Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland

Author(s): Charles Townshend

Source: The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 76, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 882-902
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427571

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Review Article
Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland*

Charles Townshend
Keele University

Scholarly analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict has, over the last generation,
shown a marked reluctance to identify it as a clash of religions or even to
isolate the religious element in the collective identities of the embattled “tra-
ditions” or “communities.” As the crisis of the 1970s intensified, heroic efforts
were made, and not only by Marxists, to demonstrate that its fundamental
dynamic was economic.1 Sectarianism was de-emphasized.2 The Provisional
IRA’s claim to be nonsectarian, heir to the United Irish tradition sanctified by
Theobald Wolfe Tone—and indeed by the much-idealized IRA of the 1919–
21 “war of independence”—has routinely passed unchallenged. There was in
this no doubt an element of wishful thinking, underpinned by a fear that to
focus too sharply on religious issues might be to reawaken demons of the past.
The past was itself sanitized to some degree.3 Bien pensant historians talked

* The books considered here are Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (New
York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. xliiiⳭ642, $35.00; Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller, eds.,
Piety and Power, 1760–1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Belfast: Institute of Irish
Studies, Queen’s University; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000),
pp. ixⳭ304, $30.00; Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 334, $42.00; Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the
Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. xiiiⳭ208, $33.00; Adrian Greg-
ory and Senia Paseta, eds., Ireland and the Great War: A War to Unite Us All? (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. xiⳭ226, $74.95; Jerome aan de Wiel, The Catholic
Church in Ireland, 1914–1918: War and Politics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003),
pp. xxⳭ380, $49.50; Michael Kennedy and Joseph Morrison Skelly, eds., Irish Foreign Policy,
1919–1966: From Independence to Internationalism (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 350,
$55.00; Mike Cronin and John Regan, eds., Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922–1949
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. xⳭ237, $75.00; Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil
War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. xiiⳭ238, $60.00; Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. xiⳭ278, $22.00; Brian Girvin and Geoffrey Roberts,
eds., Ireland and the Second World War: Politics, Society, and Remembrance (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2000), pp. 186, $55.00; Don O’Leary, Vocationalism and Social Catholicism in Twentieth-
Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), pp. xiiiⳭ274, $52.50; R. V. Comerford,
Ireland, Inventing the Nation, ed. Keith Robbins (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. xiiⳭ279, £16.99.
1
John Fulton, The Tragedy of Belief: Division, Politics, and Religion in Ireland (Oxford, 1991),
pp. 1–3.
2
For a rare counterassertion, see R. P. C. Hanson, “It Is a Religious Issue,” Encounter 55, no.
4 (1980): 11–20.
3
Mary Daly, writing in an earlier review essay in this journal, remembers finding as an under-

The Journal of Modern History 76 (December 2004): 882–902

䉷 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2004/7604-0004$10.00
All rights reserved.

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 883

down the scope, motivation, and impact of the once notorious Penal Laws, for
instance. The index of F. S. L. Lyons’s magisterial Ireland since the Famine
contained no reference to the “Protestant Crusade” or, indeed, to sectarianism.
The planners of the volumes on the nineteenth century in the New History of
Ireland saw no need for special treatment of religion as a social phenomenon,
much less as a political question. Even the volume on the eighteenth century
confined itself to the rather anodyne topic of ecclesiastical establishments,
ending in 1760.4 The element of religious warfare in the United Irish rebellion
of 1798 has remained a political embarrassment, even—perhaps especially—
as recently as the bicentennial celebrations.5
There has, however, been a cautious shift of focus, emerging in the pio-
neering work of Louis Cullen and the late work of Lyons. In his Culture and
Anarchy in Ireland, Lyons remarked (with characteristic walking-on-eggs cir-
cumspection) that “it is not always realized how active and ubiquitous the
Catholic Church was in the generation before the First World War . . . that
generation experienced something like a popular religious revival.”6 He did
not expand on the political and cultural implications of this, but others have
done so; most challengingly, Conor Cruise O’Brien.7 One-third of the chapters
of K. T. Hoppen’s Ireland since 1800 were dedicated to religion—under pun-
gent titles like “Piety and Its Spoils.” (Interestingly, though, Hoppen, despite
his consistent demolition of nationalism as a popular creed, is seldom identified
as a “revisionist” by those who criticize this tendency.)8 Emmet Larkin’s huge
ongoing “mosaic” treatment of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church fol-
lowed his pathbreaking analysis of the central role of the Catholic clergy in
the construction of Charles Stewart Parnell’s “virtual Irish state.” And Donald
Harman Akenson’s remarkable Small Differences explored the social pathol-
ogy of religion, a taboo subject among polite historians. A new depth of focus
on the formation of Protestant politics came with Sean Connolly’s Religion,
Law, and Power and Ian McBride’s Scripture Politics.9

graduate in the 1960s “that my professors were rather reluctant to discuss such topics.” “Recent
Writings on Modern Irish History: The Interaction between Past and Present,” Journal of Modern
History 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 514.
4
F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1971); T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J.
Byrne, eds., A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford,
1986); vol. 5, Ireland under the Union, Part 1: 1801–1870 (Oxford, 1989); vol. 6, Ireland under
the Union, Part 2: 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996).
5
See the barbed account in R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in
Ireland (London, 2001), pp. 225–34; and, more neutrally, Ian McBride, “Reclaiming the Rebel-
lion: 1798 in 1998,” Irish Historical Studies 21, no. 123 (1999): 395–410.
6
F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 79–80; L. M.
Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (London, 1981).
7
O’Brien’s approach was adumbrated in his States of Ireland (London, 1973), and elaborated
in God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
8
K. T. Hoppen, Ireland since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (London, 1989). See, however,
the withering verdict of an unnamed audience member—“Professor Hoppen, you are a traitor”—
quoted in R. F. Foster, Intimate Enmities: Antagonisms in Irish History, the Neale Lecture, Uni-
versity College (London, 2002).
9
Emmet Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878–

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884 Townshend

The synergy of religious and political identity was directly confronted in

Thomas Bartlett’s The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, which argued that
between 1690 and 1830 the “Catholic Question” was redefined as the Irish
question.10 This topos is at the core of Marianne Elliott’s imposing new study
of the Catholics of Ulster. If, as she has suggested elsewhere, “the Ulster
Catholic must be one of the most underresearched figures in Irish history,” she
has already gone a long way to redress the deficiency; she traces the com-
munity’s history back, if not to the dawn of time, at least to “the very earliest
of times, when Catholics, strictly speaking, did not exist.”11 The point of this
is to contest what she sees as a kind of tribal myth, that Ulster Catholics are
pure Gaels. For her (and surely this is what Irish historical revisionism is all
about) such myths are not agreeable or diverting fantasies but dangerous self-
deceptions that all too readily form the parapets of an endless pseudoethnic
warfare. Elliott’s Catholics of Ulster is a big book in more than one sense,
informed as it is by a personal engagement and an almost painful angst about
the fate of the community in which, of course, she herself grew up. She aims
to show that Ulster Catholics are not, as she puts it, “natural rebels”—that
their troubled and often violent experience (regrettably overplayed in the
highly colored publisher’s blurb for this book, which speaks of a “harsh re-
gion” and “its uniquely savage history”) is the product of complex structural
pressures. She provides, in a sense, a deep historical perspective on Fionnula
O’Connor’s remarkable work of political anthropology, In Search of a State.12
The central issue is the process by which the identity of the Catholic com-
munity was preserved through generations (if not, as the popular memory
would have it, centuries) of intense pressure, amounting in the collective mem-
ory to persecution. In this, the key period was that of the Penal Laws and the
key process “the merger of ‘Irishness’ and Catholicism,” as Elliott puts it
(chap. 5, pp. 125–60). Why did Catholics cling to their religion under a pres-
sure that was more intense, certainly, than would be the subsequent pressure
to abandon the Irish language? They resisted the first but collaborated in the
second, and it was this that determined the nature of Irish identity: in Irish the

