Sean O'Faolain and Pierre Elliott Trudeau's Midcentury Critiques of Nationalism

Comparative analysis, when applied to any sphere, including politics, holds the promise of both assessing performance and suggesting more productive plans of action for the institutions being analyzed. It is unsurprising that Sean O'Faolain, as the founding editor of The Bell—a publication that avowedly sought to combat insularity in Ireland's intellectual and public life—would adopt this approach. In 1944, O'Faolain criticized Irish politicians for their inability to deal with the unresolved issue of Partition and with the schisms it had caused in Irish society, and pointed toward Canada as exemplary for producing the Rowell-Sirois Report, three volumes published in 1940 as the Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations. The Report was largely historical in nature, detailing the story of how the disparate units of British North America had come to prosper as a federation.

Though O'Faolain recognized that Ireland and Canada offered two distinctly different contexts, he noted that both shared "the fundamentals of racial, social, religious, economic and political fissuration."¹ O'Faolain thus argued that the analogy could prepare the Irish for a few hard truths about Partition. First, even if the problem were to be legally solved, it would remain unresolved in terms of allaying all regional frictions. Second, Partition could never be truly ended because if regional frictions were allayed, they would only be temporarily so owing to the nature of their tensions. Finally, any solution would need to be envisioned as progressive, as it would take generations to achieve: there would be no quick fix.²

O'Faolain further noted the multicultural aspect of both countries, while emphasizing the crucial difference that Canadian federalism allowed for pluralism to exist officially, while Irish nationalism boiled down to an homogeneously defined Gaelic Catholicism. He applauded Canadian federalism and its links to the Commonwealth as accommodating and protective of French Canadians' rights—and implied that the Union and Commonwealth protected the rights of Protestant Ulster in a way they might not be protected by an Irish state.³ The strength of Canadian federalism, as O'Faolain saw it, was that

cultural and local loyalties could be preserved and reconciled with the political strength and solidarity of the whole, whereby the minorities in abandoning their rooted objections to a superior political authority would reap the benefits of a single control in matters of general interest.⁴

Ireland, therefore, had to stop thinking in merely local terms and look beyond its borders to international problems and solutions as a way of resolving its own issues.⁵ O'Faolain's internationalist resolutions have, to a large extent, been played out in the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg.⁶

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The Bell was an intellectual journal of record throughout the 1940s and 1950s, sustaining a reputation as both a creative outlet for leading artists and a critical organ of Irish society and government policy. In his first editorial O'Faolain announced that he chose the title because it was a "spare and hard and simple word . . . with a minimum of associations."⁷ The old nationalist symbols, representing a time when Ireland struggled in defeat, had been killed by the arrival of the future. This was why O' Faolain patently refused to have the word "Irish" in the title; the journal was to come from an Irish perspective, but to discuss matters of greater importance. Readers were encouraged to help form the journal's content and direction, or—to extend the metaphor of a bell—to tug the rope and send out a cry: "Some man who knows how to ring a proper peal will make the clapper shout."⁸ It was to be a force for change that would stand in opposition to the dominant anti-intellectualism of Irish society and be inclusive of all Irish people, not merely those of the majority or a niche group. As he said in his conclusive appeal, "Whoever you are, then, O reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House—The Bell is yours."⁹

O'Faolain's big...