Inventing Ireland (57 page)

The curtailment of the rights of women and of Protestants manifested itself in a return to a more traditional portraiture of masculinity and femininity in creative literature. In the vigorous obscenities of
Crazy Jane, Yeats might ventriloquize a voice which challenged the new priestly censoriousness, but even he went on to confess that he felt the need to "exorcize" the figure, whose language had grown "unendurable".
⁵⁰
If, in the revival period, Catholic writers had "exalted Irishwomen as emblematic mothers and desexualized spiritual maidens, the Anglo-Irish writers of Protestant background often acknowledged
sexual desire and power as significant elements in the characters and roles of their heroines"
⁵¹
; but now, the conservative tradition had won. The androgynous vision of a world whose gender boundaries were endlessly open turned out to have had a wider political, as distinct from a merely personal, meaning: the manly women and womanly men of the Irish renaissance had positioned themselves on the cusp between worlds – between the colonizer and the colonized, between west and east, between having (a phallus) and being (a woman). Now, such a confusion of gender boundaries could stand only for "the fragile status of nationality", and so it was ruthlessly disallowed. The ideologues of independent Ireland reverted to the old, neurotic philosophy which saw the male as in all things the opposite of the female. In doing so, they succumbed to a classic nationalist delusion, which would soon become evident in other emerging nation-states:

As
man
and
woman
define themselves reciprocally, so national identity is determined not on the basis of its own intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not... Nations are forever haunted by their various definitional others. Hence, on the one hand, the nation's insatiable need to administer difference through violent acts of segregation, censorship, economic coercion, physical torture, police brutality. And hence, on the other, the nation's insatiable need for representational labour to supplement its founding ambivalence, the lack of self-presence at its origin . . .
⁵²

In simpler terms, the leaders of the new state remained painfully uncertain of its legitimacy. This was a condition calculated to generate endless crises of self-legitimation, and with them a nervously patriarchal psychology. In the literature of the emerging nation, woman reverted to
being a site of contest rather than an agent of her own desire. "No nationalism in the world has ever granted women and men the same privileged resources of the nation-state": the claim of women to nationhood frequently depends on marriage to a male citizen, and almost always women are "subsumed only symbolically into the body politic", representing not themselves but "the limits of national difference between men".
⁵³
This captures precisely the kind of double colonialism under which James Connolly had said Irishwomen were compelled to live: and the new Ireland rapidly revealed itself to constitute the problem rather than the solution.

The unmodified state apparatus proved itself to have been the last, most lethal, gift of the departing imperialists: and the obsession with the father-son relationship, as a crisis of legitimation, seemed to deepen with each succeeding generation of male authors. A student of modern African or Caribbean writing would find no surprise in this: and the explanation has been given in a recent book on
Nationalisms and Sexualities:

Post-colonial governments are inclined, with some predictability, to generate narratives of national crisis, driven perhaps – the generous explanation – to re-enact periodically the state's traumatic if also liberating separation from colonial authority... Typically, however, such narratives of crisis serve more than one category of reassurance: by repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new nation, its ostensible vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state's originating agency is periodically reinvoked and rati-fied.
⁵⁴

The writers go on to remark that those "who successfully define and superintend a crisis, furnishing its lexicon and discursive parameters, successfully confirm themselves as the owners of power".
⁵⁵
Such superintendents in Ireland were almost invariably male, or, in rare cases, females who had made a betraying compromise with the new élites. These became obsessed with defending borders and achieving a separation of realms: for it was on such borders,
on
such separations, that their privilege and power depended. Yet, among ordinary people and among those intellectuals who dissented, could be found many who preferred still to leave the borders porous and ambiguous: when the official armies cratered a road, people could always be found to fill the hole in.

Basil Davidson has described the nation-sate as "the black man's burden" in contemporary Africa, and has made his own observations of these developments:

What the peoples think upon this subject is shown by their incessant emigration across these lines on the map, as well as by their smuggling enterprises. So that even while a "bourgeois Africa" hardens its frontiers, multiplies its border controls, a people's Africa works in quite another way.
⁵⁶

The aesthetic implications of this popular dissent were, of course, a return to a philosophy of hybridity and androgyny, of the kind which informed the
risorgimento.
The truest reality of a people would always be experienced in those moments when they crossed from one code to another.

