Catholic Ireland and Irish-AmericanPiety and Power in Ireland 1760-1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin by Stewart J.Brown; David W. Miller; The Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America by Michael Glazier; IrishAmerica by Reginald ByronReview by: John A. MurphyThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 27, A Post-Christian Ireland? (Summer, 2001), pp. 197-200Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736034 .

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Catholic Ireland and Irish-American

Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller (eds), Piety and Power in Ireland 1760-?960:

Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin. Institute of Irish Studies, Belfast; University of

Notre Dame Press, 2000. ISBN 0-85389-743-3. Stg. ?25 hbk.

Michael Glazier (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America. University of Notre

Dame Press, 1999. ISBN 0-268-02755-2. ?IR 58.50.

Reginald Byron, Irish America. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. ISBN 0-19

8233355-8. Stg. ?17.99 pbk.

Emmet Larkin has an outstanding reputation as a director of research, and many of

his graduate students have achieved notable scholarly status. Two of these have edit?

ed this Festschrift as an act of pietas, and three more are among the contributors who

also include friends and colleagues of long standing. Lawrence J. McCaffrey is par?

ticularly close to Professor Larkin, being his co-father figure in the founding and

development ofthat remarkable scholarly organization, the American Conference

of Irish Studies. Here he supplies a vivid personal memoir

? Larkin the scholar does

not exist independently of the man, vibrant, vigorous and forthright ?

and under?

lines his pre-eminence: 'the leading historian of Ireland working in the United

States, and no one on either side of the Atlantic has contributed more to the

advance of Irish historiography'. Larkin is still active as professor of history at the

University of Chicago and spends his summers in Ireland, researching with unflag?

ging zeal in diocesan and religious orders' archives. His sustained enthusiasm and

energy at this stage are admirable, as he moves away from the high politics of the

'devotional revolution' to study its operations on the ground.

The Festschrift hails his monumental achievement in realizing an ambitious con?

cept over three decades, a grand design rare in twentieth-century scholarship. He

has now completed

seven volumes on the role of the Roman Catholic Church in

Irish politics and society, spanning the period from 1850 to 1891. His formidable

array of sources bears witness to long years of disciplined research in Irish, British

and Roman archives. He is preoccupied entirely with the primary material and has

little time, quite literally, to take the work of other scholars into account. Using an

effective 'mosaic' technique, he reveals a great canvas whereon is depicted the fasci?

nating interplay of ecclesiastical, nationalist and imperial power politics.

He has set this vast work in a framework of boldly-stated grand themes which

continue to provoke controversy. Scholars have had fruitful engagement with his

concepts of the creation of a defacto Irish state based on the clerical-nationalist

consensus of the 1880s; of the tenant farmers as a nation-forming class; and, above

all, of the 'devotional revolution'. This last thesis, first propounded in a seminal essay

in 1972, popularized a phrase which is long since a lecture-hall word with Irish his?

torians. It has stimulated a whole generation of scholars researching in the social

history of religion. The title Piety and Power in Ireland is meant to neatly encapsulate the themes of

'the devotional revolution' and 'the defacto state', and the various essays are intended

MURPHY, 'Catholic Ireland and Irish-American', Irish Review 27 (2001) 197

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as responses to, or commentaries on, these themes. At least this is what is suggested

by the introduction, which summarizes various scholarly critiques of the Larkin

theses and rather unnecessarily provides summaries of the essays that follow, though

it must be said that four or five of the eleven contributions, irrespective of their

individual merits, have only a tenuous bearing

on the main themes.

I should declare an interest here and say that, as well as reviewing his successive

volumes, I have had long and vigorous discussions from time to time with Emmet

Larkin about his grand theses. It seemed to me from the outset that the idea of the

'devotional revolution' -

the argument that Irish Catholics became 'practising' and

committed in the post-Famine generation ? was

inspirational and authentic, arising

in an integral way from the material Larkin was

dealing with.Various scholars have

challenged it on grounds of chronology, class and region and because it seems to

simplistically predicate great cultural change on the work of individual ecclesiastics,

notably Paul Cullen. But the numerous radical variations published in recent years

are a tribute to the Larkin theme rather than a refutation of it.

