ireland: a nation reborn in an angelic womb (how art can transform an entire society)

they just kept making art ❤️

#2: Ireland's Imperial and Religious Legacies

“I don’t want to kill a 20-year-old girl just because she’s a Protestant.” He let those words hang in the air for a moment while he looked at me.

I was sitting in a taxi beside an old veteran of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on one of Belfast’s famous and highly-recommended black cab tours. When he was just a boy, he told me, his Catholic home was destroyed by loyalist rioters, and he soon found himself a 10-year-old refugee. It was then that he was recruited by the Provisional IRA. Soon he was trained to use explosives against Protestants and British authorities.

“Where does your family come from?” he asked me.

“My great grandfather moved to the US from England just over a hundred years ago.”

“Ah,” he smiled. “So you have your own history then, don’t you Andrew?”

While explaining his own hopes for Northern Ireland to leave the UK and join the Republic of Ireland, he drove me along a lengthy “peace wall” that divides Protestants from Catholics. Citing the messages of peace and resistance that characterized certain artworks which adorned its sides, he eagerly compared it to the wall which helps keep Palestinians from moving freely between the West Bank and Israel. Then he nodded with great approval when I mentioned that I had been to Palestine. “Good man,” he said. He described his sense of solidarity, as an Irish Catholic victim of British imperialism and Protestant-led discrimination, with oppressed peoples everywhere. He took me into loyalist areas with big portraits of Protestant paramilitaries painted on the sides of buildings and British flags fluttering in the autumn wind. He explained that these men were glorified for having killed so many Catholics. We stopped by a memorial to numerous young Irish Catholic militants and protestors who had died in conflicts either with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British military, or the informal loyalist Protestant militias that terrorized their communities. Although still in the UK, it is the Irish flag that flies in those areas.

“We all killed people,” he said matter-of-factly. “Both sides slaughtered the other, just for being Protestant or Catholic.” He had mentioned the 20-year-old Protestant girl so callously, like she wasn’t theoretical. Like he’d done it before and didn’t want to do it again, but perhaps killing Protestant girls was a nasty yet necessary chore that would need another crossing-off later on.

“I hope Ireland can be united peacefully,” he told me.

I was only in Belfast for a few days, at the tail-end of a three-week trip in Ireland this past November. The conflict is recent history, and the UK’s departure from the EU is even more so, yet a cluelessness characterizes some visitors. In my Belfast hotel lobby, a man attempted to pay with Euros (which the UK, in any case, has never used). “We don’t take Euros,” the receptionist explained in an English accent. “No? What? Really?” The receptionist grinned briefly at his supervisor, like they’d been through this before. “Strange, isn’t it?” he mockingly asked the guest. “I think it’s because we are in the UK.” Startled, the man lingered at the desk. For a moment, he feebly extended his hand yet again with the Euros. “So, no Euros? Really?” “Sorry, mate.” Defeated, the man walked away with visible confusion and distress on his face.

But visitors to Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland, can perhaps be forgiven for having only vague ideas as to these conflicts and even borders. I was enthralled by the beauty in the fall of that city, where friendly locals repeatedly told me how blessed I was to spend a week there without any rain. I’ve often been warned about the weather in Ireland, although the country is stunning even with a gray sky. I felt so perfectly at peace simply sitting on various benches around St. Stephen’s Green, where a bust of the great Irish writer James Joyce inspired me to visit the local bookstores cluttered about the downtown area. I first visited the small branch of Dubray Books, where I bought two Sally Rooney novels. Then I peeked into Ulysses Rare Books, a small cramped shop with an impressive collection of old and original editions of great works in Irish literature. Finally, I repeatedly walked around in the gigantic Hodges Figgis. There I bought a copy of Diarmaid Ferriter’s excellent history, The Transformation of Ireland 1900 - 2000. I left with my mind full of elaborate schemes to read as much Irish history and literature as possible, and I unhesitatingly followed this calling over the next couple months.

