in Europe only if ideologies and modes of social organization currently shaping the experience of modern Europe were also made effective in their own country.
The vocationalist ideas on social organization commended by Pope Leo XII in his encyclical of 1891, Rerum Novarum, and reaffirmed in Pius IX’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 had a special appeal to those who felt that Ireland’s Catholic nature must be expressed in her new-won independence. And this could best be managed through a loyal active obedience to papal teaching on the social order. Accordingly the 1930s saw the creation of numbers of organizations, societies, and journalistic organs that encouraged the adoption of vocationalist and corporatist ideals. These shared a sense that the crisis which faced contemporary Europe in the conflict between capitalism and communism could be resolved only by the establishment of a new vocationalist social order in which men and women would organize themselves into guilds or corporations according to their various professions and vocations and where representative government would reflect that vocationalist organization of society. Through such reorganization it was hoped the conflicts between classes and between state and state could be healed in a new era of social harmony and cooperation. In Ireland an organization named Muintir na Tire (People of the Land), founded only a week before the publication of Quadragesimo Anno, soon became much more than the agricultural economic cooperative it had been at its inception, as it enthusiastically urged the cause of vocationalism at study weekends and later in the decade at residential congresses. Muintir na Tire reckoned the parish to be the basic unit of social organization, and by the end of the decade fifty Irish parishes were sending their representatives to rural weeks of study. Other organizations spread the vocationalist message at similar occasions, the summer school proving a particularly popular means of evangelism. Intellectuals in periodicals like United Ireland and Studies commended the concept. In 1938 the Standard newspaper was reinvigorated, and its doughty espousal of the vocationalist cause through the vigorous articles of Professor Alfred O’Rahilly of University College, Cork, certainly helped the paper to its circulation of about 50,000 in 1939.25 The hierarchy added its voice, regularly commending vocationalism in its pastorals, thereby at the least providing a leaven of intellectual content to their repetitive proscriptions of such dangers to the public good and personal morality as provocative fashions, jazz music, mixed bathing, and rural company-keeping.
In September 1933 the vocationalist ideal received what might have proved a powerful impetus in Ireland when the Cumann na nGaedheal party was dissolved and reconstituted together with two other political organizations as Fine Gael. The major partner in this new political grouping was a recently formed (and even more recently banned) body named in menacing fashion the National Guard, which included in its constitution a commitment to the reorganization of society on a vocational basis.26
To explain this remarkable turn of events, whereby a party that had resolutely defended and worked the system of parliamentary democracy bequeathed to it a decade before should suddenly accept partnership in a political alliance which might involve a risky flirtation with new, less than fully democratic, forms of social organization it is necessary to consider in some detail the turbulent and spectacular growth in 1932 and 1933 of what came to be known as the Blueshirt movement.
The peaceful transition of power in 1932 (as I have already suggested) may well have been made possible because of the narrowness of de Valera’s majority, dependent as it was on the support of the Labour Party. It seemed unlikely that his regime would prove either effective or long-lived. The snap election of 1933 which gave de Valera his overall majority put a swift end to hopes that his power would be only temporary. Furthermore, the intervening months had given many of the former government’s members and supporters much to ponder, had the speed of events allowed them leisure for contemplation. Fianna Fáil seemed willing to turn an indulgent blind eye on the increasingly bellicose activities of the IRA (it had released IRA prisoners immediately upon taking office) which became identified, in an upsurge of anticommunist hysteria, with the Red threat. The government party also seemed ready to victimize former public officials of the old regime (though in fact de Valera refused to initiate a spoils system in Irish political life, which must always rest to his credit). In response to these disturbing portents an organization named the Army Comrades Association, which had been founded a week before the election of 1932 as an old comrades’ society, swiftly began a change of nature which was to transform it into a strong-arm force ready to flex its muscles against the IRA, the government, and any threat of republican extremism or communism.
Two weeks after de Valera’s re-election in 1933 he chose to dismiss the commissioner of the Civic Guards (the chief of police), General Eoin O’Duffy. For O’Duffy, a vigorous organizer and colourful popular personality, who had often been in the public eye (he had been in charge of crowd control during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932), this reverse was the opportunity to move on to greater things that before the summer was over (he was dismissed in February) was to take him to leadership of the Army Comrades Association, renamed the National Guard, and then to overall presidency of the new Fine Gael party when the old Cumann na nGaedheal party sought association with his own apparently powerful movement.
