National Identity in Ireland

Tom Garvin

Issue 379, vol.95, Autumn 2006

Primordialism is associated with nineteenth-century romantic theories of nationality, going back to Herder in the eighteenth century, Fichte in the early nineteenth and a host of imitators later on. In the high period of European nationalism, monuments were commonly erected to remote historical or even mythical figures held to be early exemplars or even founding fathers of the putative nation. The Deutsche Ecke near Koblenz, a monument which celebrates Arminius/Hermann and his famous destruction of three Roman legions under the command of Varus in the first century A. D., was intended to celebrate a primordial continuity with the modern German nation. To the anachronistic joy of nineteenth-century Germans, Emperor Augustus in old age wandered around his palace on the Palatine Hill calling plaintively Vare, Vare redde legiones.(Varus, Varus, General Varus, give me my legions back again). Similarly, in the GPO in Dublin stands a marvellous statue of Cú Chulain, the Hound of Culain, dying upright in defence of Ulster against the fir Eireann or men of Eire; the nationalist logic behind the statue is somewhat obscure, as Cú Chulain seems to have been a very early partitionist, like all Irish of the time. Macpherson’s eighteenth century Ossian forgeries asserted a continuity between the modern Scots and the ancient Caledonians who allegedly heroically resisted the Roman invader; Ossian is of course, Oisín, son of the Irish solar hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill; the Scots pinched our whiskey as well. The Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo marks a six hundred year old battle held to be a founding event for Serbia; the area is Albanian and always has been. Small children in West Africa a generation or two ago read a French history for schools that commenced “nos ancetres les gaulois”.

Perennialism concedes that nationality has been created in historical times, but argues that many nations, if not all nations, have been around for quite a long time. Thus Denmark, it has been argued, has been around as a recognisable entity for a thousand years, England is perhaps a mediaeval creation, and France is a thousand years old. In the case of Ireland, Irish nationality is sometimes seen as dating back to the time of the Bruces, a time of dawning realisation that Ireland and Scotland were twin countries with a common external menace, the rising power of imperial England[i]

Modernism asserts that nationalism is a product of the modern world and is a creation of the rising industrial state, which rewrites and refashions historical narrative to assert the claims to independence of an “imagined community.” This community is sometimes seen as emerging unselfconsciously as a “natural” reaction to the forming of industrial society and its class structures, mass literacy, great cities and popular culture. Sometimes the creation of nationality is seen as conscious. History books, popular music, football leagues, international sport, armies, schools and universities are bent to the creation of collective identity in a way that is distinctly new and unprecedented. Much of the officially and popularly received national history of the country is, if not quite imaginary, very misconceived and romanticised. By and large, modernism has had rather the best of the academic debate in recent decades, due in part to the brilliance of argument of Ernest Gellner, much to the chagrin of some traditionalists. A reaction against the Gellnerian worldview is overdue [ii].

All three sets of theories have been used to explain the phenomenon of Irish national identity. Eighteenth century writers, and later thinkers in the tradition of Thomas Davis, asserted the primordial existence in Ireland of a Gaelic people or “race” which had had a great civilisation and which had also had great powers of absorption of foreign interlopers. Vikings, Normans, Welsh people and English people who came to Ireland rapidly succumbed to the superior power of Gaelic culture and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves” (Hiberniores ipsis Hibernicis). The ancient Irish were “a race as tall as Roman spears,” and that is why the Romans never dared to invade the sacred soil of the Emerald Isle; they were frightened of us [iii]. Perennialists, by contrast, have expressed a scepticism about the alleged Ur nature of Irish nationhood and some of them have suggested that Irish national identity dates from Geoffrey Keating, who, in the early seventeenth century, proposed, in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn that an alliance be forged between the Sean-Ghaill or “Old English” mainly Catholic descendants of the mediaeval Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland after 1169 and the older Gaelic peoples. This alliance would be aimed against the upstart Nua-Ghaill who had come into the country and taken advantage of religious privilege to take over much escheated land belonging originally to Catholic families. Keating was, it could be argued, inventing or reinventing an Irish nation on religious and descent principles. Other perennialists would probably plump for the Bruce hypothesis, by which the Declaration of Arbroath, declaring Scotland’s national right to independence in the early fourteenth century, as being a crucial event not just for Scotland but for Ireland as well. Modernists, on the other hand, have typically seen the Irish nation as a product of modern times, and, while acknowledging the collective experiences of the 1603 –1823 period as formative, see it as essentially the creation of Daniel O’Connell and Thomas Davis, the first mobilising the people for political action in the world’s first mass political party in 1823, the latter supplying them with a popular ideology and a raft of popular derring-do and militaristic songs and ballads. As O’Faolain put it, 150 years of history is quite enough for us [iv].

