De Valera's Irelands (33 page)

That actual culture process produced – out of the reconciling of the local with the metropolitan, of the known with the new – a repertoire of cultural forms that were as valid an expression of Irish cultural identity in the de Valera years, as those officially endorsed by political and educa­tional authority in the years from 1926 to 1973. A further important con­sideration that arises from the collaborative nature of the kind of verna­cular cultural study that the Northside Project involves, is the reflexive, dialogical nature of both the fieldwork and the ethnographic description which it entails.
18
This raises issues of theory and method­ology that were not directly addressed by students of culture in the de Valera years but they are of sufficient concern today, to the study of culture and cultural history, to merit being at least mentioned in the present context as mat­ters that give further common cause to historians and folklorists/ethnolo­gists alike in the pursuit of the culture and the cultural history of de Valera's other Ireland.

In recent decades one of the more contentious ideological issues at the centre of critical debate in Irish cultural studies has been the appropriate­ness or adequacy of the discourse of colonialism/post-colonialism as a frame of analysis for the Irish cultural predicament – in its historical and contemporary settings. Discussion of the specific dynamics of the con­flict in Northern Ireland is a central aspect of this ideological conten­tion, and key sites of debate have been the Field Day cultural project (in par­ticular, the
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
and its
Critical Condit­ions
series of essays) and the controversy surrounding ‘historical revisionism' in certain writings on Irish history in recent decades. Perspectives drawn from a wide range of disciplines are represented in this debate (e.g., anthro­pology, sociology, political science, history, literary and cult­ural studies) but most of the main protagonists have been historians or cultural and literary theorists and critics. While the historians have tend­ed to empha­sise the particularity of meaning attaching to ‘colony/colonial' in legal and constitutional commentaries on states and power relationships, cul­tural theorists have given more attention to discourse analysis, theories of representation and variations on Gramsci and cult­ural hegemony.
1
Yet there has been enough dialogue between the discip­lines to produce some genuine intellectual engagement, and the terms of the debate have ex­tended far beyond the specific areas I have just listed.
2

An aspect of the debate which has received less attention than one might have expected it to receive is the major project of decolonisation which informed the ambitions of a section of the Irish nationalist leader­ship which came to power in the new independent Irish state in 1922. This project was explicitly identified as part of the obligation and the task of identity-formation in that new Irish state from its foundation. Variously described by its principal ideologues both before and after the founda­tion of the Irish national state as ‘the formation of an independent Irish mind', the ‘philosophy of Irish-Ireland' or ‘the de-Anglicisation of Ireland', it had as its central objective the restoration as the main vern­acular of the Irish language – by then a minority language well-advanc­ed on a long course of relentless decline, and increasingly contracting into relatively small pockets of territory where it still enjoyed a dominant position in the general process of social intercourse. This vulnerable minority lan­guage was to be restored in place of English, which by the early twentieth century enjoyed overwhelming dominance as the main vernacular of the vast majority of the people of every social rank throughout most of the island. The decolonising impulse, or cultural vision, which required for its completion such a massive linguistic revolution, would seem to merit some attention, at least to the extent that its sources and assumptions be identified and its encounter with the reality of political power involved in state-formation be reviewed. This essay is a contribution to such a re­view.
3
It seeks to examine the particular cultural visions present among the political leadership at the establish­ment of the independent Irish state and to ask what was done, or not done, to embed these visions within the policies and practices of the state up to the late 1950s, that is, during what is commonly regarded as the age of de Valera.

