This article is an analysis of space in late-colonial Irish nationalism; as it became clear that the ‘combination of chemical elements [we are] pleased to call Ireland’ was moving closer to some kind of independence – whether home rule or a sovereign republic – Irish nationalists invested considerable energy into a parallel cultural project of imagining spatial sovereignty.Footnote ² This act of imagination, in turn, served to prove ownership over the space(s) of Ireland and to anchor the Irish nation in both space and time. The article concludes by placing this aspect of Irish nationalism in a comparative framework, situating the spatial imaginaries of Irish nationalism alongside those of other nationalisms, Zionism in particular. Zionism and Irish nationalism both emerged on the literal and figurative fringes of Europe and sought to overcome that spatially ambiguous status through a number of similar strategies (language revival; martyrdom as an idealised vision of heroic self-sacrifice for the nation; the use of militaries and sport; coercive social legislation). Both movements came to fruition in an era of European colonial expansion and both were deeply affected by that context, more so in the case of Zionism. Space was of central concern for the ideologues of both movements.

There is an increasing recognition among scholars that ‘space’ is a central category of modernist politics, nationalism included. While Benedict Anderson's seminal work on nationalism is conventionally seen as a study of ‘print capitalism’, he has also emphasised the importance of maps within nationalist projects, serving, as they do, to demonstrate the supposed antiquity of modern nation states and the attendant claims about their supposedly natural spatial coherence.Footnote ³ John Agnew has noted how national space and developmental time are often conflated in modern European thought; certain national spaces get labelled as ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’, while colonial and peripheral spaces become ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’, a practice that intensified with the first European forays into the western hemisphere.Footnote ⁴ Jonathan Boyarin has identified the curious phenomenon of ‘a spatialized notion of memory’ and the fact that nationalism often makes claims about national memories being embedded in specific national spaces.Footnote ⁵ Connecting with those spaces thus becomes a means to commune with the national past and a key part of the phenomenology of nationalism. David Harvey, making much of Marx's observation that industrial capitalism has a tendency towards the annihilation of space through time, has demonstrated how the experience of capitalist modernity is bound up with the experience of specific spatial regimes.Footnote ⁶ Nationalism was one way of negotiating capitalist spatiality and the unsettling sense that under capitalism ‘all Chinese walls’ are battered down, all ancient traditions are erased and ‘all that is solid melts into air’.Footnote ⁷ Against the de-territorialising forces of global capitalism, the supposedly ancient nation and its discretely defined absolute space becomes an anchor of stability, a ‘still point in a turning world’.Footnote ⁸

This article argues for a similar understanding of Irish nationalism. While questions of space, spatio-temporality, spatial memories and spatial sovereignty permeate all the variants of Irish nationalism, from Young Ireland to the Provisional I.R.A., I focus specifically on the early twentieth century and on the work of the Gaelic League, the group founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language as well as promoting home-grown industries and social reform and which, by the turn of the century, had become one of the most important cultural organisations in Ireland.Footnote ⁹ The Gaelic League was also a social organisation, promoting its ideas through dances and day trips. In May 1903, a decade into its existence, the Gaelic League organised one such trip for its members, from Dublin to Galway. The pamphlet supplied to those taking part in this tour gave specific guidelines for participation in and ‘use’ of the seemingly novel Irish spaces through which Gaelic Leaguers passed:

There was a clear didactic quality to this. As I have argued elsewhere, Gaelic League day-trippers were being taught about Ireland and instructed in how to feel rooted in its history and geography.Footnote ¹⁰ Using Irish names ‘always’, rather than their supposedly false English versions, was also a way to express proprietorship over these places; it was pitched as a way to undo both anglicisation and the British spatial control of Ireland. Yet it was only in the description of Irish-speaking Galway that actual living people were described, with a revealing air of anthropological exoticism: ‘Crossing the River Corrib by the West Bridge (tram line) you come to Salthill. Leaving the tram line at left corner of Lower Dominick Street, you arrive at Cladach – the village of fishermen, who are rather conservative in habits and manner, but who use Gaelic as their ordinary speech.’Footnote ¹¹ The residents of the Gaeltacht, previously maligned as rustics who spoke an outmoded language, were now praised as the living repositories of an otherwise lost racial essence. As the notes for the 1903 tour make clear, Gaelic League tourists from Dublin were encouraged to envisage a linguistic and national kinship with both Fionn Mac Cumhaill – the exemplary male hero of Gaelic folklore – as well as to the ‘museum exhibits’ of the Gaeltacht.Footnote ¹² Experiencing both was a means to re-strengthen – which is to say, re-masculinise – the Irish nation.Footnote ¹³

