Culture loves a political vacuum and peace loves a controversy. The early twentieth century in Ireland was therefore merry with controversies, which performed themselves as if determining the future character of the nation. Lucy McDiarmid chooses five examples, and, although it is never clear what makes the art of Irish controversy different from that of other nationalities, the author provides highly enjoyable, intelligent, and well-written accounts.
The book opens with the dispute over the permanent location of thirty-nine paintings belonging to Hugh Lane. The owner had generously bequeathed them to Dublin and ungenerously tied the gift to a site already occupied by the Ha’penny Bridge. Bequeath was followed by condition, which was followed by retraction, codicil, and death upon the Lusitania. The paintings therefore became part of a protracted negotiation between the National Gallery in London and the Municipal Gallery in Dublin.
Lane is followed by Dr. Michael O’Hickey, professor of Irish at Maynooth, who challenged the Irish hierarchy over the issue of compulsory Irish in the National University. In a controversy that extended into a battle between the Gaelic League and the Catholic Church, O’Hickey became a central martyr in the language movement, not “for any single ideology, not simply for his linguistic nationalism, or his defiance of the bishops, or his insistence on faculty tenure, but for his unsilenceability” (54). Lane's aunt, Lady Gregory, is the next to provoke her own controversy in a tussle with Dublin Castle over the staging of Shaw's The Shewing–up of Blanco Posnet. The play had been refused a license in England and was performed at the Abbey Theatre despite a “precautionary notice” from the Lord Lieutenant. It was anticipated that “the banality of the ‘blasphemous’ passages, once publicized, would reveal the inanity of the English censor” (99) and that the fight with Dublin Castle would underline the independence of the Abbey and strengthen its national credentials.
In the midst of these controversies over language and art, McDiarmid includes the “Save the Dublin Kiddies” dispute, which follows attempts by English Socialists to house and feed the children of striking families during the Lock-Out of 1913. The transfer of children from Dublin to England was easily characterized by the Catholic Church as the worst kind of abduction, as it could plumb the cultural memories of “souperism” and fairy lore. The quintet ends with Roger Casement, a man more written about than writing. Yet the private, coded, and intimate words of his diaries would keep Casement in the eye of controversy throughout the twentieth century.
Through these specific cultural and political encounters, McDiarmid is primarily concerned with the fluidity of identity and the fluctuations of social discourses at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is amusingly illustrated with the Lane's itinerant paintings, which shift from being gift, to imposition, to another thing the English took. The English, of course, also took Casement's remains and reputation and threatened to take the Dublin children in 1913. This traffic backward and forward nicely demonstrates the instability of ideas of Irishness around which, it is argued, resolution is won “by bluff and bravado, by performative skills and improvisational flair, rather than by any clear and consistent scoring system” (7). The physical movement between the two islands also allowed that controversies, which were in their essence located in Ireland, could be reframed as anti-imperial battles in which both sides attempted to prove that they were more Irish than the Irish themselves.
McDiarmid also conveys a sense of Dublin as a contested space. The controversies are not simply verbal exchanges; they are dramatized on the city streets, in its theaters, universities, and art galleries. So that, for example, priests and people gathered around railway stations and took to the city center to protect the right of Dublin children to remain underfed in Catholic Ireland; Lady Gregory fancied that a cheer for her defiance of censorship in two jurisdictions carried from the wealthy audience in the theater onto the streets; and Casement, his bones returned stripped of the weakness of their human flesh, was paraded through the city in what one witness described as “a dress rehearsal for de Valera's funeral” (202). Absence required its own space also. The room that was kept empty in the Municipal Gallery to house the missing Lane paintings was a monument not just to Lane's changes of mind but to the changed minds in Ireland that had found it easier to create space for controversy than art.
Controversies change shape as they develop and alter the subject at their center. The Black Diaries, like Michael O’Hickey, would not be silenced. The latter turned a battle over the Irish language into a struggle for the right to speech, and the former turned the author, who had argued for human dignity, into the undignified vehicle for the Irish to talk about sex.
McDiarmid's chapters were separate articles before being joined in a book. As a whole they seem somewhat arbitrary. The battle over the feeding of Dublin children in 1913 sits uneasily in the surrounding company. The issues that found focus in this particular controversy directly affected the lives of thousands impoverished by the strike. Bluff, bravado, and performance sound rather hollow in this context. The ground is also less secure in the nods to more recent convulsions in Irish society. To describe the Magdalene laundries or battles over “the Irish womb” (212) as controversies does not do justice to systematic abuses that were scandalous rather than controversial. This is a consequence of the fact that the central premise of the book is often returned to without ever being satisfactorily defined.
Nevertheless, this book is packed with entertaining anecdotes and fascinating details and is extremely well illustrated. It crosses disciplines and draws on references from a great breadth of sources. The dense scholarship is conveyed with such lightness of touch that this book is a real pleasure to read.
