Culture: 'Great hatred, little room", Yeats famously wrote of his country. What he failed to note was that the little room has a curious effect on the hatred.
What strikes an outsider about Irish culture is how the need to rub along together on a small island can muffle conflicts and send them underground.
At its worst, it gives rise to the smiler-with-the-knife syndrome, cheerfully greeting while inwardly fuming. The self-consciously staged American "intervention" or confrontation, in which a bunch of friends or family members pin you forcibly to the sofa and have it aggressively out with you, is replaced by the oblique insult or rumoured injury. To nod genially to your colleague, while making sure that he hears from others just how mortally he has wounded you, would seem an honourable part of the Irish art of controversy.
Lucy McDiarmid's book of that name delivers an enjoyable, readable account of five 20th-century Irish spats, mercifully excluding the riots over the opening night of Synge's Playboy. (This, like Stephen Dedalus's reference to the tundish in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, is a topic which should surely be subject to rigorous state censorship for the next half-century, along with certain well-thumbed quotations from Brian Friel's Translations.)
We begin with the Hugh Lane affair, in which for a number of years 39 paintings whizzed back and forth from Dublin to London like so many frisbees, while the cultural authorities of both cities bickered over who was to lend them permanent house-room. In the end, the collection was divided into two groups, rather as Solomon proposed to do with a child whom two women claimed as their own.
Next up is the redoubtable Dr Michael O'Hickey, the man who in McDiarmid's phrase died for the language. A preternaturally stubborn native of Carrick-on-Suir, Hickey campaigned to make Irish a compulsory entrance requirement for the newly-established national university, but found his demands rebuffed by the bishops.
Dismissed from his chair as professor of Irish at Maynooth after refusing to resign, he managed to mobilise half a million trusty Irish souls to march through Dublin in support of the language, an event about as likely to occur today as a march in support of unlimited Balkans immigration. In the end, after six exhausting years of appealing to Rome, O'Hickey was victorious, and his reputation, like that of some unjustly convicted serial killer, was gradually rehabilitated.
McDiarmid's third contention was one between Lady Gregory and Dublin Castle over the banning of Bernard Shaw's dreary drama The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. The play should indeed never have been staged, but for much the same reasons that it should never have been written. She then moves on to the infamous "Save the Dublin Kiddies" controversy of 1913, in which a group of women seeking to send child victims of the Dublin lock-out to be cared for in godless England were denounced by the hierarchy, howled down by the mob and arrested for kidnapping. Finally, she plunges with commendable audacity into the longest-running of all Irish wrangles, the Casement affair, reminding us that Yeats got so excited when he read aloud his poem on the subject that he had to drink a glass of port in order to calm down.
There are a few general conclusions to be drawn from these celebrated brawls, but to do so means stepping back from them more sharply than McDiarmid does. For one thing, most of them, like the Playboy riots, are rows between groups of Irishmen and women which reflect something of their larger altercation with their imperial masters. Britain was always especially adept at setting the Irish at each others' throats. For another thing, they are mostly quarrels over culture - whether in the narrow sense of art, or in the broader sense of religion, identity, language and way of life. This is scarcely surprising, since culture in the wider sense is what men and women are prepared to die for, or to kill for. In Ireland, however, even culture in the aesthetic sense - the Hugh Lane paintings, the Playboy, the banned Shaw play, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars - has proved able to trigger public demonstrations and generate noisy contentions. Art in metropolitan societies imagines itself to transcend political questions, whereas in colonial cultures it is indissociable from them. Far more ordinary people have heard of Pablo Neruda than they have of TS Eliot.
Lucy McDiarmid writes of these disputes as whipping up "broad populist excitement". But this, perhaps, is to subscribe too gullibly to what one might call the view from the Abbey Theatre. Yeats and Lady Gregory were both dab hands at raising minor events to the status of myth and epic, not least if it promoted their particular version of Irish cultural politics. Indeed, Yeats could have conjured an imposing historic event out of scrambling an egg. Viewed in historical context, most of these commotions were pretty small potatoes. How many rioters, after all, could the show-box-size Abbey hold? Were the Liberties a-buzz with excited talk of Hugh Lane and Blanco Posnet? Casement and the Irish language are more explosive matters, to be sure - in the former case because we are talking real revolutionary politics, and in the latter because language is where culture and politics most deeply intersect. The Irish Art of Controversy is an impressively researched, admirably intelligent study; but it needs to reflect on its subject rather more than it allows itself to.
Terry Eagleton's latest book is The English Novel: An Introduction (Basil Blackwell). Holy Terror will be published by Oxford University Press in September