What was at stake for the Gaelic League here was the idea that the memory of Ireland's ancient manly heroism was embedded in certain spaces of Ireland. Taking control of these spaces would allow Irish nationalists, a predominantly urban group, to reconnect with the Gaeltacht, an isolated rural space that was imagined as being free of the humiliating presence of an effeminising British cultural-colonialism. Nationalist ideology often operates according to an ‘institutionalized tie between nationhood and statehood’ and the modern state, as Henri Lefebvre describes it, is a ‘spatial framework of power’.Footnote ¹⁴ Intentionally or not, by imagining Ireland as spatially distinct – and with the Gaeltacht as the symbolic heart of that spatial imaginary – Gaelic Leaguers such as Hyde were nourishing a separatist politics.

Considerations of ‘space’ permeated the work of the Gaelic League, as they did with much of the rest of contemporary Irish nationalism. To imagine an independent Ireland is, in a very real sense, to imagine something spatially novel, and ‘space’ as a distinct category should feature in any thorough analysis of Irish nationalism. Borrowing from the terminology of Neil Smith, Irish nationalism was an attempt to move from ‘relative space’ (Ireland's status as an internal part of the United Kingdom) to ‘absolute space’ (a separate and spatially coherent nation-state).Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, a number of works have begun to recognise the importance of ‘space’ as a category of analysis for Irish studies.Footnote ¹⁶

The space of Ireland had undergone a number of profound changes in the decades prior to the emergence of the Gaelic League. From the Famine onwards, Ireland became more and more integrated into the spaces of a British-centric trading system. Large-scale train transport served to unify Ireland into one coherent space for the first time. Kevin Nowlan has even gone so far as to speak of a ‘transport revolution’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and to argue that ‘along with emigration and the national schools, the railways might well be seen as yet another factor which contributed to the weakening of those social and economic conditions which had helped to preserve old traditions and cultural patterns in Irish rural society’.Footnote ¹⁷ Angela Bourke has noted the interesting congruence between the founding of the Gaelic League (1893) and the opening of the Galway to Clifden railway line (1895). Connemara was now accessible to anglophone tourists. Bourke discusses how ‘Railways allowed ordinary people to travel for recreation for the first time, and cultural nationalists in Ireland were now able to combine summer vacations by the sea with opportunities to hear Irish spoken fluently and to improve their own grasp of the language and its oral culture.’ Indeed, by the time of the Gaelic League's day trip to Galway in 1903, the Midland and Great Western Railway was operating a ‘Tourist Express’ service to north Connemara, which left Dublin at noon and would arrive in Clifden by 5.00 p.m.Footnote ¹⁸ The construction of rail transport, the shortening of travel times, the growing sense of an imagined community all living in a shared space: all this fed into a consciousness of a shared modern ‘Irish’ identity.Footnote ¹⁹ The focus on recovering a mythic past was also a means of negotiating this rapid, and unsettling, transformation toward modernity. The building of railways, and the new spatial regime which they engendered, were key elements of the experience of a British capitalist modernity in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Railways opened up Ireland further as a market for British goods. As elsewhere in the empire, ‘Railways would eliminate spatial barriers to circulation and production by opening up new sources for raw materials and markets for British manufactures’ and ‘Colonial spatial-economy structuring was distinguished by its privileging of infrastructures of circulation over production.’Footnote ²⁰ The new spatial regime of capitalism and Ireland's dependent economic status within that space were apprehended simultaneously. The nationalist emphasis on Irish spatial distinctness was a response to both.

These changes in rail infrastructure also created a new awareness of the Gaeltacht as a distinct space; the Irish-speaking western seaboard, previously isolated from the English-speaking and more urbanised east coast, was now in the process of being ‘discovered’ by the Gaelic League. The Gaeltacht was being created as an accessible space, even as the anglicisation that came in capitalism's wake irreparably changed it. Moreover, the Gaeltacht's residents were valorised as the newly discovered, ancient repositories of Irish-speaking culture. The word ‘Gaeltacht’, in fact, was not commonly used until the late nineteenth century and Caitriona Ó Torna has even gone so far as to suggest that some conscious strategies lay behind the construction of this overtly spatial term:

There was an obvious utopianism to this ‘invention’.

Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh (Agnes O'Farrelly), one of the few women to take a leading role in the Gaelic League, was certainly a kind of middle-class utopianist, as Ríona Nic Congáil has recently observed. The Irish-speaking Aran Islands had a central role for Ní Fhaircheallaigh's utopianism, not unlike the tabula rasa of America for Charles Fourier and Robert Owens; for her, however, it was a place that avoided the ‘diostóipe’ (‘dystopian’) capitalism of the United States. The islands were seen as pristine places ‘nach raibh truaillithe ag tionchar an Bhéarla agus an Ghalldachais’.Footnote ²² Ní Fhaircheallaigh would later recall that visiting the Aran Islands for the first time was ‘like entering a foreign land’.Footnote ²³ She was a ‘foreigner’ in this space, yet it was the only space in which one could ‘properly understand how to be’ essentially Irish.Footnote ²⁴ These were common views of the Gaeltacht, of a newly discovered and almost foreign space onto which urban Gaelic Leaguers could project their visions of a future, decolonised Ireland.

Indeed, commenting on the increasing use of the word ‘Gaeltacht’ in the late nineteenth century, Ó Torna shows how it was constructed in opposition to its ‘íomhá scátháin, Galltacht’, the anglophone parts of Ireland.Footnote ²⁵ A report in the Gaelic League's An Claidheamh Soluis on 15 June 1907 described the feeling of leaving the industrial spaces of a dystopian Galltacht and entering the utopian and presumably non-capitalist Gaeltacht:

As well as setting up a dichotomy of a clean Gaeltacht versus a diseased, anglophone and industrialised Galltacht, this article also suggests that the Gaeltacht is a place where men are dominant. The ‘Gael’ is spoken of here in overtly masculine terms, as if the space he inhabits is the sole preserve of free and happy men, where the destructive and effeminising impact of British politics and economics is noticeable by its absence. That he lives a life ‘God intended’ even seems to prefigure de Valera's 1943 speech, in which the taoiseach would famously declare that ‘the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living … The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.’Footnote ²⁷ Desmond Ryan, travelling through the Gaeltacht with Patrick Pearse in 1915, similarly saw something of great national value in this space: ‘The quaint native dress, the courtesy, the speech, the manners all showed something inherently strong, wholesome and virile, something which has survived many vicissitudes, shall more and in its own sure time grow into the larger, sweeter and more beautiful country of our dreams’. There is a trace of exoticism to how Ryan saw this space. Yet for Ryan, even if this was a dream, it was still ‘The Real Ireland’, an Ireland of wholesome and virile men.Footnote ²⁸

Ó Torna goes so far as to suggest that there is ‘blas an antraipeolaí, go fiú’ in a January 1903 account in An Claidheamh Soluis of a trip to north Connemara:

The use of the term ipsissimus – ‘the very essence’ in Latin – suggests that the Gaels of north Connemara were the purest essence of a racially-defined Irishness and still in touch with a martial masculinity from the heroic age of Granuaile (Grainne Mhaol). In a recent essay expanding on this notion of the invention of the Gaeltacht, Ó Torna foregrounded how this sense of a pure Irish space freed from the pollution of anglicisation was linked to a sense of a ‘time’ freed from English control, a phenomenon she aptly labels ‘Thiar in am, thiar sa Ghaeltacht’.Footnote ³⁰ All of this bears comparison to the ‘northern time travel’ engaged in by the savants of the Scottish Enlightenment, who believed that trips to the spaces of the Highlands and the Gàidhealtachd were trips to a pristine Scottish past and to a space that awaited the guiding hand of urban modernisers.Footnote ³¹

The same process of imagining a redeemed and Gaelicised space-time was at work in the more regular activities of the Gaelic League. The league's annual celebrations in Dublin, the Oireachtas (Assembly) are a salient example. As Eoin MacNeill said of the 1897 Oireachtas, ‘Thoughtful onlookers have seen in these events the beginning of a new and honourable life for Ireland. How great in after-days will be the honour of those who take an effective part in this regeneration!’Footnote ³² It was a return to a glorious past, while also signposting a future, redeemed Irish national sovereignty. Similarly, in 1907 the Gaelic League organised a series of historical tableaux across Dublin city depicting, inter alia, Brian Boru, Red Hugh O'Donnell, the arming of Cuchulainn, and seventeenth-century scholar Geoffrey Keating. In the programme explaining this, under the heading ‘Ceangal’ (‘binding together’, ‘connection’ or ‘covenant’), it was explained that ‘Not for the passing amusement of the moment do the Gaelic Leaguers of Dublin present these scenes from Irish History to their fellow-citizens.’ Rather the league sought ‘to intensify national spirit, to develop national thought, to stimulate national effort’. Spectators were also urged to remember the ‘bond’ that united these historical figures with the present: ‘By that bond are indissolubly bound together Ireland's Literature and History, Ireland's People and Land. The Irish Nation of to-day must see to it that that bond shall not be severed.’Footnote ³³ Reconnecting with a lost heroism was a central trope in Irish nationalism both before and after 1916. Martyrdom, militias, the G.A.A., and the revival of the Irish language were all seen as conducive to a revival of the manliness of a colonised and oppressed nation.Footnote ³⁴ So also here, the Gaelic League used these events as a means of projecting a masculinised image of ‘the past-as-it-will-be’ within the spaces of urban Dublin of which they had taken control for the day. This fits with a recent scholarly analysis of pageantry in twentieth-century Ireland: ‘Between 1907 and 1914, historical pageants served what many saw as the imperative of providing the public with a narrative of an Irish past distinct from an English one’, part of a general European craze for such politicised entertainment.Footnote ³⁵

