“Our country is in a highly mobile phase at present,” wrote E. F. O’Doherty, professor of psychology at University College, Dublin, in 1963. “In fact we are going through a deep and far-reaching cultural revolution.”1 That revolution, O’Doherty sensed, was the concomitant of the ideological and social revolution he saw in progress about him. He warned (his article appeared in the Jesuit periodical Studies):
One cannot radically change the material culture and hope to preserve all the rest intact. Yet this is our dilemma. We have set in train certain great and far-reaching processes within the material culture which inevitably will have great and far-reaching effects in other dimensions of the culture, have already had such effects. But while we are anxious to achieve the desirable changes in the material culture, we are reluctant to accept the other changes they inevitably bring with them.2
The dilemma so precisely defined in this essay, written almost at the beginning of two decades of rapid economic and social change, was at the centre of much heart-searching throughout the period. A society that had sought its rationale in a separatism justified by national distinctiveness had decided to open itself to the forces of the international marketplace, to seek economic growth as the primary national goal, and to enter fully into the economic and political life of the industrially developed states of Western Europe. Not unnaturally, the social and cultural effects of such an ideological volte face were the substance of much concerned, even heated, discussion. An equally comprehensible feature of debate were the frequent considerations of national identity in circumstances, where many of the traditional essentialist definitions – language, tradition, culture and distinctive ideology – were widely felt to fly in the face of social reality, no longer commanding anything much more than sentimental respect.
The language question remained as one of the most contentious of Irish issues, that contention undoubtedly charged by the increasingly perilous position of the language itself. In 1966 there were less than 70,000 native speakers in the state. An essay suggested that by 1975 the number may well have sunk as low as 32,000, recognizing that “it is perfectly clear that if present demographic and linguistic trends are not reversed the Gaeltacht as a distinct linguistic community will not survive the century.”3 The economic revival in the west of the country in the 1970s reflected, for example, in the rapid rise in the population of Galway, reinforced the tendency of Gaelic-speaking and partly Gaelic-speaking districts to abandon the Irish language for English, the language of tourism and of the multinational corporations and foreign companies that had located factories west of the Shannon in the period.
Government policy in relation to the language in the same period was marked by apparent ambivalence. There were serious efforts to face up to the linguistic crisis in the country. A government commission was appointed and reported in 1963. A White Paper followed in 1965. Each of these admitted with a realism almost unprecedented in official circles how much remained to be done. Indeed, the commission report unambiguously faced up to the crisis of the Gaeltacht which might prove fatal to the language as a whole:
Irish is…driven more and more into the position of being a kind of private language needed only in conversation with acquaintances – for everything outside this limited circle the Gaeltacht man must turn to English…if the Gaeltacht is allowed to disappear, the will to preserve and spread the Irish language as a spoken tongue elsewhere will probably vanish with it.4
In 1961 a new government advisory body, Comhairle na Gaeilge, was established with thirty-seven members. In 1975 Gaeltarra Éireann – a semi-state body formed in 1958 to aid Irish revival – was reconstituted as Bord na Gaeilge, to become the main agent of government linguistic policy. In 1972 a Gaeltacht radio service was initiated, Raidió na Gaeltachta, which by the end of the decade broadcast in Irish for about twenty-five hours a week. But crucial government decisions seemed to many revivalists to undermine with one governmental hand what was being attempted with the other. The Irish-speaking colleges, which prepared students for careers as National School teachers, were phased out in the 1960s. In 1961 the main opposition party, Fine Gael, included in its election manifesto a proposal to abolish compulsory Irish in the schools and in 1966 published a policy document which stated the party’s aim as language “preservation” by “realistic” means, making clear that it would remove linguistic compulsion if it gained power. For the first time a major Irish political party had clearly chosen to espouse “preservation” rather than revival, and in the nationally resonant year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. When Fine Gael came to power in coalition with the Labour Party in 1973, one of the earliest government decisions was to remove the requirement that pupils should pass in Irish in order to merit the secondary school Leaving Certificate. The necessity for a pass in Leaving Certificate Irish for entry to the Civil Service was also abandoned. To many these decisions seemed to sound the death knell for the language. According to Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, they “removed the last vestige of state policy on the language.”5
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s Irish revivalists viewed all Irish governments with the profoundest suspicion. Writing in 1967, a reporter on Irish-language matters noted in an American periodical how even in the commemorative year of 1966,
…many who still proclaim allegiance to the ideals of the 1916 leaders played down the vital importance which almost all of these men attached to the task of reviving the native language. The economic gospel seemed to have ousted the social and cultural ideals.6
During the 1916 observance, indeed, a group of radical revivalists named Misneach (Courage), which numbered among its founders the novelist Máirtín Ó Tuairisc, felt compelled to mount a week-long hunger strike in Belfast and Dublin to remind Irish men and women of past idealism. Supporters of language revival frequently felt driven to similar straits in defiance of a state whose intentions they no longer trusted. Individuals withheld radio and television licence fees in protest at the linguistic policy and performance of the national broadcasting service. Others fought running battles with state bureaucracies over such matters as the availability of Irish-language versions of official documents; and in the late 1960s young radical voices began to be raised in the Gaeltacht itself demanding civil rights for Irish-speaking Irish citizens.
In 1969 Nollaig Ó Gadhra identified the “three main areas in which Irish speakers feel they suffer discrimination in the Republic:”
The lack of employment in Gaeltacht areas; the failure to provide adequate programmes in Irish on radio and television; and [the strong suspicion that] the language is gradually being “phased out” in the training colleges, universities and even in the secondary and primary schools.7
The 1970s were, as we saw, to add fuel to the fires of the suspicion that educational policy was shifting away from language revival as one of its principal aims. In the 1970s not only was the government decision to abandon compulsion in linguistic education at the secondary level seen as a body blow to revivalist hopes, but the methods of teaching Irish in the National Schools continued to draw criticism from the teachers themselves. In 1971 the INTO commented unfavourably on the Irish-language programme for the English-speaking areas of the country outlined in the new curriculum. It was, in their view, “an overloaded, unrealistic programme” and the curriculum’s recommendations on the subject contravened “the philosophic and psychological principles enunciated” in the curriculum’s introductory statements.8 In 1976 the INTO survey on the effects of the new curriculum found that knowledge of Irish was suffering in the new context. While the report did not make clear whether the INTO was antagonistic to the programme because it contravened the principles of the new curriculum or because it was responsible for declining linguistic standards, the fact that the teaching of Irish in the primary schools was a matter for contention could give the revivalist no grounds for optimism.9
The 1970s saw no improvement, from the revivalists’ viewpoint, in Irish television broadcasting. The national television service from its inception operated under the terms of an act passed in 1960. The act charged a broadcasting authority with the responsibility for broadcasting within the state. One of the sections of the act explicitly directed the authority to “bear constantly in mind the national aims of restoring the Irish language and preserving and developing the national culture.” In addition, the authority, the act directs, shall “endeavour to promote these aims.” In published statements the authority proclaimed its serious commitment to these responsibilities. However, performance seemed scarcely to reflect the idealism of proclaimed intention. Individual, popular programmes in Irish, and programmes designed to improve knowledge of the language, such as the Buntus Cainte programmes of the late 1960s in which basic Irish was taught through broadcasts, records, and booklets or the bilingual programme Trom agus Eadrom, seemed isolated acknowledgments of linguistic responsibility in a sea of home-produced and imported English-language material. In one year, for example, from October 1975 to September 1976 Irish-language television programming amounted to a mere 131 hours, representing only 10 percent of total home production. Of this, fifty-eight hours were taken up by news broadcasts. There was only one hour of Irish-language feature material and, extraordinarily, only three hours of children’s television in Irish.10 Certainly, the fact that Irish television depended on advertising revenue determined that most of its broadcasting be in English. Few companies were willing to advertise during programmes which much of the population could not easily comprehend. And the directors of programmes were also attentive to ratings, and therefore to public opinion, in a country where at least three British television channels were available to inhabitants on the east coast and in other areas as well. Public opinion would not readily have accepted a major introduction of Irish-language material into the daily schedules.11
It was indeed with Irish public opinion, with the attitudes of the people, that the Irish revivalists were forced to contend. In the White Paper of 1965, which followed from the final report of the Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language, it was evident that the government recognized this fact. The White Paper proposed as government policy for the next decade a number of vaguely defined objectives (“extending the use of Irish as a living language, oral and written,” for example) but accepted, in a crucial sentence, that “competent knowledge of English will be needed even in a predominantly Irish-speaking Ireland.” Bilingualism, not linguistic exchange, became the new aspiration. Nor, apparently, should that desideratum be too strenuously pursued. While ready to agree with the commissioner’s general sentiments, the White Paper showed that the government was less prepared to move swiftly to adopt its recommendation on the gaelicization of a variety of Irish institutions. Phrases and terms such as “will recommend,” “will encourage,” “desirable,” and “target” suggested a governmental caution and ambiguity almost amounting to equivocation, caught as it was between a set of proposals based on little statistical and empirical research and its own sense of public opinion.
