Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

It was like taking off one’s clothes for a swim naked in some mountain-pool. Nobody who has not had this sensation of suddenly “belonging” somewhere – of finding the lap of the lost mother – can understand what a release the discovery of Gaelic Ireland meant to modern Ireland. I know that not for years and years did I get free of this heavenly bond of an ancient, lyrical, permanent, continuous immemorial self, symbolized by the lonely mountains, the virginal lakes, the traditional language, the simple, certain, uncomplex modes of life, that world of the lost childhood of my race where I, too, became for a while eternally young.

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Recollecting such bliss, the writer admitted to a “terrible nostalgia for that old content, that old symbolism, that sense of being as woven into a pattern of life as a grain of dust in a piece of homespun.”

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In the 1920s a number of literary works were published which attempted a more realistic treatment of the western island and the Gaeltacht, in a tradition that had begun with the short stories of the Irish-language writer Pádraic Ó Conaire and of Seumas O’Kelly. These were works of fictional realism written by men who know the Gaeltacht intimately. Novels such as Peadar O’Donnell’s Islanders (1928) and Adrigoole (1929) and Liam O’Flaherty’s Thy Neighbour’s Wife (1923) are works therefore not of romantic discovery but essays in rural naturalism and social criticism. What is striking about the work of both these writers, who wrote their novels with a vigorous socialist concern to unmask social injustice in the Irish countryside through literary realism, is that they both seem tempted by the vision of an Irish rural world that exists beyond political reality. At moments the Irish rural scene in both their works is allowed to occupy the same primal, essentially mythic territory as it does in the conceptions of purely nationalist ideologues. In both O’Donnell’s and O’Flaherty’s writings there are passages of epic writing therefore which obtrude in their realistic settings. At such moments class politics and social analysis give way before an apprehension of the west as a place of fundamental natural forces, of human figures set passively or heroically against landscapes of stone, rock, and sea in a way that makes their works less radical than they perhaps thought they were. There is implicit therefore in their writings a sense that Gaelic Ireland in the west is the authentic heroic Ireland in a way that confirms rather than contradicts the conventional image of the west as “certain set apart.” The power of this conventional image was perhaps so great that it affected as intelligent a social commentator as Peadar O’Donnell and overwhelmed the turbulent anger of Liam O’Flaherty’s social criticism.

So in the 1920s the sense of the western island and of the west as specially significant in Irish life became a cultural commonplace. Even an English visitor in 1924 fell under its spell:

The West is different. Its spirit was used by the intellectuals in the late struggle but it was never theirs. It seems to come from some primitive elemental force which smoulders on, like a turf fire, long after such movements have spent themselves. It is a permanent factor to the existence of which no Irish statesman can safely shut his eyes.

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The Northern Protestant naturalist R. Lloyd Praeger could declare:

If I wished to show anyone the best thing in Ireland I would take him to Aran. Those grey ledges of limestone, rain-beaten and storm-swept, are different from anything else. The strangeness of the scene, the charm of the people (I don’t refer to the rabble that meets the steamer), the beauty of the sea and sky, the wealth of both pagan and Christian antiquities…all these help to make a sojourn in Aran a thing never to be forgotten.

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When in November 1927, forty fishermen were drowned in a storm off the west coast, even the Irish Statesman which had, as we shall see, its own reasons to reject the primacy of Gaelic civilization in Irish life, responded to the disaster in elegiac terms, aligning the journal uneasily with all those who thought the west the cradle of Irish civilization:

But the trawlers in which modern fishermen elsewhere go out to sea seem safe almost as the land compared with these frail curraghs which visitors to the west of Ireland see dancing on the waters. As one watched these curraghs and the fishermen on that rocky coast seemed almost like contemporaries of the first men who adventured on the seas, their Gaelic language and their curraghs alike survivals from ancient centuries. These western fishermen are a very fine type, full of character and vitality, and Gaelic enthusiasts from contact with these vestiges of the Gaelic past have tried to conjure up an image of the Gaelic world when the tide of life was high in its heart.

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The vision of the western island as the primal source of the nation’s being received further confirmation in 1929 with the publication of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s work An tOileánach (The Islandman). Works of this kind, in which an islander’s reminiscences were recorded in written form by researchers and literary men and are then translated, came in a few brief years to comprise almost a modern Irish subgenre. The Islandman (the English translation) is one of the finest examples of this type of work, exhibiting a strong narrative sense and swift economy of style and discourse. A sense of an almost Homeric, heroically charged zest emerges from a keenly objective record of island life.

