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The Cultural Effects of the Famine

October 2018

Authors:

Kevin Whelan

University of Notre Dame

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The cultural effects of the Famine

kevin whelan

Introduction

This chapter shows how the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 was the sin-

gle most important event in Ireland in the modern period. In European

terms, famine had become an increasingly remote event, and that Ire-

land 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 govern-

ment policies, designed as much to appease British opinion and to pro-

mote social engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. Over 1 million

people died and 2 million more emigrated within a decade: the pop-

ulation of the island halved by 1900, the result of endemic emigra-

tion by young people, delayed marriages and abnormally high rates of

celibacy.

The Famine therefore marked a watershed 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 exam-

ples include Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League in 1879, and

Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884. They

137

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138 Kevin Whelan

belonged to a generation that sought to reshape Ireland in fundamen-

tal ways following the Famine and the hollowing-out of indigenous Irish

culture.

Inthischapter,Iexplore a sequence of these responses –the devotional

revolution, the decline of the caoineadh (keen), dance and hurling –and

discuss these in the context of the memory of the Famine. I conclude with

an exploration of the concept of radical memory. The devotional revo-

lution is a term used by historians to describe the startling transforma-

tion within Irish Catholicism that occurred within a generation of the

Famine. An entirely revamped religious practice hardened into a power-

fuland rigid cultural formation that essentially remained intact for overa

century,only slowly dissolving from the 1960s onwards. While most com-

mentators describe this cultural formation as ‘traditional’ Irish Catholi-

cism, it was in fact a new form, which belongs to modernising rather than

archaic forces within Irish society, and which was dependent on the cul-

turalcarnage ofthe Faminefor its emergence. Commentaries that neglect

this deeper history in favour of a foreshortened version run serious risks

of distortion and shallowness.

A more speciﬁc account of the cultural changes induced by the Famine

can be provided by looking at the fortunes of the caoineadh (keen), the

demise of which demonstrates the drastically altered status of Irish

women and of oral culture in post-Famine Ireland. Both dance and

sport also witnessed dramatic changes in the last quarter of the nine-

teenth century, changes which could readily be slotted into an ‘invention

of tradition’ model. However, in Ireland these inventions offer radical

rather than conservative possibilities, sharply distinguishing Irish cul-

tural practice at this time from elsewhere in Europe. The concept of rad-

ical memory provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding

these processes. The larger point is that it is dangerous to simply import

models generated from the historical experience of other cultures and to

apply them unmodiﬁed to the Irish scene. This is especially the case when

these models originate from metropolitan and imperial cultures.

The devotional revolution

The Famine accelerated the transformation of the Catholic church in Ire-

land. In the pre-Famine period, a vernacular Catholicism had established

deep roots among those social formations that the Famine would deci-

mate. This vernacular inheritance evolved organically within an agrarian

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The cultural effects of the Famine 139

society, its ritual rhythm dominated by calendar custom and inhabit-

ing a numinous landscape of holy wells and pilgrimage sites like Croagh

Patrick and Lough Derg. In this cultural matrix, behaviour was regulated

by custom and tradition: central religious events were the rites of passage

and communal occasions that included the pattern, wake and station.

The trauma of the Famine, the associated decline of vernacular religion

and popular culture and the erosion of the Irish language created a cul-

tural vacuum that was ﬁlled by the more ritualistic practices associated

with the devotional revolution –the institutionalisation of mass-going,

new devotional practices such as novenas, forty-hour devotions and the

exposition of the host.

Thisdevotionalrevolutionwas made possible by a formidable increase

in plant and personnel and a tightening of internal discipline, which in

turn acted as the basis of a transformation in popular religious practice.

A surge in mass attendance, an increasingly exhibitionist architectural

display and a stricter social discipline were all part of the revolution. Irish

Catholicism became more public, more assertive, more Roman in charac-

ter, as the institutional church eclipsed its vernacular predecessor. The

devotional revolution therefore represented the triumph of a canonical

belief-system over older informalities. Its success was seen in the spread

of churches, convents, schools, orphanages and hospitals. Irish Catholi-

cismbecame a crucial bearer of order and identity in a nineteenth-century

world of unprecedented ﬂux, accelerated by the devastatingimpact of the

Famine and selective emigration. These simultaneously obliterated the

demographic base of vernacular Catholicism in the Irish poor and fatally

weakened the older particularistic cultural formations rooted in the Irish

language.

The devastation wreaked by the Famine strengthened the church’s

hand in imposing its modernising crusade. Catholicism invaded the

vacated cultural space and solved an identity crisis by offering a pow-

erful surrogate language of symbolic identity in which Irishness and

‘Catholicism’ were seen as reciprocal and congruent. The symbiosis of

‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ was strengthened, and religion articulated an artiﬁ-

cial, symbolic language of identity to replace the living one being swept

away by famine, emigration and jolting socio-cultural transformations.

