Irish Lies
BOERNER, MARGARET
Irish Lies The stories the Emerald Isle tells about itself. BY MARGARET BOERNER The American understanding of Irish history has often been simplistic. Ireland has rarely been a consideration in...
...All this activity was "sourly referred to in some quarters as 'Faminism.'" But Foster's basic objection is not primarily that such theme parks (not unknown to the United States, which is perhaps where the Irish government got the idea) are bogus, but that "the ambiguities of Irish history are, in many ways, the most distinctive thing about it," and the theme park simply fails to acknowledge the supreme Irish genius for conflicting narrative...
...His books have included works on Charles Stewart Parnell, Lord Randolph Churchill, Hubert Butler, William Butler Yeats, and Punch Magazine's view of the Irish...
...Foster writes: The Cashel Heritage Society produced a luridly jolly brochure promising "a colourful Pageant of Music, Song, Dance and Drama" to commemorate "the 150 th Anniversary of this dark period of our past," with five days a week of fancy-dress events...
...They also came under a new censorship bill written by the government in imitation of England's censorship, but with Catholic confessionalism as its basis...
...After all, we Americans ourselves had thrown the Brits out in the late eighteenth century...
...But he is not so sure the idea of colliding cultures applies to present Irish history...
...Furthermore, "growth in the understanding of English speech...
...The Gaelic League went so far as to contend that "speaking English was incompatible with faith and patriotism," and the use of the English language sapped "the very fibres of mental and moral nature...
...It was an axiom of the Catholic Bulletin that in ancient Gaelic society, the poorest rural families sat around the fire discussing scholastic philosophy...
...These questions have recently been answered by governmental fiat: In 1997, a "Mission Statement on 1798" from the office of the minister of state declared the Rising was a "forward-looking, popular movement aspiring to unity...
...In Ireland, history consists of "telling tales and making it up," as Robert Fitzroy Foster subtitles The Irish Story, his book on Irish history...
...But to the great credit of the nation, in the last decade, Irish writing has finally been allowed to be what Yeats always declared it should be: "less preoccupied by imposing its own borders and readier to cross borders into world culture...
...American tourists in Ireland are surprised to learn (if they ever do) that most of the Irish who won the Nobel Prizes for literature, fought for independence, and resisted British rule were Protestant...
...These shards have been purposely and deeply buried, and bringing them to light is often excoriated by all sides in a given Irish conflict...
...At least, he trusts it does not...
...Indeed, he trusts that the present outcome of the peace process with Northern Ireland indicates "history is not about manifest destinies, but about unexpected and unforeseen futures...
...Even the term "Anglo-Irish," long used to distinguish Protestant Irish writers from the "real" Irish writers, is now used to mean simply and inclusively "Irish writers writing in English...
...The whole book is written in lively, colorful, and exact prose...
...The book comes at a time when recent events have forced us to ponder the subtleties of history, at a time when we can all appreciate how mutually exclusive versions of history shape ethnic confusion and violence...
...Elizabeth Bowen wrote about England...
...This subtitle is both accusatory and conciliatory—one can "make up" (reconcile as well as create a fiction) by telling the tale...
...Ireland's first president, Eamonn de Valera, notoriously said his vision for Ireland was that of a nation "bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens...
...He immigrated to England and began teaching in the night school at the University of London in 1974...
...But the Irish didn't win all those Nobel Prizes for literature without knowing how to make it up and tell the tale...
...means only a more complete obliteration of the historic faith and patriotism of Ireland...
...There were Irish Catholics who became Protestant—some by conviction, some for preferment—when Henry VIII made himself head of the Church of England and thereby the Church of Ireland...
...As Foster points out, "Northern Ireland over the last quarter-century of communal conflict has, on both sides, anticipated the interfaces between fundamentalist religion, exclusivist nationalism, resegregation and terrorism so horribly demonstrated in Bosnia...
...These are faults not particular to the Irish, although the Irish might be said to be especially spectacular in their use...