The precise components of public opinion on the issue were made known ten years later, when a major survey of Irish-language issues resulted in a remarkably interesting report. In 1970 the Minister for Finance, who also held responsibility for the Gaeltacht, established a Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research, charged to determine the attitudes of the Irish public to Irish, and to its restoration “as a general means of communication in a significant range of language functions.” The committee’s findings after several years of intensive research, conducted on a rigorously controlled basis, justified the caution of the 1965 White Paper. A high proportion of the population was found to be convinced that Irish was important to “national or ethnic identity, or as a symbol of cultural distinctiveness.”12 Linked to this were beliefs about “the intrinsic cultural importance of the language.”13 “Irish,” the report recorded, “when interpreted in this sense has favourable support from about two-thirds of the adult population of the state.”14 It also revealed that over two-thirds of the national population believed that “all children should be required to learn Irish as a subject in both primary and post-primary schools,” although “between 60–75 percent of the population are dissatisfied with the teaching of Irish in the educational system.”15 This dissatisfaction was probably rooted in the fact that school Irish did not often enable individuals to use the language in adult life. The committee, conscious of the gaps that can exist between attitudes and practice, also presented evidence on language usage. They found that in the non-Gaeltacht areas only about 15 percent of the population “use Irish at work, at home, and with friends, and only about 4 percent of the population appear to use it very frequently and intensively.”16 This small number of persons was from a total of about 79 percent of the population who were found to have competence varying from minimal to high in spoken Irish, with only about 21 percent of the population having no such competence whatsoever. Perhaps the social experience reflected in these figures accounted for other attitudinal factors that the committee identified. Among these were the fact that half to three-quarters of the population believed
In a further factor identified by the researchers 70 percent of the population was found to be highly supportive of government action on behalf of the Gaeltacht. But it also found that “instrumental rewards or sanctions for learning the language – such as granting entry to promotions within the public service – is [sic] not generally supported.”18
How right the government was to move cautiously in the context of Irish public opinion was made clear by the report’s sketch of the “average Irish individual’s” attitude to Irish:
The average individual…feels rather strongly that the Irish language is necessary to our ethnic and cultural integrity, and supports the efforts to ensure the transmission of the language. At the same time, under present policies and progress, he is not really convinced that we can ensure its transmission. He has rather negative views about the way Irish has been taught in school and has a rather low or “lukewarm” personal commitment to its use, although in this latter case, the average person has not sufficient ability in the language to converse freely in it. On the other hand, he strongly supports nearly all Government efforts to help the Gaeltacht, but at the same time feels that the language is not very suitable for modern business life.19
In the course of a series of complex and detailed analyses of a wide range of data, the report tried to explain how such an apparently “schizophrenic” set of attitudes was possible in sociolinguistic terms. In so doing, it created a profile of the Irish linguistic situation not totally depressing to those earnest for the survival of the Irish language. It was clear that a majority of Irish people were strongly supportive of the use of Irish in symbolic contexts, on public occasions for example, happy that the language should play a socially integrative role through official usage. Evidence showed that commitment to the language outside the Gaeltacht, and the willingness to use it, tended to rise with the level of educational attainment. Consequently, individuals who used Irish were more often than not likely to be in influential positions in society. The fact that an interest in the language and in using it could be seen to coexist with middle- and upper-middle-class success would perhaps help to lessen the traditional identification of Irish with poverty and backwardness.20 The report also recorded that although only a very small proportion of the adult population used Irish at all regularly outside the diminishing Gaeltacht, about 27 percent of the adult population had “spoken Irish at least occasionally with some set of intimates for a considerable period of time at some stage in their life” and “just over 14 percent of the adult population have used it intensively at some stage and for a considerable period during their life cycle.”21 It seemed that people came in and out of Irish usage at various stages in their lives and “the rather high proportion dropping at some point”22 was balanced by a roughly equivalent population who “come in” for the first time. A particularly hopeful fact was that of this latter group “about one-third…have come into this category at a very late stage when they have had no conversational Irish in their family or school background experiences.” Another hopeful sign was evidence that suggested “some limited evidence of a revival of interest in Irish culture among seventeen-to-nineteen-year-olds.”23
Among young people, increasingly a distinctive social group in Ireland, as in other modernized urban societies, the 1960s and ’70s saw a remarkable flowering of interest in Irish traditional music. This inescapably brought them into contact with the Irish language and did much to generate affection and real regard for the national tongue. Organizations and individuals – the Gaelic League with its annual festivals; Comhaltas Ceoltoírí Eireann, founded in 1951 to foster love of traditional music; collectors, recorders, and broadcasters like Seamus Ennis, Seán Mac Reamoinn, Proinsias Ó Conluain, and Brendan Breathnach – all found themselves suddenly in the limelight of a popular movement that far exceeded anything they might have expected when in the 1950s they began to explore the repository of Irish folk music. As Brendan Breathnach astutely recognized, this movement had had little to do with nationalist ideology but was rather a local expression of developments in youth culture throughout the industrialized world. It was not
the effect of any national reawakening, as was the founding of the Feis Ceoil and the pipers’ clubs at the close of the last century. It was a popular change among the youth, having its origin in New York, and after the usual time-lag, taken up in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland.24
So a festival known as the Fleadh Ceoil held each summer, usually in a western town, became the mecca for upward of 100,000 people, most of them young, gathered to listen to traditional musicians who in the past had been ignored outside their own domestic circles and small gatherings of enthusiasts. The music of the traditional group The Chieftains, which started life under the direction of the enormously respected composer Seán Ó Riada (who in the 1960s became more and more preoccupied by the musical potential of the Irish tradition), created a market for recordings of Irish traditional music both in Ireland and abroad, while young musicians formed such popular groups as Planxty and the Bothy Band to explore the vitality of the native folk tradition. One singer and broadcaster, reflecting in 1979 on the good health that traditional music currently enjoyed, wrote that “the island of Ireland today is vibrant with reels, jigs, hornpipes, slow airs and songs. This surge of traditional Irish music over the last twenty-five years is something of a phenomenon, something that approaches a social revolution.”25
It must be stressed, however, that this development was simply an aspect of the more general social changes that were in progress in the period. The demographic, economic, and educational developments we have discussed above had created a new social group with the leisure and freedom from responsibility to follow interests and inclinations. That among these was Irish traditional music undoubtedly was of advantage to the Irish language, for the language has commended itself through the medium of music to many who might, as a result of unhappy school experience, have had little enthusiasm for it. But the identification of Irish music and the language with leisure activities in a consumer society was scarcely what the Gaelic League in its heyday had hoped for. Nor was it what the small number of dedicated parents in Dublin, who sent their children (about 20,000 pupils in both National and secondary schools were educated through Irish) to the small minority of Irish-speaking National Schools that existed in the city, hoped for. But perhaps that and its association with Gaelic games, (which enjoyed a vibrant popularity even in Dublin in the 1970s, where Gaelic football received mass urban support for the first time),26 together with its roles as symbolic expression of ethnic distinctiveness, and as cultural catalyst for individual writers, were almost all that could be hoped for the language in the period. With the Gaeltacht in peril it seemed terribly insufficient.
Such indeed was the anguished conviction of some social commentators who contributed to the debates about the language in the period. The new Ireland, vigorously in pursuit of economic development, had set in motion, such critics argued, a process which would destroy the core of nationality, the spiritual heart of the nation, the Irish language itself. Signs of contemporary cultural dislocation and disturbance were isolated as symptoms of a disease contracted as a result of the abandonment of Irish. Writers, among them the poet and playwright Seán Ó Tuama, the archaeologist and historian Liam de Paor, Seán de Fréine, author of The Great Silence (1965) – a powerful adumbration of the assumed social and cultural effects of Ireland’s linguistic crisis – and the Irish scholar and former president of the Royal Irish Academy, David Greene, all detected in Irish culture an imitative insecurity and mediocrity in the face of British and North American culture that was the direct result of language loss. Political independence had not brought intellectual independence:
There is very little sign yet of the new or creative Irish milieu that Douglas Hyde and his followers envisaged…One has only to think for a very brief moment of the various aspects of Irish life today to realize that, as a people, we have few ideas of our own, that our model, in most cases, is still the English (or sometimes American) model. In business, science, engineering, architecture, medicine, industry, law, home-making, agriculture, education, politics and administration – from economic planning to PAYE, from town-planning to traffic laws – the bulk of our thinking is derivative.27
But it was a poet who by his words and actions expressed most powerfully this sense of cultural betrayal implicit in Ireland’s new social and economic order. In 1975, when he published a collection entitled A Farewell to English, the poet Michael Hartnett declared that henceforth he would publish only in Irish (though he subsequently returned to English). In the title poem he wrote:
Gaelic is the conscience of our leaders,
the memory of a mother-rape they will
not face, the heap of bloody rags they see
and scream at in their boardrooms of mock oak.
