Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T21:18:09.499Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Margaret O’Callaghan
Margaret O’Callaghan*
Affiliation:
St John’s College, Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

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

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

3 See Lyons, , Culture & anarchy, pp 17–26.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 163.

5 Ibid., p. 159.

6 MacSwiney, Mary in Dáil Eireann treaty deb., p. 118.Google Scholar

7 O’Hegarty, P S., The victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1924), p. 34.Google Scholar

8 Irish Catholic Directory, 1924, p. 577.

9 Moran, D. P, The philosophy of Irish-Ireland (London, 1905), pp 77, 99.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 109 ‘Saorstát Éireann’ was the Irish name for the Irish Free State.

11 Curtis, L. P jnr, Apes and angels: the Irishman in Victorian caricature (Washington and London, 1972).Google Scholar

12 Moran, , Philosophy of Irish-Ireland, p. 32.Google Scholar

13 For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Sheehy, Jeanne, The rediscovery of Ireland’s past: the Celtic revival, 1830-1930 (London, 1980).Google Scholar

14 See especially Arnold, Matthew, On the study of Celtic literature (London, 1867).Google Scholar

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

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

17 O’Hegarty, . Victory of Sinn Féin, p. 70.Google Scholar

18 Tierney, Michael, Education in a free Ireland (Dublin, [1919]), p. vi.Google Scholar

19 Myles Dillon, ‘Mr Eglinton and Gaelic culture’ in Irish Statesman, 6 Sept. 1919.

20 See, e.g., Sean Ó Ceallaigh to Blythe, 17 Aug. 1921 (University College, Dublin, Archives Department, Blythe papers, P 24/25).

21 O’Neill, Joseph, ‘The Irish language and the linguistic struggle’ in Hobson, Bulmer (ed.), Saorstát Éireann official handbook (Dublin, 1932), p. 263.Google Scholar

22 Church of Ireland Gazette, 12 Jan. 1923.

23 Heaney, Seamus, ‘In memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ in Fieldwork (London, 1979).Google Scholar

24 Buckland, Patrick, Irish unionism - I: the Anglo-Irish and the new Ireland, 1885-1922 (Dublin, 1972), pp 223-71.Google Scholar

25 Alison Phillips, W, The revolution in Ireland (London, 1923), p. 236.Google Scholar

26 A pun by Glenavy on the pronunciation of Saorstát, quoted by MacLysaght, Edward, Changing times: Ireland since 1898 (London, 1978), p. 139.Google Scholar

27 Towey, Thomas, ‘Hugh Kennedy and the constitutional development of the Irish Free State, 1922-1923’ in Irish Jurist, xii (1977), p. 365.Google Scholar

28 Seanad Éireann deb., i, 8-20 (12 Dec. 1922).

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

30 Irish Catholic Directory, 1923, p. 606.

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

32 Church of Ireland Gazette, 12 Jan. 1923.

33 Ibid.

34 Quoted by Phillips, Alison, Revolution in Ire., p. 245.Google Scholar

35 Church of Ireland Gazette, 23 Nov. 1923.

36 Seaver, George, John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg. archbishop (Dublin, 1963), p. 126.Google Scholar

37 Chamberlain’s sermon as reported in Church of Ireland Gazette, 23 Nov. 1923.

38 Ibid., 9 May 1923.

39 Irish Statesman, 3 June 1925.

40 Church of Ireland Gazette, 23 Mar 1923.

41 Ibid.

42 Brown, , Ireland, p. 71.Google ScholarPubMed

43 Catholic Bulletin, Feb. 1925.

44 Ibid., Jan. 1925

45 Lyons, . Culture & anarchy, p. 163.Google Scholar

46 Meenan, James, George O’Brien: a biographical memoir (Dublin, 1980), p. 75 Google Scholar

47 Catholic Bulletin, June 1926.

48 See the file on ‘official scale of precedence for the Irish Free State’ (S.P.O., S 4628).

49 Catholic Bulletin, Feb. 1927.

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

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

52 Catholic Bulletin, Mar. 1925.

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

54 Irish Statesman, 15 Feb. 1925.

55 Ibid., 16 May 1925.

56 Ibid., 15 Sept. 1925.

57 Ibid., 15 Sept. 1923.

58 O’Hegarty, , Victory of Sinn Féein, p. 24.Google Scholar

59 O’Flaherty, Liam, The informer (London, 1925, repr. 1980), pp 54-5.Google Scholar

60 Mclnerney, Michael, Peadar O’Donnell: Irish social rebel (Dublin, 1974), p. 74.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., p. 82.

62 Irish Statesman, 29 Sept. 1923.

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

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

65 Church of Ireland Gazette, 8 Aug. 1924.

66 Gogarty, Oliver St John, As I was going down Sackville Street (London, 1936, repr. 1980), p. 161.Google Scholar

67 Corkery, Daniel, The hidden Ireland: a study of Gaelic Munster in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1924, repr. 1979), pp 5–16.Google Scholar

68 Catholic Bulletin, Feb. 1925.

69 Ibid.

70 Irish Statesman, 31 Jan. 1925.

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

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

72 Catholic Bulletin, June 1925.

73 Irish Statesman, 17 Jan. 1925.

74 Ibid., 21 Feb. 1925.

75 Church of Ireland Gazette, 3 Oct. 1924.

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