The Gaelic League's examination papers, used for their scholarship system, also urged students to think in terms of a recovered time and space and to explore their bonds with heroic men from the national past. There was a similar phenomenon in the Irish-language exams offered through the British state intermediate system. Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh wrote the questions for the 1905 senior grade honours Irish exam, the first part of which involved translating the following into Irish:

1. (a) The Brehon laws were in force in the country from very early times.

2. (b) In 1586, the English poet Spenser received a grant of 3028 acres in County Cork …

3. (d) The Norsemen began to ravage Ireland about the end of the eighth century.

4. (e) ‘This is the land of brave men and generous women,’ said the stranger.Footnote ³⁶

The historical image is a clearly gendered one, with women taking a set role as providers of food for politically active male leaders. Clearly, historical time and geographic space were prominent themes in what was ostensibly a language exam.Footnote ³⁷

Yet, for all their claims of recovering an ancient Irish essence and an ancient Irish space-time, there were still some remarkably ‘English’ elements at work in these Gaelic League activities. Valorising the life of rural peoples was a common trope in nineteenth-century British culture, as Elizabeth Helsinger has observed. Bucolic depictions of rural scenes evoked a sense of post-industrial loss and also served as a social glue for an increasingly class-divided capitalist society:

As Helsinger points out, this is ‘a rural life that is increasingly distant from the everyday experiences of British or English subjects. This transfer of meaning often brings with it a certain stylization: images and narratives are simplified and codified as they are staged, performed, and quoted for a national audience.’Footnote ³⁸ Gaelic Leaguers were clearly operating within these broader traditions of pastoral romance, idealising peasant peoples and holding them up as symbols of the nation while continuing, in the main, to live in urban, capitalist and anglophone Dublin.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the epigram to this paper – in which Boswell described his trip to the Hebrides with Dr Johnson as a trip through space and time – is almost a piece of Gaelic League-type rhetoric.

In his study of pre-Famine British travel writers, William H. A. Williams has shown how rural Ireland was seen as a repository of traditional culture and pre-modern life. The Irish countryside was a place in which present-day British tourists could experience the past come to life. Ancient Irish ruins embodied the purity of Gaelic culture. Ireland, particularly the western seaboard, was populated by ‘therapeutic peasant[s]’ whose simple life-styles provided ‘therapy for some bourgeois malaise’; ‘Coming from an increasingly urban, industrial society, some tourists wanted to imagine the Irish peasantry as untouched and unspoiled by materialism, leading simple lives untrammelled by modern complexities, pressures and discontents. This use of the host country to meet the visitor's psychological or spiritual needs was an important aspect of picturesque tourism.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Ireland was special and unique because it was, supposedly, pre-modern and outside of the space-time of industrial capitalism. Joep Leerssen has also noted the prevalence of romanticised and nostalgic literary depictions of a disappearing Gaelic Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. Leerssen understands this nostalgia in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of chronotype:

Leerssen talks about ‘an authentic, native Ireland which was stereotypically situated in the wilder parts of the countryside and among the native peasantry … the image of a Real Ireland which is partly situated in the past and partly in the peasantry.’ And he identifies these ideas in novels such as Sydney Owenson's The wild Irish girl (1806) in which the narrator ‘approaches Ireland as a strange uncouth country in a direction that takes him from the familiarity of his domestic English background to the increasing exoticism of the West of Ireland’.Footnote ⁴¹ In these novels, the supposedly pre-modern spaces of Gaelic Ireland are taken as a synecdoche for the nation as a whole.

