Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

If one approaches “Celtic Revival” poetry as an exotic, then one is in a mood to appreciate its subtle rhythms, and its quiet tones; but if one continues to live within the Irish seas, travelling the roads of the land, then the white-walled houses, the farming life, the hill-top chapel, the memorial cross above some peasant’s grave – memorable only because he died for his country – impressing themselves as the living pieties of life must impress themselves, upon the imagination, growing into it, dominating it, all this poetry becomes after a time little else than an impertinence.

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Key words here are “must impress themselves,” “growing into it, dominating it.” The truly national imagination will, in Corkery’s sense of things, be consciously or unconsciously submissive to the great forces of the Irish being, will be dominated by them. His criticism of much Anglo-Irish writing is that the great forces “that work their will in the consciousness of the Irish people have found little or no expression in it.”

(#litres_trial_promo) “Work their will” is a telling phrase, and it does not surprise that when Corkery casts about in his book for a representative Irish Ireland moment he chooses not some individual activity, nor some occasion of personal expression but a crowd of 30,000 people at a hurling match in Munster, comprising a body of sentiment that he feels Anglo-Irish writers could not comprehend. In such passages Corkery exhibits how easy it is for a sensitive humanist with a proper appreciation of the individual to allow himself the gratification afforded in the contemplation and veneration of the national will and of the people imagined as a mass movement.

D. P. Moran had, as we noted, assured his fellow countrymen in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland that the nation he envisaged would stimulate “the free and full development of every individual.” At revealing moments in his writings Corkery made evident that he was unwilling in the country’s abnormal state to allow such liberty to writers. Rather, they must obey a national imperative, must in the interests of a truly Irish identity allow the nation to work its will on them, must serve as the seedbeds of the future. Such thinking has an authoritarian ring to it. It is the intellectual equivalent of Irish Ireland’s propagandist dogmatism coexisting uneasily with the educationalist’s vision of humane fulfilment that also stirs Corkery’s imagination.

Furthermore Corkery was sure, like most of his fellows in the movement, what Irish identity would be like if it was allowed a fertile soil in which to flower. Various supporters of the movement differed about this, but they shared the conviction that they knew. D. P. Moran was vigorously certain that to be truly Irish would be to cultivate masculinity, in a “racy Irish atmosphere” where the Celtic note of melancholy would be derided as an alien absurdity. He aspired to “making the people sober, moderate, masculine and thereby paving the way for industrial advancement and economic reform.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Eoin MacNeill, by contrast, made more of the noble, natural piety of the people and was disinclined to venerate the masculine virtues or berate weakness. But his sense of Irish identity was no less developed. His vision was of a historic Irish rural Christian civilization, chaste and learned, which must be allowed to express its rich life in the present. Corkery felt able to identify with even greater precision the forces which preoccupy a properly Irish racial mind. They are, as he defines them in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, (1) religion, (2) nationalism, (3) the land. Unless, his exclusive creed asserts, a writer is imaginatively absorbed by at least one of these preoccupations he is, Corkery assures us, not to be considered an Irish writer; he does not express the reality of Irish life. Irish identity, therefore, poses no problems for Corkery. His conception of an essential Irish mind, as of an authentic Irish literature, is equally categorical – it must express a clear-sighted sanity, an intellectual order where wit controls intensity of feeling, realism tempers imagination, intelligence the affections; the truly Irish mind must exhibit the virtues of classicism:

This core of hardness is scarcely ever lacking to the Gaelic poet; track him right down the centuries, and one never finds it missing. It is intellectual in its nature: hard-headed and clear-sighted, witty at its best, prosaic when not eager; and to its universality in the truly Gaelic world is due the fact that one can turn over the pages of the Gaelic book of poetry, century after century, without coming on any set of verses that one could speak of as sentimental.

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Such intellectual assurance with its implicit prescriptive zeal is a characteristic of Irish Ireland’s writings, and it suggests the degree to which in desiring a flowering of the Irish intellect the writers knew what to expect. That individual blooms of creativity are unlikely to obey such prescriptive imperatives is a signally salutary fact that Irish Ireland weighed rather too little.

