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The few decades following independence are sometimes painted as a kind of Dark Age dominated by literary censorship, insularity, sexual puritanism, and provincial insularism. There is good reason for all these charges, but they are only one side of the picture—the negative side. A closer and more sympathetic study reveals remarkable variety in beliefs and attitudes, a high degree of literary and artistic vitality, and a much more “European” view of culture and contemporary events than it has been customary to believe. During this period belief in the Catholic Church, was almost unquestioned and largely uncritical. The scandals and divisions of the present had not yet emerged to weaken this monolithic faith and bring doubt among ordinary people. Religion guaranteed moral and hence social stability; and quite simply, the mass of people could scarcely have got through life without it. Rural life, in particular, was largely built around it and religious ritual was part of the very texture of everyday existence; it was often the only gleam of spirituality in lives which were hard and very basic. However, there were also thinking, liberal-minded Catholics who were sincere believers but reserved the right to judge for themselves on certain matters. Irish Catholicism between 1920 and 1950 had a good deal more intellectual vitality and sophistication than it is fashionable to admit today. The writings of Kate O’Brien, Seán Ó Faoláin, and many more are not wholly comprehensible without an appreciation of it.

The nationalism which carried over from the War of Independence has similarly been attacked in our day as obsessive and monolithic. Its strength and virulence were hardly surprising, however, since the issue of independence, or at least Home Rule, had dominated Irish life for several generations, and the first half of the twentieth century finally gave the people the opportunity to square aspiration with reality. Irish nationalism was in no way unique; it was something shared with nations such as Hungary, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries which had thrown off the dominance of a powerful neighbour. Great powers such as Britain and France could afford to take their nationality more or less for granted, since it had been shaped and confirmed by centuries of history. Ireland, however, was raw, unfledged and unsure, lacking self-definition, since its traditional language almost dying and its cultural institutions had been created largely by England or else by the Anglo-Irish minority. The “official” culture of pre-independence Ireland was geared largely to making people good citizens of the British Empire. The so-called Gaelic Revival was nominally supported by the State and was given verbal support by the people, but in practice it lacked real popular following.

In 1878 the government passed the Intermediate Education Act. It introduced a system of ‘payment by results’. Payments of between £3 and £10 were made to schools for each student who passed the Intermediate examinations. As a result of a campaign by girls’ schools, it was decided that girls were to be allowed enter for the examinations. This opened secondary education to many more students. By 1921 12,000 students had taken the examinations, and girls accounted for 36 per cent of that figure. The great emphasis on examinations meant that much of the teaching in schools was focussed on passing them. In 1912, Padraig Pearse, who set up his own school, described the education system as a ‘murder machine’ which destroyed students’ minds and failed to teach them about Irish history or culture. By 1920, Ireland had an educational system which met its basic needs.

A large majority got a basic education which enabled them to claim to be literate. A small proportion could get a higher education, though access to that depended mainly on a family’s ability to pay, In 1909, Queen’s College, Belfast became a separate Queen’s University, while Cork, Galway and the Ctaholic University in Dublin were combined into a new National University. Scholarships had been introduced by the local councils in 1900 but they remained few in number until the 1960s. In fact, Irish Free State would change very little about its inherited educational system until the 1960s.

In 1924 the Intermediate Education Act combined the old Boards and Commissions into a single Department of Education under a single minister, Eoin MacNeill. The new Department oversaw a network of national schools which covered the country. Most of them were run by the various Churches on a parish basis, with the Department paying some of the building costs and the teachers’ salaries. The Churches guarded their control of education jealously and this made it difficult for governments to interfere. The primary curriculum was widened to take in more subjects, and much stress was laid on encouraging nationalism, particularly in the teaching of history. Irish was made compulsory. Around the country there were many one-teacher schools with only a few pupils. This system was expensive to run and the department tried to amalgamate them into bigger units. Many of the buildings were old and in a poor state of repair and were slowly replaced. In the cities many classes were badly overcrowded due to lack of space

In 1922 attendance at school was not compulsory and only 75 per cent of children went regularly. In 1926, compulsory attendance between the ages of six and fourteen was introduced despite the protest of farmers who wanted cheap labour during the harvest time. Nevertheless many children left before they were fourteen. Only about 10 per cent of students went beyond primary school. Secondary schools were privately owned, mostly by religious bodies. They charged fees and even though these were low, most families could not afford them. In 1921 and 1923 local authorities were allowed to levy a rate of one penny in the pound to fund scholarships to secondary schools and universities. These enabled a few clever children to get further education but the number was small. The old system of ‘payments by results’ was abolished and replaced by a grant for each pupil. The state agreed to pay a share of teachers’ salaries, provided they were properly qualified. This raised the quality of teaching in schools. The old annual examinations were replaced by two new examinations, the Intermediate, taken after three years and the Leaving, taken two years later. The Department set the syllabus for these examinations and this gave them some control over what was taught in the schools.

In 1899 ‘technical schools’ had been set up to provide more practical vocational training. By 1929 there were sixty-nine in existence, with 2,500 students. This low attendance probably reflected the low demand for technically-trained people in Ireland. The 1930 Vocational Education Act gave local councils the job of developing technical education. Thirty-eight Vocational Education Committees (VEC) were set up to provide free post-primary education with an emphasis on vocational skills, such as woodwork, metalwork, domestic economy and commercial subjects. The vocational schools badly funded and were not allowed to prepare students for the Leaving Certificate. As a result, parents did not regard them highly and they would remain the poor relations of the education system for most of this period.

