[Re: the contrast with the Catholic Bulletin the IFA stangely refers to...]
The BICO are defenders of the Catholic Bulletin (they also champion Pope Benedict XV) They have republished selections of the magazine "to remind Ireland of the independent mind it had a few generations ago". Oxford/TCD/UCD educated historian Fr Brian Murphy OSB (of Glenstall Abbey) also writes for them and wrote a book on
The Catholic Bulletin and. Republican Ireland (he also wrote
The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland). According to the IPR...
"If one were to compare the Irish Catholic today with the Catholic Bulletin of the 1930s one would despair. And one shouldn’t have to be of purely Romanist orientation to do so."
I have read several editions of the Catholic Bulletin in the National Library and I totally agree. I was very impressed by the publication. Here's an article by Brendan Clifford on the subject....
www.atholbooks.org/freemags/mags/IPR_September_2005.pdfA Know-nothing Review: Brendan O Cathaoir On The Catholic BulletinBrian Murphy’s The Catholic Bulletin And Republican Ireland: With Special Reference To J.J. O’Kelly (‘Sceilg’) wassent to the Irish Times for review. It beats me why such things are done. The Irish Times is a paper with a political mission, and it is controlled by an Oath-bound political Directorate. Its mission is now, as it has been ever since 1921, to restrict as much as it possibly can the development of nationalist Ireland away from the English mother -country. And that mission most definitely does not include publishing
informative reviews of a journal which contributed substantially to that development.
Books on Irish affairs are rarely reviewed by the Irish Times unless they either contribute to eroding the Irish national development, or a report of them can be made to contribute to that erosion.
A review of Murphy’s book was published for the latter reason on 23rd July. The reviewer was Brendan O Cathaoir, of whom I know nothing beyond this review—which is sufficient as it is a Knownothing piece. Here it is in its entirety:
“JJ O’Kelly (‘Sceilg’) was a man of high but narrow intelligence. He was a Gaelic evangelist, Sinn Féin ideologue, and editor of the Catholic Bulletin. He formed part of the Sinn Féin rump which entrusted the grail of the republic to the IRA army council in 1938. Two years later O’Kelly was praising Hitler for freeing Germany from the “heel” of the “Jewish white slave traffic”. The weed of anti-Semitism had been nurtured earlier. In 1916 the Bulletin promoted a series of articles alleging ritual killings with a poster which read “Murder by Jews”. The publication of Murphy’s research is a reminder that it is time for republican militarism to go away.”
Murphy’s book was written as a Thesis at University College, Dublin 20 years ago. Another Thesis on an overlapping subject was produced at UCD about the same time: Language And Religion: The
Quest For Identity In The Irish Free State 1922-30, by Margaret O’Callaghan.
O’Callaghan’s dismissive view of the Catholic Bulletin, depicting it as matter for ridicule, has been made orthodox for revisionism by Roy Foster. She writes:
“The Catholic Bulletin which appears to have acquired a historical curiosity value—perhaps because of its extremism and bombastic pedantry—far in excess of its actual significance at the time is a
publication that can be viewed as representing merely the most hysterical and distorted fringe of the tradition from which it came. It does however provide a key to an understanding of the sense of
cultural inferiority that disoriented and confused many Irishmen…”
“In effect it represents a magnified and corrupted monument to the basest insecurity of the post-colonial society in pursuit of identity”(pp136 & 138).
I think the best description of that is wrong-headed, which is I suppose an advance on O Cathaoir’s Knownothingism. (Is Know-nothingism an understood term these days? I bring it with me from the backwardness of the old, self-confident rural Ireland that both O’Callaghan and O Cathaoir transcended in their elevation to the Anglosphere (a word which I first heard a couple of days ago in John O’Sullivan’s exposition of the virtues of Imperialism on BBC radio). It comes from American politics around the time of the Civil War.
