Claire Connolly

The cultural effects of the Famine

Introduction This chapter shows how the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 was the single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. In European terms, famine had become an increasingly remote event, and that Ireland should suffer a devastating episode was made all the more unusual in that it then formed part of the richest, most powerful and centralised state in the world - the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union in 1800. The Famine disproportionately impacted on the 3 million potato dependent people who comprised the notoriously poverty-stricken base of Irish society. These effects were compounded by doctrinaire government policies, designed as much to appease British opinion and to promote social engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. Over 1 million people died and 2 million more emigrated within a decade: the population of the island halved by 1900, the result of endemic emigration by young people, delayed marriages and abnormally high rates of celibacy. The Famine therefore marked a water shed in many areas of Irish life – demographics, economics, society, culture. Yet the immediate response appears sluggish. Indubitably, Ireland remained culturally comatose in the immediate post-Famine period. The period from the 1880s, when the post-Famine generation took over, witnessed the creation of a series of radical responses to the Famine legacy, of which the Irish literary revival is one. Many other initiatives were also undertaken, inspired by people themselves born during the Famine. The best-known examples include Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League in 1879, and Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884.

Modernism and the Irish revival

While the attempt to recover or revive a traditional native culture was a key element of Irish cultural nationalism since the late eighteenth century, the moment of the so-called Celtic Revival, at around the turn of the twentieth century, remains distinctive and significant for a number of reasons. In no other period has Ireland produced so many writers of such extraordinary quality. Moreover, the reputations and achievements of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge are inextricably bound up with the revivalist features of their Irish subject matter, and those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are at least in part moulded by their rejection of the aesthetics and politics of the revival. The contemporary ‘branding’ of the Irish cultural heritage continues to exploit the fame of these literary stars. The works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, of course, are all also central to the history of European modernism. Indeed, it could be argued that this unique instance of a modernist movement in a colonial setting presents an important challenge to theorists of modernism; certainly, this literature demands from its critics a nuanced understanding of modernity in relation to Irish history.

Introduction: Ireland and modernity

The aim of this Companion is to introduce readers to modern Irish culture in all its complexity and variety. Before moving into detailed cultural analysis, however, the opening chapter invites readers to consider the historical and theoretical meanings of our framing concept: modern Ireland. What does modernity mean for Ireland? How can we conceptualise the modern culture of a country and a people with two languages, divided since the early twentieth century into two states? Officially incorporated into the United Kingdom with the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland in the nineteenth century was a constituent element of a sprawling empire of global reach. Union with Britain survives into the twenty-first century in the shape of the political border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic. And yet the long history of Irish migration and diaspora means that even the divided island - the basic geopolitical unit - cannot be taken for granted as the sole sphere of modern Irish culture. The nowadays much-debated terms terms ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’ also require consideration. For a long time, these words were associated with the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the Enlightenment and with the transformational dynamism of capitalism. The revolutionary utopianism of feminism, socialism and communism sprang from such quintessentially Enlightenment beliefs as human rights and global justice and equality: all such claims expressed in terms of a cry for the optimal extension of the modern. At the start of the new millennium, however, calls for the extension of modernisation are more likely to hinder than to abet campaigns for social justice or the dream of a better world beyond capitalism.