This set of stereotypes of an idealised rural Ireland co-existed alongside the ‘sense that something was wrong with Ireland [which] permeated many of the travel narratives, especially in the last two decades before the Famine’.Footnote ⁴² And indeed, as Williams concludes, the Gaelic League was a continuation of this older imperialist discourse, both in its romance and in its sometimes barbed critiques of rural Ireland.Footnote ⁴³ Leerssen speaks similarly of Irish cultural nationalism as ‘a form of internalized exoticism’ based on a perception of ‘the alien alterity of the native Gaels’Footnote ⁴⁴ and elsewhere identifies pre-existing stereotypes of the rural Irish as part of the ‘pre-history of Irish nationalism’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Gaelic League's desire to know the spaces of the Gaeltacht and to subtly remake them also drew on the legacy of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846. Gillian Doherty has placed the Ordnance Survey in the context of modernisation projects in which ‘Governments developed sophisticated information networks for more effective control of population and for better regulation of resources.’Footnote ⁴⁶ She goes on to identify the major concerns of this project; a recovery of Ireland's ancient topography, a romanticisation of ‘primitive’ people believed to be untouched by modernity, and a desire to tap into the authentic culture of rural Ireland. Doherty concludes that the Ordnance Survey ‘had profound implications for [Irish] nationality’, acting as a ‘peripatetic university’ that imparted these various concerns about nationalist time and space to a popular audience.Footnote ⁴⁷ Certainly the Gaelic League was working with all of these ideas and practices some seventy years later.Footnote ⁴⁸ The command to use only supposedly authentic Irish place names was itself a product of the Ordnance Survey project, which had produced the definitive lists of these place names. That early nineteenth-century project –combining mapping with naming – was imbued with both colonial power and political imagination, as Cóilín Parsons has recently discussed.Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise, reverting to the supposedly original names was a way to (re-)assert Irish power over the spaces of Ireland and to begin to imagine what a politically and culturally de-anglicised Ireland would look and feel like. This is hinted at in William Bulfin's 1907 cycling travelogue, Rambles in Éirinn, in which he complained about ‘un-Irish’ place-names that were not related to the actual environment.Footnote ⁵⁰ But there were also influences from further afield.

The cultural revival, as well as the political ferment that would culminate in 1916, took place in the broader context of Europe's era of colonial expansion. Irish nationalism was unsurprisingly influenced by this contemporary colonialist atmosphere. The ‘building of nations’, Eric Hobsbawm once said, is ‘inevitably a process of expansion’.Footnote ⁵¹ And indeed Arthur Griffith, to give one example, pined for a time when Ireland would ‘be placed in a position to influence the cultivation and progress of less-advanced nations, and to form colonies of its own’.Footnote ⁵² Hobsbawm claims that it is the absence of expansionism that makes Irish nationalism an ‘anomaly’.Footnote ⁵³ But what if we consider the manner in which ‘Ireland’ expands out from Dublin, and other urban locations, and colonises the rural spaces of the island in a process of informal and internal colonialism? Giulia Bruna has recently examined the ways in which revivalist travel literature employed a number of spatial tropes ‘reminiscent of the stereotypical constructions present in certain imperial and colonial travel writing’, particularly the sexualised trope of a virginal and unspoilt land awaiting the touch of a modernising ruler.Footnote ⁵⁴ A diverse array of revivalist-era writers spoke of Gaeltacht residents as being ‘sturdily primitive’ or, as Edith Somerville and Martin Ross said in an 1895 essay, as having ‘a way of their own … like the Indians’ and ‘an air of a foreign race and of an earlier century’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Bruna situates all of this in the contemporary context of European imperial expansion.Footnote ⁵⁶ It certainly seems relevant that Gaelic Leaguers were taking trips to the ‘primtive’ or ‘timeless’ spaces of the Gaeltacht at the precise time when major European powers were expanding into Africa, somewhat similarly coded as ‘primitive’.

There was certainly a coercive edge to Irish nationalist utopianism and the tension between ‘the real Ireland’ and Ireland as it would be once it was reformed and made more masculine and modern. Prominent Gaelic Leaguer and future Free State education minister Eoin MacNeill, for instance, believed alcoholism was rife in Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands and went so far as to claim that ‘the custom of treating [buying drinks for others] was established in Ireland by the English settlers – and not by the brave Normans, but by the planter hordes who came over in later times. It will therefore be a step in the direction of Irish-Ireland when we succeed to any degree in getting rid of this foreign custom.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The lexicographer Patrick Dinneen took a similar view, stating that typical Irish villages were ‘the dullest place[s] in the world, with no library or reading room, no amusements of a rational or national kind; nothing but public houses and the accompanying evil’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, both Dinneen and MacNeill sought to reform the Gaeltacht and rural Ireland and to make the residents fit an image of manly sobriety. And for MacNeill, the prohibition of alcohol would also serve to undo the English conquest which had supposedly first imported alcoholism. There was a coercive edge to these Gaelic League visions of rural Ireland.