I have argued that a genuinely radical and attractive humanism had fired much of the pre-revolutionary enthusiasm for the Irish language and its revival and that some of this feeling survived into the post-independence period. I have argued further that in the early years of the Irish Free State the proponents of Gaelic revival and the supporters of Irish Ireland, in general possessing no real social programme, tended to express the need for language revival in terms of conservation and of a despairingly authoritarian control of a society that was becoming increasingly anglicized. The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seen as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement. This, I think, becomes even clearer when we consider the relationship between the Irish Ireland ideology and the exclusivist cultural and social pressures which bore fruit in the enactment of the Censorship Bill of 1929.

A recurrent intellectual motif in the writings of Irish Ireland’s thinkers is the provision of historical accounts of Ireland’s European uniqueness. The authentic Gaelic life which must be the basis of an Irish resurgence in the twentieth century, the argument runs, is a way of life that has traditionally escaped the universalizing forces that have disturbed local life throughout most of the rest of Europe. Ireland, it seems, escaped the imperial, legalistic dominance of Rome and the essentially artificial cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance. It is true that Gaelic Ireland was threatened by the inheritors of Renaissance and Enlightenment civilization, by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, but Ireland, driven underground, did not absorb the alien values. The hidden Ireland survived beyond the power of the Protestant Ascendancy’s Big Houses and the British government official, maintaining its essential character and a brotherhood of feeling with the local life of pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation Catholic Europe.

There was, therefore, in the Irish Ireland movement a cultural equivalent of the political doctrine of Sinn Féin (Ourselves) in an imaginative attachment to the local and a belief that history had allowed that local life a protracted protection from alien influences. It was a short step from such thinking to the belief that cultural protectionism might enable Ireland to sustain her unique identity and to a draconian censorship as means of providing that protection.

Of course, not all those associated with the Irish Ireland movement took that step, and it would be quite wrong to identify the Irish Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 solely with cultural exclusivism. Many countries in the early twentieth century felt that the accelerating pace of publications, particularly of cheap newspapers and magazines, created a social problem that they could not ignore. A Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature set up by the Free State Minister for Justice in 1926, which prepared the way for the eventual bill, found it could seek guidance from the example of eleven countries and states where statutes relating to obscene publications were in force. The problem such publications created had indeed been the subject of an international convention for the suppression of the circulation of and traffic in obscene publications, organized by the League of Nations in 1923. A responsible government in the 1920s in almost any country would have felt that there was nothing unusual about the enactment of a bill to censor certain publications and to protect populations from pornography.

It was clear, too, from the report of the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature and from the Dáil and Senate debates on the issue that efforts were made by the legislators to distinguish the merely pornographic from works which might possess literary merit. Indeed, a good deal of the firepower of the bill was aimed not at literary works but at the many imported popular newspapers and magazines that were considered unsavory and at works which recommended, or provided information on, birth control.

There were signs, nevertheless, that an Irish Censorship Bill might represent something more stringent than a government’s rational attempt to suppress the more vicious forms of pornographic publication. These perhaps account for the alarm that the mere proposal of the bill aroused (as we shall see) in the minds of most Irish writers of the time. Much of the public demand for the bill was orchestrated not by members of the political parties but by Irish Vigilance Societies (the Irish Vigilance Association had been founded in 1911 by the Dominican Order) and by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (founded in 1899, among whose aims was the effort “to combat the pernicious influence of infidel and immoral publications by the circulation of good, cheap and popular Catholic literature”).

(#litres_trial_promo) It might reasonably have been feared that such bodies, in a country where the mass of the population was encouraged by the church to observe a peculiarly repressive sexual code, would press for a censorship policy expressing not literary and aesthetic but strict Catholic moral values.

Furthermore, a prevailing note sounded in the writings and speeches of those calling for a censorship bill was the notion that all evil in literary and journalistic matters derived from abroad, particularly from England. It was, therefore, the business of an Irish legislature to protect Irish life from the impure external influences and to help build up a healthy, clean-minded Catholic Irish civilization. It must protect that supposedly distinctive Irish religious life and practice that, sometimes associated with the Irish language and the Gaelic way of life, comprised national identity. It was at this point that the interests of those who sought censorship from moralistic impulses alone and the interests of those, like the Irish Irelanders, who desired cultural protectionism, met and often overlapped. An example of such an overlap is provided in the demand by a certain Father R. S. Devane, SJ, for a tariff on imported literature and journalism. Father Devane was a Dublin priest who had been strenuous in his efforts to arouse public support for the cause of censorship of indecent and obscene publications. He had met with Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State’s Minister for Justice, in 1925 to put, on behalf of an organization to which he belonged, the Priests’ Social Guild, the case for a censorship bill, and he was the only private individual who presented evidence before the Committee of Enquiry on Evil Literature established by O’Higgins in 1926. In 1927, in the Jesuit periodical Studies, Father Devane went a step further, arguing for high tariffs on imported publications in the following terms:

We are at present engaged in an heroic effort to revive our national language, national customs, national values, national culture. These objects cannot be achieved without a cheap, healthy and independent native press. In the face of English competition such a press is an impossibility…Against such propaganda of the English language and English ideas the present effort at national revival looks very much like the effort to beat back an avalanche with a sweeping brush.

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Here cultural protectionism of the Irish Ireland kind is proposed, but the cultural impulses coexist with a particular vision of morality embodied in the one word “healthy.” The Reverend M. H. MacInerny, OP, editor of the Dominican magazine The Irish Rosary and an active member of the Vigilance Association since 1912, in a comment on Father Devane’s suggestion clearly grasped the twin impulses, moral and cultural, that fired Father Devane’s demand for tariffs as well as censorship. Agreeing with “every word” in Father Devane’s article, he continued:

By all means let legislative effect be given, without undue delay, to the unanimous recommendation of the Commission on Evil Literature; this will at once bar out a great mass of prurient and demoralizing publications. For economic, national and cultural reasons of the highest moment, the Oireachtas ought to pass a resolution imposing a heavy tariff on the remainder of what Father Devane calls the “popular” class of imported publications.

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That such individuals represented public opinion on the matter, inasmuch as the public interested itself in literary and cultural affairs at all, there can be little doubt. The only outspoken opposition to such thinking came from writers themselves and had little effect. Indeed, there were those in the country who, far from attending to the writers’ criticisms of the proposed bill, merely thought they deserved to be silenced and that they were understandably fearful of the just deserts that awaited them. Such, certainly, was the attitude of the Catholic Bulletin, which had long waged a battle against Irish writers on the grounds of their alien immorality and pagan un-Irish philosophy. Indeed that periodical, in an even more obvious fashion than Father Devane’s article, suggests that a good deal of Irish Ireland enthusiasm in the period was generated less by idealistic cultural imperatives than by a desire to advance Catholic power and social policy in the country through the defeat of Protestant Ireland and the anglicized culture associated with it, in ideological warfare. For the periodical, edited until 1922 by Seán Ua Ceallaigh, who was president of the Gaelic League between 1919 and 1923 and thereafter by Patrick Keohane with Professor Timothy Corcoran as a guiding spirit, combines much anti-Protestant invective and hatred of Freemasonry with a celebration of an Irish Ireland life that comprises staunch Catholic as well as Gaelic elements. With an almost entertaining virulence of phrase, the Bulletin had excoriated the work of Yeats, Russell, Joyce, and Gogarty as the machinations of a new Ascendancy exploiting Ireland for squalid foreign gold. The periodical greeted W. B. Yeats’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 with that xenophobia which characterized its attitudes to most Irish writing in English and which fueled the fires of its demand for censorship.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the occasion. Senator Gogarty directs attention to the fact that on this issue there was recently a tussle between the English colony in Ireland and the English of England, for the substantial sum provided by a deceased anti-Christian manufacturer of dynamite. It is common knowledge that the line of recipients of the Nobel Prize shows that a reputation for paganism in thought and word is a very considerable advantage in the sordid annual race for money, engineered as it always is, by clubs, coteries, salons, and cliques. Paganism in prose or in poetry has, it seems, its solid cash value: and if a poet does not write tawdry verse to make his purse heavier, he can be brought by his admirers to where the money is, whether in the form of an English pension, or in extracts from the Irish taxpayer’s pocket, or in the Stockholm dole.

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The Bulletin was, of course, an organ of extremist propaganda but its attitudes were not unknown in other areas of Irish society, if their expression was customarily rather less inflamed. People like those who had denounced Synge’s treatment of Ireland in The Playboy of the Western World could still be found ready to object to any unflattering literary portrait of their country.

D. P. Moran in the Leader added his eloquent Irish Ireland voice to the demand for a firm censorship policy, and critics at a rather more theoretical level were at work on studies that might provide ideological ammunition for cultural protectionism. The writings of Daniel Corkery, in The Hidden Ireland, and later in his study of Synge, where he made residence in Ireland a union card in a closed shop of Irish letters, did nothing to encourage an openness to foreign literary and cultural influences. Rather, Corkery’s cultural nationalism and prescriptive zeal seem to suggest that no great disservice would be done the nation if the writings of certain authors became unavailable. Other critics were earnest in their desire to see in much modern writing, especially in works by suspect Irish writers, a shallow cosmopolitanism that vitiated imaginative power. So Seorsamh O’Neill, in an article published in 1924 in the Irish Statesman characteristic of many such which appeared in various periodicals in the 1920s, lamented the tragedy of George Bernard Shaw’s imaginative aridity, asserting that “compared with men of equal or even less vitality whose minds are rooted in their national and local cultures Shaw’s mind is two-dimensional, mechanical, lacking in depth and imaginative insight.” O’Neill associated such literary rootlessness, as he concluded his essay, with the anticipated threat of television and with international culture – “the pilings round our lives of a rag-heap of odds and ends which through lack of assimilation will remain a pile of meaningless and bewildering refuse, even though it be gathered from the ends of the earth.”

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In writings of this kind the cultural exclusivism of the Irish Ireland movement helped created a climate of opinion in which authors whose work might encounter moral disapproval could also be suspected of a lack of national authenticity or will. The nation need not disturb itself over much if their writings should fall foul of a censor. In this way the thinking of the Irish Ireland movement must be associated with the conservative climate of opinion in which the Censorship Bill of 1929 was enacted and put to work even where, in individual cases, supporters of the movement may not have espoused the cause of censorship at all or as vigorously as did D. P. Moran in his Leader editorials. None of them rose to decry censorship as a reactionary offence to the revolutionary humanism that had originally generated their movement. No voice was raised to wonder if so positive an enterprise as linguistic and cultural renewal could be stimulated by so negative a practice as censorship.

If Irish writers of the 1920s had cause to take alarm in part because of the source of the demands for censorship (the Catholic Vigilance Association and the Catholic Truth Society) and in part because of the atmosphere of national self-righteousness and cultural exclusiveness in which a censorship bill would be enacted, certain incidents also served to concentrate their minds on the kind of future which might await their work. Among these the Galway public library board putting Shaw’s works under lock and key, the stopping of trains and the burning of their cargoes of imported newspapers (which D. P. Moran thought evidence of the need to pass a censorship bill as quickly as possible), and the public demonstrations in favour of censorship were disturbing enough, but the unhappy experience of the Carnegie Libraries’ Trust in Ireland following an imprudent if scarcely pornographic publication by one of the members of its Advisory Committee must have seemed like a suspiciously nasty portent indeed.

The Carnegie Trust had made itself responsible in 1921 for establishing and financing, with the help of a local rate, centres for the distribution of books in many parts of Ireland. The playwright Lennox Robinson was secretary and treasurer to the Advisory Committee, which included among its members Lady Gregory and George Russell (Æ). In 1924 Robinson contributed a harmless short story on a religious theme, “The Madonna of Slieve Dun,” to a literary paper which the writer Francis Stuart and his wife had begun to edit and publish with some friends. The periodical came to the attention of President Cosgrave, who, it was rumoured, intended to suppress it. The story about a young girl who imagines herself another Madonna provoked a Jesuit member of the Advisory Committee to tender his resignation and a first-rate row blew up when W. B. Yeats, who had also published his sexually adventurous poem “Leda and the Swan” in the paper To-Morrow, entered the fray on Robinson’s behalf. To no avail, however, because the unhappy outcome of the literary contretemps was the suspension of the committee and the dismissal of its secretary and treasurer, the unfortunate Robinson.

