“We emerge,” wrote Seán O’Faoláin in the Bell in July 1945, “a little dulled, bewildered, deflated. There is a great leeway to make up, many lessons to be learned, problems to be solved which, in those six years of silence, we did not even allow ourselves to state.”1 Independent Ireland had survived politically, but the years of the war had seen the stirrings of changes that in the following thirty years were to alter the shape of Irish society in significant ways. Predominant among these was the widespread rejection of rural life that in the immediate postwar period quickened into what almost amounted to an Irish exodus. So the Commission on Emigration reported in 1956 that a situation had arisen in which the province of Leinster was almost as populous as Munster and Connacht combined and noted that nine counties, most of them essentially rural counties of the northwest and along the western seaboard, accounted for three-quarters of the aggregate decline in the twenty counties in the state in which population reduction had occurred between 1946 and 1951. The result of this postwar emigration was to shift the balance of population somewhat between the towns and the countryside. In 1951 41.44 percent of the population lived in cities and towns, with over one-fifth of the population of the twenty-six counties living in Dublin and its immediate neighbour, Dun Laoghaire. This change in the Irish social profile was due less to the growth of the towns and cities than to rural depopulation. There was nonetheless some internal migration, almost entirely to Dublin. In 1951 about one-third of the population of County Dublin had been born outside the county. The population of Dublin, which in 1936 had been 472,935, by 1951 had risen to 575,988, and by 1961 it would rise to 595,288. Dun Laoghaire, a town immediately adjacent to Dublin, in 1936 boasted a population of 39,785; by 1951 that figure had risen to 58,485, and by 1961 68,101 persons were recorded as residing in that area. So the process had begun which by the 1970s was to make Dublin and its environs the most populous part of the country with a population of over a million.
The problems faced by the Irish state in the postwar period were at root economic. The crisis in the countryside which was inexorably altering the balance of Irish society posed a challenge to the Irish state of a fundamental kind. Would an increasingly urban society be able to sustain itself as an economic unit in the modern world, and could any new policy check the flow of emigration from the countryside?
Initially the postwar period had been marked by economic growth, which resulted both from increased consumer spending at home as the austerities of the war years declined and from a rise in exports to Britain. The state involved itself in the building of schools, houses, roads, airports, and harbours.2 But the 1950s were troubled by crises in the balance of payments, in 1951 and 1955, owing to fluctuations in the conditions of external trade which, together with the continuing exodus of emigration, were widely felt to reflect an Irish stagnation that was increasingly unacceptable. In 1957 there were 78,000 unemployed in a year when emigration was responsible for a net loss of population of 54,000. The 1950s, therefore, saw a good deal of Irish heart-searching and concern about the future. A common note in the literature of the period was a sense of the country lying in the stagnant sidestreams of history. Patrick Kavanagh in his periodical Kavanagh’s Weekly (which he edited with his brother in 1952 for several iconoclastic months) denounced the tired mediocrity that Ireland exhibited at every hand: “From…Independence Day there has been a decline in vitality.”3 “There is no central passion,”4 he declared, in a society where “all this is horrid when you believe in People as distinct from the Nation, when you believe that Pat and Micky and Tom on the edge of the bog have potential as great or as little as a group of people everywhere.”5 The young Ulster poet John Montague in his sequence poem of 1953, “The Sheltered Edge,” portrayed Ireland enduring a protracted post-revolutionary fatigue, creative nerve quite atrophied. His images embody what was in fact a fairly widespread sense of cultural and social despair.
Standing at the window, I watch the wild green leaves
Lurch back against the wall, all the branches of the appletree
Stretch tight before the wind, the rain lash
The evening long against the stubborn buildings
Raised by man, the blackened rubbish dumps,
The half-built flats, the oozing grey cement
Of hasty walls, the white-faced children
Deprived of sun, scurrying with sharp laughter
From point to point of shelter,
And arched over all, the indifferent deadening rain.6
In evoking such enervation, individual and social, and in detecting in 1951 an “almost palpable air of distrust and ineffectuality,”7 Montague anticipated what the secretary of the Department of Finance was to assert seven years later in a report of 1958:
After thirty-five years of native government people are asking whether we can achieve an acceptable degree of economic progress. The common talk among parents in the towns, as well as in rural Ireland, is of their children having to emigrate as soon as their education is completed in order to secure a reasonable standard of living.8
The author of that report, which was to prove a powerful stimulus to new thinking on Ireland’s economic future in a way which was to prove highly regenerative, was a T. K. Whitaker. He had been forced by the dismal circumstances of the 1950s to a radical reconsideration of his economic philosophy, which to that date had been highly antagonistic to large-scale state involvement in the planning and financing of economic development. Whitaker once told the Irish journalist Tim Pat Coogan that his new outlook had been provoked by a cartoon on the cover of the humorous magazine Dublin Opinion. The cartoon, encapsulating the public mood, showed Ireland “as a downhearted Kathleen ni Houlihan asking a fortune-teller, ‘Have I a future?’ ”9 Whitaker (a civil servant in the Department of Finance) set himself to the task of providing that future.
The change of direction in the economic affairs of the state, which dates from the presentation of this report and the accession of Seán Lemass to the position of Taoiseach upon the retirement of de Valera from parliamentary politics (he was elevated to the presidency in 1959), was to have a profound effect on Irish society in the next decades. An Ireland that had espoused nationalism for a quarter of a century and employed manifold tariffs in the interests of native industry was to open its economy to as much foreign investment as could be attracted by governmental inducement. Furthermore, an Ireland that had sought to define its identity since independence principally in terms of social patterns rooted in the country’s past was to seek to adapt itself to the prevailing capitalist values of the developed world. Within three years of this economic volte face Ireland had made a first application for membership of the EEC. In 1965 an Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement was arrived at with Great Britain and duly entered upon. Each signalled Ireland’s willingness to participate fully in the postwar European economy. Economic growth was to become the new national imperative, in place of the language and the protection of native values and traditions. The 1960s and 1970s were therefore to be decades of rapid social and economic change, which stimulated much debate and controversy in the country. Indeed, those two decades of Irish intellectual and cultural life were notable, as we shall see, for reassessments and revisionism, for artistic and literary efforts to adapt to change, and for an increased public involvement in an informed Irish self-awareness.
