When Harold Nicolson visited Dublin in March 1942 to fulfil a number of speaking engagements, he noted in his diary that Irish neutrality had “taken on an almost religious flavour; it has become a question of honour; and it is something which Ireland is not ashamed of but tremendously proud.”1 He sensed the popularity of a cause that had united the people of independent Ireland under a leader, de Valera, who exhibited a “deep spiritual certainty.” By the time Nicolson paid his visit to Dublin to discover how invincibly persuaded most Irish men and women were of the soundness of the policy that had brought obloquy upon Ireland both in Britain and in the United States, neutrality was a much less risky stance than it had been just two years earlier (though of course this was not fully clear at the time). American troops were already stationed in Northern Ireland preparing for the invasion of Europe, and Germany was principally occupied in the war against Russia, so that the threat of German invasion no longer gave great cause for alarm. While pressure for a full Irish participation in the war might be exerted economically by Britain and the United States, the possibility of an anticipatory invasion by British forces to forestall German occupation of Ireland for strategic reasons had lessened appreciably. The period of greatest danger to Irish neutrality had in fact been the year of June 1940 to June 1941 when German troops came to the very point of an invasion of the United Kingdom which threatened also to engulf Ireland in a general conflagration. In this year de Valera’s diplomatic skill, together with his unswerving refusal to place the interests of any other nation above that of his own, allowed him to steer a safe passage through a mine-infested sea, in consultation with two diplomats who managed to view Irish positions on the matter with shrewd sensitivity, Sir John Maffey, the British representative, and the German minister, Dr. Edouard Hempel. De Valera’s resolute, cool-headed handling of affairs in these dangerous months won him widespread respect and support in Ireland. The neutrality policy was loyally adhered to by all parties in the Dáil, though in the early months of the war, after the fall of France, dissenting parliamentary voices had sometimes been raised.
Throughout the years of the war de Valera strove to maintain that even-handed diplomatic balance between the belligerents which served him in the tense months of 1940–41, to a degree that suggested pedantic shortsightedness to many people abroad. However, it could not really be doubted that a scrupulous diplomatic care was of the utmost importance to an Irish neutrality that exhibited telling signs of partiality. Some Irish men and women certainly favoured a German victory in the military struggle. Attitudes of respect for Hitler’s reconstruction of the German nation combined with an old Irish nationalist conviction that England’s difficulty might prove Ireland’s opportunity were reflected in a limited sympathy for the German war effort and in the IRA’s clumsy attempts to establish contacts with the German intelligence service. The majority of the population, however, probably hoped for British survival and, after America entered the war, for an Allied victory. De Valera himself certainly favoured the Allies’ cause; on the practical level Allied airmen who were shot down over Ireland were returned to Britain when Germans in similar straits found themselves spending the rest of the war in Irish internment. The Irish intelligence service and its British counterparts maintained contacts. In addition, over 50,000 citizens of the Irish state volunteered for service in the British armed forces during the course of the war.
But such evidence of Irish partiality in the European conflict did not mean that there was ever any large-scale opposition to de Valera’s determined efforts to keep the Irish state uninvolved in the hostilities. When in 1940 Professor Michael Tierney (who had earlier counselled “sacred egoism”) recorded that neutrality afforded Ireland “the nightmarish satisfaction of looking on in comparative safety at horrors we can do nothing to prevent”2 most Irish people would have agreed with his sentiments and would have seen little reason to forsake that comparative safety for the overwhelming risks to their young state that political and military partisanship would involve. And nothing that happened in subsequent years would have changed their minds. A minority, however, thought such safety ignoble, believing that to remain a spectator in such desperate times was to place Ireland in grave moral jeopardy.
Not unnaturally, given links of family and feeling with Britain, most of this minority comprised members of the Anglo-Irish community (though James Dillon, who resigned from Fine Gael on the issue of neutrality, could scarcely be identified with Anglo-Ireland), for whom Ireland’s neutrality was a difficult pill to swallow. Many of them were still accustomed to think of British forces as “our army” and “our navy.” What others saw as sacred egoism, some of them were inclined to regard as shameful indifference to the fate of their English kin. The poet Louis MacNeice, who had been in Ireland on holiday when war broke out, bitterly expressed this mood when, serving as a fire-watcher during the London blitz, he turned on his native country:
The neutral island facing the Atlantic,
The neutral island in the heart of man,
Are bitterly soft reminders of the beginnings
That ended before the end began…
But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shores the mackerel
Are fat – on the flesh of your kin.3
MacNeice, in common with many others of his Anglo-Irish background, would undoubtedly have been distressed to read the views of the Leader newspaper on the sea battles alluded to in the above stanzas. It was that organ’s stern view that Britain had brought sea warfare upon herself by her traditional policy of naval supremacy. The paper’s moral outrage was reserved for occasions when neutral shipping was caught up in a conflict of others’ making. The war therefore heightened that sense of Anglo-Ireland’s isolation from Ireland and from the world that, as we saw earlier, had in the main characterized its experience since independence. The Viscount Powerscourt confessed to Harold Nicolson with mingled gloom and saturnine satisfaction: “Here I am marooned – the last of the aristocracy with no one to speak to.”4
If Anglo-Ireland was marooned, conscious in a new way that Irish independence had really cut their country loose politically from Britain, then Irish writers too felt remote from the outside world. The 1930s had been a trying time for writers who had chosen to remain in the country. Censorship and an unsympathetic public climate had proved bearable only because markets for their work had been readily available abroad. The war closed off many such outlets (literature from neutral Ireland ceased to be so welcome in London journals and publishing houses, and the paper shortage was acute), placing Irish writers in positions of desperate financial insecurity, for no writer could imagine making a living on Irish sales alone. The poet Patrick Kavanagh caught their mood in a line from his poem “Lough Derg” (written in 1942) when, contemplating an Irish crowd at the annual pilgrimage there, he imagined the banal, acquisitive prayers of the people as “All Ireland…froze for the want of Europe.”5 A new note of real venom came into some of their writings as they reflected on their own society. Seán O’Faoláin in his An Irish Journey (1941) castigated the country’s capital for its cultural deficiencies: “The quality of life is weak…weak for a capital…Politics, journalism, conversation are generally tawdry, and sometimes far worse.”6 The city stirred him to savagery: “no sooner does any man attempt, or achieve, here, anything fine than the rats begin to emerge from the sewers, bringing with them a skunk-like stench of envy and hatred, worse than the drip of a broken drain.”7 At more controlled moments, he concluded of Ireland in wartime, “Life is so isolated now that it is no longer being pollinated by germinating ideas windborne from anywhere.”8
In his book The Emergency (1978), Bernard Share has suggested that the conventional estimation of the years 1939–45 as a particularly isolated and culturally stagnant period in modern Irish history is something of an exaggeration. He suggests that for British commentators, and for those of Anglo-Irish background, both at the time and since, it was impossible to credit that a country which had apparently opted out of the central struggle of modern times, the war against fascism, could have been anything other than culturally stagnant, since the nation, in its callous self-interest, was morally deficient. He further implies that those Irish writers who also bewailed the cultural isolation of the period were perhaps exaggerating the general condition of the country because of the peculiar pressures on themselves. Share’s opinion is that, by contrast, the years of “the Emergency,” as the war was known in Ireland, show signs of some cultural and intellectual vitality.
The truth is probably more simple – for the majority of Irish men and women the years of the war represented scarcely more of an experience of cultural isolation and deprivation than had any of the years that had preceded them. The entire period since independence, it must be remembered, had been characterized by an isolationism encouraged by official ideology and protected by censorship. Only those, like the writers, who had objected to that prewar condition, might have been expected to believe that the experience of neutrality deepened it. Most people simply supported neutrality as the only sane policy in a world gone mad, and got on with their lives as best they might.
