Around Ireland. A 2013 Diary.

Around Ireland. A 2013 Diary.

Silke Hesse

When friends heard I was travelling to Ireland this year, their reaction was almost invariably: Why? It doesn’t seem to be the thing to do if you don’t have Irish ancestors.

So why did I want to go to Ireland?

It is a beautiful country, is an obvious response.

Or: I have travelled round England, Scotland and Wales and if you grew up in Australia, the other British Isle should be of interest too.

Or: Australia is full of Irish people and their descendents. Much of what we think of as Australian seems to have been shaped by their customs and attitudes and above all their humor. How can anyone understand Australia without understanding the Irish?

Or: I love Irish literature. I want to see the country where it originated.

Or: When I was eight years old and a public enemy because of my ethnic background, the Sisters of Mercy allowed me and my brothers to attend their school as the only Protestant children. They promised not to proselytize and kept their promise scrupulously. I have a soft spot for Irish Christianity.

But there was really no need to be so personal. I could have said that I wanted to experience a country where it seems that the layers of history through 9000 years have not been concreted over or relegated to museums and where what is ancient is still perceived by most as an integral, living and perfectly natural part of their nation’s present identity.

Most of all, I wanted to go to Ireland to hear how the Irish talk about themselves.

Sunday, August 25. It was surprisingly quick to travel from Melbourne to Dublin with just one stop-over in Dubai: only 23 hours. I took the opportunity to watch Akiro Kurasawa’s film Dreams that shows legends and myths haunting the lives of everyday people, and later the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, both films I had never got round to seeing. Surprisingly, both helped to set the mood for Ireland.

As I was heading out for a taxi, I almost missed a driver holding up my name. Our tour leader, Rouna, who had arrived about the same time and was expecting a pick-up, ended up making her own way in to town. We met in the hotel foyer, both waiting to register, and agreed to go out together in half an hour’s time. She knew where the on and off Red Bus stopped. We walked up from the corner of the Bleeding Horse Inn and through the fine park at Saint Stephen’s Green, catching another glimpse of the solid front of Georgian red brick houses which my taxi driver had pointed out earlier and which I had thought unremarkable. In Australia factories and very suburban houses are made of red bricks. But now I also noticed the famous fan-lights.

At Saint Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, only a few stops on, I followed Rouna, herself a singer, to Evensong with a fine guest choir from Northern Ireland. The last hymn was Cardinal Newman’s “Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom / Lead thou me on” which we used to sing at school to the tune of “Abide with me”. I did not remember a second stanza but lines from it now stood out like a motto: “I loved to choose and see my path; but now / Lead thou me on.” I would like this trip to come together as a whole, with every experience meaningful. Others have planned it but there is no reason why it should not give me the insights I am hoping for.

Saint Patrick’s is dominated by the spirit and presence of Jonathan Swift who became Dean in 1713 . Stella, one of two women he loved, is buried there beside him. Swift’s death mask shows a face contorted by the suffering of Ménièrs’s disease which almost drove him mad and deceived his friends into believing he was just that. The home for the mentally ill opposite the Cathedral, to which Swift donated his estate, is a working psychiatric hospital to this day.

This cathedral, just outside the city precinct, was always the people’s church while nearby Christ Church Cathedral was popular with the establishment. St. Patrick’s offered refuge to the Huguenots fleeing France in the 17^th century. Apart from an over-large and stiffly pious monument to the Anglo-Irish Boyle family, headed by the Earl of Cork, the most notable exhibit here is an ancient door into which a rough opening has been cut. When in 1492, amidst the interminable tribal warfare of the times, the Lord of Ormonde sought refuge in Saint Patrick’s from his enemy the Lord of Kildare, the latter used this sword to cut this hole and “chanced his hand” in peace. In the grounds outside the Cathedral what appears to be the original baptismal well of Saint Patrick, Ireland’s Patron Saint, has been rediscovered.

  

Monday, 26 August.

I went off by myself today. Since it was Monday, I could only wander past most of the museums, but the Yeats exhibition in the library was open and I listened to the beautiful recording of his poetry twice. It began with “The Lake at Innisfree”, a poem I learned when I was young:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

In the Art Gallery, which was also open, I viewed paintings by the poet’s brother Jack, paintings that use the techniques of Impressionism for disturbed and other-worldly images more characteristic of Expressionism. In contrast to the less radical William Butler, Jack was an ardent Irish nationalist. I then walked to the other side of the River Liffey, up O’Connell Street with its nationalist monuments, and to the new Abbey Theatre. A poster advertised “The Gathering” taking place this year, a call to the millions of people of Irish descent all over the world to visit the homes of their ancestors, meet up with the people who stayed, and gain an understanding of common roots. It is obviously also a strategy for boosting tourism at a time of recession.

Later this afternoon the other three members of our tiny group of four arrived, all seniors with an academic background or interests. They had come from voting at the Australian Embassy. I had voted before I left. Obviously none of us were prepared to forfeit our vote in the coming election and we have cautiously established that our political views are similar.

Tuesday, 27 August. On our walk to Trinity College we passed the amazing statue of Oscar Wilde in Merion Square, opposite what used to be the residence of his father, a renowned eye surgeon, and his mother, a writer. It shows him reclining on a granite boulder. His dandyish clothes are made from stone; he is wearing a green jacket with pinkish red quilted cuffs and lapels that could be mistaken for soft fabric.

At Trinity College Michael O’Gorman gave us a historical introduction. He is probably a resident tutor, deliciously cynical about the younger generation of students over whom he obviously has supervisory duties. When he told us, without explaining himself further, that the Celts never existed, we presumed it to be an Anglo-Norman provocation to match his sly smirk, his Oxford accent and his dandyish get-up. Trinity has always been British, and Protestant. Irish Catholics were excluded from the College for most of its history; in the days of James Joyce, it was actually the Catholic Church which forbade its members to study there. The Catholics had finally founded a college of their own.

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Everyone in Dublin seemed to want to see the Book of Kells today. It is reputed to be the most beautiful of all medieval manuscripts. Inside, our group quickly lost contact with each other in the crush. I was drawn to the interesting side exhibitions on such topics as the materials and techniques of manuscript creation. Visitors see a different page of the Book of Kells each day. Its illustrations of the four gospels emphasize the sacred letters of Christ’s name, in keeping with the centrality of “The Word” in St. John’s Gospel; they reflect the enormous emphasis the newly literate and geographically remote Celts placed on the written word as the supreme vehicle of the Christian mission. Also important for these scribes were the evangelists, the men whose teachings the books pass on; they are depicted again and again. The biblical stories themselves take up little space. But in the niches between the huge sacred letters tiny dramas with animals and humans take place. It was clearly not the Biblical stories, which lend themselves to misinterpretation and literalism, but the sacred ideas and their sacred origins amongst what looks like suns and moons and snake-like labyrinthine ways, designed in the Celtic la Téne style, which were important for these early Christians.  

Other valuable manuscripts were also on display at Trinity, among them the Book of Ardagh, but it was not possible to more than glance at them over somebody’s shoulder. We left the exhibition space through the Long Room, a breath-taking library of 200,000 leather-bound antiquarian books.

After lunch we drove to the Hill of Tara, the mythical, ceremonial and political centre of Celtic Ireland from very early times on. Our bus-driver Tony delighted his passengers with his quick Irish wit, the butt of which were invariably the gullible Americans. Rouna tried to secure him for the rest of the trip, but that request had to go through his employer.

Though the Hill of Tara is not high, you have a panoramic view from there. An introductory film showed the massive earthworks from the air, the only way one can appreciate their shape and size. Later we hardly noticed that our climb to the Stone of Destiny, an ancient fertility symbol once central to the inauguration of Ireland’s High Kings, had taken us right into the royal enclosure, known as Cormac’s House. In addition to the fortifications and what may be unexcavated burial mounds all around, we got to see a Stone Age passage grave. We were told by our guide that the High Kingship was conceived as an ideal or sacred status; a king had to abdicate if he incurred the slightest physical defect. But it is likely that customs and purposes changed over the long period the site was used; the more gruesome early rituals go unmentioned to tourists. Daniel O’Connell chose Tara as the gathering point for his 1843 rally demanding home rule. It was attended by a million people.

Back at the hotel we had a lecture by Professor Sean Duffy, a specialist in the early history of Ireland. He sees the crucial reason for the uniqueness of Ireland’s culture in the fact that it was the only European country never conquered and colonized by the Romans. Ireland was, among other things, he believes, situated too close to the presumed edge of the world to feel safe. On the whole, there was probably little difference between the Germanic warriors of the Age of Migration and the Celtic ones; both had to be fierce in their fight for land. But never to have experienced the concept of a world-wide empire in which all were citizens and the nominal aims were peace and prosperity; or the engineering projects of Rome, such as roads, aqueducts and stadiums; or Rome’s tolerant indifference to religions as long as they were subordinated to the cult of the Emperor; or its concept of a citizen’s duty to give disinterested patriotic service to his country; or its Stoic or Epicurean but worldly approach to life, set you apart from the rest of Europe. Irish Christianity was thus in the early stages untouched by the Roman ideal of a universal “catholic” empire.  