The features of modern Irish social and cultural history that allowed Ireland to make this major ideological shift without undue strain merit some study. Primary among them was the long-term effect of the neutrality policy of 1939–45. Prior to that period the twenty-six-county state had sought to justify its separatist ambitions by highlighting aspects of Irish social and cultural life which could be identified as traditional and uniquely pertaining to the national being. It had done this almost in defiance of the facts that Ireland was a society which had largely become modernized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that it had become highly anglicized, open as it was to English mass communications. The period of neutrality between 1939 and 1945 came precisely and most fortuitously at the moment when even those regions that had most profoundly seemed to embody the ancient Gaelic civilization that justified separatist ambition were entering on a crisis. From about 1940 onward, as we have seen, thousands of young men and women voted with their feet against the conviction that they were uniquely favoured in their western fastness, immune from a modern world closely identified with anglicization and England itself. The effects of this crisis on national amour propre were severe. As Liam de Paor cogently stated it:
The failure marked by this emigration was a profound one; for the very people who flocked from the country in such numbers were the sons and daughters of those who had fought a revolutionary war (although not to the finish) in the early part of the century, and on whose behalf the revolutionary war had been fought. Their going made nonsense of the official ideology of the twenty-six-county State, of what was taught in the schools and preached from pulpits and platforms.10
We have discussed earlier too how such material transformations of the Irish social structure were accompanied by signs of change in the intellectual and cultural life of the country; the Bell was highlighted as a striking example of these. It is unlikely, however, that merely intellectual changes would have enabled Ireland to make the ideological adaptations that in face of the generally perceived crisis of the 1950s did take place with so little disturbance. The emotional experience of neutrality was probably the crucial element in the process. Neutrality and the experience of the war years had mobilized Irish public opinion for the first time to consider the twenty-six-county state as the primary unit of national loyalty. The twenty-six counties had become an entity in a new way in those years, one that its citizens had been prepared to defend in arms.11 The period 1939–45 had given Irish men and women to understand that it was possible for the twenty-six counties of Ireland to be a nation-state without the distinguishing marks of language and a hermetically sealed national culture. In such knowledge was the ground prepared for a determined impulse to adapt to developments in the contemporary world to take root and flourish. Before the period of “the Emergency” such large-scale adaptations as were to follow would perhaps have been almost impossible because they would have generally been thought to involve a dilution or contamination of the national being so necessary to the ideal of a separate political existence. After the war such fears were substantially reduced. The state was real and had proved its reality in the most tangible way. Citizens had been prepared to bear arms on its behalf.
Other factors expedited the transition. Among these were the existence of a disciplined and competent civil service that had since 1922 maintained standards of public probity unusual in newly independent states; the existence of carefully controlled financial institutions; and experience in the semi-state bodies of the central involvement of the state in activities of an entrepreneurial kind. All these factors, together with the fact that the state since 1922 had achieved political stability, created a context in which modernization was possible. Perhaps too just as important were the realities of the social climate. Since independence despite all the efforts of the Irish Irelanders, Gaelic revivalists, and apostles of a distinctive Irish way of life, the twenty-six counties had remained in many aspects a social province of the United Kingdom. This was as true in the 1950s as it had been in the 1920s. English newspapers and books which had not met with the censors’ disapproval circulated freely; the BBC was audible throughout much of the country. Domestic architecture, home furnishings, styles of dress were all influenced by English tastes. Success in England, whether on the boards of a West End theatre or on the pitches of the English First Division, was almost unconsciously esteemed above success in Dublin. Ireland as a social province of the United Kingdom had had ample opportunity to absorb the values of the capitalist mixed economy on the neighbouring island. Furthermore, since the 1930s most Irish emigration had been in quest of the employment that the British economy offered to unskilled labourers, to men prepared to work on the roads and on building sites. Modern transportation was inevitably bringing the two countries closer together. That Ireland in the late 1950s was prepared to adapt its own economy to the prevailing economic values of the world in which it found itself surprises little when one considers how this modern Irish diaspora had demonstrated that the Irish economy and the British were intertwined, whatever the distress such a recognition forced upon the economic nationalist.
It must also be recognized that the full-scale emigration of the 1950s, while posing a severe ideological challenge to the independent Irish state, actually reduced the dimensions of the practical problems it faced. Had the crisis of the countryside been followed by massive internal emigration to Irish cities the state would have been confronted by possibly insoluble problems. As it was, the drain of population from the Irish countryside and from the small towns of the rural districts to the suburbs of British cities and the Irish districts of London meant that internal emigration was of manageable proportions. The process of urbanization that Ireland’s decision to adapt to the prevailing economic climate in Western Europe inevitably involved was therefore initiated without internal social tensions of a kind which might have overwhelmed the state.
