Trinity College<\/a>, JP Mahaffy, was relieved to see the station clock indicated he still had time to spare. But when he arrived on the platform another clock told a different time, meaning Mahaffy had missed his train. After accosting the local porter, Mahaffy was told that if the two clocks told the same time, then there would be no need for two clocks.<\/p>\nFor much of the 19th century, Ireland seemed \u201csimply out of time with the modern world\u201d, as Enda Delaney writes in his stimulating new history. Those intent on the country\u2019s \u201cmodernisation\u201d \u2013 both its British colonial government, and many in a growing middle class eager to exchange a \u201cbackwards\u201d Gaelic past for \u201cprogress\u201d \u2013 were often almost furiously frustrated with the illogical nature of Ireland\u2019s \u201cold ways\u201d. <\/p>\n
Conceptions of time, Delaney writes, \u201care central to this story\u201d, and not just because of local clocks or Ireland\u2019s 25-minute time difference from Britain (\u201cit reminds us that we are coming into a strange country\u201d, John Dillon said of the time change when crossing the Irish Sea). Historians have long over-emphasised the political revolution \u2013 even though on most things \u201cthe pre-independence ways of doing things were simply carried on by the new Irish administration\u201d \u2013 at the expense of what Delaney calls a \u201ccognitive revolution\u201d. <\/p>\n
From the 1780s to 1916, Delaney argues persuasively, how we thought, spoke, believed and felt were all radically transformed. \u201cModernity\u201d came to Ireland not in the 1960s, but long before independence. This is a \u201chistory of mentalities\u201d and perhaps its most important contribution is how Delaney tries to bring history writing in Ireland into contact with the concepts and ideas that historians have used for other European countries, but which have too often been under-explored here.<\/p>\n
The twin engines of revolution were colonialism and capitalism, both brokered by \u201cthe British liberal state\u201d, which after the Act of Union set about changing just about everything about Ireland, often in ways unthinkable in Britain itself. For the government to intervene in private society there, Charles Trevelyan commented, was the exception, whereas in Ireland it was \u201cthe rule\u201d. <\/p>\n
Britain mapped the country, valued it, reorganised who owned its land, who ran its institutions, and how it was policed. They created schools and workhouses, built roads and railways, and \u201csought to improve living conditions and promote economic prosperity\u201d. But despite Victorian self-justification, this was not charity or moral responsibility; it \u201cwas ultimately about the preservation of British rule\u201d. <\/p>\n
The Royal Irish Constabulary was a paramilitary police force and the country remained heavily militarised, with the law used in ways that never would have been acceptable in Britain. This was \u201ca colonial state\u201d based on a narrative of superiority. \u201cA main cause of the backwardness of this country in the march of social improvement,\u201d wrote one observer during the Famine, \u201cis to be found in the national character.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cProgress\u201d meant becoming \u201cmore like Britain\u201d and, despite protestation, this was not simply a British belief. Many Irish people saw the future (a concept that colonial observers believed the Gaelic mind had not considered) \u201cthrough the eyes of the conqueror\u201d, as the Welsh geographer Estyn Evans said of an Irish history based only on documents. Education, social mobility, business success and political power all seemed to require accepting what Delaney calls \u201cthe disciplining of Irish society\u201d. <\/p>\n
Respectability, temperance, discipline and \u201ccivilised\u201d behaviour were the creed of those who sought \u201cprogress\u201d for themselves and their country, either within or without the union. The \u201cbackwardness\u201d of Gaelic Ireland had to be left behind. Even those who lamented \u201canglicisation\u201d tended to grudgingly accept its benefits. \u201cAll the change was not disaster,\u201d nationalist A M Sullivan wrote; \u201cmuch indeed had been lost, but much had been gained\u201d. <\/p>\n
The narrative, Delaney argues, was (and remains) flawed. \u201cEighteenth-century Irish society and culture,\u201d he writes, was actually \u201cvibrant and dynamic: not puritanical, regressive, and archaic.\u201d It was not isolated from the rest of the world but well-connected; it was not a \u201csubsistence\u201d economy, but a place where the \u201cmodern\u201d market economy was well established, from the growth of small artisan industry to the proliferation of market towns. The country was not economically stagnant but constantly changing. <\/p>\n
Indeed Ireland\u2019s transition to capitalism was so great that Karl Marx called the country \u201ca crucible of modernity\u201d being \u201cradically transformed by an Anglo-Saxon revolution\u201d. Too often we forget how great that change was. One of Irish people\u2019s \u201cslave birthmarks\u201d, James Connolly wrote, \u201cis a belief in the capitalist system of society … the most foreign thing in Ireland\u201d.<\/p>\n
Modernising Ireland was a varied and shifting society, one whose complexity is too often flattened into a narrative of poverty where everyone is a \u201cpeasant\u201d when social change and class division were real. Even in the densely populated growing west that would be devastated by the Famine, there was a living culture of socialising, stories, music, traditions and beliefs that defies the condescension that has written them and their world out of history. <\/p>\n
Delaney meticulously surveys scholarship from folklore to local history to anthropology to geography to reconstruct their living, mental world. And most importantly of all, he emphasises \u201ca vigorous Irish-language intellectual and cultural world\u201d that persisted even as the country became complexly bilingual. <\/p>\n
