Читать книгу Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001 - Dr. Brown Terence - Страница 9

Political life in the newly independent Irish Free State, even in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, reflected in obvious ways the essential conservatism of the predominantly rural Irish electorate. Law and order were rigorously maintained and the books carefully balanced. The party in power, composed in the main of elements of the Sinn Féin party that had accepted the Treaty of 1921, quickly won the support of those sections of the Irish community most likely to benefit from stability – the businessmen and merchants, the larger farmers and shopkeepers, the remnants of Anglo-Ireland anxious for security, and the kind of middle-class men and women who had earlier put their trust in respectable politicians of the Irish parliamentary party. The ruling Cumann na nGaedheal party had the support of the major national dailies, the Irish Independent, Cork Examiner, and Irish Times and of the churches. As the IRA and the republican diehards maintained an opposition that always threatened and occasionally generated violence, a general shift to the right was widely accepted by an Irish public that sought peaceful stability after a period of intense uncertainty. As one historian succinctly stated it, “Cumann na nGaedheal’s basic attitude differed little from that of the British Conservative Party between 1895 and 1905: a well-governed Ireland would receive positive economic benefits from its association with Britain and quickly forget old passions and hatreds.”¹ The government emphasized the benefits in terms of national prestige to be derived from membership of the Commonwealth while pressing ahead with the diplomatic arrangements that helped define the possibilities in that dominion status which had constituted in Michael Collins’ view a steppingstone to freedom.

Perhaps it is less than just to regret the social and cultural pusillanimity of the Free State government in the 1920s, anxious as it was to provide a sound, conservative administration in perilous times. That the state managed to survive at all is in itself remarkable. A viciously fought civil war had left in its wake a recalcitrant minority implacably opposed to the elected government. At least until 1927 when Eamon de Valera, who had led the anti-Treaty faction into the Civil War, accepted the role of parliamentary opposition for the political party he had founded in 1926, Fianna Fáil (Warriors of Fál, or Ireland), the threat from the IRA to the new institutions of the state could by no means be discounted. After the assassination in 1927 of one of the government’s most active young ministers, Kevin O’Higgins, it seemed necessary to pass an extreme Public Safety Act, as it did once again following republican violence and intimidation in 1931. Furthermore, the government was forced in 1925 to absorb that drastic shock to nationalist sensibility and aspiration, the leak of the Boundary Commission Report on the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. That report, if it had been accepted by the British government would, it appeared, have proved a crippling blow to nationalist hopes that the Northern semi-state established against the Irish majority’s wishes in 1920, would be required to cede so much territory to the Irish Free State that it would become untenable. Rather, it transpired that the Free State itself might lose a portion of its territory to Northern Ireland, gaining little. In seeking to prevent the publication and acceptance of the report, the Free State government found itself a scarcely enthusiastic signatory in London in December 1925 to a tripartite agreement accepting the territorial status quo, thereby providing much ammunition to those who saw the establishment of a thirty-two-county republic as the only legitimate if unrealizable Irish political ideal.

The resolve and courage (which extended in such difficult conditions to the creation of an unarmed police force to replace the old Royal Irish Constabulary) with which the Free State government managed the affairs of state, establishing and protecting democratic institutions, must in fairness be reckoned to its credit. That little that was remarkable was attempted in the social or in the cultural spheres is perhaps not surprising, since survival occupied most people’s minds. Yet the revolution had been fought for more than administrative efficiency and a balanced budget, and it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for those diehard republicans who thought the revolution betrayed in the 1920s, while one admires the stern-minded determination of the government in its efforts to establish and maintain public order.

But it could scarcely have been otherwise. A government with its “power-base firmly established among instinctively conservative and prosperous middle-class elements of society,”² was, in a society marked by a general conservatism, hardly likely, whatever one might have hoped, to have embarked upon many social, economic, and cultural experiments in such difficult times. That the government did in fact strenuously commit itself in such unlikely conditions to one radical policy – the apparently revolutionary policy of language revival – must seem initially, in such a context, difficult to explain. This particular commitment, however, quickly becomes comprehensible when one realizes that the government, anxious to establish its legitimacy in the face of the republican’s uncompromising zeal, had, in language revival, a cause of unexceptionable nationalist authenticity. However, the government’s dedication to the cause of language revival was by no means simply self-interested. Indeed to suggest that its espousal of this policy was anything more than very slightly opportunistic would be to ignore how profoundly the Irish revolutionary movement that had led to the independence of the Free State had been affected by the revivalist ideology of the Gaelic League and the enthusiasm it generated.