If the mass of the Irish people were in all probability unconscious of the cultural stagnation some commentators thought must inevitably result as a consequence of neutrality, the economic depredations of the war years were all too evident. Ireland, dependent for some basic necessities on the strained goodwill of the British, quickly took steps to ensure that the population could be fed. A compulsory tillage policy was introduced in 1940 which, during the war years, almost doubled the acreage under crops. Despite this, bread was rationed from 1942 onward following tea, sugar, and fuel, which had already been placed on the rationed list. Coal, gas, and petrol were in very short supply (private motoring became almost impossible by 1942 and was replaced by many resurrected horse-drawn vehicles). By most people, indeed, the war years are remembered as years of severe if not desperate shortages. For some there was wretched poverty – the monthly periodical the Bell in 1942 predicted “scurvy, rickets and kindred diseases because we are unable to get a properly balanced diet.”9 For others the unavailability of tobacco seemed the most serious personal consequence of the international crisis.
The economy as a whole entered on a period of decline. Exports fell, and while imports also fell in the generally insecure economic environment, the cost of imports rose strikingly in comparison with the prices gained for exports. The loss of many unavailable imported raw materials reduced industrial potential, and industrial employment declined. Efforts were made to exploit local resources: the turf bogs were tapped in a venture that was in postwar years to become one of the successful semi-state enterprises (Bord na Mona); advertisements appeared in the press on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, urging the population to grow potatoes wherever possible. A lively black market in scarce goods quickly developed.
British visitors to Dublin in the war years, whatever the miseries that high costs and shortages inflicted on the city’s poor (and at the outbreak of hostilities an Emergency Powers Order had frozen wages), discovered a city that seemed an island of prewar life in the midst of a sea of international change. They noticed the ready availability of meat for those able to pay for it, they observed that social life continued, given a special dash by a whiff of espionage and by English and European exiles from more stringent austerity. In the early months of the war indeed, as Patrick Campbell recalls, a hint of bohemian excess was generated by the occasion: “Dublin almost seemed to have a special duty, in a world gone grey and regimented, to preserve the gaieties and pleasures that we felt had vanished from everywhere else.”10 Indeed, Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, even sensed that Dublin in the war years exuded “a certain international atmosphere”11, in contrast with the preceding decade.
In some ways, the war years in Ireland were not without their agreeable aspects for many people. As John Ryan testified: “Looking back on it, there was a lot to be said for the times…The goodness of simple things was emphasized rather than diminished by the absence of superfluous luxuries. The country was clean, uncluttered and unhurried.”12 During “the Emergency,” about 250,000 men became involved in defence roles of one kind or another, and while service in the regular armed forces or in the reserve in a neutral country had its tediums, the war in Ireland as elsewhere offered release from the normal round of domestic and local responsibilities. Furthermore, service in the Irish armed forces had an important healing effect on Irish life. The Leader newspaper had marked its Christmas edition of 1939 by publishing a cartoon which showed de Valera and Cosgrave crossing the floor of the Dáil to shake hands, burying the Civil War hatchet once and for all, invoking the early days of Sinn Féin in a ballad:
We two have run about the hills
For Ireland suffered pain
We’d then united hearts and wills
In old Sinn Féin.
But many a time since then we’ve fought
And maybe will again;
Now friends for Ireland’s sake we ought
For old Sinn Féin.
Apart from the few diehard republicans in the IRA who tried to make common cause with Germany during “the Emergency,” the experience of uniting to defend Irish sovereignty for many certainly helped dissipate the surviving bitterness inherited from the early years of independence which, as the journalist and commentator John Healy remembered, had in prewar days “flared sullenly, if silently, at the sight of the uniform of the National Army.”13
Others noted how the years of “the Emergency” showed a decided increase in the number of books borrowed from public libraries (by 1944, twenty-four out of twenty-six of the counties of the Irish state had a public library, Westmeath and Longford going without) although public expenditure on these services remained comparatively low and the work of librarians was made difficult because of poor salaries and the endless vigilance of self-appointed moral guardians of the people. In the Bell a library assistant reported how even the poems of John Donne fell out of favour in one library, only to be read on request. The optimism of one correspondent to the Leader who reckoned that “the Ireland of the future will certainly be more broad-minded and less insular”14 because of the noticeable increase in a readership for the English classics, was not reckoning with Irish Grundyism. But film societies were founded and the Gate Theatre in Dublin flourished.
Amateur dramatics was a major feature of social life in the war years. Michael Farrell, the novelist, in the Bell in February 1942, having spent fifteen months recording the theatre up and down the country “from Belfast to Kerry, from Wicklow to Sligo,” could report in a final summary of his findings:
The striking fact is that dramatic activity in the country is abundant and enthusiastic, and that it is not necessary to list among the difficulties of the Country Theatre a lack of talent. Possibly at no time has there been so much of it; or so much talk of drama and plans for drama. Clearly, the long lull which followed the palmy and piping days of Redmondite Ireland has given place to a period of greater vigour than ever.15
He noted how some towns had recently built new halls specially designed for dramatic purposes, instancing Tralee and Killarney in County Kerry, and that there were two little theatres, in Birr, County Offaly, and Dundalk, County Louth. Elsewhere dramatic performances were staged in town halls and cinemas. Farrell accounted for the revival in amateur dramatics throughout much of the country, which dates from the late 1930s and which flowered during “the Emergency,” in two ways. He suggested that the international reputation of the Abbey Theatre had generated new interest in things theatrical throughout the country and that it was that theatre which set standards and governed taste. Furthermore, the exigencies of wartime had made Ireland attractive to Irish and English professional touring companies which in earlier days would have cast their sights elsewhere:
Since the appetite comes in eating, their visits have stimulated the production of local plays. It must be made clear, however, that the revival itself had begun several years ago and that the increased number of visits from touring companies has only been an acceleration of a process not its cause.16
To these causes one would only wish to add the fact that local Catholic clergy were occasionally to the fore in the encouragement of amateur dramatics, certainly because they saw the social benefits to be derived from community effort, but also one suspects because they saw in local drama an alternative to the questionable offerings of Hollywood. Be that as it may, the years of “the Emergency” saw a healthy growth in an amateur dramatic movement, with its annual festivals (in Sligo and Dundalk, for example) that was to be so much a feature of social and cultural life in Ireland in the 1950s. In 1953 the Amateur Drama Council of Ireland was formed.
But even the most sympathetic of British observers of Irish neutrality during the war years could not but discern in Ireland’s political stance a withdrawal from the realities of contemporary history. Cyril Connolly, for example, writing in Horizon in 1942, concluded a sensitive and sympathetic appraisal of the Irish social, cultural, and political scene: “Ireland has chosen to pass her hand.”17 A more acute observer might have acknowledged that Ireland had refused to play the game of nations by the same rules as her neighbours. The period 1939–45, therefore, for most Irish men and women, was not experienced simply as a time when Ireland opted out of history but when her own history and the maintenance of her recently won independence were of primary concern. The cultural isolation of the preceding twenty years was perhaps deepened, but the healing effects on Civil War division in Irish society of a genuine external threat might be set against that in any overall evaluation. For many, the years of the war were simply a continuation of prewar experience, in economically straitened circumstances, with the language, national sovereignty, religion, and protection of Irish distinctiveness as the dominant topics of intellectual and cultural concern in a society still moulded by its essential conservatism, with talk, drink, sport, and other local activities absorbing energies spared from the rigours of daily life.
If, then, the experience of many Irish people during “the Emergency” was, despite the international situation, one of continuity with earlier years, there are nevertheless reasons for regarding the period 1939–45 as the beginning of a watershed in Irish life. The developments of those years which allow one to speak of something as striking as a watershed were not, one must stress, in any really direct sense the outcome of the war that was raging on the European mainland. Rather, they were related to changes that were occurring in Ireland itself that would have undoubtedly occurred in peacetime as in war, for they were grounded in the dynamics of the country’s post-independence history. In this sense, the period, rather than representing a stretch of time when Ireland behaved like a historical dropout, was in fact a period when the country’s own internal historical life was entering on a crucial phase.