The quality of social life in Dublin in the 1950s and early 1960s is highly germane in this regard. As we noted, in 1951 almost one-third of the population of the city had been born outside the city’s county bounds. By the beginning of the next decade the city had swollen appreciably, much of the population rise attributable to the influx of country people, particularly young women. Most of those who came to the city were able to find employment (had the numbers been greater, as they might have been, the presence of large numbers of the unemployed young would have placed intolerable strains on the city). They were therefore able to find work in a city which was fairly close to home. The trains and buses at weekends were packed, throughout the 1950s, with new urban dwellers returning to maintain contacts with their roots in the countryside. The pains of urbanization then were less acute in Ireland than in most other European countries, where simple distance made such relatively comfortable migrations impossible. The process of change was thereby rendered the more acceptable in Ireland, the alienation and loneliness that characterizes life in most modern cities effectively reduced. One could always escape for a weekend at home.
Those migrants to the city who chose to marry and raise families in Dublin felt the pressures of urban life most keenly. The novelist Edna O’Brien could bring her country girls to Dublin (in The Country Girls, 1960, and The Lonely Girl, 1962) and allow them a brief idyll of youthful discovery followed by disillusionment before sending them on to the more exotic attractions of London, but the young woman or man from a rural background who sought to establish a family in the city was confronted there by adjustment to the novel ways of modern urban family life. For by the 1950s, despite the slow rate of economic growth in the country as a whole, Dublin had been transformed from the elegant, colourful, and decaying colonial centre of English rule in Ireland into a modern if rather dull administrative and commercial capital. Where pre-Treaty Dublin, the Dublin of Joyce in Dubliners and Ulysses, was severely inhibited by a stultifying lack of economic and social opportunity for most of its citizens, the new Dublin, while scarcely the scene of major redevelopment or an economic boom, had become socially and economically more complex, less marked by its earlier preponderance of the labouring poor. As A. J. Humphreys noted in his study New Dubliners: Urbanization and the Irish Family (1966), even by 1946 the signs were evident that the new Dublin, with its decline of the class of general labourers and the growth of skilled workers and especially of the white-collars, had become “a modern, industrialized community.”12 In 1946, Humphreys records, the new Dublin enabled 21.1 percent of its population to engage in work in the worlds of commerce and finance, 12 percent in administration and defence, 8.9 percent in the professions, and 13.7 percent in personal services, while 32.2 percent were occupied by non-agricultural production.13 The figures suggest the occupational diversity of the modern city.
Adaptation to this world, often in the new estates of semi-detached and terraced dwellings that had been constructed to meet the demand for housing in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in areas of the city such as Crumlin, Whitehall, Cabra, Inchicore, Raheny, and Artane, meant adaptation to the world of the nuclear family. The Irish immigrants from the countryside or small town, with their firmly established distinctive mode of family life and social organization, encountered in Dublin precisely the same pressures as urban dwellers elsewhere, and, as Humphreys discovered, they reacted in the same ways. A radical disjunction, familiar from contemporary sociological analysis, between the male world of work and the female world of homemaking and child care, produced in the new Dubliners just the same role changes as had occurred elsewhere. As Humphreys summarizes it (his research was done between 1949 and 1951):
…the traditional balance between the sexes characteristic of the rural family is upset in the city. The greater share of direct domestic responsibility and labour falls upon the wife rather than the husband, and generally upon the women rather than the men. At the same time, a marked decline takes place in parental power and in the power of the aged in general.14
What surprisingly did not occur in Dublin was that swift secularization which has frequently been identified with the growth of urban life elsewhere. Humphreys in his studies discovered that ideologically no essential changes in an individual’s world-view took place in the move to the city. Contact with new ideas, he reported, “as well as engagement in a rationally organized economy, has not brought about any profound transformation in the ideology of New Dubliners which remains substantially the same as the countryman’s.”15 This meant that while an urban dweller from almost any part of the industrial world would have recognized much as familiar in the Dublin that had developed since independence (once he or she had recovered from surprise at the vast numbers of cyclists who thronged the streets in the 1950s), he or she would have been struck nevertheless by the degree to which Catholic belief and practice still dominated daily life. The sense of the crucial role of the family in society survived the transition from country to city, even as the new urban ways transformed that family life in striking ways. Perhaps, indeed, the very fact that the family was undergoing transformation in the new economic and social circumstances of the city heightened the individual’s commitment to those familialist values to which the church encouraged loyalty. So the New Dubliners were encouraged to ignore how much their new situation challenged the very basis of those values which had found their more appropriate setting in the countryside from which they had come. This ideological continuity with the rural past in modern Dublin undoubtedly made the process of urbanization less painful than it might have been, accounting as it does for the fact that in the Dublin of the 1950s and 1960s cross-culturally, the urban family and familial kinship and neighborhood groupings were “undoubtedly among the very strongest in solidarity and power to be found in urban communities in Western societies.”16
The church had swiftly grasped the fact that in the postwar period it would be forced to respond to Irish urbanization. From the late 1940s onwards it set in motion a major church-building programme in Dublin city, under the direction of its strong-minded, socially aware archbishop, John Charles McQuaid. From the late 1950s date many of the vast churches in the new suburbs of the city that in their confident grandeur and echoes of Byzantine style dominate their neighbourhoods in a way which to many Dubliners seemed peculiarly apt in a diocese ruled by their esteemed and redoubtable archbishop. Often, indeed, the move to the city brought the country man and woman closer to the actual bricks and mortar of the church than they had been in the countryside. Between 1940 and 1965 thirty-four churches were built in Dublin and twenty-six new parishes were formed.17
The 1950s were remarkable for urban churchgoing. Churches in suburb and city centre often allowed for the celebration of six masses on a Sunday to accommodate the vast numbers who flocked to fulfil their religious obligations, and daily masses were required to meet the demands of the faithful. As in the post-Famine period, the church had met the challenge of the Irish rural world with major building programmes, so in the 1950s in similar fashion she prepared herself in Dublin for the demands of Irish urban growth.
