The Celts

The special problems created and suffered by the enclaves of Irish immigrant poor in British industrial cities, the more violent assertions of Irish political nationalism (such as the Fenians), and the fact that Irish rural society (and landlord-tenant relations in particular) was deemed to be endemically violent, all combined to reinforce the more sinister and negative version of the Celtic stereotype - that of the dangerous, violent, unhygienic, simianised Paddy - in the main organs of British opinion especially in the period from around 1860 to the 1890s. The Punch cartoons are the most notorious examples of this negative stereotype. The stereotype was mobilised for ideological and political duty in countering a succession of Irish nationalist demands for some form of political autonomy. In particular, the stereotype was invoked during the first Home Rule crisis of the mid-1880s in order to provide an historico-racist argument for contesting the fitness of the Irish for even a limited measure of self-government.

A particular feature of the elaboration of the racial stereotype of the Irish Celt was the way in which, by intellectual sleight of hand, as it were, religious prejudices were conflated with the racial by publicists on every side of the debate. The Weberian version of the Protestant ethic combined with that of the dreamy but impractical Celt to explain why 'Catholic Ireland' did not 'industrialise' from the late eighteenth century and why the 'Protestant' north-east was the only area on the island to experience the Industrial Revolution. The legend of the defeated and dispossessed Celt meshed with the historical sense of injustice and dispossession of the Irish Catholic community.

The term Celtic came to be used as synonymous with aggrieved or deprived Catholic. This, of course, ignored the actual Celtic ancestry of some of the industrious Calvinists of the north-east as well as the clearly non-Celtic cultural orientation of many Catholics, especially the successful and better-off Catholics. But in the sharp polarisation of communities in Ireland along a politico-religious axis in the generation before 1914 (i.e. Nationalist/Catholic, Unionist/Protestant) it became increasingly difficult for those who were unwilling to have their cultural identity defined or entirely subsumed in political or religious terms to find space or tolerance for the accommodation of a more complex version of Irish cultural development, in historical or contemporary terms.

There were, of course, significant exceptions. Douglas Hyde, while insisting on the preservation of the Irish language as the indispensable marker of a distinct Irish nationality, refused to accept that this version of cultural nationalism had any ineluctable political logic or religious affiliation. Indeed, in this regard Hyde belongs to a line of Protestant scholar-intellectuals whose interest in and support for different aspects of the Celtic heritage derived, in part at least, from their desire to find common ground between the different religious communities in Ireland in a shared sense of pride in and continuity with the Celtic past of their country.

But by the early twentieth century political polarisation had drastically reduced the room for making cultural choices of this kind. Political nationalism laid claim to the Celtic heritage, in effect the language, seeing it as the irrefutable evidence of the distinctive Irish nation for which a national state was being demanded. The more vague and imprecise (i.e. not language-bound) marks of the so-called Celtic temperament were likewise adopted by those whose sense of identity was primarily in terms of their Catholicism; it was an easy matter to translate the supposed spirituality of the ancient Celts into the fidelity and strong devotion of the majority of the Irish people to Catholicism, 'in spite of dungeon fire and sword'.

Unionists (especially Ulster Unionists) opposed to the creation of an Irish national state, tended in the main to reject the Celtic dimension (in the past or in contemporary Ireland) as having anything to do with their heritage. This heritage was defined exclusively in terms of its Protestantism and its Britishness. After the political settlements of 1920-22 there were strong pressures at work in both parts of Ireland to establish an official version, as it were, of cultural homogeneity in each of the two political jurisdictions in Ireland. This had more to do with state ideology than with the richer and more complex cultural history of the communities in both parts of the island. In both jurisdictions cultural ambiguities and complexities of identity continued to intrude upon the certainties of official ideology.

In the south, notwithstanding the formal state language policy of Gaelicisation, it soon became apparent (as any perceptive historian or half-genuine republican could have forecast) that Catholic and Gaelic were not synonymous. A substantially confessional Catholic state did not mean a Gaelic (or even Irish-speaking) community. In the north, not only was there an explicitly dissident cultural minority, but even for the dominant majority there was the dilemma that so far as 'Britishness' as a cultural identification was concerned assertion did not guarantee acceptance. Birmingham's image and understanding of Belfast need not necessarily correspond with Unionist/British Belfast's version of itself. Cultural identification is not only a matter of choice; to be effective it also requires external validation.

A word, then, by way of conclusion. The creation of a stereotype - of whatever kind - is rarely a matter of pure invention. The act of creation involves selection and exaggeration, distortion and omission. So it is with the stereotype of the Celt in modern Ireland. The quest for the Celtic element in modern Irish history and society is not a matter of genes but of genius. The characteristic Celtic modes (of thought and action, expression and behaviour) are not to be sought in the centuries since 1600 in distinctive political, economic, legal or, indeed, social structures, but in the structures of the mind. This structure of the mind - genius, mind-set, mentalite, call it what you will - is a notoriously difficult and elusive concept. It is, and has long been, a matter of selection, adoption and cultivation rather than of simple inheritance. Ethnicity, as Barth had pointed out, is not a 'given', immutable, inherited culture-kit, but a version of self which involves conscious selection, adoption and cultivation of key features, key markers of cultural identity.

x While it is true, as Estyn Evans demonstrated concisely and with commendable sensitivity, that the personality of Ireland has been shaped by the interplay over the centuries of the forces of habitat, heritage and history the Irish have played their part in shaping that personality in recent times by self-conscious and deliberate cultivation and by their response to the images and opinions which others have of them. In sum, as we approach the end of the twentieth century it seems to me to be quite plausible to suggest that while it is questionable I f any group in Ireland can claim to be 'pure Celtic' in any meaningful sense, it is probably the case that there are, to a greater or lesser extent, some archetypal Celtic traits or characteristics evident in all sections of the Irish population. This may be unsettling for those ethnic exclusivists in Ireland who demand that the essential or authentic marks of their identity be precise, tidy and verifiable. But to those with a more open sense of cultural relativism, and a more tolerant view of cultural variety, the suggestion that there is probably 'a bit of the Celt' in most of the Irish will cause neither surprise nor alarm.

Click here for part 11, or here to go to the start of the article.

From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.