Irelands of the Mind : Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture [1 ed.] 9781443804424, 9781847184221

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Irelands of the Mind

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture

Edited by

Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture, Edited by Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-422-7, ISBN (13): 9781847184221

To our parents and to the memory of our Irish ancestors

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One............................................................................................... 12 ‘The Wilds of Ireland’: Tourism and Western Terrain in the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries KEVIN J. JAMES Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32 ‘Keeping the Faith’: The Catholic Press and the Preservation of Celtic Identity in Britain in the late Nineteenth Century JOAN ALLEN Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50 The Language Question DIARMAIT MAC GIOLLA CHRÍOST Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 73 Anthropology and the Construction of Irish Identity TANYA HEDGES DUROY AND D. DOUGLAS CAULKINS Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 96 Imagining and Addressing the Nation on Irish Talk Radio MICHAEL HIGGINS Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 110 ‘I’ve come home, and home I’m gonna stay’. The Quiet Man in Irish-American Cinematic History RICHARD C. ALLEN Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129 ‘People, not issues’: Adapting Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal SARAH NEELY

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Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 142 Into The Misty: Van Morrison and Irish Cinematic Lyricism PETER MILLS Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 158 ‘Ireland’s controversial icon’: A Study of the Work of Sinéad O’Connor TONY PURVIS Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 176 Semicolonial Yeats? Fairyland, Ireland, Scotland, and Ulster WILLY MALEY Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 194 ‘There’s No ‘Race’ Like Home’: Race, Place, Nation and Narration in Brian Friel’s The Home Place ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 210 The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: Before and After the Ceasefire STEPHEN REGAN Contributors............................................................................................. 223 Index........................................................................................................ 227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the preparation of Irelands of the Mind we have received significant encouragement from many quarters. We wish to thank all the contributors, whose forbearance to our seemingly endless requests, as well as their good humour, has helped us to complete the collection of essays. Colleagues and friends have also assisted in the progression of this work and warrant a mention, particularly Owen Ashton, Rob Colls, Martin Farr, Tim Kirk, Roger Newbrook, Rosie White and the ‘foreign legion’ for the evenings out. We offer our warmest thanks, as well, to Michael O’Neill, Gareth Reeves and Patricia Waugh for their enthusiastic encouragement and support. We are very grateful to Kate Legon for the splendid index and to Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who have been patient with us while we put this volume together. Naturally, we thank our families, especially our parents, for providing love, protection and sage counsel over the years. We are indebted to Joan for offering a calming influence and continuous support for this work, particularly when it seemed to resemble McCarthy’s Bar. Finally, although born in England and Wales, we recognize the importance of our Irish ancestry and those sons and daughters of Ireland, living and dead, who have provided the inspiration for this study. We dedicate this volume to them all.

INTRODUCTION

In the past two decades, Ireland has undergone the most dramatic economic and social transformation since the inauguration of the Irish Free State in 1922. Not surprisingly, the study of modern Irish culture has been radically altered, too. A new political status within Europe, new peace initiatives in Northern Ireland, new immigrant groups within the workplace, new technologies and new modes of communication, new globalised relations in marketing and advertising – all of these developments have had profound effects on everyday life in Ireland, but they have also had a significant impact on the perception of Ireland by observers elsewhere in the world. The pace of change has been uneven, as well as rapid, so that some parts of Ireland appear relatively undisturbed by the accelerated modernity that has been so noticeable in Dublin and Cork in recent years. An older Ireland lingers on and evokes nostalgia. Even so, the image of Ireland – the way in which Ireland is thought about, talked about and written about, the way in which it is depicted in film and television programmes, in photographs and paintings – is changing quickly and unexpectedly. In keeping with the manifold changes in contemporary Irish society, there have been some profound shifts and developments in that diverse group of overlapping interests and enthusiasms known as Irish Studies. The field of enquiry has grown immensely, and with that broadening scope of interest has come a massive proliferation of theoretical structures and approaches, including a strong emphasis on comparative cultural study. A brief glance at the Irish Studies Review, one of the leading journals in the field, reveals the extent of the intellectual investment in all things Irish. As well as the predictable literary pieces on the writings of Jonathan Swift, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Edna O’Brien, and the expected historical studies of the Famine and Irish emigration to America, there are essays on cycling in Victorian Ireland, on Irish rock music, on Celtic Football Club, and on feminist politics both sides of the political border. Irish Studies has always been anti-disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary in its leanings. A roving, roguish kind of subject, it has taken hold eclectically and opportunistically of whatever materials are at hand. Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture belongs to a new wave of Irish Studies. If it gathers its topics and

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Introduction

approaches mainly from literature and history, it also carries with it a swell of interest in anthropology, media studies, film studies and popular music. It takes as its subjects of study not only fiction, poetry and drama, but travel writing and tourist brochures, nineteenth-century newspapers, radio talk shows, film adaptations of fictional works, and the music and songs of Van Morrison and Sinéad O’Connor. At one level, the book has a simple, overriding concern: how is Ireland imagined in all of these cultural artefacts? At another level, however, it acknowledges the sheer diversity and complexity of the various Irelands of the mind that its contributors seek to identify and understand. The prevailing theme throughout the twelve essays that constitute the book is the complicated sense of belonging that continues to characterise so much of modern Irish culture. There are certain preoccupations that have become familiar in Irish Studies – the construction of national identity, the tension between tradition and innovation, the experience of exile and homecoming – but these topics are given a new and invigorated treatment in the context of a rapidly changing Ireland and a rapidly changing set of intellectual methods and procedures. As Kevin James argues in the opening essay of this book, many of our current day Irelands of the mind were prompted and promoted by the development of large-scale commercial tourism in Ireland from the 1880s onwards. If James’s study of the commodification of Ireland by the tourist industry demystifies the lingering image of an innocent Emerald Isle, it also has the salutary effect of encouraging a more precise reading of how rural Ireland was presented to the gaze of prospective travellers; of how its various regions and regional boundaries were established; and of how the idea of an indigenous Irish peasantry with its own distinctive folkways, customs and handicrafts was used in the marketing of Ireland among British and American visitors. As James points out, the promotion of mass tourism and the marketing of the Irish countryside at the end of the nineteenth century stimulated the growth of the railways, the building of new hotels, and the provision of recreational facilities for golf and fishing. Ironically, the opening up of Ireland to tourism on large scale succeeded in transforming those rural regions that were being promoted for their natural beauty and remoteness in the travel writings of the time. One of the most valuable aspects of James’s essay is its critical analysis of the language and imagery deployed in popular travelogues and guidebooks on Ireland written at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. If the purpose of the travelogue is to record what is indubitably there and to share the experience of a particular place, it is also to recreate that place, sometimes investing it with a

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surprising and unexpected novelty. The travelogue and the guidebook need to be understood, then, as particular genres of writing, making use of narrative devices and techniques that often overlap with those of fictional prose. Of special interest here is the series of letters from the West of Ireland written by Alexander Innes Shand, a Scottish lawyer, novelist and journalist, and first published in the Times in 1884. Shand’s letters (published in a single volume in 1885) clearly utilise those discourses of romantic and picturesque landscape description that had been well established in English travel writing since the eighteenth century, but they also extend the range of descriptive vocabulary in that mode of writing as they seek to capture the distinctive qualities of the wild Irish West. The Irelands of the mind that emerge here are often contradictory and ambivalent. Ireland is both wild and inviting, both savage and benign. Shand’s writings nevertheless play a crucial role in the modern mapping of Ireland for tourist consumption, offering tourist paths and itineraries and promulgating ideas of Ireland’s geographical regions, racial types and cultural attributes. Letters from the West of Ireland is one of a number of key texts that, in James’s estimation, have a vital importance in the historical representation of tourist space. The West, of course, had already acquired significance as the site of cultural pilgrimage by the end of the nineteenth century. It continued to be celebrated as the repository of indigenous Irish culture in the early years of the twentieth century, gaining a powerful appeal in the writings of the Irish Literary Revival, especially in the poems of W. B. Yeats and the plays and essays of J. M. Synge. The West, as a distinctive Ireland of the mind, was fashioned and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. It found potent expression in literary and pictorial form, but it was also the subject of serious ethnographic study. What James’s research reveals, however, is that while the West was undoubtedly shaped and, in some ways, ‘invented’ during the mobilisation of the tourist industry, it was never clearly demarcated as a region, and its boundaries remained fluid and elusive. In this respect, the West perhaps operates more effectively as an Ireland of the mind than as an actual geographical entity or spatial category. The imagining of Ireland, including the mythologizing of the West, has often been prompted by the condition of exile. Some of the most intense and powerful recollections of Ireland have been fashioned at a considerable geographical distance from it. Joan Allen’s essay (Chapter 2) considers the support networks that helped to sustain the exiled Irish in Britain in the late nineteenth century. It shows how solidarity in work, church and leisure activities, as well as correspondence with family and

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friends in Ireland, formed a ‘connective tissue’ between the former homeland and the new community. The essay argues persuasively that the Roman Catholic press played a significant role in the assimilation of Irish migrants in Britain. Drawing on extensive archival research, it throws new light on the influence of the Roman Catholic newspapers and journals launched by Charles Diamond (1858-1934), and it reveals the extent to which the Catholic mission was allied to Irish nationalist ideals. Keeping the faith was clearly a political, as well as a religious, obligation. Diamond’s endeavours found a congenial setting in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he founded his first Irish newspaper, the Irish Tribune, in 1884. His cultural and political aspirations were shared and supported by the Member of Parliament for Newcastle, Joseph Cowen, whose ownership of the Newcastle Chronicle from 1859 onwards had already ensured sympathetic press coverage of Irish matters, including elections and political meetings. The friendship between the two newspaper entrepreneurs strengthened the development of Tyneside Irish nationalist politics (they were both present when the National Land League of Great Britain held its convention in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1881). Joan Allen’s essay offers valuable insights into the cultural and political activities of Irish communities in the north-east of England in the late nineteenth century, and it shows how, under Diamond’s control, the Catholic press not only ‘shored up’ Irish national identity among exiled groups in Britain, but effectively renewed it. The period under consideration in Joan Allen’s essay was a crucially important time for debates about the future of the Irish language and its role in the formation and development of national identity. Despite the sharp decline in the use of Gaelic in the years after the Famine, there were high hopes among the advocates of an Irish Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century that the language would persist and reassert itself as the principal expression and guarantor of national identity. The expectation was that, under a new political order, the language would spread out from the four main Irish-speaking areas that constituted the Gaeltacht and once again be established as the dominant tongue. Instead, as Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost argues, the Irish language risked becoming ‘a passive object of iconic and ritualistic regard’. Concentrating on the period between 1893 and 1926, between the foundation of the Gaelic League and the dawning of the Irish Free State, he takes a searching look at the idea of the Gaeltacht, both as an instrument of policy and as an imagined national landscape – an Ireland of the mind.

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Like Kevin James, Mac Giolla Chríost draws on several disciplines – anthropology, history, geography, politics and sociology – in seeking to understand the complex relations between historical actualities and imagined ideals. He argues strongly that the policy of the post-1922 State on the revival of the Irish language was based on ‘a narrow and illinformed understanding of the causes of the decline of the Irish language’, and that insufficient attention was given to problems of infrastructure and education. Despite the elevation of the status of the Irish language by law, and the enshrinement of Irish as the national language in the 1922 constitution of the Irish Free State, the policy of revival became, by the 1950s, a policy of retreat. Even so, he maintains that there is a continuing vitality in the language, and he offers a buoyant and comprehensive account of what he sees as a fresh dynamism in Irish language policy in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Tanya Hedges Duroy and Douglas Caulkins offer a vigorous and forthright account of changing ideas of Ireland and Irishness from a contemporary anthropological perspective, noting at the same time how anthropology, itself, has been changing with regard to studies of Ireland, and how it has sometimes been distrusted for its misrepresentation of Irish culture. In Chapter 4, they acknowledge the difficulty of contending with what seems like a chaotic diversity of identities in Ireland, both rural and urban, both traditional and new. Acknowledging the need for a relevant Irish anthropology attuned to contemporary realities, they draw attention to areas of social and political debate where new definitions of Ireland and Irishness might emerge, including women’s rights and the role of universities in civic life. They note how integration within the European Union has already brought about a dramatic cultural transformation in Ireland. The exploration of identity in the essay by Hedges Duroy and Caulkins is based on fieldwork carried out in western and north-western Ireland over a period of two years. The purpose of the fieldwork was to illuminate areas of consensus, contestation and uncertainty in current ideas of what constitutes Irish identity. The research involved both participant observation and systematic interview, and it drew on notions of identity associated with other Celtic cultures, including those of Scotland and Wales. Interviewees were asked to comment on brief narratives that illustrated concepts frequently associated with Irish identity, such as nostalgia and emotionalism. What Hedges Duroy and Caulkins provide is a way of mapping identity that relies on systematic analysis rather than abstract stereotyping, and what they reveal is a complex relationship between cultural ideals and everyday practice.

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Introduction

In Chapter 5, Michael Higgins carries forward the investigation into how modern Ireland contends with globalisation and multi-national capitalism. Taking his cue from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), he asks some probing questions about the ways in which national identity and national belonging are created and sustained. His research is concerned specifically with media studies, and with the vital relationship between national identity and technologies of communication. He concentrates, in particular, on the role of radio and the popular phenomenon of the radio talk show, and he speculates on whether there is an explicitly Irish form of radio ‘chat’. Drawing on recent studies of the political and cultural influence of radio, including popular American radio programmes, Higgins turns to specific examples of talk radio in Ireland and the United Kingdom. His main focus is on the Gerry Ryan Show, broadcast by RTÉ (Radio Telefis Eíreann) and currently rated as the most popular non-news programme on Irish radio. His contention is that crucial insights into the formation of national identity can be gained from a close scrutiny of the forms of discourse that constitute programmes such as the Gerry Ryan Show, in which Ireland is ‘being imagined on a daily basis’. In keeping with the ambivalence and contestation observed by Hedges Duroy and Caulkins, he concludes that radio provides a cultural space where discourses of globalisation and modernity contend with what is presented as an inherently Irish predisposition for banter, rhetoric and anecdote. If radio seems to present Irish loquacity as a persistent stereotype, it also celebrates ‘the aesthetics of talk’. Richard Allen, in Chapter 6, considers how Ireland and the Irish are imagined on the big screen, from the perspective of Hollywood in the 1950s. His essay takes a fresh look at The Quiet Man (1952), one of the best-known and most successful film productions in Irish-American cinematic history. Asking what Ireland of the mind is being offered to viewers of The Quiet Man immediately raises some complex issues to do with the Irish inheritance of the director, John Ford, with the adaptation of a short story published in The Green Rushes (1935) by the Irish writer, Maurice Walsh, and with the political events of the late 1920s, in which Walsh’s story is set. Richard Allen’s essay offers a new critical appraisal of the production history of The Quiet Man, but it also provides considerable scope for new critical interpretations of the film. In keeping with the study of Irish culture among exiled communities in Chapter 2, Richard Allen’s essay gives careful consideration to the predicament of the creative migrant. Acknowledging the unusual incitements that stir the exiled imagination, it suggests that The Quiet Man

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was not just a shrewd economic investment, evoking nostalgia among a large population of Irish Americans, but also a deeply personal project through which Ford attempted to relocate himself in Irish society. Richard Allen is alert to the ways in which a specifically Irish-American experience conditions the representation of Ireland in the film, and he offers a revealing account of how the Republican politics in Walsh’s story (and also in the original screenplay) are cautiously suppressed in production. Even so, the film has the capacity to challenge and unsettle its viewers’ preconceptions of Ireland, and its sexual politics are far from simple. For all its apparent romanticising of Ireland, The Quiet Man continues to offer some powerful insights into the experience of exile and homecoming. Sarah Neely’s essay (Chapter 7) addresses the practical and creative problems involved in the adaptation of works of fiction for the screen. Both Allen and Neely show how political ideas in cinema are shaped and conditioned, often in unexpected ways, by the structural features and audience expectations associated with fictional genres such as the love story, the romance and the thriller. Neely’s study, however, is particularly concerned with the filmic representation of Northern Ireland and with the depiction of sectarian tension and political violence in the 1980s. Her account of the creative challenges involved in the adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s 1983 novel Cal for television and cinema raises questions that have a far-reaching relevance for current discussions about politics and film in Britain, Ireland and America. Making valuable use of the British Film Institute archives, Neely shows how David Puttnam’s Cal began life as part of Channel Four’s ‘First Love’ series and how the adaptation was shaped by the producer’s desire to make a film that was both politically sensitive and widely accessible. At the same time, she suggests that the novel’s use of a highly focalised and interior narrative created additional challenges for the filmmakers. Her essay generates new critical readings of both the novel and the film, but it also prompts more general reflections on how contemporary film might achieve an appropriate balance between the claims of specific local cultures and the lure of universal appeal. The musical score for Cal was composed by Mark Knopfler and the score for the later adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb (1986) was composed by Van Morrison. A comparative case study of the two scores leads Peter Mills, in Chapter 8, to ask some fundamental questions about competing models of Irish musicality in film. What are the signifiers of Irishness that film-makers seek? How is Irishness conveyed in music? Are there ways of representing Irishness beyond the traditional melodies and

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time signatures now globally recognised and consumed as ‘Irish music’? As well as providing an exemplary instance of a new mode of Irish Studies informed by developments in the study of film and popular music, Mills’s essay also gives a fresh impetus to the main areas of enquiry in this book: the imagining of Ireland, the relationship between memory and identity, the articulation of belonging, and the experience of exile and homecoming. The music of Van Morrison is fertile ground for Mills’s research. Paradoxically, Morrison’s most eloquent articulation of Irishness has come through an inarticulate speech of the heart. If his songs are indubitably Irish, they also draw deeply on a well-established American jazz and blues tradition. Mills offers an informative and illuminating account of the uses of Morrison’s music in film production, looking at both specially composed instrumental scores and routinely licenced adoptions of his work. The essay includes a revealing account of Morrison’s collaborative work with the German film-maker, Wim Wenders. If Morrison’s music lends itself exceptionally well to film, though often through covert rather than overt Irish stylings, it is also, in itself, a cinematic art, habitually drawn to imaginative depictions and transfigurations of the landscape in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Much of the power and appeal of Van Morrison’s work is generated through a complex sense of belonging, a simultaneous attachment and disavowal that finds expression in repeated images of homecoming and exile. Ambivalence and uncertainty become the distinguishing characteristics of a displaced and disenchanted Irishness, often competing with some ostensibly ‘pure’ or ‘prior’ Irishness. In the work of Sinéad O’Connor, ambivalence and disenchantment are carried to extreme and controversial lengths. Tony Purvis’s essay (Chapter 9) considers her work as ‘performance’ in the broadest sense, giving critical attention to her speeches, her activism and her appearances on chat shows, as well as her music. At the same time, it asks what theoretical perspectives might prove most amenable in seeking to understand the cultural significance of an artist who, on both the Irish stage and the global stage, has often seemed elusive and indefinable. Purvis’s chapter explores some strange and intriguing Irelands of the mind. It shows how O’Connor has appropriated Irish myths and legends, but has also transfigured them as part of a continuing attempt to understand the past and to come to terms with a nation that has, itself, been dramatically transformed in recent times. If O’Connor’s work appears to mourn the fading icons of an island that has already ceased to

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be, it also imagines Ireland’s possible futures. Cultural memory, in this respect, is not passively received, but forms the basis of a creative challenge to contemporary Ireland. In the process, O’Connor has herself been figured as an icon, though often in negative terms. Purvis shows how O’Connor has been variously represented in the tabloid press and in internet articles, and he claims that there is a brighter political dimension to her work than her apparent pessimism and irritability seem to suggest. The image of Sinéad O’Connor singing ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ provides an appropriate point of transition to Willy Maley’s provocative essay on W. B. Yeats (Chapter 10). Maley cleverly undermines the conventional view of Yeats as the presiding genius of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ by presenting a comically complicating picture of his relationships with Scotland. Observing that studies of Irish culture have not given sufficient attention to the shaping influence of Scotland, and noting how IrishScottish relations confound the simple orthodoxies of both historical revisionism and post-colonialism, Maley offer some snapshots of Yeats and Scotland: Yeats’s father reading Scott, and his grandfather reading Stevenson; Yeats and Hugh McDiarmaid out on the tiles in Dublin; Yeats trying desperately to recite the poems of Robert Burns for Ezra Pound; and Yeats dressed in Connemara cloth manufactured in Scotland. Much of the impulse behind Maley’s lively chapter comes from Yeats’s short essay ‘A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their Ghosts and faeries.’ Here, Yeats makes a striking distinction between the freely operating and uninhibited imagination in Ireland and the rigidly prescribed and religiously suppressed imagination in Scotland, telling his Celtic neighbours: ‘In Scotland you are too theological, too gloomy . . . you have burned all the witches. In Ireland we have left them alone.’ Maley maintains that Yeats, like Joyce, arrived at a negative and pessimistic view of Scotland and that this perspective derived essentially from his despairing vision of the Scottish legacy in the north of Ireland. If Maley succeeds in complicating Yeats’s Irish credentials by drawing attention to the Scottish undercurrents in his work, he also shows how the ‘vexed connection’ with Scotland remains a challenge more generally for the development of Irish Studies. In the penultimate chapter of the book, Alison O’Malley-Younger considers the complex issues of race, place and nation in Brian Friel’s 2005 play, The Home Place. Friel is well known for his memorable and moving exploration of Irelands of the mind, and for his vivid dramatic recreation of moments of political transition and identity crisis in plays such as Translations (1981) Making History (1989) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). In The Home Place his main focus of interest is not so

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much on the grievances and aspirations of the nationalist community as on the sense of alienation and longing for home that is deeply felt among the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. The play is set in Ballybeg Lodge in Donegal, one of the big houses traditionally associated with the ascendancy, and its events take place in the shadow of political developments in the 1870s, including the activities of the Land League and the Home Rule movement. O’Malley-Younger draws attention to the ambivalence and uncertainty that emanate from the title of The Home Place and inform the play at every point. Drawing on theories of how cultural identity develops in relation to the individual and communal realisation of heimat or homeland, she shows how Friel’s work might be understood in relation to romantic nationalist ideologies of home that were prevalent in the period in which the play is set. As in earlier plays, Friel dissolves the hardened certainties that form around ideals of nationhood and shows how identity is the product, not just of clearly demarcated geographies and genealogies, but of far less tangible materials, including stories, dreams and memories. ‘Irelands of the mind’ has an immediate and compelling relevance for Seamus Heaney, who has written so revealingly about ‘Englands of the mind’ in the poetry of his near-contemporaries, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. Heaney’s acute sense of the way in which language both describes and recreates particular landscapes is amply borne out in his own creative practice over a period of nearly fifty years. Since the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1968, Heaney’s imagination has been both intimately engaged with Ireland and strangely deracinated. As political violence intensified in the north, Heaney’s imaginative stance was increasingly that of the internal exile or inner émigré. One of the characteristic features of his work has been its compulsive need to revisit its own distinctive Irelands of the mind, returning to these places both as historical and geographical actualities and as intensely subjective and imaginative locations. In the closing chapter of the volume, Stephen Regan considers Heaney’s response to the I.R.A. ceasefire in August 1994 and asks if the peace process has opened up new directions and new perspectives in his poetry. The chapter draws extensively on Heaney’s public lectures and literary journalism, as well as on a wide-ranging selection of his poetry, including District and Circle (2006). The focus, however, is on two groups of poems associated with significant places in Heaney’s imagination: Tollund and Toome. Heaney’s perpetual revisiting of these places is seen to be closely related to the processes of reconciliation in his recent work. Regan argues that Heaney’s preoccupation with memory and

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his sustained intertextual experimentation make his recent work ‘postceasefire’ in more than just a chronological sense. Together, the essays in this volume explore the many different Irelands that have been celebrated and castigated in songs and stories, plays and poems, guidebooks, newspapers, films and radio chat shows. Ireland is the serene and gentle place depicted in travel writings in the nineteenthcentury, but it is also the forbidding place of political violence and partition. Often, the image is recognisable enough, and sometimes it might even prove to be historically precise. In many instances, though, what proves to be most striking in modern culture is the strange disjuncture between image and actuality, or the strange autonomy with which the image seems to glow, and we are then left contemplating the sobering lines of late Yeats: Those masterful images because complete, Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street? Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can . . .

Yeats’s lines are a chastening reminder of the humdrum realities that often lie beneath the greatest cultural achievements, but they are also a testimony to the resilience of the imagination and its capacity for renewal and rejuvenation. If the essays in this book record the persistence and durability of some commonplace images of national identity, they also gesture optimistically towards new Irelands of the mind.

CHAPTER ONE ‘WILDS OF IRELAND’: TOURISM AND WESTERN TERRAIN IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH AND EARLY-TWENTIETH CENTURIES KEVIN J. JAMES

While there has been extensive research on how cultural and political movements in late-nineteenth-century Ireland developed and deployed images of the land and the peasantry, the analysis of how rural people and landscapes were mobilised in the promotion of mass tourism has been much more limited.1 As mass tourism grew, the state, local development The author wishes to thank Dr. Richard C. Allen and Professor Stephen Regan for their helpful comments, and also Dr. Glenn Hooper, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, for his valuable feedback. 1 Spurgeon Wakefield Thompson, ‘The Postcolonial Tourist: Irish Tourism and Decolonization since 1850’, unpublished University of Notre Dame Ph.D. thesis, 2000; Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760-1860: Culture, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) is one of several valuable historical analyses of tourists and travel writing in nineteenth-century Ireland; see also his broad survey of travel writing: ‘The Isles/Ireland: The Wilder Shore’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 174-90. Other useful papers appear in Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (eds), Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), and in Jane Conroy (ed.), Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Travel and Literature, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). The post-partition period is explored in Eric G. E. Zuelow, ‘“Ingredients for Cooperation”: Irish Tourism in North-South Relations, 1924-1998’, New Hibernia Review 10, 1 (2006), 17-39. Among research aids are the bibliography by Glenn Hooper (ed.), The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland, 1800-2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001); John P. Harrington (ed.), The

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associations, industry bodies, railway companies and other organisations marketed the Irish countryside as a site of excursion. In and after the 1880s, these groups began concerted efforts to open rural Ireland to largescale tourism, expanding the infrastructure of railways, hotels, golf links, and tourist sites. They developed strategies to coax tourists to Ireland and to structure their recreational time and travel in the holiday-grounds of the ‘Emerald Isle’,2 hoping that more visitors, especially from Britain and America, would travel throughout the country, and that expatriates might also bring capital with them to aid the tourist industry’s development.3 Through promotional campaigns, rural cultures and terrains were commodified as amenities to be marketed and consumed. This study explores links between two elements of this process: the construction of western tours in travel material, and the production of ‘vernacular’ handicraft in rural districts. It is part of a wider project exploring the business history of tourism and tourist marketing in Ireland which focuses on how routes through the island were produced and popularised for tourist consumption.

Letters from the West of Ireland Journalists and other writers offered their perspectives on the attractions of rural Ireland in published travelogues that often appeared in

English Traveller in Ireland: Accounts of Ireland and the Irish through Five Centuries (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991); Brian Ó Dálaigh (ed.), The Strangers Gaze: Travels in County Clare, 1534-1950 (Ennis: Clasp Press, 1998); John McVeagh (ed.), Irish Travel Writing: A Bibliography (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996). The study of Irish tourism has largely focussed on contemporary issues: see, for example, Ullrich Kockel (ed.), Culture, Tourism and Development: The Case of Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994); Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin (eds) Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2003); Nuala C. Johnson, ‘Where Geography and History Meet: Heritage Tourism and the Big House in Ireland’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86, 3 (1996), 551-66. 2 Tours in the Emerald Isle (Dublin: Thomas Cook and Son, 1895). 3 The Times, 6 September 1884. The development of tourism in nineteenth-century Scotland offers a useful comparator. See Alastair J. Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: Tourism in Scotland, c.1780-1939 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003); Katherine Haldane Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914: Creating Caledonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), and Katherine Haldane, ‘“No Human Foot Comes Here”: Victorian Tourists and the Isle of Skye’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 10 (1996), 69-91.

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Chapter One

newspapers and periodicals.4 Tour guidebooks complemented them by fashioning itineraries for leisure travellers to follow, and by drawing visitors’ attention to less-travelled districts of the country. Though these were two different genres of travel writing, employing markedly different narrative strategies,5 the travelogue and the tour book can be profitably paired in the study of the historical representation of tourist space. They both proposed ‘gateways’ to Irish terrain which was depicted, in a variety of discursive frameworks, as both wild and inviting, foreign and familiar, savage and benign. As a genre, the newspaper travelogue examined in this analysis – Alexander Innes Shand’s ‘Letters from the West of Ireland’ – straddled the boundary between tourist guide and traveller’s narrative.6 Shand was both a ‘tourist’ embarking on a journey that encompassed famous routes and landmarks, and a ‘traveller’, venturing farther afield to experience, and recount, the delights of Ireland ‘off the beaten track’. Moreover, in his narrative he made explicit overtures for tourists to follow travellers into these wilder places, and incorporate them within the tourist gaze.7 In this respect, Shand did not represent himself as an ‘anti-tourist’, or denigrate mass tourism; rather he advocated the extension of commercial tourism to virgin terrain in Ireland, punctuating his vivid descriptions of landscapes and peoples with frequent exhortations for tourists to follow him into the ‘wilds’ of Ireland’s West. While the autonomy of tourists’ perspectives on, and experiences in, Ireland must not be understated, the growth in tourist traffic in the latenineteenth century, and the development of a broad range of amenities for mass tourism, such as tourist routes and guidebooks, demand that we ask how the public identification of tourist paths through western space influenced the ‘consumption’ of rural Ireland as a site of recreational travel.8 They guided visitors’ encounters with, and interpretations of, landscapes and people; they mapped out physical routes through the 4

Several accounts that appeared in newspapers were also later published in a single volume. See, for instance, ‘Irish Times’ Tours in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Times Office, 1888). 5 Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (London: Routledge, 2002); Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (eds), Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For a good case study of the guidebook as a form of travel literature, see David Gilbert, ‘“London in All its Glory – or How to Enjoy London”: Guidebook Representations of Imperial London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 25, 3 (1999), 279-97. 6 See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 7 The Times, 11 September 1884. 8 See John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn. London: Sage, 2001).

Tourism and Western Terrain

15

island, and offered perspectives on people and sites in the countryside. While neither uniform in content nor adopted by the tourists without critical mediation, they charted paths for travel and promoted ideas of region, race and culture. The West’s geographic and cultural diversity lay at the core of an 1884 travelogue written by Shand. His account of a tour through the West was published in eighteen instalments as ‘Letters from the West of Ireland’ in The Times, and was subsequently compiled and published in a single volume to reach an even wider market.9 Shand’s accounts are rich in detailed descriptions of local land systems, agriculture, and urban industry; here his descriptions of people, landscapes and tourist amenities are the focus of attention. A Scottish lawyer, novelist and journalist,10 Shand wrote that many areas in Ireland did not fall under the tourist’s gaze, as excursionists to the Emerald Isle tended to follow well-worn paths to long-established tourist sites. ‘English visitors and great numbers of Americans who are dropped or picked up at Queenstown by the Atlantic liners hurry off on flying trips to Kerry or Connemara’, he lamented, ‘or else they rush northward to the neighbourhood of the Giant’s Causeway’.11 Sometimes travellers were cautioned that high expectations of such wellknown sites risked disappointment. Black’s 1877 guide to Ireland, for instance, noted that, ‘from the over-strained laudation, and the multitude of paintings and engravings that have been produced of these justly celebrated lakes [of Killarney], the tourist is apt to form too high an estimate of their beauty’,12 and opined that while the rocks bounding the shores of Muckross and the Lower Lake, and surrounding mountains were grand, they lacked the extent and ‘sublimity that distinguishes the lochs of Scotland’.13 But if the lakes of Killarney were, in most observers’ estimation, amongst the most popular destinations for tourists in Ireland, less visited sites offered bold beauty and discomfort in equal measure, and

9

A. I. Shand, Letters from the West of Ireland, 1884, Reprinted from The Times (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1885). 10 W. B. Duffield, ‘Shand, Alexander Innes (1832–1907)’, revised entry by H. C. G. Matthew, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/36037 (accessed 17 January 2006). 11 The Times, 26 August 1884. 12 Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland, Illustrated with a Map of Ireland and Several Plans and Views (15th edn. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1877), p. 186. 13 Ibid.

16

Chapter One

glimpses into an ‘authentic’ western indigenous culture unadulterated by commercial tourism, racial mixing, or ‘modernisation’.

Bounding the West Hitherto, the study of how Ireland’s West was portrayed in the latenineteenth century has largely been the province of art and literary historians. They have explored depictions of ‘western’ landscapes and culture in key works of fiction, biography and visual art, in which it was defined primarily by an imagined boundary between Anglicised Ireland and its rural Celtic ‘frontier’.14 In these media, the West frequently denotes the last ‘wilds’ of Ireland. Most scholarship emphasises the distinctiveness with which the region was invested, the importance attributed to the West as a repository of indigenous Irish culture, and the influence of the ideology of primitivism on these processes.15 Yet, however prevalent these ideas of the West were in contemporary documents, and however critical 14 Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The Peasant at Work: Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry and Life in the West of Ireland’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 13 (1997), 143-51 and ‘Landscape, Space and Gender: Their Role in the Construction of Female Identity in Newly-Independent Ireland’, in Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins (eds), Gendering Landscape and Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 76-86; Elizabeth Frances Martin, ‘Painting the Irish West: Nationalism and the Representation of Women’, New Hibernia Review, 7,1 (2003), 30-44; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Synge and Irish Nationalism: The Precursor to Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002); Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Tricia Cusack, ‘A “Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads”: Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape’, National Identities, 3, 3 (2001), 221-38; Anne Oakman, ‘Sitting on “The Outer Skin”: Somerville and Ross’s Through Connemara in a Governess Cart as a Coded Stratum of Linguistic/Feminist “Union” Ideals’, Éire-Ireland, 39, 1-2 (2004), 110-35; John Wilson Foster, ‘The Aran Islands Revisited’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 51, 3 (1982), 248-63; John Wilson Foster, ‘Yeats and the Folklore of the Irish Revival’, Éire-Ireland, 17 (1982), 6-18; John Wilson Foster, ‘Certain Set Apart: The Western Island in the Irish Renaissance’, Studies, 66, 264 (1977), 261-74; William L. Daniels, ‘AE and Synge in the Congested Districts’, Eire-Ireland, 11, 4 (1976), 14-26. 15 Cusack, ‘A “Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads’’’; Angela Mehegan, ‘The Cultural Analysis of Leisure: Tourism and Travels in Co. Donegal’, Circa, 107 (Spring 2004), 58-62; Catherine Nash, ‘“Embodying the Nation”: The West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity’, in O’Connor and Cronin, Tourism in Ireland, pp. 86-112; Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Kathleen Fahy, ‘Rural Tourism and Cultural Identity in the West of Ireland’, in O’Connor and Cronin, Tourism in Ireland, pp. 233-57.

Tourism and Western Terrain

17

they became to a range of political projects and even to the definition of Irish nationhood, definitive boundaries of the western region were elusive. Travellers’ accounts used a broad range of fluid, subsidiary spatial categories as frameworks for representing western Ireland, including ‘the South-West,’ ‘the North-West,’ Connemara, Joyce Country and the Donegal Highlands, and ascribed varying levels of wildness to these districts. Alexander Shand described some areas, such as Bloody Foreland in Donegal, as places of untamed landscapes and undiluted peasant culture.16 The broader political importance of such representations was signalled by fierce debates over the survival of rural families and by ethnographic studies seeking to identify and document disappearing indigenous cultures situated in the ‘heart’ of the western Irish countryside. Indeed, this view of western districts as repositories for pure folk traditions – and pure races – informed seminal studies of Ireland in the twentieth century.17 In more recent scholarship, the idea of a western ‘Irish peasantry’ with durable traditions has been critiqued,18 though its importance in structuring ideas of rural (and urban) Ireland in the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries has been acknowledged. But from the perspective of many travellers, journeys westward offered no uniform encounter with landscapes or peoples, no single undifferentiated ‘peasantry’, and no common tourist experience.

16

For a contemporary discussion of Irish regions, see Ullrich Kockel, ‘“The West is Learning, the North is War”: Reflections on Irish Identity’, in Kockel (ed.), Landscape, Heritage and Identity, pp. 237-58. 17 E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957); Conrad Maynadier Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (New York: Macmillan, 1937); C. M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940). 18 Joep Leerssen, ‘The Presence of the Past: Peasantry, Community and Tradition’, in J. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 157-223; Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, PMLA, 106 (1991), 1116-33; Ulrike Spring, ‘Imagining the Irish and Norwegian Peasantry around 1900: Between Representation and Re-presentation’, Historisk Tidsskrift, 80, 1 (2001), 5-99; Claudia Kinmonth, ‘Rags and Rushes: Art and the Irish Artefact, c.1900’, Journal of Design History, 14, 3 (2001), 167-85. For a particularly robust critique of traditional ethnographic and literary representations of the West, see Patrick Sheeran, ‘The Idiocy of Irish Rural Life Reviewed’, The Irish Review, 5 (1988), 27-33.

18

Chapter One

Paths to and through the West Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel guides used a range of physical, cultural and other markers to identify western terrain. Travellers accessed and journeyed through western Ireland by several means – often following paths created by railway companies that developed hotels and excursion packages and played a key role in promoting leisure travel in Ireland.19 Accessing the West by railway lines that traversed Ireland from points east provided a framework for narratives in guidebooks and personal travelogues that portrayed the westward approach as a progressive departure from Anglicised, urban Ireland (and Britain). Steamers bound for the Clyde, the Mersey or westbound for America sometimes touched down in the West as a first point of contact with the island, and in season there were steam services from Scotland to parts of the North-West, but most travellers journeying to the West followed an overland route. Murray’s Handbook, for instance, offered readers ten proposed itineraries in Ireland, ranging from one week to one month, and all commencing in Dublin. Doorways to the western country varied. Guidebooks’ paths westward to ‘holiday-ground’ by rail, car and steamer charted a course marked by structured ‘stages’, beginning with departures (usually from Dublin or Belfast) and then by approaches to, and arrivals in, the West – signalled by a stop at established termini that served as regional gateways, which offered accommodation, organized excursions, and other services geared towards commercial tourism.20 Travellers to Donegal and the North-West were encouraged by the Northern Counties Railway to regard Londonderry as the regional gateway, while the Midland Great Western Railway’s path followed a line running from Dublin through Mullingar and Athlone to Galway, often with a further trip to Westport, where Shand lamented that the Railway ‘drops you . . . then you have to shift for yourself’.21 In the mid-1890s the line extended its reach to the coast with a line to Clifden. The Great Southern and Western Railway (G.S.W.R.), in contrast, trumpeted south-west routes to Killarney by way of Waterford and Cork. Sometimes routes to or within western areas were branded to heighten travellers’ interest and assist in their promotion. The ‘Prince of Wales’ route, for instance, ushered tourists by rail from Cork to Bantry and then by coach to Killarney, via Glengarriff 19 See, for example, Tours in Ireland (London: Walter Hill for the Irish Railways, 1905). 20 See John Cooke (ed.), Handbook for Travellers in Ireland (5th edn. London: John Murray, 1896), pp. 40-4. 21 The Times, 11 September 1884.

Tourism and Western Terrain

19

and Kenmare, and, from 1897, steamers on the ‘Duke of York Route’ plied the Shannon between Killaloe and Banagher . But most guides to the West began with a ‘departure’ from London, where, following breakfast and taking the railway and steam service from Holyhead, readers of the Ward, Lock, and Co. guidebook to The Donegal Highlands were promised they could arrive in Dublin for tea or Belfast for supper, before venturing farther afield.22 Few independent travellers through the West followed precisely the same path. Some toured extensively along the coast; others journeyed inland: Shand took steamers, cars and railways, and often appraised the terrain for walking (in Gweedore he wrote that walks through the boggy ground were less enticing than in Scotland).23 The publication of bicycle guides also gave travellers an alternative to walking, hiking, coach, rail and steamer. By the late-nineteenth century most guidebooks offered routes for cyclists – often covering hundreds of miles. Almost all whose tours aimed to ‘traverse’ the West, by whichever mode of transportation, described marked variations in peoples and landscapes. Alexander Innes Shand ‘arranged a tour to embrace some of the most picturesque districts in the wilds of the West’.24 In commenting upon the area in which his tour began, he suggested that it had not at first figured on his itinerary, but ‘I had been told that in the outlying Peninsula of Inishowen there is coast scenery almost as stern as any in the kingdom, while it is certain that it is seldom visited by tourists.’ Thereafter, much of his narrative of the NorthWest constitutes an exhortation for travellers to follow his path. Shand followed a route that began in Londonderry, then took him through Donegal, the district around Loch Erne, from Sligo to Ballina, then to Westport and the ‘wilds of Connemara’, through ‘Joyce’s Country,’ down Loch Corrib to Galway, then to Ennis and Limerick, journeying over water and land to Killarney, and ending the tour at Bantry Bay.25 The tour was punctuated by a variety of small day-excursions. Writing in Buncrana, northern Donegal on 21 August 1884, he wrote of Derry as the ‘entrance to a wonderfully romantic district’ that was more easily accessible than many travellers assumed. In Ireland, he lamented, ‘even more than elsewhere, the tourist traffic has settled down into regular grooves’.26 22 A New Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Donegal Highlands, Londonderry, the Giant’s Causeway, etc . . . ‘Irish Series, 1902-3’ (London: Ward, Lock and Co., n.d., c. 1902-3), p. 3. 23 The Times, 1 September 1884. 24 Ibid., 26 August 1884. 25 Ibid., 13 March 1885. 26 Ibid., 26 August 1884.

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Chapter One

Opining that this may have reflected the poor reputation of Irish tourist amenities, Shand asserted that the discomforts of travel through the western countryside had been ‘strangely over-rated’.27 There were a myriad of alternative western tours. The Earl of Mayo, a strong proponent of tourism development, penned a piece on ‘The Tourist in Ireland’ in 1897 in which he followed a route that began at Euston, and took him to Dublin via Holyhead. From there he travelled to Bray in Co. Wicklow, Glendalough, the Vale of Avoca, through Kildare to Cork, along the Prince of Wales Route to Glengarriff, then to Killarney, ‘the district which every one who visits Erin is compelled to seek’.28 Thereafter, his route proceeded northward, ending in ‘the wilds of Donegal,’ Derry and the north coast. In the popular ‘Through Guides’ to Ireland, the island’s attractions were detailed in two volumes, each focussed on one-half of the island divided by a ‘line drawn across the country from Bray and Dublin through Mullingar to Sligo, including those places’.29 ‘Within these limits there is a great deal of country which has no attraction for the pleasuretourist’, the guide’s author, M. J. B. Baddeley noted, ‘and, while we hope not to have omitted any object or place of real interest, we have concentrated our efforts on those particular districts which may fairly be called holiday-ground’.30 In the Ward, Lock, and Co. guidebook to The Donegal Highlands, Ireland was also said to make ‘an ideal holiday ground, whether one goes north, south, east or west; but the nearer the coast the better’.31 It was this idea of the West as a recreational region, as a ‘holiday-ground’ full of contrasts with ‘everyday’ space, that served as a common denominator in guides to western terrain, though each district offered some new delight for the tourist’s eye, from rugged coastal cliffs to gentle valleys to the ‘Moorish’ architecture of Galway.

Interpreting Western Terrain: Peoples, Paths and Landscapes The quality of tourist amenities in some western districts varied, and affirmed tourists’ widespread expectations that consumption of the 27

Ibid., 2 September 1884. Earl of Mayo, ‘The Tourist in Ireland’, The Nineteenth Century, 42, 246 (August 1897), 193. 29 M. J. B. Baddeley, Ireland, Part 1, Northern Counties, Including Dublin and Neighbourhood, ‘Through Guide Series’ (3rd edn. London: Dulau and Co., 1892), p. xi. 30 Ibid., p. xi. 31 A New Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Donegal Highlands, p. 1. 28

Tourism and Western Terrain

21

authentic ‘West’ might involve an encounter with ‘primitive’ standards of service, travel and accommodation, as well as improved amenities in established tourist areas. The 1880s and 1890s by no means marked the beginning of travel, or indeed of mass tourism, in the West of Ireland, but these years did see the expansion of the infrastructure for tourism ‘improvement’. It was encouraged by such bodies as the Congested Districts Board and the Irish Tourist Association (I.T.A.), founded in 1895 under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act (1893).32 Bringing together leading members of the Irish aristocracy, including the Earls of Mayo, Howth and Dunraven, as well as political leaders such as Horace Plunkett, the I.T.A. aimed to advertise the ‘attractions of the country’; to increase links between Ireland and ‘all parts of Great Britain’; to improve the conditions of the nation’s hotels; and to encourage the formation of local committees to assist in these tasks.33 These years also witnessed the expansion of rail lines through the West, including the ‘Balfour lines’ that connected districts of western Ireland in the 1890s. Murray’s Handbook noted in 1896 that the railway line from Stranorlar to Glenties ran ‘through the heart of the Donegal Highlands’, dividing the county in ‘two convenient sections, either of which the tourist can select to see’.34 In fact these railway lines were credited with developing Donegal tourism by creating an internal transport infrastructure that connected villages, towns and sites of interest, and fed into the established railway lines whose axes ran from the east. If it opened up some districts of ‘wild’ Donegal, other areas were still portrayed as remote - far from the travelling masses and comfortable amenities. A visit there, however, would repay the intrepid excursionist. The Lady of the House shared A. I. Shand’s assessment that the North-West deserved a much greater share of tourist traffic. The periodical declared: Glenties is a wonderfully bracing and healthy place, which deserves to be more patronized by the tourists than it is, now that there is direct train communication with Dublin. Travellers as a rule pass rapidly through it en route from Gweedore to Carrick and Glencolumbkille, and thus miss some of the finest cliff and coast scenery in Donegal.35

32

See Irene Furlong, ‘Frederick W. Crossley: Irish Turn-of-the-Century Tourism Pioneer’, Irish History: A Research Yearbook, 2 (2003), 162-76. 33 The Times, 14 October 1895. See also 25 June 1896. 34 Cooke, Handbook, p. 185. 35 Lady of the House, 15 October 1897.

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Chapter One

The North-West corner of Ireland was said to offer rugged scenery, and glimpses into ‘native’ Irish culture, for those who were willing to risk the relative discomfort of travel there. ‘Great are the charms of Wicklow and Kerry’, wrote the minister and author Richard Lovett: manifold are the beauties of Mayo and Antrim; yet upon any one who wishes to see Ireland at its best, that is, least affected by outside influences, Donegal should have the prior claim. More than equal to her rivals in natural beauty, there is also a stronger element of the ‘mere Irish’ in the people, and in their habits of life.36

The idea of the North-West as ‘unspoilt’ western space made the oftrepeated criticism of its primitive tourist amenities an emblem of its authenticity as a Celtic frontier. The Times reported on 23 August 1898 that in Donegal ‘the scenery is wild in the extreme’, though Black’s Guide to Belfast and the North of Ireland cautioned travellers that they would encounter both spectacular landscapes and relatively ‘dull country’ on their way through Co. Donegal. They would, however, be rewarded by the dramatic beauty of the ‘Wild Highlands of the North-West’.37 A sister publication, Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland, noted in 1877 that: Though by no means so frequently visited by tourists as other parts of Ireland, the county of Donegal is second to none in the wildness of its scenery. The ornithologist and mineralogist have long been familiar with its charms, but to the general tourist these have remained till lately almost a sealed book.38

The guidebook also warned that accommodation and coach transportation were not of the standard found elsewhere in Ireland, and proposed a short, four day excursion which took in the coast in three days, where the most interesting scenery was found, and inland parts of the county in one.39 Efforts to penetrate the North-West with railway lines and sign-posted tourist sites were part of a programme to integrate the district firmly within the tourist imagination of western holiday-ground. The I.T.A. explicitly aimed to export more ‘advanced’ amenities to the county and seldom-visited districts of the West, following the example of 36

Richard Lovett, Ireland Illustrated with Pen and Pencil, revised by E. P. Thwing (New York: Hurst and Co., 1891), p. 158. 37 Black’s Guide to Belfast and the North of Ireland, Illustrated with Maps and Plans (25th edn. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), p. 338. 38 Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland, p. 404. 39 Ibid.

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Lord George Hill, who had opened his 23,000 acre estate to tourists and sportsmen in Gweedore,40 creating the premier tourist facility in the region. Lord Leitrim also lent his energies to the creation of links and a hotel at Rosapenna in an act of conspicuous aristocratic patronage that aimed to exploit the commercial potential of tourism. Yet despite these initiatives, many districts in Donegal remained less-visited than other western areas. Commenting on the relative absence of tourist amenities there, M. J. B. Baddeley wrote that the county offered a number of houses ‘which, with the infusion of a good deal more English tidiness and cleanliness into their sanitary arrangements . . . might be made quite satisfactory to any but the luxury-seeking class of tourists – and that class should keep clear of Donegal’.41 In Gweedore, and in other areas where he travelled, Shand decried the standard of accommodation, the terrain for walking, and the immiseration of local people.42 But such places also served as foils for other districts through which he passed, many of them on the coast, where he wrote of dramatic scenery, industrious peoples, good hotels (such as the one at Carrick, where he could not find a room),43 and inhabitants who enjoyed a higher standard of living. The reputation of tourist accommodation in the North-West was an extension of a general assessment of the quality of hotels in rural Ireland, long regarded as one of the principal hindrances to the growth of the tourist industry. F. W. Crossley acknowledged in a letter to The Times in 1895 that hotel accommodations in rural Ireland were not ‘all one could desire’ and that several ‘rural hostelries’ were ‘of a very primitive description’.44 He also admitted that the railway system was limited, compared to England, but challenged a previous correspondent to the newspaper, who on 8 October 1895 under the name ‘Rusticus Expectans’ had pilloried facilities for tourists in the West. By 1898 a correspondent to the newspaper was able to report that ‘journeys through the country have been accelerated and the hotel accommodation vastly improved’.45 Indeed, even in 1884 Shand contended that the famous Murray’s guidebooks had failed to keep up with the improving standards in western hotels.46 Outside major urban centres, Irish hotels were derided as being dingy and

40

Baddeley, Ireland, p. 131. Ibid. p. 106. 42 The Times, 1 September 1884, 6 September 1884. 43 Ibid., 4 September 1884. 44 Ibid., 14 October 1895, 8 October 1895. 45 Ibid., 23 August 1898. 46 Ibid., 2 September 1884. 41

24

Chapter One

unsanitary.47 But in some long-established tourist districts on or near the western coast the standard of accommodation was praised as very high in comparison with ‘remote’ and ‘primitive’ districts. In this respect, the absence of comfortable tourist amenities as the traveller moved from regions such as Killarney northwards to Donegal and away from standard tourist paths and destinations, served to authenticate the district’s ‘wildness’, denoting virgin terrain for the tourist. Descriptions of NorthWest Ireland as undiluted by foreign blood, untrodden by the traveller’s foot and secreted from the tourist’s gaze also validated it as a site of the purest Irish culture. ‘Wild’ Donegal’s hotels, as unkept and untamed in the tourist imagination as its landscapes, were at once forbidding and alluring.48 Similar ideas of wildness and authenticity were interwoven in discussions of the people of such districts, whom Shand and other travellers characterised as aboriginal ‘races’.

Faces of the West The wild character of these inhabitants was explicitly linked to theories of racial origin, and involved the evaluation of peoples that Shand encountered with reference to a constructed, racially ‘undiluted’ indigenous population.49 Indeed travellers and travel guides often measured the degree of ‘civilization’ in western districts through physiognomy. Around Adare, Co. Limerick, the G.S.W.R. guidebook remarked that the distinctive facial features of Palatinate Germans remained pronounced.50 Shand questioned the Spanish origins attributed to fishermen of Claddagh, instead finding them to be Saxon in appearance. While claiming that the population of Ireland was ‘the most mixed in the world’, in eastern Donegal, he intoned, ‘the Scot appears to 47

Baddeley, Ireland, p. xii. The French author Marie Anne de Bovet compared Irish accommodation unfavourably with that in England, the reputation of which she also described as notorious. See Marie Anne de Bovet, ‘Three Months in Clare, 1891’, in Ó Dálaigh, Strangers Gaze, pp. 302-7. 48 David Brett, ‘The Representation of Culture’, in Kockel (ed.), Culture, Tourism and Development, pp. 117-28. 49 For an excellent study of race and ethnicity in tourism, see Robert E. Wood, ‘Tourist Ethnicity: A Brief Itinerary’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21, 2 (1998), 21841. 50 John O’Mahony, The Sunny Side of Ireland: How to See it by the Great Southern and Western Railway, and a Chapter on the Natural History of the South and West of Ireland by R. Lloyd Praeger, B.A., B.E. (2nd edn. Dublin: Alex Thom and Co., n.d., c. 1902), p. 62.

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predominate’.51 Shand also noted of Sligo that ‘genuine Milesians’ were in the minority.52 Yet in some places that he characterized as particularly remote (‘the wild corner of North Donegal’, for instance, at the back of Bloody Foreland), Shand detected a uniformity of Celtic features – and surnames.53 Rejecting as caricatures the images of costumed Irish peasants popularized in Britain, which he did not observe ‘even in the wilds of Donegal’,54 Shand nonetheless painted colourful pictures of these Irish ‘races’. In one of the western-most points of his travels, for instance, on an island north-east of Achill, he described a culture so primitive that he labelled it savage. Shand suggested that the natives had established a kind of mini-state on the western frontier: But beyond the poverty-stricken natives of Achill is a lower depth still. Further to the north-east is an island, called, I think, Inishkea, where the people form an independent state of their own, and must be pretty nearly heathens. There is a precisely similar condition of society on one of the islands in Sligo Bay. They acknowledge no landlord, they pay no rates, they elect a monarch of their own, and though a priest does come at intervals to confess, to marry, and to christen them, they have an idol they regularly worship and propitiate before their boats put out to sea.55

This description of islanders living in a ‘state of nature’ was notable for the manner in which it was integrated within Shand’s travel narrative. Neither visiting the island nor observing the islanders at first hand, Shand created this evocative description from second-hand accounts. These islanders were powerful emblems of western primitivism – and Inishkea a forbidding site which Shand did not encourage travellers to visit. While his vivid descriptions may have fired the tourist imagination, Shand seemed implicitly to caution travellers that more benign ‘primitives’ could be observed elsewhere. Indeed, throughout Shand’s travels he remarked on the diversity of the West, and cautioned against forming generalizations about either its topography or its peoples. ‘What is true of Donegal is false of Sligo’,56 he wrote at the end of his tour. He, like others, wrote of a broad variety of landscapes and peoples, and gradations of western wildness, from bleak hills and verdant vistas to large swathes of dull terrain, and from ‘savage’ races in Inishkea and on remotest Bloody 51

The Times, 27 August 1884. Ibid., 8 September 1884. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 17 September 1884. 55 Ibid., 11 September 1884. 56 Ibid., 27 September 1884. 52

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Chapter One

Foreland, to the ‘Saxons’, ‘Scots’ and gentle natives whom he encountered elsewhere.

Frames of Reference for the West In seeking to convey the contours of the region’s landscapes, and in particular gradations of exoticness, Shand made recourse to places more familiar to him and his readers, offering several spatial frames of reference within which Irish places were situated. Most descriptions of the West were mediated by travellers’ experiences and ideas of other landscapes, regions and countries; they assimilated Irish terrain within broader geographic and imaginative frameworks. Sometimes Irish regions were explicitly compared with better-known tourist districts in the country: Black’s Guide to Belfast and the North of Ireland declared that ‘In its wealth of mountains Donegal is to the north-west what Connaught and Kerry are to the west and south-west’, and in the same discussion noted features common to the ‘Highlands of Donegal’ and those of ‘West Galway and Mayo’.57 Descriptions of the rural western landscape often referred to comparable regions in Britain, and especially to Scotland, where the development of tourist amenities was considerably more advanced, and where references to its landscapes and peoples helped to assimilate the putative wildness and remoteness of Ireland within a broader framework of Celtic tourism. If, as John Urry writes, the tourist gaze is ‘constructed through difference’ and through contrasts with the mundane, when fixed on Ireland it also sought to identify comparative, if often less compelling, ‘recreational space’ in parts of the United Kingdom.58 The Scot Gerald Balfour declared that ‘the attractions of Ireland are at least equal to those of Scotland’.59 Shand, another Scot, drew negative comparisons with Scotland when visiting Gweedore, where he observed that ‘the shooting here would be thought miserably poor’ during his visit to Lord George Hill’s property. His observations on rural modernization in the Irish West were also informed by his views on Scottish rural change. Indeed, he regretted that the North-West had not experienced the comprehensive transformation in tenurial regimes which had occurred in Scotland: in Gweedore, he remarked that ‘I have no hesitation in saying that, in the real interests of humanity, a clean sweep should be made of the crofters, and the land given over, as in the Scotch 57

Black’s Guide to Belfast, p. 338. Urry, The Tourist Gaze, pp. 1-2. 59 Quoted in a letter entitled ‘The Tourist in Ireland’, The Times, 27 June 1896. 58

Tourism and Western Terrain

27

Highlands, to sheep and game.’60 But Shand also inverted this comparison to validate districts of the Irish West as authentic repositories of a Celtic culture which, unlike that of the Scottish Highlands, had not been razed or reconstructed for the tourist gaze. He claimed, for instance, that the ‘Irish’ character of some hotels in the rural North-West was an extension of the general wildness of the region, and offered a pronounced contrast with the tamed Scottish Highlands, where there would be ‘three or four great hotels, each and all of them overflowing with their supercilious landlords spoiled by prosperity’.61 Frequent descriptions of the Irish ‘Highlands’ both implicitly and often explicitly evoked Scotland’s premier tourist region.62 Yet there were places farther afield which writers compared with Ireland’s western districts. On the approach to Moville, Shand was reminded of ‘something between our English Dartmouth and many a quiet nook in the Eastern Riviera’; while steaming back to Derry that evening the scenery evoked both the Bosphorous and the Straits of Messina.63 In Galway he found an urban centre of the West that in its grandeur and decay reminded him of Strasbourg after its capture by the Germans,64 while the Earl of Mayo labelled Cork the ‘Marseilles of Ireland,’ where the people ‘are impulsive and easily roused’.65 The American travellers Milburg Francisco and Blanche McManus Mansfield endorsed comparisons between Slieve League, Yellowstone Park and the canyons of Arizona or Colorado.66 Stanley Lane-Poole, the noted Orientalist, historian and author, confessing an ‘unalterable love for the Nile and the Bosphorous’ in his travelogue North-West and by North, wrote that he observed ‘something in the lonely hills and pastoral life of the West of Ireland and the verge of the North Riding that appeals to me in a different and more intimate way than anything in the meditative East’.67 This narrative strategy reinforced the writer’s authority as an observer of landscapes and peoples, by overtly 60

Ibid., 1 September 1884. Ibid., 26 August 1884. 62 Hardy’s Tourist Guide. Fourth Tour: Galway, Connemarra, and the Irish Highlands, with Maps and Engravings (London: Simpkin and Marshall, n.d.), p. 318. See also M. F. and B. McManus Mansfield, Romantic Ireland (2 vols. Boston: L.C. Page and Company, 1904), II, p. 189. 63 The Times, 26 August 1884. 64 Ibid., 16 September 1884. 65 Mayo, ‘The Tourist’, 191. 66 Mansfield and Mansfield, Romantic Ireland, p. 200. 67 Stanley Lane-Poole, North-West and by North: Irish Hills and English Dales (London: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1903), p. vii. 61

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referencing other places that had fallen under his gaze, while adding to Ireland’s allure by encouraging readers to see it as a microcosm of other tourist space, both familiar and foreign: a trip through the Bosphorous, a ramble through the West Riding68 and Highland vistas more dramatic and unspoilt than those in Scotland were on offer to those who ventured westward. It also reflected the widespread belief amongst those in the tourism industry that, as John Cooke, editor of Murray’s handbook for Ireland, lamented, for many years ‘The Swiss Mountains, the Tyrol, the Coast of Norway, or even Egypt, were better known to the British tourist than the Donegal Highlands, Connemara, and the grand peninsulas of Kerry.’69

Commodifying the West Travellers wishing to return home with mementos of their western tours were also reminded that the handicrafts of the ‘native’ peasantry were as varied as the landscapes they inhabited. So far this analysis has examined ways in which the external gaze was directed to western Ireland, and how the region was appraised in published works. But tourist space was not constructed by guidebooks alone. The relationship between the peasants and touristic voyeurs created a new arena for the negotiation of power. Western ‘regionalism’ was the dominant framework through which cottage industry marketed its wares. W. T. Macartney-Filgate, an energetic proponent of cottage industry in Ireland, wrote that ‘Truly the homespun is interwoven with all our associations of western life’, and that each piece of hand-woven cloth ‘has an individuality’.70 Shand noted in his account of Donegal travels that a woollen store beside the inn at Dungloe was full of socks, stockings and coloured worsteds,71 and praised the Beleek pottery for having developed ‘native talent’.72 Ward, Lock, and Co.’s guide to The Donegal Highlands claimed that ‘spinning and weaving have also occupied many of the cottagers from time immemorial’, and, describing the industry as an art, advised readers that durable and reasonable Donegal homespuns were available for purchase at ‘most of the 68

The Times, 17 September 1884. John Cooke, ‘Ireland as a Tourist Resort’, in W. T. Macartney-Filgate (ed.), Irish Rural Life and Industry, with Suggestions for the Future (Dublin: Hely’s, Ltd., 1907), p. 13. 70 W. T. Macartney-Filgate, ‘Homespun Manufacture in the West of Ireland, Mayo and Kerry’, in Macartney-Filgate, Irish Rural Life, p. 148. 71 The Times, 4 September 1884. 72 Ibid., 5 September 1884. 69

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hotels in Donegal’.73 In these accounts, local handicraft traditions were celebrated as expressions of diverse native talent, which tourists were invited to consume in several ways. If travellers were encouraged to go deeper west and farther north on their western tours, they were also invited to appreciate the range of ‘unique’ artefacts specific to these areas, to observe their manufacture, and to patronise peasant communities through the consumption of indigenous craft.74 These interactions, in turn, led producers to harness discourses of localism for commercial gain, and, as in the case of Killarney arbutus souvenir ware and furniture, to promote their manufactures as regional vernacular art.75 Black’s Guide to Belfast and the North of Ireland noted that Ardara was the capital of the North-West’s cottage industries, encouraged travellers ‘by all means’ to visit the workshops of the district, and published a print of a peasant woman spinning in her cottage, facing a sleeping baby.76 The guidebook for the G.S.W.R. also noted that cottage industries abounded in the West, but made a wider claim for the character of Irish ‘lesser industries’ generally, including ‘the homespuns woven in cottages, the beautiful Dublin poplin, the delicate lace of Youghal and Limerick, the exquisite pottery of Beleek’,77 which was recommended as an ‘exquisite souvenir of a visit to Ireland’.78 The act of production also attracted the tourist gaze, and added to allure of the journey, as travellers were promised the opportunity to observe production at sites ranging from the great pottery at Beleek to small cottage industry workshops. The Earl of Mayo praised the delicacy of Kenmare lace and its high value in Paris markets, in his travelogue;79 he also enthused about Donegal’s tweeds and stockings.80 Local handicraft offered a concrete expression of the varied economies and cultures of the western peasantry, and commodified them for tourist markets. The promotion of regional handicraft centres was a significant focus of efforts to develop Ireland’s rural tourist infrastructure, 73

A New Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to the Donegal Highlands, pp. 13, 52. For a discussion of Killarney woodwares and tourism, see Brian Austen, ‘Tourism and Industry: Killarney and its Furniture’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 12 (1996), 45-55. 75 See Joseph McBrinn’s excellent study, ‘The Peasant and Folk Art Revival in Ireland, 1890-1920: With Special Reference to Ulster’, Ulster Folklife, 48 (2002), 14-61. 76 Black’s Guide to Belfast, p. 352. Cooke, Handbook also described Ardara tweed as giving ‘excellent wear’ (p. 184). 77 O’Mahony, The Sunny Side, p. 13. 78 Ibid., p. 255. 79 Mayo, ‘The Tourist’, 194. 80 Ibid., p. 202. 74

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and the handicraft workshop became a site of exchange and cultural negotiation between native and traveller, premised on the notion that local peoples applied specialist skills to the production of diverse products. The extent to which this ‘staging’ of regional vernacular production was organized by producers or by external actors is a matter of debate, particularly given the role of such agencies as the Irish Industries Association and the Congested Districts Board in advocating ‘cottage industry’, but the relationship between handicraft and tourism suggests intensive interaction between travellers and rural dwellers in the production of souvenirs of the western tour.

