Read Inventing Ireland Online

Authors: Declan Kiberd

Inventing Ireland (5 page)

The Act of Union in 1800, which yoked the two countries together under the Parliament in London, represented a further integration of Ireland into English political life. It was the official response to the rebellion of 1798, a bloody uprising supported by radical Presbyterians, disgruntled Catholics and secular republicans, all of them inspired by recent developments in France. That insurrection had been crushed with matchless severity: the short-lived alliance between "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter", decreed by its republican leader Wolfe Tone against the strength of England, would never be achieved again. The history of Ireland in the following century would be concerned more with sorting out the differences of the Protestant ascendancy and their multitudinous Catholic tenants and underlings: for, although the Union might be said to have secured Burke's dream of an Ireland taking its place in a developing British scheme of things, his calls for the amelioration of Catholic grievances went largely unanswered. A further uprising, led by
Robert Emmet (another idealistic Jacobin of Protestant background) was easily put down in 1803 – though the image of Emmet as doomed young leader prompted many English artists, from
Southey to Keats and Coleridge, to rebuke themselves for their own failure to live up to such high romantic ideals.

Only with the emergence of the great parliamentary agitator, Daniel O'Conneli, was hope of a kind restored. Disparaged by his English enemies as "the King of the Beggars", he was perhaps the first mass-democratic politician of modern Europe in the sense that he built his power on the basis of an awesome popular movement. By 1829, this proudly Catholic leader had secured emancipation for his co-religionists: the Penal Laws against them were finally broken. He next set his sights on repeal of the Union, holding monster meetings at symbolic historical venues across the country. Tens of thousands of labourers, fisherfolk and farm workers walked to hear him: and his speeches, delivered in English by a man keen to prick the conscience of newspaper-readers in the centre of power in London, had a mesmeric effect. By his ringing eloquence, his parliamentary cunning and his back-slapping cajolery,
O'Connell achieved an ideal
rapport
with the Irish peasantry, a rapport which would be the envy and aspiration of many
writers of the Irish Renaissance. It was said that up to 100,000 flocked to O'Connell's last monster meeting at Clontarf in 1843, the site of a famous victory by which the Irish had terminated
Viking power in Europe. The authorities, sooner than see such self-confidence grow, prohibited the meeting; and its organizer, who believed that the freedom of his country did not justify the shedding of a drop of blood, submitted. It was a fatal climb-down: O'Connell never reached the old heights again, and the movement for Repeal foundered. The lessons of a failed parliamentary and democratic system were not lost on O'Connell's more tough-minded critics in the national movement. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to call O'Connell one of the inventors of the modern Irish nation: for a heady period, he gave its members a corporate identity and a sense of their own massed power. The sense of disappointment when that power failed to register with the authorities was all the greater.

Disappointment gave way to desperation in the years of
famine during
the
1840s. Almost a million people died from starvation and associated disease: and, in the same decade, one and a half million emigrated. Irish-speaking areas were among the hardest hit, with the result that only a quarter of the population was recorded as speaking the language after 1851. Through the earlier years of hunger, the British held to their
laissez-faire
economic theories and ships carried large quantities of grain from the starving island. Arguments raged (and still do) as to the degree of British culpability, but Irish public opinion was inflamed. While some landlords behaved with great callousness towards their ruined tenantry, others were heroic in generosity and in organizing counter-measures: but pervading all was a sense that this was the final betrayal by England. As so often, the balance of the debate was well registered in the popular peasant saw: "God sent the potato-blight, but the English caused the Famine".

If Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen had looked to revolutionary France for support in 1798, the post-Famine generation turned its eyes toward America. The
Fenian Brotherhood stepped into the political vacuum, spurning O'Connellite agitation for the older, trusted methods of an oath-bound secret society which had been favoured by Tone. Ever afterward the cultural as well as political leaders would look to the new world for funds, for manpower, above all for a republican example. Hence the mandatory American tours not just by subsequent revolutionary leaders but also by intellectuals such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. Hence also the eventual adoption by Irish writers of
Walt Whitman as the model of a national bard. The Fenian philosophy
was summed up by one of the leaders, John O'Leary, who opined that it was useless for an Irishman to confront an Englishman without a gun in his hand. This was a view reflected in another popular proverb which warned children against three things: "the horns of a bull, the hoof of a horse, and the smile of an Englishman".