It was inevitable that the National Guard, with its zest for marches and public displays of mass support, its uniform of blue shirts, and its raised arm salute should be immediately associated with contemporary fascist movements of continental Europe. The fact that O’Duffy was also sympathetic to the corporatist ideas of the Italian fascists made it seem all the more likely that the Blueshirt movement was an Irish expression of a European phenomenon. There is little doubt indeed that it was O’Duffy’s apparent sympathy for European corporatist ideology that made him an attractive figure to those intellectuals and ideologues within the Cumann na nGaedheal party (men like Professors Michael Tierney and James Hogan) who had already become convinced of the need for Irish social reorganization on corporatist and vocationalist lines, though they preferred to relate their social ideals to papal utterance rather than to the direct example of Mussolini. And O’Duffy’s apparent commitment to individual will as a force in public affairs probably made his movement attractive to the poet Yeats, who composed marching songs for the Blueshirts (though one doubts they were ever used).
General O’Duffy and the Blueshirt movement momentarily seemed poised for major action. By the end of 1934, however, any hopes individuals may have cherished that O’Duffy would prove a regenerative force in Ireland’s body politic were dissipated as the movement collapsed in disagreement and operatic posturings. The political inexperience of O’Duffy and his grandiloquent absurdities of speech and manner had swiftly brought home to Cosgrave and the other more sage members of the former government party that nothing was to be gained from such an ill-advised association. Nor had such traditionally minded democratic politicians much taste for social experimentation of a vocationalist kind that had attracted Tierney and Hogan to O’Duffy. Furthermore, de Valera began to move decisively against the IRA in 1935, thereby reducing support for the Blueshirts which had sprung up in part because of fear of de Valera’s past association with extreme republicanism. What the movement represented in fact, as Maurice Manning has argued, was not a widespread Irish desire to emulate social and political developments on the Continent but an Irish response to local political conditions. The politics of the Civil War had more to do with the rise and decline of the movement than the social theories of either Pius XI or Mussolini.
Despite the demise of the Blueshirt movement, which had encouraged vocationalist ideals, the belief that Irish society required restructuring according to vocationalist principles did not die with it. In the Constitution of 1937, promulgated largely because Mr. de Valera wished to redefine the constitutional relationship of the Irish state with the United Kingdom, there are clear signs that the currently fashionable Catholic social thinking influenced certain of its Articles. It is not clear whether de Valera, who was almost single-handedly responsible for the document, was a vocationalist at heart, or whether he was simply responding to the thinking of the church, allowing it certain rights, but not dominance. What is clear to most commentators27 on the 1937 Constitution is that it is a curious amalgam of ideas, particularly in the area of human rights. Enshrined in its various clauses are ideas familiar from the liberal tradition together with ideas drawn directly from Catholic social thought, including a modicum of vocationalism. Therefore the Constitution asserted that the state recognized “the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society” and guaranteed its rights “as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and State,” forbidding in further clauses any enactment of laws permitting divorce. The Constitution further limited the state’s rights in education, firmly ascribing those rights to the parents. This latter clause in practice meant that the state could not choose to interfere with the church’s control of much of Irish education so long as parents wished their children to be educated in denominational schools. The Constitution further recognized in an oddly vague clause, “the special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of its citizens.” Vocationalist thinking in particular rather than Catholic social principles in general was expressed in the Articles defining the composition of the Seanad or Upper House. De Valera had set up a commission to report on the possible composition of a future Seanad (he had abolished the old Seanad in 1936). He accepted aspects of a minority report (the signatories included Professors Tierney and O’Rahilly), which recommended a body elected on a vocationalist basis. Part of the body of senators was to be selected from panels of candidates sharing cultural, social, and administrative experience.
As a whole the Constitution of 1937 was a cautious document which did not propose, apart from redefining the state’s relationship with Britain, radical change. It affirmed basic Catholic social teaching, recognized property rights in a manner that would not disturb the largely rural, farming electorate, took the liberal tradition of individual rights very seriously, sought to protect religious minorities, and included a measure of idealism in seeking reunification of the national territory, elevating Irish to the status of the first national language. It also committed the state to do its utmost to secure the rural civilization that de Valera so devoutly desired. The fact that it was the relatively powerless Senate that de Valera chose to restructure on semi-vocationalist lines suggests that he was willing to allow Catholic ideas on the vocationalist state expression in his Constitution and in society but not to the extent that a fundamental reorganization of the legislature would be involved. To a large extent indeed the Constitution of 1937 confirmed the state’s dependence on a parliamentary system of the British type rather than introducing novel experiments based on European ideas.