To me, this was a literary culture that loves and celebrates the arts and creativity. If Ireland ultimately overcame the theocratic tendencies of its government, then this dynamism, which has always simmered despite the reprimands of the faithful, must take some of the credit. I spent hours each day seated on benches around Dublin’s beautiful parks - St. Stephen’s Green, Marrion Square, Iveagh Gardens - blissfully serenading my mind as I read Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People. I lamented the lack of space in my suitcase for all the literary anthologies I wanted to buy. A calm came over me between chapters as I would glance up at the ducks in the pond, the orange leaves still clinging to tree branches, and the people walking their dogs or strollers.

And at night in Dublin there is the unrivaled musical atmosphere of numerous pubs. Inside, local amateur musicians gather together with their instruments and vocal cords to play and sing for hours. There is a vibrant celebration of music as a soul-enriching hobby, as something that doesn’t need to be perfect to be beautiful. Some of these “sessions” are just for experts, but many are for beginners and intermediates as well, creating a welcoming ambiance that craves additional performers yet also feels completely fulfilling exactly as it is. Dublin seems to have chemicals in the air that flood my mind with fantasies about reading novels and poetry, picking up an instrument and learning it, writing a short story or a lyric, finding a song to memorize and sing even though I have no idea how.

I’ve met people who say after a few days there that they don’t like Dublin. That it’s ugly, especially in comparison to the legendarily ornate imperialist capitals of London, Paris, Rome, or Istanbul.

I sometimes feel sad for them, as if they missed out on what makes the city special. But this is usually mitigated by a shared appreciation for the alluring hikes in rural Ireland. While staying in County Kerry in the southwest, I embarked through Killarney National Park on the most beautiful 13.1-mile run that I’m ever likely to experience. Yes, I’m an American, so I stopped to take pictures of sheep. Hopelessly, I struggled to adequately savor the rich, fertile shades of green that surround the ruins of Muckross Abbey and its cemetery. I passed between two large lakes as I looped around the smaller one. These are flanked on either side by imposing mountains which reflect serenely off the soft surface of the water, which glimmers with a natural and pure blueness. I often found myself completely alone on long paths through orange fields, only to then suddenly be in the midst of late-autumn trees that stacked up the sides of the steep hills around me. At one point I gazed up toward the top of a mountain right beside me, only to quickly lower my head from a sense of dizziness. It’s no wonder that, according to Ferriter in The Transformation of Ireland, the earliest advertisements of the Irish Tourist Board emphasized the “primitive” nature of “life at Europe’s edge.”

It’s also in rural Ireland where one encounters the more sinister stories of misery under the pseudo-feudal rule of landlords and the British. This is where the most terrifying ghosts of Ireland’s past linger still, offering up immense contrasts with the country that greets tourists today. One such spirit, a “famine house” in Kerry, stirred up an immediate despondency inside me. A small rectangle of stone wall, low enough to peek over, was all that remained of what had been a whole family’s tiny home. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the small starving children barely able to keep walking beside their emaciated, dying mother as they left their house behind in the middle of the Potato Famine. Behind them were the well-fed constables who had dutifully executed the eviction. The spiritualizing horizon of hills and mountains could not have been any consolation. That was how life ended for thousands of human beings during the famine: evicted from their houses by landowners who had identified some more profitable use of the peasants’ plots. Beginning with that catastrophe in the mid-nineteenth century, so many people either died of disease and starvation or emigrated from Ireland that today, 181 years later, the country’s population has still not recovered to its 1841 peak of 8.2 million. Just recently, Ireland surpassed 5 million people for the first time since 1851.

