INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTS OF IRELAND
Dennis Kennedy
In The Poor Mouth, Flann O'Brien's young Bonaparte O'Coonassa is chased across the Paradise of Ireland by the great Sea Cat, an evil beast which 'bore a close resemblance to the pleasant little land which is our own'. Are the people who live on the island of Ireland dominated, even hounded, by the idea of Ireland?
Just what is meant by 'Ireland'? We know that it was put on the map as long ago as the second century AD by Ptolemy when he wrote his Geographia describing the then known world. He began with the most westerly part, an island called, in Greek, Ierne and peopled by sixteen tribes. A century earlier the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Life of Agricola, had included a brief account of the same island, which he called Hibernia. His conclusion was that 'in soil and climate, in the disposition of its population, it differs but little from Britain'.
Two millenniums later the island is still there, as are the features indicated by Ptolemy. The people in it, however, are vastly different from those of 2,000 years ago. While the island remains identifiably that described by Ptolemy and Tacitus, its name, 'Ireland', has become more a concept, more an idea than a geographical label. And a great deal of effort has gone into trying to prove Tacitus wrong, and to assert the reverse of his conclusion, to emphasise how different Ireland is from Britain.
The history of the last century of the island, and arguably of many centuries before that, has been dominated by arguments over the meaning of the concept or idea of Ireland, and more particularly over the meaning of the term Irish, whether used as a general description, or as a name for the people living on the island.
With the approach of the year 2000 it seemed an apt idea for a body calling itself the Irish Association to reflect on the meaning of Ireland and Irish, hence a conference entitled 'Ireland at the Millennium – the Evolution of a Concept'. How do we define Ireland and Irishness today? What are, or have been the great formative influences? Are the Irish a race apart, shaped by religion and culture, and awareness of a great heritage from a previous era? Are they the product of more recent history and the struggle for national independence? Or even of most recent history and the growth of materialism and its accompanying corruption? Is it possible to believe in any one Ireland and a shared Irishness after thirty years of community conflict?
The hope was to avoid yet another detailed examination of those most recent years and the political problems unresolved by them, and to take the longer view. With characteristic perversity, however, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien was having none of that. In his opening keynote address he relentlessly pursued the politics of the present, and in particular what he calls the implementation of malign change carried out under the benign language of the so-called peace-process in Northern Ireland.
The burden of his concern is the weakening of democratic norms in Ireland both North and South, and the increasing acceptance by government, and by many elements in society, of the existence and activities of paramilitary organisations, operating without restraint in parts of Northern Ireland, and increasingly influential in politics in the South. Civilised order, he argues, has ceased to exist in many parts of Northern Ireland, with the active consent of Her Majesty's Government, and to a lesser extent in the Republic too.
Dr O'Brien's justification for this approach was that the real task of a keynote speaker is to address the issue that most seriously concerns his listeners. He was probably right. Where should any exploration of Ireland in the Year 2000 start, but from our own viewpoint, that is on the eve of the year 2000, and what could be more central to such an examination than the erosion of civilised order in the island?
His theme of malign things done under benign labels finds echoes in other contributions to this collection, which in sum constitutes a vigorous assault on much received wisdom and many common assumptions about the concept of Ireland and how it has evolved over 2,000 years.
Richard Warner gives short shrift to the idea of the Irish as a Celtic people, and to Celtic influence on modern Ireland. Archaeology, he argues, shows that even when the label Celtic is properly applied to remains found in Ireland, there is evidence only of small areas of Celticness, not that Ireland was a Celtic country. Hill forts, plentiful in Bronze Age Ireland, predate the arrival of any Celts. Navan Fort, the pre-eminent Iron Age site in Northern Ireland, is not a Celtic site.
Things almost invariably called Celtic, from High Crosses to illuminated manuscripts, are not Celtic at all. Dr Warner's devastating – to some – conclusion is that the Celts were a minor but influential element in Iron Age Ireland, and that their contribution to Irishness, in terms of genetics or blood, was of a similar order to that of the Vikings or the Anglo-Normans. That is, compared to the English contribution, the Celtic influence was minimal.
Why then the modern fixation with Celticness, and the frequent use of the term to describe Ireland along with Scotland and Wales? To many it may not be too accurate historically and archaeologically, but is harmless enough – a vague way of describing regional identities in these islands that sets those regions and their inhabitants somewhat apart from the dominant English. But Dr Warner poses the question as to whether or not such modern and highly inaccurate appropriation of the term Celtic is indeed harmless.