(#litres_trial_promo) For any who might be inclined to doubt the primal rural superiority of the western world in Irish reality these accounts of work, feasting, death, play, fighting, and drinking could be proffered as ready proof. For in the pages of The Islandman it seems we are seeing island life not through the eyes of literary discovery or nationalist wish-fulfilment but from the cottages and currachs of the islands themselves. The work has an exhilarating freshness about it, an impression of fundamental things, a sense of origins.

In the difficult years of reconstruction after the Civil War, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Free State government made few conscious attempts other than the encouragement of Gaelic revival to project a cultural image of the nation despite the resources they had inherited and might have exploited systematically. A direct espousal of rural civilization was to be the cultural contribution of Mr. de Valera in the following decade. The government granted an annual subsidy to the Abbey Theatre in 1925, to an Irish-language theatre, An Taibhdhearc, in Galway in 1928, and established a publishing venture named An Gúm in 1926 for the publication of books in Irish. Apart from these fairly minimal gestures the government seemed content to approve, where it did not simply ignore, the work of writers who dwelt in a conservative and nationalistic fashion on rural aspects of the country’s life, while establishing a Censorship Board which would, it transpired, repress writings which might disturb conventional moral sensitivities.

But almost as if to confirm the symbolic significance of rural images in the cultural life of the state, in 1927 the Minister for Finance received the recommendation of the Irish Coinage Committee, established to help implement the Coinage Act of 1926 under the chairmanship of W. B. Yeats. Those recommendations were that the Irish coinage, which was first issued in 1928, should bear the images of Irish animals and wildlife rather than the traditional hackneyed symbols of Ireland, round towers, the shamrock, and sunbursts. There were some objections to this decision from individuals who suggested that animal imagery was insufficiently Christian for the Irish nation’s coinage. The choice of birds and beasts as the basis of an Irish coinage’s iconography was in part dictated by the committee’s desire that the coinage should be a unified series of images, but individual members of the committee were firmly persuaded that the images selected bore intimately on the rural nature of Irish life. “What better symbols could we find for this horse-riding, salmon-fishing, cattle-raising country?”

(#litres_trial_promo) wrote the chairman, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Bodkin, a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland and a subsequent director, concurred with his chairman:

Coins are the tangible tokens of a people’s wealth. Wealth in the earliest times was always calculated in terms of cattle. Thence comes the word pecunia, money, derived from pecus, the beast. The wealth of Ireland is still derived in overwhelming proportion from the products of her soil. What, therefore, could be more appropriate than the depiction upon our coinage of those products?

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And so Percy Metcalfe’s beautiful designs were issued in 1928, giving Ireland a coinage that depicted her agricultural, rural, and sporting life in the images of a woodcock, a chicken, a pig with piglets, a hare, a wolfhound, a bull, a hunter, and a salmon.

Irish painters of the period were also touched by the prevailing rural understanding of Irish identity. As Bruce Arnold has remarked, there is in the work of painters in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Paul Henry, William Conor, Sean O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, “often an uncomfortable feeling of strain, a self-consciousness about what ‘being Irish’ meant.”

(#litres_trial_promo) From the painters of this period, whom Arnold has broadly defined as comprising a school of “Irish academic realism,” come those pictures of countrymen and women, fishermen, small farmers, turf stacks against cloudy skies, and cottages in secluded places, which seem so representative of the early years of independence. Paul Henry was probably the most popular of these artists, and his simple, often unpeopled landscapes seemed to express for many Irish men and women a sense of essential Irish realities. He was almost the official artist of the Free State – a painting entitled “Errigal Co. Donegal” was used as the frontispiece to the Irish Free State Official Handbook published in 1932. It pictures a small Irish village huddling beneath an austere mountain and a clouded sky. This official handbook, in fact, draws heavily for its illustrations on the work of Henry, Seán O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, all artists absorbed by the Irish landscape.

So cultural life in the new state was dominated by a vision of Ireland, inherited from the period of the 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.

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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)

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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 (#ulink_ed41c521-2a58-5ea9-bc64-a5fb814790cc)

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 in the 1920s was ill prepared to mount a sustained attack on the conservative basis of the social order, even if it had wished to do so, nor was it able to provide the industrial muscle for a militant labour programme. The movement was split by inter-union struggles, and in the widespread depression, bred of disunity, trade union membership declined steeply. Furthermore, many categories of workers had no union organizations to represent their interests. By the end of the decade, with the Labour Party’s role as a responsible parliamentary opposition rendered almost nugatory by the entry of Fianna Fáil to the Dáil in 1927 and with the trade union movement at odds with itself and largely ignored by the government and the civil service as the worldwide economic depression began to make itself felt in Ireland, the likelihood that a consistent, energetic, politically powerful, socialist critique might be developed to challenge the prevailing economic and social orthodoxy was dim indeed. At the end of the first decade of independence, organized labour in Ireland could take comfort only from the fact that the Irish Labour Party was still in existence and that the inspirational force of James Larkin (the labour leader who had played a crucial role in Dublin in 1913), to the fore in the Workers’ Union of Ireland, had kept alive the fitful flames of a revolutionary working-class consciousness in Dublin, which had flared almost two decades earlier. In years when the dominant nationalism often combined, in the wake of the Bolshevik successes in the Soviet Union, with outright antagonism to socialist ideas of politics, that even this little was achieved is a testament to the dedication and will of those few individuals who were prepared to plant socialist seeds for a later harvesting.

The policies and approach adopted by the Labour Party in the 1920s reflected the fact that the social panorama scarcely admitted of revolutionary perspectives. The party, under the leadership of Thomas Johnson, who was concurrently secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, abandoned the revolutionary syndicalism of James Connolly while continuing to venerate his memory, preferring a cautious use of parliamentary tactics to advance the workers’ cause. “I have,” Johnson wrote in 1925, “advocated the use by the workers of political means and parliamentary institutions to further their cause. I have opposed the proposition that the workers should rely solely on their economic power to attain their ends. I have acted in the belief that a democratic government would preserve the fundamental rights which have been won and would not lightly cast aside those social obligations which they had inherited from their predecessors.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He continued in a passage that very fully expresses the position adopted by the great majority of Labour Party and trade union members in Ireland, throughout the twentieth century:

Shall the aim be honestly to remove poverty…or are we to agitate and organize with the object of waging the “class war” more relentlessly, and use “the unemployed” and the “poverty of the workers” as propagandist cries to justify our actions…I do not think this view of the mission of the Labour Movement has any promise of ultimate usefulness in Ireland.

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Johnson knew his electorate and suspected how precarious was Labour’s hold on Irish life in the Free State. For, lacking a solid base in a large industrial proletariat (only about 13 percent of the workforce was employed in industry of any kind – the island’s only real industrial centre was north of the border in Belfast), and, after 1926, in competition in rural areas with the popular reformism of Fianna Fáil, Labour had a difficult enough task in mere survival, without espousing what Johnson feared were ideas “in direct conflict with the religious faith of our people.”

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The cultural effects of this socialist eclipse in twentieth-century Ireland are not far to seek. The socialist ideas and preoccupations of much of modern Europe had curiously little currency in a country where ideology meant protracted, repetitive debates on the national question with little attention directed, until the 1960s, to class issues and social conditions. Indeed, one of the obvious weaknesses of Irish intellectual life in much of the period was the absence of a coherent, scientific study of society of the kind that in many European countries had its roots in a socialist concern to comprehend the ills of a manifestly unjust social order. For decades, indeed, such issues as the decline of the Irish language were most frequently discussed in terms of culture and nationality, without any serious effort to challenge an economic order which allowed the haemorrhage of emigration from Irish-speaking districts to flow unabated for forty years. Where other Europeans engaged in a conflict about the very nature of man and society, Irish men and women, writers, artists, politicians, workers committed themselves to a vision of national destiny which often meant a turning away from much uncomfortable social reality to conceptions of the nation as a spiritual entity that could compensate for a diminished experience. The counterpoint that a powerful socialist party and working-class movement might have represented in the intellectual and cultural life of the country in the first decades of independence is a possibility we find sounding only fitfully early in the century and suffering an almost complete extinction in the 1920s. There were, in fact, until recently, very few novels and plays of Irish working-class life in twentieth-century writing. Only in the plays of O’Casey was the world of the urban proletariat employed as the material of a committed art. There were no Irish disciples of Brecht, no efforts, apart from O’Casey’s later plays written in exile, to produce a literature engagé on behalf of socialism; indeed, only in a very few historical studies did the socialist ideas that absorbed so many European minds in the twentieth century find any large-scale Irish expression.

If the left in Ireland was unwilling or unable to pose a politically effective ideological challenge to the governing assumptions of the new state, the Protestant minority was manifestly unable to fill the breach. By 1922 the events of the preceding decade had rendered that once spirited and assured ruling caste nervously defeatist and impotent. Many of its members almost to the eve of revolution had refused to countenance the possibility of Home Rule for Ireland, and even those who had in one way or another so envisaged the Irish future now found themselves overtaken by events which had precipitated an even less desirable resolution of the national struggle. The establishment of the Irish Free State found Protestant Ireland in the twenty-six counties ideologically, politically, and emotionally unprepared for the uncharted waters of the new separatist seas, where they comprised what was seen by many of their nationalist fellow citizens as an ethnic minority.

