De Valera's Irelands (34 page)

It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members of the empire that I urge that they should not remain in the anoma­­lous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.

This was the basic formulation of the decolonising impulse. For Hyde and the Gaelic League activists the restoration of the Irish language as the national vernacular was the cornerstone of this project of national re­construction; a healthy identity being a prerequisite for a reconstruc­tion of the social and economic fabric and the collective energy and self-belief of the national community.
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Of course, the alternative badge of communal identity which might be widely recognised was religion. Religious identity was, for historical reasons, deeply and pervasively communal in Ireland. But religion was a divisive and exclusive instrument of cultural differentiation. While his­tory had determined that ‘the dispossessed people' in Ireland were in fact the Catholic people, no theorist of Irish nationalism advocated that Irish­ness be considered synonymous with, or a condition of Catholicism. This did not prevent Catholic leaders – clerical and lay – from regularly laps­ing into such an identification of Catholic with ‘Irish' and historic­ally-oppressed ‘native'.
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This strong communal sense of religious ident­ity, with its deep historical roots, would inevitably present a challenge to a project of decolonisation based upon language as the key marker of identity.

One further feature, or refinement, of Hyde's claim for the revival of Irish was that it was not simply a general plea for the cultural part­icu­lar­ity encoded in language to be allowed to live and develop, but a specific set of claims for the kind of cultural differentiation which mark­ed off the Irish from the English. This, it must be said, was fairly repres­entative of the stereotyping common to cultural taxonomy in the later nineteenth century, benignly voiced by Renan, Arnold and others, with its more morbid versions formulated in racist discourse (Gobineau and Cham­berlain, for example). In effect, the artistic and imaginative and spiritual Celts were contrasted with the solid and practical and materialist Teu­tons.
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As with all stereotypes, it was not all pure invent­ion, but, rather, exaggeration, distortion and omission. With Hyde, it involved a gene­rous measure of hyperbole and more than a few grains of nonsense:

The English race are admirable for their achievements … their persever­ance, their business faculties, their practical qualities … wealth, power, and the teeming fruits of industry are theirs … Well, the characteristics of this Irish race of ours are lightness, brightness, wit, fluency, and an artistic tem­perament. The characteristics of the Teutonic race are an intense business faculty, perseverance, and steadiness in details … The more divergence of thought and genius, of natural aptitudes, the better, because, I tell you, there is an individuality in nationalities exactly as there is in persons – and to attempt to mould or crush everything into one particular type has invar­i­ably been fatal to the people that attempted it.

A version of this particular stereotyping also informed Yeats and his col­laborators in the enterprise of establishing an authentic Irish national lite­rature in Hiberno-English, and many Gaelic Leaguers gave the for­mula a more deeply religious hue.

In sum, ‘the Irish revival', as a holistic project of decolonisation bas­ed on the restoration of the Irish language as the communal ‘voice' of Ire­land, was advocated on fairly orthodox grounds of cultural stereo­typing as well as on the higher humanistic grounds of cultural con­tinuity and ‘wholeness' in language, thought and feeling.

Hyde's main collaborator in founding the Gaelic League, the noted his­torian and scholar, Eoin MacNéill, also emphasised the need for spir­itual as well as social renewal in Ireland. Where MacNéill diverged from Hyde, perhaps, as Hutchinson's work has shown, was in MacNéill's em­phasis on the way in which the glories of the Gaelic tradition and inherit­ance, still resonating in the living Irish vernacular, emerged from the unique­ly rich cultural fusion of the Celtic genius with the light of Christianity; it was this encounter with the Christian vision which had fructified and given a unique focus to the Celtic spiritual and artistic genius in Ireland.
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Again, the noted journalist and propagandist, D. P. Moran, produced a more schematic model than Hyde of cultural absorption (with the Gael as the matrix absorbing all later arrivals), and a more colourful and cor­ro­­sive flagellation of the contradictions and paradoxes present in the Irish debate on cultural identity; but Moran's views, though influential, did not present any fundamental challenge to the main Gaelic League propo­­sitions.
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It is generally accepted that the political leadership of the popular front Sinn Féin, after 1917, and of the first generation to exercise political power in the Irish Free State, after 1922, included a substantial quota of men, and, to a lesser extent, women, who had been influenced, some deep­ly, by the Gaelic League idea and the cultural agenda of the revol­ution. Indeed, the political scientist Tom Garvin has suggested that ‘the Gaelic League was in many ways the central institution in the develop­ment of the Irish revolutionary elite'.
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This claim needs some qualif­ication. The actual number of those in the new political establishment from the 1920s through to the 1950s who were fully or firmly committed to the project of cultural change (or, more crucially, perhaps, who had any clear idea of what such a project might mean in practice) was prob­ably significantly lower than is commonly supposed, even if the ranks of the committed included some of the more notable political leaders. A larger question, however, is the extent to which the commitment to cult­ural, and specifi­cally the language, change penetrated other elements of the ruling classes, the key elites of the new Irish state: the bankers, merchants and business class, the lawyers and doctors, financiers, bish­ops and wealthy farmers.
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The new state was, from the outset, a con­serv­ative and substantially con­fessional bourgeois state. The established power elites of the pre-in­de­p­en­dence era remained largely undisturbed in the exercise of their economic and social dominance. How likely was it that such a power structure would be hospitable to a radical prog­ramme of linguistic and cultural change? Controversies over the place of Irish in the education system – notably in the new National University of Ireland – had already given evidence of sharp differences within the nationalist community.
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Nevertheless, in the first generation after independence the leaders of the main political parties in Ireland all gave obeisance to the notion that it was right and proper, indeed that it was a solemn obligation, for the government of an independent Irish state to enhance the status of the Irish language and to attend to its preservation and extension as a living ‘national' language. There was a large measure of consensus among the political leaders that the Irish language was the principal and most irre­futable mark of that sense of nationality on whose behalf an Irish nat­ion­al state had been demanded and, whatever its shortcomings, estab­lish­ed. Accordingly, Irish was accorded official status as the national lan­guage in the 1922 Free State constitution, and this was later repeated and indeed strengthened in de Valera's 1937 constitution.
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Additionally, poli-cy initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s, notably in the areas of education and recruitment to the public service, sought to extend competence and use of the language. With subsidised publications, progress in lexico­gra­phy and standardisation of the language, a modest presence in the arts and broadcasting, and significant symbolic recognition for Irish (in the nomenclature of state offices, public companies, ritual use in solemn state occasions, etc.), it would be wrong to say that no progress was made. By the 1950s a substantial cohort of secondary bilinguals had emerged from the schools and Irish had achieved a degree of penetration and a pres­ence in public domains in Ireland from which it had been excluded for many centuries.
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Yet, all this fell very short indeed of the radical cultural project of de­colonisation proclaimed by the more advanced Gaelic Leaguers. The constitutional status of Irish was not elaborated or translated into stat­u­tory legal rights for Irish-speakers; the ritual symbolic use was minim­a­list and increasingly seen as tokenism; the degree of real penetration by Irish even within the state services and the apparatus of government (local and national) was very limited; and, above all, the actual base-communities or enclaves of Irish-speakers – the Gaeltacht communities – continued to contract at an alarming rate, due to the ravages of emig­ration and the continuing shift to English within the diminished com­mu­nities, and there seemed to be no coherent state strategy for arresting this accelerating decline.
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In seeking explanations for this, however qualified, ‘failure' of the cultural project of the Gaelic League and its political offspring, one may choose to begin from any one of a number of ideological positions. A primary site of explanation is the Irish state itself, its nature and the capa­city for identity-endorsement instinct in its very existence as a national state. In terms of economic and social power structures, the Irish Free State was a conservative bourgeois state from its inception. The new political leaders made relatively few changes – and none of substance – in the centralised apparatus of government they inherited from the Brit­ish. Nor were there many changes, apart from ritual matters of nomen­clature and minor procedural and ceremonial matters, in the structures of law, government and public administration: the decision to opt for an unarmed police force was probably the most radical departure from the prevailing systems. The economic and fiscal policy of the new state was considerate of existing interests.
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The state was also deeply confessional, predictably so, perhaps, giv­en the overwhelmingly large (over 90%) majority of observing Roman Catholics among its citizens.
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Its civic culture was deeply imbued with a Catholic ethos. Indeed, the sheer size of the Catholic majority (as a re­sult of the partition of the island and the exclusion of the north-east of the island, with its sizeable Protestant community, from the Free State), and the historic experience of Irish Catholics since the sixteenth century, meant that a strong communal identity based on religious loyalty was, so to speak, ready-made and available to the Irish Free State at its found­ation. This Catholic communal identity was easily shared and culturally comfortable even for elements of the nationalist political leadership who were politically committed, at a cerebral level, to a more inclusive, reli­giously pluralistic and republican version of ‘Irishness' than that sug­gested by simple ‘Catholic nationalist' sentiment. In fact, a language di­men­sion to Irish identity which demanded nothing too burdensome, nothing beyond a symbolic recognition of the ancestral language and a care to ensure its presence in the ceremony and ritual of occasions of state, was probably the ideal ‘finishing' of identity for many Irish Cath­o­­lics, utterly secure in the historical identity and the civic culture defined and shaped by their religion.
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The growing assurance of the Irish state itself as a stable democratic state in a very turbulent world in the two decades after 1922, and its in­cremental march towards full political sovereignty by 1937 and a formal declaration of its status as a Republic in 1949, meant that the Irish state came to be taken for granted by its citizens, and Irishness (or ‘identity') became, as it were, a function of citizenship of the independent Irish state – a comfort, let it be noted, not available to the Irish nationalists living in Northern Ireland, for whom issues of identity remained inevit­ably much more fraught with anxiety.