The history of emigration, which occurred in large bursts all the way through the 1980s, reveals a country possessed by a religious nationalism which typically refused to acknowledge the economic and social problems that were causing people to leave. Even after independence, Ireland’s rural areas were chronically underdeveloped, persistently lacking the modern necessities of running water, electricity, and sewage. Many who migrated to Dublin could at best expect to live in a miserable, crumbling slum, the whole family crammed into one room. Yet as Ferriter documents in The Transformation of Ireland, it was not until the late 1940s that the Irish government finally attempted to systematically address the problems of emigration by establishing a Commission to investigate why people were leaving. Ferriter notes a Dublin Opinion cartoon from December 1949 which wrote satirically about the idea that there was any real mystery: “The Commission furnishes its report after having sat for five seconds. The people emigrate because they think they will do better elsewhere. They will return when they think they will do better here.” But others felt differently, seeing emigration as a moral or spiritual failure and viewing the quest for higher wages abroad as a fundamentally illegitimate national betrayal. It was heresy to believe the nation was lacking in some way. Ferriter includes a quote from one member of the Emigration Commission, an Irish journalist Aodh de Blacam. He promoted the delusion that there were plenty of resources and opportunities available to the young people who would choose to remain. He implied a moral failing of the emigrants:

So for lengthy periods, the promotion of equitable economic development to benefit those who stayed behind was often left off the table. To suggest there were very troubling local conditions causing people to depart could even be seen as an insult to the nation, which was doing just fine. Especially as this related to rural areas; at length, Ferriter describes the Irish idealization of the countryside, a bastion of religion and morality in contrast to the corrupting wickedness of the cities and other, less Catholic countries. An internal Irish government memorandum from the 1940s, dug up by the Ferriter’s meticulous research, described emigration as “simply an old and evil tradition in this country with its roots deep in our national history.”

Economic factors combined with rigid views on gender roles to drive many women in particular to leave. Ferriter points out great gender imbalances characterized the outflow in the “decade of the vanishing Irish,” with 1,365 women departing for every 1,000 men. He argues that it was widely considered to be a “national humiliation” for so many young women to be leaving. For the pious, it must have been both tantalizing and distressing merely to contemplate the looser sense of sexual morality these women might imbibe in countries like America or England. Not to mention a possible weakening in their spiritual commitment to Catholicism among fallen Protestant peoples. Ferriter discusses how thousands of these Irish women were eager to find not only sexual liberation and a coveted emancipation from profoundly pervasive gender discrimination, but also new economic and educational opportunities in more culturally progressive countries. Not to mention what they hoped would be more physically comfortable lives. So it is no surprise that it was often women’s organizations which highlighted the obvious solutions the out-of-touch men in government could not find. As Ferriter writes:

Today, a lack of piped water or electricity can seem like ancient history. The only time I encountered anything like this was in an open-air museum purporting to show what life was like in a typical mid-19th century village. The same place where I saw the ruins of a famine house. I also learned about it when touring the Titanic Museum in Belfast. The luxurious conditions in third class, such as running water, toilets, and coal-powered electric lighting, were unlike anything many Irish passengers had experienced at home.

Since the 1960s, despite a spate of renewed emigration in the 1980s, the population of Ireland has actually seen a substantial net increase. Dublin has gained an international and cosmopolitan feel, with several languages easily heard over the course of a few hours around the city. The Irish economy boomed in the “Celtic Tiger” years, lasting from roughly 1995 - 2007, with yearly growth of over nine percent from 1995 - 2000. In that time, new socioeconomic challenges obviously emerged, but Ireland became a radically more wealthy society than before. Demand for labor still attracts workers from across the European Union, while low taxes have lured multinational corporations from around the world, and EU funds have contributed to infrastructure projects. The high-growth years of the 2000s coincided with the peace brought about by the end of the Troubles, making it easy to feel very optimistic about the country’s future.

Granted, residual forces of an often disturbing history are still at work, as my “black cab” guide reminded me. The departure of the UK from the EU has brought forth the specters not only of a renewed push for a unified Ireland but also of border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. If such a thing happened, it would torpedo the Good Friday Agreement, which has secured a lasting peace on the island since 1998. Just last March and April, fears of a reunited Ireland sparked violent loyalist riots in Derry and Belfast. 