They push us towards the world of total work
our politicians with their seedy minds
and dubious labels, Communist or
Capitalist, none wanting freedom –
only power. All that reminds us
we are human and therefore not a herd
must be concealed or killed or slowly left
to die, or microfilmed to waste no space.
For Gaelic is our final sign that
we are human, therefore not a herd.28
In part five of his poem “A Farewell to English,” Michael Hartnett identified the poet’s art with an act of rebellion.
Poets with progress
make no peace or pact:
the act of poetry
is a rebel act.29
The late 1960s and ’70s in Ireland were disturbed by those who believed that the gun was altogether a mightier instrument of rebellion than the poet’s pen. The anti-partition campaign of violence, which fully took hold in 1972 and which continued until 1996, posed a severe ideological challenge to the new Irish order that had developed since Lemass came to power.
Since 1922 Irish unity had been a declared aim of all electorally significant parties. The 1937 Constitution, which defined the national territory as the whole island of Ireland, distinguished the jurisdiction of the existing state from the territory of the nation, “pending the reintegration of the national territory.” In so doing, the Constitution reflected the widespread belief in the major political parties and in the country at large that the constitutional arrangements of 1921/2 had left much unfinished business to future generations. Crucial amid such business was the political reunification of the nation. The Fianna Fáil party had always asserted that reunification and the revival of the Irish language were its principal national aims, and no party could have hoped to achieve parliamentary success which did not at least pay lip service to the ideal of a thirty-two-county republican Ireland.
It was, as I suggested, Seán Lemass who managed in the 1960s to wed a commitment to economic renewal to the aspiration for unity. Hitherto no ideas on how partition might be ended likely to gain wide support for their evident feasibility and practicality had even been placed convincingly before the Irish people. Lemass gave Irish men and women to understand that work for economic renewal was the best way to serve the national aim and the most practical form of nationalism, for it would make the Southern state attractive to the Northern unionist population which had in the past had ample reason to reject incorporation into a state which could not even maintain its own population. In the 1960s, when so much of the ideology that had sustained the state since independence was in crisis, as the social base altered in radical ways, it was vital that at least one element of the ideological complex of earlier decades retained its credibility, even if it now took an almost exclusively economic form. And nationalism can, through its power to command effort and commitment, be a powerful aid to modernization.30 It was possible to see Irish involvement with the UK in the Free Trade Agreement, the commitment to the Common Market, and the decision to attract foreign investment, as serving a primary national aim, defined by the founding fathers of the state. That for a few brief years the policy appeared to enjoy success was gratifying indeed (there had been few successes since 1922). In 1965 Lemass visited the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, at Stormont. In one brief moment decades of public mistrust were apparently set aside as the two parts of Ireland seemed set fair for a period of economic cooperation that might have broken down the barriers mutual suspicion had erected. In the years 1965–68 newspaper articles, essays, and books frequently spoke of the new atmosphere abroad, of the “binding up of the ancient wound.”31 It was not to be.
The protest and violence that broke out in Northern Ireland in 1968, which developed into the horrendous civil strife in the 1970s and a guerrilla campaign against the British state in Northern Ireland led by the Provisional IRA, was rooted in the six-county statelet of Northern Ireland itself. It is vital to stress this fact. The violence erupted when it did as a consequence of the dynamics of that region and society. It was not the result of a campaign originating in the Southern state, although it eventually gathered part of its support there. Few people in the Republic indeed could have viewed the upsurge of violence in the North in the early 1970s with anything other than alarm. Not only was the Northern crisis likely to export its violence into the Republic, but the experience of the Northern Catholic nationalist minority was bound to challenge the Lemass approach to reunification, thereby threatening political stability. While the Northern minority was content to remain in a Northern Ireland under the ultimate jurisdiction of the British government, pending the reunification of the national territory, economic life could be pursued in the South in the happy assurance that it could contribute to the realization of a noble, long-term aim. When the Northern minority gave notice that it found conditions in the Northern semi-state no longer tolerable, the possibility arose that the Republic might have to choose between the commitment to the ending of partition that underlay its traditional nationalist ideology, and its more recent ideological commitment to the primacy of economic values, which since 1959 had been astutely linked to that long-term ambition.
It was clear throughout the 1970s that the majority of the population of the Republic did not wish the Northern crisis and the avowed republican nationalism of the state’s traditional ideology to interfere with the economic progress of the country along the path signposted by Lemass in 1959. Lemass retired in 1966 and in 1970 his successor, the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Jack Lynch, was able to dismiss two powerful, able ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, from his cabinet on the suspicion of conspiring to import arms for use by nationalists in Northern Ireland and survive not only their departure from office, but the subsequent trial and acquittal in court of Charles Haughey on a charge of conspiring illegally to import arms (an event subsequently referred to as “the Arms Trial”). Less that two years later, when the Northern conflict was at its height, only six months after British Army paratroopers had shot dead thirteen civilians on “Bloody Sunday” in Derry, the population of the Republic voted in a referendum by a margin of more than five to one to enter the EEC simultaneously with the UK. Following entry, both the Fianna Fáil government and the coalition government (comprising Fine Gael and the minority partner, the Labour Party) which came to power in 1973 and held office for four years with Liam T. Cosgrave as Taoiseach, participated fully in EEC affairs despite the fact that Britain and Ireland were ostensibly in serious dispute over the territory of the six Northern counties. The contrast with earlier years when Ireland had refused to join NATO because of partition and had used the Council of Europe as an arena for the airing of national grievances was stark indeed. The Republic certainly arraigned the UK before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for breaches of human rights in the operation of internment without trial in Northern Ireland, but declined to press the national question vigorously, willingly accepting the ill-fated Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 which sought a settlement largely within the six-county context. (The Agreement involved a power-sharing executive in a devolved administration in Belfast and a Council of Ireland to reflect an all-Ireland dimension, all of which collapsed in June 1974, after near-rebellion among the unionist population of Northern Ireland.)
The Northern conflict therefore did not stimulate major ideological redirection in the Republic. Thoughout a decade of violence and political vacuum in the six counties, the Southern state maintained its commitment to economic and social progress, apparently ignoring when it could the commotion at its doorstep. It was not of course that the Republic simply averted its gaze from the Northern struggle, lured by the dazzle of consumerism and material wellbeing. Decades of experience of independence in the Irish Free State and in the Republic of Ireland had given a reality to the state of a very substantial kind indeed. The great mass of the citizens of the Republic knew only loyalty to that state, its courts, armed forces, and administration. The challenge posed by the Northern Catholic minority’s sharp disaffection from the political existence of Northern Ireland (which became clearer as the decade proceeded, especially after the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement) with its implication that a new political order must be achieved on the island as a whole, was inevitably met by the inertia of a people disinclined to consider the radical restructuring of the state to which they gave their whole loyalty. For the possibilities of a new, united Ireland were insubstantial when set against the reality of a state that had known, in its several forms, more than fifty years of independent existence. Despite this fact, however, it was as a possible national apostasy that the Northern issue was often raised in the flood of debate, discussion, and heart-searching that the Northern conflict stimulated. Was it the case, such discussion often pondered, that Ireland at the greatest moment of challenge had cast away her birthright of pure, undefiled nationalist republicanism for a mess of pottage? Was it the case that when the issue of reunification became for once a real one, the Republic preferred to look the other way and to proceed with business as usual – in the EEC, in trade with the UK, welcoming British tourists, refusing to confront the British government in too direct a fashion, adopting at moments an unworthy ambivalence of word and action in relation to conflicting ideological imperatives?32
In the babble of voices raised to discuss Irish identity in the 1970s, earnest to discuss how and to what degree Ireland should assert her traditional nationalism and republicanism, none perhaps managed to reach such a wide audience as that of the writer, playwright, historian, diplomat, and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. Most of this discussion, which absorbed a good deal of Irish intellectual life in the decade, took place in learned periodicals, in small magazines, and in the features and letter columns of the Irish Times and the Irish Press. Cruise O’Brien, partly because of his position as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the coalition government, partly because of his international reputation, and partly because of the suave almost pedantic pleasure he took in arousing controversy, managed to bring the debate about Irish nationalism out of the domain of intellectual discussion and into the arena of public controversy.