Such "cross-dressers" have never been completely absent from post-revival Irish writing: but the price of crossing the border for literary women was that few of them could ever hope to return.
Kate O'Brien, for instance, found her best novels banned by the national censorship board and ended her days living in Kent, from which she sent columns to
The Irish Times,
whose very title "Long Distance" rendered "her need to remain apart and her wish to stay in touch".
⁵⁷
The Land of Spices
(1941) is a protest against Irish insularity and a complex study of the ways in which Catholicism and nationalism were elided, to the exclusion of a more "European" awareness, in the minds of those who would inherit the new state. Its rather sympathetic portrayal of a strong and sophisticated nun at the outset of World War One, and its counter-pointing of her life of discipline with the vocation of a young apprentice artist, indicate the authors conviction that the family in Ireland had become a trap which many spirited women would want to avoid. A once-jailed suffragist, introduced late in the book, awakens the young heroine to an artistic calling which seems at odds with the prevailing ideals of femininity in her convent school. Yet the fact that its mother superior should, like the feminist, find herself at frequent odds with the local bishop suggests that the nuns may have found a kind of self-sufficiency within their own considerable estates. That power was, of course, jealously monitored by the bishops, but it could never be completely contained, as the protagonist shows in making her break into the world. Many of O'Briens other females are not so lucky: most are caught, sooner or later, in the introverted routines of family life, whose very insularity has been read as indicating Ireland's self-estrangement from Europe during the years of World War Two.
⁵⁸

If for some women writers the family was a trap, for others it remained what it had been during the time of the British occupation: a zone of resistance in which intense love and small kindnesses were still
possible against the wider backdrop of a heartless political world. Mary Lavin, opting for a separate peace, refused the grand themes of nation and female destiny, which exist beneath the surfaces of her work only as modes of implication and irony. A sceptical romantic, she insisted that love has a perpetual power to redeem and surprise: and if, in pursuing this theme, she tended to restrict her female characters to the domestic round, she did the same with her men. The public world was to her a world well lost for such moments. Insofar as Lavin protested against religious oppression, she offered the principled dissent of a true believer who detected that spirituality might, in a conformist community, move from living form to dead formula. Her fear appeared to be that the Catholic religion, even in Ireland, was collapsing into a matter of mere social decorum: so she was appropriately sardonic about those who treated their own celibacy as a heroic denial of appetite rather than a positive expression of spiritual value. At moments, she could be quite scathing about the degradation of ritual to routine.

But her touch was ever light and easy. She had no desire to dig society up by its roots: rather she worked to hold it true to its own nobler imperatives. Her stories and novellas offered, nonetheless, the fullest and most sympathetic account of the lives of Irish women in the early decades of the independent state: they centred on structures of feeling more than on the revelation of character in unfolding plot, and were based on the understanding that the family is not only a key to identity, but the proper referee of generational conflict and even, when necessary, the subverter of unpleasant social tyrannies. Precisely because so much was repressed, or existed only at the level of form or decorum in the wider society, the family for her became a mysterious register of all that was elsewhere denied. It could sometimes bend and break under the pressure of those who asked it to do their living for them, but it also showed itself surprisingly resilient and able to afford fulfilment to many intense emotions. Such passions might express themselves only as symbolic implication or gentle understatement: but they were no less real for that.
⁵⁹

Lavin's methods, as well as her characters, were a perfect illustration of the contention that only those who know deep feelings experience the need to displace them in symbol and metaphor. Her quiet style seldom drew attention to itself, working more
by
innuendo than by statement. Though her focus was on individuals, often caught in autumnal solitude after a fulfilled passion, her values were those of her community. She thus became that most rare thing in Ireland: a writer who found expressive freedom in rather than from the available
community; and one who somehow managed, as did hundreds of thousands of unsung women who were not artists, to find within those constrictions a way of mapping the contours of the human heart.