In this context of renewed Protestant fanaticism, it is worth remembering that the British parliament, just over a hundred years ago, had initially crafted a Home Rule law that would have left Ireland united. But many Protestants in Northern Ireland were so determined to avoid being ruled by the papist idolaters in Dublin that they organized into paramilitaries to ensure their counties would remain a part of the United Kingdom. It seems to me there must have been some economic motives as well, given that Belfast’s thriving industry, including the world’s largest shipyard, was fueled in part by the raw materials which British companies pillaged from their numerous colonial subjects. They succeeded in protecting their prized place within the British Empire, while Catholics in Northern Ireland went on to face decades of systematic discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public services.

“Did you see that guy’s head?” my wife quietly asked me. The history of British discrimination against Catholics is difficult to avoid when touring the country. We were exploring the grounds of St. Peter’s Church in Drogheda. Walking up to the display case, I carefully examined the shriveled but somewhat preserved flesh of St. Oliver Plunkett, a Catholic Archbishop whom the Protestant British killed in 1681. I glanced between the face in the paintings and the one behind the glass. As an atheist with a persisting Protestant prejudice, I do have an uncouth tendency to react mockingly to this kind of idolatry. And across the church was another relic, a piece of wood which the Church claims to come from the cross on which the Roman magistrates of Judea crucified Jesus. My natural doubts about the veracity of this led me to also wonder whether the head might be fake. Or rather, whether these remains might be someone else’s. But this man did look like the paintings. “Jesus,” I whispered, mesmerized by the 340-year-old face before me, “it’s really him.” 

The idea that Irish religious sympathies for Catholic Spain or France might incentivize the use of Ireland as a jumping-off point for the invasion and papal subjugation of Britain was a lasting fear from the viewpoint of what would ultimately be a Protestant-ruled London. Due to this, it was only natural to kill a bishop like St. Plunkett, whose crimes included a refusal to take communion with the Church of England as well as an alleged plot to aid in a French invasion on the backs of an Irish rebellion. From England’s strategic perspective, as well as from a doctrinal certainty that the Irish Catholics were not really Christians to begin with, the island and its people had to be very tightly controlled. Protestant settlers were brought in to dilute local customs, and remorseless discrimination favoring Protestants encouraged some conversion over time. Meanwhile, forts like the one I visited in the city of Cork were supposedly crucial for anticipating any Spanish or French attacks. There, in the “Elizabeth Fort,” forces loyal to King James II, the final Catholic King of England, had put up one last stand before they surrendered to William of Orange’s Protestant armies during the siege of Cork in 1690. But I learned on my tour that, under Protestant control, the fort’s canons were more or less permanently pointed at the local Catholic population.

I saw several portrayals of William of Orange in Northern Ireland, including one at Carrickfergus, the point where his forces initially arrived on the island. He looks in many of these statues like a Johnny Depp styled pirate. Unconcerned about the comedic appearance of their cherished hero, many northern Protestants still celebrate the pseudo-absurdist “Orange walk.” Each year on July 12, to celebrate William of Orange’s victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, they dress up in suits complemented with orange collarettes. Marching with banners and instruments, they seriously refer to themselves as “Orangemen.” Derry Girls, an excellent comedy on Netflix following the day-to-day lives of a group of Catholic teenagers in Derry during the 1990s, contains an amusing though somewhat frightening portrayal of this event. The girls are getting out of town ahead of these psychotically sectarian parades. Before escaping, their car is surrounded by crazed-looking, elderly Protestant fanatics.

It’s no wonder that the infamous decades of violence spanning much of the late 20th century, “The Troubles,” were not actually set off by an insurrectional plot for Northern Ireland to secede from the UK. Instead, large numbers of Catholics began marching peacefully for equal rights as British citizens in the late 1960s. Civil rights for Catholics was a step too far for the “Orangemen” and their ideological kin, many of whom eventually responded to these protests with violent attacks on Catholic homes and neighborhoods. Nor was the “public disorder” of constant demonstration much to the liking of British authorities. In response to the initial bursts of violent resistance, British security forces arrested large numbers of young Catholic men without any charges, vaguely claiming they were linked to the IRA. All this of course strengthened IRA propaganda, which needed simply to point out the obvious ineffectiveness of peaceful protest. Not to mention the ruthless damage caused by the imprisonment of so many young people.

