A
lecturer at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University,
Ferriter, barely in his mid-thirties, has produced
a massive compilation of Ireland's 20th century
worthy of a professor's lifetime's worth of research
and reflection. The fault with this book is its
abundance of riches: the level of detail combined
with the breadth of topics creates a volume overwhelming
the casual reader in its heft. In 760 pages of text
(and another 120 adding citations, a bibliography,
and index), Ferriter combines his own interpretations
of Irish historiography with a survey of past historical
study- along with many primary sources from archives,
novels, biographies, journalism and memoirs. Ferriter
largely builds upon Joe Lee's Ireland 1912-85,
often commenting upon Lee's findings before adding
his own qualifications. In his introduction, Ferriter
explains that due to the rapid changes in the past
twenty years, another look at Ireland's momentous
shift from First World location with Third World
subsistence economy, hero worship, and clerical
ethos to the current more multicultural, liberalised,
and secularised consumer culture impels his investigation.
Ferriter listens to the famed and the nearly anonymous
and gives all ample hearing. He avoids grandstanding
or polemic even in such treacherously tempting areas
as republicanism, priestly scandals, DeValera's
visit of condolence to the German Legation after
Hitler's death, feminism, or the constant blaming
by so many of his countrymen of all their problems
on England-even as they often rushed eagerly into
its hearty embrace for employment, emigration, and
entertainment.
To
avoid recounting past events, my review will point
out a sampling of points-of-interest along the long
march from Queen Victoria and Maud Gonne up to Eamon
Casey and Eurovision. Early on, Ferriter recognises
the arguments both of revisionism and those who
reject its reassessments: 'But there is also the
danger here of acute nostalgia; of shelter from
modern-day concerns by taking mid-century political
rhetoric and promises at face value, and applauding
a revolutionary generation for the dignity of their
aspiration rather than their concrete achievement.'
(4) This concern animates his judgements. Transformation
addresses the century-long tension between idealism
and pragmatism, slogans and paychecks, that bedevils
the Ireland that a hundred years of Sinn Féin's
presence has exacerbated. Its necessity for separation
from Britain led to an inability to run a Free State
as self-sufficient economy. In turn, the Republic
attempted to turn towards Europe but found itself
drawn back into witnessing and sometimes disastrously
trying to assist- as in the Arms Trial- those in
the North still battling as rhetoric met reaction.
Tom
Garvin, paraphrased by Ferriter, teaches how an
Irish Republic under DeValera could be revolutionary
and reactionary. Those who led it grew up in Edwardian
years, full of nationalist yet anti-modern romanticisation
of a return to a rural and aesthetic purity. 'They
rebelled against their elders but, according to
Garvin, were sceptical about the possibility or
desirability of mass democracy.' (76) Sharing newer
findings by historians such as Patrick Maume, David
Fitzpatrick, and Peter Hart, Ferriter agrees that
clerical conformity guided the rebels along a small-town,
'middle-agrarian' perspective often angled oddly
against the urbanised cadre that comprised so many
of the lower ranks of the IRA.
In
his narration of the wars, Ferriter remains fair-minded.
Page 234 quotes a Limerick monsignor's witnessing
of a Black and Tan atrocity; page 235 informs us
that one of those labelled as 'agents' killed the
morning of Bloody Sunday 1920 was a member of the
Veterinary Corps sent over to buy mules for the
British army- whose second cousin was Michael Davitt.
Fratricidal mayhem expressed pithily. Ferriter shares
the dreams of those out in '16 and after without
glossing over the hard-headed realism of those with
whom they shared bed and board. Seán Ó
Faoláin's autobiography Vive Moi! is used
well: in it, Séan recounts how his wife Eileen
told him and his comrades: 'You are all abstract
fanatics.' (255)
After
the wars came the uneasy peace. Ferriter examines
the controversy over Angela's Ashes. Roy
Foster castigated Frank McCourt's pose: 'if any
message is to be read out of the book, it is that
you have to get out early as you can and head west.'
(qtd. 361) Ferriter adds: 'The weakness of this
criticism is that it fails to acknowledge that for
many this was a necessity rather than a choice.'
With the limits on American immigration post-1924,
most fled east. DeValera's ideology trapped itself
defensively. Protestant Britain equalled Catholic
Ireland's foe. That the two nations shared far more
than they divided was shunted aside. Morally, the
Church formed the bulwark against not only the C
of E but the secular forces that were overwhelming
nominally Christian England and much of Western
Europe in the 1930s. Ferriter refers to Freud's
'narcissism of trivial differences' that distorted
minor differences to mask major similarities. Those
left behind, Ferriter more than once asserts, put
on the poor mouth a bit too often. When JFK visited,
a red carpet was not laid out for fear it be rained
on, at a projected damage of £250. Ireland
for most of its independence could not have sustained
even the stunted prosperity it earned if not for
the remittances of its emigrants, the emptiness
of its villages, and the lack of competition among
those who remained for farms and spouses.
