Notes
Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1991, 6). The “state,” as I use the term in this book, refers to the “political organization or management which forms the supreme civil rule and government of a country or nation” (OED). The “nation-state” is the territorially defined political entity de- fined by numerous critics as the end-goal of nationalism, e.g., the Irish Free State, Éire, the Republic of Ireland (Lloyd 1999, 19–36; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). However, the nation and the “nation-state” are not coequal. The nation includes those living outside the political jurisdiction who claim affiliation with the nationstate as well as members of the nation’s diaspora. In the Irish context this includes survivors of the nation-state’s architecture of containment living in exile. For discussions of nation and state in an Irish context, see Lloyd 1993; Kiberd 1995; Gibbons 1996; Kearney 1997; Howe 2000; MacLaughlin 2001. Raymond Williams offers two meanings for “society”: it is “our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live” and also “the condition in which such institutions and relationships are formed” (1983, 291). As Williams explains, the term signals the ability to exist in a condition of loose affiliation—“companionship” or “fellowship”—as distinct from the binding relationships of state institutional power. 2. My reading of the state’s investment in institutional containment is influenced by Foucault’s two important studies, Discipline and Punish (1995) and The History of Sexuality (1990). The double effect of Ireland’s containment culture in naming and concealing transgressive social phenomena coincides with Foucault’s disparate claims about speech. He suggests that confessional speech does not liberate but rather becomes a powerful instrument of domination (Foucault 1990). As Margot Backus points out, however, there is a need to firmly reconnect “Foucauldian discourse analysis . . . to the material roots of discourse.” Although the contexts are self-evidently different—the Magdalen laundries rather than Samuel Richard204 Smith 09.Notes 7/12/07 1:57 PM Page 204 son’s novel Clarissa—I acknowledge Backus’s critical paradigm in my questioning of the “roots of power, privilege, and educated speech in the soil of deprivation, disenfranchisement , abjection, and enforced silence” (Backus 1999, 49). 3. On the advent of “nativist” nationalism in the postcolonial moment, see Said 1988; Said 1993, xi–xxviii; Nandy 1983; Kiberd 1995; Gibbons 1991. 4. This project builds on the work of Ailbhe Smyth (1991), Gerardine Meaney (1994), Eavan Boland (1996), and Kim McMullan (1996), all of whom link feminist and postcolonial critique in their analysis of Irish patriarchy in the immediate postindependence era. Meaney, in particular, identifies the consequences for Irish women of sexual conservatism and political stagnation: “Women in these conditions become guarantors of their men’s status, bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity. They are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation, they become the territory over which power is exercised. The Irish obsession with the control of women’s bodies by church, state, boards of ethics and judicial enquiries, has its roots in such anxieties” (1994, 191). 5. This was increasingly the case after 1927, when de Valera and Fianna Fáil entered the Dáil. Irish politicans’ allegiance to Catholic values, which traditionally was simply presumed, suddenly adopted partisan political significance as Cosgrave and de Valera each attempted to out-Catholic the other. 6. Also see Coulter 1993; Wills 2001. 7. See National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Department of Justice (D/Jus) file 247/41 A–E. 8. Information received by author from Tom Quinlan, head of the Records Acquisition Division, National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin 2. See NAI D/Jus 90/4/1–31 and D/Jus 8/20. 9. Hereafter parenthetically cited as Report. Although the report was never officially published, the Stationery Office produced a limited print run for government use. NAI D/Jus 90/4; Saorstát Éireann 1931c. 10. The formation of a committee deflected a potentially sectarian debate over public morality and allowed Cosgrave to protect the minority Protestant vote from encroachments by Fianna Fáil. See Keogh 1986, 163–64; Lee 1989, 148; Whyte 1980, 49. 11. The other committee members were Rev. John Hannon, S.J.; Rev. H. B. Kennedy, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin; Francis J. Morrin...
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