Cruise O’Brien’s central thesis, propounded in newspaper articles, journal essays, public lectures, television appearances, and in his book States of Ireland (1972), was that Ireland’s ideological ambivalence on the issue of partition was altogether too dangerous a self-indulgence for the citizens of the Republic in a period when a full-scale Irish civil war threatened. Ireland, he argued, faced by the ideological challenge of the Northern conflict, should abandon an ambivalence that gave heart and encouragement to men of violence for a frank recognition that the republican nationalism of the first decades of independence was based on a seriously deficient analysis of the Irish problem and an all too literary view of history.
The chief deficiency in republican nationalist orthodoxy,33 in Cruise O’Brien’s view, was that it failed to take sufficient account of the depth and nature of Northern unionist antagonism to any threat of incorporation by their Southern neighbours. Orthodox republican nationalism had always asserted that partition was an unnatural British imposition on a nation which God and history had intended to be one. The division of the country perhaps represented differences within the nation, but if the British presence was removed, these differences would swiftly and easily be resolved. Until that happy date Northern unionists, however, would continue to support the link with Britain because it guaranteed them certain privileges as against the nationalists in the six counties (the name Northern Ireland was strictly eschewed) which they would not enjoy in a united country. When Britain finally decided to quit the country, unionists would quickly come to their senses and make the best settlement possible with their fellow countrymen. To confirm the republican in this latter conviction, ideologues had frequently invoked the years leading to the 1798 Rebellion when “staunch Presbyterians” had joined together to form the United Irishmen to rise in rebellion against the British crown.34 Such people had once recognized their obligation to play a part in the history of the Irish nation, and their descendants would do so again. The Northern unionists were at present rendered incapable of recognizing that their own best interests lay in unity with their fellow Irishmen and women, because the British presence gave them a permanent guarantee that their position was unassailable. Most Irish people since 1922 had been content to see diplomatic persuasion as the most appropriate weapon to employ against the British to compel them to leave Ireland, thereby allowing the unionists the opportunity to come to their senses. A small minority had consistently reckoned that military force applied against the British occupation of Ireland would hasten the process wonderfully. Cruise O’Brien forcefully argued throughout the 1970s that neither activity was likely to prove successful. The Northern unionists, he insisted, would, in circumstances of either diplomatic or military defeat of what they regarded as their essential interests, be unlikely to “come to their senses” in precisely the manner envisaged in the republican nationalist faith. They could pose a fearsome threat to the stability of the island as a whole.
Accordingly, one of Cruise O’Brien’s concerns throughout the decade was to administer what he believed were the sharp doses of realism necessary to cure the chronic low-level fantasy induced by nationalist ideology. In this respect he echoed earlier men of letters, George Russell and Seán O’Faoláin, who had challenged ideological dogma in similar fashion. They too had directed Irish attention to aspects of Irish reality which could not be contained within the framework of the dominant ideology. Russell denied the simplicities of the Irish Irelanders through an appeal to the cultural vitality of Anglo-Ireland. O’Faoláin denied the continuity of Irish nationalist history through a sustained reflection on the meaning of Daniel O’Connell’s career and the tradition he established. Both of them in the Irish Statesman and the Bell had, respectively, tried to challenge nationalist complacency about the six counties by allowing Northern news and opinion space in their columns. Cruise O’Brien was better placed to argue his case than his predecessors and was rewarded with more success. Not only did he hold public office, with all the opportunities that gave him for public statement, but he was able to propound this thesis in a period when television reportage was providing the population of the Republic with a greater sense of the political realities of Northern Ireland than they had hitherto possessed. Cruise O’Brien could argue that Northern unionists were unlikely to agree to reunification with ready gratitude upon Britain’s departure, while the Reverend Ian Paisley, almost nightly on the nation’s television screens, provided compelling evidence of the substance of Cruise O’Brien’s thesis. Russell and O’Faoláin had challenged the impalpabilities of ideology with impalpable arguments about culture. They had, it is true, tried to create a sense of the distinctiveness of the Northern counties and of the reality of the Southern state in their journalism, but this had neither the force nor the mass audience of the television image. Cruise O’Brien, as the poet Seamus Heaney remarked, was therefore instrumental in the 1970s in creating “some kind of clarity in Southerners’ thinking about the Protestant community in the North. And it is not enough for people to simply say ‘Ah, they’re all Irishmen,’ when some Northerners actually spit at the word Irishmen. There is in O’Brien a kind of obstinate insistence on facing up to this kind of reality, which I think is his contribution.”35 And the response of many in the Republic was akin to that of W. B. Yeats when he remarked to Lady Gregory (as she records in her Journal) of the inhabitants of the North and of their politics, “I have always been of the opinion that if such disagreeable neighbours shut the door, it is better to turn the key in it before they change their mind.”
The historian John A. Murphy provided a very just assessment of this aspect of Cruise O’Brien’s contribution to Irish debate in the period:
From the outbreak of the Northern troubles up to 1972 when he published States of Ireland or perhaps up to 1973 when he took up political office, Dr. Cruise O’Brien with characteristic pungency and courage, masterfully exposed the woolliness of Southern attitudes towards Northern Ireland and in particular the ambivalence of Southern thinking – or more accurately, feeling – about the Provisional IRA. Because he compelled people to make uncomfortable reappraisals of emotions cosily and lazily cherished, he incurred considerable personal and political hostility. He performed, then, a very great public service which will one day be appreciated as such.36
Cruise O’Brien combined his assault on the simplicities of traditional positions on Northern Ireland with a critique of republican nationalist historiography. Like O’Faoláin before him he was dubious of that ideology’s vision of an indestructible, historic, predestinate nation that had achieved its apotheosis in the 1916 Rising. O’Faoláin in the Bell had been the first to mount a sustained critique of this conception, but concurrent with the celebrations of the anniversary year of 1966, and in subsequent years of reassessments, revisionist essays began to appear fairly frequently in Irish periodicals, newspapers, and scholarly journals. A sense that the social reality of contemporary Ireland scarcely reflected the aspirations of the revolutionary martyrs of 1916 provoked “articles of a speculative kind concerned with the question of how Ireland would have developed without 1916 and whether, considering everything, the rising comes out as a positive good.”37 The veneration accorded Patrick Pearse, whose memorials in the first four decades of independence amounted almost to a cult and whose memory had been kept fresh in the National Schools, began to be questioned openly. In 1972 Studies published an extended essay by the Reverend Professor Francis Shaw, SJ (until his death in December 1970 professor of early and medieval Irish at University College, Dublin), entitled “The Canon of Irish History – A Challenge.” The article had been prepared in 1966 but was withheld by the editor, who recognized that it challenged the interpretation of Irish history which had justified the revolutionary violence of 1916, celebrated in that year. Shaw found that interpretation neither “Christian” nor “truly patriotic.” He focussed his attack on Pearse, the Pearse cult, and “a canon of history which has come into being, has been carefully fostered and was newly consecrated in the massive state-inspired and state-assisted Commemoration in 1966.”38
Shaw in his essay criticized both Pearse’s political philosophy and his actions. He argued that Pearse had anathematized the majority of the Irish people as national apostates in a most arrogant and intolerant fashion, banishing them from the canon of Irish history. Pearse had established a heretical pseudo-religious nationalist creed in his identification of revolutionary self-sacrifice with Christ’s crucifixion, as he had created a gospel of hate. He had been all too ready to transform the Gaelic League, with its broad-minded social vision, into a revolutionary political vanguard, thereby, in Shaw’s view, sacrificing its cultural life on the altar of the “terrible beauty” of 1916. Finally, he argued, – as his essay reveals the core of his true feelings – Pearse had had little understanding of the historical Irish nation. His proclamation of “seven centuries of solid and unbroken military resistance,” the “accepted backdrop to the drama of Irish history”39 was a terrible perversion of the “Irish national consciousness,” which “was more subtle, more spiritual and, I am glad to say, more peaceful.”40
Shaw quite clearly had a sense of Irish history which would allow a greater role for the Catholic church and the orthodox piety and obedience of the faithful over the centuries than “the canon” would allow. His revisionism had, therefore, a polemical, tendentious air which reduced its force. Implicit throughout, however, was a humane repugnance for the fact that canonical historical understanding in Ireland should have cast aside as irrelevant to the nation’s story so many Irishmen and women and should have elevated to sacred heights only those few who rose in violence against the oppressor. That history in Ireland should be simply a narrative of sacred, repeated events culminating in the violence of the Rising was for Shaw a travesty of historical imagining.