Wednesday, 28 August: In the morning we had a tour of Dublin with the lovely, quick- witted and very knowledgeable but overly soft-spoken Kay Caffrey: we saw, among other things, the site of the 10^th century Viking settlement (the Vikings founded the first Irish towns), drove past the Guinness brewery that none of us really wanted to inspect, visited Saint Patrick’s Cathedral again, and eventually did a tour of Dublin Castle, which had been the site of an Anglo-Norman fortress since the thirteenth century. Its courts currently contained a number of sand sculptures with strange themes, some probably alluding to Irish myth or history. The first room we were then shown commemorated the martyrs of the 1916 Rising against English domination and the brutal execution of the fourteen idealistic Irish patriots who planned it. Since the rebellion happened while Britain was at war, it was classified as treason. We were also told that the British Viceroy, on leaving Dublin, took every single item of furniture in the Castle with him. Large floral rugs designed and made in Killybegs are now part of the first stage of refurnishing. In the cellars we were able to appreciate the suitability of the site for a fortress, protected as it is by Dublin’s two rivers, the Liffey and the now all but invisible Poddle.

After lunch Padraic O’Brien took us for a literary walk through Dublin. We saw Sweeney’s Pharmacy where Leopold Bloom used to buy his lemon scented soap (it is still available) and were taken into a tiny back room with early editions and memorabilia. Having recently reread Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and listened to large sections of Ulysses spoken superbly by Irish actors, I had walked through Dublin on my first day thinking I would recognize Joyce’s city. But I found that I had built up a completely different Dublin in my mind, one where buildings were irrelevant and people met and interacted. As I had already spent time in the Yeats exhibition, to which we then walked, I used the opportunity to get Padraic to talk about such things as the Gaelic syntax of Synge’s poetic language.

This evening we had a somewhat rushed celebratory dinner at a restaurant with a décor of memorable antiques and then went on to the Abbey Theatre for George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. I found the performance a little disappointing because the actor of the crucial figure of Undershaft did not infuse it with the subtlety needed to carry the argument convincingly.

Thursday, 29 August:  This morning we drove to County Wicklow to inspect the extensive gardens of Powerscourt against the background of Sugarloaf Mountain.

After lunch we continued on to Glendalough in lovely forested hilly country beside two lakes. This was a 6^th century monastic settlement or town, founded by Saint Kevin and apparently long functioning as the equivalent of the capital of tribal Ireland. Apart from an extensive cemetery, it has the High Cross, oratory and the characteristic Round Tower of such abbeys, also other buildings and well preserved gate arches. The guide who gave us our introductory talk interpreted the circle of the High Cross as the Celtic sun or snake symbol, suggesting that in Ireland the new faith respected the older religion and built on it. The Round Tower, she said, was built both as a landmark for pilgrims and a bell tower, not as a fortification, though the monks may later sometimes have hidden sacred treasure there from the invading Viking raiders who molested them for centuries. The tower’s high door required a ladder to access.

Kevin was, like so many early Irish saints, an ascetic who originally dwelt in a cave-like cleft and spent days standing in the icy waters of the lake. Later his followers persuaded the reluctant saint to head the monastic settlement. It would have included women, children and married couples and they would have kept themselves busy with farming, teaching and transcribing manuscripts. The monastery also offered refuge and instruction to many Christians fleeing the turmoil of the collapse of the Roman Empire on the Continent. Though it was partly destroyed by English forces in 1398, it was not closed down till the Protestant closure of Monasteries in 1539.

On a walk by the lakes Rouna and I encountered a singer and harpist advertising her CDs. She had that pure Celtic voice Welsh singers are also noted for and her singing seemed like the very soul of the countryside. Unfortunately we then lost her CD in the faulty player of our bus.

Friday, 30 August: We left Dublin today. The trip along the freeway to the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary took not the hour our organizers had calculated but two and a half. When we arrived, it was raining but the vast view of the countryside with bursts of sunlight penetrating the clouds was still commanding; it encompassed much of the island. For 600 or so years, the Rock was the seat of the Kings of Munster, eventually of the High King Brian Boru who successfully defeated the Vikings in 1014 but was killed in the battle. In 1101 the Rock was handed to the Church as an ecclesiastical site. Its important buildings are now only religious, a 13^th century cathedral, a bishop’s dwelling, the beautiful 12^th century Romanesque Cormac’s chapel and a Round Tower. The massive walls, now broken open, contained secret escape passages in case of attack or siege. But when Cromwell’s army arrived in 1647 they were of no help and all 3000 occupants were massacred.

We continued past the city of Cork to Blarney Castle where only the 15^th century Norman style keep remains. We climbed the over 200 steps up to the battlements; all but one of us avoided kissing the famous Blarney Stone which is reputed to confer eloquence. It is a precarious maneuver. Eloquence is something the Irish are still noted for.

Our final destination was  Killarney where The Earl’s Court Hotel, replacing the original choice just recently damaged in a gas explosion, proved a particularly hospitable and well run establishment. It has an excellent cook too.

Saturday, 31 August: For our trip around the Ring of Kerry we had a farmer, Michael Burke, as our guide. He could tell us a lot about the formation and harvesting of peat, still the local fuel, and about the plants of the area. This wildly romantic peninsula contains Ireland’s highest mountains and closer to Killarney beautiful lakes, once visited by Queen Victoria. The local Lord had invited her in the hope that his hospitality would bring benefits for him or at least Ireland. But soon after the Queen’s return, her husband Alfred died suddenly and she was so devastated by the loss, she forgot all about her Irish stay. Her host, as a result, was bankrupted by his hospitality. The peninsula also has a famous links golf course with helicopters waiting to ferry the rich and famous.

  

That night we went to the Irish-speaking Folk Theatre at Tralee where we saw the dance performance The Children of Lir. Lir was the Celtic god of the sea. When his wife and the mother of his children died, he married again. But his new wife was jealous of the love he bore his children and turned them into singing swans. They had to live in exile in three places successively for three times three hundred years till the coming of Christianity. When the magic finally left them and they turned into humans again they were old men and women and their only compensation was baptism along with a Christian burial. One can ponder why this tragic legend about the innocent victims of an evil stepmother is so popular in Ireland.

Sunday, 1 September:  On the Dingle Peninsula we had the benefit of two Seans, a very knowledgeable bus driver as well as a good guide. We first stopped in the grounds of a castle to have a look at stones inscribed using the early Ogham alphabet. The spectacular road we then took along the cliffs above the sea, though notionally two-way, was often too narrow for another car. We passed a prehistoric fort and spent time at the Blasket Centre which commemorates the pre-modern lifestyle on the islands just ahead out at sea. The writer Synge was one of those who visited the Blasket islands around the turn of the century and helped to put them on the map. They were evacuated in 1953 when virtually only elderly people remained. Several of the former inhabitants later wrote about the lives they had left and the Centre documents their work and exhibits the boats and implements then in use. The language spoken here was Irish Gaelic, used widely in most areas of the west, known as the Gaeltacht, through which we would travel. The Centre showed a film, had an interesting photographic display and a good bookshop where I bought a book of limericks.

Later on the road, we passed a beehive hut and the Gallarus drystone oratory, a tiny church built without mortar by monks some time between the 6^th and 9^th centuries and still completely weatherproof. From both the Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula we could at times also catch glimpses of the Skelligs, two high, bare, rocky pyramids far out to sea on which Irish monks had settled in the 6^th century. The larger, Skellig Michael, still contains beehive cells and a thousand year old stairway. Apparently two Japanese tourists were recently swept into the sea from there during a storm. It seems the early monks supported themselves by trading with passing boats. Yesterday, Michael Burke had mentioned Tim Severin’s book to us that tells the story of his successful reenactment of Saint Brendan’s  6^th century voyage to America in an open leather-covered boat, Up to then it had usually  been considered fictional. Severin followed a route via Iceland and Greenland and found that many of the islands he passed on the way contained remnants of the monastic settlements of Irish monks. These monks are often spoken of as the ‘white martyrs’, as against the ‘red martyrs’ of the Roman Church who were tortured and killed for their faith, and the ‘green martyrs’ like Saint Kevin who lived ascetic lives somewhere in Ireland,. They were all sons of a heroic age. Both Brendan, and later Severin, set out from the Dingle Peninsula.

We ended the day with a walk through the pretty fishing village of Dingle. And back in Killarney there was time for some shopping that included Severin’s book.

Monday, 2 September: We travelled north to Galway today, stopping off at Bunratty Castle and Folk Park with its large collection of characteristic buildings from the 19^th century.

The Cliffs of Moher with their perpendicular drop into the sea were too commercialized and too rainy to be attractive. Our route then took us through the Burren, a spectacular area of grey limestone karst. We reached our bayside hotel by evening.

Tuesday, 3 September: Peadar O’Dowd showed us around Galway city. He is obviously the local eccentric and national treasure in one, a man who has fought passionately all his life for the preservation of the archaeological history of the town. He also contributed by helping, for example, to house appropriately the stone age weapons young divers he used to swim with brought up from the river bed. Once, he told us, he sat all day on a significant stone that the road workers would otherwise have removed.

When Ireland received development funds upon joining the European Union, the Dublin Government decided to encourage a combination of historic restoration, commercial enterprise and housing development by granting those who fulfilled all three requirements ten years’ tax exemption. In Galway the historic walls, once built by the Normans to keep the Celtic fishermen out of the Claddagh settlement (which still exists) were thus preserved in the basement of a large shopping centre, on the top floor of which flats were built. The approach that preserving historical memories does not necessarily entail allowing ancient ruins to dominate the appearance of a contemporary town or countryside, had been noticeable to me elsewhere too. On a closer look, the neat and colorfully painted farmhouses we passed on our way tended to be small two-room buildings that would never have been designed today. They must have been ancient stone houses. The old was preserved but given a new and friendlier appearance. For in the West of Ireland, where everything has always been built of grey stone, a material to which even the poorest had cheap access, the look of grey walls enclosing grey cottages can become quite depressing. The official Irish approach seems to be that a nation should remember its past but should not allow itself to be shackled to it.

