Thus spoke de Valera, in his famous 1943 St Patrickâs Day speech, laying out his vision of the ideal homeland that Irish men might soon be called upon to protect from a possible German or Allied invasion. 2 This was nothing short of an elegy to an imaginary, ever-agrarian Ireland, with harmonious ideals of vigorous masculinity and submissive femininity at the centre. Long before de Valeraâs speech, however, Irish nationalists had already been conflating national sovereignty and masculine strength. National power was conceived of as male potency and the recovery of one would supposedly parallel the recovery of the other. This book is a history of how these notions of power and masculinity came to predominance in Irish nationalism, of the forces that fed into them, and of the ideological work that masculinity and power did for Irish nationalism. This work traces these ideas back to the 1880s and shows how they continued to have resonance into the 1930s. There is an especial focus, however, on the years between 1912 and 1923.The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spiritâa land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. 1
An Irish Revolution?
Between 1912 and 1914, the British Liberal Party, then ruling in a minority government reliant on the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), oversaw the passage through Westminster of the Third Home Rule Bill. It looked as if Irish Home Rule, a contentious issue for much of the previous century, was finally about to be achieved. An independent parliament would rule over Ireland for the first time since 1800. In response to this dread scenario, unionists in the northern counties of Ireland, spurred on by a British Conservative party eager to score political points against their Liberal opponents, formed an Ulster Volunteer Force and promised to resist the imposition of Home Rule. Nationalists reciprocated with their own volunteer force, the Irish Volunteers. British troops stationed at the Curragh, not far from Dublin, had already threatened mutiny rather than impose Home Rule. As violence came more to the surface in Ireland, the Liberal government began to have serious doubts about their bill. The international crisis of 1914 thus provided a convenient extrication, allowing the Liberals to postpone full enactment of Home Rule until the ceasing of hostilities on the continent. The IPPâs leader, John Redmond, desiring to take control of the Irish Volunteers, promised Lloyd George that this citizensâ militia, by then numbering more than 100,000 men, would support the British war effort. Redmondâs machinations split the Volunteers along pro- and anti-Imperial lines.
In 1916, a small group of impatient radicals from the anti-Imperial faction staged a rebellion in Dublin, the Easter Rising, hoping to force through Irish independence. The Rising itself was a military failure, but the harsh British response, ranging from the shelling of central Dublin to mass arrests and the execution of the Risingâs leaders, helped to create a post facto legitimisation. Before the end of the First World War, the more radical Irish nationalists had regrouped under the banner of Sinn FĂ©in, despite this partyâs not having been directly involved in the rebellion itself. In late 1918 Sinn FĂ©in won a majority of Irish seats in the Westminster general election. Refusing to take their places in the British parliament, they instead formed an Irish assembly and claimed it as the heir of the âRepublicâ that had been abortively declared in Easter Week. In parallel to this high politics, a low-level guerrilla war began in pockets across the country, mainly involving the Volunteers, soon to be renamed the Irish Republican Army. Slowly, Britain lost control of large swathes of the country and an embryonic republic began to emerge. Repressive responses on the part of the British government exacerbated Irish nationalist sympathies.
Not for the last time in the twentieth century, the British constitution collapsed under the weight of Irish politics. 3 By the summer of 1921 the situation had become serious enough for the British government to begin treaty negotiations to end the violence. Nonetheless, the situation was not grave enough to force the British government to make too many concessions. Rather than a fully sovereign republic, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 offered a limited sovereignty within the Empire, a parliament that would swear loyalty to the Crown, and partition of the north east corner of the island. 4 The Treaty led to the founding of the Irish Free State, but its terms were odious enough for its opponents and supporters to first wage civil war against each other.
The period between 1912 and 1923 is the most heavily privileged in modern Irish history and is conventionally seen as the Irish Revolution. 5 This period provides the central temporal focus of this book. Unlike other accounts, however, I am wary of using the term ârevolutionâ. As an analytical tool, the word ârevolutionâ can be fraught with problems. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, it is a term that connotes âsudden, dramatic, and extensive change. It emphasizes discontinuity.â Yet, when many scholars come to study ârevolutionsâ, what they usually end up studying are the much slower long-term social changes that feed into ostensibly sudden ruptures with the past. 6 Therefore, this book suggests that rather than identifying a sudden rupture in Irish life in the second decade of the twentieth century, as many Irish historians have done, it is more profitable to trace a long arc of development from the latter nineteenth century well into the twentieth. In addition to studying the aetiology and ideological work of Irish nationalist ideals of masculinity, a secondary aim of this work is to question the historiographical utility of a term like ârevolutionâ for understanding the events of 1916 or 1922.
Taking a cue from Frank Mortâs recent discussion of how âVictorianismâ, an ideology of public respectability, outlasted Victoriaâs reign by at least a half-century, I argue that much that has come to be associated with the âIrish Revolutionâ (meritocracy, violence, the excitement of acquiring national power) not only predated 1916 by several decades but also lasted well into the twentieth century. 7 There was perhaps as much continuity as there was rupture and change and this book offers an argument not all that different from Patrick Maumeâs notion of a âlong gestationâ 8 in Irish politics and culture. Additionally, it is impossible to understand Irish nationalist culture outside of a British imperial context. The form and content of Irish nationalism, how it conceived of the state and of the economy, as well its tropes of muscular men and subtly expressed anxieties about racial purity, were not only a reaction against British rule but also at the same time, paradoxically, strongly influenced by contemporary British politics.
Michael de Nie argues that in Victorian Britain, the Irish were seen as inferior on grounds of race, religion and class: âIn British eyes, the eternal Paddy was forever a Celt, a Catholic, and a peasant.â 9 Victorian cartoons and caricatures often focused on the supposed physical deformities of Irish men and provide a useful insight into racial attitudes. Irish men were depicted as âdark, heavy-jawed criminals, semibestial ape-men, or even outright inhuman monstersâ, and thus, âthese Irish subjects inhabited a lower branch on the human family tree.â 10 Alison Winter similarly observes the harshly negative perceptions that Irish immigrants to Victorian cities faced: âThe English saw the Irish poor as the lowest of the low. By their reckoning the Irish were purveyors of physical and social disease, threatening the health of the social body by their very presence in the urban centers.â 11 And Theodore Allen, in his polemical study of The Invention of the White Race, notes the similarities between English perceptions of the Irish âraceâ, and anti-black racism in Anglo-America. 12 Put plainly, the Irish were seen as an inferior race and this work argues that these British racial accusations had a determining impact on Irish nationalists. Irish nationalism was a concerted effort to disprove such stereotypes and create a more prideful self-image of a âwhiteâ nation. Crafting an image of strong and racially redeemed Irish men was a key part of this.
In fact, a large corpus of literary scholarship has argued that Irish culture should be understood as a postcolonial culture, in the manner in which it strove to refute negative anti-Irish stereotypes. 13 Whether or not Ireland was a âcolonyâ in any conventional sense remains open to question. In terms of economics, for example, there is a large dose of fuzziness as to whether Ireland was a colony of Britain or merely an impoverished, mostly rural, periphery. It is quite debatable if nineteenth-century Ireland was more akin to the Raj or to rural Cornwall. 14 In addition, while coercive social engineering is often a hallmark of postcolonial state-building, the coercive masculinist project of Irish nationalism cannot be reduced solely to colonial forces. George Mosse, for example, notes how nationalism in Europe often emerged alongside coercive ideals of respectable masculine and femin...