A similar desire for coercive social reform surfaced in one of the most curious publications of the Gaelic League, their 1905 pamphlet Simple advice: to be followed by all who desire the good of Ireland, and especially by Gaelic Leaguers. Ranging across eight pages of disjointed non-sequiturs, the pamphlet offered advice for achieving a more ordered and hygienic vision of agricultural life, the need to maintain cleanliness, how to move one's body and the need for proper respect for class hierarchies. Men were urged to embrace sobriety and hard work whilst women should avoid ‘work unsuited to their sex’. Women should also be sure to dress ‘like a civilised human being’, and not ‘like a wild Indian’.Footnote ⁵⁹ There was perhaps also a quasi-colonial desire for control of the periphery at work here.Footnote ⁶⁰

In his famous study of Peasants into Frenchmen, Eugen Weber notes how French city-dwellers regularly saw rural peasants as ‘savages’ with superstitious beliefs and in need of something approaching a state-run civilising mission. In his concluding chapter, Weber argues that ‘The famous hexagon can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over the centuries: a complex of territories conquered, annexed, and integrated in a political and administrative whole, many of them with strongly developed national or regional personalities, some of them with traditions that were specifically un- or anti-French.’ By 1870 the process of francophone centralisation, Weber goes on, ‘had produced a political entity called France – kingdom or empire or republic – an entity formed by conquest and by political or administrative decisions formulated in (or near) Paris’. Weber's conclusion, with some changes in names, if not also dates, could be applied to Ireland around the turn of the century: ‘The modern view of the nation as a body of people united according to their own will and having certain attributes in common (not least history) was at best dubiously applicable to the France of 1870.’ The French (and the Irish) may have felt themselves to be a single nation, but this was little more than an abstraction. As Weber observes, quoting Karl Deutsch: ‘Conquest is a necessary stage on the road to nationalism’.Footnote ⁶¹ Rural peoples have to be forcibly incorporated into the urban project of nationalism.

Joep Leerssen has argued that there was ‘very little’ in the way of an urban civilising mission in Ireland, claiming instead that what was much more prominent in nineteenth-century cultural relations was quite the opposite of a top-down civilising offensive: ‘the high culture of the Anglo-Irish elite seeks to rejuvenate and energize itself through an osmosis with the unspoilt, primitive energy and ebullience of native low culture’.Footnote ⁶² Leerssen, though, misses an important subtlety here; it is not just that cultural nationalists hoped to energise themselves with Gaelic peasant ebullience. They also sought to reform and remake the Gaeltacht, to make its poor, rural residents fit their ideals of an ancient and primitive but powerful remnant of the originary Gaelic national essence. There was a civilising mission at work here, beneath a thick veneer of nationalist rhetoric.Footnote ⁶³

For sure, the idea that the Gaeltacht's residents were still a backward people in need of coercive reform did not always sit easily with the Gaelic League's spatial utopianism, but this is only a superficial paradox. Utopianism has an inherent potential to slip into coercion and even colonialism. Colonialism, Gabriel Piterberg has warned, ‘is always potentially present in utopian literature, even though this does not mean that each and every utopian text is perforce colonial’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, David Harvey, though politically amenable to utopian projects, still cautions that ‘Imaginative free play is inextricably bound to the existence of authority and restrictive forms of governance … utopianism rests in part on an acute awareness of its inner connection to authoritarianism and totalitarianism.’Footnote ⁶⁵ To imagine a better world is often also to imply that the current world should be forced to live up to that utopian vision. To imagine an idealised Gaeltacht is to desire that the space and its residents be forced to live up to those ideals.

The residents of the Gaeltacht may have been valorised as an ideal vision of the Irish nation, but that also meant that the Gaelic League could often take a coercive tack in attempting to force the Gaels to fit these idealised archetypes. Actions such as these reinforced the Gaelic Leaguers’ own self-perception as healthy and civilised, modern men (and sometimes women), whilst also putting forward a set of proper national ideals for those rural-dwellers seen as most in need of it. The Gaelic League served to reinforce nationalists’ spatial control over the rural periphery, something that approached being a kind of internal colonialism.Footnote ⁶⁶

