The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (42 page)

His focus on the virtues of stability can, of course, be put down to the trauma of civil war that the country had recently experienced; it was vital, in psychological terms, that this phase in history be sealed tightly and locked to the past. This helps to illuminate the otherwise curious lack of attention paid to economic matters – and the resulting low level of economic activity in turn explains why the numbers of those emigrating rose considerably in the years following independence: there was little work to be had, few signs of this situation being addressed in any meaningful way, and thus every incentive to leave Ireland for good. It also explains why the issue of partition was seldom addressed in practical terms: leaving aside the public hand-wringing that developed over the issue, the practical course was inevitably to accept the situation as it existed and begin work on building a new state.

It was a guiding tenet of this new state that a return to a Gaelic Ireland was both desirable and achievable. This in turn meant the fostering of the Irish language, but the methods chosen to incubate and revive it were distinctly odd. An Irish-language test was rapidly introduced to the civil service, but its usage was not extended to the government at large. Instead of becoming the chosen language of state – of the Dáil or of ministerial business – Irish became instead the language of the country’s primary schools. Here, its teaching became compulsory: teachers, in other words, were entrusted with the delivery in time of an Irish-language Ireland, and with the resolution of a problem that nobody else much wanted to face:

Today the people leave the problem to the Government, the Government leaves it to the Department of Education, the Department of Education to the teachers and the teachers to the school-children. Only the very young are unable to shift the burden to someone else’s shoulders, so perhaps they will learn to carry it, and save our faces. After all, infants before the age of reason can do marvels with language, so they may not notice the weight.
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But this was an experiment that failed, for the number of Irish speakers in the Free State continued inexorably to decline – and yet it was a policy that would not be substantially revised or re-imagined in the years to come. The fees levied for secondary education, meanwhile, ensured that it remained a luxury beyond the reach of all but the well-off; at the end of the 1920s, a massive 93 per cent of children were in receipt of no secondary education at all.
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And there were other indications that nationalist rhetoric lacked a certain substance: the population of Ireland’s western islands – predominantly Irish-speaking and with precious cultural traditions that were increasingly fragile – declined drastically in the years after independence; the populations of some of them were evacuated with government assistance; and it was painfully evident to all that there was no state policy directed at conserving this facet of Irish culture.

These years were characterized by much cultural self-absorption and preoccupation with issues of public morality. The writer and trades unionist Peadar O’Donnell, who had sympathized with the losing side in the civil war, described the behaviour of the new government as a ‘hatching hen fussiness’, concerned to an overwhelming extent with incessantly arranging and controlling its environment – so very concerned, indeed, that it had little time or energy left to attend to the wider world that surrounded it.
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The result was a state marked by a degree of insularity that can seem remarkable today. The culture of censorship, for example, very quickly became a hallmark of Irish life. As early as 1923, the Dáil had passed the first Censorship of Films Act: this would be followed by successively amended legislation designed to keep track of evolving cinematic technology and to close any legislative loopholes. A Committee on Evil Literature was formed in 1926 in order to advise the government on the protection of public morality; and in 1929 the first Censorship of Publications Act was passed, designed to net any book or publication that tended towards the indecent or obscene. Such legislation was not unique to Ireland: amid the social trauma that followed World War I, similar laws appeared on the statute books of many European countries and of the United States. In the specific context of Ireland, however, such laws helped to unify a society deeply divided by the consequences of a recent civil war. They bolstered the notion of resurrecting and protecting a pure and unsullied new nation – in particular protecting it from contamination in the form of smutty British newspapers and books that would otherwise flood west across the Irish Sea.

A wide spectrum of opinion could be relied upon to support such legislation: the republican organ
An Phoblacht
, for example, was pleased to praise the work of the Committee on Evil Literature in seeking to ‘check the tide of filth from Britain into this country’, and later would mourn the sight of those artists and writers who showed an unhealthy interest in foreign matter. ‘These writers,’ it tutted, ‘cannot have healthy brains, cannot have brains at all but a slack mass of matter like frog-spawn where grim, filthy ideas crawl and breed like so many vermin.’
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Clearly, the boat to Holy-head was the best place for such individuals if they could not come to an accord with the ways of the Free State. And for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which had moved rapidly to assert itself following the years of political chaos, such strictures were simply good lawmaking – in addition to which, the bishops could be assured of many willing listeners in the ranks of government. Censorship would be a prominent feature of life in Ireland for decades to come, and many of the country’s most prominent writers – Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, O’Casey, the novelist Kate O’Brien and short story writer Frank O’Connor among them – would join a host of foreign names among the legions of the banned.