Conclusion In Alexander Shand’s travels, untamed scenery, undiluted indigenous cultures, and poor amenities signalled new opportunities for tourists, railways and hoteliers to advance into the West. There was another aspect of this ‘wildness’ that related directly to anxieties surrounding travel in Ireland during this period, which threatened to undermine representations of western Ireland as holiday-ground, and which exercised promoters of Irish tourism. Widespread anxiety in the 1880s and 1890s about Ireland’s ‘uncivil’ politics became a focus of considerable comment, and guidebooks made efforts to assuage fears that western wildness denoted personal danger. The ‘Through Guide’ volumes assured readers that ‘Whatever may be the “troubles” of Ireland, they do not affect the safety or comfort of the tourist, and Pat, whatever his degree, is as pleased to welcome a Saxon with money in his purse and give him a “quid pro quo” as he ever was.’81 Shand ended his last ‘Letter’ published on 27 September 1884 by asserting that ‘Cockney tourists may be assured that they are safer in the West here than either in Epping Forest or Embankment’, while a correspondent to The Times three years earlier, William Hamlyn, assured prospective tourists that agitation over the ‘land question’ had not impacted on his travels in Ireland, and indeed that visitors might expect ‘extra attention, all classes being anxious to show that tourists are as safe and as welcome as ever’.82 Shand and contemporary guidebooks, all extolling western ‘holiday-ground’, sought to delicately balance the idea of western wildness with allusions to the safe and familiar, by assuring readers that travel was safe in most remote and ‘wild’ districts. The West’s diverse material cultures expressed its variety of peoples, and local 81 82

Baddeley, Ireland, p. xiii. The Times, 8 June 1881.

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manufactures became an object of tourist consumption. Visitors were encouraged to observe production during their journeys as part of their immersion in local culture, and also to purchase goods such as tweeds, lace and pottery – both gestures being construed as acts of tourist patronage towards the district’s inhabitants. But the idea that governed these narratives of the West – that a generalization of the district’s geographies and cultures was an ‘impossibility’ – both endorsed and undermined other narratives of Irish life found in ethnographic surveys, many of which homogenised, romanticised and eulogised the western peasantry. They also defied ideas of cultural unity that underlay the commentary of travellers less concerned with tourist promotion than with the wider question of the ‘condition of rural Ireland’. Consider, for instance, observations by the journalist and ardent Irish nationalist Robert Lynd, who wrote of the Irish people’s ‘oneness – oneness of customs and character and interests and even of language traditions – their oneness and, within the circle of that, their curious variableness’.83 Shand’s travel account and contemporary tourist material also knitted together landscapes, cultures and races in richly-textured narratives of laternineteenth and early-twentieth century Ireland, but in constructing the western countryside as a place of adventure and consumption, they did not detect ‘curious variableness’ subsumed under an ideal of cultural unity. Instead, they extolled the extraordinary variety found within Irish holidayground.

83

Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills and Boon, 1909), p. 8.

CHAPTER TWO ‘KEEPING THE FAITH’: THE CATHOLIC PRESS AND THE PRESERVATION OF CELTIC IDENTITY IN BRITAIN IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY JOAN ALLEN1

Those who find themselves exiled, for whatever reason and from whatever country, are vulnerable and in need of support. Arguably, for those Irish migrants to Britain in the nineteenth century, who were exiled because of economic or political circumstances beyond their control, their needs were even more pressing. Traumatised by loss of family as well as homeland and impoverished by the famine and its aftershocks, they all too frequently found themselves in an alien and hostile environment.2 Their outsider status fostered a certain insularity and mutual dependency, and Irish associational life enabled them to reconnect, albeit vicariously, with the world they had left behind. This support network, commonly located in the solidarities of work, church and leisure activities, and buttressed by correspondence with distant family and friends, acted as a kind of ‘connective tissue’ between the migrants’ homeland and the new community in which they found themselves. This study appraises another element of this connective tissue: the important role of the Roman Catholic Press in providing news from home.

1

I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, who sponsored the presentation of this paper to the Fifth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney in 2004. 2 Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991), ch. 2.

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For historians engaged in tracing the key factors in the assimilation of Irish migrants, the role of the press, whether British or Irish, should be of primary interest and yet, apart from Michael de Nie’s recent work,3 there has been a marked tendency to concentrate upon other issues, notably settlement patterns, employment opportunities and community networks.4 As Mary Hickman has observed, this research agenda has been too narrowly focussed, not least because it has mostly failed to take account of the strategic intervention of British institutions which served to assist the incorporation of the Irish into the host society.5 In a bid to offer a corrective, Hickman has examined the role of the Catholic Church, particularly its commitment to the provision of separate Catholic education, and she has concluded that schooling served to incorporate the Irish into the British state, ‘by strengthening their identity as Catholics and weakening their national identity’.6 This kind of acculturation, which aimed to teach Irish school children to be ‘useful citizens, loyal subjects’, was highly effective but, fortunately, such ‘political socialisation’ was not the preserve of the education system;7 there were other countervailing forces at work. As this study hopes to show, the Roman Catholic newspapers and journals which were launched by Charles Diamond (1858-1934)8 in the mid-1880s helped to counter this determined erosion of Celtic identity. Charles Diamond was an Irish newspaper entrepreneur and ardent nationalist who ensured that in all of his newspapers the promotion of Irish nationalism and devout Catholicism were conceived of as twin projects. While Diamond’s career as a newspaper magnate has been appraised by a

3

Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy. Irish Identity and the British Press, 17981882 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 4 For example, see S. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880-1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); Davis, Irish in Britain. 5 Mary J. Hickman, ‘Alternative Historiographies of the Irish in Britain’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 236-53. 6 Mary J Hickman, ‘Incorporating and denationalizing the Irish in England: the role of the Catholic Church’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide. History, Heritage, Identity (6 volumes. Leicester, London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1992-2000), V: Religion and Identity (1996), p. 197. 7 Ibid., p. 206. 8 Tom Gallagher, ‘DIAMOND, Charles, Labour politician and newspaper proprietor’ in J. M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (11 volumes, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), VIII, pp. 55-9.

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small number of historians,9 his influence over the political and religious allegiances of the Irish in Britain warrants more substantial treatment. Even though he had amassed a vast press empire of over forty newspaper titles at his death in 1934, served as an Irish nationalist Member of Parliament (County Monaghan) between 1892 and 1895 and was jailed for six months in 1920 for incitement to violence,10 Diamond does not have an entry in the much vaunted new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). The Catholic Herald, which celebrated its centenary year of publication in 1985, stands as a powerful testimony to Diamond’s legacy. He successfully syndicated his Herald titles to make them available in every British town and city and, with the crucial backing of the church hierarchy, purchasing the Catholic Herald became tantamount to a badge of fealty. It is clear that a rigorous study of Charles Diamond’s life and career could throw considerable light upon the connection between Irish nationalism and Roman Catholicism in Britain but such a project lies beyond the remit of this chapter.11 This study must necessarily settle for more modest aims and will confine itself to tracking Diamond’s early career in Newcastle upon Tyne as a manufacturer of paper products, and the foundation of his first Irish newspaper, The Irish Tribune (1884-1897), which circulated throughout England and Scotland. In doing so, an attempt will be made to assess his role in sustaining Roman Catholicism and countering the erosion of Celtic identity. In the late-1830s when the Tablet, the Dublin Review and the Edinburgh Catholic Magazine were first published in Britain, the Catholic press was recognisably Irish. In those early years, Catholic newspaper proprietors and journalists were mostly drawn from the ranks of an exiled Irish nationalist intelligentsia who, in the heady days after Catholic Emancipation (1829), seized every opportunity to promote the cause of religious and political liberty. In Scotland particularly, the indigenous Catholic communities were small and scattered, and had an inferior 9

Owen Dudley Edwards and Patricia Storey, ‘The Irish Press in Victorian Britain’ in Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1985), offer an overview of Diamond’s newspaper activities, but much of what we know has concentrated upon Diamond’s activities in Scotland. For example, see Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘The Catholic Press in Scotland since the restoration of the hierarchy’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Modern Scottish Catholicism 1878-1978 (Glasgow: Burns, 1979); Tom Gallagher, Glasgow, The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland, 1819-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987): Iain Maclean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983). 10 The Times, 17 January 1920. 11 A biographical study of Diamond is currently being prepared by the author.

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command of written English. Inevitably, the voice of English Catholicism held sway until the Irish wrested control of the Catholic press from what they perceived to be its baneful influence and used it to champion the cause of Irish nationalism.12 Celtic symbols and mottos, such as ‘Éire go Bráth’(‘Ireland Forever’), which underpinned the title of the Dublin Review, proclaimed their uncompromisingly patriotic mission but it was not destined to last. After Daniel O’Connell’s death in May 1847, the controlling influence of Irish journalism in Britain began to wane, and in the 1860s and 1870s a greatly enlarged Irish Catholic population in Britain turned instead to their mother country as the most reliable source of news from home.13 Irish Catholics constituted a substantial and loyal reading public. After the Irish famine, the percentage of Roman Catholics in Britain rose from a mere four per cent of worshippers at the time of the Religious Census in 1851, to a sizeable and growing minority by the third quarter of the nineteenth century.14 The period after 1868, which Bernard Aspinwall has referred to as the ‘social evolutionary phase’ of Irish migration, coincided with a press revolution.15 The removal of stamp duty and advances in technology, especially the advent of the telegraph, enabled the popular press to diversify in terms of both coverage and contents. An increasingly literate population could choose from any one of a large number of national and provincial newspaper titles.16 But while newspapers on the mainland aimed specifically at the Irish community, such as the Glasgow Free Press and the Irish Liberator, battled to sustain break-even circulation rates, newspapers published in Ireland, most notably the Irish People and the Nation, exercised a far greater hold on the affections of the people.17 This situation changed dramatically after 1884 when several new 12

Edwards, ‘Catholic Press in Scotland’, p. 159. Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, p. 178. 14 There was an estimated 6 million Catholics in the United Kingdom in 1866. See Jacqueline Clais-Girard, ‘The English Catholics and Irish Nationalism 1865-1890: A tragedy in five acts’, Victorian Literature and Culture, I (2004), 178. See also Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 140; Roger Swift, ‘ The Irish in Britain’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), Irish World Wide, II: The Irish in the New Communities, (1992), pp. 70-2. 15 Bernard Aspinwall, ‘A long journey: The Irish in Scotland’, in O’Sullivan, Religion and Identity, p. 147. 16 Aled Jones, Powers of the Press. Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth Century England (Aldershot: Scolars Press, 1996); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695-1855 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), ch. 2. 17 However, it is notable that the Nation fell out of favour with many members of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick following A. M. Sullivan’s controversial 13

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Irish journals emerged. These included the Glasgow weekly journal, the Exile, which was first published in 1884 by Patrick Shiels to serve the Irish Catholic migrant community.18 Unfortunately, Shiels struggled to keep the journal afloat and by May 1885 he was forced to cease printing. Owen Dudley Edwards suggests that the Exile was too narrow in its appeal and that by privileging Irish interests at the expense of a more inclusive Catholicism, Shiels failed to establish the mass readership and advertising base he needed to make the journal profitable.19 In this difficult and competitive climate it is interesting that Charles Diamond’s entrée into the newspaper business proved to be far more successful. Charles Diamond was born into a large Irish Catholic family in Maghera, Co. Derry, in 1858.20 His father was one of thousands of rackrented farmers who were evicted in the 1870s and eventually driven out of Ireland by the hostility and abuse of the Orange Order. When Diamond arrived in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1878, the Irish nationalist cause had already secured the sympathetic support of the internationally renowned radical and republican Joseph Cowen jnr. MP (1829-1900).21 As the regional capital, Newcastle was a bustling commercial and industrial centre which was bound to attract those looking for stable work. Irish immigrants in the North East of England far outnumbered the Scots and the Welsh, and by the second half of the nineteenth century the Irish immigrant population had expanded to embrace the ‘fourth largest ratio of Irish to English in England and Wales’.22 The largest share of this migrant population settled along the banks of the Tyne where work was plentiful.23 On the basis of numerical strength alone, the Irish were bound to have an impact upon local politics. While elsewhere sectarian attitudes bred libel action against Dennis Holland of the Irishman. For details see Gerard Moran, ‘Nationalists in exile: The National Brotherhood of St Patrick in Lancashire, 18615’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Victorian Britain, p. 216. 18 Edwards, ‘Catholic Press in Scotland’, p. 164. 19 Ibid., p. 165. 20 Jim Coffey, ‘Charles Diamond: A legend in his time’, Scottish Catholic Observer, 19 April 1985; Gallagher, ‘DIAMOND, Charles, p. 55. 21 Joan Allen, Joseph Cowen and Popular Radicalism on Tyneside 1829-1900 (London: Merlin Press, 2007); Nigel Todd, The Militant Democracy: Joseph Cowen and Victorian Radicalism (Whitley Bay: Bewick Press, 1991). 22 Frank Neal, ‘Irish settlement in the north-east and north-west of England in the mid-nineteenth century’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Victorian Britain, p. 76; R. J. Nicholson, ‘Irish Priests in the North East in the 19th Century’, Northern Catholic History, XXI (Spring 1985), 16-24. 23 See statistical breakdown provided in Neal, ‘Irish settlement in the north-east and north-west of England’, pp. 78-9.

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intolerance of the Irish in most, if not all, of the major centres in which they settled, on Tyneside they not only benefited from the relative absence of sectarianism but their political influence far outweighed their ascribed minority status.24 While the prevailing equipoise owes much to the buoyancy of the local economy and the low levels of internal friction in an Irish community that was predominantly Roman Catholic,25 the positive intervention of Joseph Cowen and his newspapers must also be recognised. Joseph Cowen was an archetypal Victorian radical who exercised a powerful influence over Tyneside politics from the late 1850s until his death in 1900. His sympathies for European republicans led him to champion the cause of a unified Italy, to vilify the expansionism of the Russians and support exiled Poles and Hungarians fleeing the oppressive rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In much the same way he denounced the coercive policies which successive British governments imposed in Ireland and brokered a strong alliance between the Irish nationalists and Tyneside radicals that served the interests of both groups.26 The rootedness of old English agrarianism and international republicanism in the North East of England acted as common currency, fostering the identification of shared political objectives. Dispossessed of their land and their freeborn rights, the Irish represented a highly visible test case, a graphic example of the corruption of the political system. When he was elected as the senior Liberal Member of Parliament for Newcastle in 1874, Cowen applied his considerable political influence to the forging of good Anglo-Irish relations, opposing a succession of 24 The argument that Tyneside was relatively free of the sectarianism which divided other communities with large Irish populations, such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester, was first advanced by Roger Cooter in his University of Durham MA thesis. This has recently been published as Roger Cooter, When Paddy Met Geordie. The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle 1840-1880 (Sunderland: Sunderland University Press, 2005). His views have been somewhat tempered by the work of Frank Neal and a recent study of the Orange Order in the north by Donald MacRaild. Both Neal and MacRaild have identified small pockets of conflict across the North East. See Neal, ‘Irish settlement in the north-east and north-west of England’; Donald MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting. The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, c. 1850-1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005). 25 Michael Morris and Leo Gooch, Down Your Aisles. The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, 1850-2000 (Hartlepool: Northern Cross, 2000), p. 12. 26 Joan Hugman, ‘Print and Preach: The entrepreneurial spirit of Tyneside politics’, in Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster (eds), Newcastle. A Modern History (Chichester: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 113-32.

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coercive statutes intended for Ireland, championing Home Rule and providing favourable and sympathetic coverage of Irish affairs in his newspapers. Cowen’s role in agitating for Irish reform weakened his position on the Liberal benches and his parliamentary career but it earned him the lasting respect and admiration of activists such as Timothy Healy, Alex Sullivan and Charles Stuart Parnell. Isaac Butt was so impressed that he was persuaded to host the first Home Rule Conference in Newcastle in August 1873. Cowen was directly involved in Irish politics at the highest level. As John Martin MP told those who had gathered to celebrate St Patrick’s Day in Gateshead Town Hall in 1875, ‘Cowen was the most valuable friend that Ireland had among Englishmen.’27 To a large extent, Cowen’s political influence derived from his ownership of one of the most powerful provincial newspaper presses in Britain. He had long been convinced that effective propaganda was an essential component of any political campaign. He flirted with the press on a small scale in the late 1840s, supporting Ultra-radical journals, such as the Democratic Review and the Red Republican, and in the 1850s he published the English Republic and the Northern Tribune.28 In 1859, he finally acquired a mainstream newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle, which was then losing the circulation war against several other local newspapers.29 Cowen invested heavily and rapidly transformed the paper’s fortunes. Over time the paper was published in daily, weekly and evening formats. He established offices in Paris and New York and appointed a web of agents throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles to ensure the press secured a global circulation.30 By 1873, daily sales figures for the second quarter were estimated to be 35,534 and the Weekly’s rates were just slightly less.31 Few papers outside London could match this and, increasingly, the views expressed in Cowen’s newspapers attracted national attention. 27

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 20 March 1883. Joan Allen, ‘Resurrecting Jerusalem: the late Chartist press in the north east of England, 1852-1859’, in Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton (eds), Papers for the People, A Study of the Chartist Press (London: Merlin Press, 2005), pp. 171-4. 29 Newcastle had a very lively print culture and supported several newspapers including the Newcastle Journal, the Newcastle Guardian and the Newcastle Courant. See Hugman, ‘Print and Preach’, p. 118. 30 O. R. Ashton, WE Adams. Chartist, Radical and Journalist (1832-1906): ‘An honour to the fourth estate’ (Whitley Bay: Bewick Press, 1991), pp. 100-3. The Chronicle offices were the ‘first English provincial establishment of its kind to possess a private telegraph system’. 31 Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 53. 28

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In the 1870s the North East of England was reputed to be ‘honeycombed with Fenians’32 and, notwithstanding a successful recruitment drive by Isaac Butt’s ‘Constitutionalists’, regional membership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood was judged to be over 6,000.33 It has been argued that the ‘mutually dependent triangular relationship between the press, its readers and politicians’ helped to construct government policy in Ireland.34 Sympathetic press coverage of the plight of the Irish was rare and it is against a backdrop of pervasive antipathy, especially in major areas of Irish settlement,35 that the unusually supportive attitude of Cowen’s Newcastle Chronicle should be viewed. The Chronicle press reported outbreaks of violence and was swift enough to condemn them, but, at the same time, consistently reminded its readers that local Irish people were not to be held responsible for outrages carried out elsewhere. For example, following the Clerkenwell explosion in 1867 when Newcastle became a particular target for government surveillance and several hundred special constables were sworn in at North Shields, the Chronicle mounted a strong campaign to establish the unquestionable loyalty of the Tyneside Irish. A forthright editorial even went so far as to insist that, ‘the people at all times have the right to revolt against their rulers’, and called upon English and Irish radicals to work together to instigate constitutional change.36 To all intents and purposes, Cowen’s Chronicle operated as a bona fide Irish newspaper: Irish elections, Irish political meetings, Irish eviction statistics and parliamentary divisions of Irish members were given such extensive coverage as to obviate the necessity for a separate Irish journal to be published in North East England. This is the dynamic milieu in which the young Charles Diamond first began to make his way in the world. Initially he found work in Newcastle city centre as a spirit traveller and paper merchant.37 All too little is known of his educational or working background. His family were said to be devout Catholics and sufficiently wealthy to provide a good education for 32 T. P. O’Connor, ‘The Irish in Great Britain’, in F. Lavery (ed.), Irish Heroes in the War (London: Everett, 1917), p. 25. 33 Quoted by D. Fitzpatrick, ‘A Curious Middle Place’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939 (London: Pinter, 1989), p. 33. See also Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 2 February 1864. 34 de Nie, Eternal Paddy, p. 32. 35 Donald MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), ch. 6. 36 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 25 November 1867. 37 Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, p. 173.

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their six children. There were two good schools near the family home in Upperlands in Gortrade, a national school and a classical school. Diamond attended the classical school and was said to have been educated ‘alongside some of the finest intellects of the day’.38 The Diamond family left Ulster sometime after 1878 when a relative, Frank Diamond, was attacked and seriously injured during an Orange procession.39 Little is known about why or when Diamond made his way to Newcastle upon Tyne but his involvement in Tyneside Irish Nationalist politics in 1881 and marriage to a local girl, Jeannie McCarthy in 1882, would seem to confirm his presence in the city by 1880. How he set himself up in business is also unclear, but what he lacked in material wealth was more than compensated for by his innate business acumen. In the event, the paper manufactory and stationers he established proved to be extremely lucrative. He produced paper bags for grocers and drapers, confectioners and fruiterers, and even hat-boxes for Newcastle’s milliners. Printing and publishing was a natural extension to this paper empire, and by 1884 he was publishing almanacs and printing a range of quality stationery.40 Diamond was an extremely ambitious man, driven by the urge to succeed and by an absolute faith in the Irish cause. Publishing a newspaper was the obvious next step, after all he had the paper and the printing expertise, but making his fortune was not the primary motivation. By 1884, Diamond had already established his political credentials, acting first as Secretary to the Newcastle branch of the Irish Land League and later as the branch President. It was in his role as secretary that Diamond first made contact with Cowen. The National Land League of Great Britain was planning to hold their first convention in Newcastle at the end of August 1881. As part of that initiative a major public demonstration in Newcastle Town Hall was to be hosted by the Newcastle branch of the Irish National Land League (INLL). Diamond wrote a deferential letter to Cowen’s parliamentary office, asking him if he ‘could possibly favour the committee’ by ‘honouring the meeting with his presence’.41 Cowen was only too happy to oblige. In March 1881, he had sent a delegation to Ireland on a fact-finding mission and a detailed account of their visit was subsequently written up as a series of frank articles for the Chronicle.42 He 38

‘Obituary’, Tyneside Catholic News, 10 March 1934. Gallagher, ‘DIAMOND, Charles’, p. 55. 40 See The Irish Tribune. An Irish Journal for England and Scotland, Saturday, 13 December 1884. 41 Tyne and Wear Archive Service (TWAS), MS. F43 (Cowen Papers). Letter Diamond to Cowen, 23 August 1881. 42 TWAS, MS. F43, 3 September 1881. 39

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41

was also blazing a trail in the Commons, infuriating Gladstone by collaborating with the Irish nationalists in a bid to talk the Coercion Acts out of time, and, arguably, bouncing the government into enacting the guillotine.43 The INLL meeting in Newcastle proved auspicious, and Cowen was elected to serve on the Irish national executive. This was a singular honour given that the League was then dominated by a ‘Dublin and London clique’.44 They even offered him an Irish seat – ‘he might have his pick of twenty’, they said.45 The occasion also marked the beginning of a strong friendship between Diamond and Cowen. It is hardly surprising that when Diamond considered setting up a new Irish weekly journal he should turn to Cowen first of all for approval and then, when that was secured, for support and encouragement. A close scrutiny of the first edition of the Irish Tribune reveals a great deal about the negotiations between the two newspaper entrepreneurs. Launched on 13 December 1884 with an ornate masthead of entwined shamrock and Irish harp, the oversized gothic typeface proclaimed the arrival of The Irish Tribune: An Irish Journal for England and Scotland. Diamond targeted his readership carefully and calculated that the number of Irish Catholics in Wales at that time was not sufficient to warrant the publication of a Welsh edition. It was not until 1894 when the Catholic population had grown sufficiently large, that the Welsh Catholic Herald was published.46 Irish Catholics in Wales were then able to benefit from Diamond’s innovative journalism.47 Costing one penny, the Irish Tribune’s eight pages carried a lively mixture of commercial advertising, Irish home news, INLL branch news, ‘Catholic intelligence’, a survey of British parliamentary and American news, and stirring political editorial. Diamond’s debut editorial was notably combative and upbeat. ‘The times’, he declared, ‘are changed . . . the Irish race is a force, which in the future will influence largely the destiny of this land’.48 Exuding confidence, Diamond promptly dispatched the idea that his newspaper was to be a vehicle for alliance politics. The Irish Tribune aimed to ‘bind 43

Alan O’ Day, Irish Home Rule 1867-1921 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 70; L.W. Brady, T. P. O’ Connor and the Liverpool Irish (London: RHS, 1883), pp. 55, 81; T. A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830-1886 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 175. 44 O’ Day, Irish Home Rule, p. 81. 45 Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 17 March 1881. 46 Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish press in Victorian Britain’, p. 176. There are no extant copies of the Welsh Catholic Herald before 1902. 47 Aled Jones, Press, Politics and Society. A History of Journalism in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993). 48 Irish Tribune, 13 December 1884.

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Irishmen, if possible, more closely together . . . Against Whig, Tory, Liberal, or Radical, we shall not fail to warn them always.’49 A long single column set out the Tribune’s mission statement: [It was] . . . to become the organ of Irish national thought in this country, to represent and possess the confidence of all Irishmen – priest and laymen, labourers and merchants, rich and poor – who on the broad national platform can meet and work together.50

Instead of concerning itself with English politics it would ask: ‘“What is best for Ireland?”: Tory and Liberal are, so far as Ireland is concerned, synonymous titles for the factions who alternately rule England, and against one and another we shall always warn our people.’51 In the second issue, too, Diamond was quick to distance himself from Henry Hyndman’s Democratic Federation,52 rejecting outright the notion that the Irish needed the support or advice of English democrats. Although the Democratic Federation had attracted a mixed following of English and Irish radicals, including Joseph Cowen in the early months, Diamond was not at all impressed by Hyndman’s sudden adoption of the Irish cause. If anything, he seems to have reacted defensively, possibly concerned that a new initiative would peel off the articulate, politically active Irish and undermine the National Land League. He was scathing in his criticism, and called upon the Irish to take charge of their own destiny and freedom. Diamond reminded his readers that America and Canada would still be dependent territories if they had not rebelled and, more pointedly, complained that the British government ‘hold India with a selfish iron grasp, and without the least compunction wring the last rupee from the starving population’.53 In his usual pugnacious style, Diamond asserted that only the ‘combined irresistible force of a determined Irish peasantry’ would deliver national independence. As for Hyndman and the newfound democrats, Diamond asserted, ‘What they will not do for themselves, they are less likely to do for others.’ As if to hammer the message home, this issue of the journal included several column inches of Michael Davitt’s ‘Prison Diary’.54 Notably, the paper carried a list of agents, already some forty-seven in all, in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow as well 49

Ibid. Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas in the British Labour Movement, 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 53 Irish Tribune, 20 December 1884. 54 Ibid. 50

The Catholic Press and the Preservation of Celtic Identity

43

as in local towns across the North East of England. The Irish Tribune, even in the first few weeks, was having an impact. In the wake of the franchise reform of 1884, the Irish population had good reason to be galvanised into action. The Coercion Acts were due to lapse at the end of 1885, and the possibility that the government might legislate to keep them on the statute book was a matter of vigorous debate. The Irish Tribune’s circulation rates went from strength to strength. In March 1885, at the end of the first quarter, the paper bragged of 20,000 weekly sales.55 Whether this was accurate or not, there is no doubt that the paper was expanding its readership. On New Year’s Day 1886, Diamond gathered together twenty staff and a few friends to celebrate the journal’s first anniversary and congratulate each other on their success.56 By then the Irish Tribune was publishing a number of separate editions aimed at particular provincial readerships, including Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester as well as the London Irish. In keeping with its demonstrably Catholic Irish loyalties, a special edition was published for all four towns in the Nottingham diocese (Derby, Lincoln, and Leicester). Undoubtedly the journal’s commercial success owed much to its owner’s religious credentials, not least the fact that Diamond’s brother-inlaw was James McCarthy, a rising star of the Catholic clergy who later became Bishop of Galloway.57 Furthermore, Dr Edward Bagshawe, the Bishop of Nottingham, had given the Irish Tribune his particular blessing, thus ensuring that the paper would be the preferred choice of many congregations within his jurisdiction. There is no doubt that Bagshawe’s handsome endorsement, and that of Cardinal Manning too,58 underpinned the journal’s longevity and commercial viability. A special portrait of Manning was issued free with the 1885 New Year issue. The picture, stated Diamond, should be in every Catholic home. There were enormous financial advantages in this. The blessing of the Church was a crucial factor in the paper’s continued success, and Diamond was always able to depend upon a steady flow of advertising revenue from Catholic businesses.

55

Ibid., 14 March 1885. Ibid., 2 January 1886. They met in an Italian restaurant, the Roma, in Central Newcastle. 57 Welsh Catholic Herald, 17 October 1902; Catholic Directory for Scotland, 175 (2003), 50. James McCarthy (1853-1943) worked in the Glasgow diocese from 1879 and was installed as Bishop of Galloway on 25 May 1914. 58 Irish Tribune, 9 January 1886; 16 January 1886. See also Clais-Girard, ‘The English Catholics and Irish Nationalism’, 177. 56

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By the time of that anniversary celebration, the Irish Tribune had blossomed in other ways too. Like the rest of the newspaper press, which was beginning to be more imaginative and democratic in its coverage, Diamond had introduced a more overtly populist journalistic style. By 1886, the paper had twelve pages of newsprint and 60 columns to fill. Readers were able to enjoy serialised fiction, a fashion column and puzzles. They could also keep up with the everyday activities of local Foresters branches, Irish Literary Institutes, the meetings of the INL, and learn more about Catholic dogma and Irish history. The provision of Irish history is particularly significant. At a time when the teaching of history in Catholic schools was judged to be ‘too controversial’ for the Commissioners to agree upon an approved textbook,59 a regular column dedicated to an heroic account of Irish history in the Irish Tribune adds weight to the claim made here that, under Diamond’s control, the Catholic press was instrumental in shoring up Irish national identity. Other elements in the paper functioned in that way too. Much of Diamond’s new journalism was modelled on Cowen’s Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, and he must have watched with interest the remarkable success of the ‘Children’s Corner’ which W. E. Adams had introduced in 1876.60 Adams aimed to make the Weekly Chronicle a popular family paper and while he was naturally committed to providing all round family entertainment, he had a more serious intent. The Dicky Bird Society had been launched to proselytise Adams’ environmentalist and good citizenship agenda. By 1886 he had recruited 100,000 young members from places as far flung as New Zealand and Hong Kong. Like Adams, Diamond was fully alive to the need to secure the loyalties of the ‘rising generation’. In the very first issue the Irish Tribune had stressed the need to ‘educate them in the Irish struggle for freedom’, arguing that ‘English schools and political parties . . . must not be allowed to tamper with them.’61 Undoubtedly, his aim was to strengthen the cause of Catholic education but he was not content merely to foster the establishment of Catholic schools and contest School Board elections.62 He introduced his own Boys and Girls column presided over by a ‘Guardian’. With the support of teachers and the clergy he rapidly generated a large

59

Hickman, ‘Incorporating and denationalising’, p. 209. See also Gabriel Docherty, ‘National identity and the Study of Irish History’, English Historical Review, III, 441 (April 1996), 324-49, and especially 327-8. 60 Ashton, WE Adams, pp. 136-8. 61 Irish Tribune, 13 December 1884. 62 Ibid., 2 January 1886.

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membership of 1200 ‘young friends’.63 Recruitment of the young: as readers, as Catholics and as Irish patriots would, he knew, secure the newspapers’ future and serve the cause of Ireland in the longer term. Meanwhile, the hard political line continued to be as strong as ever, and if anything, the editorials grew more aggressive and confident. Diamond unequivocally denounced the subversive methods of the Irish loyalists, and questioned why the British authorities ignored their activities. Home Rule, he proclaimed, was ‘inevitable, and these stupid, unteachable wretches are howling and vapouring, as powerless to stop its march as a rat to stop an elephant’.64 In 1886, Diamond was blatantly using the Irish Tribune as a campaigning vehicle for Parnell’s parliamentary fund, raising money not just from British branches of the National League but in America too. On New Year’s Day, 1886, the paper carried a report that supporters in Syracuse in New York State had sent $153,550 to the fund, and Diamond urged his readers on to greater fund raising efforts, suggesting that the forthcoming St Patrick’s Day celebrations should be given over entirely to fund raising activities.65 Diamond also used the Editorial to give strong backing to Bishop Bagshawe’s plan to found a Catholic Party. ‘Those who will not join that Party’, he wrote, ‘can remain out in the cold; but they will be powerless to arrest its development. Its formation is already fait accompli.’66 This was blatant braggadocio. It also signified the extent to which Diamond’s brand of Irish nationalism was firmly wedded to Catholicism. In their study of the Irish press in Britain, Owen Dudley Edwards and Pat Storey suggested that in the early 1890s the Irish Tribune gradually became less local and more Catholic.67 However, a close scrutiny of the paper underlines the way that Roman Catholicism and Irish nationalism were always promoted in tandem. Irish nationalist politics was viewed from an essentially Catholic vantage point: the family sections dispensed Catholic as well as patriotic sociability; and wrong footing the ‘unbearable bigotry’ of the Non-sectarian party overlaid the ongoing campaign to secure Catholic control of the School Boards.68 In 1886, both Manning and Bagshawe described the Irish Tribune as a ‘thoroughly Catholic Journal’,69 and were using its pages as a propagandist vehicle aimed at preventing any leaching 63

Ibid. Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, p. 174. 68 Irish Tribune, 16 January 1886. 69 Ibid., 9 January 1886. 64

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of loyalty to the Catholic faith. Home Rule, admitted Diamond, would ‘probably be a matter of years’, and Irishmen would ‘be called upon to defend the Catholic as well as the National cause’.70 The evidence presented here that the Irish Tribune was engaged in instilling patriotic loyalties among the faithful can be further strengthened if we take note of Diamond’s subsequent journalistic activities. Diamond claimed in 1887 that an advertisement in the Tribune ‘could reach four million Irish and Catholic people in England and Scotland’.71 Whether this was an exaggeration for commercial purposes or not, by then the Diamond press empire supported a stable of newspapers and journals and their combined circulation was a remarkable success story. In April 1885, his reputation was such that he was asked to travel north to Glasgow and revive the struggling fortunes of the Glasgow Observer.72 Diamond expressed regret that the paper could not be targeted at an allencompassing ‘Scottish’ readership but expressed his own confidence that ‘all Catholics north of the border’ would welcome ‘a competently conducted journal of their own’. From the outset, the Observer was dedicated to attacking the Scottish education system which Diamond claimed was ‘pernicious in its influences and more deadly in its intent’.73 The Glasgow Observer led a vigorous campaign to secure Catholic representation on School Boards and three candidates were successfully elected at the end of April 1885.74 Although the nationalist campaign dominated the pages of the Glasgow Observer, like all of Diamond’s other newspapers, it explicitly served the interest of the Irish Catholic community. The fact that all Irishmen ‘no matter what religious creed or what political faith’ were urged to join the Irish National Foresters, might be considered evidence that that the Glasgow Observer’s readership extended beyond the Catholic Irish in Scotland. A close scrutiny of the newspaper, however, suggests that this was highly unlikely. The regular ‘Rome Letter’ written by ‘Leo’ which appeared on the front page claimed that the Glasgow Observer would be ‘a weapon of defence religiously and politically’.75 In May 1885 Diamond praised the judiciary for punishing

70

Ibid. Ibid., 1 January 1887. 72 ‘Catholics and their Press’, Glasgow Observer, 27 February 1892. See also Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, p. 175; Edwards, ‘Catholic Press in Scotland’, pp. 169-70. 73 Glasgow Observer, 18 April 1885. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 71

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members of the Orange Order who had paraded the streets of Mossend ‘in search of some unfortunate papist’.76 As Diamond’s press activities grew he set up a number of limited liability companies. The first of these, the Catholic Press Association Limited, was launched in July 1887 and 5,000 shareholders were sought.77 In the event only 2,000 shares were taken up, many of them in half shares (10s) and the company’s affairs were wound up just over a year later.78 Nonetheless, the flotation attracted some high profile investors, including the Marquis of Ripon and a sizeable contingent of Catholic clergymen, and this underscores Diamond’s influence among the Catholic hierarchy.79 These financial setbacks seem scarcely to have impeded his plans to diversify his newspaper holdings for other journals appeared in rapid succession. The Catholic Household, A Weekly Journal for every Catholic Home was published in July 1887 with a promise that the journal would direct much of its contents to the needs of children, ‘to bind them closer to their Faith’.80 This project, too, had only a short shelf life and the last issue of the paper appeared on June 1888. While this experimental phase was punctuated by a number of failed initiatives, the Irish Tribune and the Glasgow Observer continued to flourish. Inevitably, Diamond turned his attention to the London market where he had already secured prestigious offices in the Strand. The annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations in 1888 were chosen as the perfect time to launch the Weekly Herald: The Catholic Organ for the Metropolis, aneight page broadsheet with an uncompromising flagship motto: ‘For Faith and Country, Catholic and Irish’.81 Readers were urged to be independent in politics and ‘labour for the Catholic Party in the States, as a barrier against foes from all quarters’.82 The Weekly Herald was a resounding success and eventually its national circulation dictated a change of title to 76

Glasgow Observer, 23 May 1885. National Archives (NA), BT31/14877/24839, Catholic Press Association Ltd., 28 July 1887. 78 NA, BT31/14877/24839/67, 26 October 1888. 79 NA, BT31/14877/14839/4. There were twenty-three subscribers from the Catholic hierarchy including Archbishop Thomas Croke (Tipperary), Monsignor William Wingerath (Rome), Bishop Fitzgerald (Skibbereen) and Bishop MacCormack (Galway). 80 Catholic Household, 9 July 1887. The British Library have no extant copies after 30 June 1888 but as there is no acknowledgement in the journal that this is the final issue it may have continued to circulate beyond that date. 81 Weekly Herald, 16 March 1888. 82 Ibid. 77

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the Catholic Herald.83 Clever syndication of the paper by which special editions were produced for particular regions was an effective marketing strategy. Diamond’s Catholic Herald offered readers the authoritative voice of a national journal while at the same time satisfying their appetite for local and regional news. But even this saturation coverage was not enough to satisfy Diamond’s zeal. In January 1889, Diamond took his educational crusade one step further and launched the Catholic Educator: a weekly journal published simultaneously in Dublin, Manchester, Glasgow, London and, of course, Newcastle upon Tyne. It was dedicated to the ‘interests of those engaged in the great work of training the rising generation’,84 and had the backing of his newly formed Catholic Press Company.85 The Irish Tribune circulated successfully until the end of 1895 and possibly longer, but as there are no surviving copies after that date it is difficult to state with any accuracy what the precise sequence of events were. The first extant copy of the Tyneside Catholic News (1899) specifically stated that it incorporated the Irish Tribune. The masthead’s Celtic typeface and papal cross gestured to its guiding principles and it seems reasonable to assume continuity of publication, albeit repackaged with a new title. Over the course of the next thirty years separate editions of either the Catholic News or the Catholic Herald made their way into towns and cities across the British Isles. In essence, the Irish Tribune marked a new departure in Catholic journalism in Britain. In the local context the publication of the Irish Tribune marked the moment at which Irish nationalists finally broke free from their long standing alliance with Tyneside radicalism and began to pursue their own exclusively nationalist and Catholic agenda. In terms of community building, the size and homogeneity of the local Irish population is significant. Overwhelmingly Catholic, their complete assimilation into the Tyneside population,86 with the loss of Celtic identity which that presupposes, was never a likely scenario – not least because of Diamond’s determination to teach the Irish population how to keep the faith: to be dedicated nationalists and to be committed Catholics. Beyond Tyneside, Diamond’s Irish Tribune and the Catholic newspapers which were published in its wake were an essential contributor to the cultural

83

The Weekly Herald appeared as the Catholic Herald from 1893. See Edwards and Storey, ‘Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, p. 175. 84 Catholic Educator, 16 January 1889. 85 D. M. McRoberts, ‘Charles Diamond’, New Catholic Encyclopaedia, 4 (1967), 849. 86 Hickman, ‘Alternative Historiographies’, p. 239.

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nationalism which Graham Davis associates with the 1890s.87 The determination to denationalise and incorporate the Irish into the British state, through a segregated Catholic school system was, as Hickman suggests, a remarkably effective strategy.88 Nevertheless, protective mechanisms existed in the 1880s and 1890s, which helped to offset the pernicious and cynical attempt to emasculate Celtic identity, and in this regard, Diamond’s Irish and Catholic titles might justly be regarded as a seminal and lasting influence. The high priority which the Diamond press accorded educational issues was a significant factor in securing a Catholic voice on local school boards and ultimately putting Catholics in control of their own schools. His journal, the Catholic Educator, extended this agenda by providing a forum for Catholic educationalists, expert examination guidance for students and employment advice for those wishing to work in Catholic schools. It is not just his influence on Irish nationalism, but rather his impact upon the wider Catholic communion, that is being stressed here. By sustaining a form of Roman Catholicism that was essentially Irish he also countered the weak and inherently conservative English Catholic tradition that prevailed in the mid to late nineteenth century. Through his newspapers, Diamond served the Irish people well. As an exile he was uniquely well placed to identify and supply what his readers needed. It might also be said that in providing a comfort zone for the dispossessed he was also consoling himself.

87 88

Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 215. Hickman, ‘Incorporating and denationalising’, p. 206.

CHAPTER THREE THE LANGUAGE QUESTION DIARMAIT MAC GIOLLA CHRÍOST1

This chapter focuses upon the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in relation to the Irish language in Ireland. Its purpose is to describe how the Irish language became bound to a conception of Irish national identity that reduced the language to the condition of being a passive object of iconic and ritualistic regard. The processes relating to the construction of the idea of the Gaeltacht, both as an imagined national landscape and as an instrument of policy in the period between 1893 and 1926, are analysed. Also, it is shown how the language has remained vital beyond being the definitive feature of a relict landscape and a tokenistic device in constitutional ritual. The extent of this vitality is revealed in relation to the various Irish-speaking communities and networks through the island of Ireland. It is concluded that the space occupied by the Irish language in society in Ireland is being reconfigured. While the historical notion of the Gaeltacht may indeed die, the death of the language itself is not yet on the immediate horizon. Thus, the contemporary condition of the Irish language is defined by a contradictory duality as a vital relic.

The Gaeltacht and the construction of the Irish nation-state, 1922-1937 The attitudes towards the Irish language of the principal actors at the heart of the construction of the Irish State following the War of Independence were shaped by Conradh na Gaeilge [the Gaelic League] and, in particular, the views of some of its most prominent members. The most important document is, of course, the 1892 address by Douglas 1

The author is grateful to Routledge for permission to use material from D. Mac Giolla Chríost, The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

The Language Question

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Hyde, a founder member of the Gaelic League, on The Necessity for DeAnglicizing Ireland. Here Hyde identifies the Irish language as being central to an Irish national identity, which was defined by its historical continuity and by its capacity to wholly assimilate to its essence the various newcomers to Ireland, from prehistory to the present. While recognising that the Irish language was by the late nineteenth century in serious decline he nonetheless asserted that this was a very recent event. In 1889, he had stated that the Irish language, ‘fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four million Irishmen’.2 Two other texts: Why and how the Irish language is to be preserved (1891) and A plea and a plan for the extension of the movement to preserve the Gaelic language in Ireland (1893), both penned by Eoin Mac Neill, another founder member of the Gaelic League, also proved to be particularly influential. Unfortunately the empirical data that informed these works was faulty in a number of important respects. The numbers of Irish-speakers and the territorial expanse facing the Irishspeaking community were overstated, thereby underestimating the challenge of the Irish language. It was assumed that the Irish language would somehow spread out from the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas in the west of the country. Hyde suggests, in some of his earlier writings, that accomplishing the general revival of the Irish language was not likely to occur. For example, in the Dublin University Review in 1886 he declared, ‘if we cannot spread it [the Irish language] (as I do not believe we very much can), we will at least prevent it from dying out and make sure that those who speak it now, will also transmit it unmodified to their descendants’3 [my italics]. The English language possessed a utility that the Irish language did not. The function of the latter was as a spiritual counter to the base materialism of the former. According to G. Ó Tuathaigh, upon the creation of the Irish Free State, the members of Coimisiún na Gaeltachta (The Gaeltacht Commission) the body in charge of the review of policy in this area, believed that the Gaeltacht conformed with the idealised view of the Gaelic heartland propounded by Conradh na Gaeilge. Instead of informing themselves of the real socio-economic conditions of that impoverished and marginalised part of Ireland, the Commission settled for a heavily romanticised view of Irish-speaking Ireland: 2

B. Ó Cuív, ‘Irish literature and language, 1845-1921’, in W. Vaughan (ed.), New History of Ireland VI: Ireland under the Union, 1870-1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 385-435 (401). 3 Hyde quoted in D. P. Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde. The Dawn of Irish Revolution and Renaissance 1874-1893 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974), pp. 64-8.

52

Chapter Three An idealization of rural life, of ‘traditional’ lifestyles in the Gaeltacht, an implicitly anti-industrial bias; an extraordinarily static vision of Gaeltacht society, timelessly in tune with the elemental values of the Irish people; the repository of the linguistic elixir of Irish nationhood; a vision encapsulated in the phrase ‘tobar fíor-ghlan na Gaeilge’ — the uncontaminated wellspring of the national language, from which the rest of the country could continue to draw sustenance.4

As a result, the approach of the post-1922 State, with regard to the revival of the Irish language, was based upon a narrow and ill-informed understanding of the causes of the decline of the Irish language. They concluded that the decline was of recent origin, and that its primary causes were the advent of the National School system (established 1831) and the Great Famine (1845-9).5 The principal goals of the Irish State were three-fold: to maintain the Irish language in those parts of Ireland where it continued to be the language of popular, everyday use, collectively known as the Gaeltacht; to restore the Irish language as the language of popular, everyday use in the rest of Ireland; and to provide the infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of the language in the Gaeltacht and the revival of the language in the rest of Ireland.6 A number of practical steps were taken to realise these goals. For example, in 1926, under the auspices of the commission established to give consideration to Irish language policy, the areas that comprised the Gaeltacht were defined at District Electoral Division level according to linguistic criteria (i.e. areas in which at least eighty per cent of the resident population were returned as Irish-speakers according to the 1911 Census). Districts where it was known that the Irish language was spoken but was not necessarily predominant (i.e. adjacent areas in which 25-79 per cent of the resident population were returned as Irish-speakers according to the 1911 Census and termed Breac-Ghaeltacht) were deliberately included. The understanding was that the Gaeltacht proper (Fíor-Ghaeltacht) would expand and incorporate districts where the 4

G. Ó Tuathaigh, The Development of the Gaeltacht as a Bilingual Entity (Dublin: ITÉ, 1990), p. 11. 5 G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine, 1798-1848 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1972), pp. 157-8; T. Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp. 50-1; M. Wall, ‘The decline of the Irish language’, in B. Ó Cuív (ed.), A View of the Irish Language (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1969), pp. 81-90. 6 P. Ó Riagáin, ‘Bilingualism in Ireland 1973-1983: An overview of national sociolinguistic surveys’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 70 (1988), 29-52 (30-1).

The Language Question

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Irish language gained ground, especially in communities where the Irish language was in everyday use. However, the population of the Gaeltacht c.1926 comprised less than sixteen per cent of the total Irish population and was located in geographically isolated and economically marginal parts of the country. Thus, the prospects for its expansion were not good. The provision of education in the Gaeltacht was also a matter of some concern. The government determined that education in the Gaeltacht would be through the medium of the Irish language, and measures were taken to ensure that sufficient teachers were trained for this purpose. While some question the pedagogical qualities of some of the teachers,7 Irish was quickly established as the medium of instruction in National Schools in the Gaeltacht. Consideration was given to the provision of services in the Gaeltacht by various government departments and other agencies. In their report of 1926 the Commission pointed out that no guidance or instructions had been issued to these departments and agencies concerning the delivery of services in accordance with the constitutional preference for Irish as the national language, or their dealings with the Irish-speaking population of the Gaeltacht in particular. Indeed, the government took the view that the Minister in charge would co-ordinate activity,8 but there is very little evidence to suggest that much progress was made subsequently by the government.9 Finally, economic development shaped some of the deliberations of the commission. In the 1926 report they offered a range of recommendations relating to the development of the economic and physical infrastructure, including a proposal to establish a body to monitor the implementation of policy. These recommendations, however, were largely rejected by the government.10 In the absence of a coherent government policy on economic development in the Gaeltacht, the collapse of the small farm as a sustainable economic unit was an especially severe blow to the economy of the Gaeltacht as it comprised, by some distance, the principal economic unit of the region. The 1940s would appear to have been a critical period in this economic downturn, reflected in historically high levels of emigration from the Gaeltacht, the closure of farms and the decline in

7

Brown, Ireland, p. 52. Nuala C. Johnson, ‘Making space: Gaeltacht policy and the politics of identity’, in B. J. Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland. A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 174-91 (183). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 8

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male employment in agriculture.11 Thus, while the main thrust of government policy was to maintain the population of the Gaeltacht, by 1971 its actual population was half that which it had been in 1911.12 The reason for this is largely a matter of attitude. For the native speakers of the Gaeltacht, Irish was the language of poverty, illiteracy and marginalisation, while English was the language of education, emigration, and employment. Despite government action to restore the Irish language as the medium of most schools, within the Gaeltacht the failure of the government to ensure the delivery of the Irish language services in its own departments, or to develop economic policies pertinent to the Gaeltacht, served to reinforce negative attitudes towards the Irish language within this region. Moreover, the general inability to sustain the Irish-speaking communities in this part of Ireland during the initial period of the institutionalisation of the Irish language is measured by the rezoning of the Gaeltacht in 1956 and the physical reduction in its geographical size. Education was to be the mainstay of government policy in the rest of Ireland, where English was the predominant language – termed by some at the time as the Galltacht. While many of those who were most closely involved in the revivalist movement emphasized the acquisition of the Irish language by adults, the dramatic decline of the Gaelic League in this period, during which the number of branches shrank from 819 in 1922 to 139 in 1924,13 suggests that the vibrancy of this area was greatly dissipated upon the establishment of the Irish Free State. As a result, the burden of acquiring the Irish language as a second language was placed upon the education system in general and on the National Schools in particular. The government’s education policy was pursued with considerable rigour. In 1928, the Irish language was made a compulsory subject for the Intermediate Certificate, and in 1934 it became a compulsory subject for the Leaving Certificate. Also, by 1928 there were 1240 schools in which Irish was the sole medium of instruction in infant classes, 3570 in which the teaching medium was partially Irish, and only 373 where English was the sole medium of instruction.14 Department of Education figures show that the numbers of Irish-medium schools, and schools in which the Irish language was a partial medium, increased

11

P. Ó Riagáin, Language Maintenance and Language Shift as Strategies of Social Reproduction. Irish in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht 1926-1986 (Dublin: ITÉ, 1992), pp. 26-7. 12 Ibid., p. 104. 13 Brown, Ireland, p. 54. 14 Ibid., p. 52.

The Language Question

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steadily in the period before 1940 but thereafter declined.15 This decline coincided with a loss of confidence by the teaching profession in Irish language policy in the education system. The matter was brought to the attention of the wider public by the publication of the ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Use of Irish as a Teaching Medium’ by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) in 1941 which claimed to demonstrate that instruction in Irish for those children from an English-speaking home was detrimental to their education. A second report, published in 1947, asserted that the manner in which this policy was being prosecuted was detrimental to the Irish language generally.16 Thus, by the 1950s the government, with their policy on the Irish language in education, had not realised the thorough Gaelicisation of schools and was not producing new, competent speakers of the Irish language in large numbers; indeed, the evidence is much to the contrary. The aim of restoring the Irish language as the language of popular, everyday use in the rest of Ireland, via the education system, was not brought any closer in this period. The third concern of successive governments was the infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of the language in the Gaeltacht and the revival of the language in the rest of Ireland. This included measures to define the constitutional and legal status of Irish; to standardise and modernise the language; directly or indirectly to promote publications in Irish; to provide for radio (and later television) services in Irish; to provide for public notices, street signs, and official documents and forms in Irish or bilingual formats; and to establish procedures to recruit state servants with a good knowledge of Irish.17 Implementation of policy in this period of initial institutionalisation was certainly not uniform. Individual initiatives, such as the creation of the publishing house, An Gúm (1926); the theatre, An Taidhbhearc (1928); and the Irish Folklore Commission (1935), along with the adoption of a new spelling norm (1945, revised 1947) and the establishment of Bord Leabhar na Gaeilge (Irish Language Books Board) in 1952, undoubtedly contributed to the vitality of the language. The most prominent step taken, upon the establishment of an Irish Free State in 1921, was elevation of the status of the Irish language by law. The new constitutional position of the Irish language was enshrined in Article 4 of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. In this it was stated that: 15

Ó Riagáin, Language Maintenance and Language Shift, p. 31. Brown, Ireland, pp. 189-91. 17 Ó Riagáin, Language Maintenance and Language Shift, p. 31. 16

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Chapter Three The National Language of the Irish Free State (Soarstát Éireann) is the Irish language, but the English language shall be equally recognised as an official language. Nothing in this Article shall prevent special provisions being made by the Parliament of the Irish Free State (otherwise called and herein generally referred to as the ‘Oireachtas’) for districts of areas in which only one language is in general use.18

The matter of the constitution of the Irish State was revisited by a Fianna Fáil government under the leadership of Éamon de Valera, a prominent veteran of the 1916 Easter uprising. The revised constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann (1937), introduced new provisions on the status of the Irish language within Article 8, as follows: 1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language. 2. The English language is recognised as the second official language. 3. Provision may, however, be made by law for the exclusive use of either of the said languages for any one or more official purposes, either throughout the State or in any part thereof.19

The constitutional status of the Irish language in this period was nevertheless aspirational rather than actual. Despite the recognition of Irish as first official language by the Irish Free State in 1922, and as the national and first official language under the revised constitution of 1937, it is difficult to find evidence that the constitutional obligations placed upon the State, in relation to the delivery of its services, were implemented. During the 1940s it became increasingly clear that the national aim of successive governments to maintain the Irish language in the Gaeltacht, and to revive it as the popular vernacular in the rest of Ireland, was not being achieved. The INTO reports of 1941 and 1947 were very significant in opening up a public debate on the matter. Irish language groups responded to the challenge by creating new organisations that sought to promote urban and modern technological contexts for the language. This included the creation in 1943 of Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge. This was conceived as an umbrella organisation for voluntary and community groups engaged in the promotion of the Irish language, from which, in 1953 Gael-Linn, a modern media company, subsequently evolved. The break with the Gaeltacht as the idealised essence of Irishness, linguistically wealthy and materially impoverished, is epitomised in literary form in An Béal Bocht (1941) by Myles na gCopaleen (Brian Ó 18 19

Article 4 of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. Article 8 of the Bunreacht na hÉireann (1937).

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Nualláin), a native speaker of Irish from Strabane in Co. Tyrone. As Brown notes: This comprehensively satirized the literary exploitation of the western island, in a hilarious send-up of the island reminiscence, particularly in its translated form. The life evoked in this work is so awful, so miserable, so squalid, the narrator’s endless naive complaint so wearisome in its blend of querulousness and bombast that his oft repeated lament, ‘I do not think that my like will ever be there again!’ is likely to be greeted with general relief.20

The same dislocation is expressed differently by Máirtín Ó Caidhin, a native of the Connemara Gaeltacht, in Cré na Cille published in 1948. The depiction of the Irish-speaking world would not have been familiar to ‘Pearse or his friends.’21 However, it took much longer for a coherent institutional response to the failure to sustain the Gaeltacht, or to revive the Irish language, more generally to emerge, and it was not until the second half of the 1950s that the government set about reviewing policy.

A relict landscape, 1951-1963 From the second half of the 1950s government policy in the Republic of Ireland underwent substantial modification and in some respects policy was reversed. Work continued largely uninterrupted in the standardisation of Irish spelling and grammar, and culminated in the standardisation of the Irish language. Following on from the adoption of a new spelling norm in 1945, and its revision in 1947, a new morphological form was determined in 1953 and revised in 1958. In that year the publication of the EnglishIrish dictionary of Tomás de Bhaldraithe and of Gramadach na Gaeilge agus Litriú na Gaeilge: An Caighdeán Oifigiúil (Irish Grammar and Orthography: Official Standard) marks the final development of the official and standard version of the Irish language – An Caighdeán Oifigiúil. The old style script was phased out in favour of Roman script in National Schools in 1964 and in Secondary Schools in 1970. Despite some concerns most authoritative commentators would concur with D. P. Ó Baoill that: great strides have been made in organising Irish spelling and grammar into a vehicle of great potential in dealing with the modern world. It will be 20 21

Brown, Ireland, pp. 192-3. D. Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), p. 586.

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Chapter Three easier in the next 50 years or so to eliminate some or all of the discrepancies . . . and bring the grammar and spelling into line, linguistically and semantically, with what is left of a tradition cultivated by countless generations of Irish people over the last 2000 years.22

According to Ó Tuathaigh, the publication of Irish Dialects and Irishspeaking Districts in 1951 by Brian Ó Cuív was seminal. It was the first authoritative text and prompted the public to realise that the Gaeltacht, as defined by the commission of 1926, was a fallacy.23 Subsequent to this, the first indications, from the point of view of policy and planning, that a considerable change in direction was in the offing came in 1956 with the creation of the first governmental department dedicated to the Irish language in general and to the Gaeltacht – Roinn na Gaeltachta. At the same time the boundaries of the Gaeltacht were dramatically redrawn through the Gaeltacht Areas Order (1956) to better reflect the social reality of the Irish language rather than the aspirations of the nation-state builders of the 1920s. As this was set in place, the next step was the establishment of An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge [Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language] in 1958 with the remit of reviewing Irish language policy and to make recommendations to the government. An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge published their report in 1963. Parallel to this, and under the Gaeltacht Industries Act (1957), the government created an agency with particular responsibility for promoting economic development in the Gaeltacht, namely Gaeltarra Éireann. This statutory board was initially engaged in the production and marketing of tweed, knitwear, embroidery and toys. The powers of Gaeltarra Éireann were extended in 1965 and the body became very active in the attraction of investment from outside of the Republic of Ireland.24 This represented a significant departure from previous government policy centred upon support for agricultural improvements and traditional economic activities. The modest industrialisation of parts of the Gaeltacht, under the auspices of Gaeltarra Éireann, saw the numbers employed in industry, as opposed to agriculture, rise to a peak of around 4,600 in 1978.25 However, Johnson observes that this strategy was limited in a number of key ways. 22 D. P. Ó Baoill, ‘Language planning in Ireland; the standardization of Irish’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 70 (1988), 109-26 (120). 23 Ó Tuathaigh, Development of the Gaeltacht. 24 P. Commins, ‘Socioeconomic development and language maintenance in the Gaeltacht’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 70 (1988), 11-28 (15). 25 Ibid.

