By Daragh Fitzgerald
Gladys Hynes: radical lives seeks to restore a forgotten artist to her rightful place in the pantheon of the Modernist movement. Gladys Hynes was born in India to an Anglo-Irish family in 1888 and was a distant cousin of Charles Trevelyan. Educated at the London School of Art and forged in the crucible of the suffrage movement, Hynes was a pacifist, feminist and Irish republican, as well as a painter, illustrator and sculptor whose works reflected the turbulent currents of the first half of the twentieth century and still have the capacity to stir unease. Her The Eyes that Guard Us will resonate with anyone concerned about the regimes of mass surveillance under which we now live. Close friends with Captain Jack White, as well as with Mabel and Desmond Fitzgerald, Hynes was a complicated figure who also had an intimate relationship with the high priest of Modernism, Ezra Pound. While many artists, notably Yeats, Eliot and Joyce, at some stage fell under Pound’s spell, Hynes continued to defend Pound’s right to his fascist politics and toiled after the war to get him released from St Elizabeth’s Hospital, where he was incarcerated for his enthusiastic collaboration with fascist Italy.
Irish culture and partition, 1920–1955 assesses the impact of partition on Irish literature, art and visual culture, north and south of the border. Refuting the essentialism of ‘two-nations theory’, which sees partition as the natural result of two distinct intractable cultures in Ireland, O’Neill convincingly argues that culture was not a logic of partition but that partition itself provided a basis for culture. Artists sponsored and promoted by the northern state, like St John Irvine and William Conor, expressed a type of ‘Ulster exceptionalism’ in their works, in opposition to a constructed idealised rural, Catholic, south. On the other hand, artists supported by the Free State emphasised a distinct Gaelic culture with an ancient lineage, still unsullied in the western peripheries. Such works elided the more industrial north-east, which was described as ‘merely an inferior Lancashire’ by Michael Collins, who in the few ideological writings he left behind opined on Ireland’s ‘distinct culture’.
Seeing Ireland: art, culture, and power in modern Ireland is a collection that focuses more particularly on visual art in the southern state and its antecedents. There were many tensions mediating Irish art, sponsored by the nascent Free State. Art is inherently transnational, respecting no lines drawn on a map, yet the goal was to convey a distinctly Irish artistic culture. Moreover, the culture espoused often emphasised medieval motifs, Catholicity and ‘pure’ western landscapes, while many of the artists operated in cosmopolitan circles in urban settings, trained in cities like Paris or London. Similar patterns whereby the medieval roots of modern nationalisms were emphasised to provide a legitimation of new nation-states are evident in the art scenes of Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary in this period, while Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany equally emphasised ancient pasts for the purposes of modern statecraft. The first chapter discusses the unfashionably named Irish Race Convention (described in the blurb as the ‘1922 Paris Diaspora Congress’) and its associated art exhibition. Held weeks after the Treaty had been signed, this was an opportunity for those attending on either side of the split to project an image of Ireland worthy of its place among the nations of the earth. The final chapter perceptively interrogates the Decade of Centenaries initiative and the ‘artwashing’ of a violent and contentious period, from which virulent debates eternally spring, as a homogeneous and positive nation-brand for international consumption.
Enemies of the State: Richard Musgrave, the Rebellion of 1798 and the making of sectarian Irish history reminds us that the sectarian binary in Ireland shaping culture in the two books discussed above was consciously constructed rather than axiomatic. Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, published in 1801, has shaped loyalist and sectarian interpretations of the Rebellion since, portraying it as a Catholic conspiracy led by priests. Rejected by many republicans at the time and since, certain Irish-Ireland nationalists, along with the Catholic Church, later came to embrace this idea that the Rebellion was rooted in ‘faith and fatherland’, when the priests were with the people, as of course they always were and are. While priests like Father John Murphy were involved and paid a sore price, most of the clergy remained loyal to the Crown. In fact, Archbishop John Troy of Dublin excommunicated the croppies, just as anti-Treatyites were cast out over a century later. Whelan dismantles Musgrave’s narrative through a forensic study of three individuals vilified by his account, while also considering the politics of memory and how ’98 has been commemorated and recast by later generations.
