Dublin in the Time of Joyce

Dublin in the Time of Joyce KEN MONAGHAN I was born in 1925 and grew up in an Ireland that was not greatly different to the country from which James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled on 8 October, 1904. True, there were changes. We had achieved an independence of sorts from England and twenty-six of the thirtytwo counties in the country were now governed from Dublin. The umbilical cord, however, had not been cut and six northern counties remained and still remain under British rule which has resulted in the festering sore that is Northern Ireland today. We had also experienced a particularly vicious civil war between the forces who, after the war of independence, supported the Treaty with England and those who opposed it. The civil war left bitter memories and divisions and these memories and divisions had an enormous and almost cataclysmic effect on the social and political life of the country until comparatively recent times. During this period when we were slowly coming to terms with the difficulties of governing ourselves and running the country, there was mass unemployment and grinding poverty for a large portion of the population, and the way of life was determined more than ever by the dictates of an autocratic Catholic Church. We had adopted existing British laws and taken on board their civil service and judicial systems and the only real difference was in the people who occupied the positions of power within these systems. The minions of the British Government were replaced by members of the emerging Catholic middle class who looked for leadership and guidance to the hierarchy of that same Church. Molly Ivors and her friends had come into their inheritance. In 1932, after a General Election won by Fianna Fail, the political wing of the anti-treaty Forces in the Civil War, Eamonn de Valera became Taoiseach or Prime Minister, a position he was to hold for an Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001© 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 unbroken period of sixteen years. There followed long years of isolationism when the words “Sinn Fein,” the title given by Arthur Griffith to the political party he had founded at the beginning of the century, came to mean what they said. Roughly translated Sinn Fein means ourselves alone. De Valera started a so called economic war with England during which there was a boycott on the export of Irish goods to England and on the importation of certain English goods to Ireland, and since England was the main customer for our produce which was largely agricultural, this rather futile exercise caused additional hardship, particularly in rural areas. In many ways De Valera , who had his army of fanatical supporters for whom he could do no wrong and an equally committed, though slightly smaller, band of people for whom he could do no right, was an idealist with a vision of an Ireland, Gaelic and Catholic, that would not be contaminated by the influences of an outside world which he regarded as materialistic and pagan. He dreamt of a country where comely maidens would dance, virtuously, at the crossroads while strong, manly youths engaged in healthy athletic pursuits. The comely maidens and the manly youths were not encouraged to meet except in the public gaze or until marriages had been arranged and throughout the country there was this overwhelming preoccupation with mortal sin and, in particular, with the sin of sex. Human nature being what it is the maidens and youths did come together, if clandestinely, and there are wonderful stories, most probably apocryphal, of priests in country parishes keeping a nightly vigil and beating the bushes and hedges with hawthorn sticks to flush out courting couples. In 1929 the Censorship of Publications Act, designed to protect the minds and morals of the innocent Irish people from the evils of the printed word, became law. Under the terms of the Act any reader who was offended by a word, phrase or action in a book or magazine could complain to the Censorship Board who would adjudicate on whether the book or magazine was a...