The institutional Catholic church could also take advantage of the more

homogenised post-Famine social structure, as the pre-Famine potato

people –the bruscair an bhaile (or trash of the town, as one Catholic

shopkeeper in pre-Famine Ireland put it) –with their vigorous popular

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140 Kevin Whelan

culture, were decimated and demoralised. The church injected a new

social discipline of respectability.

Agrowing political rapprochement with nationalist politicians

cemented an unusually cohesive marriage of church and nation. These

developments were stiffened by the post-Famine institutionalisation of

the church and by the surge of self-conﬁdence it got from involvement

in the creation of an Irish Catholic spiritual empire overseas. The new

Irish identity was exported to the Irish diaspora, making Irish Catholi-

cism an epiphyte on empire in the English-speaking world. At the First

Vatican Council of 1867–70, 30 per cent of the 730 bishops were either

Irish or of Irish descent. The novelist, Canon Sheehan, noted in 1881:

‘Wherever the mightier race has gone, the weaker race has followed and

established a spiritual empire coterminous with that political empire.’1

The College of All Hallows, established to educate missionaries in 1842,

had 1,500 alumni by 1900. By the 1880s, the Christian Brothers operated

in China and in Calcutta and the Loreto Sisters in Madras. The Society of

African Missions was founded in 1877. These global pretensions within

Irish Catholicism intensiﬁed markedly after the founding of the Free

State. The Maynooth Mission to China (established in 1911, with its Col-

lege built in 1918) extended to the Philippines in 1929, to Korea in 1933,

and to Burma in 1936. The Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of the Rosary

(ministering in Nigeria) were founded in 1924, followed by the Medical

Missionaries of Mary (also based in Nigeria) in 1937. By 1964, there were

over 6,000 Irish missionaries. A heroic historiography also allowed Irish

Catholicism to envisage itself as the historical, psychic and functional

core of the Irish experience, thereby seamlessly linking itself with the

national identity.

In Ireland, as population fell, the number of clergy rose. By the early

twentieth century, the Irish priest–people ratio, at 1:1,100, was the low-

est in the world. Between 1800 and 1900, the number of nuns increased

from 120 to 8,000. This vocational surge also ensured the marginalisa-

tion of the laity within the power structures of the church itself, even at

atime when that laity was becoming more pious. By 1861, only 146 peo-

ple (including deists and atheists) claimed to have no religious afﬁliation.

In post-Famine Ireland, religious afﬁliation increasingly became a surro-

gate for national identity as the effective agent of communal solidarity.

Linked to a shared experience of marginalisation, this clerical-nationalist

alliance could also transcend and neutralise class division as a basis of

political action.

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The cultural effects of the Famine 141

The keen

Afurther result of the Famine was to alter the Gaelic tradition of grieving

the dead. The high mortality rate made people callous towards death. In

these appalling circumstances, death itself –or at least its social signif-

icance –died. Talking about the demise of the caoineadh,anobserver in

Clare noted that ‘especially since the Famine of 1848, the practice has not

been much in use. The innumerable deaths which at that time had daily

taken place, together with the hunger and destitution which prevailed

throughout the country deprived the people in fact of that natural feel-

ing and regard which they were wont to have for the dead.’2

WhileGaelic culture was still vibrant and intact, two styles of caoineadh

coexisted. One was formal and literary, composed retrospectively, utilis-

ing a long line containing a regular number of natural speech stresses.3

These intricate and sophisticated compositions (like the celebrated

eighteenth-century lament poem Caoineadh Airt U´ıLaoghaire)were a val-

ued component of the Gaelic repertoire, with a venerable literary geneal-

ogy. The second style of caoineadh was more informal, improvised and

extempore, using a restricted metre with one stress per line.4By the mid

nineteenth century, the literary tradition had almost entirely collapsed,

and the oral caoineadh was all that survived.

The caoineadh furnished formal and public acknowledgements of

women’s responsibility for the ceremonies of death as well as for birth.

It functioned as a transition ceremony, a cathartic, therapeutic theatreof

death, which explored both the emotional experience of loss and the nec-

essary continuity of the surviving community. The carnival quality of the

wake wasaprecise response to this liminal ambiguity. Far from being the

‘wild and inarticulate uproar’ heard by outsiders, the caoineadh was struc-

tured, rhythmic and orchestrated, utilising iterative procedures drawn

from a rich formulaic repertoire, composed in performance and adhering

to strict metre. While the pre-existing compositional vocabulary struc-

tured it, there was ﬂexibility of improvisation within it.