The Gaelic League (founded in 1893 to propagate knowledge of and interest in the language) had been a nursery for active members of Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers of 1916. The ideology so ably broadcast by the League had moreover achieved a measure of acceptance in the country at large. Accordingly, when a Free State government was formed it contained members of the Gaelic League and individuals sympathetic to the aims of what had been perhaps the best-supported, most vital cultural movement of the preceding thirty years. In fact, the state’s first Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeill, who had been the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers when the Easter Rising took place (against his advice as it happened), was professor of early Irish history at University College, Dublin, and a Gaelic scholar who had become known in the early years of the century as a devoted worker for the Gaelic League. It was in fact he who had coproposed a series of recommendations on education at an Ard-Fheis of the League in 1913 which had sought to have Irish taught to all pupils in National Schools and to exclude from teachers’ training colleges individuals who lacked sound knowledge of the language.

The first Dáil in 1919, after the major Sinn Féin electoral successes of 1918, had created a Ministry for Irish, and as the new state was founded, the Gaelic League could be reasonably sure that any government emerging from only a section of the former Sinn Féin party would have the revival of Irish as one of its central concerns. So, an announcement of the government’s achievements and policies published in November 1924 included amid much matter on farming, drainage, rates, electricity, and railways, the following declaration:

The Organisation and the Government are pledged to coordinate, democratize and Gaelicize our education. In each of these aims great progress has already been made. It is now possible for the child of the poorest parents to pass from one end of the educational ladder to the other, and the Irish language has been restored to its own place in Irish education. In addition, the condition of that important class, the Secondary Teachers, has been improved. The Organisation and Government intend to devote special attention to the problem of safeguarding the Language in the Gaeltacht by improving economic conditions in the Gaeltacht and developing Educational Institutions therein.³

The references to democratization referred here to the government’s replacement of the intermediate and national education commissions by civil servants, thus, as one educational historian has it, “substituting for an academic and professional oligarchy, an unfettered bureaucracy”⁴ and the adoption of a system of government support for secondary schools on the basis of capitation grants for each child following approved courses. A system of incremental salary scales was also introduced, making teachers less dependent on local managements. The twenties saw, however, very little change in the Irish educational system, and certainly the claims that Irish education was being democratized ring rather hollow. For the state was content to maintain almost the entire educational structure bequeathed to it by the imperial authorities with its class-conscious, religiously managed secondary schools, its technical sphere generally thought socially inferior to the more academic institutions, and its universities almost the sole preserve of students from propertied or professional backgrounds. What was effected was a strengthening of the control of education by a central bureaucracy.

The gaelicization of education was, in contrast, systematically attempted. It was determined that all teachers leaving training colleges should be expected to have a knowledge of Irish; preparatory boarding schools were established to prepare young people for careers in the teaching profession which would emphasize the language; school inspectors were required to study Irish, and no further appointments were offered to individuals who lacked proficiency in Irish; Irish was made compulsory for scholarships in the Intermediate and Leaving Certificates in the secondary schools; and financial and other encouragements were offered to schools and individuals alike to use Irish more frequently. But it was in the primary or National Schools that the linguistic policy was prosecuted most vigorously. In its initial stages this linguistic effort was presided over by Professor Eoin MacNeill, whose commitment to education as a means to revive Irish civilization (which for him included the Irish language) was made clear in a series of articles published while he was Minister for Education, in the Irish Statesman in 1925. There he asserted:

Nationality, in the best sense, is the form and kind of civilization developed by a particular people and distinctive of that people. So understood, nationality needs no apologist…I believe in the capacity of the Irish people, if they clear their minds, for building up an Irish civilization. I hold that the chief function of an Irish State and of an Irish Government is to subserve that work. I hold that the principal duty of an Irish Government in its educational policy is to subserve that work. I am willing to discuss how this can best be done, but not discuss how it can be done without.⁵

The National School teachers were enlisted in this crusade, their role to clear the minds of the nation’s children through intense exposure to the Irish language.

