Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  There are, of course, many reasons why the Irish novel, for all its liveliness, failed to reach a level of sophistication displayed by its counterparts elsewhere – not least, the abandonment of the native language, allied to poverty and instability. But an endemic prudery seems to have marked it from the start, a prudery that escalated as the Ireland of Cardinal Cullen (another Cullen) gained its defining – Catholic – characteristics. (Paul Cullen, 1803–78, one-time rector of the Irish College in Rome, set out to impose a definite – a Roman – shape over Irish church affairs, thereby opening the way for the eventual constitutional alignment of church and state, as well as fostering illiberalism in every area: inter-denominational relations, policies of education, sexual morality and what-have-you.)

  The Gaelic League, though its aims were different, was at one with the Catholic Church in putting up a stiff resistance to any moral contagion speading in from England. In fact the Church took over the League’s stern views about the worthlessness and vulgarity of English commercial culture. It’s rather ironic, then, to find a priest in Portarlington (in 1905) getting into his pulpit to rant against the Gaelic League’s Irish language classes for mixed students (i.e. male and female). Such classes, he claimed, ‘were not conducive to the good morals of his flock’ (quoted by Mary Kenny). It was feared – and indeed the same fear persisted right down to our day – that enthusiasm for the language among the young was only a pretext for try-out dissipation. I’m not suggesting that this fear was ill-founded – only that a disproportionate importance was attached to it.

  There were good reasons why the Gaelic League came into being when it did (in 1893). By the end of the Victorian era, a demoralised populace was badly in need of something to reinforce the sense of national worth and distinctiveness. Misgovernment, famine, emigration, poverty, land wars, evictions … every imaginable abuse had been inflicted on the Irish, and to cap it all they were fed up with being portrayed, in the pages of Punch and elsewhere, as assassins or buffoons. The Gaelic League, and subsequent Irish-Ireland movement, offered a means of retrieving dignity and cultural respectability. ‘Not only Gaelic, but free as well; not only free, but Gaelic as well’: this dictum became its watchword – a stance, as many social historians have pointed out, underpinning 1916 and its aftermath. The thing was to cry up every particular in which Irishness differed from Englishness – and religion, and by extension a specific type of spiritual soundness, loomed large here, and got itself grafted on to the language movement (notwithstanding the Protestantism of the Gaelic League’s founder, Douglas Hyde, along with a good many of its adherents).

  The whole field of Irish-Irishness is fraught with anomalies and complications. Everyone is familiar (to cite a famous example) with the Playboy riots of 1907, which saw Gaeilgeoirí up in arms over the supposed aspersion cast by Synge on the morals of Mayo women. ‘It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only,’ Christy Mahon declares at one moment in the play, ‘and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern world?’ ‘Shifts’ was the last straw; perhaps this is the only occasion when Irish belligerence erupted over an issue concerning bodice and soul. Gaelic League members who took part in the protest did so, presumably, in ignorance of the fact that the national language had produced a literature in which references to this particular item of underclothing weren’t unknown; as an example, we have the folk song, ‘Eadar Caiseal agus ÚrChoill’ (Between Cashel and the Greenwood) in which a girl rejected by one man announces that there are plenty of others who would be happy to take her in her shift (léine) if that was all she had. Synge, understandably annoyed by the whole furore – ‘Did you hear that we had to have fifty-seven peelers in to keep the stage from being rushed, and that for four nights not a word could be heard for booing?’ – got off to his friend Stephen McKenna an entertaining account of Lady Gregory’s first action in the crisis. She went backstage to consult the Abbey Theatre charwoman about whether or not a breach of decorum had been committed. The verdict was that ‘chemise’ was the only acceptable word for the garment.

  The outcry provoked by Synge’s plays was modulated gradually until it had turned into an ovation; by 1910 the Gaelic League, or one of its representatives, had proclaimed a reversal of opinion in a magazine article which included the work of Synge, along with the Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley) and the anonymous ballad, ‘Slán le Pádraig Sairséal’ (‘Farewell to Patrick Sarsfield’), among the glories of the Gaelic tradition. The recantation came too late to gratify the playwright, who’d been dead for a year. It’s also, you might argue, an assessment scarcely more judicious than the earlier nationalist denunciations. There are those who believe that Synge’s literary impulse was satiric, reading into his creation of Christy Mahon, for example, an intention to deflate the heroic Cuchulain figure of Irish romance. This is a plausible and illuminating speculation. What’s certain, though, is that Synge’s own writings provide for the satirist or parodist a target even more conspicuous than anything contained in the Irish sagas. Here is Flann O’Brien: ‘I have personally met in the streets of Ireland persons who are clearly out of Synge’s plays. They talk and dress like that, and damn the drink they’ll swally but the mug of porter in the long nights after Samhain.’

  The sagas and other Irish writings were not at all mealy-mouthed, but it’s true that translators of Gaelic material, from Charlotte Brooke on, had tended to tamper with any robustness of expression they found therein. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that a few – a very few – collectors had the gumption to take down the bawdier portions of songs and recitations along with the rest. Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, in her monumental study of the song tradition of South Armagh (taking in parts of Louth and Monaghan), A Hidden Ulster (2003), mentions her father Pádraig Ó hUallacháin’s familiarity with the Rabelaisian aspect of Rannafast culture which quietly flourished alongside more seemly features. Some previously censored lines were retrieved by him and passed on to his daughters, including those in which you get a sexual braggart alluding unabashedly to his seanbhríste mór, his ‘big old trousers’, and the maidens’ delight they’re concealing. Among the friends and acquaintances of Ó hUallacháin, his daughter tells us, were many of the older women singers of Rannafast between the 1920s and ’40s, and he used to take great pleasure in the hearty laughter they broke into during the singing of such risqué songs. Pádraig Ó hUallacháin, incidentally, was the rúnaí – secretary – of Coláiste Bhrighde in Rannafast between 1937 and 1947, a role filled in our day by a George McAdam who was present during the diatribe delivered to us caught-out debauchees on the last night of our Rannafast stay.

  This is not the place to go into the vicissitudes of the Irish language – but, in brief, it was all but obliterated as a living tongue before Douglas Hyde’s call for ‘de-anglicisation’, in 1892, brought about a measure of resuscitation. Throughout the nineteenth century, at least in the more accessible parts of the country, the language had been mainly in the keeping of scholars and antiquaries like Robert MacAdam (see above): safe enough, as far as it went, but not exactly alive and burgeoning. And most of the fragments of Gaelic literature that reached the public (in translation) had already been through the hands of bowdlerisers. (Breandan Breathnach, in his authoritative 1989 study of Irish music and dancing, Ceol agus Rince na hÉireann, mentions George Petrie’s reaction to certain words and phrases in Gaelic manuscripts which struck him unpleasantly. ‘Of such a nature as will not allow even a specimen of it to be translated,’ was his outraged attitude.)

  This bowdlerising had something to do with the sedateness of the age – but more, I think, with a wish to present antique Gaelic culture as unimpeachable in every respect. Whatever required prettifying or purifying was heartily attended to. No one was going to get the chance to say that those old Gaels, Fionn, Oisin, Goll Mac Morna and the rest of them, were a lecherous lot. And the more Gaeldom and Catholicism converged, the more i
t seemed that people should be kept well away from any circumstance or conjecture at odds with the Church, for all the world like a crowd of unruly infants denied access to a dangerous play area. Irish grown-ups – i.e. the church fathers – reserved to themselves the right to make judgements about what was, or was not, suitable fodder for their dependants. So it was inevitable that censorship should become an expedient of the Free State government, after the State came into being in 1923 and entered into an unspoken competition with its counterpart in the North to produce a society as rebarbative as possible. If you’d wanted to award the palm for bigotry, it would have been hard to decide which of the two – North or South – to fix it on.