In Northern Ireland the 1947 Education Act proposed a new system of primary, secondary and third level education. Primary schooling was to end at twelve. The year before that, pupils were to take an examination called the ‘Eleven Plus’. The 25 per cent who passed got free places in grammar schools and could go on to third level education, for which there were generous scholarships. The pupils who failed went to secondary modern schools. They got a non-academic education and most of them left at fourteen or fifteen. State schools, under the control of local councils, got full grants for building and maintenance and their pupils did not have to pay fees. Catholics would not send their children to these schools which as a result were almost exclusively Protestant. Catholic-owned schools, which refused to join the State system, got 65 per cent of building grants, up from 50 per cent before the war, in spite of protests from some sections of the unionists community. Up to 80 per cent of their pupils would receive scholarships but the rest had to pay fees. These reforms came into effect in 1948. Though the Catholic community resented the lower grants, they gained a lot from them. Many Catholics were too poor to afford much education for their children. The new system opened the chance of secondary and university education for bright boys an girls who would not otherwise have had the chance.

Most of the founding fathers aimed to create an Independent Ireland which would be, in the words of Padraig Pearse, ‘not free merely, but Gaelic as well’. Reviving the Irish language was one of the first things tackled by the new Free State government. An extensive and expensive programme of training primary teachers in Irish began. The Department of Education set up preparatory colleges where Irish was the school language. Students from these schools got priority in admissions to teacher training colleges. All infant classes had to be taught through Irish and the language was to be used extensively in higher classes. The teaching of other subjects like drawing, nature study, elementary science and domestic subjects had to give way to Irish. In secondary schools Irish became compulsory in 1928 and from 1934 students had to pass Irish in order to pass the Certificate examinations. This was already a necessary requirement for admission to the National University. Extra grants were given to schools where all teaching was through Irish, and, in examinations, extra marks were given to those who answered through that language. These measures were continued and intensified under Fianna Fáil which, in the 1937 Constitution, made Irish the ‘first official language’ of the state. The revival policy did achieve some results. By the 1940s the number of primary teachers qualified to teach through Irish had risen from 10 per cent in 1922 to over 70 per cent and 10 per cent of primary schools used only Irish in class. At secondary level nearly 64 per cent of secondary students studied other subjects through Irish.

While on paper the number of people with a knowledge of Irish rose, the reality was that few of them used Irish in their everyday lives. Even in Gaeltacht areas, the number of Irish speakers continued to shrink in spite of government grants to each Irish-speaking household. In 1926 238,000 out of a Gaeltacht population of 427,000 were Irish speakers; by 1946 there were only 193,000 Irish speakers out of 398,000. The attempt to revive the Irish language through the schools alone contributed to this failure. The compulsory teaching of Irish destroyed much of the good-will towards the language which the early revival movement had generated. The time spent on teaching Irish in schools left less time to develop basic reading and writing skills in students. Parents resented this and transferred their resentment to Irish. In schools most emphasis was put on written work so that children were often able to write Irish but not to speak it. Irish was not used in government departments, law, courts, business or in the media. Therefore even those who enjoyed Irish and learnt it well had few chances to use it once they left school.

Criticism of government policies towards Irish emerged during the war. The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), the primary teachers’ union, published a report in 1941 which exposed the damage the policy was doing both to the education system and to the language. In the 1940s many of those who loved the language realised that compulsion was damaging Irish. They tried to recover the enthusiasm of the early revival through a number of voluntary organisations. In 1943 An Club Leabhar was set up to publish books in Irish. A number of new magazines also appeared, including Comhar. Literature in modern Irish was emerging from the 1940s on. Novelists like Máirtín Ó Cadháin and poets like Seán Ó Riordáin were producing fine works that could stand comparison with any in English. One of the most popular books was an Béal Bocht by the satirist, Brian O’Nolan (alias Myles na gCopaleen). It was a savage attack on the stupidities of the revival movement. These people took a more realistic approach to Irish than had been common in the 1920s and 1930s. Through them Irish and the Gaelic culture associated with it, took their place alongside other influences as part of the common inheritance of all the people of Ireland.

In practice, most people by the 1940s continued to read and speak English, listen to English radio programmes, sing English or American popular songs, buy imported English products, even emigrate to England when the going got tough economically. Irish writers relied overwhelmingly on London publishers and London-based critics to further their reputations. Irish actors placed high importance on a success in any of the better London theatres, and many professional people —particularly doctors—settled in England. Talented Irish people made careers in British newspapers, in broadcasting (the now-vanished Third Programme had a very large Irish contingent), even in the civil service. The reason for this was in most cases perfectly straightforward; there were not enough career opportunities at home. Many saw emigration as a constant brain-drain on Ireland’s resources, or the continuous loss of her brightest and best overseas. Recent research has shown this to be largely untrue. Emigration, whether to England, America or various parts of the British Empire, was never really quite the cultural blood-loss which pessimistic analysts have claimed it to be. The bulk of emigrants, both men and women, were in fact from underprivileged and poorly educated backgrounds. This made their positions overseas even harder, since they were unskilled.

Though the myth of the émigré Irish writer has become an established one, the number of writers and painters who actually left the country for good is much smaller than is generally claimed. In this sense, James Joyce is far less typical a figure than he seems—and in any case he had left Dublin, and Ireland, long before Irish Independence. The queue for the emigrant boats was a harsh, undeniable fact and a living reproach to a country which seemingly could not find jobs or roles for all its small population (for decades the number of people in Ireland, excluding the North, did not rise much above three and a quarter million). The effect on national morale was confidence-sapping and goes far to explain the often embittered tone of Irish intellectuals during the so-called de Valera Age. The refrain was almost always the same: “Can we never stand on our own feet?” Naturally, this enhanced the appeal of other cultures, especially France which was often seen as the homeland of artistic freedom and intellectual emancipation.

