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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 20, 2013 19:06:44 GMT
I was looking at this again today. I think that globalism is a problem that needs to be addressed and this is part of what Desmond Fennell is railing against in "The Third Stroke Did It". The marketing of brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald's and the like is the consumerist aspect to the phenonomen. I regular laugh at the aging hippie who is totally opposed to US influence, yet habitually goes around in denims. Today, in UCD, I saw a poster for an Irish language coffee morning that had Irish language text...and a picture of a Starbuck's coffee cup. There is nothing strictly contradictory in that, of course, but I thought it seemed rather ironic to me. I must take a picture next time. |
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 22, 2013 9:13:11 GMT
I was looking at this again today. I think that globalism is a problem that needs to be addressed and this is part of what Desmond Fennell is railing against in "The Third Stroke Did It". The marketing of brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald's and the like is the consumerist aspect to the phenonomen. I regular laugh at the aging hippie who is totally opposed to US influence, yet habitually goes around in denims. Today, in UCD, I saw a poster for an Irish language coffee morning that had Irish language text...and a picture of a Starbuck's coffee cup. There is nothing strictly contradictory in that, of course, but I thought it seemed rather ironic to me. I must take a picture next time. All this reminds me of something I am find very acute in Tom Inglis's Global Ireland. Tom Inglis, as most people reading this forum must be far more aware than I am, is one of Catholic Ireland's most scathing critics. Having written Moral Monopoly back in 1987 ... These days it would seem Inglis is not entirely happy with the new globalised, capitalist Ireland that has replaced Catholic Ireland. This is from a very insightful paragraph from Global Ireland: Things like this very much stimulate my continuing quest to understand what may have been right in DeValerean cultural protectionism. Again I am curious if people here who grew up in the after-effects of that world feel it gave them anything. |
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 23, 2013 11:54:47 GMT
"There is no society, just rational individual actors who realise themselves as individuals through market choice."
I am increasingly irritated by sweeping statements like that. Inglis as an academic should no better. (And the kind of over-cautious academic "discourse" whereby everything is qualified into meaninglessness is even worse. You can make meaningful, trenchant statements without overstating the case.)
What positive thing do we owe De Valeran cultural protectionism? It's a very difficult question to answer to anyone's satisfaction because you are dealing with intangibles. Terms like "insular", "backward-looking", "narrow-minded", "tribalistic" have a different flavour to "distinctive", "traditional", "folk", "indigenous", "heritage", but mean basically the same thing.
One could argue over whether the great outpouring of interest in Ireland's native traditions and culture and history had anything to do with a policy of protectionism, or whether it was simply popular enthusiasm, which is something mercurial and can't be legislated, or prolonged artifically.
Whether protectionism had anything to do with or not, I think I gained a lot from the afterglow of Irish cultural nationalism. I think learning Irish myths in school gave me a sense of the sublime, the transcendental, and one that was rooted in a particular place and so was quite Incarnational (which is good from a Catholic point of view). I think hearing Irish folk ballads sung by ordinary people gave me an awareness that there could be such a thing as a living folklore (in the traditional sense, as opposed to the rather mushy sense where everything is folklore) and that impersonality and a certain crudeness can be a positive good in art. I think the agrarian ideal allowed my imagination to question suburbia and popular culture and consumerism. And much more than this.
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 25, 2013 10:27:56 GMT
Yes maolsheachlann that statement is sweeping.
I find it doesn't irritate me, like you, however. Perhaps I don't object so much to hyperbole (which often results from passion) or perhaps I feel, that while overstated as you say, it contains too much truth.
Of course, I am reading that paragraph very much in the greater context of Inglis's book which I find very useful indeed - despite my obvious (severe) reservations.
In that greater context, Inglis's word "habitus" is very useful, I think.
There is an idea around that the Catholic "habitus" if you like was narrow, conformist and imposed.
Inglis makes clear that the new global "habitus" - while supposedly about individualism - is certainly narrow, conformist and imposed. In some ways, at least, we are becoming more similar, not more individual ... this is his point. I may put some more up later from Inglis to give greater context.
You raise a very good point about the question of "a policy of protectionism" versus "popular enthusiasm".