One consequence of this prevailing censorious and conservative climate was the steady eclipse of a female presence in Irish public life. The roles of the suffrage movement in Ireland and of women in the politics of 1916–22 are thrown into sharp relief by the nature of the public sphere thereafter, as female room for manoeuvre gradually became more circumscribed. This backlash can be ascribed in part to the voluble anti-Treaty reaction of the membership of Cumann na mBan, which was viewed with horror in many quarters. (‘It is women who were largely responsible for the bitterness and the ferocity of the civil war. In the whole period of war, both the “Tan” war and the civil war, the women were the implacable and irrational upholders of death and destruction.’
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) The stream of legislation that followed seemed designed to keep them in their place: after 1925, women could not automatically sit for all entrance examinations to the civil service, restricting their presence in its highest ranks; from 1927, they had formally to opt
into
jury service; and in the 1930s the ‘marriage bar’ was introduced, obliging female teachers and civil servants to resign their posts when they married. Market forces naturally ensured that a female workforce existed in factories and shops, in midwifery and on farms. The views of the state, however, were captured in a remark to the Dáil by the minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins, noting that through biological reproduction women performed ‘the normal functions of womanhood in the state’s economy’.
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The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935 then took steps to police this area of biological reproduction by banning the importation or sale of contraceptives.
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The view of the Church, meanwhile, were summed up as early as 1922 when the Rev. J. S. Sheehy asked the ladies attending a meeting of the Catholic Truth Society: ‘Will you be the bane or blessing of man: a ministering angel or wily temptress?’
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And there were few options for women who fell foul of such rules: a large proportion of single mothers were among those who boarded the emigrant boat; and of those who remained in Ireland, many became inmates of the Magdalen laundries that had evolved since the late nineteenth century. Such foundations ostensibly offered a refuge to ‘fallen’ women; but they were also extremely lucrative commercial operations, enriching the religious orders that managed them. Many such women would become wholly institutionalized, spending their entire lives in the laundries.

Their offspring, meanwhile, tended to be placed in one of Ireland’s fifty-odd industrial schools, also run and administered by a variety of religious orders on behalf of the state. These schools, like the Magdalen laundries, had existed in Ireland for decades: but whereas the system was phased out in the United Kingdom from early in the twentieth century, a decision was taken in the Free State to rely on these schools as a means of dealing with the marginal elements in society. For the schools’ inmates tended to be ‘needy’ – that is, they came from troubled or otherwise deprived families who required additional economic or other assistance; the persistent notion that the schools principally took in orphans or young delinquents is quite incorrect. These industrial schools were state-funded to provide a functional education for the children on their books: in some girls’ schools, the inmates were regarded as future domestic servants; while boys were frequently hired out to farmers to work in the fields. The full story of conditions in these industrial schools would not be revealed until the end of the century, but 2009, the Ryan Report noted that the authorities had long been aware that a culture of abuse was part and parcel of life in the industrial school system. A series of letters written in 1946 by a former inmate of Artane school in Dublin, for example, set out in some detail the regime of physical abuse that he and his peers experienced; the Department of Education was ‘dismissive. No attempt was made to establish the veracity of the complaints.’
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There was, of course, more to the culture of the Free State in these years than harshness and moral censure. In particular, popular culture was in rude health and able to compete with the Church for influence over hearts and minds. While many films were banned, for example, the picture houses of the country (and there were well over a hundred of these by the 1930s) enjoyed a boom, with punters flocking to see the latest American romances and westerns – in spite of the criticism of such films that was voiced from the pulpit each Sunday. At the same time certain grassroots organizations were evolving, with the objective of providing support and advocacy services: the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, for example, had begun its expansion from modest (and at first predominantly Protestant) origins in Wexford into something that spanned the whole country; it was strongly influenced by the self-help ethos of the cooperative movement and provided a precious social outlet in the lives of many otherwise isolated rural women.

Novels such as Edith Somerville’s
The Big House at Inver
(1925) and Elizabeth Bowen’s
The Last September
(1929) used the image of the Anglo–Irish big house to explore the plight of the Protestant community – rapidly shrinking and frequently socially isolated – in the new order. This community had an advocate in the poet Yeats, now a senator. ‘We are no petty people,’ he observed in the course of a 1925 Senate debate on divorce. ‘We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke, we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country…’At the same time, voices could be heard questioning the Catholic moralizing and censorship that was coming to dominate the Free State. The reception given to the Abbey Theatre’s first production of O’Casey’s
The Plough and the Stars
in 1926 demonstrated that criticism was alive and well. The play portrayed the bleak reality of Dublin tenement life at Easter 1916, complete with drinkers, prostitutes, looters and death by tuberculosis – and offended nationalist complacencies by failing to glorify the leaders of the rising. The result was serious disturbances in the auditorium and a threat by the government to withdraw its annual grant. Yeats and Gregory, however, had clearly anticipated the reaction the play would provoke: ‘if we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom,’ wrote Gregory, ‘it is freedom we choose.’ The production carried on, and the government did not withdraw the subsidy. It was a victory of freedom of expression – but a rare victory in a state that set a rather higher value on internal stability and security.

In these same post-Treaty years, a process of state-building was also ongoing in the infant Northern Ireland. Stability and security were the main preoccupations of the new province too, although the definitions of these terms differed in the unusual Northern context. While taxation powers remained centralized in London, issues of law and order had been devolved to Belfast – and the new government wasted no time in securing its authority: internment without trial and other special security laws were introduced; and the IRA threat to the very existence of the state was countered by the expansion of the police force. Such measures worked, though at the price of diminishing still further the position of Northern nationalists in the new Northern Ireland: the ‘B Special’ force of reserve police in particular rapidly gained a reputation for violence and brutality against the minority community.

With the IRA threat in decline and the boundary commission report consigned safely to history, the Unionist majority could focus on moulding the institutions of government in such a way as to perpetuate the status quo. By 1929, the original electoral system of proportional representation had been replaced by one of single-member constituencies that would favour larger parties (that is, the Ulster Unionist Party, the party of the state itself) and disadvantage potentially troublesome smaller ones, including fringe Unionist groupings. Indeed, single-member
elections
became more common as time went on, with some two-thirds of constituencies in the 1932 general election, for example, uncontested by any save the Ulster Unionist candidate.
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