Society
A note on Irish nationalism
Published 10 January 2008
In this selection from the New Statesman archive George Bernard Shaw writes on the situation in Ireland
Taken from The New Statesman12 July 1913
In 1913, the threat of civil war was growing in Ireland. In this timely and characteristically pungent article, George Bernard Shaw – one of the New Statesman’s founders – ridicules his countrymen and women, apparently having set out to upset Nationalists and Orangemen in equal measure. But perhaps only an Irishman living in England, like Shaw, could have launched such invective at both sides in a conflict that was to span the century.
Selected by Robert Taylor
The world seems just now to have made up its mind that self-consciousness is a very undesirable thing and Nationalism a very fine thing. This is not a very intelligent conclusion; for, obviously, Nationalism is nothing but a mode of self-consciousness, and a very aggressive one at that. It is, I think, altogether to Ireland’s credit that she is extremely tired of the subject of herself. Even patriotism, which in England is a drunken jollity when it is not a Jewish rhapsody, is in Ireland like the genius of Jeremiah, a burniug fire shut up in the bones, a pain, a protest against shame and defeat, a morbid condition which a healthy man must shake off if he is to keep sane. If you want to bore an Irishman, play him an Irish melody, or introduce him to another Irishman. The modern Irish theatre began with the Kathleen ni Houlihan of Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Rising of the Moon, in which the old patriotism stirred and wrung its victims; but when the theatre thus established called on a Young Ireland to write Irish plays and found a national school of drama, the immediate result was a string of plays of Irish life—and very true to life they were—in which the heroines proclaimed that they were sick of Ireland and rated their Nationalist husbands for sacrificing all the realities of life to senseless Fenian maunderings, and the heroes damned Ireland up hill and down dale in the only moments of enthusiasm their grey lives left possible.
Abroad, however, it is a distinction to be an Irishman; and accordingly the Irish in England flaunt their nationality. An Englishman who had married an Irishwoman once came to me and asked me could I give him the name of any Englishman who had ever done anything. He explained that his wife declared that all England’s statesmen, all her warriors, all her musical composers, all her notables of every degree were Irishmen, and that the English could not write their names until the Irish taught them. I suggested Gladstone. “She says he was an Irishman” was the reply. After this, it was clear that the man’s case was desperate; so I left him to his fate.
From this you may gather that the reaction against the Nationalist variety of self-consciousness does not, unfortunately, mean a reaction against conceit, against ignorance,
against insular contempt for foreigners, against bad manners and the other common human weaknesses which sometimes masquerade as patriotism. Ireland produces virulent
varieties of all of them; for it is, on the whole, a mistake to suppose that we are a nation of angels. You can always find something better than a good Englishman and something worse than a bad one; but this is not so in Ireland: a bad Irishman is the vilest thing on earth, and a good one is a saint. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon is a very accurate sketch of the sort of thoroughpaced scoundrel Ireland can produce, not when she is put to it, but quite wantonly, merely for the fun of being mischievous. In point of conceit,
Ireland, especially northern Ireland, can stagger humanity. The Ulster Unionist is not a shrewd calculator who, on a careful estimate of the pressure of public opinion on any Government which should try to coerce Belfast into submission to a Dublin Parliament, concludes that he can safely bluff Home Rule out of Ulster: he really believes, as so many of the Boer farmers believed, that he can fight and conquer the British Empire, or any other empire that is not Ulster and Protestant. This is not a respectable infatuation; and if there were nothing else to be considered except the salvation of the Ulsterman’s soul, it would be a positive duty for the British Empire to blow him sky high to convince him that even a Unionist God (and he believes in no other, and therefore does not really believe in God at all) has occasionally to look beyond Down and Antrim. A new siege of Derry under a capable commander would be an invaluable corrective to the old one, as it would last about ten minutes, and end in an ignominious surrender of as much of Berry as might be left. But these military moral lessons, fashionable as they are, cost more than the souls of the regenerated (not to mention the bodies of those they kill) are worth; and it would, I think, be more sensible to make Ulster an autonomous political lunatic asylum, with Sir Edward Carson as head keeper, and an expensive fleet and a heavily fortified frontier to hold against the Pope, than to thwart its inclinations in any way. The alternative, if England would stand it, would be to make Ulster a province of England, and have the Education Acts and the Factory Acts applied in the English manner; but I doubt if Ulster would tamely submit to be identified with a country where men touch their hats to a Roman Catholic Duke of Norfolk, and meet him at dinner as if he were their equal. On the whole, the notion of a Kingdom of Orangia (Ibsen invented the name in The Master Builder) is the more amusing. When it came to paying for the frontier fortifications and the new Harland & Wolff fleet, the South would smile sunnily.
What will finally settle the Ulster question, probably, is just the old-fashioned romantic Nationalism of which the South is so deadly tired. That hackneyed fisherman who saw the round towers of other days in the waves beneath him shining, pursued his not very lucrative occupation on the banks of Lough Neagh, and was no doubt an Orangeman. Now it happens that the true Ulsterman is a harsh father; and his son’s chief joy when he is old enough to dare to differ from his violent and bigoted parent is to profess every opinion that can defy and exasperate the old man. And, indeed, it is clear, as the world is now constituted, that prudent young men should aim at being as unlike Orangemen and as like human beings as possible, even as in the south the young men are discovering that in point of insufferableness there is not a halfpenny to choose between a Nationalist and an Orangeman. Thus, though the Protestant boys will still carry the drum, they will carry it under the green flag, and realise that the harp, the hound, and the round tower are more satisfactory to the imagination than that stupidest of decorative designs the Union Jack, which, it must be admitted, is, considered merely as a decorative design, the most resourceless of patterns. And the change can be effected without treachery to England; for, if my personal recollection does not deceive me, the Gaelic League began in Bedford Park, London, W., after a prolonged incubation in Somerset House.
It is not very long since I stood on the coast of Donegal and asked two boys how many languages they had. They had three. One was English, which they spoke much better than it is ever spoken in England. The second was Irish, which they spoke with their parents. The third was the language invented by the Gaelic League, which I cannot speak (being an Irishman), but which I understand to be in its qualities comparable to a blend of Esperanto with fifth- century Latin. Why should not Ulster adopt this strange tongue? Its very name suggests Scotland, which is what the present vernacular of the north also suggests.
The truth is that all the Nationalist inventions that catch on now are not Irish at all. For instance, the admirable comedies of Synge, who, having escaped from Ireland to France, drew mankind in the manner of Moliere, and discreetly assured the public that this was merely the human nature of the Blasket Islands, and that, of course, civilised people never admired boastful criminals nor esteemed them according to the atrocities they pretended to commit. The Playboy’s real name was Synge; and the famous libel on Ireland (and who is Ireland that she should not be libelled as other countries are by their great comedians?) was the truth about the world.
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