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First of all, Gaeltarra Éireann was criticised for contributing to the anglicisation of the Gaeltacht as many of the managers associated with the industrial ventures were non-Irish-speakers. Next, as the headquarters of the branch plants were located outside of Ireland there was very little local input into decision-making. Third, the centralised nature of the government policy and practices in Ireland meant that there was little engagement with local communities in the Gaeltacht. Finally, Gaeltarra Éireann was concerned with economic development, and the effect of their activities upon the Irish language was assumed to be positive. Yet they did not possess a language policy nor did they consider themselves to be engaged in language planning.26 The final report of An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge was published in 1963 and the response of the government to its 288 recommendations was determined by January 1965. It is the case that the deliberations of the commission do not appear to have been informed by a body of objective, social scientific research.27 Also, the deliberations of the committee would appear to be overly concerned with detail in some areas and to be simply impractical in others. Also, the attitude of the government to the report was lukewarm, including public administration where effective government action could have been reasonably undertaken.28 In general terms, it is fair to conclude that the tone of the response of the government to the recommendations of the report was very cool indeed. Where there was clarity of purpose on Irish language policy there was conversely a negative effect upon the language. The policy retreat has a number of significant markers – the withdrawal of the Irish language as a compulsory subject for Leaving Certificate (1973); accession to membership of the European Union [EU] under conditions whereby the Irish language became the only national and first official language of a nation-state member not to have the status of official working language of the EU (1973); and the withdrawal of the Irish language as compulsory for civil service entrance examinations (1974). The effect of the policy retreat can be seen in education in particular, where the numbers of recognised Irish-medium secondary schools dropped from 80 in 1960 to 17 in 1975.29 Thus, the position of the Irish language was significantly eroded in the domains that had been identified as most critical to the revival of the 26

Johnson, ‘Making space’, pp. 184-5. Ó Riagáin, Language Maintenance and Language Shift, p. 34. 28 Ibid. 29 M. Ó Gliasáin, ‘Bilingual secondary schools in Dublin 1960-1980’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 70 (1988), 89-108 (90). 27

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language by the founders of the State: education, legal and constitutional status, and public administration. At this point the national aim was rearticulated as ‘to restore the Irish language as a (my italics) general medium of communication’,30 and not the general medium of communication. Until that aim was realised the Irish language would continue to be the national language, but would de facto cede official language status to English: Irish must have primacy as the national language and every effort will be made to extend and intensify its use. Nevertheless, for a considerable time ahead, English will remain the language chiefly used outside the Gaeltacht for various purposes. To assume otherwise would be unrealistic and would detract from appreciation of the effort needed to achieve the national aim in regard to Irish. It would also be unrealistic not to recognise that, because of our geographical position and the pattern of our economic and social relationships, a competent knowledge of English will be needed even in a predominantly Irish-speaking Ireland. English is of great value as an international language in communications, trade and tourism, and as a means of participation in world affairs. It provides access to the knowledge and culture of the English-speaking countries as well as to the large body of Irish literature written in English and to the prose, poetry, songs and speeches in which Irish national aspirations have to a large extent been expressed. Moreover, knowledge of English helps us to maintain our ties with the millions of people of Irish birth or descent living in Englishspeaking countries.31

English, therefore, was the language of modernity, material progress and international inclusiveness — the language of realism. The Irish language, on the other hand, belonged to the realm of the ideal. As An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge reported, ‘idealism is and must remain the mainspring of the language policy’.32 One of the more positive and practical steps taken in response to the report of An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge was the establishment of Comhairle na Gaeilge [Irish Language Council] in 1969. This was intended as a step forward in policy development. In contrast to the approach of An Coimisiún um Athbheochan na Gaeilge, this body identified a number of strategic concerns, notably the preparation of a 30

An Coimisiún Um Athbheochan na Gaeilge, Report (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1965), p. 4 31 Ibid., pp. 10-12. 32 Ibid., p. 12.

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long-term strategy with specific targets; the establishment of the necessary institutional framework; and the improvement of the quality of available information. A number of important initiatives were the product of Comhairle na Gaeilge.33 One was the creation of the Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research (CILAR) in 1970 and the commissioning of a national survey on the Irish language. Related to this was the establishment of Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann (The Linguistics Institute of Ireland) in 1972. This research activity represented the beginnings of a more scientific approach to Irish policy and planning, and to an understanding of the place of the Irish language in Irish society more generally. In the early years of the twentieth century, atrophy best describes the condition of the Irish language in the northern six counties, now Northern Ireland. Between 1851 and 1911 there is significant data regarding the Irish-speaking community in this region. Much of this data has been analysed and mapped by G. B. Adams34 although, other than recording numbers and percentages of Irish-speakers, little analysis of the Irishspeaking community has been completed in relation to other socioeconomic features such as age, sex, social class and so on. In the 1911 census, 28,729 were enumerated as Irish-speakers in the northern six counties.35 As a result, the history of the Irish-speaking community in this area between 1911 and 1991 may only be very partially illuminated. In the first place the census data for the turn of the century in Ireland would suggest that the relentless contraction of the Irish-speaking community in the nineteenth century was beginning to be reversed. The total number of Irish-speakers increased in 1911 to 28,729 from a previous total in 1901 of 21,432.36 Interestingly, both the numbers and proportions of Irish-speakers increased among the younger age cohorts (under 29 years), while the numbers and proportions of Irish-speakers fell markedly in older age groups. This is probably the result of the so-called Gaelic Revival, driven by the activity of Conradh na Gaeilge. Following the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and the eventual ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Irish Free State (now Republic of Ireland) came into being, leaving the six counties of Northern Ireland 33

Ó Riagáin, Language Maintenance and Language Shift, pp. 34-5. G. B. Adams, ‘The validity of language census figures in Ulster, 1851-1911’, Ulster Folklife, 25 (1979), 113-22. 35 Ibid. 36 I. Máté, ‘Changes in the Celtic-language-speaking populations of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1891-1991’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 18, 4 (1997), 316-30 (322). 34

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within the United Kingdom. Form this point onwards, until 1991, no question on the Irish language was asked in any subsequent census in Northern Ireland. Some sources suggest that in this period the Irishspeaking community collapsed to the point of extinction. For example, the German academic Heinrich Wagner notes the decimation of the Irishspeaking community on Rathlin Island during the 1950s,37 while a native Irish speaker indicated the parlous condition of the Irish-speaking community of Central Ulster during the same decade.38 Caution must be taken with regards to the veracity of these observations, especially the effect of the prejudicial policies pursued by the Unionist dominated government of Northern Ireland,39 and the continued socio-economic stigmatisation of the language among those prepared to speak it.

New spaces, 1970-2004 The response of Gaeltacht communities to the long drawn-out review of Irish language policy, as represented in The Great Silence (1965) by Seán de Fréine, or in An Ghaeilge Bheo [Living Irish] — Destined to Pass (1963) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, was one of bitter disappointment with successive governments from 1922 and their failure to bring about the revival of the Irish language throughout Ireland. During the late 1960s the level of dissatisfaction with the State crystallised in the form of a Gaeltacht civil rights movement [Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta]. Initially, the main areas of concern were: The lack of employment in Gaeltacht areas; the failure to provide adequate programmes in Irish on radio and television; and [the strong suspicion that] the language is gradually being ‘phased out’ in the training colleges, universities and even in secondary and primary schools.40

The concerns of the Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta became wider. According to Patrick Commins, they specified that the inaction of the government in public administration was causing the further anglicisation 37

H. Wagner, Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects (Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1958). 38 M. S. Ó Murcada, ‘Gaeilge dutcais Tir Eogain’, An tUltach, 28, 5 (June 1951), 1-3, 8. 39 L. S. Andrews, ‘“The very dogs in Belfast will bark in Irish”. The Unionist government and the Irish language 1921-43’, in A. Mac Póilin (ed.), The Irish Language in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Ultach Trust, 1997), pp. 49-94. 40 Nollaig Ó Gadhra, and cited in Brown, Ireland, p. 270.

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of the Gaeltacht, and that the actions of the government-sponsored Gaeltarra Éireann, while bringing employment, was also increasing the number of English speakers in this area.41 Therefore, the position of the movement was that economic and industrial development ought to be made sensitive and responsive to the particular social, cultural and linguistic circumstances of the Gaeltacht. This activity had a number of outcomes. One significant consequence was the creation of local, co-operative ventures within Gaeltacht communities. The first co-operatives were created in 1967 in west Kerry and west Mayo.42 Over twenty co-operatives had been established by 1979 and they were variously engaged in projects to develop agriculture and industry, promote tourism, improve infrastructure, and facilitate summer colleges for residential students of the Irish language. However, many of the co-operatives met with difficulties during the 1980s due to the economic downturn and also because of the limited local availability of managerial skills. A more profound difficulty related to the ambivalent relationship between the co-operatives and the State. Commins has observed that the highly centralised nature of the State meant that it could not easily accommodate to its policies and practices local, communitybased organisations, part of whose rationale was to challenge the historically dominant form of socio-economic development as applied to the Gaeltacht by the State.43 Equally, by becoming dependent on state grant-aid the co-operatives were increasingly perceived as quasi-state agencies and, thus, the autonomy and independence necessary to maintain a sense of local ownership was compromised. Despite their limitations the co-operatives represented the first significant initiative that was characteristic of a bottom-up approach to policy and planning in relation to the Gaeltacht. Also, in their engagement with broader social and economic concerns, the language was set in an appropriately wider context. The development of Naíonraí, Irish-medium pre-schools, as an initiative of local communities, both within and outside of the Gaeltacht, is identified by Stephen May as a significant response to the retreat by the government on Irish language policy in education.44 The first such unit was founded in 1968 and their numbers steadily increased, reaching a total 41 Commins, ‘Socioeconomic development and language maintenance in the Gaeltacht’, 17. 42 Johnson, ‘Making space’, p. 185. 43 Commins, ‘Socioeconomic development and language maintenance in the Gaeltacht’, 18. 44 S. May, Language and Minority Rights. Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 139-40.

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of 185 in 1988. This, in turn, contributed to the reinvigoration of the Irishmedium sector outside of the Gaeltacht to such an extent that eighty Irishmedium schools had come into existence by 1994.45 A second outcome was the reconstitution of Gaeltarra Éireann as Údarás na Gaeltachta under the Údarás na Gaeltachta Act (1979). This was largely in response to the dissatisfaction expressed by various representatives of the Gaeltacht that Gaeltarra Éireann did not provide for the democratic representation of the local Gaeltacht communities in its decision-making processes; that its powers were inadequate to promote the effective socio-economic development of the Gaeltacht; and that its policies and practices were insufficiently sensitive to the Irish language.46 Thus, Údarás na Gaeltachta was established in 1980, with members elected by the Gaeltacht communities providing the majority of its board. However, its powers, with regard to socio-economic development, were little different to those possessed by Gaeltarra Éireann.47 The policy subsequently developed by Údarás na Gaeltachta was to encourage all enterprises in the Gaeltacht which benefited from their support to adopt ‘Language Development Plans’. According to the guidance of Údarás na Gaeltachta such plans were intended to be implemented in the workplace in order to enable enterprises to ‘increase and consolidate their use of Irish’.48 However, there is little evidence of the successful implementation of this policy in practice. Economic development under the auspices of Údarás na Gaeltachta, as with Gaeltarra Éireann, had a negative effect upon the vitality of the Irish language in the Gaeltacht. The skilled and managerial staff of such enterprises tended to be non-Irish-speaking, and in many cases Irish-speaking emigrants, who had been attracted back to their Gaeltacht communities, brought with them non-Irish-speaking spouses and children.49 The fact that a separate department within Údarás na Gaeltachta was responsible for this policy may well be a factor in the limited impact of Language Development Plans. A further development resulting from the activity of the Gaeltacht communities in this period was the creation of Raidió na Gaeltachta in 1972 as part of the broadcasting authority, Radio Telefís Éireann [RTÉ]. 45

Ibid. Commins, ‘Socioeconomic development and language maintenance’, 16. 47 Ibid. 48 http://www.udaras.ie (date accessed 18 May 2006). 49 M.S. Ó Cinnéide et al, ‘Industrialisation and linguistic change among Gaelicspeaking communities in the west of Ireland’, Language Problems and Language Planning, 9, 1 (1985), 3-16; R. Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary (London: Routledge, 1990). 46

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The social impact of Raidió na Gaeltachta upon the Gaeltacht communities has yet to be rigorously examined. But, in general terms, it is reasonable to suggest that this was critical in a number of ways. It provided employment in a technologically driven, modern industry within the immediate locality of the various Gaeltacht communities. Also, it provided a means of transcending the geographical fragmentation of the Gaeltacht. Through the use of radio, the different social experiences that defined each particular Gaeltacht community were increasingly familiar across the Gaeltacht as a whole. While this has resulted in a smoothing out of the dialectic differences of the Irish language as spoken in the various Gaeltacht communities, the fact that the Irish language possesses its own broadcast medium contributes positively to the social capital of the language. A final, substantial policy innovation was the foundation of Bord na Gaeilge [Irish Language Board] in 1978 under the Bord na Gaeilge Bill (1978). There were a number of reasons for this. Tovey has commented that the creation of Bord na Gaeilge was partly in response to representations by different Irish language groups, including Comhairle na Gaeilge, while State policy and practices were much reduced in their effectiveness after they were dispersed across a range of departments and agencies.50 The argument of these groups was that the creation of an agency with a co-ordinating role would improve the implementation of Irish language policy. Tovey notes that the results of the CILAR survey, published in 1975, showed the existence of positive attitudes towards language across Irish society in general and that this was a factor in government thinking. Bord na Gaeilge was charged with statutory responsibility for the promotion of the Irish language and, in particular, ‘extending its use by the public as a living language’. Tovey claims that the legislation left the specific powers, duties and aims of Bord na Gaeilge undefined, and suggests that it was intended to be simply a consultative and advisory board.51 The main role envisaged for the agency seemed to be that of ‘keeping a watching brief on the activities of state organisations in general and on any proposed legislation which might affect the position of Irish, and making recommendations in relation to these’.52 By the turn of the twenty-first century, a fresh dynamism was increasingly apparent in Irish language policy, and matters of language equality and rights were central to it. This dynamism included specific 50

H. Tovey, ‘The State and the Irish Language: The role of Bord na Gaeilge’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 70 (1988), 53-68 (56). 51 Ibid., 57. 52 Ibid., 58.

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commitments to the Irish language under the Education Act 1998 and the Planning and Development Act 2000, as well as the work of ‘Treo 2000. Commission to Examine the Role of the Irish Language Voluntary Organisations’, and the efforts of the ‘Coimisiún na Gaeltachta [Gaeltacht Commission] 2002’. The most substantial outcome of this activity was the passing of the Official Languages Act in 2003, aimed at ensuring the better availability and higher standards of public services in the Irish language. The Act also comprised a number of key features.53 Section 20 of this new measure provided for the establishment of Oifig Choimisinéir na dTeanacha Oifigiúla [Office of the Official Languages Commissioner] charged with the task of supervising and monitoring the implementation of this legislation. It was agreed that the Commissioner, An Coimisinéir Teanga, was to be appointed by the President, and thereby was independent. He is able to investigate complaints, pursue statutory investigations and take legal action against public bodies who ignore their commitments to the Irish language. As a consequence of the Act, various public bodies are now required to prepare ‘Language Schemes’ through which they make specific provision for the delivery of services in the Irish language. These are subject to the approval of the Minister and renewed on a three yearly basis. Also, a range of statutory obligations regarding the status of the Irish language in the public sector was identified in the Act. Thus, the challenge that confronts Irish language policy-makers has been brought into sharp focus – that is, to move beyond a tokenistic view of the language as an emblem of national identity and towards the construction of a robust and practically meaningful civic identity for the Irish language. There are some tentative indications that this may be beginning to happen. For example, it is apparent that Údarás na Gaeltachta is beginning to conceive of itself as a language planning agency, albeit one with a very specific remit in relation to economic development. The creation of a post within the planning section of the organisation to be filled by an expert in language planning, along with the creation of a language planning advisory group, suggests that the shift towards a more explicit engagement in language planning is a substantive one.54 There is evidence that the use of the Irish language in Northern Ireland has in recent years increased. The 1991 Census in Northern Ireland recorded a total Irish-speaking population of 131,974, representing 8.8 per cent of the resident population aged three and over. The meaning of the 53

An Roinn Gnóthaí Pobail, Tuaithe agus Gaeltachta. Official Language Act 2003 Overview (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2003). 54 Údarás na Gaeltachta press release, 3 May 2005. See http://www.udaras.ie (accessed 7 September 2005).

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term ‘Irish-speaking’ referred to in the Census requires some qualification. The wording of the question in the Census did not discriminate between the different levels of language proficiency. Thus, some of the respondents who described themselves as Irish-speakers might have possessed very limited competence in the language. Reflecting upon the census figures Aodán Mac Póilin has stated that, ‘responses appear to have ranged from the over-scrupulous to the over-optimistic, so the figures underestimate the numbers who have some knowledge of Irish, but probably exaggerate the number of fluent speakers’.55 The age profile of the Irish-speakers recorded in the 1991 census nevertheless indicated a general rejuvenation of the language. This rejuvenation was located in some of the same areas where an Irish-speaking population was recorded in 1911, as well as in other parts of Northern Ireland where no significant Irish-speaking population had been observed in the 1911 Census. This included the urban centres of Belfast and Londonderry. Gabrielle Maguire used the term neoGaeltacht to describe the Irish-speaking community of west Belfast, whose growth during the 1980s she recounted more fully in 1991.56 The sociodemographic contours of the Irish language, as delineated by the 1991 data, indicate that those with ‘some knowledge’ (understood as having any single skill or any combination of skills in the Irish language – understand, read, write, speak) of the language are more likely to be female, be of school age and come from a Roman Catholic background. These characteristics were broadly confirmed by the results of the 2001 Census. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Irish language in Northern Ireland was of increasing interest to the government. In 1987, the first significant government publication on the subject appeared;57 in 1988, the Irish language was incorporated in the National Curriculum;58 and in 1991, questions on the Irish language were included in the Census forms for 55

A. Mac Póilin, ‘The Irish language movement in Northern Ireland’, in M. Nic Craith (ed.), Watching one’s tongue. Aspects of Romance and Celtic Languages (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), pp. 137-62 (153). 56 G. Maguire, ‘Language revival in an urban neo-Gaeltacht’, in G. Mac Eoin et al. (eds), Third International Conference on Minority Languages: Celtic Papers (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1987), pp. 72-88; G. Maguire, Our Own Language: An Irish Initiative (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1991). 57 K. Sweeny, The Irish Language in Northern Ireland 1987: A preliminary report of a survey of knowledge, interest and ability. Policy Planning and Research Unit. Occasional Paper no. 17. A government statistical publication (Belfast: HMSO, 1987). 58 Department of Education Northern Ireland [DOENI], Education Reform in Northern Ireland: Proposals for Irish in Irish-medium Education. Report of the Irish Working Group, October 1989 (Belfast: DOENI, 1989).

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Northern Ireland.59 Yet, Government policy towards the Irish language in Northern Ireland, while undergoing some development, remains illdefined.60 On the whole, government policy on the language issue during that period has suffered criticism in several quarters for its ad hoc and reactive nature.61 Features of policy were contrasted with the measures taken to preserve Celtic languages in other parts of the United Kingdom, particularly the Welsh language and Scots Gaelic.62 Others drew attention to improving the status of the Irish language under the auspices of European framework legislation.63 The political settlement of 1998 in Northern Ireland, however, had a significant impact on the language question. The context in which the language is set in the document arising from the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, entitled ‘The Agreement’, offers the prospect for transforming language policy in a number of key ways. This agreement caused a further substantial shift in the evolution of discursive strategies with the result that rights discourse became foregrounded in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In the section entitled ‘Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity’ in ‘The Agreement’64 concerns with regard to language issues were formally addressed. It stated that: All participants recognise the importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to linguistic diversity, including in Northern Ireland, the Irish language, Ulster-Scots and the languages of the various ethnic communities, all of which are part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland.65

59 Department of Health and Social Services/Registrar General Northern Ireland [DHSS/RGNI], Northern Ireland Census 1991: Irish Language Report (Belfast: DHSS/RGNI, 1993). 60 R. M. O. Pritchard, ‘Language policy in Northern Ireland’, Teangeolas, 21 (Summer 1990), 26-35; Committee on the Administration of Justice [CAJ], Staid agus stádas Gaeilge i dTuaisceart na hÉireann: The Irish Language in Northern Ireland (Belfast: CAJ., 1993). 61 D. Mac Giolla Chríost, ‘The Irish language and current policy in Northern Ireland’, Irish Studies Review, 8, 1 (2000), 44-55. 62 A. Mac Póilin, ‘Mr Priestly’s priorities’, Supplement to Fortnight (nd), 28-30. 63 CAJ, Staid agus stádas Gaeilge i dTuaisceart na hÉireann. 64 Northern Ireland Office [NIO], The Agreement: Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations (Belfast: NIO, 1998). 65 Ibid., Clause 3.

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Clause 4 indicated that it was the view of the British government that the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (‘the European Charter’) would provide the means for the practical realisation of a series of commitments laid out in ‘The Agreement’ with regard to education, public administration and broadcast media. These commitments have the potential to elevate the status of the Irish language, but the critical conditions of ‘The Agreement’ relate to defining that which is appropriate, and in identifying the desires and sensitivities of people and the community. Also, it is obvious that the emergent institutional framework associated with the ‘new Assembly’ will be of central importance to the prospects of the Irish language in Northern Ireland in the short to medium term. Despite substantial political difficulties in the intervening period, both the British and the Irish governments reaffirmed their commitment to the Irish language with regard to ‘Rights, Equality, Identity and Community’ in their ‘Joint Declaration’ of 2003. Under Paragraph 30 it is noted that, ‘The British Government will continue to discharge all its commitments under the Agreement in respect of the Irish language.’66 The realisation of some of these commitments included the signing of the European Charter in March 2000 (in force by July 2001) by the British government. The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in the administration of Northern Ireland [DCALNI] was identified as the leading body charged with implementing the European Charter. It is in this role that DCALNI have issued guidance (in draft form in January 2004) for public bodies to satisfy the United Kingdom government’s commitments to the European Charter. DCALNI, however, communicate no sense of mission nor declare any aims with regard to policy on the Irish language. Indeed, the emphasis on ‘UK government commitments’, as opposed to any engagement by the administration in Northern Ireland, may be regarded as an indication that the Irish language is undergoing a process of institutionalisation on the basis of legitimation at United Kingdom state level but in the absence of legitimation at a local level within Northern Ireland. The sense of legitimation is crucial to language status.67 Through the signing of the European Charter and the recognition of the Irish language with respect to Part III, a number of commitments were made with regard to Irish in the areas of education, media, public administration, judicial authorities and cultural, social and economic activities, and transfrontier exchanges. The Code of Courtesy included in 66 67

NIO, Joint Declaration (Belfast: NIO, 2003). May, Language and Minority Rights, p. 150.

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the guidance developed by DCALNI indicates those areas in which DCALNI anticipates greatest context: the use of Irish language versions of personal names and addresses, and the exercise of language choice in faceto-face meetings, telephone calls and letters. With regard to the Irish language in relation to questions of citizenship, equality and rights it is noted by DCALNI that ‘the Charter does not establish any individual or collective rights for the speakers of regional or minority languages’, and that the purpose of the European Charter is ‘cultural’.68 It does, however, observe that the European Charter ‘commits the United Kingdom government to ensure that authorities, organisations and persons concerned are informed of the rights and duties (my italics) established by the Charter’.69 Elsewhere in the ‘Joint Declaration’, under the section entitled ‘Rights, Equality, Identity and Community’, the two governments point out that a number of important steps were taken during this intervening period. These included the setting up of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission [NIHRC], established by legislation in 1998. This body was charged with the task of advising those responsible for drawing up a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, and it is clear that language issues were important. For example, its consultative document of 2001 featured a clause specific to language rights.70 The legal recognition of language rights would be a substantial step forward as the Irish language in the public domain, and in the workplace in particular, has been a matter of considerable friction.71 The successful implementation of Irish language policy requires the facilitating of linguistic pluralism within harmonious working environments, and a more inclusive and plural public space is made more likely by the recognition of specific language rights. While it is the view of DCALNI that the European Charter does not confer any specific language rights, NIHRC points out that ‘The Agreement’, under the section entitled ‘Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity’, means that the United Kingdom government is committed to ‘a recognition of linguistic diversity coupled with specific commitments for 68

Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure Northern Ireland [DCALNI], The European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. Code of Courtesy (Belfast: DCALNI, 2004), p. 3. 69 Ibid., p. 5. 70 Northern Ireland Human Rights’ Commission [NIHRC], Making a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland: A consultation (Belfast: NIHRC, 2001). 71 Mac Giolla Chríost, ‘The Irish language and current policy in Northern Ireland’, pp. 44-55; D. Mac Giolla Chríost and J. Aitchison, ‘Ethnic identities and language in Northern Ireland’, Area, 30, 4 (1998), 301-9.

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the protection and promotion of the Irish language’. Associated with this is a commitment by both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland governments to ‘the protection of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights’. Thereby the inter-relationship between economic, social and cultural rights, on the one hand, and civil and political rights, on the other, has been identified in ‘The Agreement’.72 This serves to underline the argument that the European Charter is not relevant to the recognition of language rights. The context in which it is set in ‘The Agreement’ appears to suggest otherwise. That the issue of language rights remains problematic is confirmed by the fact that the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland is currently exploring the legal status of workplace discrimination against Irish speakers.73 Further space for the Irish language in Northern Ireland may be opening out in a more literal sense. The Dutton Report on the development of a ‘Gaeltacht Quarter’ in Belfast was commissioned by a number of Northern Ireland governmental departments, namely the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, and the Department of Social Development.74 The principal recommendation arising from the report was the creation of a company concerned with urban regeneration and charged with ‘promoting a strategy which secures wealth creation within one of the most deprived parts of Northern Ireland, by maximising the economic opportunities provided by a growing cluster of Irish language and cultural based enterprises and activities, which additionally have significant tourism potential’.75 But the most striking feature of the report is that it was ever commissioned in the first place. The fact that several government departments are of the view that the language is a matter of substantial, material interest is symptomatic of a significant shift having occurred in official perceptions of the place of the Irish language in the cultural, economic and political landscape of Northern Ireland. Today, the Irish-speaking community in Ireland is of a modest size. The results of the 2002 census in the Republic of Ireland show that the 72

NIHRC, Submission to the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the UKs Fourth Report (Belfast: NIHRC, 2002), Section 7. 73 D. Mac Giolla Chríost, The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: Equality and Rights (forthcoming). 74 C. Dutton, Gaeltacht Quarter. The Establishment of a Development Board and Related Issues. Final report to the Department of Culture, Art and Leisure, the Department of Social Development and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (Belfast: np, 2004). 75 Ibid., p. 32.

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notion of the Gaeltacht as a linguistically homogeneous and territorially coherent social entity cannot be sustained.76 For example, the Irish language is used on a daily basis by approximately fifty-four per cent of the total resident population of the various Gaeltacht areas taken together. The total number of daily users of the Irish language within the Gaeltacht (33,789) is almost half the number of daily users of the Irish language in the Greater Dublin Area (63,825). There is around five times the number of daily users of Irish aged 3-4 years outside of the Gaeltacht than there are daily users of the language in the same age cohort within the Gaeltacht. Also, it is clear from the 2002 census data that the education system is the primary means of acquiring the Irish language within the Gaeltacht rather than the home. Numbers of Irish-speakers and daily users of the language rise sharply at school-going age and this has been the case for some time. According to other results, the Irish language is not the sole language of the home in just under half of all private households in the Gaeltacht. Moreover, while several parts of the Gaeltacht have populations where the Irish language is used in over three-quarters of the households, this should not disguise the linguistic fragmentation of the Gaeltacht.77 Equally significant changes are occurring within the language outside of the Gaeltacht. One sign of the increasing vibrancy of Irish-speakers outside of the Gaeltacht is the record number of complaints received by An Coimisinéir Teanga. This shows that of all the counties of the Republic of Ireland the highest proportion of complaints regarding the new Language Act came from Dublin (35%), and that seventy-four per cent of complaints came from non-Gaeltacht areas.78 Also, in Northern Ireland the Irish language has been rejuvenated in a network of small but vibrant communities that are at their most dynamic in the urban centres of the region. In general terms, the institutional-language movement discourse in both the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland is, at present, tending towards issues of citizenship, rights and equality. As the implications of the European Charter and the Official Languages Act, along with community-based language policy and planning initiatives, work their way through both parts of the island and their institutions, it is events, cultures and processes of resistance, challenge, negotiation and change that are defining the condition of the Irish language. That condition is both a vital and relict feature of the increasingly diverse society that is contemporary Ireland. 76

Coimisiún na Gaeltachta, Report (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2002). Ibid. 78 An Coimisinéir Teanga, Inaugural Report. To the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2004), p. 32. 77

CHAPTER FOUR ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IRISH IDENTITY TANYA HEDGES DUROY 1 AND D. DOUGLAS CAULKINS

Given the twentieth-century representation of Ireland as a troubled but authentically romantic folk culture and its image in the early twenty-first century as an economically energetic ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland currently contends with an apparently chaotic diversity of identities. Ireland and Irish culture have been represented, or ‘misrepresented’, in a variety of ways throughout the history of anthropology in Ireland. Indeed, Lawrence Taylor’s article on Ireland and the Irish view of anthropology suggests that anthropologists should be very cautious in attempting to characterize any aspect of Irish culture. As Taylor notes, the Irish have been quick to reject or criticize most anthropological portraits of Irish culture and identity — often with good reason.2 From strong negative reactions described amongst the participants in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s study of mental illness in Ireland,3 to comments made and stories told by town members in the current study, it is apparent that the Irish have often felt mis1

Acknowledgments: Annette Giangicoma carried out the fieldwork in a second location in Ireland. Fieldworkers in other parts of the British Isles included Meredith Good, Christina Hanson, Terry Osborn, Anna Painter, and Emily Zabor. We acknowledge the National Science Foundation grant DBS-9213430 for support of research on identity scenarios. 2 L. J. Taylor, ‘There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves: The anthropology of Ireland and the Irish view of anthropology’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 95, 1 (1996), 213-26. 3 N. Scheper-Hughes, ‘From anxiety to analysis: Rethinking Irish sexuality and sex roles’, Women’s Studies, 10 (1983), 147-60; N. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (20th edn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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categorized by outside anthropologists who ‘blow-in’ to town for several months or years and then ‘blow-out’ again, often writing their articles and books from a safe distance. Perhaps the best summary of the relationships between Ireland and anthropology is contained in Thomas Wilson’s Themes in the Anthropology of Ireland. Wilson describes the ‘Arensberg and Kimball effect’ in which the dominant anthropological model for anthropology in Ireland from the mid-1930s until the 1970s was largely based upon functionalist community studies conducted in western Ireland in the Aran Islands, Connemara, and Gaeltachts.4 These studies created a narrative of a tenacious ‘traditional’ culture successfully resisting the forces of modernization.5 What this approach lacked, says Taylor, was a ‘relevant Irish anthropology, one better attuned to both academic discourse within Ireland and the current life of the Irish people’.6 The mid-1980s brought a slightly different anthropological approach to the study of Ireland, but focused narrowly on the breakdown of Irish rural society,7 even going so far as to characterize Irish rural society as dying.8 These attempts to supplant both the ‘triumph of tradition’ narrative of Arensberg and Kimball and the ‘agony of disorganization’ narratives of the 1970s and 1980s were finally successful.9 While there was an escape from functionalism, occasionally individual anthropologists appear to have embraced, as Scheper-Hughes did, the practice of studying the ‘other’ through their own political and personal lens. The approach and actions of these anthropologists are perhaps responsible for the Irish mistrust of 4

T. M. Wilson, ‘Themes in the anthropology of Ireland’, in Susan Parman (ed.), Europe in the Anthropological Imagination (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 107-17. 5 Douglas Caulkins and Ilana Meltzer, ‘Modernization Narratives in European Ethnography’. Panel on ‘The Plot Thickens: Narrative Structures in Ethnographic Writing, 1930-2000’. Society for Cross-Cultural Research Annual Meetings, Charleston, South Carolina, 23 February 2003. 6 Taylor, ‘There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves’, 214. 7 Wilson, ‘Themes in the anthropology of Ireland’. 8 Hugh Brody, Inishkillane: Change and decline in the west of Ireland (London: Allen Lane, 1973); John C. Messenger, An Anthropologist at Play: Balladmongering in Ireland and its consequences for research (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1983); Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. 9 Douglas Caulkins and Ilana Meltzer, ‘Modernization Narratives in European Ethnography’. Society for Anthropological Sciences General Meeting, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 24 February 2005.

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anthropologists and others who travel to Ireland in order to record, interpret, and ultimately judge Irish culture. As John Malony, publican in southwest Donegal has observed, ‘there are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves; one of them is lies and the other’s the truth’.10 Wilson contends that the most recent phase of anthropology in Ireland has broadened to embrace a range of studies on social and political problems facing Irish people,11 including such diverse topics as the city in modern Ireland;12 drug and alcohol abuse among youths and adults in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland;13 intellectuals and cultural construction;14 women’s rights and sexual transgression;15 Ireland through a post-colonial lens;16 Ireland as a ‘celtic tiger’;17 social change;18 and

10 Taylor, ‘There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves’, 212. 11 Wilson, ‘Themes in the anthropology of Ireland’. 12 D. Kiberd, ‘The City in Irish culture’, City, 6, 2 (2002), 219-28. 13 K. McElrath, ‘Risk behaviours among injecting drug users in Northern Ireland’, Substance Use and Misuse, 36, 14 (2001), 2137-57; D. M. Hogan, ‘Parenting beliefs and practices of opiate-addicted parents: concealment and taboo’, European Addiction Research, 9, 3 (2003), 113-19; K. McElrath, ‘MDMA and sexual behaviour: ecstasy users’ perceptions about sexuality and sexual risk’, Substance Use and Misuse, 40, 9-10 (2005), 1461-77; A. Percy, S. McAlister, K. Higgins, P. McCrystal and M. Thornton, ‘Response consistency in young adolescents’ drug use self-reports: A recanting rate analysis’, Addiction, 100, 2 (2005), 189-96. 14 M. Kornprobst, ‘Episteme, Nation-Builders and National Identity: The reconstruction of Irishness’, Nations and Nationalism, 11, 3 (2005), 403-21. 15 B. LeMaster, ‘When Women and Men Talk Differently: Language and policy in the Dublin deaf community, for Irish Towns and Cities: Anthropological Perspectives on Urban Life’, in T. Wilson, H. Donnan and C. Curtin (eds), Irish Urban Cultures (Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast Press, 1993); T. Inglis, ‘Sexual transgression and scapegoats: A case study from modern Ireland’, Sexualities, 5, 1 (2002), 6-24. 16 D. Lloyd, ‘Regarding Ireland in a post-colonial frame’, Cultural Studies, 15, 1 (2001), 12-32. 17 B. Laffan, ‘Transformed into a model economy - the emergence of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger’, in C. Brady (ed.), The Hutchinson Encyclopaedia of Ireland: An A-Z guide to its people, places, history, and culture (Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 2000), pp. 132-3; P. West, ‘The new Ireland kicks ass’, New Statesman, 17 (June 2002), 20-1 (Cover Story). 18 C. King, ‘Social change as the republic has grown more outward-looking’, in Brady (ed.), Hutchinson Encyclopaedia of Ireland, pp. 324-5.

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multiculturalism, identity, and the politics of identity in Ireland.19 In addition, anthropologists have described cultural ideals amongst the Irish diaspora in England,20 and in the United States,21 but have produced few recent studies focusing on community and cultural issues within contemporary Ireland itself. One of the major forces facing Ireland and Irish culture today is, as Wilson notes, integration into the European Union.22 Ireland itself is going through a cultural transformation as it continues to integrate European Union funding and status into its economy and culture.23 The goal of this essay, based on 24 months of fieldwork in two different locations in western and north-western Ireland, is to illuminate areas of agreement, contestation and discontent in those multiple overlapping constructions of Irish identity. We have used both participant observation and systematic interviewing to triangulate our understanding of identity. Rather than focusing on cultural institutions or folkloric cultural content of ‘Irishness,’ this study draws on concepts of personhood often associated, to varying degrees, with several Celtic cultures in the British Isles. We make brief comparisons with Wales and Scotland in order to help illuminate emergent identities seen within Ireland.

The Setting Ballylough (a pseudonym) is located in a north-western county in the Republic of Ireland. During the famine years in the mid-1840s, Ballylough 19

P. Logue (ed.), Being Irish. Personal reflections on Irish identity today (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 2000); D. Kiberd, ‘Strangers in their own country: Multiculturalism in Ireland’, in E. Longley and D. Kiberd (eds), Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), pp. 45-74; C. O’Kelly, ‘Politics of Identity – V; Being Irish’, Government and Opposition, 39, 3 (2004), 504-20. 20 B. Gavin, ‘A sense of Irishness’, Psychodynamic Counselling, 7, 1 (2001), 83102; N. Gilzean and J. W Mcauley, ‘Strangers in a strange land?: (Re)constructing ‘Irishness’ in a Northern English town’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 11, 2 (2002), 54-76; B. Walter, S. Morgan, M. J. Hickman and J. M. Bradley, ‘Family Stories, Public Silence: Irish Identity Construction amongst the Second-generation Irish in England’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 118, 3 (2002), 201-18; L. Harte, ‘Somewhere beyond England and Ireland: Narratives of ‘home’ in secondgeneration Irish autobiography’, Irish Studies Review, 11, 3 (2003), 294-305. 21 Reginald Byron, Irish America (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 22 Wilson, ‘Themes in the anthropology of Ireland’, pp. 113-16. 23 Taylor, ‘There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves’; West, ‘The new Ireland kicks ass’, 21.

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was hit particularly hard, and the county still loses the majority of its young people to emigration and migration within Ireland and the EU. Until the mid-1970s employment opportunities in the town were limited to family-owned stores, shops, and pubs. Employment opportunities surrounding the town were mainly farming based, although some community members also worked in the coal mines in the nearby mountains. Additional community members worked for the local electricity board, turf board, and other government-run agencies. Currently Ballylough exemplifies some of the tensions of a rapidly changing, economically expanding region. Both international and local firms are part of this transformation. The county seat, Ballylough, is the most progressive and largest town in the county with a population of around 2,000 people when the study was conducted. In the mid-1980s Ballylough boasted two factories, both locally owned and run: Alibathaer Creamery and Martins Manufacturing (pseudonyms). In 1995, as a combined result of incoming European Union funds and international tax breaks and incentives, construction began on a factory owned by an American company. Located just down the river from Ballylough, Wendelprost Ireland (pseudonym) boasted the largest enclosed building in all of Europe. Workers from various counties in Ireland were hired to complete the plant manufacture. Managers were brought over from America to oversee the Irish workers. In 1996 the company began a major recruitment effort among the local people, and in 1997 the company held its opening ceremonies. The reaction to Wendelprost Ireland varied among community members. Some viewed it as an intrusion on their ‘Irish way of life,’ while others objected to the environmental hazards it caused. Several weeks after the plant opened, a strange smell along with an unusual fog was rumoured to have spread just south of the town for a period of about three weeks. Community members complained to the company and the mysterious smell began to dissipate, but it reoccurred several times during the time period this research was conducted. Liam expressed his overlapping feelings about the plant: I’d love to be able to trust the people who build big factories, that they’re going to come in and do us good and not kill us all with bloody smog and smoke like that. I’d love for them to be able to come in and make their money and give jobs to people. And I’d love to be able to trust the people who are in charge of letting them do it. So that they can protect the environment and protect us from people like the people that are coming in (the Americans associated with the company). Because I met some of them, and I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them.

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Still other community members believed that the company’s American work ethic and policies for workers were ludicrous, impractical and unacceptable in Ballylough. Often when the subject of the new plant came up in casual conversation people would mention the failed training seminars held for new plant employees. These included common American style trust-building activities such as walking around blindfolded with a partner and opening up and exploring inner feelings on key subjects. The local view was, more or less, that these activities were degrading, and as Sean put it, ‘pure hypocritical shite’.25 On the flip side, some residents welcomed Wendelprost with open arms, believing that it would provide much-needed jobs for Irish youth and adults from the surrounding counties. They cited the potential for decreased emigration and the ability for youth to remain at home as positive aspects of Wendelprost’s influence on the community. They also linked the town’s increased income with the money that contractors brought to the community and spent in locally owned restaurants, pubs, hotels, and bed and breakfast places. The dual attitude towards Wendelprost developed a split of sorts between townspeople. Either you were for it or you were against it. At the same time, a German-owned company rented space, rumoured to be tax free, in the IDA complex. That company went bankrupt during the time research was conducted in Ballylough. After 1998, construction began on the Paintco plant, another American company, in a nearby town. Locally owned industries are also on the rise in Ballylough. A total of five local industrial companies were located in the Ballylough Irish Development Agency Industrial Complex in 1998, compared to the two companies present in the mid-1980s. In addition, at the time this research was conducted, Ballylough boasted a progressive Internet café and desktop publishing studio operated by a local shop owner.

Scenarios and Irishness Under these circumstances of rapid change, it would be expected that Irish identity would be highly contested. This paper reports on the development of a research instrument for studying the degree of 24 25

Interview with Liam, 15 November 1996. Interview with Sean, 15 November 1996.

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agreement or contestation in Irish identity. In addition to twenty-one months of participant observation during fieldwork in Ballylough, interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of forty-five residents in the town. The semi-structured interview included a number of open-ended questions about Irish self-identity as well as a series of twenty-one brief scenarios or incidents from life developed by Caulkins and Trosset26 based on an ethnographic study by Trosset in Wales.27 Subsequently it has been possible to use the scenarios not only in Wales but also in Scotland, England, and another location in Ireland to measure variation in some cultural domains in the British Isles.28 These scenarios deal with concrete situations that can be associated with a number of behaviour styles sometimes associated with Irishness, including nostalgia, egalitarianism, emotionalism, and martyrdom, work orientation, individualism and performance. Each of the scenarios was printed on a separate card and the cards were randomized before being shown to the consultant. The scenarios include both positive and negative examples, which are, for instance, not only nostalgic behaviour, but also non-nostalgic behaviour. Needless to say, these scenarios do not capture the full range of possible behaviours, but offer a sampling that would seem to be strategic in this time of apparently rapid transition. Note that our strategy was to allow interviewed participants to characterize Irish identity in terms of concrete behaviour rather than abstract concepts, which, as Taylor noted, are often challenged.29 26 D. Caulkins and C. Trosset, ‘The ethnography of contemporary Welsh and Welsh-American identity and values’, Proceedings of the first North American conference on Welsh Studies: Rio Grande University, Ohio, 1996, 9-16; D. Caulkins, D. Trosset and C. Trosset, ‘Scenarios of ethnicity: Strategies for studying Welsh identity. Panel on ‘Welshness re-examined: The construction of identity in Wales’, Central States Anthropological Society Meetings, Kansas City, 19 March 1994; D. Caulkins, D. Trosset and C. Trosset, ‘Racial and ethnic stereotypes of the Welsh, by the Welsh and for the Welsh. Panel on ‘Constructing race and racism in contemporary Europe’, American Ethnological Society, Santa Monica, California, 16 April 1994; C. Trosset and D. Caulkins, ‘Too much or not enough? Convergent values in Wales and the U.S.’, Society for Cross-Cultural Research Meetings, Santa Fe, NM, 18 February 1994; C. Trosset and D. Caulkins, ‘Is ethnicity the locus of culture? The image and reality of ethnic subcultures in Wales’, American Anthropological Association, Washington D.C., 19 November 1993. 27 C. Trosset, Welshness Performed (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). 28 D. D. Caulkins, ‘Consensus, clines, and edges in Celtic cultures’, Cross-Cultural Research, 35, 2 (2001), 109-26. 29 Taylor, ‘There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves’.

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After every card and scenario, the participants were asked to rate each scenario on a five-point scale for the degree to which it illustrated typically ‘Irish’ behaviour. Second, they were invited to rate each scenario according to how good or desirable they thought the behaviour was. ANTHROPAC software30 was then used to analyze the degree of agreement among the consultants following the consensus analysis model of Romney, Weller and Batchelder.31 Consensus analysis is a method developed in cognitive anthropology to assess the degree to which respondents agree or disagree on the salience of elements within a domain of discourse.32 Contrary to our expectations before the beginning of the fieldwork, there was a high level of agreement on what was ‘Irish’ behaviour. It was expected that there would be a higher degree of variation in the descriptions of Irish cultural practices, given the reported ambivalence about any outside characterization, whether lies or truth, of Irish culture. Our analysis shows that the degree of agreement was over the conventional threshold of a ‘cultural level’ or agreement, as shown by a factor analysis of the agreement matrix of the forty-five consultants. The conventional threshold is achieved if the first factor is more than three times the size of the second factor (See Appendix 1, Table 1). All of the cultural knowledge scores of the 45 participants were positive, with an average score of 0.463 (Standard Deviation 0.230). These findings indicate a rather low level of agreement, only just above the standard threshold and invite further analysis. Four of the scenarios show a level of variance over 2.50 (Scenarios 5, 8, 12, and 13). This could be attributed to either lack of salience – that they do not address important aspects of local cultural models – or they could be highly contested, with polarized responses. The evidence, particularly from the conversation in interview transcripts, suggests the former interpretation. These items are probably of greater salience in the original Welsh setting in which the scenarios were 30

S. P. Borgatti, ANTHROPAC 4.91 (Columbia: Analytic Technologies, 1992). A. K. Romney, S. Weller and W. H. Bachelder, ‘Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Informant Accuracy’, American Anthropologist, 88, 2 (1986), 313-38; A. K. Romney, W. H. Bachelder and S. C. Weller, ‘Recent applications of cultural consensus theory’, American Behavioural Scientist, 31, 2 (1987), 163-77. 32 D. Caulkins, ‘Consensus analysis: Do Scottish business advisers agree on models of success?’, in V. DeMunck and E. Sobo (eds), Using Methods in the Field: A practical introduction and case book (Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press, 1998), pp. 179-95; D. Caulkins and S. B. Hyatt, ‘Using consensus analysis to measure cultural diversity in organizations and cosial movements’, Field Methods, 11, 1 (1999), 5-26. 31

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devised, but produce random responses in the Irish setting. If the four high-variance scenarios are eliminated and the data set is reanalysed, the ratio between the first and second factors increases to 3.469, rather than 3.034. The average cultural knowledge score increases to 0.512 (standard deviation 0.258).

If it is Irish, is it necessarily good? Much of the debate about identity, however, concerns the degree to which typical behaviours are good, appropriate, or desirable. To illuminate that aspect of identity an additional question was posed after each scenario card: ‘How good, or desirable, on a scale of 1 to 5 is the behaviour in this scenario?’ Again we found a cultural level of agreement on what was good and desirable, but this time at a higher level of agreement (See Appendix 1, Table 2). The knowledge scores for the forty-five consultants averaged 0.582 (standard deviation 0.198). These consultants, in short, agreed on what behaviours they considered Irish, but they agreed much more strongly on what behaviours they considered desirable. This finding suggests that the residents of Ballylough evaluate behaviour on the basis of a cultural model, rather than idiosyncratic judgments. The next question to be answered, of course, is whether or not the profile of Irish behaviour, on which there is consensus, is highly correlated with the profile of approved or desirable behaviour, in which there is an even higher degree of consensus. In other words, is ‘Irish’ behaviour also approved behaviour? It is possible to give one answer to this question by correlating the answer key or the profile of culturally correct answers from both datasets. For Ballylough the correlation between the Irish and the approved profiles is 0.74. While this is a high correlation, it reveals that the consultants concede that Irish behaviour is not necessarily good behaviour.

Contestation The results of this enquiry indicated that the residents of Ballylough may be critical of typical behaviour, suggesting the ambivalence of the discourse surrounding identity and moral character in the town under study. While the broad outlines of Irish identity seem well within a cultural level of agreement, we still find considerable scope for contestation in the discourse on identity, particularly in relationship to the more ideal behaviour. Participants were often cultural critics, taking a cynical view of the desirability of Irish behaviour in the contemporary

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setting. The correlation between the Irishness and desirability ratings for Ballylough was only +0.73, lower than the correlations between desirability ratings of ‘Welshness’ (+0.84) and ‘Scottishness’ (+0.83) in neighbouring Celtic countries. It is important to note that during the semiformal interviews, participants expressed a strong affinity for and desire to maintain what they viewed a ‘traditional Irish culture’, for example, ceilidhs (traditional Irish musical gatherings and festivals), pub culture, ‘blue Mondays’, and sports such as Gaelic football and soccer. Indeed when asked what characterized Irish identity in their own minds, participants listed overwhelmingly similar responses as Rory expressed: Somebody who appreciates Irish values, or what they perceive to be Irish values . . . appreciates a tradition, what’s traditionally Irish. Music, values, someone who likes living in Ireland. I would consider tolerance to be an Irish trait, tolerance of the people you live near.33

Matt echoed Rory’s thoughts: ‘They have a draw or a nature for Ireland, a like of the place. They’d be quite cooperative, they work well with one another.’34 Mary agreed, ‘They’d have a few words of Irish, able to speak a little bit of Irish, they’d know a lot about the country and are proud of the country.’35 Finally, Padrig summed up, ‘To me, a person’s Irishness is very important. By this I mean their involvement in or interest in Gaelic games, Irish language, Irish music, etc. You don’t have to be partaking in all of them, but I would regard a person who has a negative attitude to these things as not being Irish in any real sense.’36

Transformation The above mentioned values were, however, often contrasted by the very real cultural change and industrialization Ireland needed to negotiate in the face of its new status as a member of the European Union. Until recently, Ireland had trailed other European countries industrially. Now it thrives on European Union funds and inward investments from abroad, and has been characterized as a ‘Celtic Tiger’ of today. Residents felt conflicted about Ireland’s participation in the European Union; while they appreciated the monetary funds and increase of industry and jobs that EU membership brought, they were also frustrated and slightly nostalgic about 33

Interview with Rory, 6 November 1996. Interview with Matt, 12 November 1996. 35 Interview with Mary, 18 November 1996. 36 Interview with Padrig, 25 November 1996. 34

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ways in which they perceived fast occurring cultural change within Ireland itself, as thirty-seven year old Francie illustrated: I grew up in the country. We dug our potatoes this week, we went and dug the neighbour’s next week. We helped each other. We cut the meadow and saved the hay this week, and the neighbours helped us and we went there the next week or the next day. We saved the corn, you know? Everything was done together. We don’t have that anymore. It’s disappearing even as we get more money from the EU . . . I don’t know, the characteristics of the Irish are becoming very much like the characteristics of the English, Europeans, American. See the world has become a very small place now, and it’s all this industry that’s rushed us. Now it’s earning money, having this, having that you know. A material culture is developing. It’s all mass culture, it ‘tis.37

Other members of the community were more concerned about social and religious aspects of life which were changing, as Eimer discussed: ‘The disadvantages of modern living, such as divorce and family breakups and family law . . . I don’t think they’re a good thing for Ireland.’38 As Francie noted, residents exhibited a sense of loss for the rural values that Ireland has espoused in the past, and a sadness over what was perceived as a disintegration of the sense of community which had held Ireland together for many years.39 As Liam explained: We’re Celts. No matter how much interbreeding is there, the values we got off people coming down through the centuries, they’re still there and we cling to them. We cling to our heritage, maybe we don’t speak the language (Gaelic) and stuff, but we cling to our music, very very much so. People who couldn’t speak a word of Irish love their Irish music and they love that culture and they love to celebrate it every time they can. That’s what’s different about us . . . I think there will be a more European identity, and before you go to the toilet you’ll have to sign a paper to wipe your arse like they do in Germany. I think everything is going to become so bureaucratical that Irish people, it will take them an awful long time to come to terms with it. And I think when they come to terms with it it will make them colder, less friendly, less outgoing, more drudge, drudge, drudge kind of people.40

37

Interview with Francie, 30 October 1996. Interview with Eimer, 12 November 1996. 39 Interview with Francie, 30 October 1996. 40 Interview with Liam, 15 November 1996. 38

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Another source of frustration for some Ballylough residents was linked to the preparations for transition to a single European currency and an anxiety about losing their own hard won Irish Punt. Although most participants accepted the economic benefits of EU membership, and the inevitable accompanying cultural transformations, they were not without personal reservations as Sean explained: When we joined, we joined a Charter and rights, and all this crap. But this is evolving all the time, and things are changing and changing. They’re making new laws and everything, and what happens 100 years down the road when our children and their grandchildren want to secede from this alliance, what’s going to happen? IS there going to be a war, are we going to be annihilated? How are they going to deal with us when we decide, if we decide, we’ve had enough and want to get out of this?41

While all agreed that the ‘Celtic Tiger’ is financially good for Ireland – an island off the coast of Europe, whose traditional trade partner (England) has long been considered a foe of sorts – some were also worried about the effects Ireland’s arrival in the European market could have upon the Irish culture itself. Did people feel Irish culture was ready for the competing influences of other European cultures and the economic transformation accompanying the ‘Celtic Tiger’? Participants indicated a frequent cycle of ambivalence about particular behaviour orientations, reflecting frustration between what life in Ireland had been like in the recent past, and what it was in the process of becoming in the current day. Examples from participant observation and interviews highlight some of the important themes in this transformation.

Work When this survey was begun in Ballylough (October 1996), a group of men were sandblasting the twelve foot tall church railing and gates outside of the town’s Catholic church. The men were part of a back-to-work programme, FOSS, created by the government as a stopgap in Ireland’s historic unemployment. These men came to the church at dawn every morning and worked on the railing until dusk every weekday night. It was rumoured that they planned to have the railing cleaned and painted in time for Christmas services at the church. In May 1998 the men had just finished the railing. Granted, they had done a spectacular job, but it had taken them almost twenty months to complete the project. During the 41

Interview with Sean, 12 November 1996.

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period of renovation (October 1996 – May 1998) rarely were the men seen to be at rest. As residents noted, it is important to be seen as someone who works – even if that someone is one of the many members of the population who are unemployed and/or on the dole. To have work was described as important and performing good work was a source of pride. Residents granted more esteem to those who appeared to be working, no matter how inefficiently, in comparison to those who were perceived to be idle. As Jim stated: ‘I would say everything doesn’t fall from the sky. You must get out and work.’42 Matt echoed, ‘If you have a particular job let’s say, either part time or permanent and you lose it, you know, you don’t just give up. Get on with looking for an alternative lifestyle.’43 Consequently, what the men painting the railing were doing, in effect idling while being seen to work was reasonable behaviour within the logic of this cultural practice. This logic explains why one would rather have a full-time job than a part-time job. Thus, scenario 21, in which a man gives up a full-time job, is thought to be a very uncharacteristic practice in Ballylough. Participants rated the Irishness of this scenario only 1.43 on a scale of 1 to 5. They did not approve of the behaviour either, rating it only 2.0 on the same scale. Scenario 21: A single man decides he does not have enough time to himself and quits his steady job for part-time work. (work vs. leisure) How Irish is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 1.43 How good is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 2.00 While it might be desirable in the abstract to have the opportunity for more leisure, participants were clear about the necessity of performing full-time work. One could have a full-time job and do part-time work but the level of respect community members had for this individual would diminish greatly. As Colm explained: If you take a job with somebody, work. Look for experience. I feel anybody gettin’ a job should actually treat the job well, work at it well, and get as much experience as you can out of the job you’re doing. And I think if you don’t like a job you shouldn’t stay in it. If there is a job you don’t like look for another job, but tell the boss that you’re unhappy and be straight with him.44 42

Interview with Jim, 12 November 1996. Interview with Matt, 12 November 1996. 44 Interview with Colm, 31 October 1996. 43

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However, before leaving the current job, Colm went on to say, ‘you should secure another job with a similar number of hours of work per week. One would not want to be seen holding a part-time job when one could be doing full-time work.’45 The one exception to this rule was in the case of mothers of school age or younger children. In this case, the community members interviewed believed that raising one’s children was an important job and a mother who worked should consider working parttime in order to be available for her children when they returned home from school. By and large, participants believed that if one is able to work, then one should be willing to work, and to work as many hours as any other person in the town. Hence the outcome of the following scenario: Scenario 18: A young woman whose parents cannot afford to pay for her college education works her way through college with part-time jobs. (individual effort vs. entitlement) How Irish is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 4.35 How good is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 4.52 According to the difference between the typical and approved ratings, while the participants consider this kind of industriousness highly typical of the Irish, it would be slightly more ideal if they were even more industrious. Obtaining an education and thus more potential for future job opportunities was seen as an extremely positive endeavour in Ballylough. When asked what advice they would give to a young person from their family, the vast majority of participants stated that young people should be true to themselves, strive to be happy, never pass up an opportunity to better themselves or experience life, and pursue education so that they could locate a job they would enjoy in the future. Participants also advised young people to respect themselves, and not to stay with jobs or situations that made them unhappy. As Neve noted, ‘Do what makes you happy and work hard at it.’46 Education was seen as one of the key factors to pursuing a decent job and thus a happy lifestyle in the future. As Francie explained, ‘The more things you can do the better, ‘cause no matter how you go (about doing the) work, you can put them into practice.’47 Ronan elaborated, ‘Study hard and get the best out of school, and if you like, go 45

Ibid. Interview with Neve, 23 November 1996. 47 Interview with Francie, 30 October 1996. 46

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to college. If not, do your best to get a job within Ireland or emigrate and see a bit of the world.’48 Anne elaborated, Learn, study what you like to study. If at least you study and choose what you like you’re relatively happy. Go for what interests you, but go. If you don’t like it you don’t have to find a job in it. Society needs a crew of underclass, if you have to be that, at least you will have chosen it and you’ll be more happy.49

As she stated, residents of Ballylough also recognized that industriousness is not always realized,50 as indicated in the ratings for scenario 20 in which the behaviour of a girl who does as she pleases seems more typical than ideal. Scenario 20: A young girl has music lessons every day but rarely puts much effort into them and will sometimes just skip class entirely. (acceptance/non-acceptance of opportunities) How Irish is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 2.91 How good is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 1.85 Participants believed that it was normal, and quite Irish, for the girl to skip music lessons if she did not feel like going. However, with an approval rating over a point lower (1.85 vs. 2.91 for Irishness), the practice falls well short of the ideal. The ambivalence that is apparent in these scenarios, which perhaps illustrate the willingness to shift priorities depending on context, is also reflected in ethnographic observations.

