The bishops were confronted by other, even more challenging, voices. From the heart of the rural community came a Clarewoman, Edna O'Brien, a fine storyteller and gifted stylist, who focused in her work on the sexual passions and betrayed emotions of a whole generation of Irishwomen. Books like The Country Girls won their author an early reputation as a scandalous woman, a sort of Irish Françoise Sagan; but the unerring accuracy of her eye and the deft Tightness of her phrase convinced many that here were believable, fallible, flesh-and-blood women, neither paragons nor caricatures. That some of the male characters portrayed in these books were based on noted "pillars of Irish society" added to the cream of the jest. Although a later, openly feminist, generation would become somewhat critical of her fondness for "wounded woman" stereotypes, OBrien was arguably the writer who made many of the subsequent advances in Irishwomen's writing possible: and she continued to craft a prose of surpassing beauty and exactitude.
Traditional Ireland remained ambivalent about the changes: as he opened the national television station in 1962, President de Valera admitted that it could be a force for great good but feared that it might in the end do more harm. Perhaps he sensed that the new media, conducted in prestigious international languages, might seal the doom of minority tongues like Irish. In that he would not have been far wrong, though it is also arguable that the massive revival of traditional music and folk dancing was as much the creation of television as of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Television became the device by which a long-repressed community learned once again how to talk to itself; and in the process that society was forced to confront much that had long gone unadmitted.4
Throughout the 1960s there were major discrepancies in the levels of social welfare enjoyed north and south of the border. Although unionist politicians had embraced the welfare state only with reluctance, they were soon happy to cite these discrepancies as another argument against reunification: for instance, in 1960 Northern Ireland spent more on education than the Republic, which had three times the population.5 Within the next two decades these discrepancies would largely disappear, not in some disingenuous attempt to woo unionists into the Republic, but simply because its citizens insisted on modern levels of comfort and social security. Accession to the European Economic Community was endorsed by a majority of five to one, despite the warnings of traditional republicans and radical socialists that it might herald further diminutions of national sovereignty. Soon Irish farming would enter into a boom period, brought on by the policy of higher prices for food.
In the cities, however – and after 1971 more than half the people lived in urban rather than rural settings – reactions were more mixed. Many established industries such as shoe-manufacturing, motor-assembly and milling went under in the face of new trade conditions. (These industries had been traditional centres of militant trade unionism.) Political leaders were, nonetheless, able to sell EEC membership to the electorate on the basis of the large subventions accruing to the country as a peripheral region from central European coffers, subventions which helped to build an infrastructure of roads, redesigned seaports and luxury hotels. Though the employment generated was welcome, fears were expressed that a "dole mentality" long endemic in the depressed west was extending across the whole island, whose leaders and civil servants became expert in the small-print of European hand-outs. While much of the money promoted enterprise, some clearly stunted it. Cynics began to suggest that Shaw's dire prophecy in John Bull's Other Island was finally coming true: as smaller unviable farms were sucked up by bigger ones whose proprietors seemed more interested in ranching than crop-growing, the future of entire rural areas seemed to lie wholly within the area of tourism. The playwright Brian Friel even wrote a satire, The Mundy Scheme, devoted to the idea of Ireland as a gigantic theme-park, retirement commune and cemetery for European industrialists.
In 1969, inspired by the Civil Rights movement for black emancipation in the United States, a group of activists in the Connemara Gaeltacht launched their own campaign to revitalize the Irish-speaking areas. At that time, the level of unemployment was even higher in Connemara than in the gerrymandered city of Derry, itself under unionist misrule. The demand was for industrial development in the region, for proper schools and villages, for an autonomous local authority and for a broadcasting service in the native language. It had become sadly clear that, while politicians in Dublin paid lip-service to Irish, they had allowed the Gaeltacht areas to continue their slow dying. Some sardonic souls believed that by 1969 it was simply too late to turn the policy around: to them the argument was no longer about how to revive the language so much as about who exactly was responsible for the disposal of the corpse. Yet the Cearta Sibhialta (Civil Rights) movement was in most respects remarkably successful. Appealing to the idealism of the young in the years following student revolts in Europe and North America, it managed to detach Irish from the purgatorial fires of the school classroom and to present it as part of a global countercultural movement constructed upon "small is beautiful" principles. Many gifted graduates did what few Gaelic Leaguers of Hyde's generation managed: they voted with their feet and settled in the west, offering leadership to rural cooperatives. Young people from the Gaeltach no longer regarded emigration as axiomatic: many stayed and helped to build small industries in their communities.6
Meanwhile, in the major cities of Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast, a strong parents' movement called for all-Irish language schools in areas of social deprivation: recognizing that Irish was still a passport to educational success, some wanted their offspring to benefit from expert instruction in the language, while others simply believed that without a sound knowledge of Irish their children would have only a two-dimensional understanding of the national culture. These schools soon became centres of excellence and the nucleus of other language-based activities of the wider community Many of the activists were persons of high culture and soon a revival in the writing and publishing of Irish was under way. Most of its exponents had learned Irish as a second language, and predictable arguments raged as to whether the quality of their work really measured up to that of the previous generation of masters such as Máirtín Ó Cadhain or Máirtín Ó Direáin: but one of the surviving geniuses of the earlier group, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, gave her enthusiastic blessing to Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, whose poetry won an international following in English translation as well as in the original Irish. Other younger authors such as Alan Titley, Michael Davitt and Deny O'Sullivan seemed to confirm that this revival was of real artistic consequence.
