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Making Ireland Modern by Enda Delaney: a fascinating exploration of Ireland’s path to modernity

Delaney explores how we thought, spoke and felt was radically transformed from the 1780s to 1916

O'Connell street and O'Connell bridge, Dublin, with Nelson's pillar in the background circa 1900. Photograph: William Lawrence/Sean Sexton/Getty Images
O'Connell street and O'Connell bridge, Dublin, with Nelson's pillar in the background circa 1900. Photograph: William Lawrence/Sean Sexton/Getty Images
Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of Society and Culture
Author: Enda Delaney
ISBN-13: 978-0199569823
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Guideline Price: £35

Heading for a train in rural Ireland, the provost of Trinity College, JP Mahaffy, was relieved to see the station clock indicated he still had time to spare. But when he arrived on the platform another clock told a different time, meaning Mahaffy had missed his train. After accosting the local porter, Mahaffy was told that if the two clocks told the same time, then there would be no need for two clocks.

For much of the 19th century, Ireland seemed “simply out of time with the modern world”, as Enda Delaney writes in his stimulating new history. Those intent on the country’s “modernisation” – both its British colonial government, and many in a growing middle class eager to exchange a “backwards” Gaelic past for “progress” – were often almost furiously frustrated with the illogical nature of Ireland’s “old ways”.

Conceptions of time, Delaney writes, “are central to this story”, and not just because of local clocks or Ireland’s 25-minute time difference from Britain (“it reminds us that we are coming into a strange country”, John Dillon said of the time change when crossing the Irish Sea). Historians have long over-emphasised the political revolution – even though on most things “the pre-independence ways of doing things were simply carried on by the new Irish administration” – at the expense of what Delaney calls a “cognitive revolution”.

From the 1780s to 1916, Delaney argues persuasively, how we thought, spoke, believed and felt were all radically transformed. “Modernity” came to Ireland not in the 1960s, but long before independence. This is a “history of mentalities” and perhaps its most important contribution is how Delaney tries to bring history writing in Ireland into contact with the concepts and ideas that historians have used for other European countries, but which have too often been under-explored here.

The twin engines of revolution were colonialism and capitalism, both brokered by “the British liberal state”, which after the Act of Union set about changing just about everything about Ireland, often in ways unthinkable in Britain itself. For the government to intervene in private society there, Charles Trevelyan commented, was the exception, whereas in Ireland it was “the rule”.

Britain mapped the country, valued it, reorganised who owned its land, who ran its institutions, and how it was policed. They created schools and workhouses, built roads and railways, and “sought to improve living conditions and promote economic prosperity”. But despite Victorian self-justification, this was not charity or moral responsibility; it “was ultimately about the preservation of British rule”.

The Royal Irish Constabulary was a paramilitary police force and the country remained heavily militarised, with the law used in ways that never would have been acceptable in Britain. This was “a colonial state” based on a narrative of superiority. “A main cause of the backwardness of this country in the march of social improvement,” wrote one observer during the Famine, “is to be found in the national character.”

“Progress” meant becoming “more like Britain” and, despite protestation, this was not simply a British belief. Many Irish people saw the future (a concept that colonial observers believed the Gaelic mind had not considered) “through the eyes of the conqueror”, as the Welsh geographer Estyn Evans said of an Irish history based only on documents. Education, social mobility, business success and political power all seemed to require accepting what Delaney calls “the disciplining of Irish society”.

Respectability, temperance, discipline and “civilised” behaviour were the creed of those who sought “progress” for themselves and their country, either within or without the union. The “backwardness” of Gaelic Ireland had to be left behind. Even those who lamented “anglicisation” tended to grudgingly accept its benefits. “All the change was not disaster,” nationalist A M Sullivan wrote; “much indeed had been lost, but much had been gained”.

The narrative, Delaney argues, was (and remains) flawed. “Eighteenth-century Irish society and culture,” he writes, was actually “vibrant and dynamic: not puritanical, regressive, and archaic.” It was not isolated from the rest of the world but well-connected; it was not a “subsistence” economy, but a place where the “modern” market economy was well established, from the growth of small artisan industry to the proliferation of market towns. The country was not economically stagnant but constantly changing.

Indeed Ireland’s transition to capitalism was so great that Karl Marx called the country “a crucible of modernity” being “radically transformed by an Anglo-Saxon revolution”. Too often we forget how great that change was. One of Irish people’s “slave birthmarks”, James Connolly wrote, “is a belief in the capitalist system of society ... the most foreign thing in Ireland”.