Not all the stories Peadar told us could be verified. He claimed, for example, that during the period of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws the Anglo-Norman Lynch family, one of the so-called fourteen tribes of mostly Anglo-Norman merchant families that ruled Galway town for centuries, allowed their superb old townhouse to be used as an unobtrusive Catholic Church. Galway, he explained, had always been a merchant town, trading with France and Spain, and traders had to be tolerant of difference. If the trade of tourism also affects the character of communities, it is perhaps no wonder that we have met so many friendly people here in Ireland which now relies heavily on the tourist dollar.

Peadar also took us through the medieval Collegiate Church of Saint Nicholas, showed us the house where the Australian explorer Robert O’Hara Bourke was born, as well as the simple dwelling where James Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle spent her youth. Later, on our own, we inspected the grand new Catholic Cathedral financed by American expatriates, found a marvelous bookshop specializing in Irish history, had seafood for lunch, walked by the river with its locks, and of course visited the museum. It had mounted an exhibition on the Congested Districts Board, the first government institution to take on Irish rural poverty energetically, and there were reproductions of the now archival articles John Millington Synge wrote for the Manchester Guardian about the people he and his illustrator, W.B. Yeats’ brother Jack, had interviewed and portrayed on their travels.

Wednesday, 4 September: It was Connemara today, a bleak peninsula of mountains and moors and lakes that reminded me of the Lake District in England. We first visited a national park and were taken on a guided walk by a ranger who showed us among other things different varieties of heather and another peat bog. The Connemara horses, supposedly descendents of Arabs on board a ship of the Spanish Armada wrecked on this coast, stayed out of view. The native animals we were shown were all stuffed but they gave us a sense of the local environment all the same.  

Our next stop was Kylemore Abbey, a nineteenth century fairytale castle, a little like those that Bavaria’s King Ludwig was fond of building in his fine landscapes. Around 1850, Mitchell Henry, a Manchester doctor and industrialist, had visited Connemara with his young wife on their honeymoon. This was just after the region, one of the poorest in Ireland, had lost a third of its population in the potato famine and then suffered a cholera epidemic. The couple fell in love with the wild romantic landscape. Henry bought the land and built the castle in 1867. He planted a park and a walled garden with 21 glass houses and later, after the untimely death of his wife, built a Gothic church there in her memory. He employed about 300 workers from the area in the construction phase and gave ongoing employment to many. He paid them well, built a school for their children, and had windows put into the houses of his tenants for healthier living. In 1893 he pioneered hydroelectric power, thereby reducing his electricity costs to one fortieth of what they had been. For many years Henry also represented the district of Galway in Parliament, determined, it would seem, to do his share to make good the damage English pride, bigotry and greed had inflicted on the Irish over centuries. He was not the only charitable Englishman. We were told that during the famine an English Quaker couple had come to nearby Letterfrack to devote their lives to helping the poor. In 1920, after the Henrys had left and the next owners had also departed, a community of Irish Benedictine nuns, who had lived in exile in Belgium until their convent was destroyed in WWI, were able to buy Kylemore and turn it into an abbey. Until recently they conducted a boarding school for girls there. 

Thursday, 5 September: We were picked up from our Galway hotel by a local driver this morning and taken along the coast to Rossaveal, from where we caught the ferry to the largest of the Aran Islands, Inishmore, along with hundreds of other tourists. We walked the twenty minutes to our hotel with a group of American scholars who were going to share our introductory talk. It was given not by the local poet and singer we were expecting, but by a man called Cyriel who seemed to have more to tell us about the island on which he had grown up than could ever fit into half an hour, even at the pace he goes. What Cyriel talked about was not, as we might have expected, an age-old and unchanging traditional island culture, but change, constant change. In distant geological times the island’s land mass had been off the African continent; then the movement of plates pushed it north. Perhaps as recently as 500 years ago, he claimed, the island was attached to the mainland and in a few hundred years a developing rift through Inishmore will most likely break it in two. The population of the island, he said, had come from all over the world: from the Black Sea, Egypt, the North African coast and Spain, though probably never from continental Europe. (I had read somewhere that the mythical Fir Bolgs were exiled to Inishmore by the Tuatha de Danann, but this was not Cyriel’s story.)  The Irish and above all the Irish Islanders were always a seafaring nation. They still traveled a lot, he himself had lived in many countries, but they eventually came back to the island. Life for the Aran fishermen, he told us, had always been tough and unpredictable; young and old men drowned, and their families had to cope. In anticipation of such a fate, fishermen always wore their heavy Aran jumpers, knitted in their sculpted family patterns so that when their bodies were washed up, usually in distant Donegal, their families could be informed. Cyriel answered our question as to how Aran people had coped in the recent recession by telling us that he, like all the others, works at many jobs: he is an artist, he helps unload the ferries, he works as a teacher and he drives tourist buses or pony carts when there is demand; whatever needs doing, he is there to do it. Living on the island has always been tough, he says, for like the Burren, of which it once was a part, the island is covered with slabs of limestone. They have to be broken up with balls of granite and then cleared away into walls before “landmaking” can begin. That is a laborious process of carrying first sand, then kelp, then sand, then kelp up to the newly cleared site, till after months a patch of arable soil has been created. From the Stone Age till now, many thousands of kilometers of walls have been built from broken rock in this manner. So why do people seek out such a hard life? They still follow, Cyriel told us, the tradition of the white martyrs; at one time there were probably about forty monasteries on Inishmore. They adopted the Coptic tradition of the desert fathers rather than the traditions of the Roman Church. The island has always attracted people who want to get away from the endless “troubles” of Ireland, but also live a life of hard work and uncertainty that will challenge them to prove themselves. Though Inishmore (the name means large island) is surrounded by the wild Atlantic, it is also warmed by the Gulf Stream and as a result plants from every part of the world, from the tropics to the arctic, grow wild in the cracks between the rocks. The island contains several Iron or Bronze Age forts like the superbly constructed Dun Aengus with its rare chevaux de fries fortification and the Black Fort, both situated right on the edge of high precipitous cliffs.  Dun Eochla, in turn, is on the highest point of the island and there is Dun Eoghanachta too. We should also visit the well preserved ruins of an early Christian settlement known as the Seven Churches; a hermit’s beehive hut is another relic from the past. And there are sacred wells dotted throughout the island to which the islanders still do pilgrimage. Many believe in their healing powers.

After a chowder for lunch, some of us went for a walk along the walled lanes. Many of the laboriously ‘made’ plots have been allowed to run to weed, some are too small to be of much use, others provide grazing pastures for sheep, cattle and horses. In one of them there were upturned currachs, boats with a colander-like construction covered with tarred canvas. We came across wayside monuments for young men who were the victims of British soldiers: “Pray for the soul” of whoever it is, they all say. Later some of our group bought Aran jumpers in a particularly well stocked shop in Kilronan where we are based; there you can get not only the machine knitted ones sold everywhere in Ireland, but beautiful hand knitted jumpers as well. The wool is from Australia these days.

In the evening we had dinner at the Ti Joe Watty restaurant, where there was live music. We were then dropped back to our hotel which had even better live music, played by the three young Mulkerrin brothers, twice all-Ireland prize winners. Padraig, Eamon and Sean, who is only fourteen, use a range of instruments: concertina, tin pipes, guitar and violin among them, and they sing. Sadly, I missed Sean’s Irish dance at the end of the night.       

Friday, 6 September: I went for an early walk along the bay this morning After breakfast we then hailed a minibus driver, expecting him to be at our service till further notice. But like Cyriel, he needs to fit as much work as possible into a day. Michael is an elderly man who had been a fisherman all his working life; lately, however, the French have edged Ireland out of the lobster and seafood market so he has had to turn to other work. We eventually agreed on a pick-up time and in the course of the day we then did get to see Dun Aengus, which was quite a walk, the Seven Churches, the end of the fourteen kilometer long island with its drying lobster nets, a seal off a beach frequented by seals and other sights on the tourist list. One of our group had asked to see the sacred wells and Michael agreed to take us. Up on the ridge we got out and followed a narrow path through weeds and scrub, climbing over stiles on several stone walls. We then came upon a small hole in the path, roughly secured by stones; it turned out to be the well that cures eyes. But Michael urged us to go a bit further to a well that cured all ailments, and Rouna and I followed him as the threatening clouds started to dump their rain in a sharp, lashing shower. The second well was a little larger and close by some overgrown ruin. Michael told us to scoop up water and then crouched down on the lee side of one of the walls to wait out the rain while Rouna and I ran back and got wet to the bone. We were then dropped at the hotel and changed into dry clothes.

Once dry, I decided to walk alone up the steep hill to the Black Fort by the edge of the perpendicular sea cliffs at our end of the island. Up on the ridge the ground was still paved with unbroken slabs of limestone but there were little gardens in the cracks and they probably contained those plants from many regions of the world Cyriel had mentioned. As I walked back down the hill, wishing I could transfer the benefit of that healing well to a young friend struggling with cancer, I noticed a tiny patch of rainbow over the bay. I focused my hopes on a full rainbow and, to my delight, I was able walk down the hill with a perfect double arch ahead of me all the way. This is without doubt a magical island!    

