The dominance of the SNP in the recent British election has, inevitably perhaps, drawn comparisons between the Scottish nationalism of today and the SNP’s position in British politics, and Irish nationalism during the 19th century and the IPP during the Home Rule years. I think it might be useful to step back a little and remember the context that both came from. Primarily, in Paul Bew’s words, that there are Scots who remember the poll tax, whereas there were Irish with living memory of the Famine.
new book The Great Famine, Ciarán Ó Murchadha spent two chapters describing the society and culture of pre Famine Ireland, culminating with this personal portrait:
For those schooled in the ways of traditional Ireland, all the changes of the period leading up to 1845 were disconcerting and difficult, a dissatisfaction that is perhaps personified in the figure of Rory Oge, the blind uileann piper encountered by Anna Maria and Samuel Hall at a fair in Killaloe in 1841. The Halls go to some trouble to present the piper, whose last name we are not told, as one of the last of his kind, and in a colourful conversation that takes up seven pages of text, and which includes a roguish illustration of Rory Oge in his tent, they allow him vent his spleen on the current age. Rory Oge resents the fact that ‘faction fights have altogether ceased, and [that] dances are now a days few and far between,’ and is ‘wrathful exceedingly’ on issues ranging from the disappearance of illegal stills and the decline of dancing to what he sees as a general loss of spirit among the ‘boys.’ His particular bete noir, however, consists of the temperance bands, which appear to him to be the harbingers of a new tame orthodoxy among the people that was killing of the old, wild cheerful anarchy of Ireland. For the new disciplined Ireland in the making Rory Oge has nothing but withering contempt.
A generation earlier, Tom Garvin described the effect the Famine had on Irish society and politics:
In an unpublished paper, J.G.A. Pocock has characterised Ireland’s political experience since the Great Famine of the 1840s as one of revolutionary politics in the paradoxical context of a society which was becoming steadily more stable. The Irish revolutionary movement derived its energies from a series of grievances that were slowly being rectified. The real enemy of the Irish rebel was not the British soldier or police but the reformer and the continuing steady adjustment of Irish society to commercialised, capitalist, modern civilisation. Emigration also acted as a safety valve to drain off the discontented and unemployed young.
A further twist that can be added to this argument is that the rebels themselves sensed its validity and were tempted to preserve those evils in the society that generated discontent and helped their political project to survive. Ireland has indeed been a modernising society since the Famine of 1845– 7, although that modernisation has been slow and has been resisted by many elements. The tragedy of the Famine was itself the occasion of a great, even convulsive, modernising change. In some ways, few European societies have travelled as far as Ireland has in the ‘long century’ since 1847. This is so despite a persistent popular and even academic stereotype of the country as unchanging. The highly disciplined and austere Tridentine Catholicism of modern Ireland dates from the mid-nineteenth century.
Linguistically, the country was also transformed; the language of the masses changed from Irish to English, and literacy in English replaced the non-literate use of Irish. To change language entailed changing cultural worlds, and millions migrated mentally from the medieval Gaelic world to the modern world of the English language. Few countries have undergone so sudden and complete a linguistic shift; in parts of the island, the exchange of languages appears to have occurred in one generation. Again, the agrarian property system was revolutionised as a consequence of the Land War of the 1880s, as the land was transferred from a mainly Anglo-Irish and Protestant landlord class and became vested in the mainly Catholic and post-Gaelic tenantry. This tenantry in turn evolved into a newly dominant stratum of small-and medium-sized owner-occupier farmers.
The economy was revolutionised. Whereas in 1830 agriculture was mainly subsistence and the island was encumbered with a huge landless rural proletariat, by 1890 commercial agriculture, based mainly on cattle exports to England, had become important. The rural proletariat had largely melted away and the owner-occupier farmer dominated the scene. An important turning point in the life of any underdeveloped country had been reached and passed; Ireland since the 1880s has had many serious problems , but they have been insignificant when compared with the appalling situation of much of the population prior to the Famine. By the end of the century the main outlines of the process were obvious; one Anglo-Irish observer of that time saw it clearly as a huge social and cultural revolution, one which could not fail to be followed by a political revolution.
Pre-Famine culture was ruthlessly dismantled by the people themselves in the decades after the Famine, almost as if there was a hatred for the heritage that had led them to such disaster. Diet, superstitious beliefs, sexual life, ideology, political life, dress and kinship systems were radically remodelled. The cultural revolution of Victorian Ireland prefigured much of what is happening in the underdeveloped world of the later twentieth century, where the efforts of peoples to cope with the invading culture and international economy of the West often bear an uncanny resemblance to the almost desperate attempts of the Victorian Catholic Irish to come to terms with the overwhelming culture and power of imperial England
Of course that is only part of the story, and there are undoubtedly parrallels that someone (more knowledgable than me) could draw out. As Garvin goes on to note:
Once the alliance of English Liberalism, Irish agrarianism and Irish constitutional nationalism had destroyed landlordism, the ‘agrarian motor’, which revolutionary separatists had hoped to use to move their own rather different cause along, slowly began to run out of fuel; it is arguable that had the ‘accident’ of the First World War not intervened, the Irish revolution would have died by the mid-twentieth century without realising its objective of complete separation of Ireland from Britain. Since 1890 there has always been a curious revivalist quality to Irish separatism and republicanism deriving from their ambiguous attitude toward reform, cultural change, capitalist development and modernisation.
But we should still recognise the rage and bewilderment faced by a people who had their entire society devastated and transformed beyond recognition within a generation when trying to understand their, often conflicted and complicated, relationship with the Union.