The state was somewhat less assured in its adaptive efforts in the 1950s. Until the final two years of the decade, when T. K. Whitaker and Seán Lemass decisively set Ireland on a new course, the postwar period was one of hesitancy and uncertainty. In political terms this uncertainty was reflected in a new electoral volatility in the country. Following a period of twenty-five years in which there had been only one governmental change, there were four changes of government between 1948 and 1957 (Fianna Fáil surrendered power to coalition governments for two periods, 1948–51 and 1954–57). Ideologically the fires of economic nationalism and the quest for cultural self-sufficiency were waning, but as yet they had not been replaced by a coherent set of new values. The handling of social policy in the postwar period serves as a crucial indicator of the state’s lack of ideological assurance. In 1947, responding to postwar impatience at deficient social services, it might seek to reform the health services in a manner that brought the state itself more noticeably to the fore in the provision of welfare. In so doing, Ireland might have appeared to be modelling itself on contemporary Britain, resolutely preparing to challenge the church’s teachings on the dangers of state power and on the social dimension of the national life, which was reiterated so forcefully in the years following the war and in the early 1950s. But the events of 1951, when a controversial scheme was proposed by the Minister for Health (Noel Browne) in the coalition government (the coalition comprised all the parties in the Dáil other than Fianna Fáil) that had wrested power from de Valera’s party in 1948, show that such an ideological conflict, even if embarked upon vigorously, would scarcely be fought to the finish. The church, determined to maintain its role and influence, was adamant that its teaching on social matters should not be set aside nor should an individual’s right to act, his conscience properly informed by the church, be abrogated by any state bureaucracy in a welfare state. Browne’s scheme18 was an attempt to provide a free health scheme to pregnant mothers and to ensure proper postnatal care of mothers and children. Browne, a young radical whose party, Clann na Poblachta, was the most socially progressive in the Dáil, was perhaps unwise in proposing that the scheme would operate without a means test. Such a proposal could be met with well-reasoned objections that perhaps disguised professional self-interest of one kind or another. But the death knell of the scheme was sounded when the hierarchy let it be known through a committee established to investigate the matter and through a letter to the Taoiseach that it took the gravest exception to Browne’s scheme, finding it contrary to Catholic social teaching.
The interparty government was quite unprepared to back its young firebrand Minister for Health against the hierarchy. Some of his government colleagues had been unpersuaded of Noel Browne’s wisdom on some points of his scheme, others found it distasteful, and others had always thought Browne altogether too volatile and deficient in that measured pragmatism esteemed by the political mind. It was unlikely that they would have backed him wholeheartedly, even against the Irish Medical Association, which perhaps had been his initial target when he proposed the scheme. The government certainly did not care to back him in open struggle with the hierarchy, a struggle he himself had unabashedly made public. So the government withdrew the scheme and informed the hierarchy of its intention to do so amid many widespread political expressions of loyalty to the church, which even included one from Browne himself. Browne’s declaration after his resignation that he accepted the hierarchy’s views on the matter, whether the fruit of conviction or expediency, did nothing to help his subsequent political fortunes. A storm of controversy ensued in which the issue of church-state relations was discussed exhaustively in periodicals and in the daily press.
What emerged from this protracted debate, the first of its kind in the history of the state, was that the church authorities were absorbed by the dangers they sensed in increased state power; indeed, the social distresses that had occasioned the debate in the first place were rather lost sight of in much ideological dogmatism. It was accordingly borne in on legislators that an Ireland that might wish to adapt to its difficult circumstances by increased state welfare services would have to reckon with episcopal opposition to the presumed ideological and social dangers of welfarism. “The Welfare State is almost upon us,” warned Dr. Cornelius Lucey, Coadjutor-Bishop of Cork. “Now, under one pretext, now under another, the various departments of State are becoming father and mother to us all.”19 So the state in the 1950s, in the midst of an ideological as well as a social and economic crisis, was forced to proceed with great caution when it sought to employ increased welfare as an adaptive stratagem. Caution and hesitant uncertainty were often indistinguishable.
In the field of foreign policy, in the postwar period the state also exhibited a lack of assured conviction.20 On the one hand Ireland seemed anxious to emerge from the political isolation of wartime neutrality to play a part in the developing international bodies of the postwar period. The country benefited in the years immediately after the war from the European Recovery Fund, which allowed the state among other things to improve housing and to organize the country’s transport system under central government control. Ireland involved itself in the Council of Europe and in 1955 was admitted to the United Nations. De Valera had stated his agreement with the UN Charter in 1946, but the Soviet Union had prevented Irish entry for almost a decade. Following entry, for a few brief years, the country played a role which anticipated the intermediary position between the great power blocs that some Third World countries occupied in the United Nations in the 1960s. In 1961 Ireland became a member of UNESCO. Some of this diplomatic activity, however, was less directed towards full participation in international affairs than towards the solution of the Irish problem of partition. Ostensibly because of the partition issue Ireland refused to join NATO in 1949, and in the same year the country was declared a republic outside the British Commonwealth of Nations (the repeal of the External Relations Act in 1948 had broken the Irish link with the Commonwealth).
The decision to move to the status of a republic outside the Commonwealth shows how much Irish external relations were still dominated by the country’s relationship with Britain, persistently soured as it was by the partition of the island, for which Britain was held wholly responsible. The decisions on NATO and the republic were of course taken by the interparty government, not by Fianna Fáil under de Valera, who had guided Irish foreign policy for many years. But these two acts of foreign policy were not in essential conflict with the general direction that de Valera had taken. Indeed, the nature of the coalition that comprised the interparty government of 1948–51 meant that de Valera’s long-term republican policy was prosecuted with a directness and haste he would not have wished. Seán MacBride, leader of Clann na Poblachta, with his past association with the IRA and his resolute republicanism, was in all probability the man who pressed the issue. J. A. Costello, the Taoiseach and a leader of Fine Gael (which in its earlier form as Cumann na nGaedheal had advertised itself as the Commonwealth party), believed that the declaration of the republic might take the issue of republicanism and the gun out of Irish politics. In this hope he was to be singularly disappointed.