Those
able to live mid-century in Ireland, contrary to
so many ballads, may have regretted their residence.
2.5% of married women were employed, according to
reports in 1945. During the 'Emergency', only 740
autos were licensed throughout the 26 Counties.
In 1954, 64% of Irish remained unmarried. Across
the border, in Fermanagh, 58% of occupied dwellings
were deemed uninhabitable. Poet Anthony Cronin in
the last issue in July 1954 of the quixotic publication
of non-conformist intellectuals, The Bell,
diagnosed the malaise. 'Here, if ever was, is a
climate for the death wish.' (462) However, Ferriter
relies heavily on Brian Fallon's An Age of Innocence:
Irish Culture 1930-60, which argues for a much
more vibrant and iconoclastic undercurrent than
is conventionally granted those thinkers and writers
who stayed. Even John Charles McQuaid, as John Cooney's
biography has shown thanks to the opening in the
late 90s of archives, had a modicum (at times) of
forward thinking despite their own Tridentine limitations.
Ferriter never forgets that such leaders as the
Archbishop, Dev and Collins, like us, are prisoners
of their own time and training. Heroic missionaries,
craven abusers, corrupt pols, ecumenical neighbours.
He balances the reality that is recorded against
the distortions and stereotypes that too many lazy
and facile commentators on Ireland have peddled
during the last two decades.
Ferriter
quotes Joe Lee again to good effect. Emigration
to England helped Ireland, in my analogy, much like
Mexico benefits from the $15 billion sent yearly
back by American migrants. Lee: 'few people anywhere
have been so prepared to scatter their children
around the world in order to preserve their own
living standards.' (472) Perhaps revisionism at
its 1989 harshest, but Ferriter accepts the brunt
of Lee's attack. Earlier, a late 50s Tuairim study
group sought to upend the 'contradictory "Sinn
Féin" myth in Irish economic thinking.'
(543) Patrick Lynch is quoted: 'it is because so
many emigrate that those who remain at home are
able to afford a standard of living that could not
be maintained if Irish political independence implied
the obligation to cater on their own terms for all
the people born in Ireland since the state was established.'
Lynch, as would Lee three decades later, exhumes
a disturbing truth. Politicians ignorant of economics
could not run the capitalist state. The Church,
Ferriter documents, repeatedly interfered with social
activism, preferring to exalt the poor towards spiritual
uplift rather than risk communist-delivered or socialist-tainted
tangible but soul-deadening gains. The myth that
Ireland wept as her children left for exile, Ferriter's
sources demonstrate, must be abandoned for financial
triage. Often, the parents were all too glad to
see their weans off, perhaps subconsciously to be
sure.
Economic
fables and political pandering interfere with later
Irishmen and women seeking the self-sufficiency
trumpeted by the rebels as Ireland's goal. Nationalist
legend also sought to trump facts. Ed Moloney's
history of the IRA is often relied upon as Ferriter's
main source for recent developments; it proves much
more useful than Before the Dawn does for
Ferriter! Fintan O'Toole's 2000 observation is quoted:
'the largest number of republican paramilitaries
killed in the conflict were murdered, not by the
RUC or the British Army, or the loyalist terror
gangs, but by their own comrades. The INLA and the
IRA have been responsible for the deaths of 164
of their own members. The British Army, RUC, UDR,
and loyalist paramilitaries killed 161.' (637) Ferriter
efficiently presents all of the complications of
the past thirty years in his final section. Like
all of the chapters, chronological division allows
him to roam about topics organised under brief captions,
these quoting an apropos phrase from the primary
source he cites to make his main point for that
page or two. While this approach makes the book
more like a series of short essays rather than a
narrative history in the usual sense, it also slices
up the immense text into portions better able to
be read at leisure. This is not a book to plow straight
through, but one to be waded in. Albeit opposite
from Don Akenson's idiosyncratic and semi-factual
A History of Irish Civilization (reviewed
by me recently), the Canadian and the Irish
historians share an ability to serve up heaps of
history as digestible bite-size pieces. The nourishment
derived from both of these affordable textual repasts
should fuel many mental workouts.
