THE SPECTATOR.

WEVIEWABOOKS .11

Colin Wilson on George Bernard Shaw Reviews by Jack Bennett, Joseph Lee and Patrick Cosgrave. Auberon Waugh on new novels

Edward Norman on modern Ireland

`The Gael is not like other men', wrote Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Rising; `a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life.'

It is, on the face of it, only kind to sup- pose that the Irish Republic of contem- porary discernment is not the fulfilment of Pearse's prediction; that thee Irish master-race has yet to rear up from the discarded debris of political and moral aspiration in the sister isle. Regenerations are a dicey undertaking for any people, but the Gaelic political and social vision, the 'Irish note' of the litterateurs, the Catholic purity of the Irish Church—these things began to promote. from the later 1880s, a national 'ideal whose logical im- plications are happily unrealised. The crude racism of Irish nationalism was in origin a slight matter dreamed up by clerks and schoolteachers festering in the genteel suburbs of Edwardian Dublin, and proclaimed upon the playing-fields of Tipperary. Circumstances in Ireland during the Great War quite unexpectedly engendered a political dislocation almost providentially calculated to allow these small minorities to represent themselves as the folk soul of the nation.

The modern Irish state, spattered with the self-conscious blood sacrifice of Pearse and his followers in 1916, and of some of the most disagreeable brutalities which even the recent history of guerrilla war- fare have accomplished, made it look for a while as if the 'Gaelic note' might even yet receive a real expression. Between the wars the Free State enforced the teaching of the Irish language in schools, required Irish as a qualification for public service, • prohibited divorce and contraception, introduced a code of censorship, and— most importantly, perhaps—failed to establish the conditions conducive to the creation of a welfare society. These, how- ever, were the only permanent results of the rich heritage of racial discrimination and Gaelic militarism upon which the founders of the state had hoped to draw so extensively. The Irish people of the real world—the small farmers, the de- pressed shopkeepers, and the lower middle classes of the cities, had benefited too substantially, in the end, from the diffusion of English civilisation. The Irish nation which emerged was in essence their nation: a petit-bourgeois country much given to triviality and political in- eptitude. It is, as a result, a splendid place to be.

It has been the insistence by English and American liberals that Irish national aims in the present century were not only justified, but righteously justified, which has provided the ultimate reason for the extraordinary contemporary vilification of Northern Ireland. That province, it has been supposed, represents a sort of cor- rupt reserve of triumphant old-style Tory- ism, not to say veiled fascism. Many whose high-mindedness on other questions does them unlimited credit even contrive to see the forces working for the integra- tion of Ulster with the Republic in heroic terms: the forces of 'civil rights'; the `freedom-fighters' of the housing estates; the transformed hillside men, now 'urban guerrillas'; and so forth. The terms, which are either ludicrously inappropriate or self-condemning, are new to Ireland— whose actual troubles, of course, as usual manage to escape the sort of universal analysis apparently found so necessary in our day. The position, however, is quite plain. Northern Ireland was created against the will of a fair majority of its inhabit- ants, who sought only to remain united to England. It was launched by military men with an unofficial army at their back. de- pendent upon the sympathy of a massed Tory working class. It has been governed by a single party for fifty years. But in conditions so conducive to the develop- trent of a real sort of fascism, nothing of the kind has occurred. Northern Ireland de- veloped into a liberal welfare state after the Second War as a result of the adoption of the policies of the Unionist government. The Republic stands in some contrast. There real fascism found exponency during the 1930s, the Roman Catholic Church held back the creation of state welfare machinery, and some of the devices of a 'controlled' society, which would be the cause of violent uproar among English liberals if they existed in Ulster, have managed to survive to the pre- sent. Since it is a fairly casual society, and because it is Ireland, the realities are not unpleasant; but the agencies of contemporary protest, more concerned with principles and symbols than with actualities, would not have felt inhibited by that. Upon the North, for example, they have called down anath- ema because of the Special Powers Act. The existence of coercive legislation in the Re- public—which in the 'thirties was far more savage than any Britain had ever dared to impose, and which was not held in terrorent but was actually used—has been allowed little exposure on this side of the Irish Sea.

Had it not been for the fact that works on Irish history tend to create more mythical material than they dispatch, it might have been presumed that misconceptions about the real position of the divided nation in the twentieth century were the result of the sparse writing on the period. The compila- tion of recent Irish history is now on the way, however. It has got off to a very promis- ing start. Several recent works are of such value, and two of them in particular—by Professor Lyons and Dr Whyte—are of such distinction, as to lay down foundations which are unlikely to be shaken. Ireland since the Famine, by Professor Lyons, is a work of quite astonishing scholarship.* It is not, as one might say, a brilliant book, in the sense that suggestive ideas spark off elliptically : it is not intended to be, It was written as-an authoritative account of Ireland's history since the mid-nineteenth century. As a critical work, evaluating recent research in many fields, and providing a readable, accurate and interesting version of the last hundred years, it succeeds outstandingly and it is unlikely to be replaced by anything of comparable quality for a very long time. It is, perhaps, rather too long for the general reader; but for the student of Irish history *Ireland since the Famine F. S. L. Lyons (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £7.50)

it will be essential. The balance, too, is right, with only one lapse: Lyons is too kindly impressed by the bitter legacy of the civil war between the Free State and the Republicans: `Charity and the interests of truth alike demand a certain reticence about events which are still felt so profoundly.' The result, unhappily, is that only two of the 800 pages of the book are given to the war: exactly the same amount of space as is allocated, for example, to the machinery of the Electricity Supply Board. It was the civil war which so lucidly revealed some of the nastier ideo- logical bases of Irish nationalism; the insist- ence on wading through blood to achieve a proper distinction between Free State and Republic.

