In a certain sense, it’s possible to see here a stream of continuity — not of events, direct meanings or cultural logic, but in the form of an inversion, an involution, occurring by way of a reaction.

JOHN WATERS

The Danceless Death of Ireland

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The symptoms of what became Ireland’s most debilitating post-Independence pathology were slow to be spotted by sociologists, psychologists and the like, it being assumed that the roots of every ‘national’ problem lay in economics. Even (perhaps especially) domestically, as with many matters relating to the subjugation of the Irish people, the issue was ignored and, if mentioned, denied, the conventional willy-nilly wisdom being that the Irish were a fecund population, in which large families were commonplace. It was via the Irish diaspora in North America that the issue first came to significant public notice, not least because it was becoming clear that the ex-pat Irish population in America was itself labouring under some unusual symptoms of late marriage and relative childlessness compared to other ethnicities in the New World.

The first signs had been noted in Canada, even before the declaration of Irish independence. In 1917, when the Archbishop of Toronto, Neil McNeil, brought the matter to the attention of scholars in Notre Dame and Fordham Universities — both in the United States. This created a flurry of articles in American magazines, which drew attention to the mysterious failure of the Irish community to reproduce itself in anything resembling the numbers manifested by other ex-pat communities. In the early 1920s, while Ireland went to war with itself, these academics were publishing articles in America magazine with titles like ‘Are Irish Catholics Dying Out in This Country?’, ‘Catholic Bachelors and Old Maids’ and ‘The Disappearing Irish in America’.

One of the academics centrally responsible for this opening-up of the issue was Dr James J. Walsh of Fordham University, who also noted that the tendency towards late marriage or spinsterhood/bachelorhood was especially noticeable in families which had produced priests or nuns. Celibacy, he observed, seemed to be accepted as the ideal, even by those remaining in the secular world. ‘I am sorry to say that the more priests and religious there are in the family, the less tendency does there seem to be for other members of the family to get married.’

This factor comes in for intense study in various articles in the 1954 volume of essays, The Vanishing Irish, but the analysis there invariably fell short of a definitive prognosis as to the reasons for and functioning of this strange symptom. It is loosely speculated in the book that an excessive reverence for the celibate state might be causing some kind of resistance to engagement with the opposite sex, or to the contemplation of marriage and procreation as proper pursuits for Catholics. Several of the essays touch on this topic and a couple delve into it with some gusto, but what emerges in the end, being invariably couched in whimsical theory and quasi-comical anecdote, falls short of a conclusive analysis. Undoubtedly, deference to the Catholic Church and its power prevented any definitive diagnosis being arrived at.

There are, however, some interesting contributions, with subtly different emphases, which almost invariably cast the spotlight into the prevailing cultures of Ireland and Irish-America, rather than considering the likely root causes and connections to history and its undertows. The Irish playwright, Paul Vincent Carroll, for example, speculates that the cause may lie with the ‘mysticism’ of the Irish male:

He knows, even when he is making a fool or an exhibition of himself, that all life is a gloriously disguised fake. He is only too pathetically aware that all these foolish things will pass. . . . To be precise, materialism has never captured the inner being of the Irishman, as it has captured the entire being of, say, the American. . . . [G]ive an Irishman the king’s robes and jewels, and at the mystical fall of evening the illogical fellow will go hungering after some undefined something that is positively unattainable. He knows he is the lost child of some celestial hall of high splendours and that there is no real satisfaction for him in the tinselries of earth. Somewhere deep underneath his humbugging and his jollifications, there is a restless yearning that has no name.

For this reason, Carroll claims, women hold out no mystery for Irishmen, as they do to the males of other races. Women, being materialists of nature and necessity, will seek, in pursuing the affections of an Irishman, to ‘capture him from his dreaming’ and ‘lofty preoccupations’, and bind him to the marriage bed ‘which he dislikes, and the grinding stones which is the nightmare of his private raptures.’ This does not mean, he stresses, that the Irishman is a celibate — far from it; but, if he marries, it will be ‘when the blood runs cooler and he requires the comfort of a nurse and housekeeper.’

