Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997
pages 9-11 | 3850 words
He’ll have brought it on Himself
Colm Tóibín
Sometime in the early sixties, when I was eight or nine, the actor Micheál MacLiammóir came to Enniscorthy, a small town in the south-east of Ireland where we lived, to perform his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar. My uncle, who was a staunch member of Fianna Fáil, the ruling party, and a fervent member of the ruling church – he was later decorated by the Pope – bought us all tickets, and we attended, as did many others in the town, in a family group. MacLiammóir was, we were told, a great actor, a great Gaelic speaker and a great Irishman. I remember his voice and his presence on the stage; I remember him reclining like a large sleek cat on a chaise-longue, world-weary and knowing and infinitely melancholy, and then standing up and looking at us all, caressing us with his narrowed eyes and speaking as though he was telling us fresh gossip, insinuations he would be asking us to keep secret at least until we had left the theatre. It was strong stuff for a small boy.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 13 · 3 July 1997
From Eoin Dillon
While Colm Tóibín, understandably, emphasises Catholic dominance in Southern Ireland (LRB, 22 May), he ignores the persistent anti-clerical tradition. People may have been moved by the piety of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion as they awaited execution, but they supported the subsequent war for independence, contrary to the stern advice of their pastors. Dublin supported Parnell right to the end; the bitter Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist represented a heart-felt schism. With the formation of the state in 1922, anti-clericalism went subterranean. But in the Forties and Fifties, many working-class men went to Mass ‘for the sake of the children’, and because their wives told them to, at the same time making obvious their contempt for all in the cloth. An old Communist in Dublin told me how members of the local Catholic Solidarity responded to such contempt by squirting holy water from a water-pistol through his letter-box to purify the tenement.
Eoin Dillon
Dublin
From Barra Ó Séaghdha
In Colm Tóibín’s world Irish Catholicism emerges out of nowhere with mysterious power in the last century. The Catholic Church’s drive to implant itself in the minds of Irish people and to establish itself ineradicably on the landscape through the building of schools, seminaries, convents and orphanages can be seen, in part, as the typical will-to-power of that extraordinary institution. In an Irish context, it can also be seen as a form of over-compensation for the variety of religious apartheid that characterised Ireland in the previous century, during much of which almost all the social, political, educational and economic power was controlled by a Protestant minority. Tóibín quotes approvingly from The Moral Monopoly by Tom Inglis – ‘It was peculiar to Ireland, and it was to have a lasting effect, that the whole civilising process took place in and through the Catholic Church’ – and blandly accepts the word ‘civilising’, with all the colonialist freight it carries. For the colonised mind the switch from Gaelic to English is inherently civilising. Modernisation, state schooling and anglicisation – these were not exclusively mediated through the Church. Nor was ‘a native rural bourgeoisie’ entirely absent.
On the Catholic nature of the 1916 Rising, Tóibín accepts uncritically those parts of Kenny’s book that suit his own pick-’n’-mix approach to history. Thus (via Kenny, via Tóibín) Conor Cruise O’Brien ‘points out that the emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Rising made the partition of Ireland almost inevitable’. Realistically, partition had become almost inevitable several years before when, in reaction to the prospect of a very limited form of Home Rule for Ireland (under the Crown), the Ulster Volunteers had been formed and armed. This momentous event had taken place under the benign eye of the police, with the approval of the Conservative Party under Bonar Law, and was unopposed by key elements in the Army. The message was clear, particularly as Carson was soon to be invited into the War Cabinet. All this merits precisely half a sentence in O’Brien’s Ancestral Voices.
Curiously, Tóibín fails to mention the Ulster Protestant Roger Casement, hanged for his part in the Rising, who became a hero to nationalists, even though his homosexuality had been publicised by British propagandists. Tóibín also fails to grasp how heretical Pearse’s sacral nationalism was: it placed national over individual salvation, and conferred political sainthood on such non-Catholics as Tone, Emmet and Mitchell. Given the Catholic Church’s anti-revolutionary pact with the authorities in 1795, its denunciation of the Fenians (and of Parnell after the Split), its defusing and Catholicisation of the potentially dangerous 1798 centenary celebrations, its Flatley-like leap from the old Home Rule establishment to the new Free State order, and its carefully controlled retrospective blessing of revolt (once real revolution was excluded) – is it not a tribute to the success of the Catholic Church’s manoeuvrings that ‘post-Catholic’ Irish liberals like Tóibín are still in thrall to its version of history?
Barra Ó Séaghdha
Academy of English
