Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

Independence marked therefore the end of the Protestant minority’s significant political power in the South of Ireland. Indeed, in its fragmented state it is difficult to see how any political party could have represented its interests in specific ways. None attempted the task, and the political associations that had directed the Unionist cause before independence swiftly became defunct. It is true that about seventeen former Southern Unionists were to be granted seats as non-elected members of the Upper House of the Oireachtas, Seanad Eireann (the Senate), but the actual political insecurity experienced by the Protestant community in Ireland at independence can be adjudged the more certainly by the remarkable spectacle of a delegation dispatched by the general synod of the Church of Ireland on 12 May 1922 to wait on Michael Collins to inquire in what may strike one now as plaintive terms indeed, “if they were permitted to live in Ireland or if it was desired that they should leave the country.”

(#litres_trial_promo) (It is surely revelatory that it was a church body and not a political party or association that took this step.) Collins’s firm assurance that they were welcome to remain and would be protected by his forces must have relieved them as it evidenced in a very important quarter indeed the existence of that republican strand in modern Irish nationalism which owes something to an eighteenth-century vision of an Irish democracy which could offer a secure home to Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter alike. But events in the country itself, over which it is only fair to emphasize Collins and the provisional government’s army had a far from satisfactory military control, must have seemed to many Anglo-Irish people to suggest that less idealistic forces might swamp the exemplary conscientiousness of the new administration. Between 6 December 1921 and 22 March 1923, 192 Big Houses were burned by incendiaries as reported in the Morning Post of 9 April 1923.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although these attacks on the houses of the former Ascendancy can be understood as part of a political and military strategy (many of the houses were burned by republicans who considered probably rightly that their occupants were supporters of the Treaty party), to Anglo-Ireland itself this must have seemed a veritable Jacquerie and a painful demonstration of their isolated vulnerability in an Ireland which no longer appeared to accept them.

The emotional state of Anglo-Ireland in the period was registered in a number of novels which appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s which employed the Big House as a metaphor that might allow the author to explore the socially disintegrated world of the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1925 Edith Somerville published The Big House of Inver, a chronicle of passion, vice, enmity, and corruption which destroy the great house of the work’s title. In the opening chapters the writer ponders the decline in the fortunes of the house as an emblem of social decay among her Anglo-Irish peers. She is tough-minded and ironic about their plight, convinced that they and their ancestors were in large measure the architects of their own downfall. The Anglo-Irish Big House had been a noble conception: “Inver House embodied one of those large gestures of the mind of the earlier Irish architects, some of which still stand to justify Ireland’s claim to be considered a civilized country.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Such defiance, she recognizes, comes too late; too many houses have been burned, destroyed before the fire took them, from within. The house that “faced unflinching the western ocean” suffered a fierce blow in the Famine of 1845, but the line of succession had been sullied before that by an act of lustful folly. From this primal sin can be traced subsequent incapacities to outface the blows of fate and history: “The glories and the greatness of Inver therewith suffered downfall. Five successive generations of mainly halfbred and wholly profligate Prendevilles rioted out their short lives, living with country women, fighting, drinking, gambling.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The Famine was only the axe that felled the dying tree:

Many an ancient property foundered and sank in that storm, drawing down with it – as a great ship in her sinking sucks down those that trusted in her protection – not alone its owners, but also the swarming families of the people who, in those semifeudal times, looked to the Big Houses for help. The martyrdoms, and the heroisms, and the devotion, have passed into oblivion, and better so, perhaps, when it is remembered how a not extravagant exercise of political foresight might have saved the martyrdoms. As for other matters, it might only intensify the embittering of a now outcast class to be reminded of what things it suffered and sacrificed in doing what it held to be its duty.

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Such stern resignation to Anglo-Ireland’s demise, with its flash of anger at wasted opportunities, was rare in the ranks of her Anglo-Irish contemporaries, but Edith Somerville bears eloquent testimony here to the bitterness and sense of social isolation many of her fellows experienced in the 1920s.

There were those who hoped that resignation was premature, that Anglo-Ireland might have some role to play in the new Ireland even if its political power was broken. One of the most poignant expressions of this hope was the novel published in 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. In 1942, writing of her own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, she reflected on the isolation which she felt was a central feature of Anglo-Ireland’s experience, made the more severe by the development of the Irish Free State and the depredations of wartime, but a constant of its history.