The canon of history of which I speak stamps the generation of 1916 as nationally degenerate, a generation in need of redemption by the shedding of blood. It honours one group of Irishmen by denying honour to others whose merit is not less. In effect it teaches that only the Fenians and the separatists had the good of their country at heart, that all others were either deluded or in one degree or another sold out to the enemy. This canon moulds the broad course of Irish history to a narrow pre-conceived pattern; it tells a story which is false and without foundation.41
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s assault on official republican nationalist history in the 1970s was essentially similar to that of Shaw, though executed with more subtlety and literary skill. Perhaps beneath its subtlety, it too was tendentious for after 1973, as a member of the Labour Party in coalition with Fine Gael, he had immediate reasons to direct Irish historical consciousness away from the orthodox doctrines of republicanism which were most particularly the ideological inheritance of Fianna Fáil. Be that as it may, Cruise O’Brien, like Shaw, distinguished history proper from the essentially “literary current in Irish history”42 which is suffused with romanticism, an altogether dangerous infection in the body politic. It was such a literary version of Irish history that generated the 1916 Rising (Cruise O’Brien made much of the way in which in the period leading to the Rising literature and life intertwined), and it continued to inspire desperate deeds. He wrote:
To minds that are possessed by that idea of sacrifice it is irrelevant to prove that a campaign like the current IRA campaign, for example, cannot possibly accomplish any desirable political objective. That can be demonstrated, it can be quite logically and clearly demonstrated, but it doesn’t matter. The objective is to become part of “history” in the abstract or mythological sense, to achieve immortality by getting oneself killed for Ireland’s sake. That the actual people of Ireland, in their overwhelming humdrum majority, want no such sacrifice is also irrelevant, having no other effect than to cause the people in question to disappear from “Irish history” which in every generation consists of the doings and sayings of the martyrs.43
As a government minister Cruise O’Brien set his face against all those aspects of Irish popular culture which carried an infection that presented itself as “unhealthy intersection” between literature and politics. The patriotic ballad, the commemorative speech, the public veneration of the nationalist dead all seemed to fall under his increasingly severe interdict. As a result, even those who were willing to grant the substance of his views on the Northern question found it impossible to stomach his iconoclastic handling of national sentiment. John A. Murphy was representative of a good deal of opinion when, having praised Cruise O’Brien for his stand on Northern Ireland, he continued in his article of 1977:
He concentrates his attack on the excesses of nationalism and the ambivalences indubitably inherent in Irish nationalist attitudes but in so doing he indicts the whole nationalist population and especially anyone who articulates a unity aspiration. His attack on nationalism is a stalking-horse for an assault on nationality itself.44
Murphy sensed that the resentment Cruise O’Brien aroused “may have been linked with an intuitive popular feeling that he had begun to challenge the basis of Irish nationality itself.”45 There were those too who felt his sympathy for the Northern unionist position (later expressed in his support of the United Kingdom Unionist Party), which may have had its sources in a wish to protect stability on the island as a whole, was a betrayal of the nationalist minority in the North.
What was intellectually depressing about the revisionism propounded by Conor Cruise O’Brien in the 1970s was its unhistorical quality. What Cruise O’Brien believed was a false view of history, dangerous insomuch as it stimulated a current campaign of violence the only outcome of which would be civil war he challenged by speculation of a curiously unhistorical kind. Implicit throughout Cruise O’Briens’s writings in the 1970s was the suggestion that Ireland would have achieved as much as it had, had the Easter Rising of 1916 not taken place, had that “unhealthy intersection” between literature and politics not been fabricated. A mind capable of severity and stringency on other matters became markedly self-indulgent on this issue. The reasons why, in the context of the imperial maladministration of nineteenth-century Ireland, a myth of the indestructibility of the Irish nation, of the seamless garment of Irish historical continuity had developed, why indeed nationalist historiography had become dominated by a sense of the repetitive successes and failures of the patriotic struggle, were almost entirely ignored. The fact that these developments had causes of quite specific kinds46 and could not simply be talked or legislated away was not sufficiently implicit in his words or actions.
Writing in 1971, Liam de Paor reflected on the “new period of Irish history” that he sensed beginning about him – “a time of troubles because it is a time of accelerated change. The myths with which – whether we accepted them or not – we have lived for many decades have suddenly ceased to have the appearance of life and are assuming the faded look of old photographs.”47 One such myth, he felt, was the tradition “that took its form from nationalism, and was expressed in a cycle of hope, failure, apathy and renewed hope, or to put it another way, of illusion, disillusion, cynicism and renewed illusion.” This was a dialectic which was suited “to a history of the dispossessed.”48 The “touch of affluence” that the 1960s had brought, de Paor asserted, “had broken the chain” – Ireland was in need of a new historical myth. As new social and economic circumstances began to loosen the hold of old ideologies on the minds of Irish people, readily accepting the new national imperative of economic growth, Cruise O’Brien’s persistent debunking of the old historical myth was scarcely what was needed. Indeed, it may have been his paradoxical fate to have protracted the life of a geriatric ideology somewhat beyond its natural span, so objectionable did many find his attacks upon a respected ancestor. He perhaps helped keep its faded photograph in the frame. Happily some of what was needed in a changing Ireland was in fact beginning to be provided.
From the late 1930s onward the writing of history in Ireland had undergone a quiet revolution.49 From that period, building on the work of a very few predecessors, Irish historians set themselves the task of exploring their country’s past without palpable design upon their readers. In 1938, as we saw, the scholarly journal Irish Historical Studies was first published, and over forty years, guided by its editors, it offered a focus for careful, scientific historical research. One of its editors, Professor T. W. Moody, in a valedictory lecture in 1977 at Trinity College, Dublin, spoke of the role history should play in Irish life. It should be, he stated, “a continuing, probing critical search for truth about the past.”50 The degree to which this history should be distinguished from the “canon” of Irish history extirpated by Professor Shaw in his Studies article is evident when Moody isolates the notion of myth as “received views” which must give way before “the knowledge that the historian seeks to extract by the application of scientific methods to his studies.”51 When that occurs, such myths as the predestinate nation must evaporate since they are “incompatible with the history of social living in the modern Ireland.” Moody in this lecture is certainly naive about the cultural and political neutrality of such “scientific” inquiry in every circumstance, but the note he strikes does reflect the patient, sane balance that characterized the historiographical revolution in Ireland. By the late 1960s and the early 1970s that revolution had laid sufficient groundwork for the publication of a number of synthetic studies of modern Irish history to become possible. Such works as Louis Cullen’s Life in Ireland (1968) and An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660 (1972) and F. S. L. Lyons’s Ireland Since the Famine (1971) represented cultural developments in Ireland of a more crucial kind than all the raised voices debating national identity in that decade. So too was the fact that younger historians in the Irish universities could produce in the Gill paperback History of Ireland series, notable for its analytic vigour, a series of short introductions to various periods. Finally, Irish history in the period determined that it had come of age when, under the aegis of the Royal Irish Academy and directed at the outset by Professors T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, Irish historians embarked upon a nine-volume history of the country. To date seven volumes and a number of compilations of historical statistics have appeared.
This historiographical revolution, a major fact of modern Irish intellectual and cultural history, began to bear its fruit in Irish schools52 and in the Irish mass media. Initially, a sense grew among Irish history teachers throughout the 1960s that history teaching required renovation. The Department of Education proved receptive to new thought, and the Secondary School Curriculum in History was revised in the 1960s to emphasize social and cultural aspects of the country’s past. Such an emphasis replaced the approach which for forty years had been represented by an influential school textbook by Mary Hayden and George A. Moonan, A Short History of the Irish People, which was written “from a frankly national standpoint” and had organized its chronicle-like narrative around an understanding of the birth, growth, and maturity of a historic Irish nation. Irish publishers produced new textbooks, and these offered to pupils in Irish schools a sense of the complex social and cultural make-up of their country in its European context. The new history reached wider audiences, too, through radio and television broadcasts. The Thomas Davis Lecture series on the national radio service (the first was broadcast in 1953) regularly presented Irish historians’ new findings on the distant and recent past. In 1974, RTE broadcast a series of television lectures entitled A Question of Identity which addressed itself to the historical strands which comprise the Irish nation. And in 1977 the major six-part RTE television series The Heritage of Ireland presented a vision of the country as a complicated mosaic of cultures and social forces, utterly remote from the simplicities of earlier, more ideologically committed, versions of the national story.