The IRA, attracting recruits as the interparty government’s antipartition diplomatic campaign showed no signs of success, began a campaign of antipartition violence in the 1950s directed against Northern Ireland. For the republic of twenty-six counties was hardly the republic of separatist dreams. Its declaration was unlikely to have satisfied that minority in the country which since 1922 had refused to countenance any constitutional arrangement other than a thirty-two-county republic, pure and undefiled, nor those who, prepared to work within the existing system, were nevertheless in essential sympathy with that undying aspiration. As the state, in seeking to reform the social services, was constantly in mind of the hierarchy’s pronounced views on social organization and policy, so the state tentatively breaking out of the political isolationism and neutrality of the war years was required to exercise a caution it did not necessarily find burdensome, even when it was inhibiting, on matters which might relate to national sovereignty. As in church-state relations, caution and uncertainty had a tendency to appear under the same guise.
So the state, as a social and economic crisis developed all about it in the 1950s, seemed to lack the self-assurance and ideological conviction necessary to meet it. But the social changes that were in part responsible for the general crisis were in fact preparing the ground for the new seeds that, planted at the end of the decade, would produce a rich harvest of economic regeneration and social and cultural change in the 1960s and 1970s. The society was becoming increasingly urban, though not because of emigration, at a pace which could prove politically destructive. The modern communications, which had in part been responsible for the rejection of traditional satisfactions in the countryside and small towns, were bringing Ireland into contact, in the imagery of the cinema and mass circulation periodicals, with the social forms of advanced capitalist consumer societies, thereby raising Irish expectations and creating demand for a new economic order.
There were various signs that a new Ireland, an Ireland less concerned with its own national identity, less antagonistic to outside influence, less obsessively absorbed by its own problems to the exclusion of wider issues, was, however embryonically, in the making. The Bell and the Dublin Magazine were joined by new literary periodicals. In these a younger generation than that associated with the older journals began to publish their work, though they also availed themselves of the opportunities afforded them by their seniors. Irish Writing (edited by David Marcus and Terence Smith from 1946 to 1954 and by Seán J. White from 1954 to 1957), Poetry Ireland (edited by David Marcus as a separate periodical from 1948 to 1952 and subsequently as a supplement of Irish Writing) and Envoy (edited by John Ryan and Valentin Iremonger) all gave such new writers as Pearse Hutchinson, Patrick Galvin, Basil Payne, Thomas Kinsella, Benedict Kiely, James Plunkett, and John Montague greater opportunities to see their work in print in Ireland than had existed for writers since the first decades of the century. What was notable about each of these journals was their determination to put literature first, not to be sidetracked by arguments for or against nationalism or the Irish tradition. A foreword to an issue of Envoy in 1950 caught the mood: “The younger poets…take their nationality more for granted,”21 while Robert Greacen in Irish Writing set the tone for many Irish writers of his generation: “If they set store on any one quality it is on personal integrity. Write about what you feel and think and know as honestly as you can and with as little jargon as possible.”22 He sensed that “the new Irish writers, for their part, seek neither to decry nor accept harp or sickle or hammer; they are not sufficiently naive to be able to work to any single symbol.”23
The poetic mentor of many of the new young poets was Auden, their cultural hero James Joyce. Indeed Envoy was the first Irish periodical to attempt a full-scale critical response to Joyce’s work since the Irish Statesman ceased publication. The journal’s critical esteem of Joyce, expressed in a special issue, was related to its rather self-conscious Europeanism. Its first editorial had hoped the journal would serve “abroad as envoy of Irish writing and at home as envoy of the best in international writing.” The latter intention was expressed by the publication of work by Nathalie Sarraute, a first publication in English of extracts from Chekhov’s “Sakhalin Island” and essays on English, European, and American writers. Irish Writing also brought European writing to the attention of Irish readers. A piece by Jean-Paul Sartre was included in Issue three in 1947, and extracts from Beckett’s fiction appeared in later numbers. Also, Irish Writing began to publish essays by non-Irish critics of Irish writing, alerting their Irish readers to the fact that the literature in English of their recent past was beginning to generate wide international critical attention. Among those who contributed to a special W. B. Yeats edition in 1955 were Donald Davie (at the beginning of his poetic and academic career in Trinity College, Dublin), Peter Ure, Hugh Kenner, Peter Allt, and two Irish critics who had no reason then or later to feel diffident in such company, Vivian Mercier and Denis Donoghue. In October 1951 a correspondent in Hibernia noted the numbers of American students who had been coming to Dublin to study Joyce and Yeats in recent years.