Nevertheless, culturally Ireland did stand on her own feet to an extent which, in retrospect, is often quite surprising. Much, of course, was inherited from the recent past—the National Museum, the National Library, the Royal Dublin Society, the National Gallery, the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (founded by Hugh Lane and now bearing his name), the Royal Hibernian Academy etc. There were also the universities—Trinity College Dublin, then regarded as the stronghold of the Protestant Ascendancy, and the various constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland, in Dublin, Cork and Galway respectively. Some of these institutions were rather shamefully neglected, notably the National Museum which has only been adequately funded in recent decades; the National Gallery, too, led virtually a subsistence life until the 1960s. This was less the outcome of public philistinism than of sheer poverty. Ireland was a very poor country by West European standards, which also explains the aforementioned phenomenon of emigration. But neglected or not, these institutions continued to exist and often exercised a potent influence.

However a body which in many ways was much more expressive of the new Ireland was the Irish Academy of Letters, founded by the poet W. B. Yeats in 1932. After all, Ireland at this stage was known to the world primarily for its writers, who were widely and inseparably identified with its whole history and culture, its national soul. It included figures from at least two generations—Yeats himself, Edith Somerville the co-author of the Irish R.M. stories, George Bernard Shaw (who served as its first president) were among the older figures, while Seán Ó Faoláin, Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor represented the new generation of Irish short-story writers. The poets (apart from Yeats, that is) included Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins, Padraic Colum, Seamus O’Sullivan; and the dramatists were represented by Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, and Sir John Ervine. The most obvious absentee was James Joyce, then living in Paris, who had cold-shouldered the entire project from the start. Sean O’Casey, Ireland’s leading playwright, also declined membership—he was already living in England and had been particularly disenchanted with Ireland since the Abbey Theatre had rejected his First World War play “The Silver Tassie”. In spite of these notable absences, however, the roll-call of the new body was a formidable one and showed conclusively the depth of talent in contemporary Irish writing.

The rejection of O’Casey’s play, which raised much dust at the time, was an ominous indicator that the generation of Yeats and his patroness-friend Lady Gregory was ageing and beginning to lose contact with a younger generation—though O’Casey himself was by no means a young man and did not make his mark as a playwright before middle age. The Abbey had been virtually the flagship for the whole Literary Revival early in the century; its gradual hardening into an official and increasingly conservative institution was a sign of the times. Yeats’s mythic themes and philosophy no longer commanded the readership or audience they had earlier in the century, even if Yeats’s personal and artistic prestige was undiminished. A drier, more realistic and social-minded mentality was beginning to take shape, typified by the new school of fiction-writers. These writers saw around them not an Island of Saints and Scholars, nor one populated by spiritual presences and the ghosts of legendary heroes, but a rather prosaic small country bogged down in local politics and class tensions and the hard necessity to scrape a living.

And politics and economics apart, there was a new (though not entirely new) and unpleasant factor of increasing power in cultural life—official literary censorship. The Censorship of Publications Act had been passed by the Oireachtas in 1929 and for rather more than three decades was to play a big role in national cultural life. Yeats himself had anticipated it and his Academy of Letters was to some extent an attempt to fight censorship along organised lines and with professional solidarity. In fact, it achieved little in that field and the long-drawn war against the literary censors was fight mainly by lonely and isolated figures. Irish censorship is probably the most harped-upon feature of the first forty years of national independence—in fact, many intelligent people base, or at least used to base, their whole view of the period on it.

In fact, literary censorship was much more a feature of life in most Western countries than we think—the liberation which came with the 1960s has changed our perspectives radically on this matter. There was active literary censorship in Britain and America—D. H. Lawrence suffered badly under it in his homeland and even long after he had left it. Other American novelists such as Sinclair Lewis were frequently denounced as immoral, or, what was worse in the eyes of the common man, amoral. Continental nations tended to be freer in their approach, yet the writings of Colette shocked large sectors of contemporary France, and several leading German writers between the two world wars were involved in furious controversy over their “decadent” views. Otto Dix, a leading German painter of the period, was twice in court to answer pornography charges. Ireland, then, was by no means unique in having legal censorship; what was special was the virulence with which the laws were applied. There was a kind of moral fundamentalism in the national mind which grew paranoid at the thought of “letting in foreign filth”. Irish writers who offended in a similar way were officially regarded as agents of decadence and social disintegration. They were seen as striking at the roots of family life and moral decency. In 1942 the book The Tailor and Ansty was banned. It was a collection of stories and sayings which an English writer, Eric Cross, had recorded from a country tailor and his wife. They were exactly the kind of people romanticised by de Valera, but in real life their language was too broad and racy for the tender sensibilities of the censors. After the banning, their book was burned in their home village and the old couple humiliated.

It is a curious aspect of the censorial mind that the writings of Joyce escaped its net, at least in Ireland; in Britain copies of his work were seized and burnt by Customs, while in America his best-known book, “Ulysses,” was banned for several years. Joyce, safe in his Continental exile, was relatively little affected by any of this. The real sufferers were the courageous Irish writers who remained at home and tried to fight obscurantism and stupidity on their own ground, often risking public opprobrium and financial loss. Kate O’Brien, Austin Clarke, Benedict Kiely, Seán Ó Faoláin and his writer-in-arms Frank O’Connor, all fell foul of the censor at some time in their careers. Many “foreign” writers were banned too, of course, including Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Scott Fitzgerald, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, John Cowper Powys, even Somerset Maugham. This did not, of course, prevent those who really cared about literature—particularly contemporary literature—from getting and reading the books they wanted. Nevertheless it was a deprivation for many ordinary readers who were excluded from discovering, in their own right, much of the significant writing of their age.