Nevertheless, the Constitution of 1937 shows that de Valera had a precise appreciation of the need for the state to take account of the fact that Southern Ireland, the area of the Free State’s jurisdiction, was in the main a Catholic society, where the population would expect Catholic social teaching, especially when it touched on marriage and family law, to be expressed juridically. Furthermore, it manifests his understanding that the church had rights defined by herself that an Irish government could usurp only at its peril. De Valera seemed willing therefore to grant the church a role in education and in providing social services that a more revolutionary and secular republicanism might have attempted to wrest from her. In 1939 de Valera acceded to a motion introduced in the Seanad by Michael Tierney and another senator recommending the establishment of a commission to examine how further vocational organization could be encouraged in the country. The commission of twenty-five persons, chaired by the Most Reverend Bishop of Galway, Michael Browne, drew on the expertise of various individuals who had been most vocal in their support of vocationalist ideals. That de Valera considered such a commission worthwhile shows at the least that the idea of restructuring Irish society according to papal teaching still had a fairly wide currency, but de Valera may well have acceded to the suggestion simply because a commission was the best way to appear to act without the need to do so. After it reported in 1943 little more was heard of the corporate state,28 although a later prime minister, Seán Lemass, who came to power in 1959, was to be influenced by corporatist ideas.
The ideological climate of the 1930s was therefore marked by economic and republican nationalism (the latter expressing itself at its most extreme in the recurrent violence of the IRA which was directed both within and without the state), though the state also presented the same essentially Catholic nationalist aspect that it had done during the Cosgrave administration. Concern for the native language, music, and rural tradition, and antagonism to cosmopolitan values were intensified to a degree which would have gratified the Russian Narodniki. The efforts of some intellectuals, ideologues, and socially active priests and laymen to introduce European ideas of social reorganization which coloured the Constitution of 1937 allowed for a good deal of sociable discussion and debate throughout the decade. They did not, however, interfere with the steady development of Irish society into a stable, deeply conservative, parliamentary democracy where change, if it was to occur, would occur slowly within the framework that the Constitution provided. It was a decade when even some of society’s most outspoken critics, young short story writers and novelists who experienced a deep post-revolutionary disillusionment, felt little need for literary experiment, preferring to explore the new Irish world through the traditional forms of the short story and the realistic novel. The only literary journal to survive from an earlier era of literary enthusiasm and the heady days of Dublin’s literary salons was the Dublin Magazine edited by Seumas O’Sullivan, who, with his wife, the painter Estella Solomons, tried to keep up, with a few others, the tradition of “evenings” for discussion and literary exchange that had so enlivened earlier years. But the Dublin Magazine in the 1930s was more notable for its sense of an insecure, self-regarding coterie remembering past glories and for its academic tone than for literary energy and commitment to a coherent, vital editorial policy. That intellectual and imaginative stirring which had once stimulated Edward Martyn to affirm that “the sceptre of intelligence has passed from London to Dublin” had now ended. Once more Dublin was a place to leave.
Occasionally a play, for example Paul Vincent Carrol’s Shadow and Substance (1937) with its unabashed assault on Irish hypocrisy, might stimulate a brief intellectual frisson at the Abbey, and Micheál MacLiammóir’s Gate Theatre in Dublin (employing the remarkable talents of his friend Hilton Edwards as director and designer) might influence the quality of stage design in the Irish theatre but neither managed quite to create that sense of new awakening that had characterized the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre.
In 1938 W. B. Yeats left Ireland for the last time, but not before his play Purgatory (performed at the Abbey in August 1938) had provoked conventional taste to a final public flurry of uncomprehending disapprobation of the poet’s work. Judicious periods abroad in more congenial intellectual climates had of course always been Yeats’s habit – a strategy which over many years had allowed him to survive as an artist in his own country. In the 1930s other, younger men also felt the need to escape the stultifying air of the Free State. For them Paris offered a freedom Ireland could not provide, as it had for generations of Irish artists and writers.
