Inventing Ireland (77 page)

Through the 1970s a balance of terror seemed to be all that either side achieved: the IRA bombed British cities in scenes of horrific carnage, while the security forces perfected techniques of surveillance, espionage and "grassing" (the work of paid informers who provided courts with uncorroborated evidence concocted by the police). In 1981 ten IRA men starved themselves
to death in a desperate attempt to gain political status within the prison system: the emotions unleashed by this even in Northern Ireland brought hundreds of recruits flowing into the
Provisional Sinn Féin/IRA movement. Only a tiny minority could be trained for military activities: the remainder were drawn into the political process, heralding the rise of the modern Sinn Féin as a political party, second only to the SDLP within the northern minority and the largest single party on Belfast City Council. Thereafter, the IRA/Sinn Féin went forward on a two-track policy "with an armalite in one hand and a ballot-box in the other", one result of which was the election of
Gerry Adams as MP for West Belfast. In the south, however, news of the hunger strikes was downplayed by the national broadcasting station, probably unnecessarily, for the popular reaction was one of bafflement.

After the hunger strikes Sinn Féin won almost 42 per cent of the nationalist vote in Northern Ireland, and relations between Taoiseach
Charles Haughey and the British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher soured. In an attempt to reopen debate about the future, the next Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, launched a
New Ireland Forum in May 1983, at which the Republic's parties, the SDLP and some of the unionists gave evidence. It also heard submissions from a range of politicians, ecclesiastics, academics, writers and so on. Its report went far – some said too far – in acknowledging the integrity of the unionist tradition, about which it had more to say than, for example, about the rights of Irish speakers. It listed three possible options, (i) a united Ireland, which would necessitate a replacement for the 1937 constitution, (ii) federation of the two parts of Ireland, (iii) a system of joint authority with Dublin and London together responsible for the north. As the Irish had radically revised and reduced the aspirations of Irish nationalism, it was assumed that the British would revise their nostra too and attempt to bring the unionists onside. In the event Mrs. Thatcher said "out, out, out" to all three proposals, much to the chagrin of the republic and of international commentators. Indeed, so damaged was she by the ensuing adverse publicity that her advisers urged her to adopt a more conciliatory line.

Accordingly, when the leader of a Fine Gael/Labour coalition, Garret FitzGerald, signed an
Anglo-Irish Agreement with Mrs. Thatcher at Hillsborough in 1985, there was an audible sigh of relief. The right thing had been done by the SDLP and northern nationalism: henceforth the Dublin government would have a recognized consultative voice (though not a decision-making one) in the conduct of northern policy, and violations of the civil rights of the minority could be closely monitored Unionist opinion was outraged by this unprecedented recognition of a legitimate southern
interest. Many nationalists on the ground complained that the agreement made little difference to their actual living conditions, but that in the process Dublin had conferred legitimacy on the British interest in Northern Ireland.
¹⁶

In the years that fallowed and particularly during the Sinn Féin/SDLP peace initiative of 1993-4, the British government repeatedly stressed that it had no long term strategic or selfish interest in staying in Ireland and would do so only as long as a majority in Northern Ireland wanted it that way. At the same time, war-weary nationalists began to admit that something less than a united Ireland would satisfy them now. They had never expected much from the republic, a place which had often seemed as hostile as London to their aspirations. At the start of the recent phase of "Troubles" in 1968, only 40% of them had supported a united Ireland (though less than 20% were satisfied with the existing constitutional position: which begged a question – what
did
they want?). By 1993 a large number still pronounced themselves indifferent to final unity with Dublin, but even more disenchanted than ever with the northern state, whose troubles had cost more than 3000 lives in the interim. Though some demographers estimated that Catholic nationalists might outbreed the Protestant unionists by the year 2040, this was sheer fantasy: the contraceptive pill was doing far more to curtail the number of Catholics than the loyalist death-squads. As Northern Catholics grew ever more confident and sophisticated it seemed unlikely that this group would ever evolve a homogeneous politics or cultural philosophy: they were, in the words of one commentator, "in search of a state".
¹⁷
Moreover, it was very possible that by 2040 the religious and cultural pieties of both sides would have been so diluted by international consumerism as to render any model which sought to reconcile them useless and redundant.