There was little or no censorship of ideas and debate on topical issues—including that of censorship—was often keen and outspoken. The period of censorship coincided with the peak years of the great Irish literary magazines: the long-lived Dublin Magazine edited by the poet-critic-scholar Seamus O’Sullivan, the very influential Bell launched by Seán Ó Faoláin who was its first editor, Envoy edited by John Ryan, and Irish Writing which was largely Cork-based. These were organs of opinion which were read and mulled over—though not necessarily agreed with— by thinking or well-informed people. These publications sometimes angered or offended political or clerical reactionaries, but they were not as a rule interfered with. Much of this controversy is hopelessly dated for contemporary readers, but its intellectual sharpness and verbal style is undeniable. Irish newspapers, too, often carried articles and letters by the university and literary intelligentsia which pulled no punches and were erudite and elegantly written, with no “talking down”.

Newspapers, too, were aware of their cultural duties, even if their definitions of these tended to vary a good deal. The Irish Times, sometimes called “the Old Lady of Westmoreland Street” because its front office was on that street, assumed a special role from the 1930s onwards. Previously it had been very much the organ of the Protestant and Anglo-Irish Establishment and its long-time editor, John Healy, was a confirmed Unionist. A major shift occurred when R. M. Smyllie, generally called “Bertie” Smyllie, succeeded him as editor and began to give his newspaper a totally different character and reputation. He consciously courted the Dublin intelligentsia, particularly the writers, who in turn were flattered to be noticed and many of them became his personal friends. Poets, in particular, came into his circle and Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins, Padraic Fallon were all regular contributors—not merely of poems, but of articles and book reviews. The Irish Times, once the reading of foxhunting or racegoing Anglo-Irish county types, became to a great extent the organ of the Irish intellectual. Its star columnist, however, was the civil servant who wrote under the aforementioned pen-name Myles na Gopaleen, and published novels under the name Flann O’Brien, but in private life was simply Brian O’Nolan. His comic/satiric touch made him probably the greatest Irish journalist of the mid-century and his unique column, Cruiskeen Lawn, was read as avidly by ordinary Dubliners as it was by literary folk. It was also read, sometimes with fear or anger, by the various public figures who came under the sting of Myles’s satire.

The other Dublin-based daily newspapers, the de Valera-owned Irish Press and the neo-Redmondite Irish Independent, did not have any equivalent to him, nor indeed did any newspaper in the British Isles—though the writings of “Beachcomber” (in private life J. B. Morton , who incidentally was a lover of things Irish and had an Irish wife) offer a parallel and may indeed have supplied Myles with some of his ideas. The Irish Independent never found—or possibly did not seek—any equivalent to Myles na gCopaleen. Nevertheless, in John D. Sheridan it had a humorous columnist on a rather lower level, but by no means a contemptible one. He was in fact something of a national institution for entire decades, and collections of his articles were published regularly and were bought and read in England and America as well as his homeland.

The centre of cultural and intellectual activity was of course Dublin, but it did not possess a monopoly. Cork, in particular, had a flourishing intellectual life and Radio Éireann maintained a separate studio there which was widely listened to in the South. The short-story school of O’Connor and Ó Faoláin was essentially a Cork phenomenon—following in the footsteps of their mentor, the writer and academic Daniel Corkery—and proved a valuable counter-thrust to Dublin intellectual egocentricity. While both men were cosmopolitan in outlook and influenced by Russian and French models, they were also strongly regional in their subject matter and social thinking. Cork always possessed a small but committed cultural elite, who included personalities such as the sculptor Seamus Murphy, the scholar/poet/academic Sean Ó Tuama, and the important Gaelic poet Seán Ó Riordáin. University life, too, had plenty of vitality and Cork produced its own respected newspaper, the Cork Examiner. Cork, in fact, proved to be in fact what it had always claimed to be—the capital of the South, independent of Dublin or even London. Without this regional vitality, Ireland would have much the poorer in almost every respect. Though the contribution of Galway and Limerick has been largely ignored, the former produced two outstanding Gaelic writers in the poet Máirtin Ó Direáin and the fiction-writer Máirtin Ó Cadháin, as well as various distinguished scholars and academics. Limerick, however, did not acquire university status until much later and its intellectual life probably suffered from its intermediate position between Cork and Galway.

In the early years of the century the so-called Literary Revival or Irish Renaissance had produced such European figures as Yeats in poetry, George Moore in fiction, Shaw, Synge and O’Casey in the drama, as well as a whole cluster of lesser but respected writers such as Padraic Colum, James Stephens, and others whose reputations have rather faded but were strong at the time. However, O’Casey went into exile in England only a few years after independence, while James Joyce, easily the most considerable figure of the generation after Yeats, had left Dublin years before for the Continent and never came back. Both Moore and Shaw had lived abroad for many years. This was a considerable emigration-drain, which has helped to shape the widespread belief that the cream of Ireland’s writers and intellectuals were forced into exile by philistinism and narrow-mindedness in their homeland.