I first heard of the Catholic Bulletin about 40 years ago when, in search of information on something else entirely, I was directed to a Repository—a shop selling graven images and superstitious
relics—around the corner from the Pro- Cathedral in Dublin. The proprietor, MacGiolla Phadraig, told me what I wanted to know, and then engaged me in a long conversation about the dynamic of Irish political affairs in the 1930s. He said I would never get to understand it through Marxist sources and should read the Catholic Bulletin. I was not inclined to read anything with ‘Catholic’ in the title, but MacGiolla Phadraig was an impressive individual and I did so. I found it at least equal in quality to the very best English political magazines. It ceased publication at the end of 1939 and has never had a replacement. I learned things from English Imperialist magazines even though I could never be an Imperialist, and I learned things from the Catholic Bulletin, even though I found when I was very young that I could never be a Catholic.
Murphy’s book, which deals with the early years of the Bulletin, is travestied by O Cathaoir. I am familiar only with its last decade—its series on Irish Fascism when Fine Gael declared itself Fascist, for
example. O Cathaoir’ Know-nothing gibberish would be a suitable entry-point for a treatment of the early 1930s to supplement Dr. Pat Walsh’s treatment of the late 1930s in a pamphlet of Catholic Bulletin extracts.
PS: I was informed much later by Manus O’Riordan that MacGiolla Phadraig, from amidst his plaster saints, produced satirical anti-Fascist verses in ridicule of the Volunteers which Fine Gael sent to fight for Franco."
That aforementioned Pat Walsh wrote in the June IPR:www.atholbooks.org/freemags/mags/IPR_June_2004.pdf"[.......]None of this history, of course, is mentioned in the Irish Times “history of air war.” In 1920s and 1930s Ireland the Catholic Bulletin published fierce propaganda against the Irish Times. It viewed the Irish Times as an ascendancy remnant with a malignant influences on a society struggling to establish an independent democracy. It desired the wiping out of such noxious remnants which worked at the mind of the Irish people, encouraging them to accept the British view of things and not to be bothered with an independent perspective—a view that might question the right of Bull to police the world so that native peoples should pay it taxes.
Reading the revisionist histories of this period today, one would conclude that Ireland was a free democracy after the Treaty of 1921 and all the Bulletin’s efforts against ascendancy influence was a kind of narrow Catholic sectarianism intent on wiping out the last vestiges of Protestantism in the 26 Counties.
But Ireland was not a free democracy in the 1920s and 1930s. It had voted overwhelmingly in 1918 for indepen- dence. But, after a 3-year British military campaign to crush the Republic established by the Irish democracy, it had been forced by Britain to remain in the Empire at the threat of “immediate and terrible war”— in which Churchill had been prepared to use bombers. It had then been weakened by a British-inspired so-called “civil war”. Part of its historic territory and people had already been removed and placed in the hands of its enemies. Its strategic ports were retained by Britain. It was also held economically to Britain through the rancher system of agriculture whereby Irish agriculture produced for the English market and was dependent upon it. And control of the Irish banks and money was in British hands to keep Ireland ultimately in check through the purse strings.
In these circumstances, with Ireland being pulled closer and closer into line with the Empire, can the Catholic Bulletin’s campaign against ascendancy influence be viewed as anything more than a continuation of the struggle for independence, waged over the minds of the Irish people, to keep alive the belief in the possibility of future independence?
The Irish Times supported British Imperial policing of tax-evading rebels from the air, whilst the Catholic Bulletin condemned Bomber Bull and his terrorism against native peoples. The Irish Times is still going strong and the Catholic Bulletin is no more. And unfortunately that says it all—because the Irish Times is far more appropriate to the world of today and to the Ireland of today than the Catholic Bulletin. So who can say today that the Catholic Bulletin was not justified in waging war against the ascendancy and their influence, when the independent Ireland of the Bulletin has been eroded, over the last 30 years or so, by the Anglo- Ireland of the Irish Times?