  Those of us enrolled at Catholic primary and secondary schools in the North in the 1950s were at the mercy of educators who’d inherited the Church’s whole package of pietistic hogwash. What was clear to Michael F.J. McCarthy in 1902 – that ‘we have allowed the education of our children to become a branch of theological administration’ – still held true over half a century later. Most Six-Counties Catholics felt themselves to be adrift, politically; but as far as religion was concerned, the same structures and devices operated throughout the whole of Ireland. As for the liberal ethic – it is difficult to judge whether we in the North were in a worse position, with a clashing form of bigotry constantly before us to reinforce our own; or whether the proximity of a different system of values and beliefs actually worked, willy-nilly, to lighten the moral air. Ghettoes or religious enclaves certainly existed, but it was impossible to ensure that segregation would be total. Some of us had non-Catholic friends, despite the Church’s disapproval.

  The Church’s – or the churches’ – disapproval. Given such an attitude, any movement towards integration was suspect. Integration equalled adulteration, or at least dilution: dilution of faith and morals which could only be safeguarded in a (selectively) devotional atmosphere. So we underwent our separate forms of spoon-feeding. Of course, while our education was in progress, we were hardly aware of its larger implications: we just enjoyed, or chafed at, appropriate parts of it. We were fortunate, getting a kick out of companionship and juvenile intrigues, doing our best to re-enact the experiences of our favourite story-book characters, mystery girls brought up by gypsies, School Friend crusaders against colourful breaches of justice. We had summer meadows to lie around in in our white cotton blouses, chewing blades of grass and gossiping; and the thrill of fog-bound classrooms with the lights full on at midday and the prospect of having to grope our way home.

  Our school is strict, but in the battles between pupils and nuns we sometimes come out on top, evade punishment, ‘get away’ with things. And strictness is relative, anyway. I hear tales of children at Catholic schools being made to crawl on bare knees along gravel paths, having mutton or semolina pudding – whatever nauseates them – forced down their throats, of getting their hair whacked off. ‘Charitable institution’ tales, like those concerning the now infamous Magdalen Homes, those supposed refuges which embody the dark satanic side of Irish provincial Catholicism. To undergo a normal convent education, even at a school such as Ballynahinch – this was, by comparison, a bracing and congenial business, especially if you enjoyed being one of a crowd, immersed yourself in school activities and avoided a reputation for misbehaviour, as some found easy to do. Some pupils took so enthusiastically to school life that they left their alma mater only for the length of time it took to gain a teaching qualification, whereupon they were back again and involved in the reassuring routine of classrooms, timetables, school lore, inter-house competitiveness, rallying one’s charges, apportioning encouragement and censure, upholding and enlarging the school tradition. These are the ones who have the history of the school at their fingertips, who can name the prominent members of any class in any year going back to 1926, who applaud the achievement of distinguished old girls, such as Mary McAleese. For them, the school is a community in itself, a haven, and a source of emotional sustenance – never a place where harm is done.

  A couple of years ago I went back to St Dominic’s. I took a taxi from Rugby Road in Belfast, where I was staying; down Botanic Avenue, along Great Victoria Street, up the Grosvenor Road – or what remains of it; and then I had to direct the driver. Turn left, I said; then right – into the school grounds. It’s a winter’s day towards the end of term. The drive is crammed with teachers’ cars. Otherwise, it’s just as I remember it – the enormous twin brick buildings joined at ground level by a passageway; the imposing entrance to the convent part; the modified gothic detail. Good heavens, there is even a nun, in proper Dominican habit, standing in the opened doorway – or am I seeing things? I thought the habit was a thing of the past. The scene in front of me – the red of the brickwork, the green, nearly oval-shaped patch of grass with flower beds in the middle, the bare trees, the lull during lessons, the little gateway I know to be let into the school wall round to the right – all this strikes deep into my seven senses.

  I was four when I first came here. The school had a kindergarten department in those days, in which I spent a year before being transferred to Aquinas Hall on the Malone Road, as a shake-up of the system occurred with the implementation of the 1947 Education Act (the start of the Eleven-Plus). I was four, and desperate to get to school, as an only child with a yearning for playmates. However, I hadn’t quite understood that the new experience would entail parting from my mother and taking my place among a crowd of strangers, in a strange setting. In the event, I was dragged kicking and bawling into St Dominic’s on my first day there, hauled and pulled along by a hefty nun in a habit, while I tried my hardest to keep a hold of my mother, my anchor. Coercion seems to have marked both my coming and my going. The nun won, as was inevitable, and I was left to my fate: parked in a room full of toddlers doing peculiar things with chalk and plasticine. I made the best of it, having no alternative. I ceased to snivel – though I met with no particular kindness or understanding – took a scornful line about some contemporary wetting the floor and having to be hustled out of the classroom by a tut-tutting teacher, and gained a bit of credit for being able to write my name.