I am not sure how easily these can be separated.
For example - shifting territory here - there might be more "popular enthusiasm" for the Catholic faith, were there not bullies on the block (e.g. RTE and the Irish Times) trying to squash that enthusiasm.
I am very, very aware that what I am intimating about protection from bullies is the beginning of a slipperly slope that leads to Franco, say, where Catholicism is "protected".
Very difficult stuff this question of protectionism. But I guess my question is what happens to a genuine "popular enthusiasm" when their really are powerfully bullies, not in one's paranoid imagination, but in reality.
Franco is not the answer, obviously. But something Joseph Ratzinger said repeatedly haunts my soul ... Throughout Ratzinger's post 68 life (after which he became much less liberal) Ratzinger continually talked about the "little people", their faith and their need for protection.
Tough stuff.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 25, 2013 15:20:21 GMT
Well, when it comes to the "bullies", what do you expect? "Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man." "If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first". All the snide editorials and media bias in the world are nothing compared to the bombs and beatings that Christians in other parts of the world face (and a Chinese bishop, at a Vatican event recently, pointed out the persecuted Catholics there are much more faithful and orthodox than in the liberal West). Probably Catholicism has less to fear from official disapproval than from official approval.
I thought you were referring to cultural protectionism for nationalism, rather than Catholicism-- that is a bigger issue.
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 26, 2013 8:06:31 GMT
I thought you were referring to cultural protectionism for nationalism, rather than Catholicism-- that is a bigger issue. As I said maolsheachlann, I was conscious of "shifting territory" - but only somewhat. I was casting the net wider - but again only somewhat. The issue of bullying remains the same. I hesitate to speak of this because really I feel bumbling and naive, only beginning to think of these issues much, much later in my life than most folk here. Thus please note that what I am about to say is liberally peppered with phrases like "I guess", "I think" - I really do not know! But from what I understand, as I search for what De Valerean cultural protectionism really meant, it meant protecting what you invoke here: I think the De Valereans (for want of a better word) wanted to protect exactly what you invoke here (and which I find haunting) "a sense of the sublime" that is "incarnational" and soars beyond "popular culture and consumerism" ... They wanted, I think, to protect it from a materialistic mentality coming from abroad (Anglo-America, I guess, to a very large extent) which I think they might well have regarded as bullying ... My point about Ratzinger's profound post-68 shift from good-friend-of-Hans Kueng liberal to deeply conservative was that in Ratzinger's case, at least, I see profound compassion. Such a mentality as Ratzinger's cares very deeply children what children grow up with and it cares about what is robbed from them. I am very moved by at least one side of what you seem to have grown up with maolsheachlann from what you write above ... I think to my own American childhood, friends I still know from that, even a wider group of classmates I see on Facebook and I do tend to think that the De Valereans were onto something very important ... National Identity, the subject of this thread, is wider than simply nationalism. Somewhere in the imagination of the De Valereans it includes - I suspect? - this "incarnational" manifestation of something "sublime" that soars beyond "consumerism" ... to borrow your string of words again. It involves protecting that. I guess in reality, it had many, many shadows and downsides. But when I read what you wrote, when I think of an American classmate of mine whose alienation tears at my heart ... I am glad you were protected ... yes from a certain form of bullying. Or so it seems to me as I bumble through these things ... |
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 26, 2013 8:43:31 GMT
Don't apologise, Roger. I think the whole Irish people spent the first sixty years of last century talking about the Irish condition or the meaning of nationhood or the prospects for the revival of the Irish language. Then we got television and regular foreign holidays and fitted showers, and we slowly stopped talking about that over a few decades, leaving it to occasional novelists or summer school speakers or sociologists. So, even if you only started thinking about these things recently, we didn't get all that far in a hundred years or so of talking about them.
