Yeats and the Irish Free State

The Senator and the Coinage Committee

The Irish Senate
• Upper house of the Oireachtas composed of 60 members
• The Senate could delay legislation up to 270 days and could initiate its own
bills (except for money bills).
• The main reason for its establishment was to give a public voice to Unionists
and other Anglo-Irish Protestants like Yeats whose community already felt
threatened and marginalised in the new state.
• Yeats was appointed to the Senate’s panel concerning education, literature
and the arts.
• Senators were a sanctioned target by the Anti-Treaty IRA.
• The Senate first sat in Dec. 1922, by Feb. 1923 the houses of 37 Senators had
been burnt. Yeats’ home in Merrion Square was shot at.
The Abbey and Censorship
• Yeats sought to secure a subsidy to support and maintain the Abbey Theatre. He wrote
an extensive letter to Desmond Fitzgerald, a government minister, detailing the financial
demands of the institution.
• The subsidy was granted and was made an annual payment to the theatre from 1927
onwards but at the potential loss of creative independence as the government now had
a representative on the theatre’s governing board.
• Although Yeats was no longer a senator by 1929 he strong opposed the Censorship Act
of that same year. The act set up the Censorship Board to keep out books and magazines
that were considered indecent and obscene or advocated contraception. The acts
standards were clearly in line with Catholic values.
• Yeats thought that if you policed culture in such a manner you discourage creativity and
freedom of expression: “And our zealots’ idea of establishing the Kingdom of God upon
earth is to make Ireland an island of moral cowards.”
Divorce
• Having consulted with Catholic bishops W. T. Cosgrave decided the government
would ban divorce in 1925.
• Yeats saw this as a serious infringement on the rights of Protestants. For him it
spoke to the wider marginalisation and mistreatment of Protestants within the
new state despite their historic contribution to Irish culture and society
• “I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence
we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be
grossly oppressive. . . . We are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift,
the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. . . . Your victory will be brief, and your
defeat final, and when it comes this nation may be transformed.”
• Many Protestants in southern Ireland lived in fear during these years. Over the
course of the War of Independence and Civil War many big houses were burnt
down and the South’s Protestant population declined from over 311,000 to
207,000 from 1911-26
First Issue 1928
The Coinage Committee
• Committee responsible for the design of a new Irish coinage.
• Yeats was chosen as its chair in 1926 and oversaw the competition for
the chosen designs.
• Yeats wanted the coins to embody a pastoral theme that emphasised
agrarian life while also linking the images to Irish myth, themes ordinary
people could relate to and appreciate.
• The coins are also secular, unpolitical and modernist: They do not bear
any religious symbols such as a Celtic cross or reference St. Patrick, they
don’t bear the image of historical figures or reference historical events
that would have made them less inclusive and more political as symbols
of Irish identity.
Continued . . .
• The designs (by Percy Metcalf) were received with positivity despite anger at their secular
image from Catholic publications such as The Catholic Bulletin that described them as “beast
coinage”.
• The coins fulfilled Yeats as a cultural nationalist and he refereed to them “as the silent
ambassadors of national taste.”
• While serving the basic purpose of legal tender, the coins would champion an identity that
could accommodate both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish traditions within Irish Society, and Irish
culture. This reminds us of how Yeats showed that you could build an Irish literary tradition
within the English language without any loss of Irish character (The De-Anglicisation of Ireland).
• The coins allowed Yeats to it back at the Catholic middle class he derided for being to
preoccupied by religion and money (“born to pray and save”). When they now “fumbled in a
greasy till”, they fumbled the very coins chosen by Yeats.
• The coins also reflect Yeats’ keen sense of aesthetics. Like the bindings of his poetry books a lot
more can be taken from the images presented to us.