In May 1922 the situation of
Protestants had appeared to change after independence, and their synod had accordingly directed the archbishop of Dublin to ask Michael Collins "if they were permitted to live in Ireland or if it was desired that they should leave the country".
¹
Some had indeed been burnt out. The new state, therefore, bent over backwards to assuage their fears by rather paradoxically appointing sixteen Protestant unionists to the first Seanad; but within two decades the number of Protestants at primary schools in the state was halved from 28,000 to 14,000. Yeats's speeches to the senate have to be read against that depressing backdrop. Opposing the proposed censorship of films, he said on 7 June 1923 that "you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the general conscience of mankind". In the debate on legislation which sought to outlaw divorce, he told the senators on 11 June 1925, "if you show that this country, Southern Ireland [sic], is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North . . . Once you attempt legislation on religious grounds you open the way for every kind of intolerance and for every kind of religious persecution". Far from preserving sexual morality in the countries which adopted it, the law of indissoluble marriage encouraged a cynical tolerance of dishonesty and irresponsibility in sexual relations. Moreover, to impose separation without the prospect of remarriage on couples whose relationship had irretrievably broken down was to force "the law of the cloisters" upon all He recalled Parnell's vow to Kitty O'Shea: "in the opinion of every Irish Protestant gentleman in this country he did what was essential as a man of honour. Now you are going to make that essential act impossible and thereby affront an important minority of your country-men".

As so often, Yeats saw in the liberal attitudes of Protestantism a more authentic version of the codes of Gaelic Ireland. To the complaint by
Colonel Moore that young people were now wedding in the knowledge that their marriage might last only a year, Yeats jocularly replied "an ancient
Irish form of marriage". In a second, undelivered draught of his speech, Yeats asserted that he was one of those who "believe as little in an infallible book as an infallible church". Here, he distinguished that lobby of sceptics (of which he named himself a member) from "men who fallow the teachings of some Church that is not under Rome". In other words, he conceded that in certain moments his Protestantism was strategic, a useful stick with which to beat the Catholic philistines of the Free State Senate, just as it had served the same purpose far Synge, enabling him to extol the nation of
Grattan, Emmet
and Parnell against the narrow-gauge nationalists. Yet, both men showed cunning in these controversies: and so Yeats's more trenchant critique of the anti-divorce law was never delivered, and undelivered also was Synge's Open Letter to the Gaelic League. The fact that Yeats was not recalled far a further term in the Senate after 1928 indicates just how well-judged his caution was: the token Protestant senators had now served their purpose and could be quietly dismissed by the theocrats of the new state.

One day after his "retirement" from the Senate, Yeats predicted that the proposed Censorship of Publications Bill, through the use of the phrase "subversive of public morality", could in time permit a government minister to exclude books like Marx's
Kapital,
Darwin's
The Origin of Species,
or the novels of Flaubert, Balzac or Proust, "all great love poetry", "half the Greek and Roman classics", and everything
on the Roman Catholic Index. The rigid fighting spirit which had proved invaluable in the struggle to free Ireland of English rule was now becoming a damned liability. It was creating intolerance in a state which now, more than ever, needed to redefine itself as "a modern, tolerant, liberal nation'.
²
In
Pages From A
Diary
written in 1930, Yeats defined his own understanding of the unfinished business of Irish republicanism: "Preserve that which is living and help the two Irelands, Gaelic and Anglo-Ireland, so to unite that neither shall shed its pride".
³

It was a noble aspiration, but it flew in the face of realities. In Northern Ireland, sectarian hatreds had been sharpened ever since 1916. The Easter Rising was portrayed by
Ulster
unionists as a stab in the back of those committed to the war effort. By 1920 there were riots and pogroms in Belfast, as chronic unemployment led Protestant workers to drive Catholics out of their jobs in factory and shipyard Southern unionists in the main opposed the partitionist settlement: even Carson wished to keep Ireland united, but with dominion status as part of the British Empire. However, a unionist state was what emerged in 1921: the anger of the Catholic minority at this arrangement simply redoubled northern Protestant enthusiasm far it.
⁴
Though there is evidence that Collins worried far northern
nationalists, and may even have planned attacks on the state, most southern politicians were surprisingly indifferent to the plight of the Catholic minority. The unspoken consensus appeared to be that eventually Northern Ireland would sue for terms of unification, being unable to survive as such a tiny economic entity. Meanwhile, those in Dublin who felt that they had a full-time job securing their own state were, in all likelihood, secretly relieved to be spared the task of quelling that sizeable loyalist army which, in a thirty-two county Ireland, could only have compounded their problems.