In his essay “After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,”18 Clifford Geertz identified a tension between two impulses in newly independent nationalist states in the twentieth century. The one is an impulse to answer the question “Who are we?” by employing “symbolic forms drawn from local traditions.” Through these, the new state can “give value and significance to the activities of the state, and by extension to the civil life of its citizens.” Such an impulse Geertz labels “essentialism.” The other impulse to answer the question of national identity through discovering the “outlines of the history of our time and what one takes to be the overall direction and significance of that history,” Geertz names “epochalism.” New states, he argues, frequently exhibit a tension between the two impulses – “to move with the tide of the present and to hold to an inherited course.” Geertz’s categories and terms are highly illuminatory of the Irish experience since independence.
The first twenty years of Irish independence were obviously dominated by the first of these impulses. The Irish language, religion, and aspects of rural life that could be identified as embodying Gaelic tradition served as the essentialist symbolic forms, giving significance to the life of the state and its citizens. There had, however, been conscious efforts by the new state almost from its inception to define itself as well, in relation to the movements of contemporary history. Ireland joined the League of Nations in 1923 and was admitted to the League Council in 1930. After the change of government in 1932, de Valera, who was elected president of the council in the same year, continued the effort. He was scrupulous in his observance of his responsibilities to the League, refusing, despite great public pressure, to shift from a policy of nonalignment in the Spanish Civil War. He also supported sanctions against Italy following the assault on Abyssinia. Throughout its first twenty years, in fact, the Irish state played an important role in a contemporary historical movement which sought through an international forum to establish national rights and to protect the peace. In this, Ireland, particularly under de Valera’s direction, was to the fore in pressing the belief that small states must not become puppets of the larger powers. Ireland’s voice was heard in contributions to some of the vital issues of the period. Furthermore, some of those who in the 1930s had sought to introduce vocationalism had also, with less success, tried to adapt Ireland to international developments. The tension that Geertz identifies as characteristic of newly independent states was therefore evident in the Irish Free State from the earliest years of its foundation. Geertz helps us understand how such a tension is expressed in society. He writes:
The interplay of essentialism and epochalism is not…a kind of cultural dialectic, a logistic of abstract ideas, but a historical process as concrete as industrialization and as tangible as war. The issues are being fought out not simply at the doctrine and argument level – though there is a great deal of both – but much more importantly in the material transformations that the social structures of all the new states are undergoing. Ideological change is not an independent stream of thought running alongside social process and reflecting (or determining) it, it is a dimension of that process itself.19
It is not difficult, in the light of this, to explain why essentialist conceptions of Irish identity were to the fore in this process in the first two decades of Irish independence. As we saw earlier, the Irish Free State in those decades was a largely homogeneous, conservative, rural society, in which critics of the dominant ideological consensus could make little headway. Furthermore, the abstractions of international relations, while attractive to the juridical mind of a de Valera, could scarcely stir the popular imagination as could the intimacies of local language, religious belief, and tradition. Conservative ideology and the social fabric were bound up with one another, both expressive of the atavistic and widespread conviction that the essential Irish reality was the uniquely desirable, unchanging life of small farm and country town in the Irish-speaking west. There was neither competition from other equally compelling conceptions of the nation’s life, nor pressure for ideological innovation in the dynamics of social complexities or large-scale rapid change. For despite the degree to which much of rural Ireland had been penetrated by modernizing influences in the early decades of the century, and the ways in which change had been at work there since the Famine, much of the social life of the countryside as it had developed in the late nineteenth century remained apparently intact, as we saw, until well into the 1930s. It was only in the early 1940s that things in rural Ireland began to change more rapidly and noticeably.
From the period of “the Emergency” onward Ireland has undergone the experience of a widespread rejection of the conditions of rural life similar to that which has characterized most Western European countries since the end of the nineteenth century.20 Up to the late 1930s, most commentators are agreed, emigration reflected in its paradoxical way a commitment to rural life, or at the very least to the protection of the inherited plot. From that date onward the historian, with increasing frequency, comes on reports and surveys, on literary and dramatic portraits, which agree in their discovery of an almost universally demoralized rural scene, where emigration has begun to represent an outright rejection of rural life. In 1925, as Hugh Brody points out in his Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland, the Gaeltacht Commission in its studies found little evidence to suggest that the country people of the Irish-speaking districts were demoralized, in the sense that they rejected their world. Certainly the commissioners found much rural poverty and a highly ambivalent attitude to the Irish language that disturbed their revivalist sensibilities (most Gaelic-speaking parents seemed determined that their children would speak English); and there were areas, too, like the Aran Islands, where the collapsed market for mackerel had caused much depression and parts of the coast of Clare where some of the population in the war years had become used in a way that bespoke social deterioration to making a living off flotsam, jetsam, and oil from sunk ships.
But to read through the minutes of evidence presented to the commissioners is to be struck by how strong a hold the land had on the people and how much commitment, even where circumstances were desperate, there was to survival there. The evidence in these documents in fact confirms the authenticity of Peadar O’Donnell’s literary conclusion in his novel Islanders (1928), where the hero and heroine at the end of the book reject the possibilities of mainland life in the east of the country to remain on their island even though their life there will be one of privation and stringency. Indeed in his evidence one Patrick Gallagher, the manager of a rural cooperative in Donegal, close to where O’Donnell set his novel, told the commissioners that the people in the Rosses in County Donegal “looked upon the little holding at home as a place to come to for a few months in the winter, some place in which to build a nest, while they look to Scotland, the Lagan and America as the place in which to earn the money to keep the rest.”21 In 1948, when it was widely accepted that emigration had reached crisis proportions, a commission was appointed to prepare a report on the matter. Its conclusions (the report was published in 1956) reveal that the countryside now viewed emigration in a new way. Throughout the report it is implied that the conditions of rural life are now quite unacceptable to many country people. The report solemnly reminds its readers of the data with regard to sanitation in the 1946 census, which revealed that four out of every five farm dwellings had no special facilities, such as a flush lavatory, chemical closet, privy, or dry closet and that only one out of every twenty farm dwellings had an indoor lavatory. It noted that “through the cinema and the radio, and above all by direct experience either personal or through relatives, people in such conditions are, more than ever before, becoming aware of the contrast between their way of life and that in other countries, especially in urban centres.”22 The report remarked on the lack of social contacts and insufficient facilities for recreation and intellectual pursuits, detecting in fact “a psychological and economic malaise.”23 In summary the commissioners stated of the rural conditions they had studied:
We were impressed by the unanimity of the views presented to us in evidence on the relative loneliness, dullness and generally unattractive nature of life in many parts of rural Ireland at present, compared with the pattern of life in urban centres and with that in easily accessible places outside the country.24
The reasons why this change in rural consciousness occurred are not hard to find. The report itself sensed that modern communications had interfered with rural satisfaction. Furthermore, the availability of work in Britain’s war economy had given many Irish emigrants the opportunity to earn good wages quickly. Indeed, John Healy, remembering his boyhood in Charlestown, County Mayo in the 1930s, in his The Death of an Irish Town, suggests that this latter development was highly disruptive of the social fabric of County Mayo. For instead of the rural emigrant departing for a protracted exile from which he or she sent back remittances to sustain the homestead, or for the rigours of short-term, ill-paid employment, the towns were now visited by returned workers with spending money in their pockets. The rural emigrants’ returning to local towns thereby disturbed the balance of the social hierarchy in such towns with their assumed superiority to the small farmers who depended upon credit facilities, infecting them with the dissatisfaction that had already begun to take its toll of the countryside. Such is Healy’s remembrance of the period, and certainly from the 1940s onward Irish emigration was increasingly from the country towns as well as from the countryside. In 1940 a writer in the Leader caught the hint of this infection in the small town air when he published a short one-act drama entitled The Microbe – a Rural Tragedy. The microbe of the title is the affliction that visits the young in Bailebeag, a small country town, disturbing their contentment. “I refuse,” declares the daughter of a shopkeeper who has passed the examination for entry to the Civil Service, “to stagnate down here on a farm.”25
Perhaps films and magazine advertisements and the ready availability of jobs in Britain had merely put a superficially attractive gloss on economic necessity in this period. Perhaps, as has been argued, the quickening pace of emigration that dates from the years of “the Emergency” can be accounted for in terms of increasing mechanization and of a “steadily increased hegemony of commodity economy”26 which had been at work in Irish rural society since the Famine and in that sense was nothing new. But what cannot I think be doubted is that since the early 1940s larger numbers of people (particularly young women) than in earlier decades left rural and small-town Ireland because they believed a more attractive life awaited them elsewhere. The lure of the urban world, glimpsed in film and magazine, made emigration less awesome, gave a sense of possibility to what in the past would have been experienced only as the workings of an implacable fate.
