Buried Lives Read online

  English had become the native tongue of the Irish several centuries before independence, especially in the main cities of Dublin, Limerick, Galway and Cork. Some 14 per cent spoke Irish as their first language in the new Free State in 1921, and were mostly situated in the remoter parts of the south (Kerry), west (Connemara), and in Donegal. By 1891 only 3.5 per cent of children under 10 were able to speak Irish.7 As early as 1700, many Catholics had abandoned the Irish language. There were at most 21,000 native monoglot speakers in 1901, and by 1891, only 17.6 per cent of the population spoke the language, and many of these did not speak it regularly. By the time the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 to promote Irish, ‘The Irish language had been substantially abandoned by the mass of the population and all main towns.’8 Hindley went on: ‘By the late eighteenth century Irish was an interest for scholars and occasional Protestant activists as a medium for conversions.’9

  It had become the dying language of a rural peasantry. Galvin wrote: ‘… it (Irish) had not even survived that century (seventeenth) as the first language of Irish Catholicism … By the early nineteenth century Irish was already a minority language, spoken outside the towns and in areas far away from commercial penetration.’10

  So why revive it? One theory is that it was to give the new Irish State a distinct identity. The Free State was based on a romantic brand of nineteenth-century nationalism, which intimately linked language, blood and soil. Irish became a sacred cow and the ‘prosecution of the Irish language became the necessary bench-mark of an independent ethos’: part of ‘a national philosophy’, as Roy Foster explains.11

  The Protestant community found this ideology alien. An irony is that Ireland’s current success in the global economy is partly derived from the ascendancy of the English language. It can be argued that the language became a fig leaf for narcissistic nationalism. As Jack White wrote in Minority Report, ‘W.P. Ryan expressed the confrontation in a single sentence: “We are working for a new Irish civilisation, quite distinct from the English”.’ White went on: ‘Gaelic society had been shattered before 1700. The new civilisation would have to be built, presumably from the fragments that survived in the peasant cottages of the south and west … It would have to express itself in a language unknown to a majority of the nation…’12

  Those who opposed the imposition of Gaelic ‘were up against lingo-fanatics who ‘through ignorance, lack of perceptiveness, closed minds, excess of idealism, refuse to accommodate the reality of an English-speaking Ireland’. Hindley also concluded that compulsory Irish was ‘a fundamental error in social psychology by making a language “essential” or “required” by what the public sees as artificial means. It is not natural and the outcome was that the Irish rejected it. “Loyal lies” are told about it for patriotic reasons. They “honour it as a symbol but have no practical use for it”.’13

  Today, idealistic nationalists who associate language with nation have acted as a parasite on a dying host of native speakers. These people are mostly middle-class, speaking a version of Irish that is designed to make it easier to learn but that is ‘excruciatingly embarrassing to any natural Gaeilgeoir’.14 These mostly middle-class professionals and intellectuals, such as Douglas Hyde and later Church of Ireland bishops – together with advanced nationalists like Gerry Adams – speak, or try to speak, a language their great grandparents had rejected for sensible pragmatic reasons. This they do in the face of the willingness of native speakers in the Gaeltacht ‘to allow the language to die now it has ceased to serve any practical purpose.’15

  It was ‘an ideological weapon for nationalist and fundamentalist Catholics, feared by Protestants’ and used for ‘moral superiority’, according to Tom Garvin in Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland.16 Garvin concludes: ‘The extremists confiscated the language much as they had confiscated Gaelic games, they identified the language and games with a particular political ideology – Protestants naturally excluded themselves [my emphasis] but so did most of the Catholic middle class.’17

  Irish was not only compulsory; it was discriminatory, as Myles Dillon pointed out.18 Dillon believed that the compulsory language was alienating to Protestants in independent Ireland. He argues that it was used as ‘a means of transferring power, or rather authority’. He explained that after 1922:

  All the cultural institutions of the country were in the hands of the Protestants: the Royal Irish Academy, the National Library, the National Gallery, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the Royal Dublin Society, the Museum, the College of Science, the Botanical Gardens, even the Society of Antiquaries. All that must now be changed: a new administrative class was to be established, and the language was one of the means to be used. Lyster, Eglington, Praeger, Best, Armstrong, Westropp, Sir Frederick Moore, none of these men could have passed the test. None of them could stand a chance of civil service appointment now. I shall not dwell upon that painful subject: I believe that far from helping the language movement, this turning of the screws has destroyed its value as a form of allegiance.19

  The policy was also criticised by Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin in the 1950s when he told de Valera that he should give up on compulsion as when school children went home, their parents spoke to them in English. De Valera replied ‘the experiment is not over’. Although there have been important changes since then, Irish is still a compulsory subject in national schools and is taught as a compulsory subject in secondary schools to leaving certificate level today. A pass in Irish is a requirement for entrance to the National Universities of Ireland (NUI) situated in Dublin, Galway and Cork and to the Recognised Colleges and Constituent Universities of the NUI. For example, the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin requires a pass for Irish students who would not require a knowledge of Irish to study medicine. Textbooks and lectures are in English. The total cost of promoting the Irish language is some 1.2 billion euro a year, at a time when the Irish Government is deeply in debt. Irish has become a school language changed and re-changed to make it more acceptable, but the policy has not worked in attracting children to speak it as a second language. Hindley believes:

  The demoralizing efforts of long continued language decline leave little to be proud of, and the failure of almost all efforts at preserving or reviving Irish causes general pessimism, defeatism, and cynicism about the motives, intelligence and possible success of continued efforts by those who refuse to be discouraged. At best apathy and indifference ensue.20

  Irish Protestants tended to live quiet lives after the foundation of the Irish Free State, meeting in church on Sundays and socialising in their many parish halls during the week where badminton, whist drives and indoor bowling were usually provided, followed by tea and cakes. These social events kept a sense of identity and difference alive in what many regarded as an alien environment. Kurt Bowen summarizes the situation thus:

  Prior to the 1960s, when tensions between the two communities were much stronger, rural Protestants maintained polite but very distant relations with most Catholics. While they knew their Catholic neighbours far better than did urban Protestants, to mix socially at this time was quite another matter. Their overall superiority in class terms must have strengthened their sense of separateness and solidarity … For the most part, their sense of identity and communal life revolved around religion and parish. 21

  Protestant numbers continued to decline sharply, for reasons to be explained later, and by 1947 they had been sidelined – even beached – in the newly independent Ireland. They had lost power and influence in a State that dumped Catholic-inspired legislation on them. The sort of Ireland that Thomas Davis had advocated, where all religions and traditions would be respected, was not to be. Ireland had become a Roman Catholic, Gaelic, nationalist country where a succession of governments promoted a homogenous culture. De Valera’s vision of Ireland was similar to the vision Gandhi had for an independent India: a frugal, self-sufficient country, pious and simple. He summed it up when he said:

  Whenever men have tried to imagine a per
fect life, they have imagined a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke. Ireland will always be a place where men plough and sow and reap.22

  Fianna Fáil espoused ‘a self-sufficient rural republic, Catholic in religion and Irish-speaking – the vision at the heart of earlier Sinn Féin rhetoric’.23 Wills further argues:

  … de Valera’s vision of a rural republic was undoubtedly idealistic, but it expressed a genuine respect for the life of the small farmer, so numerous in the Irish countryside. His dream reflected a widespread belief that the integrity of Irish existence should be defended against the commercial, industrial, cosmopolitan life of modern society.24

  From the 1920s until recent times, there was an unquestioning deference towards the Roman Catholic Church and State nationalism, an acceptance of ‘a sincere attempt to develop practical ways to organize Irish society on Catholic social principles’.25 In such a society, Protestants had become almost irrelevant. The cliché used when referring to Northern Ireland is that post-separation from the South, it had become unashamedly a Protestant place for a Protestant people. In the South, the cliché was ‘Home rule is Rome rule’. There is much truth in both; a legacy of partition.

  The Protestant minority had lost confidence. Once British in identity and unionist in sympathy, it was left on the margins of Irish society. Brian Inglis wrote about the so-called ‘West Brit’ community in 1962, in his memoir West Briton.

  This class, opposed to the Anglophobia of the new State with its emphasis on Celtophilia, minded its manners and kept quiet. It played cricket and tennis, games considered ‘foreign’ by many. It was moneyed and snobbish, sending children to English public schools or as second best, to St Columba’s College in Dublin. By definition, it did not fit in, no more than British people did in post-independence India and in African countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe. The middle-class Protestants who were in trade were looked down on in rural and urban Ireland by the ex-Ascendancy Protestants. Class distinctions prevailed. However, there were binding factors. Almost all southern Irish Protestants were ex-unionists; many had served in the British forces and in the now-defunct Empire. Those who had not served had relatives who had; the links with Britain were long-standing. For generations, they had intermarried with their own people.

  Protestants had largely lost their old arrogance, though most considered themselves straighter, more conscientious in their financial dealings, and possessing a more disciplined, careful temperament than their Catholic neighbours. They believed that their word was their bond. They were thriftier, more punctilious and looked after their own tribe in the businesses they ran, from Guinness and W&R Jacobs, Lamb’s Jams, Lemons, and Goodalls in Dublin to R.H. Hall in Waterford and Shaw’s department stores around the country. They had their own hospitals – the Adelaide in Dublin and Victoria in Cork. They ran most of the banks, particularly the Bank of Ireland, where they ensured the directors came from their own ranks. By and large, these Protestant-run banks adhered to the principles of integrity essential to bank management, unlike the recent behaviour of most Irish banks, which ended in having to be bailed out by the State with huge loans from the Troika.

  Most Protestants, privileged as they had been, believed that they had administered Ireland with an even hand. Many of the country’s leading patriots came from their ranks – Henry Grattan, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward FitzGerald, Thomas Davis, Charles Stewart Parnell. The Protestant community also produced literary giants: Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge, Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett. But by the 1930s, they had become the opposite of what W.B. Yeats once called them: ‘no petty people’. They had become a petty people, arguably one that had lost its way. Without the support of Protestant numbers in Northern Ireland after partition, they became an insignificant minority.

