Irish Adventures in Nation-Building by Bryan Fanning (review)

Abstract

future. Through archival research, interviews and legal analysis, it sheds light on that web of mutually regarding personal relationships that have shaped our constitutional law. For lawyers, it provides invaluable context for the legal decisions that have influenced our constitutional system and political community. For non-lawyers, it provides an engaging and provocative introduction to the fundamentally important work of the Supreme Court. In providing this excellent account of a misunderstood but foundationally important institution, Mac Cormaic has provided a valuable service to our democracy. Dr Oran Doyle is Associate Professor of Law and Head of School, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on constitutional law. Irish Adventures in Nation-Building, Bryan Fanning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), viii+196 pages. This collection of eighteen essays covers the relationship between ideology and public policy in the cultural, political and economic development of modern Ireland. It ranges from the Famine to the boom-era inflow of immigrants and the argument over the roles of liberalism and corporatism in the economic bubble and crash of early twenty-first century Ireland. It is unusually coherent for a collection of occasional pieces, partly because the author provides an introductory essay setting out its main concerns and linking it to the analysis of such theorists of nationalism as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, partly because it forms part of a wider intellectual project. This comprises several related books in which Fanning interrogates the formation and adaptation of official versions of Irish identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through debates in policy journals and through attitudes to immigrants and ‘New Irish’ citizens in the twenty-first century. Some of these essays are more convincing than others. For example, the comparison between state development strategies and official culture in Ireland and Taiwan lends a new dimension to the concept of the ‘Celtic Tiger’(not least because so few Irish readers will know much about Taiwan). The surveys of the changing nature of public policy debates in Studies (incidentallycritiquingsimplisticassumptionsthatpost-independenceIreland 240 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Summer 2017: Book Reviews was sharply divided between Catholic reactionaries and liberal modernisers) and of the extent to which The Bell, for all its perceptive criticisms of Irish society, remained a creature of its time, are likewise valuable contributions to knowledge. (More might, however, have been said about the overlap and tensions between Peadar O’Donnell’s communitarian-Marxist approach and Sean O Faolain’s enlightened liberal-bourgeois project). The analysis of the rise and fall of Irish Thomist sociology is also helpful. On the other hand, the discussion of Pádraig Pearse, centred on a 1906 article in which Pearse fantasised about a glorious Irish-speaking republic of 2006 in a world where English was only spoken by a few peasants in Somerset, is two-dimensional: it misses several hints that Pearse – who, contrary to contemporary perceptions, did have a sense of humour – was speaking tongue-in-cheek and engaging in self-conscious hyperbole, and it fails to note that Pearse’s idealisation of Cuchulain and his world resembled contemporary British public-school idealisation of mediaeval chivalry. (This was explored in Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot; as Girouard points out, a major progenitor of this ethos was The Broadstone of Honour by the early nineteenth-centuryAnglo-Irish convert to Catholicism, Kenelm Digby). In this context, Fanning’s contrast between Pearse’s idealised future and the current Irish vogue for the television series A Game of Thrones (which consciously reacts against the chivalric myth by emphasising the bloody and rapacious aspects of feudal knighthood) may be more appropriate than he realises. The essay format naturally lends itself to suggestion rather than comprehensiveness, and it is no disrespect to Fanning’s achievement to point out that some of the issues he raises are more complex than he presents them. For example, he accepts the ‘modernist’ theory of nationalism, and its emphasis on such matters as the way in which national identities, which present themselves as outgrowths of peasant folk cultures, in fact derive from a process of codifying and adapting premodern identities – this produces a standardised high culture capable of meeting the requirements of social and political modernity...