Modernising Ireland was a varied and shifting society, one whose complexity is too often flattened into a narrative of poverty where everyone is a “peasant” when social change and class division were real. Even in the densely populated growing west that would be devastated by the Famine, there was a living culture of socialising, stories, music, traditions and beliefs that defies the condescension that has written them and their world out of history.

Delaney meticulously surveys scholarship from folklore to local history to anthropology to geography to reconstruct their living, mental world. And most importantly of all, he emphasises “a vigorous Irish-language intellectual and cultural world” that persisted even as the country became complexly bilingual.

The change from that to an English-speaking country was the most radical shift of all, and yet, Delaney notes, it has never received “anywhere near the same attention from Irish historians as the development of nationalism and unionism”. Again, much of Irish society both then and since swallowed whole the argument of an 1850 commentator that Irish “is not the language of business, of modern civilisation, and it will not enable a man to get on in the world [and] its doom is inevitable”. The “utilitarian” needs of “modern communication”, Daniel O’Connell commented, meant he “could witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish”.

That was the attitude of much of the population, who longed, educators wrote, to learn English, with all its “prizes and social privileges”.

“The middle classes”, raged Thomas Davis, “think it a sign of vulgarity to speak Irish”, because at school and at home they are offered endless incentive to speak “the language of their masters”.

Yet none of this, Delaney argues, was inevitable, and we have too long accepted that it was. The British Empire and the world are full of evidence that Irish “could have remained the dominant language for everyday interactions” even if “English remained the formal language of government, law, and commerce”. The reason it didn’t was because “the social and cultural climate was deeply antipathetic towards the use of Irish in any context”.

There were many reasons for that, not least the colonial state’s hostility, from law to education. The Famine years were catastrophic for the language, and a reflection of how colonial Ireland’s modernising government was. Trevelyan approvingly compared the horrendously inadequate relief programme to “rationing” an army, while the Young Irelanders pointed out that ships coming from England were more likely to be bringing troops than food.

The mass emigration that had begun before the Hunger and accelerated hugely afterwards was also focused on the Irish-speaking and culturally Gaelic areas of the country, further associating a way of life with a past to be shaken off and forgotten.

The trauma of the Famine helped to promote the rise of the state’s partner in progress, “the new supercharged Irish Catholicism: disciplined, universal, and orthodox”. Gone was the decentralised, local priesthood of the Penal period, one that ministered to a society that had, in Oscar Wilde’s mother Francesca’s words, “the instinctive belief in the existence of certain unseen agencies that influence all human life”.

In its place was a stricter, English-speaking Catholicism often motivated by an insidious objective, the enforcement of a more “respectable” bourgeois set of practices and devotions. The new church did a lot of social good, but it also brought what Presbyterian Robert Lynd presciently called “the despotism of men who are greedy for power and for opportunities to let other people feel it”.

The people whose ways of thinking, speaking and living were left behind were “the generations of emigrants, cottiers, labourers, small farmers and others” who were “cast aside” as the “flotsam and jetsam” of “the transformation to modernity”. One of the most distinctive features of the Irish experience of that process is how transnational it was: “the decimation of the lower classes through famine and emigration virtually removed a whole social stratum, much of which was reconstituted in the twilight zones of British and American cities.”

Transnational history has been a major focus of Delaney’s work, and this is an important attempt to restore “agency to ordinary or everyday individuals” at home and abroad who have too often been left “people without history”. The thematic structure may throw readers used to our national love of narrative but Delaney is trying to reorient us “away from thinking in ... dichotomies which do little justice to the complexity of the past”.

Our path to modernity was “neither inevitable nor one-directional”, and only by understanding that complex truth can we hope also to understand what we have lived with and created since.

Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and the host of Ireland’s Edge

Further Reading

The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford, 2017) by Breandán Mac Suibhne. From a story of informers and vigilantes in his family’s home village in Donegal, Mac Suibhne reveals the extraordinary change of the decades after the Famine.

Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland, 1800-1921 (Oxford, 2016) by K Theodore Hoppen. Hoppen meticulously traces the words and actions of the men tasked with “governing Paddy” under the Union.

The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life, and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (UCD, 2018) by Margaret Kelleher. Kelleher uses the execution of Maolra Seoighe, an Irish speaker who could not understand his English language murder trial, to show the complex bilingualism of modernising Ireland.