The 1970s, when secondary school education became the norm, was the period when the historiographic revolution (referred to in public debate as “revisionism”) began to make itself felt in the schools. In the 1980s and ’90s many young people educated in this period became opinion-formers in Ireland, at a time when the Irish state began a full-scale attempt to resolve the Northern question. The subtle nationalism the political class and the mass media brought to this task may have been due in part to the historiographical revolution and the dissemination of its approach in the secondary schools, as well as in the universities in the 1970s. That it had real purchase on the Irish mentalité was certainly evidenced in the degree to which the question of “revisionism” became, as we shall see, hotly debated in the 1990s, when voices were raised to protest that it was in fact a reactionary phenomenon, inhibiting radical change and sustaining the status quo.
For the church, too, in Ireland the 1960s and ’70s were years of debate and adaptation. From the late 1950s onward it was recognized that the social and economic changes afoot in the country would present great challenges to the faith of the people and to the church herself. In such intellectual Catholic periodicals as the Furrow (which began publication in 1950), Doctrine and Life (which began publication in 1951), and Christus Rex (a periodical which had started life in 1947 and then interested itself in social matters from a Catholic point of view), articles appeared which, partly in the wake of the changes in Catholicism abroad, and partly in response to the evident changes in Irish society, began to express concern at the intellectual poverty of modern Irish Catholicism. In 1957 Father Denis Meehan, professor of divinity and classics at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, asked in an article entitled “An Essay in Self-Criticism,” “Has the Irish influence in the English-speaking Church been anti-intellectual, or at best unintellectual?”53 In 1959 an essay in Doctrine and Life stated the matter more directly:
Too many people in Ireland today are trying to make do with a peasant religion when they are no longer peasants any more. We are a growing and developing middle-class nation, acquiring a middle-class culture and we must have a religion to fit our needs.54
This was a theme that was to recur in the intellectual Catholic periodicals as the 1960s progressed, particularly after the Second Vatican Council. It was argued in various critical articles that Irish Catholicism had played a crucial role in the past as an element in Irish national identity, but that this could change dramatically in the new Ireland that was developing, with serious effects on the religious life of the people. A writer in the Furrow in 1962 struck the note:
As a nation we must take the whole question of education much more seriously than has been the case up to date. The challenge of the Common Market and the need for secular education if we are to survive as a nation is awakening our people to the need for more schools, better schools, and better trained teachers, but there is an equal need to face up to the challenge of the growth of contemporary paganism to our Christian heritage.55
It was feared by a number of thoughtful clergy and laity that the traditionally unintellectual faith of the Irish would be incapable of withstanding full exposure to the ideas, culture, and secularism of contemporary Europe. This small but developing Catholic intelligentsia realized that the expedients of the past employed to protect the faithful from the incursions of dangerous thought – censorship and authoritarian control – would be inadequate dykes against the incoming tide and that they had in fact been responsible for the intellectual deficiencies of Irish Catholicism which made the faithful so vulnerable in their new circumstances. In 1959 Father Peter Connolly, professor of English at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, published a critique of the censorship policy in Ireland. An eminently balanced discussion of a Catholic view of censorship, his essay reflects the author’s impatience with the local interpretation of Catholic teaching on the matter and his hope that a Catholic intelligentsia might emerge able to respond critically to the challenges and insights of modern Irish and European literature:
A society should not be bereft of the salutary criticism of some of its own most passionately aware members, and the reaction to many of the literary bans is harmful – a cynicism about the Act and contempt for Censorship in general. The novels and the new ideas will seep through in any case but into a negative atmosphere in which the sense of intellectual adventure has gone stale and embittered. This is an aspect of the common good which we might reconsider at greater length particularly if the problem of an intellectual Catholic elite is one which faces us in Ireland today.56
Father Connolly’s contribution to this problem was to publish critical essays on banned books and films which took them seriously as works of art. He was joined in this enterprise by Reverend John C. Kelly, SJ, spiritual director at Belvedere College, Dublin, who wrote film criticism for the Furrow and in 1961 contributed an essay entitled “The Modern Novels and Christian Values” to Doctrine and Life. In this essay Father Kelly argued that the Christian has much to learn from the modern novel and, piquant irony indeed, employed the work of James Joyce – an ex-pupil of Belvedere College who had epitomized for many the diabolism of corrupt literature – as grist to his critical mill.
In 1964 Father Connolly put on record his views on the ways to combat censorship in Ireland:
The real aim of whatever articles I published…was to bypass the kind of anti-censorship wars which…in my opinion, are wholly outmoded. Carried on valiantly by the Bell writers in the forties those wars had pushed “liberal” littérateurs and conservative Irish readers farther and farther apart and pinned them down on extreme wings. It was time to try something else. This formula was to offer positive appreciations of contemporary films and books which would simply ignore polemics about our censorship. It would demonstrate to Irish readers that in face of modern novels or films of whatever kind it was not necessary to bury one’s head in the sand or, on the other hand, to sacrifice one jot of moral principle…we hoped for a gradual growth of the climate of opinion which would make a juvenile standard of censorship – though not all censorship – untenable.57
Michael Adams has suggested that Father Connolly’s article in Christus Rex did “much to clarify the ideas of Catholics on the censorship question.”58 Certainly within five years the Minister for Justice was able to liberalize the workings of the law in relation to the censorship of films without much controversy, and in 1967 the same minister, Brian Lenihan, introduced a bill in the Dáil which would allow the removal of a ban from a book after a period of twenty years. During the Dáil debate this period was reduced to twelve years. As Adams reports, “In one grand gesture over 5,000 titles were released from limbo.” Many of these were the works by Irish writers which had so offended against earlier conceptions of the moral order, and from that date they became freely available in Irish bookshops and libraries. So ended a sorry chapter in modern Irish cultural history.
Priests like Fathers Connolly and Kelly hoped that a Catholic elite would emerge, able, as Ireland became open to all the currents of modern culture, to respond with an informed critical discrimination to the major works of modern literature. To an extent their hopes were realized. Since the 1960s a generation of young Irish scholars and critics in the universities (many with a Catholic social formation) began to produce a criticism of modern literature. In 1966 the periodical University Review (which had been founded in 1954 as the official organ of the Graduates’ Association of the National University of Ireland and had published since then occasional essays by Irish academic critics on Irish writing) published a special Yeats edition, marking a milestone in the development of a modern critical literature on Irish writing in English emanating from the universities.
Like the historiographical revolution, this quiet change in intellectual life in Ireland was a work of consolidation on the foundations built by a few pioneers. Among these were such scholars of an earlier generation as Professors Roger McHugh, Lorna Reynolds, A. N. Jeffares, and Vivian Mercier, who had addressed themselves to the study of Anglo-Irish literature when the subject had not attracted the attention of the world in the way it has since done. The recognition that Irish writing in English was a field worthy of serious study was firmly established in the Irish universities. Young scholars and critics began the work of assessing their country’s recent literary past, concerned to see the Literary Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the literature of the independent state, in the contexts of modern letters and of Irish social and cultural history. Modern English, American, and Anglo-Irish literature began to be taught in each of the university departments of English and from the early 1970s figured in the curriculum in English in the secondary schools (a revision of the Leaving Certificate English syllabus in the secondary curriculum in the 1990s allowed for the comparative study of texts in their cultural settings, as well as for the study of film). The Association of Teachers of English with its periodical ATE was vigorous in its encouragement of an informed critical awareness among its members, drawing on the teaching profession itself and on the universities for essays and articles and for lectures at its annual conference. The Irish University Review regularly published critical essays and findings on Irish literature in English. Irish publishers began to publish works of criticism and scholarship on Irish literature in both English and Irish and were active in the production of anthologies and guides for the secondary schools. It became difficult therefore to pass through an Irish education without some experience of modern writing. Signs of interest were evident: the university departments of English attracted numerous well-qualified applicants; small journals and the newspaper literary pages reflected a wider and more informed knowledge of modern writing than in the days when the Irish Statesman, the Bell and Envoy tried to remind the public of the very existence of such works; radio and television programmes regularly dealt with literary matters in discussion, features, and dramatic adaptations of modern Irish writing. What all this activity meant was that a wider segment of educated opinion in the country was informed about current literature than could have been the case in the past, when censorship was rigorously in force and when universities and schools were antagonistic to the study of twentieth-century writing.