Eoin MacNeill himself had a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of language to society than many others who supported revival, and he well understood that to depend on the schools alone to revive Irish would be unwise. But it was his ironic fate, busy as he was with other matters of state, to preside over the legislative steps that made such a dependence possible. In the absence of any coherent social and economic policy, particularly in relation to the Irish-speaking districts that remained, this dependence was, as events were to prove, almost entirely misguided. The schools alone could not perform a linguistic miracle while the social order was undisturbed by any revolutionary energies.

Theoretical justification for this linguistic onslaught on the schools was supplied by the very influential professor of education at University College, Dublin, Father T. Corcoran, SJ. His claim to eminence in historical studies was work on the hedge schools of penal times (when education for Catholics was offered in barns and even out-of-doors by many dedicated spirits) and on the apparently baneful influence on the Irish language of the British-imposed National School system of the nineteenth century. It was his simplistic belief that what the National Schools had wrongfully done, they could now undo. He was certain that the National Board of Education had been “fatal to the national use of vernacular Irish”⁶ as he sought to ‘reverse a change that was made fully practicable only by the prolonged misuse of the schools.”⁷ In 1920 the Irish National Teachers’ Organization (INTO) at its annual congress, conscious that the Gaelic League had already set out a series of proposals for the gaelicization of the National Schools, responded by establishing a conference to consider its own position. Professor Corcoran, “while declining to act as a member…intimated that it would have at its disposal the benefit of his advice and experience.”⁸ He was available therefore as a consultant to the congress when it suggested in 1921 that all singing in the National Schools should be in Irish, that instruction in history and geography, which were taught from the third standard onward, should be through Irish, and that one hour a day should be spent in direct language acquisition. Such draconian measures meant that other subjects had to be eliminated from the programme. So, in Irish National Schools, drawing, elementary science, hygiene, nature study, and most domestic studies were dispensed with in favour of the language. Furthermore it was proposed that all teaching in the first two, or infant grades, should be in Irish. The new programme was accepted and set in motion in April 1922.

Patrick Pearse, in a famous phrase, had once castigated the imposition of an educational programme on children by an external authority as “the murder machine.” Professor Corcoran was disinclined to see any analogy in the policies he encouraged. He was persuaded that because non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States could be taught English in grade schools, although it was not the language of the home, so in Ireland children from English-speaking homes could receive instruction in all subjects in Irish at school. The obvious point that European immigrants’ children in the United States were being introduced to the language of the wider community while in Ireland children certainly were not, apparently did not weigh with him. Nor indeed, one imagines, did the fact that children might endure some emotional and mental distress in their efforts to cope with the linguistic obstacle course he was setting them, for his vision of the educational experience had little room for such concepts as pleasure or the joy of learning. His dismal creed was formulated in dispiriting terms: “All true education must progressively combine effort with mere interest: it is the effort that enobles and makes worthily human.”⁹ Policies were developed to retrain teachers to take part in this educational enterprise; special courses were arranged for teachers to increase their knowledge of Irish; individuals whose mother tongue was Irish were encouraged to enter the teaching profession at the Irish-speaking preparatory colleges, even if they displayed few other pedagogic aptitudes. As Professor Corcoran had it: “From the national point of view, even mediocre quality in a boy or girl of fourteen years, if the Irish vernacular command is present, makes that prospective teacher highly valuable.”¹⁰

So, despite a government-appointed conference which reported in 1926 and expressed some doubts about fundamental aspects of the experiment, the major educational innovation of the 1920s was the effort to gaelicize the National Schools, thereby, it was hoped, achieving a revival of Irish as a vernacular language. By 1928 there were 1,240 schools in the country where the teaching of infants in the first two grades was entirely through Irish, 3,570 where teaching was through English and Irish, and only 373 where the teaching was through English alone.

