The Politics and Polemics of Culture in Ireland, 1800–2010

Pat Cooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia irlandese

As a contribution to cultural policy studies, this book offers a uniquely detailed and comprehensive account of the historical evolution of cultural policies and their contestation within a single democratic polity, while treating these developments comparatively against the backdrop of contemporaneous influences and developments internationally. It traces the climate of debate, policies and institutional arrangements arising from the state's regulation and administration of culture in Ireland from 1800 to 2010. It traces the influence of precedent and practice developed under British rule in the nineteenth century on government in the 26-county Free State established in 1922 (subsequently declared the Republic of Ireland in 1949). It demonstrates the enduring influence of the liberal principle of minimal intervention in cultural life on the approach of successive Irish governments to the formulation of cultural policy, right up to the 1970s. From 1973 onwards, however, the state began to take a more interventionist and welfarist approach to culture. This was marked by increasing professionalization of the arts and heritage, and a decline in state support for amateur and voluntary cultural bodies. That the state had a more expansive role to play in regulating and funding culture became a norm of cultural discourse.

1 British Government and the Shaping of Irish Cultural Life in the Nineteenth Century

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099352-1

A Liberal Inheritance

Over the century following the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland acquired an infrastructure of government administration and a range of cultural institutions that would form a critical part of the state’s inheritance following the foundation of the Free State in 1922. The character of these institutions was determined less by conditions prevailing in Ireland than by forces for social and political change in Britain precipitated by the industrial revolution. Throughout the century, the Westminster government sought to contain the social and democratic forces unleashed by rapid industrialisation and urbanisation through successive expansions of the franchise (in 1832, 1867 and 1884). Institutional innovations such as the construction of a system of public libraries and museums were informed by the belief that exposure to high culture could transform the inner lives of the uneducated urban masses, which in turn would help to forge a unifying spirit of cultural consensus in an age of mass democracy.¹ The industrial revolution also provided the means for a dramatic expansion of the British Empire, which reached its greatest extent by the end of the century. Colonial expansion was accompanied by improvisations in colonial government, driven by the desire to forge acquiescence among subject peoples in the imperial project. Ireland occupied an ambiguous role within that empire. On the one hand, it served as a source of manpower for the British army and colonial administration; on the other, it was itself an object of colonialist experiments in government. The governmental and administrative apparatus laid down in Ireland under these circumstances would produce a complex political inheritance for the first generation of post-independence politicians. They would react to that inheritance with an ambivalent mixture of suspicion and implicit normative dependency.

The political ideology that provided the vital thread of continuity throughout a century of turbulent change was pragmatic, adaptive liberalism. British attitudes to culture were also shaped by reaction to the French Revolution. In 1831 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that ‘the darkest despotisms of the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government;’ in England, he thought, any proposition for state fosterage of the arts should be met with ‘the commercial maxim—laissez faire.’² Suspicion of any move to extend the range of government much beyond the fields of justice, taxation and national defence remained a constant of classical liberalism through the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, therefore, initial incursions into the cultural field were tentative and pragmatic. It was only with great reluctance that government became involved in setting up and funding the National Gallery in London in 1824, provoked by a perceived threat to national prestige when it was realised that priceless art collections were in danger of being lost to overseas buyers. It would take considerably longer for government to acknowledge any requirement to intervene in markets to secure artworks as public goods. Thus, the National Gallery did not acquire a proper governance structure and clear line of government funding until 1855.³ The acceptance of a more substantive role for government in culture and the arts in Great Britain would require further dilution of laissez faire dogmatism, accompanied by the administrative institutions to deliver it.⁴

However, not long after laissez-faire values reached their apogee with the passing of the Corn Laws in 1845, they began to come under pressure. Rapid industrialisation and its attendant huddling of the uneducated masses in urban centres provoked anxieties about social cohesion among middle-class intellectuals like John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. Raymond Williams has traced how an idea of culture as a potential agent of social stability and consensus emerged over this period, largely in response to such anxieties.⁵ Arnold launched an assault on the dominant liberal spirit of ‘doing as one likes’ in Culture and Anarchy. It was published in 1867, the same year the Second Reform Act extended the franchise to all male heads of households, including working-class ones. Arnold’s main concern was that high cultural standards might be put in jeopardy by the levelling march of democracy. He thought the best hope of arresting this trend lay in diffusing a knowledge of classical European culture, which he defined as ‘the best that is known and thought in the world.’⁶ Culture was the ‘study of perfection’ and its motive force ‘the moral and social passion for doing good.’⁷ The social programme of his cultural criticism linked utilitarian means to moral purpose. It identified models of excellence in the arts and crafts and sought to diffuse knowledge of these exemplars throughout society. The network of publicly funded museums and art schools that emerged over the latter half of the century across the United Kingdom followed the Arnoldian vision of culture as an agent of social discipline and bulwark against anarchy.⁸