The Catholic Bulletin has a bad press these days—the days of the new Anglo- ascendancy in Ireland. No one has a good word to say for it. And it cannot speak for itself because it is unavailable to all but those academics who disparage it and whose institutions have it and give them alone access to it.
The present writer came across the Bulletin about twenty years ago when studying in the library at Queens University. I was not very disposed to it— being a socialist and the Bulletin being very insistent that socialism was not a good thing for Ireland (or anywhere else for that matter!). But I became strangely drawn to it, particularly in the quality of its coverage and analysis of foreign affairs during the 1930s. I kept reading it when I should have been studying the books that I had been directed to. It seemed so knowledgeable, so brilliantly sure of itself, so confident in its view of the world. So different to the Ireland we now live in.
But the problem was always to get at it. If you were not a student you had to pay about £50 to see it and you could not get it out of the library to read it at length.
I think I only quoted from it once or twice in my PhD but it caused a major bone of contention with the examiner, Professor John A. Murphy—who dis- missed it and its first editor, J.J. O’Kelly, as an irrelevant extremist, not represent- ative of nationalist Ireland at all. This really surprised me. The Bulletin expressed the worldview of my parents and everything they had communicated to me about themselves. So how could it be extremist and an irrelevancy? When I read it I saw Ireland, or at least the Ireland I understood to be Ireland.
But I was naïve in those days— believing that knowledge stood on its own merits, that it was not a property or product constructed by academics with other agendas. So I did not see that the Bulletin was dynamite for the revisionist historians who wished to coax the Irish away from their vulgar suspicions of Britain and re- establish the British view of things in Ireland when all the fuss had died down over Irish independence, and under the cover of an “anti-terrorist” agenda over events in the North.
The Catholic Bulletin is dynamite because it is independent Ireland, before Ireland lost its mind—lost its own mind about things and conceded to the British view of the world. Ireland lost its mind—lost its own mind about things and conceded to the British view of the world. And that view of the world is very much the thing that has
produced what we have today in the world—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine and in Madrid.
So the very least we can say of the Catholic Bulletin is that it is very relevant that its alternative view of the world is put before Ireland today to shake it out of its acquiescence to what is presented as the
only possible view.
The Catholic Bulletin kept a vigilant eye on the activities of those whom it accurately described as “Bomber Bull” in the early 1930s. In its Gleanings column in its edition of August 1934, for instance, it reproduced extracts from a series of articles on the subject of air bombing published in the London Times. The Times’s aeronautical correspondent at Peshawar revealed how civilian bombing had been developed into a systematic science by the Royal Air Force in India/
Afghanistan:
“When the first of last year’s troubles broke out among the Mohmands and the Bajaurs of the North-West Frontier, the R.A.F. was hampered by the inaccuracies of existing maps. The process of making a tribal directory had already been begun, and the tribal directory for the Mohmands and the Afridis practically complete.
Built on a basis of R.A.F. photographs—in two sections respectively labelled Where’s Where’ and ‘the Landed Gentry’—it enables any village or subdivision of a tribe to be found on the map and pictorially at the shortest notice.
The card index of the first section gives at a glance the name of every village, its map reference, photograph number and all details and if a village has to he bombed, the directory supplies the relevant particulars to the pilot. The second index shows all divisions of the tribes, their habits, the districts used by them in Summer and Winter, and a list of their most important men together with their places of residence.”
The current operations around the mountains and caves of Bora Bora by Sam the Bomber were, therefore, predated and originated by Bull the Bomber three quarters of a century ago:
“One of the Mohmand lashkars took refuge in a series of big caves which might have made by nature for the purpose. They were reputed to have given shelter to 3,000 men… The determination of these tribesmen to go on fighting was broken by the bombardment of their empty villages. In other cases opposition has been worn
down by continuous -air assault. Once a settlement has been reached, the tribesman knows he must fulfil its terms or suffer the rapid renewal of air activity.”