His answer is that it might be positively dangerous, and with spectacular lack of diplomacy compares it in essence, if certainly more innocent in intent, to the Nazis' use of pre-history to support the doctrine of the pre-eminence of the German people. His conclusion is that objective truth in Ireland today is falling victim to political correctness and parity of esteem, and that we could be entering a new totalitarianism, the dictatorship of sensitivity.
It hardly counts as parity of esteem, but he also does a demolition job on the Cruthin, whom he describes as 'Early Christian Ulster people ...dragooned into service as the ancestors of all good Ulster Protestants'. The terms 'Cruithin' and 'Ullans', he suggests, and all the nonsense they imply, should, along with 'Celtic', be excised ruthlessly from Irish historical and archaeological writings.
Edna Longley largely avoids the term 'Celtic', but does identify a Gaelic cultural emphasis as one of two conflicting – and invalid – sides in what she terms the Irish Kulturkampf, a war that pre-dates the troubles of the past 30 years. Not only are the two cultural ideologies in the island invalid, they are disastrous. By continuing to promote them, their advocates are preventing cultural debate and cultural self-understanding: and the promotion of deeply internalised prejudices costs lives. A true peace process requires the decommissioning of culture throughout the island.
These lively attacks on much traditional thinking – or non-thinking – may seem moderate enough in comparison with Arthur Green's full frontal assault on the very concept of Ireland. Any use of the term other than as a geographical label for the island involves us in a false construct. The island, he argues, and the people in it, share in the life of the whole British Isles and beyond that relate most closely to America, with continental Europe a fringe influence. Ireland is not, and cannot be, a freestanding cultural entity; the British Isles is the world in which we live. Cutting ourselves off from that entity would be to perform cultural amputation, and already attempted cultural isolation is contributing to the disaster of ingrowing cronyism and corruption in Dublin politics and collective delusions as to Ireland's place in the world.
Since the rationale of the independent Irish state depends on assertions of cultural difference, it is natural that the state machine should support the established national ideology, and that Irish opinion-formers should be inhibited from pointing out the reality – that we all live under an empty sky from which all the Irish gods have gone, whether Orange or Republican gods, Protestant or Catholic. For cultural nationalists the shock of this reality can be unbearable, hence the wish to build a cultural laager behind which the playboys of the western world can be secure.
If the foundations for a broadly and clearly distinct Irish cultural identity are shaky, does Ireland's Catholicism not cut it off from the other island, and constitute a formidable element of cultural distinctiveness, unfashionable though it may be acknowledge it? Alan Ford sees a very powerful tradition in Irish history, and in the writing of Irish history, of an inseparable link between religion and national identity. Here again we are in the field of invented traditions. When was this link first forged?
His answer is in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at a time when the English monarchy was extending its rule in Ireland and imposing Protestantism on a population which was largely untouched by the Reformation. This was the time when a historical Irish identity was formed by Catholic historians, educated as priests in continental Europe, and returning with, as Dr Ford puts it, the conscious intention of rescuing the remnants of Irish Gaelic civilisation and at the same time rediscovering the richness of the history and theology of the early Irish, or 'Celtic' church. These efforts resulted in the Annals of the Four Masters in the first half of the 17th century.
(In the same period another returning scholar, Geoffrey Keating, produced the first great narrative history of Ireland, from Adam to the coming of the Normans. Keating's work was widely circulated in manuscript form, and printed both in Irish and in English translation in the following century. Reading it today, one of its most striking aspects is the obsession of Keating with tracing the lineage of the Irish people back to the earliest days. He is much concerned with who can and who cannot be correctly described as Irish – he becomes heated indeed over any suggestion that the Scots of the border regions with England could be deemed Irish, like their more Northerly countrymen, rather than mere migrants from England.)
But, as Dr Ford points out, this older idea of national identity as deriving over time from the history and geography of a people and their distinctive genetic make-up, which made it possible to believe in an identifiable Irish people with their own characteristics, has increasingly been replaced by a more modern approach. This is that national identity is something which is created, not innate, and that it can therefore change as peoples' ideas of their own identity are modified, or indeed strengthened. As he concludes, old certainties about religion and national identity are much less certain than they used to be.
