This
ambitious book may look like it contains another
glib hack-writer introducing after a fulsome preface
a few hundred pretty photos on the Emerald Isle,
the volume to be given as a gift destined to be
dusted on your host's coffee-table. But, the text
dominates nearly all 280 pages, the photos admittedly
are handsome but for once far too few, and the
result surveys the Anglo-Irish decline against
the rise of Catholic Ireland. Its wars for independence
introduce economic decline, religious triumph,
cultural stagnation, and ultimately the slow demise
of those 'out in 1916' as the verities of mid-20c
Ireland collapse into the consumer-driven, Anglo-
American media and market domination that accelerates
past the final date of the book's title.
In fact, the 1916-1966 bracket shortens the span
of the actual study. Somerville-Large relates
sparingly but adroitly his own memories-- born
in Dublin 1928 to a gentrified family of Protestant
and English background-- into a tale of how his
peers and forebears lived, before and after independence
for most of the island. He reaches a depth of
textural detail that I found refreshing. Even
for readers familiar with subjects as often-recounted
as the Easter Rising, this author manages to offer
tellingly and well-chosen details that make this
complicated subject fresh and startling at times.
For instance, one in three of those Irish who
fought in the Great War died: 50,000. Twenty-eight
children died in the Rising. 125 of the nearly
1800 insurgents on that Easter Monday came from
a single Christian Brothers school in O'Connell
St, another eighty-four from other CBS's. Only
five had been educated in Jesuit schools-- most
of their graduates could be found fighting on
the French front.
Later decades reveal more divisions. At times,
the gentry could talk the local IRA men out of
burning down the Big House, by pulling rank and
gaining the respect that still might emerge unconsciously
from the sons of former tenants. For every Protestant
child put up for adoption in the mid-century,
ten families applied for its care. For every ten
Catholic children in the same predicament, only
one application was submitted. Those in state-run
schools for those who did not find homes or parents
could wake to hot cocoa-- made from shells-- in
which the worms floated on top as scum, for the
boiling water had killed them. Archbishop McQuaid--
an often stereotyped and caricatured figure not
easy to love-- sent funds to many poor, including
poet Patrick Kavanagh, who admitted he could not
have remained in Ireland otherwise in such parlous
decades as the constrained 40s and 50s. McQuaid
also allowed, in 1947, those of his flock living
in still-rationed Dublin to be exempted from the
Lenten fast giving up meat; too many were malnourished.
Lacking soap and fuel to heat hot water, those
in that city's many tenements called the consequent
scabies a 'Republican Itch'.
A trip by rail during WW2 from Dublin took 23
hours to reach Killarney, a couple of hundred
miles away; a cartoon in the humour magazine Dublin
Opinion shows a woman being tied to the tracks
by a villain. She protests: 'don't leave me here,
I'll starve!' Tea sold on the black market during
WW2 at rates equal today to £40 per ounce.
Bob Geldof's grandmother ran two Belgian dining
places in the capital. A 1960 visitor observed
that since 1916 the island's vistas had changed
little; such bucolic bliss due that 'the spell
of the land', observed an Englishwoman, which
'owes much to the enormous, the subtle and the
speculative magic of the unsuccessful'. Somerville-Large
wonders if the decline in religious observance
has been replaced by 'the spiritual nourishment
we gain from looking at paintings'. Growing up
at Warrenpoint in the North, Denis O'Donohue,
'like a bird-watcher' at a hundred yards, asserted
he could distinguish sectarian allegiances. The
Protestants strutted as if they owned the place.
Catholics shuffled 'as if they were there on sufferance'.
Anti-TB crusading doctor Robert Collis in 1936
noted how Dubliners spoke of their hometown affectionately
as 'an old lady'. Visitors admire her distinctive
garb, as if of handsome streets and Georgian houses,
so 'they smile complacently and feel proud. Lift
the hem of her outer silken garment, however,
and you will find suppurating ulcers covered by
stinking rags, for Dublin has the foulest slums
of any town in Europe'. Recruiting literature
from the Irish Army in the early 1940s, absent
any mention of patriotism, appealed more directly
to its impoverished potential volunteers: 'There
are Physical Training Instructors to build up
your muscle and bone, to say nothing of three
good hot meals a day, a bed in warm comfortable
quarters and enough pay to keep you in cigarettes'.
Comrades in the Free State's forces included the
sons of those who had fought against each other
two decades earlier: a deValera, Cosgrave, Ryan,
and Fitzgerald.
The early Aer Lingus stewardesses were recruited
under requirements both for a knowledge of nursing
and for how to make a fourth hand for bridge.
The London tabloid News of the World although
officially banned was read by 14 out of 55 working-class
families in a suburban area of 1950 Cork. Nazi
intelligence reported how the Irishman 'supports
a community founded upon equality for all, but
associates with this an extraordinary personal
need for independence which easily leads to indiscipline
and pugnacity'.
An old woman and thirty-three girls died in a
locked dormitory in a convent school fire in 1943
Cavan town while the Poor Clares all escaped;
'local opinion' surmised that the sisters had
kept the girls confined. Testimony later revealed
that the sisters did not want their otherwise
fleeing charges to be seen in their nightdresses.
Civil servant Brian O'Nolan, a.k.a. Flann O'Brien/
Myles na gCopaleen, is supposed to have drafted
not only a bitter limerick about this tragedy
but also the Tribunal of Inquiry's report that
had little choice given 'the climate of the day'
but to exonerate the nuns.
Full of such anecdotes, both inspiring and sobering,
this compendium by Somerville-Large extracts from
many biographies, memoirs, and histories these
vignettes. A few shortcomings from his approach
do diminish its impact, however. No notes link
his sources to the pages from which citations
and paraphrases originated. One cannot track down
further with any ease, therefore, the references
and contexts in these valuable primary texts.
The book does run out of stamina after around
the early 1950s; the considerable rigours of life
lived in the stress of pre- and post-independence
Ireland, under the Emergency, and through extended
post-war privation seem to have exhausted Somerville-Large's
effort.
Still, for the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, this depiction
of how the Protestants retreated from privilege
as the Catholics advanced in power remains gripping,
densely detailed, and flows engagingly. Each chapter
takes a theme, explores it through recollections,
and then segues into the next that examines Ireland
from yet another perspective. The narrative, despite
its titular dates, staggers in fits and starts
past 1966 to end what Seán O'Faolain christened
a 'dreary Eden' with the death of blind DeValera
at 93 in 1975, his requiem mass said by his grandson
in Irish and Latin, with not a word of English.
