Inventing Ireland (85 page)

Perhaps the greatest contribution made by Joseph Lee to Irish scholarship has been his insistence on the value of comparisons (even though most of his are limited to a European frame of reference). Only
Raymond Crotty, in his analytic studies of agricultural economics in Ireland and the "underdeveloped" world, went further.
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Both men stood relatively isolated in a university system which lacked departments of comparative politics or comparative literature. As notable as this lack, however, was the unwillingness of most colleges in the republic to offer holistic courses in Irish Studies. These are widely and successfully taught on an interdisciplinary basis in Belfast, Coleraine, Oxford, Kent, London, Liverpool and in dozens of American, Canadian and Australian universities, but in Ireland the thinking still seems to be that academic rigour would be compromised by such approaches. The result is an extraordinarily insulated set of disciplinary activities, as well as a rather dishonourable suspicion of those few practitioners who
have bravely pursued cultural studies in the widest sense. Yet the need for such ecumenical, even impure, practices is far greater there than in most other countries. Imagine the contribution to peace and reconciliation if every unionist child, through an integrated course of cultural
study,
learned something
of
the riches
of
the Gaelic tradition as mediated by such exemplary Protestants as Synge, Gregory and Hyde. Imagine also the potential if many children in the republic were to be challenged by a syllabus which asked them to study the elements of English Protestant tradition which might help them to repair the gaps in their own. An education which used the traditions of neighbouring peoples as a basis for constructing a critique of its own might in due time lead to real progress.

There have been sustained, at times self-lacerating, attempts at just such an autocritique in the republic: but these have been matched by no similar revisions in other places. The unionists of Northern Ireland, perhaps because they feel besieged, consider this a time less for self-scrutiny than for self-assertion, and so they have produced no coherent movement of revisionism – although individual contributions by
Christopher McGimpsey and the
reverend Martin Smyth have proved illuminating. Equally, the British analysis veers between the traditional "not an inch" of the pro-union conservatives and the rather uncritical "greener than green" sentiment of the labourite left. Unionists have yet to explain the meaning of their union with a Britain now filled with ethnic minorities and a multicultural system: in such a contact, might not the speakers of the Irish language in Belfast claim good treatment as a civil right rather than as a tribal challenge? There is reason to believe that the "union" in which many believe is with a Britain that is now a pre-war curiosity for historians.

The British, for their part, might ask themselves to spell out the implications of their continuing support for the union: they must attempt to explain how for fifty years one of the most civilized peoples of modern Europe maintained a one-party state on its very own doorstep. And they might consider whether the cost of that union has been heavy not just in terms of lives and money, but in the damage done to British democracy by a system of torture, supergrasses and spies. As the forces for a republican Britain gather strength and self-confidence, they may begin to ask whether the links between a triumphalist all-Protestant monarchy and the thinking of loyalist exremists are too close for comfort.

British socialists and radicals might
come to
question their own longstanding fixation on Irish nationalism, with its colourful array of
poets, balladeers, desperadoes, and try instead to make an informed assessment of the deeper aspirations and implications of
unionism. Since the days of Matthew Arnold, British liberals have offered mythical readings of the culture which their government is nominally opposing: perhaps it is time for them to conduct a pragmatic analysis of the culture of the northern majority which Westminster is still actually supporting. The link with an exclusively Protestant
monarchy has not been an entirely happy one for many unionists, who are painfully aware of the use of that link to an openly sectarian politician like
Ian Paisley: and the much-neglected contribution of Ulster Presbyterianism to the building of the United States might prove a better source of inspiration, and of overseas aid, in years to come. One possible explanation for the reluctance of many unionist revisionists to declare themselves may be the widespread view among republicans that Northern Ireland, being constructed on ritual discrimination, is unsalvageable: to reform it, they say, would be in effect to destroy it. Yet the emergence of a strong unionist autocritique might well be the most potent of all defences against such strictures.
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Equally, the citizens of the republic need to put some hard questions to themselves. Just how "Gaelic" is the self-image of a country which, within the past decade, has had a Minister for Education who could not speak the Irish language? And just how "Catholic" is a land which no longer produces priests in sufficient quantity to service the increasingly elderly and depopulated parishes of the major archdioceses?

Of their very nature, the problems of the north of Ireland cannot be solved by some bold, imaginative gesture: rather their harsh contours can be softened by a steady chipping-away at the lies fostered by simplified versions of history. Just how tangled the questions of identity have become is apparent in the fact that militant loyalist gunmen have at various times in recent decades threatened to kill British soldiers in defence of a union which – it is feared – the authorities in London might be about to betray. There could scarcely be a more vivid illustration of Douglas Hyde's thesis that Anglophobia was strongest among those who were most Anglicized: what was true of English-imitating Irish nationalists in the 1890s seems now to be true of English-fixated Irish unionists in the 1990s. Hyde took this hatred of England as a sign of lost self-confidence, of a people whose culture lacked an inner dynamic ever since their abandonment of their native language.

Paradoxical it may be, but the recent debate surrounding the Irish language may shed much unexpected light on the current dilemma of
unionists. Some unionist militants, as if vaguely sensing this, have taken to learning the Irish
language during protracted spells in jail; others have adopted the figure of Cuchulain who, after all, defended the gap of the north against outside attack, as a model to inspire their followers. There is an Orange Lodge which marches under the banner
Oidhreacht Éireann
(Irish Heritage). Some of the more liberal unionists, such as Christopher McGimpsey, have argued strongly for the Irish language as an essential part of their heritage too: and it is a fact that many ancestors of today's loyalists would have been Irish-speaking.