1886 (Philadelphia, 1975), The Roman Catholic Church and the Plan of Campaign in Ireland,
1886–1888 (Cork, 1978), The Roman Catholic Church and the Fall of Parnell, 1888–1891
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850–1860
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–
1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), The Roman Catholic Church and the Home Rule Movement in
Ireland, 1870–1874 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), The Roman Catholic Church and the Emergence
of the Modern Irish Political System, 1874–1878 (Washington, D.C., 1996); Donald Harman
Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922: An International
Perspective (Kingston, 1988); Sean Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant
Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992); Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and
Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).
10
Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830
(Savage, Md., 1992).
11
Marianne Elliott, “Religion and Identity in Northern Ireland,” in The Long Road to Peace in
Northern Ireland, ed. M. Elliott (Liverpool, 2002), p. 178.
12
Fionnula O’Connor, In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1993).

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 885

Protestant Bible, as she notes, was called Bhı́obla Gallda—the “foreign Bi-
ble.” The hedge schools, a folk symbol of ethnic resistance, prospered not by
preserving Irish but by “meeting the surging demand for literacy” in English
(p. 181). The Catholic Church, which also preferred the use of English, was
uniquely positioned to provide (as Larkin argued) the organizational cadres
for the nationalist mobilization of the Parnell period: as Elliott suggests, its
involvement was larger in Ulster because the lay leadership there was weaker.
In this process “the Church played a major role in squeezing out the Protestant
voice in Irish nationalism” (p. 292).
The imbrication of religion and politics has been perpetuated by multiple
mechanisms, so consistently as to become unconscious and invisible to Cath-
olics themselves—though none the less obvious to Protestants. There is a kind
of implicit partitionism in Elliott’s account, as in so much revisionist work on
the history of Irish nationalism. But this is not the result of political bias, as
antirevisionists habitually allege. The point was vividly made by the veteran
republican organizer Peadar O’Donnell, whose patient efforts to recruit Prot-
estants had succeeded to the extent of persuading several to join a commem-
oration in Belfast of the 1916 rising; but when the march was stopped by
police, “the whole republican procession flopped down on its knees and began
the rosary.” As O’Donnell drily noted, “My Orangemen could have risked
getting their heads cracked with a baton, but they couldn’t kneel on the Belfast
streets to say the rosary.”13 Yet while the Marxist O’Donnell might testily
dismiss the Belfast IRA as a mere “battalion of armed Catholics,” in this they
were little different from their illustrious ancestors, the Irish Volunteers of the
revolutionary period, who commonly incorporated attendance at Mass into
their Sunday route marches and field days before the 1916 rising. The first
response of the 1916 rising internees, putting to sea from Dublin in cattle boats,
was to kneel amid the dung to say the rosary.14
It would be easy enough to acquit Ulster Catholics of the charge (if such it
be) of being natural rebels, by insisting—as the traditional nationalist histo-
riography did—on the culpability of Britain. Elliott urges a more complex and
nuanced interpretation. On this level her book is an extended plea for an honest
awareness of history as an escape route from the “prison of history”: Catho-
lics—like all other groups—need to accept that, however much they may have
been victimized, they are not simply victims. Catholicism (as Bartlett has also
shown) generated a “grievance culture” that gradually magnified the real griev-
ances from which it derived and reinforced the robust sense of shared faith
with a negative, even corrosive sense of exclusion. Such a process was work-
ing, for example, in the collective response of the Catholic community to the
Northern Ireland state in its first decades. As Elliott suggests, it was not just
that Catholics were directly discouraged by the Unionist regime from enlisting
in the police or the civil service but also that they opted out on the assumption
that they would be unwelcome. When in the 1960s they eventually began to

13
Elliott, p. 403.
14
McGarrity MSS, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 17512.

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886 Townshend

test that assumption with some persistence, they found it more fragile than had
been thought. Likewise, when dealing with the powerful fear of conversion
(akin to the Armenian concept of “white massacre,” or cultural murder, a
concept coined in the Irish context by P. H. Pearse with his “murder machine”
label for the system of English-only national schools),15 Elliott notes that “what
was once a justifiable reaction to Protestant proselytism has hardened into
dogmatism” (p. 458; she might even have said paranoia).
All the same, the mutually reinforcing stereotyping of Catholics and Prot-
estants has been a defining characteristic of intercommunal relations for a very
long time. And as Elliott found when serving on the Opsahl Commission, it
was still very much alive in the last years of the twentieth century. The crudest
of these, such as the Protestant notions of Catholic dirtiness and laziness, are
easy enough to dispose of; others, which may have been still more politically
damaging, such as the conviction that Irish Catholics are “priest-ridden,” su-
perstitious, or fatalistic, are more subliminal. A common finding is that Prot-
estants remain far more aware of the papal decree Ne Temere (1907) than are
Catholics. How far is this awareness a distortion? As Elliott indicates, some
stereotyping is rooted in simple social observation—for instance, the idea of
Catholic willingness to endure hardship (p. 186)—and there have been po-
litical and cultural divergences that are not imaginary.
A recognition of the increasingly close and intense identification of Irishness
with Catholicism—in the absence of a Gaelic-speaking linguistic community,
the closest approximation to the European sense of a “cultural nation” (in
Herder’s terms, a Volk)—has been one of the central contributions of modern
Irish historical scholarship. Outstanding here has been Larkin’s pioneering
work on what he labeled the “devotional revolution,” which now receives
suitable tribute in the form of a Festschrift with the nicely allusive title Piety
and Power. This wide-ranging yet unusually coherent collection both amplifies
and interrogates Larkin’s oeuvre, which for all its imposing scale remains
tightly focused on the managerial plane. Donal Kerr usefully points to the
revolutionary credentials of the pre-Famine Catholic Church, noting that this
was the only period in Irish history in which a substantial number of clerics
(including one bishop) apparently upheld the right of rebellion. This stance
was projected into the period of Paul Cardinal Cullen’s dominance, when Fa-
ther Patrick Lavelle challenged the cardinal’s application of papal decisions
on secret societies to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, on the grounds that
although the Fenians were anticlerical they were not (as Cullen maintained)
anti-Catholic and that the government was in any case not legitimate. As the
century went on, of course, the hierarchy became increasingly quietist, and
Frank Biletz offers an interesting account of its conflict with the Irish-Ireland
movement, which for all its apparent atavism had a strong progressive dimen-
sion. To these proto–Sinn Féiners, the clergy’s contribution to the campaign
for de-Anglicization was distinctly ambivalent: Anglophobia helped to launch

15
P. H. Pearse, “The Murder Machine,” in Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political
Writings and Speeches (Dublin, 1922), pp. 5–50.