In the evening we had the lobster dinner which one of our group had arranged. A fisherman had been sent out specially that morning.

Saturday, 7 September: We left by the earliest ferry and found a new, quite delightful bus driver John waiting for us at Rossaveal. He took us back through Galway and then north into the rain. We caught just a glimpse of the spire of Knock pilgrim church to which planes full of the faithful are flown for healing each day. Lunch was at Waterford Hotel in Sligo, Yeats country. Afterwards, just a short way up the road, we had a lecture by Stella Mew of the Yeats Society on the poet’s family connections and on Irish politics of the time. The Yeats family even has an Australian link; everyone in Ireland seems to have a link with Australia. We stopped briefly at rainy Drumcliffe under Ben Bulben where Yeats is  buried in the old churchyard. We then had to drive on past Donegal through hilly country dotted with tiny half collapsed famine houses to the village of Glenties. The family hotel where we are put up is also the village pub and the harvest festival is on this weekend. There was live fast Irish music after dinner.

Sunday, 8 September: We were in Donegal early and our guide Anne Leonard was waiting for us in the deserted town. She told us she wonders why there has been so little work for guides lately; Rouna suggested that stingy tourists were probably letting bus drivers take over that role. Anne went on to lament that great numbers of unemployed young people were leaving the district again for places like Australia, as in the bad old days. The population had now declined so much, it had to be boosted with non-Irish people. Poles and Lithuanians are prominent.

Anne walked us down towards the bay, pointing out the low islands at its mouth from which the famine ships once set sail for America or Australia. We moved on to the ruins of a Franciscan monastery by the shore; it was where a famous history of the Irish people, The Annals  of the Four Masters,  was written in the 1630s. But the monastery was sacked so many times that the monks eventually moved to quieter Drumcliffe.

The town square, known as the Diamond in these parts, has recently been renovated with European money. European money has also bought a sight-seeing boat for tourists which was, however, unmanned today. On a walk by the river that flows through the town, Ann pointed out a forbidding house that people call the Orange house. Nobody had ever seen movement there but everyone felt threatened by it, she said. We had a tour of the castle which the ruling O’Donnells left in 1607 during the “Flight of the Earls”; the Irish Earls had hoped to get military help from Spain to vanquish Cromwell and his Protestants. When the O’Donnells fled, the English Brooke family took over the castle.

Yesterday we had asked John what “fairy forts” were. He was kind enough to enquire locally and was given directions to the closest one. The narrow road took us up to the top of a hill where piles of rock suggested a prehistoric fortification, a dun. Apparently fairy forts must not be interfered with. At Sligo we had been told it was Yeats’ bad luck that the digging of his grave disturbed such a fort. Can the dead suffer bad luck?

We drove on to Killybegs. It was the source of the beautiful floral Donegal carpets in Dublin Castle and is still a busy fishing village as well. Hotel Tara was the only place open for lunch; it was overcrowded with guests from a wake. But the salmon we eventually got was excellent.

We now drove up a narrow, bumpy and winding road to the spectacular Slieve League sea cliffs, at around 600 meters the highest in Europe, molded mountains that change their colors with the light and drop steeply into the Atlantic.

In Glencolumcille on the northern side of the peninsula we met Paddy Gillispe, a name that means “son of the bishop’s servant” he told us; but as he is short in stature he is known to all as Paddy Beab, the little. Paddy took us first to the church, a Church of Ireland, but he said they had always been generous to him. The English Lord of the region was apparently also generous to his tenants during the famine years. A stained glass window over the altar reflects his attitude for it depicts Christ letting the children come to him.

In the churchyard with its dignified Celtic crosses you could distinguish the hastily dug graves of the famine times. We were shown a trap-door that opened to a tunnel beneath the cemetery where in the 7^th century the monks would hide when their monastery was once again raided and burned by the heathens.

Glencolumcille is named in honor of Ireland’s second patron saint, the “dove of the church” Columcille, also known as Saint Columba (521-597). He came from a prominent Donegal family; his direct ancestor had been a High King of Ireland. Columcille founded several Irish monasteries but we were told that he made Glencolumcille his base. He then got into trouble because he copied a Psalter belonging to Saint Finian,  intending to keep the copy. When St. Finian objected, the king commanded him to return it. (The first copyright ruling). Columcille refused and a battle ensued in which 4000 men were killed. This probably much simplified story was repeatedly told to us to emphasize the importance of written documents to the early Irish Christians. In punishment, Columcille was exiled. He then went to the island of Iona and founded a monastery there which became a great place of learning and central to the Christianization of the Gaelic tribes of Scotland.

Paddy showed us a Turas or pilgrimage stone beside the church that was part of the pilgrimage route the Saint had inaugurated. It was engraved with Celtic symbols. As a boy, Paddy had taken part in barefoot pilgrimages in which each of several such stones was circled three times in silence while the pilgrim said three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and one Creed. It is not unreasonable to presume that the purpose of this ritual was to somehow integrate the Celtic past into the new Christian faith.

Paddy then accompanied us on a drive along the beautiful coast with its fine beaches, pointing out a Martello tower, one of a number that had been built in the early 19^th century in case Napoleon invaded. When we returned to the village, we were also shown six prehistoric dolmens, graves between 3000 and 4000 years old, the largest made with 20 ton stones.

Paddy was in no doubt that the mythical early Irish settlers could be identified as coming from specific areas on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the Tuatha de Danann, also know as the fairy people, definitely from Egypt. The Celts, with whom the Irish identify so strongly, did not arrive before 500 BC at the earliest and so could not have built these graves.

On our way back to Glenties we passed through Ardare and dropped in at Eddie Doherty’s shop. Although it was Sunday evening, Eddie demonstrated the hand-weaving skills that had created the beautiful tweed cloths and garments he sold there to people like us.

There was a harvest ball at our Glenties Hotel in the evening with the women wearing grand ball gowns but we did not participate.

Monday, 9 September: We drove to Derry this morning through fertile agricultural country. It was a surprise to hear that Britain had not wanted the poorer lands of Donegal, traditionally a part of Ulster, to be included in the Northern Irish state. In Derry, which is called Londonderry across the border that it adjoins, our guide Tommy met us. Derry was the first Irish town to be selected in 1613 to receive so called “plantation” immigrants from England and Scotland. They were brought in to take over the lands of which Catholic landowners had been dispossessed. (Our guide did not use the word “plantation” so that I initially got the impression he was talking about developmental aid.) Since London merchants organized the migration, the town was renamed Londonderry. There is apparently still legal controversy about this name. Our tour began at the 1890 Neo-Gothic Guild Hall. The first exhibit there is a statue of Queen Victoria in white Cararra marble. Its hands are broken and we were told that an IRA bomb had catapulted it onto the street. But all the damage it could do was broken hands and a few chips. (Republicans could presumably interpret the loss of hands as the cessation of English meddling.) In the large assembly rooms of the Guild Hall the London merchants and their escutcheons are depicted on stained-glass windows, as is the story of the Apprentice Boys who alerted the city when Catholic King James II tried to invade in 1689. The town’s walls, built by the London Merchants in 1618 to protect their investment, are still intact and have never been breached. But King James’ Siege of Derry, during which a third of the town’s population died of starvation and disease, took a heavy toll all the same.

We then walked along the walls. From there we could view the city from a detached distance, in particular the Catholic Bogside quarter down the hill where three large murals on the gable walls of houses commemorating Catholic martyrs could be seen. The first was of a schoolgirl shot on her way home because she was carrying a suspicious briefcase.

Derry was another of the places where Saint Columba, the city’s patron, founded a monastery but the cathedral named after him was built much later by Protestants.

Once our tour of the wall was over, we had a quick look at a historic emporium in the centre of town; but its wares were not enticing. John our driver then insisted that before we go we must walk across the new Peace Bridge, designed by Wilkinson Eyre and opened in mid 2011, which winds across the wide River Foyle . Till recently, the river’s opposite banks represented opposite sides in the political struggle but with the Good Friday Agreement in place this is hopefully no longer the case. Derry has just been awarded the UK City of Culture designation, which may help it to create a new peaceful image for itself.

Tuesday, 10 September: Today’s drive took us first to the Bushmills Distillery where the difference between the making of Irish whisky and Scottish whiskey was demonstrated, and then to the Giant’s Causeway with its spectacular basalt columns. Our guide tried to interest the children of the group in the old legend of the two giants. The Irish giant Finn MacCool once built this causeway to Scotland (where there is actually a similar matching geological formation) to challenge the Scottish giant, Benandonner to do battle. But when he saw the size of his rival coming across the straits, his courage forsook him. His wife, however, has a good idea. She tells him to dress as a baby and lie in the family cradle. He does that and when Bennandonner arrives and sees this enormous baby he can only assume that its father must be of truly monstrous size. So he flees back to Scotland destroying the causeway behind him. The children are unimpressed by such nonsense but an adult could deduce something about Ireland’s self image from the story: On this small island you just can’t get by without kissing the Blarney Stone when you are in trouble.

After lunch, our driver drove us along beautiful coast roads until it was time to take the freeway to Belfast, where we are put up in the central Jury’s Inn Hotel. We were invited by the leader of an American scholarly tour group to attend Professor Bill Rolston’s lecture on the political murals of Northern Ireland. Rolston has been photographing such murals for many years and has just published the fourth volume of Drawing Support. Northern Ireland’s often giant murals, many of them on the gable walls of houses, allow a nuanced picture of the emotions, arguments, historical interpretations and political trends in this long and bitter struggle.