The London Times correspondent then outlined the value of aerial bombing for the post-Great War inflated Empire of over-stretched cash-strapped Bull:
“The revolution in Frontier control is not that bombs are taking the place of shells but that the punishment of wrongdoing has become so cheap, and unprovocative, and so unpleasant to the tribesman, that he hesitates to behave in ways that would incur it. There is thus
room to hope for eventual administration without military occupation, as has happened in Iraq, Aden and elsewhere.
There is ample room for the expansion of the little Air Force of the Frontier. If ever the whole Frontier were inflamed at the same time, help from elsewhere would certainly have to be sought.”
It was believed during the early 1930s that Britain had, of all the European powers, the most to gain from the abolition of aerial bombing. Britain had always been secure in its island fortress behind
the Royal Navy—the most powerful military force in the world. But the development of the air weapon had meant that Britain had ceased to be an island and London, the centre of her power and
communications, was very vulnerable from the air.
During the early to mid 1930s there was a great desire in Europe to outlaw civilian bombing as a form of warfare, or at least draw up conventions about the possible uses of aeroplanes in war. But
Britain, despite commentators’ predictions about having the most to gain from such a development, obstructed such an agreement
when all the other European powers —including Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany—were all in favour of it.
Before we look at them more closely, here is the editorial report of these forgotten events from the Catholic Bulletin of December 1935, headlined,
The Scandal Of The British Bombing Plans:
“Right in the middle of the recent British Election—the election in which Baldwin’s majority has become 250… — came out, in its full measure, the giant scandal of English International Policy concerning War and its Ways. We had long known that England was the one obstacle to the total abandonment, by all nations, of the gross abuse of Bombing of whole cities and peoples from the Air.
We had also to bide our time, for it was very desirable to put Bull in the position of being shown up by his own representative personages, for the bold lying and blatant hypocrisy that have ever and always characterised him. Our opportunity has come. The London Times of November 8th, 1935, in the middle of all the reports of election speeches and of election letters, provides us quite fully with what we may call perfect material for the exposure of this most scandalous performance by Bull, a performance done on a most public stage, and in the very fullest official form. The performer-in-chief concerning Bull as International Air-Bully and as Advocate of Bombing from Aeroplanes is, we make haste to say, that champion of Ascendancy in Ireland, the Most Noble the Marquis of Londonderry. Behind him, as we shall see is placed as Advocate in Reserve, Antony Eden of Geneva and Moscow, English Emissary-at-Large over Europe and all around. A clumsy champion, this ex-Minister of the Craig Compound, the man who planned the
iniquitous Belfast Education Act of 1923, the heir of the title given to Castlereagh.
For Londonderry actually provides plain palpable proof, in the very words on Air Bombs, 7th November, 1935, that the elaborated pleas that he made were simply destitute of truth, devoid of
common decency.”
What appears next in the Bulletin is 12 pages of evidence taken from British sources to back up the Bulletin’s view of Bomber Bull.
We can only summarise it here. What appears to have happened is as follows:
"In May 1933 the League of Nations disarmament conference at Geneva seemed almost agreed as to the abolition of military aircraft and agreement might have been reached had Britain abandoned her reservation of the use of military aeroplanes for “police purposes in outlying regions”.
Lord Londonderry, Air Minister, stated in the Commons that amid the public outcry he had immense difficulties preserving the use of the bombing aeroplanes even on the frontiers of the Middle East and of India.
The policy of total air disarmament was supported by France, Germany, Russia, Italy (with reservations), Spain, and all the other European powers and had also been accepted by the United States.
Only Anthony Eden and the client government of Iraq and Siam were opposed. At this point there was an outcry in Britain as a
result of which the British Government ultimately consented to waive its demand for the retention of aeroplanes for “police
purposes in outlying regions” if it proved the only obstacle to a general agreement.
But this shifty tactical withdrawal came too late. After June 1933 the international situation grew worse and the disarmament
conference was suspended. Lord Londonderry immediately announced the Government’s decision to expand the air force forthwith and this ended all possibility of the disarmament conference reconvening.