Persisting in the truth: Peter Finnerty and the birth of activist journalism takes its title from a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem hailing the journalism of Peter Finnerty, composed with the intention of donating all proceeds towards Finnerty’s legal expenses as a result of his imprisonment in Lincoln Castle for libel, the second time that he had been imprisoned for this offence. Finnerty was born in Loughrea and was a proud United Irishman who viewed Lord Castlereagh as a personal nemesis. He was first tried for libel as a result of his condemnation of the judges who sentenced William Orr to death in 1797. Defended by John Philpot Curran, he was condemned to two years’ imprisonment and a session in the pillory, where he was accompanied by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Oliver Bond. His second prison term came a decade later when he was based in London and was his reward for accusing Castlereagh of sanctioning torture and extrajudicial killings in Ireland. Finnerty outlived Castlereagh by a few months, and one wonders whether he visited the ‘noble grave’ and followed Lord Byron’s instructions.
Sea and settlement in Ireland is a collection reflecting on the impact of maritime links on Ireland from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century. Aisling Durken’s chapter focuses on the role these connections played in the development of Drogheda, which involved the more mundane shipping and linen industries in the profane transatlantic slave-trade. Drogheda had intimate ties with Liverpool, Britain’s most important slave port, and merchants in Drogheda like the Heywood family made their fortunes in part from the buying and selling of human beings and from their possession of a sugar plantation in the West Indies.
Landlords and tenants in County Carlow, 1879–1960 is concerned with the fall of the Big Houses and the system they represented, tracing developments from the Land War through to the ‘ending of landlordism in Carlow’ (I must have missed a motion passed in the Dáil!). The Wolseleys of Carlow produced Sir Garnet, one of the most important British military figures of the nineteenth century, and were recorded as being decent landlords who paid for relief for tenants and agreed to rent reductions. Unusually, most of the transfer of ownership of land in Carlow occurred after British rule rather than before, as the Free State stepped in to support communities who had borrowed from banks at ruinous prices to purchase land.
The Church of Ireland under the Stuarts details the history of the Church of Ireland through the tumultuous ‘long seventeenth century’, a period characterised by dispossession, violence, insurrection and revenge. Queen Mary II commented that the Church was ‘the worst in Christendom’ shortly after the Battle of the Boyne. Nevertheless, the Church did not simply endure and survive this cataclysmic period but flourished—a testament to the strength of its structures, the commitment of its flock and, of course, the support of a powerful rapacious state.
Sacha Llewellyn, Sean Mark and Jennifer FitzGerald, Gladys Hynes: radical lives (Yale University Press, €34.99 hb, 352pp, ISBN 9780300273489).
Stephen O’Neill, Irish culture and partition, 1920–1955 (Liverpool University Press, €144.80 hb, 320pp, ISBN 9781836244813).
Ciaran O’Neill and Billy Shorthall (eds), Seeing Ireland: art, culture, and power in modern Ireland (Notre Dame Press, €44 hb, 250pp, ISBN 9780268210670).
Fergus Whelan, Enemies of the State: Richard Musgrave, the Rebellion of 1798 and the making of sectarian Irish history (Eastwood Books, €20 pb, 256pp, ISBN 9781918093070).
Andrew Shields, Persisting in the truth: Peter Finnerty and the birth of activist journalism (Breviary Stuff Publications, €12 pb, 256pp, ISBN 9781916158665).
Geraldine Stout and Matthew Stout (eds), Sea and settlement in Ireland (Four Courts Press, €45 hb, 272pp, ISBN 9781801511612).
Oliver Whelan, Landlords and tenants in County Carlow, 1879–1960 (Four Courts Press, €36 hb, 288pp, ISBN 9781801512176).
Patrick Little (ed.), The Church of Ireland under the Stuarts (Four Courts Press, €49.50 hb, 224pp, ISBN 9781801510882).