Wednesday, 11 September:  Our driver John, who is leaving us this morning, came and told us he had been burgled last night and a lot of his personal property including his GPS had been stolen. He was such an empathetic, knowledgeable and thoughtful man that it is quite upsetting to think that this was his reward.

After breakfast, we took a taxi to see the murals of Belfast at first hand. Our driver was prepared to chat, telling us that he had grown up in a mixed marriage. His father was a Catholic and his Protestant mother had originally refused to marry him. But he was able to prove to her that her own grandfather had been a Catholic, a carefully kept family secret. However, though his parents personally were able to reconcile across the religious and political divide, they still had to make decisions as to where to live and where to school their children, for in Belfast there are only Protestant or Catholic areas and Protestant or Catholic schools. In the whole of the city, he said, there was only one interdenominational school and that was posh and expensive. So whatever choices his parents made, it invariably involved enmity and persecution from one side or the other. It was simply impossible to live in Belfast without being drawn into the Troubles. One of us asked him where the many Polish Catholic immigrants now working in Ireland lived. Anywhere, was his answer, it is not about religion, it is all about politics and they are not stigmatized by that. In the area he took us to there is still a long high wall separating off the Catholics and they still lock the gates at night. Belfast has always been a working-class city and the suburbs we saw looked run down and damaged. Their saving grace is their murals which are everywhere; it is in the murals that cautious attempts at reconciliation are tested and the identity and dignity of a culture is preserved.

In the afternoon we all went to the huge, multi-storey waterfront Titanic Experience Exhibition. Its interactive exhibits are aimed at a fairly naive audience. All the same, the exhibition was an eye-opener for me because I had not realized how many people in this city had worked on the liner and what breadth of skills they had developed to create its structure, its machinery and its high-class interior and then organize its servicing and provisioning. When the ship went down, it took with it many people from Belfast working in the service industries; but its sinking also destroyed a communal project that an entire city had proudly and successfully worked on over many years.

    

Tonight there was an hour or so before dinner to find a bookshop and get Seamus Heaney’s wonderful translation of Beowulf. Ireland’s latest Nobel Laureate, who grew up in the Ulster countryside, died just a few days ago and the papers have been full of moving tributes and farewells. His last words were to his wife, telling her not to be afraid.

We then had our last dinner together at the nearby Crown Bar and Restaurant. You grow fond of people with whom you have shared so many impressions. In the morning we will then take separate taxis to the airport to catch our various flights.

Notes on Irish Christianity[1]

Silke Hesse

The Roman Catholic Church grew out of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

That had stood for order, peace and universal values under a single “god-like” leader. After any initial conquest, a relatively small amount of coercion was usually able to maintain its hold. 

The Roman Empire eventually collapsed because 1) citizens became too comfortable, prosperous and greedy, so the taxation system no longer worked. 2) Dynastic leaders were not up to the task of constant visionary renewal. And 3) there were new outside pressures from the great migrations of Indo-Germanic peoples into Europe.

I am tempted to put forward the following theory:

The Catholic (i.e. universal) Church, as for example Saint Augustin saw it, was conceived as a re-embodiment and improvement of the Roman Empire.

It too was to be a system to unite disparate peoples under one set of values without otherwise interfering too much with their cultures.

It was to be subject to the absolute authority of a non-dynastic leader, the Pope, chosen on his merits, but now celibate and thus free of family pressures.

It was to have the same lingua franca as the Roman Empire, namely Latin.

Members would enjoy citizenship of the Church where before they had been citizens of the Roman Empire.

There would be non-violent coercion through the sacraments which the faithful would believe could alone assure eternal well-being and which were controlled and could be withheld by the church.

These sacraments had to be predictably available and independent of the personal merits of the individual priest in charge of them, so a ruling was made to that effect.

Men’s fear of punishment could be transferred to a hell and a purgatory in an afterlife, in preference to torture and dungeons, except where the absolute authority and unity of the Church was questioned. In the case of heretics, terrible forms of torture and death then became accepted practice.

There would be discipline as in the Roman army: hierarchical structures, obedience, a culture of the sacrifice of the individual for the community as a whole, pride in coping with hardship, and an ethic of martyrdom.

The suppression, exclusion and control of “feminine” values that were associated with nature and not subject to the man-made laws and decisions of the Church was considered crucial. Feminine values included procreation, care of the physical person with food and drink, healing and comfort, and the avoidance of warfare. In the new Catholic Church, women could only be included if they lived an “unnatural” life of celibacy, physical hardship and withdrawal from society.

The ideal of woman, which could not be suppressed completely, would be made available through the transcendental figure of Mary, also conceived as non-sexual.

The growth of the Church Empire was to be brought about by a combination of persuasive conversion, conquest, political agreements and a high birthrate, the latter the “mission” of women.

This re-conception of the Roman Empire at a time when the wider European world was collapsing into chaos, was brilliant and by intention benign, largely designed by the first great psychologist of the Christian era, Saint Augustin. Once established, the regime of the Church did create fairly good order in Europe for a time. And many, though by no means all the teachings of Christ fitted into that scheme quite well.

But it was a dangerously one-sided culture that excluded and repressed many things, in particular, all that was feminine.

In the view of the Catholic Church, the sole purpose of sexuality was to increase the constituency of the Church.

This new “Roman Empire” used religion for its own political ends, much as its predecessor had, suppressing individual intuition and vision, personal conscience, the ability to adjust to real life situations, and human personality with its fruitful variety.

Though it proclaimed peace as its ideal, it was a fortified peace that did not rule out violence.

And it was still an institution based on hierarchical power with inadequate restrictions on the potential abuse of such power.

Though attempts were made in medieval Europe to create a dual system of political and religious power working in tandem, the Church was never willing to relinquish its worldly role, leaving it vulnerable to the accusation of abusing its religious role.

What could a legitimate religious role have entailed?

The Church could have encouraged a search for values appropriate to any specific age and then embodied these values. (Our age, for example, gives higher priority to a naturally fulfilled life than earlier ages did. Celibacy is no longer a widely admired value, either among the clergy or the wider community, and that can lead to problems of abuse.)

It could have championed individuals and countered social injustices.

It could have drawn attention to the ultimate unknowability of the Divine and consequently shown interest in and respect and tolerance for all humankind’s diverse religious attempts to approach the Divine..

It could have asked philosophical questions about the purpose of life.

It could have shown the respect for life demanded by the Ten Commandments.

It could have helped wherever help was needed.

It could have modeled an ideal community.

At various times the Church did try to do many of these things but there was always a conflict with its political role that interfered with the purity of its design. As a result many modern people are disillusioned with religious institutions.

Can a Christian Church not built on the model of the Roman Empire be imagined?

Early medieval Ireland was the one country in Europe never colonized by the Romans.

It had the advantage of being a society in which Druidic wisdom and learning were highly advanced, meaning that complex mythologies, rituals and laws and their thought-provoking interpretations were available to the people. And Ireland was, on the whole, a well controlled country under strong-man kings who were in close touch with their constituencies. But it was a country that still suffered from a warrior ethos of strength and honor and armed contest, now driven by intoxication rather than meaningful purpose, a way of life no longer appropriate for settled modern man. Ireland at the time was also a country in which there was little discrimination between men and women. In the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Roman Empire was collapsing and Saint Patrick began his mission, Ireland was ready for the new ethos of Christianity. And it was in the unusual position to receive the Christian message at a time when it was hardly influenced by the as yet developing Roman Catholic Church.

Ireland’s great missionary, Saint Patrick, who had spent sixteen years of his youth as a shepherd slave in the countryside, had had time to observe the culture and understand what was needed. When he returned after the necessary years of study, he went round to chieftain after chieftain making treaties with them. It seems that these natural leaders of the people could easily be made to appreciate the advantages of a change of culture and in only a few years Ireland was almost uniformly Christian. In tandem with the political system of chiefdoms, but not in competition with it, Christian abbeys or settlements developed, typically around a notable saint or leader who had usually spent years as a hermit and had no political ambitions. These early abbey communities included men and women, married and unmarried people. Saint Brigid, a contemporary of Saint Patrick, was the abbess of a convent that seems to have included monks. In early Ireland, women were not excluded from leadership in the church.

Moreover, the heroic ethos of pagan society was not, as in Rome, replaced with the “red” martyrdom of valiantly endured torture and death, but with the “green” martyrdom of subsistence amongst the hardships nature imposed, or later with the “white” martyrdom of heroic exploration of the Creator’s world in its hitherto unknown and inhospitable reaches. It would seem that Saint Brendan and his monks travelled through the frozen seas as far as America. Saint Kieran, we are told, lived alone in the woods for many years with wild animals for his monks before he founded the monastery and metropolis of Saighir Chiardin. And Saint Kevin heroically stood for days in the freezing waters of Glendalough to declare his unwavering Christian commitment.

The early Irish monks immediately understood that their oral Druidic culture could be extended by means of the written word and that books were a great treasure. Their writers and copyists made no distinction between the works of the ancients, biblical and theological texts, the mythologies and songs their druids had so faithfully handed down over the ages, and historical chronicles. They knew of no censorship. For them, everything that human experience and imagination had contributed to an understanding of the world was of value. After European culture had largely been destroyed by the barbarian hordes, it was the Irish copyists who rescued it and returned it to the mainland. It is significant that one of Ireland’s three great patron saints, Saint Columcille, committed his great sin, which gave rise to a battle in which 4000 men fell, by not giving up a book he had copied without the permission of its owner. In punishment, Columcille was exiled from Ireland. He proceeded to found a monastery on the Scottish island of Iona which became, with its many subsidiaries, the greatest centre of early Christian learning of the time and the bearer of the Christian mission to the Celtic Picts and Scots of Scotland.

