Saints, Shamrocks, and Signifying Practices: Aer Lingus and the Materialization of Irish Identity

Introduction: Flag Carriers and the Rhetoric of National Identity

Airlines are hugely symbolic. . . . They remind us of the still-enormous power of nationalism, for unlike trains or cars, aircraft bear flags and brand themselves with national signs.¹

By the time Aer Lingus was founded in 1936 by Fianna Fáil’s Seán Lemass, Catholicism and Irish cultural identity had consolidated in the wake of post–Civil War realities of political instability and social disjunction. An emphasis on Catholic hegemony offered citizens an “imagined community” of national solidarity; indeed, the “deep, horizontal comradeship” organized religion afforded was, in part, responsible for assumptions within political and cultural discourse that the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” had become intrinsically linked, if not virtually synonymous.² Against this background, the establishment of a national airline was understood to fulfill many pragmatic and ideological functions. As a transport medium under the auspices of the Department of Industry and Commerce, it was an important economic and security asset. As a “flag carrier,” it provided a potent symbol of independence and was an achievement to which all countries aspired. As a state-sponsored company, it offered a conduit for “official” articulations of Irish national identity, which, as will be examined here, were distinctly Catholic in inflection.

The study of Aer Lingus offers an opportunity to explore how these discourses were negotiated by one of the most potent symbols of Irish modernization. The particular synthesis of tradition (including the conventions of religious and nationalist expression) and modernity the airline represents is far from contradictory but supports Clifford Geertz’s argument that newly independent countries experience a tension between the “towering abstractions” of “essentialism,” or the “Indigenous Way of Life,” and “epochalism,” the “Spirit of the Age.”³ Geertz asserts that “the impact within any new state society of the desire for coherence and continuity on the one hand and for dynamism and contemporaneity on the other is both extremely uneven and highly nuanced” and offers that a negotiation of essentialism and epochalism emerges in concrete form in “specific symbolic forms” that can be “described, developed, celebrated, and used.”⁴ Furthermore, and of particular relevance here, Geertz also suggests that typically a rise in religious activity emerges within a newly independent state and that such activity defines the “character and content of that nationalism as an ‘information source’” for the “collective behavior” of the community.⁵

The study of Aer Lingus provides a unique opportunity to consider Geertz’s ideas. It is argued here that the rhetoric of Catholic homogeneity, as attached to the construction of Irish cultural identity, was embraced by Aer Lingus in the 1940s and normalized within a variety of visual, material, and experiential practices that comprised the company’s branding and publicity strategies. The airline was only one of nineteen state-sponsored companies established between 1927 and 1939 in response to the Free State’s development of infrastructure. These agents of modernization included the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), Irish Shipping, and the Agricultural Credit Corporation. Of these companies, the airline is distinctive because it consciously chose visual identifiers and adopted specific practices that were both implicitly and explicitly Catholic in inflection. While it could be argued that Aer Lingus—in its role as official agent of the state—offers an exemplar of how successive Irish governments ideologically entwined the discourses of Church, state, and national identity, there were also more pragmatic considerations in adopting such tactics.⁶ The airline was distinct from other Irish state-sponsored companies, as it was a national company with an international profile and, thus, occupied a unique position in that its target audience was not confined to its country of origin. Consequently, any expressions of national and cultural identity it projected or mediated reached external as well as internal audiences. As plans to launch Aer Lingus’s transatlantic route emerged in the late 1940s, the company became acutely aware that the promotion of the airline as both Irish and Catholic could yield considerable financial benefits from the North American market, particularly amongst the Irish diaspora in the...