by Dermot Keogh
Gearóid Ó Crualaoich
This paper will be concerned more with culture than with history but I hope that it can be taken as a contribution to certain common issues of a theoretical nature that have loomed large in recent years in respect of both historiography, the writing of history and ethnography, the writing and representation of culture. I want to suggest that the emphasis given in the cultural ideology of de Valera’s Ireland to folk tradition, as an expression of Irish identity, served in effect to mask and to mute the actual cultural history of Ireland in the four middle decades of the century, and that another Ireland of those years has gone largely unrecorded. That other Ireland is the Ireland whose cultural expression was the popular culture of the city streets and the factories, the popular culture of town life in the urbanising countryside, the popular culture arising from the modernising aspects of village and rural life, as in the effect, for example, of rural electrification that culminated – in popular cultural terms – with the establishment of an Irish television station in 1961 when so many ordinary Dublin and east coast homes were already festooned with reception masts reaching for the popular media culture of the British stations.
De Valera’s inaugural address to the new Irish television audience in 1961 reinforces, in a way, his radio message to the Irish people on St Patrick’s Day 1943 regarding the nature of Irish cultural identity and the noble traditional heritage that nourished and sustained it.1Folklore was, still, in the official cultural perspective of de Valera’s Ireland, one very important element, perhaps the chief one in that identity and that heritage, and was a main ground for the ideological bias that disregarded contemporary and urban popular culture in the official reckoning and promotion of cultural self-perception and in its official representation. This ideological bias had its historical roots in an era much earlier than that of de Valera’s Ireland but was still sufficiently current, in the de Valera years, to result in the kind of ethnographic and historical denial of actual popular cultural creativity that matches the imaginative myopia underlying the denial and suppression of literary creativity that the Censorship of Publications legislation of 1929 implied.
As regards the quality of official Irish cultural thinking then, as much was already being said in 1940 by Seán Ó Faoláin who wrote, in the first issue of The Bell, that the magazine would stand for ‘Life before any abstraction, in whatever magnificent words it may clothe itself’.2In the pages of his magazine, he promoted an intellectual pluralism and a cultural internationalism that was the antithesis of the prevailing ideology regarding Irish culture and Irish cultural identity. The folk tradition aspect of that view of Irish culture which The Bell opposed and, specifically, of Irish popular culture is also to be found, well in the aftermath of the de Valera years, in the closing words of an article published in 1979 and written two years earlier in commemoration of the founding a half-century before of the Folklore of Ireland Society in 1927. The title of this article is ‘The Irish Folklore Commission: Achievement and Legacy’ and its author, Bo Almqvist, Professor of Irish Folklore at UCD was successor in that position to Séamas Ó Duilearga, the father figure of folklore study in Ireland in the de Valera years. Bo Almqvist closed his article with this exhortation to the Irish people:
A mhuintir na hÉireann!
Do not neglect one of the greatest treasures you possess! I beseech you for your own sake, for the sake of your men and women, for the sake of past generations – all the humble but truly great men and women who cherished their national heritage and passed it on in trust to us – for the sake of understanding, identity and unity in this country in these troubled times, for the sake of joy and beauty in generations to come, for the sake of truth and love of learning, for the sake of everything you hold dear, noble and holy, do not let us down in our work!3
This passage strikingly illustrates an essentialist and essentially romantic antiquarian notion of Irish identity – at least as far as popular culture is concerned – and represents the thinking, in regard to folklore and traditional culture as the expression of Irishness, that was endorsed by Irish governments of the de Valera years to the extent of their continual support of an official Irish Folklore Commission under the direction of Séamas Ó Duilearga. Ó Duilearga had been a student of, and later assistant to, Douglas Hyde at UCD. Douglas Hyde’s role was paramount in promoting in Ireland the philosophy of the Romantic Antiquarian movement that underlay the nineteenth century nationalism of many of the European nations striving to build their identity in terms of native language and folk tradition.
Roy Foster has noted that Hyde’s 1892 address to the National Literary Society ‘On the Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered in the same year as his Love Songs of Connacht anthology of folk poetry was published, ‘rapidly achieved legendary status’ being ‘credited with inspiring the foundation of the Gaelic League a year later’ and becoming ‘a canonical text of Irish cultural nationalism’.4 In a review of Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht by W. B. Yeats, we have the expression by Yeats too of a perceived need, as Foster puts it, ‘to derive inspiration from a basic energy, by knowing one’s roots’ that is, I submit, on a par with the message Bo Almqvist still had for the Irish people as recently as the late 1970s. In his 1893 review Yeats had written:
As for me, I close the book with much sadness. These poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. But we – we live in a world of whirling change, where nothing becomes old and sacred and our powerful emotions … express themselves in vulgar types and symbols. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us.5
In the face of this modern metropolitan world, Irish cultural nationalism, of the sort Hyde and Yeats espoused and that de Valera was to attempt to practise – deriving, historically, from the philosophy of J. G. von Herder in eighteenth century Germany and flowing through the writings of Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders – sought, in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, to locate folk traditions at the heart of national identity. I believe that such a conviction regarding the essential nature of national identity still operated as an important element in the decision of de Valera to choose Douglas Hyde as an appropriate person to be inaugurated as first President of the Irish Republic in 1938.