Because the caoineadh waspre-eminently a woman’s genre, it could

code gendered rhetorics of resistance within the mourning formalities.

It could also give a direct voice to marital strife and conﬂicts between

kin groups, precisely because the wake brought the two families together

physically, and because the shock of death exposed or released raw emo-

tional states. Exchanges between priests and women-keeners are fre-

quently recorded. While robust exchanges between poets and priests

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142 Kevin Whelan

were frequent in the eighteenth century, there wasa deal of intimacy and

respectbetween thetwo in the Gaelictradition. However,once the church

began to distance itself from the tradition and once the devotional rev-

olution took hold, a new sense of distance between priests and people

emerged. Because it was women’s work and rooted in a vernacular cul-

ture of expression and structure of feeling, the caoineadh wasopposed by

the institutional church.

If the keen was anathema to a modernising, institutional church

determined on obliterating its vernacular competitor, it also occupied a

prominent position in British attacks on Gaelic culture, as a consistent

signiﬁer of Ireland’s cultural and political incivility. In one account, the

keen is compared to ‘the counterfeit and barbarous clamour of howling

savages that would disgrace the funeral of a Hottentot or the obsequies

of a native of Otaheite [Tahiti]’.5The keen was thus assessed as a bar-

baric mark of primitivism, an animal howl inhabiting the ambiguous

borderlands between nature and culture; a sinister sound which embod-

ied the strange danger of Irish emotion in all its raw and violent excess.

Its affront to the canon of polite taste was all the more unsettling in that

it had a formulaic, ritualistic and even professional dimension (in the

case of keening women). This affect was heightened by the keen’s the-

atrical performance of emotion, which signiﬁed Gothic Catholic excess

as opposed to Protestant privacy and inwardness in response to grief.

The shocking coexistence within the wake of laughter and lament, of a

wildly oscillating emotional register, came to signal Celtic inconsistency,

the lack of the fully formed, regulated, rational personality of civil Anglo-

Saxon society.

This ethical critique focused obsessively on the mouth, the vector

of oral culture, insistently envisaged as lax and unstable –the site of

drunkenness, sedition and the excessive emotion of the keen. Hence

arose the concern to impose the Kantian hierarchy of the sense –to

promote the distantiated and objectifying eye and ear in place of the

proﬂigate immediacy, the inferior taste of the mouth. The anglicisation

of Ireland in the nineteenth century required a reordering of the Irish

senses, the acquisition of the stiff upper lip in place of raucous loose talk.

This newly disciplined Irish body could then participate in the forma-

tion of a new ethical subject –rational, self-interested and above all con-

sistent. The overlap of the political and emotional economy is nowhere

so transparent as in this discourse. In her convent boarding school at

Bruff in CountyLimerick, Sissy O’Brien was struck by the nuns’ emphasis

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The cultural effects of the Famine 143

on strict silence, believing that she and her classmates would have been

‘lively and joyous, but for incessant repression and the haunting fear of

breaking rules, especially of breaking silence’.6

Dance and its transformations

In a culture of poverty, body language could offer joyous liberation, an

exuberant display of ﬂamboyant theatricality lifting out of the material

world. Dancing became a cultural statement, the somatic and kinetic

intelligence of which blended into a richly expressive vernacular art. The

accomplished traditional dancer rode the rhythm, consummately mas-

tering the movement. But s/he also oscillated along the porous bound-

ary between respect for tradition and an assertive individuality. For the

spectators, the attraction was the expressive tension between tradition

and the individual talent; the dancer, bound to the strictly prescribed

music, could also innovate within and against it. Where male and female

danced together, there was also sexual theatre –expressed through the

heavier ‘hit’ of the male dancer (culminating in the ‘batter’, heavy rhyth-

mic drumming with the full foot), counterpoised against the quicker,

buoyant step of the female performer. In the crowded social settings of

pre-Famine Ireland, the challenge and the spectacle was heightened by

the rigid limitations of space. The rich pre-Famine repertoire of Irish

dances involved the creative interplay between indigenous and exoge-

nous forms, resulting in popular hybrids like the ‘sets’ and ‘reels’ (an

Irish adaptation of the continental ‘quadrille’). The itinerant dancing

masters customised these new forms, translating them into a popular

idiom and then propagated them in their newly standardised forms

through their itinerant teaching circuit. Dance was a malleable, inher-

ently portable art form that could easily transfer from one place to

another.