Observation - Friction with outside Cultures In the semi-structured ethnographic interviews, participants frequently mentioned the link between hard work and respect within the community. It is important to note that the respect accorded to hard-working people was not necessarily tied to the individual’s personal financial gain, but to the individual’s ability to provide for his/her family and then contribute towards the community. A person who was understood to be hard-working would, in addition to performing well at his or her job, also work to better the community – through volunteer work, neighbourly attitudes, and 48

Interview with Ronan, 9 November 1996. Interview with Anne, 31 October 1996. 50 Ibid. 49

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participation in organizing community-wide events and festivals. Indeed when asked what made a person respected within the Ballylough community, participants overwhelmingly cited both hard work and volunteerism, also seen to be work of a sort, in that it allowed members of the community to give back to the community by sharing their time and energy. Thus, hard work might not necessarily be defined solely as work for one’s employer. In fact there might be occasions when working hard on volunteer projects, community issues, or even helping out a friend (whether assisting in building a house or cheering them up at the pub and helping to resolve a particularly difficult personal issue) might take precedence over hard work at one’s place of employment. Participants also mentioned that friendliness toward others, respect for one’s neighbours and a willingness to help those in need are important aspects of a respectable personality. A person who worked late hours in order to benefit others and then missed work on Monday morning would be more respected than a person who was at his or her job from 9 in the morning to 6 pm every day and took exactly one hour for lunch. This attitude was clearly shown when Daithi Burke was interviewed at his place of business one night at about 5.30 pm. It was winter, so it had been dark outside since 4 pm that afternoon and a brutally cold and bitter rain was falling. While the interview was being conducted, a man came in and asked Daithi if he could stop by his mother’s house and repair her television after work that night. Daithi replied that he had to do a job for the man waiting in the store, and then a job for the priest and then he could stop by the man’s mother’s home, but that he would be getting there pretty late. Although it was wet and cold outside and he was staying late in the shop to finish the interview with the researcher, Daithi was stockpiling people to help out after work. He probably would not be returning to his own home until 9:30 or 10 pm at night. Setting someone else’s needs before your own was considered both successful and respectable within the Ballylough community. Thus, participants felt that although work for an employer should always be accomplished, when it should be accomplished was sometimes a matter open for discussion. There were times, participants stated, when life and people took precedence over financial gain. Thus, ‘Blue Mondays’, flexible work hours, and a relaxed attitude towards deadlines were all accepted aspects of work life in Ballylough. Town residents were fond of saying that ‘the Irish work to live, whereas the Americans live to work’. These attitudes made sense within the community because all members subscribed to a similar viewpoint; however, they met with resistance from the international employers at both the German company and the

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American company, Wendelprost Ireland, who were used to setting strict deadlines and expecting all employees to work as hard as possible to meet those deadlines. The American financial manager for Wendelprost Ireland described his problems with the Ballylough work ethic as follows: If I wanted a part in the States, I could phone up my distributor, give him the number of the part, and ask him to ship it across the country. If he mailed it at 2 pm on Monday it would get to me by 8 am on Tuesday. Over here it’s a whole different story. I call up a distributor, I ask for a part, they don’t have numbers, I have to describe the part. It might be three or four days before a part comes in, and it will be the wrong one. I’ll send it back, describe the part in detail again, and in another three days it’ll come back — the same damn part as before, and just as useless as it was the first time. People over here don’t care; they don’t care about deadlines, about missing Mondays. We’re supposed to tolerate this and be productive? I’ve got the people in America on my neck all the time, ‘Why isn’t the plant done? We’re over budget, what are you doing out there?’ And it’s my neck on the line.51

The citizens of Ballylough were not unaware of these differences between their current culture and their new emerging identity within the European Union and world market. They knew that to be successful competitors in these markets they had to adapt to (ironically) more ‘American’ work attitudes. But at the same time, residents were reluctant to give up important cultural values. ‘Work to live’ is a cultural value which allows one to cease work to help a neighbour in trouble, it allows one to take time off to celebrate the birth of a child, or one’s brother’s marriage, or to mourn a parent’s death. These things are not easily given up in the face of increased dependence upon industrialization, and are considered to be more important than personal financial gain. Clearly, the importance of these social relations implies a strong emotional connection with others. Strongly held feelings were respected, but in the face of increasing pressures from international companies and conformity to EU standards and principles, emotional and social connections seemed to be in transition. In scenarios 9 and 10 below, residents of Ballylough claimed to be relatively emotional and nostalgic. They also regarded this emotional approach as somewhat of a failing, at least in some contexts. In both scenarios, the approved behaviour is rated nearly a point below the rating for the typical behaviour.

51

Interview with Barry, December 1996.

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Scenario 9: A published letter from a reader of a newspaper asserts that one should argue social policy from the heart, not from the head. (emotionalism) How Irish is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 3.50 How good is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 2.63 Scenario 10: After five years in the city, a bank clerk still feels a bit homesick every Sunday as he thinks about his parents and sister having dinner without him. (nostalgia) How Irish is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 3.98 How good is this behaviour on a scale of 1-5? Consensus answer: 2.80 Certainly this concern about emotionalism in the face of additional cultural pressures was felt by Ballylough residents in many ways. Martins Manufacturing, one of Ballylough’s oldest companies, was constantly faced with Ireland’s negotiation between traditional and emerging identities and work attitudes. Ciaran Martin was well aware of the need to update traditional work ethics in order to achieve and maintain recognition as a multinational company. Ciaran’s staff was comprised mostly of Irish technical school graduates with degrees in specific manufacturing related fields. Ciaran himself had taken numerous management training courses, and had encouraged his senior staff to do the same. He had invested a great deal of money into desktop publishing equipment and web-design software so that Martins could produce their marketing material in-house. His product designers use top-of-the-line computers and software.52 During the years surrounding research collection, Martins had manufactured products for companies like Sony, Panasonic, and Motorola, yet Martins Manufacturing itself remained almost stagnant. Despite its upgrades, additional technology, and international contacts, the company made an annual profit similar to what it made in the mid-1980s. Ciaran himself went through cycles of extreme productivity, when he worked 18hour days for several months at a time, balanced out by a slack period of a couple days or weeks during which he was rarely seen around the company at all. The work attitude of the employees mirrored Ciaran’s own, and they were frequently prone to exercise the phenomenon of ‘Blue Mondays’. Ciaran and other residents of Ballylough know that what is historically ‘Irish’ is not necessarily always good when taken in the context of Ireland’s emerging status in the European Union, but that does not 52

Participant observation, 1997.

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necessarily mean they embrace changing what they see as the positive aspects of small town cultural values. Companies in Dublin, Galway, and Cork, the nation’s larger industrial cities, seem to have found a compromise between important cultural values and manufacturing and industrial expectations brought about by participation in the EU, but Ballylough appears to be searching for a balance between the two.

Discussion It has been shown that the discourse on identity within Ballylough, and probably other smaller town locations in Ireland, takes place within a framework of agreement about what constitutes both ‘Irish’ behaviour and good or desirable behaviour. Results of an ethnographic survey using these scenarios in a community in southwest Ireland (N=42) were very similar to those in Ballylough (correlation = +0.92), indicating that there is likely a national rather than a local level of cultural agreement. In other populations in the British Isles the same scenarios elicited less similar responses for ‘Welshness’, ‘Scottishness’ and ‘Englishness’. The response in the Scotland Highlands was similar to those of Ballylough (+0.82), followed by Wales (+0.72) and southern England (+0.69). The discovery that Irishness and desirability are not necessarily highly correlated opens space in the discourse for ambivalence and contestation. Participants did not necessarily embrace their perceived identity, certainly not at all times, but they did accept it as part of ‘being Irish.’ The cultural logic of Irishness is comfortable and compelling. As ethnographic examples indicate, being Irish does not necessarily mean following Irish ideals. Participants saw cultural practice and cultural ideals as separate entities that are sometimes close together and sometimes farther apart. This approach to mapping identity, which sketches areas of consensus as well as arenas of variation and contestation, combines the strengths of systematic analysis with the ethnographic sensitivity of participant observation.

Coda Ballylough itself has seen many substantial changes in the years since this research was completed. A housing boom, an influx of both local and European Union development money, and increased sales prices for picturesque land which had hitherto for been used for farmland and cattlegrazing, have ensured higher incomes for some of the local residents and have directly and indirectly caused the town’s population to double. Now,

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in addition to the locally owned and operated supermarkets, there is a German chain supermarket. The housing boom has brought many immigrant labourers to the area and the town is now coping with an increasingly diverse population. A new grand hotel with a nightclub has added to the town’s value as an entertainment and tourist stop. It is clear that Ballylough is still very much on the cusp of change. Thus, issues surrounding the definition and desirability of Irish behaviours may be even more salient for Ballylough residents in the coming years.

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APPENDIX ONE Table 1 Factor Analysis of Ballylough Identity Scenarios Agreement Matrix: Factor 1 2 3 Total

Eigenvalues 12.023 3.963 3.282 19.268

Percent of variance explained 62.4 20.6 17.0 100.0

Cumulative percentage 62.4 83.0 100

Ratio between first and second factors 3.034 1.207

Table 2 Factor Analysis of Ballylough Scenario Approval Agreement Matrix: Factor

Eigenvalues

1 2 3 Total

16.992 3.115 2.741 22.848

Percent of variance explained 74.4 13.6 12.0 100.0

Cumulative percentage 74.4 88.0 100

Ratio between first and second factors 5.454 1.137

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APPENDIX TWO Identity Scenarios, Rated 1 (least) to 5 (most) for Irishness Egalitarian 1. A school teacher, while shopping, modifies her speech in an attempt to avoid sounding more educated than the shop employees. (1.69) 2. A university professor has tea in his kitchen with the workers who are repairing his garden wall. (4.00) 3. An employee of a firm is pleased because he wins a promotion that gives him authority over other workers. (3.43) 4. A child is discovered in tears after receiving third prize in a local competition. (3.18) Martyrdom 5. A woman regularly buys petrol at the higher of two available local prices, because the owner of that gas station is a member of the same religious denomination. (2.41) 6. A mother, who needs a winter coat, goes without so that her not-very talented daughter can continue her piano lessons. (4.02) 7. A person chooses a career and a place to live based on the opportunity they provide for a high salary and job advancement. (3.87) Emotionalism 8. A middle-aged farmer speaks with deep feeling about how moved he is by the words of a song. (3.27) 9. A published letter from a reader of a newspaper asserts that one should argue social policy from the heart, not from the head. (3.50) Nostalgia 10. After five years in the city, a bank clerk still feels a bit homesick every Sunday as he thinks about his parents and sister having dinner without him. (3.98) 11. When an old couple dies, their adult children clear out the house before selling it, and toss old things like family photographs in the dustbin. (1.48)

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Performance 12. A family unloads their removal van after dark to prevent the neighbours from seeing their belongings. (2.98) 13. At her parents’ request, a small child stands on a kitchen stool, smiles at their family guests, and sings a song she recently learned at school. (3.32) Individualism 14. The youngest daughter in a family refuses to learn the piano like her older siblings and insists on playing a different instrument. (3.58) 15. When given the choice, office workers decide to work on a project as a group rather than on their own. (3.32) 16. Despite her dreams of becoming a lawyer, a young woman attends medical school at her parents’ urging. (2.93) 17. A man purchases an automobile similar to those of his associates at work. (2.90) Achievement 18. A young woman whose parents cannot afford to pay for her college education works her way through college with part-time jobs. (4.35) 19. A primary school teacher rewards children who read the greatest amount of books in the shortest amount of time. (2.51) 20. A young girl has music lessons everyday but rarely puts much effort into them and will sometimes just skip class entirely. (2.91) 21. A single man decides he does not have enough time to himself and quits his steady job for part-time work. (1.43)

CHAPTER FIVE IMAGINING AND ADDRESSING THE NATION ON IRISH TALK RADIO MICHAEL HIGGINS

‘Those who share an interest share an identity’ —W. J. M. Mackenzie

Introduction: the imagined community and Ireland The last twenty years have seen a sustained interest across media, literary and cultural studies around the problematic of ‘the nation’.1 While some extremely accomplished work on the relationship between national identity and technologies of communication emerged in previous decades,2 the debate’s current impetus has come from the 1983 synthesis of Ernest Gellner’s work in Nations and Nationalism,3 and publication of the first edition of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Benedict Anderson pointed out that the members of a nation are never likely to meet face-to-face, meaning that any relationship between them operates as an abstraction. Yet for all that it depends upon the imagination, this is a relationship that succeeds in excluding those outside of the national boundaries, while constructing an internal fraternity of citizens in a ‘horizontal relationship’ under the sovereign power of the state.4 Since the publication of influential works by Anderson and Gellner, a number of books and articles have turned to how various literary and 1

A. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998). For example, K. W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (revised edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). 3 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 4 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: The Origins and Spread of Nationalism (revised edn. London: Verso, 1991), p. 7. 2

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media forms may be instrumental in the reproduction of this shared sense of national belonging. Perhaps the most persuasive and certainly the most cited general account is given by Michael Billig in Banal Nationalism, in which he looks at the place of national belonging in the activities of everyday life.5 In the particular case of Ireland, moreover, the international journal Cultural Studies issued a special edition on Irish culture in 2001.6 This was in addition to collections of essays already available exploring the implications of Ireland for cultural theory7 and examining Ireland from the perspective of media studies.8 In more recent years, this preoccupation with national identity has also begun to focus on the narratives and implicit assumptions that lie behind particular national characteristics. The question has been asked: if nations really are imagined, then what sort of things do they imagine of themselves? Ruth Wodak et al. look at the case of Austria, and find a willingness there to exert considerable intellectual labour in unifying and giving narrative to what it means to be Austrian, and what distinguishes an Austrian from a German or anyone else: a greater community ethos and so on.9 Others have focussed on the irregularities and the disjuncture of nationhood. A study of Scottish newspapers, for example, finds that national identity switches between Scotland and Britain to suit the political expediencies of the issue under discussion, meaning that national belonging is bound up with and subject to forms of political identification.10 Given Ireland’s position in the midst of what Anderson identifies as the ‘last wave’ of nations to emerge after the First World War, its novelty alone would be consistent with a need to expend considerable effort in the construction of a national character.11 And as

5

M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). See S. Thompson, ‘Introduction: towards an Irish cultural studies’, Cultural Studies, 15 (2001), 1-11. 7 C. Graham and R. Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (London: Macmillan, 1999). 8 M. J. Kelly and B. O’Connor (eds), Media Audiences in Ireland: Power and Cultural Identity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997); D. Kiberd (ed.), Media in Ireland: The Search for Diversity (Dublin: Open Air, 1997); D. Kiberd (ed.), Media in Ireland: Issues in Broadcasting (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002). 9 R. Wodak, R. and R. de Cillia et al., The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 10 M. Higgins, ‘The articulation of nation and politics in the Scottish press’, Journal of Language and Politics, 3 (2004), 463-83. 11 The outcome of the Balkans conflict has served to undermine Anderson’s suggestion that the early twentieth century saw a ‘last wave’ of emergent nations, 6

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Spurgeon Thompson recently noted, since the 1990s we have seen an increase both in the production of explicitly ‘Irish’ cultural forms and in an academic interest in their contribution to Ireland’s sense of itself.12

The political and cultural influence of talk radio The particular take of this chapter will be the role of the radio talk show in contributing to this widespread sense of national belonging. Radio itself continues to be what Peter Lewis and Jerry Booth describe as a relatively ‘invisible medium’, having long suffered a relative neglect in media analysis.13 This is in spite of the medium’s ratings success in comparison to television, and the role of such technologies as the transistor, the Internet and the digital receiver in expanding its capacity and reach.14 The lack of attention from other scholars is in spite, too, of the comprehensive introductions provided by Andrew Crisell and Lewis and Booth.15 Both of these volumes describe how the production and reception of radio differs considerably from other broadcast media, and show that the medium is well suited to changing contexts of consumption. In addition, there are a number of conceptually influential studies on radio talk, such as those by Martin Montgomery and Ian Hutchby, which have demonstrated a number of the techniques used to engender an illusion of intimacy between the radio presenter and the listeners.16 Apart from the conversational analyses of Montgomery and Hutchby, much of the research on the activities of talk radio in particular has emphasised its political dimension. This is especially true in America, where the popularity of right-wing talk show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, has prompted a series of studies into talk radio and political

but the general point concerning Ireland’s relative youthfulness still holds. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 119. 12 S. Thompson, ‘Introduction: towards an Irish cultural studies’, Cultural Studies, 15 (2001), 1-11 (1). 13 P. M. Lewis and J. Booth, The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio (London: Macmillan, 1989). 14 A. Crisell, ‘Radio’, in A. Briggs and P. Cobley (eds), The Media: An Introduction (Harlow: Longman, 2002), pp. 121-34. 15 A. Crisell, Understanding Radio (2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1994); Lewis and Booth, The Invisible Medium. 16 M. Montgomery, ‘DJ talk.’ Media, Culture and Society, 8 (1986), 421-40; I. Hutchby, ‘Power in discourse: the case of arguments on a British talk radio show’, Discourse and Society, 7 (1996), 81-97.

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influence.17 It need hardly be said that the findings of these studies have been varied. Some, such as Z. Pan and G. M. Kosicki, find that a greater than average level of audience engagement with talk radio tends to coincide with keener political interest, and suggest that the very least talk shows do is provide the means for political dialogue and participation.18 Other studies such as that by D. A. Jones, however, have been more dismissive of the political influence of talk radio, arguing that it makes little difference either way.19 However, a third strand of research, including studies by Itzhak Yanovitzky and Joseph Cappella, and by GangHeong Lee and Cappella, offers a useful insight for our purposes.20 While these commentators agree that talk shows have a negligible effect in terms of inspiring political engagement, they find instead high and consistent levels of agreement between the views of the talk show audience and those of its host. Talk shows may not inspire political activity in themselves, but they do encourage like-minded individuals to select and gather around their favoured programmes. So, if the extent of political activity is all that is at stake, the findings of the available studies offer little reassurance to those seeking to extend democratic participation in Ireland. For example, while they concede that Ireland is in no worse a position than most other affluent democracies, Neil Collins and Patrick Butler point to a widespread concern that the Irish public ‘are increasingly disengaged from politics, frequently displaying low levels of knowledge about their democratic institutions, [and routinely expressing] a mistrust of government leaders’.21 Yet, before extending this 17

The point of departure for a number of these studies is what is perceived to be the malign prejudice of Rush Limbaugh himself, and the apparent popularity of talk radio amongst right-wing conservatives in particular. See B. A. Hollander, ‘Fuel to the fire: talk radio and the Gamson Hypothesis’, Political Communication, 14 (1997), 355-69; A. Hall and J. N. Cappella, ‘The impact of political talk radio exposure on attributions about the outcome of the 1996 US Presidential Election’, Journal of Communication, 52 (2002), 332-50. 18 Z. Pan and G. M. Kosicki, ‘Talk show exposure as an opinion activity’, Political Communication, 14 (1997), 371-88. 19 D. A. Jones, ‘Political talk radio: the Limbaugh effect on primary voters’, Political Communication, 15 (1998), 367-81. 20 I. Yanovitzky and J. N. Cappella, ‘Effect of call-in political talk radio shows on their audiences: evidence from a multi-wave panel analysis’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 13 (2001), 377-97; G. Lee and J. N. Cappella, ‘The effects of political talk radio on political attitude formation: exposure versus knowledge’, Political Communication, 18 (2001), 369-94. 21 N. Collins and P. Butler, ‘Political mediation in Ireland: campaigning between traditional and tabloid markets’, Parliamentary Affairs, 57 (2004), 95-107 (93).

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to dismiss media audiences as disengaged, we should consider the evidence for the role of talk radio in gathering communities of shared political interests and beliefs. In other words, at least in the political arena, talk radio operates on the basis of an implicit contract that the listeners will agree with what they hear. It is this chapter’s contribution to look at what Irish radio may tell us about the maintenance of other forms of community, looking in particular at the imagined community of the nation.

Examples of talk radio in Ireland and the UK Radio is a popular medium in Ireland, with the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources (DCMNR) reporting that 86 per cent of the adult population tune in every day; one of the highest proportions in Europe.22 Talk radio, in particular, provides a key element of the national radio schedules. Joe Duffy’s LiveLine is broadcast each weekday on RTÉ (Radio Telefis Éireann) 1 and the similarly frequent Gerry Ryan Show on RTÉ 2 is cited as ‘the most popular non-news programme on Irish radio’.23 The purpose of this study is to explore whether, just as in the case of its political forms in America, this popularity of talk radio is rooted in an emphasis on commonality with and between the listeners, drawing in this case upon a particular sense of national belonging. Taking as its focus the packaging of RTÉ 2’s Gerry Ryan Show, the chapter will examine the extent to which radio provides a space for public participation, while cloaking this contribution within a commonly-held tradition of Irishness. For a British equivalent of the Gerry Ryan Show and its place on the RTÉ schedule, in terms both of market reach and format, it is useful to look at the Victoria Derbyshire24 programme from BBC Radio 5 Live. Radio 5 Live is itself a relatively new and innovative member of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) portfolio, having started to broadcast in 1990 and been devoted to the oddly matched causes of children and

22

DCMNR, Review of Radio Licensing in Ireland: Consultation Document (Dublin: DCMNR, 2005). 23 RTÉ, Reaching our Audiences: Radio Telefis Éireann Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements 2004 (Dublin: RTÉ, 2004), p.16. 24 While Victoria Derbyshire is also the name of the programme’s presenter, in keeping with its designation in radio schedules and in the BBC’s own literature, this description will hitherto be used to refer to the programme itself.

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sport.25 However, given an earlier undertaking by the BBC that it would offer ‘rolling news’ on one of its radio stations, it was hardly a surprise when Radio 5 Live was subsequently re-launched in 1994 to cater for sport and news within a talk format, leading, at least temporarily, to the ungenerous designation of ‘Radio Spews’.26 Of course, while these new priorities are more compatible than the original twinning of children’s programming with football commentary, issues of relative prominence would remain, and other than on weekends the emphasis has tended to be with the coverage and discussion of news.27 What is perhaps most interesting about Radio 5 Live for our immediate purpose, is the manner in which the re-launch of 1994 brought with it a better definition of the target audience, based mainly on gender and class.28 As Guy Starkey observes, the new target audience member was male, and had a clearly defined interest in the major spectator sports of ‘football, boxing, cricket and horseracing’.29 In contrast to the middleclass audience of Radio 4, Radio 5 Live was also aimed at those ‘at the lower end of the socio-economic scale’ and ranging from their twenties to their forties.30 The self-image of the station and its target audience had an influence on the tone of the news coverage, which became deliberately informal, as well as on the topics selected for coverage. In a manner that will become apparent later in the chapter and will provide a comparison with the Gerry Ryan Show, the Radio 5 Live audience were also assumed to be in some way representative of ‘the nation’ as a whole, and this would be articulated with the explicitly populist interpretation of what would be deemed to be newsworthy.

25

G. Starkey, ‘Radio Five Live: extending choice through Radio Bloke?’, in A. Crisell (ed.), More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a MultiMedia World (London: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 21-7. 26 B. Franklin, Newszak and News Media (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 21-7. 27 Starkey, ‘Radio Five Live: extending choice through Radio Bloke?’, p. 31. 28 ‘Audience’ here is to be understood in its media industry sense as those deemed to be listening at a given time, and of interest primarily for extent and demographic composition. In a manner that will become clear, my idea of ‘audience’ differs from this, such that I suggest the mass audience should be approached as an essentially imagined form of community in the same way as the nation. Shaun Moores offers a wide-ranging account of the academic approaches to audience studies. See S. Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption (London: Sage, 1993). 29 Starkey, ‘Radio Five Live: extending choice through Radio Bloke?’, p. 27. 30 Ibid., p. 28.

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The discourses of Irish talk radio The most sustained analysis of the forms of talk and topics for discussion on the Gerry Ryan Show is provided by Sara O’Sullivan.31 O’Sullivan is interested in how the Gerry Ryan Show works to straddle the divide between the public and the private realms.32 The thrust of her argument is that the Gerry Ryan Show should not been seen as an element of the civil public sphere envisaged by Jürgen Habermas and defined as space for a rational debate on matters of public concern between informed, stake-holding individuals.33 While conceding that many of the necessary qualities of discussion and debate are present in the Gerry Ryan Show, O’Sullivan points out that the preferred outcome of many of these exchanges is not discursive resolution so much as the provision of entertainment.34 In the terms outlined by Franklin, therefore, the Gerry Ryan Show can be said to be complicit with much of the rest of the media in valuing amusement and distraction over matters of fact and policy.35 O’Sullivan arrives at these conclusions by means of a content based study of the show, in which she classifies listeners’ calls into the four types of ‘expressive calls’, ‘service encounters’, ‘exhibitionist calls’ and ‘trouble telling’ exchanges. The latter two types are less common. One of these is the ‘exhibitionist’ call, which is where a listener uses the opportunity to engage in a performance, whether that is the recital of a poem or the relating of a story or anecdote. Even less common in frequency is what O’Sullivan calls the ‘trouble telling’ call. These calls operate either inside or outside of the main topic, and are where listeners use the show as a space in which to unburden themselves or discuss a matter of personal, emotional concern. In terms of the outcome of these exchanges, O’Sullivan argues that such encounters are more an exercise in ‘emotional reciprocity’ than they are an exchange of information.36 Yet, to the extent that trouble telling calls have more in keeping with intimate 31

S. O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open: talk radio and the public sphere,’ in Kelly and O’Connor (eds), Media Audiences in Ireland, pp. 167-90. See also S. O’Sullivan, ‘The whole nation is listening to you: the presentation of the self on a tabloid talk radio show’, Media, Culture and Society, 27 (2005), 719-38. 32 O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’, p. 171. 33 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 34 O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’, p. 184. 35 Franklin, Newszak and News Media. 36 See also K. Atkinson and S. Moores, ‘We all have bad days: attending to face in broadcast troubles-talk’, The Radio Journal, 1 (2003), 129-46.

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forms of face-to-face interaction than conventional broadcast talk, they may be essential to the sense of ‘community’ developed by the overall framing of the show. Far more common, however, are those calls that make up the ‘expressive’ category. This describes those occasions whereby callers outline and assert their own position on a given topic. Such callers may appear to be seeking to persuade others or, more commonly, want to use the opportunity to give vent to their thoughts on a given matter. During September 2005, expressive calls were turned to such diverse issues as the prospects and tactics for the Irish soccer team’s forthcoming World Cup qualifying tie and whether wedding present lists are a good idea or not.37 Almost as common are the calls that O’Sullivan describes as ‘service encounters’, when listeners call for help or advice, or answer such a call from earlier in the programme. Often, of course, the structure of the programme means that these calls are linked to and develop matters raised in the expressive calls. The overall popularity of talk radio has already been mentioned, and this invitation to public participation is not limited to the Gerry Ryan Show. In April 2005, for example, RTÉ 1’s LiveLine programme positioned itself as rallying point for a campaign to expose and remedy bed shortages in the accident and emergency department of a Dublin hospital.38 Conventionally, presenter Joe Duffy is also positioned as speaking and acting on behalf of the listeners, in a manner that Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley described as a ‘populist ventriloquism’.39 In keeping with this, Duffy frames his talk in terms of the listener’s involvement as participant, claiming that ‘if people have a story to tell they phone LiveLine . . . the topics come from the callers. They make the show what it is. And that could be anything from dodgy dealers to your favourite holiday reading.’40 Returning the focus to the Gerry Ryan Show in particular, though, there are two main points that emerge. The first concerns the breadth and character of the topics that are covered, and the variety of styles employed by the callers and the host, both of which O’Sullivan sees as fundamentally reactionary. Even those ‘expressive’ calls that are cloaked 37

RTÉ, The Show [online]. See http://www.rte.ie/2fm/ryanshow/ todays.html. RTÉ, LiveLine’s Portacabin Project [online]. See http://www.rte.ie/radio1/ story/1029803.html. 39 C. Brunsdon and D. Morley, ‘Everyday television: Nationwide’, in T. Bennett and S. Boyd-Bowman et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 118-41 (123). 40 RTÉ, About Joe Duffy [online]. See http://www.rte.ie/radio/story/1021205.html. 38

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in the rhetoric of engagement and debate tend to depart from a belief in ‘traditional norms or values’ rather than reason and sound evidence.41 In other words, far from a public debate, O’Sullivan’s description positions the Gerry Ryan Show as a space for the rehearsal of what the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of ideas that have succeeded in forming a ‘national-popular collective will’.42 What is more, this populist character of the show extends beyond the choice of topics to its web-based invitation to callers, mixing an informal style with a direct mode of address. Promising that the production team are ‘fresh as paint and looking forward to hearing from you’, listeners are assured: We’ve buckets of great calls, topics, interviews and the bizarre-est of stories lined up for discussion so stay tuned in . . . it’s all about you and your lives, you love to talk and we love to listen . . . you like to listen and Gerry likes to talk so we’ve a good thing going!43

Having emphasised the populist approach to audience participation, we can now turn to the second main point, which has to do with the manner in which the programme develops the very notion of ‘talk’ itself. While it is sensible that a talk show should place stress upon the opportunities it presents for discussion, it nonetheless seems that to a large extent the Gerry Ryan Show promotes talk as an end in itself. Moreover, in keeping with Gramsci’s idea of a determinedly ‘national’ popular will, the promotion of the show is also unequivocal in placing a love for chatter within the Irish context: Gerry likes to talk. And so do the Irish. It was a match made in Broadcasting Heaven. From the very start of the show Gerry looked to his new audience for their thoughts and opinions on everything from unemployment to underpants. Nothing’s too sacred. Not any more. If you need to talk about it, you need to talk to Gerry.44

There is an explicitly stated articulation between nation and practices of talk in this address to the listeners. As well as going on to illustrate the range of topics that may be discussed, the passage calls attention to a mythical Irish love of language for its own sake. At one level, this is a 41

O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’, p. 174. A. Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957), p. 140. 43 RTÉ, The Show [online]. See http://www.rte.ie/2fm/ryanshow/ todays.html. 44 RTÉ, About the Gerry Ryan Show [online]. See http://www.rte.ie/2fm/ ryanshow/index2.html. 42

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quite successful attempt at making fun of this stereotype of Irishness. It presents what Colin Graham describes as an emergent ‘ironic authenticity’ that draws upon the established ‘old authenticity’ of the Irish cultural canon and folk heritage.45 Putting the plea to irony to one side, however, another reading may detect a potentially negative Anglicised version of Irishness that dwells upon a supposed national distraction with fast talk, or ‘blarney’, with little intention towards fulfilment or action. On the other hand, of course, this emphasis on the aesthetics of language also draws upon the imagining of Ireland as a modern literary nation, whose major figures, such as W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, remain in living memory and are internationally renowned.46 Overall, though, this sheer variety of subjects and forms of talk is the very stuff of the Gerry Ryan Show, and is presented as being a natural consequence of a peculiarly Irish predilection for the aesthetics of chatter. If the Gerry Ryan Show acts as the broadcast equivalent of the ‘parish pump’, as O’Sullivan asserts, then it is a determinedly Irish form of parish pump.47

The discourses of UK talk radio As mentioned above, in order to provide a comparison of how another talk radio programme may be complicit in the construction of a national identity, we will also look at Victoria Derbyshire from the UK based BBC Radio 5 Live. This comparison is useful because the BBC is as central to the formation of national broadcasting in Britain as RTÉ has been in Ireland.48 Both organisations have a breadth of interest that extends across broadcasting and the Internet.49 Both were founded as instruments of cultural policy committed to ‘public service broadcasting’ at the level of the state, but have remained distinct from governmental control. While the public duties of the two organisations are constructed from their own complex histories and political circumstances, summarised in turn by John Horgan and Paddy Scannell, they are nonetheless entwined with and 45 C. Graham, ‘…Maybe that’s just blarney: Irish culture and the persistence of authenticity,’ in Graham and Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory, p. 22. 46 See A. Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 47 O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’, p. 167. 48 J. Horgan, Irish Media: A Critical History Since 1922 (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 85-6; J. J. Lee, ‘Democracy and Public Service Broadcasting in Ireland’, in Kiberd (ed.), Media in Ireland, pp. 10-23. 49 DCMNR, Public Service Broadcasting Charter (Dublin: DCMNR, 2004), pp. 45.

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informed by notions of a national public.50 Last, but by no means least in the list of similarities: the Gerry Ryan Show and the Victoria Derbyshire programme are also on air simultaneously, starting each week day at nine in the morning and running through until midday. In common with the Gerry Ryan Show, Victoria Derbyshire tends to mix discussion of the main news of that or the previous day with a number of selected issues. All topics in the Victoria Derbyshire programme meet a number of criteria. Firstly, they are timely, or otherwise dominant in current public discourse. Even then, the selection process remains central, as statements or reports on trends are as worthy of inclusion as an unexpected occurrence; the example, below, of the paper from The Lancet provides a typical example. Secondly, matters covered have to appeal to and be relevant to the audience in a fairly immediate way. Drawing upon a concern, shared by the Gerry Ryan Show, for generating interesting calls, issues are presented on Victoria Derbyshire in such a way that they are invested in the lives of the listeners, who are made to feel sufficiently empowered to make their own contribution. Thus, discussion of the attacks by suicide bombers on London in July 2005 was framed around whatever implications there might have been for racial and religious relations amongst the listeners. With the exception of significant news days such as the July 2005 bombings, each programme will also introduce a range of issues, and will switch between them over the course of the morning. On the last Friday of August 2005, for example, the main topic presented for discussion was the publication of a medical paper in The Lancet suggesting that homeopathic medicine had no more of a success rate than placebo (reformulated as ‘dummy drugs’), and contributors were chosen to represent both the expert and public realms. The discussion started with a telephone interview with one of the authors of the paper, where the presenter offered many of the relevant statistics and asked the scientist to clarify and expand upon the study’s findings. Phone calls were then taken from listeners, who were encouraged to elaborate on their own experience of homeopathy, and many of whom claimed some expertise of their own, before the debate was finally reined in and summarised by the presenter. Other issues offered for debate and taken up by listeners calling in included the establishment of a new elite Australian soccer league, as well as the thorny question of whether the London-based Notting Hill Carnival was in danger of becoming overly gentrified. However, perhaps the most 50

Horgan, Irish Media; P. Scannell, ‘Public service broadcasting and modern public life’, in P. Scannell and P. Schlesinger (eds), Culture and Power (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 317-48.

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illustrative item to appear on the programme that day, and certainly the one that generated the greatest number of calls, concerned a man’s conviction and sentencing for racial abuse in addressing two individuals as ‘boyos’. This section of the programme was incorporated within a wider debate, one that has much currency in Radio 5 Live talk and in the discourse of the right-wing populist press, on the supposed imposition of ‘political correctness’. Indeed, while the two matters are clearly unconnected, the same issue of political correctness also framed much of the debate on an acceptable reaction to the London bombings. Thus, it is possible to see how two very different issues draw upon a common well of dominant concerns and languages of popular criticism. There are a number of general elements that Victoria Derbyshire has in common with the Gerry Ryan Show. For one, the rationale that guides Victoria Derbyshire is the popularising of the issues of the day, of making political and cultural policy a matter of public debate, and encouraging a range of listeners to offer their own contribution. The forms of talk on the Victoria Derbyshire programme also attract a range of call types of the sort outline by O’Sullivan,51 in which the ‘expressive’ – the presentation of a particular viewpoint or argument – figures as the most prominent. Most importantly, however, the populism expressed through the Victoria Derbyshire programme has much in common with the reactionary default to ‘common sense’ that O’Sullivan found in the Gerry Ryan Show. Even as there are similarities in content, there are subtle but important differences in the forms of national identity expressed in the two contexts, such that they draw upon national imagined communities formed of different complexes of narratives and practice. For its part, Radio 5 Live has preferred to market its ‘talk’ function in terms of a nation of differing viewpoints; a community of individuals in debate. Labouring this claim somewhat, Victoria Derbyshire’s predecessor on the morning talk slot, Nicky Campbell, styled his show ‘the nation’s conversation’,52 so presenting his listeners as symbolic of the nation as a whole. On other occasions, Radio 5 Live has sought to emphasise the sincerity of this national contribution by offering itself as the place where ‘the nation speaks its mind’. The type of populism used to frame the Gerry Ryan Show, on the other hand, offers the show as the place where the nation comes together to talk and listen as an aesthetic and pleasurable experience in itself.

51 52

O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’. Starkey, ‘Radio Five Live: extending choice through Radio Bloke?’, p. 34.

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Conclusion As demonstrated above, RTÉ is the designated supplier of public service broadcasting in Ireland. The charter that outlines this role holds RTÉ to a fundamentally Reithian idea of PSB by naming the broadcaster as the provider of entertainment, information and education.53 Less indebted to John Reith’s heritage, however, is the requirement placed upon RTÉ to reflect the diversity of Ireland in individual, community and regional terms.54 This responsibility of RTÉ towards the national culture is also embodied in other legislation. Until 1988, RTÉ was the source of all licensed broadcasting in Ireland. Yet, if anything, the Radio and Television Act of that year consolidated the broadcaster’s position at the cultural heart of the nation by removing its obligation to provide local radio, and demanding instead concentration on four national stations.55 In a context in which RTÉ is so central to national cultural policy, it behoves us to ask what contribution is made to the nation’s sense of itself. Collins and Butler, we will recall, warn of an emerging national indifference to politics which they argue ought to be checked.56 While it may be observed that one of the means by which the Gerry Ryan Show retains its popularity is that it steps aside from the systems of formalised political debate advocated by N. Collins and P. Butler,57 O’Sullivan stresses that elements of political discussion remain in the show as part of a relatively diverse mix of public engagement and dialogue.58 What we have introduced here has been another ‘national’ dimension, where we have argued that the packaging and rhetoric that surrounds the Gerry Ryan Show draws upon elements of the ‘imagined’ characteristics of Ireland by foregrounding the aesthetics of ‘chat’ as an end in itself. Taken to its most pessimistic conclusion, if we are to continue to maintain that informed public opinion is best able to emerge from a mediated public sphere conducted on equitable and rational terms,59 the form of ‘imagined community’ that is illustrated here seems likely to impede its development.60 53

DCMNR, Public Service Broadcasting Charter, p. 6. Ibid., p. 4. 55 DCMNR, Review of Radio Licensing in Ireland. 56 Collins and Butler, ‘Political mediation in Ireland’, 93. 57 Ibid. 58 O’Sullivan, ‘The Ryanline is now open’. 59 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 60 This is in partial contrast to Garnham, who accentuates the positive role of the nation in the public sphere. Garnham’s focus, however, is on the national state as a 54

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Through all of this, however, an industry reading of this use of the national imagined community will see it as part of a commercial imperative. The Gerry Ryan Show has as much an eye on what it sees as its core audience as those American political talk shows discussed in the introduction. Programmes, such as the Rush Limbaugh show, appeared to thrive because they were successful in representing a particular political community of right-wing conservatives, giving that community an articulate and (to them) agreeable cheerleader. In this context, it is worth recalling the various accounts offered above of how listeners will seek out programmes that draw upon a similar political will to their own. Overall, it therefore seems that the Gerry Ryan Show is engaged in a similar activity of attracting and retaining the sympathy of listeners, based this time on a national imagined community rather than a political one. Importantly, the terms within which community is imagined draws upon a form of Irishness that articulates popular radio talk with what is offered, somewhat knowingly, as an inherent national predisposition for banter, rhetoric and anecdote as a celebration of the aesthetic qualities of chatter. The task for the future may be to reconcile the complex terms of this imagined community with a public service inspired necessity for a truly popular civil realm of public discussion.

legislative and governmental space, whereas mine is on the nation as it offers an imagined set of common norms and beliefs. Thus, Garnham’s account emphasises the nation as a means of establishing governmental answerability, and this account focuses on whether the means of identifying with that nation may be an impediment to rational discussion. See N. Garnham, ‘The media and the public sphere’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 359-76.

CHAPTER SIX ‘I’VE COME HOME, AND HOME I’M GONNA STAY’. THE QUIET MAN IN IRISH-AMERICAN CINEMATIC HISTORY RICHARD C. ALLEN1

In 1952 The Quiet Man won an Oscar for its director John Ford.2 The film was an immediate success due to the mixture of drama, escapism and romantic comedy, the spectacular views of Connemara,3 the stirring music of Victor Young, and the dramatic performances of John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara and Barry Fitzgerald. The main character of the film is Sean Thornton (Wayne), an American boxer, who returns to his birthplace (Innisfree)4 after the death of his opponent. The film charts his gradual 1 I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, who sponsored the presentation of this paper to the Fifth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney in 2004, and I would like to thank Pamela O’Neill for allowing me to republished this chapter from the conference proceedings. See P. O’Neill (ed.), Exile and Homecoming (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2005), pp. 393-411. 2 Released by Republic Pictures in 1952 (124 mins). 3 The director of cinematography was Winton C. Hoch. 4 Based upon the poem by William Butler Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

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acceptance into the Irish community after highlighting many of the similarities and differences between life in America and Ireland. The film is fictional and stereotypical, but as this study will argue, it offers some powerful insights into the experience of exile and homecoming. The Maurice Walsh short story upon which the film is based tells us much, not only about the traditional ideas and beliefs of Ireland in the 1920s, but also about the way Irish society was perceived and often misunderstood in America and Britain. The film serves to perpetuate some of the mythology and prevailing stereotypes of Irish society in the late 1920s (c.1927) as understood by Americans in the 1950s.5 Here Irish community life is portrayed as mutually supportive and honourable, and this too may be regarded as a nostalgic exaggeration. Nevertheless, as a vehicle for exploring issues such as emigration and exile; landownership; the subordination of women; and the controlling influence of the Catholic Church, this tragic-comedy allows the audience to engage at a high level with the emotional turbulence of the exile’s condition. Inevitably, Ford glosses over the political conflict and tension of the period, and yet it remains an insistent subtext to the main storyline, offering a reason for both exile and return. Ford’s film was based upon one tale in a collection of short stories by the Irish writer Maurice Walsh (1879-1964). Born in Lisselton, County Kerry, on 2 May 1879, Walsh was a customs and excise officer by training, but better known as the author of twenty novels and a number of short stories set in either the Scottish highlands or the west of Ireland.6 His I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. The film was mostly filmed at Cong, County Mayo, particularly on the Ashford Castle estate. 5 Kevin Rockett, ‘The Irish migrant and film’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide. History, Heritage, Identity (6 vols. Leicester, London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1992-2000), III: The Creative Migrant (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), p. 170. 6 The Key above the Door (London: Chambers, 1923), While Rivers Run (London: Chambers, 1926), The Small Dark Man (London: Chambers, 1929), Blackcock’s Feather (London: Chambers, 1932), The Road to Nowhere (London: Chambers, 1934), Green Rushes (London: Chambers, 1935), And No Quarter (London: Chambers, 1937), Sons of the Swordmaker (London: Chambers, 1938), The Hill is Mine (London: Chambers, 1940), Son of Apple (London: Chambers, 1940), Thomasheen James, Man of No-Work (London: Chambers, 1941), The Spanish Lady (London: Chambers, 1943), The Man in Brown (London: Chambers, 1945),

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novels were a mixture of romance and drama, and emphasised strong community relationships. A Western Mail correspondent wrote that, The Road to Nowhere with its ‘thrilling fights, raids on preserved game, two love stories, and an enlightening picture of gypsy life, all presented with fine verve in elegant English, help to complete a masterly piece of work’, while The Scotsman enthused that The Key Above the Door provided the reader with ‘genuine entertainment . . . a story whose characters are gloriously alive’.7 To the reader Walsh’s novels were a clear form of escapism. Written in an accessible style and with strong characterisation, they appealed to a mass readership in an age before television began to replace reading as a leisure pursuit. Indeed, Walsh’s novels were so successful that they were translated into French, German, Flemish, Danish and Italian. Some of his loyal readers were secured when he published his first collection of short stories in the Dublin Magazine in the 1920s.8 Many others encountered Walsh by reading the Saturday Evening Post, which had a circulation of 3,000,000 readers in the 1930s. On 11 February 1933, the Saturday Evening Post published a new Walsh short story, The Quiet Man, which told the tale of Shawn Kelvin, who as a blithe young lad of 20, went to the States to seek his fortune. And 15 years thereafter he returned to his native Kerry, his blitheness sobered and his youth dried to the core, and whether he had made his fortune or whether he had not no one could be knowing for certain.9

The story turns upon how he meets and marries Ellen O’Grady and battles to secure her dowry and his family’s honour. Two years later, ‘The Quiet Man’ was published in The Green Rushes, a collection of interconnected short stories about Ireland in the early 1920s. The Green Rushes offered a blend of romance and adventure which was designed to underpin what Walsh saw as the essentially chivalric code of Irish rural Castle Gillian (London: Chambers, 1948), Trouble in the Glen (London: Chambers, 1950), Son of the Tinker and other tales (London: Chambers, 1951), The Honest Fishermen (London: Chambers, 1954), A Strange Woman’s Daughter (London: Chambers, 1954), Danger under the Moon (London: Chambers, 1956), The Smart Fellow (London: Chambers, 1964). 7 Extracted from the dustcover of the 1935 edition of The Green Rushes. For a full overview of the life of Walsh, see Steve Matheson, Maurice Walsh: Storyteller (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1985). 8 The Penguin paperback edition back cover of The Key Above the Door (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). 9 Saturday Evening Post, 11 February 1933, pp. 10-12.

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society.10 At the same time, Walsh makes it plain that he believes that Irish society is matriarchal; his female characters are strong willed, confident and assertive. It could be argued that they are the literary embodiment of Erin itself. This does not presuppose that his Irishmen are in any way weak or subservient; rather Walsh insists on greater balance and accommodation between the sexes. By the time that ‘The Quiet Man’ found its way into The Green Rushes, Walsh had changed some of the details, including the names of the main characters. In the new version, Kelvin becomes Paddy Bawn Enright, but in most other respects the story remains unchanged.11 Walsh’s tale of the returning Irish exile was destined to capture Ford’s imagination, for he had used short stories from the Saturday Evening Post before as a source for his movies, most notably Earnest Haycox’s ‘Stage to Lordsburg’, which in 1939 was turned into the film Stagecoach. By the 1930s John Ford (aka Sean Aloysius O’Feeney 1895-1973)12 had already established his career as a director in America. His parents were first generation Irish settlers in Maine after emigrating from Spiddal in County Galway in 1872.13 His Irish inheritance proved to be a defining influence, and in 1936 almost certainly informed his decision to buy the rights to ‘The Quiet Man’ and convert it into a major film.14 It nevertheless took several years of patient negotiation with various film studios before the film was made. Although Ford relied heavily upon Walsh as adviser and stuck faithfully to the central romance of the tale, he invested it with his own ideas and understanding of Ireland and Irish society. The large population of Irish-Americans constituted a ready and 10

Walsh, Green Rushes, pp. 170-207. For a useful discussion of Walsh’s tales in Green Rushes, see Luke Gibbons, The Quiet Man (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), ch. 1. See also Des McHale, The Complete Guide to the Quiet Man (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001); William C. Dowling, ‘John Ford’s Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man’, Eire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, 23, 1 (2002), 190-211; Des McHale, Picture The Quiet Man (Belfast: Appletree Press, 2004). 12 Ford was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on 1 February 1895 and died shortly after receiving the first American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. See J. Baxter, The Cinema of John Ford (London: Zwemmer, 1971); Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (new edn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Tag Gallagher, John Ford. The Man and His Films (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986). Luke Gibbons has nevertheless written that Ford was born in 1894 as John Martin Feeney. See Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 8. 13 Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 7. 14 Ford paid Walsh $10,000 for his cooperation which earned Walsh the American Screen Writers Guild Award in 1952. 11

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receptive audience, but for Ford this was not just a money-spinning enterprise. It was a deeply personal journey in which he related strongly to the idea of homecoming and exile, drawing heavily upon his family background. It is not insignificant that in his reworking of Walsh’s tale he gave the central character his own name, Sean, and the family name of his cousins, Thornton. His determination to locate as much of the filming in Ireland as possible gave the film its central authenticity. Perhaps more importantly, it enabled Ford to relocate himself in Irish society. In Patrick O’Sullivan’s excellent collection of studies of Irish immigration, the third volume focuses upon the ‘Creative Migrant’. In his introduction, O’Sullivan astutely observes that the migration experience is oxymoronic, a paradoxical ‘bitter-sweet’ experience, acute in so far as it often represents the death of the old life, and the uncertain promise of a new one.15 It is a truism that many people who are classed as ‘outsiders’ are the most prolific writers, actors, sportsmen and women, or musicians. But why are they so creative? Outsiders tend to defend their culture, possibly from a subliminal fear of losing it. They tend to cling to their culture, for if all their material possessions have been lost, creativity may be all they have left. Artists seek to recreate their past visually or to represent that past nostalgically. In an alien environment, they may fear that their memories of home may disappear too. They feel closed off from the cultural expression of the host-society, and therefore they may look to their past cultural identity to find consolation or affirmation. Art, music, literature, or film, can provide an outlet for emotion – a means of expressing the inevitable alienation, which is often a common experience among migrants. The creative act can be an exorcism for emotions that might otherwise have had a negative psychological impact. Recent research has revealed the vulnerability of migrants to psychological trauma and distress.16 A sense of imposed inferiority often gives rise to a determination ‘to prove the oppressor wrong’, quite simply to prove themselves not just as good as but better than those who discriminate so unfairly.17 For those who wish to assimilate, the creative arts and other cultural pursuits may act as a bridge between the outsider and the lost society. Making a creative cultural contribution to society may also provide the migrant with a new, more acceptable identity. In doing this,

15

O’Sullivan (ed.), Creative Migrant, p. 1. For example, see Lara Marks (ed.), Migrants, Minorities, and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies (London: Routledge, 1997). 17 Gibbons, Quiet Man, pp. 9-10. 16

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they take on an alternative persona which defines them by their talent/occupation rather than ethnicity.18 Equally, the migrant is just as capable of producing unreal or distorted images of the past, particularly their own past, as anyone else.19 So whose history is being offered? Marcia Landy has proposed that there is a ‘fetishizing of memory’,20 and this is endorsed by Luke Gibbons who suggests that ‘the emigrant’s break with the past has been internalised within Irish culture, forming popular images of itself’.21 For example, the Hollywood blockbuster Far and Away (1992) nostalgically dramatised the Irish migrant experience and the ‘American dream’ for a late-twentieth century audience. Filmed in Ireland and Montana, for authenticity, it was beautiful but quite unreal. Yet, for the creative migrant, although entertainment, fame and financial rewards may be primary motives, their activity, as already explained, may be a reflexive activity. The creative depiction of the Irish in the American cinema is ‘a story of the gradual change from early crude stereotypes . . . a tale of the gradual assimilation of the Irish into the multi-faceted American culture’.22 While the cinema has helped to broaden the representations of the Irish, financial and technical constraints have often compromised their ‘positive cultural power and influence in America’.23 Thus, until recently they have had no real control over the way they have been portrayed in films. This is again illustrated in The Quiet Man. ‘The film’s enduring popularity’, according to Lance Pettitt, may be the way ‘its comic excesses articulate the trauma of loss, and by the way it portrays the romantic reintegration of an Irish émigré’. He goes on to observe that the film ‘unashamedly celebrated a way of life that was actually being rejected by Ireland’s sons and

18

For an excellent examination of the exiled Irish and their culture in America, see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles. Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (pbk edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), particularly ch. 3 and 8. 19 The theme of returning Irish-Americans is provided in the anthropological work of Conrad Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (3rd edn. Ennis: Clasp Press, 2001). 20 Marcia Landy (ed.), The Historical Film. History and Memory in Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 1. In her introduction to this volume Landy explores the different methods of historical interpretation and cultural representation. 21 Luke Gibbons, ‘Synge, Country and Western’, in L. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 40. 22 Rockett, ‘Irish migrant and film’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), Creative Migrant, p. 170. 23 Ibid.

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daughters’.24 Thus such ‘versions of history’ can distort the past but can also have a significant part in determining how people, particularly migrants, comprehend their social and cultural surroundings.25 It is something of a truism that for many Irishmen, drinking, gambling and the telling of tales were acts of sociability and ‘a reaffirmation of group solidarity’.26 Certainly many of the depictions of the Irish worldwide from the nineteenth century onwards suggest that they were awash with alcohol, constantly involved in alcohol-induced fights and attracted to debauched celebrations.27 Not all Irishmen were alcoholics, of course, but the stereotype of the drunken, fighting Irishman has persisted.28 In this respect, the central Irish character of Michaleen Flynn (Fitzgerald), a diehard republican, a heavy drinker and gambler, as well as a man who is perennially cheerful when he is in the centre of things, is profiled. When Sean first sees Mary Kate Danaher (O’Hara), Michaleen tells the American that she is ‘only a mirage brought on by your terrible thirst’ and he is whisked off to the pub. Flynn also sardonically refers to the American era of prohibition, shuddering at the thought of the same happening in Ireland. This could, according to Luke Gibbons, reflect John Ford’s desire to lampoon the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) heritage of Maine with its ‘notions of civility and upward mobility’ as well as the tendency to shake off their ‘uncouth ethnic past’.29 The men gather in the bar listening to the accordion player, talking, or revelling in Michaleen retelling ‘blood-curdling’ stories. Later, when acting as the matchmaker, Michaleen asks Mary Kate if she has anything to drink, as ‘the sun is that hot on my pate’. She takes him to her parlour, provides some porter, which he blesses with the phrase, ‘your fine steady hand’. 24

Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland. Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 64. 25 Landy, Historical Film, p. 2. 26 Paul O’Leary, ‘From the cradle to the grave: popular Catholicism among the Irish in Wales’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide, III: Religion and Identity (1996), p. 186. 27 For example, See Lewis Perry Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A study of antiIrish prejudice in Victorian England (New York: New York University Press, 1968); Lewis Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971); Kevin O’Connor, The Irish in Britain (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972), pp. 131-2. The predilection for alcohol and ribaldry is most commonly demonstrated in the Irish wake. For examples, see O’Leary, ‘From the cradle to the grave’, pp. 185-7. 28 Elizabeth Malcolm, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin; New York: Gill and Macmillan, 1985). 29 Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 14.

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When he attempts to arrange the courtship of Sean and Mary Kate at Will Danaher’s house, he is offered buttermilk. Affronted by this dubious hospitality, Michaeleen complains ‘the Borgias would do better’! Michaleen is cast as the local betting agent, encouraging the whole community to gamble on the horserace and ‘big fight’, and even though the women only wager small amounts between themselves, and do not take it as seriously as the men, they are still involved. Despite these vices, Michaleen is the intermediary who explains many of the rural Irish customs to both Thornton and the audience. For example, as the matchmaker, it is his job to promote the interests of the couple, as well as to ensure that all the ‘priorities are kept to’. When Michaleen acts as chaperone to Mary Kate and Sean, he states that they will ‘do the talking and the walking’ in his company. The major theme which the film highlights is emigration and exile. Indeed as Liam Ryan has stated, the idea of emigration is at the very core of ‘the Irish experience of being modern’.30 Thousands of Irishmen and women were forced to leave the country in the nineteenth century due to pressures on land caused by over-population and the ever-present spectre of famine.31 As the century progressed, the prospect of employment in burgeoning American industries also lured people away from the subsistence farming which prevailed in many areas of Ireland.32 As a result, people left Ireland in a steady stream throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emigration not only made a vast impact on Ireland, but also greatly affected the countries in which the Irish settled, as they tended to retain the characteristics of a distinctive group. J. C. Beckett wrote that emigration ‘established in the United States a huge population whose sense of national solidarity was based mainly on hatred of the British, and it was among the American Irish that the tradition of violent 30 Liam Ryan, ‘Irish emigration to Britain since World War Two’, in R. Kearney (ed.), Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1990), p. 45. 31 By the early 1920s forty-three per cent of Irish-born men and women had emigrated with just over a million having settled in America. See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 (pbk. edn. London: Fontana, 1985), p. 20. For details of the famine and its consequences, see Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine. The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997); Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). See also Timothy Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 32 See Graeme Kirkham, ‘The Origins of Mass Emigration from Ireland’, in Kearney (ed.), Migrations, pp. 81-90.

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revolution was most active’.33 As such, the emigrant relies on prevailing images of the past in periods of great adversity and stout resistance. As Landy points out, ‘in this view of history, there is often an implied contrast between the greatness of that past and the decadence of the present’.34 The film is a product of this Irish-American way of thinking. Yet The Quiet Man was designed to appeal to an international audience and for this reason it could not appear to be overtly republican or anti-British in outlook.35 This was especially true after American and British cooperation in the two World Wars. Consequently, the anti-British sentiments and the desire for a united Ireland simply become suppressed themes in the film. Republican sentiments are voiced only by the supporting characters who were supposedly directly involved in the struggle for independence, notably Michaleen Flynn, Hugh Forbes (Charles B. FitzSimons) and Owen Glynn (Sean McClory). In the original story, Maurice Walsh chartered the experiences of Paddy Bawn Enright, an Irish emigrant, who has returned to his native Kerry but fails to find the peace he seeks. In this politically charged version, he is taunted by Danaher of Moyvalla and yet he is not willing to challenge Danaher’s appropriation of Enright land. Distressed by ‘the horror and dool of the Black-and-Tan war’,36 Enright joins an Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) flying column before returning to his cottage on Knockanore Hill. These republican sentiments were openly expressed in the first screenplay written by Richard Llewellyn, as John Ford originally wanted to have a much darker side to his Quiet Man, and was happy to portray Sean Thornton as a member of a flying column in the midst of the Black and Tan war. Certain scenes were, however, deemed to be politically insensitive and were consequently toned down when Ford enlisted Frank S. Nugent to complete the screenplay.37 Even so, Michaleen Flynn’s staunch republicanism is clearly in evidence when he refers to the past glories of the flying columns in Cohan’s pub. When Michaleen encounters 33

J. C. Beckett, A Short History of Ireland (5th edn. London; New York: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 145. 34 Landy, Historical Film, p. 3. 35 This was in spite of the fact that Ford had hired Ernie O’Malley as ‘IRA Consultant’, and Ford’s visit to Ireland to Spiddal in December 1921 where he witnessed first-hand the burned out cottages of his relatives. See Richard English, Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Gibbons, Quiet Man, pp. 40-4. 36 Walsh, Green Rushes, p. 172. 37 This is discussed further in Gibbons, Quiet Man, pp. 44-6.

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Hugh Forbes and Owen Glynn, he salutes them and calls Forbes ‘commandant’; when Forbes acknowledges that the war with the British is over,38 Michaleen dryly remarks ‘true, but I haven’t given up hope’. Later Michaleen leaves Sean at White o’Morn, explaining that he will now ‘join my comrades and talk a little treason’, and towards the end of the film, Danaher (Victor McLaglen) observes that ‘the I.R.A.’s in this too’. His comment receives a swift response as Hugh Forbes states that if they were then ‘not a scorched stone of your fine house would be standing’. Michaleen typically adds ‘a beautiful sentiment!’39 Ford leaves it to the intelligent among the audience to make of this what they will. After the partition of Ireland in 1921, Irish emigration to America continued unabated. Indeed, the period after the establishment of the Irish Free State saw half a million Irish people migrate, and in Connemara nearly one-fifth of the population emigrated in the 1950s, when the film was produced.40 Those who had owned land in Ireland often sold it in order to raise the fare to America. This meant that those who remained behind were able to consolidate their territory by purchasing the land their neighbours were forced to sell. This is conveyed by Dermot Fahy’s (Ken Curtis) remark that Danaher had ‘too much [land] of your own as it is’. Given his Irish upbringing and background, Maurice Walsh was all too familiar with the distress associated with the Land War and quite naturally this became a central issue in The Quiet Man.41 In the film Sean’s purchase of White o’Morn initially creates resentment amongst some of the people in Innisfree as they believed that he had no right to land that he had not laboured upon. The fact that he has more than enough money to pay for the land is irrelevant to them unless he can demonstrate the legitimacy of his claim. He has to prove his ancestral claim to the property. Dan Tobin (Francis Ford), the elder statesman of the village, calls upon him to defend this claim and it is then that Sean explains who his father and grandfather were. The attitude of the people 38

There is no such clear reference in the film itself to the Anglo-Irish war or the Irish civil war which ravaged Ireland just prior to the period in which the film is supposedly set. 39 This is again discussed in Gibbons, Quiet Man, pp. 52-4. 40 See Pettitt, Screening Ireland, p. 64, and citing C. Ó. Grada, A Rocky Path: The Irish Economy since the 1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 135. 41 Even in the 1930s Ireland was still a country that had a very significant number of small-holdings, but there was a steady tendency towards the consolidation of estates. See F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (pbk edn. London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 603-4.

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towards outsiders buying land is a defence mechanism for the survival of families depended on the amount of land which each family farmed, and harsh subsistence farming always meant that good land was at a premium. There was always an instinctive desire to prevent interlopers from having all the best land.42 Sean’s determination to reclaim the family land is apparent at the beginning of the film, when Michaleen remarks that White o’Morn is ‘nothin’ but a wee, humble cottage’. Sean is not interested simply in the market value of the cottage; his impulse is emotional, not commercial. After enquiring about its owner, Sarah Tillane (Mildred Natwick), he is informed that she is unlikely to sell, but he asserts, ‘Don’t bet on it, ‘cause I’m buying it.’ All too aware of the opposition to such a purchase, Michaleen asks, ‘Now why would a Yankee from Pittsburgh want to buy it’? It is at this juncture that the audience is provided with Sean’s credentials and his desire to forget his tough life in Pittsburg with its ‘steel and pig iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell’: I’ll tell you why Michaleen Oge Flynn, young small Michael Flynn who used to wipe my runny nose when I was a kid. Because I’m Sean Thornton and I was born in that little cottage over there. And I’ve come home, and home I’m gonna stay.

For Danaher though this is a problem. He sees Sean as a threat to his romance with the widow Tillane as it would mean ‘building a fence between your land and mine’, and he argues that Sean has no rights to land that he has not worked. Fortunately, there were those in Innisfree who ‘wouldn’t begrudge a Thornton his birthplace’ and who were ready to acknowledge that it was ‘Thornton land’. When questioned by Sarah Tillane about his reasons for wanting to buy the cottage, Sean states that ‘Innisfree has become another word for heaven to me.’ The widow Tillane sarcastically enquiries whether the house is to become a national shrine to the Thorntons where Sean could charge ‘tuppence for a guided tour’. She firmly reminds him of her Norman-Irish lineage, and that her family had not established monuments or memorials. Thornton’s romantic attachment to his family home suggests that he does not fully appreciate what he is asking of the widow, and completely fails to understand the Irish dependence on the land. This is further illustrated when he suggests growing roses near the cottage in an area that could easily be used for planting crops. In this case he is gently reprimanded by Mary Kate. The importance of land-holding to the Irish is 42

This is briefly discussed in Brown, Ireland, pp. 23-5.

