In 1960 Conor Cruise O’Brien edited a collection of essays entitled The Shaping of Modern Ireland, which had a major impact both on the way the course of the country’s history was perceived, not only among historians but also the general public. Focusing on the period between Charles Stewart Parnell’s death in 1891 and the 1916 Easter Rising, it consisted of a series of biographical essays on the men (only men) who “shaped” the country that emerged from the revolution.
It was an unusual book, written by academics and commentators from the Ireland of the 1950s, some of whom would have known the subjects of their essays. Cruise O’Brien described the collection as “an interrogation by a cross-section of contemporary Ireland of a significant cross-section of its own past”. He was himself both a gifted historian – his Parnell and His Party (1957) had become an instant classic – a career diplomat, and a journalist in both Ireland and Britain, where he served as editor in chief of the Observer.
Like many of his contributors, he was personally acquainted with the men and especially the women who made twentieth-century Ireland, including his aunts Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Mary Kettle, the widow of Tom Kettle, the Nationalist MP who was the rising hope of Redmond’s party until he was killed in action on the Western Front in 1916.
The Shaping of Modern Ireland was published six years before the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and reissued a decade later. As such, it may be seen as an early example of what became an extended reassessment of the causes and consequences of the “terrible beauty” of 1916.
The present volume represents an effort to look afresh at some of the key figures from that formative era in modern Irish history. Its editors are a diplomat and historian, Daniel Mulhall, currently Irish Ambassador in London, and myself, Eugenio Biagini of Cambridge University, a professional historian. We asked a number of academics and public figures to re-examine the decades leading up to 1916 through the prism of those figures who featured in Cruise O’Brien’s book.
While for the most part adhering to the structure of the 1960 volume, we have made some adjustments and additions to reflect changed perceptions of that period. For example, the original volume featured only one woman contributor and all of the subjects of the essays were male. Curiously, even Constance Markievicz did not gain entry to the male bastion of “shapers” of modern Ireland, despite the prominent role she played in the Easter Rising and its aftermath, including her achievement in being the first woman ever to be elected to the Westminster parliament.
The editors have redressed the balance without diluting the original mix by increasing the number of chapters and broadening the coverage to include a number of prominent women from the decades prior to the attainment of Irish independence – Eva Gore-Booth, Constance Markievicz (Sonja Tiernan) and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington (Margaret Ward). They have also included a chapter by Elizabeth Kehoe on the three very diverse “daughters of Ireland”, Maud Gonne, Kathleen Lynn and Dorothy MacArdle. The last one was herself a contributor to the 1960 volume, and shaped a whole generation’s understanding of this formative era.
In a major and significant departure from the exclusive emphasis on political history in the 1960 volume, the editors have also included chapters on figures from the world of business – including the Jacobs and Guinnesses (by Joe Lee), William Pirrie of Harland & Wolff and Sir Horace Plunkett (by Mary Daly), an improving large landowner and the champion of agricultural co-operatives.
The complexity and diverse outcomes of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism is captured in an essay by Daniel Mulhall, who compares AE (George Russell), DP Moran and Tom Kettle. Moreover, the book includes chapters on both Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins – who were not included in the original volume, perhaps because De Valera was still the dominant figure in politics at the time, while Collins personified the other side of the bitter civil-war memories which were so alive in 1960.
The inclusion of these two figures involves stretching the book’s timeframe to encompass the turbulent years that followed the Easter Rising, but it must be observed that many of the contributors to the 1960 book felt that they too needed to deal with events of the post-independence decades which related to the lives of their chosen personalities.
By contrast, Ulster remains under-represented, despite attention paid to Pirrie and a chapter on Edward Carson (by myself; in the original volume this topic was covered by RB McDowell).
In his introductory essay, Cruise O’Brien described the period as “a sort of crease in time, a featureless valley between the commanding chain of the Rising and the solitary enigmatic peak of Parnell”. It is no longer possible to see it like that, for the period’s ebbs and flows are now much more comprehensively explored than they were a half century ago.
This assessment is published half the way through the decade of commemoration, and on the centenary of the Easter Rising, which in itself took place in the midst of a devastating war and on the brink of a series of far-reaching revolutionary crisis comparable to those of 1789-1799 and 1848-49. Indeed, between the spring of 1916 and the end of 1923 rebellions and revolutions transformed the social, constitutional and geo-political layout of much of Europe and the Middle East. This transformative cycle was spearheaded by the Easter Rising in Dublin, at the westernmost end of Europe, and saw its most celebrated and influential culmination in the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire.
