Just before Christmas 1900, 10-year-old Michael Collins got his own bedroom in the newly built family home that marked the rising prosperity of strong Catholic farmers in Ireland. A precocious and voracious reader, he had a little bookcase in the room, loaded with what would, in retrospect, seem like appropriate books for a nationalist revolutionary in the making: the lives of Robert Emmett, Wolfe Tone and O'Donovan Rossa; the writings of Thomas Davis; the patriotic novels of Charles Kickham. But beside them were the standard authors of Victorian England: Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. His favourite book was George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, with whose passionate, implacable Tom Tulliver he identified.
Even in the heart of rural, Catholic Ireland, in other words, English culture had a firm foothold. If there was one thing on which people of widely divergent political views in the Ireland of the first decade of the 20th century tended to agree, it was that the country was becoming, in its broad culture, more and more deeply absorbed into the United Kingdom. For many - especially, though not exclusively, loyalist Protestants - this was a great sign of progress. For nationalists, it was a mark of shame. But few doubted that it was happening.
The use of the Irish language had fallen drastically over the previous 50 years: in 1851, there were 1.5 million Irish-speakers, but in 1901 there were just 641,000, of whom a mere 21,000 spoke Irish alone. Douglas Hyde, president of the Gaelic League, had delivered a famous lecture in 1892 called On the Necessity of De-Anglicising the Irish People. But the very title contained a concession that the Irish people were already Anglicised. Similarly, in 1900, when Maud Gonne founded Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland) as a feminist vehicle for cultural and political separatism, the organisation's concern with "the reading and circulation of low English literature, the singing of English songs, the attending of vulgar English entertainments at the theatre and music hall and (the) . . . English influence which is doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people" implied that these pastimes and influences were already well established in Ireland.
Likewise, the fact that the Gaelic Athletic Association instituted a formal ban on its members playing "English games" such as soccer, rugby, cricket and hockey, was an indication of how strong the pull of these sports really was. Especially in Dublin, soccer was far more popular than Gaelic games. Commercial mass entertainment was established by the end of the decade. The first cinema in Dublin, the Volta, was established by James Joyce in 1909, and was followed by dozens of others. English comics were widely read in Irish cities: C.S. Andrews, a shopkeeper's son born in Dublin in 1901 and later a key figure in the nationalist movement, grew up with them.
"From the comics we read," he recalled, "Chips, Comic Cuts, and later the Magnet and the Gem and the Union Jack, we absorbed the correct British imperial attitudes to the `Fuzzy Wuzzies', the `Niggers' and the Indian Nabobs . . . soccer football was the game talked of and played everywhere on the vacant lots in the city . . . In cricket we followed the fortunes of Surrey and Kent, Hobbs and Hayward . . . Our nursery rhymes were English and we knew all about Dick Whittington, Robin Hood and Alice in Wonderland, but we never heard of Fionn or Cuchulain."
The paradox of Catholic Ireland in the early 20th century was that it was becoming both more self-confident and more deeply entwined with British culture. As the historian D.G. Boyce has put it, its people had "taken enormous strides towards enjoying the fruits of majority status; but, more than any other of the peoples of the Celtic lands of Britain, they had advanced at the expense of their traditional ways of life". The Irish language had been largely abandoned in favour of English. A fierce sense of respectability had replaced the older, more convivial attitudes. Even the popular nationalist ballads were infused with the rhythms and sentiments of British Victorian verse. In the countryside, there was, by 1900, ample evidence of commercial agriculture and a money economy. After the Famine of the 1840s, pasture had taken over from tillage, and the export of cattle to Britain had become a huge and very lucrative trade. Whereas in the 1850s, less than 300,000 cattle a year had been exported to Britain, by the early years of the 20th century the numbers had risen to well over 800,000, tying the rural economy ever more tightly to the imperial one.
Ireland was, after all, part of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. And it seemed likely that the new century would be dominated by a few great empires which would, between them, encompass virtually all of humanity. It seemed clear that whatever change the 20th century might bring, for small nations like Ireland it would take place within, at best, a modified imperial context.
For some, especially for the majority of Protestants, even the notion of modifying Ireland's relationship with the Empire through the enactment of limited internal autonomy (Home Rule) was out of the question. Protestant Ireland was not confined to the North. The Orange Order had its headquarters in Dublin, and 80 lodges in the 26 counties, 10 of them in Dublin. There were at least 1.1 million Protestants in Ireland, 327,000 of them in the 26 counties of what would eventually become the Republic of Ireland. But the showpiece of the thrusting, confident Protestant Ireland was Belfast. By the beginning of the new century, Belfast had overtaken Dublin as the country's largest city. While Cork's population was actually in decline, and Dublin's was growing quite slowly, Belfast population had quadrupled since 1850. It represented, literally, a new Ireland. With the biggest shipyard in the world and thriving engineering plants, linen mills, rope works, and distilleries, it was a flamboyant participant in the industrial revolution, fully integrated into the powerful economy of the United Kingdom.
