Culture Matters (3)

Cultural Absorption (1)

Throughout history various groups and peoples have arrived in Ireland but they have generally been absorbed into Irishness. For example, the Anglo-Normans or Old English, who came to Ireland in the 12th century, became known as Hiberniores Hibernicis Ipsis, or 'more Irish than the Irish themselves'. Of that process the English poet Edmund Spenser wrote, ‘Lord how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures.’
[A View of the Present State of Ireland p 151]

Since the advent of the Gaelic revival and Irish cultural nationalism in the 19th century, the cultural vision of Irish nationalists has generally included as a core element the absorption orassimilation of all others into their culture and identity.  They believe that those who arrive and settle in Ireland either become Irish or should become Irish, not merely in some vague geographical sense but in terms of cultural identity.

This view was expressed many years ago by David Patrick Moran (1871-1936), the voice of the Irish-Ireland movement, who wrote The Philosophy of Irish Ireland in 1905: 'The foundation of Ireland is the Gael and the Gael must be the element that absorbs.'

Such a view is thoroughly racist but it was very prevalent at that time in the Gaelic movement. Moran had a vision of an Ireland that was thoroughly Gaelic and he also had a vision of an Ireland that was Roman Catholic. He founded a weekly journal called The Leader and in it he said: 'When we look out on Ireland we see that those who believe or may be immediately induced to believe in Ireland as a nation are, as a matter of fact, Catholics … The Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation.' [The Leader 27 April 1901]

It should not be imagined that Moran was a lone and isolated voice or somehow untypical. He was expressing the common view of Irish Gaelic nationalism. Professor David George Boyce states that: ‘Moran has been criticised for his alleged ‘racism’; but his real purpose was to spell out, regardless of cant and humbug, the principles which others accepted but preferred not to examine too closely.’ [Nationalism in Ireland p 243]

The vision of cultural absorption was also expressed by Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), who was the founder of the Gaelic League and later the first president of the Irish Republic: 'In two points only was the continuity of Irishism in Ireland damaged. First in the north-east of Ulster, where the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult to absorb. … In spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core.'

Sir John Randolph Leslie (1885-1971) was born on the family estate at Glaslough in county Monaghan and he was a descendant of Bishop John Leslie, a Scottish churchman who became bishop of Raphoe in 1633 and Bishop of Clogher in 1661. At Cambridge John Randolph Leslie converted to Roman Catholicism, became a passionate Irish nationalist and changed his name to Shane Leslie. In 1923 he wrote the novel Doomsland and in it the character Francis Joseph MacNeill is a thinly disguised representation of the Belfast nationalist Francis Joseph Bigger (1863-1926). At one point in the novel MacNeill expresses in very succinct form the general view of Bigger: 'I tell you, there is no such thing as Scots-Irish, man or material. You might as well speak of a Scots-Irish potato. What comes to Ireland becomes Irish. Besides, Scotland is an Irish dependency beyond the seas.'

The Catholic Bulletin was an important expression of Irish republican thinking and in the post-1916 period its editor was John J O’Kelly (1873-1957), who was president of the Gaelic League (1919-1922) and acting chairman of Dail Eireann (1919-1921). In 1924 The Catholic Bulletin provided this demand for cultural assimilation: 'The Irish nation is the Gaelic nation; its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the Gael. All other elements have no place in Irish national life, literature and tradition, save as far as they are assimilated into the very substance of Gaelic speech, life and thought.' [Irish Kulturkampf p 10]

It is true that some Ulster Protestants such as Bulmer Hobson, Roger Casement, Francis Bigger and Alice Milligan were absorbed or assimilated and they played major roles in the Gaelic movement but as Professor Richard Kirkland has observed, ‘they were exotic figures in the often sectarian atmosphere of Northern nationalism.’

Moreover in A History of Ulster Dr Jonathan Bardon comments that these folk were ‘utterly unrepresentative of the mass of Ulster Protestants who were repelled by these new interpretations of cultural identity.’ [A History of Ulster p 422]

Unfortunately the vision or aspiration of Gaelic absorption is not dead. Brendan Clifford, who has provided a number of important insights into recent Irish republican thinking, refers to it in one of his booklets: 'This is the end part of a strategy which was worked out by some very respectable supporters of the Provisional IRA in the republic in 1970-71. …. A process would begin which would end with the people who are now unionists being indoctrinated into the nationalist culture.'  [Parliamentary Despotism – John Hume’s Aspiration January 1986]

Down through the years many of those groups that settled in Ireland were absorbed but there is one notable exception. In 1914 Rev J B Woodburn published his book The Ulster-Scot. The book was an immediate success and when it was reviewed in The Times on 30 April 1914 the reviewer commented: 'He is a mystery, this Ulster Scot. All other peoples Ireland tends to absorb.'

Almost a century later there is still an Ulster-Scots culture and an Ulster-Scots cultural community in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland.

The fact that the Ulster-Scots have not been absorbed was also noted, albeit in a thoroughly intolerant way, by John Francis Taylor (1850-1902), an influential Dublin barrister and Irish nationalist: 'Wherever the English have come they blended with the people … but these unthinkable Scotch, why indeed were they kept upon the planet?'

Today Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism are more sophisticated and subtle in their approach but they remain largely intolerant of those cultural traditions which are not Irish and Gaelic and therefore they continue to seek preferential treatment for Irish and Gaelic culture.

The Gaelic vision of cultural absorption set out by Moran, Hyde and others was an intolerant vision and one that should have no place in out society. We must seek to build a shared and better future in Northern Ireland, a future based on equality, diversity and interdependence, and that should also be the way forward for the Republic of Ireland.