JOURNALISM: DIARMAID FERRITERreviews An Irish Century: Studies 1912-2012 Edited by Bryan Fanning UCD Press, 336pp. €40
SINCE ITS foundation, in 1912, Studies, the Irish Jesuit quarterly journal, has clocked up 400 issues and published about 3,000 essays, arguably becoming the most important Catholic periodical read by Irish intellectuals. Specialising in social issues, philosophy, history and economics, it has provided a forum for analysis of these subjects not just in Ireland but also in continental Europe.
This centenary collection, incorporating 31 of the articles, is a worthy tribute to the journal’s endurance, quality and relevance, as well as being a handsomely designed and accessible overview of the manner in which, during its first 100 years, Studies has recorded and fostered discussion about some of the key milestones and changes in Irish society.
The editor of this anthology, the prolific UCD social scientist Bryan Fanning, points out that after the Irish revolution that brought the Free State into existence, Studies hosted the social, economic, constitutional and political debates that shaped the new State: “Both the conservative and liberal wings of the Catholic bourgeois who dominated politics and academia set out their thinking in Studies.”
In terms of economic planning, Fanning writes that the reorientation of economic policy proposed by the secretary of the Department of Finance, TK Whitaker, in the late 1950s “can be traced through a series of articles published in Studies by various Irish economists in the preceding two decades”.
As the decades passed, Studies began to reflect the emphasis on social justice that permeated certain Catholic quarters; it had “moved well to the left of the political mainstream by the 1980s”, focusing on the damage to social cohesion by market forces.
The range and quality of articles chosen is, overall, impressive. The earlier pieces reflect the political and cultural stirrings of the early 20th century and a high, if unrealisable, idealism. Patrick Pearse’s 1913 essay – his sole contribution to Studies – claimed greatness for the Gaelic epic; 10 years later, however, George Russell wrote an article lamenting that the champions of physical force had squandered the spirit created by poets and scholars.
In 1966 Denis Gwynn commemorated the sacrifice of Thomas Kettle in British army uniform, but Studies was not ready for Francis Shaw’s excoriation of Pearse’s “false equation of the Patriot with Christ” in his article on the canon of Irish history. It was prepared for 1966 but not published until 1972, when it could also serve as “a tract for the present troubled time” in its denunciation of the blood sacrifice.
Some of the articles on economics give pause for thought about the current Irish predicament, such as John Maynard Keynes’s contribution in 1933 on national self-sufficiency and his endorsement of economic protectionism, and Patrick Lynch’s vibrant advocacy of state-fostered economic planning in 1953. John Sweeny’s 1983 article on the extent to which social class differences had become so firmly implanted also resonates in its contention that the “surrendering to the market [of] such fundamental decisions as how many work in what and how is a recipe for social disaster”. It could have been written yesterday.
There was space, too, for discussion of literature. In 1965 a young Gus Martin criticised the overweening influence of Joyce and Yeats: “Because the most vocal of our writers have been dissentient and distrustful of Irish values it has been assumed both at home and abroad that all sensitive artists feel the same.”
Some of the dominant themes of Studies in more recent years have been the decline of religiosity and increased secularisation in Ireland, as well as the institutional failures of Catholicism and the need to confront the reality of the systematic sexual abuse of children. The journal also addressed the challenges of immigration during the boom; and the editorials of Fergus O’Donoghue SJ since the economic crash have reflected the expanded gallery of rogues and demons. In 2009 he wryly observed: “The doghouse no longer feels lonely; in fact it is becoming rather crowded. Catholic clergy have been in it for ages but now we have been joined by bankers, builders, property developers and government leaders.”
This book is an unapologetic celebration of the humanities and underlines the significance of the journal’s commitment to the long essay form, increasingly rare in a world of throwaway comments and communications reductionism. Many of those essays over the century, as acknowledged, have been “dull and worthy”, but many of them have been both good and important.
It is perhaps inevitable that anthologies will be faulted for their exclusions, and this one is no exception. It is curious that not a single article from the 1940s was deemed worthy of inclusion, given the postwar debates about the welfare state. The expulsion of a decade also undermines the robustness of the book’s title, An Irish Century.
The introduction could also have benefited from the author visiting the Irish Jesuit Archives on Leeson Street for more information on the editors, their means and their methods. As I discovered as a research student there 20 years ago, Patrick Connolly SJ, the editor from 1914 to 1950, referred to his contributors as his “faithful galley slaves” who, when pleading that they were too busy writing books to write essays for him, were informed that the easiest way to write their books was through instalments in Studies.
In that sense it was quite an old boys’ club. Fanning could have elaborated on the implications of his aside that “only a small proportion of writers in Studies were women”. Thankfully, however, included in the collection is a 1933 article by Daniel Binchy, the Irish envoy to Germany from 1929 to 1932, about the most dangerous boy of all, Adolf Hitler. Binchy had first seen Hitler in action in Munich in 1921 and remarked to his friend that he was “a harmless lunatic with the gift of oratory”. His friend’s astute retort was: “No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.”
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. His Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s will be published in October by Profile Books