The main thrust of specifically Catholic thinking since the early 1960s had not, however, been literary, though the emergence of a generation of Irish critics and of teachers in the mainly Catholic secondary schools keen to assess and present modern literature could not be gainsaid.59 Nor indeed was it theological. Much of the intellectual energy of lay and clerical minds in the 1960s and ’70s was absorbed primarily by the sociology of religion. The recognition that Ireland was entering a phase of rapid urbanization and modernization spurred Catholic intellectuals to reflect on how religion fares in modern societies and on how Irish Catholicism should adapt to its new environment. To attempt adaptation without knowledge would, it was realized, risk shipwreck. Writing in 1964 in the Furrow, John A. Dowling warned of the
…ignorance, not only of the facts of Irish religious life, beliefs and sociological change-factors, but of the extent to which these are important and discoverable by modern scientific methods. We have for so long assumed that sociology is a philosophical discipline – merely using experimental data, open to all who are trained to observe – that the absolute intellectual dishonesty of basing judgements on “self-evident” opinions and “principles” escapes us in practice.60
It was in fact from the early 1960s that a marked change became evident in the intellectual Catholic periodicals towards an altogether more empirically based sociological concern than had existed hitherto. The problem, defined by David Thornley in 1966 in Doctrine and Life, “that religion is both a constant, inasmuch as it is an aspect of habit, and a variable, inasmuch as it is responsive to changing social and intellectual circumstances”61 became a principal focus of attention in Christus Rex (which in 1972 became Social Studies) and in other periodicals. Monsignor Jeremiah Newman (who was consecrated Bishop of Limerick in 1974) was perhaps the best known of the clergy who in the period confronted the sociological implications of secularization that seemed to attend urbanization almost everywhere in Europe. In 1971 in an article in Christus Rex, he outlined what he thought were the challenges Ireland faced:
…it would be realized that the Common Market countries contain at heart the greatest and most engulfing urban agglomeration that exists in the modern world. Ireland’s entry into the Common Market would bring us face to face with this colossus and its way of life.62
Monsignor Newman argued in this essay that the greatest challenge of the decade would be in “the sociocultural sphere” to
…construct a new culture in a new context, a culture that will at once be new and relevant in that context and at the same time preserve the best of the old. It means a culture that will be considerably industrial yet without losing what is of lasting value in our rural social fabric. It means a culture that will be considerably international yet without parting with what is of value in our national heritage. It means a culture that will be considerably secular yet without losing our religious persuasions. Our beliefs, it is true, will be less structurally supported, less sociologically conditioned, but they will also be more personal. Our religious vocations will be less institutionally funnelled, less conditioned by employment possibilities, but they will be all the more consciously elected for that.63
The sociological investigations of the 1970s tended to confirm Bishop Newman’s prognostications. Increased secular opportunities in all probability accounted for the decline in vocations that was noted by researchers. As early as 1966 David Thornley had calculated that however much the Irish church had anticipated urbanization through the establishment of new city parishes and a church-building programme, the demographic developments of modern Ireland were already placing enormous strains on an overburdened clergy. He noted that in 1966 with “4,028 secular and 1,912 regular priests the ratio of clergy to population was 1:707 as compared to a ratio of 1:830 in France,”64 which bespoke a fairly satisfactory state of affairs. But, he argued, “in certain areas of Ireland there are actually too few priests.”65 The diocese of Dublin appeared peculiarly bereft of the ministrations of the priesthood where the ratio was 1:1,340. So the swift development of Dublin was bound to place serious strains on the church’s manpower. Thornley estimated that a decree of one of the Maynooth Synods, which bound every parish priest or his curates to visit each family in his parish once a year, might involve a scrupulous observer of ecclesiastical directives in one of the large Dublin parishes in 2,000 visits a year.
Two studies66 carried out by the Irish Episcopal Commission for Research and Development in the 1970s clearly showed that in the new Ireland of diverse economic opportunities for young men and women the church’s manpower problems could not easily be met. Between 1966 and 1974 vocations to the priesthood and religious life declined from 1,409 in 1966 to 547 in 1974. While the greatest reductions had occurred in vocations to communities of nuns and brothers (declining between 1966 and 1978 by 70 percent and 83 percent respectively), recruits to the diocesan priesthood had also dropped by 31 percent. Between 1975 and 1979, however, vocations to the secular priesthood rose slightly. A new feature in Irish social life was the small, but in the Irish context scarcely insignificant, number of priests seeking laicization. In both 1966 and 1967 only one diocesan priest was laicized. In 1971 there were ten such and in 1975 twenty, though by 1978 the figure had dropped to nine. Research among secondary school-leavers in 196967 found that a surprising 80 percent had considered the religious life, but that 54 percent had decided against it, while 20 percent had postponed the decision. The reasons these school-leavers gave for their rejection of a religious life were the severity of the oath of celibacy and the distractions of the secular, consumer society. The figure of 80 percent had dropped to 46 percent, or by almost a half in 1974.68 A sociologist writing in 1979 reckoned that if the trends of the 1970s continued, and he saw no reason why they should not do so, “the number of those in the priesthood and religious life in Ireland will decrease by a third, to less than 20,000 in the next twenty-five years.”69 The dramatic decline in vocations to the religious orders was reflected in the decreasing involvement of such persons in the Irish educational system, which in the 1970s allowed for a much higher lay profile in the pedagogical sphere. By 1979 only 2,300 out of 10,830 secondary teachers were religious, in schools owned in many cases by the religious orders themselves. There were only 370 priests and brothers still teaching in the National Schools.70
Research also confirmed that religious belief, particularly among the well-educated young, had begun to be experienced less as an all-embracing reality within which life must be ordered and as an immutable aspect of Irish national identity than as a personal expression of individual commitments and values. The four-volume “Survey of Religious Practice, Attitudes and Belief” found in 1973–74 that although 90 percent of the Catholic population still attended mass at least once a week, 25 percent of single men and women in the 18–30 age-group had forsaken this religious obligation altogether, while 30 percent of those aged 21–25 had done so. Research among university students in Dublin in 1976 also tended to suggest that the younger generation of Irish men and women had much less homogeneous attitudes to their faith than had often been assumed of Irish people in the past. A sociologist summarizing his findings in this research concluded that “the Christian orientation which emerged…is essentially an inner-worldly humanistic perspective.”71 A striking fact was that “one in every seven respondents who was brought up as a Roman Catholic no longer regards himself/herself as such.”72 The strong humanitarian orientation of Irish students’ religious faith prompted the writer to question:
Is this evidence that Catholicism among students is losing its supernatural referent and becoming a secularized civil ethic? In other words, although the majority of Catholic students still see themselves primarily as Christians, is this becoming compartmentalized into a religious belief and practice which does not permeate the rest of their daily lives?73
Evidence that such was the case was provided by the attitudes of university students to the moral teaching of the church on sexual ethics. Less than one in five of all the respondents to the questionnaire in the 1976 survey believed sex before marriage to be always wrong (44 percent of Catholics seeing exceptions to the general rule) while 58 percent of the Catholic students questioned on the matter thought contraception morally acceptable.74 In this respect Irish students were merely reflecting in an extreme form the attitudes of Irish Catholics in general in the period. For despite the Irish hierarchy’s affirmation of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), the Survey of 1973–74 cited above had found that 28 percent of Catholics saw contraception as “generally wrong but permissible in certain circumstances.” More critically, in the age-group most likely to be most concerned by the church’s proscription of artificial contraceptives, those of 18–30 years of age, 49 percent of men and 45 percent of women thought it not only morally acceptable but sometimes a responsibility.
Such figures clearly suggested that Bishop Newman’s prophecy that Irish society would be “considerably secular” in the future was soundly based. A major proportion of the younger generation was prepared in the 1970s to base its moral perception on things other than the church’s official teachings. It is true that Catholics in Ireland were aware that the hierarchies of other countries applied the papal teachings on artificial contraception with less rigour than they were applied in Ireland, but attitudes were also being formed throughout the 1970s by secular, liberal views of individual morality.
In fact much of the pressure for change of the law forbidding the importation of contraceptives came from a small but vocal minority of women who espoused the doctrines of the women’s liberation movement (founded, as we saw, in 1970). The Commission on the Status of Women had given Irish feminists much ammunition since it revealed how little Ireland had adapted its legal system to accommodate the rising expectations of women in employment and in the home. Since 1972, therefore, the issue of women’s rights was consistently debated as women served notice through various action groups that legal restrictions on their freedom of action would no longer be tolerated.75 Church teaching, with its emphasis on the virtue of motherhood, had been buttressed by the constitutional affirmation of 1937 that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” Legal force to such pious expression had been effected by a marriage bar in the Civil Service and in local authorities and health boards, which meant that upon marriage a woman resigned from her post. In 1977 the Employment Equality Act made such restrictions on married women in employment illegal. This act represented a major victory by the women’s movement in a continuing struggle that challenged the social and religious values traditionally propounded by church and state.