The Orange state which emerged was sectarian to an astonishing degree. Constituencies were gerrymandered to copper-fasten Protestant supremacy; discrimination in the allocation of jobs and homes kept Catholics in the position of second-class citizens; and even the more ambitious members of the minority were thus loath to apply for posts in the police and civil service to which, at least in theory, they were entitled. The
Royal Ulster Constabulary was a paramilitary force equipped with guns and armoured cars, unlike the
Gardaí Síochána of the Free State. The
"B-Special" police force played an ignominious role, its interpretation of peace-keeping being the administration of regular beatings to members of the Catholic population (this work often done in collusion with the UVF). The authorities soon had at their disposal a raft of measures, including internment and extradition. The
"Special Powers Act" of 1922 remained on the statute-book for fifty years, becoming the envy of the uncivilized world.
⁵
When Justice Minister
Vorster introduced his notorious Coercion Bill at the South African parliament in 1963, he quelled all protest with the remarkable observation that he would be "willing to exchange all the legislation of that sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act".
⁶

Life for northern nationalists was hard. Some of their elected leaders boycotted the
Stormont parliament in Belfast; and those who took part in it were never embraced. In all the years of Stormont's existence until it was prorogued in 1972, the
Unionist Party voted in only one amendment proposed by nationalists and that was to a wildlife bill! High unemployment rates and poverty seemed endemic in Catholic ghettos: the young socialist republican
Paddy Devlin recalled sitting at his parents' kitchen table while a single boiled egg was split three ways.
⁷
Thus emerged one of the great puzzles of modern European political life: that as Britain led the war against fascism and pioneered the welfare state, its leaders nonetheless maintained and bankrolled on their very doorstep a one-party system characterized by religious bigotry and political repression. Again and again the rulers of Britain were warned of festering discontents, while the leaders
in Dublin regularly heard horrifying testimonies from northern Catholics driven south from pogroms.

In the uncertain summer of 1936, the British
Council for Civil Liberties complained in a report that Ulster unionists had been allowed to create "under the shadow of the British constitution a permanent machine of dictatorship".
⁸
The report made an explicit comparison with fascist regimes in Europe, where there was a total identification of party and state. British public opinion remained indifferent. In Dublin, de Valera's 1937 Constitution was scarcely an adequate answer. It asserted that the national territory was the whole island of Ireland, but such verbal republicanism was of scant consolation to the stateless minority of Northern Ireland and could only inflame the sectarian bitterness of their oppressors. Anyway, the Constitution went on to exclude the six northern counties from
de facto
jurisdiction, "pending the reintegration of the national territory". While seeming to make a territorial claim, it actually gave the first formal recognition to partition: the more eagle-eyed northern nationalists correctly deduced from it that they were on their own.

By comparison with all this, life for the
Protestant minority in the twenty-six counties was comfortable. Though civil rights to divorce and contraception were denied in law, it was possible for many to circumvent these disabilities by a trip outside the jurisdiction. Because they were such a small minority, they posed no threat to the new order and, provided that they remained reasonably quiet and contented with their lot, they were untroubled Even at the height of the
War of Independence, there had been few personal attacks on Protestants, the insurgents confining themselves to the burning of ascendancy houses. The legacy of history meant that, though the Free State had its share of poor Protestants, they were generally well protected by their charitable societies, and most Protestants enjoyed an affluence well in advance of the average.
⁹
They tended however, to have an arm's-length relationship with the institutions of the new state and with its parties, though there were always exceptions like Douglas Hyde. A significant number, especially in the earlier years, simply preferred to leave. Few enough of them would have cited theological hatred as a cause of their going for even amidst the passions of Northern Ireland the verbal attacks on Protestants had rarely been religious, more often taking a political form.

In the south, such anti-partitionism as was voiced was feeble in the extreme: the factors which caused Protestants to leave were often the same considerations that impelled Catholics to take the boat as well – economic stagnation, boredom, a search for a more sexually liberal society, resentment against a culture of censorship. Mr. de Valera was as careful to befriend the professors of Trinity College as his predecessors had been to create Protestant
senators: nevertheless, when he unambiguously announced in a broadcast to the United States two years after the passing of his Constitution by popular vote that "we are a Catholic nation",
¹⁰
the members of the religious minority who had been reassured by the elevation of a co-religionist to presidential office might have been forgiven for wondering which of the gestures to take the more seriously
.