At the level of party politics it is suggested that Hyde was not de Valera’s first choice for President, but that the risk of having a party politician such as Seán T. O’Kelly rejected by the people in the aftermath of his narrow constitution referendum victory, caused de Valera to opt for someone who, in J. J. Lee’s words could safely satisfy ‘sundry national self-images’ while still guaranteeing a Fianna Fáil presidency.6 The factors motivating any such potential choice are surely complex and calculated – perhaps especially so in the case of Mr de Valera – but I believe that one significant element in the choice of Douglas Hyde to fill the presidential office was that, in de Valera’s perspective and that of other Irish Irelanders – within Fianna Fáil and outside it – Hyde’s career and public image had given public witness to a deep allegiance to the Irish-Ireland ideal. In office as first citizen and symbolic representative of the Irish nation, Douglas Hyde would give effect to the cultural equivalent of the political policy of Sinn Féinism and the economic policy of protectionism which we can also associate with de Valera’s Ireland. Such political use of Hyde as a kind of cultural icon by de Valera suggests something of a renewal in the de Valera years of the ideals of the early Gaelic League era regarding the cultural expression of national identity. In fact the more imaginative, ecumenical, and potentially unifying aspects of the kind of cultural revolution that Hyde and the early Gaelic League had intended and
pioneered had not survived the lurch to physical-force nationalism. Instead a narrower, more conservative and, indeed, somewhat anti-modern tendency marked the cultural nationalism of the years between 1916 and the end of the de Valera years of power.
Mr de Valera himself would, in due course, also fill the presidential office in a manner similarly appropriate to the perception of Irish national identity as residing chiefly in matters of a conservatively defined cultural tradition. By then, however, the appeal-power of even the attenuated version of a romantic antiquarian definition of Irish cultural identity had waned. The centrality of ancient tradition in official cultural ideology was yielding ground to the influence and implications of the fresh economic and social thinking of the Lemass era. This focused on the less exclusively insular concerns of an Irish government less preoccupied with matters of basic political stability, economic survival or external threat in a time of war.
With hindsight, we can see that the implication of the cultural ideology that prevailed in de Valera’s Ireland was to privilege the memory of traditional cultural forms that were expressive of the world-view and lifestyle of former rural, relatively unsophisticated, largely under-educated and perhaps only partly-literate segments of the Irish population. This memory culture of the non-elite and non-urban tradition formed, of course, the central concern of the activities of the Irish Folklore Commission that had been established in 1935 with de Valera’s approval. The sense of an essential heritage of cultural riches in danger of being lost forever in the displacement and destruction of tradition by the forces of modernity was well caught in the motto of the Folklore of Ireland Society’s Journal, Béaloideas, every number of which since 1927 has carried the Gospel quotation: Colligite quae superaverunt fragmenta ne pereant, a sacred injunction to preserve precious survivals now in danger of discard.
In Germany, we know that the implications of a similar later nineteenth and early twentieth century preoccupation in national cultural ideology, with the symbolic recovery and repossession of the past, had a more directly political and sinister outcome than was the case in Ireland. A recent study by Uli Linke of the focus of research in the history of German folklore scholarship has proposed a direct relationship between culture theory and the exercise of political power by the state, that is relevant to a consideration of the privileging of folk tradition in the cultural ideology of de Valera’s Ireland. Linke’s article raises issues in regard to the potentially negative side of an exclusive privileging of what Linke terms ‘peasant lore’ and ‘commonplace culture’ in showing how such a preoccupation in German folkloristics facilitated the emergence of social and political policies of a racist and totalitarian nature. In an introductory paragraph Linke writes:
I begin, with a brief discussion of the fetishism of peasant lore, and of commonplace culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this era of European nation-building, the romanticised life-world of peasants served as a template for the political identity of an emerging German state. Contemporary folklorists equated peasant traditions with the unchanging customs of the past: peasant lore was presented as a pristine and authentic repertoire for building a common German culture. From this discussion of ‘regressive modernisation’ – the political journey into the future by detour through the past – I extract a nationalistic concept of culture in which a theory of power is absent: the workings of power are ignored or perhaps even silenced. I suggest that early German folklorists, as active participants in cultural politics, were not motivated to uncover or elucidate the hidden dimensions of power they so skilfully manipulated. This non-treatment of power is even more pronounced in the context of Nazi folklore scholarship: by concealing the strategies of power, the study of folk culture becomes a means for legitimating Hitler’s imperialist policies and racial concerns for ‘purity of blood’ and reproduction.7
Linke goes on to show how, in Germany, the initial romantic perception of the value of common cultural tradition (akin to the Davis position in the Irish case) gave rise to expressions of distress that ‘large segments of the German population had abandoned their native heritage in favour of foreign models of refinement’ (akin to the Hyde de-Anglicisation position). In the twentieth century in both Germany and Ireland, we know that cultural nationalism took on radically political and militaristic form. Here in Ireland, Hyde had claimed that his message was essentially apolitical, holding that ‘an agenda of cultural revival should be as attractive to unionists as to nationalists since it was above politics’.8 Hyde relinquished his leadership of the Gaelic League in 1915 when he was unable to stop it from embracing an openly partisan political stance on the question of national self-determination by military means and returned to political office (albeit one allegedly above politics) only in 1938 to personify (at de Valera’s wish) that partly self-determined nation as its President.
