Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  In no set of writings is the notion of Ireland as England's unconscious more deeply or more sustained!/ explored than in those of Edmund Burke.12 He contended that what happened to the native aristocracy in Ireland under Cromwell and the Penal Laws befell the nobility of France in the revolution of 1789: an overturning of a decent moral order. He believed that the same sickness lay not far beneath the composed surface of English civil society, and that it was his duty to warn people of its likely long-term effects. Under the Penal Laws in Ireland a son, simply by convening to Protestantism, could usurp his father's prerogatives, or a wife her husbands, and this Burke saw as a blueprint for revolution. Within the Irish Anglican minority, for whom all the better postings were reserved, something like a career open to talents was possible: hence a coachmaker's son like Wolfe Tone, the Jacobin and rebel, could become a barrister-at-law. Burke was profoundly unimpressed by all this, seeing the Protestant ascendancy as nothing more than "a junto of robbers", a mercantile class which displayed the hauteur and ruthlessness of a fake aristocracy.

  Burke's empathy with India under occupation was also expressed in terms which vividly recalled the extirpation of Gaelic traditions by adventurers and planters. Few people were as rooted in custom as the Indians, but Burke complained that all this had been callously swept aside by Warren Hastings and the East India Company. "The first men of that country", "eminent in situation"13 were insulted and humiliated by "obscure young men", pushing upstarts who "tore to pieces the most established rights, and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations".14 It was the same humiliation known by the princely Gaelic poets-turned-beggars; and Burke saw in Hastings the kind of profiteer who ripped a social fabric. Affecting aristocratic style, those expropriators were homo economicus hell-bent on breaking Brah-minism. To those who worried that he might be overstating the case, Burke replied in 1786 "I know what I am doing, whether the white people like it or not".15

  What Burke had to say against the "junto of robbers" in Dublin could have been said also of Hastings' men in India: they built no schools or public services, being motivated only by the love of quick profit; and so they had the boldness of obscure young men who "drink the intoxicating draughts of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it".16 Burke was shocked by the complicity in all this of Indian middle-men, who prospered as stewards in much the same fashion as the bailiffs denounced so wearily by the Gaelic poets. But it was for the fallen nobles of India that Burke offered his plangent caoineadh ar chéim síos na nuasal (lament for fallen nobility). To the House of Lords in 1794 he declared: "I do not know a greater insult that can be offered to a man born to command than to find himself made a tool of a set of obscure men, come from an unknown country, without anything to distinguish them but an usurped power . . "17

  Whether the subject was England, India or France, the threat to traditional sanctity and loveliness was evoked by Burke in the image of a ravaged womanhood. In the Reflections, Marie Antoinette was described rather colourfully as fleeing from a royal palace in which no chivalric hand was raised to defend her:

  I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.18

  The Gaelic poets usually imagined their monarch wedded to the land, which was emblematized by a beautiful woman: if she was happy and fertile, his rule was righteous, but if she grew sad and sorrowful, that must have been because of some unworthiness in the ruler. The artist was the fittest interpreter of the state of this relationship. So it was not hard for Burke to cast himself in the role made familiar by a hundred aisling (vision) poems, which evoked a willing, defenceless spéirbhean or "sky-woman", who would only recover her happiness when a young liberator would come to her defence. Where natural laws were transgressed, however, there could only be pain and strife. So it was, also, in Hastings' India, where Burke imagined that the Hindu womanhood stood defiled by an East India Company whose officials "ravage at pleasure".19 Like Ireland, India appeared to him as a theatre of the unconscious, a place where unbridled instincts ran riot, while the constraints of civilization were abandoned by those very people who pretended to sponsor them.

  In his later years, Burke chose to imagine the return of the repressed in the figure of an animal from the colonies now unleashed on the mother of parliaments:

  I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as a prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the tower. But if, by habeas corpus or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons while your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise, who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions in the desert behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that are in our chambers and lobbies.20

  His disillusionment with policies in Ireland and India led him to prophesy the end of empire (even before it had fully formed). That makes him the somewhat surprising precursor of today's "Third World" theorists, who offer critiques of cultural imperialism in the years of its slow decline. Ireland provided him, as it would provide many others, with a metaphor for the world beyond Dover, affording points of comparison which helped to explain events in places as far-flung as India or the Americas. The French terror, which he was quite sure no English audiences would willingly contemplate, he made available to his readers in a transposed account of life in post-Crom-wellian Ireland, a hell in the grip of "demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition".21 The consequent suffering was as visible and tangible on the streets of rural Cork as in the suburbs of revolutionary Paris.

