In remembrance of Professor Tom Garvin MRIA – political scientist, UCD Professor, and frequent contributor to Studies – who sadly passed away last month, we are publishing extracts from two of his past articles; the first being from his 2006 paper “National Identity in Ireland”.
A prolific author and celebrated academic, included amongst his many achievements were his instrumentality in the establishment of the Political Studies Association of Ireland and involvement in the early years of the European Consortium for Political Research. In the article extracted below, he presents popular yet conflicting sociological theories relating to the concept of nationalism and applies their interpretations to the development of an “Irish national identity”.
For further information on Tom’s life and many achievements, please see his obituary in The Irish Times and his In Memoriam from UCD.
Tom Garvin, ‘National Identity in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 95, No. 379 (Autumn, 2006), 241-250. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30095838
(…)
Popular nationalism, whether seen as very ancient or a modern phenomenon, is routinely seen as being related to what are sometimes termed ethnic markers. Geography, language, religion, social condition and “race” are the obvious variables. Civic condition (whether one is or is not a legal inhabitant of a given state with all the rights of a native) could be added to this list. In mediaeval Ireland, a sense of Ireland as a home to one ethnic tradition to the exclusion of others does not seem to have existed; the Gaelic Irish saw themselves as Gaelic in culture and not different fundamentally from the Gaels of western Scotland and the Isle of Man, who shared the same language and culture. The non-Gaelic speaking inhabitants of Ireland (Viking or Gaill and English or Sean-Ghaill) were commonly labelled na hEireannaigh {the Irish) in contradistinction to the Gaels, who lived in Ireland and Scotland as well as in the Isle of Man. An overall “Irish” identity does not seem to have existed.
(…)
However, the conquest of the seventeenth century changed things for ever, and the common ruin of the Old English and the Gaelic septs after Aughrim’s great disaster “when the foe indeed was master” made the programme of Geoffrey Keating very apposite. Catholicism became virtually a proscribed religion, and the lion’s share of the land of Ireland fell into Protestant, commonly New English, hands. A gulf between the common people, who remained mainly Catholic, and a mainly Protestant ruling caste, grew up, much deeper and more bitter than similar class and status gaps in other feudal or semi-feudal countries. Although bonds of affection between master and man did undoubtedly exist in Irish rural society, it was relatively easy to regard the settlement as illegitimate and to agitate, not so much for its abolition (although a dreamy revanchism undoubtedly existed), but for resistance to the system’s modernisation.
(…)
A more pre-political love of the land was another perennial theme, particularly among emigrants but also at home…the love of the land became an obsession during the terrible years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a whole population engaged in a slow-moving and endless war for possession of ever smaller pieces of potato-ground in a Malthusian tragedy…. In the late eighteenth century, even the middle nation itself became restless, and increasingly came to identify itself with the Irish nation, often to the exclusion of the millions of subordinated aborigines around it.
(…)
The great rising of 1798 was organised by people who were fascinated by the ideas of the Scottish enlightenment and those of the American and French revolutions. However, the mainly middle-class leaders drawn from Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter backgrounds thought differently from much of the population, which had other priorities. In Ulster, the idea of the Rights of Man appealed indeed to many Protestants, as it did to many Catholics in the south of the island. However, behind the enlightenment rhetoric also lurked a conviction that the settlement of 1690 should be reversed or at least rectified…No one knows how many people were killed that summer; estimates range between thirty and fifty thousand, in a total Irish population of about four million…1798 was remembered by the common people as a huge mistake, a bloody catastrophe which should never be repeated. It was this perception that gave constitutional politics, as represented by Daniel O’Connell and his entourage, its chance. It was only two generations later that the romanticisation and heroisation of 1798 led to a cult of physical force nationalism, portraying the rising as a gallant blood sacrifice which must be repeated by the descendants of the heroes. Collective memory was vivid in Ireland, but collective memory can be manufactured.
(…)
In 1873, the land of Ireland was owned outright by about three thousand individuals or institutions; half of the land (the better half) on the island was owned by three hundred. By 1904, the land of Ireland was effectively owned by half a million farmers. The landowner system had been transformed, and for a long time afterwards, the small to middle-sized Catholic yeoman farmer became the idealised and vilified typical Irish social type. The second revolutionary change was education; mass education in the English language was made generally available, and by 1860 most of the population had become more or less literate in the English language; the Irish language’s long decline accelerated. The third great change was the Devotional Revolution which coincided with the time of the Famine. A newly English-speaking and literate population was subjected to a newly disciplined Catholicism, organised around the little kingdom of the Parish and rigidly controlled by a new, disciplined and literate clergy under the direction of Archbishop, later Cardinal, Paul Cullen. Because of the illegitimacy of the political order after 1690, the priest as leader of his people had hypertrophied into ethnarch status; bishops resembled tribal kings, and parish priests were kinglets in their little realms. The Devotional Revolution merely intensified, extended and rationalised something that had long existed.
(…)
After 1879, rurality, farming and Catholicism became the mark of the true Irishman or Irishwoman. Town origins, Protestantism and even advanced education came to be looked upon covertly as being alien and as marks of the outsider. The Irish language was eventually grabbed as a mainly symbolic ideological claim to authenticity and aboriginal status. An alliance of Faith and Fatherland that was to last for a century was forged. The aftermath in the form of partition and independence is well known.
This alliance is now in its death throes a century later for various reasons. A deep reason is the inherent intellectual weakness of mainline Irish Catholicism as distinct from its very great cultural power. Mass education since the 1940s weakened its collective charisma, as it ceased to be a religion for simple folk and was challenged by a growing literate lay public. Ironically, its cosy partnership with the Irish state after 1922 in the long run did it great damage, as the structures of Irish democracy and the top-down authoritarian structures of the Church eroded each other.
(…)
Furthermore, the identification of Irish nationality with a theory of descent and common religious allegiance is gradually being replaced by something else. To address what this “something else” might be, let me quickly sketch a comparative perspective. Since the early eighteenth century in Europe, there have been a series of attempts, stemming from the English, Scottish, French and German Enlightenments, to substitute humanist and/or scientific ideas for traditional religious and tribal loyalties as the basic unifying principle of human society. Communism, Fascism, neo corporatism and nationalism were the principle candidates to replace the traditional order.
Nationalism turned out to be the most successful competitor, in part because of its intellectual emptiness, which permits its marriage with older loyalties such as religion, with democracy and with various different economic systems. In Ireland, as in many other countries, it allied itself with a branch of the universal Church and bent its local representatives to its own purposes. Irish nationalism displays a strange mixture of tribal identity, religious sectarianism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism and liberalism. Nationalism in Ireland is as it is elsewhere: it is ideologically agnostic or promiscuous, and will jump into bed with anyone. It is going to persist as a dominant organising principle of political organisation for mechanical and practical reasons, even though the scientistic and historicist ideas originally underpinning it are decreasingly popular or even believable, at least in the West: nationalism as als ob philosophy.
(…)