Popular nationalism, whether seen as very ancient or a modern phenomenon, is routinely seen as being related to what are sometimes termed ethnic markers. Geography, language, religion, social condition and “race” are the obvious variables. Civic condition (whether one is or is not a legal inhabitant of a given state with all the rights of a native) could be added to this list. In mediaeval Ireland, a sense of Ireland as a home to one ethnic tradition to the exclusion of others does not seem to have existed; the Gaelic Irish saw themselves as Gaelic in culture and not different fundamentally from the Gaels of western Scotland and the Isle of Man, who shared the same language and culture. The non-Gaelic speaking inhabitants of Ireland (Viking or Gaill and English or Sean-Ghaill) were commonly labelled na hEireannaigh (the Irish) in contradistinction to the Gaels, who lived in Ireland and Scotland as well as in the Isle of Man. An overall “Irish” identity does not seem to have existed. Certainly, Irish chieftains seem to have thought nothing of bringing in Scots-Viking foreign soldiers (Gallóglaigh) to serve them, or even to set up shop in Ireland on their own account. Gaelicised Norsemen became the progenitors of the Doyles, McLoughlins, Higginses, Tonras, MacSweeneys, Gallaghers and Galloglys. The Norse gave many words to the Irish language (long,pingin, scilling,geata) and named many areas and towns in the south and east: Helvick, Leixlip, Howth and Wexford, for example.

Tacitus reports an Irish prince showing up at Anglesey to invite Agricola and his legions over to Ireland in the first century, much as another minor chieftain, Diarmuid MacMurrough, invited the Anglo-Normans into the island in the 1160s because of a row over a woman [v]. Tacitus comments

The side of Britain that faces Ireland was lined with his forces. His motive was hope rather than fear. Ireland, lying between Britain and Spain, and easily accessible also from the Gallic sea, might serve as a very valuable link between the provinces forming the strongest part of the [Roman] empire. It is small in comparison with Britain, but larger than the islands of the Mediterranean. In soil and climate, and in the character and civilization of its inhabitants, it is much like Britain; and its approaches and harbours have now become better known from merchants who trade there. An Irish prince, expelled from his home by a rebellion, was welcomed by Agricola, who detained him, nominally as a friend, in the hope of being able to make use of him. I have often heard Agricola say that Ireland could be reduced and held by a single legion with a fair-sized force of auxiliaries; and that it would be easier to hold Britain if it were completely surrounded by Roman armies, so that liberty was banished from its sight.

A thousand years later, the Irish chiefs seem to have been willing to swear allegiance to that far-off Angevin king, Henry II. As the Gaels themselves put it, the Gaels were too busy fighting each other to worry too much about foreign interventions which could, after all, be used against the other (Gaelic) fellow; bhí na Gaeil i gcónaí ag troid eadarthú féin. Anglo-Norman attempts to stop the incomers adopting Gaelic customs, costume, language and property relations give evidence indeed of an anti-Irish nationalism of sorts, an “English-in-Ireland” identity which, in one form or another, was to resurface periodically as a kind of “middle nation” identity over the next millennium.

However, the conquest of the seventeenth century changed things for ever, and the common ruin of the Old English and the Gaelic septs after Aughrim’s great disaster “when the foe indeed was master” made the programme of Geoffrey Keating very apposite. Catholicism became virtually a proscribed religion, and the lion’s share of the land of Ireland fell into Protestant, commonly New English, hands. A gulf between the common people, who remained mainly Catholic, and a mainly Protestant ruling caste, grew up, much deeper and more bitter than similar class and status gaps in other feudal or semi-feudal countries. Although bonds of affection between master and man did undoubtedly exist in Irish rural society, it was relatively easy to regard the settlement as illegitimate and to agitate, not so much for its abolition (although a dreamy revanchism undoubtedly existed), but for resistance to the system’s modernisation. An entire rhetoric of nostalgic retrospection grew up in which Ireland would again be in the hands of the old Catholic lords and in which “beidh Eire fós ag Cáit ni Dhuibhir” (Kate Maguire will yet get Ireland back).This popular Jacobite sentiment faded in the eighteenth century, but was not always replaced by an enthusiastic loyalty to the Hanoverian Protestant dynasty. A more pre-political love of the land was another perennial theme, particularly among emigrants but also at home. Bán-chnuic Eireann O was no monopoly of the exile, and the love of the land became an obsession during the terrible years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a whole population engaged in a slow-moving and endless war for possession of ever smaller pieces of potato-ground in a Malthusian tragedy. The legitimacy of the joint British-Irish state was weak in Ireland, behind the facade of the Georgian glories of Dublin and the brilliance of Ascendancy culture. In the late eighteenth century, even the middle nation itself became restless, and increasingly came to identify itself with the Irish nation, often to the exclusion of the millions of subordinated aborigines around it.

