Courtney McGrailThe Shaping of Modern Ireland – A Centenary Assessment
edited by Eugenio Biagini and Daniel Mulhall
(Irish Academic Press, €22.50pb/€45.00hb).
Ian d’Alton
This is a courageous book. It is a fine reworking of a collection of essays published in 1960, originally a Thomas Davis radio lecture series, covering the genesis of modern Ireland from1891 to 1916 through the lives of the period’s prominent Irishmen (no women featured in 1960).
It is courageous because in an era of ‘isms’ rather than egos, it follows the original’s structure; and it dares to walk in the shadow of the formidable Conor Cruise O’Brien, who edited the 1960 volume, and provided a foreword, an introduction and a substantive essay.
The contributors to the 1960 book spoke as much to the nature of the then-contemporary intellectual elite as at their contributions. Likewise, the extensive biographies placed at the start of this volume list a high-level mix of professional historians and academics, commentators on public affairs, a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, a women’s activist and an ambassador. There is even the son – Martin Mansergh – of one of the 1960 contributors.
Preface
In a comprehensive preface, the editors explain how and why this book differs from the 1960 original.
Tweaking the time-frame allows the inclusion of de Valera and Collins. Women are now extensively discussed as contributors and subjects; although it is really only by extending the timeline well beyond 1916 that allows the Gore-Booth sisters, Kathleen Lynn, Maude Gonne and Dorothy Macardle to be recognised as significant ‘shapers of modern Ireland’.
A refreshingly inquisitive essay by Joe Lee on the firms of Guinness and Jacob nevertheless sits somewhat uneasily in the volume’s personality-based structure. Rectifying a significant omission in 1960 could have avoided this problem. William Martin Murphy (pictured), contemporary owner of The Irish Catholic, was the initiator of the cheap daily press in Ireland, a conspicuously successful industrialist and employer, and bête-noir of the 1913 lock-out. Juxtaposing him with Lord Pirrie of Harland and Wolff might have allowed a fruitful interrogation of southern Catholic entrepreneurial skill as against the Weberian Northern Protestant claim to superior industry.
Essays in collections such as these will inevitably vary in quality and thoughtfulness.
There is an excellent overview from Ulster historian Paul Bew (Baron Bew of Donegore since 2007), in which he does not try to compete with O’Brien’s original, but rather offers an exegesis of it.
Essays
The essays which work best are those dealing with individuals, rather than groups – such as Patrick Maume on Hyde, Michael Laffan on Griffith, and Daithi Ó Corráin on Archbishop William Walsh. Eugenio Biagini’s essay on Carson is a beautifully-composed model of what the 2016 volume ideally seeks to achieve – a close critique of R. B. McDowell’s original essay, illuminated by wide and deep reference to the extensive scholarship since 1960, and with an interpretation of what made Carson tick.
The more successful essays on groupings of individuals are those that weave their subjects closely together. Amongst the best are Vincent Comerford on the unconstitutional nationalists Stephens, Devoy and Clarke and Frank Callanan on Redmond, Dillon and Healy.
Question
The question remains, though, did the subjects of these essays shape Ireland or did Ireland shape them? One way of addressing that conundrum is to step off the island. The narrative of ‘shaping’ here is interpreted as exclusively home-grown. But there is another story.
In 1928, Arthur Balfour, former Tory Chief Secretary, spoke proudly of the independent Irish state as “the Ireland that we made” – a landed, conservative and devout country created, largely, by Tory (and some Liberal) administrations from 1890 onwards.
It is arguable that whole-scale transfer of land to owner-occupiers, housing of rural labourers, governmental neglect of urban slums, semi-democratisation of local government and the creation of a national university that would educate a Catholic elite to run Home Rule Ireland were more significant than all the dreamers, poets, dynamiters, language enthusiasts and editors put together.
A chapter on, say, the Chief Secretaries Balfour, Wyndham and Birrell might have offered a wider perspective, and a less introspective viewpoint on how the Ireland we inhabit today was shaped.