Both revolutions were inspired by democratic ideas, focusing on popular sovereignty, and citizens’ equality without distinction of gender. Of the two, for a long time most observers believed that the Russian one was by far the most successful and influential. By contrast, the Irish revolution seemed to have failed: even early commentators, such as Sean O’Casey and Sean O’Faolain, expressed their disappointment and frustration as they surveyed the gap between reality and rhetoric in political and social outcomes, in the daily struggle for survival in which ordinary people were engaged.
While many ordinary citizens were forced to emigrate, those who did not faced endless battles over civil rights, gender roles, health, religion and basic social entitlements. Social and economic problems were compounded by Ireland’s partition – a development which, as the Protestant nationalist Ernst Blythe admitted as early as 1955, was not primarily due to British occupation, but to the resolute wish of a majority of the people of north-east Ulster to remain part of the United Kingdom. For Cruise O’Brien and many of his contemporaries, the IRA Border Campaign (1956-62) seemed to confirm that Ireland would not be able to escape the legacy of 1916.
Thus, in the light of the difficult outcome of the revolution, Cruise O’Brien perceived the period from 1891 to 1916 “as a lull between storms”. In hindsight, the editors of the centenary reassessment argue that it was instead the storm between two “lulls”. For what is striking in the course of modern Irish history is the resilience of parliamentary government in both its pre- and post- 1922 varieties, and the extent to which violence was used to secure access to the electoral process, rather than to replace it. In this perspective, the key significance of the period 1891-1916 was not the building of the nation (which actually was partitioned), but the assertion of democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty – which, in different ways, shaped both South and North. For its shortcomings and disappointments, the revolutionary period asserted the ultimate sovereignty of the Irish people, who demonstrated – if we can borrow from the title of a recent major work on the subject – that the Irish were “a nation and not a rabble”.
If the one started in 1916 was largely a political revolution, this was not because the social revolution “failed”, but because to an extent it had been pre-empted by the State through the Land Acts (1881-1903) and the operation of the Congested Districts Board from 1891. Collectively, these reforms amounted to a great experiment in social and economic engineering which revolutionised Ireland’s rural economy and society, though they did so for the benefit of the rural middle classes and largely neglected both the farm labourers and the urban workers.
Was it a bourgeois revolution? To say the least, it further enshrined ideals such as peasant proprietorship into the Irish collective psyche. Moreover, it was in the context of the social and economic experiments of the 1880s and early 1900s that Irish industrial entrepreneurship – in Belfast, Dublin and Cork – saw the rise of major business leaders, who in their own way “shaped” modern Ireland.
If, as Alexis De Tocqueville wrote, there is always considerable continuity between the old regime and the revolution, in Ireland’s case such continuity took the shape of a culture solidly rooted in what CB Macpherson called “possessive individualism”. While Macpherson had devised his view as an analysis of capitalist individuality, it was much more suitable to describe the world-view of a society based on land ownership, one that was typical of the Irish whether it expressed itself in the “American dream” of the diaspora, or in peasant proprietorship at home.
This dimension must be borne in mind as we reflect on the reasons why, of the two revolutions of 1916 and 1917, the Irish is the only one which has passed the test of time. It is remarkable that, despite the intellectual sophistication and the resources available to sustain the Bolshevik experiment, well before the turn of the twentieth century the Soviet Union was in tatters and its Marxist message discredited; even their atheistic premises had been rejected by an age which now saw the globalisation of varieties of religious fundamentalism.
By contrast, the Irish Republic has become one of the most stable and prosperous democracies in the world. Even Northern Ireland, which was the theatre of the most prolonged civil conflict in late twentieth-century Europe, has reached a remarkable degree of stability and economic recovery and was regarded as a model of conflict resolution and peace-making.
Perhaps for the same reasons, the 1916 Rising had a longer-lasting, though a lower-profile impact on the world than the Bolshevik Revolution. For, as the contributors to a major international conference held at Churchill College, Cambridge, last month have argued, the Irish revolution symbolised the ongoing radical potential of the basic democratic message – popular sovereignty as the only source of political legitimacy in the modern world.
It is in the nature of volumes like the present one to be selective in ways which are all too easy to criticise. Why have we not departed more radically from the selections of leaders who left their mark on the shaping of modern Ireland? Why have we not included more of the victims of the process – for example, the children, the emigrants? Ultimately, any selection would be arbitrary and only a histoire totale – a fully genderised, economic, social, economic, cultural, environmental history, aware of the longue durée of the phenomena under discussion – would do justice to the subject matter. But that would have been a different book for a different audience.
[ The Shaping of Modern Ireland: A Centenary Assessment, Opens in new window ]