In the next two decades emigration, principally to Britain, would account for a major decline in rural population. In the intercensal period 1936–46 an estimated net emigration of 187,000 was recorded. By the period 1951–56 this would rise to 197,000 (a larger figure in less than half the time) and for 1956–61 the figure would be 212,000. As Hugh Brody concludes, the country-dweller’s “determination to stay on the land seemed to have broken.”27 By 1965–68 when Damian Hannan came to study attitudes to emigration among young people in County Leitrim, almost all traces of the familialist values which had once played so crucial a role in rural life seemed to be absent. Hannan stated, on the basis of findings among respondents to a questionnaire to school-leavers, five-sixths of whom had considered emigrating: “results suggest that family obligations do not have the precedence in migration decisions that was expected” and “where respondents believed they could not fulfil their aspirations locally, increasing levels of family obligations made no difference to their migration decisions.”28
In 1942, at the beginning of this starkly new phase in Ireland’s social history, the poet Patrick Kavanagh published his harrowing poetic account of a particular rural life, The Great Hunger. The work is a record of the diminished experience of a small farmer, Patrick Maguire, in County Monaghan. Maguire’s life is claimed by the forces of Land, Mother, and Church (a variation on Corkery’s troika of forces which must be reflected in a truly national literature). In thrall to these forces, Maguire’s vital energies are withered in an all-encompassing negation. Kavanagh’s poem is an outraged cry of anger, an eloquently bleak riposte from the heart of the rural world to all those polemicists, writers, and demagogues who in de Valera’s Ireland sought to venerate the countryman’s life from the study or political platform. There is a harsh authenticity in this work, where sexual starvation is imaginatively associated with the great famines of the 1840s, which reveals the uncompromising directness of Kavanagh’s social criticism. Acutely conscious of the realities of Irish life, Kavanagh overwhelms the reader of this work with a sense of the desolation of a rural existence in Ireland. The same energetic directness of mind which dominates The Great Hunger was to characterize Kavanagh’s later social criticism, when he turned his impassioned intelligence on the Irish urban scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1942, however, he wrote of the world of his own childhood and young manhood in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan. The poem, which must rank as a major work by an Irish poet in the twentieth century, discovers in one small parish a deprivation and mute despair which in Ireland as a whole were to drive thousands of young men and women off the land to the industrial suburbs of Birmingham and to London. Indeed, if there is a case for viewing a major work of art as an antenna that sensitively detects the shifts of consciousness that determine a people’s future, The Great Hunger is that work. Maguire’s life and the dismal fate that befell countless Maguires in the hundred years following the Famine, were no longer acceptable.
Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:
The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field
Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun.
The tongue in his mouth is the roof of a yew.
Silence, silence. The story is done.
He stands in the doorway of his house
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.29
Many Irish men and women in the early years of this new phase in Irish social history contrived to ignore the bleak facts of rural disintegration that it represented. Many continued to write, speak, and sermonize on the features of Irish identity that only rural people authentically possessed. But for some the ideological challenge of the new social reality could not easily be set aside. Very quickly ideological and intellectual innovation began to be evident as aspects of the social process of change set in motion by new attitudes in the country.
For the Gaelic revivalist the crisis in Irish rural life of the 1940s from which the countryside did not begin to recover until the late 1960s and Ireland’s entry to the EEC in 1973 posed a challenge of a precise and unignorable kind. Indeed it was in the ranks of the revivalists that some of the first signs of ideological change based on a perception of social change can be detected. It had been the hope that had fired the Irish-language policy of the first two decades of independence that the rural Gaelic-speaking districts of the western seaboard would be consolidated, and their populations increased. Furthermore, Irish in the schools in English-speaking areas would gradually expand knowledge of the language so that the partly Gaelic-speaking areas would enlarge, thereby reversing overall the decline in knowledge of the language that had set in in the nineteenth century. In the 1940s it became clear to most people who thought about the matter that the policy was failing in its purposes, for neither had emigration from Irish and partly Irish-speaking districts been checked – indeed it was increasing alarmingly – nor had the language in the schools policy been as successful as had been hoped. The revival policy was not creating a situation where an eventual linguistic exchange might occur throughout the country. Rather, it was evident that the Irish language was nearing the point of extinction. The point began to be made in Dáil and Seanad speeches which criticized the policy frankly. The Leader newspaper was equally frank when in 1940 it opined, “people today lack faith in the possibility of language revival.” That newspaper astutely associated the crisis in the fortunes of the language with the “decay that has overtaken rural Ireland.” The editor sadly warned: “There is no use, therefore, in blinking the fact that the last reservoirs of living and vigorous Irish on whose continuance depends the success of what we are trying to do in the Gaeltacht are vanishing before our eyes.”30
There were signs of that loss of faith in the country that gave enthusiasts for the language great cause for concern. In 1940 University College, Dublin, the largest college in the National University of Ireland, appointed a new president. The Gaelic League protested about his knowledge of Irish. As if to add real injury to insult, the same college appointed a Mr. W. J. Williams to its chair of education in 1943. Again the Gaelic League felt obliged to protest. The college made clear, however, despite the Gaelic League’s vigorous objection, that even in so crucial an appointment as the most influential chair of education in the country, academic criteria counted for more than strictly national requirements. After a brief but very ill-tempered controversy Professor Williams was confirmed in his appointment.
In the National Schools too the early 1940s produced sure signs that things were changing. The teachers began to voice outright criticisms of the dependence on the schools for language revival. Educational values were being ignored in the drive for a revival conducted on purely nationalist lines. Certainly the Irish National Teachers’ Organization (the INTO) had, as we saw earlier, readily cooperated with the Department of Education in the early years of the drive to restore the national tongue. But by 1936 the organization’s executive responded to what its historian has described as
…a growing body of opinion even among staunch supporters of the revival movement, that the teaching of ordinary school subjects through the medium of Irish in the English-speaking areas and the all-Irish programme for infants in those areas, was not alone detrimental to the educational development of the children, but a hindrance to the progress of the language.31
In response, the executive encouraged the wide discussion of the issue at branch and county committee level. The result was a resolution, which we have already noted, at the annual Congress in 1936 which led eventually to the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Use of Irish as a Teaching Medium. This report appeared in 1941 (an Interim Report was issued in 1939). It was unfortunate that discussions of and reactions to its findings in the years following its publication were somewhat muddied by the fact that the INTO was in dispute with the Department of Education on other contentious matters, particularly the issue of salaries (a long, bitter dispute gave rise in 1946 to a protracted teachers’ strike). It was therefore improbable that the vital issue of the language could have been discussed in an atmosphere of reasoned calm. Nor was it. The Minister for Education, in conflict with the INTO almost as a way of life, was in no mood to be conciliatory on a matter about which he had strong personal feelings. He simply did not wish to hear from his National School teachers that the majority of those teaching infants were “opposed to using Irish as the sole medium of instruction when English is the home language,”32 nor was he concerned to learn that “the great bulk of evidence supports the view that a smooth and easy educative process imposing comparatively little strain on the child and making his life in school a happy one, is extremely difficult in a language other than his home language – even with the brighter pupils, and next to impossible with those of average or slow mentality.”33 Rather, in a Seanad speech in 1942 he cast serious doubts on the good faith of the INTO, and in the Dáil in 1943 he declared that Irish could not be saved “without waging a most intense war against English, and against human nature itself for the life of the language.”34 Human nature, however, was to prove characteristically recalcitrant. The INTO was not to be browbeaten by the minister, or by the Gaelic League, a branch of which had issued a pamphlet attacking the INTO in 1941. Its backbone stiffened by its experience of persistent conflict, the organization steadily proceeded with its plans and programmes, producing a booklet in March 1947 outlining a plan for education, which included in its remarks on Irish the opinion that “the general tendency is towards making Irish almost a dead language,”35 insisting that the department, so zealous for the language, was in fact contributing to its demise through an insistence on written Irish (each child was required to sit an examination in Irish at the end of his primary course) at the expense of oral proficiency.