Oscillating between utopian dreams of the future whilst still allowing certain colonial tropes, practices and pre-existing norms to go unquestioned, is a commonplace in postcolonial nationalism. Perry Anderson recently observed that Indian nationalism, since 1947 at least, has been defined by an attitude of ‘what empire has joined, let no man put asunder’.Footnote ⁶⁷ When it comes to spatial awareness – the borders of the nation, the internal divisions of the nation, where the nation fits in a broader global system – postcolonial nationalisms show a marked willingness to accept the maps laid down by the previous colonial powers. Rachel Havrelock has pointed out the irony of Zionists and Palestinian nationalists ‘absorb[ing] the British imperial map’ of Israel-Palestine, and making it part of their respective national mythologies, notwithstanding that the borders of the ancient Land of Israel-cum-Palestinian homeland are those drawn by the British Government's Palestine Exploration Fund at the end of the nineteenth century. Havrelock makes the case that one of the functions of ‘national lore’ is that it ‘domesticates the lines drawn across the world by empires’.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Indian historian Partha Chatterjee has identified anti-colonial nationalism's tendency to create ‘its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power’. As such, Chatterjee suggests, ‘the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This focus on liberatory acts of nationalist imagination does not sit easily with Chatterjee's earlier identification of postcolonial nationalist thought as a ‘derivative discourse’, in India and elsewhere, one that never broke free from the political epistemologies imposed by the West.Footnote ⁷⁰ Manu Goswami has criticised Chatterjee on this point, claiming that Chatterjee ends up positing a pure, if imaginary, nationalist space uninfected by the colonial encounter.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet, it seems that the contradiction is less in the analyses of Chatterjee than in postcolonial nationalism itself. Nationalists will regularly seek to construct spaces freed from the rule of the coloniser, but that remains an unfinished project; colonial structures of thought remain inescapable. Early twentieth-century Irish nationalism certainly fits this bill; Irish attitudes towards the national space were never ‘forged in a space of cultural autonomy’, rather they were also a product of ‘the inherited economic cartography of colonial space’.Footnote ⁷² Goswami has also spoken of the ‘family resemblance’ between postcolonial nationalisms, which belies the ‘specific state strategies, political cultures, and institutional complexes’ and the various claims about national uniqueness.Footnote ⁷³ How Irish nationalists perceived the national space, moved through it, and claimed a singular sovereignty over it, were remarkably similar to other contemporary national movements.

Remarkably similar ideas about space certainly animated the activities and ideas of Zionism, another national movement gestating at the turn of the century. I have elsewhere argued for the shared similarities of Irish nationalism and Zionism.Footnote ⁷⁴ Both ideologies emerged on the literal and cultural borders of Europe. Both sought to create more idealised visions of their national selves that would refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes. And notwithstanding the radically different situations in turn-of-the-century Ireland and Ottoman Palestine, both saw spatial control as central planks of the nationalist project.

Jews were perhaps the spatially undefined people par excellence and Zionism sought to create a spatially coherent nation-state to end the anomalous condition of what one historian terms the Diaspora's ‘infinite temporal and spatial permutations’.Footnote ⁷⁵ And the tactics engaged in by Zionists – tourism as a way to prove ownership and the demand that ‘native’ Hebrew names be used – were often remarkably similar to those of Irish nationalists. And just as in Ireland, this focus on Jewish ownership of Palestine was again a vehicle for gendered and regenerative projects.Footnote ⁷⁶

This, of course, was hugely complicated by the undeniable presence of the Palestinian Arabs, themselves also coming into a strongly felt sense of national consciousness.Footnote ⁷⁷ Where Irish nationalists had to prove their ownership of the national space to themselves as much as to others, Zionists had to deny the presence of the Palestinians as part of their spatial project. Zionist utopianism certainly manifested itself in a recognisably colonialist format. Palestine was ‘imagined empty’ (or at least without real owners) by the Zionists, ‘in order to start a new world from scratch’, which quickly became a denial of the Palestinians and their political rights. Irish nationalist utopianism had its own potential for coercion, even if the coercion remained more verbal than physical. Indeed, comparing Irish nationalist and Zionist attitudes to space points to both the possibilities and the limits of ‘settler colonialism’, an increasingly popular paradigm for scholarly analyses of the Zionist project and its attitudes towards space. If all national movements share some kind of obsession with space, and if this has an intimate link to gender norms and race, then, in the case of Zionism, it is worth asking where the ‘nationalism’ ends and the ‘settler-colonialism’ begins.