The 'de facto state' thesis, on the other hand, begs too many questions to com?

mand similar acceptance, unless we give radically unconventional meanings to

terms like 'state' and 'nation'. I have always felt that Larkin's provocative assertions in

this particular respect are not so much conceptual frameworks as theatrical flourish?

es, unwarranted by the historical evidence, and extraneous to the substance of his

work. In his substantial essay in this book, Joe Lee pays tribute to the power and

audacity of the notion of'a state before a state' before going on to say that he has

'some reservations' about the argument. This is surely the understatement of the

book, since Lee then zestfully proceeds to briskly demolish the whole thesis!

Donal Kerr reviews Catholic Church attitudes towards political violence from

the 1760s to the 1860s. Hugh Kearney considers the O'Connell centenary celebra?

tions of 1875 in terms of contested symbolism between those emphasizing his

(Catholic) role as Liberator and those who would rather stress his (secular) signifi? cance as

Repealer. (I recall the 'Save Derrynane' appeal of the late 1940s when

O'Connell was so much out of favour with nationalists that the campaign's only

hope was to laud his 'Catholic' achievements.) Frank Biletz writes interestingly about the successive editorships of the Irish Peasant of Patrick D. Kenny and W P.

Ryan between 1903 and 1910, and their rows with the Catholic bishops. Stewart J. Brown, who is professor of ecclesiastical history at Edinburgh, shows us how the

New Reformation movement (1801-29) ignominiously failed because, out of

patronizing ignorance, it mistakenly concluded that a backward, priest-ridden pop?

ulation had only a skin-deep attachment to the Catholic faith.

In a Festschrift that must gladden the renowned historian's heart, the two most

germane contributions come from David Miller and James S. Donnelly Jr, who

have been working in different vineyards of the 'devotional revolution'. Miller's

always accomplished scholarship is evident here again in his 'Mass Attendance in

Ireland in 1834' wherein he revisits the analysis he first made in 1975, returning now to the data with the benefit of more modern technology. Finally, Jim Donnelly uses the rich material in the files of the Irish Catholic to write fascinatingly about

198 MURPHY, 'Catholic Ireland and Irish-American', Irish Review 27 (2001)

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'The Peak of Marianism in Ireland, 1930-60'. Donnelly reminds us that the Marian

cult in Ireland was not an insular phenomenon, being part of a wider movement

among European and American Catholics. For Irish people, Marianism (perhaps even Mariolatry?) was in part at least a response to the impact of the Spanish Civil

War, the international 'red' menace, and the perceived degeneration of moral, espe?

cially sexual, standards in the world at large. Devotion to the Virgin, as reflected in

national and international pilgrimages, seems to have fulfilled a spiritual need not

fully catered for by the local boundaries of religious life lived within the parochial structure. Donnelly's essay prompts the reflection that the nineteenth-century

devotional revolution wasn't really completed until the real state was founded ?

the

Irish Free State, the partitioned state, the Catholic state. Now at the turn of the new

century, it would appear that the devotional revolution has finally run its course.

That revolution, according to Larkin, had enabled the Irish people 'to reforge their

identity in a new national consciousness'. What's to become of us now, Emmet?

Emmet Larkin also figures prominently in the pages of The Encyclopaedia of the Irish

in America, being moreover a member ofthat monumental publication's distin?

guished advisory board. It is a most ambitious enterprise, running to nearly a

thousand double-column pages and extending alphabetically from 'Achievement of

the Irish in America' to 'Yorke, Peter C (go consult the reference!). In addition to

biographical entries, this indispensable single-volume work of reference contains

various essays by leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. The topics dealt with

include Irish domestic history and emigration. In a novel departure, there are

entries on the Irish experience in each of the fifty states and in the major cities. The

Irish ground in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco is well-trodden

but welcome new paths are opened up into Alaska, Mississippi, New Mexico, the

Dakotas and so on. Inevitably, there will be complaints about omissions, especially

from those familiar with the small print of Irish America. Perhaps some space could

have been provided for additional entries by cutting down on overlapping material.

And the question of revisions and updates will arise from time to time. But none of

these reservations can take from the admirable achievement of editor Michael

Glazier, himself an emigrant from Ireland, who deserves our congratulations for

taking on and successfully completing

a mammoth task.

Reginald Byron offers an alternative view of Irish America. Byron is professor of

sociology and anthropology at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is a fourth

generation American of mixed ancestry, the Byron line coming from north-east

England with a distant and uncertain Irish connection. Interest in his ancestral

background was awakened during his academic career which has been spent in

Britain and Ireland since the 1970s. These details are relevant in that they help to

explain his new interest in, and unusual views about, Irish America with particular

reference to the city of Albany, the capital of New York State, which is the setting of

the field study that constitutes the core of this book.

MURPHY, 'Catholic Ireland and Irish-American', Irish Review 27 (2001) 199

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He claims to probe 'the taken-for-granted boundaries of the idea of Irish-Amer?

ica' and challenges generalizations based on Irish enclaves in America's large

industrial cities. By the same token he queries the historical genuineness of Irish

American nationalism and its alleged anglophobic experiences, and he asserts that

the anti-English demonology of nationalist propagandists such as John Mitchel was

designed to fashion group solidarity. At any rate, the Irish experience in Albany (second only to Boston in the 1980

census in the proportion of residents reporting themselves to be of Irish ancestry) seems to have been very different from that of their fellow-countrymen in New York

City and Boston. Famine immigrants were well received, meeting with little hostility

from the Anglo-Dutch ascendancy there. By the third quarter of the nineteenth cen?

tury the Irish were the single largest bloc in Albany politics. Their integration into

Albany society, accompanied by residential mobility throughout the area, was medi?

ated through their involvement in the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party. Pace Kerby Miller, they seem to have evinced little feeling of homesickness, being

glad to have escaped from poverty, and showing no wish to return.

Under Byron's supervision, over 500 fourth-to-sixth-generation descendants of

mid-nineteenth-century Irish immigrants were interviewed in the 1990s about their

consciousness of ethnicity and their attitude towards Ireland and Irishness.The inter?

views are reproduced at some length here. They testify to the frailty of'social

memory' of the Famine and other events which are commonly believed to inform

the ethnic identity of contemporary Irish-Americans. A number of the interviewees

were dependent for their information about Irish history on Leon Uris's Trinity!

They have some sentimental interest in Ireland but after several generations of assim?

ilation and intermarriage, Irishness for these people is a virtual ethnicity, no

longer a

lived reality. Byron notes, for example, that St Patrick's Day is observed as a 'quintes

sentially American institution', something by which I was forcefully struck myself on

visits to various US cities on the national festival over a number of years. This is a

refreshingly intriguing book with no trace of misty-eyed self-indulgence about the

sea-divided Gael.

JOHN A. MURPHY

Re-examining Irish Folklore

Diarmuid O Gioll?in. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity Identity. Cork: Cork

University Press, 2000. ISBN 1-85918-168-6. IR^40 hbk. ISBN 1-85918-169-4.

IRX 14.95 pbk.

Richard White. Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past. Cork: Cork

University Press, 1999. ISBN 1-85918-232-1. IR^T 14.95 pbk. US edition New

York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Despite the remarkable richness of documented folklore in Ireland, which has

enabled innovative research in many directions and facilitated copious publications

200 BEINER, 'Re-examining Irish Folklore', Irish Review 27 (2001)

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