Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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СКАЧАТЬ became the staple of Gaelic League propaganda and of the writings of that most energetic proponent of Irish Ireland, the pugnacious journalist and editor of the Leader newspaper, D. P. Moran, well into the 1930s. The true Ireland is Gaelic Ireland; Gaelic Ireland has extraordinary assimilative powers, and it must, as the receptive centre of Irish reality, receive English-speaking civilization, as it has developed in Ireland, into itself. Otherwise Ireland would lose her essence, cease to be, in any worthwhile sense. In his powerful polemic The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, Moran stated the case clearly: “The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs. On no other basis can an Irish nation be reared that would not topple over by the force of the very ridicule that it would beget.”¹⁵

      There was, it is important to stress, a vigorously idealistic and humanistic aspect to much of the revivalist activity in the first three decades of the century. Certainly there were those who supported revival from motives of the crudest kind of racial chauvinism and many for whom the language was merely a nationalistic rallying cry, a way of stamping the new state with a distinctive imprint, but thinkers like Douglas Hyde, D. P. Moran, Eoin MacNeill, and in the 1920s, Daniel Corkery, the novelist, short story writer, and critic, all of whose writings were influential in arousing interest in the language and the civilization they thought it enshrined, had each a concerned awareness of the psychological distress suffered by countless individual Irish men and women because of colonial oppression. Irish people could not be themselves, they argued, could not express the vital life of their own country. They were mute in their own language, ignorant of the most appropriate, perhaps the only, vessel capable of bearing that life into the future. They languished as provincial Englishmen, aping metropolitan manners in a most vulgar fashion, or they were driven in frustration to the spiritual and emotional sterilities of permanent political agitation. D. P. Moran summed up Ireland’s cultural paucity in a trenchant sentence: “Ireland has invented nothing of importance during the century except the Dunlop tyre.”¹⁶ And even Moran, who one suspects wished for cultural revival mostly because it would underpin economic resurgence, was conscious of the individual enhancement possible in a cultural awakening:

      When the people go back into their national traditions, get permeated by their own literature, create a drama, resurrect their customs, develop their industries; when they have a language to bind them together and a national personality to guard, the free and full development of every individual will in no wise endanger or weaken any political movement.¹⁷

      Eoin MacNeill, equally sure why the national life should be fostered, was clear why he espoused the cause of national freedom. It was so that the Irish people might live their own lives in their own way:

      For my own part, if Irish nationality were not to mean a distinctive Irish civilization, I would attach no very great value to Irish national independence. If I want personal liberty to myself, it is in order that I may be myself, may live my own life in my own way, not that I may live the second-hand, hand-me-down life of somebody else.…If I want national freedom for my people, it is in order that they may live in their own way a life which is their own, that they may preserve and develop their own nationality, their own distinctive species of civilization.¹⁸

      Daniel Corkery too, at his most imaginatively ample, suggests that he shared Patrick Pearse’s grasp of the simple educational fact that integrated creative personalities cannot be fostered without a “creative and integrated community with a special and continuing experience of its own.”¹⁹ So his urgent concern in his polemical critical works The Hidden Ireland (1924) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) (which led him, as we shall see, to a narrow exclusivity of mind) to promote an Irish literature which would truly relate to a vital Irish world, has to be seen in part as an educationalist’s desire for books in the schools that would touch the quick of actual life:

      What happens in the neighbourhood of an Irish boy’s home – the fair, the hurling match, the land grabbing, the priesting, the mission, the Mass – he never comes on in literature, that is, in such literature as he is told to respect and learn.²⁰

      The Irish Ireland movement at its best, therefore, was aware, in a mode of thought reminiscent of many nineteenth-century English and European Romantic social critics, of the creative possibilities for the individual in a healthy social environment. Independence of mind, integrity of personality, confident possession of identity, liberality of thought, and artistic self-expression were the fruits that could be expected from cultural regeneration of which linguistic revival was the neccessary catalyst.

      Such idealism commended itself to many Irish men and women in the new state who felt it only right that Irish children should learn their ancestral language in the schools, encountering there “texts…which did not automatically reflect the fashions and clichés of the English-speaking world, but brought the pupils into contact with a world of ideas which was at once alien and, mysteriously, intimately their own.”²¹ The children in their Irish-speaking National Schools were not in a spiritual sense enduring any imposition. They were encountering the language of the essential Gaelic strand in Irish life, the language of the past, and their own language which would eventually, the most optimistic hoped, absorb English and the cultural life associated with it, as so much had been absorbed by Ireland down the centuries.

      It might have been thought, therefore, that the government’s language policy would have been successful for it was pursued in a society where considerable numbers of people were ready to see in the policy no imposition but a rediscovery of a necessary past. And had the efforts to revive Irish in the 1920s been conducted primarily on the basis of the kinds of humanism which generated the original enthusiasm of the Gaelic League, together with a committed sense in the country as a whole of the need for genuine social as well as linguistic renewal, the policy might have met with real success. In such a context certain basic practical problems (the fact that there were several dialects of the language in the country and the Gaelic and Roman script were very different) might have been addressed with decisive energy. As it was, in the absence of a revolutionary social policy attending the efforts for linguistic revival and making it possible (for no language policy could have had much chance of success which did not tackle the depressed economic conditions of the Irish-speaking districts, and indeed of the slums of Dublin), conservative and authoritarian tendencies in the language movement quickly began to cloud the radical humanism which for many had been the most attractive aspect of its ideology. Instead of participating as one element in a general transformation of the social order, the revival movement soon came to be characterized by the reaction and dogmatism of the disappointed and despairing. For almost all that the revivalist had to encourage him or her as time went on was the language policy in the schools and a faith in the assimilative powers of Irish reality that contemporary social fact did little to confirm. Indeed, the linguistic profile of the country even in the 1920s suggested that rather than proving to be an assimilative centre of the Irish experience, Gaelic Ireland was being absorbed into the English-speaking world.

      There were some signs, however, which suggested that revival might be possible. The fact, though, that revivalists had some superficial causes for optimism, in retrospect, makes the essential weakness in their position all the more poignant. The census of 1926 had revealed that a striking increase in the numbers of those who claimed a knowledge of Irish had recently taken place in Dublin County Borough and Dublin County (from 11,870 in 1911 to 23,712 in 1926 and from 5,873 in 1911 to 15,906 in 1926, respectively), but some reflection would have cast cold water on the optimism generated by such figures.²² Undoubtedly some of the rise was due to the fact that since independence school-children had been required to study Irish, and that before independence СКАЧАТЬ