A new iconoclasm was in the air, distinct from the satiric, antagonistic bitterness that had characterized the work of an earlier generation of writers. “We must look outward again or die, if only of boredom,” wrote the poet and critic Anthony Cronin in the Bell in 1953. Instead of assaulting the society they found so inhibiting, young writers simply got on with their work, stating what they thought to be obvious when occasion called for statement. So John Montague in 1951 could reflect with commendable detachment, “Ireland is at present in the awkward semi-stage between provincialism and urbanization, and the writing that will best serve should deal with the problems of the individual against this uneasy semi-urban setting.”24 So Denis Donoghue could blandly inform the readers of Studies in 1955, writing on “The Future of Irish Music,” “It is quite possible that Irish music may have no further existence” and “there is in Ireland today no composer whose works an intelligent European must know.”25 And a young Trinity College-educated historian, F. S. L. Lyons, reviewing a book by two fellow academics from University College, Dublin, on such a contentious issue as the Great Famine, could almost surreptitiously introduce a new concept to discussion in Ireland, “historical revision.”26 The Bell, even under the editorship of the socialist Peadar O’Donnell, lost much of its interest in aspects of Irish social life, and in its last years (it closed in 1954) was heavily literary in content, in a way it had not been in the 1940s. The poet Austin Clarke began publishing poetry again after a silence that had lasted since 1938, when in Night and Morning he had wrestled with the Catholic moral conscience with an anguish reminiscent of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His new work had moved beyond the Manichean bitterness of that personal, haunted volume. In its place came a humanistic critique of Irish society in a satiric verse which suggested a mordant assumption that the clerical excesses of modern Ireland were hopelessly inauthentic expressions of the native sensibility. Clarke’s satire of the 1950s was vigorously sane, the persona adopted that of a man who has transcended parochial absurdities in a broad, humanistic vision of Irish identity and who finds aberrations from this tiresome and infuriating. A sceptical, radical mind found expression in a body of verse that a younger generation in the 1960s was to find invigorating. In the 1950s too the poet Patrick Kavanagh abandoned the crude, boisterous satire, bred of anger and frustration, which he had produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for a lyrical celebration of everyday Irish experience that has served for many Irish men and women since as a metaphor of the surest kind of liberation, a liberation of the spirit. In 1953 Alan Simpson, a young, dedicated theatre director, founded, with Carolyn Swift, an experimental theatre in tiny premises in Dublin, the Pike Theatre Club, where in 1954 Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow first came to life and in 1956 Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had its Irish première and second English-language production. The Pike was in fact only one, if perhaps the most celebrated, because of its association with Behan’s famous play about prison life and with Beckett’s first major theatrical success, of various small theatres and theatre groups that sprang up in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s as young actors, directors, and designers brought a new generation’s energy and enthusiasm to the theatrical life of the city.
It was one such actor, Cyril Cusack, who achieved the succès de scandale of the 1950s when in 1955 he took the Gaiety Theatre for a three-week presentation of Sean O’Casey’s anticlerical play, The Bishop’s Bonfire. The play opened amid much anticipatory antagonism, and on the first night the capacity audience seemed assured of a riot in the best traditions of Irish theatre as well as a dramatic performance. The play ran for five weeks rather than the three Cusack had planned. Cusack had approached the production of this play with high seriousness (he had even sought advice on the script from a London prelate)27 and had no wish to become involved in what almost amounted to a theatrical test case. But the fact that the play, certainly one of O’Casey’s least successful, was produced in Dublin at all was a blow struck for artistic freedom. That such a blow was all too necessary was made evident three years later, when a Dublin tourist organization proposed to mount a Dublin International Theatre Festival (the first such festival had taken place in 1957) which would include productions of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned and three mime plays by Beckett, as well as a dramatic realization of Joyce’s Ulysses, entitled Bloomsday. When it became evident that the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, was opposed to the production of the O’Casey play and of Bloomsday (he had been asked, unwisely, to open the festival with a votive mass) and when powerful representatives of public opinion, including Dublin trade unions, supported his view, the organizers withdrew the play (they were bound by their constitution to avoid controversy) and eventually cancelled the festival for that year.
Furthermore, in 1957 Alan Simpson had been arrested and charged with “presenting for gain an indecent and profane performance”28 – the play in question being Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. Simpson, charged on a summary warrant normally used only to arrest armed criminals and members of the IRA, refused to give an undertaking that he would withdraw the play and stood trial. Released on bail, he decided the play should continue, and before the next performance the entire cast was advised by the police that by appearing in such a play they ran the risk of arrest. After a year of complicated legal proceedings, Simpson was cleared in a Dublin district court of the charge against him. This outcome to an unfortunate incident compacted of elements of farce and great personal anxiety for Simpson was something of a turning point in Irish theatrical life. For had the judgment gone against Simpson, subsequent directors and theatre managements would have been forced to exercise an inhibiting caution in all doubtful cases. As it was, the judgment meant that adventurous experiments could be embarked upon in the assurance that the police would be less inclined to proceed against a play even when they received complaints from the public or from the various self-appointed watch committees that sought to protect the Irish moral environment from theatrical pollution. The court’s judgment gave encouragement to all those who might have lacked Simpson’s cool resolution, making more clear the way for less courageous spirits.
For the Gaelic revivalist, the 1950s also brought novelty of an encouraging kind. Certainly the fortunes of the language in general continued their protracted decline. In 1951, instead of 704 primary National Schools teaching through Irish the number had dropped to 523, and the next decade was to see an even sharper reduction. Emigration was working its constant attrition on the Irish-speaking and partly Irish-speaking areas. But the response of the revivalist that we detected at its inception in the early 1940s, which involved the recognition that the state could not be depended upon to revive Irish, that the arena of the future struggles for the language must be the anglicized towns and cities, and that individual effort could not be postponed quickened into vigorous life in the 1950s. By 1963 an American commentator could count “a minimum of sixteen major national organizations founded since 1940 for the promotion of particular aspects of the revival.”29 One of the most energetic and inventive of these was Gael-Linn, which, founded in 1953, set itself with a will to the business of fund-raising. It involved itself, for example, in the production of two films, Saoirse? (Freedom?) and Mise Eire (I am Ireland) which were immensely popular. The music for these was composed by Seán Ó Riada, a composer whose work was to become widely acclaimed in the 1960s. And Brendan Behan’s work An Giall (which in English became The Hostage) was written on a commission from Gael-Linn.