Being quite opposed to the pretension of brutal imperialism to be a force for good, I am naturally inclined in my heart to say “fuck these stupid Orangemen” and support the idea of a unified Ireland. It all seems like the same old shit the British bequeathed upon nearly every continent on Earth. Nearly everywhere the British ever ruled, they left behind some combination of partition, ethno-religious tension, and hastily drawn borders, all of which have served to foment violent conflict for decades. In his essay “The Perils of Partition,” published in The Atlantic in March 2003, Christopher Hitchens gives a whirlwind overview of this unfortunate global legacy:

But I must acknowledge that even light shades of domestic theocracy might be only marginally better than foreign exploitation. It is at times surreal to contrast the thriving creative culture of Ireland against a historical backdrop of the Catholic Hierarchy’s suffocating societal domination. Leaders of the State regularly consulted with the Irish bishops, though admittedly without ceding formal control (a frustration for some fanatics). Clerics worked with groups like the Catholic Truth Society to push early on for tight controls over artistic expression, resulting in draconian censorship legislation. “I know nothing about films,” said the state censor James Montgomery in 1923, “but I know the Ten Commandments.” The prohibition of novels, plays, films, and poems - which included the banning even of some of the greatest works of national literature - presented an enduring challenge for the Irish artist and reader. Activists in County Mayo successfully organized around priestly leadership in the 1930s to have a Protestant librarian fired, perhaps for fear of the malevolent spiritual influence that the Trinity College educated woman might have. “Could a Protestant,” it was asked, “be trusted to hand out books to Catholics?” Catholic cultural influence was so powerful that sales of contraception were illegal until 1985, defenseless children and sexually compromised women were routinely shut away by church and state in terrifyingly abusive institutions without serious investigation for decades (many women fled to England to avoid this fate), divorce was not available until 1995, and the constitution deemed the life of the freshly conceived fetus to be equal to the woman’s until a 2018 referendum. Avoiding the political and cultural influence of the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities could have been a motivating factor behind some northern skepticism about the promised superiority of rule from Dublin rather than from London, maybe even especially among the religiously moderate. Then again, Catholics and Protestants in a repressive Northern Ireland did occasionally find common cause when it came to banning sexual movies.

Ah yes, the fundamentalists’ favored past time: monitoring, contemplating, worrying about, fearing, and secretly desiring the sexual activity of the fallen. Jesus himself may have been more concerned about aid to the poor, but not the Irish bishops. One fascinating point of emphasis in Ferriter’s The Transformation of Ireland is his many discussions of how local understandings of Catholicism (in contrast to certain Latin American priests oriented towards liberation theology and various evolutions of Marxism) consistently stood in the way of socioeconomic progress. Ireland was for decades a country with extreme issues of poverty. But movements to deal with this destitution frequently ran against the Irish bishops’ very narrow understanding of “Catholic social theory.” Which, according to them, basically meant the State should have nothing to do with family affairs. Many welfare schemes to support poor people, for example, were denounced by the Church as encroachments upon the sacred family unit, or else linked to the alleged godlessness of “socialism.”

Ferriter also discusses examples of how attempts to economically empower women were similarly resisted. This was because the woman’s ideal role, as had been enshrined in article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution, was to serve as a caregiver in the home. In fact, there was so much concern to preserve the ideal of a nuclear family headed by a penis-donning breadwinner that, from 1932 to 1958, married women were not allowed to teach primary school. If an experienced female teacher got married, she would have to resign. Often, to the obvious detriment of the quality of education offered many Irish children, she would then be replaced with a younger, less experienced, and often untrained single woman. That kind of employment discrimination against married women was widespread in Irish society. And these reactionary attitudes were quite prevalent, especially among the Catholic extremist foot soldiers of the IRA. Ferriter quotes one woman who describes her experience as an IRA operative: “As a republican woman if you died you were supposed to be a virgin on your deathbed, with a rifle in one hand and rosary beads in the other. The idea that a republican woman would have an orgasm was blasphemy.”

