Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon

Author:Piers Dudgeon [Piers Dudgeon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849546386
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Her thinking on nationalist politics in the equally traditional country of Wales was, significantly, to keep the political and religious institutions out of the picture.

She had many heated arguments about this in 1974, when she followed the Welsh Nationalist candidate Gwynfor Evans for the Irish Times during his campaign to get back into Westminster. Her position was that Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, was simply unnecessary, because Wales had retained its traditional culture, its language, music, songs and poetry already. Why did they need a political party to fight for it? Israel and Ireland are, like Wales, both traditional cultures and she had seen what happened when religious or political institutions took control of them. Sunrise ‘came up unnoticed while they told me why’, she said, and she loved every minute of it.

What inspired Maeve the writer were the values of these traditions, many of them endemic to cultures she had experienced all over the world, the implication being that all cultures belong to Tradition – with a capital ‘T’ – which is bigger than any one religion or political party can account for.

When James Joyce and his university friend Gogarty considered ways to ‘Hellenise’ Ireland in Dalkey in 1904 they were suggesting something similar – that in the centuries since the Romano-British missionary St Patrick had converted Ireland to Catholicism, the Church had lost sight of the ‘theoria’ of the Greeks – the Platonic ideas or forms out of which the Church had arisen, and that these ideals – beauty, love, truth – were intrinsic not only to ancient Irish culture but to Tradition itself, which is in no way restricted to a nation or to a religion, or indeed to a period in chronological time.

When Maeve spoke for Ireland, and when she wrote for Ireland, which she did with renewed vigour once she had found her feet as an Irish woman in London, Tradition is what she spoke for.

There is an interesting codicil to this. Maeve was not alone among the Binchys in championing native Irish culture at this time. So inspired was her uncle, Professor Daniel Binchy, by his undergraduate years, when he had been caught up in the martyrdom of those UCD boys back in 1920 – boys who were themselves fighting for the nation’s identity – he began to write what became his life’s work. The six-volume Corpus Iuris Hibernici, in its reinstatement of ancient Irish law [Brehon Law], speaks elegantly of the customs and values of Irish tradition and the identity of the Irish people within the pre-Christian kingdoms – Leinster, Ulster, Munster, Connacht and Meath.62

Daniel Binchy’s work resulted in six volumes, 2,343 pages and 1.5 million words. Corpus Iuris Hibernici confirmed that Ireland, for all the horrors it had suffered, had a cultural identity which neither Britain nor the Catholic Church in Rome could, after all, redefine.

There was significant alignment between Daniel and his equally patriotic niece, in that the final volume of his master work came off the press in 1978, the very year that Maeve’s first book of fiction – Central Line – was published.

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