It was not the Republicans who in the end resorted to an Irish version of fascism, how- ever. Mr de Valera came to power in 1932, and before long his more logical Republican followers were crammed into 'detention camps'. If fell to his Fine Gael opponents, the original creators of the Free State, the heirs of Michael Collins. to join in unhappy alliance with General O'Duffy's Blueshirts early in the 1930s. Maurice Manning's The Blueshirist describes the interesting result. It is a careful and unprejudiced account, but rather indecisive. On the one hand he does not see the Irish version of fascism as in any real sense related to the European move- ments, and on the other he cannot bring him- self to recognise in it any authentic inherit- ance from the Irish nationalist tradition. Yet it was probably both these things. There are enough photographs in the book of shirted members extending straight-arm salutes to be as least suggestive. And with O'Duffy prais- ing .Mussolini and sliding off to fascist con- gresses in Europe, things surely became a little more than suggestive. It is only in the last analysis that Manning is right: for in the 1930s, as in Ulster today, international movements are•only- seen in Ireland through a glass darkly. And, as Lyons notes, the chant of 'Hail O'Duffy', though exhaled from ten thousand Irish throats, does not somehow enjoy the arresting authority of 'Heil Hitler'.

It is only fair to add that the contribution of the Irish nationalist tradition to the cul- tivation of these Irish gestures towards fas- cism is difficult to determine precisely. Al- though it was Fine Gael who were drawn into a union with the Blue Shirts, they were always doubtful and even captive allies. And

t The Blueshirts Maurice Manning (Gill and Macmillan £3.00) it was their Republican opponents, in the previous decade, who had begun the call for a military dictatorship, for the elimination of political parties and for the establishment of the rule of those elected by destiny and the bullet. The implications of Irish national- ism, that is to say, were shared out im- partially between the Free Staters and the Republicans. The romantic cult of violence, the doctrine of blood sacrifice, the insistence on the purity of the Irish race and culture, and the actual experience of shooting down policemen in the streets, had proved too stimulating to enjoy an early demise. It was only to be expected that when the Brit- ish withdrew the militants should seek to keep the sacred flame of nationality burning. It was a matter of political hazard which side would flirt with authoritarianism first.

Dr Whyte gets nearer to the' ideological basis of Ireland's fascist leanings in the 'thirties. His Church and State in Modern lrelandl has the enormous merit of open- , ing new vistas with a quite outstanding im- partiality, and in so sensitive an area. His analysis of the social thinking of the Catholic Church in the 'thirties and 'forties reveals its increasing dependence upon Corporatism. On the Continent, the social doctrines of Musso- lini and Franco, of Petain and Salazar. were (for them) in happy coincidence with the sort of teachings favoured by the Holy See in Ouadragesimo Anno. Both the main Irish political parties were sympathetic and, in pleasing union with the Catholic hierarchy, Vocationilist ideals established themselves at the centre of government thinking on social questions. Mr de Valera's 1937 Constitution, with its 'Directive Principles of Social Policy', continue to hint at them. There was also a dash of anti-Semitism abroad in the land. Father Cahill's works, which elucidated the

.familiar thesis of an international conspiracy by Jews and Freemasons, were extremely popular in the 'thirties, especially, and pre- dictably, among intellectuals. The constitu- tional prohibition of divorce and the censor- ship laws are surviving memorials, in con- temporary Ireland, to the belief in the duty of the nation-state to enforce Catholic morality. A large part of Whyte's book is given over to a close account of the success of the Catholic hierarchy in defeating attempts by the government to introduce the essentials of a National Flealth scheme during the period when Britain and North- ern Ireland established theirs.

Now, however. the position is changing. All of the Irish bishops were supporters of Franco in the Spanish Civil War; only two of them were outspokenly in favour of McCarthyism in America in the 1950s.. They will shortly have an opportunity to reveal how extensively they have tumbled to the great confusions which have followed the Second Vatican Council. The Irish govern- ment has within the last fortnight refused Parliamentary time for the discussion of a Bill introduced by an opposition member to regularise the sale of contraceptive devices in the Republic for the first time. The Catho- lic Church and the Fianna Fail government have again demonstrated the unsurprising resilience of church and state accord in Ire- land—a resilience which rests, as it happens, not on eternally shared political beliefs but on the Catholic puritanism of a lower- middle-class state.

t Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923-70 J. H. Whyte (Gill and Macmillan £4.25).