There is obviously a solid core of truth in this, but what is often overlooked is that many or most of these distinguished literary emigrants left before the foundation of the new State. O’Casey is an obvious exception, but he was motivated less by censorship or chauvinism than by Yeats’s rejection of “The Silver Tassie” for production at the Abbey Theatre. It was a deep, personal hurt, almost a sense of betrayal, since O’Casey greatly respected Yeats and regarded him as a protector and almost a father-figure. In due course, he transferred his allegiance to Shaw, who had preceded him to voluntary exile in England decades before. The episode is a complicated one, and too much may have been made of it; nevertheless it has helped to solidify the worldwide impression that after the great days of the Literary Revival, Ireland became too small and narrow—too provincial—for any major writer or artist to feel at ease in. Those authors who stayed at home are generally regarded as essentially second-rate figures of little more than local interest. This belief has grown to the stature of a myth and is still common in literary textbooks, especially those written by English or American academics and critics. The playwright novelist Samuel Beckett’s departure from Ireland during the Thirties has helped to strengthen it, and like his master Joyce, Beckett wrote his most significant works on foreign soil.

As a result of this myth, or rather distortion, fine poets such as Austin Clarke (even though he had spent a lengthy period in London), Patrick Kavanagh, Padraic Fallon, Patrick MacDonogh, found it hard to obtain a hearing outside their own frontiers, even if they were sporadically included in English anthologies. Much the same is true of various talented dramatists and novelists, though not of the short-story writers who obtained a strong foothold in America—Benedict, Lavin and others. At the beginning of the century Irish literature had commanded world attention. In the decades after independence it more or less slid out of the reckoning internationally, with certain exceptions who were not, in any case, necessarily the most significant talents.

It seems an inescapable fact that the slow alienation of England, in particular, from Irish writing of the new generation had a good deal to do with the fact that the Anglo-Irish period of literature was past or passing. Somerville and Ross, for instance, represented the type of so-called Ascendancy writers with whom British readers were perfectly at home, but they were much less attracted to the school of “peasant” writing which succeeded it. This is, of course, a very broad generalisation and is subject to many qualifications. However, the fact remains that the Literary Revival had been largely the creation of Irish Protestants with an upper-middle-class or “county” background—Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, Synge. Anglo-Ireland, however, went into slow decline after 1923, for reasons which were social and economic rather than political or cultural. A new, raw, often socially insecure Ireland was succeeding them, even in professions which previously they had dominated such as business, medicine and the law. Much so-called Irish nationalism, in fact, was really a class struggle, and after independence a new “native” middle class quite rapidly emerged, most of them the children of rural smallholders or of small-town shopkeepers and tradesmen. Similarly, many of the old country estates were broken up into small holdings on which a new type of farmer eked out a subsistence living—the family background of Patrick Kavanagh in Monaghan, for instance, forms a typical part of this picture. The Big House celebrated by Somerville and Ross, and by George Moore, was in eclipse and a new type of novel or play depicting small-town or peasant life was increasingly prominent. Those readers in England and elsewhere who still expected Irish writers to produce sophisticated, ultra-witty stage comedies a la Wilde or Shaw, or dashing novels of the hunting field, or delicately musical, Celtic Twilight lyricism, were to be disappointed. The world depicted by O’Connor and Ó Faoláin in their fiction, and by T. C. Murray was low-keyed and regional, petit-bourgeois, often dully respectable and morally inhibited. Its humour, too, was generally homespun or laboured and for the most part did not export well—the typical Abbey Theatre rural farce would have cut no ice with a West End audience in London, or with the average Broadway theatregoer in New York. Not surprisingly, foreign readership often baulked at the literature of post-independent Irish society, or simply left it alone. Ireland had no Evelyn Waugh, no Noel Coward, no W. H. Auden or John Betjeman, nor indeed any real equivalent to the new school of urban sophistication which had emerged both in Britain and in America. Apparently now solidly rural and monolithically Catholic, it already seemed to most cultivated Englishmen to be an alien culture, even a backward-looking one. England became increasingly dominated by the so-called “Thirties Poets” and by the new American literature, both in prose and verse.

James Joyce in many ways stands outside this discussion, since he had been an exile from the age of twenty and made only one brief return visit to Dublin, in 1912. He showed little interest in the contemporary English literary scene and was almost entirely geared towards Latin Europe. The greater part of Joyce’s life was divided between France and Italy, and his death in Switzerland in 1941 was rather fortuitous, since he went there basically as a refugee from the second World War. Though invited several times to America, he never went there—which seems rather ironic when we consider his enormous prestige there and the number of Americans who have studied and written about his work—including his biographer, Richard Ellmann.

Joyce is often spoken of as the outstanding victim of Irish cultural chauvinism and censorship. His works, in fact, were never banned in Ireland and his early books, the short-story collection Dubliners and the autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were read enthusiastically by two generations of Irish people. Ulysses, by contrast, was considered scandalous and immoral, yet it was ignored by the Censorship Board and could—though with some difficulty and circumspection be bought in the better bookshops. The tradition that he was virtually ignored by literary Dublin for most of his later career is almost a travesty of the facts—he had a considerable influence on younger writers including not only Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, but on figures as far apart as the dramatist Dennis Johnston and the poet Austin Clarke. In turn, Joyce followed developments in his homeland from afar, including literary and intellectual trends, and he relied on friends to feed him information, press cuttings, anecdotes and other materials which might be fed into the witch’s cauldron of his style. In 1951—by which time, of course, he was long dead—the magazine Envoy devoted an entire issue to him, and in the same decade the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where the first chapter of “Ulysses” opens, began to be a place of artistic pilgrimage. Contrary to what is so often said, his fellow-countrymen, or at least an educated minority of them, were fully cognisant of his world stature as a novelist and innovator.

