Hidden Ireland, Silent Irelands: Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor versus Daniel Corkery
The “Irish Ireland” culture from 1890 to 1960 tended to erect nationalist/nativist themes into so many barriers against perceived cultural and political threats from abroad : Irish racial purity was to be preserved against outside corruption. In the resulting isolationist climate, there could be little realistic discussion of social problems persisting into the mid-1900s : prisons, illegitimacy, T.B., slums, pawn-shops.
State censorship of literature was another symptom of the isolationism.
Sean 0’Faolain traced the beginnings of the isolationist mentality to Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland. As an escape from confronting the penury of contemporary peasant existence, Corkery was led to a flight of fantasy, to an idealisation – delusional on several grounds – of glorious times in a hidden Ireland of the past. As transmitters of culture, the “great houses” of the old Gaelic aristocracy (according to Corkery) surpassed not only the Planter houses, but the very universities of Europe. Even for its own day, however, the encomium of any of the major Munster Gaelic poets (reverenced by Corkery) to his patron’s largesse painted a false picture of prosperity and high living; it also had the effect often on later generations of inducting them into a dream-world of social passivity and silence.
0’Faolain tried to set the record straight in The Great 0’Neill and in his life of Daniel 0’Connell (King Of The Beggars) : Only 0’Connell offered the necessary leadership – he turned the people into protagonists of democracy (drawing his inspiration from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the English radicals).
Frank 0’Connor laid a similar burden of blame at Corkery’s door – but concentrated on Corkery’s dismissive attitude towards Brian Merriman’s extended poem, “The Midnight Court”. 0’Connor praised Merriman for forsaking any high style in favour of the spoken Irish of Clare, the expression of earthy sexuality (around marriage, inheritance, women’s rights) and the advocacy of people’s real-life concerns. He judged Merriman’s poem to be a perfectly proportioned work of art on a contemporary subject.
Mid-20th century, newly-independent Ireland was reaching back to the high-flown rhetoric. It was not ready for too much reality or for non-romantic accounts of traditional life : a series of extracts published by 0’Faolain from The Tailor And Ansty – an irreverent account of country life in Gougane Barra – fell foul of the censor.
Bryan Fanning lectures in the School of Social Studies, University College Dublin.
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