in union with Britain or have recourse to foreign aid from a great power of some sort outside these islands? Should Ireland be freed by constitutional action or through revolutionary insurrection? Should the Irish speak English, Irish or both? Should Ireland be ruled as a unit, or as two states? Who should rule Ireland: an upper caste or aristocracy of a particular religion, a clerisy of priests, or those individuals elected by the general population from among themselves? Should Ireland have a king, and if so, should that king be Stuart or Hanoverian? If not, should it be a republic, and what kind of republic should it be? Should the Irish be encouraged to get rich, or should they live in frugal comfort combined with a virtuous poverty? Should the Irish be prevented from losing their innocence, or allowed to see the world’s seamy side freely? Should the Irish be given that dangerous thing, an education, or should they be kept in a useful ignorance? Should they be educated or just trained? Should Irish sexuality be controlled and repressed by the Church or the State? Or the question posed by Jonathan Swift: Must the miserable condition of Ireland and the corruption of Ireland’s government always be mentioned in the same breath?
This book is by way of an experiment, for which neither author can find a convincing precedent in this country. Each of us trawled through the historical and social literature of the island of the last three centuries to come up with books which seemed to have had an impact on Irish opinion, have defined or best exemplified long-running debates, or have been under-appreciated in terms of their significance. An example of the latter is Brian Merriman’s 1780 Irish-language poem The Midnight Court, which satirises the reluctance of Irish men to get married early. This poem crops up over the centuries and several times in the book in discussions of social class, cultural revival and issues of sexuality.
Both of us are historically-minded social scientists, one in political science and the other in social policy. Neither of us are graduate students of literary criticism, and our selection inevitably will reflect that fact. Some might argue that in the much-tilled field of Irish Studies, not having such a qualification is a distinct advantage. The few works of fiction we include are chosen for the social and political arguments they provoked at the time of publication or later rather than for their place in some or other canon of Irish literature. The twenty-nine chapters each deal with one or two books which symbolise or clearly state a point of view that is shared by many and disagreed with by many others at the time of writing and commonly for many years afterwards. Other works that address the same issue are dealt with as well. In all, over fifty books scattered over three centuries are touched on or discussed at length.
Geoffrey Keating’s 1634 appeal for the creation of a united Irish Catholic nation has echoed down the centuries. He couples that plea with a wonderful and half-mythological account of the allegedly world-famous rise of the Gaelic nation in Ireland since the time of Patrick. A few decades later, William Molyneux made an argument in favour of parliamentary autonomy for a Protestant Irish nation at the end of the seventeenth century, a few years after Aughrim’s Great Disaster of 1691 which resulted in the expulsion from Ireland of the Catholic ruling class and the taking of the entire island by a new property-owning class of Protestant faith. Swift’s mordant satire on the corruption and tyranny of British rule in Ireland a generation later concludes that the Irish might as well eat their own young; they would be better off if they did. His Modest Proposal (1729) and his pamphlets of the same decade have found an Irish audience in every generation since. The Catholic Church reorganised itself after the great defeat of the Jacobite cause with priests trained in Europe and with penny catechisms that enabled its doctrines to be widely taught in the eighteenth century, despite a hostile government in London and Dublin. Wolfe Tone, the famous rebel leader of the bloody 1798 rising, reveals a very whiggish political vision of a free Ireland where only the well-to-do of all religions had the franchise. Presumably he would have approved of Daniel O’Connell’s acceptance of the disenfranchisement of the Forty-Shilling Freeholders in 1829 in return for Catholic Emancipation. O’Connell understood that in an open-vote election, poor men did not have a truly free vote. In his Jail Journal (1861) and other writings John Mitchel influentially denounced O’Connell’s constitutionalism and his championing of English liberalism.
A prominent debate on the possible cultural and political sources of Irish poverty and backwardness was started at the beginning of the twentieth century by two well-known protagonists, Horace Plunkett and Father Michael O’Riordan; Protestant squaring off against Catholic as usual in what became a notorious and fascinating duel. James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History (1910) owed as much to Mitchel as to Karl Marx. Connolly championed the same romantic nationalists – Tone, Mitchel and Fintan Lalor – that Patrick Pearse also included in his ‘new testament’ of Irish nationalism. The themes of many of Canon Sheehan’s novels, including his last, The Graves at Kilmorna (1913), were the search for virtue and holiness in a fallen world and heroic martyrdom in the sacred cause of the Irish nation. Patrick Pearse’s world view appears in many ways to echo the views of this forgotten bestseller-writing priest.
Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland (1924), arguing for an Irish cultural revival based on the Gaelic tradition of Munster in the eighteenth century, became almost official dogma after 1924, and led to impassioned debate among Irish writers and academics for decades afterwards, including Sean O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, Corkery’s rebellious students. P.S. O’Hegarty’s Victory of Sinn Fein of the same year was possibly the first eye-witness account of the tragic treaty split in the Sinn Fein leadership with descriptions of the personalities of the leaders of both sides. His argument has been wrangled over ever since, often by protagonists who have never heard of his book.
The non-fiction fruits of the romantic ‘Celtic Twilight’ included a remarkable series of autobiographical works in Irish (The Islandman, Twenty Years A-Growing) which emanated from the Great Blasket Island in the 1920s and 1930s. The community was dying and knew it; the islanders wished to be remembered as they had been in their prime. In Guests of the Nation (1931) O’Connor established himself as the foremost Irish short story writer of his generation, signalling his rejection of violence in pursuit of political goals and tacitly rejecting Corkery’s worldview. In 1938, O’Faoláin’s King of the Beggars rehabilitated the Great Dan after two generations of Mitchelite vilification. Flann O’Brien’s satiric works of 1939–1945 (At Swim-two-Birds, An Béal Bocht, The Third Policeman) echoed the Blasket school to great comic effect and also satirised the Gaelic revival’s often absurd posturings.
Fr James Kavanagh’s manual of social ethics of 1954 set out the official familial and Thomistic line espoused by the Catholic Church in Ireland at that time. It depicted Church dominance of public morality, education and even sociology as part of a God-given natural order. In the same year, Paul Blanshard’s The Irish and Catholic Power set out a damning critique of the effects of such power upon Irish society. Blanshard’s polemic was unpalatable even to liberal Catholics, a much intimidated and rather small group of people at that time. However, Blanshard’s critique of Church authoritarianism and of a public morality obsessed with sex yet soft on financial dishonesty prefigured later debates.
Michael Sheehy’s Divided We Stand of 1955 started a debate about the partition of Ireland that is also still going on, and was echoed and expanded by Conor Cruise O’Brien in his States of Ireland of 1972. It was raised again from a very different point of view by A.T.Q. Stewart’s The Narrow Ground of 1977, a book that has had a deep influence behind the scenes on late twentieth-century Irish political thought. Both O’Brien and Stewart challenged anti-partitionist perspectives that had predominated in the twenty-six counties for three-quarters of a century after independence. These are exemplified here by Todd Andrews’s 1979 memoir and its sequel, among other things a behind-the-scenes account of how a single generation of post-revolutionary republican Catholic leaders under de Valera ran the country for several decades until they became a gerontocracy.
Philip Larkin famously wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis that ‘Sexual Intercourse Began/ In Nineteen Sixty-Three/ (which was rather late for me) – /Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP’. If Larkin had been Irish he might have instead bookended the arrival of sex as a topic for public argument as occurring between the publication of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and John McGahern’s The