The revivalist could also take heart, even in the desperate circumstances of the 1950s, in the fact that modern Irish writing was shakily finding its feet. In 1945 Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh had founded a small publishing house, Sáirséal agus Dill, which among other things published the work of the novelist and short story writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain and of the poet Seán Ó Ríordáin. The publication of such writers and of the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin allowed the critic David Marcus to write in 1955:
During the last ten years or so Gaelic writing in Ireland has moved into a new era. There has been an eager and widening awareness among the reading public and an atmosphere of excitement in the writing itself – two factors which, in supplementing each other, have generated continuous growth; and among the new writers which this activity has produced are many whose freshness and modernity might be said to have given Irish literature in Gaelic something it never had at any previous stage of its long development – an avant garde movement.30
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel Cré na Cille (The Graveyard Earth) seemed to its readers then and since particularly a work of that avant garde, as it made them believe that, in Seán Ó Tuama’s words, the Irish language could be forged into “a flexible and compelling instrument of modern thought and feeling.”31
In the visual arts, too, the evidence mounted that the era of nationalistic isolation was coming to an end. Numbers of younger painters in the postwar period began to build on the work of the Living Art Exhibition, on the foundations provided by Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, and earlier innovatory spirits. By 1955 a future director of the National Gallery, James White, could write of the new “mature young painters of Ireland” and could compare the present most favourably with the past:
Twenty-five years ago, a handful of painters and sculptors lived a somewhat remote life from the people of the country and were understood by a minority. Today hardly a week passes without a couple of exhibitions by individual artists. Three major group shows are held in Dublin and as many as ten group shows are held in cities and towns outside the capital. The work of our principal contemporary artists has been shown in North and South America, in Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and Holland. Artists like Scott, Dillon, Hanlon, O’Neill, Middleton…are known and regarded with interest in countries where art is a tradition as old as memory. The main reason is that they use an international idiom or style deriving from the Paris School. This style is applied to the interpretation of Irish subject matter.32
Irish artists were able to exhibit abroad in part because the official mind had paid some attention to a remarkably gloomy report presented to the government in 1949. The Report on The Arts in Ireland by Professor Thomas Bodkin, former director of the National Gallery of Ireland, then professor of fine arts and director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in the University of Birmingham, stated bleakly that
…measures which might have been taken effectively in 1922 to foster the Fine Arts and rehabilitate the art institutions of the country are no longer likely to prove sufficient. In the intervening twenty-seven years the resources of such institutions and the status and power of those who administer them, have been steadily curtailed rather than augmented. We have not merely failed to go forward in policies concerning the Arts, we have in fact regressed, to arrive, many years ago, at a condition of apathy about them in which it had become justifiable to say of Ireland that no other country in Western Europe cared less, or gave less, for the cultivation of the Arts.33
Bodkin in his report cast a cold eye on the museums and galleries which the British had established in the country and lamented their decay and disorganization. He observed how little Irish industry exhibited any sense of aesthetic values, berated the universities for their philistinism, and reflected sadly that for many years after independence “no financial provision whatever was made for the development of cultural relations between Ireland and other countries.”34 Bodkin noted that a partial remedy to this latter deficiency had been instituted in June 1947, when a grant-in-aid of £10,000 was voted for expenditure by the Minister for External Affairs and a committee named the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations proposed to advise him. Bodkin suggested that an immediate activity for the new committee was the encouragement of exhibitions by Irish artists abroad. Of the many proposals in the Bodkin Report, this was one of the very few that were implemented. Bodkin’s report, however, stirred the state into some small concern for the arts, which was expressed in the establishment of an Arts Council in 1951. The creation of this body, while scarcely an imaginative, energetic response to the criticisms of the Bodkin Report, was at least a measure of recognition that the state must act as a patron of the arts in a modern society, even though the patronage in fact provided was for some time to prove considerably less than adequate.
In 1955 James White had expressed his concern about “the absence of criticism and informed writing on the visual arts”35 in Ireland. In the 1950s that void in Irish intellectual life had begun, however minimally, to be filled. The periodical Envoy, for example, was the first of the essentially literary publications (it proclaimed itself A Review of Literature and Art) to attempt an assessment of the visual arts in the post-independence period. It did this in a manner which for the first time recognized that painting and sculpture in Ireland were not simply adjuncts to literary movements. Rather, they were an artistic activity in their own right. Critical essays were therefore published with accompanying reproductions, on the work of Louis le Brocquy, Colin Middleton, Nano Reid, Thurloe Connolly, George Campbell, Daniel O’Neill, and Hilary Heron, on religious art in Ireland and on artistic Modernism, alongside the assessments of Irish literary figures. The public at large in the post-war period was made aware of these inroads of artistic Modernism by the occasional building commissioned by official bodies that displayed knowledge of developments in European architecture. In 1943 the new airport building at Collinstown airport, serving Dublin, had been designed in the Modernist idiom by Desmond FitzGerald. In 1953 the architectural firm Michael Scott and Partners, which was to be responsible for much new building in the 1960s, designed the central bus station in Dublin in the Modernist mode, a sign of things to come. Private housing in limited areas of Dublin’s suburbs had since the late 1930s reflected the functionalist ideas of contemporary European and British architecture. The late 1940s saw a good deal of private development in this idiom in the city, which in the 1960s and 1970s was to become the characteristic mode of the commercial redevelopment of Dublin, as it had been in postwar London.