Well over a third of the men and 70 per cent of the women employed in the city had industrial jobs. Its huge, confident and opulent city hall, built in 1906, declared its prosperity to the world. And, with the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1905, this confident industrial culture had, for the first time, a broadly based political structure capable of mobilising the Protestant masses. With the gathering pressure for Home Rule, unionists had both an incentive for militant resistance and the means to organise it.
Yet, while the cultural dominance of this Anglicised, modernising tendency was increasing, its political power on the island as a whole was in decline. The process of transferring the land from the old ascendancy to a new Catholic peasantry was proceeding at an astonishingly rapid pace, especially after the Wyndham Land Act of 1903. The Reform Act of 1884 had already given the vote to the majority of ordinary Catholics, ensuring that, in the south and west of the country, a Protestant could no longer expect to be elected to parliament unless he happened to be a Home Ruler. No less significantly, the Protestant gentry had lost control of local government in 1898, when the Local Government Act created elected county, urban and rural district councils. In the place of the old paternalistic Protestant political elite, a new Catholic ruling-class-in-waiting, made up of an alliance between the politicians of the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by John Redmond, and the Catholic Church, was beginning to emerge. The Catholic Church had become, in the half century since the devastating Famine of the 1840s, almost an alternative state. It controlled much of the healthcare system and the vast majority of the 9,000 national schools, a basic but effective education system that had, by 1911, reduced the illiteracy rate to just 12 per cent.
The growing Catholic professional class was catered for by the secondary schools run by the Jesuits and other orders. The lower middle class was schooled by teaching orders like the Christian Brothers who had, by 1903, about 30,000 pupils.
THERE was, admittedly, a fringe of militant nationalism beyond the respectable parliamentarism of the Irish Party at Westminster. But in 1900, it, too, expressed itself most forcefully in an imperial context, with demonstrations of support for the Boers organised by the romantic nationalist Maud Gonne and by the journalists Arthur Griffith and D.P. Moran. Neither expressed any interest in the black majority of the South African population, and both Griffith and Moran laced their Anglophobia with attacks on "the swarming Jews of Johannesburg". And this new nationalism was largely confined to the intelligentsia in Dublin and Cork. Griffith's Sinn Fein, in its first electoral outing in Leitrim in 1908 was trounced by the Parliamentary Party.
Yet the appeal to a separate Irish identity was very strong. The search for an apparently older and more authentic culture was one way of coping with the startling confusion of modern life. Throughout the modern world, governments and political movements were responding to all of this change, and to the development of mass democracy, by discovering or inventing a national past that seemed to offer security and community in an uncertain and increasingly open world.
Throughout Europe, young intellectuals were asking the same questions that Irish writers, artists and journalists were putting to the country. In Ireland, moreover, the reaction against cultural absorption and confusion was not confined to Catholics, and the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 as a forum for distinctively Irish theatre was largely the work of two Protestants, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. That this cultural renaissance might not fit too snugly into the self-image of the rising Catholic middle-class was all too evident in the riots that greeted the premiere of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey in 1907.
In some respects, Ireland was both typical of European countries and utterly peculiar. Typical in that country people were moving to the cities. Peculiar in that the cities they were moving to were in other countries. By 1911, a third of all people born in Ireland was living elsewhere, mostly in Britain and the US, but also in Canada and Australia. New York had more Irish-born people living in it than Dublin did. And few emigrants returned. Whereas, in the period from 1907 to 1910, 63 north Italians returned home, the Irish tally was just seven.
For, side by side with the beginnings of modernity, there was poverty of the most primitive kind. Even at a time when the lot of the urban poor worldwide was generally brutal, Dublin stood out for the savagery of its social conditions. The infant mortality rate in Dublin was higher than in Moscow or Calcutta. In 1901, the death rate in Dublin for those aged between one and 60 was 75 per cent higher than the English level. Of the 9,000 people who died in the city every year, 1,600 died in workhouses. Official attitudes to public health can be judged by the fact that, in 1907, of the 167 national schools in Dublin, 104 had no toilets.
These people, too, were acquiring a voice: the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, founded by James Larkin in 1909. By the end of the decade, then, neither the imperial claim to have pacified Ireland, nor the nationalist insistence that there was a clear, unified Irish culture was well founded. Many visions of what Ireland should be had begun to compete with each other. It still seemed, nevertheless, that Ireland would have, before 1920, an autonomous government, led by John Redmond, putting in place a final settlement that would make the country a settled and contented part of His Majesty's dominions.