Irish continued to enjoy a privileged but strangely precarious position in national life. A book of poems published in the language was likely to have as many intelligent readers as a comparable volume in English, yet Irish was by common consent still in danger of disappearing as a community language within a generation. The incursions of the international media, whose television shows and magazines were conducted in English, meant that the Gaeltacht remained under cultural threat even after some semblance of industrial policy had been formulated for it. Bilingualism became widely practised among the young in such places; and few spoke Irish with the same purity or rigour as did their ancestors. It become clear that if Irish had a long-term future, it was as likely to be in the cities as in the countryside.
The public at large wished the language well but remained unwilling to make concrete sacrifices to protect it. The decision by the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government of the mid-1970s to make a "pass" in Irish no longer compulsory in state examinations was generally applauded. Many language enthusiasts felt betrayed, however – one said that the move ended "the last vestige of state policy on the language"7 – but others argued that compulsion had served only to bring Irish into discredit with honest minds. Henceforth, those who studied the language would, it has hoped, come to see it as a gift rather than a threat: those who nursed such ideas pointed to the immense popularity of Gaelic music and folk music among those same young people least inclined to l
earn compulsory Irish at school.
This paradox seemed to indicate a failure of official policy, yet at a deeper level it may simply have revealed a real ambivalence in national attitudes. A 1975 government report showed that about three-quarters of the people still believed the language essential to Irish identity, but that less than one quarter believed that the language would still be thriving in the next century. The problem of being at once Irish and modern had not been fully solved by John F. Kennedy's ritual phrase or two in Irish. The fate of a people still despondent about its capacity to shape its cultural future became manifest in the tortuous clauses of the government report:
The average individual . . . feels rather strongly that the Irish language is necessary to our ethnic and cultural integrity, and supports the efforts to ensure the transmission of the language. At the same time, under present policies and progress, he is not really convinced that we can ensure its transmission. He has rather negative views about the way Irish has been taught in school and has a rather low or "lukewarm" personal commitment to its use, although in this latter case, the average person has not sufficient ability in the language to converse freely in it. On the other hand, he strongly supports nearly all government efforts to help the Gaeltacht, but at the same time feels that the language is not very suitable for modern life.8
These words were published in 1975. but they still hold true. A government proposal to establish an Irish-language television station won popular support in 1993, though not without opposition from the mass-circulation Independent group of newspapers. Adult classes in Irish remained much in demand: and the Gaelic schools movement, on the basis of superlative results, grew stronger than ever. Yet, for all that, Irish-language programmes on television and Irish-language newspapers were watched and read only by a minority. The "rebels" of John F. Kennedy's imagination were showing a surprising degree of conformism to the world of Dallas and Falcon Crest.
In that, of course, they were no different from other peoples: what disappointed the idealists, however, was that it need not necessarily have been so. Douglas Hyde had hoped to make Ireland again interesting to the Irish: the repossession of a language was to be the prelude to the repossession of a distinctive cuisine, clothing dance tradition, physical culture, and so on. Though Gaelic games and musk grew ever more popular, the language itself remained in an ambiguous position. While some of its partisans could be written off as antiquarians better at home in a Society for Creative Anachronism, many more touched a truly sensitive nerve. By 1989 a best-selling history of the country by J. J. Lee held that at the root of the failure of enterprise lay a lack of self-belief, traceable directly to the loss of the ancestral language.9 This thesis, which might have been laughed to scorn a decade earlier, was now widely quoted on the airways of a national broadcasting station which many – though not Lee himself – held responsible for bringing Ireland into line with international consumerism.
In the decades following the 1960s, the Catholic church implemented much of the aggiornamento. The censorship of books and films was relaxed, often with the support of the more intellectual priests and nuns. Although individual bishops were still capable of giving errant politicians "the belt of a crozier", most religious debates were internal to the Catholic church, which was confronted with a catastrophic fall in vocations to the religious life. That church retained its controlling interest in most secondary schools, but fewer and fewer priests and nuns could be spared for teaching work: meanwhile, the new community schools, staffed by lay personnel, continued to multiply The encyclical of Pope Paul VI outlawing contraception in 1968 generated much acrimonious debate, but it soon became clear that a new à la carte Catholicism was being practised: between 1960 and 1990 the size of the average Irish family was cut by half from 4.6 to 2.3 children.