Through all these decades, Protestant Ireland continued to produce more than its share of idealists, who sought to hold a middle ground. The
Young Ireland leader,
Thomas Davis, had founded
The Nation
newspaper in 1842 with the help of Catholic friends. Sometimes described as naïve dreamers by caustic critics, the Young Irelanders included a few such among their numbers: one vowed to abstain from intoxicating liquor "until Ireland was free, from the centre to the sea", a rather self-denying prospect. But Davis had flint and iron in him as well. He viewed O'Connell's bluff, back-slapping politics with fastidious distaste, discerning in its lineaments an emerging Catholic sectarianism (in place of Tone's "common name of Irishmen"). A Catholic nation would have no place for a Davis, just as surely as the Protestant nation proclaimed in Dublin in the previous century had based itself on the assumption that Catholics simply did not exist. Davis bravely tackled O'Connell in public on the issue; and in forthright essays he identified cultural activity as the true course of a more ecumenical nationhood. "Educate that you may be free" was a favourite motto. He provided later leaders of the Irish Renaissance with many of their crucial ideas: he contrasted the philistinism and gradgrindery of England with the superior idealism and imagination of Ireland. He was not, however, anti-industrial, believing that it was as important to mine the ore at Arigna as to publish a patriotic poem: indeed, he saw these two actions as intimately linked, for his central thesis was that Ireland would never achieve its full industrial and entrepreneurial potential until it had first recovered its cultural self-confidence – and that would only be regained through political separation from England. The Union claimed to accord the Irish all the freedom of citizens of the most prosperous nation in the world; in practice, it simply provincialized them in the name of a facile cosmopolitanism.

These powerful and penetrating analyses were cut off by Davis's death in 1845 at the early age of thirty-one. It would be left to Yeats, Hyde and a later generation to restore to culture its central importance in the liberation of a people: and even if Davis had lived a longer life, the Famine and the Fenians would probably have obscured his contribution. The portents for a cultural alliance of Catholic and Protestant were never very encouraging: through much of the Famine decade
stories circulated about Protestant preachers offering starving peasants soup and clothing in return for religious conversion. Across the north, especially, sectarian tensions continued to heighten, with Catholics supporting a separatist nationalism and Protestants the Orange Lodges. O'Connell might have failed as a political agitator, but his equation of Catholicism and nationhood was proving all too seductive to many desperate souls. Yet, when the Fenians rose in rebellion in 1867, many Catholic bishops denounced them, forbade them the sacraments and, in certain spectacular cases, excommunicated them. Republican separatism never enjoyed much clerical support. Rural communities could often identify the Fenian in their number by the fact that he did not go to mass or that, when he did, he took no communion. W. B. Yeats, who was himself for a brief period a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, would work mightily to keep open this gap between "Catholic" and "national" feeling. On it the very notion of a cultural renaissance depended.

One of his exemplars in this regard was the next great Irish leader,
Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord from County Wicklow who seemed in all things the antithesis of O'Connell – silent where he had been gregarious, aristocratic as opposed to populist in style, cold and disdainful whereas the predecessor had been warm and wheedling. To this complex man, whom they called the uncrowned king of Ireland, the emerging masses entrusted their fate and their party, which he led at
Westminster through the 1880s. He displayed immense strategic guile in philibustering its sessions, using his numbers to tip the balance of power and, once or twice, immobilizing its political processes. The great issue of the decade was land, a debate initiated ten years earlier by
Gladstone's first Land Act of 1870 which, following the disestablishment of the
Church of Ireland in the previous year, had effectively put the Protestant ascendancy on notice that its end was near. By its famous no-rent policy of "boycott" – so named after Captain Boycott, one of its victims in Mayo – the
Land League helped win many famous victories; and Parnell's shrewd obstructionist tactics did the rest.