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 887

the Gaelic athletic movement, but it also justified the church’s resistance to
the teaching of modern science, which made the Irish people less self-reliant.
Biletz offers the quirky example of Patrick D. Kelly, a classic returned emigrant
with ambitions to shake his countrymen out of their torpor by demonstrating
the value of new agricultural techniques, who coined the memorable phrase
“parochial terrorism” to describe the clergy’s stifling influence on local initia-
tive.
Two key essays, by Hugh Kearney and J. J. Lee, respectively, in Piety and
Power encapsulate the volume’s qualities. Addressing the “contested symbol-
ism of Irish Nationalism,” Kearney takes as his starting point Larkin’s dem-
onstration that the members of the Catholic hierarchy “saw themselves as
leaders of the Irish nation, as much as, if not more than politicians like Parnell,
Redmond and Dillon,” adding that to make sense of Irish nationalism “it is
necessary to follow Larkin’s lead and keep the Catholic hierarchy at the centre
of the picture” (p. 65). From this point, he tightens the focus to a single mo-
ment, the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell,
the Liberator, who led the campaign for Catholic emancipation. His centenary
was celebrated over three days (August 5–7) in Dublin in 1875. This became,
he suggests, a crucial symbolic issue in the defining of Irish identity: Was it
religious or secular? The interpretation of O’Connell’s achievement—the
question of whether Catholic emancipation or the Repeal of the Union move-
ment was more significant—was central to this. In the event, the sheer length
of the proceedings seems to have outworn the church’s power of influence: by
the third day, references to emancipation had ceased and repeal was center
stage; there was even “a whiff of popular radicalism about the proceedings”
(p. 79). But as Kearney notes, though this symbolic contest was illuminating,
it was not final: the clerical interpretation strengthened over the next genera-
tion.
While Kearney amplifies, Lee interrogates what he calls “the Larkin thesis,”
propounded in Larkin’s famous article, “Church, State, and Nation in Modern
Ireland” (1975): that during the 1880s the accommodation between Parnell’s
national movement and the Catholic Church effectively created the modern
Irish state.16 In Lee’s view, this is one of the most powerful analytical contri-
butions ever made to the study of Irish history—a thesis of “breathtaking
audacity,” purporting to find the Irish state “fully formed more than thirty years
before it came into formal existence” (p. 133). But does the thesis stand up?
Lee’s forceful, broadly conceived analysis (which is surely destined for every
reading list on modern Irish history) concludes that it simply claims too much.
The Irish “state” in 1891 might have been capable of denying the British state
the power to impose its will in Ireland, but it by no means possessed a mo-
nopoly of coercive power on its own account. British power, Lee argues, was
still capable of rerouting or even derailing the progress of the “virtual state”
to the actual state. The events of 1916 were not an epiphenomenon. For Lee,

16
Emmet Larkin, “Church, State and Nation in Modern Ireland,” American Historical Review
80 (1975): 1244–76.

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888 Townshend

it is the civil war rather than the fall of Parnell that constitutes “the supreme
political crisis in modern Irish history” (p. 149).
One important corollary of the Larkin thesis to which Lee objects is its
implication that by 1891 not only the emergence of the de jure Irish state but
also the emergence of the Northern Ireland state was “only a matter of time.”
Lee is evidently unhappy with the idea that partition was already inevitable
before Parnell’s death; however, others may see this as an important contri-
bution to understanding the impact of “cultural nationalism” in the Irish con-
text. A century ago, Irish nationalists found the idea of partition absurd, and
the idea that it might be inevitable or even justifiable would have been quite
literally inconceivable. The sense of outrage and damage persisted for gener-
ations after the formal acceptance of partition in 1921–25, and the suggestion
that it owed at least as much to Catholic attitudes as to Protestant “bigotry”
has been the most uncongenial of all revisionist messages.
Oddly, the word “partition” does not appear in the index of Stephen Howe’s
Ireland and Empire, though he notes early on that one of the most challenging
implications of recent historiography is that the Home Rule negotiated by John
Redmond’s Nationalist Party was not, as the dominant Sinn Féin version of
history held, a feeble sellout but all that was ever going to be achieved, even
after years of bloodshed. “More could simply not be had” (p. 41). Redmond,
of course, never accepted partition, but he did accept the inescapable fact of
Ireland’s relationship with Britain and thought it not inherently deleterious to
Irishness. Howe’s remarkable analysis directly confronts the core question in
the study of Irish identity: whether Britain (or “England,” as nationalists in-
variably called it) should be seen as an exploitative and damaging external
element or as part of an organic whole—what J. G. A. Pocock calls “the
archipelago” and politicians in the Republic call “these islands”—in which
identity has evolved through reciprocal interaction. He offers an ostensibly
neutral survey of the now widespread view that Ireland’s experience was de-
cisively shaped by colonial exploitation (though his tone of magisterial rea-
sonableness is a kind of subconscious Englishness that will probably not con-
vince everyone in Ireland, at least, of his neutrality). This is far and away the
most sustained critical assessment of the issue, based on impressively wide
reading and mercilessly alert to all signs of illogical or tendentious argument.
Howe starts from the obvious but important point that under the Union—
indeed, until the 1960s—remarkably few Irish nationalists regarded Ireland
as a colony or identified their cause with that of non-European subject peoples
in the British Empire. From the explicit white racism of John Mitchel to the
implicit contention of Michael Collins during the treaty negotiations of 1921
that Ireland, like Britain, was a “mother country,” nationalists were apparently
quite comfortable with imperialism.17 From this point, Howe moves on to
survey the contemporary work of cultural theorists on colonialism, persistently
challenging their casual linkage of racism with colonialism. A good example

17
An idea explored in Keith Jeffery, ed., An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 889

among many is his careful analysis of Seamus Deane’s critique of Conor Cruise
O’Brien. Howe argues that Deane’s view of history and politics is vitiated by
his refusal to differentiate between the epistemological (or, indeed, emotional)
stances appropriate to some kinds of intellectual task and those suitable to
others (p. 117). Deane has become a particularly scathing critic of revisionists
like O’Brien and R. F. Foster, but, as Howe notes, Deane’s positive proposals
are less impressive than his negative critique; his invocation of a new politics
of identity “unblemished by Irishness yet securely Irish” (p. 118) is allusive
to the point of imprecision.
In the process, Howe succeeds in convicting most of the leading cultural
theorists—Deane, Terry Eagleton, Luke Gibbons, and others—of most of the
offenses in the critical book: conceptual vagueness, elision, slippage, unsup-
ported generalization, and old-fashioned republican politics. David Lloyd, for
example, makes “sweeping claims about colonialism as a homogeneous entity,
seemingly unsupported by any extensive reading of colonial history”; the key
argument in Lloyd’s “almost oxymoronic” view of racism in Ireland rests
solely on “two overworked quotations from Charles Kingsley and Thomas
Carlyle” (p. 129). It will be clear from this which critical tradition Howe
belongs to; although elsewhere he mildly chastises Irish revisionist histori-
ography for its stolid empiricism, he plainly expects arguments to rest on
evidence.18 Although, following most of those who have written on the “re-
visionist controversy,” he barely notices the vastly influential and fiercely icon-
oclastic work of David Fitzpatrick, he is persuaded by the approach of the
leading economic revisionist, Liam Kennedy.19 Not only his argument that
whatever may have gone wrong with the Irish economy cannot be unambig-
uously attributed to colonial exploitation but also his combative line on post-
colonial interpretations of modern Ireland seem congenial to Howe.
It would be hard to imagine a more revisionist contention than that Irish
nationalists were enthusiasts for the British Empire; while this idea has been
adumbrated, it has not yet been systematically argued.20 The ultimate test of
Ireland’s relationship with the empire was participation in the Great War. To
Redmond, for Ireland to fight alongside Britain was natural; to those who were
coming to be known as Sinn Féiners, it was outrageous. This psychological
opposition was stronger than the technical arguments about whether or when
Ireland would secure Home Rule. The rough outline of Ireland’s war experi-
ence—initial enthusiasm followed by steady disenchantment, ending eventu-
ally in large-scale resistance to conscription—is well enough known and fairly
compatible with the dominant nationalist interpretation. More awkward to deal

18
Stephen Howe, “The Politics of Historical ‘Revisionism’: Comparing Ireland and Israel/
Palestine,” Past and Present, no. 168 (2000), pp. 243–44.
19
Has any so-called revisionist, for instance, issued so direct a challenge as Fitzpatrick’s “Let
statistics be used as a hammer for shattering Irish self-deception”? David Fitzpatrick, “The Ge-
ography of Irish Nationalism, 1910–1921,” Past and Present, no. 78 (1978), pp. 113–44, 137.
20
But note D. H. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Liverpool,
1997), with its injunction that “seeing oneself as being imperialized should not blind one to also
seeing oneself as an imperialist” (p. 174).