The simple, if tragic, fact was that with the Irish rural world in decline, and the gaelicization policy in schools in English-speaking areas a very limited success, increasingly attacked by the teachers themselves, the future for the language was bleak indeed. Furthermore, the bitter conflicts of the 1940s in which some of the revivalists were made to appear as irrational dogmatists made it all the more easy for individuals and organizations to defend in public values other than the strictly national. Even in the period when the revival policy had been prosecuted with the greatest intensity in the 1930s, values other than linguistic nationalism had almost surreptitiously been expressed in educational practice. It is a most telling fact, revealed in the INTO’s report on language teaching in 1941, that in the teaching of religion “in the overwhelming majority of the schools the home language was used as the medium of instruction.”36 In other words, the religious faith of the people could not be jeopardized by any national imperative. In the period following the 1940s it became more possible to defend publicly liberal educational values as well as religious values – the respect for individual human development for example – in the face of the nationalist demand that education serve precisely defined national priorities. This change in the Irish intellectual climate was eventually in the 1960s and 1970s to allow for reassessments of educational practice.
If some revivalists thought such developments to be almost unbearable signs of national apostasy, not all supporters of language revival in the 1940s were content simply to berate their fellow-countrymen for a lack of zeal in what they considered the nation’s primary enterprise. Rather, there were those who, reading the signs, even detecting a hint of ambivalence in de Valera’s attitude to the educational policy, set themselves to the task of a renewal in the language movement itself. For twenty years language revival had in the main been left in the government’s apparently trustworthy hands. In the 1940s individuals once again began to sense that responsibility must rest with themselves. At the same time an opinion gained in currency that the association of the language with the depopulating districts on the west coast, indeed with rural Ireland, was unhelpful. Irish was increasingly being associated with rural impoverishment and deprivation, and with a semi-artificial folk culture that many Irish people found embarrassing if not ridiculous. In Dublin young men and women began to assert their right to espouse Gaelic revival in a modern urban manner, satirizing the professional rural Gaels who vulgarized a distinguished intellectual tradition in their employment of Gaelic as a tool of advancement in the state bureaucracies. So the 1940s saw the growth of urban-based language organizations concerned with publishing books, magazines, and a newspaper.
Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) who had shown in his English-language novel At Swim-Two-Birds (published in 1939) that the Irish mythological past could be explored in a satiric modernist mode, published under a different pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) in 1941. This comprehensively satirized the literary exploitation of the western island, in a hilarious send-up of the island reminiscence, particularly in its translated form. The life evoked in this work is so awful, so miserable, so squalid, the narrator’s endless naive complaint so wearisome in its blend of querulousness and bombast that his oft-repeated lament, “I do not think that my like will ever be there again!” is likely to be greeted with general relief. Later the author was to characterize his book as “an enormous jeer at the Gaelic morons with their bicycle-clips and handball medals, but in language and style…an ironical copy of a really fine autobiographical book.”37 What Myles na gCopaleen was satirizing therefore was not the original Irish versions of island literature. Rather it was their translation and the cultural and social assumptions that underlay the complacent regard in which such works were held by people who had neither a developed knowledge of the Irish language itself nor an understanding of the actualities of the Gaelic past they so sedulously venerated. For Brian O’Nolan (who wrote variously under the pseudonyms Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O’Brien, and others) was in no way antagonistic to the Irish language. It was its contemporary defenders he found unacceptable – the kind of “Gael” he found “the most nauseating phenomenon in Europe. I mean the baby-brained dawnburst brigade who are ignorant of everything, including the Irish language itself.”38 O’Nolan in fact believed that the continued existence of the Irish language in the country was essential for Ireland’s literary and cultural future, for he believed it “supplies that unknown quantity in us that enables us to transform the English language and this seems to hold of people who know little or no Irish, like Joyce.”39 O’Nolan was later to berate the poet Patrick Kavanagh for his indifference to the state of the language:
Any notion of reviving Irish as the universal language of the country is manifestly impossible and ridiculous but the continued awareness here of the Gaelic norm of word and thought is vital to the preservation of our peculiar and admired methods of handling English.40
Such a sophisticated understanding of the cultural significance of the Irish language was rare in the ranks of those who were concerned for its fortunes. In O’Nolan the language had a powerfully gifted apologist whose sensitive awareness of the future that was possible for Irish was singularly prescient. Irish would have to survive as a second language and as a vital cultural catalyst.
Other developments of the 1940s show that a new activism was stirring. A periodical Inniu (Today) was founded in 1943; a book club, An Club Leabhar, started five years later, made Irish-language literature available to a surprisingly large readership (a new book was guaranteed a sale of 3,000 copies). Journals such as Comhar (founded in 1942) and the Gaelic League’s Feasta (founded in 1948) offered publishing opportunities to a rising generation of poets and Irish-language short story writers. In 1943 Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaelige (National Gaelic Congress) was formed. This organization, when it became vitalized by a ginger group which had in 1935 formed an intervarsity body of students interested in Irish revival, became after 1946 one of the most inventive bodies in the language movement. It was responsible in 1953 for the establishment of Gael-Linn, which through its exploitation of modern media was one of the most successful and energetic proponents of revival in the postwar period.
The early 1940s therefore represented a watershed in the fortunes of the Irish language. The Irish-speaking districts of rural Ireland had entered a crisis which inevitably posed a threat to the language and to the ideology which had sustained the revival policy. The National Teachers began to express open dissatisfaction with their role in the revival attempt and on its effects on school life and achievement. Finally an awareness grew among concerned individuals and in the organizations they founded that the only hope for its future was to encourage interest in the language in the towns and cities. The myth of assimilation with the Irish language as the primary element in the receptive matrix of Irish reality could be sustained no longer with any credibility as emigration flowed unabated from the countryside, through the years of “the Emergency” and in the next fifteen years.
In the future the revival of Irish was to be seen as requiring individual effort and enthusiasm; it was to become primarily an urban-based, individualistic concern, espoused by educated, socially aware men and women who would propose a vision of Gaelic tradition and life as an alternative to the prevailing liberal capitalist values that would dominate the country as Ireland became a willing recruit to the consumer society. In a sense, indeed, the crisis that overtook the language movement in the 1940s as the impetus of the official revival policy began to wane (the revivalists were right to detect in Mr. de Valera a lack of immediate zeal) and as the Gaeltacht entered on a period of almost fatal decline was paradoxically beneficial to the cause of Irish. As I have suggested earlier, the Irish Free State had set itself an impossible task when it adopted a policy of language revival without relating such a venture to any radical social and economic programme. The inevitable outcome was the failure which began to be evident in the 1940s both in the depleted population of the Gaeltacht and in the lack of major linguistic progress in the rest of the country. A change of attitude was forced upon the revivalists which in fact encouraged them to adapt their ideology, aspirations, and activities to actual social conditions in Ireland in a way that they had scarcely done before. The following decades were therefore to see a proliferation of Irish-language organizations all effectively dedicated to keeping Irish before the public mind as an essential and undeniable presence in the cultural life of the country. In so doing, revivalists abandoned in practice, if not always in theory, the unrealizable dream of a linguistic exchange in a country where no revolutionary reordering of economics, society, and consciousness made that possible. Instead they effected what was possible – the protection of Irish as an element in Irish life even when the country as a whole became almost fully absorbed by the values and social forms of the consumer society. Had the crisis for the language, related to the crisis in the countryside, not been so marked in the 1940s and early 1950s a misguided dependence on the ineffective state revival policy might well have continued for much longer than it did, so affording the language no protection when Ireland entered on a period of rapid social and cultural change in the 1960s. As it was, the crisis of the 1940s had allowed the revivalists just enough time to prepare for the even more difficult times ahead. When these arrived at least the troops were in position.
