The Unpopular Front: Catholic Revival and Irish Cultural Identity, 1932–48

Cultural nationalism in independent Ireland has found few sympathetic historians. Exceptions include Margaret O’Callaghan’s challenge to the F.S.L. Lyons ‘battle of two civilisations’ thesis, in her masters thesis ‘Language and Religion: The Quest for Identity in the Irish Free State 1922–31’ published in part in Irish Historical Studies in 1984 as ‘Language, Nationality and Cultural Identity in the Irish Free State 1922–27: The Irish Statesman and the Catholic Bulletin Re-Appraised’. Here, O’Callaghan argues that ‘Irish-Ireland’ cannot be regarded as a fully-developed cultural bloc which set itself up in opposition to an equally coherent Anglo-Irish culture. The war of words over the rightful place of the Irish language and the Roman Catholic religion in the life of the nation were, rather, symptomatic of a society striving to give cultural expression to its newly won independence.¹ Similarly, Patrick Maume’s critical biography of Daniel Corkery argues that his subject’s criticisms of Synge and his fellow Anglo-Irish writers, and his ultimate rejection of all Irish writing in the English language as inauthentic, were based on an original creative impulse to promote the expression of a distinctive Irish voice.² In analysing the intellectual roots and the evolution of Corkery’s ideas, Maume’s work, like O’Callaghan’s, suggests that the quest for intellectual forms of self-expression was not confined to Irish liberals.