In the 1950s opposition to censorship, that bulwark against external contamination, entered on a decisive phase. The Act of 1946, with its appeal machinery, had by no means satisfied the growing body of opinion in the country that thought the policy inappropriate both in its form and execution. Indeed, the operation of the censorship policy under the new legislation had proved, as we saw, even more restrictive than the old, measured simply in terms of books banned. Perhaps the Censorship Board, reacting to the increasingly vociferous criticisms of its activities, intensified its cultural and moral crusade. In so doing, it was acting in unconscious concert with other conservative institutions and organizations who seemed to sense that changes were afoot which must be resisted. The Archbishop of Dublin, for instance, in 1944 forbade attendance at Trinity College by Catholic students, replacing the church’s strongly worded advice by fiat. In 1956 the National Council of the church made the Dublin diocesan regulations on this issue applicable throughout the country. Individual Catholics, however, chose to ignore him, and it became clear that lay Catholic opinion was no longer so quiescent before episcopal admonition on social and cultural matters as it once had been. The Catholic periodical Hibernia, for example, when it cleared its mind of the heat generated by the Cold War, published thoughtful essays by Catholic laymen on constitutional issues, Northern Ireland, and the social and cultural life of the country that, coloured by a devout religious loyalty, were nevertheless in tone and content remote from the simplicities of episcopal denunciation and proscription. In 1958, for example, a young journalist Desmond Fennell addressed himself, shortly after the Simpson case had been settled in court, to a sensitive Catholic response to the moral issues raised by Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which had recently caused such controversy in Liverpool that its transfer to Dublin had been cancelled. Fennell admitted to having seen the play in Düsseldorf (where it had also met with opposition, as it had even in New York). He concluded that “the ultimate moral question is paradoxically an aesthetic one, ‘Is this art?’” The answer in Williams’ case was clearly positive. The “play’s uniting theme is the saving power of love.”36
In 1956 the Irish Association of Civil Liberties (which had been founded in 1948), following several years of vigorous newspaper assault on the operations of the Censorship Board, organized a petition requesting the Taoiseach, J. A. Costello (an interparty government was once more in power) to establish a commission to investigate the board’s operations. A large meeting was held in the Mansion House in Dublin to publicize the censorship controversy. Instead of acceding to the petitioners’ demands, the Minister for Justice, who was responsible for the board, filled two vacancies that arose in 1956 by the appointment of two individuals known for views likely to commend them to the board’s critics. Disagreement between the three earlier appointees and the two new members quickly developed. In 1957 the divisions between them became so unbridgeable that the three former members resigned from the board. The Fianna Fáil Minister for Justice (for an election had reversed the political position once more) quickly appointed a new board comprising the two recent recruits with three other individuals who proved to be altogether more open-minded than members of the board had been in the past. No longer did the Censorship Board see itself as waging a war against an alien campaign of cultural and moral contamination but operated as a body “making it difficult for the average person to read books which were pornographic and had no literary merit.”37
It would be wrong, it must be stressed, to make too much of these signs of a changing intellectual and cultural climate. For most people in Ireland in the postwar period, the amateur dramatic movement, which burgeoned in the 1950s in festivals and competitions, was their only point of contact with artistic activity of any kind. For many, literature, art, intellectual endeavour, or architectural innovation would have seemed luxurious irrelevancies set against the daily struggle for survival in years of economic despair. The efforts of state and of individuals to brighten up the general deprivation of life in the country through festivals of one kind or another (these were also designed to attract tourists to Ireland) could not really achieve much against such a bleak background. An Tostal, for instance, a spring festival organized by the Tourist Board for the first time in April 1953, like the Tailteann of an earlier decade, never quite established itself as its organizers had hoped, though the Dublin International Theatre Festival, which derived from it, survived the debacle of 1958 to flourish in the 1960s in a happier climate. That, on the evening of the first Tostal, police had to break up with baton charges a crowd of riotous young men in O’Connell Street in Dublin did not augur well for its future.
Perhaps indeed a truer impression of the times emerges when one reflects, not on the various signs abroad of cultural change, but on the frustrated, unhappy histories of three of the country’s most gifted writers, who scarcely found the attractions of an insecure, bohemian existence in the pubs of Dublin in the 1950s adequate compensation for lack of public appreciation of their real artistic ambitions and of financial support.38 Indeed, each of the careers of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan, and Brendan Behan shows the terrible marks of years of public indifference or misunderstanding. The only future that seemed open to the Irish writer in the late 1940s and early 1950s was penury in his own country or an appeal to the wider public gallery through eccentricity, showmanship, and bravado that would distract both public and writer from the serious business of his art. The effects of this dismal quandary were all too apparent in various ways on what one critic has called this “doom and drink-sodden triumvirate.”39
Reading the poet Anthony Cronin’s memoir Dead as Doornails (1976), in which the period and the lives of these three writers are memorably recalled, a sense develops that they were the “tragic generation” of modern Irish letters, despite John Ryan’s more benign recollection that “the windows had been flung open and intellectually speaking, people were breathing again.”40 The changes in the intellectual and cultural life of the country that I have detected were not such as to clear the air of a cultural provincialism all these artists in their different ways found intolerable. Nor indeed, in a period when the empty country cottage and the boarded-up suburban house in Dublin or Cork were the visible signs of the heavy toll of emigration, could they, unless they could be accompanied by major economic improvements, do much to hold young Irish men and women from the emigrant ships. For it is the emigrant, so poignantly evoked in Brendan Kennelly’s poem “Westland Row” (the name, then, of a Dublin railway station for the boat to Britain), who seems finally the most truly representative figure in what for many were very dismal times indeed:
Brown bag bulging with faded nothings;
A ticket for three pounds one and six
To Euston, London via Holyhead.
Young faces limp, misunderstanding
What the first gay promptings meant—
A pass into a brilliant wilderness,
A capital of hopeless promise.
Well, mount the steps: lug the bag:
Take your place. And out of all the crowd,
Watch the girl in the wrinkled coat,
Her face half-grey.
Her first time.41