The right of married couples to plan their families by whatever methods they choose was established in a constitutional test case taken by a mother, a Mrs. Mary Magee, in 1972 to the Supreme Court. In 1973 four of the five judges found the constitution’s clause protecting privacy infringed by that section of the law which prohibited the importation of contraceptives even for private use by married persons. More dramatically than any other event in the 1970s, this legal case (in which Mrs. Magee was supported by the Irish Family Planning Association) demonstrated that the state would be required to adapt to a changing society where conflicting values were reflected in differing attitudes on moral and social issues. Following the Supreme Court’s judgment, a period of intense debate ensued in which the contraception issue became a wearisome, occasionally near-surreal, topic of newspaper letter, article, and report. There were those demanding complete freedom from any legal proscription on contraceptives and those, the indefatigable correspondent Miss Mary Kennedy of the Irish Family League at their head, who appeared to hope an absolute ban could be enforced despite the court’s judgment. The fear that contraceptive legislation would be followed by demands for an abolition of the constitutional proscription on divorce was often expressed, and it was argued that abortion would be a subsequent issue on the liberal agenda. And certainly such fears were not groundless. Following the enactment of a Fianna Fáil bill in July 1979, after years of protracted political pusillanimity, which allowed for the sale of contraceptives to married persons in chemists’ shops on prescription, vigorous demands that the state should recognize the increasingly alarming facts of Irish marital breakdown began to be heard. But the fact that several thousand young women from Ireland each year sought abortions in the United Kingdom did not at that time produce any significant vocal support for a change in the law in that regard.76
The hierarchy responded to the new social context in which it found itself in two ways. First, faced by the particular legal quandary of the Magee case, it cautiously let it be known in 1976 that the state was not bound to enforce “the principles peculiar to our faith” on “people who do not adhere to that faith.” The way was cleared thereby for the state to enact legislation which would allow those married persons who claimed the right to use contraceptives to do so, so that the Supreme Court’s constitutional judgment could be respected. But the hierarchy had prepared for this legal outcome by issuing in 1975 its pastoral letter Human Life is Sacred, which argued strenuously against what it termed “the contraceptive mentality” that “contradicts the Christian understanding of family life”77 and is a product of modern idolatry in which “money, alcohol, drugs and sex are being given a place and a status in modern secular society which is not too different from the place occupied by the gods of money, wine and sex in pagan times.”78 The Fianna Fáil government act of 1979, which regularized the legal position on contraception, bringing it in line with the Magee judgment, showed, undoubtedly, that the government had taken due account of such ecclesiastical opinion.
Second and more generally, the hierarchy and the church as a whole throughout the 1970s committed itself to religious renewal in the country. The religious curriculum in National Schools was radically revised to bring it in line with the assumptions and methods of the new curriculum introduced by the Department of Education in 1971. Bible study was encouraged at the personal and parish level, as was greater participation by congregations in the liturgical life of the church, expressed since the Second Vatican Council in the vernacular languages. Individual bishops and clergy gave enthusiastic support to a lively charismatic movement.79
Hierarchical commitment to religious renewal, grounded as it was in the sociological evidence of the 1970s that Catholic Ireland was scarcely immune to the secularizing tendencies of modern industrial society, was of course reflected most dramatically in the statements issued in preparation for a papal visit of 1979, and possibly in the papal pronouncements themselves. In both these Ireland was called upon to remain steadfast to the old faith, loyal to the Holy See and papal teaching. The traditional means of grace were commended to the people, the lapsed and careless were recalled to their obligations, the historical destiny of the Irish as a Christian and missionary people was reaffirmed, the young were especially challenged to the life of faith, and the evils of secularism and materialism were roundly condemned. Throughout the papal visit itself a sense that the church saw Ireland at a crossroads gave to the occasion an aura of remarkable historical significance. An almost evangelical awareness that for Ireland the hour of decision had struck dominated the few days at the end of September 1979 when Ireland welcomed a Pope for the first time.
If the hierarchy’s response to the rapid changes of the 1970s in Ireland was a major commitment to renewal in the hope that Ireland in the 1980s would remain a devoutly Catholic nation, there were those who doubted whether such was possible or even desirable. Voices were raised to question if the Christian message was not devalued by too close an association with any political or social order. It was suggested that the challenge of the modern secular world, increasingly an influence on Irish life, might enforce upon Christians of all denominations a new awareness of the radical nature of their faith and of the need for ecumenicism. The concept of pluralism was introduced to the intellectual Catholic periodicals and recommended as an appropriate mode of thought for understanding the role of church and state in a modern society. For the Christian, a pluralist society was invoked as an opportunity for both witness and humility:
Christians will have to develop more fully the ability to live in tolerance and respect for people who do not share their beliefs. They must not experience these others as a threat to the Christian faith, but as an invitation to dialogue.80
Expressed in religious terms, pluralism in Ireland would mean that no longer would religious and national identity coalesce as directly as they had done in the past and that no church could lay claim to be the church of “the people.” New political and legal structures would be required to express such pluralist possibilities.
Churchmen who argued in this fashion were of course a very tiny minority,81 but they were nevertheless expressing in religious terms ideas that had achieved some currency since the 1960s in cultural and political matters as well. As early as 1964 Garret FitzGerald, later to become Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs in the coalition government of the 1970s and subsequently leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, had made a plea (in terms that would have warmed George Russell’s heart) for a recognition that “Irish people today are not the inheritors of a single, clear-cut traditional national philosophy that could serve as a touchstone by which to judge proposals affecting the future of our society.” Rather, Ireland was formed by the influence of “a number of…streams of thought, all of which have some place in our minds but have not been sorted out nor fused into a coherent and internally consistent philosophy.”82 In the 1970s others dwelled on this theme, and FitzGerald himself published perhaps the most detailed study of its implications for any future unified Irish state in his book Towards a New Ireland (1972). Politicians, since the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in 1969, had made regular obeisance to the concept of the diversity of cultural and religious traditions on the island, and in 1972 a referendum was held, largely in response to the Northern crisis, which allowed for the painless removal from the Irish Constitution of the clause which spoke of the special position of the Catholic church as “the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” The citizens of the Republic were perfectly willing to allow such a formal, if vague, expression of the association between national identity and Catholicism quietly to be forgotten.
In the 1970s the introduction of the concept of “pluralism” to Irish intellectual debate would certainly have seemed like a vindication to an earlier solitary thinker like George Russell, who, as we saw, had defended cultural diversity, as a national resource. And although the concept had not yet had the chance to “strike deep roots” in Irish awareness,83 there were certainly signs in the wind that an essentialist, exclusive conception of Irish identity (Catholic and Gaelic) that had absorbed the twenty-six county state for the first half century of its existence, was weakening its hold on social life and practice. In 1970 the hierarchy relaxed its ban on the attendance of the Catholic faithful at Trinity College, Dublin (in the past a symbol of ancien régime Ascendancy Protestantism), allowing the college thereafter to play a central role in the higher education of the nation’s young in a way that would have been unthinkable in an earlier generation (the Anglican college chapel there in time became a centre of ecumenical worship). And, at secondary level, Catholics and Protestants were mixing as they had not done before in modern times. The reduction in the Protestant population to about 4 percent (the product of low birth rates, emigration and the Catholic Church’s insistence that the offspring of mixed marriages must be raised as Catholics), meant that Protestant schools had places to spare. Catholic parents, especially in Dublin, were only too ready to avail themselves of such opportunities for their children. By the late 1970s 20 percent of pupils in what had become effectively religiously mixed schools were Catholic. As the sociologist Kurt Bowen, who reported on this development, observed:
Without discounting the class-based attraction of Protestant schools, which has always existed, I would argue that the recent growth in the number of Catholic applicants reflected their desire for a more secular education than that available in their own schools. With their diminished emphasis on denominational instruction and their religious mixture among teachers and pupils, Protestant secondary schools went a long way to meet this demand.84
Bowen also noted how in the 1970s the social isolation of Protestants was giving way, in both urban and rural settings, to cooperative activity in a wide variety of civil institutions, which had once been “almost exclusively Catholic in make-up.” He noted that “there seemed to be emerging among both Catholics and Protestants a new secular conviction that religious affiliation should not be a consideration in recreational and special interest activities not directly connected to their parish churches.”85 A further sign of a society attempting to find a way to deal with difference was the emergence of an appreciable demand for multidenominational primary education, with pilot projects inaugurated in the Dublin area at Marley Grange and Dalkey.
Yet even in the 1970s when these developments were taking place, no new conception of Irish identity was articulated to take account of difference with quite the same persuasive power with which the ideal of a nation free, Gaelic and Catholic had reinforced a dominant homogeneity since 1922. Cultural production in the period, to which we shall turn our attention in the next chapter, suggested a time of transition when no new image of Ireland as other than an economy seeking to modernize itself had achieved definitive form.