...Although he was trained at Trinity College Dublin in the late 1960s under the great Theodore Moody, he could not find a job in Ireland (like most educated Irish until the last decade...
...The island is one-fourth Protestant to this day (the greater number living in British Northern Ireland...
...instead it has been "fictionalized and poeticized . . . romanticized and sanitized...
...One of the first to do so was Leland Lyons, another student of Theodore Moody—all the more interesting, according to Foster, because he had been a historian who peaceably followed the "faith-and-fatherland" view...
...Ireland has rarely been a consideration in American foreign policy—which means that Americans have been able to ignore Irish history even more than they have ignored the history of other European countries...
...The common American vision of, say, the era of John Ford's The Quiet Man, thus arose: So far as we Americans knew, the Irish natives were Roman Catholics who had been starved by British Protestants in the Great Famine...
...As Foster has ruefully reflected, his nation is "too prone to mistake verbiage for eloquence, fanaticism for piety, and swagger for patriotism...
...But there is an especially important question as to whether the 1798 Rising was retrograde and sectarian (a group of Protestants was burned alive in a barn in Wexford) or enlightened and pluralistic (the founding of the United Irish League brought together middle-class men of all religions...
...Those Protestants have been Irish for centuries, as have the small number of Jews in Ireland...
...Indeed, the accusation of taxation without representation was an Irish as well as an American charge...
...At the end of his book, after an appreciation of Trollope and Bowen, and devastating criticisms of Angela's Ashes ("there is some danger that America is ready to believe in Ireland, past and present, as interpreted through the memories of the McCourt family") and Gerry Adams's Before the Dawn ("his visceral dislike of the actual Republic of Ireland, which is so mysteriously unlike the virtual-reality green-and-Gaelic model he has been educated to believe it should be"), Foster finishes with an appreciation of the long-lived historian Hubert Butler's internationalism and a final chapter on the changing interpretation of Ireland's first war of liberation, the 1798 Rising, inspired by the American and French Revolutions...
...Perhaps this was all the necessary pain of growing a nation...
...Yeats wrote "evil literature...
...In 1991 he was made a fellow of Hertford College and is now Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford...
...But it was enforced as in a third-world dictatorship, and some time passed before scholars could free themselves from it...
...Irish history was viewed as an "apostolic succession of national liberators," and those events or those persons who failed to advance this motif were ruthlessly suppressed...
...Foster's four central chapters on Yeats—"Yeats at War," "Yeats, Obituarists, and Irishness," "The Normal and the National," and "Yeats, Carleton, and the Irish Nineteenth Century"— illustrate the "protean and fabulous beast" of Irish identity in the person of W.B...
...All had spent time abroad, many of them forced abroad by economic necessity or condemna-tion—which made them not Irish writers...
...Protestants were cruel Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...
...Patrick converted the Irish from paganism...
...Lyons came to the conclusion that in Ireland there were "several distinct cultures" which sometimes overlapped but were more often "sealed into separate, self-justifying compartments...
...The eighteenth-century Irish—par-ticularly middle-class, often Protestant Irish—felt as had middle-class Americans two decades earlier: They were free-born citizens who were being treated by the mother country like conquered aliens...
...certainly it had popular support...
...If the Protestants would just go home to Britain across the Irish Sea, Ireland could be whole again...
...Although Gerry Adams may believe that "all over Ireland . . . people can show you the land that was taken from their families three or four hundred years ago and name the families that took it," the story of Ireland is actually a set of "stories" used as defining narratives...
...He is currently working on the second volume of his biography of Yeats...
...And, since "visitors' time is limited," all Irish history should be fun-neled into a fixed number of "story lines," linked to tourist sites...
...Nowadays, indeed, the Irish have made positively everyone they possibly can into an Irish writer: Goldsmith, Swift, Sheridan, Trollope, Wilde, Beckett, Bowen, O'Brien—all those earlier pariahs...