There was a lot of political gunpowder around in eighteenth century Ireland, and the match duly was lit, in the form of a dual event: the American and French revolutions. The symbolism of the shot that went around the world and, some years later, the fall of the Bastille and the nations of Europe blossoming like flowers on the branches of the Tree of Liberty, representing in allegory the great international and revolutionary liberation of the peoples of Europe, quickly became the half-understood stock-in-trade of hundreds of local secret societies in many European countries, perhaps particularly in Britain and Ireland. In Ireland some of these local societies were to become incorporated in a general revolutionary conspiracy, the United Irishmen. The United Men, which started as a reformist society looking for annual parliaments and a semi-democratised non-sectarian propertied manhood franchise, became gradually more revolutionary in the 1790s under the influence of France and the clumsy attempts of the British at forcible repression.

The great rising of 1798 was organised by people who were fascinated by the ideas of the Scottish enlightenment and those of the American and French revolutions. However, the mainly middle-class leaders drawn from Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter backgrounds thought differently from much of the population, which had other priorities. In Ulster, the idea of the Rights of Man appealed indeed to many Protestants, as it did to many Catholics in the south of the island. However, behind the enlightenment rhetoric also lurked a conviction that the settlement of 1690 should be reversed or at least rectified. Some sectarian massacres took place and eventually the rising was put down with great brutality by a mixture of Irish Protestant, British and Irish Catholic troops. No one knows how many people were killed that summer; estimates range between thirty and fifty thousand, in a total Irish population of about four million. 1798 constituted an Irish Vendée, fittingly witnessed by Humbert, belated emissary of the French government and a dismayed witness also to the massacres of Cholet in the real Vendée a few years earlier. The killing was finally stopped by Cornwallis, horrified as he was by the bloodthirstiness of the Dublin government. Cornwallis saw the government as essentially genocidal.

1798 was remembered by the common people as a huge mistake, a bloody catastrophe which should never be repeated. It was this perception that gave constitutional politics, as represented by Daniel O’Connell and his entourage, its chance. It was only two generations later that the romanticisation and heroisation of 1798 led to a cult of physical force nationalism, portraying the rising as a gallant blood sacrifice which must be repeated by the descendants of the heroes. Collective memory was vivid in Ireland, but collective memory can be manufactured, and duly was by the nationalist propagandists of the increasingly literate Ireland of the late nineteenth century; interestingly, some percipient observers watched the cult of 1798 uneasily as late as 1898.

In the nineteenth century a series of revolutionary changes occurred in Ireland. Agriculture in early nineteenth-century Ireland was increasingly based on the potato, an easy crop to tend and a very productive one for foodstuffs. William Drennan, the Belfast patriot, ascribed to it Ireland’s spiritlessness and laziness: in Ireland

 misery sits, and eats her lazy root,

There ? man is proud to dog his brother brute!

In sloth, the genius of the Isle decays,

Lost in his own, reverts to former days ?

Through all, extends one sterile swamp of soul,

And fogs of apathy invest the whole [vi].

The pre-Famine subsistence agriculture was wiped out by the Great Famine of the 1840s; a million died, and another million fled the stricken island. The population crashed from perhaps nine million to seven, and eventually was to shrink to four million by 1900. After 1850 a semi-commercialised agriculture developed, helped along in part by land purchase and redistribution schemes of a penitent British government, large farms being bought up under a government scheme by Catholics in the 1850s, and small farmsbeing given on low rent hire-purchase to the rest of the tenants in the 1880s. In 1873, the land of Ireland was owned outright by about three thousand individuals or institutions; half of the land (the better half) on the island was owned by three hundred. By 1904, the land of Ireland was effectively owned by half a million farmers. The landowner system had been transformed, and for a long time afterwards, the small to middle-sized Catholic yeoman farmer became the idealised and vilified typical Irish social type. The second revolutionary change was education; mass education in the English language was made generally available, and by 1860 most of the population had become more or less literate in the English language; the Irish language’s long decline accelerated. The third great change was the Devotional Revolution which coincided with the time of the Famine. A newly English-speaking and literate population was subjected to a newly disciplined Catholicism, organised around the little kingdom of the Parish and rigidly controlled by a new, disciplined and literate clergy under the direction of Archbishop, later Cardinal, Paul Cullen. Because of the illegitimacy of the political order after 1690, the priest as leader of his people had hypertrophied into ethnarch status; bishops resembled tribal kings, and parish priests were kinglets in their little realms. The Devotional Revolution merely intensified, extended and rationalised something that had long existed. Irish national identity was further reinforced by the fourth great change, which was the political mobilisation of the great bulk of the population under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt through the Land League of 1879-1882. This mobilisation had been prefigured by the campaigns of Daniel O’Connell in the period 1823 to 1843. After 1879, rurality, farming and Catholicism became the mark of the true Irishman or Irishwoman. Town origins, Protestantism and even advanced education came to be looked upon covertly as being alien and as marks of the outsider. The Irish language was eventually grabbed as a mainly symbolic ideological claim to authenticity and aboriginal status. An alliance of Faith and Fatherland that was to last for a century was forged. The aftermath in the form of partition and independence is well known.