The Catholic church turned against the robust tradition of dance,

becauseit could be free, intoxicating, spontaneousand sexual.It involved

close encounters between male and female and could occur in unregu-

lated spaces, like public houses and at cross-roads. Dance belonged to

the participants without mediators or masters. The church moved to

domesticate its wilder energies and to control the time and places of per-

formance. This occurred simultaneously with the increasing dominance

of industrial time (regulated by the clock) over agrarian time (regulated

by the daily and seasonal cycle). In the post-Famine period, the dance

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144 Kevin Whelan

tradition was leached of its vitality, exuberance and hybridity; like the

hedge schoolmaster, the dancing master was inexorably squeezed out as

the churches increasingly frowned on their activities.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a remarkable transforma-

tion occurred in Irish dance, spearheaded by Fion ´

an MacColuim.7

MacColuim, a clerk in the India Ofﬁce in London, ﬁtted the classic pro-

ﬁle of a nationalist intellectual. Active in the Gaelic League in London,

he was struck by the lack of a social dimension to the language move-

ment, especially as compared with the vigorous Scots c´eilithe nights he

saw in the city. Imitating the Scots model, he organised the ﬁrst Irish

c´eil´ıat Bloomsbury Hall in London in 1897. MacColuim was perturbed,

however, by the lack of variety in the Irish dances, and by the absence

of large-scale, rapidly moving dances, covering the entire ﬂoor space

of a hall that could involve everybody as participants rather than as

spectators. He then met an old Sliabh Luachra dancing master, Patrick

Reidy, who introduced him to a more extensive repertoire of Irish dances.

Thus encouraged, MacColuim accompanied Reidy on a collecting trip to

Ireland –drawn inevitably to Reidy’s native ground in Kerry, but also

attracted to the county as a bastion of ‘pure’ or literary Irish (as opposed

to the patois of Connemara, or the deplorably Scots-tainted Donegal

dialect). Thus, the ‘Highlanders’, ‘Lancers’ and ‘Flings’ of Donegal and

the sean-n ´

os (old style) dance style of Connemara were rejected in favour

of a Munster-based canon of Irish dance, just as ‘Munster’ Irish was

promoted as the canonical dialect by the (Munster-dominated) Gaelic

League.

This new canon of Irish dance involved a number of principles.

Invented group dances like ‘The Walls of Limerick’ and ‘The Siege of

Ennis’ were adapted as ideal for large social occasions, because they

involved large numbers and traversed the whole ﬂoor (unlike the tradi-

tional style, which valued the ability to ‘dance on a sixpence’ in tightly

restricted domestic space). The stepping style was simpliﬁed and rigid-

iﬁed to eliminate the vulgar batter (seen as English clog dancing in dis-

guise) and to curtail ﬂamboyance (as in the theatrical arm-ﬂailing of the

Connemara style). The tempo of the music was also slowed, to create a

more stately, reﬁned style. The distaste for the batter was also because

of its raw male sexual libido, an insistent theatrical performance of mas-

culinity, displayed in covert competition with other males.

These developments were linked to the movement away from

‘house’ and ‘cross-roads’ dances to hall-based c´eilis,amoveapproved and

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The cultural effects of the Famine 145

promoted by the Catholic clergy, and culminating in the Dance Hall Act

of 1935. This effectively outlawed house dances (allegedly on hygiene

grounds, more accurately on moral hygiene grounds). Hall settings could

be much more tightly supervised, as opposed to house dances –espe-

cially once the car introduced a new form of mobility for what Cardi-

nal MacRory in 1931 saw as urban sexual predators –‘unsuitables from

adistance’. The Carrigan Commission of 1931 attributed great moral per-

ils to ‘the opportunities afforded by the misuse of motor cars for luring

girls’. The impact of the 1935 Act was draconian, making it practically

impossible to hold dances without the sanction of the trinity of clergy,

police and judiciary. Both the setting as well as the style of the new

Irish dances acted to dampen down sexuality. The invented dance style

waspurposely asexual, involving minimal physical contact, as opposed

to the full-blooded, full-frontal engagement of, for example, the tradi-

tional sets. This evolution from passion to pallor, from erotic to neu-

rotic, almost buried the existing forms. Increasingly, and predictably,the

new form appealed most to pre-pubescent children, a development aided

by the Gaelic League-sponsored dancing schools in the 1920s. This had

three repercussions: insistence on Irish language competence as a prereq-

uisite for teaching excluded the last of the old-style dancing masters; a

competitive element was introduced which increasingly conﬁned danc-

ing to the stage rather than the dance ﬂoor; a new costume-culture was

invented, elaborately ‘Celtic’ in style, making the children look as if they

had been ‘bespattered by the Book of Kells’8(while an added reﬁnement

of pinning on medals won in competition gave them the incongruous

look of retired ﬁeld marshals).