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890 Townshend

with has been the treatment of those hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who
volunteered to serve in the British Army. Far from being honored as returning
heroes of the “war for civilization,” they were a distinct embarrassment to the
governments of the independent Irish state, whose credentials rested on resis-
tance to recruitment and, indeed, outright rebellion against British rule. It
would not be much of an exaggeration to say that World War I was written
out of Irish public memory. Exploration of the ambiguities of Ireland’s war
experience has become one of the more striking historiographical enterprises
of recent years. It was heralded, like so much else, in Fitzpatrick’s Politics and
Irish Life and brought into focus in a volume of essays by Dublin University
graduate students under his editorship in 1986.21 In 1988 Foster’s Modern
Ireland stressed the oddity of Ireland’s wartime experience in the European
perspective, and from 1993 a small spate of essays by Keith Jeffery, together
with D. G. Boyce’s University College of Swansea inaugural lecture, gave the
reevaluation process a strong push.22 In the public sphere, the belated building
of Edwin Lutyens’s “little temple” in 1994 was officially declared to be the
completion of his National War Memorial in Dublin (even though his proposed
bridge across the Liffey remains unbuilt). Since then there have been substan-
tial, empathetic studies of Irish servicemen by Terence Denman, Thomas
Dooley, and Myles Dungan.23 Now Jeffery’s 1998 Lees Knowles Lectures at
Trinity College, Cambridge, offer a more substantial survey, while Boyce’s
lecture gets a third outing in the collection edited by Adrian Gregory and Senia
Paseta.
Jeffery’s Ireland and the Great War is a model of broad learning and shrewd
assessment in tightly organized form. He focuses on four themes, which he
labels obligation, participation, imagination, and commemoration. Under the
first, he surveys the vexed question of Irish recruitment into the British Army:
How many volunteered, and why? Estimates of Irish war fatalities, for in-
stance, range from forty-nine thousand to twenty-five thousand. His account
of participation deftly—and illuminatingly—links the experience of the Irish
troops in the Battle of the Somme and in the Dardanelles with that of the rebels
in Dublin at Easter 1916. A vital hope of the constitutional nationalists (Home
Rulers) was that Irish participation in the war would demonstrate Ireland’s
fitness for self-government and overcome Unionist resistance to Home Rule—
an idea signaled in the subtitle of Gregory and Paseta’s collection, Ireland and
the Great War: A War to Unite Us All? The 1916 rebellion decisively crushed

21
David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life, 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and
Revolution (Dublin, 1977); David Fitzpatrick, ed., Ireland and the First World War (Dublin, 1986).
22
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988); Keith Jeffery, “The Great War in
Modern Irish Memory,” in Men, Women, and War, ed. T. G. Fraser and K. Jeffery, Historical
Studies, vol. 17 (Dublin, 1993), and “Irish Culture and the Great War,” Bullán, nos. 1–2 (1993),
pp. 87–96; D. G. Boyce, The Sure Confusing Drum: Ireland and the First World War (Swansea,
1993).
23
T. Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers (Dublin, 1992); T. P. Dooley, Irishmen or English
Soldiers? (Liverpool, 1995); M. Dungan, They Shall Grow Not Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great
War (Dublin, 1997).

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 891

any such possibility, but, as Jeffery shows, there is all too much evidence that
the gulf between nationalists and unionists was already too deep to be bridged
by common war experience. The most plangent example of a formerly virulent
Unionist converted to admiration of the Catholic rank and file (of his son’s
regiment, the Irish Guards)—Rudyard Kipling—was, sadly, an isolated one.
The disillusionment of the Home Ruler Thomas Kettle, sensitively traced by
Paseta, was more indicative of the real political outcome of the war. Kettle,
with uncanny but too long-sighted prescience, saw the war as Ireland’s path
back into Europe, but he recognized after Easter 1916 that, while the rebels
would “go down in history as heroes and martyrs, I will go down—if I go
down at all—as a bloody British officer.” It seems that Ireland’s war experi-
ence, far from restoring the all-Ireland sense of identity that had been so se-
verely fractured by the confluence of the cultural nationalist movement and
the Home Rule crises, etched the fracture still more deeply. Philip Orr’s brief
but thoughtful essay on the experience of the Tenth Division in the Balkans
provides a somber reflection on the limits of reconciliation through common
memory.
Memorialization looms large in the second half of Jeffery’s study. In the
chapter entitled “Imagination,” he surveys Irish cultural responses to the war,
subtly analyzing the ambiguous response of artists like Sir John Lavery and
Sir William Orpen, as well as the ambiguous Irish reception of works such as
Mainie Jellett’s painting Peace (1919), which was depoliticized (as well as
despiritualized) by being renamed The Bathers’ Pool. Jeffery points out, in a
characteristic aperçu, that the only significant Great War painting in a public
collection in Ireland is Lavery’s Daylight Raid from My Studio Window
(1917)—“a strikingly civilian and detached vision of the war, which is reduced
to a distant pattern of aircraft in conflict” (p. 85). His final section, “Com-
memoration,” builds up from primary sources an illuminatingly detailed nar-
rative of a series of commemorative projects, including the Ulster Division’s
Scottish-baronial style Thiepval Tower and the oddly obscure Dublin memorial
to Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins (which started life as a plaster cenotaph
and became a slender obelisk in the middle of the Dáil parking lot, inaccessible
to the public). This subtly suggestive essay traces the careful elisions in, say,
the inscription on the discreet Kettle monument in Stephen’s Green and un-
ravels the failed attempt to stage an all-Ireland opening of the National War
Memorial in 1939. Though Jeffery is an acute and perceptive critic, his ap-
proach here is usually to let the detail speak for itself, which indeed it often
does quite deafeningly; on some issues, however, particularly the symbolism
of commemorative projects, we might wish for more deliberate analysis. In
discussing the Irish “Peace Tower” built at Messines in 1998, he does allow
himself a paragraph on the question of whether sites of defeat have more
binding resonance (as for Anzac Day) than those of victories such as Messines.
He also, characteristically, uses the illegal demolition of the building from
which the stone for the tower was taken to add a wry note on Irish political
culture. It is surprising that his impressive source list (supplemented by a
brilliant bibliographical essay) makes no reference to the work of Pierre Nora.