Each of these family houses, with its stables and farm and gardens deep in trees at the end of long avenues, is an island – and, like an island, a world…Each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin.

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The Last September is set in a Big House at a moment when that innate isolation was intense, during the grim months of the War of Independence in 1920. The heroine, Lois Farquar, orphaned niece to Sir Richard Naylor of Danielstown, becomes conscious, amid the comings and goings of guests, the tennis parties and dances arranged for the British garrison, of a haunting isolation, a sense of space ready to be filled when the transitional years of adolescence are done with, when autumn achieves the definition of winter, when the war that threatens their lives has been resolved.

Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here, too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set.

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The basic metaphor of the novel is the emptiness of the spaces in the house and the space between the house and the landscape and society it has been set amidst. Early in the novel Lois walks among the laurel trees in the shrubbery and comes undetected upon a man in a trench coat:

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short-cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique, frayed island moored at the north but with an air of being detached and drawn out west from the British coast.

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She recognizes that, “Conceivably she had surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery,” and the book suggests, in its constant metaphors of empty space, that perhaps some means can be discovered of filling them with a significance that will relate the isolated Ascendancy world of Lois Farquar to the wide, active countryside that surrounds her house. But the book’s expression of hope for such a relationship is muted and rendered plaintive by the valedictory movement of its prose and by the chilly finality of its scrupulously composed social tableaux and vistas. Written with the knowledge of 1929, the whole is contained within the final metaphor of empty spaces filled at the last by fire:

At Danielstown, half way up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the step the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace.

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It was possible, perhaps, to those less sensitive to the emotional isolation so precisely explored by an Elizabeth Bowen, to pretend that while the new order might refer to Kingstown as Dun Laoghaire, Kingstown it remained in polite society and that the National Anthem was still “God Save the King,” though Queen Victoria’s statue had vanished from the forecourt of Leinster House, former home of the Royal Dublin Society, now the seat of government.

(#litres_trial_promo) Brian Inglis, in West Briton, his witty account of Protestant society life in Malahide (a seaside town seven miles north of Dublin) in the period following independence, gives a spirited account of a contentedly vestigial world. He remembers:

Their social world remained stable; like a prawn in aspic it gradually began to go stale, but it did not disintegrate. All around them “that other Ireland” as George Russell (Æ) had called it, was coming into its force, but they remained almost unaware of its existence.

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Accent, social class, and religion still determined membership of the exclusive Island Golf Club. General satisfaction was expressed at the government’s impeccably orthodox economic policies. Indeed, as he recalls: “The State’s effort to impose what to us was an alien culture and, worse, an alien language, was almost the only feature of life in the Free State which compelled our attention and aroused our active resentment.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Sailing, dancing, hunting, and the club remained to distract Anglo-Ireland and those who felt themselves associated with it from uncomfortable developments, while the thriving condition of the Royal Dublin Society, with its lectures, concerts, and library suggested that the cultural influence of the distinctly Anglo-Irish or Protestant institutions was still strong. Membership of the society, which established itself in new premises in Ballsbridge in Dublin in 1925, increased substantially in the 1920s. In 1919 it could claim 2,221 members; by 1926 that figure had risen to 7,000, and although in 1920–21 only 9,730 attendances were registered at the reduced recitals of that troubled year, by 1925–26 35,780 attendances were registered at recitals and 11,002 at the lectures sponsored by the Society.

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By contrast to the Royal Dublin Society, the condition of Trinity College, Dublin in the 1920s is a more accurate indicator of the isolated predicament of the Anglo-Irish and Protestant minority in the new state. That university had long been identified with the Protestant Ascendancy (although in the nineteenth century it had rather served the Irish Protestant middle class than the gentry, who often preferred Oxford and Cambridge for their sons) and in the years preceding independence had endured much nationalist obloquy on account of certain intemperate utterances by some of its best-known fellows, in particular, John Pentland Mahaffy, whose contemptuous attitude to nationalist Ireland was not to be easily forgotten or forgiven. Furthermore, the college was in somewhat straitened financial circumstances. A Royal Commission of 1920 had recommended that the college receive an annual subvention from the public purse, and a sum of £30,000 per annum had been designated for Trinity in the Government of Ireland Act of the same year, but the provisions of that act never became active in the South of Ireland, and although the provost of the college sought to have some such financial arrangement included in the Treaty of 1921, he was unsuccessful.