Through all the "Troubles" Northern Catholics held their heads high: they won a sympathetic hearing in the world, thanks to the astute leadership of
John Hume. The IRA, by a combination of ruthlessness and intelligence, remained one of the most feared guerrilla movements in modern history. Though it claimed to be a non-sectarian movement eager to embrace Protestants in the event of a British withdrawal, many of its actions seemed to belie that rhetoric – such as the massacre of eleven Protestants at a service for Remembrance Day in Enniskillen in 1987. For their part, the Sinn Féin/IRA leadership made full political capital out of an alleged "shoot to kill" policy of the British Army in pursuit of unarmed Provisionals: when the British policy officer,
John Stalker, probed too closely into this case, he was relieved of his duties. Equally corrupting of due legal process was the widespread use of "supergrasses" from within the nationalist
(and, to a lesser extent, unionist) communities: in return for betraying comrades, some rather unsavoury individuals were offered immunity from law and start-up cash for a life elsewhere.

The newly-politicized Sinn Féin/IRA axis exploited such weaknesses to the full before a British audience increasingly ready to believe ill of its police and army. The growing doubts about the safety of convictions for terrorist bombings in the mid-1970s led in time to the release of the
Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, after sustained campaigns by their families and friends, much aided by priests, nuns and conscientious members of the British legal profession. For all of their sufferings, nationalists generally conveyed the impression of a group operating to a clear agenda and to some purpose. It was the unionist political leadership which, again and again, gave the sense of an insecure people on the verge of some final betrayal, forever at war with self and circumstance. Unionists excited for more sympathy in the republic (which they nonetheless continued to distrust) than in Britain. This was because the objective interests of the élites in the northern and southern states were now at one.

If southerners liked to think of themselves as happy Europeans who had long outgrown the battles of the past which still engrossed their cousins north of the border, there was much truth in that analysis but also some strain. For they had not so much solved as shelved the problem of creating a liberal nationalism. In their period of national revival, they had identified as essentially Irish precisely those elements of the national heritage which they now seemed most anxious to discard: and through the years of the northern "Troubles", they had allowed a small, tightly-organized cadre of broadcasters to wish all messy, tribal nationalisms away. Coverage of Northern Ireland through most of the
1980s had substituted a wish – that nationalisms would evaporate – for a fulfillment. The collapse of Stalinism in eastern Europe in 1989 left these commentators in shock. The reemergence of nationalism as a force to be reckoned with meant that the question of how to achieve a humane modernization of national traditions (as opposed to their callous liquidation) loomed more pressingly than ever.

Moreover, the debt crisis which sapped enterprise in the south meant that its citizens still owed more per capita than those of Mexico – and the politicians who had squandered the monies loaned by bankers during the spate of elections between 1977 and 1987 had left no major infrastructures with which to service the debts. At one point all the money collected in personal taxation went to service the interest payment component of the debt.
¹⁸
Given that there had been a doubling of jobs in the public service from 1966 to 1985, it was obvious where much of the borrowed money
had gone, but there was often little for these employees to do and poor promotional prospects in a service doomed to cutbacks in future decades. Most young people still faced a future as likely to involve a job in London, Dusseldorf or New York as in Dublin, Galway or Cork. They were better educated than ever and by no means convinced that such a prospect was more unfair than that which many east-coast Americans have of being transplanted to work in some western state: but, through all the debates, there remained the strong sense that Ireland was a good place, a preferable place, in which to live and raise a family. Nobody could quite say why: encomia on the "quality of life" were often vague. Perhaps what drew people back to Ireland was the conviction that in a Europe filled with countries which have a glorious past, the Irish are among the very few still exercised by the prospect of an interesting future, by a belief that everything in the country might yet be remade.