...or the old Wicklow gaol in its new tourist-friendly incarnations, full of resting actors in period costume, suggest that at least one great Irishman, Oscar Wilde, would appreciate the way that reality slavishly imitates art...
...His teacher, Theodore Moody, was a pioneer of the "revision" of simplistic Irish history-making, and Foster has devoted his career to unearthing entombed shards of Irish history...
...Far more so than the American Revolution, the Rising has defied impartial investigation...
...Indeed, one comes to wonder whether aid from ordinary Irish Americans to the terroristic IRA is any different from support for bomb factories in the Middle East...
...R.F Foster is an Irishman who is a distinguished professor of Irish history at the University of Oxford...
...James Joyce was a "foul-minded" traitor to his country...
...Foster is awed by Lyon's "subtle, reflective, and interrogative" intelligence and "refusal to go for easy answers...
...Brendan Bradshaw asserted, "the traditional faith-and-fatherland view of Irish history was salutary and should be sustained, its wrongness notwithstanding...
...A series of essays rather than a historical chronicle, The Irish Story analyzes theme parks in Ireland, Leland Lyons's late-twentieth-century reinter-pretation of Irish history, Yeats's work with the Irish war of independence early in the twentieth century (for which Foster has the greatest respect), Anthony Trollope's memories of Ireland reflected in his Irish hero Phineas Finn, Elizabeth Bowen's vision of the shape-shifting Irish landscape in her Irish childhood, Hubert Butler's excavation of Ireland's stories, and the narratives of Frank McCourt (for which Foster has the greatest disdain...
...All these have been Irish for at least four hundred years (longer than most of us have been Americans), and many have been Irish from the beginning of time—even before St...
...The essay on "Theme-parks and Histories" argues, in a scholarly and amusing way, that (as the deadly prose of an Irish Tourist Board document puts it) the "symbols of collective memory" are now organized by the state so as to provide "interpretative gateways into our heritage...
...This question has not been answered...
...Yeats, declasse member of the Protestant ascendancy, disgusted observer of the horrors of war, defender of the war of independence, Nobel Prize winner, and very much an Irish public man...
...The sense of a lost Eden is common to all immigrants, and there has been little to oppose Irish immigrants' nostalgia and sentimentality for the "ould sod...
...In particular, Foster has analyzed the "blood myth" of the dispossessed Catholic and the political myth of the freedom-loving Protestant...
...He reads Lyons hopefully as teaching the lesson that "Irish identity should not be interpreted as an immutable graven image, but as a protean and fabulous beast...
...The later settlements by New Model Army soldiers under Cromwell were more violent...
...A 200-acre Famine Theme Park was opened in west Limerick [so that] "it will be possible . . . to experience first hand in this remote area how 1,000 people struggled for survival...
...Frank O'Connor's stories were a betrayal...
...Those who established the Republic of Ireland early in the twentieth century had a vested interest in making it, however materially deprived, into a morally superior nation...
...Edna O'Brien wrote about sex...
...whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of old age...
...There were Irish who were Protestants sent over from Scotland during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I who had become members of the Church of Scotland...
...interlopers opposed by the brave freedom fighters in the Irish Republican Army, who drove them out of the south during the war for independence and who are struggling to drive them out of the north so that Ireland can be Irish— that is, entirely Roman Catholic...
...In 1998, this resulted in the heretofore somber and simple memorialization of the Famine's being transmogrified into a celebration "linked to exploiting tourist sites and attracting interest from the Irish diaspora...
...As the Irish historian Dr...
...This American attitude toward the IRA was equally irritating to the British authorities in the north and the Republic of Ireland in the south, who both regarded the IRA as a bunch of thugs, receiving money and support from Irish Americans only because Americans didn't understand that Sinn Fein was a terrorist organization...
...But his great book, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland (1979), written while he was holding a chair at the University of Kent in England, opened up Ireland to a new kind of analysis...
...Ireland needed only those writers and historians who would express the "pain of Irish history...
...The spectacle of the Famine Museum right beside the [tourist] restaurant...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 43