A (to some extent) related thesis is developed by the Irish journalist, Mary Francis Keating, sister of the painter, Seán Keating, who says simply that ‘the Irishman hates marriage’. He will dally with women for a time, but does not especially like them. ‘He is not a good husband or father, and the blame for the fact that the Irish are a vanishing race must be laid squarely and solely on his shoulders,’ though she hastens to urge that we not ‘pile all the blame . . . upon the shoulders of those few Irish who are extant today’. This rather stereotypical feminist appraisal of Irish manhood is somewhat redeemed by the analysis which follows concerning the cultural effects of male detachment upon women:

The Irishwoman has had to become the ‘dominant’ female, a role which suits her ill and makes her quite frequently dislike herself heartily. It earns for her, too, the dislike of the man.

In marriage, she alleges, the Irish woman must of necessity become a bully, who compensates herself for the deficit of husbandly love by imposing a stranglehold on the children, refusing to permit them to grow up, ‘lest they fly away the first chance they get.’ This, she says, is what deters young men from seeking wives — or, as she puts it, ‘getting emotionally involved with other people’: they are trapped in the adoration of their mothers and have neither motivation nor opportunity to escape.

Margaret Culkin Banning writes of the ‘ferocious chastity’ of certain categories of Irishwomen and the ‘instinctive modesty’ of Irishmen.

Catholic girls of Irish descent, even when the Irish blood is considerably diluted, have the same instinct of modesty. Before them always, and from childhood, is the ideal of the Virgin Mary, and so both their training and their temperaments work together to curb passions before marriage or without it. It is also against the instinct of these girls to seek men. They may have the ‘come hther’ in their eyes, but today other girls use more direct methods of attraction, which are both forbidden and repugnant to an Irish-American Catholic girl. It is not that the Irish do not like sex, but they have always disciplined sex. They have found and they have seen, in their admired priests and nuns, that life can be lived without it.

The writer, Bryan McMahon, wanders closer to the core of the issue when he speaks of the arcane Irish Catholic trope of ‘company keeping’, in other places and cultures known as ‘romance’.

Looking back twenty or thirty years, it would appear to me now as if the whole artillery of our Irish church had been brought to bear on that mysterious subversive force — the ‘company keepers.’ If from any pulpit there had been slight reference to company keeping of a laudable nature — as of course there must have been — my adolescent mind did not adequately register it. Never can I recall there being placed before me the possibility of connubial happiness, the essential incompleteness of single man, or the essential incompleteness of single woman.

Twenty or thirty years before, he recalls, ‘open-air dancing at the crossroads was in full swing’, but this was brought to an end by clerical killjoys.

I do not say that these dances were entirely without blemish, but they were as near to being so as blemished human nature will ever allow. One does not raze a house to the ground if a window is broken; yet this system of dancing was smashed largely as a result of a campaign by the clergy. Wooden roadside platforms were set on fire by curates: surer still, the priests drove their motorcars backward and forward over the timber platforms; concertinas were sent flying înto hill streams, and those who played music at dances were branded as outcasts.

How clearly I recall a band of laughing boys and girls on a fine Sunday afternoon dancing ‘sets’ on the floor of a ball alley by the sea. Suddenly the cry of ‘The priest!’ is heard. The dancers scatter in terror; the lame fiddler bobs brokenly after the others. Even at that time to my young mind, the incident didn’t make sense. I thought it would be more fitting if the priest sat on a chair at the edge of the platform and smiled at the dancers, the while he paired them off in his shrewd mind.

I recall with sorrow now, but with what then seemed to me to be the refinement of humor, the spectacle of a fat man jammed in the end window of a boathouse whence an afternoon dance had scattered in alarm: there fixed forever in my memory is that fat man poised for the blow from the sacerdotal umbrella. I once saw a parish priest at dusk wearing a postman’s cap so as to steal up on company keepers

It seems true to say that this emphasis on the sins of the flesh, thundered out at mission after mission, has rendered the Irish people among the most chaste in the world. But again as the result of the fatal Celtic trait of overcompensation, this chastity has projected itself beyond what is right and in many instances has ended by warping virtue into vice. Many a young Irish bride has suffered mental agonies in being unable to make the mental adjustments necessitated by the marriage state.

