Table Of ContentIRISH CULTURE AND NATIONALISM, 1750--1950
IRISH CULTURE AND
NATIONALISM, 1750-1950
Edited by
Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandie
and
Pauric Travers
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-17131-6 ISBN 978-1-349-17129-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17129-3
© Oliver MacDonagh 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-32858-3
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 17 5 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1983
ISBN 978-0-312-43595-0
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Irish culture and nationalism, 17 50-1950.
I. Ireland - Civilization - 18th century - Addresses,
essays, lectures. 2. Ireland - Civilization - 19th
century - Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Ireland -
Civilization - 20th century - Addresses, essays,
lectures. 4. Nationalism - Ireland - History - 18th
century - Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Nationalism -
Ireland - History - 19th century - Addresses, essays,
lectures. 6. Nationalism - Ireland - History - 20th
century - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. MacDonagh,
Oliver. II. Mandie, W. F. III. Travers, Pauric.
DA947.3.I74 1982 941.507 81-21292
ISBN 978-0-312-43595-0 AACR2
Contents
Prefaae vii
Notes on the Contributors ix
1 Burke, Ireland and the Empire 1
J. C. Beakett
2 Problems Common to both Protestant and Catholic
Churches in Eighteenth-century Ireland 14
E. M. Johnston
3 Popular Recreation in Nineteenth-century Ireland 40
Etizabeth Mataotm
4 Charles Gavan Duffy in Australia 56
J. E. Parnaby
5 Irish Culture and Nationalism Translated:
St Patrick's Day, 1888, in Australia 69
Otiver MaaDonagh
6 Irish Nationalism and the British Empire in the
Late Nineteenth Century 83
H. V. Brasted
7 The Gaelic Athletic Association and Popular
Culture, 1884-1924 104
W. F. Mandte
8 Bernard Shaw's Other Island 122
A. M. Gibbs
9 Imagination and Revolution: the Cuchulain Myth 137
Patriak Rafroidi
10 Finland, Norway and the Easter Rising 149
A. R. G. Griffiths
11 The Priest in Politics: the Case of Conscription 161
Pauria Travers
v
vi CONTENTS
12 The Irish Republican Brotherhood in Australia:
the 1918 Internments 182
Patriek O'Farrell
13 Grafting Ireland onto Australia: some Literary
Attempts 194
Gerard Windsor
14 Yeats and the Anglo-Irish Twilight 212
F. S. L. Lyons
15 The Anglo-Irish and the Historians, 1830-1980 239
G. C. Bolton
16 Poetry and the Avoidance of Nationalism 258
Vineent Buekley
Index 280
Preface
All the essays in this book originated as papers delivered
to a conference on 'Irish Nationalism and Culture,
1750-1950', held at the Australian National University in
Canberra in November 1980. The conference was jointly
sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre at the
University and the Australian Historical Association. It was
organised by the editors of this volume.
The main purpose of the book (as of the conference whose
offspring it is) was to help to define and establish, as
well as to contribute to, Irish cultural history. 'Culture'
was conceived of in a broad sense, to include popular as
well as high, politics and sport as well as art, myth and
religion. 'Irish' was also generously interpreted. Three of
the papers dealt with Australian manifestations of Irish
nationalism, two with its implications for the British
Empire, and one . with its Scandinavian counterparts and
derivations. Both these extensive usages seem well-justified
to the organiser-editors, and indeed indispensable if yet
another narrow, isolated strip is not to be added to Irish
studies. A secondary, but far from negligible, purpose of
the book is to further Irish studies in Australia. The
generating conference was the first such to be held there
and this book is the first joint-fruit of the Irish research
being carried out in Australia - as well, of course, as
fruit of the work of the conference's distinguished visitors
from Ireland, Professors Beckett and Lyons.
Our very warm thanks are due in the first place to the
Humanities Research Centre and the Australian Historical
Association for both financial help and general
encouragement, and to the staff of the Humanities Research
Centre, and most of all Miss Mary Theo, for their great
organisational endeavours. We are also deeply grateful to
the Irish Cultural Relations Committee for its support of
the undertaking. Finally, we must pay tribute to the heroic
labours of the secretarial staffs of the History Department,
Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National
University and of the Canberra College of Advanced
Education, in typing various versions of papers at
vii
viii PREFACE
extraordinary speed and eventually mastering 'the new
technology' by which this book has been produced.