The significance of folklore studies in the newly established Irish Free State and in the later Republic was, meanwhile, endorsed by official government support and accorded the symbolic importance which I have argued that de Valera’s choice of Douglas Hyde as President contained. Its influence on social and political affairs, however, was largely confined to its diverting of official and scholarly attention away from the lived popular culture of Irish people in the 1930s and 1940s in favour of a concern for the preservation of the record of past cultural forms. Things had, as we know, taken a grimmer turn in Germany where what matches the official Irish lack of interest in urbanised popular culture is a virulent aversion to cosmopolitanism that saw cities as the locus of decadence. Linke cites two quotations that vividly illustrate this. The first, dated 1935, is from an anthropological journal entitled Volk und Rasse:
Dangers threaten the population when it migrates to the cities. It withers away in a few generations, because it lacks the vital bond with the earth. The German nation must be rooted in the soil if it wants to remain alive.9
In the previous year, 1934, the director of the Working Group for German Folklore had asserted:
German folklore is the study of the racial and traditional world of the German people which is purest and most alive in those communities which have experienced the most eternal contact with blood and soil.10
Here in Ireland the anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan bias of earlier twentieth century folklore studies amounted in effect to little more than neglect of the popular culture of the contemporary urbanising world – as evidenced in the exclusion of city schools from the Commission’s 1937/8 Schools’ Folklore Collection project (whereby the pupils of all primary schools in the state – barring the cities – were set to work to write down the folklore and traditions remembered by their elders). When, in 1938, de Valera greeted Douglas Hyde’s accession to the presidency as that of a ‘rightful prince’ and hailed it as closing, in his (de Valera’s) perspective, a symbolic breach that had existed since ‘the undoing of our nation at Kinsale’.11His words remained at the level of rhetoric and cultural ideology fuelling, not social and political hatred, but rather the antiquarian and traditional construction put officially on Irish cultural identity – surely one of the abstractions against which Seán Ó Faoláin set his sights in The Bell.
That continuing antiquarian/traditional construction of what constituted Irish folklore or popular culture was effected by folklorists and cultural nationalists on the basis of traditional materials gathered more from the memories, than from the living, behaviour of informants and culture bearers, who were themselves of course living in a society and a culture deeply transformed by the technology and social organisation of the contemporary modern world.
Today, historians and ethnologists alike would question whether the concepts of an exclusive ‘folklore’ and an exclusive ‘folk tradition’ can be historically or ethnographically meaningful – given the artificial nature of the distinctions they imply in social reality and cultural experience. Is there any meaningful way i
n which ‘folklore’ can be separated off from the totality of a society’s or an individual’s production of and participation in cultural knowledge and cultural forms – material, social or symbolic? The fullest, most recent, Irish discussion relevant to this question is that of the historian, Seán Connolly, who attempts to outline and analyse the history of the idea of popular culture as addressed in historical writing about Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12
At least two separate issues arise from Connolly’s treatment of the historiography of Irish pre-twentieth century popular culture, that are relevant to a consideration of the neglect of the actual popular culture of de Valera’s Ireland by folklorist and historian alike. The first of these has to do with the very idea of a popular culture that is in some way detached or detachable from the overall picture of cultural activity in the case of any society. Citing examples from the culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ireland – such matters as card-playing, dancing and hurling in the domain of recreation or beliefs and practices associated with the fairy faith in the domain of religion, Connolly is able to argue convincingly for a flow of cultural transmission, a sharing and a spreading out of cultural knowledge and patterns of behaviour within the social world that defies the setting of boundaries between folk and non-folk. The cultural reality of that world is, instead, best thought of in holistic terms as comprising an unbounded and unstructured flow of ideas, behaviours, institutions and material artefacts, that both shift and change in response to shifting and changing economic and political life in the framework of the general modernising tendency of the European world. In Connolly’s view, any attempted rigid division of cultural reality into separate subaltern and elite cultural worlds is untenable, in a way that highlights a similar implausibility in the constructed, artificial nature of a distinctive Irish folklore world as this was officially understood in de Valera’s Ireland.