The twin frustrations of twentieth-century Irish life, reflected in the two unachieved aims of the largest political party on the island, are the failure to reintegrate the
national territory and to revive Irish as the community language. The second wound is much less discussed in books and newspapers, and nobody has died because of it – but the silence which surrounds it may in large pan be due to the fact that it was self-inflicted. In just over a century a language spoken by millions withered to almost nothing. Had such a thing happened in any other small or medium-sized European country, it is probable that the language in question would have disappeared. At the start of the nineteenth century, there were more speakers of Irish than speakers of Dutch, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish or Welsh: yet they coolly abandoned their language in the belief that it was an obstacle to progress. Only later did some of them, led by Douglas Hyde, conclude that with it went a social framework, a hold on a world, a basis for self-belief and, ultimately, economic prosperity.

Few enough people outside the ranks of cultural nationalism have been able to admit to the traumatizing effect of the loss of Irish on the personality of citizens. Roy Foster's
Modern Ireland
offers no separate consideration of it in the course of a very long study. For more than half a century after the foundation of the independent state in 1922, there was no official investigation of public attitudes. Most people congratulated themselves on their eloquence in English, while remaining dumb in Irish.
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It is hard to avoid the conclusion that even the brilliance of the Irish literary performance in English may have had about it some element of determined compensation. The astonishing speed and stunning success with which the Irish jettisoned their native language has never been fully explained, nor has the unsuccess with which they strove to reclaim it in the twentieth century. After seventy years of official support and daily classes for every school child in the land, only five per cent could claim "frequent user" ability, and only two per cent "native speaker" fluency.
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Learning a second language is
never easy, of course, yet with far fewer institutional supports, the Irish mastered English so comprehensively in the nineteenth century that they produced one of the greatest literary outpourings in that language.

Most other European minorities who learned English did so only when they had settled in major cities of Britain or the new world: but the Irish changeover occurred at home. Other peoples had to trade with speakers of a foreign language and so to acquire some proficiency in it, but this never led them to give up their own. The Irish experience was in this respect unique: they didn't learn English in order to emigrate – rather they learned English, and then many of them emigrated, finding no pressing reasons to stay. Seán de Fréine has argued most convincingly that the Great Famine did not of itself destroy the language: a people with self-belief will recover from even worse cataclysms, as both the Germans and Jews have done in the twentieth century. Rather, the Famine revealed a new helplessness in people who had previously faced adversity with confidence and good spirit: it exposed the fact that they no longer had traditions which might give them sustenance.
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De Fréine contends that the Penal Laws of the previous century debilitated the Irish, robbing them of an aristocratic leadership. They were willing to adopt English by the 1790s, if that was to be the price of reforms which would permit them to hold onto their religion. So Maynooth was set up in 1795, with classes conducted in English for "young dandies" who were painfully keen to conceal their Irish.
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Thereafter, more and more parents who spoke only Irish to one another saw to it that English alone was spoken by their children. A process of "denial" soon followed. Convulsed by guilt at the enormity of what they had done, many found it most convenient to forget that there ever had been such a thing as an Irish language distinct from English. The inferiority-complex which impelled so many to give up Irish was not cured, more often exacerbated, by the gesture: and so a people in denial sought to project their own guilt elsewhere. Hence the rampant Anglophobia among many nationalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the consequent writing of Irish history as a Manichaean morality-tale in the first half of the twentieth.
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Hence, too, the over-emphasis on Catholicism as definitive of Irishness in the same period. With the native language all but gone, many found it necessary to locate the sole or central meanings of a culture in what
had
survived. Yet the evidence would now suggest that the Irish may be about to jettison Catholicism as unsentimentally as once they disposed of their own language.

By its own admission the Catholic church is already on the retreat in
the southern state, unable to find any mainstream daily newspaper to sponsor its values: yet many Protestant unionists remain suspicious of the siren-call of the south. In ancient times, certainly, the seductive powers of Gaelic culture were such that even a group as self-confident as the Normans was assimilated, becoming "more Irish than the Irish themselves": but the evidence from recent centuries all points to the capacity
of the Irish themselves
to be assimilated. The more Anglophobic the leaders of Irish nationalism became, the more fully did they make their country an integral part of a prevailing British culture. At the start of the century Synge had lamented the
lack of sufficient Irish readers to sustain native publishing houses or a national school of letters: yet the nationalist politicians who grumbled about a unionist veto on political progress never seemed to worry about the fact that English publishing houses and English tastes largely determined what books by Irish authors got into print.

In more recent decades, native publishing houses have flourished, but the newspaper market has been flooded by cheap British tabloids, which sold widely and did much to coarsen public taste, while the better broadsheet papers were forced to imitate English rivals, which constantly undercut them on the basis of their superior economies of scale. There was little enough reason for unionists to fear cultural assimilation: rather the danger was that both unionists and nationalists were being coopted by the global media network in the English language.

Against that rather bleak backdrop the cultural successes of the past three decades seem positively heartening. There are now thousands of books published in Ireland every year, to a very high standard of writing and design: an indigenous children's literature is but one manifestation of a new-found confidence. Local publishing companies, like local radio stations, have reflected the traditions of their immediate hinterland in ways which help people to resist the globalization of English-language culture. Among the young in particular, ever since the 1960s, the Irish language has been embraced by many as a force for a "counterculture" quite distinct from nationalist attachments. Indeed, anti-English outbursts have been signally absent among those who, speaking Irish on a daily basis, have no reason to worry as to whether what they say or do has the stamp of Irishness or not. Given that only fifty people could write in Irish when the Gaelic League set to work, the current levels of writing in the language are near-miraculous.