The editors and publishers wish to thank the following who
have kindly given permission for the use of copyright
material:
R. Dardis Clarke, for the poem 'The Trial of Robert Emmet'
by Austin Clarke.
Seamus Deane, for the poem 'After Derry, 30 January 1972',
originally published in GraduaZ Wars by the Irish University
Press.
Dolmen Press Ltd, for the poems 'When I Am Angry' from The
Rough FieZd by John Montague, and 'The Young Fenians' by
Padraic Fallon, included in the Faber Book of Irish Verse.
Faber and Faber Ltd, for extracts from the poems
'Punishment' and 'Summer 1969' from North by Seamus Heaney.
Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., New York, and A. P. Watt Ltd,
on behalf of M. w. Yeats and Anne Yeats, for the extract
from the poem 'Sixteen Dead Men' by w. B. Yeats, from
CoZZeated Poems of W. B. Yeats.
Canberra O. MacD., W.F.M.
JuZy 1981 and P.T.
Notes on the Contributors
J. C. Beckett is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen's
University, Belfast. He is the author of A Short History of
Ireland (1952), Confrontations (1973) and The Anglo-Irish
Tradition (1973).
G. C. Bolton is Professor of History at Murdoch Univer
sity, Western Australia. His books include The Passing of
the Irish Act of Union (1966), Britain's Legacy Overseas
(1973) and A Fine Country to Starve in (1972).
H. V. Brasted is Lecturer in History at the University of
New England. He is the author of articles on Indian
nationalism, and is undertaking comparative research on
Indian and Irish nationalism.
Vincent Buckley, poet and critic, is at present living in
Ireland on extended leave from the University of Melbourne,
where he holds a personal chair in the Department of
English. Among his recent publications are The Pattern and
Late Winter Child (1979).
A. M. Gibbs, Professor of English at Macquarie University,
New South Wales, is the author of Shaw (1969) and The Art
and Mind of Shaw (1983). He is now working on a two-volume
study, Shaw: Interviews and Recollections.
A. R. G. Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in History at Flinders
University, Adelaide. He is the author of Contemporary
Australia (1977).
E. M. Johnston is Professor of History at Macquarie Univer
sity, New South Wales. Among her books are Great Britain
and Ireland 1760-1800 (1963) and Ireland in the Eighteenth
Century (197 4).
F. S. L. Lyons is Professor of History at the University of
Dublin, a Fellow and sometime Provost of Trinity College,
Dublin. Among his publications are Ireland since the Famine
ix
X NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
(1971), Charles Stewart Parnell (1977) and Culture and
Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (1979).
Oliver MacDonagh is W. K. Hancock Professor of History at
the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National
University. His publications include Ireland: The Union and
its Aftermath (1968, rev. edn 1977), Early Victorian
Government (1977) and The Inspector General, a life of Sir
Jeremiah Fitzpatrick (1981).
Elizabeth Malcolm recently completed a doctorate on the
nineteenth-century temperance movement in Ireland at Trinity
College, Dublin. She is a graduate of the University of
Sydney and contributed an essay to a volume of essays in
honour of T. W. Moody, Ireland under the Union (ed. F. S. L.
Lyons and R. A. J. Hawkins, 1980).
W. F. Mandle is Head of the School of Liberal Studies at the
Canberra College of Advanced Education, and sometime Reader
in History at the Australian National University. He is the
author of numerous articles on sports history and of Going
it Alone: Australia's National Identity in the Twentieth
Century (1978).
Patrick O'Farrell holds a personal chair in History at the
University of New South Wales. His books include Ireland's
English Question (1971), England and Ireland since 1800
(1975) and The Catholic Church and Community in Australia
(1977).
J. E. Parnaby is a Senior Lecturer in History at the
University of Melbourne. She has published several articles
on Australian nineteenth-century political history and is
currently working on a biography of Gavan Duffy.
Patrick Rafroidi is Professor of Modern and Contemporary
English Literature and Director of the Centre d'Etudes et de
Recherches Irlandaises at the University of Lille 3. During
1980/81 he held a Visiting Fellowship in the Humanities
Research Centre, Canberra. Professor Rafroidi is Chairman of
IASAIL, general editor of Cahiers Irlandais and Etudes
Irlandais, and author of a two-volume history, Irish
Literature in English (1980).
Pauric Travers has recently completed a doctorate at the
Australian National University on 'The Last Years of Dublin
Castle: the Administration of Ireland 1890-1921'. He is a
graduate of University College, Dublin, where he was awarded