Legend tells us that Saint Patrick enjoyed the company of the ancient heroes of Irish Celtic myth, heroes like the giant Caeilte whom he asked for a “well of pure water from which we might baptize the people of Bregia, of Meath, and of Usnach.” Eventually Patrick even baptized Caeilte and his followers and in parting he said: “By me to thee, and whatsoever be the place – whether indoors or abroad – in which God shall lay hand on thee, Heaven is assigned.” By some interpretations the Celtic cross, a combination of cross and circle, points to the merging of Christianity with the pre-Christian cults of the circle that included the sun, the moon and the snake, in other words the merging of feminine cults with the masculine, sword-like cult of the cross. The illustrations of the famous Book of Kells also make much use of snake symbolism. The legend that Saint Patrick drove all the snakes of Ireland (Ireland never had snakes) into the sea obviously makes a statement that denies such merging.

Joseph Campbell points out that the “heresy” of Patrick’s contemporaries, Pelagius and Caelestius, both apparently natives of Ireland, was perhaps indicative of views held among the early Christians of Ireland. He sums their teachings up under the following headings:

1. That Adam would have died even if he had not sinned.
2. That the sin of Adam injured himself alone, not the human race.
3. That newborn children are in the same condition in which Adam was before the Fall; corollary: that infants, though unbaptized, have eternal life;
4. That the whole human race does not die because of Adam’s death or sin, nor will it rise again because of Christ’s resurrection;
5. That the Old Testament Law, as well as the New Testament Gospel, gives entrance to heaven; and
6. That even before the coming of Christ there were men who were entirely without sin. (p.465)

These teachings are probably closer to what many modern Christians are willing to believe than traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. And they seem closer to the spirit of Irish Christianity too. Today there are theologians who believe they can prove that the ideas of Pelagius were never at odds with the spirit of Christianity. It could be suggested that Augustin and the Roman Catholic Church felt they needed a doctrine that required a firmer rejection of Paganism and more of the coercive power of threats, such as the withdrawal of sacraments or the fear of hell-fire, to subdue the turmoil of homeless and often starving nomadic intruders entering the settled territories of civilized Rome. There is no reason why dogma should not be read as political policy.

Perhaps unfortunately, Irish Christianity could not long withstand the influence of  the Christianity of post-Roman Britain, which was more attuned to and therefore more directly influenced by the Roman Church. At the Council of Whitby, where the Irish Church subordinated itself to the English Roman Catholic Church, the issue at stake was the date of Easter which differed according to different calendars. In other words, what was on the agenda was the enforcement of absolute unity and subordination to a central authority. The Irish delegates probably thought, as we might today, that the date on which such a festival was celebrated was irrelevant.

To those who encounter Irish Christianity in its natural settings, or the reflection of this in e.g. James Joyce’s writings, it still seems to have a different ethos from European Catholicism. Large numbers of its members have always felt rebellious against the dictatorship of the Roman Church imposed upon them. In Ireland, Celtic ideas have even now not been discarded and there is often an underlying contempt for Rome’s suspicion of natural processes, its fear of women and its prescriptiveness that interferes with individual conscience. More recently Ireland, like so many Catholic communities around the world, has also had to cope with the shock of its many abusive and very un-Christian clergy.

Like the Roman Empire and like the ideological dictatorships of the twentieth century, the Roman Church believes that human nature, which has always been a force for both good and bad, is best controlled with coercive prescriptions and the ideal of unity. The doctrine of original sin is a Roman doctrine. It can, however, just as validly be argued that human nature comes into its own and is most creative, productive and humane if it is given the greatest possible freedom to explore its potential. That is the view of today’s democratic societies. They can be seen as the logical outcome of the Protestant Reformation that discarded the Roman Church with its dogmas and called on people to explore their consciences. In Ireland, the Roman and the Protestant Churches are today trying to overcome enmities that have existed for centuries. If Irish Christianity had, however, been able to go its own way, which had become clearly defined after three centuries of un-Roman religious practice, the Christian world would have had a third and possibly better model to follow.

Notes on Aspects of the Struggle against English Colonial Dominance in Ireland

Silke Hesse

The Irish History of Invasion:

Over the millennia, from 7000BC, Ireland was invaded by many different groups of people.

Mesolithic hunter-gathers and Neolithic and Bronze Age builders of massive stone graves were among the earliest.

According to mythic tradition, Irish history began with five settler groups. They were the Milesians, probably Celts who had perhaps come from Scythia via the Iberian Peninsula to displace the legendary Tuatha de Danann (perhaps from Egypt), the Fairy People, who had in turn superseded the Fir Bolg and the Fomorians. Some early invaders may have been pirates from the African coast. And fairly late, between 500 and 100BC, the Celts, the vanguard of the Indo-Germanic tribes migrating westwards through Europe, invaded, perhaps from more than one site on the continent. Most of these groups fought, settled, moved on, merged or died out as they did everywhere during that age of migration. It is not possible to reconstruct those times accurately.

The Celts had also come to England but were there pushed to the west into Cornwell and Wales by a group of Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.  Scotland was settled by the Picts and Scots, who were also Celts.

Then the Romans arrived and incorporated England into their Empire until that collapsed in the fifth century AD. But the Romans never reached Ireland. During the 9^th and 10th centuries the Vikings raided Scotland, Northern England and Ireland. In Ireland they eventually settled as traders and builders of towns like Dublin and Limerick.

 In 1066 the Normans conquered England and introduced a fourth language after Celtic, Latin and Germanic, namely French. A century later the Anglo-Normans were invited in to help an Irish chieftain against his tribal enemies and decided to stay in the country. This led to the Pope recognizing the English king as overlord of Ireland three years later in 1172. 

Colonization

Up to that time, each group of invaders brought different skills, among them seafaring and fishing, farming, trading and building. Initially the groups probably fought each other hard for land and resources but eventually learned to share them. Once the Anglo-Normans were involved, however, a form of feudal class system was introduced. In Europe, this was originally a system of reciprocal rights and duties, designed to facilitate life in a largely lawless society. But since feudalism fulfilled no real purpose in Ireland, it was perverted into a colonial system. In 1366, the Statutes of Kilkenny forbade marriage between Anglo-Normans and Irish, an early sign of an intent at colonial domination and a very un-Roman approach. Richard II’s attempt to assert control in 1394 had only limited success. But in the following century the Anglo-Norman Earls of Kildare took on the office of Lord Deputy for the English Crown. With Henry VIII’s Protestant revolution and his proclamation as King of Ireland by the Anglo-Norman Irish parliament, the Protestant-English takeover then became entrenched, even though by now many of the Catholic Anglo-Norman families no longer supported it.

Thus, in addition to the age-old distinction between cultures and languages there was now also one of religious faith and affiliation, though in practice Protestantism in Ireland was from the start a mainly political force. Its religious mission could, however, serve to legitimize colonial domination of the Catholic majority with their potentially dangerous loyalty to the Roman Church and to Catholic neighbors like France and Spain. What ensued was 150 years of warfare that ended with the Irish-Catholic defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

From 1622 onward, the English supplemented military force with a plantation program; British and Scottish Protestants were settled on the estates of evicted Irish landholders, forcing Irish loyalists onto ever more marginal land and into ever greater economic hardship. All the Catholic churches in Ireland were taken over by the official Anglican Church of Ireland, all monasteries were dissolved, and the Penal Laws were passed against Catholics. The laws of 1695 took away almost all of the civil, religious and economic rights of Catholics, including their right to own or lease property, to hold public office, to vote, to acquire an education or to worship in public.

From the late 18^th century onwards, many of these laws were then modified or even repealed. The Act of Union in 1801 made it possible for Irish Catholics to be voted to Parliament again, which now sat in Westminster, for the Irish Parliament had been abolished. This meant that the regular famines that resulted from an inequitable distribution of land and which culminated in the terrible Potato Famine of 1845-1849, were not a priority and handled with such negligence that the response amounted to genocide. Its hypocritical brutality certainly fuelled Irish determination never to be dependent on Britain again. While Irish religious persecution began in the century of European religious conflict and war and was partly fuelled by the political agenda of Rome, it continued far beyond the wars of the Reformation. Of course the era of nationalism that followed also saw the internationalist Church of Rome as its greatest threat.

In Ireland, Britain learned the tactics of colonial domination and obviously developed a taste for colonialism. Australian historians can hardly overlook the continued persecution or exclusion of Irish, Catholic and disadvantaged people that occurred in our country too. One wonders whether it inspired the ruthless suppression of Aboriginal culture and religion and the hypocritical neglect of starving indigenous people when their lands and waterholes were taken over by white settlers, a neglect that often amounted to a discreet but highly effective form of genocide. The approach was similar.