The Catholic Bulletin explained the motives behind Bomber Bull’s actions:
“Bull wanted to bar all military use of Bombing Planes, all, absolutely, everywhere. England has no relish at all for another sequence of what happened to the London area, 1916-1918. That was military use: it was unpleasant to London. Cut it out altogether. Hence the fine, strong, sweeping phrases against it, which Lord Londonderry made such play with in his oration at Southampton— another exposed position placed much as London is. Total abolition of Military Air Bombing is Bull’s aim, his professed aim. But always Bull wants to be the sole possessor of the Bombing Aeroplanes. How will he contrive that? By having in all the Colonial and Imperial Borders abroad, Civil Bombing Machines! He will use them only for POLICE purposes, if you please! He will, with these very civilised instruments of mere internal or civil administration, be the only possessor of the Bomber in the whole world! And he will compel those hill tribes in Asia and in Africa, tribes on the Imperial and Colonial “outlying regions”, “on the frontier”, of course, — how convenient these chosen phrases are, how nicely vague! —keep the peace, keep order, and thus keep his Bombers!”
Britain stymied attempts at the abolition of aerial bombing by insisting on the inclusion of a clause allowing retention of bombers for “police purposes in certain outlying regions” in any agreement between the European powers. The other powers could not agree to this— knowing that in the event of another European war they would be all defenceless against a formidable and experienced British bomber fleet transferred from the North West frontier and Iraq. Then, when British public opinion learnt of this, Eden played for time until the international situation took a turn for the worse. Londonderry announced re-armament and all hopes of future agreement were scuppered.
In November 1935 Lloyd George revealed that Mussolini’s aircraft bombing Abyssinia were being driven on petrol supplied by the Anglo-Iranian oil company in which the British Government had more than half the shares—although Britain was supposedly supporting League sanctions against Italy at the time.
And so the way was open for Britain to wage aerial war on the civilian populations of Europe when the time came a few years later. Bull, the apprentice, had served his time bombing natives for “police purposes in certain outlying regions” and Bomber Harris was brought back from the Middle East for the new job in hand.
(In Part Three, next month, we will look at how and why it was democratic Britain, rather than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which possessed the disposition, organisation, resources and intent for conducting war through mass anti-civilian bombing when the war came in 1939.)
Helen Hilton gives her impressions:www.atholbooks.org/freemags/mags/IPR_January_2004.pdfOn 27th November 2003 I went to hear Roy Foster speak at the Royal Festival Hall to promote his new book on Yeats. The event took the form of a talk by Mr. Foster and an interview afterwards by Tom Paulin.
I must say that I never heard such trite remarks about Yeats as those made by Mr. Foster. He said that he had attempted what he seemed to think were unique and revolutionary approaches to biography in that he believed life and art were related and he aimed to get behind the other biographies and autobiographies of Yeats. He also sought to clarify his public life, including his para-fascism. Foster was ‘embedding’ Yeats’ poems in their context to show how he renegotiated his relationship with Ireland. Then we were told he was one of the founding fathers of the new State (which would, I believe, come as a big surprise to its actual founders). His political sense was keenly developed, we were told. Moreover, there was great entertainment to be had from ‘the vituperation’ of the Catholic Bulletin concerning Yeats. His stances were responses to the torrent of such vituperation.
Mr. Foster recounted an interview he’d had with Kathleen Raine when researching his book and here one suspected that she considered him an ignoramus about Yeats and ordered him to leave her house—but of course that was not the impression he sought to give in the account he gave of their meeting. I would agree with her after listening to Mr. Foster for a couple of hours. His whole approach was very disappointing and never rose above a gossipy, anecdotal approach that made his subject more and more meaningless and uninteresting.
For example, there was no attempt to put Yeats in the context of the poets and poetry of his era—Eliot, Pound etc.
