Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd Read Free Book Online Page A

self-denying prospect. But Davis had flint and iron in him as well. He viewed O'Connell's bluff, back-slapping politics with fastidious distaste, discerning in its lineaments an emerging Catholic sectarianism (in place of Tone's "common name of Irishmen"). A Catholic nation would have no place for a Davis, just as surely as the Protestant nation proclaimed in Dublin in the previous century had based itself on the assumption that Catholics simply did not exist. Davis bravely tackled O'Connell in public on the issue; and in forthright essays he identified cultural activity as the true course of a more ecumenical nationhood. "Educate that you may be free" was a favourite motto. He provided later leaders of the Irish Renaissance with many of their crucial ideas: he contrasted the philistinism and gradgrindery of England with the superior idealism and imagination of Ireland. He was not, however, anti-industrial, believing that it was as important to mine the ore at Arigna as to publish a patriotic poem: indeed, he saw these two actions as intimately linked, for his central thesis was that Ireland would never achieve its full industrial and entrepreneurial potential until it had first recovered its cultural self-confidence – and that would only be regained through political separation from England. The Union claimed to accord the Irish all the freedom of citizens of the most prosperous nation in the world; in practice, it simply provincialized them in the name of a facile cosmopolitanism.
    These powerful and penetrating analyses were cut off by Davis's death in 1845 at the early age of thirty-one. It would be left to Yeats, Hyde and a later generation to restore to culture its central importance in the liberation of a people: and even if Davis had lived a longer life, the Famine and the Fenians would probably have obscured his contribution. The portents for a cultural alliance of Catholic and Protestant were never very encouraging: through much of the Famine decade

stories circulated about Protestant preachers offering starving peasants soup and clothing in return for religious conversion. Across the north, especially, sectarian tensions continued to heighten, with Catholics supporting a separatist nationalism and Protestants the Orange Lodges. O'Connell might have failed as a political agitator, but his equation of Catholicism and nationhood was proving all too seductive to many desperate souls. Yet, when the Fenians rose in rebellion in 1867, many Catholic bishops denounced them, forbade them the sacraments and, in certain spectacular cases, excommunicated them. Republican separatism never enjoyed much clerical support. Rural communities could often identify the Fenian in their number by the fact that he did not go to mass or that, when he did, he took no communion. W. B. Yeats, who was himself for a brief period a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, would work mightily to keep open this gap between "Catholic" and "national" feeling. On it the very notion of a cultural renaissance depended.
    One of his exemplars in this regard was the next great Irish leader,Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord from County Wicklow who seemed in all things the antithesis of O'Connell – silent where he had been gregarious, aristocratic as opposed to populist in style, cold and disdainful whereas the predecessor had been warm and wheedling. To this complex man, whom they called the uncrowned king of Ireland, the emerging masses entrusted their fate and their party, which he led atWestminster through the 1880s. He displayed immense strategic guile in philibustering its sessions, using his numbers to tip the balance of power and, once or twice, immobilizing its political processes. The great issue of the decade was land, a debate initiated ten years earlier byGladstone's first Land Act of 1870 which, following the disestablishment of theChurch of Ireland in the previous year, had effectively put the Protestant ascendancy on