It would be wrong to suggest that some at least of the cadre of polit­i­cal leaders in the new state did not wish and work for a more substan­tial cultural change, and specifically for more substantial progress in res­pect of the ‘preservation and extension' of the Irish language. Their own understanding of the enormity and complexity of the task being under­taken may, in retrospect, seem seriously deficient. But the geocultural location of Ireland, right in the middle of the Anglo-American highway of communications and entertainment, increasingly the main artery of a global technology grid of communications whose dominant language was English, made the challenge of achieving any viable form of bilin­gualism – to say nothing of a reverse language ‘shift' – especially daunt­ing in Ireland (Quebec invites comparison, but only on certain limited grounds).

The disproportionately large majority of monoglot English-speakers in Ireland at the turn of the century, and the reassuringly high status achieved by the ‘English of Ireland' in the forum of world literature (Yeats' Nobel Prize came in 1923, Shaw's two years later, while Joyce's
Ulysses
was first published in 1922), as well as its robustly creative energ­ies in all aspects of popular culture, further weighted the advantages in favour of English being overwhelmingly the dominant vernacular and of its con­tinuing to erode the fragile base of the Irish-speaking commun­ity. Eng­lish was also the language of the vast majority of the Irish of the diaspora and of the countries in which most of them settled; while for the leaders of the Irish Catholic Church, English was the vital instrument of their dy­namic global missionary effort from the middle of the nine­teenth cen­tury forward.

It is not surprising perhaps, that, in the face of such overwhelmingly unbalanced prospects, some who were early enthusiasts for the cultural project based on the revival of Irish should, over time, have lost faith and hope in the project. Some also lost charity. In particular, a section of the intelligentsia, from relatively early in the life of the new state, began to articulate a dissident critique of the ‘official culture' of the state: an offi­cial culture, substantially embodied in legislation as well as in a host of more symbolic ways, which they denounced as excessively confess­ional, conservative, censorious and philistine. The preponderant in­fluence of con­servative Catholic social teaching may have been the main target of this criticism. But it was significant that the language revival policy, es­pecially the formulaic exhortations and heavily bureaucratic emphases which were seen as dominant features of state policy and its implemen­ta­tion, was increasingly seen by some intellectuals as merely another aspect of the sterile ‘official culture', and denounced accord­ingly.
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