Joyce, in short, became an organic part of Irish literature from the 1920s onwards, and in the decade after his death he became almost a symbol of revolt for younger writers in reaction against the Celtic Twilight on the one hand, and the rural school(s) of writing on the other. This new generation consciously sought an “international” tone, in contrast to the self-conscious nationalism of much Irish writing between the world wars, and in opposition to the still-powerful rural writers it laid stress on urban themes and a big-city sensibility. In this, of course, they were in line with their contemporaries in Britain - where the Georgian poets with their rural subjects were in eclipse - and in America, where folksy writers such as Willa Cather were now out of fashion and New York called the tune. However. Joyceanism was something special and unique - it never really took root in England, for instance, and many of Joyce’s keenest followers and admirers were either French, or Russian like Andrey Bely, or German like Doblin. (On the other hand, he made a strong appeal to Welsh writers such as David Jones and John Cowper Powys, and to Scots such as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid).

For many years indeed, for many decades—there was a belief that Ireland’s contribution to the visual arts was far inferior to her literature, in fact not remotely comparable to it. Irish painting and sculpture were seen as belonging in a provincial British context, or else as third-rate and third-hand borrowings from France, then the most prestigious country in Europe (and the world) in the visual arts. It is only in the past two decades that this negative, even patronising attitude has been effectively challenged.

In fact, the Literary Revival or Renaissance was paralleled by a very vigorous school of Irish painters and sculptors—though the term “school” might be rather misleading, since these artists were all individual figures who pursued separate paths and never banded together as the Impressionists had done in France. For instance, John Butler Yeats, father of the poet, was a portrait painter of genius, as is now generally acknowledged, who has left us an unequalled gallery of the literary talent of his time including his son W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Synge, Padraic Colum, George Russell and many more. His painter-contemporaries included the great landscapist Nathaniel Hone, who had trained in France, the sensitive genre artist Walter Osborne, and John Lavery, who had grown up in Scotland and spent his formative years as a painter in France. A little later, William Orpen showed himself to be immensely skilled, versatile and prolific in about every genre from portraiture to still life. By the Twenties, however, Hone and Osborne were dead, John Butler Yeats had for years been an exile in New York, and Orpen had settled in England. Irish art had lost many or most of its outstanding figures and Hugh Lane, the great dealer, patron and founder of the gallery in Dublin that now bears his name, had been lost on board the Lusitania in 1915.

There can be little doubt that the dominant figure in Irish painting of the twentieth century is Jack B. Yeats (1869-1957). The son of an outstanding painter and the brother of Ireland’s pre-eminent poet, he would have had every excuse if he had felt overwhelmed by their combined gifts and as a result had failed to realise his full potential as an artist. And in fact Jack Yeats was a very modest, man, private and unassuming where his poet-brother was very much a public figure His rise as a painter was slow and though his early work has plenty of vitality, his great period as a colourist did not begin until the late 1920s, when he was already middle-aged. His work is a unique fusion of realism and imagination, of the everyday and the visionary, and his nervous brushstrokes and broken, irridescent colour were far in advance of their time particularly in relatively provincial Ireland. However, Yeats also had a strong following in England, he was known to American buyers, and France thought highly enough of him to award him the Legion of Honour. Today his fame is worldwide and he ranks with the great figures of his generation in France and Germany.

The Royal Hibernian Academy, under the presidency of Dermod O’Brien, had been very much under the influence of William Orpen, who even after his voluntary exile from Ireland had continued to be powerful as a teacher and personality. His followers and pupils included artists of genuine calibre such as Leo Whelan, James Sleator, and Frank Tuohy; another, more contentious one was Sean Keating. This meant, in effect, that the RHA came to stand more and more for a turn-of-the-century Realist style which twentieth-century Modernism had made look increasingly outmoded. O’Brien himself , though an able painter, was a rather backward-looking figure who was largely hostile to the new trends, with the result that the Academy became equated in the eyes of a younger, more rebellious generation with head-in-the sand reaction. In 1943, in the very depths of the second World War, a number of independent-minded people got together and formed the Irish Exhibition of Living Art which was mildly Modernist and was strongly influenced by the hugely prestigious School of Paris. Figures associated with it included Louis le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness, the sculptor Oisin Kelly and others. This generation, if it can be called that, was able to combine the formal and other advances of European Modernism with a strongly Irish quality of imagination.

Much or most of the activity outlined above took place against the background of financial stringency and in a country with a small population with relatively few cultural traditions outside folk ones. It is therefore hard to sustain the charge that Ireland during the two world wars was a cultural and intellectual backwater, taking refuge behind tariff walls and a stringent, unimaginative censorship. No doubt there were many disappointments and frustrations, particularly on a personal level, yet there was always a core of committed, disinterested people who were able to keep the flag of Irish culture flying. Contrary to the hostile myths, Ireland’s creative nerve did not desert it, nor did philistinism and reaction crush the energy which the Literary Renaissance had first set in train. Literature continued to produce remarkable talents, the theatre was vital if not hugely creative, a new generation emerged in the visual arts, it was the golden age of the Irish literary magazine, journalism and broadcasting (on radio—television did not come until the Sixties) maintained a high level. From being little more than a province in the multi-lingual British Empire, Ireland became fully a nation with a culture of its own.

1912 and the years which followed were a time of great political instability in Ireland. While Catholics and Protestants generally had different political aspirations, they shared one common view—that any religious minority would be treated unfairly. The partition of Ireland in the early 1920s led to the formation of two states in which majorities triumphed: the Free State with its strong Catholic identity and Northern Ireland with an equally strong Protestant identity.

Protestants had voiced their fears during the Home Rule debate of 1912. The Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches issued strong statements against Home Rule. In addition to expressing political and economic concerns, they objected to the Catholic Church’s influence on Irish politics and feared that a Dublin government would promote Catholic beliefs. They resented the Catholic Church's demand that the children of mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics. One of the highlights of their campaign was the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant, a pledge to resist Home Rule which they saw as ‘subversive of our civil and religious freedom.’

As the British Government began to consider separate arrangements for Ulster, the Catholic Church became alarmed. In 1916 bishops and priests wrote letters to the press protesting against such proposals. The bishops feared that Catholic schools would suffer financially under a Belfast administration. They also feared that Catholics would be treated as second class citizens. When partition loomed in 1920, Bishop Charles McHugh of Derry declared, ‘to become serfs in an Orange Free State carved out to meet the wishes of an intolerant minority, to this we will never submit.’

The outbreak of rebellion in Ireland raised a different question: that of the morality of armed struggle. The Catholic Church had traditionally condemned armed rebellion as immoral. During the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence few priests openly sympathised with the rebels. As the conflict continued, some bishops and priests condemned acts of violence strongly, but the policies of the government and the actions of the Black and Tans were also denounced. Although the Catholic Church did not approve of rebellion, many rebels were devout Catholics. During the 1916 Rising rebels recited the Rosary on the roof of the General Post Officer (GPO). Patrick Pearse and hunger striker Terence MacSwiney saw themselves as Christ-like figures. Those condemned to death were satisfied that they were about to enter into eternal glory, and were seen by many Irish as martyrs. When the conflict ended with the signing of the Treaty, the Catholic Church was pleased, though some bishops were disappointed that the Treaty permitted Northern Ireland to opt out the Free State. The Catholic Church supported the new Dublin government, and prompted by the government, issued a strong condemnation of those who fought against the state in the civil war.

15. A Catholic State

The Irish Free State celebrated its Catholic identity. In 1929 the centenary of Catholic Emancipation was marked by a sense of religious and political achievement. Religious and political leaders participated in the Eucharistic Congress of 1932—the first major international event to be held in the Irish Free State. The Irish Army also played an important ceremonial role at the event. About one million people attended Mass in Phoenix Park. At a local level, shrines testified to religious feeling. Early political leaders in the Irish Free State were committed Catholics. Laws passed reflected moral values of the time. The Cumann na nGaedheal government led by W. T. Cosgrave passed the Intoxicating Liquour Act in 1924 to reduce the opening hours of public houses, and another in 1927 aimed at reducing the number of public houses. A Censorship of Films Act was passed in 1923. Divorce was ruled out in 1925. The Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 banned indecent and obscene literature, and literature advocating contraception. This Act tackled a longstanding Irish Catholic concern regarding ‘evil literature’. The Fianna Fáil government, led by Eamon de Valera, passed a Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1935 which banned the importation of contraceptives. Under the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, a licence was required to hold a public dance. As historian Dermot Keogh has noted, de Valera did not follow the bishops’ suggestion that girls should not be permitted to go to dances unless accompanied by parents! In 1937 de Valera introduced a new constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, which clearly reflected Catholic beliefs. In preparing the constitution, de Valera took advice from Fr John Charles McQuaid, and from the Jesuits, though he did not follow all of their recommendations. The constitution included a reference to the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church as guardian of the faith of the majority, strong protection for the family, and a ban on divorce. Its emphasis on women’s work in the home proved controversial.

Religious orders ran hospitals, schools, orphanages, and other institutions. John Charles McQuaid, who became Archbishop of Dublin in 1940, promoted a wide range of Catholic social services. Assistance was provided for emigrants, homes for the disabled and a Catholic Social Services Conference was established to provide a range of services to the less well-off. It provided food for the poor, supplied turf, and centres for mothers.

16. Popular piety

Catholic organisations and religious activities had a widespread appeal during theis period. Sodalities and confraternities, such as the Jesuits’ Sodality of the Blessed Virgin and Sacred Heart Confraternity, were popular. The Legion of Mary, combined devotion to Mary with social concern. Initially it focused on counteracting Protestant attempts to convert Catholics, and persuading prostitutes to lead more meaningful lives. The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association attracted thousands of members and promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart. Knock attracted thousands of pilgrims each year. Pilgrimages to Lourdes and Rome were also popular.

As the economic depression of the 1930s led to hardship in Ireland and elsewhere, attention turned to social problems. In 1931 Pope Pius XI outlined his views on social issues in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (reconstruction of the social order). Rejecting both communism and capitalism, the Pope called for vocational organisations to represent particular industries and occupations, and hoped that employers and workers would work in harmony is these organisations. Study groups examined the Pope's ideas and religious journals discussed social problems. The St. Vincent de Paul Society, which had spread to Ireland from France in the nineteenth century, played an important role in providing assistance to the poor.

17. Ireland and the Catholic World

The press and religious publications kept Irish Catholic informed of the problems facing Catholics in France, in Mexico and the Soviet Union. Irish Catholics were concerned by the progress of communism in the Soviet Union, and took a particular interest in events in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. The Irish Christian Front was formed to combat communism in Ireland and send aid to the soldiers of General Franco who had toppled the Communist government. About 700 men led by Eoin O’Duffy travelled to Spain to fight for Franco. A smaller group went to fight on the communist side.

Irish missionary efforts in Africa, India, the Philippines and China were a source of considerable pride. New missionary orders for sisters and priests were formed in the 1920s and 1930s. Edel Quinn promoted the Legion of Mary in East Africa. Missionary magazines, often distributed through schools, highlighted Ireland's contribution.

The Protestant population of southern Ireland declined sharply during the period 1911-26. Some were killed in the First World War, members of the army and navy left, and others fled from intimidation. When Protestant church leaders appealed to Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins for protection, the government although sympathetic, was unable to prevent attacks. During the civil war a number of Protestants whom W. T. Cosgrave had appointed senators had their houses burned to the ground.