Hurling

The writing of Irish cultural history has tended to focus excessively on

high culture, usually from a political perspective. Historians mesmerised

by high politics and literary scholars preoccupied by the high deeds of

Yeats and Joyce have spared little time to researching the broader cultural

dynamic of sport within Irish culture. In this section, I take the example

of hurling in an effort to write sport back into cultural history and try to

broaden and deepen the appropriate contexts in which to consider the

role of sport in post-Famine Ireland.

By the eighteenth century, there were two principal and regionally

distinct versions of hurling. ‘Commons’ was akin to the modern Scottish

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146 Kevin Whelan

game of shinty: it did not allow handling of the ball which was wooden

and hard; it used a narrow-bladed crooked stick. A winter game, it was

played by both Presbyterians and Catholics and it was conﬁned to the

northern third of the island, especially Antrim, Derry and Donegal. B´

aire

or iom ´

an, the second version, was by contrast a summer game of south-

ern provenance. The soft animal hair ball (the sliotar) could be handled

or carried on the hurl, which was ﬂat and round headed. Unlike ‘com-

mons’, this version was extensively patronised by the landed gentry as

aspectator and gambling sport. The gentry formed and captained the

teams, issued the challenges, supplied the hurling greens and supervised

the matches. These gentry hurlers were especially active in Cork, Tip-

perary, Kilkenny, Wexford and Galway. This game required level, well-

drained pitches of the type especially found in limestone areas which also

produced abundant ash, the best material for making hurls.

Landlord patronage was essential to the southern game. But the

impact of the French Revolution, which sharpened class and political

divides, and the spread of metropolitan behavioural norms, eroded the

landlords’ local loyalties. The Famine also accelerated the decline of

hurling from its mid-eighteenth-century heyday, when the game had

been sponsored by the landed gentry. Post-1798, the gentry withdrew

their patronage and the game degenerated into crudity. A modernising

Catholic middle class abandoned the game as an embarrassing vestige

of a past from which they wished to distance themselves. This mod-

ernising thrust was also aided by the impact of Fr Matthew’s temper-

ance campaign, whose ‘moral revolution’ (as described by the German

traveller Johan Georg Kohl in 1842) seconded O’Connell’s political one.

Both stressed the utilitarian, progressive strand of the Enlightenment,

and both were hostile to popular culture and to non-respectable forms of

behaviour.

After the Famine, faced with both gentry and Catholic disap-

proval, the game survived precariously in three isolated pockets: in

east Galway (the Gort–Ardrahan–Kinvara area), around Cork city (the

Aglish–Carrigaline area) and north of Wexford harbour (the Blackwater–

Skreen–Castlebridge area). This precipitous collapse had other causes

besides the Famine. In the late 1830s, commentators in Killarney

and Kilkenny recorded the explicit hostility of Catholic priests to the

game. Attacks on the game by anglicising Catholic clergy, by sab-

batudinarians and by magistrates who feared its crowd-gathering and

therefore subversive potential contributed to the sharp decline. This

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The cultural effects of the Famine 147

formed part of the rapid anglicisation of Irish culture in the sec-

ond quarter of the nineteenth century, which saw the Catholic mid-

dle classes engaging in a precipitate retreat from vernacular cultural

forms, a retreat conducted at a break-neck speed unprecedented in

nineteenth-century Europe. Lacking support and controlling inﬂu-

ence, the games disintegrated, allowing priests to demonise them as

immoral and disreputable displays of atavism, occasions of violence,

drunkenness and the promiscuous mingling of the sexes. The oppro-

brious term cail´ın b ´

aire (hurling girl) evolved to mean a girl of loose

morals. Thus, in hurling, as with faction ﬁghts, patterns, wakes, the

keen, the priests intervened to quell robust expressions of vernacular

culture.

Police and magistrates also intervened. The veteran Fenian Jeremiah

O’Donovan Rossa claimed that magistrates forbade hurling and that he

had personally witnessed police setting out to halt a match.9To this trin-

ity of landlord, parish priest and policeman could be added the ﬁgure of

the strong farmer, as the key agent who sounded the death knell of hurl-

ing. The game did not die; it was killed. The Young Irelander Michael

Doheny noted how the game was ‘fast dying away’ and identiﬁed cler-

ical distrust as a ﬁrst cause. But he then identiﬁed a second, and more

important factor: ‘the disinclination of the farmers to allow the hurling

ontheir grazing lands’.10 As the socially respectable withdrewthemselves

from participation, the game was kept alive by boys and the very poor.

Because meadows were increasingly unavailable, the game was literally

squeezed out into the roadside (where it assumed the dangerous form

of road hurling) or into the coarse countryside (where it declined into

scuaib´ın,arough and tumble cross-country scramble, devoid of the grace,

skill and discipline of its elegant predecessor).