That belief was shown to have some basis with the election to the presidency in 1990 of Mary Robinson, a civil rights lawyer and feminist, a woman with a record of speaking out on difficult topics such as censorship, sexual freedom and travellers' rights. She expanded the role and symbolic meaning of her largely ceremonial office, in a series of publicized visits to Buckingham Palace (never before graced by an Irish Head of State), West Belfast (a virtual no-go area to most members of the Dublin élite), Inis Meáin (where she started her campaign) and
Somalia (where, in a bold linkage to the Great Famine, she told the Somalis that they were the Irish of Africa, before proceeding on to the United Nations to plead for international aid on their behalf). Mrs. Robinson's election had a galvanizing effect upon all political parties, compelling them to put forward more female candidates: of equal importance was her return to traditional ideas of the nation, such as the notion that Irish people include not only the five million on the island but the many millions more overseas, whom she visited regularly and for whom she kept a light burning in the window of her official residence. In her continuing focus on the "Third World" and on Irish anticipations of that experience, she reinvigorated many debates of the revivalist generation.
¹⁹

All in all she presented another instance of the classic Irish radical in deceptively conservative clothing. She effected a brilliant reconciliation at the level of symbolic politics of the best native traditions with a thoroughly renovated modern consciousness. The problem which was solved by the shapers of Irish literature but unresolved in the world of
realpolitik
found in her a national leader who portended a resolution in a fashion that might be meaningful for
all
inhabitants of the island.

Although the Irish Renaissance was largely a celebratory affair, in tone and in mood, it nonetheless shaped a notion of the artist as a person at war with the social consensus, a crusader for some ideal which existed more often in the past or in the future. No matter how ferocious the critique mounted by a writer, he or she could always justify that ferocity by pointing to the patriotic motives which underwrote it.

Independence had not resolved any of these tensions: rather it exacerbated them. Censorship, ostracism and emigration became the lot of the more accomplished artists, proving to Samuel Beckett's satisfaction, at any rate, that the Irish nation never "gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after".
¹
With so many modernist masterpieces banned, Irish readers often had to content themselves with cowboy tales. These proved hugely popular with a readership which may have identified with the improvisations of a frontier society: certainly, the recurring legend of a seeming rebel who turns out
on inspection to be a pillar of society seemed to sort well with the national condition after 1921.

Yet the underlying paradox was that by censoring modernism the Irish authorities maintained it at the level of an heroic opposition, long after it had begun to lose that status in other countries and especially in the wake of World War Two. Though censorship made it harder than ever for writers to make a living in Ireland, it also managed to endow the profession with a conspiratorial glamour: the writer was easily seen as a subversive, a magician, a user of dark hidden powers. Poets such as Austin Clarke maintained a sharply antagonistic commentary on the timidity of political leaders afraid to enter a Protestant church for the
funeral of Douglas Hyde: yet the more sensitive among them feared
that the muse might be coarsened by the constant practice of satire which was, as Patrick Kavanagh lamented, "unfruitful prayer".
²

Deep down, the writers yearned for a
rapprochement
with the new order yet the fate of the gifted young writer John McGahern, whose novel
The Dark
was banned and whose teaching contract was not renewed in 1965, made such an adjustment seem difficult. The young had already opened themselves to the world of rock-and-roll, in the conviction that it would prove quite compatible with native tradition. If sexual intercourse began in England in 1963, as
Philip Larkin had it, it came also to Ireland in that year with the rattle of the
bodhrán
and the beat of the portable radio.
John Montague played the role of an Irish Larkin as its somewhat wistful laureate:

The Siege of Mullingar, 1963

At the Fleadh Cheoil in Mullingar
There were two sounds, the breaking
Of glass, and the background pulse
Of music. Young girls roamed
The streets with eager faces,
Shoving for men. Bottles in
Hand, they rowed out a song:
Puritan Ireland's dead and gone,
A myth of O'Connor and O'Faoláin.

In the early morning the lovers
Lay on both sides of the canal
Listening on Sony transistors
To the agony of Pope John.
Yet it didn't seem strange, or blasphemous,
This ground bass of death and
Resurrection, as we strolled along:
Puritan Ireland's dead and gone,
A myth of O'Connor and O'Faoláin.
³

It took official Ireland and its loyal opposition of writers a few more years to catch the new mood. By 1965 the posture of "inherited dissent" adopted by artists was being castigated by younger critics as a superannuated stereotype, which appealed to "forces of rejection" rather than "forces of affirmation".
⁴
Writers were enjoined to engage with a new, confident, inclusive Ireland of advance factories, material
affluence, liberal education and a self-reforming church. The nay-saying which had once been a challenging form of address was now dismissed as a dead formula; yet even after the censors had been removed, many writers continued to act as if they were still under ban, and portraits of a repressive priesthood still dominated fiction. It took a liberal priest,
Peter Connolly of Maynooth, to argue that with the lifting of censorship a truly national criticism could again become a possibility.