The relationship between a distinctive language or speech, and a sense of community or distinctive peoplehood, has been acknowledged through­out human history. In Ireland, the relationship between language, people­hood and identity was already a source of comment during the medieval period, in the encounter between the long-settled Gaeil and the more re­cently settled Anglo-Normans. Language and, notoriously, religion were the key elements of cultural discrimination in the great convulsion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the out­come of which was the tri­umph and ascendancy of the English lang­uage, law and politico-admini­­strative institutions throughout Ireland, and the corresponding defeat and dissolution of the whole institutional edifice of the Gaelic political and social order.
4
From that time forward, the matter of language, togeth­er with religion, has seldom been far from the centre of the debate on Irish culture, community and identity. And when, at the end of the eight­eenth century, a further elaboration on con­cepts of identity and people­hood congealed into the political ideology of nationalism, Ireland was not immune to the spread of the new ideology. An interest among a minority of the ruling elite (mainly Protestant and of planter descent) in the nature of Irish cultural particularity, allied to an encounter with early European romanticism, had already prompted the first in a series of ‘Celtic Reviv­als' (Seamus Deane's phrase) in Ireland. These were inspired by a desire to ‘know' (i.e., to divine and, in a certain sense, to appropriate) the genius and the roots of the imagination of the ‘native' or indigenous Celtic peo­ple and culture in Ireland.
5

Furthermore, among the disciples of the new political nationalism in Ireland from the later eighteenth century there were a few thinkers, no­tably the young Thomas Davis, who were especially alert to the cult­ural implications of the constitutional-legal claims being made for an autono­mous Irish ‘state' on behalf an ‘Irish nation', and who were aware of the general European criteria for recognising the claims of different groups to ‘nationhood' (and to national states). In this valuation of claims to ‘nation­hood', a distinctive language was commonly acknow­ledged as a paramount criterion.
6

However, it is from the last two decades of the nineteenth century that we come upon those ideas and programmes regarding cultural re­newal, and language ‘revival', that are commonly referred to as ‘the philo­sophy of Irish-Ireland' or, in the case of some commentators, ‘the Gaelic League idea'.
7
The timing of this stirring of ideas and cultural concern was not accidental, and neither was its focus. By the closing decade of the nineteenth century, as a result of the electoral success of Parnell's poli­tical movement for Irish ‘Home Rule', some form of devol­ved self-gov­ernment for Ireland seemed imminent.
8
At the same time, the census re­turns were clearly indicating that the death of the Irish language seemed now inevitable and hardly less imminent. It was at this juncture that what we may term a deliberate project of ‘decolonisation' was formu­lated and adopted by a group of intellectuals and artists with, in time, significant support from a larger constituency of political act­ivists who were to form the political leadership of the new Irish state eventually established in 1922.
9

While a movement for the revival of nativist sports and athletics had already been founded in 1884, with an explicit declaration that it sought to reverse the tide of seemingly relentless adoption of English cultural and leisure pastimes in place of native Irish customs, the appropriate starting point for discussion of the project of decolonisation is probably Douglas Hyde's seminal lecture, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ire­land', delivered to the National Literary Society in November 1892. Hyde's personal encounter with the Irish language, and the manner in which it fired his imagination, is a familiar story, and need not be re­hearsed here.
10
But, so far as his views on language and identity are con­cerned, it is worth noting that while he became committed to the ‘exten­sion of our [i.e., Irish] language among the people', it is clear that he was especially exercised to maintain and preserve Irish as a living language among the base-community of Irish-speakers whose vernacular it still was. By the late nineteenth century these were largely concentrated in areas in the western counties of the Atlantic coast. As he told a New York audience in 1891: ‘What I wish to see is Irish established as a living lang­uage, for all time, among the million or half-million who still speak it along the west coast, and to ensure that the language will hold a fav­ourable place in teaching institutions and government examinations. Unless we retain a bilingual population as large as we now have, Irish may be said to be dead, and with it nine-tenths of the glories of the past.'
11
When Hyde, with others, founded the Gaelic League two years later, the primary ob­jective of the new movement was declared to be: ‘The preservation of Irish as the national language of Ireland and the extension of its use as a spoken tongue.'
12

While Hyde's principal concern may have been the maintenance (i.e., reproduction) of the existing Irish-speaking communities, the League's objective of preservation and extension was no more than the logic of Hyde's basic propositions regarding language and identity and the need for socio-cultural regeneration in late nineteenth century Ire­land. Hyde claimed that the purpose of the Gaelic League and the lang­uage revival mission was ‘to render the present a rational continuation of the past'. For Hyde, it would be a catastrophe of unimaginable prop­ortions for any peo­ple (for both the individuals and the collectivity) were the continuity of its cultural tradition, articulated and given form princ­ipally through lan­guage, to be ruptured. Such a cultural tradition en­compassed thoughts, feelings, perceptions, wisdom, a distinctive world-view based on a uni­que configuration of values. The case made for cult­ural continuity, through the medium of Irish, and, therefore, for lang­uage revival, rested on a set of assumptions and propositions that com­bined elements of general hu­manism with specific tenets of cultural nationalism.

