To say the economic success of the Celtic Tiger has been accompanied by an equally bountiful flowering of Irish artistic talent is to state the obvious. Over the past 10 years or so Ireland has not only produced record growth-rates and job-creation figures, but we have seen our global cultural influence reach unprecedented levels. Our music, film, sports achievements, literature and drama have had a worldwide impact the scale of which would have seemed unimaginable a mere decade ago. James Joyce's Ulysses has been acclaimed by an international panel of experts as the greatest novel of the 20th century, Irish athletes compete in the world's greatest arenas, there are now three separate companies of Riverdancers criss-crossing the globe and the world's most played song - the theme from Titanic - recalls the seannos air Taimse im 'Choladh. Meanwhile, theatre audiences in the West End and Broadway flock to see the work of Irish playwrights.
In many ways we are just beginning to understand the scope of our latest cultural revival, but already a new orthodoxy has taken hold. Commentators, particularly in the media here and abroad, are fond of attributing our cultural and economic success to the fact that Ireland has at last ceased to be inward-looking and has now begun to embrace "the modern world". By cutting our links to the past and turning our backs on regressive tradition, Ireland (so the argument goes) has become an open, liberal, European, cosmopolitan society. This, I would like to argue, is a dangerous assumption because it sets up the categories of "progress" and "Irish tradition" as mutually exclusive terms. Furthermore, I would like to challenge this notion by arguing that the most interesting and creative energies behind the Celtic Tiger's economic and cultural successes may stem from a rediscovery and reinvention of some of our older ideas and practices rather than from a self-conscious denial of them.
A little over a century ago Ireland was also experiencing a great period of achievement, best known as the Irish Revival. This took place between 1893-1922 and bears many interesting parallels with developments here over the past decade or so. Yet most of the points of contact have escaped the notice of commentators and cultural analysts. The prevalent view of this earlier period sees it as a time of "romantic Ireland", of anti-modern traditionalism and of backward-looking Celtic mysticism, lightyears away from the "sophisticated" present. When we learn of this time at school there is a concentration on high literary figures like W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge and Douglas Hyde, who are seen as loftily removed from the concerns of ordinary people.
Yet this view of the Irish revival of the 1890s is grossly misleading and needs to be interrogated. In fact, rather than being backward-looking and traditionalist, the Irish Revival represents one of the most innovative periods of development in Irish history when viewed in context. Like today, the revival of a hundred years ago was both economic and cultural. If the prosperity of the 1990s is built on job creation, a sharp improvement in the standard of living occurred at the turn of the century when the majority of tenant farmers became landowners for the first time as a result of the land acts. Interestingly this "alternative" modernisation process was informed by a belief in the potential for innovation within Irish cultural forms, rather than a clear-cut distinction between tradition and modernity. This was in direct contrast to colonial modes of modernisation which insisted on London as the centre of all new ideas.
MUCH of the energy of the Revival derived from what can be broadly termed the "self-help" ethos. This was based on the simple idea that the Irish had accepted London as the centre of culture and civilisation for too long, and that the time had come for Irish people to regenerate their own intellectual terms of reference and narratives of cultural meaning - in other words, that Irish people should trust themselves and their own intellectual resources to solve their own problems. This self-help ethos was encapsulated by Douglas Hyde's famous essay "The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland". Here Hyde pointed out what he saw as a disabling Irish contradiction - that Irish people professed to hate all things English yet constantly imitated them. What worried him most was that the Irish were ceasing to be cultural producers and were becoming passive cultural consumers constantly looking elsewhere for innovation. It was for this reason that he encouraged the revival of the Irish language and co-founded one of the first self-help movements - the Gaelic League.
Hyde was emulated by a great number of important figures such as W. B. Yeats, William Rooney, Lady Gregory and James Connolly who, although interested in lofty cultural matters, also busied themselves with the day-to-day difficulties of setting up "self-help" theatres, language groups, cultural movements and political organisations. What is often forgotten is that these writers not only produced a significant body of Irish literature and drama, but that they were also skilled organisers and "arts administrators" who made important material interventions in Irish society. All of these were progressive initiatives, yet this aspect of the revival is rarely pointed out. The self-help ethos was not confined to cultural matters, though. One of the most successful of all the self-help initiatives - the co-operative movement - was founded by Horace Plunkett in 1894 to improve the economic lot of small farmers. The figure of Plunkett looms large over the Irish Revival, yet shamefully his contribution has been under-appreciated. Plunkett realised that although the majority of farmers now owned their own land, most of them lacked the expertise to compete in increasingly sophisticated and mechanised agricultural markets.