Rarely
does Ferriter cause me to pause puzzled. But here
is one crux. He relates an interviewee in Fionnuala
O'Connor's In Search of a State who notes
how republicans nimbly shift goalposts and frameworks
in arguments, never tiring of outwitting their conversational
foil. Ferriter relates how knee-capping and 'tyranny'
carried out by republicans in their own communities
meant they were by default the police when it came
to child abuse, for example. SDLP supporters turned
to the IRA for backup as well. Ferriter concludes:
'The IRA developed an extraordinary capacity to
ignore violence that did not fit their own concept
of legitimacy,' going on to tell how the RUC bore
the brunt of the IRA's antagonism due to the police's
position vis-a-vis 'the hatred that existed in oppressed
working-class republican areas.' (642) How the IRA
ignored illegitimate violence escapes me. Ferriter's
further definition of legitimate violence as codified
by the IRA might clarify what becomes beyond the
pale.
It
is a credit to Ferriter that few head-scratchers
exist in his text. I only found one typographical
error (an extra 'of'), and another error twice;
while more than one man named 'Enda' appears in
the text, when the surname's Longley, this critic's
first name's 'Edna.' The attention to documentation
once in a while leaves it slightly uncertain where
a quote belongs, as the numbered superscripts sometimes
take in more quotes than the numbers account for;
I assume that the following quotes after the numbers
are in the previously indicated source, but this
is not ascertained quickly. These are minor quibbles.
It's a pleasure to find so much scholarship packaged
affordably, compactly, in a readable typeface and
font size.
Over
the last few years, among many rich topics for debate
and analysis raised, Ferriter remarks on the 41%
increase in alcohol consumption 1989-99: he finds
'ironic that what was blamed on poverty at the end
of the nineteenth century was blamed on affluence
by the end of the twentieth century.' (668) Egged
on by the media-fueled, credit-card sponsored headlong
rush towards self-centredness and the erosion of
clerical morality and political propriety, what
does Ireland now promise? As Mary Kenny in Goodbye
to Catholic Ireland, a frequently cited source
here (to be reviewed by me next), supports, Ferriter
sums up well the Church's contested legacy. He cites
'radical journalist Vincent Browne' who despite
his own bent longed sometimes to go back to 'those
days of rosaries and the vale of tears'. (qtd. 739)
Ferriter elaborates: 'The sense of camaraderie and
solace that had been experienced in communal religious
devotion had been replaced, [Browne] mused, by the
individual subscribing "to the anonymous society,
acquisitive, rootless, unbonded"'. As different
a critic from Browne as Desmond Fennell, whom
I discussed in The Blanket three years ago,
shares Browne's unease and Ferriter's autopsy. Fennell
(once an advisor to an earlier, more visionary,
Provisional Sinn Féin in its 1973 propaganda
campaign for Éire Nua) labels this unrest
many of us feel as a 'postwestern condition' suffered
under the sway of Amerope. This conglomerate combines
corporation and nation and product. It overpowered
Ireland after the rest of Europe and North America
despite Irish attempts to hide behind the barriers
of trade protection, clerical submission, and political
shenanigans. The Irish facing now the same forces
that have buffeted the rest of the West over the
past two centuries, the past century surveyed by
Ferriter shows that such transformations may be
as painful and as inevitable as the loss of Edwardian
innocence and the shove out into a post-Edenic expanse.
Wrapping
up my considerations, Ferriter's later comments
on republicanism, given The Blanket's audience,
deserve attention. Eamon McCann earns many mentions
in Ferriter's account; the historian urges what
the organiser has, that more attention be paid to
gender, class, and power issues when examining recent
Irish political and cultural struggles. The Troubles
dominate, understandably, but as Ferriter chides,
study of the underlying social divisions has not
followed pace. With studies like Transformation,
the ground is now being prepared for such excavation
by the next generation of activists and scholars.
Even such academic departure from Troubles treatment,
I concur, displays to some Irish partisans disloyalty
to the Cause. Ferriter quotes O'Connor as to how,
unlike loyalism, republicans tolerate less diversity
and therefore there results little dissidence. She
avers 'the major difficulty the rebel in northern
Catholic society has always found, is the impossibility
of being taken at his or her own word as an independent
agent: stepping outside the tribe equated with going
to the enemy'. Ferriter concurs. 'This was Sinn
Féin's real trump card.' (658) History repeats
in Transformation. The centennial of this
party of republican idealists who must first in
the South and now in the North reign as pragmatists
demonstrates both the stoic endurance of the tribal
clan and the stubborn defiance of the guerrilla
dissenter.