Walter Benjamin in a famous phrase once christened Paris the capital of the nineteenth century. The title bears testimony to the city’s power to attract writers, poets, painters, and intellectuals, who, fleeing political persecution or cultural stagnation, found there a cosmopolitan freedom from local constraint entirely necessary to their work. In the early decades of the twentieth century Paris seemed set fair to maintain that cultural dominance of Europe as it remained the lodestar for emigré writers and artists from much of the Continent and from the United States. It was in Paris that James Joyce lived throughout the 1930s at work on Work in Progress which was to become Finnegans Wake (1939). In Ireland a few young intellectuals, mostly graduates of University College, Dublin, though the most famous of them, Samuel Beckett, was a graduate of Trinity College, were conscious of Joyce’s genius and reputation; indeed some of them sought his acquaintance in Paris. They recognized in their veneration of Joyce’s work and their sense of the European nature of his achievement that Irish cultural provincialism could be redeemed only if a proper concern with nationality was combined with an acceptance of the riches of European culture. Most of these young men, some of whom settled in Paris for a time in the 1930s (Beckett indeed settled permanently), were members of the very small Irish bourgeoisie that in its urban tastes and values had been overtaken by the populist rural values of the new state. Apart from Beckett, their literary work, that of the poets Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, and the slightly older Thomas MacGreevy for example, has received limited critical attention in Ireland or elsewhere. Its intellectual, often theological, concerns, its unselfconsciously urban pre-occupations, its modernist experiment, its assured familiarity with European civilization, set their work apart from what most Irish men and women had come to expect from their contemporary writers. For these writers Ireland could be most herself not through a self-absorbed antiquarianism but through acceptance of her position as a European nation with links to the intellectual and artistic concerns of the Continent.
Their highly experimental work therefore represents an important strand in modern Irish literary and cultural history, which because of the prevailing nationalist ideology that celebrates the rising of a peasant people against oppression became almost as hidden an Ireland as Corkery’s eighteenth-century Munster. The novelist Mervyn Wall in 1971 reflected on the social origins of his contemporaries. He noted that many of these writers were
…of urban origin, and like myself they probably never had the experience of listening, as had probably O’Faoláin, O’Connor, Kavanagh and others who had been born in the provinces to aged relatives cracking their swollen knuckles over the fire as they told tales of old Land League days, of evictions and of the lucky shot that winged a land agent. I, and I suppose most of my acquaintances, only learnt about small town and rural Irish life through visits to the Abbey Theatre and subsequent reading. Many of the writers…had brilliant academic careers. Many came from prosperous families and no doubt from childhood on believed that a secure place in the world awaited them.
It was natural for these people to turn to Europe where culture was, just as the writer of provincial origin nowadays turns to America where the money is. Provincial Ireland has the long tradition of American emigration behind it. Dublin has not. I hate mentioning myself, but by doing so I may make things clearer. My father had the means and leisure to spend a great deal of his time from 1895 onwards travelling all over Europe and even to the West Indies. Our house was full of books that dealt with other lands, and I never heard when young a single place name in Ireland mentioned. All the talk was of Paris, the Italian lakes, Vienna and Dresden.29
For a brief period in 1936–38 the periodical Ireland Today gave a platform to some of these writers and to intellectuals and critics whose concerns were European as well as Irish. The journal was one of the very few places in Ireland where support for the republican cause in Spain had any overt expression. Indeed it was popular opposition to its stand on this issue that led to its demise in 1938. The journal, as well as reporting on political developments in European countries in vigorously antifascist terms, attended to developments in European cinema, sought to publish intellectual Catholic commentary on social and cultural policies in the Free State and in Europe, and sought out new writing. There was an astringent impatience in its pages, a contempt for all mediocre aspects of Irish life, an iconoclasm that could be directed at the Abbey Theatre and the Gaelic revival alike, and an uncompromising republicanism in some of its social commitments which made it an obvious target for suppression in the interests of a national complacency that thought Ireland had little to gain from modern European culture and nothing certainly from the pretensions of a self-appointed intelligentsia.
As the 1930s ended, however, it became clear to even the most obdurate that the affairs of Europe must become Irish affairs as the war clouds gathered, threatening a storm that might engulf the infant Irish state on its uncontrollable journey. There was a general concern that come what may, the victories won in 1921 should not be thrown away in wartime alliances and risky partisanship. For most Irish men and women survival as a state seemed the highest good that could be expected in the coming crisis. Ireland must seek to survive as a neutral power. Michael Tierney in an article in 1937 caught a mood which by 1939/40 united the country:
We must be implicated, as far as in us lies, in no more wars to end wars or wars for democracy or for any of the other high-sounding ideals in which war-propaganda is so fruitful. Our course, above all in war-time, must be one of “sacred egoism.”30