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a constant trope within Irish literature, art and film, but it is arguably most noticeable in The Field (1990).43 Arguably, the stress that John Ford places on ‘land issues’ in The Quiet Man reveals as much about America as it does about Ireland. From the very first moments of the film, Ireland is perceived as a poor but scenic country whereas Thornton is a ‘millionaire like all Americans’; western Ireland is a quaint backwater, a holiday area for Americans who go there to fish; and it is a region where horse drawn carts are the usual mode of transportation and mechanised vehicles are scorned. Ford, like many other observers, promoted the ‘undying continuity’ of rural life that was ‘impervious to change’ and hermetically sealed.44 For example, Sean suggests that he could buy a tractor but Mary Kate refuses it on the grounds that they are ‘dirty, smelly things’ and that horse manure has more benefits. As Terence Brown has stated, by promoting such views writers and film-makers were ignoring the extent to which rural counties were affected by the modernisation of Ireland in the late-1920s and 1930s. In rural areas, modern machinery and methods of production were welcomed, and by 1943, ‘the overwhelming majority of the people in Ireland’, according to one commentator, were ‘in step with the rest of the English-speaking world . . . Modernised countryside has not yet become ‘typically Irish’ in print, though out of print, it certainly is.’45 The American perception of Ireland as a country constrained by anachronistic traditions is represented in the role of women throughout the film. Sean Thornton epitomises the orthodox American view and, according to Pettitt, is ‘tainted with a different code of social values’.46 He is perplexed by the enforcement of a strict moral code and archaic customs which prevent the women from asserting themselves. To Sean, they are simply denied a voice in determining their own future. Furthermore, he believes the complex courting rituals are unnecessary and rejects Michaleen’s role as a matchmaker and chaperon stating, ‘back in the States I’d drive up, honk the horn and the gal would come running’. In 43

Based on John B. Keane’s play and directed by Jim Sheridan in 1990, The Field tells the story of Bull McCabe (Richard Harris) who during the 1930s lovingly tends a rented field in western Ireland before the owner, a widow, decides to sell it to an Irish-American. Tragedy ensues when McCabe refuses to relinquish the land. For a brief discussion, see Pettitt, Screening Ireland, pp. 124-6. 44 Brown, Ireland, p. 40. Although a later development – the introduction of electricity into Cong when filming was taking place – is a significant contrast to the depictions of the cottages in the film. 45 Neil Kevin, I Remember Karrigeen (London; Dublin: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd, 1944), pp. viii-ix, and cited in Brown, Ireland, p. 88. 46 Pettitt, Screening Ireland, p. 64.

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response, Mary Kate takes exception to such informality when she retorts, ‘come a-running? I’m no woman to be honked at and come a-running’. For her, respect in her own community is of more importance than the freedom of American women, and consequently she considers that she is more ‘free’ than they are because she has the approbation of her fellow villagers. In another scene, Mary Kate is told by Michaleen to ‘have the good manners not to hit the man (Sean) until he’s your husband and entitled to hit you back’. Irish women are portrayed as having great strength of character, which can only be controlled by force. Yet Sean cannot control her before they are married because until that time she is protected by her brother, Squire ‘Red’ Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen).47 Sean cannot comprehend these social mores, and refuses to accept that Mary Kate cannot marry without her brother’s permission, particularly as she is a mature woman. Mary Kate politely thanks Sean for his proposal, but will not flout convention, and it is left to Michaleen to explain that ‘this is Ireland, Sean, not America, without her brother’s consent, she couldn’t and wouldn’t [marry]’.48 This episode again serves to illustrate the traditional view of Ireland where the women and the men have to observe the conventions. Thornton’s American values are in sharp contrast to these Irish traditions, and his behaviour towards Mary Kate is different from that of her brother and other men. He treats her with great courtesy and attempts to help her down from the cart, but Michaleen ridicules him, arguing that she is ‘a fine, healthy girl’ who needs no assistance from him. By including such a scene, the film suggests that the American’s attitude towards women is over-sensitive and unnecessary, but at other times Sean occupies the moral high ground. In an early scene in the film, Sean bids Mary Kate good morning and then dips his hand in the holy water and offers it to her. She accepts it and makes the sign of the cross. Michaleen chastises Sean for being ‘a bold, sinful man’ and explains that it is ‘a privilege reserved for courting couples, and then only when the Banns has been read’. For Sean, this is simply being polite, but by this intimate action he is contravening courting customs. Shortly afterwards, he is confronted by Will Danaher in the pub, but in contrast to the squire, Sean 47

For a clear appreciation of the roles and obligations of Irish women in the modern age, see Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha O Corráin, Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension (Dublin: Arlen House, 1978); Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (eds), Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Swords, Co Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1990). 48 For a discussion of Irish marriage customs, see K. H. Connell, ‘Catholicism and Marriage in the Century after the Famine’, in K. H. Connell (ed.), Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1996).

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is the epitome of good manners. Danaher tells Sean to keep away from Mary Kate as ‘she’s not for the likes of you’. Sean retorts that in America ‘we don’t talk about our womenfolk in saloons. You sort of make a habit of it. This morning it was the widow Tillane.’ Dan Tobin is equally indignant and complains to Danaher, ‘it’s ashamed you should be’. Danaher, not to be outdone, nevertheless argues that at the back of the church Sean ‘took liberties that he shouldn’t have’. When Sean replies that this is a lie, Danaher is outraged as his honour is tarnished. Angrily he states that this is ‘a word I take from no man’. A fight is about to ensue when Father Peter Lonegan (Ward Bond) intervenes and forces the two men to shake hands. It is not long, however, before the two men are at each other’s throats again. Sean gains Danaher’s permission to marry Mary Kate, although it is revealed that his consent is only obtained through ‘fraud and falsity’. When Danaher realises that he has been tricked he refuses to hand over Mary Kate’s dowry, and is ready to fight to uphold his honour. Sean fails to appreciate the repercussions of this act. Mary Kate will not accept that she is married until her brother provides her with the traditional dowry of money and furniture, and by withholding it Danaher also withholds his approval of her marriage.49 For Mary Kate this is an impossible situation. Desperate to secure her self-respect, she refuses to go home with Sean until she has gathered her ‘fortune’, for ‘it’s mine, mine and my mother’s before me’. Again, Sean has no understanding of the shame that will be attached to a marriage without consent. He accuses Mary Kate of simply being mercenary over her possessions: ‘seems like a lot of fuss and grief over a little furniture and stuff’. He does not appreciate that these goods and her dowry invest Mary Kate with her autonomy: freedom from her brother and the right to be a wife to her husband. She needs Sean to make a public demonstration of her right to these items by literally fighting for her freedom, and refuses to consummate her marriage stating: ‘Do not touch me! You have no right . . . I’ll wear your ring. I’ll cook, and I’ll wash, and I’ll keep the land. But that is all. Until I’ve got my dowry safe about me, I’m no married woman. I’m the servant I have always been, without anything of my own!’50 From his vantage point as a modern

49

For the importance of the dowry in Irish communities, see Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, pp. 54-5. He suggests that the dowry system ‘helped perpetuate harmony and rough equality both among and within farming families’ (p. 55). 50 Forced to spend his first night of marriage in a sleeping bag, Sean is beseeched by Mary Kate the next morning to get up and not shame her in front of her friends, Michaleen Flynn, Hugh Forbes and Sean Glynn, who come to visit on the day after

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American, Sean reflects the values of the American viewer and is bewildered by this attitude. He is married to Mary Kate and says as much, but Mary Kate explains the central dilemma: haven’t I been trying to tell you? Until I have my dowry, you haven’t got any bit of me. Me, myself! I’ll still be dreaming amongst the things that are my own as if I had never met you. There’s three hundred of years of happy dreaming in those things of mine, and I want them. I want my dream. I’ll have it and I know it! I’ll say no other word to you.

Sean can only placate his wife by announcing that she will have her dowry or ‘fortune or whatever you call it’. Crucially, Mary Kate’s fortune gives her an independence which enables her to contribute to the marriage. This means that her husband thereby has to treat her as an equal partner. Initially, Sean does not care whether she simply marries him with the clothes on her back, while Mary Kate refuses to countenance a courtship unless she has ‘her fortune about me’ and says she will not ‘go to him in my shift’. Although he grudgingly acknowledges Mary Kate’s right to her dowry, Sean is uncomfortable when part of her dowry is brought to the house. He finds it impossible to accept that the money releases Mary Kate from her bond of servitude, and can only interpret it as greed. Puzzled, Mary Kate questions out loud, ‘what manner of man is it that I have married?’ A voice of reason, the bridge between tradition and modernity, Hugh Forbes states ‘a better one, I think, than you know’. It is only when Mary Kate leaves him after consummating the marriage, and thereby adding to her shame, that Sean finally realises the symbolic importance of this tradition to his own cultural inheritance and he can be integrated into the community. The concepts of honour and shame are clearly very strong throughout the film. By flouting tradition with his refusal to fight Danaher for Mary Kate’s dowry, Sean effectively shames himself in front of the community. The only way he can regain his honour is, of course, by fighting Danaher – something which he tells Reverend Playfair he cannot do unless he is really outraged. It is not just his honour he fights for in the end. He fights for his wife, his adopted community and their customs, and he fights for justice.51 In a letter to a relative, Father Kenneth McElligott, written in June 1960, Maurice Walsh stated that this part of the story was based upon the wedding. This is further discussed between Mary Kate and Father Lonegan who chastises Mary Kate for her behaviour. 51 See also Richard Neupert, The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 44.

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two real events, when ‘a bully refused to pay his sister’s fortune at Listowel Fair’, and when McElligott’s grandfather exposed a cheat before the whole market.52 Thus, the honour-system was not a creative device, but something which was a feature of old and modern Irish society. What must be acknowledged is that when Sean accepts the importance of the dowry he also recognises the Irish attitude towards women. Women are represented as of secondary importance to landholding. This can be illustrated by the fact that Danaher is prepared to pay £600 for Thornton’s land in order to thwart Sean’s plans, when we are told it was only worth £200, yet he will allow only £350 for his sister’s dowry. After fighting Danaher for the dowry and clearing himself of his ‘shame’, Sean’s attitude towards Mary Kate changes accordingly and he calls her the ‘woman of the house’ and orders her around. In contrast, however, Mary Kate now turns the tables. She breaks with tradition by throwing away the stick which the woman at Castletown railway station gives Sean to ‘beat the lovely lady with’. As Brandon French has observed, in this action Mary Kate ‘rejects the notion of her husband’s mastery, to which the older woman has obviously acquiesced’.53 It is questionable whether Ford was aiming this at American women who were more liberated, and so he had to satisfy their need to have a strong-minded heroine while remaining true to the harsh realities of Irish family life and social conventions in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Mary Kate exemplifies the ambiguity vested in the portrayal of Irish women, who are proud and strong, and yet capable of being weak and subservient. Historically, Irish women have often been shown to have great strength of character, which is in part historic and connects with the strong female icons of the Celtic past. This belief in the strength of women predominated until the harsh famine years, when the role of women altered and a new emphasis was placed on chastity and obedience.54 Ford’s screenplay works with the grain of this model. Mary Kate thus has two aspects to her character, although the ‘strong’ side is highlighted to reinforce the stereotype of Ireland as an ancient and proud nation. Of the other women in the film, only the widow Tillane exhibits the same strength of character. Naturally, as a widow, she is able to assert herself 52 http://www.quietmancelebrations.com/letter.htm (accessed 11 February 2003). Unfortunately this website is no longer in existence. 53 Brandon French, ‘The Joys of Marriage: The Quiet Man’, in Brandon French (ed.), On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p.18, and cited in Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 18. 54 This is debatable, see Connell (ed.), Irish Peasant Society, ch. 2 on illegitimacy before the famine.

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because she is financially independent: she has no husband and ‘neither chick nor child’ to restrict her. She is the owner of the wealthiest estate in the area and she is the only person to employ a maid. Noticeably, the widow is descended from Norman stock and is a member of a privileged minority, separated from most of the community by her wealth and possibly by her religion.55 As the widow’s strength of character is not shared by other women in the village, the suggestion is that the subservience of women is tied to their religion. The importance of religion is emphasised throughout the film. One of the first symbols we see is a Celtic cross in Innisfree, which serves to highlight its centrality to both the community and to Irish history. Much of the action takes place in or around graveyards and churches, while two Catholic priests and one Anglican minister occupy central roles in the film. Many of the traditions which are seen to bind the village people emanate from the Catholic Church. When Sean is admonished by Michaleen for playing ‘patty fingers’ in the holy water he does not realise that the Irish consider this to be sacrilegious. According to Brandon French, when Sean and Mary Kate embrace in a graveyard near an abandoned Celtic church, they ‘kiss blissfully in that garden of death – an evocation of the original fall, which introduced death into the world’.56 Gibbons, however, views this event as far more symbolic: ‘a triumph of direct access to Nature and the body over the meditations of culture and history’.57 Undoubtedly, the Roman Catholic priests exerted a great deal of control over the people. In effect, they act as the ‘conscience’ of the community and are able to keep the peace far better than the police. Paul O’Leary has suggested that the Irish Catholic Church in the midnineteenth century witnessed a major transformation from being a peasant religion centred on festal traditions to ‘a Mass-centred form of worship which accorded the clergy a role in popular culture they had not previously enjoyed’. Consequently, the clergy required regular attendance at Mass and sought to reform or at least contain those popular practices to which it objected.58 As already discussed, Father Lonegan prevents a bar brawl between Danaher and Sean and threatens to ‘read’ Danaher’s name out during the Mass on Sunday if he will not shake Sean’s hand. The film presents the Roman Catholic Church as the ‘Church of the people’. The priest and Mary Kate speak in Irish, while the Anglican bishop who visits 55

Her close relationship with Mrs Playfair may suggest that she is a Protestant. French, ‘Joys of Marriage’, p. 20. 57 Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 69. 58 O’Leary, ‘From the cradle to the grave’, p. 182. 56

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the village speaks with a pronounced English accent as he drives around in a large car, the only car in the film. We are told by the Reverend Cyril Playfair (Arthur Shields) that the Anglican congregation is very small, which reinforces the idea that the Anglican Church is indeed an alien institution. The cordial relationship between the Roman Catholic and Anglican communities, which Ford presents, is the weakest part of the film, as the two communities were rarely on good terms. In the film, they are allowed to intermingle amicably suggesting that any differences between them were minor. The Reverend Playfair and Father Lonegan become coconspirators and trick Danaher into consenting to Mary Kate’s wedding. Later Father Lonegan covers up his dog collar and encourages his parishioners to ‘cheer like Protestants’ when the Anglican bishop drives past, in the hope that the bishop will believe that the crowd is Anglican and will not, therefore, transfer the Anglican minister to another parish. Both of these examples show the willingness of the two religious congregations to get along with each other, particularly the good neighbourliness of the Roman Catholic priest which Gibbons calls ‘a charade, a self-conscious simulation of a unified community’.59 Indeed, the primacy of community over religious division is simply Ford’s idealised vision of Ireland, as well as an American version of the tolerant society. There was always bound to be a large element of nostalgia and romanticism in The Quiet Man, for the director and his team were more strongly influenced by the optimism of the fifties than the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. To a certain extent, the morality of Innisfree is counterpoised by the decadence of American society and the failure of the ‘American Dream’. For example, Sean epitomises the self-made man who has worked his way up from the Pittsburgh steel mills to be a wealthy prize fighter. But when his opponent dies, he realises how shallow the American value system is, and it is this deep disillusionment which prompts his return to Ireland to find the peace and tranquillity that is patently lacking in America. There was a limit to how far Ford could take this argument, constrained as he was by the need for the film to be an economic success and appeal to a wide audience. By the 1950s, too, cinema had become an important medium even in Ireland. As early as 1927, the bishops of Ireland had issued a notice condemning the erosion of parental authority, notably the dance-hall, ‘evil literature’, the preponderance of English 59

Gibbons, Quiet Man, p. 86.

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newspapers and magazines, and the motion picture, which they believed tended to ‘destroy the characteristic virtues of our race’.60 It is interesting that F. S. L. Lyons considers that of these evil snares, the cinema was perhaps the most important, spreading as it did from the large cities into the smallest county towns. To the eyes of the anxious moralists it was in some ways worse than the dreaded dance-halls. Not only did it add darkness to propinquity, but it held the mirror up to a way of life very different from that which Catholic boys and girls had been taught to regard as necessary and right.61

Yet there is little sign of the erosion of Irish culture in The Quiet Man. On the contrary, this film was at pains to applaud the moral virtues of small Irish communities, a sentiment that an exile, such as Ford, undoubtedly shared.

60

Cited in Brown, Ireland, p. 40. For details of the methods of censorship in the mid to late-1920s, see Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, pp. 686-8. 61 F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 158.

CHAPTER SEVEN ‘PEOPLE, NOT ISSUES’: ADAPTING BERNARD MACLAVERTY’S CAL1 SARAH NEELY

It’s the characters that matter . . . Some critics said, ‘set against the background of the Troubles’.2 Well, it’s not the background – it’s totally there, it is interwoven. —Bernard MacLaverty3

The relationship between British filmmaking and television has often been lamentably described as a necessity borne out of a lack of funding. Some critics have recognized the virtues of this necessity. John Hill, for instance, considered ‘the possibility that television films can draw sustenance from television’s public service tradition and speak to their own cultures in a way that Hollywood films increasingly do not’.4 In short, smaller budgets mean fewer commercial constraints. However, even though many broadcasters claim their television audience is their first priority, the lure of a wider distribution is still a reality for many 1

With kind thanks to Sir David Puttnam for granting permission to cite materials from British Film Institute (BFI) archive. 2 Ben Gibson, ‘Cal’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 51, 608 (1984), 273-4; Karen Kreps, ‘Review on Cal’, Box Office (December 1984), 153-4; Tom Ryan, ‘Away Matches’, Cinema Papers, 51 (May 1985), 83; Colin Vaines, ‘Cal’ Subject Matter Provides David Puttnam with Many Attractions’, Screen International, 12-19 May 1984, 15. 3 Christian Ganter, ‘Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow, in Interview with Christian Ganter, Würzburg’, Anglistik: Mitteilungen Berbandes Deutsch Er Anglisten, 7, 2 (1996), 5-22 (13). 4 John Hill, ‘British Television and Film: The Making of a Relationship’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996), pp. 151-76 (p. 166).

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filmmakers. Cal (dir. Pat O’Connor,1984), produced by David Puttnam as part of Channel Four’s ‘First Love’ series, presents an interesting case study. Puttnam, by the time he made Cal, had produced several successful films including Chariots of Fire (dir. Hugh Hudson, 1981). The ‘First Love’ series, on the other hand, has not been without its criticisms. The British Film Institute’s current Screen Online directory says the series ‘included some attractive films, which gave a chance to young filmmakers, but which were too parochial for international success’.5 John Caughie described the series as ‘distinctly, if somewhat sentimentally, British, with something of the style of a single play on television but with an added visual sophistication derived from film production values’.6 Yet Puttnam’s perception of Cal in relation to the ‘First Love’ series seems even further divorced from its televisual roots. In September 1983, Puttnam sent a note to the cast and crew emphasising the fact that they were ‘making a movie. Not a film for television.’7 Although this could be more reflective of Puttnam’s commitment to production values, it also seems likely that his comments were intended to articulate his aims for the film to attract a broader appeal. Production associate, Susan Richards also alluded to a wider range of possibilities. Writing to Puttnam in December 1983, she described the film as the ‘most cinematic’ of the series and questioned whether something should be done about it.8 This response is hardly surprising, considering MacLaverty has been praised by critics and the director for his visual, almost cinematic-style of writing. The filmmakers’ push towards wider appeal may have also been in response to initial feedback from Warner Bros. who believed it to have little potential in America.9 However, it was the short novel’s focus on the ‘Troubles’, and the activities of a particular cell of the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.), that provided the most significant challenge to the filmmakers. The novel, cast in an Oedipal web, details the experience of Cal as he struggles to come to terms with the effects of his own ambivalent involvement with the I.R.A. Unable to secure employment, Cal, much to his father’s dismay, turns down a job at the local abattoir where his father 5

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/470271/ (accessed 17 June 2007). John Caughie, ‘Broadcasting and Cinema 1: Converging Histories’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 189-205. 7 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. David Puttnam to cast and crew, 28 September 1983. 8 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Box 1, item 2. 9 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. TLX from Alison Odell to Puttnam, 8 July 1983. 6

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works, because he is unable to stomach the brutality. Complying with friends who are involved in the I.R.A., he agrees to act as a driver. After one of the runs results in the murder of a Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) officer, Cal recalls the sequence of events throughout the novel, which show him to be an accessory to the murder. Cal meets and then continues to obsess over Marcella, the widow left behind, and ironically finds work on the farm where she lives with her daughter, and the parents of her deceased husband. As a relationship develops between Cal and Marcella, his struggle to repress his past actions begins to fail as the romance narrative is continually interrupted by the violent past. In the film, the images resurfacing through a series of flashbacks and musical motifs refuse to let him forget, and remind him of the consequences. Interestingly, the spectator is not privileged with all of the details of Cal’s guilt, and the crime is revealed through the piecing together of puzzle-like flashbacks, with brief shots of the murder alternating with more benign shots of the landscape or episodes involving the love affair with Marcella. This technique offers its most intense representation of the murder in the sequence depicting Marcella and Cal’s lovemaking. MacLaverty’s writing, although intensely psychological and introspective at times, arguably lends itself readily to the medium of film. However, MacLaverty’s use of a highly focalized narration poses certain difficulties when adapted to the outwardly objective medium of film. In their close analysis of the adaptation of Cal, Paul Simpson and Martin Montgomery argue that Cal’s voyeuristic viewpoint, privileged in the novel, is easily adapted by the ‘cinematic gaze’ of the camera.10 Even though the narration may prove subjective, much of the psychological development of Cal’s character within the novel is created through his relation to objects around him. Cal’s emotional state is mapped onto his immediate environment through his gaze upon the physical world. Even in his imagination, his physical surroundings are ripe terrain. For instance, waiting on a street corner, Cal visualises, in his mind’s eye, an imagined shooting. Conversely, depending on how the narrative is read, one could say his environment is mapped onto him. In Cal, as Gary Brienzo and others have noted, it is the emotional and social isolation frequently characterising MacLaverty’s fiction which

10

Paul Simpson and Martin Montgomery, ‘Language, Literature and Film: The Stylistics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal’, in Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber (eds), Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 138-64.

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ultimately drives the characters towards an unstoppable fate.11 The film draws on this sense of fate by building on the central image from which the narrative unfolds. Cal opens with a key moment, before exploring the surrounding events leading up to it. Throughout, violent images of the murder are intercut and coupled with musical motifs, delivering the narrative as a haunting of Cal’s repressed memory. The narrative structure, organised so that throughout the film we are offered glimpses of the events that took place on the night of the murder, becomes most prominent in the lovemaking scene, when images of Marcella and Cal are interspersed with the violent images which flashback to the fateful night. The structure of the novel is, for the most part, mirrored by the film. However, the flashbacks occur less frequently in the written form and do not play as strong a thematic role. In the novel, they are a dramatic method of unravelling the narrative in a way that mimics Cal’s own subconscious guilt in his relations with Marcella. In the film, particularly in the scene previously discussed, the flashbacks act in a similar fashion as concise moments of trauma around which the narrative revolves, but because of film’s ability to cut through space and time with such rapidity, the flashbacks segment the lovemaking scene to great dramatic effect. Yet for the filmmakers of Cal it was not the translation of subjective narration from page to screen that presented the greatest challenge – it was the subject matter. The filmmakers acknowledged how important it was for spectators to be able to recognize the conflict in visually graphic forms and saw the necessity for the distinction between Protestant and Catholic to remain ‘clear and identifiable’.12 At the same time, it was felt that the success of securing worldwide distribution also relied on marketing the film as a love story instead of as a film about the ‘Troubles’. Considering the filmmaker’s first agenda, to establish the conflict in obvious terms, like many other narratives addressing Northern Ireland, it becomes culturally significant who is being represented and how. Brian McIlroy’s study of the filmic representation of Northern Ireland expresses dismay at the lack of Protestant representation in films, and more frequently the tendency not to represent Protestants as civilians.13 Certainly not all films with Northern Ireland as their subject matter are guilty of caricaturing Protestants, but perhaps because films are set in 11

Gary Brienzo, ‘The Voice of Despair in Ireland’s Bernard MacLaverty’, North Dakota Quarterly, 57, 1 (1989), 67-77. 12 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Letter from Alison Odell (Puttnam’s assistant) to David Puttnam, 23 July 1983. 13 Brian McIlroy, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1998).

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Northern Ireland in order to suit a specific genre (i.e. crime, gangster, political drama) they necessarily adhere to the conventions of the genre that require specific features, namely character and plot tropes. In Cal, images of the sectarian divide infiltrate the entire length of the film. Photographs and images of the Queen Mother, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the spectacle of an Orange march, murals on buildings, and ‘God Save the Queen’ broadcast on the television, are all interchanged with signs detailing the gravity of sins (i.e. paintings of the crucifixion, and the rituals of the Mass). In one particular scene, Cal is beaten up by a group of young men, and although it is dark and the figures indecipherable, a ‘Union Jack’ shirt worn by one of the men stands out brightly in contrast. Almost disembodied, it is the only thing plainly visible. Like many other points in the narrative, the frame is organised around these iconic images, which gather great prominence on screen, suffocating the rest, and sometimes leaving little room for the characters. Similarly, a photograph of Marcella’s murdered husband, Robert, sits in a prominent position in the living room supposedly due to the wishes of Marcella’s mother-in-law. It is this visual prominence – the importance and significance of images that dominate the narrative – that becomes so poignant in the filmic translation. Considering McIlroy’s comments, it is important to note that many critics praised Cal, the novel, for its subtle, humanising depiction. Margaret Scanlan offered praise for how the novel ‘depicts goodwill and hatred alike as evenly distributed between religious factions’, and gives ‘Northern Ireland the human face’14 that is often foregone for dramatic caricatures. More specifically, Stephen Watt has aligned the efforts of the novel with projects such as the Field Day Theatre Company because of its attempt to offer representations of Ireland that are demythologised.15 Rather than opting to replace familiar myths with new ones in an act of avoidance, MacLaverty’s narrative works in constant negotiation between the two, confronting the problem directly. Dietmar Böhnke, identifying this dilemma in his study of Scottish literature, argues that the replacement of Scottish kailyard with grittier, urban narratives coined as ‘anti-kailyard’ is at risk ‘of becoming, through the detachment of Scottishness, as isolated, changeless and closed as the Kailyard itself’.16 In Cal, this binary 14

Margaret Scanlan, ‘The Unbearable Present: Northern Ireland in Four Contemporary Novels’, Études Irlandaises, 10 (December 1985), 145-61. 15 Stephen Watt, ‘The Politics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal’, Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies, 28, 3 (Fall 1993), 130-46. 16 Dietmar Böhnke, Kelman Writes Back: Literary Politics in the Work of a Scottish Writer (Glienicke, Berlin: Galda und Wilch, 1999), p. 37.

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relation created between pastoral landscapes and urban dwellings may appear to accentuate the mythological representations of Ireland. In a sense, it is recognising the danger of replacing old myths with new ones, and instead offers a more complex representation through the contrasting and blurring of these myths. Comparing the critical reception of the book and film could lead to the conclusion that the image consolidates or simplifies complex situations and events; or, as Susan Sontag concludes in her analysis on the strengths and limitations of the photographic image, ‘narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image’.17 Even MacLaverty expresses his own feelings that the image is somehow less subtle, and more brash, than its descriptive representation on page. This ‘belligerence’ of the image coupled with the genres the narratives are applied to, as McIlroy has pointed out, is a further reminder that who exactly is represented is a significant factor of this image, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how they are represented through the medium of film. Films addressing the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland often develop narratives that make themselves most comfortable within the generic framework of the political thriller. How aptly accomplished or insightfully dealt with is another matter. Yet films, such as Patriot Games (dir. Phillip Noyce, 1992), Nothing Personal (dir. Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1995), Resurrection Man (dir. Mark Evans, 1998), and Hidden Agenda (dir. Ken Loach, 1990), all rest squarely within this genre. The convenient manner of systematically synthesising the culture into a pre-existing generic structure, and forcibly reshaping the various elements in order to conform to the new form, risks losing its footing in reality. Warning of the tendency to draw from the most stereotypical images to serve as generic tropes, John Hill explains: The problem with this is that, while such images clearly conform to the thriller’s demands for the dramatic and striking, and also cue an audience (to the ‘universe’ of the ‘Troubles’) in the way that thriller icons conventionally do, they nevertheless do so only by virtue of being the most obvious and, indeed, clichéd of images. Thus, a film which, at the level of manifest content, seeks to challenge dominant perceptions of the ‘Troubles’ actually reinforces them at the level of formal imagery.18

17

Susan Sontag, ‘Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death’, The New Yorker, 9 (December 2002), 28. 18 John Hill, ‘Finding a form: politics and aesthetics in Fatherland, Hidden Agenda and Riff-Raff’, George McKnight (ed.), Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), pp. 125-43 (p. 135).

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However, rather than confront the form of representation directly, Cal side-steps this issue by developing its narrative out of a love story upon which ‘the political’ is grafted. The iconography is explicit, and overwhelms the characters not because it divides them, but because of its power to subsume the individual. Although this type of dependence on iconic imagery is evident in Cal, and the sectarian divide is for the most part apparent, the film does not always succeed in relaying the novel’s complexities. For instance, when Cal and his father are burned out of their house, in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood, a woman consoles Shamie and says, ‘it makes you ashamed to be a Protestant’ (p. 75). Her expression of solidarity stresses her identity as a ‘civilian’ before anything else – an identity McIlroy finds many narratives deny Protestants. However, in the film, in this particular scene, it is not so clear. Cal runs to find Shamie and a crowd of neighbours surrounding the burning house and although the concerned neighbour is present, her identity is not as explicit as she cries to Shamie: ‘I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed.’ Some of the explicitness of the novel is possibly given up due to the explicitness of the image. In The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film, Linda Seger describes the scene in Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) when Atlanta is burned, by looking at both novel and film. She recognises an inherent difference in the way in which they deal with the same subject matter. In short, she praises the film’s ability to convey a wealth of detail in a short space of time. However, she remarks that no matter how efficient the film may be in this regard, it is never able to relay information in as detailed a manner as the novel without seeming awkward. For Seger, ultimately, this scene in the film version creates ‘a sense of the sweep of the story, the excitement, terror, fear, panic’, whereas the novel portrays all this as well as a ‘new understanding of the historical period – the context, the meaning of the battles, and the strategy of both Sherman and the Confederate generals Johnston and Hood’.19 The details of the house-burning scene in Cal also lose some of their clarity, particularity in the film version. In the screen adaptation, a spectator might be able to infer from the scene that the consoling neighbour is Protestant, but more likely, the rapidity of the detailing of the disaster’s events will have swept away an important but relatively small detail. The constraints of the medium of film need not be solely to blame for a flattening of representation on screen, although John Hill, pointing to films such as Angel and Cal, has argued that cinema has failed to express an 19 Linda Seger, The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), pp. 21-2.

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‘ability to respond intelligently to history, and the willingness to engage with economic, political and cultural complexity’.20 He generally attributes this to a pull towards commercial success. Certainly, the promotion of Cal abroad influenced the way in which the ‘Troubles’ were represented. David Puttnam, in a letter to the distributors, Warner Bros, who were in the process of promoting his last film, Local Hero (dir. Bill Forsyth, 1983), for its video rental potential in America, anticipates the problems marketing Cal, and emphasises the necessity to play down the terrorism and place ‘people not issues’ at the forefront. 21 Puttnam’s approach adds weight to McIlroy’s critique of the industry’s limited registers for representing Catholic and Protestant Northern Ireland: ‘A more traditional approach to joint representation or apparent parity of esteem is to adopt the Romeo and Juliet storyline.’22 Ironically, even the creation of a narrative image for Cal was carefully plotted to avoid too many overt references to the ‘Troubles’ and place more emphasis on the romance narrative. The production notes emphasised that ‘despite its background of anguish and bloodshed, Cal is not primarily a political film’.23 There were also suggestions that posters might be changed for foreign release.24 In one letter to MacLaverty, production associate Susan Richards wrote that, ‘it does not help foreign distributors to easily recognise the nature of the film’ and that what is represented is best kept symbolic (i.e. an Orangeman with drums is a better way of depicting locality than representing direct physical violence).25 The symbolism that Richards encourages is something visibly developed in the film. In a review of the novel in the Sunday Times, David Lodge remarked that in Lamb (another novel by MacLaverty) the symbolism was obtrusive, whereas in Cal there is no symbolism. It is this absence of symbolism in the novel that Lodge feels ‘seem[s] to be waiting for a film director to give the intensity the words have failed to evoke’.26 Lodge’s challenge appears 20

John Hill, ‘Images of Violence’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema and Ireland (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 14793 (p. 184). 21 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Letter from David Puttnam to Bernard MacLaverty, 5 December 1983. 22 McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, p. 59. 23 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Item 23, publicity material, production notes. 24 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Telex from Guy Easy, 20 March 1984, ‘it does not help foreign distributors to easily recognise the nature of the film’. 25 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Letter from Susan Richards to Bernard MacLaverty, 9 December, 1982. 26 David Lodge, Review of Cal, The Sunday Times (see BFI, David Puttnam Archive).

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to be taken on board in the film version of Cal, but rather than developing the symbolism as a method of representing where words fail or fall short, the filmmaker’s tactics invoke the symbolism to opposite effect, resulting in the symbolic overpowering the narrative intricacies that the words relate. What is offered in its place is a further abstraction of the narrative. The metaphor or symbol is used to avoid depicting an unpalatable reality. The result is perhaps what Joe Cleary has caustically referred to as the reductive ‘romance across the divide’ narrative – privileging the personal over the political. In his essay on narrative representations of Northern Ireland, Cleary refers to the Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992) and Cal as examples which typify narratives that magnify the sectarian divide, always relegating part of the representation to the margins of the narrative. Styling Cal a ‘romance-across-the-divide’ narrative, Cleary ultimately sees the union between Cal and Marcella as ‘a veiled allegory or furtive fantasy of a “nationalising embrace” for which the state equivalent could only be a united Ireland’ or a resolution of conflict in the North.27 Fidelma Farley has remarked upon these impossible romance narratives in films focusing on Northern Ireland as calling upon ‘the viewer’s hostility against (usually) the I.R.A. for preventing romantic resolution and thus the formation of the family, which represents the possibility of a stable society/nation’.28 For most critics, regardless of how it is read, the reliance on this type of narrative shorthand comes at a cost. Tom Ryan, describing the compromise made in relation to Cal, admits the oedipal drama is framed by a somewhat thoughtful representation of social and political conflict, but for him, ‘the central strategy is a safe one . . . There is no attempt to provide any substantial perspective on the turmoil . . . The film’s ‘real story’, then, is to be found in its reworking of the older woman-younger man tale.’29 Kevin Rockett has critiqued Jim Sheridan’s films in a similar fashion. Referring to My Left Foot (dir. Jim Sheridan, 1989), he writes:

27

Joe Cleary, ‘“Fork Tongued on the Border Bit”: Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 95, 1 (1996), 227-76 (p. 251). 28 Fidelma Farley, ‘Ireland, the Past and British Cinema: Ryan’s Daughter (1970)’, in Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage, and Costume Film (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 129-43 (p. 140). 29 Tom Ryan, ‘Away matches: The Killing Fields and Cal’, Cinema Papers, 51 (May 1985), 83.

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Rockett’s comments bear the familiar ring of the criticism surrounding MacLaverty’s Cal. Rockett points to the transformation from page to stage as evidence of the influence of Hollywood financing on the representation of Irishness on the big screen. My Left Foot has also been criticised, not only for its Hollywood-assimilated representations of Ireland, but its representation of its original source. Rockett’s lament for the ‘broader critiques’ absent in Hollywood-produced films echoes Martin McLoone’s call for complex representations rather than essentialist portraits of Irish identity, in order to establish a truly national cinema.31 In reality, filmmakers, like Sheridan, are increasingly adopting the Hollywood model and methods of support, and even, as in Sheridan’s case, a perspective more closely identified with the American consciousness. For example, Sheridan’s film In America (2002), written, produced and directed by himself, is set in New York City and tells the story of a family from Ireland who have emigrated to America after the death of a child. On the other hand, even the success of Neil Jordan, who is capable of producing a film he describes as ‘non-mainstream’ from mainstream backing, is not without end. Even with the relative success of The Good Thief (2003), he was dismayed with the current climate of the industry, and claimed to have temporarily abandoned filmmaking for novel-writing.32 John Hill has also remarked on the tendency for Hollywood narratives to ‘encourage explanations of social realities in individual and psychological terms, rather than economic and political ones’,33 and on the ways in which the conventions of narrative realism focus on ‘the values of individualism [rather than] those of the community’.34 However, he is 30

Kevin Rockett, ‘Irish Cinema: The National in the International’, Cineaste, 24, 2-3 (1999), 23-5 (24). 31 See McLoone’s discussion of The Commitments (dir. Alan Parker, 1991), in M. McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: BFI, 2000), p. 205. 32 Sylvia Patterson, ‘Interview with Neil Jordan’, Sunday Herald Magazine, 2 March 2003, 20-5 (25). 33 Hill, ‘Finding a form’, p. 132. 34 Ibid., p. 133.

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reluctant to subscribe to any idea of a ‘counter-cinema’. Instead, he examines the possibilities of ‘Third Cinema’, the challenge that it presents to Hollywood, but also its lack of a prescriptive methodology, and its understanding that approaches in the making of a film ‘will vary according to the social, political, and cultural contexts in which it is produced and to which it is addressed’.35 But what other options were available to the filmmakers of Cal, intent on ensuring overseas distribution? Was there a way of retaining the subtleties of the conflict in the original narrative and, at the same time, ensuring the material was accessible to audiences unversed in the cultural and political contexts? In the end, regardless of the efforts made to represent the issues in black and white, audiences were still confused and unable to discern the religions of certain characters.36 Similarly, the film’s sale in the foreign market still proved difficult.37 But is there an alternative route that filmmakers of Cal might have explored, that would have still allowed for a wider appeal? Or, do the attempts to broaden appeal result in the loss of what was compelling and meaningful about the narrative in the first place? In an article exploring the conflict between dominant and marginal value systems, particularly in regard to language, Tom Leonard dispels the myth that the local is somehow aberrant and unable to connect with global meanings.38 Instead, he argues, it is the precise articulation of the local that ensures its translation across cultures. There is little doubt that the most successful British and European films have been those that have proven capable of articulating local and regional identities. This is true of both the past and the present. Witness the continuing popularity of narratives focusing on the triumph of the individual over institutional or societal adversities (e.g. Full Monty, dir. Peter Cattaneo, 1997; Bend it Like Beckham, dir. Gurinder Chadha, 2002; East is East, dir. Damien O’Donnell, 1999; Trainspotting, dir. Danny Boyle, 1996; City of God, dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2002).39 As John Hill observes, ‘it has also been a feature of the best of British and European

35

Ibid., p. 139. BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Correspondence regarding audience questionnaires from Dennis Davidson Associated, Ltd. 37 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Letter from Guy East to David Puttnam, 1 June 1984. 38 Tom Leonard, ‘On Reclaiming the Local and The Theory of the Magic Thing’, Edinburgh Review, 77 (1987), 40-7 (43). 39 See Phil Parker’s analysis of the trend in ‘Personal Drama: An Obsessive Success’, BFM, 6, 7 (December 2004), 49. 36

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cinema that it too has been rooted in its own specific culture’.40 But is there also a correlating trend in the narratives’ commitment to translate on universal terms at the expense of loss of local specificities? John Caughie maintains there is a tendency to inflate the effects of wider distribution: It is, indeed, possible to exaggerate the processes of the global market, and to render the local helpless against the depredations of the major players in the international market . . . It is not that the global market has no place for nationally specific representations . . . The point, I think, is that what the international market values in national specificities are precisely those qualities which transcend the local and make it universal: humanity, character, and in particular, character in adversity. It is more difficult to sell on the international market the material social conditions which produce the adversity. Characters coping with their social situations are universal and therefore marketable, but the political conditions which produce the situations can be very, very local and, hence, more difficult to sell.41

So the political does not always translate. Certainly in the case of Cal, the privileging of the romance narrative may seem to deflect from any serious engagement with narrative elements dealing with political violence. A cursory analysis of the film’s narrative line reveals that the majority of scenes focus on the development of Cal and Marcella’s relationship: the first half of the film establishes the categorical oppositions through the use of iconic imagery, while the later half of the film follows the love story in greater detail. However, as Sontag points out, ‘violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing’.42 The filmmakers’ insistence on ‘people not issues’ ensures against the audience forgetting the individual in the face of political discourse. Puttnam himself, at one point, expressed concern over the possibility that they were ‘beginning to suffer from classic Hollywood drift, i.e. trying to make something which is acceptable to everyone and ends up with its guts pulled out, not really addressing itself to anyone’.43 Note, however, that his reservations do not concern the privileging of the romance narrative over the cultural and political contexts. The romance 40

Hill, ‘British Television and Film’, p. 166. John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 195-6. 42 Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, p. 5. 43 BFI, David Puttnam Archive. Letter from David Puttnam to Susan Richards, 21 June 1983. 41

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story he identifies as the narrative’s key strength. What he is concerned about here is turning the narrative into an ordinary love story. MacLaverty’s remarks that open this essay insist that the reflection on the ‘Troubles’ is integral to the narrative’s structure. In many ways, he is right. The story begins with the brutal murder of an R.U.C. officer. Consequently, every scene following the development of the relationship between Marcella and Cal is imbued with its subtext. If Cal had not been involved in Marcella’s husband’s murder would he have been drawn to her in such an intense way? If Cal and Shamie had not been burned out of their house because they were Catholics living in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood, would Cal have found it necessary to seek refuge in the byre on Marcella’s land – an event which plays a crucial role in their coming together? Like the Romeo and Juliet narrative that Cal has so often been said to draw from, elements of fate are at play – the outside world divides them, while simultaneously forcing them together at the same time. It is fair to say that comparing the novel to the film reveals some of the limitations of the image in representing the finer details of the language. Also, evident is the tendency for generic conventions to simplify by their very nature. Lastly, whether right or wrong, there are certain ideas about the differences between what is acceptable to localised television viewers and what is acceptable to global film audiences. Although all of these factors can be identified in the film Cal, like any adaptation, the film is ultimately an interpretation – one ‘reading’ of the text. In the end, Puttnam valued one aspect of the narrative over others. Even if the various constraints of production seem evident in analysis, it is fair to say that Puttnam made little compromise to his vision of the narrative. MacLaverty himself feels that if he were to write it again, he would not caricature the I.R.A. to the extent that he did when he first conceived the novel. Interpretation changes with hindsight. Still, he points out that many people have read the film in different ways, and in the end it is not easy to establish the film’s affiliations.44 As some of the diverse criticism throughout this essay reveals, the film garners multiple readings. It is like an accident; everyone sees something different.

44

Ganter, ‘Bernard MacLaverty, Glasgow’, p. 14.

CHAPTER EIGHT INTO THE MISTY: VAN MORRISON AND IRISH CINEMATIC LYRICISM PETER MILLS

There’s a big part of me that’s strictly involved with the island of Ireland . . . I’m a citizen of Europe and America but I belong, specifically, to Ulster. —Van Morrison, 1984

In 1963, the seventeen year old Van Morrison was paying his dues on the German club scene as part of the updated, rock-and-rolled-up showband The Monarchs. Much attention was paid to the theatrics and visual dimension of group performance in this context; the German clubowners famously wanted their imported British groups to ‘mach schau’ and The Monarchs did just that. Morrison, the group’s sax player rather than vocalist, was a very energetic stage performer; a spectacle, created or natural, was required. In an entry of his unpublished journal he remembered the period: Heidelberg. Tram lines. The Odeon Keller, lots of good beer. My one and only movie scene. The Bahnhof. Mark Twain Village. The hotel brawl. Bratwurst. American cigarettes. Soldiers. And the music fills the room as I’m writing, Miles Davis music. Big Ricky. Cognac. My surprise birthday party. Seven sets a night. Seven nights a week. Matinees Saturday and Sunday. The eagle flies on Friday. An apprenticeship, they call it, paying dues. That’s what it’s called. It’s all a busman’s or woman’s holiday. Right Paul Right Pete now. Waiting for the Volkswagen to come.

Although this was almost certainly written retrospectively (‘My one and only movie scene’) it is possible to note the Kerouac-like energy of the writing, the beat of it, as Brian Hinton cannily notes, fast cutting like a movie, seeking via art to recapture a previous state (a technique and an ambition central to Morrison’s work as a whole), while still expressing the

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‘fizz’ of youth, his fast, blurry life expressed as an impressionistic screenplay. Effectively, Morrison here interprets the world and his experience of it as visual text; his keen eye for the telling visual detail is clear.1 This piece seeks to investigate how his music’s visual appeal and perceptions of ‘Irishness’ have worked together in the way that music has been employed as a discourse within film. But immediately we have a puzzle: if we ask ourselves the question ‘how Irish is Van Morrison’s music?’ then the easy answer is, ‘not very’. The briefest listen reveals that his music is, broadly speaking, derived from the great American forms which have both shaped and dominated mainstream popular music without ever being quite fully part of it: jazz, blues, folk, country, and soul. Despite the undeniable importance of locality to his key themes (‘Cyprus Avenue’, ‘Coney Island’, ‘On Hyndford Street’ and more) the Irishness of his work has little or nothing to do with the surface details and structures we associate with Irish roots music. Although Morrison grew up in East Belfast, hearing and participating in traditional music (his first exposure to live music was via the McPeake Family, authors of ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ which Morrison later covered as ‘Purple Heather’), you will look long and hard for extensive excursions into the traditional Irish songbook or upfront use of traditional Irish arrangements and instrumentation. A mid-1980s link-up with Moving Hearts stalled after a promising start and, tin whistle overdubs aside, there was little ‘Celtic’ about the ‘Celtic New Year’ in 2005. Likewise, his one major sojourn into the traditional repertoire, Irish Heartbeat recorded with The Chieftains in 1988, is arguably something of an under-realised document. Yet his music is frequently used by filmmakers seeking to connote Irishness, and not just for their craft. So our question must be, how does this contested idea of ‘Irishness’ inform his music and how can we relate that to how his music has contributed to film? Arguably the bulk of visual applications of his music have not been specifically Irish in context but have been employed to introduce into the narratives the perceived values and the connotative 1

Brian Hinton, Celtic Crossroads (London: Sanctuary, 1997), p. 31. This section first debuted in Ritchie Yorke’s book on Van Morrison, Into The Music (London: Charisma Books, 1975), a work long out of print but distinctive in that the author had the co-operation of his subject. Here Morrison reflects upon the band’s time in Heidelberg in August 1963. Them played the chain of clubs all known as ‘The Storyville Club’ in Frankfurt, Heidelburg and Cologne, rather than the Hamburg of mythology. The extract was originally included in Morrison’s ‘Reliable Sources’ press pack in the early 1970s and also turns up in Clinton Heylin, Can You Feel The Silence: A New Biography (London: Penguin-Viking, 2002), p. 22.

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semiotic bundle via which Irishness is understood and deployed. This is alongside the notions of aesthetic and artistic value that a Van Morrison song brings to a film: alongside, say, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis certainly, The Beatles and The Who perhaps, the very presence of his music on a film’s soundtrack confers a kind of cultural capital upon the schema as a whole. What then do filmmakers think they are getting when they use Morrison’s work in their movies?2 As has been pointed out, Irish pop is perceived as somehow stylistically different from, say, American and British music.3 It embodies a mix of traditional and pop styles and, thereby, the naturalisation of ‘Irish’ as a style available within pop – vividly captured by The Corrs’ highly polished blend of 1990s pop and traditional values (perhaps best realised in their conspicuously after-Riverdance cover of Fleetwood Mac’s AOR standard ‘Dreams’, rendered via a modish backbeat and just enough tin whistle for the ‘Celtic Tiger’) and by Celine Dion’s theme song for Titanic, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ (a song written by two Americans, sung by a Swiss vocalist) in which the addition of ‘Irish’ musical textures delivers the highly marketable ‘Celtic’ ambience to the song, thereby echoing the stylised Irishness present in the film. The music stands for cultural integrity and authenticity, working-class heroism and survival, evidence of a culture surviving transplantation to the ‘New World’. It tells us that the Irish are the good guys. This piece will consider how Morrison’s music has been used in film as ‘mood’ or even ‘programme’ music, and how his specially commissioned work has functioned in relation to visualisations of specifically Irish contextualisation. It includes a brief comparative casestudy between Morrison’s music for Colin Gregg’s adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Lamb and Mark Knopfler’s score for Pat O’Connor’s film of another MacLaverty novel, Cal, alongside an analysis of Dagmar Hirtz’s 1994 movie Moondance which makes exclusive use of Morrison’s music, albeit not in its ‘original’ form. All three of these movies are set in Ireland, and the backdrop theme for this is a consideration of the idea of ‘Irishness’ as musically perceived and represented, connected with Morrison, as signifier or as aspiration. For an artist who has resisted the encroaching centrality of visualisation in the processes of marketing and understanding music (he 2

Morrison’s music has been licensed to innumerable movies; ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ alone has been used in over 40 films. 3 For example, Rob Strachan and Marion Leonard, ‘A Musical Nation: protection, investment and branding in the Irish music industry’, Irish Studies Review, 12, 1 (April, 2004), 39-49.

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refused to let the BBC film his set at Glastonbury 2005, for example) and one whom, it could be argued, has somewhat underwritten for cinema, Morrison has a perhaps surprisingly strong connection with the form. His music has been widely used in movies from Hollywood romantic comedies to the work of European auteurs and he certainly understands the power of the visualised mythology: in his tender part-lullaby, part elegy ‘Wild Children’ he namechecks Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando, alluding empathetically to On The Waterfront. Morrison’s work has been of particular interest to Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese. Wenders’ film debut, produced for West German TV, a 13 minute short entitled Drei Amerikanische Albumen (1969), makes use of three albums, these being by Harvey Mandel (of the group Canned Heat), Creedence Clearwater Revival and Morrison, namely Astral Weeks. In Morrison’s phrase, what’s wrong with this picture? Wim Wenders mistook this most Northern Irish, and in the very best possible sense, parochial album (like the work of Samuel Beckett it succeeds in combining the local and the universal in a most powerful and identifiably Irish way) for an American record. The first collaboration between Wenders and German poet-playwright Peter Handke, the film is a kind of road movie, recording travelling through West Germany to the accompaniment of the eponymous ‘American’ LP’s, providing a soundtrack to the ambiguous post-war landscapes of West Germany. The sense of exile whilst being at home, of something having been lost and of music being used to evoke a feeling, a mood, a once or future time of wholeness and connection, is strong. This, to some extent, can function as a working definition of the ambition of Irish song, depicting home, its rituals and habits from emotional, spiritual, and physical distances: home reimagined in exile. Thus the fracture and sense of loss we hear in this music in some sense makes it ‘Irish music’ even though it bears no resemblance to the formal structures of recognisably ‘Irish’ music as broadly (and indeed commercially) understood. Wenders alights upon this. The Astral Weeks segment shows a character examining the record sleeve commenting on how much they love the album, and the album’s final cut, the crazy-paving fractured ‘Slim Slow Slider’, begins to play. It is unclear whether this is diagetic or nondiagetic, and the scene cuts to images of West German industrial and agricultural landscapes. Delivering another twist, it might be noted that Morrison’s songs on Astral Weeks are indeed all songs of exile: this meditation on epiphanic moments of a Northern Irish childhood was

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recorded in New York, the artist being accompanied by American jazz musicians.4 Morrison and Wenders collaborated more directly for the director’s Wings of Desire. In the film’s opening sequence there is a hand transcribing characters, and a voice is heard languidly reciting a poem which periodically resurfaces throughout the narrative.5 This German text is the original of ‘Song Of Being A Child’ which emerged, beautifully and unexpectedly, on Morrison’s 1998 anthology, The Philosopher’s Stone: The Unreleased Tapes Vol. One. Written by the co-writer of the Wings of Desire screenplay, Peter Handke, the poem was recorded with musical accompaniment and, in Handke’s English translation, by Morrison alongside Northern Irish folk singer and actress June Boyce, who was in his band at that time; hers is the voice one can hear asking ‘did ye get healed?’ at the close of the song of that title.6 The piece did not make the movie cut, arguably because their mutually coaxing Ulster intonation lends this central European poem an unmistakable linguistic locale, so much so that it is progressively difficult to think of it as a ‘German’ text. Herein the listener feels and hears the transformative power of performance – Wenders told Bono of U2 in a 1998 interview reproduced on Wenders’ website that ‘I am becoming much more of a sound guy than an image guy – I want to do in film what Van Morrison does in music, blur the boundaries between what we see and what we hear, and appeal straight to the field of the imagination where senses are less distinct from each other.’7 In Emotion Pictures, Wenders included a short piece simply entitled ‘Van Morrison’ wherein, in June 1970, he attempted to encapsulate the correspondences he found between film and Morrison’s music: I can dare say that I know no other music that is clearer or more evident or more perceptible to all my senses than this one. Not just every now and again, no, for extended periods of experience this music gives you a 4

The musicians who accompanied Morrison on Astral Weeks were New York jazz players Jay Berliner (guitar), Connie Kay (drums), Warren Smith (percussion) and Richard Davis (double bass); strings and harpsichord were dubbed later by Larry Fallon. 5 Wings Of Desire [Der Himmel Uber Berlin] (dir. Wim Wenders, 1987). In the film the piece is voiced by actor Bruno Ganz who plays the angel Damiel, who falls in love with the mortal circus-performer played by Solveig Dammartin. Ganz’s performance as Hitler in Downfall [Der Untergang]) (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) has been highly praised. 6 Van Morrison, ‘Did Ye Get Healed?’ on Poetic Champions Compose (1987). 7 See Wim Wenders website http://www.wimwenders.com (accessed 17.6.2007).

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feeling and a notion what films could be like: perception [Wenders’ italics] that doesn’t always jump blindly at meanings and assertions but rather lets your senses extend further and further. Where something really becomes indescribable: the last shot of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach by Jean-Marie Straub.8

So Wenders sees Morrison’s music as an agent of understanding, an aid to perception as well as a description of the consequences of such extended perception, where the opening facilitates progress rather than a momentary glimpse which then is closed; the moment endures beyond its temporal span. Here there is something revealed about what Morrison’s music delivers to the visual context, above and beyond the structural confines of the medium. Morrison’s own personal appearances in film are limited: the journal extract referred to ‘My one and only film scene’, and that is a film which may have been called Glide, shot in Germany in 1962 in which he had a walk-on part as – reasonably enough – a sax-playing Irish teenager. Morrison was apparently chosen because of his red hair, which would communicate his Irish ‘otherness’ to the German audience without him having to speak a line. No prints of this movie have ever surfaced and, rather like Bob Dylan’s oddly near-contemporaneous appearance in a play, ‘The Madhouse on Castle Street’ for the BBC in 1963, we might now have to assume that it is lost.9 It was not until 1976 that Morrison made an appearance in a film – The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film of The Band’s farewell concert at The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel, in particular, had welcomed Morrison to Woodstock in the early 1970s and gave him the enduring nickname ‘The Belfast Cowboy’.10 Here, eight years on from Astral Weeks, Morrison performed a career-restarting ‘Caravan’ but also opened with ‘Tura Lura Lura (That’s An Irish Lullaby)’, at the suggestion of Robertson and Manuel, which did not make the movie edit but appeared 8

Wim Wenders, ‘Van Morrison’, in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Shaun Whiteside with Michael Hoffman (London: Faber, 1989), pp. 52-4. 9 ‘Glide’ was remembered by Morrison’s late father George Snr. as the title of his son’s first movie role. No prints have ever surfaced. Dylan’s appearance in ‘The Madhouse on Castle Street’ was the subject of a BBC documentary, ‘Dylan In The Madhouse’, first broadcast on BBC4 in September 2005. 10 The Band ‘4% Pantomime’ on Cahoots Capitol/EMI 1971 (Robertson/Morrison). The nickname both stemmed from and inspired the lyric in this song, ‘Oh Belfast Cowboy, lay your cards on the table’. The song, a loose semi-improvisation, was written by Morrison and Robbie Robertson, and sung by Morrison and Richard Manuel.

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on the triple OST album. ‘Tura Lura Lura’, a traditional Irish number, sounds wholly un-Irish in this arrangement: Morrison takes the verses, Manuel the choruses, and it is played like a slow-burn soul-blues number, after Ray Charles and Otis Redding, heavily emphasising Manuel’s swirling organ, fat horns, vocals testifying in a soul-shout. Morrison’s repetitions of the title phrase are those of ‘babybabybaby’, alongside vocal interjections familiar from his original material and indeed from the discourses of blues and soul. Thus this version of the ‘Trad’ song effectively represents a reinvention of both the song itself and a working toward a different signifier of Irishness: close perhaps to Morrison’s cherished notion of ‘Caledonia Soul Music’. According to Robertson, however, Morrison saw the Irish element as less than mystic or intoxicating; characteristically claiming credit for the idea to play this song with Morrison, Robertson recalls that when the idea was suggested to him, Morrison’s response was ‘And then you want me to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”’?’11 Both comic and guarded, this response demonstrates how one man’s roots tradition is another man’s cultural burden and borderline laughing stock. Morrison was later to describe the discovery that, as he put it, ‘I belonged to my own tradition, that I was an Irish writer’ as being akin to ‘being hit over the head with a baseball bat’.12 In 1976 he was still some way from viewing his roots in such a light. The brief yet revelatory effect of The Band on pop was their deliberate musical and stylistic references to ‘roots’ via their new yet ancient American music which was co-developed with and a profound influence upon Bob Dylan, a relationship charted by Greil Marcus in his book Invisible Republic.13 In the late-1960s this was the prevailing mood amongst the key influences of Morrison’s peer group, yet for Morrison the need to break with tradition was at least part of why he had fled into exile in America in 1966. What was ‘rootsy’ about Irish music to The Band was what Morrison wanted to slough off, to some extent. It is worth noting that the real roots expert in The Band was keyboards man Richard Manuel, and, anecdotally at least, it was he to whom Morrison was closest. Whoever instigated the song for The Last Waltz, Morrison was not entirely at ease in being cast as ‘the Irishman’. 11

Robbie Robertson interview with VH-1 re: The Last Waltz, archived at http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/reviews/lastwaltz.html (accessed 17.6.2007). 12 Provided in A Coney Island of the Mind for Channel Four 1989 (exec. producer Tony Boland, ed./dir. Peter Lynden, Tom Tyrwhitt. Broadcast on Channel 4, February 1990). 13 G. Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (London: Picador, 1997).

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Scorsese and Morrison linked up again for the soundtrack to the director’s extraordinary 1983 movie The King of Comedy. Morrison delivered a freshened up version of a song originally written and recorded in 1973, ‘Wonderful Remark’, which played over the closing titles.14 Despite little direct correspondence with the details of the movie, the mood of the song resonates with the melancholic conclusion of the narrative; an apparently happy ending which, once considered, is a shocking refusal of such a thing: wickedness seems to triumph in the success of Rupert Pupkin, played by Robert De Niro. Morrison’s song therefore both illuminates and reinforces the quality of moral fabulation within the tale. Scorsese later directed the idealised heroics of the Irish diaspora – via the discourse of the mytholigisation of ‘the West’ – in The Gangs of New York, and asked Morrison to contribute the theme song. When Morrison demurred, he turned to U2, an act more closely associated with Wenders, who aspire to carry that weight of cultural and moral authority which Morrison, less determinedly, also bears. They have also, like Morrison, steered clear of the formal dynamics of Irish music, while incorporating the associated cultural ambience of that discourse, that understanding of ‘Irishness’ which both grants and denies special status. This particular form of Irishness is locked tightly into commodification; post-Riverdance, it can be read as a flamboyant purloining of tradition which also appears as an innovative refreshment of it. In 1982 Morrison was entering a phase in which his records were less dominated by vocal and blues modes, exploring instead more ambient, instrumentally based models. At this time he gave interviews suggesting that he planned to ‘retire’ from the album/tour/album cycle of the popular music industry and henceforward compose exclusively for film. While he did indeed begin to direct his music toward someone else’s visuals, what he actually did was to refashion the way he took his music on the road and the way he delivered it; some years in advance of Bob Dylan’s ‘Never Ending Tour’, Morrison decided to play where and when it suited him. So despite never quite abandoning his job description as ‘rock star’ he did undertake a number of commissions to write for film. An example which will be considered later is Colin Gregg’s adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Lamb, where the main theme was handed over to and ‘developed’ by Bill Whelan when the more traditional commitments of Morrison’s job took precedence. Firstly, though, it is worth briefly considering his 1994 score for Beyond The Clouds, directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and produced by Wenders. This is a more 14

‘Wonderful Remark’ on King of Comedy OST 1983; 1973 version on The Philosopher’s Stone (1998).