It is against this vacuum that the work of Michael Cusack and the

Gaelic Athletic Association should be set. It ﬁts the scenario envis-

aged by Miroslav Hroch for the development of risorgimento national-

ism. This involveda tripartite sequence: initially recuperation of national

identity (history, language, folklore); then, the progressive reworking

of this by ideologists of nationalism and; ﬁnally, the transition from

cultural revival to political demands.11 A national community must be

nurtured, its identity carefully recuperated out of the shards of his-

tory, language and folklore. This new cultural vocabulary had then to

be inserted into a grammar of political action. In its redeﬁned form,

national culture could be harnessed to political demands. This sequence

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148 Kevin Whelan

required a number of social processes to underpin it: an increase in

the number of educated people (facilitated in Ireland by the National

School system); a dislocation in the settled sedentary culture (in Ireland,

the Famine and a traumatic language shift); a rise in mass commu-

nications (the penetration of print culture is a logistical imperative);

and cheap transport which made popular mobilisation possible (in Ire-

land, the railway system and the newspaper). If these social processes

combined with a political tendency towards the eclipse of empire, then

cultural nationalism is empowered. Janus-headed, it simultaneously

homogenised (stressing the unity of the Irish people) and differentiated

(stressing their distinctiveness from the British people). Nationalism

became a classifying protocol, which reordered relationships between

peoples.

While cultural nationalism underpinned the GAA at a macro-level, a

more pragmatic concern with codiﬁcation did so at a micro-level. The

Victorian period was the great era of sports codiﬁcation, both in the reg-

ulation of existing sports (Australian rules football in 1858, the English

FootballAssociation in 1863, the Queensberry rules in boxing in 1865) and

in the creation of new ones (Lawn Tennis in 1873, basketball in 1891). Ini-

tially, an English phenomenon based around the public schools, codiﬁ-

cation was rapidly exported to the empire and to the anglophone world.

Codiﬁcation eased the transition in sporting forms from rural to urban,

participating to spectating, and recreational to competitive. The rise of

mass spectator sports for urban consumption was facilitated by enhanced

spending power, the associated commercialisation of leisure, improved

communication networks and the invention of the weekend. Codiﬁca-

tion also linked to a new rhetoric of high moral purpose of character

building, the cult of masculinity and of racial stereotyping. This led to

asustained effort to organise and then control working-class sport and

to develop ‘national’ games. Baseball in the USA, rugby in New Zealand,

soccer in England and Australian Rules football in Australia emerged

almost simultaneously as national games.

Cusack explicitly visualised Gaelic games as a disciplined perfor-

mance of Irish masculinity, a calculated corrective to the Victorian car-

icature of the Irishman as a slouched simian brute, comic caperer or

childlike innocent. The robust physicality of the games symbolised and

performed a fully-developed masculine character, a recovery of the male

body from its emasculated and emaciated Famine forms. Cusack believed

that the post-Famine Irish male had internalised ‘degeneracy’. The body

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The cultural effects of the Famine 149

itself was now reinscribed politically and made explicit as a site of

renewal and rectiﬁcation. The Gaelic male speciﬁcally rejected corpo-

real colonialism, reshaping an Irish body politic as an antidote to dehu-

manisation, degeneracy and depoliticisation. The concepts of discipline,

organisation, tactics and self-control associated with the games strength-

ened military potential as powerful enactments of tactical solidarities,

patriotism and political muscle.

Cusack’s organisation of Gaelic games ﬁts neatly into the wider evo-

lution of European cultural nationalism and of the sports codiﬁcation

movement. The genius of Cusack was the welding of these two strands

together in an Irish context. He realised that the initial momentum

behind sports codiﬁcation in Ireland was emanating from Trinity Col-

lege and the Dublin public schools, and inﬁltrating the boat clubs, rugby,

hurling, athletics and cricket. In an era of the six-day working week,

the refusal to sanction games on Sunday was inevitably construed as an

anti-Catholic and anti-working-class manoeuvre, as was the insistence

on the ‘gentleman amateur’ ethos (patently modelled on English prece-

dents) which refused participationto ‘mechanics’ and ‘labourers’. Cusack

realised the need for a game for the Irish rural poor and especially the

labourer class; hurling and football could emancipate the small man

from the tyranny of the existing athletic clubs and thereby help in erod-

ing paternalism.

