Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884-1938 by Aidan Beatty

Author:Aidan Beatty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

If an Irish man could be perfected only by speaking the language of his forefathers, without this language he would be, as another Gaelic League pamphlet phrased it, ‘a self-degraded and denationalized being who is proud of being mean and who glories in being abject.’ Once such an abject young Irish man learnt Irish, a language of which he was previously ashamed, he would gain pride and self-respect from the knowledge that his ‘Celtic ancestors were worthy of the vigorous and refined language they spoke’. He would learn that Ireland has produced ‘sages who in wisdom and learning were not surpassed by men of any nation in the world’ and ‘warriors who in valour might vie with the proudest of other lands.’ 28 The return to Irish was thus posited as a return to a more glorious and heroic sense of Irish identity, before the humiliation of being deprived of state power and linguistic purity by British colonial rule.

The claims to be returning to a mythical Gaelic Ireland could also be reworked to accommodate a vision of women’s liberation. Where British imperialism was often justified on the grounds that it was a benevolent means to protect native women from their ‘savage’ menfolk, the 1917 work Women in Ancient and Modern Ireland by C. Maire Ní Dhubhghall (Crissie M. Doyle) instead argued that oppression of women was an English invention, one that would be promptly dismantled with the full return to an Irish Ireland. As Áine Ceannt declaimed in her introduction to this book: ‘In reading of Ireland’s glorious past we find the women taking their rightful place in Arts, Literature, Legislation, and even in the making of War. The Irish woman of to-day is debarred from entering on many a sphere which she would desire. Are we competent to take our proper place in the New Ireland which is dawning for us? Let us see to it that we be worthy successors of Brighid, Maebh and Gráinne Mhaol.’ 29 Both Ceannt and Ní Dhubhghall mapped a number of different schemas of time onto each other. The future return to Irish rule would not just be a return to a glorious recovered Irish past, but also a return to an old/new Gaelic gender equality. Nor were Ceannt and Ní Dhubhghall the only ones to think along these lines. In an essay entitled ‘The Social Position of Women’, Eoin MacNeill claimed no ancient and few modern countries had matched the ‘enviable position’ of women in ancient Ireland. 30 It was only in contemporary America, MacNeill claimed, that women had achieved such ancient Irish equality. Thus, for MacNeill the ‘return’ to ancient Gaelic Ireland was also an embracing of American-style modernity. 31 This essay, however, does not appear to have been published. Nor were such ideas at the forefront of MacNeill’s thinking in the 1920s, when he was a prominent government minister of the Free State.

A perhaps more accurate sense of Irish revivalists’ views of women can be seen in the Gaelic League’s

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