Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland From Patrick to Present by Kevin Whelan (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland From Patrick to Present, Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018), 304 pages. It would be difficult to think of three more powerful forces in Ireland over the ages than land, religion and history. In a world where the frontiers of different disciplines are defended with vigour and where unbreachable Berlin walls are constructed around subjects, only a brave scholar would attempt to cross boundaries and step on others’ sacred patches. For good or for good, this is exactly what Kevin Whelan has done in this refreshing, enlightening and original book. The book does what it says on the cover: it is an examination of the relation between religion, the land and how this expressed itself in population patterns over our long history. And it is a long history as it begins at the beginning of the Christian era, i.e. at the beginning of our recorded history, and proceeds to the tribulations of our current times. It is replete with singular maps, illustrative diagrams and relevant photographs. The copious sources drawn from are in eleven different languages, which is not the least unusual feature of the author’s story. These sources include the usual historical documents, but Whelan also does not shirk from quoting poetry, ballad and song to good effect, and even Joyce’s Finnegans Wake gets a look in. The opening lines of the preface set the bracing tone: ‘This book offers an exercise in one-handed history: it refuses fence-sitting “on the one hand/on the other hand” approaches’. The author approvingly quotes Max Weber’s quip: ‘I am not a donkey and I don’t have a field’. He may not have a field, but he certainly has a ranch or even a whole prairie as he sucks up and references any piece of information which will add to his overall thesis. The back cover on my copy of the book also states that the work is ‘an oblique-angle version of Irish history’, but it is more correctly a better picture of the lives and concerns of the ordinary and not-so-ordinary people than the conventional history which depends mainly on official printed sources. Although religion in its spiritual sense is what gives it a special status among dimensions of knowledge, it is religion as a social force and as a glue of communal identity which is to the vanguard here. Thus, while minute attention is given to the physical shape of churches and the importance of Studies • volume 109 • number 433 85 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 85 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 85 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 their actual construction, it is often the social conclusion drawn from this which is most relevant. During the great destruction of Catholic churches during the long nightmare of suppression, mediaeval churches were ‘turned into a tennis court, tippling rooms, a communal oven, and private houses for the Aungiers, Moores and Brabazons’, and indeed Ormond Quay was constructed out of the debris of St Mary’s Abbey. This kind of severe detail may not be comfortably encountered in these ecumenical times, but a great part of the argument of the book is an accumulation of evidence which explains how Catholicism took such a firm hold on the lives of Irish people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was often, to be blunt, a reaction against the dominant, domineering and dictatorial position of the established Protestant church. A statement such as ‘English democratic institutions were founded on the most naked of sectarian principles’ could add a tail – that this is still the case today. When we come to the building of Catholic churches after the loosening of the penal laws and the ‘devotional revolution’ of the early nineteenth century, a sentence such as ‘We need to avoid the anachronistic assumption that the pennies of the poor were extracted from unwilling or gullible Catholics hoodwinked by cunning and rapacious priests’ stands out as a truth not universally acknowledged by hoodwinked commentators of recent times. He quotes extensively the common ballads and songs of the time which celebrated the building of new churches, noting that their popularity...