The shrewd application of the principle of territoriality was a crucial

element in the GAA’s success. The GAA met national and social needs

while retaining the territorial allegiances which imparted cohesion and

emotional solidarity to Irish rural life. Similar forces of territoriality have

been identiﬁed behind the success of rugby in the Welsh villages, cricket

in the West Indies,12 and rugby league in Yorkshire and Lancashire. In

Ireland, the games spread with astonishing rapidity. There were over

1,000 clubs by 1890 and the GAA is acknowledged by sports historians as

the most speedily and extensively established sporting organisation in

the world. In the absence of Cusack’s intervention, hurling might now

be an antiquarian footnote or a furtive survivor, like road bowls or cock

ﬁghting

From its inception in 1884, the GAA found itself in an intensely com-

petitive relationship with other sports, notably rugby and athletics. Cod-

iﬁcationwas deployed on an inter-sport, competitive principle.The 1880s

wasthe pre-eminent decade of codiﬁcation –of cricket, golf and ten-

nis, for example, when permanent sporting organisations and grounds

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150 Kevin Whelan

were established. The notorious GAA ‘Ban’ on participating in other

sportsevolvedin this context.13 Initially non-political, its aim was to force

players to declare their sole allegiance to the GAA for afﬁliation fees,

strengthening the fragile ﬁnancial base of the game. It was only later and

secondarily that the ‘Ban’ acquired its political purposes, before it was

ﬁnally rescinded in 1971.

Cusack and his GAA backers also used the game as a nationalising

idiom, a symbolic language of identity ﬁlling the void created by angli-

cisation. It had therefore to be sharply fenced off in organisational terms

from competing ‘anglicised’ sports like cricket, soccer and rugby. Thus,

from the beginning, the revived game had a nationalist veneer, its rules

bristling like a porcupine with protective nationalist quills on which

its perceived opponents would have to impale themselves. Its principal

backers were those already active in the nationalist political culture of the

time.Its spread depended on the active support of an increasingly nation-

alist Catholic middle class. Gaelic games received their greatest support

from those active in nationalist politics, especially the Irish Republican

Brotherhood (the Fenians). Gaelic games were a crucial conduit to that

mass backing which increasingly gave cultural nationalism its demo-

cratic mandate.

The spread of the new game also depended on the active support

of an increasingly nationalist Catholic middle class. The GAA’s social

base came especially from journalists, schoolteachers, clerks, priests and

publicans, the social constituency behind cultural nationalism across

nineteenth-century Europe. Thus hurling’s early success was in south

Leinster and east Munster, the same region which powered popular

nationalistmovements like DanielO’Connell’s campaign, the Devotional

Revolution in Irish Catholicism, Fr Matthew’s temperance campaign, the

Fenians, and the take-over of local government. The GAA was a classic

example of the radical conservatism of this region –conservative in its

ethos and ideology, radical in its techniques of organisation and mobil-

isation. The spread of hurling can be closely matched to the spread of

other radical conservative movements of this period, notably the diffu-

sion of the indigenous Catholic teaching orders and the spread of coop-

erative dairying.

Framed in a longer time perspective which embraces the eighteenth

century, the game of hurling represents a textbook example of Peter

Burke’s model of the relationship between European ´

elites and vernac-

ular cultures. The model of ´

elite participation in popular culture is a

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The cultural effects of the Famine 151

threefold process: ﬁrst immersion, then withdrawal and ﬁnally rediscov-

ery, invariably by an educated ´

elite, and often with a nationalist agenda.

‘Rediscovery’ involved an invention of tradition, creating a packaged,

homogenised and idealised popular culture. The relationship of hurling

and the newly established GAA in the 1880s shows this third phase with

textbook clarity. Looked at in this way, hurling can be envisaged as a clas-

sic example of ‘the invention of tradition’, but with the crucial distinc-

tion that its invention was deployed for radical rather than conservative

purposes, in constructing the nation as an imagined community. That

national consciousness itself had to be imagined, or constructed, and

then disseminated. In Ireland, it has been fashionable to denigrate the

fabricating impulse in that construction; it is equally valid to celebrate

its creativity and emancipatory potential, a creativity evident in Cusack’s

magniﬁcent obsession. Joyce’s focus in Ulysses on Cusack’s Cyclopean ﬁx-

ity relates to the later and embittered man when the initial creativity had

hardened into the sclerotic institutional structures of the GAA, overseen

by its ﬁrst generation of professional administrators.

In this achievement, hurling became a resonant symbolic language,

speaking from the space voided by the brutal dissolution inﬂicted on ver-

nacular forms by the Famine. If the games became a classic example of the

invention of tradition, the really signiﬁcant question becomes not how,

but against what was it invented? In the Irish case, the invention of tra-

dition was also an inversion, seeking to redress the bruising encounter

with colonialism, with its persistent hollowing effect on indigenous cul-

ture. In contrast to the conservative orientation of arguments centred on

the invention of tradition in Victorian Britain, memory in Ireland was

deployed for radical political purposes: a spur to agency, rather than a

prop to passivity.