In 1967 the Minister for Justice introduced legislation to allow for the "unbanning" of books after a period of twelve years, and thereby thousands of volumes were freed to enter the Irish market.
⁵
Henceforth, every bookshop would have a well-stocked section featuring "Irish Writing" on permanent display. Many Irish artists who had begun their careers overseas opted to come home and claim their share in the new riches. A returned
Pádraic Colum pronounced himself delighted by the smiling faces of young men and women openly holding hands in the city streets.

Yet, among the artists certain uncompromising souls sensed something more than a truce in the war between Bohemian and bourgeois: the defeat of Irish modernism itself. This had been a movement which assumed that the artist must live at an angle to society: now, even the most scathing assaults on that society by people like Patrick Kavanagh and Kate O'Brien were being transformed into facile testimonies to the tolerance of the Irish mind and, worse still, into weekly television entertainments. If in the 1890s a generation of Irish artists had returned to Dublin from a London which seemed determined to reduce them to the role of mere entertainers, now in the 1960s another generation, whose members had trained as artists in foreign lands, found its writers reduced to the status of
"gas bloody men" on prime-time television.

The stage Irishman, a fabrication of the British folk mind, might almost be a thing of the past: but the native élites had replaced him with an equally spurious caricature, the
stage writer. Doubtless, the legendary drinking feats of Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh had given credence and a prehistory to the stereotype: perhaps their drinking was an attempt to assert in pubs a
machismo
which the very act of writing had put into some doubt, given that theirs was a culture in which words were seen as feminine and deeds as masculine. However, it was the unprecedented affluence of the 1960s and early 1970s which saw the widespread emergence of the phenomenon, a phenomenon by no means peculiar to Ireland. Pondering the
numbers of writers in residence on campuses, the American critic
Irving Howe observed rather wistfully of their easy domestication: "Modernism must always struggle, but never quite triumph – and in the end it must struggle in order not to triumph".
⁶
His fear was that in the US, as elsewhere, the bracing enmity between Bohemian and bourgeois had given way to wet embraces.

So it happened in Ireland. The Fianna Fáil government announced a
tax holiday for artists, encouraging many English and American authors to settle on the island. In the event, most who came were purveyors of pot-boilers and airport-novels, whose earnings were vast enough to justify living for at least part of the year under rainy Irish skies and making the promised financial killing. The real effect, however, was on the status and self-image of Irish artists, who now felt free to come in from the cold. Even in the bad old days, Kavanagh had jibed that the standing army of Irish poets never fell below five thousand, but that number now seemed conservative as the bards declaimed their verses in the pubs. Each poet was granted a ritual, often drunken, appearance on television; summer schools resounded to their voices; and some government ministers even appeared in newspaper photographs with artists whose work they had once helped to suppress. The more disreputable a writer had once been, the higher (it seemed) the fee now commanded. These newly-visible Bohemians embodied for the Irish élites all those qualities which fifty years of money-grubbing had led the Paudeens to reject in themselves – lyricism, prodigality, spirituality, open-heartedness. There was an element of repressive tolerance at work in this process, alongside a very genuine admiration of the artist's intrepidity of mind. In the climate so created, it was predictable that some more biddable types would prefer to enact in public the role of writer than to confront in private the anguish of actual writing.

One way of avoiding these pressures was the oldest remedy of all: exile. The novelist
Brian Moore left his native Belfast during World War Two, took out Canadian citizenship and, after years of struggle, published
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
It evoked the quiet desperation of drab Belfast lives in a scrupulous rendition of provincialism of mind and body. Thereafter, Moore tended to write cross-cultural novels, often spliced between an Irish and a foreign setting. A similar technique characterizes novels by
William Trevor, for instance
Felicia's Journey,
which cuts between the British midlands and a rural Irish community: but this author, who was born in Cork and has done most of his writing in England, is most well-known in Ireland for
The Ballroom of Romance
and
Fools of Fortune,
the first a study in middleaged
disappointment, while the second is a chronicle set in Cork during the war of independence. Both Moore and Trevor are rightly renowned for the cool, crafted clarity of their prose, their wry, wistful ironies, and their use of telling detail; and each has won a substantial overseas readership for many other books of high quality which have nothing to do with Ireland.