Modern British colonialism was a large-scale version of the sort of class system of which remnants still exist in England, a system in which the perception of a right to privilege is central. Though it builds on earlier feudal structures, it is an aggressively modernized version of economically defined dominance, suited to rewarding and facilitating commercial enterprise. In it fairness tends to be disregarded and any means effective in providing an advantage are legitimized in order to ensure the continued dominance of a clique of  people who consider themselves superior, irrespective of the value of their wider contribution to society. It was this class system that created the narrow, self-righteous, unimaginative, judgmental, bullying attitudes of the Victorian era. In English society the class system would eventually call onto the scene people with democratic, creative and charitable ideals and urges. They would form a rebellious counterweight to entrenched and officially sanctioned practices.

Irish-Protestant Writers: Between the Camps

In this context it is interesting to look at the contribution of the writers of the so-called Anglo-Irish ascendency, who grew up in Ireland but were of Anglo-Protestant stock, usually well to do and well educated, consequently not forced into partisanship either as Irish-Catholic victims or as English-Protestant aggressors, and at liberty to examine the situation in their country rationally and impartially.

The first to come to mind is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). He had initially tried to embark on a career in English politics but had soon realized that he would need to find other ways of making an impact. He retrained and became both a prominent Anglican cleric and a great writer. More than a century after his death Irish-British literature then took off. There came in quick succession Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), George Bernard Shaw (1856-50), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). Of  these, Shaw (1925), Yeats (1923) Beckett (1969) and Heaney (1995) were all awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an unusually rich harvest. Wilde enjoyed at least as much fame and international publicity as the Nobel Laureates did, but  eventually in the form of notoriety, persecution and humiliation. Synge, for his part, died young. He had spent much of his adult life in Europe but then sought out Irish culture in its purest form on the Aran and Blasket islands. These British-Irishmen were perhaps the most gifted of the British writers of the modernist period. James Joyce, their contemporary and perhaps the most influential modernist prose writer, had an Irish-Catholic background and does not quite belong in this group.    

Jonathan Swift wrote his most scathing attack on England’s treatment of the Irish, A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country,  in 1729, 34 years after the introduction of the repressive Penal Laws that followed upon William of Orange’s defeat of James II and the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. He begins: “It is a melancholy Object to those, who walk through this great Town or travel in the Country, when they see the Streets, the Roads and Cabin-doors crowded with Beggers of the Female Sex, followed by three, four or six Children, all in Rags, and importuning every Passenger for an Alms.” His modest suggestion is that babies be cheaply fed on mother’s milk for the first year of their lives and then sold by their mothers for meat. This, he argues, would provide money for the mother, decent food for the populace, particularly the wealthier people who can afford meat, and release from a future life of suffering for the child. He is firm that he is suggesting this remedy for Ireland only. “Therefore let no man talk to me of other Expedients: of using neither Cloaths, nor Household Furniture, except what is of our own Growth and Manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the Materials and Instruments that promote Foreign Luxury: Of curing the Expensiveness of Pride, Vanity, Idleness, and Gaming in our Women: Of introducing a Vein of Parsimony, Prudence and Temperance: Of learning to love our Country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our Animosities, and Factions, nor act any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very Moment their City was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our Country and Consciences for nothing: Of teaching Landlords to have at least one degree of Mercy towards their Tenants. Lastly, of putting a Spirit of Honesty, Industry, and Skill in our Shop-keepers, who, if a Resolution could now be taken to buy only our Native Goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the Price, the Measure, and the Goodness, nor could ever be brought to make one fair Proposal of just Dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it.” In other words, he suggests that the economy of Ireland is severely distorted by class-based profligacy. He is sensible enough to barely touch upon the punitive license that Protestant landlords have been given to exclude Catholics from the economy in the hope of annihilating all who had defied England and supported James II and their descendents as well. Instead, he proposes what one might facetiously call a sensible and kindly form of the genocide which the Protestant loyalists were in fact perpetrating, thus exposing the sentimental hypocrisy that disguised Britain’s policies in Ireland.

In his most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, Swift again inconspicuously identifies with the Irish by playfully assimilating their folk-tales of giants, “little people” and the flying hosts of the Sidhe, while depicting his hero as an English patriot. Gulliver gives glowing reports of the laws, practices and customs of his homeland which the rulers of the distant countries he visits strangely enough seem to reject as either inhumane or nonsensical. In the fourth book, human nature itself, as embodied in the Yahoos, is presented as irremediably barbaric compared with the natural virtue, good sense and dignity of the Houyhnhnms or horse people. At this point in his book, Swift seems to have lost faith in mankind. His entertaining and interesting stories contained much food for thought for all those who could have had an indirect or direct influence on English politics. But few of his readers seem to have been prepared to listen to his message while they were enjoying his stories!

Oscar Wilde who spent his productive life in London and not in the Ireland of his youth, had a wit that never failed him and a love of all that was unconventional, beautiful and extravagant. His conviction that art was to be pursued for its own sake, that stories must be newly invented, not retold, and that realist concerns were totally out of place in the artistic world do not, initially, suggest a man with a social conscience. But in his late essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” the vision of a good world is much to the fore. Wilde’s “socialism” that predates the Russian Revolution, is one in which individual possessions are kept at a minimum and shared by all. He has in mind a form of socialism that is totally devoid of authoritative prescriptions. In Wilde’s interpretation, the true meaning of Christ’s teachings is that each man has the duty and mission to be himself, completely and uniquely. This goal can be realized in many ways but among other things through art. In the Victorian world of conformity, where a person was expected to be like everyone else and behave like everyone else, anything that deviated from the accepted standard was deeply suspect. The Catholic Irish, their religion and culture, were among the casualties of such conformity, as were Wilde’s own homosexual desires. But if life is to reach its full potential, Wilde protests, all its possibilities have to be explored and ultimately accepted. Man has to become a “true Individualist”. Wilde lends himself to being quoted and his ideas are pithiest in his own words: “In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy [for the true Individualist] is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.” ”[…] the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men.” “The new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.” “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.” “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” “What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried, or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction .” “The proper aim is to try to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”  “Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well behaved. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.” But charity, Wilde believes, is not the way to help them: “…in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. … Charity degrades and demoralizes.” It prevents people from going out and finding their own solutions; it makes them “welfare-dependent”, a word much used in present-day Australia to describe the malaise of Aboriginal people. To flourish, people need to be themselves completely. And being that, they will be an inspiration to others too. As Wilde sees it, the entire culture has to change if social progress is to come about. This is not an immediate or practical solution but one in tune with his age of radical revolutionary thinking.

George Bernard Shaw, a friend of Wilde and a Fabian socialist, picked up and reworked some of these ideas in his play Major Barbara, written five years after Wilde’s death. This is its story and argument: Lady Britomart, a member of upper class society, had married the gifted foundling Andrew Undershaft, who is fabulously rich due to his efficient management of the arms factory he inherited from his adoptive father. Society never likes being directly involved with such dirty businesses as the manufacture of armaments, so the Undershafts had a rule that the firm had to be run by a foundling. The money, of course, that could be earned in this industry was always most attractive. Lady Britomart rejected her husband once their three children were born but he had supported them over the years, as was his duty. When the play opens she has, however, just decided to make contact with him because her children, who have never earned a penny in their lives, will need more money to establish themselves in society once they are married. Sarah and her brother are content to continue living the lives of spoilt parasites. But the intelligent and passionate Barbara has gone in the opposite direction. She has joined the Salvation Army and made it her mission to help the poor for whom the Army provides meager meals on condition that they repent formidable sins (which they tend to have to make up because in the eyes of the rich the poor are always morally inferior) and that they loudly confess their faith in the Christian doctrine of a good God even though they can no longer believe in. It is an approach perfectly in tune with the values of polite society. The money for this charitable work is provided by industrialists such as Barbara’s father, the munitions manufacturer Undershaft. When Barbara realizes this, she leaves the Army in protest. But a visit to his industrial empire with its emphasis on the safety of the workplace, the dignity of work, the welfare of the employees, beauty of design and the care of nature, makes her change her views. It is decent work, not charity and preaching that the poor need. And the conundrum of munitions manufacture? Should armaments be sold only to the “good”? Undershaft is adamant that the manufacturer has no right to meddle in politics by refusing his wares to those who are not of his nation’s party. And Barbara’s fiancé enlightens her further: “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. This power that only tears men’s bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men’s souls.” When Shaw wrote his play the world was about to enter a period of righteous world wars and massive and brutal utopian projects that involved industrialization on a grand scale. It has since, of course, been conceded by most that wars and utopian politics create far more problems than they solve and ought to be abandoned. But Shaw’s implied suggestion that the Irish problem too, that was at the time being sympathetically investigated by the Congested Districts Board (active between 1891 and 1923), was better solved by providing useful work to the poor than by offering or imposing charity, was pertinent then and remains valid. 

William Butler Yeats was another writer who came from an established Anglo-Irish family. He spent his youth in Sligo, London and Dublin. In London he wrote the beautiful poem “The Lake of Innisfree”, “innis” meaning “island” in Irish and “free” being an English word:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

While it is a poem of yearning for the countryside of his childhood, there is an island by that name in Sligo, it is also a program that Yeats then fulfilled. This involved a return to things simple and natural, and it involved a nurturing of the freedom of the small island on which he was born, an island where two languages were spoken, often in combination, that both needed to be heard. The founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin then gave Yeats a platform from which he could help the ordinary people of Ireland rediscover their culture, not just as archaic mythology or superstition but as an indigenous system of values suitable for a modern age and substantial enough to found a nation upon. It is worth looking at a few of the 26 plays in his Collected Plays to see what he was trying to tell his audience. All but one of them were performed at the Abbey.