Mr. Paulin tried to make the subject interesting. He began by asking Mr. Foster to give details of some of the revelations Yeats received from the many mediums he engaged. Mr. Foster was very reticent to reply to the question. He seemed torealise that, if he did so in any detail, Yeats would come across as a eccentric, to say the least.
Then Paulin wanted to talk about Yeats’ views of Northern Irish Protestants: these he hated with a vengeance, adopting a total partitionist stance to ensure he never had anything to do with the ‘horrid lot who would spoil our tempers’. Again, Foster would not engage, though Paulin repeatedly attempted to provoke him, for instance by saying that Yeats’s visions often reminded him of Paisley’s sermons. Furthermore, he reckoned some of Yeats work had ‘the swagger of an Orange band’. Foster was non-plussed. Paulin was clearly interested in talking about the varieties of Protestants in Ireland and why they were so varied—and maybe how Catholic some of them were. After all, he reminded Foster, Yeats repeatedly referred to Purgatory and ‘we don’t believe in that, Roy, do we?’ Foster could only explain that it was some pre-Celtic notion that Yeats had and he was not sure of the theology. It was obvious that it was not the theology Paulin was interested in. He wanted to discuss the relationships and beliefs of different Protestant tendencies in Ireland and how they related to each other and to Catholics. This could have been very interesting and a Yeatsian scholar should have jumped at the opportunity. But the subject died a death despite Paulin’s best efforts. I think Mr. Foster’s shallowness was cruelly exposed and he was quickly back to getting a cheap snigger or two from the audience at Yeats’s expense. His sexual foibles seem to be a great old reliable in these circumstances and Foster made full use of them.
The overall impression was that Foster had reduced Yeats—with his mysticism, occultism, sexual fantasia, fascism, eugenics and many more weird and wonderful preoccupations—to a totally bizarre figure who could inspire no respect, either as a public or private figure. It seems to me that such a man would generate vituperation in any democratic society as naturally as he walked.
Yeats could not come to terms with the Democracy of the 20th century. This was vulgar and debasing and he did all he could to save himself from it and escape from it—hence his varied preoccupations.
The situation in any country in the Western world of his time would have engendered such attitudes in him, regardless of where he lived. This is the substance of him and to explain him it is necessary for any biographer to make a valid assessment of his attitude to Democracy. There is a valid critique of Democracy and, even if Yeats did not make it, it behoves a writer who is lauded as his definitive biographer to attempt to make it and so allow Yeats’s behaviour to be properly assessed. It seemed to me that Foster does not try, or even seem to realise that such an approach is necessary. In the absence of this Yeats is a pathetic public figure and Mr. Foster’s big book will only confirm this.
Essentially, Mr. Foster blames the democracy for making Yeats what he was and places the Catholic Bulletin at the cutting edge of this. As this journal therefore seems the most significant context for judging Yeats, according to Foster, I had a look at it. It comes across as a self-confident analytical expression of the new Irish democracy and was, for example, a consistently anti-fascist journal. No wonder there was vituperation between it and Yeats, but this publication was on the right side in this crucial issue of the day.
It seems not in the least surprising that Yeats, the Anglo-Irish and the Free Staters took to fascism. They were fascists before fascism was invented as far as the Bulletin was concerned and whatever political nastiness was about they could be relied on always to take to it like ducks to water.
It seems to me that Mr. Foster is engaged in a totally futile exercise in that he is seeking to have the democracy judged and condemned by the attitudes and norms of someone who lived in it but despised it. To succeed, the democracy would have had to come to hate itself. This is never likely to happen—though not impossible. Yeats certainly did not succeed in doing so with the Irish democracy of his day. Although from what I have come across he might be successful in Ireland today.
Yeats will, and should, be remembered for the poetry that the democracy he detested, liked, and I would suggest that the less said about what else went on in his head the better. As far as I can judge, several more large books could be filled with his nonsense. At the end of the day he will be remembered for nothing else but this poetry. I think this gets completely lost with Mr. Foster. Yeats should be saved from Mr. Foster.