And curiously enough, it may be noted here, very many factors, earthen though they may be, leading toward marriage among Irish countryfolk, would appear to me to be of pagan origin. Superficial consideration of this fact presents the unthinking with the wrong idea that the Church has no reply whatsoever to the question of the beautiful but complex relations obtaining between man and woman.

Seán Ó Faoláin, one of the most celebrated Irish novelists and essayists of the mid-twentieth century, in a chapter titled ‘Love Among the Irish’, obsessed that the old canard that Ireland’s misfortune had been entirely down to foreign misrule had been rebuked by the events of the early years of Irish independence. This has since become a rather simplistic strawman argument of revisionists, but Seán Ó Faoláin elaborates upon it in a manner as to render it more compact and subtle. (Ó Faoláin it was, by the way, who inspired the publication of The Vanishing Irish, having written an essay on the Irish demographic crisis for Life magazine. He it was, too, who introduced the most dramatic and accuract descriptions of the crisis: ‘racial haemophilia’ and ‘racial decay’.)

Having excluded conventional arguments about economics and housing, he goes on to dismiss poverty as the primary reason for the collapsing demographics of the Irish nation at home and abroad. On the contrary he argues, it was the glimpsing of prosperity that had placed an impediment between the Irish and taking the plunge:

What is creating the psychological block here is something far nearer to the opposite of poverty. All our young people are developing a proper concept of what constitutes decent living conditions, and until they get them, they are on strike against marriage. We are rearing generations in Ireland that have ten times more pride and ambition than their parents ever had, and good luck to them for it. As one young woman put it to me in two sentences: ‘I saw what my mother went through. Not for me, thank you!’

Then he nudges close to the nub of the issue, citing a young male correspondent:

We Irishmen have been conditioned into a state of sexual frigidity and repression because for generations we have clothed the sublimity of love in shrouds of taboo, false prudery and an attitude of Victorian Puritanisn that hạs given to the act of sexual union the blasphemous nature of something offensive.

But then Ó Faoláin somewhat pulls his punch. If, he editorialses, this attitude has been fostered by the Catholic Church, (‘and I am afraid it has been’), it has not been fostered ‘consciously and deliberately.’

How could it be? It is the doctrine of the Catholic Church that to seek satisfaction of bodily desire in sexual union, that is, in marriage, is one of the most virtuous functions of mankind, a holy act in which God and man must take constant joy and delight. It has been fostered, most unhappily, because the young people will not marry young and the clergy fear that the result must be a relaxation of sexual morality. The stage is set for conflict and an impasse. The Church thunders against the dangers of sex. The young men, obedient up to the point of marriage, at which they balk, are inevitably conditioned into a frustrated terror of woman.

This rings a bell or two, though it is far from clear that he is correct about this not being done ‘consciously and deliberately’ — as we shall see.

But then Ó Faoláin goes on somewhat to contradict himself:

I am an Irishman and a Catholic. I live in Ireland. I am bringing up my children in Ireland as Catholics. I fully acknowledge the right of the Catholic clergy in Ireland to adopt any attitude they think fit toward the problems of young love. I am simply objecting that the position I see adopted by the state and by some of the clergy in Ireland is shortsighted, inhuman, unwise, and may be fatal to both.

Since my boyhood I have heard my elders fulminatíng about keeping company, night courting, dancing at the crossroads, V necks, silk stockings, late dances, drinking at dances, mixed bathing, advertisements for feminine underwear, jitterbugging, girls who take part in immodest sports (such as jumping or hurdling), English and American books and magazines, short frocks, Bikinis, cycling shorts, and even waltzing, which I have heard elegantly described as ‘belly-to-belly dancing.’ Perhaps the most extreme example of this kind of thing was to hear woman described from a pulpit to a mixed congregation as the ‘unclean vessel.’

Enough. What we need, surely, is the lifting of an unclean cloud. For a picture of a saner attitude to woman go into any southern city of Europe. There the God-given beauty of woman is almost adored. Courtship is frank and fair. The youths discuss the charms of their girls openly and with enthusiasm. Their songs are of love; their thoughts are of love; their blood is at natural blood heat. They marry young. While the population of Ireland is dwindling, the population of Italy, a much poorer country, is soaring.