Additionally, Zionists had to change the popular Jewish conception of the Land of Israel (moving from the perception that it was the Holy Land to embracing it as a partially secularised national homeland).Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet, some of the early Zionists were undoubtedly also intrigued by Arabs. They ‘looked up to the local Palestinian-Arabs and mimicked the Arab way of life in the hope of reinventing themselves and creating a new Jewish culture inspired by their image’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Certainly, where Irish nationalists may have engaged in a certain kind of verbal violence towards the Gaels, Zionists practised real existing violence. This Irish–Israeli comparison can certainly only go so far. The Irish nationalists, of course, were relatively successful in quickly incorporating the Gaels into the national project, whereas the Palestinians were never incorporated into the Israeli nation: they were ultimately too different and, of course, Zionism went against their own emerging sense of Palestinian national identity. But what appears to be a glaring difference from the perspective of the twenty-first century should not distract from some intriguing similarities at the start of the twentieth century. Much like how Zionists sought to prove that they constituted a ‘normal’ nation by taking control of the spaces of Palestine, so also Irish nationalists sought to prove their national normality through a spatial power and through a power exercised over the rural dwellers of the Gaeltacht. For at least some early Zionists, the Palestinians played a role that was cautiously comparable to the role the residents of the Gaeltacht played for Irish nationalists; an earthy peasant people, rooted in the soil of the homeland as well as being rooted in the time of the national past. Both male Palestinian fellahin and the men of the Gaeltacht were said to lead a free and unrepressed life. And in both cases, utopianism mixed with the quasi-colonialist idea that Zionists and Irish nationalists had a right coercively to reform these people. The results were undoubtedly different, but in both cases, Irish nationalism and Zionism were animated by similar ideas of space, power and identity.Footnote ⁸⁰

The spatial focus of Irish nationalism continued after the achievement of formal independence in the twenty-six counties in 1922. Jason Knirck has pointed to the continued prevalence of the idea that a sovereign Gaelic state would emerge after independence as well as the lack of a consensus as to what this actually meant.Footnote ⁸¹ And, as Philip O'Leary has shown, the notion that Gaelachas (Irishness) could only be experienced in the Gaeltacht lasted well into the Free State period and was ‘By no means a minority or extreme position’. The Gaeltacht remained ‘a site of mandatory pilgrimage for those wishing to begin the long process of attaining authentic Gaelachas’.Footnote ⁸² With tellingly religious language, O'Leary calls this ‘the orthodox glorification of the Gaeltacht’.Footnote ⁸³

Such orthodoxy certainly bubbled to the surface in the work of the 1925 Gaeltacht Commission. The assumption that Irish remained a rural language animated the work of the commission and the thinking on language continued to be defined by geography, with it being assumed that into the future Irish speakers would only reside in the delimited rural spaces of the Gaeltacht. The commission's published report talked about the Gaeltacht as being, ideally, a spatially coherent and homogeneously Irish-speaking region, as well as one from which Gaelic culture, if not Gaelic language, could be slowly propagated to the rest of Ireland. Suggested economic developments were mainly in the areas of agriculture, with only a brief mention of industrialisation.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was a region that should remain pastoral and untouched. It was the home of the ‘best of our race’ with the inference that this section of the ‘race’ should remain embedded in the bucolic spaces of the Gaeltacht.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Nuala Johnson has noted, the commission sought to inscribe the Gaeltacht as an exemplar of nationalist ‘poetic space’, unindustrialised and the ‘synecdoche of Irish identity’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Criticisms of the Gaeltacht Commission which drew attention to the harsh realities of the western seaboard, and thus away from idealised visions, were curiously censored. In a note to the government, Craobh na gCúig Cúigi (The Branch of the Five Provinces), a Dublin-based branch of the Gaelic League, demanded that the recommendations of the Gaeltacht Commission be implemented immediately ‘chun an Gaedhealtacht a shábháil’ (‘to save the Gaeltacht’). This pessimistic phrase was omitted in the English translation of the note.Footnote ⁸⁷

The members of the Gaelic League, mainly drawn from the aspirational classes,Footnote ⁸⁸ were clearly invested in questions of space and the disciplined urban control of rural space. Such questions of space and nationalist geographies were present in the most seminal moments of early twentieth century Irish nationalism: the O'Donovan Rossa funeral, the selective ways in which the control of central Dublin during 1916 was remembered, the War of Independence, the Treaty debates and the Civil War. Footnote ⁸⁹ Uncovering these spatial obsessions also raises important questions about broader issues of capitalism, colonialism, and governmentality as well as gender, race, and class. More than that, teasing out the spatial logics of Irish nationalism lends itself to a comparative analysis with other, equally spatially-focused, nationalist ideologies, such as Zionism and Indian nationalism. As John Maher has observed, in a recent comparative study of Irish, Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, ‘territory is never far from nationalist thoughts’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Space is at the heart of Irish nationalism.