Opposition to this Kulturkampf from those who were in essential sympathy with revivalism and its underlying ideology was not significant. Only a few voices were raised to suggest that this demand that children should shoulder most of the burden of language revival might prove counterproductive. Such opposition as there was, as we shall see, tended to originate, not in doubts about the feasibility of the programme nor indeed in deeply felt sympathy for the children actually participating in it, but in apprehensions of a more general kind that the policy might have a deleterious effect on Irish culture as a whole. Michael Tierney, professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, and member of the Dáil, who had served on the government’s commission appointed in 1925 charged with a study of the Gaeltacht (the Irish-speaking areas) sounded a warning in 1927. While believing that the efforts to revive the language presented “the greatest and most inspiring spectacle of our day,”¹¹ he counseled with exacting realism:

The task of reviving a language…with no large neighbouring population which speaks even a distantly related dialect, and with one of the great world-languages to contend against, is one that has never been accomplished anywhere. Analogies with Flemish, Czech, or the Baltic languages are all misleading, because the problem in their cases has been rather that of restoring a peasant language to cultivated use than that of reviving one which the majority had ceased to speak. Still less has it proved possible to impose a language on a people as its ordinary speech by means of the schools alone.¹²

It was Osborn Bergin, Gaelic scholar and professor of early Irish at the same university, who somewhat wryly pointed out what was happening:

Today the people leave the problem to the Government, the Government leaves it to the Department of Education, the Department of Education to the teachers and the teachers to the school-children. Only the very young are unable to shift the burden to someone else’s shoulders, so perhaps they will learn to carry it, and save our faces. After all, infants, before the age of reason can do marvels with language, so they may not notice the weight.¹³

The decline in membership of the Gaelic League in the 1920s suggests that Bergin was correct in this cold-eyed analysis, for in 1924 there were 819 branches of the League in existence while by 1924 there were only 139. A sharp drop of this kind cannot be accounted for only in terms of the dislocation of the Civil War; it seems that many members of the League felt their work was at an end since the state could now be entrusted with the task they had hitherto adopted as their own. It may be indeed that a cultural movement of the kind the League had been, like a religion of the dispossessed, really thrives only under pressure and that the elevation of the language to semiofficial status in the state was a concealed disaster. It is worth noting that a body, Comhaltas Uladh, whose prime concern was the encouragement of the language in Ulster, was one of the few lively sections of the League in the late 1920s as it concerned itself with that part of the country where members of the Northern Ireland government ignored, when they were not openly hostile to, the language movement.

It should be made quite clear that most members of the Gaelic League and the many that gave their willing or tacit support to the government’s revival policy and strategy in the 1920s would have rejected the suggestion of imposition contained in Professor Tierney’s warning. To comprehend why this is so it is necessary to consider the ideological assumptions of the Gaelic League and of that cultural force known as the Irish Ireland movement which supported its aims in the first two decades of the century. For those assumptions had been made generally available through much effective propaganda and were influential in creating a cultural context in the 1920s in which the government’s Irish revival policy could be implemented with a significant measure of popular support and without any great sense of imposition.

The classic text in the Gaelic League’s ideological armoury was Douglas Hyde’s famous speech, delivered before the National Literary Society in Dublin on 25 November 1892, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.” In this Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, who became an enthusiastic worker for Gaelic revival, had identified an Irish cultural imperative, the need to “build up an Irish nation on Irish lines,” decrying a central ambivalence in Irish society, “imitating England and yet apparently hating it.” His appalled conviction in that lecture was that “within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity, deliberately thrown away our birthright and anglicized ourselves, ” so “ceasing to be Irish without becoming English.” Central to the structure of Hyde’s argument in his lecture is that the true, essential Irish reality is the Gaelic, the reality deriving from ancient Ireland, “the dim consciousness” of which “is one of those things which are at the back of Irish national sentiment.” An obvious rejoinder to such a view of late-nineteenth-century Ireland might have been that since the seventh century, a time he particularly venerated, frequent invasions have produced a composite civilization or indeed a mosaic. Hyde outlined, in anticipation of such an argument, the very powerful myth of Ireland’s assimilative capacities, a myth that has maintained its potency in Irish life to the present day. The passage where he expands on this popular myth is worth examining:

What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the Ireland of today is the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning. It is true that North men made some minor settlements in it in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is true that the Normans made extensive settlements during the succeeding centuries, but none of these broke the continuity of the social life of the island. Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a generation or two fully Irishized, and more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves, and even after the Cromwellian plantation the children of numbers of the English soldiers who settled in the south and midlands, were after forty years’ residence, and after marrying Irish wives, turned into good Irishmen, and unable to speak a word of English, while several Gaelic poets of the last century have, like Father English, the most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster, where the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult to absorb, and the ownership of the land, eight-ninths of which belongs to people many of whom always lived, or live, abroad, and not half of whom Ireland can be said to have assimilated.¹⁴

We note here how major social changes in the distant past are themselves assimilated in a sentimental metaphor (“Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast”) but that the more recent complications of Irish history do not admit of such simple resolution. For Hyde cannot avoid recognizing that contemporary Irish experience demonstrates not the assimilative power of Irish reality but the degree to which Ireland has been assimilated by the English-speaking world. So he must implicitly condemn the class with which he, as a Protestant English-speaking descendant of the aliens, might most readily be associated, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, remaining untroubled later in his lecture that the contribution of Daniel O’Connell and St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth to the decline of Gaelic might be seen as tending to refute his theory about Ireland’s assimilative capacities.

Such thinking became the staple of Gaelic League propaganda and of the writings of that most energetic proponent of Irish Ireland, the pugnacious journalist and editor of the Leader newspaper, D. P. Moran, well into the 1930s. The true Ireland is Gaelic Ireland; Gaelic Ireland has extraordinary assimilative powers, and it must, as the receptive centre of Irish reality, receive English-speaking civilization, as it has developed in Ireland, into itself. Otherwise Ireland would lose her essence, cease to be, in any worthwhile sense. In his powerful polemic The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, Moran stated the case clearly: “The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs. On no other basis can an Irish nation be reared that would not topple over by the force of the very ridicule that it would beget.”¹⁵

There was, it is important to stress, a vigorously idealistic and humanistic aspect to much of the revivalist activity in the first three decades of the century. Certainly there were those who supported revival from motives of the crudest kind of racial chauvinism and many for whom the language was merely a nationalistic rallying cry, a way of stamping the new state with a distinctive imprint, but thinkers like Douglas Hyde, D. P. Moran, Eoin MacNeill, and in the 1920s, Daniel Corkery, the novelist, short story writer, and critic, all of whose writings were influential in arousing interest in the language and the civilization they thought it enshrined, had each a concerned awareness of the psychological distress suffered by countless individual Irish men and women because of colonial oppression. Irish people could not be themselves, they argued, could not express the vital life of their own country. They were mute in their own language, ignorant of the most appropriate, perhaps the only, vessel capable of bearing that life into the future. They languished as provincial Englishmen, aping metropolitan manners in a most vulgar fashion, or they were driven in frustration to the spiritual and emotional sterilities of permanent political agitation. D. P. Moran summed up Ireland’s cultural paucity in a trenchant sentence: “Ireland has invented nothing of importance during the century except the Dunlop tyre.”¹⁶ And even Moran, who one suspects wished for cultural revival mostly because it would underpin economic resurgence, was conscious of the individual enhancement possible in a cultural awakening:

When the people go back into their national traditions, get permeated by their own literature, create a drama, resurrect their customs, develop their industries; when they have a language to bind them together and a national personality to guard, the free and full development of every individual will in no wise endanger or weaken any political movement.¹⁷

Eoin MacNeill, equally sure why the national life should be fostered, was clear why he espoused the cause of national freedom. It was so that the Irish people might live their own lives in their own way:

For my own part, if Irish nationality were not to mean a distinctive Irish civilization, I would attach no very great value to Irish national independence. If I want personal liberty to myself, it is in order that I may be myself, may live my own life in my own way, not that I may live the second-hand, hand-me-down life of somebody else.…If I want national freedom for my people, it is in order that they may live in their own way a life which is their own, that they may preserve and develop their own nationality, their own distinctive species of civilization.¹⁸

Daniel Corkery too, at his most imaginatively ample, suggests that he shared Patrick Pearse’s grasp of the simple educational fact that integrated creative personalities cannot be fostered without a “creative and integrated community with a special and continuing experience of its own.”¹⁹ So his urgent concern in his polemical critical works The Hidden Ireland (1924) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) (which led him, as we shall see, to a narrow exclusivity of mind) to promote an Irish literature which would truly relate to a vital Irish world, has to be seen in part as an educationalist’s desire for books in the schools that would touch the quick of actual life:

What happens in the neighbourhood of an Irish boy’s home – the fair, the hurling match, the land grabbing, the priesting, the mission, the Mass – he never comes on in literature, that is, in such literature as he is told to respect and learn.²⁰

The Irish Ireland movement at its best, therefore, was aware, in a mode of thought reminiscent of many nineteenth-century English and European Romantic social critics, of the creative possibilities for the individual in a healthy social environment. Independence of mind, integrity of personality, confident possession of identity, liberality of thought, and artistic self-expression were the fruits that could be expected from cultural regeneration of which linguistic revival was the neccessary catalyst.

Such idealism commended itself to many Irish men and women in the new state who felt it only right that Irish children should learn their ancestral language in the schools, encountering there “texts…which did not automatically reflect the fashions and clichés of the English-speaking world, but brought the pupils into contact with a world of ideas which was at once alien and, mysteriously, intimately their own.”²¹ The children in their Irish-speaking National Schools were not in a spiritual sense enduring any imposition. They were encountering the language of the essential Gaelic strand in Irish life, the language of the past, and their own language which would eventually, the most optimistic hoped, absorb English and the cultural life associated with it, as so much had been absorbed by Ireland down the centuries.

It might have been thought, therefore, that the government’s language policy would have been successful for it was pursued in a society where considerable numbers of people were ready to see in the policy no imposition but a rediscovery of a necessary past. And had the efforts to revive Irish in the 1920s been conducted primarily on the basis of the kinds of humanism which generated the original enthusiasm of the Gaelic League, together with a committed sense in the country as a whole of the need for genuine social as well as linguistic renewal, the policy might have met with real success. In such a context certain basic practical problems (the fact that there were several dialects of the language in the country and the Gaelic and Roman script were very different) might have been addressed with decisive energy. As it was, in the absence of a revolutionary social policy attending the efforts for linguistic revival and making it possible (for no language policy could have had much chance of success which did not tackle the depressed economic conditions of the Irish-speaking districts, and indeed of the slums of Dublin), conservative and authoritarian tendencies in the language movement quickly began to cloud the radical humanism which for many had been the most attractive aspect of its ideology. Instead of participating as one element in a general transformation of the social order, the revival movement soon came to be characterized by the reaction and dogmatism of the disappointed and despairing. For almost all that the revivalist had to encourage him or her as time went on was the language policy in the schools and a faith in the assimilative powers of Irish reality that contemporary social fact did little to confirm. Indeed, the linguistic profile of the country even in the 1920s suggested that rather than proving to be an assimilative centre of the Irish experience, Gaelic Ireland was being absorbed into the English-speaking world.

There were some signs, however, which suggested that revival might be possible. The fact, though, that revivalists had some superficial causes for optimism, in retrospect, makes the essential weakness in their position all the more poignant. The census of 1926 had revealed that a striking increase in the numbers of those who claimed a knowledge of Irish had recently taken place in Dublin County Borough and Dublin County (from 11,870 in 1911 to 23,712 in 1926 and from 5,873 in 1911 to 15,906 in 1926, respectively), but some reflection would have cast cold water on the optimism generated by such figures.²² Undoubtedly some of the rise was due to the fact that since independence school-children had been required to study Irish, and that before independence the language had been introduced into the secondary school curriculum; it was not wholly due to the direct efforts of the Gaelic League. And there was no guarantee that such people would continue to use Irish in their daily lives as adults.

Much more telling were the figures from north-western, western, and south-western areas of the country. These included the counties with the highest proportions of Irish-speakers (in Galway 47.4 percent of the population claimed to know Irish, in Mayo 36.8 percent, in Clare 30.3 percent, in Waterford – excluding the County Borough – 30.1 percent, in Cork – excluding the County Borough – 21.1 percent). Despite the high incidence in these counties of persons claiming knowledge of the language the figures in fact revealed a serious decline in the numbers of Irish speakers in those regions. In Galway for example, between 1911 and 1926 the numbers of such persons had declined from 98,523 to 80,238, in Cork from 77,205 to 60,616, in Mayo from 88,601 to 63,514, in Kerry from 60,719 to 49,262. Though some of these reductions were undoubtedly attributable to emigration of Irish-speaking persons, in itself a lamentable fact, it was probable that a real loss of the language was occurring in situ. Even in those districts which were designated fior-Gaeltacht areas by the Gaeltacht Commission, where 80 percent and over of the population claimed knowledge of Irish, the period 1911–26 showed a decrease from 149,677 claiming knowledge of the language to 130,074 – an actual loss of 19,603 or 13.1 percent. What is even more striking is that in those areas the Gaeltacht Commission designated breac-Gaeltacht, partly Irish-speaking (i.e., with 25–79 percent of the population claiming knowledge of Irish), the period 1911–26 saw a reduction of 47,094 persons claiming knowledge of the language, a loss of 28.7 percent. Such statistics suggest that what many witnesses told the commission was occurring: Irish-speaking parents were bringing up their children through the sole medium of English. The figures that the commission itself produced in its 1926 report revealed that in 1925 there were only 257,000 Irish-speakers altogether in the seven Irish-speaking and partly Irish-speaking areas identified by the commissioners. Of these, 110,000 resided in the partly Irish-speaking districts.

From the census figures, and the figures supplied in the Gaeltacht Commission report, it would have been difficult therefore to avoid the conclusion that English was making inroads and emigration effecting its slow attrition. While the effects of official language policy could be seen among schoolchildren and signs of Gaelic enthusiasm were evident among some well-educated adults in the English-speaking areas (when broken down by occupations the professional class boasted the largest percentage of Irish-speakers – 43.5 percent of this group claiming knowledge of the language), the protracted decline of the Gaeltacht had gone unchecked. That decline meant that overall in the years 1881–1926 the number of Irish-speaking persons in the country had dropped by 41 percent.

Eventually the fact that the ideology of the Gaelic League and the Irish Ireland movement flew in the face of social reality was to prove signally destructive of its best intentions. Committed to a view of Irish reality which was to become increasingly untenable, in a society where the population seemed unwilling to consider let alone to inaugurate a period of radical social change, the revivalists could do nothing but dogmatize and appeal for more stringent enforcement of linguistic sanctions. As they did so the popular appeal of the whole revival enterprise could not but lessen. Even in the 1920s there were signs that this unfortunate process was at work.

The language policy throughout the 1920s was often defended in the crudest possible terms. J. J. Walsh, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, informed a meeting in 1926: “There was no doubt that a country without a language was not a country at all. At best it was a province,” declaring roundly:

They were told that the teaching of Irish was compulsory, but the teaching of everything else in school-life was equally so. They knew that the majority of children learned because there was no alternative. Therefore the talk of ramming the subject down their throats was all nonsense…This country had for centuries been dosed with compulsory English to the entire exclusion of their native tongue, and the people who now complain of compulsory Irish were whole-hog backers of that English policy.²³