  The 1st Earl of Midleton, St John Broderick (1852–1942), was the last leader of southern unionists. He worked tirelessly to prevent partition along with Lord Barrymore, Lord Desart, Lord Iveagh and Archbishop of Dublin, John Henry Bernard, all members of the Unionist Anti-Partition League. As Lord Midleton wrote:

  The Southern Unionists had a still wider aim and an equal nemesis to face in case of failure. They recognized, as Redmond did, that the aspirations of an island of 4,000,000 people, situated as Ireland is, could only be realized if the whole country remained together, and that the penalty of detachment from Great Britain would be that Ireland would subside into the rank of a third-rate power. Past injuries must be forgotten and past differences buried, if a solvent and prosperous State was to be built at this crisis of the national history.26

  His counsel was ignored and ‘past injuries … and past differences’ were to become centerfold in the teaching of Irish history for generations of school children in an independent Ireland.

  There can be little doubt that by 1947, Ireland had indeed become ‘a third-rate power’. Clair Wills, writing of Ireland in the Second World War concluded that:

  Far from achieving self-sufficiency, rural Ireland’s failure to thrive questioned the very economic survival of the state. In large measure Ireland had remained a backward part of the British Isles, and this dependency seemed only to be getting worse. The departure of young men and women, with no prospects of a livelihood from the family farm or in local industries, led to a further contraction of rural life for those who stayed. Depopulation produced its own vicious circle. As the numbers dwindled, there was less and less work for those who stayed behind. With farms abandoned, small businesses closed down, school teachers in outlying areas laid off, there were fewer and fewer opportunities for socializing, and so diminishing prospects of marriage and family. The choice was either to board the emigrant boat or be buried alive at home, in a world with no future.27

  Most southern unionists who stayed on in this ‘world with no future’ played down their British sympathies. They were conscious of discrimination against Catholics during the penal laws, though these laws also applied to Catholics in England, and non-Anglicans such as Presbyterians and Methodists in Ireland. Modern historiography accepts that the penal laws were largely unenforced and unenforceable.28 Had they been enforced, the Roman Catholic Church would have been completely suppressed and forced out of Ireland. Instead, it enjoyed the widespread allegiance of Irish Catholics and Thomas Bartlett argues in his book Ireland: A History that the penal laws strengthened the Catholic Church and a strong network of Catholic parishes were laid down during penal times.

  Whether guilty, timid or both, in the words of Hubert Butler, ‘[a] once voluble people seems now to be stricken with aphasia’.29 They played an insignificant part in the public life of the new State, particularly after the 1937 constitution changed Protestant representation in the Senate. In 1930, there were over a dozen Protestant senators and in 1927 there were 14 TDs in Dáil Éireann. By 1948, there were only 3. As Brian Walker has pointed out, the ‘electoral act of 1935 … reduced the size and redrew the boundaries of a numbers of constituencies. Probably more important was the fall in numbers of Protestant electors and a paucity of Protestants among the membership of the main parties.’30

  There were a few notable exceptions of Protestants who had high office, such as Presidents Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers. The co-founder of the Gaelic League in 1893, Douglas Hyde sought to revive the dying Gaelic language as the main platform of the pre-independence cultural nationalist movement. Hyde’s dream was to replace what he considered a debased English language with a pure Gaelic one. English was the language of the ‘penny dreadfuls’, of vulgarity and immorality. But Hyde did not want the language to be politicised, and he withdrew his support from the Gaelic League when it came under the control of Sinn Féin.

  Hyde was atypical of the general run of Protestants, who had little or no time for Gaelic revivalism. He had become ‘the archetype of t
he Catholic Protestant, cunning, subtle, cajoling, superficial and affable’.31 Edward Carson referred to these ‘Catholic Protestants’ as ‘those rare birds’. Hyde and Childers, Protestant Irish presidents, are regularly held up as examples of generous treatment of Protestants in independent Ireland. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien has pointed out, they were token Protestants, paraded as examples of the pluralism of the new State. Like Martin Mansergh, the speech-writer for Charles Haughey, a Senator and former Fianna Fáil TD and major player in the peace talks in Northern Ireland, they were unrepresentative of their tribe.

  Protestants had no political party with which they could easily identify. It was a question of choosing between various shades of green: Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Labour, who shared a common 1916 genesis. (Though Labour was founded in 1912, it provided the Citizen Army in 1916 under the leadership of socialist James Connolly. They were largely absent from the civil service, partly because a knowledge of spoken Irish was required up until 1974, partly because it was not their preferred career choice, with prospects of promotion to the highest grades.

  The Protestant community was a victim of history, as R.B. McDowell wrote in Crisis and Decline, a thoroughly researched record of southern unionists during the early twentieth century. They had for centuries upheld the authority of the British Empire and ‘flourished under its aegis’, like ‘Germans in Bohemia, Swedes in Finland … Greeks in Asia Minor, Muslims in the Balkans. Among those who abandoned adherents of a lost cause were the unionists in the south and west of Ireland’ who were left behind, or chose to emigrate.32 As Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in Ancestral Voices, the past 300 years of Irish history ‘has been the recovery of the Irish Catholics: the Catholics getting their own back, in more senses than one’.