Paul KeenanFelix M. Larkin
The idea behind this book is a good one and, as the editors – both well-known UCD academics – point out in their introduction, there is no convincing precedent for it in this country.
They have sought, in their own words, “to come up with books which seemed to have had an impact on public opinion [in Ireland], have defined or best exemplified long-running debates, or have been under-appreciated in terms of their significance’.
They chose over 30 books, all worthy of inclusion – and one or other of the two editors considers each book in a brief essay.
These essays often take issue with the popular perception of the books in question. A good example is Bryan Fanning’s piece on The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone. Patrick Pearse regarded the Autobiography as“the first Gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationalism”, but Fanning shows that romantic nationalists like Pearse “successfully co-opted the real Wolfe Tone” and that his Autobiography is not actually a political tract, but a fairly conventional account of the life of a man who “had a lust for life and craved personal advancement”. His verdict is that Tone’s life “cannot be reduced to any single political aim”. Incidentally, Fanning gets the name of Tone’s wife wrong: it was Matilda, not Martha.
Catholic social teaching
The other books that find a place in the Fanning-Garvin collection range in time from Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland (1634) to Elaine Byrne’s Political Corruption in Ireland (2012). They include several texts explicitly critical of the Catholic Church and its influence on Irish political culture and social life: Horace Plunkett’s Ireland in the New Century (1904), Paul Blanshard’s The Irish and Catholic Power (1954), and Suffer the Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan (1999).
Fanning records that Blanshard’s book was so unpalatable to the Irish establishment in the 1950s and 1960s that students in UCD had to obtain written permission from their professor in order to borrow it from the university library.
There are also chapters on Andrew Dunleavy’s Catechism (1742) and James Kavanagh’s Manual of Social Ethics (1954). The latter was commissioned by Archbishop McQuaid as a handbook of Catholic social teaching based on the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).
These encyclicals, to quote Fanning, “drew upon a coherent intellectual legacy stretching back to Aristotle via Aquinas, one that contested both liberalism and Marxism … [and] Kavanagh closely followed the argument of the encyclicals against class conflicts”. The continuing influence of this thinking can be seen, as Fanning observes, in the social partnership model that governed industrial relations in Ireland in recent decades.
Several literary works are included: Canon Sheehan’s The Graves at Kilmorna (1913), Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman (1929), Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation (1931), Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-two-Birds (1939), Enda O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965).
Flann O’Brien was the pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan, and in his essay on At Swim-two-Birds Tom Garvin writes affectionately about the relationship between O’Nolan and his civil service colleague, John Garvin – a Joycean scholar and Tom’s father. The elder Garvin tried his best to protect O’Nolan from official retaliation for often outrageous behaviour, but in 1952 he was ordered by his then minister, Patrick Smith, to dismiss O’Nolan – and all Garvin could do was to delay the inevitable.
History
Another of the elder Garvin’s friends was Todd Andrews, and Tom shares his own memories of that ‘powerful personality’ in an insightful essay about Andrews’ two memoirs, Dublin Made Me (1979) and Man of No Property (1982).
Inevitably, one is conscious of what has been left out of this volume. Other editors might have chosen differently. Some readers will be surprised that there is no Joyce, no Yeats, no Heaney – and only one work of academic history, A.T.Q. Stewart’s The Narrow Ground (1977).
The Course of Irish History(1966), edited by T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin, undoubtedly the most widely read of our history books, might have been included – along with J.J. Lee’s Ireland, 1912–1985 (1989), a brilliant analysis of the failures of post-independence Ireland which had enormous impact when published.
Another significant omission is Arthur Griffith’s The Resurrection of Hungary (1904), which set out the blueprint for how Ireland finally gained her independence.
By and large, however, the editors have chosen well and they give us valuable commentaries on the books they have chosen. Both their choices and the commentaries will no doubt fuel many future arguments about Irish politics and society.