The early 1940s were no less marked by the agitation that began to mount against the censorship policy as it had operated since 1929. Certainly there had been critical rumblings throughout the previous decade, but these had been uncoordinated and were easily set aside by the staunch defenders of the system. In 1940 Seán O’Faoláin, who had been at the heart of a brief controversy in 1936 when his novel Bird Alone had fallen under the Censorship Board’s interdict, founded the periodical the Bell. From almost the first issue O’Faoláin made it his business to mount a sustained, unremitting attack on the Censorship Board. What gave his criticism its extra cutting edge (and the procensorship lobby was incensed by the Bell’s campaign) was that O’Faoláin could not be dismissed as simply another Ascendancy freethinker writing to the Irish Times on behalf of free thought. He accepted the need for certain standards of literary expression in any society. What he doubted was whether the Censorship Board was to any degree in touch with Irish standards and taste as they actually were. Indeed he argued, with a spikily infuriating common sense, that the fact that so many Irish writers had met with the board’s disapproval displayed how remote its members were from an understanding of native taste and standards. These O’Faoláin sensed were “in the most debatable state of flux.”41 As if to provide its critics with just the ammunition they required, the board had recently banned Kate O’Brien’s novel The Land of Spices, and in 1942 it set its face against an account of the lives of two country people in County Cork, which had been written by Eric Cross, The Tailor and Ansty (1942). The first work is largely set in a convent, in a manner which a reviewer in the Irish Independent found to be “a picture of rare fidelity and charm, with the portrait of the Reverend Mother splendidly life-like in every line.” Unfortunately, he also found “one single sentence in the book so repulsive that the book should not be left where it would fall into the hands of very young people.”42 The Censorship Board agreed with him and, presumably on the basis of that one sentence, which refers to homosexual love, tried to ensure that the dangerous work would fall into nobody’s hands at all.
In response to the banning of The Tailor and Ansty a controversy began, which culminated in a full-scale debate on censorship, following a motion critical of the Censorship Board tabled by Senator Sir John Keane, in the Seanad in November and early December of 1942. It was a curious event indeed. Europe at war and the senate of the Irish state occupying itself for four full days of debate because an author had innocently recorded the Rabelaisian directness of speech characteristic of country life almost everywhere. The debate in the Seanad made much play both with Kate O’Brien’s and Eric Cross’s books and with the fact that the Censorship Board had recently banned a book on the “safe period” as a means to family planning written by an English Catholic gynaecologist and published by a Catholic publisher, Sheed and Ward of London. The debate was quickly transformed into a dramatic tussle of epic proportions between Sir John Keane, the motion’s proposer, and Senator Professor William Magennis, who had served on the Censorship Board since 1933 and as its chairman since February 1942. Sir John was the loser, for despite the fact that other members of the Seanad were critical of aspects of the 1929 act and of its operation, when the motion expressing criticism of the act was put, the house divided thirty-four votes against to two votes for. Professor Magennis, who spoke for four and a half hours in defence of the board and all its works, had carried the day.
The debate, however, had afforded the opportunity for substantial criticisms of censorship to be voiced in public at length and had revealed the attitude of mind – intolerant, paternalistic, and blustering – which apparently governed the board’s activities. Furthermore, the Senate debate stimulated opposition to the censorship policy of a more coordinated kind than had existed hitherto. A Council of Action was formed in November 1942, which worked busily in preparing a memorandum critical of current practice and making suggestions for improvements. By 1945 the government accepted that some changes were necessary and brought in a bill which allowed for the establishment of an Appeal Board (one of the ideas proposed by the Council of Action). The act became law in 1946. If the supporters of a rigorous censorship policy thought the new act would quiet criticism, they were to be disappointed. For the liberal reformers, having scented blood, were quite unprepared to rest from their efforts. In a Seanad debate on the 1945 bill Professor Magennis, stung into an unguarded taunt in the course of a heated exchange, had asked, “Is Ireland to be Irish or is it to be subjugated again by a foreign printing press by means of a spiritual defeat?”43 Since the new Censorship Board in the postwar period continued to ban almost wholesale the works of most serious modern Irish, English, American, and European authors (in 1954 the record for books banned in any one year was established at 1,034) it seemed clear that the new body, even with its appeal machinery, was involved in an effort to insulate the country from the rest of the world rather than in an attempt to protect readers from the grosser forms of pornography. From the 1940s onwards the Censorship Board was forced to conduct its business in the face of a persistent, well-directed criticism from a small group of liberals, writers, and polemicists, aided by the support of the Irish Times, that the entire policy was rooted in an effort to employ the act as a weapon of cultural protectionism.
The critics of the censorship policy in the 1940s were in fact, it can be argued, the vanguard of the intellectual and cultural changes that were to take place in Ireland over the next thirty years. For it became an aspect of their critique of censorship that not only was it a manifestly absurd policy but that Ireland, in crisis as the flight from the land accelerated, could not adapt to save itself if it did not open windows to influences from abroad. They reckoned that Ireland would have to abandon its obsessive absorption with its own past and its own diminished cultural forms and adapt to the world about it, openly accepting what energy and diversity it could find within itself, if it was to survive as a modern nation. Censorship was a dangerously inhibiting check on such necessary adaptation. Their attacks on censorship were therefore only a part of a larger ideological conflict in the country that in the 1940s was manifested most obviously on this issue, but which was to be expressed increasingly in various social and cultural debates in subsequent decades.
It was Seán O’Faoláin in his remarkable periodical the Bell (founded in 1940 and edited by O’Faoláin until 1946) who defined the nature of the conflict with the greatest precision.
O’Faoláin understood that the crisis in the countryside must involve major social and ideological changes in the country as a whole. He sensed a “new jostling spirit” in “the wholesale exodus from the countryside” and that “men are leaving home who were content enough to stay hitherto.”44 He argued that Ireland was “feeling the full force of the cold blast of social change.”45 He did not nevertheless simply bewail the collapse of rural Ireland that he believed was at hand, if it had not already begun:
Is this wholesale flight from the fields the sign of an embryonic, intelligent ambition among our country folk? It is, no doubt, for the moment mainly a physical dissatisfaction: no more. It is just as likely to be inspired by the meretricious appeal of the streets – glorified by the movies, which have now penetrated to the smallest villages – as inspired by healthy ambition. Yet the seed of ambition is there, too; and that seed is dynamite. The results will show themselves slowly enough, but the comparison with other countries suggests that they will ultimately, if not altogether in our time, alter the whole appearance and conditions of Irish society.46
O’Faoláin here senses that the processes at work in the Irish countryside will slowly but irresistibly draw Ireland into the modernized industrial world. The social changes and the intellectual and cultural adaptations required will be enormous. He reckoned that Ireland was ill-prepared to meet the challenges that these would involve.
We may not go the whole of that road, but in as far as we are on the road one may say that the old patriarchal, rural Ireland is slowly beginning to disintegrate. And it is disintegrating just at the moment when the classes who, as I have said, normally provide the intellect – the initiative, the direction, and the revolutionary ideas to meet revolutionary changes – can do nothing better than wail for the past, like John Ball, dig their heads in the sand and try by repression to hold back the tide. One comes thereby back again to the final conclusion that the really terrible threat to Ireland is an intellectual one. We are not really wide-awake at all, not keeping pace at all with the irresistible movement of life.47
O’Faoláin tried in his journal to help his readers keep pace with that movement in two ways: he sought through attacking censorship and the attitudes it represented and through frequent editorials in which he attended to international political and diplomatic developments to open Ireland’s windows to the world beyond its shores, the world in which its postwar future would lie; second, he sought to open his countrymen’s eyes to the actual conditions of their own country. In this latter enterprise he was governed by the historical awareness which had fired his study of Daniel O’Connell in King of the Beggars. Ireland was not a great restored nation, but a “country at the beginning of its creative history, and at the end of its revolutionary history.”48 He believed that the period since independence had seen a kind of putsch which had brought an intellectually and culturally impoverished middle class into power. This ruling elite had inured itself against an awareness of the dismal facts of Ireland’s social reality as a nation but newly formed in the nineteenth century and as yet lacking in many of the appurtenances of civilization, in dreams of the Gaelic past, the noble peasant, the seamless garment of Irish history and culture. With fine indifference to the fluttering in the dovecotes, O’Faoláin launched attack after attack on these romantic conceptions in the name of a pragmatic realism. The Gaelic revival had become mere jobbery, the enthusiasts for the language “vivisectionists” who had actually “done irreparable harm to the language.” The vision of the heroic virtue of the west was mere escapism.
