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183 CHAPTER SEVEN ‘What to Do with their Lovely Past?’ Promoting the Commemoration Abroad ‘They dream their lives away casually here,’ Jimmy Breslin wrote of Ireland in the NewYork Herald Tribune in 1966,‘but at the same time the dreaming is what makes them.Dreaming of sex comes out far better than sex.’The wise man might riddle what dream had come true fifty years after the Easter Rising. Breslin laced his coverage of the commemoration with stories of poverty, pubs, poetry and a propensity to believe in leprechauns in a way that the government in Dublin found distasteful and irreverent. But Breslin’s view of Ireland was not intended as a critical onslaught. He was more concerned with the new enemy in Ireland: the worship of the car.‘If there is anything that can kill the romance and the lilt of a place it is a good auto salesman with a full showroom,’ he wrote. He deplored the mechanical culture of the United States in which their idea of a good poet was Robert Lowell, a man for whom it should be a felony to give a sheet of paper.1 Breslin’s coverage highlighted what Seán O’Faoláin described as the dominating problem for all Irish politicians: what to do with their lovely past. ‘For while everybody in Ireland wanted efficiency and modernisation’, O’Faoláin wrote, ‘everybody also wanted to preserve the old folk-ways and the old folk-values that had been our laws of life for centuries.’2 The end of economic protectionism meant that Ireland in the 1960s had to convince those outside that it was modern but different . Future economic development relied on a presentation of the Republic as happy in the embrace of modern technology while maintaining the romance and lilt that attracted tourists to the place.‘Money talks,’ said one Irish commentator.‘It is the one language that we have most effectually revived.’3 The jubilee of the Rising provided an opportunity for politicians to project the image of Irishness at home and abroad as that which could carry its lovely past into a prosperous future. One effective response from nations burdened by their pasts is to commemorate themselves into a state of forgetfulness. The ritual replaces memory and facilitates selectivity.Therefore the commemoration in 1966 offered an effective vehicle through which to unveil a reinvented Ireland. It both signalled Ireland’s uniqueness and, through the pomp and pageantry, provided the props for a well-designed set to present to the broader world.The jubilee attempted to assert a confident national narrative in a new Ireland that was simultaneously honouring the old. Images and Reflections Coverage of the visit of President John F. Kennedy three years earlier had provided a technological and emotional rehearsal for the golden jubilee of the Rising.The recent arrival of a national television broadcaster in Ireland meant that both events would be experienced differently at home and witnessed more widely abroad. Basil Payne had described watching,‘or rather participating in’ Kennedy’s speech on television as a unique experience for any Irishman. He wrote in the Capuchin Annual of 1964, ‘Here was a moment “in and out of time”, a moment of living history when one was able to assess and cherish one’s own position in time and tradition; a moment when one could look outwards, inwards and upwards simultaneously.’ Kennedy reflected the Irish back to themselves in confident and positive terms. W.R. Dale, writing in the New Statesman, noted that an ‘eminent and cosmopolitan’ Irishman had said the president’s visit had meant, ‘Simply this. I’m an Irishman and a Catholic, and from now on I feel I am not a second-class citizen.’4 The Republic of Ireland appeared no longer to examine its reflection in the crack’d mirror; however, there was always the danger of stepping through another looking glass into a wonderland of lazy imagery. Payne reviewed some of the coverage of the president’s visit in the foreign press: ‘Begorra! It’s Himself,’ said the headlines in the Wall Street Journal, content to churn out a jaded cliché, calculated to coincide with the popular misconception of rustic Ireland still so prevalent in America. And Newsweek’s correspondent, writing presumably through preselected green-tinted spectacles, reported that ‘Dublin festooned itself with shamrocks, papier-mache green derbies, souvenir shillelaghs and other exotic paraphernalia associated with Irishmen in NewYork and Boston (but never, well seldom, in Ireland).’ 184...

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