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892 Townshend

Jeffery’s book is, necessarily, exploratory rather than conclusive, while

Gregory and Paseta’s volume, with the same title, has still more of the air of
a work in progress. Such collections often demonstrate the whims of contrib-
utors as much as the will of editors, and their ten essays are a mixed bag. Peter
Martin’s account of the Irish nobility provides plenty of quotidian color but
does not quite rise to Jeffery’s pungent suggestion that this social group was
the war’s biggest loser. Eileen Reilly’s study of women shows, not entirely
unexpectedly, that voluntary war work was done mainly by Protestant ladies.
Joanna Bourke’s more adventurous approach to military psychiatry will be
familiar to many from her already published work. James Loughlin gives a
good account of the politics of Ulster remembrance, though he has little to say
about the war itself.
The editors make the point that Ireland was “almost unique” among bellig-
erent countries in witnessing an antigovernment rebellion during the course of
the war, but their laudable stated aim of integrating the understanding of 1916
into the wider war experience is not altogether successfully followed up by
their contributors (Jeffery’s work better realizes that goal). In fact, only Ben
Novick’s essay on the importation of arms into Ireland makes an explicit link
with the 1916 rising. He recovers, among other things, the strange political
setup in which it was possible, in the midst of a major war, for the Irish
Volunteers to place orders for service rifles with British gunsmiths. Gregory’s
reassessment of the 1918 conscription crisis looks as if it might address the
big question of whether this, rather than 1916, was the key point in the re-
casting of modern Irish politics, but he has little to say about Ireland, concen-
trating instead on the British government’s motives. Was the announcement of
conscription a blunder? His argument—that because conscription proved a
massive failure in terms of securing Irish recruits, the government cannot have
been motivated by the need for manpower—is simply not logical; while his
conclusion, that the real motivation was the need to placate British public
opinion, is unlikely to cause much surprise.
The conscription crisis forms the culminating point of Jerome aan de Wiel’s
new study, The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914–1918, the most substantial
on the topic to appear for thirty years. Aan de Wiel provides close documen-
tation of the church’s careful repositioning from pillar of the Redmondite party
to backer of Sinn Féin. He follows writers like Hoppen in finding the core
reasons for this shift in the need to follow as much as to lead public opinion:
religious doctrine took a backseat. The clergy did not follow the pope’s lead
in opposing the war on principle and backed off from supporting Redmond’s
recruitment campaign only because they “simply could not run the risk of
forcing Irishmen to join the army” (p. 41). In effect they were more alert to
public opinion than was the parliamentary party, and indeed the “rogue bish-
ops,” as aan de Wiel calls them—most notably, Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of
Limerick—became a kind of alternative nationalist leadership around the mid-
point of the war. O’Dwyer’s reverberant denunciation of General Sir John
Maxwell’s regime in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion receives due promi-
nence here, though aan de Wiel’s criticism of David W. Miller’s pioneering

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 893

interpretation seems to miss its point.24 He is more persuasive in presenting

new evidence, from previously unused Roman Catholic Church archives, on
one of the oddest incidents of the period: Count George Plunkett’s mission to
Rome in early April 1916 with a letter, allegedly from Eoin MacNeill as “pres-
ident” of the Irish Volunteers, asking for papal blessing of the forthcoming
rebellion. If Plunkett was telling the truth, the entire history of MacNeill’s
“countermanding order” will have to be rewritten, but this seems unlikely.
Although aan de Wiel perhaps plays down Plunkett’s unreliability, he is right
to say that there remains an unexplained element in this story. Its most re-
vealing aspect, perhaps, is that section of Plunkett’s letter (whomever it was
written by) asserting that “the people, the Catholic nation, is with us.”
The new alertness to the global context of Irish experience is clearly con-
structive, even if we may sometimes sense a bit of finger-wagging—a central
impulse of some revisionism being to instruct the Irish that they are not as
exceptional as they like to suppose. So it is necessary to recognize that the
Irish experience, even if not, as some maintain, sui generis, was untypical.
Ireland’s real war began after the world war had ended. Its physical scale may
have been dwarfed by its global predecessor, but its moral dimension was far
from trivial. Although historians have picked away at the foundation myth of
national unity in the 1919–21 period, showing the patchy nature of the popular
mobilization under the Sinn Féin banner, the psychological intensity of the
war of independence survives in collective memory.25 Ireland had a “revolu-
tion” of some sort, even though the term was rather loosely used by contem-
poraries and historians have so far done disappointingly little to pin it down.26
The meaning of the revolutionaries’ struggle for freedom or independence was
painfully interrogated in the traumatic process of civil war, and a sense of
incompletion was aggravated by the fact of partition. For many, this was a
révolution manquée. The governments of the Irish Free State/Eire after 1922
had to cope with the psychological as well as the economic fallout of its
semidetachment from Britain. These were, as the title of a pioneering collection
of essays put it, “the years of the great test,” and these years have not been
very attractive to historians since then.27
Oddly, perhaps, Ireland’s external relations have received more careful treat-
ment (as in the distinguished work of David Harkness, Patrick Keatinge, and

24
David W. Miller, Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898– 1921 (Dublin, 1973), pp.
331– 32.
25
For a general account, see Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Dublin,
2002); key studies of the mobilization process are Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to
Guerrilla Warfare: The Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence,
1916–1921 (Dublin, 1996); and Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies (Oxford, 1998).
26
Fitzpatrick, again, may have been the first to recognize the need to clarify the meaning of
this slippery term in the Irish context. (Its slipperiness retains a positive appeal for some writers,
e.g., Francis Costello, The Irish Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1916–1923 [Dublin, 2003]). For a
further attempt to pin it down, see the essays by Charles Townshend (“Historiography: Telling
the Irish Revolution”) and Peter Hart (“Definition: Defining the Irish Revolution”) in The Irish
Revolution, 1913–1923, ed. Joost Augusteijn (Basingstoke, 2002).
27
Francis MacManus, ed., The Years of the Great Test, 1926–1939 (Cork, 1963).

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894 Townshend

Deirdre MacMahon, for instance) than has its political experience.28 Much of
this work is summed up and usefully extended in the collection Irish Foreign
Policy, 1916–1966, edited by Michael Kennedy and Joseph Skelly. Between
a highly serviceable historiographical outline by the editors that serves as an
introduction and Ronan Fanning’s tersely argued concluding essay on Ireland’s
cautious embrace of internationalism are a baker’s dozen case studies ranging
from the marginal (such as Kennedy’s essay on Irish diplomats in Latin Amer-
ica) to the central (such as Bernadette Whelan’s analysis of Ireland’s ambiv-
alent engagement with the Marshall Plan)29 and the thematic (Gary Murphy’s
ambitious survey of Irish views of Europe in the 1950s). Ranging even more
widely from the foreign-policy core of the collection, and focusing on British
rather than Irish policy, is Deirdre MacMahon’s substantial essay on the evo-
lution of Dominion Status.
At last, younger scholars have begun to grapple more systematically with
the internal politics of this period, notably, in the work of John Regan on the
establishment of the Irish Free State regime, Richard Dunphy on the Fianna
Fáil party, Richard English on the republican movement, and Mike Cronin on
the Blueshirts. These four historians all contribute essays to a state-of-the-art
collection, Ireland: The Politics of Independence. Its editors, Mike Cronin and
John Regan, register the point that “writing on independence has been the
preserve of a few pioneers probing deep into primary sources without the
assistance of an extensive secondary literature” (p. 6); to an unusual degree
this has been true of the major works of synthesis by Ronan Fanning and J. J.
Lee as well.30 Though this collection may not reshape the historical landscape,
it should certainly, as they hope, “at least make a contribution to the diversi-
fication of the historiography” (p. 6). Interesting examples are Senia Paseta’s
analysis of the marginalization of the once radical young leadership of the
Home Rule Party and Susannah Riordan’s account of the attempts by what
she calls (perhaps oxymoronically) a “loose phalanx of thinkers influenced by
Roman Catholic social theory” to construct an alternative pattern of develop-
ment (p. 100)—what today might be called a “third way”—against the trend
of the times toward left-wing popular fronts. Riordan shows the sheer scale of
the task faced by those who would restore or reshape the cultural identity of
a nation. As one of them plaintively put it, “I would rely on public opinion,
if it were Irish public opinion, to defend us, but why should we allow Irish
public opinion to be overwhelmed by foreign laxity?” (p. 109). It was this
fatal distrust that drove the increasingly sterile and counterproductive regime
of censorship, which may ironically have intensified the eventual “quiet se-
cularisation” of Irish society, as the editors call it (p. 9), over the last three
decades of the twentieth century.