Malachi O'Doherty discusses religion as a factor in the current situation, agreeing that it is probably true that fighting in Ireland today is not over religion, but adding the painful reminder that the depth of hatred and distrust displayed between warring factions is primarily expressed in terms of religion. That hatred must, in part at least, be religiously motivated, though attachment to religion may be more allegiance to a community of people than adherence to a doctrine. But their different religious attitudes and religious mind-sets still strongly influence both Republicans and Loyalists, inhibiting the movement away from hatred and distrust.
Jonathon Bardon introduces a new dimension, or at least new terminology into the discussion – the term ethnic. The first evidence for ethnic hatred, he writes, is not found until well into the sixteenth century, which is just about the time that the Catholic historians were 'inventing' the Irish as a distinct people with long historical continuity, and just after the English throne had extended its rule in Ireland and was attempting to impose religious change.
But while ethnic hatred or something akin to it may have been kept alive by folk-memories of the 16th and 17th centuries, the division between Protestant and Catholic, or between the descendants of the newcomers and those of the existing population was far from complete. Inter-marrying was common between the religions, and many planters married into the existing population. People not only changed religion upon marriage, but often too the language they spoke.
For much of the prolonged Home Rule dispute of the second half of the 19th century both sides regarded themselves as unquestionably 'Irish', sharing that broad identity as residents of the island. But with the worsening of the crisis and the Gaelic revival of the turn of the century, the ethnic element resurfaced and unionists began to speak of different racial characteristics. The solution was the Border, but of course the border was far from being an ethnic divide, and Jonathon Bardon has no qualms about applying an ethnic label to present divisions within Northern Ireland.
He sees it not as unique, a place apart, but as a variation on a European theme, with remarkable parallels between the community conflict in Northern Ireland and the much worse ethnic blood-letting which has occurred in the Balkans over the past decade.
Bruce Arnold, in his survey of the last four decades in the Republic observed from close quarters as a political journalist and eminent writer on culture, records the ups and downs and concludes that Ireland has found itself to be like other countries and people. There is no unique Celtic character, there is nothing special or different about the race; the country has all the problems of developed European society from urban crime to gross cultural tastes, and its new religion is shopping and its new churches shopping malls.
But alongside this decidedly harsh reality has developed a phenomenal growth in Irish self-confidence, from limited ideas of their own abilities and a faith in emigration as the path to opportunity forty years ago, to a position today where, in fields from entrepreneurship to the hosting of chat-shows, they are the best in the world. Or are confident that they are. In achieving this, he concludes, the country and its people have lost, or are losing whatever was special about Ireland. If there ever was anything special.
What do these papers tell us about the concept of Ireland in the year 2000? They have one thing in common – they both challenge conventional wisdom, and they warn of the danger of accepting a comfortable blurring of ascertainable fact as a basis for better understanding. They are all, in their way, revisionist, to use a term now almost old-fashioned.
All historical examination and discussion of ideas should be essentially revisionist, amending opinions and accepted explanations in the light of new sources and new insights. To many in Ireland this process has proved so painful that 'revisionist' has become a term of abuse, and a counter-revisionist school has emerged, most commonly observed at the interface between academic scholarship and popular commentary.
To an extent academic or specialist debate has been going one way, dismantling many of the traditionally held elements of the romantic concept of Ireland embodied in 19th century Irish nationalism and also in the independent Irish state after 1922, while popular and political attitudes have in recent years gone the other way, apparently embracing, in a wave of self-confidence, an even more romantic though modernised version of nationalism. Never has a superficial Irishness, as manifested in Irish pubs and Irish chorus lines, been so fashionable.
At political level this led to increasing official endorsement of the validity of the claims of Irish nationalism just when the various supports for it were being shown to be false, and when, as another contributor notes, popular nationalism was waning fast. In the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 the basis for agreement inside Northern Ireland is stated to be mutual recognition and acceptance by nationalists and unionists of each other's rights. But what rights do unionists or nationalists have as such? They both have rights as citizens, and enjoy legal protection against various types of discrimination, but what is a nationalist right or a unionist right?
In the intervening years official pronouncements, from the Downing Street Declaration to the Belfast Agreement, have developed this peculiar concept to the point where there must now be parity of esteem and equal treatment for the 'identity, ethos and aspirations' of nationalists as well as unionists. But the essential identity, ethos and aspiration of any Irish nationalist lies in not being British – it is a political identity. The parallel aspiration for a unionist must surely lie simply in being a citizen of the United Kingdom.
If these elements are deemed to be much more than political, and to include cultural, linguistic and racial aspects, then those who take that view are surely bound to reject the many arguments put forward in the papers in this collection, and cling to the misleading labels, dangerous myths, and disastrously invalid ideologies attacked in them.