Yet liberal scruples continued to act as a check on the encroachment of government upon a wider range of civil society interests. As each extension of the franchise created new forms of popular demand on government, it generated new forms of resistance to those demands. The tension between pressure on government to act as the arbiter and regulator of democratic values and the libertarian attachment to bedrock principles of individual autonomy produced the paradox whereby the age of individualism and laissez-faire gave birth to the centralised administrative state.⁹ This paradox arose partly from a tendency to think of politics and economics as separate realms. While it became increasingly permissible for the state to intervene in social problems (particularly in the fields of health and welfare), the liberal mindset continued to rule economic issues strictly off-limits. Nevertheless, the erosion of the boundaries between economics and other fields proved inexorable. An initial point of erosion was the growing acceptance that government had a role to play in supporting the art and design needs of industry through the education system. Government intervention in the field of industrial design education can be seen, therefore, as playing a critical role in the emergence of a more tempered liberalism in which political and cultural motives were combined, so that ‘political history and cultural history are utterly inseparable in the history of Liberalism and its decline.’¹⁰ By the Edwardian era, liberals still clung to the values of individualism but had ‘reinterpreted it according to shifting boundaries between voluntarism and an enlarged view of the capacities of the State.’¹¹

Culture and Colony

Classic nineteenth-century liberalism conceived the rule of law as exercised for the common good by a property-owning class, not as a vehicle of equality and democracy. While the idea of small government was central to the liberal ideal, it crucially depended upon the individual’s capacity for self-government.¹² Liberal government was therefore obliged to consider significant variations in the economic, social and cultural factors constituting the self-governing citizen. Those factors were sharply inflected in colonial contexts, where the need to develop compliant, self-governing elites became an urgent necessity as the boundaries of empire expanded.

At the same time, efforts to use educational systems to forge stability and consensus within the United Kingdom met with resistance. Widespread adherence to liberal doctrines, a strong Dissenter tradition, and the opposition of radicals like William Cobbett, who suspected such moves as an attempt to dominate the working class in the interest of middle-class values, acted as a brake on the adoption of interventionist policies.¹³ However no such impediments existed in volatile colonial contexts, where the need to exert control was paramount and where efforts to use educational systems as a glue of imperial cohesion could be more expediently deployed. Though the extent to which Ireland can be characterised as a colony is a subject hotly debated by historians,¹⁴ what is not disputed is that Ireland has a colonial history comprising the extensive involvement of Irish people in the imperial project, while the country was itself the object of colonial exploitation—and experimentation.¹⁵

In 1831 Ireland got a state-supported primary education system some 40 years before the Education Act (1870) gave England a comparable system of basic education. This initiative has been attributed to the absence of a broadly acceptable governing class in Ireland, a deficiency which has also been attributed the creation of a national police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (established in 1822), and the setting up of the Office of Public Works (OPW) in 1831.¹⁶ Coolahan, in his history of Irish education, deploys the image of Ireland as a ‘social laboratory’ where policy initiatives that might have met with greater resistance on the mainland could be tried out, and Allen has also written of the country’s ‘laboratory status’ within the empire.¹⁷ The national school system, initially designed to be non-denominational, soon succumbed to the realities of Ireland’s indigenous sectarian divisions by becoming almost wholly denominational.¹⁸ In Ireland, however, the primary locus of resistance to government encroachment on the cultural sphere was not liberal values but the Catholic Church, whose political power and influence increased dramatically from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. The Church resisted state encroachment on the domains of family, education and health, where it determined its own influence should predominate.

The tussle between church and state over education throughout the century had enduring implications for the field of culture. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 can be seen not only as a means of alleviating Catholic grievance in relation to state sponsorship of religion but also as a move that conformed with both liberal principles and denominational autonomy. Catholic and Protestant churches in Ireland remained equally committed to a denominational system of education and worked together to fend off state efforts to fund second-level education through the later part of the century, ensuring that it stayed firmly under denominational control.¹⁹

Ireland was not, however, the first country to witness an educational initiative within the empire. Under the 1813 Charter Act, which renewed the East India Company’s charter for commercial operations in India, the government sought to assert its influence over the Indian educational system to counter the Company’s power. The main vehicle for the inculcation of English values among Indians was the teaching of English literature. This was formalised in the 1835 English Education Act, which for the first time required Indians to study English alongside native literature in the classroom.²⁰ A different approach was taken in Ireland, where little effort was made to instil a love of English literature through s...