Forum Report: Aspects of a conference report read like a shopping list for Irish Studies
In October 2005 a "Forum on the Future of Irish Studies", organised by Christina Mahony of the Catholic University of America, was held outside Florence. Now a report on the proceedings has been published by the Centre for Irish Studies in Prague.
Apart from a few Irish diplomats, Arts Council representatives, publishers, and librarians, the delegates were distinguished scholars of Irish studies. Fifty-two scholars, even if all have written excellent books before, cannot together write a good book in three days, nor to be fair was that the aim of the Forum. These 150 pages of bullet points, charts, "best practice", position papers and submerged differences of opinion will not be a big seller with the general reader, but the issues raised are of some general importance.
A key question by Roy Foster at the close of his plenary lecture - "Does Irish Studies have any meaning within Ireland, or is it only relevant abroad?" - is left hanging in the air, unaddressed by the conferees. Their agenda is Irish Studies programmes abroad, not education of Irish people in Ireland. How can these relatively new programmes be spread within and without the universities with diasporic communities in Anglophone countries, where they currently exist?
One excellent proposal arose from the session on libraries chaired by Catriona Crowe and Bruce Stewart: the establishment, perhaps through the Royal Irish Academy, of a "digital hub", a one-stop shop for information on Irish cultural products. The cost might initially be €200,000 a year.
Other requests were unboundedly exorbitant, as can happen when the rich come to beg.
The sales pitch to Irish taxpayers is made most bluntly by Michael Kenneally of Montreal: Irish Studies is a "renewable economic resource". Scholars abroad promote and sponsor Irish cultural products (tourism, books, films, travelling theatre productions), and so the Irish Government should "provide substantial annual funding" for their activities. After all, as many delegates observe, the British Council does it, the Alliance Française and Japan Foundation do it, and the International Council of Canadian Studies is state-funded. Prof Kenneally has a lengthy shopping list: grants to start new courses, doctoral fellowships for non-Irish students in their home universities, other fellowships for one-year visits by graduate students to Ireland, conference funding, book prizes, travelling archives, missionaries for the teaching of the Irish language, and (why not?) visits for the present delegates every three years for a conference in Florence.
No doubt - even lulled by the Italian autumn in the hills of Fiesole, and conceding that culture is an absolutely primary industry of Ireland - some of the delegates must have recoiled from the deliberately crass formulation in which scholars are simply promoters of ethnic commodities, now presenting a bill for services.
In the long run, perhaps the State should set up a cultural agency for the diasporic empire, somewhat like the British Council. (Culture Ireland is intended to assist the development abroad of Irish literature and performing arts, but not of humanities and social sciences).
In the short run, however, there are pressing needs at home. The delegates do not show that they are aware of how poorly third-level education, especially in the arts, is funded in Ireland. No Irish university has the staff-student ratio of Notre Dame or Boston College, Oxford or Liverpool. Ireland ranks one step from the bottom of a list of European countries in terms of levels of investment in education. Last year, no Irish university made the top 100 in any ranking system, ultimately because they have been too poor for too long. Yet we teachers in Irish universities aspire to be eminent; we would like to serve our own students well and to recruit international students at third and fourth level.
Of course, it would be great to promote the speaking of Gaelic on the Pacific rim, and to fund speaking tours by top scholars of the NUI, DCU, and TCD to all the lands where green is worn, but it would also be nice if intelligent students in this country could study in small writing-intensive seminars rather than large lectures followed by single examinations. Only recently has the Government of Ireland fellowship scheme funded a few to do graduate work in Irish universities. It is still very difficult even for the best PhDs to get a teaching job without emigrating.
If more of the prominent delegates were not themselves Irish by ancestry, one wonders if the forum might have asked what the point is of promoting Ireland (as opposed to studying it), other than to sell cultural products and make money. The delegates seemed to be agreed that Irishness is a leading brand among nationalities, on account of Irish people's creative genius, entrepreneurial flair, experience of virtual negritude, commitment to small-nation republicanism, and so on. Should one happen not to be Irish, this air of ethnic self-congratulation could give one a feeling like being the one Jew at a Kansas church supper, when the Christians bless themselves for being saved.
Has Irish Studies drifted into the provision of ethnic uplift? The original academic model of Irish Studies was Classics. To understand the plays of Sophocles or the orations of Cicero, one had to know philosophy, history, language, and the whole literary tradition of the ancient world, plus its customs of slavery, sport, democracy, female subjugation, and pederasty. In a similar way, the two major scholars of international modernism, Hugh Kenner and Richard Ellmann - persons of zero Irish ancestry, by the way - assumed that if you wished to understand fully Yeats, Joyce, or Beckett, and through them the modern world, you had to understand Irish culture. In short, even if you were not Irish, Ireland was worth studying, not because it was a place of nobler virtue, but because so many writers of the first rank were born here - and only for that reason.
The present current in Irish Studies to downplay "products of high culture" or "the canon" thus seems bizarre. The literary achievements of a small number of citizens of this little island in the 20th century is one of the magnificent mysteries in the history of human culture. We still don't know how it came to pass or have the measure of its magnificence. It probably cannot be helped that people of Irish ancestry absurdly take a personal pride in the achievement of those few masters, as if they'd written Ulysses themselves. Expatriate Scotsmen similarly still exult in the glories of late 18th-century Edinburgh: Adam Smith, Hume, Scott, Boswell, and the rest. And anyway, vain patriotic illusion itself may be one factor that has given more recent Irish writers the courage for the high endeavour of literature and drama. Amazingly, the quality of the "cultural production" at the end of the 20th century rivals that of its beginning. The enhancement of life these works produce belongs to the world at large.
Adrian Frazier is the author of George Moore 1852-1933 and is currently working on a book about connections between the Irish revival and Hollywood films. He is the director of MA programmes in writing and drama & theatre studies at NUI Galway
The Future of Irish Studies: Report of the Irish Forum Edited by Christina Hunt Mahony, Laura Izarra, Elizabeth Malcolm, John P. Harrington, Ondrej Pilný, Catriona Crowe Irish Forum: Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University, Prague, 151pp. NPG