I can only speak for myself. I've swung wildly from extreme to extreme (and also the middle) on the matter of nationalism. I can literally remember when I was in my teens and I hung a huge Irish tricolour on my bedroom wall and sent myself into tears, lying in bed and reciting mentally "The Fool" by Patrick Pearse and "The Fisherman" by W.B. Yeats. I just took it as read that nationalism meant an essentially traditional, anti-materialist, agrarian outlook. I was shocked when I realised there were people who were ardent supporters of Sinn Féin (which I never was), ardent republicans, who didn't seem to have any particular tenderness for rural life or Wren Boys or Puck Fairs or fishermen in grey Conemmara cloth or fairy forts, and who seemed positively eager to "catch up" with the rest of Western Europe. I think maybe my subsequent anti-nationalism was a reaction to the shock of this realization.
But I'm not pretending my romantic traditionalism was ever the prevailing nationalist philosophy in Ireland. As far as I can see, many (most?) of the people who were "out" in 1916 and in the War of Independence did not have a particularly poetic vision of Ireland. They just wanted the Brits out, on a point of principle (I assume). The great modernizer Sean Lemass was one of the hardliners in the Civil War.
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Post by shane on Sept 26, 2013 14:00:12 GMT
I thought Tom Inglis' quote encapsulted brilliantly the materialism of my generation. Just go on Twitter and see how piously devoted to consumer culture everyone is. It's all "I bought these clothes, I ate at this restaurant, I want that new iPhone". I find it so shallow. For a few months, I felt very disillusioned with the Church, but the banality of modern culture was a powerful self-corrective. At the time of the Savita aftermath, I was struck by an article written by the leftist Gene Kerrigan in the Sindo, which seemed to celebrate the liberalizing force of globalization on Irish culture:
Well I was born in 1990, a cub of the Celtic Tiger. I grew up with high expectations and material comfort. When ruminating on our modern lifestyles, I increasingly find myself asking, 'to what end?' It all seems so shallow. When older generations relate their childhoods to me, I find myself slightly jealous at the very strong sense of community and identity that animated their lives. I don't accept that my generation are happier or more self-satisfied than our counterparts 60 years ago were, and I don't find much to celebrate in the progress that Kerrigan hails.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 26, 2013 14:15:14 GMT
I feel the same, Shane. And I know there is a danger of sentimentalising or romanticising or whatever, but I've always felt this sense of befuddlement when I'm told how far we have come from the Ireland of our grandparents and great-grandparents. I read a Walter Macken novel, or hear a Percy French song, or see some black and white photograph from the forties, or listen to a street ballad, or even just read the text of De Valera's famous St. Patrick's Day speech, and I think..."What am I missing here? What is so awful about this?". Of course, there were awful things, like TB and slums collapsing in the inner city of Dublin, but that's not what people are complaining about when they complain about our pre-consumerist Ireland.
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Post by rogerbuck on Sept 27, 2013 11:01:36 GMT
I feel heartened indeed by these last comments. You both come from a different kind comparison to me - e.g. comparing the consumerist Ireland to what you hear of the past. I on the other hand compare my memory of growing up in America with what I read of Irish childhood. Still I reach similar conclusions. Maolsheachlann really names my own feelings quite exactly here: just read the text of De Valera's famous St. Patrick's Day speech, and I think..."What am I missing here? What is so awful about this?". Of course, there were awful things, like TB and slums collapsing in the inner city of Dublin, but that's not what people are complaining about when they complain about our pre-consumerist Ireland. Yes, what is so awful - indeed! You have both inspired me to put up a few more extracts from Inglis (which is quite easy since I already have them typed in for my book manuscript). This may seem a bit jumbled and random. I am just quickly ripping already-typed bits from my manuscripts. Still haphazard as they are, maybe they still stimulate useful reflection: Comment: I read with great interest the Maolsheachlann's comments above about Sinn Fein nationalism versus what might be De Valera/early Fianna Fail nationalism(?). I wonder how the above relates? Question marks here because I am so young, so new to these questions ... Now Inglis again: Comment: While what Inglis says about social bonds is very important here, I think, this point is more commonly made. Again what I find really interesting is the analysis as to this soul-chilling sameness. Or in other words how conformist the global habitus is - while the same criticism is regularly made against Catholic Ireland ... In a rush. May put up more from Inglis later ... |
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 5, 2013 10:56:58 GMT