The Belfast Agreement carefully avoids using the term 'the Irish people', referring instead to 'the people of the island of Ireland', but it nevertheless confers on these latter a standing that depends on an out-dated nationalism. Thus they have a right to self-determination, albeit subject to conditions on how it is exercised. But why should 'the people of the island of Ireland' be considered a unit suitable for the exercise of this right? The island is not a political or administrative unit; the Agreement itself suggests that the people in it are divided in fundamental ways. It is only by accepting the very out-dated concept of geographical nationalism that the island can be so considered.
In addition the Agreement chooses to ignore much modern scholarship, and plain common sense, by elevating Gaelic and Ulster-Scottery into significant cultural characteristics of the people of modern Northern Ireland. Thus dubious sops are thrown upon which nationalism – of either side – may feed.
At the start of the third millennium we seem to have conflicting concepts of Ireland. The old and largely discredited one of a historic nation with a long history and sense of place, is based on distorted history and archaeology, much mythology and self-delusion; the other is of an island of mixed peoples, intimately tied to its neighbours, the inhabitants of which share a general, but not exclusive, identity based on living together on the one small island.
Defenders of the Belfast Agreement would say that by appearing to accept the old concept, they are in fact making possible the evolution of the second. The more sceptical fear that the reverse is true, and that the Agreement and the assumptions on which it is based may, in the end, place the second beyond our reach.
The conference on which this book is based was not meant to be about the Belfast Agreement. The papers here reproduced are not, in the main, about the current political situation. But they are about our understanding of the past and the impact of various elements on the evolving problem. They generally come down heavily against comfortable myths and the distortion of history and culture for political ends.
What then, is one to make of the final chapter, by Don Akenson? Professor Akenson is a historian of formidable probity and a ruthless researcher. He has written with almost alarming insight into many aspects of Irish history, and would generally be regarded as an arch revisionist. He is the biographer of Conor Cruise O'Brien. How then, does he come to assert that it is by forgetting the savage truths of the past and replacing them by agreed and agreeable lies that Northern Ireland will, in time, be able to live with itself?
The paper reproduced here is the text of a short pre-dinner speech. Professor Akenson had just published his massive Surpassing Wonder dealing with, as he terms it, the 'invention' of the Bible and the Talmuds. In a nutshell, he argues in that book that all the Scriptures dealing with events up to about the eighth century BC were an invention of that time, probably having no basis in fact or history. But they were the essential 'gospel' to allow the people of Judah to believe in themselves as the Chosen People and to maintain and promote the worship of the one true Jehovah.
Similarly the people of Northern Ireland need a new set of scriptures that will allow them to forget their conflicting versions of the past, and settle for conscious and reasoned discourse.
Some would say that that is already happening; that the history of 30 years of appalling savagery and terrorism is now being presented as a struggle for equality, and that many distasteful and regrettable, but necessary, aspects of it are now best forgotten. What we need now are more shared myths, not fewer, and more respect for cultural traditions, however invalid.
Is that what Professor Akenson is advocating? Maybe not, for he is talking in the context of vast changes which have already taken place in both Protestant Ulster, and in the Irish Republic, and he is arguing for new scriptures, not revised versions of the old ones. The old covenant between God and Ulster upon which Northern Ireland was founded is broken, he writes, and Ulster Protestants are now wandering in the wilderness. In the Republic the Celtic Tiger roams and the old Imperium of de Valera's Ireland is gone, with the decline of both cultural and political nationalism along with Catholicism. His prediction is that the South no longer cares, and will abandon Northern Catholics as readily as the British will abandon Northern Protestants.
In the Third Millennium, Northern Ireland will be on its own. Then, he seems to be saying, the people of Northern Ireland will be obliged to stop holding the 'savage truths' of the past (or their different versions of them) as scripture, and find another, shared gospel to live by.
That sounds a rather optimistic and very distant prospect. The more immediate task may well be to continue challenging the more exaggerated, and often divisively exclusive, concepts of what constitutes Ireland and Irishness. Tacitus, scarcely a revisionist, was struck by how little Ireland differed from Britain. Those wishing to build an inclusive concept of Ireland today should perhaps see the Roman historian's observation as a positive starting point, not a slight to be disproved by any means to hand.
Dennis Kennedy is a historian and lecturer in European Studies at Queen's University. As a journalist he served as Deputy Editor of The Irish Times. He is currently (2000) the President of the Irish Association.
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