Ideologically, the Protestants of Ireland, apart from certain few individuals who had been aroused by an enthusiasm for Gaelic revival and the cultural renaissance, had in the decade before independence made almost no effort to comprehend the nationalist cause. A dismissive contemptuousness had often reflected the offensive blend of insecurity and caste snobbery that characterized fairly commonplace Protestant reactions to Irish nationalism. The Irish Ireland movement by turn had not hesitated to reply in kind, proposing a theory of Irish nationality that denied full spiritual communion with the Irish nation to the colonizing, landed Anglo-Irishman with his apparently English accent, manner, and loyalties and his Protestant faith. It was indeed the Irish Ireland movement that had given potent propagandist currency to the term Anglo-Irish itself, to the discomfort of many individuals who had hitherto had no doubts of their fully Irish patrimony. Even those of them who had sought to sympathize with Irish needs and aspirations had found themselves denied a secure hold on their own Irish identity in these years by the propagandist outspokenness of the Irish Irelanders. Accustomed to think of themselves as unambiguously Irish, indeed Irish in one of the best possible ways, they had found themselves swiftly becoming treated in the newspapers, in political speeches, and in polemical pamphlets as strangers in their own land. The Celt and the Irish language were the new orthodoxies comprising an ethnic dogmatism that cast Anglo-Ireland in the role of alien persecutor of the one true faith. Furthermore, the recurrent political and emotional crises of the decade preceding independence had not allowed many Protestant Irishmen and women sufficient leisure and sense of security to devise an intellectual counter to the assaults of Irish Ireland or indeed much opportunity even to consider, had they cared to, the kinds of defence the poet W. B. Yeats had in fact developed in the face of Irish Ireland’s assault on what he thought were values Anglo-Ireland most fully possessed. Rather, the trauma of the Home Rule crisis, followed by the Great War in which so many of their sons perished and the savageries of guerrilla war in their own land, had left them without ideological resource, concerned only with economic and actual survival.

The Irish minority, to which the term Anglo-Ireland had recently been attached so uncomfortably, and which hoped for survival in these difficult circumstances, was not a large one in the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State. Before the partition of the country in 1920, Protestant Ireland had been able to feel a certain security inasmuch as it comprised one-quarter of the population of the entire island. In 1926 the census in the Free State revealed that only 7.4 percent of the population of the twenty-six counties was recorded as professing the Protestant faith. Of these, only a few were the substantially landed Protestant gentry that for generations had intermarried with one another, with the better-born Catholic Irish, and with the English aristocracy and had supplied the empire with politicians, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors and Ireland with a ruling caste, with sportsmen, churchmen, and occasionally patriots. Many of these Irish gentry had resided on large estates in the predominantly rural provinces of Munster and Connacht, where by 1926 they comprised an extreme minority of the population. Indeed in the 1926 census only 2.6 percent of the population of Connacht was returned as Protestant while in Munster the figure was 3.6 percent.

For the rest, the Protestant population of the Irish Free State was made up of inhabitants of the three counties of Ulster that had been included in the state where 18.2 percent professed the Protestant faith and inhabitants of Leinster where 10.1 percent of the population was Protestant. In the Ulster counties of Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal many of the Protestants were small and medium-sized farmers, whose emotional centre of gravity often lay across the Irish border as bonds of blood and political instinct tied them to a more vigorous and populist Protestant unionism than had commonly been espoused by the Anglo-Irish gentry to the south (the Orange Order remained a strong influence on Protestant life in these counties almost to the present day). In Leinster much of the Protestant population was made up of professional and businessmen (Protestants were particularly well represented in the banking and legal professions and in the biscuit, brewing, distilling, and builders’ providers trades), who undoubtedly felt a kinship with the Irish Protestant gentry of the former Ascendancy to whom they were often related, but whose interests would increasingly lie in a prudent accommodation with the new order. Such people and their families, helping to give a distinctive social tone to such fashionable areas in and near Dublin as Rathmines and Rathgar, where in 1926 33.2 percent of the population was Protestant, and Greystones, where 57.4 percent of the population declared themselves to be such, probably shared more in social terms (though they often did not care to admit it) with their Catholic, suburban, middle-class contemporaries than with the landowners of the former Protestant Ascendancy. As time went on and the political climate relaxed, this would allow for their integration into the new Ireland in ways which would not be so easily possible for their landed coreligionists and kin, whose possession of such tracts of the Irish soil as they still owned would always be liable to affront nationalist sensibilities. So what before independence had been a social minority bound together by religious affiliation and Unionist politics became fragmented upon independence: the remaining landowners isolated in the countryside, the farmers of the Ulster counties unsettled in mind and ready to move to the more congenial atmosphere of Northern Ireland, and the Protestant professional and business community concerned about stability and nervously ready to accept the new order if it offered such. What they all shared was a sense of isolation and of political impotence.