Hyde's understanding of the relationship between language, thought and identity was unremarkable for his time. Whereas, in the beginning, thought and feeling may have given rise to language, the dynamics of language development and of cultural formation within human society had become more complex over time. Hyde quoted approvingly Jubain­ville's definition of language as ‘the form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence'. As a language develops it encodes a complex system of understandings, meanings and values particular to its com­munity of users – a distinctive world-view. As the Prussian philosopher and theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, had written some time earlier: ‘every language constitutes a particular mode of thought, and what is thought in one language can never be repeated in the same way in an­other.'
13

The abandonment of a language, therefore, to say nothing of its en­forced abandonment, inevitably involved a dis­orientating rupture in cultural continuity at several levels; not only an alienation from land­scape (placenames) and inherited historical narra­tives and communal myths, but also a deep psychological trauma, at an individual and com­munal level, caused by the loss of a rich inherited matrix of wisdom and knowledge – knowledge of self and of the world. This elemental trauma, it was believed, had been exacerbated by a num­ber of features particular to the language change in Ireland: that it was the outcome of conquest, military and political, so that the abandonment of the native communal language in the face of the dominant new lang­uage of the conqueror (in law, commerce, politics, administration, etc.) became internalised as part of the shame of being conquered, of exper­iencing defeat, dispossession, humiliation and general impoverish­ment.
14
This general syndrome among a conquered people – the self-disparagement and shame, the contempt for the native culture felt by many of its carr­iers in the face of their need to come to terms with a seemingly invincible new culture sustained by a new ruling group – is well-documented in the literature on colonia­lism, from Memmi and Fanon to Said.

It was an outrage to Hyde and his fellow ideologues of the Gaelic League that this language abandonment had produced frightening inter-generational tension, incomprehension and emotional violence. The natu­ral inter-generational transmission of love, wisdom, know­ledge, sensi­bili­ty and feeling was violently interrupted and sabotaged, through si­lence, reproach, repression and physical punishment, in the interests of a language-change enforced by the need to conform to an external struc­ture of power and material opportunity. This, in essence, was the ‘human­­ist' impulse advanced by Hyde on behalf of the lang­uage revival.

The specifically cultural nationalist aspects of Hyde's propositions are also of interest, though also unremarkable for his time. As Hyde saw it, by abandoning their own distinctive language, customs and traditions (for Hyde, a broad but conventional inventory of demonstrably nativist modes), and adopting uncritically the English language and cultural fashions (popular and elite) originating in England, while continuing at the same time to insist vehemently on their own distinctiveness as a peo­ple or nation, and, accordingly, their entitlement to an Irish national state, the Irish had succeeded in having the worst of all worlds:

It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house … how it continues to clamour for recognition as a distinct nation­­ality, and at the same time throws away with both hands what would make it so. If Irishmen only went a little further they would become good English­men in sentiment also.

In short, if thoroughly assimilated to English culture, they might at least be able to generate a truly creative life and to achieve something of con­sequence by their collective energy (in the economic or social sphere, for example), untroubled by contradictions in self-definition or disorien­tat­ing cultural confusion. But this hadn't happened and, on the evidence of nationalist political rhetoric, seemed unlikely to happen. As Hyde saw it, general social debilitation had been caused by the simple fact that ‘we have ceased to be Irish without becoming English. It is to this cause that I attribute more than to anything else our awful emigration and im­pov­erishment.' Accordingly, if the Irish were determined not to be assimi­lated to the powerful English culture, and to insist on their dis­tinctive­ness as a people – and for Hyde all the evidence was that they were de­termined so to insist – then at least they owed it to themselves to try to give that claim to separate or distinct peoplehood some verifiable basis, some authentic and convincing evidence: