Silencing Stephen: Colonial Pathologies in Victorian Dublin

The very name given to the project initiated by the British Council in the mid-2000s, i.e. Lives Entwined, set the tone for the four volumes of essays it has hitherto given birth to, and in which the overarching themes are indeed the strong cultural and historical ties linking British and Irish people and the main stumbling blocks to their reconciliation in decades past, namely the exacerbation of the memory of their strife-ridden past by British imperialism and Irish nationalism, as well as the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This article shall attempt to determine the extent to which the personal accounts given by the contributors to Lives Entwined testify to the “postcolonial recalibration” of British-Irish relations referred to by Tony Reilly in his introductory remarks to the first volume. It shall be argued that while Reilly’s statement is not wide of the mark, the overwhelming majority of the contributors highlighting the end of an era fraught with historical tension between Britain and Ireland, and the emergence, in its stead, of a new and more peaceful one, this assessment of the situation should not be taken for granted too easily nowadays, given the political turmoil brought about by Brexit.

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

Stephen Dedalus’s tripartite formulations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man encapsulate the nature of those forces that are in conflict for the possession of Irish selfhood. The three forces of the Church, Irish Nationalism and British Imperialism also colonize all levels of the text of ‘The Dead’, erupting in the heat of conversations which provide a more or less naturalistic context for their appearance, but emerging also in the bias of descriptive passages which coat with a sometimes religious, sometimes militaristic, patina the appearance of objects or the character of actions which only a certain amount of wilfulness on the part of the writer and of credulity on the part of the reader will create a sanction for. It isn’t a question of the writing investing objects and actions with a symbolic significance that they are basically compatible with, but of its overloading them with a metaphorical burden that they would be incapable of sustaining if readers were to judge the texture of the prose in the light of naturalistic relevance or irrelevance. It is as if what is focused on as an issue in certain parts of the text splays out into neighbouring parts without respect for the semantic integrity of individual sentences and paragraphs.KeywordsPolitical DimensionMilitary OccupationSemantic IntegrityIrish CultureFinal SceneThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The notion that mobility weakens collective norms and increases tolerance has a long pedigree in sociology. In this article, we examine the association of migration with partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, a region where the overlap of opposing religious and national identities is reflected in the residential segregation of its population. In representative samples of the population, we find that Irish Nationalist identification among Catholics and British Unionist identification among Protestants was lower among people not born in Northern Ireland and return migrants from beyond the British Isles. Having lived in the Republic was associated with more Nationalist identification among Catholics but less Unionist identification among Protestants and others. Moreover, having lapsed from the family religion is associated with decreased partisan identification. While international migration has in many countries led to increased tensions, conflict and the ascendance of exclusionary national populist movements, our results thus suggest that mobility beyond the British Isles has contributed to less nation–state conflict in Northern Ireland.

On receiving the June 1978 issue of Monthly Review I was delighted to see an article on the present struggle in Northern Ireland (Mary Turner, Social Democracy and Northern Ireland: the Origins of the Present Crisis), for this question has been sadly ignored by socialist writers both in Britain and the United States. The article is clearly situated within the dominant school of socialist thought on the Irish problem, which has traditionally focused on the issues of national oppression and national liberation. I would like to take this opportunity of raising certain questions about the nationalist position, and in particular the nature of the assumed links between socialist struggle and the reunification of Ireland.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty gave most of Ireland substantive political independence; not full sovereignty as a republic, rather partial sovereignty, as a dominion: the Irish Free State, which became part of the British Empire. Thus, in 1922 Ireland took its place among the dominions. Each greeted it differently. Australia and New Zealand were wary before becoming quite hostile; Canada and South Africa were consistently positive; and Newfoundland was positive and then a little concerned. These reactions to Irish independence reflected four things: attitudes towards Irish nationalism; feelings towards Irish immigrant communities; each country’s sense of national identity; and the direction in which each country wanted to develop its sovereignty. Another reaction to Irish independence came from Indian nationalists who were seeking dominion status and derived huge encouragement from Ireland. Newly independent Ireland’s diplomatic stance also set the tone for how its foreign policy would evolve.

The conclusion examines the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the formation of the Irish Free State, foregrounding the British-Irish political figures brought together at 10 Downing Street who illuminated the events of this book. Far from a sideshow to developments in Ireland, the concluding chapter submits, Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to both Irish and British contemporary assessments of the Irish Revolution. Irish nationalists in Britain, further, mobilised popular political interest, and activism, on an unprecedented scale across this decade of constitutional crisis, war, and revolution. The potential influence of Irish nationalism in British cities, moreover, occupied the minds and minutes of British policy makers, from Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George. How was Irish nationalism re-constructed across Britain between 1912 and 1922? Shaped by the influences of the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, and the British Empire, Irish nationalism was the cumulative experience of layers of overlapping representations of, and relationships with, ideas of nation. In its modes of political activism, gendered experiences of political life, and representations of public politics, Irish nationalism was impacted by changes, and continuities, across the British polity between the late Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods.

Brian Hughes here seeks to examine the means by which non-state militants, primarily the IRA, attempted to establish and maintain control over their communities during the Irish war of independence. He is also much interested in the forms of response which local people offered to address, and (at times) counter, these ambitions. His general idea is to map a rarely explored part of the landscape of revolutionary Ireland—that encompassing the large majority of the population who found themselves caught between the relatively small numbers of separatist guerrillas (perhaps no more than 3,000 at any one time) and the retreating forces of the United Kingdom state. In essence, he posits that this community, otherwise diverse, was united by a desire to avoid absolute commitment, by a willingness to elide loyalties where necessary and by a general desire to look out for itself. The book is meticulously researched, but is particularly effective when combining papers from the Bureau of Military History and the records of the Irish Grants Committee. Collating these Irish and British materials has enabled Hughes to expose the complex ways in which ordinary citizens, caught in the cross-fire of revolution, interpreted the course of events around them, as well as their own loyalties. A strikingly emblematic case is supplied by an egg-dealer from Arva, County Cavan, James McCabe, who simultaneously applied to both the Irish Free State and the British authorities for compensation arising out of the struggle of 1919–21. McCabe, a (long-) retired officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary, looked to the British Treasury-funded Irish Grants Committee for financial relief on the grounds of his service to the Crown; but he was also an Irish nationalist, who had a son active in the IRA, and he turned, too, to the Irish Free State authorities for financial redress, citing the family’s record in the revolution. Few were as bold as McCabe in seeking to milk the two competing jurisdictions for personal benefit; but his story does illustrate crisply the kind of ambiguous, alternate or sequential loyalties which characterised many at this time.

The consensus movement that won the right to establish a separate nation-state in the early 1920s was characterised by a primordial communitarian political philosophy and social conservatism. This political and social identity, which represented a move towards a new confidence in national ‘we-feeling’, occurred in a context of insecurity and contradiction. It can be understood in part as a product of the internal rationalisation of the movement impelled by perceptions of needs, the distribution of social power, revulsion at war, the martyrology of revolution, unprecedented prosperity, and the international context. It was in part also the movement’s response to problems in its external environment. The dominant problems in this environment were, on the one hand, the power of both the British State and Irish Unionism to block a political settlement that would be satisfactory to all strands of Irish nationalism and, on the other, the unresolved social question in Ireland. The euphoria of inclusive we-feeling, both of its own and its unionist other, led Irish nationalism away from a dialogical politics with other political and confessional traditions on the island. The social question was suppressed: propertied conservatism and social injustice were never to receive a fundamental challenge.KeywordsPublic SphereNational IdentityIdentity ProjectIrish SocietyCatholic ChurchThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

After the 1918 general election the Labour Party became the official opposition party at Westminster. In response to the growing Irish republican campaign to establish an independent Irish state the Labour Party had to re-assess its relationship with Irish nationalism. The Labour Party was now acutely conscious that it was on the verge of forming a government and was concerned to be seen by the British electorate as a responsible, moderate and patriotic government-in-waiting. Although it had traditionally supported Irish demands for home rule and was vehemently opposed to the partition of Ireland, the Labour Party became increasingly wary of any closer relationship with extreme Irish nationalism which it believed would only damage its rapidly improving electoral prospects. Therefore the Labour Party supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 even though it underpinned the partition of Ireland and sought to distance itself from any association with Irish republicanism as the new Irish Free State drifted into civil war. In early 1923 the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) alighted upon the new issue of the arrest and deportation without trial, to the Irish Free State, of Irish republicans living in Britain who were obviously British citizens. The attraction of this campaign for the Labour Party was that it enabled the party to portray itself as the defender of Irish people living in Britain without having to take sides in the Irish civil war. In addition the Labour Party was able to present itself as the protector of civil liberties in Britain against the excesses of an overweening and authoritarian Conservative government. One of the main reasons the issue was progressed so energetically on the floor of the House by the new PLP was because it now contained many Independent Labour Party (ILP) �Red Clydesiders� who themselves had been interned without trial during the First World War. Through brilliant and astute use of parliamentary tactics Bonar Law's Conservative government was forced into an embarrassing climb-down which required the cobbling together of an Indemnity Bill which gave tory ministers retrospective legal protection for having exceeded their authority. By any standard, it was a major achievement by a novice opposition party. It enhanced the party's reputation and its growing sophistication in the use of parliamentary tactics benefited it electorally at the next election which led to the first Labour government.

1. Introduction - Tom Inglis 2. Irishness and nationalisms - Sinisa Malesevic' 3. Where is Ireland in the worlds of capitalism? - Sean O Riain 4. Just another bubble economy? - Denis O'Hearn 5. A Catholic vision of Ireland - Bryan Fanning 6. The Irish political elite - Kieran Allen 7. The Irish family - different or not? - Tony Fahey 8. Single women in story and society - Anne Byrne 9. The Irish body - Tom Inglis 10. Sexual abuse and the Catholic Church - Marie Keenan 11. The difference between Irish and American Catholicism - Michele Dillon 12. Postcolonial legacies and the Irish psyche - Geraldine Moane 13. Thinking about Ireland and the Irish diaspora - Mary J. Hickman 14. Being Irish and male in Britain - Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood 15. The new Irish and the Irish nation - Bryan Fanning 16. Conflict and reconciliation in Northern Ireland - Joseph Ruane 17. Irish language, Irish nation - Iarfhlaith Watson 18. The difference of Irish music - Martin Dowling 19. The GAA and the sporting Irish - Katie Liston 20. Feeling at home in contemporary Ireland - Ethel Crowley 21. Searching for and explaining difference - Tom Inglis 22. A new vision of Irish studies - Linda Connolly 23. Irish studies between the past and the future - Michael G. Cronin Index

In his two language memoirs, The Speckled People and The Sailor in the Wardrobe, Hugo Hamilton recounts growing up in Dublin in a household in which Irish and German were the only two tongues permitted. His mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and his father was an Irish nationalist who punished his children if he caught them speaking English. Hamilton’s parents encouraged him to be different, but he recounts the difficulties of standing out in a society in which his trilingualism made him feel uncomfortably unique. Throughout his childhood, he was forced into a triangulation among Irish, German, and English. Hamilton’s father insisted that to speak English was to betray Ireland, though most of its citizens did not speak Irish. Like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Hamilton aspires to free himself of the nets of language and nationality. Ultimately, though writing in English, he aspires to a condition beyond any language, to citizenship in a global republic of art.

Reviewed by: Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 by Aidan Beatty Peter B. Strickland Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, by Aidan Beatty, pp. 266. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. $100. Timed to coincide with the Paris Olympics, the revival of the Tailteann Games in 1924 was intended as a public display of the strength and vitality of a newly independent Ireland. The Olympic-style competitions were open to all men of Irish descent, with athletes traveling to Ireland from the settler colonies of the British Empire, as well as from Britain itself. Organizers hoped that hosting the games every four years would exhibit Ireland's physical prowess and enthusiastic nationalism. Diminishing budgets hampered the games over the next decade, and because the competitions were largely associated with, and promoted by, the Free State government, the project did not survive the rise of Fianna Fáil. One [End Page 144] could easily dismiss the attempted revival of the Tailteann Games as a shortlived minor event in the history of Irish sport. In Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, however, Aidan Beatty persuasively examines the event within a much larger context; he repositions the games as a piece of a longer history of the conflation of Irish "national sovereignty and masculine strength." Gender analysis remains a rare commodity in political histories of Ireland; rarer still are studies that employ masculinity as a category for historical analysis. Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism corrects this oversight by placing masculine concerns at the center of the nationalist movement. Beatty demonstrates that, regardless of changes in state power and the varying dominance of political parties, the common denominator of Irish nationalism was the importance it placed on establishing and reinforcing Irish masculinity. Asserting the centrality of masculinity to Irish nationalism allows Beatty to place the revolutionary years into a wider framework, and in doing so, to undermine the very notion of a singular, watershed "Irish Revolution" by connecting the ideas and experiences of Irish nationalists across generations. To accomplish the goal of minimizing the "Irish Revolution," Beatty approaches his subject thematically. He begins with the revolutionary years (1916–1923) in chapter two, and asserts that questions of masculinity were central to each of the dramatic moments of those years. The next three chapters turn to the period before 1916, and the final two chapters shift the discussion to the years after the civil war. In examining such themes as space, land, or the body, each of these chapters uses the histories of organizations and political parties to provide topical focus. This deprioritizing of the revolutionary years allows Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism to connect the muscular vision of Irish nationalism promoted by the GAA in the 1880s (chapter 3), with Fianna Fáil's economic policies toward privately owned farms in the 1930's (chapter 6). This longue durée approach aligns Beatty's interpretation of Irish nationalism with the wider field of postcolonial studies, which seeks to demonstrate the long legacy of the colonial experience. This already ambitious work also seeks to escape the exceptionalism of what Beatty calls the "Irish Sonderweg" by comparing the connections between Irish nationalism and masculinity to similar intersections in other European and postcolonial contexts. In this case, Beatty takes the Zionist movement as his comparative example. Considering both the Irish and the European Jews as "quasi-colonial" peoples, he argues that comparing the two provides a "Zionist mirror" that can reveal many of the intricacies in the relationship between Irish nationalism and masculinity. This is an intriguing interpretive tack, but unfortunately, this comparative turn rarely adds to the study beyond confirming the unsurprising conclusion that ideas and practices in Ireland had analogs in the Zionist experience. In its role as "mirror," the Zionist story itself is not subject [End Page 145] to the same close examination as the Irish story. Beatty's consideration of moments when Zionism, or Jewishness, and Irish nationalism actually intersected result in more effective comparisons. A fine example of this is the third chapter's discussion of a 1924 political cartoon titled "Jew Regard for the Law," which appeared in Guth na Gharda ("The Policeman's...

Under terms of the Treaty of 1921 between Great Britain and Ireland, it was agreed that: “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa, with a Parliament having powers to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Ireland and an Executive responsible to that Parliament, and shall be styled and known as the Irish Free State.” The status of the Irish Free State was further defined by this language: “Subject to the provisions hereinafter set out, the position of the Irish Free State in relation to the Imperial Parliament and Government and otherwise shall be that of the Dominion of Canada, and the law, practice and constitutional usage governing the relationship of the Crown or the representative of the Crown and of the Imperial Parliament to the Dominion of Canada shall govern their relationship to the Irish Free State.” The Imperial Government gave this treaty the force of law by the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act of March 31, 1922. To implement the treaty, Dáil Eireann, sitting as a constituent assembly, enacted a constitution for the Irish Free State in 1922. This constitution declared: “The Irish Free State (otherwise hereinafter called or sometimes called Saorstát Eireann) is a co-equal member of the Community of Nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.” It was given the force of law by the Imperial Government in the Irish Free State Constitution Act of December 5, 1922.

The author analyzes the evolution of the national movement in Ireland in the first half of the 20th century through the prism of women's participation and gender equality issues. It is argued that the Irish nationalists' choice of patriarchal Catholic ideology has not been predetermined since the revival of Irish nationalism, and although the Catholic faith played a significant role in the anti-British activities of the Irish national movement, there were many Protestants among its activists, as well as women who shared feminist values and played an important role in organizing the political and military struggle of the Irish for independence. The article focuses on the various methods of women's participation in the Irish national movement, including the creation of separate women's organizations, and membership in key societies and groups, as well as participation in constructing barricades and in fighting during the Easter Rising. It was more difficult to take part in the specifically women's struggle to grant Irish women the right to vote, which was associated with the activities of London organizations, the Women's Socio-Political Union specifically. It is argued that it was the anti-British orientation of the Irish political struggle that made it impossible (or difficult) to associate Irish feminists with the goals of the women's movement in the United Kingdom, which led to the victory of the social doctrine of Catholics and the “enslavement” of Irish women after the Irish Free State was created. The article analyzes not only sources of personal origin, telling about the participation of Irish women in the national movement, but also official documents of the young Irish state, demonstrating the evolution of its ideology in social and gender issues towards a patriarchal approach to the role of women in society, the fight against which has become the task of feminists of the second wave starting in the 1970s.