D. P. Moran in his editorials in the Leader issued a repetitive barrage of dogmatic statement, which was echoed in periodicals such as Fáinne an Lae (The Dawning of the Day), and intensified by anti-Protestant bigotry, in the zealous pages of the Catholic Bulletin. That monthly periodical had been established in 1911 chiefly to warn the Catholic faithful of the dangers of immoral literature, but it quickly became dedicated to waging cultural and psychological war against the malign influence of Protestant Anglo-Ireland. Professor T. Corcoran was a frequent anonymous contributor. The direct, brutal tone of the following passage is characteristic of the journal’s literary style. Here the Bulletin in 1924 editorializes on a suggestion that modern Irish nationality is a synthesis:

The Irish nation is the Gaelic nation; its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the Gael. All other elements have no place in Irish national life, literature and tradition, save as far as they are assimilated into the very substance of Gaelic speech, life and thought. The Irish nation is not a racial synthesis at all; synthesis is not a vital process, and only what is vital is admissible in analogies bearing on the nature of the living Irish nation, speech, literature and tradition. We are not a national conglomerate, not a national patchwork specimen; the poetry or life of what Aodh de Blacam calls Belfast can only be Irish by being assimilated by Gaelic literature into Gaelic literature.²⁴

The intemperance here is in part that of anti-Protestant bigotry (the Bulletin knew that the remnants of Protestant Anglo-Ireland would be offended by such Irish Ireland dogma) but it is also, one suspects, as so often in Irish Ireland propaganda, the fruit of frustration.

In the more thoughtful attempts of Irish Ireland’s writers to propose a genuinely Irish philosophy of national life one can hear conservative and authoritarian notes drowning the radical strains of their message as, in an increasingly hopeless linguistic situation, they sought to protect the language without any broad social vision of how this could be done. This revealed itself in two ways: in a tendency to venerate national life at the expense of individual expression and in a highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity. The work of Daniel Corkery in the 1920s and early 1930s supplies a fascinating example of how the humanistic ideals of Irish Ireland could be swamped by a conservative’s vision of the nation’s life in just the way I am suggesting.

Before the War of Independence Daniel Corkery had been a moderately well-known Irish novelist and short story writer who had espoused the cause of Gaelic revival with quiet conviction. His novel The Threshold of Quiet (1917) is a sensitive study of provincial frustration, concentrating on the dismal, unfulfilled lives of a group of young Corkmen. A gravely earnest reflection on the quiet desperation of lives lived without achievements of any major kind, it is a fine expression of his serious-minded, pedagogic cultural and social concern. The War of Independence and particularly the death of his close friend Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of Cork, after a long hunger strike, seems to have affected Corkery deeply, sharpening his didacticism and quickening his sense of national outrage and need. In the 1920s and early 1930s his writings became increasingly polemical and dogmatic as, from his position as professor of English at University College, Cork, he sought to direct the course of Irish writing and education into properly national channels. Corkery justified the rigour of his stance in the following terms:

In a country that for long has been afflicted with an ascendancy, an alien ascendancy at that, national movements are a necessity: they are an effort to attain to the normal. The vital-minded among the nation’s children answer to the impulse: they are quickest to become conscious of how far away everything has strayed from the natural and native. They search and search after that native standard that has been so long discarded: they dig and dig; and one may think of them as beginning every morning’s work with…“I invoke the land of Ireland.”²⁵

One notes here how political history is allowed to justify a unity of national purpose which might interfere with individual perception and expression. A search for the “native standard” is necessary if the country is to become “normal.” So in the contortions of his cultural study of the dramatist John Synge, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (as the critic labours to discover why despite his origins in the alien Ascendancy Synge nevertheless manages to be a good dramatist), one finds the humanistic strain in Corkery’s thinking, his educationalist’s concern for enhancing individual experience, drowned by notes of a nationalist’s celebration of the nation’s will. In denying Anglo-Irish writers of the Literary Revival artistic membership of the Irish nation, he comments:

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.²⁶

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.”²⁷ “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.”²⁸ 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.²⁹

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”).³⁰ 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.³¹

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.³²

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.³³

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.”³⁴

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.³⁵

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,”³⁶ 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.³⁷

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.³⁸

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.³⁹

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.⁴⁰

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.⁴¹

So the Censorship of Publications Act gave a licence to Irish Grundyism which had its censorious way in literary matters for almost four decades of Irish independence.