28
See, e.g., D. Harkness, The Restless Dominion (London, 1969); P. Keatinge, The Formulation
of Irish Foreign Policy (Dublin, 1973); D. McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists.
29
Whelan’s topic is explored at full length in her Ireland and the Marshall Plan, 1947–1957
(Dublin, 2000).
30
R. Fanning, Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1983); J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985 (Cambridge,
1989).

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 895

This is a useful book; students will certainly be glad of Dunphy’s concise

distillation of his work on the mystery of Fianna Fáil’s enduring grip on the
public mood. But the collection has some inconsistencies—the scale of con-
tributions varies sharply from the fourteen pages of English’s deft survey of
socialist republicanism to over fifty pages of Donal Lowry’s analysis of Irish
foreign relations (which has fourteen pages of notes alone). Furthermore, the
authors have been ill served here by their publisher, which has produced a
nastily bound and shockingly inaccurate text with a seriously inadequate index
(there is no entry, for instance, for Bulmer Hobson, who figures very interest-
ingly in Finin O’Driscoll’s essay on the 1934 Commission on Banking, Cur-
rency, and Credit).
The contours of Irish politics for at least the first half century of indepen-
dence were, notoriously, defined by the civil war. It is a truism that the war
was not “about” concrete issues (in particular, partition) but about the more
metaphysical issue of status. Although the Irish Free State government de-
picted it as a struggle between democracy and militarism, even at that abstract
level there was little ground for triumphalism in its victory. The conflict was
a lacerating moral experience for the revolutionary cohort that had felt itself
united through the “four glorious years.” Anne Dolan’s Commemorating the
Irish Civil War traces the fine and unstable line between “national” and party-
political values in the halting and uncertain attempts to construct memorials
to the two celebrated casualties of August 1922, Arthur Griffith and Michael
Collins. Her analysis focuses on three historical narratives: those of the cen-
otaph erected outside Leinster House for the first anniversary of Collins’s
death; the cross erected at the site of the ambush in which he died, at Beal na
mBlath; and the state’s failure to construct any memorial to Griffith that his
widow would find appropriate. This is a subject with strong potential to illu-
minate the nature of Irish identity, and Dolan has dug deep in the archives and
come up with a mass of fascinating material. Here we are shown politicians
and officials ruminating more or less directly about the underlying issues of
political allegiance. We might, however, wish for a somewhat more sensitive
and empathetic reading of these efforts than Dolan provides. Hers is an account
from which nobody emerges with credit. Her interpretation is consistently
negative, her tone astringent. Her view of the motives of politicians is almost
Fenian in its contempt. The argument that Griffith should be given a memorial
plot sufficiently large that it “would not be dwarfed for all time” by Parnell’s,
for instance, she attributes to “a childish impulse to prove that ‘anything you
can do I can do better’” (p. 116). Mocking General Richard Mulcahy’s “new
and seemingly acute democratic sensibilities” in refusing to endorse a monu-
ment to the death of four National Army soldiers in a County Wexford ambush,
she reads his remark that “personally, I very much dislike the idea of erecting
a monument at the site of an ambush between Irishmen,” as having “more to
do with shame than democracy” (p. 122). Mulcahy’s claim to have been a key
figure in democratic nation building can be disputed, but it is a serious claim
and should at least be discussed rather than rejected out of hand.31

31
As in Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), esp. pp. 54, 60, 205.

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896 Townshend

Surely, the idea of shame, if it is to be introduced at all, could be used as a

pathway to understanding rather than condemnation. The dismal story of the
cenotaph is certainly in part a story of penny-pinching, but it is also a mani-
festation of the pathology of civil conflict. The decay of the temporary structure
provides an all too tempting metaphor, which is exploited to the hilt here, yet
the explicitly unfavorable comparison with the completion of the Whitehall
model is not really useful without an attempt to measure the Irish civil war
experience against the British experience of the Great War. Dolan adopts the
line taken by some architectural historians that the obelisk finally raised on
Leinster lawn is “dwarfed” by its surroundings, but that seems a subjective
view of what some people see as a rather elegant monument. (They can only
see it, of course, as they are not allowed to approach it.) How are such aesthetic
issues to be measured? She often implies that “cheap” forms of commemo-
ration, such as the renaming of streets and bridges, are somehow less genuine
than the building of expensive memorials, but, again, such a materialist mode
of calibration seems too crude to meet the needs of the analytical issue. (One
might ask, for instance, what the renaming of railway stations says about the
memorialization of the rebel leaders of 1916.) The same goes for the some-
times painful efforts to find appropriate verbal forms of commemoration: W. T.
Cosgrave’s invocation of the “man kneading bread in a dark oven” at the
Griffith-Collins ceremony in 1926 may be strange, but simply to dismiss it as
“degenerate” (p. 182) seems to be missing an opportunity for exploration.
While the decoding of commemoration is never going to be an exact science,
a more systematic approach emerges in the collection of essays edited by Ian
McBride under the title History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Some of these
originated as contributions to the 1998 Conference of Irish Historians in Brit-
ain, and though they range widely across history—and, indeed, other disci-
plines—they stick to the point identified in the editor’s alert and perceptive
introduction (a persuasive piece of research in its own right). Taking his key
from Ernest Renan’s justly celebrated proposition that national consciousness
rests on a collective memory that is shaped as much by what is forgotten as
by what is remembered, McBride explores the relationship between demotic
instinct and elite manipulation in the persistence of certain memories. McBride
notes that the “invention of tradition” approach has done little to advance the
understanding of why, as distinct from when, traditions take root, and he argues
for the need to grasp how great the perceptual chasm between “traditions” in
Ireland can be. As he shows, “a comparison of loyalist and republican com-
memorations reveals not merely rival accounts of the same events, but alter-
native cultural codes which give rise to different ways of structuring historical
experience” (p. 27). Thus McBride stresses how “profoundly alien to Protes-
tants” was Pearse’s idea of the “crucified nation” (p. 35), just as the essay that
follows, by Alan Ford, shows the dramatic and irreconcilable divergence be-
tween Protestant and Catholic discourses of martyrdom.
Alongside thoughtful essays on the memory of the great famine, the expe-
rience of Irish Americans in the American Civil War, and the experience of
Ulstermen on the Somme, this volume offers a pioneering survey, written by

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 897

David Fitzpatrick five years before Dolan’s study, of commemoration in the

Irish Free State. His laconic title, “A Chronicle of Embarrassment,” sets his
interpretative tone—as in so much of his work, sardonic yet engaged. On his
account, simple incompetence played a bigger part than jealousy or self-seek-
ing in the state’s inadequate commemorative achievement, but he also finds a
degree of statesmanship there; for instance, he attributes the often labored
evenhandedness of both W. T. Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera to the need to
mitigate “the religious and political bigotry of many of their supporters”
(p. 190), and he concludes that “both governments were hesitant in exploiting
the emotional capital accumulated through the fabled seven centuries of na-
tional struggle” (p. 203). This is a characteristically deft synoptic view that
should be widely read. The collection also offers a number of illuminating
contributions from literary scholars, notably Joep Leerssen’s treatment of the
spectacular, and in a real sense revolutionary, nineteenth-century leap of “Cath-
olic, nationalist Ireland” from its premodern occlusion (“hermetically sealed
off” in “the ambit of an incomprehensible language, a proscribed religion, a
seditious interpretation of the nation’s past”; p. 214) into the open arena of
print culture, the media, and the public voice.
The selective memory of the First World War was echoed in the Irish ex-
perience of the Second World War, officially labeled “the Emergency”—a term
that, if anything, overdramatized the war’s direct impact. There were key dif-
ferences between the two wars, of course, most obviously that in the Second
World War Ireland was an independent state—whatever republicans might
say—and demonstrated this by adopting a formal policy of neutrality. Neu-
trality, indeed, added a vital coda to the Irish foundation myth and has now
been subjected to a quiet but effective revisionist analysis.32 An important
parallel with the First World War is the awkward memory of the Irishmen who
enlisted in the British forces, again tacitly suppressed until the mid-1990s,
when the Volunteers Project was initiated by historians at University College
Cork. This project formed the basis for the collection of essays edited by Brian
Girvin and Geoffrey Roberts, and it significantly enlarges the serious study of
Ireland’s wartime experience. The core of Ireland and the Second World War
is formed by a trio of essays on the volunteers themselves: Cormac Kavanagh
exploring the political dimension of the issue, Aidan McElwaine presenting
the project’s oral history findings, and Richard Doherty arguing in good old-
fashioned terms the case for the volunteers to be accepted as “Irish heroes.”
These are prefaced by a helpful survey of the neutrality question by John A.
Murphy and a hardheaded analysis of Ireland’s wartime politics by Girvin.
Girvin accepts that, whether or not de Valera’s claim that participation in the
war would have risked serious internal conflict was plausible, neutrality was
the only course that commanded a consensus. But de Valera exploited its os-
tensibly abstract logic to sustain his own party’s political aims. And Girvin
adds another layer of inconsistency to the Irish government’s neutrality policy

32
Most forcefully by Trevor Salmon, Unneutral Ireland (Oxford, 1989). See also P. Keatinge,
A Singular Stance: Irish Neutrality in the 1980s (Dublin, 1984).

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898 Townshend

by pointing out its quiet cooperation with Britain in the politically sensitive
field of emigration: he suggests that as many as two hundred thousand men
and women left Ireland for Britain during the war. Their experience is dis-
cussed in another essay by Tracey Connolly, while Eunam O’Halpin and Donal
Ó Drisceoil provide handy digests of their pioneering work on the security
apparatus and the censorship regime.
Collections like this, whatever their substantive virtues, often fall short of
gripping the reader in the manner of the best monographs. This one does rise
in moral pitch, however, thanks to Geoffrey Roberts’s pithy, combative con-
cluding essay, which contrasts the pious distancing of Ireland from the Allied
cause (as in General Mulcahy’s suggestion that it would be “hard to say that
the United States, France and Great Britain can completely wash their hands
of responsibility for the situation in Europe”; p. 171) with John Dillon’s per-
sistent denunciation of the policy of “indifferent neutrality” as “a constant
source of shame” (pp. 176–77). Around this tension, he offers a thoughtful
exploration of the possible costs and benefits of a clear identification with the
anti-Nazi cause and a conclusion that confirms to some degree the notorious
pessimism of Lyons’s account.33
Besides cementing the effective independence of the Irish state, the Emer-
gency was also a deciding moment for the equally important question of
whether it was effectively a Catholic state. In 1944 the Commission for Vo-
cational Organization produced its report on the possibility of building in Ire-
land the kind of corporativist institutions indicated in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno (1931). The commission had been created in 1938, and
its long drawn-out inquiry represented the culmination of the efforts of those
who felt that Catholicism “should play a more central role in the country’s
future development” (p. 1), as Don O’Leary puts it in the first full-scale study
of the vocational question, Vocationalism and Social Catholicism in Twentieth-
Century Ireland. This well-researched monograph builds sensibly on the work
of O’Leary’s doctoral supervisor, Dermot Keogh, on the 1937 constitution, to
show how skilfully de Valera’s government operated to utilize the social
strength of the Catholic Church without giving ground to the potentially state-
challenging aspirations of social Catholicism.34 A good example was de Va-
lera’s suggestion that the vocationalists should try to make use of the extensive
experience of the Whitley Councils in Britain. O’Leary seems undecided on
whether this was a deliberate spoiling tactic or a positive pragmatic proposal
that the social Catholics (more ideologically anti-British than de Valera him-
self) refused to entertain. Either way, he makes it clear that the vocationalist
project was doomed not only by the antidemocratic (if not fascistic) convic-
tions of many of its adherents—which aligned the movement with Fianna
Fáil’s political opponents in the 1930s—but also by its persistent (and very
unfascist) hostility to the state. It annoyed too many civil servants; and it is
significant that when Seán Lemass got his retaliation in early, before the com-

F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1971), pt. 4, chap. 2.

33

Dermot Keogh, “The Irish Constitutional Revolution: An Analysis of the Making of the
34

Constitution,” in The Constitution of Ireland, 1937–1987, ed. F. Litton (Dublin, 1987), pp. 4–84.

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 899

mission’s report was published, it was in the form of a heated defense of state
agencies. Thereafter, he famously let rip, denouncing the “querulous, nagging,
propagandist tone” (p. 130) of the commission’s observations and the self-
contradictory nature of its recommendations.
By 1945, it was clear that Ireland was not to be a Catholic state in any
simple sense, though of course the meaning of such a term could never be
specified exactly. O’Leary’s account of the attitude of the Catholic Headmas-
ters’ Association toward another vocationalist idea, the council of education,
shows that the existing system of educational administration was already re-
garded as “very near to the perfect Catholic system” (p. 83). It is clear through-
out his study that the Irish Catholic Church was always more concerned with
the struggle to halt or reverse spiritual decadence than with the agenda of social
Catholicism. It is less clear how concerned it was to overcome the formidable
list of educational defects found among Irish Catholics by the French writer
Louis Paul-Dubois in 1907: “A certain form of intellectual apathy very wide-
spread, a distaste for mental effort, a certain absence of the critical sense[,]
. . . lethargy of opinion, lack of liberty of mind, of energy, and of power of
moral resistance.”35 The condition of the natural sciences, at least, gave cause
for some anxiety about the effects of denominational pressure.36
Where does all this leave the issue of Irish national identity? In one sense,
the question may have become less pressing. As Vincent Comerford observes
(with the ring of authentic personal experience) in Ireland, whereas twenty or
thirty years ago a citation from “some giant of the nationalist pantheon” was
the standard weapon for assaulting opponents, “now such invocation is seldom
heard” in Ireland (p. 2). But if Irish people, or at least citizens of the Republic,
have become more relaxed about their identity, he makes clear in this new
study in the Inventing the Nation series that most of their thinking about na-
tionality is still shaped by a belief in the permanent, immanent existence of a
national spirit. Against this essentialism, which he calls Herderian (a little
unfairly to Herder, who as a pioneering philologist saw the Volksgeist emerging
through—not determining—the evolution of language, and so was much
closer to what seems to be Comerford’s view), he proposes an account of
nationality that emphasizes contingency and adaptation. (His book’s title seems
a little misleading here, since “Ireland” is not a nation, as his account repeat-
edly stresses—but perhaps “the Irish” would have evoked too many old-fash-
ioned approaches.)
Comerford treats the vast theoretical literature on nationalism with a light
touch; he thinks that both those who insist on the essential modernity of na-
tionalism—Ernest Gellner, above all—and those who, like Adrian Hastings,
contend that nations existed in the medieval world have valuable “insights.”37
This is perhaps too easy going. In practice, however, the modernization process

35
Louis Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland (Dublin, 1908), p. 497.
36
See Greta Jones, “Catholicism, Nationalism, and Science,” Irish Review, no. 20 (1997),
pp. 47–61.
37
E. Gellner, Thought and Change (London, 1964), chap. 7, pp. 147–78; A. Hastings, The
Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997).

