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

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СКАЧАТЬ Literary Revival, as a rural Gaelic civilization that retained an ancient pastoral distinctiveness. This vision was projected by artists, poets, and polemicists despite the fact that social reality showed distinct signs that the country was adapting to the social forms of the English-speaking world and that conditions in rural Ireland were hardly idyllic. It is probable, as I have suggested, that this imaginative interpretation of Irish rural life, particularly as lived on the western island, served as an integrative symbol of national identity in the early years of independence. It helped to confirm people in a belief in Irish distinctiveness, justifying that political separatism which a revolutionary movement had made a linchpin of political life in the state. As such, it provided an imaginative consolidation of the new order in which a conservative, nationalist people in a society dominated by farmers and their offspring in the professions and in trade believed that they had come at last into their rightful inheritance – possession of the land and political independence.

      But there were other symbolic properties that the new state had enlisted to sustain its sense of its national uniqueness. In addition to the imaginative legacy that the recent past had bequeathed to modern Ireland in powerful images of heroism and idyll, the new Irish state was significantly blessed with a repository of national treasures that had either been unearthed in the preceding century or had entered into the popular consciousness at that time. Many of these treasures were associated with Irish Christianity in the Hiberno-Romanesque period, and they had become charged in the nineteenth century with a national as well as religious symbolism. Great works of art and craft, the Cross of Cong, the Ardagh Chalice, the Books of Kells and Durrow, had become identified with the Celtic genius. Lady Wilde, the mother of the playwright, had written in 1888:

      Early Irish art illustrates in a very remarkable manner those distinctive qualities of Irish nature, which we know from the legendary traditions have characterized our people from the earliest times…All these reverential, artistic, fanciful, and subtle evidences of the peculiar celtic spirit find a full and significant expression in the wonderful splendours of Irish art.²¹

      So profound a sense of national significance became attached to the Celtic treasures, which were widely admired after the opening of the National Museum of Ireland in 1890, that its effects permeated Irish design work of all kinds in the twentieth century. Ireland, such work signified in bookplates, medals, jewellery, Christmas cards, Celtic lettering on shopfronts, letterheads, postage stamps, and tombstones, was once the centre of great artistic achievement, was dignified by the peculiar genius of her people, and could become so again.

      By the 1920s enthusiasm among artists for Celtic design had perhaps passed its peak, the high point of the movement being the work that the Dun Emer Guild produced in the early years of the century. Nevertheless, at a popular, often rather crude level, Celtic designs continued to be associated with Irish national identity in the first decades of Irish independence. Indeed, the Official State Handbook published in 1932 sets the title on a front cover in pseudo-Celtic lettering against a background based on the Book of Kells and contains plates of the National Museum’s treasures, as well as reproductions of Irish landscape art. One aspect of the Celtic revival in arts and craftwork, however, maintained standards of unusual excellence well into the 1930s.

      Many of the Irish treasures which fired the imaginations of designers and artists in the early twentieth century had been works of Christian art, associated with worship and piety. It does not, therefore, seem surprising that concurrently a group of artists, partly at the urging of that pious but practical patron and playwright Edward Martyn, had established a cooperative, An Tur Gloine (The Tower of Glass)²² to provide stained-glass windows for Irish churches which made possible the very remarkable work of Harry Clarke, Michael Healy, and Evie Hone. These artists were to produce some of their finest church windows in the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly they had received part of their inspiration from the fairly widespread English and European interest in craftwork and religious art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the sense of Irish antecedents must also have stimulated them in their labours. Once again Ireland was becoming known as a centre of Christian art as Irish missionaries took their knowledge of this modern achievement abroad with them and as Irish stained-glass work received international recognition. As James White and Michael Wynne affirmed in 1961:

      By the end of the 1920s standards in stained-glass production had so risen in Ireland that it could safely be claimed that this was one sphere of art in which we as a race had taken a commanding position and in which one could point to an individual Irish school. Could it be that these Irish artists had inherited an instinctive feeling for the gleaming colours and dark sinuous lines which make the Celtic illuminators the most remarkably creative beings produced in our island? This suggestion may seem far-fetched since twelve centuries separate the two groups. Yet comparison throws up many similarities, not least of which was a desire in both cases to suggest the sanctity and holiness of the saints and to see them as removed from the worldly ambience so attractive to artists in other mediums.²³

      In this chapter we have seen how images of heroic nobility lost their imaginative potency in the 1920s and how a largely conservative, rurally based society found its self-understanding expressed in minor literary and artistic works whose claims to attention now are often little more than a conventional rustic charm. It is good, therefore, to reflect for a moment on the achievements of these artists in stained glass who, without compromising high standards, managed both a measure of popular esteem and international reputation before we consider in the following chapter the defeats and distresses endured by those social groups and individuals who in the 1920s and early 1930s found the social and cultural character of newly independent Ireland less than inspiring.

       CHAPTER 4

       The Fate of the Irish Left and of the Protestant Minority

      It might have been expected that the Catholic nationalist conservatism which dominated Irish society in the first decade of the Irish Free State’s history would have met with some significant political opposition from two sources – from the forces of organized labour and from the ranks of the Protestant minority in the state. The former had, as their intellectual inheritance, the internationally minded writings of the socialist, syndicalist, and revolutionary James Connolly, executed after the Rising of 1916, and experience of the bitter class conflicts of 1913 in Dublin, to generate commitment to a view of Irish society which would emphasize class interests and divisions, rather than a nationalist vision of social and cultural unity transcending class. And Protestant Ireland, culturally and emotionally involved with the English-speaking world and recently represented in Westminster by the Unionist party, was naturally antagonistic to those definitions of Irish nationality current in the new state which emphasized the centrality of either Catholicism or the Irish language and the Gaelic past. The fact is, however, that neither organized labour nor the Protestant community was able to mount any effective political opposition to the dominant political, ideological, and cultural consensus of the early years of independence. The reasons for this require analysis.

      In 1922 Irish Labour politics were expressed through the trade union movement and the Irish Labour Party. The Labour Party, with admirable if naive political idealism, had chosen not to contest the elections of 1918 and 1921, believing that such restraint would allow the electorate to express itself unambiguously on the national question. So, despite the incorporation of aspects of Labour policy in the Democratic Programme adopted by the First Dáil in January 1919, a number of years were to elapse before the popularity of socialist policies of however diluted a kind could be tested at the polls. As a result, the Labour Party stood on the sidelines of Irish politics throughout the crucial years of the War of Independence until 1922. As the Free State began reconstruction it found itself unable to make much electoral headway. Furthermore, the trade union movement СКАЧАТЬ