If there once was an old association of the Peasant with Liberty it is all over. The romantic illusion, fostered by the Celtic Twilight, that the West of Ireland, with its red petticoats and bawneens, is for some reason more Irish than Guinness’ Brewery or Dwyers’ Sunbeam-Wolsey factory, has no longer any basis whatever.49
Ireland’s cultural grandeur, whatever the truth of former times, was now merely a myth that gave comfort to an insecure, uprooted middle class which had cashed in on the revolution and had instinctively resisted change ever since.
In opposition to romantic conceptions of Ireland, O’Faoláin employed his journal to open as many windows as possible, so that a full and varied picture of modern Ireland might be developed. He thought it unlikely that the new Ireland that had emerged since the democratic triumphs of O’Connell in the nineteenth century would show any very complex forms of life, since it was, he understood, as yet only at the beginning of its history, but what variety and complexity there was he was keen to discover. He believed that even the diminished social life of a real Ireland was of much greater interest to writer and citizens alike than the simplistic unrealities propounded in the ruling ideology and esteemed by the ruling elite.
In his journal O’Faoláin reasserted the doctrines that had been the staple of editorials in the Irish Statesman twenty years earlier. Ireland was not a cultural unity but a synthesis, even a mosaic, a hybrid society that had developed following the English conquest. Bluntly stated, the truth was not that Ireland had assimilated all the stranger brought but “the sum of our local story is that long before 1900 we had become part and parcel of the general world-process – with a distinct English pigmentation.”50 The implications of this truth were clear to O’Faoláin. Irish people should be “honest and realistic and admit that our object is not unilingualism, but that we should speak, according to our moods and needs, both Gaelic and English.”51 They should also admit and celebrate indeed the fact that “Irishmen writing in English have won distinctiveness for an Irish literature which stands apart from, and even challenges, the achievements of contemporary writers elsewhere.”52 In asserting that Anglo-Irish literature was an indigenous literature (note that he calls such writing “Irish”) O’Faoláin, as Russell had before him, was engaging in cultural warfare against a dominant ideology that he thought simplified Irish reality to the point of dangerous fantasy.
What made O’Faoláin’s reiteration of the Statesman’s doctrines more persuasive than they had been in the earlier periodical was the fact that the Bell was willing to present documentary evidence to justify its assertions. In Russell’s Statesman the debate as to the exact nature of Irish reality had often been conducted on a theoretical, even sometimes a mystical, level. The Bell set itself the task of a documentary, empirical exploration of Irish social life from which a portrait of national diversity would emerge. So writers from a variety of backgrounds were invited to present their viewpoints on the contemporary scene.53 These were presented in a symposium in the journal in September 1941 when the Gaelic, classical, Norman, Anglo-Irish, and English strands were represented by individual contributors. Contributions from the six counties of Northern Ireland were particularly welcomed as they gave a sense of that province’s distinctive industrial life. A series of articles dealt with the experience of differing Irish personalities, the film censor, the editor of the Irish Times, an entrepreneur, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin, a director of the Abbey Theatre. All kinds of hidden Irelands were briefly brought into the light – Elizabeth Bowen remembered her girlhood dancing classes in Dublin; a day in the life of a Dublin mechanic was evoked, as was the daily experience of a bank official, a jockey, a music teacher. Life cutting turf on the bog was investigated, as were the desperate conditions in Irish prisons and in the slums. Irish restaurants, galleries, architecture, furniture, whiskey, street ballads, journalism, crime were all explored in an effort to see Ireland steadily and whole, stripped of the romantic cloaks of misconception. The picture that does emerge is of an Ireland of some social if not cultural diversity (it is noticeable that O’Faoláin sought diversity in professions and trades) which could not easily be contained within the dominant ideological framework. It was an Ireland where creative effort was restricted by poverty (a depressing series was devoted to “Other People’s Incomes”) and a lack of an inspiring communal vision. But there were signs of individual life. Not the least of these was the fact that the periodical attracted a generation of young Irish writers and critics to its pages. A section of what was to become Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was published in the Bell. Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing as Donat O’Donnell, began his career as a literary critic in its columns, as did Vivian Mercier. From the North came poems from John Hewitt and W. R. Rodgers.
It is difficult to assess that precisely was the Bell’s impact on Irish society. The periodical was published each month in an edition of 3,000 copies. Probably about 1,000 of these went overseas. O’Faoláin himself, noting that “in Ireland there is only this one secular magazine,”54 reckoned that each edition was seen by about 30,000 people. Certainly this was a small enough number, but Vivian Mercier, writing in the Bell itself, was at pains to point out that it managed to keep its audience, and this fact rather contradicted the rarely uninterrupted pessimism of its editorials. Mercier sensed too that the periodical’s main readership was the small-town intellectual, hungry for mental stimulus, and undoubtedly it was with such that it must have had its greatest influence. Dermot Foley remembered55 how in Ennis, County Clare, he awaited each edition with excitement, discovering to his surprise that there were other readers in the town and that an O’Faoláin editorial, on the Gaelic revival for instance, could rouse considerable controversy and debate. Furthermore, the Bell’s sympathetically critical interest in the amateur theatre movement brought it to the attention of many people who, keen only to find their own activities reported on, might not otherwise have seen the periodical at all.
It is, of course, even more difficult to assess how the Bell affected the intellectual and cultural life of the country. What one can do, however, is determine what were its distinctive contributions to that life. Among these were, first, the simple fact that hitherto unsayable things got said. Irish follies which in many instances derived from the excesses of ideology, were ridiculed in the Mise Eire (I am Ireland) column in ways which, together with Brian O’Nolan’s humorous column “Cruiskeen Lawn” in the Irish Times in the same period, brought back a real bite to published Irish satire that even Dublin Opinion had not managed in the earlier years of independence. Second, and more important, the sociological investigative thrust of the periodical’s concerns brought a muchneeded revival of humanism and rationality to the discussions of Irish identity that had preoccupied intellectual life since the foundation of the state. This point needs some brief elaboration.
A principal effect of the efforts to define Irish identity in terms of local attributes, such as religion, language, and culture, in the first two decades of independence had tended to present the Irish manifestations of those things as in some way isolated and distinct from their expressions elsewhere, particularly in Britain and on the continent of Europe. Furthermore, the absence from Irish cultural life of much sustained critical reflection on the actualities of daily experience in literature (such works as attempted this were more often than not banned), documentary film, art, and drama had left most Irish people dependent throughout the period on journalism for social self-examination. Regrettably, almost all Irish journalism in the period had contented itself with the reportage of events and the propagandist reiteration of the familiar terms of Irish political and cultural debate until these categories became mere counters and slogans often remote from any actualities. Irish journalism therefore comfortably reinforced the prevailing sense that Ireland, marked, as the nationalists constantly stressed, by distinctive religious, social, and linguistic forms, was somehow different from the rest of the world. It did not challenge Irishmen and women to reflect seriously on their own reality. It allowed, by contrast, an absorption with abstractions such as Sovereignty, the Faith, Republicanism, the Language. Had it so challenged, that sense of Irish uniqueness so necessary to the unthinking acceptance of the dominant nationalist ideology would have been disturbed. For an empirical examination of Irish social life would have revealed as well as things unique to the country the degree to which Irish life was influenced by the world around it.