Declining numbers proved the most serious problem for Protestants in later years. Concern about the Catholic Church’s requirement that children of mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics encouraged Protestants to remain apart, but it proved difficult to maintain separate schools in areas with a dwindling Protestant population. Nevertheless, Protestants, who were on average better off than Catholics, had a certain prestige in society. The Irish Times represented the Irish Protestant unionist perspective. Trinity College, Dublin, remained a Protestant institution as the Catholic Church prohibited Catholics from attending it. Southern Protestants maintained close links with Protestants in Northern Ireland as the main Protestant churches continued to function on an all-Ireland basis.

Opposition to issues like censorship was more likely to come from liberal or lapsed Catholics than from Protestants. Some issues, however, were contentious. As a senator, W. B. Yeats protested strongly against measures to prevent divorce. Many Protestants disapproved of gambling and were unhappy with the introduction of the Hospital Sweepstakes. A further controversy arose in 1931 when a Protestant graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was appointed as county librarian for Mayo. Objections to her lack of proficiency in Irish were soon followed by concern about the type of books that she, as a Protestant, might make available. She was transferred to the Department of Defence. However, such cases were very rare.

Ireland’s Jewish community began to grow in the late nineteenth century as Jews, many from Russia and Lithuania, arrived in Ireland. By 1926 there were 3,686 Jews in the Irish Free State, most living in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. During the 1930s, a decade of increasing anti-semitism in Europe, some prominent Irish figures expressed hostility to Jews. These included Charles Bewley, the Irish government’s envoy in Berlin in the 1930s, and writers Fr Denis Fahey and Fr Edward Cahill who presented Jews as a threat to the Catholic Church and linked Jews with socialism. Anti-semitic views also appeared in a number of Catholic journals.

Nevertheless, the Jewish congregation was recognised formally in the 1937 Constitution. The Irish Free State’s first Chief Rabbi was Isaac Herzog, whose eldest son Chaim later became president of Israel. Herzog was on friendly terms with Cardinal MacRory, and Eamon de Valera, and was honoured by representatives of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party before leaving for Palestine in 1937. During World War II the Department of Justice was reluctant to allow many Jews enter the country, fearing that they would not assimilate. After the war a number of Jewish children were brought to Ireland. From the mid 1940s the Jewish population went into decline, largely due to a high rate of emigration.

Protestants formed about 66% of the population of Northern Ireland in 1921. While most were united in their unionism, in religious matters they differed widely. They included members of the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian, Methodist, Moravian, Lutheran churches, the Society of Friends, and a range of other groups. Their liturgies differed, as did their church buildings: many Methodist and Presbyterian churches were simple buildings contrasting with the more ornate buildings of the Church of Ireland. Evangelical styles of preaching that emphasised the need for conversion attracted Protestants from various denominations. W. P. Nicholson, an Ulsterman who had been influenced by American evangelicalism and ordained in the United States, was an influential preacher in Northern Ireland. His outspoken preaching is thought to have increased the numbers turning to religion in the 1920s.

The Orange Order provided an opportunity for Protestants of different denominations and social classes to celebrate a common Protestant heritage. Many of the banners carried on Orange parades bore illustrations of biblical scenes or Protestant churches in Northern Ireland. The Orange Order has representatives on the Ulster Unionist Council, which governs the Unionist Party. Most Unionist members of parliament between 1921 and 1972 were members of the Order. In the years soon after partition the government tackled two issues of longstanding concern to Protestants—education and alcohol abuse. Many new schools were opened and the government passed an Intoxicating Liquour Act, restricting the sale of alcohol and banning the opening of pubs on Sundays. At local level Protestant respect for Sunday observance was also evident and public parks were closed on Sundays.

Catholics were an unhappy minority in this environment. Most had ignored the new state set up by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and hoped that the IRA’s struggle would produce a better settlement. Cardinal Logue declined an invitation to attend the Belfast parliament’s opening ceremony in June 1921 and Catholic MPs initially boycotted the parliament. The Catholic bishops were highly critical of the new government's policies, particularly its security policies and the limited funding available to Catholic schools. Protestants resented and feared this Catholic hostility to the new state.

Catholicism, nevertheless, flourished in Northern Ireland. The Catholic Church engaged in extensive fundraising to support Catholic schools, churches and other institutions. Many Northern Catholics travelled to Dublin for the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, some coming under attack on the journey. These attacks were condemned by the Belfast government. Belfast Catholics hosted the annual Catholic Truth Congress in 1934. Catholic priests openly supported nationalist politicians and expected them to promote Catholic education. Study circles examined Catholic social teaching. The St Vincent de Paul Society was particularly active in the Belfast area in the 1930s, a time of high unemployment. A number of factors reinforced divisions in Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants often lived in separate areas, particularly in Belfast and Derry. Endogamy, that is the custom of marrying within one’s own group, further reinforced the divisions. The Catholic Church was committed to educating Catholics in separate Catholic schools.

These divisions hardened during the 1930s. Cardinal MacRory offended many Protestants when he stated that the Church of Ireland was not part of the Christian Church. The Ulster Protestant League expressed much opposition to the Catholic Church as well as concern about the disloyalty of Catholics. The Catholic Church’s opposition to conscription during World War II strengthened Protestant views that Catholics were disloyal.

From the 1921 to 1949 northern Catholics considered themselves a persecuted minority. Protestants looked at developments in the Irish Free State, and felt their fears that Home Rule would mean Rome Rule had been justified. The situation was well summed up by Northern Ireland Prime Minister James Craig when he said, in 1934, ‘… in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state.’