The change from that to an English-speaking country was the most radical shift of all, and yet, Delaney notes, it has never received \u201canywhere near the same attention from Irish historians as the development of nationalism and unionism\u201d. Again, much of Irish society both then and since swallowed whole the argument of an 1850 commentator that Irish \u201cis not the language of business, of modern civilisation, and it will not enable a man to get on in the world [and] its doom is inevitable\u201d. The \u201cutilitarian\u201d needs of \u201cmodern communication\u201d, Daniel O\u2019Connell commented, meant he \u201ccould witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish\u201d. <\/p>\n
That was the attitude of much of the population, who longed, educators wrote, to learn English, with all its \u201cprizes and social privileges\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe middle classes\u201d, raged Thomas Davis, \u201cthink it a sign of vulgarity to speak Irish\u201d, because at school and at home they are offered endless incentive to speak \u201cthe language of their masters\u201d. <\/p>\n
Yet none of this, Delaney argues, was inevitable, and we have too long accepted that it was. The British Empire and the world are full of evidence that Irish \u201ccould have remained the dominant language for everyday interactions\u201d even if \u201cEnglish remained the formal language of government, law, and commerce\u201d. The reason it didn\u2019t was because \u201cthe social and cultural climate was deeply antipathetic towards the use of Irish in any context\u201d. <\/p>\n
There were many reasons for that, not least the colonial state\u2019s hostility, from law to education. The Famine years were catastrophic for the language, and a reflection of how colonial Ireland\u2019s modernising government was. Trevelyan approvingly compared the horrendously inadequate relief programme to \u201crationing\u201d an army, while the Young Irelanders pointed out that ships coming from England were more likely to be bringing troops than food. <\/p>\n
The mass emigration that had begun before the Hunger and accelerated hugely afterwards was also focused on the Irish-speaking and culturally Gaelic areas of the country, further associating a way of life with a past to be shaken off and forgotten.<\/p>\n
The trauma of the Famine helped to promote the rise of the state\u2019s partner in progress, \u201cthe new supercharged Irish Catholicism: disciplined, universal, and orthodox\u201d. Gone was the decentralised, local priesthood of the Penal period, one that ministered to a society that had, in Oscar Wilde\u2019s mother Francesca\u2019s words, \u201cthe instinctive belief in the existence of certain unseen agencies that influence all human life\u201d. <\/p>\n
In its place was a stricter, English-speaking Catholicism often motivated by an insidious objective, the enforcement of a more \u201crespectable\u201d bourgeois set of practices and devotions. The new church did a lot of social good, but it also brought what Presbyterian Robert Lynd presciently called \u201cthe despotism of men who are greedy for power and for opportunities to let other people feel it\u201d.<\/p>\n
The people whose ways of thinking, speaking and living were left behind were \u201cthe generations of emigrants, cottiers, labourers, small farmers and others\u201d who were \u201ccast aside\u201d as the \u201cflotsam and jetsam\u201d of \u201cthe transformation to modernity\u201d. One of the most distinctive features of the Irish experience of that process is how transnational it was: \u201cthe decimation of the lower classes through famine and emigration virtually removed a whole social stratum, much of which was reconstituted in the twilight zones of British and American cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Transnational history has been a major focus of Delaney\u2019s work, and this is an important attempt to restore \u201cagency to ordinary or everyday individuals\u201d at home and abroad who have too often been left \u201cpeople without history\u201d. The thematic structure may throw readers used to our national love of narrative but Delaney is trying to reorient us \u201caway from thinking in … dichotomies which do little justice to the complexity of the past\u201d. <\/p>\n
Our path to modernity was \u201cneither inevitable nor one-directional\u201d, and only by understanding that complex truth can we hope also to understand what we have lived with and created since.<\/p>\n
Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and the host of Ireland\u2019s Edge<\/p>\n
Further Reading<\/p>\n
The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford, 2017) by Breand\u00e1n Mac Suibhne. From a story of informers and vigilantes in his family\u2019s home village in Donegal, Mac Suibhne reveals the extraordinary change of the decades after the Famine.<\/p>\n
Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland, 1800-1921 (Oxford, 2016) by K Theodore Hoppen. Hoppen meticulously traces the words and actions of the men tasked with \u201cgoverning Paddy\u201d under the Union.<\/p>\n
The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life, and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (UCD, 2018) by Margaret Kelleher. Kelleher uses the execution of Maolra Seoighe, an Irish speaker who could not understand his English language murder trial, to show the complex bilingualism of modernising Ireland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of Society and Culture Author: Enda Delaney ISBN-13: 978-0199569823 Publisher: OUP Oxford Guideline…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6489,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-87938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-book-reviews","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}