This training and information gap was filled by the co-op societies by encouraging farmers to better their expertise and to benefit from the economies of scale by working together. The co-op movement also allowed many small farmers to break free of the economic stranglehold of the gombeen publican-shopkeepers so prevalent at the time. Plunkett, too, taking a lead from Douglas Hyde, was firm in the belief that Ireland could only recover economically if it was culturally self-assured. To this end he endorsed and repeatedly drew attention to the work of the Gaelic League and lent his support to the theatre movement. He regularly sponsored local cultural and sporting activity and became the great grassroots populiser of the "high" cultural ideals of the Revival. Plunkett was also keen to ensure that the factors of cultural production were widely available to all and with the assistance of the Carnegie Trust he established village libraries all over Ireland.
The extent to which the co-ops contributed to the intellectual and artistic life of Revival Ireland has been largely forgotten. One of the chief organisers of the co-op project was George Russell; the poet, painter and mystic AE. In many ways he is a quintessential Revival figure who did not see any contradiction between his economic ideas and his artistic interests. He edited the organisation's journal, the Irish Homestead, which devoted a considerable amount of space to cultural matters. In this remarkable publication it was not uncommon to see a poem by Yeats or a short story by James Joyce published side-by-side with an article on fertilizers or how to treat cattle with scour.
But if there are traceable parallels between the current Irish revival and that which occurred a century ago, there are also many levels against which the current renaissance simply doesn't measure up. As we have seen, one of the most interesting aspects of the Revival a century ago is the degree to which economists took an interest in the general cultural and spiritual health of the country while the poets absorbed themselves in the material problems of the nation. Unfortunately such a crossover of debate is not as much in evidence in Celtic Tiger Ireland as it was a hundred years ago.
Neither were prominent figures slow about highlighting the class biases of Revival Ireland. Synge, in his social criticism, always took the side of the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of Irish society. He, like Connolly, was disgusted at the extent to which the emerging elite often profited at the expense of those worse off. And who could forget Joyce's astute diagnosis of the malaise of the Irish political culture of his day in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"? One can only wonder what he would have made of the mores of "Tribunal Ireland". If the Celtic Tiger has produced many successful writers and artists, few come even close to their antecedents in terms of the daring and impact of their critiques of contemporary Ireland.
ONE further and crucial difference between Ireland today and Ireland a century ago is that the version of national identity that was being fashioned by the Revivalists was formed under very different circumstances - largely out of a perceived need to bolster and preserve the fragments of fragile "native" forms from the homogenising influences of mass culture. Today Irish culture from Roddy Doyle to Riverdance is being presented as a marketable category easily packaged to meet the expectations of mass audiences. The reasons for, and repercussions of, these profound changes in cultural fortunes are many and complex - yet shamefully under-debated in the society where they are occurring.
There is no doubt that we are undergoing a great crisis in Irish self-identity right now. We have convinced ourselves that the contemporary moment represents a great period of liberation when the fundamental problems which have dogged Irish culture and society are being finally overcome and consigned to the past, yet the daily revelations of Tribunal Ireland and the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots make a mockery of such a naive thesis. The harsh reality is that the Lemass era not only laid the foundations for the possibilities of the Celtic Tiger but also ushered in the era of corporate gombeen politics that is being uncovered now.
What we mustn't forget is that it also sanctioned a fundamental distrust of the Irish past in the form of a revisionist project which relentlessly challenged the intellectual legacy of the Irish nationalist and republican traditions. As a result of this, the fetishisation of "the noble Irish past" was replaced by an equally unhealthy fixation on the "exceptional progressivism" of the contemporary moment. The time may now be right for a new revisionist project - not one which sees the past as an analogue for the most appalling failings of the present, but one which looks to the achievements and liberational energies of the past in order to critique the imperfect present and inspire an alternative to it.
P. J. Mathews is a lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin and is the editor of New Voices in Irish Criticism, recently published by Four Courts