Book Review: Paper tigers?

The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880

Author: Cian T McMahon

ISBN-13: 978-1469620107

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Guideline Price: £30.95

Contemporary Ireland revels in its novel reputation as the cosmopolitan hub of a “global”, “transnational” and “imagined community” of those choosing, among other identities, to define themselves as “Irish”. Being “Irish” entails flexibility, ambivalence, self-parody, unpredictability and just a dash of the old hypocrisy. (Vote Yes for gay marriage, Yes for marriage as the foundation of the family, Yes for the family as a moral institution antecedent and superior to all positive law.)

Historians have begun to notice that global Ireland and transnational Irishness are not the offspring of some Celtic tiger but long-time outcomes of enormous and sustained emigration. The terminology has changed. Few of today’s Irish would extol “the Celtic race at home and abroad”. Yet the problem of how to perform Irishness outside Ireland, without alienating one’s hosts and ethnic competitors, is in many respects the same in 2015 as it was in 1865.

Since the Great Famine most Irish residents have had close personal and family connections in North America, Britain and the former British empire. Emigration generated a glut of detailed information about life beyond Ireland conveyed by “returned Yanks”, emigrant letters, newspaper reports and popular literature. Likewise, millions of more or less Irish Americans, Australasians and Britons were kept in touch with events and public opinion in Ireland, often through distorting lenses. As most emigrants chose the United States, the impact of Americanisation on the Irish at home was arguably stronger than that of anglicisation. Perhaps Douglas Hyde should have proclaimed “the necessity for the de-Americanisation of Ireland” in his famous address presaging the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893.

For nearly two centuries the press was the pre-eminent public vehicle for exchanging information and ideas about Ireland and the Irish world. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880 rests mainly on a study (without content analysis) of 20 American and two Australian newspapers for Irish or Catholic readers from the 1840s to 1880.

McMahon concludes that these weekly “rags” – an oddly dismissive term for papers of such high aspirations and pretensions – facilitated “the growth of a borderless Irish reading public, which, through the constant exchange of news and opinion, imagined itself into being”.

This is indeed how owners and editors may have viewed their publications, as most “Irish” newspapers were propagandist vehicles for the political factions claiming to represent the national interest abroad. They provide colourful, often scurrilous evidence of the vicious animosities that divided former Young Irelanders such as John Mitchel (apologist for the Confederates, both Irish and American, and for slavery) and Thomas Francis Meagher (latter-day abolitionist, commander of the Union’s Irish Brigade in the civil war, later exterminator of Native Americans).

Historians, like editors, tend to exaggerate the importance of the press, accepting dubious circulation claims and assuming that factional organs were truly effective in shaping the views of a “community” of readers. McMahon offers no sustained analysis of newspaper production or distribution, virtually ignoring the hundreds of non-Irish papers that provided daily sustenance for most American (and Australian) readers of all nativities. How many Irish emigrants and their descendants actually read “Irish” papers, and what effect did the rantings of Mitchel, Meagher, Thomas D’Arcy McGee or John Boyle O’Reilly have on their readers?

In relation to "circulation" in 1869, McMahon reports 6,300 for Mitchel's Irish Citizen, 9,200 for the American reincarnation of the Irish People, 35,000 for the New York Irish-American and 45,000 for O'Reilly's Boston Pilot. Even if 95,000 copies of these papers were indeed distributed, it is obvious that the vast majority of Irish-Americans were not reading them. In 1870 almost two million natives of Ireland (excluding descendants) were enumerated in the United States census.

Although overstating the communal impact of the “Irish” popular press in the US and Australia, McMahon is right to assert its importance for Irish nationalism. Journalism and political agitation were inseparable throughout the 19th century and beyond, most crucially when radicals or reformers were struggling to find a popular audience and to escape from the intellectual margins. For an aspirant radical nationalist with some education and a way with words the newspaper offered a far more promising vehicle than oratory in an empty hall or pontification in a stuffy committee room. Many Young Irelanders and Fenians were brilliant journalists but inept politicians. They were not the first or last Irish nationalists to rely primarily on press polemics; the same applies to the intellectual United Irishmen and Arthur Griffith’s early Sinn Féin. For those without popular support, “editorialising” (McMahon’s term) created the illusion of influence and power. Surely someone out there was listening.

McMahon is aware of the gulf between rhetoric and reality. “As a sweeping rhetorical device that ignored underlying tensions, global nationalism was riddled with ambivalence, ambiguity, and, at times, outright contradictions.” He convincingly documents the difficulty of reconciling “Celtic” affirmations of “civic pluralism” with conflicting Irish perceptions of slavery and black racial inferiority, exonerating Irish nationalists of systematic racism (especially in the Australian context). Yet many Americans allegedly agreed with Edward A Freeman, a noted historian, that “this would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it”.

McMahon maintains that "the average Irish soldier fighting in the Union army" shared the sardonic outlook of "Private Miles O'Reilly" (Charles G Halpine) of the New York 69th in Sambo's Right to Be Kilt:

Some tell us ’tis a burnin’ shame

To make the naygurs fight;

And that the thrade of bein’ kilt

Belongs but to the white:

But as for me, upon my sowl!

So liberal are we here,

I’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself,

On every day of the year.

McMahon’s over-reliance on the polemical press precludes any deeper analysis of “global Irish identity” as experienced by the relatively unlettered mass of emigrants and their families. Although many Young Ireland exiles were Protestants, he admits “that in this book, the term ‘Irish’ refers to a mostly Catholic, nationalist, male community”. Apart from a brief reference to the unexpected emergence of Orangeism in the United States, nothing is revealed about Irish anti-nationalism and anti-Catholicism, a topic that “would exceed the limits of this project”.

In order to assess the practical importance of ethnic “community” for the Irish abroad one must go beyond polemical attempts to create one, whether “Celtic” or “Ulster-Scots”. Transnational ties and global affinities are better studied through personal testimony, especially family correspondence, which is often untouched by political conceptions of nationality.

McMahon makes good use of published letters from Australia indicating how important newspapers were to recipients both at home and abroad, but he selects atypical examples with explicitly nationalist content. Although repetitious and didactic, like the prose of the Young Irelanders, McMahon’s book is a useful contribution to a topical debate. Yet the “global dimensions” of Irishness, as experienced by the post-Famine Irish, remain elusive.

David Fitzpatrick is professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories Since 1795, was published last year by Cambridge University Press