Yeats 'an inspired political witness'

THE PAINTER Jack B Yeats, a London-born, Anglo-Irish Protestant, resolved his identity “with a sectarian sidestep” to celebrate those on the margins of the Catholic community, according to a New York-based Irish artist.

Brian O’Doherty told a symposium on identity and sectarianism that Yeats had the right instincts in respect to revolution, oppression and notions of individual liberty and was “an inspired witness” in his political paintings.

“He even took Irish lessons, in those days the equivalent of receiving the stigmata,” said O’Doherty, who for 36 years signed all his art works “Patrick Ireland” in protest at the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972.

He was speaking at the symposium, The Outsider: Sectarianism and Identity in Ireland Today, which was held at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo on Saturday to coincide with the Yeats exhibition, The Living Ginger.

Dr Mike Cronin, who is director of Boston College in Dublin, told the symposium that working-class Protestants had been “written out” of the narrative of Irish history. We did have a “parlour image” of Protestant members of the Ascendancy “ambling around the Big Houses, painting pictures, writing poetry and dreaming of cultural revival”, said the historian.

Dr Cronin said the 1937 Constitution, which some described as “confessional” but he believed was “sectarian”, with its special position for the Catholic Church, seemed to suggest that Protestants were not welcome.

Referring to the sharp decline in the Protestant population in the last century, Dr Cronin said he did not agree with the theory that a form of ethnic cleansing had taken place, but “a lot of them did not feel safe”.

Outlining how the Yeats family was part of the network of Anglo-Irish Protestants who were at the heart of the cultural revival, Dr Cronin said that in the poem Coole Park, 1929, WB Yeats invoked people such as Douglas Hyde, JM Synge and Hugh Lane.

This suggested “an artistic cell” and a cultural revival driven by an elite who spent a lot of time with “the self-proclaimed peasantry” to create an aesthetic dominated by images of the west of Ireland.