5 Rev. R. S. Devane S.J.

Fairly typical of the thinking that was to impel Ireland in a cultural direction contrary to its everyday reality was a once well-known Jesuit called R. S. Devane. Father Devane had an obsession with capturing and defining the essence of the Irish personality. He curiously (for a Catholic priest) seemed to be possessed of – or by – a characteristic that Patrick Kavanagh would elsewhere define as a ‘Protestant’ affliction: the curse of those who, ‘doubting that their Irishness would ooze, have put it on from the outside’. This outlook, declared the poet, ‘is similar to the sentimental patriotism which takes pride – or pretends to take pride – in the Irishness of a horse that has won the Grand National, with the emphasis on the beast’s Irishness instead of its horsiness’.

In 1950, Fr Devane produced a pamphlet, ostensibly about the pernicious influence of the British media, entitled ‘The Imported Press’. He bemoaned the rising tide of British cultural forms – books, magazines, newspapers – ‘appealing to children, to youth, to our women, to all classes, supplying to them the same mental pabulum as is supplied to the “Great British Public”, now unfortunately so largely dechristianized as to need reconversion’.

The condescension of hindsight aside, Fr Devane’s diatribe enables us to observe in clear form the nature of the cultural misunderstandings that beset our still young nation in the absence of clear thinkers with a complex awareness of how human cultures develop.

Devane seemed to take it for granted that there was some shimmering quantity of indigenous Irish culture which, if it could be corralled and purged of all alien influences, would initiate some magnificent resuscitation of the Irish mind. He appeared to have no sense whatever of the fact that, once changed by external influences, a culture has as much chance of returning to its prior state as a bell of being unrung.

In the most famous passage in ‘The Imported Press’, Fr Devane declared: ‘A factor of deep significance in the recent evolution of our country has been the establishment of the Gaelic League in 1893. Only those of the older generation can adequately appreciate the dynamic influence of that movement in the first decade of this century. The soul of the nation was then deeply stirred by it. A mystic idealism spread throughout the land. A national messianism, the feeling that the nation had a sacred mission, took possession of the people. Ireland was on the point of realizing the long-dreamt hope of being “a nation once again”. The widespread revival of Irish music, song and dance, and the language revival, gave ample proof of the dawning of a new day. The nation was one in ideal and in action.

‘It is now sad to look back on those halcyon days, and to see the blight of the Civil War and the fratricidal strife that followed in its wake. Gone is the idealism; gone the mysticism; gone the messianism. They have been replaced by cynicism, fatalism and pessimism. Native music and song have given way to jazz, crooning and the dances of African primitives.’

In those paragraphs is contained a succinct summary of the thinking that was to result in far greater damage to the fabric of Irish culture than anything inflicted in the 800 years of invader sabotage. The Devane approach, which was identical to that which governed most official thinking about culture in the first half-century of independence, takes for granted that culture is to be located in the concrete evidence of an artefact, a dance step, an arpeggio, a sentence or a brushstroke. But of course the spirit of a culture derives not from objects, marks, movements or sounds, but from the life of a people. It is organic and spontaneous and is ‘authentic’ only when it reflects the life being lived at the moment of its generation. A correct analysis of Irish culture would have apprehended it as a complex, variegated organism comprising many diverse elements – some native, some English, some hybridized exoticisms that, by virtue of the uniqueness of the crucible of their formation, were capable of bestowing a new richness and self-understanding on the people.

Devane’s error was to confuse tradition with traditionalism. For him the sum of Ireland’s authentic, intrinsic identities could be captured by a process of purification. By harking backwards to some ‘remembered’ excellence that had existed prior to contamination by the ‘alien’, he believed the essence of Ireland could be rediscovered and rehabilitated. In this he was typical of a generation that considered itself to be adhering to the guidance of Padraig Pearse, while actually utterly misreading him. For not only was ‘de-Anglicization’ an impossible project: it was also a complete misunderstanding of how culture works. Pearse had never suggested that, in order to rediscover what was authentically ‘Irish’, it was necessary to cleanse it of elements that were ‘unIrish’ or ‘not Irish’. On the contrary, he had insisted that the existence of any number of externally derived elements in the culture did not disqualify that culture from being understood as ‘Irish’, or even ‘Gaelic’. His view of nationhood was based on that of Thomas Davis, the Protestant ideologue of the Young Ireland movement, who held that nationality was a spirituality, a power alive in the land, by which all those who lived in that land could become connected.

The defining problem with an arrested culture is that it has no way of growing organically, or even of imagining how this might have happened if the interruption to its growth had not occurred. A superficial understanding suggests just two ways of responding: fossilization, or a process of lurching forward in jumps and starts, reacting neurotically to developments elsewhere, imitating, rejecting and trying to unbecome what you have been given as a self-description.

Some post-colonial nations cope with these conditions better than others. Some simply throw their hats at the past, and move on to create its antithesis. Neither course is healthy, and either is doomed to provoke a backlash in the other direction.

The correct course requires a subtle understanding of the relationship between tradition and freedom. Tradition is merely the inherited hypothesis, which, being tested all the time, creates a tentative, provisional understanding of meaning. It is never definitive, never more than an ironic attempt at comprehension. And each attempt is alive only when the emotional reality that created it remains present also, and is free to interrogate tradition and reject it if necessary. Tradition should be respected but not revered to the point where it becomes the only consideration. Also to be considered is the freedom to re-create in the new conditions of the ‘now’. In the absence of these conditions, art and culture become dead things, and the core misunderstandings set off a prolonged cultural reaction in which attempts at retrenchment are followed by outright repudiation. This phenomenon is at the core of the failure of independent Ireland. A crude choice was proffered: either the authentically pure or the uncomplicated other. Things could be ‘Irish’ or ‘not Irish’ but there could be no point of convergence. Thus, the process that should have led to self-understanding simply set off a series of reactions and counter-reactions in the cultural arena, while the authentic life of the re-emerging nation followed a course that, more and more, was not recognized as ‘culture’ at all.