Psychology of the Irish after the Flight of the Earls

[civic_critic]

I came across this interesting piece on crookedtimber.org:

All it [the Flight of the Earls] did was to leave the people to stumble around for several centuries before they got it together sufficiently to start shoe horning the British out of Ireland.
After many years I went back to Cork City like a tourist, in the 70s, and wandered down to where the fishboats were lined up along a quay. A good sized boat was being readied to go out, and 4 or 5 young fellows were on it doing this or that. They were busy, aware of each other, but ignoring all passers by. They used a number of Gaelic phrases though they spoke English. Their’s was a closed society, as it seemed.They would turn away and be silent as defence.
Months later, back on the West Coast of Canada I was up at Alert Bay, an Indian fishing town on a small island. There was a good sized boat lined up with others, and a few young Indian fellows were working on it, getting ready to go out. They spoke English, but they were also closed to what was outside of their own society, and quite shy in their manner. Even their speech was flat, showing nothin.

It was like an arrow to the heart: it was the same thing I had seen in Ireland that I was seeing at Alert Bay. It would take a great long spiel to work it out, but I was seeing a population that had been interrupted. Only confident among their own; unable or unwilling to walk up to the stranger and just take possession of their own place. They too had been robbed of their history. They too would need a long while to get back on their feet, just to walk out and around the place.
The English were criminals; the Earls were worse.

An interesting insight into two cultures interrupted and damaged. Do the Irish have the ability yet to "take possession of their own place" as individuals and as a nation?

I've put this into Health & Social Affairs since it relates to the mental health of our society.

[anmajornarthainig]

I don`t think it was a huge leap to draw a parallel between two people who had suffered genocide, conquest, plantation , a sustained assault on their culture and language (including a resulting one from within). I assume he is blaming the earls for leaving anyone of us would probably have done the same. The writing was on the wall for them. The Gaelic nobility who stayed were collectively fairly useless (with some exceptions) regarding Gaelic culture. The people who made an effort to save it were Protestant, urban Catholics and Catholics who were "common."

As for the other point on the impact of the collapse of Gaelic culture I would say it was this:

1. Destruction of the language and a way of life. The status of Irish collapsed. Not the Famine, not emigration Irish was in serious trouble by the late eighteenth century (not in numerical terms but in terms of having a future).
2. A loss of leadership and a collective loss of confidence as a result.
3. A tendency to regard English and later American ideas as superior and a desire to imitate them regardless of not whether they were or are applicable to Ireland or what is being done elsewhere.
4. An obssession with having possessions? (Reaction to plantation, conquest?)
5. A lack of civic pride? .....lack of self-respect?, lack of affinity with ruling classes? We only have an irish state 3 generations. There was fifteen to twenty generations before that of the problems listed above.

[Worldbystorm]

Some very interesting points. But perhaps overblown.

Take Gaelic. The slow retreat of the language can be seen as anmajornarthainig notes due to a host of reasons. But I think that Gaelic really suffered from English being seen as the more useful language for advancement...a utilitarian response from the Irish people, which was understandable if regrettable.

Still, the problem with the contention is that it rests on individuals living centuries later being psychologically impacted by those events. I think that's extremely difficult to prove. And then, why the Flight of the Earls as the pivotal point. Some people point to the Famine as initiating a sea change in a fairly loose reasonably joyful society (despite the English incursion) which rapidly transitioned to a very conservative society. Or another question. I lived through the 1970s and 1980s when it was impossible to get work, the country was failing before our eyes. If this psychological hurt was so significant how come we haven't seen any manifestations of it's after effects in the 1990s and 2000s? If that's true of a contemporary societal rupture, which the 1980s were - as anyone who lived through them will tell, it seems difficult to see how events centuries before would necessarily impact on people who hadn't lived through them (hence the Famine did have a sustained impact on Irish society because it affected people then living).

Another point. Stephen Howe in his excellent book on Colonialism and Ireland has noted that contemporary local history studies have thrown up a very interesting insight into the nature of rural society in Ireland prior to the 20th century, that being that there was remarkably little connection between the local and the global or to put it more simply the large historical events one might be expected to be recorded at local level, such as 1798, etc, simply didn't seem to impinge upon the local imagination in the way expected. Obvious reasons for this would be lack of mobility, lack of interest (even in contemporary societies relatively few people are that interested or touched by the larger events), lack of media etc.

Also, it's fair to say that in some ways all this history was 'elite' history, the Flight of the Earls being a good example. For most Irish people on the ground it would not have mattered one iota who was in charge, they themselves weren't.

Incidentally having had good friends who worked out of Howth harbour on trawlers during the 1980s in my experience they're an introspective group at the best of times.

[anmajornarthainig]

Worldbystorm,

as an event by itself the Flight of the Earls `significance should not be over-estimated but it has to be remembered in its full context .The thing which impacted on ireland was not that two significant chieftains left it was that thousands of political, cultural and religious leaders were forced to leave, were killed, completely lost their power or were forced to accept the english state all within a couple of generations. That is massive the fact that it happened hundreds of years ago reduces its significance in terms of directness but not indirectly on contemporary Irish society . The collapse of Gaelic society has to be up there with the arrival of the Normans and the arrival of Christianity.

The Irish language collapsed because of English policy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The fact that it took a hundred and fifty years for that collapse to manifest itself in the lower reaches of society is irrelevent.

I agree basically with the other things you are saying.

[The Earl of Desmond]

But there were a number of chances to get the English out of Ireland before the flight but the local Irish just didn't get involved and that was the true crime that time and time again it was Irish people who betrayed their own for a few quid or more likely a few drinks.

Didn't the FitzGeralds almost get the English out until the Butlers (Earls of Ormonde) rather than do the right thing for Ireland saw a chance to get more money for themselves to became traitors.

[Gombeen]

Well our drinking problem as a nation, has been atrributed to the psychological effect of colonisation and defeat, in the same way that defeated peoples like the Native Americans, Aborigines in Australia and the Maori in New Zealand have a noted drink problem amongst their people.

[CJH]

Well our drinking problem as a nation, has been atrributed to the psychological effect of colonisation and defeat, in the same way that defeated peoples like the Native Americans, Aborigines in Australia and the Maori in New Zealand have a noted drink problem amongst their people.

We're not defeated anymore. I thought we shared our propensity for drink when most Northern Europeans

[Gombeen]

The legacy of colonisation usually lives on well after independence. You need only look at Africa to see that. Not to mention the still critical state of the Irish language 80 years after independence.

[CJH]

The legacy of colonisation usually lives on well after independence. You need only look at Africa to see that.

I agree, but I don't think it should be an excuse any longer. And we are in a very different position to the Maori and Native Americans.

[Gombeen]

I'm not making excuses for it. Just stating things as the are. Though I do believe we are coming out of it gradually. The historical hang-ups up about the Irish language in the Gaeltacht do seem to be finally disappearing and Irish people are a lot more confident in themselves in general now. But more money seems to have just made us drink more, not less.