The PRESS was badly mismanaged; its distinguishing feature was that it had a core group of readers who were astonishingly loyal, but that they were dying off and not being replaced and it couldn't attract new readers. Furthermore, their core readers (older, more rural, dyed-in-the wool FFers) were of a type less attractive to advertisers who prefer young professionals with lots of discretionary income. (DINKS - Double Income, No Kids - is the formula; this BTW is a minor factor in why the media have become more gay-friendly in recent decades.) I wonder how much of the EXAMINER'S decline is related to trying to develop a national paper and move away from a regional base (though that regional base would have been challenged by local radio and other media such as freesheets.) That might be detectible from the circulation figures for the ECHO, which is still Cork-centred. Thought this was better in this thread than where it was. Tim Pat Coogan did his best to make The Irish Press a liberal newspaper. Hibernicus is correct with the reason it failed - bad management and poor industrial relations. The question I have is how much of this was due to developments within Fianna Fáil due to changing perceptions of national identity, religious identity and changing mores? Could it be that FF were the authors of the Press'es demise in the long term? At the same time, the Irish Times went from being a minority (albeit an influencial minority) concern to being a major national newspaper. In the IRA/SF split, Gageby backed the Officials; Coogan the Provoes. This latter was not respectable, not even in a Fianna Fáil led by Charles Haughey. The other position should not have been respectable either, but people have glossed over that. And for all the piety of Press readers, the newspaper did not reflect this. On the other hand, up to the late 1980s, both the Irish Press and the Irish Independent gave the feast of the day and the Irish Press used the mast head Dochum Glóire Dé agus Onóra na hÉireann, which was St Colmcille's motto, a variation of Pro Deo et Patria for those who are wondering. There are several issues here at once: the departure of Fianna Fáil from its original core values; changes in Irish society, especially the education, for which FF ministers were largely responsible; internal politics in the Church. But in the process, a staple of 20th Century Irish nationalism disappeared. |
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 5, 2013 10:57:08 GMT
The PRESS was badly mismanaged; its distinguishing feature was that it had a core group of readers who were astonishingly loyal, but that they were dying off and not being replaced and it couldn't attract new readers. Furthermore, their core readers (older, more rural, dyed-in-the wool FFers) were of a type less attractive to advertisers who prefer young professionals with lots of discretionary income. (DINKS - Double Income, No Kids - is the formula; this BTW is a minor factor in why the media have become more gay-friendly in recent decades.) I wonder how much of the EXAMINER'S decline is related to trying to develop a national paper and move away from a regional base (though that regional base would have been challenged by local radio and other media such as freesheets.) That might be detectible from the circulation figures for the ECHO, which is still Cork-centred. Thought this was better in this thread than where it was. Tim Pat Coogan did his best to make The Irish Press a liberal newspaper. Hibernicus is correct with the reason it failed - bad management and poor industrial relations. The question I have is how much of this was due to developments within Fianna Fáil due to changing perceptions of national identity, religious identity and changing mores? Could it be that FF were the authors of the Press'es demise in the long term? At the same time, the Irish Times went from being a minority (albeit an influencial minority) concern to being a major national newspaper. In the IRA/SF split, Gageby backed the Officials; Coogan the Provoes. This latter was not respectable, not even in a Fianna Fáil led by Charles Haughey. The other position should not have been respectable either, but people have glossed over that. And for all the piety of Press readers, the newspaper did not reflect this. On the other hand, up to the late 1980s, both the Irish Press and the Irish Independent gave the feast of the day and the Irish Press used the mast head Dochum Glóire Dé agus Onóra na hÉireann, which was St Colmcille's motto, a variation of Pro Deo et Patria for those who are wondering. There are several issues here at once: the departure of Fianna Fáil from its original core values; changes in Irish society, especially the education, for which FF ministers were largely responsible; internal politics in the Church. But in the process, a staple of 20th Century Irish nationalism disappeared. |
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2013 21:38:00 GMT
I don't think Gageby himself backed the Officials, though there were a lot of them around him. He himself was an example of a Fianna Failer and state-patriot, proud to have been a soldier in the Irish Army in WW2 and hostile to Ulster Unionists because his father and grandfather were Labour Home Rulers in Victorian/Edwardian Belfast and were treated as traitors.