Conclusion: radical memory

As we can see in all of these case studies, the recourse to the past in Ire-

land was deployed for radical political purposes. This stands in contrast

to the conservative orientation of arguments centred on the invention of

tradition in Victorian Britain. Cultural memory in the hands of activists

like Cusack and Davitt acted as a spur to agency rather than a prop to

passivity; they deployed the past in a radical way to challenge the present

andreshape the future, to restore into possibility historical moments that

had been blocked or unfulﬁlled earlier.14 There is more in the past than

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152 Kevin Whelan

simply what happened; at any given point in time, multiple trajectories

towards the future are open. Radical memory in the post-Famine period

deployeda prospective rather than anelegiac nostalgia, a nostalgia for the

future, not the past. This dialogue of cultural memory and expectation

keeps alive the memory of suffering and defeat against the obliterative

force of the victors’ narrative. Radical memory opens a space for a coun-

terpoint history. These post-Famine projects in their diverse ways treat

history as rememorative, seeking to write back in that which had been

erased or submerged. ‘Rememoration’, a term invented by Toni Morri-

son, displays an acute awareness that ‘the act of imagination is bound up

with memory’ and that individual memory and social memory are inex-

tricably linked.

The most alert and engaged cultural thinkers of the post–Famine gen-

eration differentiated between two modes of memory: an individualist,

self-obsessed, disabling one, which internalises damage as melancholia,

and a culturally induced enabling form, which seeks wider explanations

and political strategies. The second approach allows for legitimate trans-

lation from the personal to the public sphere, while avoiding the inter-

nalisation of damaging notions of fate, destiny and providence, all of

which had wreaked enormous damage during the Famine, by encourag-

ing political passivity. The second form of public memory accepts respon-

sibility for the past and historicises memory; by doing so, it restores

agency and prevents the slide of memory into nationalist nostalgia. In

that way, it radicalises historicism.

This redemptive model of radical memory must also continue to

acknowledge the irredeemable losses that lie at the core of historical

injustice, loss so absolute as to be beyond redemption, as has been power-

fully argued in the case of the slave trade, the Shoah or the Irish Famine.

Ahistorical negative space of absolute loss exists, a limit that theory can-

not transgress, that ethics cannot redeem, a disconsolate future that has

lost its past. This is also the realm of contingency and necessity, of Marx’s

piercing aphorism that people make their own history but not in condi-

tions of their own choosing.

Notes

1. Patrick Sheehan, ‘The effect of emigration on the Irish church’, Irish Ecclesiastical

Record 3, 3 (1882), 611.

2. Royal Irish Academy, MS 12, Q 13, p. 10.

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The cultural effects of the Famine 153

3. Breandan ´

O Buachalla, An Caoine agus an Chaointeoireacht (Dublin: Cois Life, 1995);

Breandan ´

OMadag ´

ain (ed.), Gn´eithe den Chaointeoireacht (Dublin: An Cl ´

ochomhar,

1978); Sean ´

O Coil ´

ean, ‘The Irish lament. An oral genre’, Studia Hibernica 24 (1984–

88), 97–117.

4. Angela Bourke, ‘The Irish traditional lament and the grieving process’, Women Stud-

ies International Forum 11 (1988), 287–91; Angela Bourke, ‘Performing, not writing’,

Graph 11 (1991), 28–31; Angela Bourke, ‘Caoineadh na marbh’, Oghma 4(1992), 3–11.

5. WexfordHerald,29November 1792.

6. Mary Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur: The Story of Mary Fogarty (Sissy O’Brien) (London:

Longmans, 1937), p. 100.

7. See Diarmuid Breathnach and Maire N´ıMhurch ´

u, Beathaisneis: 1882–1982 (Dublin:

An Cl ´

ochomhar, 1986), pp. 37–9.

8. Iowe this phrase to Eileen Battersby.

9. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Rossa’s Recollections: 1838 to 1898 (New York: Mariner’s

Harbour 1898), p. 203.

10. Michael Doheny, ‘The autobiography of an agitator’, Irish American, 19 February

1859.

11. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditionsof National Revivalin Europe:A ComparativeAnalysis

of theSocial Compositionof PatrioticGroups amongthe Smaller EuropeanNations,trans.Ben

Fowkes (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 61–83

12. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

13. ‘The Ban’, as it became known, prevented GAA members on pain of expulsionfrom

participating as players or spectators in ‘foreign games’, notably soccer, rugby and

hockey.

14. Kevin Whelan, ‘The memories of “The Dead”’, Yale Journal of Criticism 15, 1 (2002),

59–97.

The Cultural Effects of the Famine

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