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Language, nationality and cultural identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-7: the Irish Statesman and the Catholic Bulletin reappraised

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Margaret O’Callaghan
Margaret O’Callaghan*
Affiliation:
St John’s College, Cambridge
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Extract

In 1967 the late F S. L. Lyons published an essay entitled ‘The minority problem in the 26 counties’, defining the minority in the Irish Free State as ‘unionist in politics and mainly protestant in religion’. Since that date the topic has received considerable scholarly attention. Indeed the tendency has been to approach the cultural development of the new state in the years after independence from the point of view of that minority. While this paper does not seek to minimise the significance of the minority’s role in the evolution of the new state, it does seek to question the validity of the perspective produced by an excessive preoccupation with that role. That perspective is most clearly articulated in the published version of Lyons’s Ford lectures, Culture and anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939. The vision there presented is of an island rent by ‘four irrevocably warring cultures’ (Gaelic, English, Anglo-Irish and Ulster protestant). The cultural history of the Irish Free State in the first decade of independence, it is argued, is best understood as a battle between two of these apparently immutable cultures. In essence this view presents the nineteen-twenties as the decade during which Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Ireland confronted one another in the arenas of language and religion. The images are now fixed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 94 , November 1984 , pp. 226 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1984

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References

1 Lyons, F S. L., ‘The minority problem in the 26 counties’ in McManus, Francis (ed.), The years of the great test, 1926-1939 (Cork, 1967), pp. 92–103.Google Scholar

2 See, in particular, Lyons, F S. L., Culture and anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939 (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar, and Brown, Terence, Ireland: a social and cultural history, 1922-79 (London, 1981).Google Scholar

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5 Ibid., p. 159.

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15 Gregory, Augusta, Cuchulainn of Muirthinne (London, 1902)Google Scholar and Gods and fighting men (London, 1904).Google Scholar

16 For a fuller account, see O’Callaghan, Margaret, ‘Language and religion: the quest for identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-32’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University College, Dublin, 1081).Google Scholar

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29 There is no sustained analysis of this collusion, but a reading of the Dáil and Seanad debates together with the published accounts of W Alison Phillips (Revolution in Ire.), P S. O’Hegarty (Victory of Sinn Féein) and Donal O’Sullivan, The Irish Free State and its senate (London, 1940), has uncovered abundant evidence of it. Former unionists and Irish Free State supporters alike consistently analysed republicanism in terms of ‘criminality’ See, for example, Kevin O’Higgins’s contribution to the Seanad debate on the Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Bill on 26 July 1923 Seanad Éireann deb., i, 1455-64) and, in particular: ‘it has not been war, it has been organised crime and sabotage on the grand scale, anarchy with arms; anything but war as war was ordinarily understood. There is criminality latent in men everywhere, I take it.’

30 Irish Catholic Directory, 1923, p. 606.

31 Seanad Éireann deb., i, 639 (28 Mar. 1923).

32 Church of Ireland Gazette, 12 Jan. 1923.

33 Ibid.

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38 Ibid., 9 May 1923.

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41 Ibid.

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50 Ibid., Feb. 1925. The italics are mine.

51 This is a reference to Tomorrow: a New Irish Monthly, a short-lived publication with which Yeats and Lennox Robinson were involved. Yeats’s Leda and the swan (‘the foul swansong’) and a story of Robinson’s which drew an analogy between a pregnant country girl and the Virgin Mary aroused consternation in the Catholic Bulletin and forced Robinson’s resignation from the committee of the Carnegie Library Trust. Robinson stated in the first number of Tomorrow (12 July 1924): ‘My friends who have started Tomorrow deplore the fact that we are surrounded by bad art, bad politics, bad religion’

52 Catholic Bulletin, Mar. 1925.

53 Stuart, Francis, Things to live for (London, 1934), pp 253-4Google Scholar, quoted in Lyons, Culture & anarchy, p. 171.

54 Irish Statesman, 15 Feb. 1925.

55 Ibid., 16 May 1925.

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63 See Scamus Breathnach’s report on the first Aonach Tailteann scheduled to take place in 1922 in the Blythe papers (U.C.D.A., P 24/44): ‘the advertisement of the essentially Irish past-times is the prime object of this aonach; but it has a secondary, yet very important object also. We see in our games through their triennial cycle the surest means of permanently cementing the scattered units of the Gael.’

64 See the annual reports of the council of the Royal Dublin Society, 1916-24, for an interesting example of adaptation.

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69 Ibid.

70 Irish Statesman, 31 Jan. 1925.

71 Corkery, , Hidden Ire., p. 24 Google Scholar, where the less than elegant translation reads:

Ti not the poverty I most detest
Nor being down forever
But the i sult that follows it
Which no eeches can cure.

72 Catholic Bulletin, June 1925.

73 Irish Statesman, 17 Jan. 1925.

74 Ibid., 21 Feb. 1925.

75 Church of Ireland Gazette, 3 Oct. 1924.

76 Lyons, , Culture & anarchy, p. 170.Google Scholar