The Countess Cathleen is set in a time of famine. Father and son, Shemus and Teigue, have decided it is better to earn money by devilish means and sacrifice the insubstantial soul, which probably doesn’t even exist, than to starve. They sell their souls to the demons disguised as merchants. Mary, the wife and mother, refuses to be a part of this bargain and dies of starvation. At this time the young Countess Cathleen, the heiress of an absentee landlord with vast properties, returns to her childhood home. There she sees the suffering of the people and is determined to help with all she has. When tricked into believing that she has lost everything, she decides instead to sell her beautiful and expensive soul to the merchant devils so she can feed the people and prevent them thus losing their own souls. The angel receiving her soul after death reassures us, however, that “The Light of Lights, looks always on the motive, not the deed, The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.” There are four main messages in this play : 1.The children of absentee landlords, who have had the benefit of the sort of education that makes a person compassionate, must return home and help. 2. People have a right not to starve, even when religious morals suggest they do not. 3. True religion is embodied in an ethics of love and helpfulness, not suffering. 4. Modern day evil takes the form of financial exploitation, which drives people to desperate measures. Famine is thus an economic problem, to be solved by economic measures.

The Land of Heart’s Desire tells of Mary, Shawn’s young wife, who is bored and unsatisfied in her primitive surroundings where there is nothing to nourish her imagination. She turns to an old book about fairies that she finds in the rafters. Her mother-in-law decries her laziness while the priest and the men of the house tell her that as a married woman she can no longer expect to have a life of her own and her restlessness will disappear once she has children. She, however, though hesitantly, chooses to abandon the world of bourgeois and church values to go to a land where joyfulness and imaginative values flourish, where “the lonely of heart is withered away”, where even the old are fair and even the wise are “merry of tongue”. There is no need to be frightened of the much maligned fairy world; even women are entitled to choose the life they want to live.

In The Pot of Broth, the farmer’s wife, the mean and greedy Sibby, refuses traditional hospitality to the tramp who comes to the door. The Tramp gets his due by tricking her into believing that he owns a stone that can cook a fine broth (albeit with her ingredients). Her fair-minded husband realizes what is going on and says nothing. The beggar for his part is careful not to take more than his liberal due.

The Green Helmet shows us the superiority of the heroic ideal that the legendary  Cuchulain represents. The mythical Red Man chooses him over King Conall and Leary who have dishonestly broken a pledge in order to avoid death. He says: “I choose the laughing lip/ that shall not turn from laughing, whatever rise or fall/ the heart that grows no bitterer although betrayed by all/ The hand that loves to scatter; the life like a gambler’s throw”. Cuchulain is what Australians might call a larrikin hero.

The Dreaming of the Bones tells of a young fugitive from the Post Office battle for Irish independence who asks a stranger and a young woman he meets on a bleak hillside to help him hide. This is desolate country haunted by lost souls. It turns out that the couple are Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, the 12^th century King of Leinster and his lover who called in the Normans to help them avoid the punishment of exile imposed on them. It is Dervorgilla who introduces herself and her lover as “that most miserable, most accursed pair/ who sold their country into slavery; and yet/ they were not wholly miserable and accursed/ if somebody of their race at last would say, ‘I have forgiven them’.” But this is the one thing the patriot, with his narrow nationalist values where even legendary love means nothing, will never be able to do, for it was this act that ended up causing the centuries of Troubles in Ireland. He answers: “O, never, never / Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven.”

The Only Jealousy of Emer shows Cuchulain’s much wronged wife Emer beside the dying hero. She has had the magnanimity to call his young mistress Eithne Inguba to his side. And faced with the choice of relinquishing him to a Woman of the Sidhe or releasing him, she does the latter, though she knew that the dying hero would call for the arms of Eithne Inguba, her rival. True love, the play tells us, is prepared to give up the beloved if it is in his interests rather than insisting on ownership and inviolable marriage rights.

There is a certain simplicity to Yeats’ plays but they are intended for simple people, people whose ethical instincts have for centuries been interfered with by a doctrinaire and self-serving Roman Catholic Church. By drawing his examples from the myths and legends they were familiar with, Yeats gave the Irish back their heritage in a purified and usable form.

John Millington Synge was the first of the modern Irish writers to realize that it was necessary to meet and get to know real Irish people in their own natural surroundings if one wished to understand them enough to help them regain their self-esteem and confidence. And more than that, you had to learn to speak their language to understand how it had modified and changed the English they spoke so that they were only seemingly using your language. Synge, who also travelled for the Congested Districts Board reporting to the Manchester Guardian, then spent the better part of five years living with the locals on the primitive Aran islands, sharing their lives and learning to feel at home in their language. He eventually published a detailed diary of his observations and experiences. Synge also stayed on the Blasket Islands and in County Wicklow. The plays he wrote for the Abbey Theatre were psychological studies of people living in a pre-modern world, rather than the moral sermons Yeats produced. Synge understood how women felt, women who had again and again lost husbands and sons to the sea and were eventually left with a household of females, unable to support themselves adequately in this harsh life with its entrenched rules and customs. Their sense of tragedy was not the impassioned protest of Greek princesses addressing callous deities, but the exhausted resignation of people for whom, realistically speaking, there had never been any way of life that could have led to happiness. That is the story of Riders to the Sea.

Synge’s comedy Playboy of the Western World caused riots when it was performed  in Ireland and the United States. It tells the following story: In a primitive and isolated farm cottage a young woman is awaiting her marriage to a young man for whose cowardliness and unthinking obedience to the priest she has little respect. A disturbed fugitive turns up at the door. When pressed, he confesses in terror that he has just beaten his niggardly and despotic father to death. To his amazement not only his hostess but all the young and old women of the area now see him as their hero, a strong man with the courage to do something about the dictatorial authority they all suffer from in their lives. They all want to marry him. This unexpected adulation causes the shy and awkward young man to excel in the games being put on by the village next day and his status as hero rises still further. Unfortunately, however, it emerges that the beating had not quite killed the father who has meanwhile also taken to the road to haul his son and slave back home. When this is revealed, the unsuccessful murderer suffers an instant and shameful loss of prestige. He decides that he will have to do the deed again more thoroughly. But his father is too tough and it is now this heroic survivor who impresses the fickle women. The young man is no longer welcome. In the end he has to accompany his father back home without getting any of the women who had wanted him for their husband. But he goes in the knowledge that he is a young man who will only grow stronger with the years while his father an old man who can only grow weaker. So by the laws of nature he will be the winner in the long run. The simple story gives deep insights into the mentality of a rural Irish society in which women and the young traditionally have nothing to say. Reading between the lines, the play makes it obvious, however, that Irish women have far more entrepreneurial spirit and far more energy and wit than their men who are all weaklings, drunkards, gamblers or exploiters. You need to understand such things when you take it upon yourself to help the poor, as the people of the Congested Districts Board were.

Without betraying their artistic standards, these young writers found a place for themselves from where they could contribute to the struggle of the Irish people for dignity, justice and a life worth living.

Other Contributors:

James Joyce writes about Irish people living between the dictatorship of Catholicism and the beauty of a natural life. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus stands for the contorted and conflicted position of the indoctrinated but rebellious Catholic caught between the Church he hates and loves and humanist values. Stephen is far too belligerent for his own good; he is also too easily tempted to drown his sorrows in drink. And he is too doctrinaire to fulfill his mother’s dying wish, even though, paradoxically, the doctrine he stands for is a protest against doctrine. Moreover, he is in the grip of lust rather than love when he meets women: a patron of brothels racked by guilt.

Leopold Bloom, the Jew, on the other hand may not be virtuous by bourgeois standards but as a humanist, a caring, loving human being, he cannot be faulted. And his adulterous wife Molly recognizes this and feels free to fully enjoy her lover without ever feeling guilty towards her husband, who knows about the other man but avoids meeting him for simple reasons of tact and decency. The Blooms are rare people but Irish society as a whole is far more like Dedalus, a society of pugnacious, lustful, righteous and unkind men who try to escape their problems through alcohol. That is what Roman Catholicism has done to the Irish people. This is something only a person who was brought up an Irish Catholic could have written about.

In Samuel Beckett’s plays, in turn, we find a deep compassion for the people who have been thrown irreversibly on the scrap heap of life, like so many of the disadvantaged Irish in the “congested districts” were, people for whom there was never any hope. He teaches us to see the humanity, the comedy and the tragedy in meaningless, even sub-human lives. These days, it is a message that seems to have reached the dementia wards of our nursing homes with their kindly nursing staff.

Seamus Heaney, the most recent Irish Nobel Prize Laureate, succeeded in drawing attention to the beauty and richness of the simple lives of rural people like the Irish farmers he grew up with, people who cared for the earth and the landscape they loved but were for so long looked down upon by the “better classes”.

What the Irish writers of the twentieth century produced was socially relevant, enlightening and useful and it was also beautiful and wise, all at the same time. While adversity may destroy those it strikes, it can heighten the creativity, humanity and understanding of the compassionate who take up their cause and are determined to bring about a better, fairer world. It is an awkward lesson to learn that a polarized society, in which injustices cry out to be rectified, can also nurture the best and most creative in people.

  

   

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[1]  This draft essay is particularly indebted to  Joseph Campbell The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Penguin Books, New York, London, Ringwood et al.., 1964 etc. ISBN 0 14 00 4306 3

and  Thomas Cahill How the Irish Saved Civilization. Hinges of History. Hodder and Stoughton, London 1995. ISBN 0 340 63787 0.