It is quite a relief to contrast that startlingly recent world, aspects of which must still linger in certain pews, to the modern Ireland portrayed in Sally Rooney’s incredible third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. The Millennial character Simon is an object of morbid fascination by his peers on account of being a believing Catholic with exceptionally progressive politics and a sexually liberated lifestyle. “You realize he goes to confession right,” one character texts another. “Like he literally tells his bad thoughts to a priest.” She calls him a “freak.” After visiting a church service with Simon, his companion Eileen writes to a mutual friend with a mixture of startled disbelief and admiration which perhaps captures increasingly incredulous attitudes among many Irish youth:

It must be said that Simon also might represent new ways in Ireland to use and interpret Catholicism as an inspiration for social progress.

Alongside cutting-edge novels like Rooney’s, the ideologically broad selection of nonfiction in Dublin’s bookstores is another indication of how far Ireland has progressed over the course of the past century. I saw books representing both republican and loyalist perspectives on “the Troubles” - and not just in Dublin, but in the epicenter of Belfast as well. This enriching literary liberalism is on the other side of a great gap with the Dublin of 1907. Ferriter shows how many Irish nationalists of that time prized certain fantastical notions of the noble Irish peasant, idealizing the often wretched life of the countryside as if it were a righteous paradise of a purer, more primitive Irish culture which was uncorrupted by the evils of modernity, British colonialism, and the English language. In this context, sensitive Irish nationalists were offended by the performance that year of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. It was claimed that the play had insulted the Irish nation and Irish “womanhood” by depicting Irish peasants engaged in offensive dialogue, violent crime, and a relative sexual bluntness, all of which reinforced traditional English stereotypes of the Irish. The offended hooligans sparked violent riots as they attempted to have the performance shut down. Similar unrest followed the play to America, where it was protested by Irish emigrant audiences. Such an outrageous reaction to a work of art showcased a dominant strain of Irish culture, one which was unwilling to accept or reflect upon even internally generated criticism, or to fearlessly face the troubled realities of rural poverty and underdevelopment. In that sense, an immature nationalism and a deep-seated sensitivity about the Irish identity was perhaps just as much to blame as was religion for both censorship and a reluctance to aggressively support rural economic development. “The reaction to the play,” writes Ferriter, “revealed huge ironies - the protestors physically assaulting the actors to prove, as some of them shouted, ‘We are not a violent people’.” As Edward Hirsch points out in his journal article “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh would be among the many Irish writers eager to debunk this tendency to romanticize rural conditions and mentalities, writing that his “childhood experience was the usual barbaric life of the Irish country poor.” And today, far more offensive materials can be found on Dublin’s shelves, while Playboy of the Western World is considered a masterpiece of Irish theater.

New literature and media emanating from Ireland testify to a dynamic society which the theocrats and other reactionaries could not keep stagnant forever, despite the intense power they long held over institutions and minds. There is a radical difference between the increasingly international, self-reflective, reforming, high-tech Ireland of today and the impoverished, exploited, repressive country of the past. Perhaps that is because all along, regardless of the clerics’ temporal domination or the legacy of British oppression, divergent minds like Synge were carrying on their aesthetic and intellectual efforts, whether in Ireland itself or abroad as emigrants, even in the face of strident ecclesiastical condemnations. And these determined creatives ultimately proved to be just as much a part of Irish culture as is the Catholic Church. While there are certainly still priests who yearn for a restoration of the old days and men who long to maintain tight control over women, and while the threat of violence still lingers in the background, the experience of Ireland over just the last century leaves me feeling inspired by the capacity of human beings to ultimately overcome the most deeply entrenched religious and nationalist fanaticism.