  Burke was, of course, no Irish separatist. He believed that the link with England, though the cause of many woes, would be Ireland's only salvation. Nevertheless, as the product of an Irish hedge-school he had a natural sympathy, if not for revolution, then at least for those caught up in the stresses of a revolutionary situation. Conor Cruise O'Brien has inferred from this a conflict at the centre of Burke's writings between outer Whig and inner Jacobite: while the "English" Burke may on the surface be saying one thing, the "Irish" Burke may be implying quite another.22 Thus, he questioned the common English view of the Irish as rebellious and emotional children, praising his people's self-restraint in the face of persecution. Taking up where Céitinn had left off, he attacked misrepresentations by more recent English historians: "But there is an interior History of Ireland – the genuine voice of its records and monuments – , which speaks a very different language from these histories from Temple and from Clarendon . . . [and says] that these rebellions were not produced by toleration but by persecution".23 Burke contested English stereotypes of the Irish, because he saw in them projections onto a neighbouring people of those elements which the English denied or despised in themselves: but he believed that, taken together, the English and Irish had the makings of a whole person. This would prove an attractive proposition for many nineteenth-century theorists, and was the psychological rationale which underlay the Act of Union.

  The Act of Union in 1800, which yoked the two countries together under the Parliament in London, represented a further integration of Ireland into English political life. It was the official response to the rebellion of 1798, a bloody uprising supported by radical Presbyterians, disgruntled Catholics and secular republicans, all of them inspired by recent developments in France. That insurrection had been crushed with matchless severity: the short-lived alliance between "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter", decreed by its republican leader Wolfe Tone against the strength of England, would never be achieved again. The history of Ireland in the following century would be concerned more with sorting out the differences of the Protestant ascendancy and their
multitudinous Catholic tenants and underlings: for, although the Union might be said to have secured Burke's dream of an Ireland taking its place in a developing British scheme of things, his calls for the amelioration of Catholic grievances went largely unanswered. A further uprising, led by Robert Emmet (another idealistic Jacobin of Protestant background) was easily put down in 1803 – though the image of Emmet as doomed young leader prompted many English artists, from Southey to Keats and Coleridge, to rebuke themselves for their own failure to live up to such high romantic ideals.

  Only with the emergence of the great parliamentary agitator, Daniel O'Conneli, was hope of a kind restored. Disparaged by his English enemies as "the King of the Beggars", he was perhaps the first mass-democratic politician of modern Europe in the sense that he built his power on the basis of an awesome popular movement. By 1829, this proudly Catholic leader had secured emancipation for his co-religionists: the Penal Laws against them were finally broken. He next set his sights on repeal of the Union, holding monster meetings at symbolic historical venues across the country. Tens of thousands of labourers, fisherfolk and farm workers walked to hear him: and his speeches, delivered in English by a man keen to prick the conscience of newspaper-readers in the centre of power in London, had a mesmeric effect. By his ringing eloquence, his parliamentary cunning and his back-slapping cajolery, O'Connell achieved an ideal rapport with the Irish peasantry, a rapport which would be the envy and aspiration of many writers of the Irish Renaissance. It was said that up to 100,000 flocked to O'Connell's last monster meeting at Clontarf in 1843, the site of a famous victory by which the Irish had terminated Viking power in Europe. The authorities, sooner than see such self-confidence grow, prohibited the meeting; and its organizer, who believed that the freedom of his country did not justify the shedding of a drop of blood, submitted. It was a fatal climb-down: O'Connell never reached the old heights again, and the movement for Repeal foundered. The lessons of a failed parliamentary and democratic system were not lost on O'Connell's more tough-minded critics in the national movement. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to call O'Connell one of the inventors of the modern Irish nation: for a heady period, he gave its members a corporate identity and a sense of their own massed power. The sense of disappointment when that power failed to register with the authorities was all the greater.

  Disappointment gave way to desperation in the years of famine during the 1840s. Almost a million people died from starvation and associated disease: and, in the same decade, one and a half million emigrated. Irish-speaking areas were among the hardest hit, with the result that only a quarter of the population was recorded as speaking the language after 1851. Through the earlier years of hunger, the British held to their laissez-faire economic theories and ships carried large quantities of grain from the starving island. Arguments raged (and still do) as to the degree of British culpability, but Irish public opinion was inflamed. While some landlords behaved with great callousness towards their ruined tenantry, others were heroic in generosity and in organizing counter-measures: but pervading all was a sense that this was the final betrayal by England. As so often, the balance of the debate was well registered in the popular peasant saw: "God sent the potato-blight, but the English caused the Famine".

  If Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen had looked to revolutionary France for support in 1798, the post-Famine generation turned its eyes toward America. The Fenian Brotherhood stepped into the political vacuum, spurning O'Connellite agitation for the older, trusted methods of an oath-bound secret society which had been favoured by Tone. Ever afterward the cultural as well as political leaders would look to the new world for funds, for manpower, above all for a republican example. Hence the mandatory American tours not just by subsequent revolutionary leaders but also by intellectuals such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. Hence also the eventual adoption by Irish writers of Walt Whitman as the model of a national bard. The Fenian philosophy was summed up by one of the leaders, John O'Leary, who opined that it was useless for an Irishman to confront an Englishman without a gun in his hand. This was a view reflected in another popular proverb which warned children against three things: "the horns of a bull, the hoof of a horse, and the smile of an Englishman".