(#litres_trial_promo) So the 1920s found Trinity financially insecure, intellectually and socially remote for the most part from contemporary Irish concerns, and identified in the popular mind with the former, rejected ruling class. There were those, too, ready to express the profoundest ill-will toward the institution. An Eoin MacNeill, with a certain distress, might regret that the college was responsible, as the chief agent of English culture in Ireland, for that anglicization which had almost destroyed the authentic civilization of the country (the college awarded him an honorary degree in 1928). Others were even more vigorously opposed to the college, ready to see in the large crowds that gathered in College Green, in front of the college, on Armistice Day, the symbol of a surviving Ascendancy attitude to be identified with the college itself. That the first provost to be appointed after the foundation of the Free State was a Gaelic scholar (Dr. E. J. Gwynn was appointed in 1927) and that scholarly material on the Irish language and on Irish literature was published in the college’s house journal, Hermathena, could do only very little to reduce antagonism toward an institution which had before independence seemed to set its face against the ideal of Irish freedom.

In the 1920s and 1930s Trinity suffered one of its bleakest periods. The buildings and grounds became dilapidated and a little unkempt. A sense of isolation and economic insecurity was not alleviated by much intellectual or imaginative enterprise. Many of the graduates sought their careers abroad, and the college was unable to play its part in the developing life of the Free State in the way the National University, particularly University College, Dublin, did. Indeed, the college in the centre of Dublin bore in its isolation and decline a striking resemblance in social terms to the Big Houses of the countryside – each symbolizing a ruling caste in the aftermath of its power.

Many Anglo-Irish men and women chose simply to leave the country, preferring the secure if duller life of a villa on the English south-east coast to the strains of further anxiety and isolation in Ireland (and their departure meant that much of the fine furniture and many books and paintings that had escaped the fires of the Civil War went for sale and were bought by dealers from abroad). The period 1911–26 saw indeed a striking decline of about one-third in the Protestant population of the South of Ireland as a whole

(#litres_trial_promo) (in the same period the Catholic population declined by 2.2 percent), which must be accounted for not only by the lamentable losses endured by Protestant Ireland in the Great War but by the large numbers of landed families, Protestant professional men, former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, civil servants, and Protestant small farmers, who felt that the new Ireland was unlikely to provide a satisfactory home for themselves or their offspring. In the early 1930s one witness recorded the fact that in County Clare seventy Protestant landed families had left the country since 1919,

(#litres_trial_promo) leaving only a small remnant of their class and creed behind them. In other counties of the south and west the pattern was similar, if not quite so starkly etched.

A sense of bitterness and betrayal accompanied these men and women into exile, together with a conviction that the new Ireland was, sadly, no place for them. Their feelings and attitude are, in fact, well represented in a volume of reminiscences by P. L. Dickinson published in 1929. Dickinson, a Dublin architect, in his book The Dublin of Yesterday, remembers his youth and young manhood in a city he reckons has now fallen into enemy hands. Fairly typical of the professional Dublin man who felt a kinship with Anglo-Ireland and the Protestant Ascendancy (his father was vicar of the important St. Anne’s Parish in Dublin, and his family had links with the gentry, while his paternal grandfather had been bishop of Meath), Dickinson had been educated in England before returning to a comfortable Dublin professional life in a social ambiance he found totally agreeable. He had wide contacts in Dublin’s literary, artistic, and medical worlds, numbering among his acquaintances John Pentland Mahaffy (he was secretary to Mahaffy in the Georgian Society founded in 1910), W. B. Yeats, whom he met in the Arts Club, where he enjoyed many sociable occasions, George Russell, Pádraic Colum, and Katherine Tynan. A man of broad views (he was sceptical about revealed religion and prepared to view monogamy as only one form of sexual arrangement), he felt by 1929 that Ireland was “largely ruled by a priesthood and atmosphere based on economic conditions of the medieval and early Renaissance period.”