O’Faoláin and his contributors, through attending in an empirical, investigative manner to Irish realities, opened windows in the Bell to show how much Irish life was not some absolute state of national being but an expression of humanity’s life in a particular place, bound up with European history, geography, economics, and social forces of all kinds. The Bell was therefore a vital organ of empirical, humanistic self-consciousness at a moment when the new state was entering on a period of profound challenge. As such, it probably helped to make more generally available ideals of rational reflection and social analysis without which the country could not have responded to the postwar crisis as capably as it did. For prior to the period of the Bell only in certain sections of the state’s civil service56 had principles of scientific investigation and level-headed statistical assessment commanded much respect. Perhaps the Bell helped to prepare the ground in the wider community for a period when social analysis was to become a crucial partner in a process of modernization with economic development. Be that as it may, an American critic has supplied a just assessment of the Bell’s remarkable contribution in the 1940s. O’Faoláin had in his articles and editorials produced
…the fullest analytic description of contemporary Ireland, and of its strengths, faults and derivations ever given. More than anything else these writings, close in manner and approach to the best eighteenth century pamphleteering justify his title as first Irish man of letters.57
There were further signs during the war years that ideas and influences that were to become commonplace in the postwar period were already at work. Three examples must suffice. In 1942 Professor Patrick Abercrombie, professor of town planning in the University of London, published the Dublin Town Plan. Town planning as a concept had been introduced to Ireland earlier in the century when Lord and Lady Aberdeen in 1911 invited Patrick Geddes to present a Town Planning Exhibition in Dublin. In 1922 Professor Abercrombie’s plan entitled “Dublin of the Future” had been published, but since that date, despite the reconstruction following the Civil War and the creation of new areas of housing in suburbs to the north of the river Liffey, little systematic thought had been given to urban development in the country’s capital. Certainly none of Abercrombie’s major proposals (a new cathedral, a national theatre, a Bourse) had been implemented. In the new Abercrombie proposals concepts such as the “greenbelt,” “ribbon building,” “satellite towns,” and “urban sprawl” were offered to the city administration as categories suitable for understanding their own experience and for guiding future policy. Abercrombie even advised Dubliners to ponder the garden city: “A town should be an urban pattern set on a background of green.” The appearance of such a document was a sign that Irish administrators realized that much of the Irish future would be urban and that the towns and cities would be forced to renewal and redevelopment (Cork and Limerick cities both retained planning advisers from the late 1930s onward). And contemporary social facts suggested that new thinking on Irish urban life was timely indeed. In 1938 a survey of the tenements of Dublin found 60 percent (6,554 out of 11,039) of tenements and cottages unfit for human habitation. In these 64,940 persons were forced by economic circumstance to make their homes. For those families who had been rehoused in the building programmes of the 1930s, problems remained. As a commentator noted in 1945:
The new settlements in Crumlin and Drimnagh are without any of the essential social amenities. There are no parks, no playing fields, no town halls. No schools were provided at first…There are no factories, no technical schools, no secondary schools, no football grounds…A fine police barracks has been provided to control the unruly crowds of workless adolescents.58
In the future administrators could not say that they had not been warned nor that they had no idea that a better way might exist.
In the visual arts the early 1940s represented a crucial turning point. The self-conscious nativism of the early years of independence had diminished and Irish art was at its most representative in the staid academicism of the annual Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition. But throughout the 1930s, despite the unsympathetic climate, a number of painters had resolutely persisted in taking account of modern European art. In the 1940s it became clear that their influence as artists and teachers had had effect. In 1943 it was possible to found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Among its founders were Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone (the stained glass artist and member of a renowned artistic family), Louis le Brocquy, and Norah McGuinness. Within a few years, energetically guided by Norah McGuinness, the event became “the arbiter of artists with an interest in international developments and new ideas.”59 These exhibitions brought to the attention of an Irish public the fact that there were Irish painters whose work reflected the artistic concerns of the Continent. Following the inauguration of the Living Art Exhibition it was no longer possible to pretend that Irish art and Modernism were entirely antithetical. The exhibition of the work of Irish artists together with that by English and European painters, revealed how Irish art had in fact responded to the Modern movement, for all the antagonism of the local critical climate. In addition, exhibitions were mounted in Dublin in the early 1940s of Modernist art that explicitly announced the validity of Modernism. Herbert Read, who had brought surrealism to London in 1936, defended in the Bell a Subjective Art Exhibition held in Dublin in January 1944, where the paintings exhibited caused a deal of controversy. In August 1944 a Loan Exhibition of Modern Continental Painting opened to a contemptuous review by the poet Patrick Kavanagh in the Irish Times. “It would have been better,” a writer in the Bell opined without apology in the heated debate on the value of Modernism that immediately arose, to have nailed “him down rigidly to his absurdities on the subject of modern painting.”60 The same writer also sensed “there is now in Ireland a public of connoisseurs in embryo.”61 In the future that embryo would grow as modern Irish painting and sculpture entered on a period of vital diversity and experiment.
A regular audience for symphonic music also began to establish itself in Dublin during “the Emergency.” Since independence musical life in Dublin had languished. In the 1920s only the energy of Colonel Fritz Brase, a German conductor who at the government’s request established the Free State Army Bands, and with an enthusiasm beyond the call of duty, brought life to the Dublin Philharmonic Society, for a few years giving Dubliners a chance to hear orchestral music, saved the city from complete mediocrity in musical matters. The 1930s had been almost without musical interest.62 Much had been made in newspaper and periodical of the distinctive tradition of Irish folk music and a wearisome debate had been conducted (akin to that which so characterized literary discussion in the decade) on the question of whether Irish music would develop through the country’s exposure to the art music of Europe or solely through the absorption of the native folk idiom.63 While efforts were made in the schools to stimulate the latter process and Irish traditional music began to be afforded a new and welcome respect, the opportunity for Irish people to acquaint themselves with the idioms of contemporary art music simply did not exist. It was scarcely possible, indeed, for the interested Irish person to hear the familiar favourites of the classical repertoire. So, as in much of intellectual life in the 1930s, the debate about music was conducted in a curiously scholastic context without much of the thing itself to give substance to the arguments. It was radio that gave what substance there was. From its inception in 1926 the Irish radio station had realized that classical music as well as folk music on record and in performance could play an important part in programming. A station orchestra from humble beginnings (four musicians in 1926) grew to number twenty-four members in 1936, twenty-eight in 1937, and forty in 1942.64 In 1938 and 1939 the Radio Eireann orchestra had given a series of public concerts in Dublin with guest conductors and soloists; they had not achieved any great popularity. In 1939 Mr. Paddy Little was appointed Minister for Posts and Telegraphs (it was his ministry that was responsible for broadcasting), and because of his own enthusiasm for music he was prepared in 1941, despite the lack of real success two years earlier, to sanction a new series of public concerts by the station orchestra. The season was to be one of eleven concerts at fortnightly intervals before and after Christmas. The orchestra this time played to capacity audiences. Indeed the Mansion House (with seating for around 800) proved too small to meet public demand, and in 1943 the concerts (which were an annual event until 1947) were transferred to the Capitol Theatre (with seating for about 1,800). Joseph O’Neill has suggested that Dublin’s cinema-minded audiences had become aware through Hollywood films of the existence of the world’s great orchestras and that by the early 1940s “symphonic music had lost its terrors.”65 Be that as it may, it was these concerts that for the first time in independent Ireland created a regular audience for orchestral music and introduced in public performance the idioms of recent symphonic work by Sibelius and the experiments of Debussy, de Falla, and Stravinsky.
So Ireland, as the countryside began that depopulation which was to provoke radical reassessments of official economic policy in the late 1950s, was disturbed by acrimonious controversies over language revival, education, and censorship as new conditions began to transform the social basis on which these had rested. The watershed in Irish social life was accompanied by novelties in the intellectual and cultural life of the country – the magisterial denunciation of rural life in the work of Patrick Kavanagh, the re-emergence of associations dedicated to the protection of the Irish language, the humanism and practical internationalism of the Bell, the bitterly satiric voices raised against myopic ideological dogma, the hints that Irish life was opening once again, despite the apparent hermeticism of the war years, to ideas and influences from abroad that would bear on its future life as a largely urbanized society concerned to define itself not predominantly in terms of its local past but in relation as well to the economic, social, and political developments of contemporary European history.