Sean O'Faolain and Irish Identity

Ever since the initial surge of cultural nationalism in the 1840s, the Irish have pondered the question "Who are we?" With the creation of the Free State, the issue of national identity became more acute. For more than thirty years, Sean O'Faolain (1900–1991) was at the center of the national dialogue about what sort of nation Ireland should be. O'Faolain was a native of Cork City; the son of an RIC constable, with degrees from University College, Cork, and Harvard; like Frank O'Connor a one-time protégé of Daniel Corkery; and a talented writer of fiction and nonfiction, who—unlike so many of the Irish literati—chose to practice his craft at home rather than abroad. Throughout his career, and especially in his years as editor of The Bell, O'Faolain encouraged the work of young writers and scholars.

As a young American scholar doing research in Ireland, I was often a beneficiary of his kindness. He invited me to his home in Killiney for receptions and for one-on-one conversations. While smoking our pipes and sipping his whiskey (usually Paddy's), we talked about Irish history and literature. In 1961, O'Faolain quizzed me about my immigrant father, as he was preparing to evaluate his own father in Vive Moi! In other conversations, he gave me valuable insights into Daniel O'Connell, the subject of a book I was writing, and when I published an essay titled "Trends in Post-Revolutionary Writing," O'Faolain offered a detailed critique. I last visited O'Faolain in 1983, when he and his wife, Eileen, lived in Rosmeen Park, near Dún Laoghaire. Both were intellectually vigorous. As I was leaving, Sean put his arm around me and said, "Larry, don't love Ireland too much."

In reviewing Sean O'Faolain's achievement, I find a similar note of healthy skepticism—his refusal to acquiesce to the lies and half-truths about Ireland that were so vigorously promoted by church and state—to be one of his most enduring contributions. In numerous periodical articles and public pronouncements, O'Faolain courageously and persistently insisted that Irish identity should be pluralistic and cosmopolitan—a position that often placed him in confrontation with the nation's political, religious, and much of its intellectual establishment.¹

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It would be unfair to describe Ireland from the 1930s into the 1960s as a cultural wasteland. For one thing, those decades were something of a golden age of the short story, with pens and typewriters of Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, and Sean O'Faolain himself turning out masterpieces. Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen published his most inventive and comic work in those years, and Mervyn Wall's short stories, plays, and novels provided a beautifully crafted fictional portrait of Ireland in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And though the plays at the Abbey or Gate were rarely masterpieces, such performers as Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, Jack MacGowran, and Michéal Mac Liammóir were acknowledged geniuses.

But the era was also dominated by an uncompromising Republican ideology that had, at its worst, veered into anti-Semitism and religious fanaticism. By the 1930s, voices of moderation and inclusion had been steadily pushed to the side of the national discussion. Passionately anti-British and parochial, and tied to an exclusively Catholic and Gaelic definition of Irishness, Eamon de Valéra's Ireland became a restrictive Catholic confessional state. A puritanical, defensive Catholicism—best exemplified by a Censorship Board that banned not only overt pornography but also the work of distinguished writers, including many American, British, and Irish Catholics—and a chauvinistic, backward-looking, Irish-Ireland Gaelic nationalism, isolated the country from the Western mainstream, enhancing its gloomy atmosphere. While Free State leaders were fervent anti-Partitionists, their insistence on Ireland as Gaelic and Catholic added a cultural dimension to the border separating North from South...