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substantial work but arguably still slight: here instrumental versions of ‘Fire In The Belly’ from The Healing Game and ‘Queen Of The Slipstream’ from Poetic Champions Compose are heard, alongside his latter-day standard ‘Have I Told You Lately’ and, importantly, hints of his ‘signature motif’ during the somewhat unsettling ‘seduction’ scene between John Malkovich’s typically dispassionate stalker and Sophie Marceau’s equally recognisable existential beauty. This signature 7-note motif first emerged on the 1983 original recording of the song ‘Irish Heartbeat’, and this song is in itself a very rare explicit nod to Irishness, musical and personal, in Morrison’s catalogue. It might be noted, however, that the lyric is left unspecific enough for the song to have entered the folk repertoire in the broadest sense – the only mention of Irishness is in its title, not the lyric. Morrison delivers the riff to the Beyond The Clouds score via his distinctive, impressionistic method (borrowed to some extent from Stan Getz) of blowing as much around the note as on it, blurring the acoustic distinctions between the individual notes, yielding instead a sensuous rain-mist of fluting, ambient tones delivering a sound with a strongly visual, almost physical presence. This sound, heard to good advantage at the opening of Morrison’s 1983 instrumental track ‘Celtic Swing’, is almost all breathing above, around and beneath the note, with the note at the centre, a kernel of essential sound, spinning yet also the still sonic centrepoint. This sound, and the signature riff, clearly signifies and realises – perhaps even visualises – the ‘Celtic’or ‘Irishness’ at some level for Morrison. This is developed in the music he provided for RTÉ’s ‘The Schooner’. The film was directed by Bill Miskelly, an adaptation of Northern Irish writer and teacher Michael McLaverty’s short story of that title in 1983 and broadcast by RTÉ on Boxing Day of that year: no copy now exists as RTÉ saw fit to wipe the tape.15 The music survives, however, as a lo-fi copy, recorded to cassette via open mike from a domestic television set, which circulates amongst Morrison collectors. The marks and shapes of much of Morrison’s work and his interests in certain sound shapes at this stage (1982/3) are clear: piano, synthesiser and sax. These were the colours of his palette at this time, and the music has clear connections to released tracks such as ‘Scandinavia’, ‘Celtic Swing’ and ‘Rave On John Donne’. The co-operation between melancholy and magic to be found in ‘ordinary life’ is a central tenet of the story and Morrison’s interest in how 15

See Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema in Ireland (London: Routledge, 1988) pp. 134-5. Original story ‘The Schooner’, in Michael McLaverty, Collected Short Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1978), pp. 250-67. The Schooner was broadcast by RTÉ on 26 December 1983.

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the world might be transformed by musical descriptions and evocations of it echoes the emotional terrain and cultural ambience of this film and narrative. As the journal entry suggested, Morrison has a cinematic eye which is distinctively Irish without necessarily displaying the widely understood connotative signifiers of ‘Irishness’. When asked in 1984 about his Irishness he was unusually candid: ‘There’s a big part of me that’s strictly involved with the island of Ireland . . . I’m a citizen of Europe and America but I belong, specifically, to Ulster.’16 Dagmar Hirtz’s film Moondance, based on Australian-Irish novelist Francis Stuart’s 1932 novel The White Hare,17 makes extensive use of Morrison’s music in a specifically (Southern) Irish context, yet one which is left unspecified: the viewer enters a rural, benignly anarchic idyll, a kind of Never Never Land, where two brothers Patrick and Dominic live together in a ‘big house’, seemingly abandoned by their bohemian mother. Adults are absent. Into this idyll comes a beautiful vision, a stranger in the shape of 18 year old Anya, a German student who, ironically, comes to teach the boys how to write English. In exchange they teach her how to live in this landscape, delivering an education of the soul and spirit rather than of the mind. Inevitably Anya soon ‘goes native’: the ebb and flow of love between the three provides the dynamic of the narrative. The mother returns and the three move to Dublin, represented as a place of enclosure, of gloom and of depression; of drink, violence and failing relationships. Thus the film becomes a kind of embodiment of the twin natures of Irish experience expressed musically, the traditional music of the rural landscape and the darker musics of the urban centres, delivering contested versions of Irish self-identification, connected yet polarised. ‘Moondance’ is, of course, one of Morrison’s best known compositions and provides the dominant musical theme in this film, arranged as a jig, an orchestral ‘romance’ version, and as a vocal duet between Brian Kennedy and the composer’s daughter Shana Morrison. In the jig version, arranger Fiachra Trench superbly reimagines (or rediscovers) this piece of would-be Sinatra as a fundamentally Irish piece of writing; the hitherto undisclosed Irish taproot of the melody and rhythm is thereby revealed. It plays under the opening titles and later accompanies the moment of highest delight for Patrick, Dominic and Anya’s private idyll; they are illuminated on a mountain top overlooking an extravagantly beautiful lake. In their moment of epiphanic reverie, they dance to the ‘Moondance’ jig version, yet it is playing non-diagetically, suggesting that 16 Extracted from Bill Flanagan, Written In My Soul: Rock’s Great Songwriters Talk about Creating their Music (New York: Contemporary, 1984), pp. 373-84. 17 Francis Stuart, The White Hare (New York & London: Macmillan, 1932).

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this music is both the rhythm of the life they are living, and of the landscape they inhabit. Their internal rhythms and emotional topographies are in concord with the outer world: they are completely in harmony with their environment. Like ‘Coney Island’s abrupt closure (ending directly after the line ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’), it seems that there is nowhere for them or the narrative to go beyond this sense of completeness. This idyll is indeed fractured when their mother, played by Marianne Faithfull, returns unannounced early the next morning, finding the three collapsed on a single, chaste mattress. ‘Madame George’ is the mother’s theme; when she arrives to disturb the idyll, it starts up, and the endtitles are accompanied by Faithfull’s version of the song. ‘Have I Told You Lately’, sung by Brian Kennedy, is used for the first full physical encounter between Patrick and Anya. Dominic is an accidental witness to the event and this leads to dreadful consequences later in the film, as he responds to the presence of place that is being considered here. He returns from Dublin and burns down the hut where he saw the couple making love. Anya’s theme is ‘Queen of the Slipstream’, possibly Morrison’s greatest love song; it strikes up as she appears for the first time and accompanies her as closely as ‘Moon River’ cleaved to Holly Golightly, and this spell is finally broken only during her chastely erotic betrayal of Patrick with Dominic – the song is playing as they caress each other and is brutally truncated as Patrick returns unexpectedly. Irish landscapes provide the backdrop for the narrative but also profoundly influence it, and Morrison’s music is indexed as the emotional pulse of this terrain throughout. Indeed, the film begins with images of belonging, the wild children navigating thoughtlessly through their rural paradise to the strains of the jig version of ‘Moondance’ itself, and closes to the jaded urban langour of Marianne Faithfull’s version of ‘Madame George’ matched to images of liminality, departure and exile at Dublin docks.18

Cal and Lamb Mark Knopfler’s score for Cal, he has commented, was related to the Irish folk songs learned in folk clubs round the north of England while he was holding down a day job as reporter for Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds in the mid-1970s. He claims that ‘the Irish style was easy for me to get into; it reminded me of the miners’ songs of the North East, such as ‘The Coaly Tyne’, so when they asked me to write for ‘Cal’ I read the 18

All the songs featured in the movie appear on the 1994 Van Morrison ‘tribute’ album, No Prima Donna.

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book, met Bernard and just followed it from there’.19 There is here an impressive level of conscientiousness in preparation, making ready and suiting the work to its purpose. There is a very conscious Irish styling to the score, shaped in the same way as he produced the scores for Local Hero and Last Exit To Brooklyn with their subtly suggested Scottish and American musical traditions. So the score comes from a starting point of working from outside traditions which the score is seeking to evoke. In the film, Knopfler plays alone, while the OST album presents Dire Straits, Pick Withers and all. Knopfler’s main theme accompanies the film’s first image, offering a form of stylised Irish cinematic lyricism in itself, a scene which offers the grand stillness and silence of the Irish landscape as metaphor of problematic continuity, the clouds suspended threateningly over human affairs represented by the small moving dot (in a perhaps accidental echo of Omar Sharif’s arrival across the desert in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia). This figure reveals itself to be a priest, who parks his bicycle and hammers into an ancient tree a battered tin plate bearing the legend ‘The wages of sin is death’ upon it. This cuts to the slaughter of the innocents, to the abattoir where the protagonist Cal works. Knopfler’s lilting, romanticised music is obliterated by the punch of the electrical stun gun. Van Morrison ghosts through this film as a feature of cultural life: John Lynch as Cal hum-sings ‘Moondance’ as he is dressing and making ready for his first date with Helen Mirren, who plays the widow of the Royal Ulster Constabulary officer in whose killing Cal was involved; this tension between the ideological and human pursuit provides a substantial part of the emotional torque of the drama. As a penumbral signifier, the grafitti legend ‘Van the Man’ is seen in the background at a Falls Road checkpoint, defiant against the metallic greyness and procedure, against the lack of warmth, a reminder of the world beyond, which once again evokes Morrison’s ‘Coney Island’ and its wished-for Eden, pre-Fall, an eternal ‘now’ of contentment: ‘wouldn’t it be great if it were like this all the time?’ This is a startlingly human and humane wish: this phrase was used as the slogan for the Peace Process in 1994/5 as part of a television campaign to which Morrison licensed his music for free; the phrase also appeared around Northern Ireland on posters. ‘Days Like This’ was also taken up for use in the Peace Process. Indeed, it seemed that his lack of specific engagement with the politics of the North, that has sometimes garnered him criticism, freed the music to symbolise a Northern Irish identity and a mode of living above and beyond ‘the Troubles’. Stiff Little 19

Mark Knopfler interviewed by Robin Denselow, in Guitars & Claviers (Paris), 173 (April, 1996).

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Fingers’ music employed anger, rage and energy to convey their love and loathing of Northern Ireland, and their search for an ‘Alternative Ulster’: Morrison arguably imagined into being that ‘alternative’ in pieces such as ‘Coney Island’ and ‘Orangefield’. Morrison’s music was central to the PR exercises surrounding the mid-1990s Peace Process; he played (or, it must be noted, mimed) ‘Days Like This’ outside Belfast City Hall prior to Bill Clinton’s appearance on 30 November 1995.20 So, for a figure that was seemingly at a deliberate remove from the ‘real’ life of the Six Counties, he was increasingly seen as the embodiment of all that was seen to be the virtues above and beyond the international perception of the place. That his music reimagined Northern Ireland as a place free of the troubles was a model for the ‘real’ place to break free of that ‘reality’: rather like James Joyce’s impact on Dublin (the city is to some extent slowly transforming into Joyce’s reimagined version of itself), the music of Van Morrison has been employed to effect an evolving transformation of the country. Morrison’s music for Lamb is sparse in contrast to Knopfler’s generous album’s worth of material for Cal. The main theme has some tangential reference to Irish musical signifiers, but unusually for the time is realised by synthetic means; the theme is delivered by a near-ambient evocation of notes rather than distinct musical pulses. The synthetic yet organic sound is clearly redolent of Morrison’s musical interests at this time: his albums Beautiful Vision (1982) and Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1983) both make use of these misty textures. For all its sketchiness, the theme meets its purpose: the film opens with shots of Atlantic rollers breaking on an empty beach; an uneasy idyll broken by a startling shot of a figure (Liam Neeson) breaking the waves from beneath, shooting up out of the surf, wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of a boy child. Morrison’s music provides both the murmur of the ocean and also the sense of unease – the sense that something about which we should be querulous is about to happen. The use of the Joycean device of the end being in the beginning of the narrative reveals that it has. Morrison delivered the main thematic model via fragments of material to the producers and Bill Whelan ‘developed’ it. In fact, several people who know about Morrison’s working methods were not surprised by this blowing hot and cold; the editor of Wavelength, Simon Gee, observed that he ‘hasn’t got the patience’ to write a full score.21 The film was the first key role for Liam Neeson, born in Ballymena. Neeson and Morrison stayed in touch after 20

Clinton wanted to gig with him, as he had with both Fleetwood Mac and Vaclav Havel, but was advised against it. The Northern Ireland office chose to use Morrison’s songs in the Peace Campaign in this manner. 21 e-mail from Simon Gee to the author, dated 12 June 2004.

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this project and Neeson declaimed a version of ‘Coney Island’ on the 1994 Morrison tribute album, No Prima Donna, perhaps the only tribute album produced, compiled and arranged by the artist to whom tribute was being paid. Neeson also sang backing vocals on the Morrison/Chieftains version of ‘Shenandoah’. This version of the American traditional song bettered their Irish Heartbeat material and was the end theme for the 1998 PBS TV series about Irish-American emigration, The Irish In America: Long Journey Home; yet this recording, like his music for Lamb, makes no deliberate or easily decoded reference to traditional Irish music. Does the self-conscious ‘Irishness’ of the chords, progressions and instrumentation of Knopfler’s theme make it more ‘Irish’ than Morrison’s? Morrison’s observation about being actively involved in the island of Ireland is relevant here; while his music does not wear its green explicitly, it might be argued that rather than giving a window into a received tradition (exquisite as it might be, as with Knopfler) Morrison’s music, and the cinematic lyricism that drives it, is actually the growing point of that tradition, the point at which tradition becomes innovation, and the point at which real discoveries are being made and real connections between hitherto separated musical discourses are born. It can be suggested that this is Morrison’s problem and virtue, that he somehow works at the seam yielding the idea which is simultaneously firmly grasped yet which remains evasive – he sees it feelingly, as he presses on, into the misty. So, what can be made of Morrison’s complex relationship to his own Irishness? The films which have taken Morrison as their subject have begun brightly in hope of investigating this ‘Irishness’ via documentary content but the balance has always been settled in favour of performance footage. Van Morrison in Ireland, Mike Radford’s film of the singer’s return to the Irish concert stage in Belfast and Dublin in Summer 1979, seems to encapsulate Morrison’s ambiguity towards such acts of definition. Cut into a performance of ‘St Dominic’s Preview’ are shots of Morrison and long-time sideman Herbie Armstrong22 hurrying through the .

22

Herbie Armstrong was on the Belfast scene at the same time as Morrison in the early 1960s and played with one of the incarnations of Them. He achieved UK pop success in the early 1970s as a member of the group Fox, alongside Kenny Young (co-author of ‘Under The Boardwalk’) and Noosha Fox. He later rejoined Morrison’s coterie, appearing on Wavelength (1978), Into The Music (1979), Common One (1980) and Beautiful Vision (1982). He recorded a Morrisonproduced single of ‘Real Real Gone’ in 1982, virtually indistinguishable from Morrison’s demo of the song, which was finally issued in 1998 on The

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streets of Dublin in August 1979, turning a few heads, in search of a café or bar. As Armstrong orders for them, seated at a table at the café in the Shelborne Hotel, Morrison turns momentarily to the camera and gives it a superbly contemptuous blank look, yet one pregnant with meaning: ‘You’re going to film THIS?’ The film contains, frustratingly, no conversation with its subject, but Radford did persuade Morrison to walk down Cyprus Avenue, across Orangefield and to be driven down Hyndford Street whilst being filmed.23 This periodic urge to return to these locales frequently informs his work to the present day. The lyric of ‘Celtic New Year’ (2005) begins with a sweet piece of Belfast parlance (‘If I don’t see you through the week, I’ll see you through the window’), and there is a tin whistle at the coda to signify an ambient Irish context at least, but the place names in the song are American and furthermore refer to locations closely and unmistakably associated with American music: Louisiana and Bourbon Street in New Orleans.24 Performances of the song in 2005 changed the line ‘when I’m down on Bourbon Street’ to ‘when we get back to Bourbon Street’, alongside dedications of the song to the late George Best, referred to by Morrison as ‘my Homeboy’. It is the sense of ambiguously pursued resolution, for a return home. This places the performance in the tradition of home reimagined through exile which characterises this cinematic lyricism. Morrison’s production company is not idly called Exile. Yet he resists definitive gestures toward dynamics of community ownership, too: he fought, and failed, to prevent the Belfast Blues Society placing a small brass plaque on his childhood home at 125 Hyndford Street, East Belfast, citing ‘invasion of privacy’. Occasionally he returns to the area, simply to reconnect observing that, ‘It’s called healing through the past . . . I don’t yearn for it but you sort of have to go back and find out where you are.’25 More recently, he met a request to use his likeness alongside those of George Best and C. S. Lewis in a campaign of desectarianisation of street murals in Belfast with similar suspicion: Northern Ireland’s political street art is one of the main tourist attractions for visitors to its principal cities of Belfast and Londonderry. Now there are moves to change the face of some of east Belfast’s loyalist paramilitary inspired art into softer canvasses. The new emphasis will be on celebrating

Philosopher’s Stone. Morrison re-recorded the song in an inferior version for his 1990 album Enlightenment. 23 Van Morrison in Ireland (dir. Mike Radford 1979). 24 ‘Celtic New Year’ from Magic Time (2005). 25 Entertainment Weekly, 369 (7 March 1997).

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the achievements in sport, literature or music of the ‘sons of Ulster’ rather than the dogs of war. Among the new images are paintings of soccer legend George Best and the children’s writer C. S. Lewis. Belfast born singer Van Morrison is understood to have turned down a request to feature his face on a mural.26

In conclusion, it might be argued that Morrison understands full well his connection to the traditions which bred both him and his music, but refuses to be hidebound or defined by them, or the cultural expectations which flow from an acceptance of them. He thereby discovers, or even creates, fresh expressions and form of that ancient identity by permitting tradition and innovation to run as parallel streams through the flow of his work. Wherever he is, he is always actively, and strictly, involved in the island of Ireland.

26

Story from BBC News website, 31 May 2005. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news.

CHAPTER NINE ‘IRELAND’S CONTROVERSIAL ICON’: A STUDY OF THE WORK OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR TONY PURVIS

Her music and conduct have raised more provocative issues than most rock-and-roll performers do in their entire careers. How do folk-tinged ballads top the charts in these dance-heavy times? How does anyone become a superstar with intentionally insular music? How does a bald woman become a sex symbol?1 Despite the lamentations of those who see the changes in Ireland as the erosion of a strong identity and a vibrant culture, they could not be more wrong. In the first instance, the Irish identity being ‘lost’ was synthetic. Supported by the institutions of government and Church with censorship and shame, Irish identity and culture were a post-colonial product within the Republic.2

O’Connor’s complex Irish melodies The observations which preface this chapter are all the more interesting because Jimmy Guterman, Sinéad O’Connor’s biographer, says very little about Ireland, the Irish, and Irishness. Moreover, the references to sex and gender are in relation to O’Connor’s so-called status as a ‘bald’ sex symbol. Yet Ireland and gender are probably the key determining discourses in her life and work. Indeed, it is media constructions of Irishness and gender which have made O’Connor seem ‘provocative’ and which have created the ‘issues’ to which Guterman alludes. Why might 1

Jimmy Guterman, Sinéad: Her Life and Music (New York: Warner, 1991), p. vii. R. B. Finnegan and E. T. McCarron, Ireland: Historical Echoes, Contemporary Politics (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 2000), p. 406 2

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Guterman and O’Connor’s other early biographer, Dermott Hayes,3 not probe in more detail the ‘Irish question’ at the centre of O’Connor’s output? There is, of course, much to attest O’Connor’s Irish identity; and her Irishness is well documented in the popular media. However, O’Connor’s is an Irishness which is more than a simple espousal of a national identity bequeathed on the basis of her geographical place of birth. Rather, hers is an identity which is both ‘narrated’ and ‘narrativised’,4 grounded in historical and discursive contexts,5 and which is, as Ien Ang suggests, more generally of the construction of nations, an Irishness which exposes the political, religious, musical and literary dimensions of Ireland at the same time as it articulates the culturally contested statuses of gender, sexuality and social class.6 Every experience of movement and change in nations is, as Ang notes, an experience of the problem of public and personal ‘representation’ which is also, complexly, a moment of cultural reconstruction as well as a moment of misrepresentation. For Ang, and as exemplified in the life and work of a singer such as O’Connor, the anxiety of identity and of knowing what to say, is also a spatial anxiety, of knowing which words, myths and rituals to endorse in order that a culture and community might be recognised. It is this personal and cultural complexity – or the hybrid and synthetic nature of identity in the words of R. B. Finnegan and E. T. McCarron above – which the media has failed to deconstruct in its politicisation of O’Connor, and it is a complexity which Guterman and Hayes do not really tackle. Indeed, in drawing on the many traditions which have served to inform and structure contemporary myths of Ireland and Irishness, O’Connor’s biography proves a fascinating case study in the on-going demythologisation of Ireland itself. At the same time, Ireland is re- and demythologised in O’Connor’s own output, particularly in those songs and ballads which mourn and lament an Ireland that has passed or fragmented. In the album She who dwells . . . O’Connor sings of an Ireland that has shifted, changed, and been reshaped.7 The songs mourn a past yet they imagine a future. O’Connor is tied to the past of Ireland and Irishness but one similar to its imagined futures, so the definitions of the reshaped 3

Dermott Hayes, Sinéad O’Connor: So Different (London: Omnibus Press, 1991). See Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction’ and ‘DissemiNation’, in H. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-7, 291-322. 5 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). 6 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 7 Sinéad O’Connor, She who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty (Hummingbird Records, 2003). 4

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Ireland are incomplete. In the way that O’Connor is tied to Ireland, so Ireland is tied to her, though neither O’Connor nor Ireland is reducible to any one representation. It is such complexity which the media is unable fully to control, and it is this complexity which is articulated in her musical output, discussed later in the piece. In many ways it is the music and lyrics which afford O’Connor a degree of agency and self-determination. Yet it is the media which facilitates our access to her and her work. Moreover, audiences’ knowledge of O’Connor’s identity is often formed on the basis of mass media representations. Her Irishness is also something which the popular media has been quick to both over-determine and exploit in its constructions of O’Connor. She is variously constructed as an (Irish) hysteric, an eccentric, as someone who tells lies and who cannot be trusted. Her Irishness is not the kind imagined by Dana, the Nolans, or U2, yet neither does O’Connor wholly repudiate their work. Nonetheless, she is an Irishwoman who is an ordained priest; she is a figure who has campaigned against warfare and global capitalism; and she is a woman who has herself relied on the mass media in order that her message be heard. It is in the context of a mesh of mass media representations of O’Connor and Ireland that both the woman, as well her own representations of Ireland and Irishness, can be understood. What of these media representations? Do we detect in them and her work a representation of or a reflection on the cause of Ireland? Certainly, O’Connor is someone who has been singled out as having a positive relation to the exportation of Irish culture to the world.8 So how has O’Connor appropriated the popular myths and images of Ireland’s culture in her own output? Does O’Connor anticipate or imagine the new times of Ireland’s future, or is hers a rendition which mourns the fading icons of an Ireland that is now gone? Guterman’s observations which preface this chapter also point to the controversy which continues to surround O’Connor, and those of Finnegan and McCarron point to the complexity which is Ireland. This chapter, then, will examine the ways in which a supposedly controversial icon of Ireland’s popular culture has appropriated the myths of Ireland and Irishness in order to intervene in both its traumatic past and its current modernity, as well as to anticipate its future. But O’Connor’s popularity, the media representations, and audience consumption of these representations are not without an attendant cultural politics associated with the complexity which is Ireland itself. The production and 8

Finnegan and McCarron, Ireland, pp. 391-3.

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consumption of her work has since the beginning always been an intervention in Irish culture, constituting an active negotiation of Ireland’s social spaces rather than a passive absorption in their power. On the one hand, O’Connor dismisses the band U2 as not sufficiently political. On the other hand, she endorses the often apolitical work of Van Morrison. It is by provoking U2’s and invoking Morrison’s own appropriations of Irishness that O’Connor is able to make an intervention in the culture. Indeed, it is in the words and music of Ireland’s past that O’Connor finds material to creatively challenge ‘Ireland’. But hers is a reverse-discourse, in the sense that Michel Foucault formulates this construction,9 and it acknowledges that any interrogation can only occur on the basis of an intricate genealogy which itself sustains on-going interventions in the culture. The narratives and icons of O’Connor’s own past, both mainstream and alternative, popular and canonical, are the resources which enable her to enlarge how Ireland’s culture and history are rendered to a global audience. Her performances are rendered in ways which ultimately serve to enrich the cultural memories which (de)construct Ireland.10 A 2003 DVD of O’Connor’s work incorporates two important live performances, one at the Dominion Theatre in London (June, 1988: The Value of Ignorance), and the other at Forest National in Brussels (October, 1990: The Year of the Horse). Here, O’Connor blends the behaviour and language of social protest and anger with gestures which register a melancholic sadness. O’Connor is gentle and serene, anxious and obsessive. She mixes traditional sounds and lyrics with material which screams its urban and post-modern angoisse. In performances which are reminiscent of Ireland’s women caoineadh (keening),11 these mixtures, nonetheless, reflect a healthy tension at the core of her work which brings together the old and the new. These tensions are, as Elizabeth Cullingford has argued, central in all discussion concerning Ireland, tradition, and modernity. 12 Musician and folklorist Mick Maloney comments more generally that this blending 9

Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1884, ed. J. D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002); see especially ‘Governmentality’, pp. 201-22; ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 326-48; ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, pp. 403-17. 10 For example, see the DVD Sinéad O’Connor Live (Chrysalis Records, 2003). 11 See Angela Bourke, ‘The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 2 (1988), 287-91; Angela Partridge, ‘Wild Men and Wailing Women’, Eigse, 18, 1 (1980), 25-37. 12 Elizabeth Cullingford, ‘Virgins and Mothers: Sinéad O’Connor, Neil Jordan, and The Butcher Boy’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15, 1 (2002), 185-210.

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of the old and new in much contemporary Irish music ‘involves taking responsibility for the future and also being respectful of the past. It is a truly humble act but also a supremely assertive one.’13

De-facing O’Connor and Ireland It is the assertive side of O’Connor’s work which has often been singled out in news reports and tabloid columns. In the media representations, O’Connor has been figured as an icon of rebellion, of hope, of pleasure, of a future yet to come. Her music and her concerts imagine new ways of living a future. The music press and the many internet articles regularly represent O’Connor in terms of anger and rage, though they often fail to document O’Connor’s own agency in her actions and music. She has stated that ‘I know that I have done many things/To give you reason not to listen to me/ . . . Words can't express how sorry I am.’14 They also represent her as saint, as goddess, and as beacon of Ireland’s women, someone who disrupts boundaries. These are representations which repel as much as they attract audiences. Appearances on American chat shows, Ireland’s The Late Late Show, and interviews with Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross in England, have sought to confirm O’Connor’s pessimism and irritability. Elizabeth Cullingford has suggested that as a result of ‘her transgressive performance on Saturday Night Live, O’Connor’s record sales dropped and her career faltered: she became a virtual pariah in the music world’.15 She claims to have been abused as a child and ‘turned her private trauma into a national crusade’.16 But her music sings another story, providing a much richer sense of an Ireland yet to come, one which nonetheless draws on the materiality of a past whose mourning actively serves to re-signify new myths and which re-imagines different icons. Before examining the ways in which her music articulates alternative ways of performing Irishness, it is important to explore how the media has actually constructed O’Connor. Much of the mass media representation depicts her as pathological, obsessional, neurotic or psychotic and, in 13

Mick Moloney, ‘Old Airs and New: From Reels to Riverdance’, in Michael Coffey (ed.), The Irish in America (New York: Hyperion, 1997), p. 188. 14 Sinéad O’Connor, ‘The Lamb’s Book of Life’ from the CD Faith and Courage (Atlantic/Wea, 2000). See also C. J. Farley, ‘Sinéad Keeps The Faith’, Time Magazine, 12 June 2000, and provided in http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,997146-2,00.html (accessed 7 March 2007). 15 Cullingford, ‘Virgins and Mothers’, 192. 16 Ibid., 189.

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many ways, her gender and her ‘Irishness’ are evoked in stereotypical ways that intensify her pathologisation. In September 2004, Canadian Chartattack.com covered O’Connor in the following ways: Sinead O’Connor is in the news again — for asking the press to keep her out of the news. The Irish singer took out a full-page ad in an Irish newspaper this week begging the press to stop portraying her as an erratic wingnut. The ad consisted of a 2,000 word essay in which O’Connor complained of unfair treatment and once again reminded the world that she was abused as a child. ‘If ye all think I am such a crazy person, why do ye use me to sell your papers?’ O’Connor wrote. ‘Please, I just want to be a little old lady now and not be all controversial and not be bashed and called crazy and laughed at when I open my mouth to sing or speak.’ To be fair to the press, O’Connor had her share of boneheaded moments over the past couple decades. Since her recording career began with 1987’s ‘The Lion And The Cobra’, O’Connor has publicly defended the IRA, dissed U2 (who helped her get her start), refused to have the American national anthem played at her concerts (causing Frank Sinatra to threaten to ‘kick her ass’), ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, broke down in tears at a Bob Dylan tribute concert. And this was all before she was 30 years old. In the last decade O’Connor has been considerably less high-profile, but she’s been up to plenty of hijinx. In 1999 she was ordained a Catholic priest and changed her name to Mother Bernadette Mary, but turned in her collar after she realized that she didn’t have it in her to stay true to her vow of celibacy. In 2000 she declared herself a lesbian, only to marry a dude a year later. Finally, she boldly declared her retirement from music last year [2003] but few actually believed her. O’Connor most recently made the Irish news last week when she appeared on the radio to talk about her involvement in a campaign to eradicate childhood head lice. Although head lice is a major problem for Irish children, she was largely ridiculed by the Irish press.17

Newspaper articles similarly describe O’Connor’s naivety, her immaturity, and vulnerability. Ireland’s Evening Herald columnist Mary Glennon writing in the 1990s suggested that Every few years a new Sinéad seems to emerge . . . Which is the real one? Is she just a silly, ill-educated young girl who does her belated growing up very publicly? Or is she a very mixed up person emotionally who is being manipulated by business people far cleverer than she in the ways of the

17

http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2004/09/2407.cfm (accessed 7 March 2007)

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The internet news article, and the comments of Glennon, synopsise something of how O’Connor’s Irishness is understood by the media. They also bring together the rhetoric which has been used to structure much of the positive and negative reporting of O’Connor herself. Perhaps two of the images which stand out here, and which have also been prominent features of much of O’Connor’s media and photographic representation,19 are the allusions to mental health on the one hand, and ‘erratic’ behaviour on the other. Mental ill-health and behaviour disorders are associated more generally with women who have resisted dominant forms of gender construction and differentiation. Women visionaries and mystics, women politicians, and women in public life generally have been structured in relation to a figural logic whereby the woman is discursively and thus socially disempowered from the start. It is such feminine disempowerment that Neil Jordan has also considered in his films Michael Collins (1996), and The Butcher Boy (1997), both of which critique the idealisation of women in Ireland under the rule of Eamon de Valera. Women and images of women rarely serve to represent the nation (the Colleen is a well-known exception in the Irish context), despite the feminisation of space using terms such as ‘motherland’.20 Jordan’s films show how such feminisation has often been figured in the name of the male-dominated Catholic Church and Irish State. O’Connor’s reworking of the paternal metaphor is rendered in her musical re-appropriations of maternal, Celtic (in the guise of Brigit), and Marian mythologies. O’Connor sings in the name of the (m)other. The pathologisation of the figure of woman across public or religious life, a move which is in part tied to the discourses of modernity, only serves to intensify the discourses which continue to position the same figure as ‘eccentric’ at the outset of her career.21 This is certainly true in 18

Provided in Hayes, Sinéad O’Connor, p. 11. Hayes provides a range of photographic material from the early years of O’Connor’s career. 20 See the opening paragraphs of Cullingford’s ‘Virgins and Mothers’ regarding President Mary MacAleese’s comments on Ireland, tradition, modernity and globalisation. 21 See A. Byrne and M. Leonard (eds), Women in Irish Society: A Sociological Reader (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1997); A. Connelly (ed.), Gender and Law in Ireland (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 1993); T. Hesketh, The Second Partitioning of Ireland: The Abortion Referendum of 1983 (Dublin: Brandsma Books, 1990). 19

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the case of O’Connor’s own career. Media representations of women typically isolate the head, the face, and the eyes so that one part of the body comes metonymically to represent bodily identity as such.22 Hayes’ biography visualises O’Connor frequently in terms of the face, the stare, and the gaze. In terms of the analysis of the mass media, we can note how a similar metonymic substitution occurs in relation to the news media’s representation of the nation. Typically, one image or figure (e.g. Dublin; the Colleen; the harp) comes to stand in for the State as a whole. O’Connor has thus been subjected to a double metonymic slippage. On the one hand, media images of O’Connor’s body have been associated with discourses which link hysteria to femininity,23 and which place femininity as anti-modern, relegating the figure of the feminine to a sphere associated with irrationality, witchcraft, and superstition. The Colleen and the Mother of God remain outside of the discourses of hysteria and are firmly welded to notions of purity, simplicity, sanity and family life. On the other hand, O’Connor has been placed in a privileged relation to the Irish nation to the extent that she performs Irishness: O’Connor is made to speak in the name of Ireland. Despite the pathologising rhetoric which the media has drawn on, O’Connor, even if she were hysterical in the way the media would have us think, manages to construct and re-shape social agendas against this hostile backdrop. Cullingford reports how O’Connor’s crusade against child abuse, and particularly the Catholic Church’s silence on the issue, was ‘fully justified . . . What had looked to many critics like O’Connor’s demented overreaction to her personal trauma proved to be a symbol of a far deeper and more pervasive social malaise.’24 This foregrounding of the nation via discourses of gender, childhood and religion is more complex than it seems. It is undoubtedly O’Connor’s gender identity which has been central to her work as well as media representations. In April 1990, SPIN magazine featured an article, with O’Connor herself on the front cover, and suggested that her then record company wanted the artist to present herself in more girlie-fashion and to ‘tart’ up her image. O’Connor cropped her hair in response, not however, in order to present a more feminine image but in order to nominate herself as someone who was attempting to resist dominant images of womanhood and femininity available to her. Her gender identity in the context of discourses of the nation is further complicated by Roman Catholic iconography. The religious symbolism 22

See Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments (London: Arnold, 1997). Principally in the work of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (London: Penguin, 1974). 24 Cullingford, ‘Virgins and Mothers’, 191. 23

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associated with O’Connor has only added to the discourses of femininity and nationhood which have surrounded her media constructions. O’Connor has herself linked nationhood with religion and femininity. ‘When you grow up in Ireland’, she said in an interview with Q magazine, ‘you aspire to being like the Virgin Mary. Irish women are brought up to look up to the Mother of God and have this obsession with purity and chastity.’25 Her birthday (8 December) is also the Roman Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception, though O’Connor complexly embraces, repudiates and hybridises Marian and Roman Catholic doctrines in the service of her music, her politics and her Irish identity. Like the figures of Jesus and Mary as theorised and practiced in South American liberation theology, O’Connor’s Virgin and Child are mother and brother, fighters, and symbols of purity and hope.26 This hybridisation is particularly evident in recent albums, and particularly She who dwells . . . However, although O’Connor seems to profess a simple faith, reminiscent of the simple, childlike piety of Therese of Lisieux and Bernadette of Lourdes, she also embraces a complex or hybrid form of Catholicism. Her Catholicism makes more sense when viewed against radical and liberationist cults of Mary which have coexisted alongside mainstream Latin American Catholicism in South America. She was subjected to much criticism and caused international controversy when in October 1992, shouting ‘Fight the true evil!’, she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, live, on the American television show Saturday Night Live. The media seized on this as an opportunity to condemn both her and her nationality. O’Connor knew, of course, that she was on a world stage, so all of her outbursts need to be viewed in light of someone whose identity is both enabled and constrained by the media. But her performances also have to be seen in light of someone who is also incorporating into her work an Irish-inflected antihomophobic, anti-sexist politics. The host of Saturday Night Live at the time was Andrew Clay, whose humour was built around homophobia, sexism, racism, and a more general xenophobia. In context, it can be seen that O’Connor’s resistances reflect the work of a performer who is alert to the cultural politics of art, music, and the mass media. From the outset of O’Connor’s career in the late 1980s, she has performed identities which are always inter-implicated in mass media representations. The construction of her identity became part of news production in the music and national press. When, in 1990, she refused to 25 26

Cited in Guterman, Sinéad, p. 19. See Emilio Nunez, Liberation Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1985).

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go onstage at the Garden State Arts Center, New Jersey, if ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was sung, O’Connor was not acting as spontaneously or as petulantly as her media claimed. The underlying political motivations behind her actions at this time predate, though clearly inform, her singing career. But the media was quick to ignore the wider context of O’Connor’s actions and represented her behaviour in terms of anti-American discourse, hysteria and un-harnessed femininity. Frank Sinatra said that he ‘wished he had seen her so he could kick her in the ass’.27 On 27 August 1990, the New York Post’s front page headlined with ‘IRISH SINGER SNUBS U.S.’. Yet O’Connor herself was more reasonable about the playing of the anthem. She told USA Today that she did not understand what national anthems had to do with her or her performances, and that she was not being disrespectful to America because her request was part of a more universal comment regarding the playing of all national anthems. The media also took interest in O’Connor’s links with other music at this time. She listened to and took inspiration from hard-core rap band ‘N.W.A’ (Niggas With Attitude), and her own acronym for the mass media at the time was emblazoned across one of her T-shirts: ‘P.W.A.’ (Paddy With Attitude). This incorporation and appropriation of traditional music with urban rap has always marked her understanding of Ireland. The fusing of a very insular-sounding Irish folk music with a very public hardcore and self-conscious rap is important not simply because it underlines the complex hybridity which is Irish culture itself. Rather such syncretism exposes the oral and aural aspects of both traditional Irish music and urban rap. According to Michael O’Suilleabhain, Irish traditional music is definitionally ‘music which is passed down by ear, passed on, interestingly, by human contact’.28 O’Suilleabhain’s stress on the transmission of culture on the basis of the oral and aural traditions is perhaps more complex than it might first seem. Undoubtedly it is the tangibility of ‘human’ contact which the media tries to construct via the discourse of the cult of the celebrity. The face, body, eyes, hair, and voice of the celebrity are made to represent identity as such. But these bodies, and the ‘human contact’ they are thought to incite, are wholly constructed bodies. Like the nation, they are shaped in the force fields of discourse. Roland Barthes’ discussion of the myths which structure contemporary mass culture proposes that media representations are neither natural nor neutral. His Mythologies exposes how celebrities’ faces and voices are made meaningful in relation to 27

Provided in Hayes, Sinéad O’Connor, p. 112. Cited in Finnegan and McCarron, Ireland, p. 392. See also Fintan Vallely (ed.), The Companion to Irish Traditional Music (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).

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cultural consumption and social exchange.29 Perhaps, however, Barthes’ analysis needs to attend to the fact that these are women’s faces which are being examined. His essay ‘The face of Greta Garbo’30 is useful in this analysis of O’Connor, whose own persona has been described as ‘endlessly performative’.31 Faces and physiologies become embodied not on the basis of biology, or indeed the simple markings of the face itself, but in the situations and signifying practices of cultural histories. Garbo’s cinematic face plunged audiences into ‘the deepest ecstasy’.32 The impact of the star is not simply linked to her celebrity status but to a subsequent conceptual consumption, an effacement if you will, of Garbo in the cinematic and cultural economy. In Barthes’ account, moreover, it is clear that consumption is tied to notions of identity and language: ‘As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.’33 Barthes is here pointing to the simultaneous effacement and defacement which any act of consumption effectuates. In the case of Sinéad O’Connor, her performances on and off stage have been transformed, or defaced, by the media into controversial events, and O’Connor’s own ideas – about Ireland, Irishness, and gender identity – have, as a consequence, made her seem isolated or effaced. Undoubtedly she is a figure, like Garbo and Hepburn, whose iconicity can be understood in the context of specific myths, in this case of Ireland and Irishness, Irish music, Irish femininities, and Irish cultural history. Unlike Garbo and Hepburn, however, O’Connor’s iconicity is in part connected to hysteria, deception, and strangeness. O’Connor has many media faces; she is someone who is ‘endlessly performative’. The simultaneous effacement/defacement of O’Connor at the hands of the media is a representational mechanism paralleled in Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of the history of nations which have emerged from colonial domination.34 The subaltern in Spivak’s analysis always has a face and a voice, but once the voice speaks, once it is heard, a defacement occurs: the coloniser has made the subject speak. But Spivak’s work is also a reminder that the face is always marked by its subaltern ethnicity, something Barthes’ analysis does 29

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993). Ibid., pp. 56-7. 31 Cullingford, ‘Virgins and Mothers’, 189. 32 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 56. 33 Ibid., p. 57. 34 G. C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1987). 30

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not really address. In the case of O’Connor’s ethnicity, we can see that it is socio-psychological before it is simply anthropological.35 Research since Barthes (notably the work of Foucault and more recently Judith Butler),36 suggests that discourses, alongside the consumption of cultural performances and representations of celebrities,37 actually constitute the sites of a cultural dialectic in and around which subjects continually (re)negotiate personal and collective identities. Alternatively phrased, the myths, texts and practices which underpin the performances of O’Connor are themselves constructions of Irish subjectivity. That she draws on the past in the ways that she does in her more recent work testifies not to a dumbing-down or crude commercialisation of contemporary Irish culture; and nor does it reflect any pessimism on O’Connor’s part about Ireland’s present or future. The imagined ‘deterioration in Irish culture in Ireland’, suggest Finnegan and McCarron, can also be interpreted as ‘a creative explosion in Irish culture and a bold, unprecedented assertion of Irishness in the global environment’.38 In O’Connor’s music, Irishness is not simply a question of geographical location. Rather, as Stuart Hall suggests more generally of national identity, it is ‘a historical, not a geographical concept’,39 and depends for its meaning on a history of cultural inclusions and exclusions. To isolate one element in a subject’s identity, whether it be on grounds of social class, ethnicity, nationality, gender or sexuality, is to reduce and over-determine identity itself. John Rex’s ‘Immigrants and British Labour’40 and Steven Fielding’s Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1830-193941 have shown how identities are not hermetically sealed. Rather, economic and material circumstances continually unsettle 35

For a discussion of the social psychology of ethnicity and identity, see Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). 36 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 37 See Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Sheila Whiteley, Sexing the Groove: Gender and Popular Music (London: Routledge, 1997). 38 Finnegan and McCarron, Ireland, p. 406. 39 S. Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds), Formations of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), pp. 275-320 (p. 277). 40 John Rex, ‘Immigrants and British Labour – The Sociological Context’, in Kenneth Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities (Folkestone: Wm. Dawson, 1980), pp. 232-8. 41 Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1830-1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993).

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homogenising tendencies which seek to over-determine Irishness to the exclusion of social class, gender, region and occupation. To affirm or posit one element of O’Connor’s subjectivity or imagined intentionality (by way of a unique Irishness or ethnicity), is to extend the logic of the metonymy of the ‘face’. It is to imply that one facet of her identity can come to speak in the name of all the others; the part speaks for the whole and is determinate. The logic of metonymy, a key strategy in all forms of representation, is a way of forcing one subject (in this case O’Connor) to bear the weight of another identity (Ireland). O’Connor as celebrity and as icon can be used to represent Ireland; she speaks for the cause of Ireland; she is more Irish than the faces and voices which are Ireland itself. Recall that it is an ‘Irish’ singer and not simply a singer, pop singer, or female singer who is accused of snubbing the United States. She is a ‘Paddy’ with attitude. Logic of this kind makes a woman born in Ireland continuous with Ireland, but Ireland, the geographical space into which O’Connor was born, is now continuous with historical constructions of Irishness structured by the media. However, in the examples of media reports cited earlier, it is clear that Ireland is always taken for granted but never discussed, always present but on the basis of an absence in the discourse. The notion of an ‘Irish’ singer only makes sense on the basis of some provisional stability residing in the terms Ireland and Irish. Reductions of this kind also serve as ways of providing a subject with a sense of selfconsciousness, autonomy and agency. Simply stated, O’Connor is, of course, an Irish singer. It is also a way of making one category or label speak in the name of everything else; it is a way of restricting agency; and it is a means of indicting someone on grounds of their assumed (national) autonomy. Isolating O’Connor as paradigm of Irishness, of contemporary femininity or insanity in this way (and the two are linked), will always ensure that the subject is in a state of anger, but one in which the anger is also a symptom of a melancholic loss, a loss, in other words which in fact has not taken place.42

Irish women and an Irish woman Outside of Ireland and Irish music, O’Connor is situated more specifically in relation to discourses of Western femininity and popular 42

See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in his On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey and ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1984).

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music. O’Connor’s representations make sense in relation to Madonna, k d lang, Tracy Chapman, Annie Lennox, Debbie Harry, Kylie Minogue and Kirsty McColl, women whom O’Connor has variously singled out over the course of her career. Yet O’Connor is never far from Irish articulations of femininity, Irish women singers and performers, and Irish folk music more generally. Her Irishness, however, is further complicated by media representations which allude to a simplistic Ireland, one which is oppressive and women-hating, an Ireland which is mad, pre-modern and superstitious, and an Ireland which has lesbian priests in the form of O’Connor herself. Yet if it is versions of Irish femininity which O’Connor has found so oppressive and humid, why does she seem to mourn their passing? By singling out race or gender, then, discourse also isolates the subject, makes race/gender into a problem before this is analysed at the level of the idea, narrative, or rhetoric. Stuart Hall observes how reductions of this kind (the isolation of race is the example he discusses) operate in order to articulate collective or public fears at the level of the personal; the collective can be played out in the single figure.43 Race, alongside place of birth, accent, dialect and skin colour, signifies at an ideological level so that ‘race’ becomes a forum where compound tensions and conflicts can be projected and provisionally resolved. Thus, the so-called crises of human cultures, which have often been figured in terms of the crisis of race, or gender, or ‘new’ identities (difference, in other words), and which are often articulated in Britain and Ireland in the names of teenage mothers, crime, abortion and divorce, are not crises so much as a formulation of some of the ways in which a ‘crisis’ (a term which now displaces fears onto the other and loses sense of the actual crisis) is constructed and played out (a playing out which resembles a ‘working through’, typical of many of the features of mourning and melancholia). It is in the context of recent Irish social history, then, that someone like O’Connor is figured in the media in terms which resonate crisis, hysteria and psychosis. This is in very obvious contrast to the dominant portrayals of Ireland’s popular women singers and music to which O’Connor and Europe would have been exposed via the Eurovision Song Contest broadcasts every year in May. Muriel and the Lindsays, Angela Farrell, Sandie Jones, Maxi, Tina Reynolds and Dana are some of the singers and groups which O’Connor would have heard. During the 1970s it was Dana’s ‘All Kinds of Everything’, for instance, rather than ‘The Virgin Prunes’s’ Dada-esque performances which were used to promote an image 43

Hall, ‘The West and the Rest’.

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of Ireland as gentle, welcoming, and, as Dana seems to suggest, in love with the seasons, the weather, and rainbows. After co-writing a few songs with band Tua Nua (close friends of Irish rockers U2), O’Connor began a solo career. However, by 1985 she had signed to Ensign Records and in 1987 recorded her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra.44 The record won much praise, and spawned the alternative hit ‘Mandinka’. After the release of the acclaimed ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’, O’Connor became a famous if alternative rock performer, thanks to the album’s Prince cover ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and her opinions on international and Irish domestic politics. O’Connor was regularly in the American press for her support of the I.R.A. and her views on the band U2. O’Connor’s musical output has always evoked traditional images of beauty associated with Ireland. In that sense she takes nothing away from the Ireland imagined by Dana and others. However, it is the remythologisation of Ireland in terms of Ireland’s pre-colonial and postcolonial contexts which makes her work distinct. In ‘This is a rebel song’ and ‘Paddy’s Lament’, O’Connor similarly brings to the fore the importance of acts of faith in response to conquest and colonisation. But she attends as well to the gendered politics of individual acts in faith in the cause of Ireland and Irish culture.45 There is not, however, a singular notion of Ireland or the Irish which emerges from her renditions. In both songs she confuses how audiences might understand first- and second-person address, allowing the confusion to underscore diasporic and hybrid cultural formations. Individual and collective identities merge, so that a homogenous or coherent ‘Ireland’ is envisioned as a strategically necessary mobilisation. In affirming the provisional and diasporic facets of all identities, O’Connor chooses lyrics structured around the potential productivity of alienation, exile, temporality and suffering. Addressing a collective Irishman and an individual Irish man, O’Connor clearly invokes gender in her rendering of songs about a rebel and (a) Paddy. Ireland, O’Connor’s ‘mother’ country, has a gendered culture and past which, in both songs, is lyricised in relation to paternal as opposed to maternal metaphors. The individual address allows her to articulate desires about male-female love which – because of O’Connor’s own gender – now includes a female voice. The collective address is one which acknowledges the legacy of this gendered past and its impact on the 44

Sinéad O’Connor, The Lion and the Cobra (Capitol Records, 1987). Her appropriation of the lament tradition is also a way of underlining O’Connor’s own appropriation of the ‘keening’ (caoineadh) tradition of Irish women (see footnote 11 above). 45

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social construction of gender and Irishness. But the singular and collective invocations underline how identity is always narrated on the basis of an inclusion which is always an exclusion. It is in ‘Paddy’s Lament’ that O’Connor re-exposes how cultures, traditions and nations are wrought on the basis of on-going narration. To the extent that narratives necessarily include and exclude in order to construct identity, so the narratives of Ireland and Irishness require the simultaneous inclusion/exclusion of subjects at any one point. However, O’Connor’s rendition engenders another dimension: this is a woman singing a lament about a man who has left his (m)other country: he is more than Irish now but remains, as does O’Connor, tied to the identity which makes different sense in its new, diasporic setting – America. In the colonial past, it was the exclusion of Ireland which allowed U.K. governments to partially construct English cultural and linguistic hegemony. It was the necessary inclusion of Ireland in narratives of Britishness, however, which in part served to constitute Ireland’s own sense of culture and identity.46 Ireland’s reclamation and subsequent narrativization of its own heritage is especially evident in popular music, music hall, song, and dance. In singing of ‘poor Paddy’s sad narration’, O’Connor underlines how music and song are central to popular constructions of Ireland. Her own rendition as opposed to the first-person ‘Paddy’ which the song imagines, is both a singular and collective apostrophic address. Paddy’s ‘hunger’ and ‘poverty’ are the cause of exile; and they are the cause of an actual ‘Paddy’ who left his love for America and an imagined group of Paddies who have come to typify how Irishmen are nominated in popular constructions of Ireland. Yet Paddy’s hunger and poverty are the cause of singing, both for Ireland and in the name of the man Paddy who left his lover ‘broken-hearted’. The world, however, which is given narrative shape in ‘Paddy’s Lament’, is subsequently defamiliarised in O’Connor’s rendition of the piece. Listeners are commanded to listen. ‘Hear Ye!’, screams O’Connor. Dublin is Paddy’s home, and we know it is O’Connor’s home too, though not the one imagined in the song. In order for Dublin to have the meanings it has (Ireland’s capital, major European city, cultural hub, site of education, government and law, tourist destination, focal point of Irish literary cultures), Dublin moves to a future which provisionally silences something of ‘unofficial’ Dublin. This ‘other’ Dublin, one which is far removed from the café culture that has emerged with Dublin’s 46 For a discussion of the ways in which Irishness is constructed in various AngloIrish discourses see Finnegan and McCarron, Ireland, pp. 31-122.

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Europeanisation, is rendered in the song as Paddy’s hunger, poverty and desolation, and by O’Connor’s re-gendering of the song. A woman now articulates the cause of Ireland but it is a cause which is distinctly different from the message of globalisation uttered by Mary MacAleese.47 Exile and diaspora are understood in terms of Paddy’s and O’Connor’s respective genders so that the alienation which Paddy feels because of maleness and social class is meaningful in the context of O’Connor’s and other women’s alienation. Paddy’s diasporic plea – surely the plea of all dispersed peoples – is to stay at home. ‘Hear me boys’, shouts Paddy, ‘Stay at home.’ We know, however, that home makes sense only on the basis of what Paddy has left. He ‘delights’ in ‘dear old Dublin’ in order to ameliorate the loss and subsequent mourning. Similarly, O’Connor in rendering this lament delights in Dublin to the degree that the city and the country are not the same. The gendered traditions to which O’Connor is exposed have themselves begun to disperse so that home is reformulated and refashioned. Sung in the first-person (but now by a woman who inhabits this male identity), and specified by O’Connor as a gendered society, she is able to implicate her gender identity in terms which underline the hybridity which marks Irishness itself. In ‘Thank you for hearing me’, O’Connor invites audiences to accompany her on a journey of thanksgiving. In ‘seeing’, ‘staying with’, and ‘loving’, the listener is ultimately commanded to share a silence with her. Interpellated by a direct invocation, this paradoxical speech act which silences us simultaneously evokes the ways in which all culture is founded on acts of recognition. These, at the same time, are acts of repudiation, or acts of speech and silence, the speech of ‘now’ and the deathly silence of the past. In affirming one version of Ireland, and in celebrating Ireland’s modernity, so another tradition is mourned or provisionally silenced. The repetitive refrains of the song are common to all popular lyrics, but these are repetitions which remind audiences of the ways those cultural traditions which seem to underpin a nation’s modernity are founded on a drive to move endlessly forward, but always with the past. In many respects, O’Connor’s music has enabled her to resist the media, even though it is the same media which has made her music known. But her other resistances further underline the complex appropriations of religion, Celtic culture, and feminism. In ‘Brigidine Diana’, O’Connor announces that the song, coming as it does from 47

See David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1999). His argument contends that the ‘modernising’ discourses of recent times obscure England’s involvement in Ireland’s painful history.

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‘Ireland’s soul’, is dedicated to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. The song’s lyrics are invocatory, cast in the terms of popular Catholic prayers, where the sacred verses of the Ave Maria and the Regina Caeli are melded with secular Irish music and contemporary lyrics. However, ‘Brigidine Diana’ is also a re-writing of the religious and the royal myths, allowing O’Connor to foreground the political and gendered structures which underpin the offices of Church and State. Mary, the Mother of God, traditional icon of motherhood for many Irish women, is overshadowed in the song by Diana. Mary is with less grace than the secular heroine. Diana is re-imagined as goddess and saint, Christ-like and true mother, but also a mother who worked in the cause of the other. The song’s references to Babylon, secular empires and nations, and British armed aggression resituate how the Mother of God, on the one hand, and the mother of the heir to the British throne, on the other hand, might be understood. The frequent allusions to the Ave Maria as well as Celtic goddess Brigit ensure that religious piety and simple faith are understood in the political, economic and gendered contexts in which faith is lived.48 Acts of faith are not simply demonstrations of prayer and devotion; they are also acts of determination in the face of opposition and aggression. Cullingford writes that in Ireland, opposition and resistance are already built into Irish cultural formations. Cullingford likens O’Connor to Diana, a figure who also used her celebrity status to raise social awareness. O’Connor’s public ‘performance of the Catholic priesthood . . . serves a precise political purpose. Women will one day be ordained as Catholic priests.’49 In addition, however, O’Connor’s actions make sense in a local, not just a global, context. O’Connor is a priest in Ireland, and it is in Ireland that she seeks to have an impact. Moreover, O’Connor incorporates Marian and Catholic traditions into her work, allowing the Celtic traditions of lament and mothering to inflect and re-shape the myths which have structured much of Irish life. O’Connor is undoubtedly framed in eccentric and hysterical terms in media discourses. Yet she is someone whose work betrays its indebtedness to a culture which is inescapably marked by eccentricity and uniqueness. When cultures emerge from tradition to modernity, from the familiar to the new, then the modern and the new always seem eccentric and unique until modernity itself becomes tradition. In order to be traditional, O’Connor has first to be modern. 48 Cullingford notes how O’Connor has always demonstrated identification with her ‘own rebellious version of the Queen of Heaven’ whereby the ‘Irish Virgin may have subsumed the Celtic goddess Brigit.’ See Cullingford, ‘Virgins and Mothers’, 192-4. 49 Ibid., 206.

CHAPTER TEN SEMICOLONIAL YEATS? FAIRYLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND, AND ULSTER WILLY MALEY1

Scotland has not featured prominently in Irish studies, but there are recent signs of a shift, with Irish-Scottish studies fast becoming a growth area, situated on the disputed border between revisionism and postcolonialism.2 In Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Seamus Deane observes that ‘the Irish-English relation . . . was mediated through Scotland’.3 In From Burke to Beckett, Bill McCormack pushes the issue further, arguing that if Ireland is to be fully comprehended 1

This essay is based on a paper entitled ‘Away with the Fairies (Or, It’s Grimm Up North): Yeats and Scotland’, first delivered as the Leverhulme Lecture in Scottish and Irish Literature, Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde, on 27 November 2003, then again at the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, on 28 November 2003. It was further revised for presentation as part of a conference entitled Irish Scottish Exchanges, on 11 September 2004, National Identity and Cultural Exchange in Ireland and Scotland, University of Edinburgh (Supported by the Leverhulme Trust), 9-11 September 2004. I am grateful to Aaron Kelly for the original invitation and to the Leverhulme Trust for sponsoring such an important lecture series and conference. 2 James McGonigal, Donny O’Rourke and Hamish Whyte (eds), Across the Water: Irishness in Modern Scottish Writing (Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing, 2000); Ray Ryan, Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966–2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes and Des O’Rawe (eds), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies / Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003); Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (eds), Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). 3 Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 108.

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then the culture of that geographical space known as Scotland should properly be treated because, for much of the historical period covered by the early pages of the [Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing], the oral or literary cultures of the two places were interactive in a most intimate manner. Why then – considerations of expense, length etc., aside – is early Scottish literature omitted? Perhaps the implication that Gaelic Scotland constituted an instance (not wholly unique) of Irish colonizing activity was politically inadmissible. The counterargument, that events in the eighth century (or earlier) hardly compromise the integrity of twentieth-century independent Ireland, is forceful - suspiciously so, if one recalls that Yeats’s first play about Cuchulain, On Baile’s Strand (1904), crucially depends on kinship and antagonism bridging the North Channel . . . The nation, conceived historically, is no more and no less than a totality made up of all totalities subordinated to it and is (at the same time) overdetermined by totalities of a higher complexity. In contrast, any notion of Ireland as ‘selfidentical whole’ stems (whether it likes it or not) from the Prussian side of Hegel’s system.4

The purpose of this essay, necessarily tentative as it treads untrammelled territory, is to pick up on Deane’s observation and McCormack’s richly suggestive passage and to look at Yeats and Scotland, a coupling that might at first glance seem odd or awkward. For despite Yeats’s Celticism, and his open, if uneven, admiration for the poetry of Robert Burns, there are fewer clear connections between his vision of Ireland and his vision of Scotland than might be expected. It will be argued here that Yeats, like Joyce, arrived at a negative and pessimistic view of Scotland, and that this perspective derived from a despairing vision of the Scottish legacy in the North of Ireland.5 Scotophobia in an Irish context is far from being the province of modern writers, and has been a feature of Irish culture at least since the Ulster Plantation.6 A recent collection of essays on Joyce was entitled Semicolonial Joyce, yet Joyce is a writer who complained of struggling under a double yoke of Roman and British imperialism, and was thus doubly colonized, or double-colonial. Yeats, by contrast, can be

4 W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p. 445. 5 Willy Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds), Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 201-18. 6 Christopher Fox, ‘Swift’s Scotophobia’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 6, 2 (2002), 43-65.

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seen to be ‘semicolonial’, yet he has recently been the subject of a major collection of essays promoting his ‘postcolonial’ status.7 In this essay, a Scottish context for Yeats will be presented in order to show the extent to which his image of Scotland was touched and tainted by Ulster. The intention here is not to establish such a context through a reading of On Baile’s Strand, although the repeated references to ‘hungry Scotland’ are worth noting.8 Nor is it proposed to trace the fugitive and furtive figuring of Scotland in the poetry. Just one odd instance of the word ‘Scot’ in Yeats’s poetry has been found, in ‘Nineteen-Nineteen’, where the verse runs as follows: Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.9

The drunken soldiery going scot-free, are they the weasels? In Shakespeare’s Henry V, an English Lord invokes ‘a saying very old and true: / “If that you will France win,/ Then with Scotland first begin”’. He goes on to rehearse a standard fear of the time: For once the eagle England being in prey, To her unguarded nest, the weasel Scot Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs, Playing the mouse in absence of the cat, To tame and havoc more then she can eat.10

These are weasel words, for the fear of the Scots is bound up with an imperial enterprise elsewhere – ostensibly France, allegorically Ireland –

7

Deborah Fleming (ed.), W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2001). 8 J. P. Harrington (ed.), Modern Irish Drama: a Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. 15. 9 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 233. 10 Gary Taylor (ed.), Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1.2.16973.