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The bill, when it eventually appeared, was apparently a much less draconian legislative tool than had been feared. The Minister for Justice was willing to make amendments to the bill when it was presented to the Dáil, and the bill itself failed to implement the Committee on Evil Literature’s recommendation that there should be recognized associations in the country charged with bringing dubious publications to the attention of the Censorship Board. What Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet, wit, surgeon, and senator, had feared as “the most monstrous proposal that has ever been made in this country,”

(#litres_trial_promo) since it implied that the Irish should make use of their “recently won liberty to fill every village and hamlet with little literary pimps who will be recognized,” was not to be part of the legislative process. No one at the time of the bill’s enactment foresaw that the customs would fulfil the function of public watchdog, referring books upon suspicion to the board in large numbers, thereby filling the role that the Committee on Evil Literature envisaged for the recognized associations. Even the Irish Statesman, which had waged a protracted campaign against the bill, was able to express relief that it had turned out rather better than expected. J. J. Horgan in an essay on affairs in the Irish Free State in the Round Table probably expressed the general satisfaction of those who had been disturbed by the possibilities of an Irish censorship when he wrote in March 1929, “The debates on this measure in the Dáil have been more courageous than was to be expected.” In May 1930 he reported on the earliest effects of the new legislation, recounting with relish how in some respects the act was proving counterproductive, where it was having any effect at all:

The first result of the new Censorship of Publications Act has been the banning of seventeen books by the Minister for Justice on the advice of the Censorship Board. The only three of any importance are Mr Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Miss Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (which has already been banned in England), and Mr Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals. The remainder of the books censored are principally the works of Dr Marie Stopes and writers of her ilk on the subject of birth control. It is interesting to record that one bookseller who had six copies of Mr Huxley’s book which he could not sell, sold them all on the day the censorship of that volume was announced, and also received orders for twelve additional copies.

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The Minister for Justice, Horgan informs us, was rather concerned that lists of banned books were being published in the daily press, thus conferring upon them a certain notoriety. He also regretted, it appears, that few people were bringing objectionable works to the Censorship Board’s attention. On this latter point Horgan observed with what seemed like sage equanimity:

The fact is that very few people in Ireland read any modern books at all, and that those who do are not likely to take the trouble of acting as literary informers to the Censorship Board. In any event, to attempt a censorship of modern literature, even in one language, is not unlike trying to drink a river.

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That for almost forty years the Censorship Board would make this epic attempt seemed in 1930 an improbability. That it was in a large part successful is a cultural fact of twentieth-century Ireland that as yet has not been comprehensively analyzed.

Twenty years after the enactment of the bill the writer and critic Arland Ussher, who had been involved in the fight against censorship in the 1920s, managed a retrospective detachment, providing a measured assessment:

We were wrong and over-impatient – unjust also, to the men who were re-building amid the ruins…We…concentrated our indignation on their Acts for prohibiting divorce and for prohibiting the sale of “evil literature” – measures which might have been expected from any Irish Catholic government, and which, considering the social atmosphere of Ireland, did little more than register prohibitions that would in any case have been effective, in fact if not in form.

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Other individuals who perhaps suffered more directly from the fact and the form of the prohibitions could not afford such an olympian historicism. In the 1920s Dermot Foley was a librarian who had left his native Dublin to take up a post as a librarian in Ennis, County Clare. In an essay published in 1974 he told how the wave of national enthusiasm that had inspired the War of Independence, “a spirit of optimism and participation so powerful that it survived the terrible realities of a civil war,” broke, in his case in County Clare, against the harsh rocks of puritanical philistinism. He remembered the effects of the Carnegie Trust row:

An incident that was treated as farce by sensible people nearly foundered the whole library movement. Its consequences hit me in Clare. In Irish Revival terms, thereafter books were tainted and it was left to the Censorship Board to expose libraries as seed-beds of corruption. It became a statutory, inexhaustible beanfeast for the bigots and obscurantists, and in due time made a dog’s dinner of defenceless people who, above all things, badly needed a bit of leadership to lift them out of the morass of ignorance they had for so long endured.

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For Foley the greatest crime perpetrated by censorship was not the undoubted injury done to Irish writers, not the difficulty experienced by educated men and women in getting hold of banned works, but the perpetuation of cultural poverty in the country as a whole, left without the leaven of serious contemporary literature.

My library was whipped into serving up an Irish stew of imported westerns, sloppy romances, blood-and-murders bearing the nihil obstat of fifty-two vigilantes, and anything escaping them was lying in unread bundles on the shelves of musty halls and schools.

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