(#litres_trial_promo) It was no place for one of his class and outlook. He was particularly oppressed by the Gaelic enthusiasm:

The Gael was a rung on the ladder, a rung which has long been overstepped. The modern movement in the new political entity – the Irish Free State – the modern movement back towards this Gaelic Hey-Day is pathetic: or if you wish it is comic; certainly it is useless. It cannot last – Ireland is politically and economically and, above all, socially, one with Great Britain; any such retrograde movement as an attempt at the compulsory revival of a dead language only becomes a local racial injury. It hurts every one a little; but it hurts the authors a lot. To those who, like myself have had to leave their native country owing to the acts of their fellow-countrymen, a perfectly dispassionate judgement of the situation must be a little difficult. I love Ireland; few people know it better. There is hardly a mile of its coastline or hills I have not walked. There is not a thought in me that does not want well-being for the land of my birth; yet there is no room today in their own land for thousands of Irishmen of similar views.

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All that he now sees in Ireland are “the gestures of the child shaking itself free from its nurse” as he looks on with “a devoted but impotent love.”

Some Anglo-Irishmen were unprepared to accept the position of isolated impotence or exile that seemed their lot in the new political dispensation. Men of substance like Lord Midleton and Andrew Jameson, who had played leading parts in the Irish Unionist Alliance which had attempted to project the Unionist cause in the years before independence, were willing to take places in the Seanad, ready to participate in government and to defend their social and economic position in the political arena (in fact, only Jameson was offered a seat). However, it was in the Dáil that the real legislative muscle was exercised, and although the government contained men who realized the new state could gain much from the former Ascendancy, there were also those, like Ernest Blythe, for a time Minister for Finance, who frankly admitted later of such as Midleton and Jameson, “We looked on them as the dregs of landlordism.”

(#litres_trial_promo) So a figure like the remarkable Bryan Cooper, Anglo-Irish landowner, former Unionist MP at Westminster and British army officer, who stood and was elected as an independent for the Free State Dáil, where he played a significant role in legislative business, finally in 1927 joining W. T. Cosgrave’s ruling party, must be seen, I think, as an exception to the rule that more usually saw Anglo-Irishmen and women quite remote from political life in this period. Cooper was probably unique as Anglo-Irishman in his adaptability and personal attractiveness, so while his participation in the Dáil, which was welcomed by various members of that house, can, as his biographer argues, be seen as proving

…that a man of his birth and upbringing could have, and did have, a place in Ireland and could help to shape the new Irish State. His presence in the Dáil and his power there gave the lie to the pedants in the Kildare Street and Stephen’s Green Clubs and gave the lie to the Protestant Bishops and rural Deans

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one also suspects that Cooper’s genial and attractive personality made smooth his way in an assembly that might not have proved so welcoming to others less happily endowed.

Some few Anglo-Irishmen and individuals who identified with Anglo-Ireland’s fate were prepared in the face of isolation, impotence, and the difficulties militating against political participation to contemplate defiance and intellectual defence as proper responses to their predicament. In 1926, in his play The Big House, Lennox Robinson nicely caught this mood. The play, which was presented by the Abbey in September of that year at what one reviewer called “one of the most enthusiastic first performances that I can remember at the Abbey Theatre,”

(#litres_trial_promo) offered four scenes from the recent life of a Big House which has sent its sons to their deaths in the Great War and is finally destroyed in the flames of the Civil War. The heroine, Kate Alcock, is perhaps the most interesting character in the play. Daughter of the house, she has sought to identify with the Ireland she has seen developing about her, but at a crucial moment in the play she senses her absolute separation from those with whom she seeks acceptance. A young woman in the village has perished at the hands of the Black and Tans, and Kate visits the bereaved family:

Oh yes, I threw a bridge across the gulf and ran across it and called Pat, Mick and Larry by their Christian names, and hobnobbed with priests and creamery managers and Gaelic teachers – but it was only a bridge, the gulf remained and when the moment came they instinctively forced me to stand on the farther side. Oh, it wasn’t only tonight I’ve felt it. I’ve been conscious of it ever since I’ve been conscious of anything, but I thought it could be broken down.

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The play ends with Kate accepting her Anglo-Irish distinctiveness, defiantly determining to rebuild the gutted family house, convinced that “Ireland is not more theirs than ours.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Now she glories in her Anglo-Irish difference, rejecting the “democratic snobbishness we went in for:”