by Neil Hegarty
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.’4 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.’5) 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’.6 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.7
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?’8 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.’9
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, t
hough 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.*
At the same time, the essentially sectarian nature of Northern society grew still more stark. As early as 1923 an attempt was made by the province’s first education secretary, Lord Londonderry, to create an integrated, secular and greatly expanded system of schooling. His proposals ran rapidly into the sand, faced as they were by insurmountable opposition from the Catholic and Protestant establishments that balked at – among other ideas – proposals to remove religious instruction from the school timetable. Education in Northern Ireland continued its evolution into two separate and parallel systems, and a disillusioned Londonderry resigned from the Northern Ireland cabinet in 1926.*
Profoundly insular though it was, the Northern state could not keep the outside world entirely at bay. The global depression that began in 1929, for example, devastated the province’s industrial base and brought buried class-based tensions within Unionism to the fore. The swelling numbers of unemployed in and around Belfast had little in the way of welfare provision on which to fall back; and it took a certain fleetness of foot on the part of the government – including the expansion of relief measures and improved conditions for the police – to put a lid on growing social disturbances in Protestant areas of the city. As the economy of the province continued its decline, meanwhile, the Northern state became ever more dependent on British government subvention – much to the disappointment of London, which had envisaged an economically healthy Northern Ireland being in a position to make modest contributions to the imperial exchequer. In the course of the 1930s this economic dependence would become explicit, with the Unionist establishment increasingly anxious to have an ostensibly autonomous Northern Ireland included in the gradual unrolling of greater welfare provision across the United Kingdom as a whole.
The result was that all sectors of society were able to share in the bounty of gradually expanding welfare payments, more generous pensions and improved healthcare – but such measures were not accompanied by political change. Northern Catholics were systematically discriminated against in the areas of employment and housing; local government was gerrymandered to ensure Protestant domination even in Catholic areas – most notoriously in the case of Derry, where a 1936 reorganization of the city corporation ensured Unionist control of a predominantly nationalist city. The inevitable consequence of such policies was to undermine any tacit nationalist acceptance of the constitutional status quo.
In the Free State, the accession of de Valera’s Fianna Fáil to government in the spring of 1932 was a highly significant political moment. The transfer of power from Cumann na nGaedheal – in contrast to the situation in many other European countries in this fraught period – was accomplished smoothly and without any threat to the state’s democratic institutions. Throughout the election campaign de Valera had emphasized his new party’s social, economic and welfare credentials, in particular pledging to reduce the scourge of unemployment. His enemies had claimed that Fianna Fáil would bring only instability and factionalism to Irish politics: yet in the event, the new government proved to be just as keen as its predecessor on stability and continuity. There was little in the way of revolutionary fervour about its policies: rather, from its first months in power it displayed the pragmatism that soon became the party’s hallmark, with rhetorical calls for pure, traditional nationalism jostling with actual – if modest – increases in the provision of welfare, housing and medical services.
De Valera’s devotion to the principle of economic self-sufficiency, meanwhile, soon saw the erection of tariff walls around Ireland and a range of policies designed to keep foreign capital out and Irish money and investment in. In the traumatic years after the Depression, policies such as these were popular across the developed world. But Ireland had been losing its population since the time of the Famine nearly a hundred years earlier, and the countryside was rapidly depopulating, regardless of de Valera’s belief that it was in the fields and lanes of Ireland that the true, authentic spirit of the nation was to be found. Neither political independence nor claims to self-sufficiency could alter the facts of economic decline and failure – nor disguise the tales of human tragedy that lay behind the statistics.
Fianna Fáil now faced a new parliamentary opposition. The new Fine Gael party consisted mainly of former Cumann na Gaedheal members; it also, however, numbered in its ranks the so-called Blueshirts, an organization that traded on the distinctive straight-armed salute of the Italian and German fascists. The Blueshirt ideology was a heady mixture of Catholic conservatism and anti-Semitism; the movement was headed by Eoin O’Duffy, a former Garda commissioner sacked by de Valera in 1933, and was spiced with a loathing of de Valera that sprang from the ashes of the civil war. The visually arresting aplomb of the organization and its various activities (some of its members fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish civil war) have certainly earned it a place in the history of the period, especially when seen in the context of the rise of European fascism. But there was no appetite in Ireland for fascism – and, in truth, the Irish Blueshirts were no more than a rag-bag movement that faded rapidly, damaged and divided Fine Gael and left little or nothing behind by way of a political legacy. If anything, its existence served only to bolster Fianna Fáil: in taking steps to curb and finally eliminate the Blueshirt threat (such as it was), de Valera’s party was able to assume the mantle of the party of law and order – in the process facilitating its own transition into the realm of constitutional politics.
A decade after the Treaty, de Valera remained eager to return to the issue of the constitutional arrangements between Ireland and the Empire. The measures he took to alter these arrangements were highly effective: the existing governor general was boycotted; in time, de Valera nominated a new appointment to the post, who was instructed to do nothing and remain invisible; the office itself, having been softened up in this way, was eventually abolished in 1936. At the same time, annuities paid to the British government by Irish farmers (the price they were obliged to pay as a result of the Land Acts in order to gain title over their land) were diverted to the Irish exchequer. This was in direct contravention of the terms of the Treaty, and the British government responded by imposing heavy taxes on a wide range of Irish exports to Britain: the Irish government then responded in kind – but this was an economic war in which Ireland came off much the worse.
Despite this, the episode ended well for de Valera: in April 1938 the British government agreed to give up its rights to the land annuities in return for a one-off payment of £10 million. Furthermore, it relinquished control of the Treaty ports in Cork and Donegal: a British assessment had concluded that, in the event of war, it would not be worthwhile retaining the ports against the explicit wishes of a restive and unhappy host country; furthermore, the British could rest assured that the Free State would now have no excuse to open its territory to German arms. De Valera, of course, had no intention of allowing any such situation to develop if it could possibly be avoided – so the return of the ports and the removal of this British presence from the Free State thus represented pure victory. Fianna Fáil, then, might not have declared
a republic overnight: but the ground was being laid for such a step in the fullness of time – and the drawing up of a new constitution was another piece in this jigsaw.
The constitution of 1937 was a carefully poised document and one that sought, by means of a combination of clear assertion, allusion and implication, the allegiance and loyalty of all. On the one hand, the constitution reflected the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of the state by means of a clause enshrining the special position of the Catholic Church in Irish life, and through others banning divorce and blasphemy. At the same time, however, the constitution defended the position of the Protestant denominations and (not insignificantly, given the state of affairs in 1930s’ Europe when the document was formulated) the country’s small Jewish community. The Catholic Church may have been ‘special’, therefore, but it was certainly not the established Church – a situation quite unlike that of many of Ireland’s European neighbours – and there was therefore no compulsion for certain office-holders to be Catholic.