Throughout this period Samuel Beckett remained in Paris, a last surviving exponent of the monastic discipline of high
modernism: his example inspired many of the less compromising sort, poets such as John Montague,
Richard Murphy,
Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Tony Cronin, Brendan Kennelly and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill; playwrights like Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and
Thomas Kilroy; novelists including
Francis Stuart, John Banville and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. This is not to say that the authors named all endorsed his apparent indifference to society: but it is to suggest that his elevation of the
estranged artist
as a model had immense implications. It fostered a healthy scepticism about the politicians' wet embraces, all the more necessary when in 1980 the Taoiseach Charles Haughey (who had also devised the tax holiday) announced the foundation of
Aosdána,
a self-electing élite of about 150 artists, who would have a basic income guaranteed by the state as well as the prestige of membership.

What followed, however, was in the case of many artists a remorseless privatization of experience, and an an which located its interest in the pathology of the alienated individual. This may explain why so many Irish poets in the period fought shy of politics and of social issues. The decade after the foundation of
Aosdána
saw
hunger strikes in the north, vast unemployment in the south, the wrongful imprisonment of suspects in British jails, and the divisive divorce and abortion referenda, yet these events passed without finding their laureate. It would be difficult to imagine a Yeats or an O'Casey failing to use such material. Only a vulgar cynic would accuse the writers of being bought by the politicians for, being a self-elective body,
Aosdána
operates under no direct political constraint, its members being theoretically free to write whatever they wish: but in practice writers were a lot less critical of Haughey than poets like Clarke and Kavanagh had been of Costello or de Valera. Perhaps Haughey's own rather ambiguous relationship with the Irish middle class, which thought of him as rather too raffish for its tastes, gave him a special appeal for artists; or perhaps they were understandably grateful for what was, after all, an imaginative scheme which undid much of the damage caused by the censorship.

Thomas Kinsella was one of the very few artists who refused an
invitation to membership of
Aosdána.
An Irish-language scholar himself, he must have smiled wryly at the ambiguity of the title,
aos
meaning a "band" and
dána
either "artistic" or "audacious" (depending on the context). As a student of Eliot and Auden, however, he was also aware of the need to marry modernity to native tradition. When he was a younger man, he had by day earned his living as a civil servant in that Department of Finance which opened up Ireland for overseas trade and investment; by night he wrote poems which worried that Ireland might

. . . have exchanged
A trenchcoat playground for a gombeen jungle.

Around the corner, in an open square,
I came upon the sombre monuments
That bear their names: MacDonagh & McBride
Merchants; Connolly's Commercial Arms.
⁷

This was not at all like Montagues parody of Yeats on Romantic Ireland: it was more a weary parody of the consumerist present, in a grocers republic which could never live up to the Ireland of Easter 1916.

Even after a decade of apparent economic success in the 1960s,
Kinsella's voice remained troubled, unsure. If one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism was its tendency to produce "functionaries by day and hedonists by night",
⁸
he seemed to reverse that process, his working career a commitment to that materialistic Ireland which his poems did so much to question:

Robed in spattered iron
At the harbour mouth she stands, Productive Investment,
And beckons the nations through our gold half-door:
Lend me your wealth, your cunning and your drive,
Your arrogant refuse; Let my people serve them
Bottled fury in our new hotels,
While native businessmen and managers
Drift with them, chatting, over to the window
To show them our growing city, give them a feeling
Of what is possible; our labour pool,
The tax concessions to foreign capital,
How to get a nice estate though German,
Even collect some of our better young artists.
⁹

Kinsella's project was representative of a whole generation which sought – as Yeats had at the start of the century – to free Ireland from provincialism by an exacting criticism and European pose. Now, however, there was the added complication of Yeats to be coped with. One way of fighting free of that awesome legacy was to set up shop under the sign of Eliot: