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Modernization’s Lost Pasts: Sean O’Faolain, the Bell, and Irish Modernization Before Lemass

2014; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2014.0068

1534-5815

Mark S. Quigley,

Philippine History and Culture

Modernization’s Lost Pasts:Sean O’Faolain, the Bell, and Irish Modernization Before Lemass Mark S. Quigley As contemporary Irish society continues to grapple with the fallout of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse, it is hard to resist considering the boom’s dramatic rise and fall against the backdrop of the series of important Irish centennials that have recently begun to unfold. Reflecting in particular on the ignominious “bailout” regime that made the IMF-led “troika” the effective masters of Irish public policy and left a legacy of staggering debt set to burden the Irish people for decades to come, one turns almost inevitably to such resonant dates as 1913, 1916, and 1922, and to questions of how much the fundamental relationships governing Ireland and its place in the world have changed in the past hundred years. The most recent assertions of the determinative effects of Ireland’s place within the circuits of global finance, are most readily rooted in the vision of modern Ireland articulated by T. K. Whitaker in his 1958 White Paper, Economic Development, and more famously advanced as Irish government policy by Seán Lemass from 1959 onward. Lemass remains a fascinating figure whose life in many ways encapsulates the key conflicts of modern Irish history from 1916 to the lead-up to the “Troubles” in the early 1960s. His name has become synonymous with a modernization regime rooted in the aggressive courting of international capital; but he was also the architect of de Valéra ’s earlier protectionist policies and played a key role in establishing such semi-state enterprises as Bord na Mona, Bord Siúcra, and Aer Lingus. As Lemass’s approach shifted significantly over the early decades of post-Independence Ireland, the project of “Lemassian modernization” for which he is most noted is best assessed against a backdrop of wider intellectual and cultural shifts in the 1930s and 1940s. The most prominent distiller of those larger intellectual shifts was Sean O’Faolain, whom Joe Cleary identifies as “one of the major architects of the modernizing programme” alongside Lemass and Whitaker.1 Though O’Faolain set himself the role of modernizer from the early years of the Free State, the ideological [End Page 44] and intellectual contours of that role change significantly between the 1920s and the aftermath of World War II, or “the Emergency” as it was termed in Ireland. Despite such fluidity, O’Faolain’s shifting visions of what modernization might encompass have effectively been overwritten by the singular prominence of Lemass’s post-1959 project of economic liberalization that has dominated the last fifty years of Irish history and so recently borne such bitter fruit. To conceive of the intellectual ferment of 1930s and ’40s Ireland in relation to “modernization” is to propose some important shifts in how the term is typically used, and to question how that use tends to establish, in turn, a set of intellectual coordinates that map out other key terms in Irish thought and politics—such as “nationalism,” “tradition,” and “republicanism.” As Conor McCarthy explains in his far-reaching study of Irish modernization, the elaboration of “modernization theory” by American social scientists in the 1950s means that the term becomes almost entirely associated with a strong emphasis on “industrial technology, entrepreneurial skills and capital investment.”2 Apprehending modernization in this way obviously coincides with a larger geopolitical vision taking shape in the aftermath of World War II under the aegis of the United States’ global development initiatives and serves as a blueprint for the efforts of Whitaker and Lemass. McCarthy notes that an important aspect of this understanding of modernization—and one of particular significance for decolonizing spaces—is that it is posed in an oppositional relationship to nationalism. Guided by a sense of such oppositions, McCarthy argues, “the Lemass/Whitaker modernisation effected a separation between the ‘national’ community and the engine of its putative modernisation” with the result that their initiatives “effectively passed control of the modernisation of the economy and society of the Republic over to multinational capital.”3 Discourses of modernity and modernization within Irish Studies, in the wake of that shift, are almost invariably linked with vigorous critiques of nationalism. McCarthy...