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900 Townshend

does not play an explanatory role in his account (though he notes, for instance,
the direct link between literacy and the expanding use of the English language).
His method is to unpack all the components conventionally taken to constitute
“Irishness,” under a set of headings such as “Origins,” “Language,” “Sport,”
and “Artefacts” (a term he takes to incorporate the visual arts, but not music).
He draws out their shifting patterns, charting an alertly nuanced path through
a rich mix of often arcane evidence—dealing with everything from the
brethem (the pre-Norman arbitrators whose corpus of Brehon law was one of
the most exciting nationalist rediscoveries of the nineteenth century) to the
bodhran (the pseudotraditional percussion instrument adopted by the céilı́
bands of the late twentieth century, the epoch of what may be called “lifestyle
Irishness,” the triumphant accompaniment of Riverdance and the Irish pub).
Comerford is alert to the growing inconsistency between the United Irish-
men’s inclusive sense of nationality and the “racializing” tendency imported
from Europe, notably, by Thomas Davis in the 1830s: he points out that the
term “Celt” scarcely appears in the lexicons of Wolfe Tone and O’Connell but
became the leitmotif of Davis’s hugely influential writings. Davis, himself,
was sadly blind to the alarming contradiction in his idea of the nation, and
Comerford skillfully draws out the full political implications of this. Sports,
too, furnish a perfect vehicle for his approach: he demonstrates, first, how
Archbishop Thomas Croke’s famous list of unnational games and pastimes
that were “not racy of the soil but rather alien to it” was silently amended
(tennis was dropped from it; soccer added) by the institutional nationalists of
the Gaelic Athletic Association; and, second, how the key national sport of
hurling developed from a fairly arbitrary rejection of the established game of
“hurley” played by Protestants in Trinity College and went on through further
substantial adaptations in the interests of spectator value.
The tremendous and lasting success of hurling, in marked contrast with the
fate of the Irish language itself (which most hurling pioneers regarded as vitally
linked with the game) highlights an issue that Comerford’s interpretation does
not fully confront. Why do some nationalist initiatives, and indeed some na-
tions, prosper and others are stillborn? Here the deliberately revisionist title of
the series may be unhelpful, imposing the limitations of the “invention of
tradition” school—the implication that “invented” traditions or identities are
less “genuine” than others—in this case, following Elie Kedourie’s famous
assertion that nationalism was invented in the nineteenth century.38 This con-
structivism can produce real misunderstanding and miss the point that the
mechanics of invention are less significant than the mechanics of reception.
To take an example from another national culture, does the information that
“nesting dolls” did not, as is generally believed, derive from Russian folk
culture but were a commercial invention of the 1890s make them less “Rus-
sian”? Logically, perhaps, it should—but in reality it does not. It is its defiance

38
E. Kedourie, Nationalism (London, 1960), p. 1; Craig Calhoun, “The Virtues of Inconsis-
tency: Identity and Plurality in the Conceptualization of Europe,” in Constructing Europe’s Iden-
tity, ed. Lars-Erik Cederman (Boulder, Colo., 2001), p. 47.

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 Religion, War, and Identity in Ireland 901

of logic and forensic analysis that makes nationalism so resistant to the grasp
of political science. The series might be better called Imagining the Nation,
especially since Comerford endorses Benedict Anderson’s approach and, in-
deed, deploys it to some effect—for instance, in his demonstration of the way
in which British state-creating actions repeatedly “extended, enhanced and
defined the content of Irishness” (p. 37).39 To insist that nationalism, “like
everything else about nationality is adjustable, flexible, renegotiable, as cir-
cumstances dictate” (p. 48) is, like the Marxist view of nationalism as false
consciousness, to risk defining it out of existence—a kind of intellectual wish-
ful thinking. It remains true, as Craig Calhoun pointed out ten years ago—in
the midst of an unwelcome nationalist revival—that repeated academic an-
nouncements of the death of nationalism have proved to be greatly exagger-
ated.40
Comerford finds that “the only aspect of culture that comes near to coincid-
ing with political division in preindependence Ireland is religion” (p. 78). His
account of this is somewhat tentative, however—almost portraying what he
calls the “crystallization of three broad political collectivities” on a denomi-
national basis as a coincidental rather than a causal process (p. 99). His ter-
minology here is oddly neutral: in the sixteenth century “an ideology was being
put in place that identified Roman Catholicism as the essence of Irishness”
(p. 94), but who was doing this and why it was accepted remains unclear. The
question of why the Reformation failed in Ireland is a fundamental one, and
his argument—that the predestinarian and/or aristocratic tendency of Protes-
tants in Ireland made them uninterested in converting Catholics—is somewhat
dubious in itself. At best, it would provide only a partial explanation. His
treatment of the Penal Laws is glancing enough to incur the wrath of tradi-
tionalists; he notes that those laws “assumed mythical status and became part
of the armoury of politicised Catholicism” only after 1790, by which time
most of the code had been repealed (p. 107). The date might look significant
to someone thinking of the modernization process, and he does note that the
Catholic Church “promoted a modernizing ethos” through most of the nine-
teenth century, but the exact mechanism of the increasingly close mesh be-
tween Catholicism and nationalism remains out of focus. Again, while Com-
erford presents a very interesting analysis of the polarizing impact of the land
war, we are left wondering whether this religious divide is cause or effect.
Surprisingly, the “devotional revolution” thesis does not appear at all, though
Cardinal Cullen is tantalizingly invoked as “a key inventor of nationality who
was simultaneously opposed to nationalist politics” (p. 111). Why Catholicism
embued so much of the Irish sense of identity remains a mystery, though there
can be no doubting the electrifying force of the revived fear of conversion
from the time of the midcentury “Protestant Crusade” through at least 1914.

39
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991).
40
See Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and Civil Society: Democracy, Diversity and Self-Deter-
mination,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford, 1994), p. 305.

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902 Townshend

A related point arises later, when Comerford refers briefly to the Irish na-
tional anthem and, more briefly than one might expect in a study of national
symbols, to the national flag. The anthem serves his purpose well, since it was
(a) written in English and (b) adopted in a highly erratic way. The way Peadar
Kearney’s song so naturally chimed with the spirit of the Irish Volunteer move-
ment is indeed one of those occult aspects of nationalism that continue to defy
analysis. The flag is, on the face of things, more straightforward but not without
its own mystery. The green-white-orange tricolor that after 1916 replaced the
Irish Volunteers’ green flag with a gold harp was originally designed by the
Young Irelander T. F. Meagher to symbolize peace between nationalists and
loyalists. Curiously, though, the orange can be seen through distorting filters.
Conor Cruise O’Brien once pointed out, as evidence of their prejudice, that
Loyalists often describe the tricolor as green, white and gold—gold being the
color of the papacy. Yet green, white, and gold were indeed the colors adopted
by Robert Emmet and projected, via pictures of him, into countless Irish house-
holds for generations.41 And one of the favorite numbers performed at the
lecture-concert meetings that spread the Sinn Féin message after 1916, along-
side the “Soldier’s Song,” “Sinn Féin Amháin,” and “Who Fears to Speak of
’98,” was “The Green, White, and Gold.” Perhaps the symbolic color-blindness
is even more informative than O’Brien suggested.

41
See Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London, 2003), pp. 182–83.

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