  Through all these decades, Protestant Ireland continued to produce more than its share of idealists, who sought to hold a middle ground. The Young Ireland leader, Thomas Davis, had founded The Nation newspaper in 1842 with the help of Catholic friends. Sometimes described as naïve dreamers by caustic critics, the Young Irelanders included a few such among their numbers: one vowed to abstain from intoxicating liquor "until Ireland was free, from the centre to the sea", a rather self-denying prospect. But Davis had flint and iron in him as well. He viewed O'Connell's bluff, back-slapping politics with fastidious distaste, discerning in its lineaments an emerging Catholic sectarianism (in place of Tone's "common name of Irishmen"). A Catholic nation would have no place for a Davis, just as surely as the Protestant nation proclaimed in Dublin in the previous century had based itself on the assumption that Catholics simply did not exist. Davis bravely tackled O'Connell in public on the issue; and in forthright essays he identified cultural activity as the true course of a more ecumenical nationhood. "Educate that you may be free" was a favourite motto. He provided later leaders of the Irish Renaissance with many of their crucial ideas: he contrasted the philistinism and gradgrindery of England with the superior idealism and imagination of Ireland. He was not, however, anti-industrial, believing that it was as important to mine the ore at Arigna as to publish a patriotic poem: indeed, he saw these two actions as intimately linked, for his central thesis was that Ireland would never achieve its full industrial and entrepreneurial potential until it had first recovered its cultural self-confidence – and that would only be regained through political separation from England. The Union claimed to accord the Irish all the freedom of citizens of the most prosperous nation in the world; in practice, it simply provincialized them in the name of a facile cosmopolitanism.

  These powerful and penetrating analyses were cut off by Davis's death in 1845 at the early age of thirty-one. It would be left to Yeats, Hyde and a later generation to restore to culture its central importance in the liberation of a people: and even if Davis had lived a longer life, the Famine and the Fenians would probably have obscured his contribution. The portents for a cultural alliance of Catholic and Protestant were never very encouraging: through much of the Famine decade stories circulated about Protestant preachers offering starving peasants soup and clothing in return for religious conversion. Across the north, especially, sectarian tensions continued to heighten, with Catholics supporting a separatist nationalism and Protestants the Orange Lodges. O'Connell might have failed as a political agitator, but his equation of Catholicism and nationhood was proving all too seductive to many desperate souls. Yet, when the Fenians rose in rebellion in 1867, many Catholic bishops denounced them, forbade them the sacraments and, in certain spectacular cases, excommunicated them. Republican separatism never enjoyed much clerical support. Rural communities could often identify the Fenian in their number by the fact that he did not go to mass or that, when he did, he took no communion. W. B. Yeats, who was himself for a brief period a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, would work mightily to keep open this gap between "Catholic" and "national" feeling. On it the very notion of a cultural renaissance depended.

  One of his exemplars in this regard was the next great Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord from County Wicklow who seemed in all things the antithesis of O'Connell – silent where he had been gregarious, aristocratic as opposed to populist in style, cold and disdainful whereas the predecessor had been warm and wheedling. To this complex man, whom they called the uncrowned king of Ireland, the emerging masses entrusted their fate and their party, which he led at Westminster through the 1880s. He displayed immense strategic guile in philibustering its sessions, using his numbers to tip the balance of power and, once
or twice, immobilizing its political processes. The great issue of the decade was land, a debate initiated ten years earlier by Gladstone's first Land Act of 1870 which, following the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in the previous year, had effectively put the Protestant ascendancy on notice that its end was near. By its famous no-rent policy of "boycott" – so named after Captain Boycott, one of its victims in Mayo – the Land League helped win many famous victories; and Parnell's shrewd obstructionist tactics did the rest.

  Throughout the later nineteenth century, Ireland functioned as a sort of political and social laboratory in which, parabolically, the English could test their most new-fangled ideas – ideas about the proper relation between religion and the state, about the changing role of the aristocracy, above all about the holding and use of land. Indeed, experiments of this kind can be traced as far back as the 1830s, when Ireland was given a streamlined system of national education and a country-wide postal network years ahead of England, which only adopted the models after they were seen to thrive and prosper. All this may help to explain the seeming paradox of a modernist literature and cultural politics in a country too often noted for its apparent backwardness. In fact, by the 1880s and 1890s, Ireland was in certain respects clearly advanced by contrast with England. In politics, it was confronting its national question (something which, even today, the English have not done), dismantling church-state connections, and evolving a republican politics based on a theory of citizens' rights. A highly-educated younger generation, finding few positions available commensurate with its abilities or aspirations, was about to turn to writing as a means of seeking power: out of the strange mixture of backwardness and forwardness everywhere, it would forge one of the most formally daring and experimental literatures of the modern movement.