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and they capture beautifully the extent to which Scotland is the key to containing Ireland and, crucially, vice versa. Before proceeding, some snapshots, images or instances will be presented of Yeats and Scotland, portraits in plaid, moments to mull over if your mind wanders: the first is of Yeats’s father, reading Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet to his twelve-year old son. Have you ever seen such cruelty? Is this the key to Yeats’s adult antipathy to Scotland? The second is Yeats’s grandfather, an old sailor, reading his first book on his deathbed. The book? Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Next up is Yeats himself, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hugh MacDiarmid on a Dublin street in the wee small hours of the morning after a night on the tiles. What are they doing? Playing see-who-can-peethe-highest (a living stream that ended in the gutter). ‘I crossed swords with him’, as MacDiarmid put it. Then comes the butt of someone else’s joke. Yeats, under instruction from Ezra Pound, tries to recite Burns, fails miserably much to Pound’s amusement, proving to Pound in the process that Yeats, deaf to other cadences, can scan no verse but his own. The final image in this fistful of fleeting glimpses is of Yeats, at a time when Irish national dress was being debated, proud as punch of his own habits in this regard. Until he gets a letter from his tailor telling him good Connemara cloth takes time to get delivered these days, as it has to come all the way from Scotland. Dressing in Scots garb while searching for something distinctively Irish – that’s a suitable way of thinking about Yeats and Scotland. A word that Yeats was fond of using in relation to Scotland was ‘gloom’. This essay aims to shine some twilight on that gloom, by taking the reader on a ‘thistlestop tour’ through some rough terrain – ‘mind the gaps’ – stopping off at various stations on the cross-cultural network. The connections between Scotland and Yeats will be explored largely by author through successive encounters with Burns, Scott, Stevenson and MacDiarmid. Any serious discussion of Yeats and Scotland ought to begin with a short text reprinted in Mythologies, entitled ‘A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their Ghosts and faeries.’ The original intention of this essay was to begin with that brief polemic by Yeats and finish with two issues that beset the new Scottish Parliament in its first years – sectarianism and Section 28, or anti-Catholicism (or antiIrishness) and homophobia (arguably in part the product of a holy alliance between Calvinism and Catholicism). ‘Scotland Against Fairies’ is an old slogan, part of a longstanding campaign. Gnomophobia and homophobia go hand-in-hand. In his ‘Remonstrance’, Yeats decries Scotland’s apparent

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antipathy to fairyfolk, an antipathy foreshadowed in an earlier work by a poet whom Yeats admired. Start with what you know, and for me that means Edmund Spenser, the English poet who settled in Ireland, wrote The Faerie Queene there, and about whom Yeats wrote a famous essay about poetry and politics – really an essay about Yeats. On 1 November 1596, Robert Bowes, the English secretary in Scotland, wrote from Linlithgow to express James VI’s displeasure with The Faerie Queene (Books IV-VI were newly published): ‘His Majesty has commanded me to certify you that so many as are there of the second part of the “Ferry Quene” he will not have sold here and further he will complain to Her Majesty of the author as you will understand at more length by himself.’11 Within two weeks Bowes wrote again, spelling out the Scottish king’s objections: The King has conceived great offence against Edward Spenser (Spencer) publishing in print in the second part of the ‘Fairy Queen’ and 9th chapter som dishonourable effects (as the King deems thereof) against himself and his mother deceased. He alleged that this book was passed with privilege of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the view and allowance of all writings to be received into print. But therein I have (I think) satisfied him that it is not given out with such privilege. Yet he still desires that Edward Spenser for all his fault may be duly tried and punished.12

The Fairie Queene, even the politically charged Book V, is a complex allegory, but here is the Scottish king reading it as if it was a tabloid – ‘See what he’s saying about my mother?’ – quoting chapter and verse. James reads the Trial of Duessa in canto 9 of Book V as a depiction of the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. In an earlier book Duessa had been described as having ‘neather parts . . . with dong all fowly dight’.13 It is not a flattering portrait. James asked that such copies that are printed be destroyed. Is this the first banishing of fairies from Scotland? In A View of the State of Ireland written at the same time as Book V of The Faerie Queene, Spenser posed the question of whether England’s Irish problem could be solved by allowing the Scots to settle in Ulster. He answered his own question thus:

11

Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. 13 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1.8.48.1-4, in J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (eds), The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 44. 12

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Doe we not all know, that the Scottes were the first inhabitants of all the North, and that those which now are called the North Irish, are indeed very Scottes, which challenge the ancient inheritance and dominion of the countrey, to be their owne aunciently: This then were but to leap out of the pan into the fire: For the cheifest caveat and provision in reformation of the North, must be to keep out those Scottes.14

Yeats, when he wrote of Spenser, wrote of Yeats. He saw a loyal servant, where others would see a radical writer, even a republican one. Both Spenser and Yeats had a problem with ‘the North’ – with Ulster and with Scotland. In his ‘Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their Ghosts and faeries’ Yeats accused his Celtic country cousins of demonising faeries: In Scotland you are too theological, too gloomy. You have made even the Devil religious. ‘Where do you live, good-wyf, and how is the minister?’ he said to the witch when he met her on the high-road, as it came out in the trial. You have burnt all the witches. In Ireland we have left them alone. To be sure, the ‘loyal minority’ knocked out the eye of one with a cabbage stump on the 31st March 1711, in the town of Carrickfergus. But then the ‘loyal minority’ is half Scottish. You have discovered the faeries to be pagan and wicked. You would like to have them all up before the magistrate. In Ireland warlike mortals have gone among them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn have taught men great skills with herbs, and permitted some few to hear their tunes. Carolan slept upon a faery rath. Ever after their tunes ran in his head, and made him the great musician he was. In Scotland you have denounced them from the pulpit. In Ireland they have been permitted by the priests to consult them on the state of their souls. Unhappily the priests have decided that they have no souls, that they will dry up like so much bright vapour at the last day; but more in sadness than in anger. The Catholic religion likes to keep on good terms with its neighbours. These two different ways of looking at things have influenced in each country the whole world of sprites and goblins. For their gay and graceful doings you must go to Ireland; for their deeds of terror to Scotland. Our Irish faery terrors have about them something of make-believe. When a countryman strays into an enchanted hovel, and is made to turn a corpse all night on a spit before the fire, we do not feel anxious; we know he will wake in the midst of a green field, the dew on his old coat. In Scotland it is

14

Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds), Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (1633): from the first printed edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 110-11.

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A few years after the first appearance of this piece in the Scots Observer, Yeats visited the North (of Ireland) and lectured to the ‘loyal minority’ in Belfast on faeries, a difficult enterprise at the best of times. Apparently it was not very well received. Yeats later remarked: ‘I have been away in County Down, looking almost in vain among its half-Scotch people for the legends I find so plentiful in the West.’16 Whether half Scottish or halfScotch, the inhabitants of the North had a problem with the kind of Celtic mysticism expounded by Yeats. Liam McIlvanney has shown how the work of Robert Burns was intimately bound up with the Ulster-Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s.17 If Ulster had a Romantic streak, it owed it to Burns, so it is no surprise that Burns was the basis of Yeats’s admiration for, and antipathy towards, Scotland. Burns occupied an awkward place in Irish culture, and not just for Yeats. Even admirers were unsure if the ploughboy-playboy could or should be imitated by Irish writers. Yeats often invoked Burns as a breath of fresh air bursting out of the gloom, and was especially fond of comparing J. M. Synge to Burns in terms of their use of dialect and earthy topics. But at other times Burns is resisted and represented as a writer of limits. According to Yeats, the fruit of Robert Burns and Scott with their lack of ideas, their external and picturesque views of life, has been to create not a nation but a province with a sense of the picturesque . . . The external and picturesque or political writer leaves the strongest intellects of their countries empty (and in the case of Scotland, England has crowded into this emptiness), and is content to fill with kilts and bagpipes, newspapers and guidebooks, the days of the least creative.18

Yeats, like other Irish critics, envied Burns’s status and admired his language, but occasionally expressed doubts about the very popularity, which at other times he praised and envied. Other Irish commentators were wary of the Scottish comparison. John Eglinton, writing in 1899 in Literary Ideals in Ireland, observed: 15

W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 107-8. Denis Donoghue (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Memoirs: The Original Unpublished Text of the Autobiography and the Journal (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 45, n. 6. 17 Liam McIlvanney, ‘Robert Burns and the Ulster-Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 4, 2 (1999/2000), 125-43. 18 Donoghue (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Memoirs, p. 248. 16

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[A] well-known Scotch Professor once said that Ireland was not a nation because it had never had a Burns or a Bannockburn. It is, however, as reasonable to think that these glorious memories of Scottish nationality will form a drag on its further evolution as that the want of a peasant poet, or of a recollection of having at least once given the Saxons a drubbing, will be fatal to an attempt to raise people above themselves in this country by giving expression to latent ideals. Ireland must exchange the patriotism which looks back for the patriotism which looks forward.19

Yeats wanted to champion Synge (the playwright Burns) and William Carleton (the prose Burns), but he had misgivings, too. Carleton, himself, in the preface to Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), had written of avoiding ‘intolerable Scoto-Hibernic jargon’.20 D. P. Moran, another Irish critic, cautioned against a wholesale buying into Burns and the brogue: [T]hough certain classes of ballad and lyric poetry can be written in dialect, as Burns has proved, you cannot rise to dignity or poetry on ‘begors’ and ‘bedads’. There is something essentially mean about the corrupt English of the Irish peasant, particularly when put into cold print; it passes the power of man to write literature in it.21

Moran blamed Yeats for sponsoring ‘The Celtic Note’. Moran’s criticisms would apply to Synge, but Yeats wanted to defend Synge while acknowledging the difficulty of writing in ‘dialect’. There is a long and involved debate around the language question in Irish and Scottish literature. While Burns was often invoked as a positive role model by Yeats, Edwin Muir held Yeats up as an example for Scottish writers to follow. Muir argued that Yeats does more for Irish literature by writing in English than Scottish writers do for Scotland by writing in ‘dialect’: The poetry of Mr Yeats belongs to English literature, but no one would deny that it belongs to Irish literature pre-eminently and essentially. The difference between contemporary Irish and contemporary Scottish literature is that the first is central and homogeneous, and that the second is parochial and conglomerate; and this is because it does not possess an organ for the expression of a whole and unambiguous nationality. Scots dialect poetry represents Scotland in bits and patches, and in doing that it is 19 Cited in Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (3 vols. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), II, p. 957. 20 William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (Dublin: William Curry, Jr., & Co., 1830), p. xi. 21 Deane (ed.), Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, I, p. 555.

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Synge, for Yeats, was Burns at his best. Yeats pointed out that while ‘Scotland left Burns in the Excise; the world has mocked her for it’, Ireland must prize its writers, whatever language they chose.23 Defending William Carleton against neglect and abuse, Yeats hoped that Ireland would not likewise constrain its writers. But Burns was also for Yeats a universal writer. Moran had urged Yeats to do for Ireland what Burns had done for Scotland. Yeats – though he encouraged the comparison between Synge and Carleton and Burns – did not do ‘dialect’. Though he liked to bend it like Beckett, Yeats preferred Posh. Yeats saw Burns’s Irish following in this case as based on a hankering after the obvious, the popular. Perhaps the finest and funniest illustration of Yeats’s double take on Burns, half admiring, half envying, can be seen in the episode referred to earlier. Ezra Pound had a laugh at Yeats’s efforts at reciting Burns. ‘Years ago’, says Pound, Yeats was struggling with rhythms and saying they wouldn’t do. I got him to read a little Burns aloud, telling him he cd. read no cadence but his own . . . I had a half hour of unmitigated glee in hearing ‘Say ye bonnie Alexander’ and ‘The Birks o Averfeldy’ keened, wailed with infinite difficulty and many pauses and restarts to The Wind Among the Reeds.24

His inability to recite Burns notwithstanding, Yeats imagined what he’d wish for if granted an audience with the King of Faery: ‘I would say “I do not ask even a fiftieth part of the popularity Burns has for his own people,

22

Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1982 [originally published 1936]), pp. 111-12. 23 John Kelly and Eric Domville (eds), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume One: 1865-1895 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 206. 24 Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 148.

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but I would like enough to help the imagination[s] that were most keen and subtle to think of Ireland as a sacred land”’.25 Yeats admitted his shortcomings when it came to dialect, but praised the efforts of Synge and Lady Gregory – who wrote in an ‘Irish’ that was ‘as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in’.26 In ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’ Yeats could say: ‘Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular poets, [Burns] has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is in Longfellow.’27 Yet in his Nobel Prize speech Yeats rejoiced in Synge’s ability to do for Ireland what Burns did for Scotland: ‘Burns himself could not have more shocked a gathering of Scotch clergy than did he our players.’28 Burns, then, was a writer who divided Ireland, and divided Yeats too. For while Yeats wanted to support the Irish tradition that drew on Burns, it was not one that he himself could follow – and although he admired Burns’s status he also resented it. It has been argued elsewhere that a lot of this debate about ‘dialect’ has to do with class and religion.29 Walter Scott is another major Scottish writer about whom Yeats had mixed feelings. Yeats’s father – ‘Papa’ – read Redgauntlet to the young Yeats, and Yeats later read Scott to his own children. Yeats, in Celtic mode, drew analogies between ‘defeated’ races. The ‘Highlanders’, he said, were like the Irish, ‘of one stock with ourselves’. But Scott was a shadow as well as a shaping influence. Yeats asserted that: ‘Scott made a single lowland Scottish dialect serve for all Scotland’, and he resented the fact that Scott was seen as a national and international writer while Irish authors like Synge and Lady Gregory were viewed as parochial or provincial.30 The same combination of grudging respect and admiration coupled with envy and disdain marks Yeats’s attitude to both Burns and Scott. Roy Foster describes Yeats’s shift from Scottish models to Irish 25

Kelly and Domville (eds), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, I, p. 388. William H. O’Donnell (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Prefaces and Introductions (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 225. 27 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 6. 28 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, Nobel Lecture, 15 December 1923. 29 Willy Maley, ‘Ireland, Verses, Scotland: Crossing the (English) Language Barrier’, in Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth (eds), Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 13-30. 30 John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (eds), Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats (2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1975), II, p. 468. 26

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mores with typical terseness: ‘His reading is related to his own early work; Scott gives way to Sligo county histories.’31 Robert Louis Stevenson fares rather better. Yeats is more positive about a writer who is his contemporary. Stevenson wrote admiringly of Yeats’s work, and Yeats returned the compliment. ‘I need hardly tell you’, he told Stevenson, that your praise of ‘The Lake of Innisfree’ has given me great pleasure. After all it is the liking or disliking of one’s fellow craftsmen, especially of those who have attained the perfect expression one does but grope for, which urges one to work on – else were it best to dream ones dreams in silence. My grandfather a very passionate old retired sailor – quite the reverse of literary – read ‘Treasure Iseland’ [sic] upon his death-bed with infinite satisfaction. It is well nigh the only book I ever heard of him reading. I wonder at the voice, which while delighting studious and cloistered spirits, can yet hush into admiration such as he, much as I wonder at that voice which stilled the waves of old.32

Again, what Yeats admires in Stevenson is what he found admirable and enviable in Burns and Scott – the ability to cross over between privileged and popular audiences and to ‘go global’. This is what Yeats wanted for Irish literature, but he felt that Scotland took its ‘mature’ tradition for granted, while Irish critics failed to appreciate the emerging apprentice work of Ireland. Crossing swords with Professor Edward Dowden, Yeats bristled at being accused of endorsing literature ‘that raves of Brian Boru’. Yeats countered that none of the books on his recommended reading list ‘raves of Brian Boru’ half as much as Burns did of Bruce and Wallace, or has an ‘intellectual brogue’ more ‘accentuated’ than the Scottish characteristics in Scott and Stevenson.33 Dowden subscribed to the AngloIrish tradition of Swift and his successors – to which of course Yeats belonged – but Yeats said that those works ‘will be substitutes for the books I have named only when the books of Hume are considered Scotch literature in the same sense as the books of Burns and Barrie’.34 J. M. Barrie was another Scottish writer who saw and supported the new Irish drama. But are we living in Cloud Cuchulain Land, the Never 31 R. F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), I, p. 530. 32 Kelly and Domville (eds), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, I, p. 404. 33 Ibid., p. 440. 34 Ibid., p. 448.

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Land of Peter Pan Celticism? This brings us to two more minor Scottish figures that crossed Yeats’s path: MacGregor Mathers, or Samuel Liddell Mathers, and William Sharp, also known as Fiona Macleod. Yeats explains how he first met Synge in Paris, and had a strange encounter with MacGregor Mathers – the Eminem of his day – concerning Fiona Macleod: I saw Mrs Sharpe [sic] the other day and know a great deal more about the Fiona Macleod mystery. It is as I thought. Fiona Macleod was so far as external perception could say a secondary personality induced in Sharpe by the presence of a very beautiful unknown woman whom he fell in love with. She, alas! has disappeared from everyone’s sight, no one having set eyes on her except George Meredith who says she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw. Whether there was more than this I do not know but poor Mrs Sharpe, though generous and self-sacrificing as I can see does not want to enlarge that unknown woman’s share. A great deal, however, which Sharp used to give in letters as an account of Fiona’s doings were she insists a kind of semi-allegorical description of the adventures of his own secondary personality and its relation with the primary self. For instance in one letter to me he had said ‘I will leave your letter where Fiona will find it when she wakes’, and by this he meant that the secondary personality when it awoke in him would answer the letter which it certainly did in a much more impassioned way than that of the rest of the letter. I don’t think there would be much of all this in the official biography for when I said to Mrs Sharpe that she should tell the whole truth, she answered ‘How can I! Other people are so much involved.’ She never talked quite openly about things, except it being a secondary personality, but told things in a series of hints and yet, at the same time, quite clearly. I noticed that each time she said this personality was awakened in him by a beautiful person she would add as if to lessen the effect, ‘and by beautiful scenery’. She was evidently very fond of him and has sent me his birth date and her own to find out how their horoscopes interlocked. I would be rather glad if you would keep this letter, for I am fresh from seeing Mrs Sharp (I saw her a week ago) and this will be a record. Put it in a safe place and I may ask you for it again some day for it is a fragment of history. She told me that the morning William Sharp died she heard visionary music and indeed a good deal of one sort and another about the supernatural side of his talent.35

This is a bizarre passage – haunting, hallucinatory, hilarious. Did the Scots put Yeats off Celticism? 35

Terry L. Meyers, The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod, incorporating two lost works, ‘Ariadne in Naxos’ and ‘Beatrice’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 19-20.

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Some Ulster writers changed their names to move closer to Yeats’s vision, but one Scottish writer went further. Yeats admired Fiona Macleod, and corresponded with her, before he found out that ‘she’ was in fact a ‘he’: William Sharp, prominent critic, biographer, poet and Whitmaniac. In 1894 Sharp assumed the persona of Fiona Macleod, and so began a split-level writing career. Writing as Fiona Macleod, Sharp was able to get in touch with his feminine side, a technique which no doubt came in handy if you were Victorian and Scottish. As Fiona, William published visionary Gaelic poetry, fiction and drama. She was considered a better writer than the man who gave birth to her. Folklore was her forte. Yeats said of her that she ‘had in her hands the keys of those gates of the primeval world, which shut behind more successful races, when they plunged into material progress’.36 Fiona was the Celtic Tigerlily who put the prim into primeval, but she got on less well with Oscar Wilde than she did with Yeats. Isobel Murray argues that Sharpe’s Children of To-morrow is a source for The Picture of Dorian Gray, but whoever heard of a Scottish writer influencing an Irish one?37 In fact, going back to Burns and Carleton, Edgeworth and Scott, there is a constant two-way traffic. In Yeats, Fiona Macleod found a soul mate. He understood ‘The strain of life – the strain of double life.’38 Fiona was fond of quoting Yeats to the effect that ‘the arts have become religious’, by which it can be assumed that Yeats meant mythical and spiritual, though they remained ‘religious’ in other ways. When Yeats first met William Sharp, before Sharp had assumed the alter ego of Fiona Macleod, he was not impressed: ‘I was introduced to Sharp of the Sonnets of This Century and hated his red British face of flaccid contentment.’39 When Sharp went on to lead a double life, getting in touch with his feminine side, in the form of the fair Fiona, Yeats warmed to him/her, to the ‘secondary personality’ as he called it. Some contemporaries had even surmised that Yeats was Fiona Macleod. Yeats had written to Sharp at one point – in 1896 – urging an alliance between ‘Scotch, Welsh and Irish Celts’. Yeats, repulsed by Sharp’s ‘Britishness’, seduced by Fiona Macleod’s bogus Celtic femininity, eventually rejected both as two sides

36

Frayne and Johnson (eds), Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, II, p. 45. Isobel Murray, ‘Children of To-morrow: A Sharp Inspiration for Dorian Gray’, Durham University Journal, n.s. 49, 1 (1987), 69-70. 38 Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy (eds), Letters to W. B. Yeats, with the assistance of Alan B. Himber (2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), I, p. 52. 39 Donoghue (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Memoirs, p. 129, n.1. 37

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of the same (debased) coin. Lady Gregory famously looked back on the setting up of the Irish National Theatre as an exercise in bad faith: I think the word ‘Celtic’ was put in for the sake of Fiona Macleod, whose plays however we never acted, though we used to amuse ourselves by thinking of the call for ‘author’ that might follow one, and the possible appearance of William Sharp in place of the beautiful woman he had given her out to be, for even then we had little doubt they were one and the same person. I myself never quite understood the meaning of the ‘Celtic Movement’, which we were said to belong to. When I was asked about it, I used to say it was a movement meant to persuade the Scotch to begin buying our books, while we continued not to buy theirs.40

We have come a long way from Yeats’s envious reaction to the popularity of Burns and Scott to the superior taste of the Irish. After that Sharp exit, Hugh MacDiarmid brings us back to the majors. MacDiarmid enjoyed his stay in Dublin in the summer of 1928. Although he chiefly admired Joyce, MacDiarmid was grateful for the respect and support of Yeats.41 MacDiarmid had other reasons for exploiting connections with Yeats and other Irish writers. After that Dublin trip he claimed that he was ‘able to make certain arrangements which will help the Scots National Party to the Irish vote at the General Election’. MacDiarmid scholars have recognised his role in ‘fighting Irish parochialism towards Scotland’, but it is not clear how successful MacDiarmid was.42 Joyce’s lasting antipathy to Scotland is well known.43 Yeats certainly did act as an advocate of MacDiarmid – much more so than did Joyce, the writer MacDiarmid most admired. Yeats included four of MacDiarmid’s poems in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Yeats knew that a lot of Scottish input had gone into the making of modern Ireland, in terms of writers and thinkers, and in terms of the Scottish influence in the North in the wake of the Ulster Plantation. But he was ambivalent about both those Celtic connections. In the last few years, critics like Edna Longley, Owen Dudley Edwards, and John Wilson Foster have focused on the ‘North’ as key to understanding the Irish-Scottish avenue or impasse.44 Vexed issues of 40

Harrington (ed.), Modern Irish Drama, pp. 378-9. Morgan, ‘James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’. 42 Dorian Grieve, Owen Dudley Edwards and Alan Riach (eds), Hugh MacDiarmid: New Selected Letters (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), pp. xxvi-xxvii. 43 Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’. 44 Edna Longley, ‘Including the North’, Text & Context, 3 (1988), 17-24; Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Scotland, Ulster, and You’, in Ian S. Wood (ed.), Scotland and 41

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class, religion and language as well as an attachment to empire, affect the Irish writer’s attitude to Ulster and to Scotland. According to John Wilson Foster: ‘Social class and religious denomination would have early instilled in Yeats a distaste for the bulk of his co-religionists in what in his lifetime became Northern Ireland.’45 Yeats wanted to keep the baby of Burns but throw out the bathwater of bigotry, though he arguably succumbed to some doom and gloom of his own. Again, according to Foster: Yeats wished Ulster to mean an inspired peasant Carleton and an aristocratic Ferguson in the real world, and Cuchulain in the unreal world, a place that had produced the figures that mattered most to Yeats: peasant, artist, aristocrat and hero. But such a view of modern Ulster could not be sustained and Yeats gave up on the north as a bad job. Scots Ulster, Presbyterian Ulster, became indeed a kind of antithetical cultural self.46

Yeats’s discomfort with the North goes back well before Partition. Ulster is caught up in his mind with a negative notion of Scotland, or perhaps Scotland is caught up in his mind with a problematic perception of the North. Either way, Yeats gave up on both as bad jobs. Yeats defended Synge’s use of ‘dialect’ but when the Ulster-born Daniel Deeney used some ‘Northern’ pronunciation in his 1900 volume, Peasant Lore from Gaelic Ireland, Yeats was less sympathetic. It is John Wilson Foster’s contention that Yeats’s Ireland excluded the North. The Faeries had been driven out of Ulster as well as Scotland. As Foster says, ‘many a celebrated Southerner . . . found the [North] galling’.47 As argued elsewhere, Joyce could be added to the list.48 In Ireland, the Scottish North did not measure up to the English South. This is about more than snobbery, but not much more. As one would expect of her, Edna Longley finesses the parting in the Celtic fringe: ‘In fact, Joyce and Yeats shared an anti-Ulster prejudice with implications for Irish-Scottish literary intercourse. This prejudice marks regional and religious (not just

Ulster (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1994), pp. 173-82; John Wilson Foster, ‘Getting the North: Yeats and Northern Nationalism’, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley (eds), That Accusing Eye: Yeats and His Irish Reader, Yeats Annual, 12 (1996), pp. 180-212. 45 Foster, ‘Getting the North: Yeats and Northern Nationalism’, pp. 181-2. 46 Ibid., p. 183. 47 Ibid., p. 183. 48 Maley, ‘Kilt by Kelt’.

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Catholic/Protestant but also Anglican/Presbyterian) partitions in Ireland.’49 Yeats hoped that the South would come to stand as a good example to the North. In 1924, speaking in the Irish Senate, he declared: I have no hope of seeing Ireland united in my time, or of seeing Ulster won in my time; but I believe it will be won in the end, and not because we fight it, but because we govern this country well. We can do that, if I may be permitted as an artist and writer to say so, by creating a system of culture which will represent the whole of this country.50

Yeats really was away with the faeries. But being away with the faeries – or blue-sky thinking – has its uses. In his study of MacDiarmid, Alan Riach remarks: ‘A homogeneous image of Ireland was proposed by the Celtic Revival and the Anglo-Irish Yeats.’51 Yeats had a very gloomy and one-sided view of Scotland, seeing in it a fulcrum of all that was conservative, Unionist, imperialist: in short, ‘British’. Yeats had warned the South not to get too Catholic if it wanted to get the North. The same prejudice that made Scotland a hard sell in Ireland and especially the South – because of the North – is what makes it so easy for Scottish critics to plump for stateless Joyce over Free State Yeats. Santa Joyce, the one that does not exist, allows critics to dismiss Satanic Yeats, either unsubtly in Terry Eagleton’s terms in his ‘Ballad of English Literature’ – ‘Willy Yeats was a fascist’ – or more delicately in the slightly subtler but no less problematic terms of critics like Seamus Deane and George Watson.52 Yeats gets short shrift, or shorter shrift than Joyce. The fact that Yeats was a Protestant who trailed his coat of many colours through the mud and blood of politics has nothing to do with it, just as the reason the Dublin audiences rioted against plays of Synge and O’Casey was nothing to do with their religion. It is all objective and above board. Nothing to see here: no faeries or demons. Scotland gets a bad press in Ireland because of Ulster, and a bad press in the South because of the North. Yeats gets looked at sideways and with suspicion because of the 49 Edna Longley, ‘The Whereabouts of Literature’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), p. 157. 50 Foster, ‘Getting the North: Yeats and Northern Nationalism’, pp. 184-5. 51 Alan Riach, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 88. 52 G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1979; 1994); Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 18801980 (London: Faber, 1985).

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very North at which he looked sideways and suspiciously. Scotland and Ulster get brushed with the same tartan. In a sense, Yeats is the North. Recently, postcolonial readings of Yeats have gained ground, most famously that of Edward Said, who read Yeats’s Celticism in relation to Negritude.53 But Yeats’s Irishness in Said’s account was set against a monolithic Britishness. Said had little to say about Scotland, and like most postcolonial critics tended to see ‘Britain’ as one flat homogenous and ahistorical whole, interchangeable with ‘England’. But one recent reading of Yeats from a postcolonial perspective argues that: ‘Yeats is completely out of luck if the postcolonial era dawned when the Republic of Ireland was officially founded in 1949 or, for that matter, when the partition might one day be dissolved between the Six Counties of the North and the lower Twenty-Six.’54 The man who famously declared that there was ‘more enterprise in going naked’ had a rude awakening on the fashion front at the height of his Celticism: On the issue of clothing, the Irish Irelander stood firm. The Leader urged the wearing of Irish cloth, tailored in Ireland and Yeats attempted to follow this model: ‘I believed myself dressed according to public opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that “It takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the way from Scotland”’ . . . Yeats’s public engagement with the dress question came at the Dublin Pan-Celtic Congress of August 1901, when the issue of an Irish national costume was debated: Yeats temporised, arguing for the very gradual adoption of national dress; he pointed out that they all had to cope with the reactions of ‘the small boy’, who could be evaded if they ‘started first in evening dress’. Irish Irelanders did not advocate a national costume.55

Ireland got from Scotland more than Connemara cloth. It got a key component of its colonial make-up. Including the North – if not getting the North – means thinking about the Scottish contribution and the Scottish undercurrents in Irish life. It is arguably a less gloomy picture than the one Yeats paints, and less galling to some than it should be, but it is a very 53

Edward Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, in Seamus Deane (ed.), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 69-95. 54 Jahan Ramazani, ‘Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?’, Raritan, 17, 3 (1998), 66. 55 Deirdre Toomey, ‘Moran’s Collar: Yeats and Irish Ireland’, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley (eds), That Accusing Eye: Yeats and His Irish Reader, Yeats Annual, 12 (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996), p. 49.

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mixed and vexed connection. It is perhaps pertinent to conclude with a line from the open-ended conclusion to an important essay by Owen Dudley Edwards, entitled ‘Scotland, Ulster, and You’: ‘Neither Ulster nor Scotland is the thing it seems to be, and we have to make long journeys to understand home.’56

56

Edwards, ‘Scotland, Ulster, and You’, p. 182.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ‘THERE’S NO “RACE” LIKE HOME’: RACE, PLACE AND NATION IN BRIAN FRIEL’S THE HOME PLACE ALISON O’MALLEY-YOUNGER

The very relationship between Heimat and Place – birthplace and childhood home, places of happy memories, places in which people live, dwell, work, enjoy the company of family and friends – the complexity of this very relationship ensures that Heimat can never be assigned a proper place. It is neither one place nor another. Heimat is No-place, ou topos. Heimat is Utopia.1

I begin with a quotation from Bernhard Schlink that seems especially relevant to the questions of race, place and nation that form the basis of this study of Brian Friel’s drama. In his 2005 play, The Home Place, Friel revisits the home ground of Ballybeg (small place, or small home) to consider issues of personal, cultural and national identities through the foci of ‘home’ and Heimat or ‘homeland’. These are not new themes for Friel. The Home Place could be described as a kind of echo-chamber of Frielian motifs touching on: place and displacement, language and communication; history and myth; exile and homecoming; memory and illusion; Self and Other. The play confronts issues of race and nation, Celticism and the variegated nature of nationalisms, both Irish and English, in an allegorical, symbolic framework in which the political impinges on the personal, and the notion of ‘home’ becomes a highly charged signifier to a fractured and divided community. In The Home Place, Friel challenges the highly charged tropes of home and place that 1

Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 32.

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have permeated Irish literature and cultural nationalism. Equally, he examines the alienation and the longing to be at home felt by the AngloIrish. The very notion of ‘home’ is scrutinised and problematised as a sentimental and nostalgic fiction that is and has no place in anything other than the imagination. Eugene O’Brien remarks, ‘there is hardly a more quoted line from Shakespeare in the overall context of Irish Studies than the famous question from Henry V: ‘what ish my nation?’2 He continues, ‘by its conflation of the individual and the national, it stresses the subjective interdependence on broader societal and cultural constructs’.3 As O’Brien rightly points out, the discourses of nationalism are predicated on an essentialist ‘them’ and ‘us’ philosophy, in which individual subjectivity is subjugated to the notion of group membership. The scope of this chapter will not allow for an in-depth debate of the national politics of Early Modern Ireland or England, but this discussion is included for a variety of reasons: first Shakespeare’s Henry V revolves around ideas of nation and nationalism; it dramatises the English nation coming into being in the ‘Mirror of all Christian Kings’, Henry V. Other peoples including the homogenous Celtic fringe, and of course, the French are presented in the play as antitypes to English national character. As England is seen as unified, civilised and ordered, England’s ‘Others’ are presented as disunified, disputatious and disordered. As the adult Hal mirrors the essence of ideal Englishness, his ‘Others’ mirror what Englishness is not, and so they must be made to conform to their status as subject peoples, thereby naturalising the right of England to rule subordinate peoples. Secondly, and what is equally interesting, is the fact that Macmorris, the violent and irascible (stage) Irishman, raises the question ‘What ish my nation?’ in a time prior to the existence of the Irish nation as we understand it today. As Richard Kearney observes, it was not until the emergence of political nationalism from the eighteenth century onwards that sovereignty became identified with the Volk . . . and later with the nation state.4

2

E. O’Brien, The Flight of the Earl: Hugh O’Neill as an Index of Irish Cultural Liminality, in A. O’Malley-Younger and F. Beardow (eds), Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2005), p. 23. 3 Ibid. 4 R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 103.

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Prior to this, fealty was to the tuath or clan, each presided over by a ri, or king. The idea of an ard ri, or High King, ruling the whole of the island of Ireland was aspirational, rather than realistic. The native ruling caste identified themselves as Gaels, and operated according to the clan or sept system of the Breton Laws. Identity within this system was tribal, its laws jus sanguinis, the law of the blood, stressing common descent from a single ancestor. Identity was regional, feudal rather than national. Indeed the nation qua nation as a unified entity did not exist, as the ‘Upstart’ Mabel stresses to Hugh O’Neill in Friel’s Making History: You are not united. You have no single leader. You have no common determination. At best you are an impromptu alliance of squabbling tribesmen . . . grabbing at religion as a coagulant only because they have no other idea to inform them or give them cohesion.5

Reductive as this is, it gives rise to O’Neill’s measured retort that ‘the formation of nations and civilisations is a willed act, not a product of fate or accident’.6 The trenchant question that arises from this is, who are the people of Ireland? Who is included and excluded by this Volk-ish sensibility? As Macmorris might ask, not what, but who, and where is my nation? The concepts of ‘home’ and homeland are keystones in nationalistic philosophy and rhetoric. As Vincent Cheng suggests, ‘‘nation’ becomes internalized as a natural and unquestioned condition of essence and destiny . . . either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, vaterland, patria), or that of home (heimat or tanah air) – for both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied’.7 Equally, as Martin Heidegger suggests in his lecture entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, delivered on 5 August 1951, the home, belonging, place, abode and dwelling are conceptual spaces of anchorage and return that make being possible. In both Cheng’s and Heidegger’s cases, there is a correlation of dwelling and ontology. To be in and of a place is, according to Heidegger’s assessment, fundamental to a sense of authentic selfhood. Home is not merely a house, a domicile or an abode, but a powerful cultural signifier that is a point of orientation, an axis mundi that designates a sense of cultural belonging and

5

B. Friel, Making History (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 38. Ibid., p. 40. 7 V. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 196. 6

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existential shelter to the individual subject, and a sense of ontological surety to a cultural group.8 Discourses of nation revolve, in part, around a profound sense of connectedness to the soil, the land, and home. The temporal and political settings of The Home Place make these issues especially relevant. In postfamine Ireland, the prevailing concerns of tenant farmers were cessation of landlordism, the prevention of evictions, resistance to rack-rents, and civil justice, through Home Rule.9 Materially, homelessness fuelled insurrections, and was at the forefront of political and ideological debates. Equally the notion of heimat, a romantic nationalist ideology of the homeland, fostered a communal nostalgia, and longing for the national home or homeland. As David Lloyd asserts: The slogan of the Nation succinctly expresses the ramifications of the nationalist project: ‘To foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil’: The act of fostering, by which a people ‘separated from their forefathers’ are to be given back an alternative, is renaturalized through the metaphor of grounding: through its rootedness to the primary soil of Ireland, the mind of Ireland will regain its distinctive savour.10

Irishness is thus ‘grounded’, rooted in the soil of the homeland, the Heimat. As O’Brien argues: [This] . . . organic connection between people and place . . . is central to nationalist ideology, as the very act of inhabiting a piece of land becomes an ideological statement of self-identification. In this context the land becomes the ultimate nationalistic signifier, it is heimlich, in the sense of offering a home to a set of ideological practices which bind people together . . . it is in place, either real or imaginary that the organic group has its being.11

8

Heidegger’s lecture is translated in Albert Hofstadter, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 143-61. 9 For a recent study see Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005). 10 D. Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p. 16. 11 E. O’Brien, ‘The Epistemology of Nationalism’, Irish Studies Review, 17 (Winter 1996/7), 19.

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O’Brien’s argument revolves around the ‘teleological point of nationalism’, the heimlich sense of place which validates the ethnic and offers a sense of ontological surety to an organic group.12 The sense of being in and of a place, of being ‘at home’, is lacking for Brian Friel; instead he identifies ‘rootlessness and impermanence’ as ‘the inheritance of being a member of the Northern minority’.13 Born only seven years after partition, Friel’s life spans the contemporary ‘troubles’ as we understand them. A ‘practising lapsed Catholic’14 he has experienced what Connor Cruise O’Brien describes as ‘historical agony and dissolution, the tragedy of people in a place: the Catholics of Northern Ireland. Yes the Catholics: there is no equivalent Protestant voice.’15 The ‘historical agony and dissolution’16 referred to by O’Brien have been the substance of Friel’s early life and they are often represented as crises of dwelling in his characters who are often, if not invariably, exiles at home. This is something they share with their creator for whom, according to Elmer Andrews, ‘being at home is at one and the same time being in exile.’17 As Friel suggests this comes about due to the fact that ‘we are constantly being offered the English home, we have been educated by the English home and we have been pigmented by an English home’.18 This is clearly depicted in Friel’s plays wherein characters display a shifting and fissured sense of identity, neither fully English nor fully Irish. In The Home Place, Christopher Gore is raised in Ireland yet fixated on English custom and culture. This is evident in the tree-felling trope at the end of the play where Christopher hankers for what he sees as his native soil of England and cannot feel rooted in the soil of Ireland, his place of domicile but not his home. Yet, as Andrews continues, for Friel ‘[t]his feeling of rootlessness and impermanence may not only be artistically enabling, it may also be the essence of the only authentic existence. Should he ever feel that he was settling into a comfortable ‘home’, Friel admits, he’d be 12

Ibid. Fintan O’Toole, ‘The man from God knows where: An interview with Brian Friel’, Dublin, 28 October 1982, 20. 14 Paul Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 81 – ‘Kathleen Mavourneen. Here comes Brian Friel’. This was taken from an interview with Desmond Rushe in 1970. 15 C. C. O’Brien quoted in R. Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (Harlow: Longman, 1996), p. 156. 16 Ibid. 17 E. Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, Neither Reality Nor Dreams (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 4. 18 O’Toole, ‘The man from God knows where’, 21. 13

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off again.’19 There is no heimat for Friel. The nearest cognate to the notoriously untranslatable heimat in his work is the omphalos, or centre, comically satirised in The Communication Cord as a xenophobic fantasy which crumbles and collapses when scrutinised. In The Home Place, the heimat is either ‘a past memory or a future possibility’,20 an imaginative fiction with no basis in fact. The conceptual and contextual pun that is the title of Brian Friel’s The Home Place draws attention to the ideas of nation, homeland, home, place and race which underpin the play. The play is set in Ballybeg Lodge, ostensibly the family home of the Anglo-Irish Gores, but, as is invariably the case with Friel, according to Elmer Andrews: [Friel’s] ‘family homes are always either broken or in the throes of breakdown . . . his images of the past, the homeland . . . likewise emphasise crisis and disruption and material exploitation rather than spiritual anchorage’.21 Capitalising on the emotive connotations of ‘home’ as a sacrosanct domicile peopled by a family unit, and contrasting this with the notion of the ‘homeland’, Friel foregrounds the manner in which the discourses of nation and empire, essentially public concerns, encroach on the private concerns of the individual. Thematically Friel revisits the contrasts between tradition and progress in his depiction of the opposition between the romantic nationalism of the Irish schoolteacher/choirmaster Clement O’Donnell and the Scientific Racism of the English colonialist Christopher Gore, both of whom attempt to identify and codify the essence of Irishness, and both of whom are unsuccessful. The chronological setting locates the play in a transitional phase in Irish history. It is 1878, shortly after the Great Famine between 1845 and 1851, the establishment of Irish Tenant League of the 1850s and the Home Rule movement of the 1870s, at the outbreak of the Irish Land Wars. As in Aristocrats, in The Home Place ‘an old order is disintegrating’.22 However, this is not the Catholic Big House of the former play, but an Anglo-Irish ‘Planter’ dynasty, symbolic representatives of the demise of feudal landlordism in Ireland. ‘The time is out of joint’ for the inhabitants of Friel’s Ballybeg Lodge, who represent an Anglo-Irish class in decline.23 This historical decline, according to Roy Foster, was due to ‘political upheavals and land agitation from the 1870s [which] would destroy 19

Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, p. 5. See Csilla Bertha, ‘The House Image in Three Contemporary Irish Plays’, New Hibernia Review, 8, 2 (Summer 2004), 64-84. 21 Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, p. 104. 22 Ibid., p. 149. 23 Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V, 188. 20

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Ascendancy Power completely’.24 In The Home Place, the Anglo-Irish Gores represent a dying breed who take sustenance from reminiscing about a prelapsarian past and fantasising about an Edenic future, engaging in social niceties to avoid what the drunken choirmaster, Clement O’Donnell, describes as ‘the nuances of a situation like this’.25 This situation is emphasised in the clash between two cultures which is threatened throughout the play, and evoked, symbolically, by Friel in stage directions that are redolent of Elizabeth Bowen’s fictions. In The Home Place, ‘the house is approached by an (unseen) avenue off right. A crescent of trees encloses the entire house and lawn; it seems to press in on them. The meniscus is most dense down stage left.’26 The trees here represent a defence, a barrier against the outside world, the native Irish beyond the walls. As Guy Felhman comments, ‘the high walls of the Big House were to separate for seven centuries the Gaelic population from the English invaders, and this partition gives birth to two separate worlds, both perfectly alien and yet close to each other’.27 In The Home Place, however, these defences are routinely breached, not only in the form of servants, Margaret O’Donnell and Sally Cavanagh, going about their daily business, but also in the shadowy presence of Con Doherty, who emerges from, and melts back into the thicket, unseen. The imagery is powerful in these initial scenes, evoking an overpowering sense of claustrophobia, subterranean violence and potential aggression. This is a ritual space, set apart from everyday time and space. It is a sanctuary under threat, wherein the characters do not develop but mark time in moments of intemporal significance, filling their lives with everyday rituals, home truths, reminiscences and chatter. This is evident in the closing lines of the play wherein, surrounded by the detritus of all they have ever known, the characters concentrate on domestic, even quotidian issues. Sally Kavanagh, about to leave the lodge that has become her home, goes about her day-to-day business such as changing the sheets and peeling the potatoes; while Christopher, on the brink of losing his home and Margaret, the woman he loves, concentrates on the genesis, longevity and necessity for felling the trees in his orchard. His is the plight of many of Friel’s characters who prefer vividly to recreate the past than to come to terms with the reality of the present. 24

R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 215. 25 B. Friel, The Home Place (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 2005), p. 40. 26 Ibid., set directions. 27 G. Felhmann, ‘An Historical Survey’, in Jacqueline Genet (ed.), The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation (Dingle: Brandon, 1991), p. 15.

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In The Home Place, nobody is at home in their place, and nobody can find a place that really represents home. Like the trees that have been planted in the ground of the lodge, and which, by the end of the play have been marked for destruction, David and Christopher Gore come to realise that their roots are not in Ireland but in an imagined England. ‘Home’, or the home place, is in Kent, or Warwickshire, irrespective of the fact they have lived in Ireland for generations. Home is not where they live, but from whence they sprang, their ancestral and hereditary place of being. They define home as the place that defines them, an imaginative patria that is the origin and source of identity. This, however, is a fictive, mediated source, accessible only in idealised, nostalgic reminiscences. As Stuart Hall argues, the homeland is not waiting back there . . . There is a past to be learned about, but the past is now seen, and has to be grasped as history, as something that has to be told. It is narrated. It is grasped through memory. It is grasped through desire.28

This desire cannot be fulfilled, only assuaged in what amounts to consoling fictions of roots and rootedness for the displaced émigré. The Home Place is an antinomian drama of exile, in which Friel captures the sense of disconnection from ‘roots’, the interiority and anguish present in the psyche of the Anglo-Irish. Residents of a strange world they have inhabited for centuries, the Anglo-Irish in the play feel themselves to be out of context, exiles at home, facing and fearing almost certain dissolution. In The Home Place, the fear of what lies beyond the walls of the demesne is foregrounded. Ballybeg and its inhabitants are both unsettlingly familiar and stringently alien to the Anglo-Irish. In this context, Freud’s definitions of heimlich and unheimlich are applicable to a reading of the play. In his essay entitled Das Unheimliche (1919), Freud noted the semantic link between German adjective heimlich (homelike/familiar) and its antonym unheimlich (uncanny): In general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two different sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of

28 S. Hall, ‘The Local and the Global’, in Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 38.

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Opposites but with a deep affinity, heimlich signifies that which is known, unheimlich that which is frightening, paradoxically because it is at once known and unknown, the estranged familiar. Das heimliche originally meaning ‘belonging to the house’, ‘secure’, ‘comfortable’, offers a sense of grounding or Selfhood in the face of the foreign Otherness of das unheimliche, the repressed, or unconscious Self. Such classifications extend to national discourse in which, as Homi Bhabha opines, ‘the heimlich pleasures of the hearth’ are poised against ‘the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’.30 This sense of the unheimlich is evident from the start of the play. It begins in August, ‘the year is just about on the turn, time ripening into decay’.31 ‘The countryside is still’,32 and the crescent of trees ‘seems to press in on them’.33 There is a sense of waiting, a tension and charge in the air suggesting that something is about to happen. The sense of an unseen predator is heightened by the dialogue between Margaret and Sally, juxtaposed with the entrance and exit of Con Doherty: MARGARET: When you’re finished there, put the chickens back into the henhouse. SALLY: You told me to let them out. MARGARET: The falcon’s back. I’ll have to get someone up to shoot him.34

The symbolic presentation of the Irish (in the character of Con) as predators, and the Anglo-Irish denizens of the lodge as prey allows Friel to give a sense of the latter’s helplessness in the face of the unknown. The play is pregnant with a sense of the unknown, or the unheimlich poised to strike. The tension is magnified by Christopher Gore’s angst relating to the murder of the tyrannical landlord, Lord Lifford, battered to death by 29 S. Freud, The Uncanny (1919), in Standard Editions of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 218-56. 30 Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 2. 31 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Marking Time: From Making History to Dancing at Lughnasa’, in A. Peacock (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), p. 202. 32 Friel, The Home Place, p. 11. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 12.

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unknown assailants on his way to evict one of his tenants. Gore is perpetually paranoid. He begins the play questioning the native Margaret about ‘which of us is next on the list’,35 and ends it stating ‘of course there’s an ugly scheme abroad . . . Maybe they’re plotting out there already. Maybe the whole of Ballybeg is going to rise up and . . .’36 The fact is that the violent uprising he fears at the start never materialises. Lifford’s death occurs offstage, and both this and his funeral are narrated events. The confrontation between the Irish and Anglo-Irish of the play is an almost polite encounter amounting to little more than threats. There is a Beckettian sense of ‘waiting’ that propels the plot, and is entirely in keeping with the psychological insecurity, marginalisation and sense of displacement of the Anglo-Irish in the late nineteenth century. Effectively, in The Home Place, nothing happens, there is no classical dénouement, no sense of closure or catharsis. The focus of the play is on a transitional phase, betwixt and between what was and what may be, between the polemics of physical-force nationalism and scientific racism, Irishness and Englishness, tradition and progress. The Home Place examines the ambiguous relationship between heimat and heimlich by highlighting the sense of dispossession and strangeness felt by those who have, for centuries, made a home in a place that is not their perceived homeland. This raises the question of what constitutes national identity. For Christopher Gore, a sense of resilient homelessness is characteristic of the Anglo-Irish, planted in a place that is not their heimat. As he asserts: The planter has to be resilient, hasn’t he? No home, no country, a life of isolation and resentment. So he has to – resile . . . And the resentment will stalk him – and never forget it – down through the next generation, and the next and the next. The doomed nexus of those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe themselves dispossessed.37

Evident in his speech is an acute and circumstantial sense of angst and alienation, yet there is also an assertion that this resilience in the face of dispossession is a character trait distinctive of the planter. Thus he voices a sense of resilient Otherness to the heimisch (native) Irish resulting from the historically immigrant status of his people, his tribe. He identifies himself as a member of one particular group or community of people thereby asserting the existence of that group as a distinct entity, a 35

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 74. 37 Ibid., p. 68. 36

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recognisable thing which, irrespective of location, has a transhistorical and ontological consistency. His attempt to fix parameters on an abstraction cannot succeed in anything other than his imagination. His quest is futile. There is no place like home. There is a sense of impermanence, displacement and cultural anomie associated with the lodge, summarised in the name which the villagers ascribe to the Gores: ‘the Lodgers’. Even Christopher, who uses the names ‘house’ and ‘home’ interchangeably to describe Ballybeg Lodge, comes to the conclusion that the house is a ‘treacherous legacy’, leading him to seek recourse in a lyrical reverie of England as home: I can’t tell you how beautiful the home place is at this time of year. And how tranquil. And how – replete. The orchards; and the deer park; and the lines of bee-hives in the pampered walled garden; and the great placid fields of wheat and oats and barley. A golden and beneficent land. Day’s without blemish. Every young man’s memory, isn’t it ? – or fiction? Or whatever.38

It is an idealisation filtered through a lens of nostalgia, memories and desire, a fiction which is always beyond reach. It is an unreliable representation precisely because it is a memory, an imaginative fiction, an inner landscape rather than an empirical given. Yet, his idea of home offers him the opportunity to voice an authentic cultural identity that is lacking in a country that has become alien to him. It gives him what Seamus Heaney defines as ‘a confidence of identity from his image of the past, an image whose contents may be questionable but whose truth has proven acceptable’.39 This bucolic vision is not home, but an imagined home, a méconnaissance, irretrievable and nostalgic, but nonetheless an escape from the dereliction of the present in a place that is a place, but not a home, and certainly not a home place. Though a resident of Ireland for generations, Christopher Gore comes to the realisation that he, like the implanted trees that are about to be culled, cannot thrive in this foreign soil. His is the alienation of the Anglo-Irish who, according to George Watson, ‘felt themselves isolated, even aliens, in their own land’.40 For the spiritually hyphenated Anglo-Irish then, Ireland was no place like home; 38

Ibid., p. 63. S. Heaney, ‘For Liberation: Brian Friel and The Use of Memory’, in Peacock (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel, p. 233. 40 G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. Critical Studies in Irish Literature (2nd edn. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), p. 29. 39

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for the nationalist Irish, home was a no place, a Celtic utopia in which there was no place for the English ‘invader’. The uses (and abuses) of nostalgia are invoked and critiqued in The Home Place. The concept of a shared, national memory is evoked only to be exposed as a fiction that can neither sustain nor be sustained. In turn both the Anglo-Irish and Irish characters exhibit a longing for belonging in an ‘imagined community’ created and sustained by Romantic ideologies of the homeland. Central to these Romantic nationalist discourses was the notion of defining a border and forming a sense of communal Selfhood based on exclusivity; formulating the communal Self on the not-Self, the Other, or as Bhabha suggests, ‘Those who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture.’41 This dialectic of Self and Other is fundamental to the notion of national identity, succinctly summarised by Billig: If nationalism is an ideology of the first person plural, which tells ‘us’ who ‘we’ are, then it is also an ideology of the third person. There can be no ‘us’ without ‘them’.42

Friel’s play satirises the us/them binarism underpinning ethnocentrism and reverse ethnocentrism, in the characters of Clement O’Donnell and Richard Gore. The fundamental irony of this pairing results from the fact that each believes in a racial taxonomy, but inverts it to his own ends. Clement does not repudiate colonialism, but extends the notion that there is a discrete national character that can be distilled. As Luke Gibbons points out: By positing a countering notion of Irish racial/national character to combat the English stereotype, Irish nationalists were therefore performing an act of static stereotyping.43

This is exactly what Clement tries to do in affiliating a sense of Irishness with the melodies of Thomas Moore, whose lyrics can be seen as cri de coeur for a collective Irish Volk, and which advocate, in highly sentimental and symbolic terms, a revolutionary national spirit in the face of tyranny and oppression. As he suggests:

41

Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 2. M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: SAGE Publications, 1995), p. 78. 43 L. Gibbons, ‘Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’, Oxford Literary Review, 13, 1-2 (1991), 95-117 (104). 42

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Chapter Eleven CLEMENT (To Richard) I imagine you have poets in England of much greater accomplishment, Mr Richard. But Tom Moore is the finest singer we have; the voice of our nation. Yes – yes – a romantic man and given to easy sentiment, as I am myself; a mixture of rapture and pathos. But he has our true measure, Mr Richard. He divines us accurately. He reproduces features of our history and our character. And he is an astute poet who knows that certain kinds of songs are necessary for his people. And they were especially necessary at the time he sang them.44

The play begins with the mesmeric sounds of Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night being sung ‘in an opulent three part harmony’,45 by a school choir in the distance. The song introduces complex layers of meaning to the play, inviting us to look beyond the surface verisimilitude to the underlying motifs of race and nation. It is no secret that Moore was a supporter of romantic, organic nationalism, and a friend to the Irish patriot Robert Emmet, for whom he wrote, O Breathe Not His Name. Oft in the Stilly Night, while less explicitly commemorative of the cause of the United Irishmen, recalls their losses in the lines: ‘When I remember all/ the friends, so link’d together/I’ve seen around me fall’, thus lending a romantic provenance to the events of the play. Yet, this is not Friel’s way of endorsing revolution, but part of a dramaturgical and emotional structure that sets a prevailing tone of melancholy, and highlights the dynamic stasis and missed opportunity that underpins the play. Clement O’Donnell is an eloquent dreamer prone to selfaggrandisement, who voices Ireland and Irishness in terms of ontology or being, tradition, history, a source. He speaks with the Romantic fervour of the nineteenth century, voicing the notion of nation as a willed act encapsulated in the Völkergeist or national spirit. This concept of a Volk is, according to the critic George Mosse: a much more comprehensive term than ‘people,’ for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century ‘Volk’ signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental ‘essence’.46

The deterministic essentialism at the core of this allows for notions such as heimat to connote an organic, ancestral landscape that is embedded, preurban and rooted in the soil. The amour de la patrie, encouraged by this 44

Friel, The Home Place, p. 42 Ibid. 46 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library, 1964), p. 4. 45

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ideology, underpinned a myth of commonality that saw the ‘individual’ subsumed by ‘the people’. Equally, the exclusivist nature of the Volk meant that without the correct pedigree and credentials, even being born into the nation did not guarantee being part of it. For such people, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy being a case in point, Ireland was no place like heimat! Richard Gore, like Lancey in Translations, is concerned with epistemology: with knowing, defining and codifying the Irish. He and Clement O’Donnell are reverse sides of the same coin, each believing that there is such a thing as ‘Irishness’ that can be either recovered or uncovered. Each attempts to create what Benedict Anderson calls an ‘imagined nation’, an essentialised, imaginary community, ‘characterized or shaped in terms of presumed shared traits.47 Just as Clement tries to preserve a fictive Celtic spirit, so does Richard attempt to postulate an imagined Irish racial type. For Clement, however, there is a ‘Renanesque’ notion of the nation as a ‘living soul, a spiritual principle’.48 For Richard, nation and race are synonymous, and national character is more a matter of biology than spirit. This is evident in their discussions of music in Act One. Speaking of his choir, Clement suggests that: The music liberates them briefly from their poverty, Mr Richard. A fleet and thrilling mayfly – if you’re an angling man. When they sing they fashion their own ethereal opulence and become a little heavenly themselves.49

The romantic diction here recalls the music of John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; a transient yet no less sublime escape from the harsh realities of life. To the Victorian Englishman, Richard Gore, music has far less spiritual and poetic resonances. Referring to Clement, he hypothesises: And you tell me he’s a man of music? . . . Because very often when a specimen deviates from the physical norms of the tribe, some psychological peculiarity manifests itself, too. So a skill in music wouldn’t

47

Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, p. 196, and citing B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 48 See Stephen Regan, ‘The Celtic Spirit in Literature: Renan, Arnold, Wilde and Yeats’, in A. Marshall and N. Sammells (eds), Irish Encounters: Poetry, Politics and Prose (Bath: Sulis Press, 1998), p. 28. 49 Friel, The Home Place, p. 40.

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Chapter Eleven be all that unusual. Can’t have had any formal musical training, our dominie, did he? Couldn’t have. Must be instinctive.50

Thus while music to Clement is a willed act, to Richard Gore it is an involuntary, instinctive racial stigmata caused by a peculiarity in an inferior gene pool. Described by his cousin, Christopher, as a ‘bore and a snob’,51 Richard Gore spends his time travelling around the Empire examining and chronicling ‘specimens’ and drawing ‘scientific’ conclusions based on crude, uncorroborated indices of race such as the quantitative relationship between human cranial capacity and mental ability, and region and character. Hence he categorises the people of Cavan as ‘a people given to deviousness and perfidy’,52 those from Wexford as industrious farmers, but capable of treason, and Clement as an inbred buffoon whose talent in music is a congenital abnormality. It is not only the Irish he categorises in this way. His taxonomic imagination stretches to his assistant, Perkins, whom he defines as ‘obsessed with curiosity. Characteristic of all the Norfolk Fens people. Also tiny feet and remarkably large hat size.’53 As the play makes clear, both Clement and Richard are doomed to failure. Their mission, to fix an abstraction is, as the critic Mel Gussow says of analysing Friel, ‘like shifting smoke with a pitchfork’.54 For Brian Friel, ‘all quests for essentialist perfection are chimerical and treacherously flawed’.55 That said, Friel does not disavow or decry concepts such as race, place and nation, choosing instead to engage with what Shaun Richards defines as ‘a meaningful but not naïve authenticity’.56 This authenticity is not, for Friel, an empirical given, but a symbolic category, an effect that is irreducible to a single meaning, which must be subject to a perpetual process of critical reappraisal and redefinition. For Friel, ‘authenticity’ is personal rather than collective, and as such is subject to the distortions and desires of the individual memory. 50

Ibid. Ibid., p. 19. 52 Ibid., p. 35. 53 Ibid., p. 37 54 Mel Gussow, ‘From Ballybeg to Broadway’, New York Times Magazine, 29 (September 1991), 205. 55 M. C. King, ‘J. M. Synge, “national” drama and the post-Protestant imagination’, in S. Richards (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), p. 91. 56 S. Richards, ‘Placed Identities for Placeless Time: Brian Friel and Postcolonial Criticism’, Irish University Review, 27, 1 (Spring/Summer, 1997), 55-68 (56). 51

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The Home Place crystallises only to problematise the idea of home in the conceptual homeland of Ballybeg, an imaginary microcosm for Ireland. Here the characters shuttle between certainty and bewilderment in their sense of identity, attempting to narrate a sense of self that is anchored to place, race and nation. The constant in the play is that home must be revised and redefined in a manner that transcends essentialist, racist or sectarian discourses. As Clement O’Donnell suggests, ‘sé sin scéal eile, a fabula alia’; that’s another story. In The Home Place, no one character can tell the story of the nation’s origin. The nation, any nation, is a composite of textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, texts and sub-texts. It is, as Homi Bhabha suggests, ‘narrated’, written, a work in process, and therefore resistant to totalising or teleological imperatives. Each character voices a different notion of nation in The Home Place. Effectively, Friel ‘writes’ home and then rewrites the concept in the narratives of each of his characters. This challenges the myth of homogeneity which underpins nationalistic discourse. For Friel, Ireland is ‘a state of mind rather than the mind of a state’.57 His characters have no primal essence, but variegated existences; identity is personal and evolutionary rather than collective and revolutionary. It is this approach that underpins The Home Place, wherein authentic identity is not a matter of geography, genealogies or genetics, but a collection of stories, inventions and memories. In The Home Place, to invoke Paul Gilroy, ‘both the roots and routes of identity are emphasised’, in the recognition of the fact that: There can be no recovery of an authentic cultural homeland. In a world that is increasingly characterised by exile, migration and diaspora, with all the consequences of unsettling and hybridisation, there can be no place for such absolutism of the pure and authentic. In this world, there is no longer any place like Heimat.58

57

O’Toole, ‘The man from God knows where’, 20. David Morley and Kevin Robinson, Spaces of Identity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 27. 58

CHAPTER TWELVE THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY: BEFORE AND AFTER THE CEASEFIRE STEPHEN REGAN

Just a few days after the I.R.A. ceasefire was announced on 31 August 1994, Seamus Heaney wrote a short article for the Dublin Sunday Tribune. It begins in a very positive mood: ‘The announcement by the Provisional I.R.A. last Wednesday changed everything for the better.’ The effect of that announcement, he says, was like having a blind lifted in his head: I went outside to try to re-collect myself and suddenly a blind seemed to rise somewhere at the back of my mind and the light came flooding in. I felt twenty-five years younger. I remembered what things had felt like in those early days of political ferment in the late sixties.1

But that feeling of being ‘freed up’, as Heaney puts it, turns to anger as he ponders twenty-five years of suffering that have brought the situation to a point that is actually less politically promising than things were in 1968. Even so, the tentative optimism encouraged by the ceasefire is evident a little later in Heaney’s Nobel Prize speech in 1995, in which he speaks of ‘acts of faith’ around the world that ‘inspire a hope that a new possibility can still open up in Ireland as well’.2 With the exception of Edna Longley’s sobering essay, ‘Northern Irish Poetry and the End of History’, very little attention has been paid to the 1

Seamus Heaney, ‘Light Finally Enters the Black Hole’, Sunday Tribune, 4 September 2004. For additional comments on the ceasefire see J. P. Dunnigan, Deep-Rooted Conflict and the IRA Ceasefire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995); Brian Rowan, Behind the Lines: The Story of the IRA and Loyalist Ceasefires, (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995). 2 Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 460-1.

