Sean O’Faolain’s An Irish Journey:: Globalism, Tourism, and Labor in Provincial Ireland

Sean O’Faolain’s travelogue An Irish Journey (1940) is a literary initiation into the quotidian life of postcolonial Ireland’s provincial towns. O’Faolain provides a detailed first-person account of the author’s circuitous trip around the entirety of the island, crisscrossing both the Irish Free State and the partitioned North. His journey is carried out with the stated intent to draw attention to overlooked locales outside of the established tourist mainstays of the day. O’Faolain’s itinerary delays his arrival in urban Dublin until the final chapter of the book, and he largely eschews the romanticized wilds and backcountry shebeens in the West that inspired so much of the Irish Literary Revival’s imagery, and that had calcified within the popular imagination of Ireland’s national character. Instead, a network of towns bring O’Faolain’s Ireland into focus.

Commenting on the assumption of the rural extremes as the perceived home of Irish authenticity, Terence Brown writes that there was

something poignant in fact about the way in which so many Irish imaginations in the early twentieth century were absorbed by the Irish west, almost as if from the anglicized rather mediocre social actuality with its manifest problems, its stagnant towns and villages, they sought inspiration for vision in extremities of geography and experience. They looked to the edge of things for imaginative sustenance.¹

An Irish Journey refutes that view. O’Faolain endeavors to position the English-speaking provincial middle of Irish society as the nation’s authentic cultural core, and articulates a cultural geography of Ireland that exists between the familiar poles of the city and the rural village. Dublin, Belfast, and the isolated Gaeltacht regions of Kerry, Galway, Sligo, Mayo, and Donegal are given only fleeting treatment in An Irish Journey; such towns as New Ross, Clonmel, Thurles, Killarney and Strabane all feature prominently. “Most journeys around Ireland begin with the capital, Dublin,” O’Faolain posits in the book’s opening pages. “I feel that the poise is wrong there. Ireland is a land of fields, and farmers, and small towns, and it is these that have made it what it is . . . I want to rediscover that simpler, more racy Ireland of the people.”² The Ireland that O’Faolain discovers is indeed one of the people—or more accurately, of a multitude of peoples—and yet, even to purport its essential simplicity cunningly elides the author’s full perception of the complex, globalized modernity that played an important role in provincial Irish life, which he reveals over the length of the text.

The town may at first glance seem a peripheral Irish geography. Yet the life of the provincial Irish town is distinctive in its own right, and not merely the residue of overlapping circles of influence from the socio-cultural poles. By the middle of the 1920s, modernity’s influence on social change was becoming more evident in Irish town life. Residents adapted swiftly to the elevated standard of living and accompanying bourgeois social norms that followed the introduction of mass-produced goods and new agricultural technology in the country’s interior.³ It is this modernizing, globalizing Ireland that O’Faolain championed throughout his career as an author, essayist, critic, editor, and public intellectual—most famously as co-founder (with Peadar O’Donnell) and first editor of the literary magazine The Bell, established in 1940, the same year that An Irish Journey was published. O’Faolain and his collaborators at The Bell were fierce iconoclasts crusading for the modernization of Ireland’s own self-conception; O’Faolain, Lawrence J. McCaffrey writes, “was determined to use the written word to battle hindrances to modernity—Celtophilia, chauvinism, parochialism, rural provincialism, an authoritarian and puritanical Catholicism, and intellectual isolationism.”⁴ An Irish Journey should be viewed as a piece of that larger cultural project. The particularities of Irish provincial life that O’Faolain uncovers reflect not just vibrant and sophisticated communities at the local level, but are also framed by the author as radically globalized in ways that resist simplistic recollections of the...