Throughout the later nineteenth century, Ireland functioned as a sort of political and social laboratory in which, parabolically, the English could test their most new-fangled ideas – ideas about the proper relation between religion and the state, about the changing role of the aristocracy, above all about the holding and use of land. Indeed, experiments of this kind can be traced as far back as the 1830s, when Ireland was given a streamlined system of national education and a country-wide postal network years ahead of England, which only
adopted the models after they were seen to thrive and prosper. All this may help to explain the seeming paradox of a
modernist literature and cultural politics in a country too often noted for its apparent backwardness. In fact, by the 1880s and 1890s, Ireland was in certain respects clearly advanced by contrast with England. In politics, it was confronting its national question (something which, even today, the English have not done), dismantling church-state connections, and evolving a republican politics based on a theory of citizens' rights. A highly-educated younger generation, finding few positions available commensurate with its abilities or aspirations, was about to turn to writing as a means of seeking power: out of the strange mixture of backwardness and forwardness everywhere, it would forge one of the most formally daring and experimental literatures of the modern movement.

As a laboratory, of course, Ireland had also known some less pleasant experiments –
laissez-faire
economics, oscillations from conciliation to coercion, curfews and martial law – for it was a crucible in which Britain not only tested ideas for possible use back home, but also for likely implementation in other colonies. The process was reciprocal. Inevitably, the arriving Irish, in their tens of thousands, occupied and used England as a laboratory in which to solve many of their own domestic problems at a certain useful remove. The career of Parnell, no less than those of Wilde and Shaw, might be read as an instance of the theme.

The crisis which overtook the aristocracy under the challenge of Parnellism can be understood with reference to a quip of Oscar Wilde: property, he joked, gives people a position in society, but then it proves so expensive to maintain that it prevents them from keeping it up. In some ways, this had been a problem long before
Gladstone devised his Land Acts, a problem which was traceable back to 1800. After the Act of Union, Dublin was a "deposed capital"; its season was no longer splendid; many landlords spent more and more time in England; and the self-confidence which had characterized the Anglo-Irish of the eighteenth century began rapidly to wane. One frustrated leader of this enfeebled aristocracy,
Standish O'Grady, berated his peers in a pamphlet of 1886: "Christ save us! You read nothing, know nothing!"
24
Parnell, assisted by the Land League, was simply delivering the final blows which would complete the fall of feudalism in Ireland. He never overtly endorsed the violence deployed by agrarian insurgents, but he could not help being its beneficiary: in this, too, Parnell remained an enigmatic and ambivalent figure, despite repeated British attempts to discredit him with links to organized crime. In the end, just when
Home Rule seemed a real possibility, he was broken by his love for Kitty O'Shea, a woman married to a member of his parliamentary party. Cited as a co-respondent, he was abandoned by Gladstone (whose High Anglican conscience was outraged) and denounced as a public sinner unfit for leadership by the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church. His party split amid terrible rancour and he died in his beloveds arms at Brighton in 1891.

Parliamentary methods had once again revealed their limitations, and a younger generation of intellectuals turned from politics back to culture and to the teachings of Thomas Davis. The poet Yeats met the ship which bore Parnell's remains back to Dublin; and when the leader was buried at Glasnevin a meteor appeared to fall from the skies. The way was open for a literary movement to fill the political vacuum. Its writers would take Standish O'Grady's versions of the
Cuchulain legend, and interpret the hero not as an exemplar for the Anglo-Irish overlords but as a model for those who were about to displace them. Cuchulain provided a symbol of masculinity for Celts, who had been written off as feminine by their masters. A surprising number of militant nationalists accepted that diagnosis and called on the youth of Ireland to purge themselves of their degrading femininity by a disciplined programme of physical-contact sports. The
Gaelic Athletic Association had been founded in 1884 to counter such emasculation and to promote the game of camán (
hurling) beloved of the young Cuchulain. If the British Empire was won on the playing fields of
Rugby and
Eton, then on the playing fields of Ireland was being perfected a new generation which might call the permanence of that victory into question.

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