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ways in which writers in Northern Ireland have responded to the peace process. Longley is well used to journalists from abroad asking writers in Belfast, ‘What are you going to write about now?’ ‘One reply’, she proposes, is that poetry ‘had never depended either on one theme or on one orchestration of that theme’.3 Even so, some crucially important questions need to be addressed about the perceived change of political climate registered in the recent poetry of writers like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon. Edna Longley’s own incisive readings of works produced by these poets since 1994 accept the proposition that ‘the collective script might be changing’, even though she remains wary of simple formulations such as ‘post-ceasefire literature’.4 The various interruptions and deadlocks and the general intransigence of the peace process have tended to undermine the initial promise and hopefulness of 1994, but the possibility of substantial political progress in a more peaceful domain has prompted reflections and imaginings that seem to indicate a new poetic consciousness. One manifestation of this is an impulse among poets (especially Seamus Heaney) to revisit and revise their own creative achievements. Longley notes ‘the accentuated tendency for poets to quote and revise not only earlier poets and each other but also their former textual selves’.5 In terms of a distinctive preoccupation with memory, forgiveness and reconciliation, and in terms of a sustained intertextual experimentation, it might be argued that there is a significant body of writing that is ‘post-ceasefire’ in more than just the obvious chronological sense. The image of light flooding into Seamus Heaney’s poems is anticipated, of course, in a good deal of his writing prior to 1994. This is especially true of the poems in Seeing Things, published in 1991, in which Heaney turns away from a ‘poetry sluggish in the doldrums of what happens’ towards the visionary mode suggested by the title of the volume.6 In the poem ‘Fosterling’, he writes of ‘waiting until I was nearly fifty / To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans / The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten’. There is no doubt that Heaney’s work has recently come out into the light and that it has started to shed the heavy layers of discomfort that have been there since the early 1970s. For Heaney’s detractors, of course, this apparent lightening is of little consequence. His poetry, they would have us believe, has always been supremely evasive of the actual stuff of 3

Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 280. Ibid., p. 315. 5 Ibid., p. 316. 6 Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991), p. 50. 4

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politics, encrypting it in Celtic and Norse mythology and presenting it with such serene even-handedness and subtle obliquity as to say very little at all. The title of Heaney’s poem, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, has frequently been turned back on him with an accusing stare. To appreciate fully the recent lightening in Heaney’s work, and the extent to which it has been a matter of intense creative struggle, we need to recall those moments of darkness and near-despair that made the title of his 1969 book Door into the Dark seem ironically prophetic.7 It is also worth recalling those occasions on which Heaney has been moved to speak out forcefully against the British media, the British government and the British army. In March 1988, Heaney was invited to London to receive the Sunday Times award for excellence in writing. He used what might otherwise have been a pleasantly emollient occasion to express his deep dismay at the British media coverage of events in Northern Ireland, which threatened to undermine recent attempts to establish an Anglo-Irish political agreement: I noticed in yesterday’s newspapers an inclination to view the British army presence in Ulster once again as part of the solution rather than part of the problem, an inclination to view them as hygienic, rubber-gloved, impersonally motivated technicians operating in polluted ghettoes where indigenous hatreds are cultured in self-induced and self-wounding conditions. I noticed an inclination to think of military funerals as a tribal and undesirable form of solidarity when enacted on the Falls Road, but as somehow immunised against tribal significance when the victims were British soldiers, the mourners were British parents, and the martial music was relayed with deeply emotive effect by the news channels of British television.8

Heaney’s bold and uncompromising stance on this occasion was informed by Robert Lowell’s assertion that ‘every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments’, but the example of Yeats was also in his mind: ‘Yeats’s challenge to the writer was to hold in a single thought reality and justice, and the same challenge is in effect in Westminster and Fleet Street.’9 It is not possible to embark upon a worthwhile appraisal of Heaney’s postceasfire poetry without giving adequate measure to the gravity and seriousness that weigh upon his earlier writings, and without taking into 7

Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber, 1969). Seamus Heaney, ‘Anglo-Irish Occasions’, London Review of Books, 5 May 1988. Quoted by Ronald Schuchard in the Introduction to Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 14. 9 Ibid. 8

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account what he memorably characterises elsewhere as his own ‘responsible tristia’.10 That tristia is gently self-ironising, but it adequately points to a pervasive mood and a sense of moral obligation that persist in Heaney’s work over a period of some twenty years. Heaney’s 1993 lecture, ‘Frontiers of Writing’ (the closing piece in The Redress of Poetry), recalls an Oxford college dinner that took place a week after the death of Bobby Sands, on the same day that another hunger striker, the son of a neighbouring family of the Heaneys in Co. Derry, was being buried. As the poet circulates among the sherry-sipping crowd, he thinks of a very different crowd in a small house, close to home, where a funeral is taking place. He recognises acutely a ‘moment of conflicting recognitions, self-division, inner quarrel, a moment of dumbness and inadequacy when it felt like a betrayal to be enjoying the hospitality of an Establishment college and occupying, if only accidentally, the room of a British minister’. What he experiences at that moment is ‘the classic bind of all of Northern Ireland’s constitutional nationalists’, caught between ‘commitments to cultural and political ideals which are fundamentally Ireland-centred’ and ‘their disavowal of support for the violent means of the Irish Republican Army, an army which operates with pre-emptive and atrocious force in order to further similar cultural and political ideals’. Heaney’s acknowledgement of the ‘frontier’ and its political, as well as imaginative, consequences is candid but also unflinchingly forthright: ‘But whether the north and the south are to be regarded as monolithic or pluralist entities, the fact of the border, of partition, of two Irelands on one island, remains the salient fact.’11 There are other occasions on which Heaney has made his political sympathies and attachments explicit, and his prose writings have been scrupulously frank about their own aesthetic and ideological procedures. To understand the complex shifts that have taken place in Heaney’s writings since the ceasefire, however, it is necessary to go back even further to 1972. In an essay titled ‘1972’ and published in the Guardian that year, Heaney asks how poetry can come to terms with the violence and brutality of the times. He ponders these lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65: ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’12 In a later essay in 1974, Heaney answers that question with the help of Yeats. What he must do, as Yeats does in his ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, is to find ‘befitting emblems of adversity’: images and 10

Seamus Heaney, ‘Exposure’, in North (London: Faber, 1975), p. 73. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber, 1995), pp. 188-9. 12 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), p. 33. 11

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symbols that are somehow adequate to the predicament.13 Those emblems of adversity have steadily given way to emblems of reconciliation and renewal in recent times, but their force and significance are still apparent in Heaney’s most recent poems. The most striking emblems of adversity in the 1970s can be found in the bog poems of Wintering Out and North, in which Heaney establishes a parallel between the sectarian killings going on in his own north and the ritual sacrifices to Mother Earth in the early Iron Age culture across northern Europe. The source for this pervasive anthropological interest was P. V. Glob’s illustrated book, The Bog People, published in English in 1969. Heaney writes that ‘the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles’.14 Among the first of the bog poems to be written was ‘The Tollund Man’, which begins with the announcement of a pilgrimage, a desire to visit the peat bogs of Jutland: ‘Some day I will go to Aarhus’. The most striking aspect of this and other bog poems is the strange fusing of Christian and pagan ritual. In the third stanza, the meditative line, ‘I will stand a long time’, suggests a veneration and a reverence usually reserved for the Stations of the Cross, and the second section of the poem explicitly acknowledges that to pray to a pagan saint is to ‘risk blasphemy’. The closing stanza of the poem recognises the paradox of internal exile, of being an inner émigré: ‘Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home’. One of the first poems to be written by Heaney after the announcement of the ceasefire at the end of August 1994 was ‘Tollund’, the penultimate poem in Heaney’s 1996 book, The Spirit Level. The poem is dated September 1994, as if announcing its presence in a new political dispensation. At the same time, it looks back at ‘The Tollund Man’, gently suggesting a changed world view in its delicate verbal echoes of the earlier poem. As the new title suggests, the focus now is less on the fossilised sacrificial object than on the broader prospect of the place itself, with its promising ‘path through Jutland fields’. The penitential journey envisaged in the earlier poem has now been undertaken; but most importantly, the speaker’s solitary and uncertain veneration in ‘The Tollund Man’ (‘I will stand a long time’) now gives way to a sense of shared destiny and communion: ‘That Sunday morning we had travelled far. / We stood a long time out in Tollund Moss’. The familiar yet ‘hallucinatory’ quality of 13 14

Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., pp. 57-8.

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the place prepares us for the prospect of ‘seeing things’, for the possibility of the miraculous. One way in which Heaney is prompted to see a bright utopian vision is through a subtle recall of ‘Townland of Peace’, part of a sequence titled ‘Freehold’, written in the 1940s by the Ulster regionalist poet, John Hewitt: ‘It could have been a still out of the bright / ‘Townland of Peace’, that poem of dream farms / Outside all contention’.15 In ‘The Tollund Man’, Heaney had established a parallel between ancient Jutland and the ‘old man-killing parishes’ of his own homeland. Now, he establishes a different parallel between the quiet pastoral of the Jutland fields and Hewitt’s wartime regional idyll, in which the poet imagines stepping ‘clean out of Europe into peace’. As Edna Longley suggests, ‘“Townland of Peace” may have come into Heaney’s mind because its images distinguish peace from war so simply and clearly, and because it explains how wartime circumstances stimulated the visionary new history for ‘Ulster . . . my region’ that emerges later in “Freehold”’.16 At the same time, Heaney’s new vision of ‘Tollund’ is one that is open to change and modernisation. His pastoral setting admits ‘Light traffic sound’, and the generously embracing image of a scarecrow with its arms open is strategically aligned with a satellite dish in a nearby paddock. A standing stone has been ‘resituated and landscaped’, and the speaker who once felt lost among foreign names now discovers ‘tourist signs in futhark runic script / In Danish and in English’. All the signs suggest that ‘Things had moved on’. The earlier negative identification that Heaney articulates in ‘The Tollund Man’, feeling ‘lost, / Unhappy and at home’, now gives way to a more easeful and open sense of being ‘at home beyond the tribe’. The dejected solitariness of the earlier poem is replaced with a more positive sense of companionship and shared endeavour: More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning. And make a go of it, alive and sinning, Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

The image of ghosts is momentarily unsettling, since the haunted present usually signifies the troubled legacy of the past, but the facing of the light is a positive indication of a new start and a new determination to go 15

See Frank Ormsby (ed.), The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991), p. 379. 16 Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 307.

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forward, unconstrained by the narrow moral and religious dictates that have previously hindered progress. The willingness to take risks in the interests of change has a formal corollary in Heaney’s readiness to employ the rhythms of living speech: ‘make a go of it . . . not bad’. Edna Longley notes that the phrase ‘Ourselves again’ appears to conflate the familiar translation of Sinn Féin (‘ourselves alone’) with the famous Irish ballad, ‘A Nation Once Again’, and she concludes: ‘Perhaps it is fitting that subtextual irresolution should characterise an “end” that cannot yet generate the language, the tropes and modes, for “a new beginning”’.17 Andrew Murphy, however, offers a more optimistic reading of these closing lines, noting that ‘By cancelling the “alone” and replacing it with “again”, Heaney suggests a kind of rebirth of Irishness and a breaking of traditional isolationist introversion’.18 The closing colloquial summation, ‘not bad’, is just deflationary enough to caution against wild expectations; it suggests a reasonable start, but it also invites a more generous estimation of human kindness and potential than had previously prevailed. The most remarkable manifestation of the Tollund Man in recent times, however, has been in ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’, a sonnet sequence included in District and Circle (2006). As the title of the sequence suggests, the longed-for germination that Heaney sought in Wintering Out has now come about and the Tollund Man walks abroad in the rapidly changing contemporary world. The new global order that he inhabits is one in which terrorism is a persistent and widespread concern, and in which new technology drives the increasing need for surveillance. If this seems like a disappointing, dystopian end to all that was hoped for in the earlier poem – as if the violence and terror at the local level have now assumed a worldwide presence – there is also an abiding hope and determination. The persistence of the Tollund Man testifies to the survival and persistence of poetry itself, and now the Tollund Man speaks in his own voice, with a new-found sense of liberation: Into your virtual city I’ll have passed Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes, Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face Coming and going, neither god nor ghost . . .

The strong sense of endurance and fortitude that informs the poem derives in part from the anti-totalitarian vision of Heaney’s friend and fellow poet, Czesáaw Miáosz, who died in August 2004: ‘The soul exceeds its 17 18

Ibid., p. 309. Andrew Murphy, Seamus Heaney (Plymouth: Northcote House), p. 103.

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circumstances’. The presence of the Polish poet reinforces the impression that ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ is a celebration of poetry’s ‘staying powers’. By the end of the sequence, it seems as if poet and Tollund Man have merged and become one. If the title District and Circle brings to mind the London Underground and the hellish circumstances of the terrorist bombings in July 2005, it also suggests Heaney’s continuing preoccupation with his own district and his relentless circling back on his own poetic achievements. There is resilience and endurance in the figure of the turf cutter with which the sequence ends: ‘I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit / And spirited myself into the street’. Stylistically, too, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ registers a changed world view. For all the deep-seated anxieties that attend the prospect of globalised terror, there is a lightness and deftness in Heaney’s handling of the sonnet form. The syntactical fluency and rhythmic buoyancy of the sonnets suggest a recovery of confidence in the lyric mode. In the opening sonnet, for instance, the Petrarchan rhyme scheme is established with an easeful and artful simplicity, allowing words like ‘passed’ and ‘ghost’, ‘lost’ and ‘rust’, to function as near-echoes of each other, rather than as full-throated rhymes. This sustained experimentation with lyric form takes on a new confidence and adventurousness in the changed political climate of the post-ceasefire period. Between 1972 and 1994, from ‘The Tollund Man’ to ‘Tollund’, Heaney had continued to think about the function of poetry, and about whether lyric poetry, in particular, was adequate to the circumstances in which it now had to operate. One of the most revealing instances of Heaney’s theoretical manoeuvring can be found in the Richard Ellmann Lectures which he delivered at Emory University in Atlanta in 1988, and which were subsequently printed in a small book titled The Place of Writing (1989). In these lectures, Heaney confesses just how difficult it is to carry on writing in a cultural climate where a suspicion of Yeatsian heroics combines with a more general European scepticism about the possibilities of poetry after Auschwitz: it all added up to a situation in which the literary intelligentsia of Britain and Ireland were anxious to confine the operations of imaginative writing to a sanitized realm that might include the ludic, the ironic, the parodic, the satiric, the pathetic, the domestic, the elegiac and the self-inculpatory, but which would conscientiously exclude the visionary prophetic, the patriotic witness, the national epical.19

19 Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta, GE: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 38.

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In Heaney’s own work, of course, there are many instances of the domestic, the elegiac and the self-inculpatory, but rather less attention has been given to the visionary prophetic, the patriotic witness and the national epical, all of which are also abundantly present in Heaney’s work, and which arguably begin to surface more confidently and explicitly in the poetry written after the ceasefire of 1994. The references to ‘the ludic, the ironic, the parodic’ derive in part from the preface to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison, in which Heaney (somewhat reluctantly) had been included in 1982. It suggests the kind of poetry then being written by Paul Muldoon, a poetry that was advertising itself as postmodern in its self-reflexive, allusive, deconstructive energies. Just a little later in the essay, Heaney takes Muldoon to task for seeming to deride the notion that poetry might have a desirable, never mind a demonstrable, relation to the life of a nation. To get involved with such ideas, he [Muldoon] implies, is at best to commit a literary offence, at worst to promote dubious mystiques involving race memory and the chosen people complex.20

How, then, to steer a line between patriotic witness and the kind of postmodern playfulness that would seem to abandon any serious commitment to the life of the nation? Heaney has always tried to balance the place of writing in terms of a particular national location with the place of writing in terms of where it exists, theoretically, in relation to other cultural activities and events. Three poems written by Heaney over a period of thirty years, all of them preoccupied with a particular place – Toome, in Co. Antrim – suggest how pervasive and persistent Heaney’s ideas about the ‘place of writing’ have been throughout his career. All three poems give voice to the urge and necessity of poetry itself, but also reveal distinctive stages of development in Heaney’s thinking about the adequacy of his own artistic impulses. The first of these poems, simply titled ‘Toome’, appeared in Wintering Out in 1972. It is one of a number of sensuous verbal realisations of local places, including ‘Anahorish’ and ‘Broagh’, in which Heaney taps a long Irish tradition of placenames poems (dinnseanchas) and attempts to recover ‘forgotten Gaelic music in the throat’: ‘My mouth holds round / the soft blastings, / Toome, Toome.’ At a phonetic level, the poem is an exploration of the distinctive music of Gaelic vowel sounds; it exerts a sense of kinship and perhaps a sense of possession in the mouth’s 20

Ibid., p. 41.

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prolonged ‘holding’ to the soundings of the place. As Heaney suggests in his early essays, however, linguistic contours are also geo-political contours. Toome is part of the Bann valley, a site of important archaeological discoveries (and therefore an appropriate place for poetic excavations involving language and memory), but it is also associated with the 1798 Rebellion, and especially with the folk memory, preserved in Ethna Carbery’s song, of the rebel Roddy McCorley: ‘For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the Bridge of Toome today.’21 The ‘soft blastings’ of Toome open up the poem’s excavation of the landscape, while subtly hinting at its troubled political history. Heaney’s poetic ‘prospecting’ uncovers, instead of gold, an assortment of objects, including ‘musket-balls’. The final prospect is a place of danger, where the speaker acknowledges the risks that accompany his archaeological excavations: ‘I am sleeved in / alluvial mud that shelves / suddenly under / bogwater and tributaries, / and elvers tail my hair.’ That final image is a Celtic version of the Medusa myth that suggests that Heaney has pushed back well beyond the 1790s into pagan Ireland. If it provides evidence that Heaney has ‘located his primeval, preliterate self’, it also reminds us of the fossilising, petrifying consequences of looking too intently into the past.22 ‘The Toome Road’ provides a striking indication of the colloquial vigour and directness that started to enter Heaney’s work between Wintering Out in 1972 and Field Work in 1979.23 That stylistic shift is immediately apparent in the poem’s opening recollection of a meeting with the British Army: One morning early I met armoured cars In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, All camouflaged with broken alder branches, And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.

The echoes of English folk song (‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising’) are quickly dispelled, and the image of a singing maiden is displaced by military hardware. In its surveillance of rural Ulster, the army also appears to have displaced the birds and even the trees in which they sing. The broken alder, the darling tree of the exiled Sweeney, is an 21

Ethna Carbery, ‘Rody McCorley’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 367. 22 Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 44. 23 Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber, 1972); Field Work (London: Faber, 1979).

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ominous sign. In Heaney’s version of Buile Suibhne, the alder has ‘some milk of human kindness / coursing in its sap’, but here that innocence has been destroyed. The voice of the poem modulates in response to the perceived invasion, asserting territorial rights: ‘How long were they approaching down my roads / As if they owned them?’ If the voice is that of a local farmer, it is also the oracular voice of the poet, speaking with the full authority of the author, through and on behalf of the community, and emulating the defiant idiom of Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’.24 Even as the conceit of the military convoy as a grotesque debasement of nature is extended, the poem refuses to conceal its violent actuality. If the occupants of the armoured cars are ‘Sowers of seed’, they are also ‘erectors of headstones’. The lyrical address, ‘O charioteers’, is strangely anachronistic, but its function is to expose rather than obscure political power. As Neil Corcoran points out, ‘the British soldiers become, briefly, continuous with the forces of the Roman imperium’.25 That backward historical look might seem to deflect from the urgent needs of the moment, but it nevertheless presents the British army as an aggressive, occupying presence. The poem gathers to a climax as it sets against the passing image of violence an enduring image of artistic inspiration: ‘The invisible, untoppled omphalos.’ The Greek omphalos is a crucially important word in Heaney’s lexicon, as it is in that of James Joyce. It appears as the first word in the opening essay of Heaney’s first collection of essays, Preoccupations, associating the navel and the centre of the world with the sound of water being pumped in the yard of the farm where he grew up in Co. Derry. The claim that it ‘stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass’ is a defiant recognition of art’s resistance to brutal pressures, and a bold acknowledgement of all that poetry stands for. From the outset, the poet’s imagination has set the assuaging rhythms of water being pumped in the yard – ‘omphalos, omphalos, omphalos’ – against a troubling military incursion. The child growing up in the 1940s hears ‘American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toomebridge’, while ‘American troops manoeuvre in the fields along the road.’26 In Electric Light (2001), Heaney returns to the early places of the imagination, but with a new sense of energy and insight.27 The opening poem, ‘At Toomebridge’, gathers up Heaney’s earlier interests in local 24 S. Heaney (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2000), p. 68. 25 Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986), p. 134. 26 Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 17. 27 Seamus Heaney, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001).

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topography and replays them with a new suddenness and a new sense of the marvellous: Where the flat water Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth And fallen shining to the continuous Present of the Bann.

The title and the repeated anaphoric emphasis on ‘where’ (four times in a poem of ten lines) are strong indicators of a persistent interest in places and placenames in Heaney’s work. The technique of finding verbal equivalents for features of the landscape is reminiscent of the earlier ‘Toome’, while the speaker’s excited apprehension of the world recalls some of the early poems in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark. Even so, there is a distinct and decisive change of perspective. The typographical indentation and the syntactical disconnectedness create the impression that the poem has been extracted from some larger sequence. The movement of water sets up a complex interplay of spatial and temporal effects, as if enacting the processes of memory and imagination as they explore the contours of the earth. The poem acknowledges both the Heraclitean flux that Gerard Manley Hopkins revelled in and the persistent, ineffaceable stuff of history, including the remembrance of ‘Where the rebel boy was hanged in ‘98’. The world is charged with electricity, and poetry is born out of the tension between sameness and difference, between that which lasts and that which changes. Heaney’s renewed engagement with the energies of place in Electric Light is undoubtedly prompted by the changing political climate in the late 1990s. A consciousness of the ceasefire and its local consequences becomes apparent in the poem’s recollection of ‘Where the checkpoint used to be’, but this is a post-ceasefire poem in other ways as well. The stylistic corollary of the changed political order is a new willingness to entertain the ludic, self-reflexive, playfully riddling idiom that had previously appeared suspect. Heaney’s self-referencing now takes on a slippery, eel-like allusiveness. The closing lines both take us back to the earlier poetry and reassert a sense of changed priorities: ‘As once before / The slime and silver of the fattened eel.’ The expected ‘sliver’ is cleverly transformed into silver, and a subtle subliminal connection is established between electric light and electric eels. The reader is reminded both of the ‘prospecting’ speaker amidst the elvers in the earlier ‘Toome’, but also of the phosphorescent eels near Toomebridge in Heaney’s early ‘Lough Neagh Sequence’. The light that came flooding in with the announcement

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of the ceasefire in August 1994 now seems to fill the poems with a new political promise and a new stylistic charge and energy. Since 1994, Heaney’s poetry has taken on a more reflective, retrospective disposition; it has steadily, if cautiously, opened itself to the possibilities of reconciliation and peaceful settlement. Both before and after the ceasefire, Heaney has credited poetry with the responsibility of being a witness to its times, as well as an impulse for change. He has never abandoned the idea that poetry might have ‘a desirable and demonstrable relation to the life of a nation’, even if his conception of poetry has broadened recently to admit more of ‘the ludic, the ironic, the parodic’ than once seemed possible. It is still too early to tell how Heaney’s poetry might develop in the aftermath of new power-sharing initiatives at Stormont, but there is no doubt, as he himself has recognised, that things have ‘moved on’.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Allen is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century radical politics, the Irish in Britain and the history of the popular press. Among other things, she is the author of Joseph Cowen and Popular Radicalism on Tyneside (London: Merlin Press, 2007) and (with Owen R. Ashton) the co-edited volume, Papers for the People. A Study of the Chartist Press (London: Merlin Press, 2005). She is currently writing a biography of the Catholic Press baron and Irish nationalist, Charles Diamond. Richard C. Allen is Head of History at the University of Wales, Newport, and was formerly Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor of British History (2006-7) at Westminster College, Missouri. He has published widely on many aspects of Quakerism in Wales and elsewhere, and on migration and identity. His most recent work is Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales: From Resistance to Respectability (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). He is currently writing a study of Quaker migration entitled, Transatlantic Connections. Welsh Quaker emigrants and Colonial Pennsylvania, as well as co-authoring, Quaker Networks and Moral Reform in the North East of England. Douglas Caulkins is the Donald L. Wilson Professor of Enterprise and Leadership in the Anthropology Department at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa. He has held visiting scholar positions at several universities in Norway and the U.K. and has written extensively on Celtic identity in America and the British Isles. Among his recent publications are ‘Perceiving Ethnic Differences: Consensus Analysis and Personhood Among Welsh-American Populations’, Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory (2005) and ‘Consensus, Clines, and Edges in Celtic Cultures’, Cross Cultural Research, 35,2 (2001). Tanya Hedges Duroy is a research associate, ethnographer, and part-time instructor. Her research has focused on cultural identity, cultural diversity, and deviance. She has most recently served as a qualitative research professional focusing on substance use and misuse amongst adolescents and young adults. Her recent work is published in Encyclopedia of the

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Contributors

Culture Wars (forthcoming), Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (2004), and Journal of Drug Issues (2003). Kevin J. James is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Guelph, Canada. His research has been published in several edited collections, and in journals including Saothar, Scottish Economic and Social History, Textile History, Labour History Review, Rural History and Scottish Labour History. His most recent work is being published as Handloom Weavers in Ulster's Linen Industry, 1815-1914 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming). Michael Higgins lectures in media and journalism at the University of Strathclyde, and is co-convenor of the media and politics group of the Political Studies Association. He has published numerous articles and chapters on media, celebrity, politics and national identity. Forthcoming in 2008 are the books Media and Their Publics (Maidenhead: Open University Press) and, with Clarissa Smith and John Storey, the Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost is Senior Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University, where he teaches historical and sociological approaches to the Celtic languages. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society, and the author of three books: Language, Identity and Conflict (London & New York: Routledge, 2003); The Irish Language in Ireland (London & New York: Routledge, 2005); and Language and the City (Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, and a Fellow of the English Association (FEA). He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He is editor, with Andrew Hadfield, of A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). He has also edited five collections of essays: with Brendan Bradshaw and Andrew Hadfield, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton, Postcolonial Criticism (London: Longman, 1997);

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with David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); and with Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007). Peter Mills is Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture at Leeds Metropolitan University. His research interests include popular music and its use in film and television, and the relationship between popular song and protest. He has published work on Samuel Beckett, The KLF, Olaf Stapledon and The Pink Floyd, alongside being a contributor to The Rough Guide to Rock (Middlesex: Penguin, 2002). As singer and lyricist of the band ‘Innocents Abroad’, he has recorded and co-produced two albums, Quaker City (1989) and Eleven (1991). He is currently working on an extensive study of the work of Van Morrison for Continuum Books. Sarah Neely is a Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on Scottish and Irish film and literature. She has also written on a number of areas of film adaptation including the heritage genre, adaptations of Shakespeare, and the use of classic literature in the teenpic. Tony Purvis is lecturer in Media and Culture at Newcastle University. He is co-convenor of the Research Group in Media and Film at Newcastle, and researches and teaches media and cultural analysis, cultural theory, psychoanalytic approaches to media, and television drama. His most recent publications include, Television Drama: Theories and Identities (with Sue Thornham) (London: Palgrave, 2005) and Media and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). He also has several recently published chapters including ‘Sexualities’, in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Oxford Guide to Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and ‘Methods of Media Analysis in Bi-Lingual Contexts’, in Li Wei (ed.), Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Stephen Regan is Professor of English at the University of Durham. His publications include Irish Writing 1789-1939: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), The Eagleton Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), Philip Larkin: The New

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Contributors

Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), and The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992). He has also written numerous articles on the work of modern Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. He is the founding editor of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, published by Oxford University Press. Alison O’Malley-Younger is Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the University of Sunderland. She has published in the fields of contemporary critical theory, women’s writing in Ireland and contemporary Irish Drama. She has edited, with Frank Beardow, Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2005) and, with John Strachan, Essays on Modern Irish Literature (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2007). Drama: Text and Performance is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Her current research project is Stage Irishness, Ireland and the Colonial Gaze, a study of the Irish works of the playwright Dionysus Lantner Boucicault.

INDEX

accommodation, hotel 2, 13, 23-4, 27 Adams, G. B. 61 Adams, W. E. 44 agricultural decline 53-4 agricultural development 63 alcohol 116-17 alienation 10, 174, 204 Allen, Joan 3-4, 32-49 Allen, Richard 6-7, 110-28 America decadence of society 127 emigration to 111, 117-18, 119 perceptions of Irish society 111 radio talk shows 98-9 ‘American Dream’ 127 American Irish 117-18 ‘Anahorish’ (Heaney) 218 Anderson, Benedict 6, 96, 97, 207 Andrews, Elmer 198-9 Ang, Ien 159 Angel (film) 135 Anglican Church 126-7 Anglo-Irish Treaty 61 anthropology consensus analysis method 80-1 and construction of Irish identity 5, 73-95 functionalist models 74 anti-British sentiment 118 anti-Catholicism 179 Antonioni, Michaelangelo 149 Arensberg, C. 74 Armstrong, Herbie 155-6 art, street 156-7 Aspinwall, Bernard 35 Astral weeks (Morrison) 145-6 ‘At Toomebridge’ (Heaney) 220-1

aural tradition 167 Baddeley, M. J. B. 20, 23 Bagshawe, Dr Edward 43, 45 Balfour, Scott Gerald 26 The Band 147, 148 Baoill, D. P. O. 57-8 Barrie, J. M. 186-7 Barthes, Roland 167-9 Batchelder, W. H. 80 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 100-1, 105 An Béal Bocht (Ó Nualláin) 56-7 Beautiful Vision (Morrison) 154 Beckett, J. C. 117-18 behaviour styles see Irish identity/Irishness Beleek pottery 28, 29 Belfast Gaeltacht Quarter 71 street art 156-7 Belfast Blues Society 156 belonging, national/cultural 6, 8, 97, 100, 196-7 Bend it Like Beckham (film) 139 Best, George 156, 157 Beyond The Clouds (film) 149-50, 150 Bhabha, Homi 202, 205, 209 Bhaldraithe, Tomás de 57 bicycle guides 19 Billig, Michael 97, 205 Black’s Guide to Belfast and the North of Ireland 22, 26, 29 Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland 15 The Bog People (Glob) 214 Böhnke, Dietmar 133

228 Booth, Jerry 98 Bord na Gaeilge 65 Bowen, Elizabeth 200 Bowes, Robert 180 Boyce, June 146 Boyle, Danny 139 Brienzo, Gary 131-2 ‘Brigidine Diana’ (O’Connor) 174-5 Britain anti-British sentiment 118 migrants in assimilation of 33, 48, 49 and Catholic press 3-4, 32-49 radio talk shows 100-1, 105-7 British Film Institute 130 ‘Broagh’ (Heaney) 218 Brown, Terence 121 Brunsdon, Charlotte 103 Burns, Robert 9, 177, 179, 182, 183, 184-5, 186, 188 The Butcher Boy (film) 164 Butler, Judith 169 Butler, Patrick 99, 108 Butt, Isaac 39 Cal (novel by Bernard MacLaverty) narrative style and structure 7, 130, 131, 132, 141 Cal (screen adaptation) 7, 129-41 commercial appeal 130, 136, 139 music for 7, 144, 152-3 and political discourse 7, 136, 137-8, 140 subject matter as challenge to 132-3, 135 symbolism 136-7 Calvinism 179 Campbell, Nicky 107 Cappella, Joseph 99 Carbery, Ethna 219 Carleton, William 183, 184, 188 Carson, Ciaran 211 Catholic Church 33, 43, 111, 126-7

Index Catholic Educator 48, 49 Catholic Emancipation (1829) 34 Catholic Herald 34, 48 Catholic Household 47 Catholic religious symbolism 165-6 Catholic News 48 Catholic Party 45 Catholic press, and Irish migrants in Britain 3-4, 32-49 Catholic Press Association Limited 47 Catholic Press Company 48 Catholicism 166, 175, 179 and Irish nationalism 33, 35, 45 Cattaneo, Peter 139 Caughie, John 130, 140 Caulkins, Douglas 5, 73-95 Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta 62 celebrity, cult of 167-8 ‘Celtic New Year’ (Morrison) 156 ‘Celtic Swing’ (Morrison) 150 Chadha, Gurinder 139 Channel Four, `First Love’ series 7, 130 Chapman, Tracy 171 Chartattack.com 163 Cheng, Vincent 196 The Chieftains 143 children, and Catholic press 44-5, 47 Children of To-morrow (Sharp) 188 Church see Anglican Church; Catholic Church citizenship 70 City of God (film) 139 civil rights movement, Gaeltacht 62 civil service 59 class 185, 190 Clay, Andrew 166 Cleary, Joe 137 Clinton, Bill 154 Coercion Acts 38, 41, 43 An Coimisinéir Teanga 72 An Coimisiú um Athbheochan na

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture Gaeilge (Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language) 58, 59, 60 Coimisiún na Gaeltachta see Gaeltacht Commission Collins, Neil 99, 108 Comhairle na Gaeilge 60-1, 65 Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge 56 Commins, Patrick 62, 63 Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research (CILAR) 61, 65 commodification, tourism and 2, 13, 28-30 The Communication Cord (Friel) 199 community attitudes to 87-8 imagined 96-8, 108, 109, 207 primacy of 127 ‘Coney Island’ (Morrison) 152, 153, 154, 155 Congested Districts Board 21, 30 Conradh na Gaeilge 50-1, 54, 61 consensus analysis 80-1 constitution, Irish language and 5, 55-6, 60 Cooke, John 28 co-operatives, Gaeltacht 63 Corcoran, Neil 220 The Corrs 144 cottage industries 28-30 Cowen, Joseph, Jnr 4, 36, 37-8, 39, 40-1, 42, 44 Cré na Cille (Ó Caidhin) 57 creativity, of migrants 6-7, 11415 Creedence Clearwater Revival 145 Crisell, Andrew 98 Crossley, F. W. 23 Crying Game (film) 137 Cullingford, Elizabeth 161, 175 cultural belonging 196-7 cultural change, and EU membership 5, 76, 82-4, 90-1

229

cultural consumption 168, 169 cultural identity 10, 194 see also Irish identity/Irishness Cultural Studies 97 Dana 160, 171-2 Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel) 9 Davis, Graham 49 Davitt, Michael 42 ‘Days Like This’ (Morrison) 153, 154 The Lady of the House 21 Deane, Seamus 176, 177, 191 Death of a Naturalist (Heaney) 221 Deeney, Daniel 190 defacement/effacement 168 de Fréine, Sean 62 Democratic Federation 42 Democratic Review 38 demythologisation 133, 159 Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in the administration of Northern Ireland (DCALNI) 69, 70 Derbyshire, Victoria see Victoria Derbyshire de Valera, Éamon 56 dialect 183-4, 185 Diamond, Charles 4, 33-4, 36, 3949 Diamond, Frank 40 Diana, Princess of Wales 175 Dicky Bird Society 44 Dion, Celine 144 displacement 194 District and Circle (Heaney) 10, 216, 217 Donegal 22-3 The Donegal Highlands (Ward, Lock, and Co.) 19, 20, 28 Door into the Dark (Heaney) 212, 221 Dowden, Edward 186 dowry system 123-4, 125

230 Drei Amerikanische Albumen (film) 145 Dublin 173-4 Dublin Magazine 112 Dublin Review 34, 35 Dublin University Review 51 Duffy, Joe 100, 103 Dunraven, Earl of 21 Dutton Report (2004) 71 Dylan, Bob 147, 148 Eagleton, Terry 191 East is East (film) 139 economic development, in the Gaeltacht 53-4, 58-9, 63, 64 Edinburgh Catholic Magazine 34 education Catholic 33, 44-5, 46, 49 and language 53, 54-5, 59, 60, 63-4, 69, 72 Education Act (1988) 66 Edwards, Owen Dudley 36, 45, 189, 193 effacement/defacement 168 egalitarianism 79, 94 Eglinton, John 182-3 Electric Light (Heaney) 220-1 emigrants/emigration to America 111, 117-18, 119 as theme in films 111, 117-18 see also migrants Emmet, Robert 206 emotionalism 5, 79, 89, 90, 94 English language 54, 56, 60 English Republic 38 Englishness 91, 195, 203 equality, and language issues 65, 68-71 Equality Commission for Northern Ireland 71 ethnography 17, 31 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages 69-70, 71, 72 Code of Courtesy 69-70

Index European Union 59 cultural change and membership of 5, 76, 82-4, 90-1 Evans, Mark 134 Exile 36 exile/exiled communities 3-4, 6-7, 8, 32, 198 theme of in drama 194, 201 in films 7, 111, 114, 117, 145 in music 174 The Faerie Queen (Spenser) 180 fairies 180, 181-2 Far and Away (film) 115 Farley, Fidelma 137 Farrell, Angela 171 Felhman, Guy 200 feminine/femininity 165, 166, 170-1 Fenians 39 The Field (film) 121 Field Work (Heaney) 219 Fielding, Stephen 169 film(s) 6-7 exile as theme in 7, 111, 114, 117, 145 genres, and book adaptations 134 Irish identity/Irishness, representation of in 111, 115, 116, 138 local versus universal appeal 7, 139-40 music and 7-8, 142-57 Northern Ireland, representation of in 7, 12941 politics and 7, 136, 137-8, 140 Protestant representation in 132-3, 135, 136 television 7, 129-30 women, representation of in 111, 113, 121-6, 164 see also The Quiet American Finnegan, R. B. 159, 160, 169

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture ‘Fire In the Belly’ (Morrison) 150 Fleming, Victor 135 folk traditions 2, 17 Ford, John 6, 7, 110, 113-14, 118 Forsyth, Bill 136 Foster, John Wilson 189, 190 Foster, Roy 185-6, 199-200 ‘Fosterling’ (Heaney) 211 Foucault, Michel 161, 169 Francisco, Milburg 27 Franklin, B. 102 French, Brandon 125, 126 Freud, Sigmund 201-2 Friel, Brian 198-9 The Communication Cord 199 Dancing at Lughnasa 9 The Home Place 9-10, 194-5, 197, 198-209 Making History 9, 196 ‘Frontiers of Writing’ (Heaney) 213 Full Monty (film) 139 Gael-Linn 56 Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) 50-1, 54, 61 Gaelic Revival 61 Gaeltacht 58, 72 boundaries of 58 civil rights movement 62 co-operatives 63 economic and industrial development 53-4, 58-9, 63, 64 education in 53 and Irish language 4, 50-4, 557, 62-6, 72 radio 64-5 Gaeltacht Areas Order (1956) 58 Gaeltacht Commission 51-2, 53, 66 Gaeltacht Industries Act (1957) 58 Gaeltarra Éireann 58-9, 63, 64 The Gangs of New York (film) 149 Garbo, Greta 168 Garnham, N. 108-9 n.60

231

gCopaleen, Myles na 56-7 Gee, Simon 154 Gellner, Ernest 96 gender discourse 158, 165-6, 172-3 Gerry Ryan Show (radio programme) 6, 100, 102-5, 106, 107, 108, 109 Getz, Stan 150 An Ghaeilge Bheo (Ó Caidhin) 62 Gibbons, Luke 116, 127, 205 Gilroy, Paul 209 Glasgow Free Press 35 Glasgow Observer 46-7 Glennon, Mary 163-4 Glide (film) 147 Glob, P.V. 214 globalisation 6 Gone with the Wind (film) 135 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 689, 70-1 The Good Thief (film) 138 Government of Ireland Act (1920) 61 Graham, Colin 105 Gramsci, Antonio 104 Great Famine 52, 199 Great Southern and Western Railway (G.S.W.R.) 18, 29 The Great Silence (de Fréine) 62 The Green Rushes (Walsh) 6, 7, 112-13 Gregg, Colin 144, 149 Gregory, Lady 185, 189 Guardian 213 An Gúm 55 Guterman, Jimmy 158, 159 Gweedore 23, 26 Habermas, Jürgen 102 Hall, Stuart 169, 201 Hamlyn, William 30 Handbook for Travellers in Ireland (John Murray) 18, 21 handicraft traditions 2, 13, 28-30

232 Handke, Peter 145, 146 Harry, Debbie 171 `Have I Told You Lately’ (Morrison) 150, 152 Haycox, Earnest 113 Hayes, Dermott 159 The Healing Game (Morrison) 150 Healy, Timothy 38 Heaney, Seamus 10-11, 204, 210-22 ‘Anahorish’ 218 ‘At Toomebridge’ 220-1 ‘Broagh’ 218 Death of a Naturalist 221 District and Circle 10, 216, 217 Door into the Dark 212, 221 Electric Light 220-1 Field Work 219 ‘Fosterling’ 211 ‘Frontiers of Writing’ 213 ‘Lough Neagh Sequence’ 221 ‘1972’ 213 North 214 The Place of Writing 217 Preoccupations 220 The Redress of Poetry 213 Richard Ellmann Lectures 217 Seeing Things 211 The Spirit Level 214 ‘Tollund’ 214-15 ‘The Tollund Man’ 214, 215-16 ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ 216-17 ‘Toome’ 218-19, 221 ‘The Toome Road’ 219-20 ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ 212 Wintering Out 214, 216, 218, 219 Hedges Duroy, Tanya 5, 73-95 Heidegger, Martin 196 heimat see home/homeland/heimat heimlich and unheimlich 201-2 Henry V (Shakespeare) 178, 195 Hepburn, Audrey 168 Hewitt, John 215 Hickman, Mary 33, 49

Index Hidden Agenda (film) 134 Higgins, Michael 6, 96-109 Hill, Geoffrey 10 Hill, John 129, 134, 135-6, 138-40 Hill, Lord George 23, 26 Hinton, Brian 142 Hirtz, Dagmar 144, 151 historical revisionism 9, 176 history 44, 194 Home Rule 38, 45, 46, 197 Home Rule Conference (1873) 38 Home Rule movement 10, 199 home/homeland/heimat 10, 194-5, 196-9, 201-9 homecoming 7, 8, 111, 114, 194 homelessness 197, 203 The Home Place (Friel) 9-10, 1945, 197, 198-209 homophobia 179 honour 124-5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 221 Horgan, John 105 hotels 2, 13, 23-4, 27 Howth, Earl of 21 Hughes, Ted 10 Hutchby, Ian 98 Hyde, Douglas 50-1 Hyndman, Henry 42 hysteria, discourses of 165 identity 10, 169-70, 194, 209 see also Irish identity/Irishness; national identity imagined community 96-8, 108, 109, 207 In America (film) 138 In the Name of the Father (film) 138 Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (Morrison) 154 individualism 79, 95, 138 industrial development, in the Gaeltacht 58-9, 63 Institiúid Teangeolaíochta

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture Éireann 61 I.R.A. 10, 137, 210, 213 Irish Dialects and Irish-speaking Districts (Ó Cuív) 58 Irish Folklore Commission 55 Irish Free State 5, 54, 55, 61 Irish Grammar and Orthography 57 Irish Heartbeat (Morrison) 143, 150 Irish identity/Irishness 10, 158, 170, 194, 199, 203, 205, 207 anthropology and construction of 7, 73-95 consensus analysis 80-1, 93 contestation in the discourse on 81-2, 91 and EU membership 5, 76, 82-4, 90-1 filmic representation of 111, 115, 116, 138 music and 143-4, 150, 155, 171-5 Sinéad O’Connor and 158, 159-60, 169, 170, 172-5 work attitudes and 79, 84-8, 89, 90 Irish Industries Association 30 Irish Land League 10, 40 Irish language 4-5, 50-72 civic identity for 66 constitutional status of 5, 556, 59 education and 53, 54-5, 59, 60, 63-4, 69, 72 and equality and rights discourse 65, 68-71 and EU membership 59 and Gaeltacht communities 4, 504, 55-7, 62-6, 72 law and 5, 55 and national identity 4, 50, 51, 66 in Northern Ireland 61-2, 66-71, 72 standardisation of 57-8 Irish Language Board 65

233

Irish Language Books Board 55 Irish Language Council (Comhairle na Gaeilge) 60-1, 65 Irish Liberator 35 Irish Literary Revival 3 Irish National Foresters 46 Irish National Land League (INLL) 40, 41, 42 Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) 55, 56 Irish People 35 Irish Republican Brotherhood 39 Irish Studies Review 1 Irish Tenant League 199 Irish Tourist Association (I.T.A.) 21, 22 Irish Tribune 4, 34, 41-6, 47, 48 The Irish In America (TV series) 155 James, Kevin J. 2-3, 12-31 James VI, King of Scotland 180 Johnson, Nuala C. 58-9 Joint Declaration, British-Irish (2003) 69, 70 Jones, D. A. 99 Jones, Sandie 171 Jordan, Neil 137, 138, 164 Joyce, James 9, 154, 177, 189, 190, 191 Kearney, Richard 195 Kennedy, Brian 151, 152 The Key Above the Door (Walsh) 112 Kimball, S. T. 74 The King of Comedy (film) 149 kinship 196 Knopfler, Mark 7, 144, 152-3 Kosicki, G. M. 99 lace 29 Lamb (MacLaverty) 136, 144 screen adaptation 7, 144, 149, 154-5

234 The Lancet 106 landownership 111, 119-21, 125 Landy, Marcia 115, 118 Lane-Poole, Stanley 27 lang, k d 171 language 194 in Irish and Scottish literature 183-4 see also English language; Irish language Larkin, Philip 10 Last Exit to Brooklyn (film) 153 The Last Waltz (film) 147-8 The Late Late Show 162 law, Irish language and 5, 55 Lee, GangHeong 99 Leitrim, Lord 23 Lennox, Annie 171 Leonard, Tom 139 Letters from the West of Ireland (Shand) 3, 14, 15, 18, 19-20, 23, 24-5, 26-7, 28, 30, 31 Lewis, C. S. 156, 157 Lewis, Peter 98 Limbaugh, Rush 98-9, 109 Linguistics Institute of Ireland 61 The Lion and the Cobra (O’Connor) 172 LiveLine (radio programme) 100, 103 Llewellyn, Richard 118 Lloyd, David 197 Loach, Ken 134 Local Hero (film) 136, 153 Lodge, David 136-7 Longley, Edna 189, 190-1, 210-11, 215, 216 Longley, Michael 211 ‘Lough Neagh Sequence’ (Heaney) 221 Lovett, Richard 22 Lowell, Robert 212 Lynd, Robert 31 Lyons, F. S. L. 128

Index Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait 4-5, 50-72 Mac Neill, Eoin 51 Mac Póilin, Aodán 67 MacAleese, Mary 174 Macartney-Filgate, W. T. 28 McCarron, E. T. 159, 160, 169 McCarthy, James 43 McCarthy, Jeannie 40 McColl, Kirsty 171 McCorley, Roddy 219 McCormack, Bill 176-7 McDiarmaid, Hugh 9, 179, 189 McElligott, Father Kenneth 124-5 McIlroy, Brian 132, 134, 135, 136 McIlvanney, Liam 182 Mackenzie, W. J. M. 96 MacLaverty, Bernard 7 see also Cal; Lamb McLaverty, Michael 150 Macleod, Fiona see Sharp, William McLoone, Martin 138 McPeake Family 143 ‘Madame George’ (Morrison) 152 Madonna 171 ‘The Mad House on Castle Street’ (BBC play) 147 Maguire, Gabrielle 67 Making History (Friel) 9, 196 Maley, Willy 9, 176-93 Maloney, Mick 161-2 Malony, John 75 Mandel, Harvey 145 Manning, Cardinal 43, 45 Mansfield, Blanche McManus 27 Manuel, Richard 147, 148 Marcus, Greil 148 Marian tradition 166, 175 marriage 123-4 Martin, John 38 martyrdom 79, 94 Mathers, Macgregor (Samuel Liddell) 187 Maxi 171 May, Stephen 63

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture Mayo, Earl of 20, 21, 27, 29 media representations of celebrity 167-8 of events in Northern Ireland 212 of Sinéad O’Connor 160, 162-5, 166-8 of women 165, 167-8 `Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (Yeats) 213, 220 Meirelles, Fernando 139 memory 9, 10, 194, 204, 205, 211 and migrant experience 114, 115 Michael Collins (film) 164 Midland Great Western Railway 18 migrants in Britain assimilation of 33, 48, 49 Catholic press and 3-4, 32-49 creativity of 6-7, 114-15 memories of home 114, 115 see also emigrants/emigration Mills, Peter 7-8, 142-57 Miáosz, Czesáaw 216-17 Minogue, Kylie 171 Miskelly, Bill 150 modernity 6, 161, 164, 175 modernization, rural 26-7, 121 Montgomery, Martin 98, 131 Moondance (film) 144, 151-2 ‘Moondance’ (Morrison) 151-2, 153 Moore, Thomas 205-6 ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ 206 Moran, D. P. 183, 184 Morley, David 103 Morrison, Blake 218 Morrison, Shana 151 Morrison, Van 7, 8, 142-57, 161 and film music for 7, 8, 143-7, 149-55 personal appearances 147-8, 155-6 and Irishness 8, 143-4, 150, 155, 161

235

Astral Weeks 145-6 Beautiful Vision 154 ‘Celtic New Year’ 156 ‘Celtic Swing’ 150 ‘Coney Island’ 152, 153, 154, 155 ‘Days Like This’ 153, 154 ‘Fire In the Belly’ 150 ‘Have I Told You Lately’ 150, 152 The Healing Game 150 Inarticulate Speech of the Heart 154 Irish Heartbeat 143, 150 ‘Madame George’ 152 ‘Moondance’ 151-2, 153 No Prima Donna 155 ‘Orangefield’ 154 The Philosopher’s Stone 146 Poetic Champions Compose 150 ‘Queen Of The Slipstream’ 150, 152 ‘Song Of Being A Child’ 146 ‘Wild Children’ 145 ‘Wonderful Remark’ 149 Mosse, George 206 Motion, Andrew 218 Moving Hearts 143 Muir, Edwin 183-4 Muldoon, Paul 211, 218 Muriel and the Lindsays 171 Murphy, Andrew 216 Murray, Isobel 188 music 7-9, 207-8 and film 7-8, 142-57 and Irish identity/Irishness 143-4, 150, 155, 171-5 rap 167 ‘My Heart Will Go On’ 144 My Left Foot (film) 137-8 myth/mythology 133-4, 159, 194 ‘N.W.A.’ (Niggas With Attitude) 167 Naíonrai 63-4

236 Nation 35 nation/nationhood 9, 10, 165, 194, 195-6, 197, 199, 207, 208, 209 national belonging 6, 8, 97, 100 national costume 192 national identity 4, 6, 10, 96-8, 169, 194, 203, 205 and Catholic press 44 and Irish language 4, 50, 51, 66 and radio talk shows 6, 98-109 National Land League of Great Britain 4, 40 National School System 52 nationalism 4, 10, 49, 194, 195-8, 205 and Catholicism 33, 35, 45 physical-force 203 nationalists 37 Neely, Sarah 7, 129-41 Neeson, Liam 154-5 New York Post 167 Newcastle Chronicle 4, 38, 39, 44 Newcastle upon Tyne 4, 36-7 Nie, Michael de 33 ‘Nineteen-Nineteen’ (Yeats) 178 ‘1972’ (Heaney) 213 No Prima Donna (Morrison) 151-2, 153 Non-sectarian party 45 North (Heaney) 214 Northern Counties Railway 18 Northern Ireland 8, 153-4 Bill of Rights 70 filmic/literary representation of 7, 129-41 Irish language in 61-2, 66-71, 72 and Irish-Scottish relations 189-92 media coverage of events 212 peace process 10, 153-4, 211 street art 156-7 Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) 70 Northern Tribune 38

Index nostalgia 5, 79, 89, 90, 94, 114, 115, 204-5 Nothing Personal (film) 134 Noyce, Phillip 134 Nugent, Frank S. 118 O’Brien, Connor Cruise 198 O’Brien, Eugene 195, 197-8 O’Brien, Flann see O Nualláin, Brian O’Casey, Sean 191 Ó Caidhin, Máirtin Cré na Cille 57 An Ghaeilge Bheo 62 Ó Cuív, Brian 58 O’Connell, Daniel 35 O’Connor, Pat 144 O’Connor, Sinéad 8-9, 158-75 effacement/defacement of 168 and gender discourse 158, 165-6, 172-3 and Irish identity/Irishness 158, 159-60, 169, 170, 172-3 media representations of 160, 162-5, 166-8 and religion 165-6, 175 ‘Brigidine Diana’ 174-5 The Lion and the Cobra 172 ‘Paddy’s Lament’ 172, 173-4 She who dwells... 159-60, 166 ‘Thank you for hearing me’ 174 ‘This is a rebel song’ 172 The Value of Ignorance 161 The Year of the Horse 161 O’Donnell, Damien 139 Office of the Official Languages Commissioner 66 Official Languages Act (2003) 66, 72 ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ (Moore) 206 O’Leary, Paul 126 O’Malley-Younger, Alison 9-10, 194-209 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats) 177

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture On The Waterfront (film) 145 Ó Nualláin, Brian 56-7 oral tradition 167 ‘Orangefield’ (Morrison) 154 O’Suilleabhain, Michael 167 O’Sullivan, Patrick 114 O’Sullivan, Sara 102-3, 104, 107, 108 O’Sullivan, Thaddeus 134 the Other 194, 202, 205 Ó Tuathaigh, G. 51-2, 58 ‘outsiders’, creativity of 114-15 ‘Paddy’s Lament’ (O’Connor) 172, 173-4 Pan, Z. 99 Parnell, Charles Stuart 38, 45 Patriot Games (film) 134 peasant culture 17 The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 218 performance behaviour styles 79, 95 Pettitt, Lance 115-16, 121 The Philosopher’s Stone (Morrison) 146 physiognomy 24 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 188 place, sense of 9, 194-5, 197-8, 199, 208, 209 placename poems 218-19 The Place of Writing (Heaney) 217 Planning and Development Act (2000) 66 Plunkett, Horace 21 Poetic Champions Compose (Morrison) 150 poetry 10-11 dialect 183-4 placename 218-19 see also Heaney, Seamus; Yeats, W. B. political conflict 111 and tourist safety 30

237

political correctness 107 politics and film 7, 136, 137-8, 140 and radio talk shows 98-100, 108, 109 Tyneside radical 37, 48 population 24-6 postcolonialism 9, 176, 178, 192 pottery 28, 29 Pound, Ezra 9, 179, 184 Preoccupations (Heaney) 220 press see Catholic press primitivism 25 Protestants, filmic representation of 132-3, 135, 136 public sphere 102, 108 Purvis, Tony 8-9, 158-75 Puttnam, David 7, 130, 136, 140, 141 Q magazine 166 The Quiet Man (film) 6-7, 110-11, 113-14, 115-28 themes community, primacy of 127 emigration 111, 117-18 exile and homecoming 7, 111, 114, 117 honour and shame 124-5 landownership 111, 119-21, 125 marriage and dowry system 1234, 125 religion 111, 126-7 women 111, 121-6 The Quiet Man (Walsh short story) 111, 112, 113, 118 race 9, 171, 194, 199, 207, 208, 209 racial origins 24-5 Radford, Mike 155, 156 radicalism, Tyneside 37, 48 Radio 5 Live 100-1, 105, 107 radio, Gaeltacht communities 64-5

238 radio talk shows 6 discourses of 102-7 and national identity 6, 98-109 political and cultural influence of 98-100, 108, 109 Radio and Television Act (1988) 108 Raidió na Gaeltachta 64-5 railways 2, 13, 18-19, 21, 22 rap music 167 Rathlin Ireland 62 Red Republican 38 The Redress of Poetry (Heaney) 213 Regan, Stephen 10-11, 210-22 religion 111, 126-7, 165-6, 175, 185, 190-1 see also Catholic Church; Catholicism ‘Remonstrance with Scotsmen ...’ (Yeats) 9, 179-80, 181-2 republicanism 118-19 international 37 Resurrection Man (film) 134 revisionism, historical 9, 176 Rex, John 169 Reynolds, Tina 171 Riach, Alan 191 Richards, Shaun 208 Richards, Susan 130, 136 rights discourse, and language issues 65, 68-71 Ripon, Marquis of 47 The Road to Nowhere (Walsh) 112 Robertson, Robbie 147, 148 Rockett, Kevin 137-8 Roinn na Gaeltachta 58 Romney, A. K. 80 Rosapenna 23 Ross, Jonathan 162 RTÉ (Radio Telefis Eíreann) 6, 64, 100, 105, 108, 150 Ryan, Gerry see Gerry Ryan Show Ryan, Liam 117 Ryan, Tom 137

Index safety of tourists 30 Said, Edward 192 Saturday Evening Post 112, 113 Saturday Night Live 162, 166 Scanlan, Margaret 133 Scannell, Paddy 105 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 73, 74 Schlink, Bernard 194 School Boards, Catholic representation on 45, 46, 49 ‘The Schooner’ (film) 150-1 Scorsese, Martin 145, 147, 149 Scotland 26-7, 176-7 Catholic communities in 34-5, 36, 46 Yeats and 9, 177-93 Scotophobia 177 Scott, Sir Walter 9, 179, 185-6, 188 Scottish literature 133 see also Scotland, Yeats and Scottishness 82, 91 Screen Online 130 sectarianism 36-7, 179 Seeing Things (Heaney) 211 Seger, Linda 135 Self and Other 194, 202, 205 Shakespeare, William Henry V 178, 195 Sonnet 65 213 shame 124-5 Shand, Alexander Innes 3, 17 Letters from the West of Ireland 3, 14, 15, 18, 1920, 23, 24-5, 26-7, 28, 30, 31 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod) 187-9 Children of To-morrow 188 She who dwells ... (O’Connor) 15960, 166 ‘Shenandoah’ 155 Sheridan, Jim 137, 138 Shiels, Patrick 36 Simpson, Paul 131

Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture Sinatra, Frank 167 ‘Song Of Being A Child’ (Morrison) 146 Sontag, Susan 134, 140 Spenser, Edmund 180-1 The Faerie Queen 180 A View of the State of Ireland 180-1 spinning 28-9 The Spirit Level (Heaney) 214 Spivak, Gayatri 168 ‘Stage to Lordsburg’ (Haycox) 113 Stagecoach (film) 113 Starkey, Guy 101 steam services 18, 19 stereotypes of Irish/Irish society 111, 115, 116, 134 Stevenson, Robert Louis 9, 179, 186 Stiff Little Fingers 153-4 Storey, Pat 45 street art 156-7 Sullivan, Alex 38 symbolism 136-7 religious 165-6 Synge, J. M. 3, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 191 Tablet 34 An Taidhbhearc 55 Taylor, Lawrence 73, 79 television films 7, 129-30 ‘Thank you for hearing me’ (O’Connor) 174 ‘Third Cinema’ 139 ‘This is a rebel song’ (O’Connor) 172 Thompson, Spurgeon 98 ‘Through Guides’ to Ireland 20, 30 The Times 3, 15, 22, 23 ‘Tollund’ (Heaney) 214-15 ‘The Tollund Man’ (Heaney) 214, 215-16 ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ (Heaney) 216-17

239

‘Toome’ (Heaney) 218-19, 221 ‘The Toome Road’ (Heaney) 21920 tourism 2, 3, 12-31, 63 Tovey, H. 65 ‘Townland of Peace’ (Hewitt) 215 Trainspotting (film) 139 Translations (Friel) 9 travel writing 2-3, 13-31 Trench, Fiachra 151 Trosset, C. 79 Tua Nua 172 ‘Tura Lura Lura’ 147-8 Tyneside Catholic News 48 U2 149, 160, 161, 172 Údarás na Gaeltachta 64, 66 Ulster see Northern Ireland Ulster-Scots Literary Revival 182 Urry, John 26 The Value of Ignorance (O’Connor) 161 Van Morrison in Ireland (film) 155-6 Victoria Derbyshire (radio programme) 100, 105-7 A View of the State of Ireland (Spenser) 180-1 Volk, concept of 205, 206-7 volunteerism 87, 88 Wagner, Heinrich 62 Wales, Irish Catholics in 41 Walsh, Maurice 6, 111-13, 118, 124-5 The Green Rushes 6, 7, 112-13 The Key Above the Door 112 The Quiet Man 111, 112, 113, 118 The Road to Nowhere 112 Watson, George 191, 204 Watt, Stephen 133 Wavelength 154 weaving 28-9 Weekly Herald 47-8

240 Weller, S. 80 Welsh Catholic Herald 41 Welshness 82, 91 Wenders, Wim 8, 145, 146-7, 149 Western terrain comparisons with other landscapes 26-8 tourism and 3, 12-31 ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ (Heaney) 212 Whelan, Bill 149, 154 `Wild Children’ (Morrison) 145 Wilde, Oscar 188 Wilson, Thomas 74, 75 Wings of Desire (film) 146 Wintering Out (Heaney) 214, 216, 218, 219 Wodak, Ruth 97 Wogan, Terry 162 women 170-2 disempowerment of 164 in film and literature 111, 113,

Index 121-6, 164 media representations of 165, 167-8 pathologisation of 164-5 rights of 5 ‘Wonderful Remark’ (Morrison) 149 work attitudes 79, 84-8, 89, 90 Yanovitzky, Itzhak 99 The Year of the Horse (O’Connor) 161 Yeats, W. B. 3, 11, 212 and postcolonialism 178, 192 and Scotland 9, 177-93 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ 213, 220 ‘Nineteen-Nineteen’ 178 On Baile’s Strand 177 ‘Remonstrance with Scotsmen...’ 9, 179-80, 181-2