  Soon there were tears in the morning if I couldn’t go to school, through running a temperature or some such. Like everyone else, I wore a small box-pleated maroon-coloured tunic and sash, with the school crest emblazoned on the left-hand side, and regulation white Viyella blouse. These garments were purchased from a school outfitter’s near Dunville Park on the Falls Road. In the classroom, we learned things by rote – ‘Four ones are four, four twos are eight’; ‘Who made the world? God made the world.’ This led to some misunderstandings. One child for years declaimed the line from the Apostles’ Creed, ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate’, as ‘Suffered under a bunch of violets’. To her, one version made as much sense as the other. (Years later, I remember hearing about a similar misapprehension on the part of a non-comprehending pupil. The Secondary Intermediate school where my mother taught, St Louise’s, has a school song in praise of its patron saint, which goes something like, ‘Hail, St Louise, something, something / Captain and guardian of our school …’ This stuck in one person’s head as, ‘Kept in the garden of our school’, which actually did make sense, since the school grounds contained a statue of St Louise.)

  Some of the big girls about the place made a pet of me and brought me sweets and did up my shoe laces for me, while others – teasers – went in for pinching and hair-pulling. Once, when I turned on one of the latter and bit her, I was put to sit on a high stool in a corner to contemplate my wickedness. I was prepared for my First Holy Communion in this place. Photographs show a group of us smirking for the camera, our parents standing proudly behind us wearing their choicest suits and hats. We communicants are dressed up to the nines in nasty little fussy white art-silk frocks and veils, clutching mother-of-pearl-backed missals in our kid-gloved hands: Margaret Dornan, Margot Farrell, Fiona Devlin, Sally Smith.

  My first return to St Dominic’s was at the age of el
even, happy to be a grammar-school pupil, an eleven-plusser. Since leaving it five years later under that fearsome Gaeltacht cloud, I’d tended to look the other way while passing the place on the top deck of a Falls Road bus. Certainly the time has come to quell any residual antipathy I may still be harbouring. The first thing is to learn whatever I can about the history of the school – hence my current visit, to pick up a hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary booklet. Dominican nuns, I find, existed in Ireland seven hundred years ago; Penal Laws in the seventeenth century drove them into exile in Spain and Portugal, before a motherhouse was established at Cabra, County Dublin, in 1818. Fifty years after that date, a communication went out from the Bishop of Down and Connor to these Cabra nuns, inviting them to Belfast to found a school. This is it. Opened on the Falls Road in 1870, with four day pupils and a boarder, the convent, according to a contemporary report in the Ulster Examiner, ‘occupies an elevated and agreeable position in the environs of Belfast and commands an extensive view of the surrounding country … Unremitting attention is given to the health and comfort of the Young Ladies … No efforts are spared to train the Pupils in habits of obedience, industry and neatness … During the summer months the pupils are permitted to take long walks in the country.’ We’re in L.T. Meade territory here, accompanied by a whiff of peculiarly Irish Catholic innocence and decorum.

  Whatever the realities of the situation for these early Belfast convent girls, they are now irretrievable, absorbed into an idealised, holy haze. However, judging by the numbers of them who went on to become nuns themselves, there can’t have been too much insubordination. Early photographs show small girls in pinafores, strolling arm-in-arm through the extensive grounds, or sitting in the long grass making daisy-chains. You get no sense of things being fraught or disagreeable – though no doubt they sometimes were. Reminiscences of St Dominic’s earlier days, mostly written by nuns, are uniformly jolly in tone, as though to suggest that eventual assumption of the veil needn’t entail a goody-goody girlhood.