This alliance is now in its death throes a century later for various reasons. A deep reason is the inherent intellectual weakness of mainline Irish Catholicism as distinct from its very great cultural power. Mass education since the 1940s weakened its collective charisma, as it ceased to be a religion for simple folk and was challenged by a growing literate lay public. Ironically, its cosy partnership with the Irish state after 1922 in the long run did it great damage, as the structures of Irish democracy and the top-down authoritarian structures of the Church eroded each other. An authoritarian and secret power-wielding order finds it difficult to sustain itself in a polity where, despite stringent libel laws and a political culture which was traditionally secretive, cautious and even cowardly, authentic freedom of speech and thought ultimately existed. While the Catholic faith of most Irish people remains as healthy as ever, the leadership of the clergy is no longer universally accepted. Furthermore, the identification of Irish nationality with a theory of descent and common religious allegiance is gradually being replaced by something else.

To address what this “something else” might be, let me quickly sketch a comparative perspective. Since the early eighteenth century in Europe, there have been a series of attempts, stemming from the English, Scottish, French and German Enlightenments, to substitute humanist and/or scientific ideas for traditional religious and tribal loyalties as the basic unifying principle of human society. Communism, Fascism, neo-corporatism and nationalism were the principle candidates to replace the traditional order. Nationalism turned out to be the most successful competitor, in part because of its intellectual emptiness, which permits its marriage with older loyalties such as religion, with democracy and with various different economic systems. In Ireland, as in many other countries, it allied itself with a branch of the universal Church and bent its local representatives to its own purposes. Irish nationalism displays a strange mixture of tribal identity, religious sectarianism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism and liberalism. Nationalism in Ireland is as it is elsewhere: it is ideologically agnostic or promiscuous, and will jump into bed with anyone. It is going to persist as a dominant organising principle of political organisation for mechanical and practical reasons, even though the scientistic and historicist ideas originally underpinning it are decreasingly popular or even believable, at least in the West: nationalism as als ob philosophy.

The long-term winners in this debate appear to have been those hard-headed people the lawyers, whose concept of citizen (another idea with classical roots) offers only a secularised and emotionally unappealing substitute for the religious, linguist, historicist, communitarian, socialist or racist ideas of the past. Academic history, long an intellectual handmaiden of nation-builders, is in trouble because its role seems less necessary than it was, and the “death of history” in the sense of a lessened sense of the importance and immediacy of a sometimes mythicised past seems indeed to be occurring.

Into such a vacuum all kinds of strange forces, many of them not new at all, can move. The rise of an often anti-scientific fundamentalism in the Christian and Islamic worlds in the last generation reflects the weakening appeal of the Enlightenment’s secularist ideas of human community. In Ireland these secularist ideas were commonly blotted out by Catholicism, and the weakening of the Church makes us Irish pretty vulnerable to the new superstitions. As Chesterton remarked, he who ceases to believe in God can end up believing in nearly anything. Another change is the weakening of historicist styles of thinking, accelerated by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the demise of Marxism as popular myth. This affects historicist styles of nationalism also; no one speaks seriously of Ireland’s national destiny any more. Perhaps we are seeing not the death of history, as suggested by Fukuyama, but rather its return after two centuries of being enserfed by the purposes of nationalists and nation-states. Modern political theory offers us a powerful image of the political process as being an endless voyage on a world that is all ocean. The helmsman of the ship may dream of landfall, but that is all it is: a dream. He may even promise landfall to his crew and demand that they accept his claim, but there is no land; the parable denies bluntly the validity of any attempt to organise political life around some dream of perfect virtue or authenticity, whether nationalist or socialist. The events of the last twenty years make it an even more powerful image. Let us make do with citizenship, itself a noble and republican idea.

Tom Garvin is Professor of Politics at University College Dublin

Notes

 [i]        The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge: University Press, 1997

[ii]          Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983; Gellner, Nationalism, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997.

 [iii]         Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999 (originally published 1990).

[iv]      See Sean O’Faolain, King of the Beggars, London: 1938.

[v]       Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, 74-5.

[vi]          Vance, 99.