Sexual behaviour, within and outside marriage, became markedly more liberal; and many rights denied to women – such as the right to work in the civil service after marriage – were restored. The special position of the Catholic church in de Valera's constitution was removed by popular consent in 1972, by the self-same electorate which sent Ireland enthusiastically into the EEC. One of the leaders of Catholic opinion, Jeremiah Newman, argued that adaptation to the new reality of life in an industrialized Europe would test Irish mettle to the end of the century. For Newman (who would prove to be a highly traditionalist bishop of Limerick) the question was "how to construct a new culture in a new context, a culture that will at once be new and relevant in that context and at the same time preserve the best of the old. It means a culture that will be considerably industrial yet without losing what is of lasting value in our rural social fabric. . . It means a culture that will be considerably secular yet without losing our religious persuasions".10 His conclusion was that religion would be more and more a private election rather than a matter of social decorum. The logical inference was that this might produce a more thoughtful sort of Catholic, but that there would be fewer practising. Henceforth, those who went into the religious life would choose it in a most deliberate and conscientious way, rather than seeking social prestige or career opportunity.
One result was that throughout the 1970s and 1980s many Catholic priests and nuns spoke increasingly of their "option for the poor". Some adopted radical positions on social questions concerning travellers, the unemployed, or the rights of children. Many others went to the mission fields of the "developing" world, where they made their own comparisons with the situation in their home country: a significant number returned with new ideas about the democratization of parish life or the need for clergy to enter the regular workforce rather than live as a group apart. These persons, a force for renewal, became a thorn in the side of many a cautious bishop. The spectacle of nuns being jostled by policemen outside the American embassy or of priests being arrested on demonstrations became commonplace.
When the US President Ronald Reagan visited Ireland in 1984, the public response was lukewarm in contrast to that accorded Kennedy, despite the visitor's sentiment that he was "coming home" to the family seat at Ballyporeen. This was largely due to the caustic commentaries on US foreign policy by radical priests and nuns, some of whom had been abused or even imprisoned by CIA-sponsored dictatorships in the Third World. The huge outpouring of support for Irish singer Bob Geldof's Live-Aid musicals for the relief of famine in Africa owed something to folk memories of the Great Hunger, but much also to the campaigns of returned missionaries. Confronted with awful poverty in debt-ridden states, many Irish volunteers reexamined their own motives, preferring to promote social change in these societies rather than seeking religious conversions. A nation whose missionaries had gone forth to teach the poor of the developing world now found many returning with the news that the "Third World" had much to teach them.11 The "liberation theology" pioneered in Latin America was a major factor, prompting much talk of two churches (an eccle-siocracy of empurpled prelates versus a people's devotional church), though the case should not be overstated, since many priests and nuns remained conservative while some bishops were social radicals.
The response of the institutional church to the loosening of its teaching authority was a call for charismatic renewal which came to a climax in 1979 with the visit of Pope John Paul II. He preached against the IRA, abortion, divorce and contraception: and, before one million souls in the Phoenix Park, he called on the faithful to remain loyal to their creed in face of secularist attack. The right of married couples to use contraceptives as an aspect of family planning had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1973: now the focus shifted elsewhere, as strict Catholics demanded that the legal ban on abortion be written into the constitution by special referendum, something which was done after a bitterly acrimonious debate in 1983. The majority Fianna Fáil party was still not ready for a full-scale confrontation with the church in order to separate its domain from that of the state.
Three years later in 1986 the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, led by the social democrat Garret FitzGerald, attempted
by referendum to rescind the ban on divorce. The conservatives won again: women, in particular, were said to have been frightened at the implications for property and inheritance in a society of limited means where divorce might easily be available. Foreign correspondents who watched a small majority for divorce turn into a modest majority against it remained unclear as to whether Catholic theory or pragmatic considerations explained the result. In the following decade, Fianna Fáil (now in coalition government with Labour) would confront the clergy on a range of issues, from control of schools to the running of hospitals: when in 1993 they decriminalized homosexuality in a vote of parliament, there was so little dissent that many felt sure that a reform of the law against divorce would not be far off.
What had not been resolved, however, was the question: what kind of society was to replace the pious, mainly rural and Catholic community of an earlier period? Successive government leaders, though they talked glibly of pluralism, never defined it with any clarity. To many it seemed no more than a buzz-word for administrative convenience: if the Catholic ethos of many hospitals seemed under threat, so did the Protestant ethos of still others, both in danger of making way for a soulless, characterless health-service whose governing principle was a value-free efficiency.
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