(Gageby thought Lynch took the only possible course of action in the Arms Crisis, but he also thought Captain Kelly was unfairly treated and thrown to the wolves. His soft spot for Haughey was partly related I think to Haughey's having been in the Irish Army in WW2 as Gageby was - they were both very definitely members of a generation that came of age in the 1940s and reacted against the economic and other constraints of the 1940s and 1950s.) He saw himself as being in a tradition of Protestant Republicanism going back through his father-in-law Sean Lester and the early C20 circle around Alice Milligan to Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. (He was a Christian Scientist in later life - I suspect its mind over matter message suited his entrepreneurial instincts.) Several of his contemporaries remarked he admired John Paul II more than many of his ex-Catholic staff, and when he urged them to restrain their opinions when covering the 1979 Papal visit they took to calling him "the first Catholic editor of the IRISH TIMES". I remember talking to Con O'Leary about a grossly unbalanced IRISH TIMES piece on one of the early Youth Defence demos and he said it wouldn't have happened under Gageby - because while Gageby believed in the liberal agenda he also cared for fairness and accuracy.
BTW Gageby started out working for the PRESS group, and was editor of the EVENING PRESS. Coogan says in his memoir that Gageby went to the IRISH TIMES (which he had tended to dislike) because the de Valeras paid him a pittance even though he had taken the EVENING PRESS from a slow start to outselling the EVENING HERALD.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 6, 2013 9:05:01 GMT
I didn't know that Gageby was Seán Lester's son-in-law, but it fits. Was he Anglican or another Protestant denomination? I also didn't know he was the driving force behind the success of the Evening Press. Seems like a loss for the Press Group and Fianna Fáil that he went to the Times.
Now, I am not going to propose the militant republican option as the only patriotic expression - enough people within Sinn Féin do that. However, it seems to me that whatever differences separated the Officials and Provisionals in 1970s, there is not much which the present (Provisional) Sinn Féin is proposing which the original Officials would have much of a problem with. Republicanism has also all but vanished from Fianna Fáil and though it is within living memory that robust nationalism was a feature of Fine Gael's modus operandi, it is absent now. One wonders what the point is in the respective Bodenstown and Béal na mBláth commemorations have in respect of both parties.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 6, 2013 21:57:29 GMT
I think Gageby was born Presbyterian or Methodist, but I may be mistaken; as I said he became Christian Science later. His treatment by the De Valeras was probably an example of what is known as "the gratitude of the House of Hapsburg" - i.e the tendency of a certain type of power-holder to assume that what their subordinates do for them is no more than their due and hence imposes no reciprocal obligations.
One interesting phenomenon in relation to images of physical-force republicanism is the tendency for its icons to become detached from a wider narrative and just to become emblems of revolt for its own sake. The 1916 Proclamation goes to some lengths to present itself as speaking on behalf of a continuous national tradition and to represent an alternative government (how far this was justified is matter for discussion - you could argue that it justified what one critic called "the reincarnation of millions of dead patriots to outvote the living" - but it's interesting that they felt it was necessary). A lot of modern pop-culture invocations of 1916 and other rebellions seem to present it just as revolt for revolt's sake and that it's enough to feel screwed-over to justify revolt.
BTW here's an interesting example of memory loss and how this affects the sense of being part of a continuing tradition. During the Easter Rising the President of the Catholic University School in Leeson Street, a Fr Waters SM, was fatally wounded when he crossed the city under fire to help the priests in Haddington Road Church carry out their duties of attending to the wounded and dying. He was hit in the abdomen by a stray bullet - the wound itself was not that serious as he was able to walk to a hospital, but infection set in and he died a slow death, showing great fortitude. With modern antibiotics he would almost certainly have lived.
Now the CUS is one of the most prominent Catholic schools in Dublin, and at the very least Fr Waters displayed heroic commitment to duty, so how come I had never heard of his sacrifice? Is it because it is an uncomfortable reminder of the numerous civilians who similarly were "collateral damage" of the decision to hold the Rising, or because nowadays the idea that a priest should be willing to die for his mission if necessary is no longer highly regarded in Ireland?
I wonder if Fr Waters is remembered at all today by the CUS or the Marists. I'm not close enough to either to know.
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