Unless this changes, he says, both Ireland and the Church will continue to lose out:

If some such revolution does not take place, it can mean only that that impalpable thing we know as the Irish nature is shrivelling and hardening into selfishness, is growing less and less attractive in its smug blindness to the unhappiness of this generation and the threat to the generations of the future. In that sense the Irish whom the world has known, and admired, may indeed vanish from the earth; and I am still proud enough of my race to think that their disappearance would be the world’s loss.

What we observe, then, looking at the problem as a decline stretching not over a century but over a virtually continuous period of 180 years, is a nation deprived of the opportunity to love itself, being interfered with in more or less equal dimensions from both Rome and London, continuously seeking its salvation externally and finding no fulfilment anywhere — more than a little like John Joe, in Tom Murphy’s play A Crucial Week in the Life of Grocer’s Assistant, who was ‘a half-man here and a half-man there, and how I can I ever hope to be anything?’

Some years after the publication of The Vanishing Irish, the German writer, Heinrich Böll, who was a frequent visitor to, and resident in, Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, when he owned a cottage in Dugort, Achill Island, wrote in his Irish Journal about the dismaying changes he was noticing then, despite the onset of what he termed ‘prosperity’. Since the years 1954/55, he wrote in 1967, Ireland had ‘caught up with two centuries and leaped over another five. We live in a country in which, for a very long time, shrinking family sizes have been touted as something akin to a sign of progress, as indeed have escalating crime statistics. It is at once chilling and educative to observe how a society can be persuaded that its destruction is some kind of victory.’

Böll actually identified the onset of another demographic apocalypse, dating from — approximately — the year of my own birth, and had an unambiguous view of its cause. When he first came to Ireland, at the start of the 1950s, he had optimistically predicted that the country might be able — just about — to maintain her population through the coming years: ‘Of the eighty children at Mass on Sundays,’ he wrote, ‘only forty-five will still be living here in forty years; but these forty-five will have so many children that eighty children will again be kneeling in church.’ By the 1990s, arising mainly from emigration, the 45 adults that Böll expected to remain at home in Achill was more likely to be 25 or 30, and the 80 children he hoped to see kneeling in church was likely to be half that, at best. By the late 1960s, he was attributing the problem to a specific factor (Böll was an unorthodox but staunch Catholic):

. . . a certain something has now made its way to Ireland, that ominous something known as The Pill — and this something absolutely paralyzes me: the prospect that fewer children might be born in Ireland fills me with dismay.

This may have been an over-simplification of a problem that, even today, remains a mystery in its depths, as Ireland’s indigenous population continues its collapse, now into what may be a terminal pattern.

However, by the 1970s, seemingly at once contradicting and affirming Böll’s prognostications — as if his and other warnings had been heeded — the national fertility rate had climbed to nearly 4, indicating that ‘we’ already knew that these drifts need neither be definitive nor necessarily terminal, and that there is no need for external assistance in righting them. The ‘rational’ explanation for this shift was what is remembered as ‘the Lemass era’, which briefly staunched the outflow of Irish people and enabled the emergence in the 1970s of a uniquely Irish ‘baby boom’, which briefly changed the face and mood of Ireland into a much more positive and forward-looking nation, a disposition that appeared to sustain until approximately the early years of the present century.

Today, while our pathetic political class boasts that Ireland is now ‘the wealthiest country in the world’, the Irish population is again collapsing and being replaced by outsiders who barely know — or care — where they are. The zeal for abortion must surely be listed as one of the key manifestations of the modern withering disease (10,000 baby-killings per year since legalisation on January 1st, 2019), as must the silence that has met the inundation of Ireland over the past two decades with what are insultingly termed ‘the New Irish’ — mostly fake refugees, fraudulent asylum seekers and others who have come here as part of a wave of displacement now occurring on a global basis, but accompanied here by a particular undertone of utterly baseless historical retribution being directed by Irish politicians against their own people.

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This article (Ireland: Birthplace of the Totalitarian, Part II) was created and published by John Waters Unchained and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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