Bryan Fanning - Irish Adventures in Nation-Building

Irish adventures in nation-building

Irish adventures in nation-building

Bryan Fanning

Manchester University Press

Copyright Bryan Fanning 2016

The right of Bryan Fanning to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 7849 9323 8

First published 2016

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The lyrics of a comic song by Wayne Kemp, One Piece at a Time, made famous by Johnny Cash, tells the story of a man who spends his life assembling Cadillacs in Detroit. He smuggles out components from different models one by one and assembles these into an odd-looking car of his own. The transmission is from 1953, the engine from 1973, and so on. This book brings together essays written during a far shorter period during which I also worked a number of other books including The Quest for Modern Ireland: The Battle of Ideas 19121986 (2008), an analysis of influential Irish journals during this period, the second edition of Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2012), which included examinations of groups sidelined by twentieth-century nation-building processes, and Histories of the Irish Future (2015), an intellectual history of Ireland and a history of understandings of Irish crises and predicaments from 1650 to our present time.

The essays that constitute Irish Adventures in Nation-Building are designed to fit together as a multi-disciplinary analysis of the making of modern Ireland. These focus on the intellectual, social, political, religious and economic ideas and processes that variously shaped Irish society, Irish nationalism and the Irish nation-state. Individual essays address key moments or influential debates and shifts in these. The structure of Irish Adventures in Nation-Building is mostly chronological, although some essays cover the entire century or so upon which the book is mostly focused. I am particularly indebted to the editors of the publications in which a number of these essays first appeared The Dublin Review of Books, The Irish Journal of Sociology, Studies, The Irish Studies Review and Taiwan in Comparative Perspective as well as to friends, colleagues and research collaborators for their support. In particular I wish to thank Bruce Bradley SJ, Denis Dillon, Maurice Earl, Tom Garvin, Andreas Hess, Tom Inglis, Sen LEstrange, Joan Maher, Ronaldo Munck, Rev. John McNeil Scott, Neil OBoyle, Philip OConnell, Fergus ODonoghue SJ and Pilar Argiz Vilar.

At the time of writing the Republic of Ireland is in the midst of a decade of centenary celebrations of key milestones in the foundation of an independent Irish nation-state. It is also struggling with the legacy of a prolonged economic crisis that has challenged some of the Republics cherished narratives. Nations, Benedict Anderson has influentially argued, are imagined communities. And what is being imagined of course changes over time. My vantage point is that of a social scientist who is an avid reader of works on Irish literature and history by writers who are usually not avid readers of the social sciences. Disciplinary silos can be comfortable and comforting, but no one academic vantage point can claim to cover all the angles. Different disciplines present different maps and the trick is to learn how to these alongside one another. History as an academic discipline and studies of Irish literature offer the most frequently consulted maps of the Irish story. Economists have a lot of influence in an era where the national interest tends to be calculated in financial terms, but this was not always so. The various social sciences study society, its institutions and social problems but often pay insufficient attention to historical contexts. No single attempt at synthesis can wrap everything up neatly but when the object of study is literally common ground, in this case the territory that calls itself the Republic of Ireland, efforts to join some of the dots such as this are worthwhile. The essays that follow focus on literature as well as on social and economic policy, on historical scholarship as well as what the social sciences tell us about Irish society and the Irish nation-state.

The approach in Irish Adventures in Nation-Building is firstly to offer a map that locates the main nation-building projects that have shaped Ireland across two centuries and then to focus mostly on the last century in the chapters that follow. Collectively these essays chart the main shifts in dominant ideas and shifting cultural, economic and political circumstances during the last hundred years. Topics considered range from why Patrick Pearses ideas about education were ignored to why Ireland has been recently so open to large-scale immigration, from the case for isolationism in support of de-colonisation to how and why Ireland came to be defined as an open economy. What is being examined are shifting representations of nation-building goals set out in seminal periodicals, books and government reports. For the most part the focus is on mainstream vantage points and critiques of these.

Some of the early chapters examine the influence of Catholicism and the common cause it found with cultural nationalism in post-independence Ireland. Subsequent chapters address contestations of post-colonial isolationism by liberals who were also nationalists. Later chapters examine the emergence of a new economic nation-building project from the late 1950s. The vantage points examined include those of prominent revolutionaries, cultural nationalists, clerics, economists, sociologists, political scientists, public intellectuals, journalists, influential civil servants, political leaders and activists who weighed into debates about the condition of Ireland and where it was going. Most of these were men and, for the most part, their perspectives were privileged ones. Some chapters focus on where women, Travellers, vulnerable members of society and, most recently, immigrants figure in the mainstream narratives that profess to tell Irelands story.

Andersons approach to the study of nationalism and nation-building is predicated on the argument that similar sociological processes can be found in different contexts. Nationalism and nation-building projects have also come to preoccupy academics in different countries in similar ways. They, no less than the politicians and officials of nation-states, are protagonists in processes of nation-building. As put by Anderson:

For a fair part of the past two hundred years, narrating the nation seemed, in principle, a straightforward matter. Armies of historians, good and bad, helped by folklorists, sociologists, statisticians, literary critics, archaeologists, and of course, the State, produced a vast arsenal of work to help existing or future citizens imagine the biography, and the future, of their political communities. There could be every conceivable difference in method, approach, data base, and political viewpoint, but these historians typically understood their texts as documents of civilisation, or stories of progress, however meandering, because the nation was always, and without much question, regarded as historically factual and morally good. There are all kinds of political and other reasons that allow us to be confident that the flow of such work will continue indefinitely, since