Dramatics at the birth of the State

Culture, religion, language, welfare, sexuality and politics – the perfect ingredients for controversy, Irish-style. Catríona Crowe looks at a new book that focuses on five famous controversies at the birth of the State

What makes a good controversy? You need firmly opposed antagonists, who malign each other's moral rectitude and/or competence; you need a compliant media to fan the flames in contradictory and unpredictable directions; you need a public that is prepared to take sides, and even invent new sides when it suits; and you need lots of rhetoric. The issue has to be something that can run for some time, that cannot be resolved easily, and that resonates with deeper levels of how the society perceives itself. Two recent controversies – the Tara road dispute and the nursing-home payments revelations – have met, and continue to meet, most of these conditions, and as a result are thriving on all kinds of levels, from the academic to the political to Joe Duffy's Liveline.

Lucy McDiarmid's entertaining and erudite examination of five controversies covers the period when the Irish state was effectively being planned, between 1908 and 1916. They deal with culture, religion, language, welfare, sexuality and politics, and taken together, provide a fascinating microcosm of Irish society and its concerns at a crucial time. They are: the long-running saga of the Impressionist paintings left to Dublin city by Sir Hugh Lane on condition that they be housed in a permanent gallery; the dismissal of the priest Dr Michael O'Hickey from the chair of Irish in Maynooth for defying the bishops on the issue of compulsory Irish for entry to the new National University; the production by the Abbey Theatre of GB Shaw's play The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, banned in England; the 1913 battle between feminist socialists and Catholic clergy which largely prevented the children of locked out workers from being brought to England so that they could be fed and cared for; and the issue of Roger Casement's "black diaries" and the disquiet they have caused for many years.

The Lane pictures now mostly reside in the Dublin municipal gallery named after their donor, having spent a long time in the Tate in London. In their time, they were designated as filthy foreign pictures or great national treasures, depending on the needs of the disputing parties. At one time, it was proposed to demolish the Ha'penny Bridge and in its place, build a gallery spanning the Liffey to house the pictures. This gallery would certainly have been destroyed by the gunboat Helga in 1916, thus necessitating retrospective gratitude to the philistine city councillors who voted against the gallery and caused Lane to remove his pictures to London.

One of them (Berthe Morisot's Jour d'Été) was stolen from the Tate by two nationalist students in 1956, and stashed under a bed in a London flat where a drunken party was in full swing. The fellow who robbed the painting turned up at the official reception in Charlemont House to welcome the pictures back in 1961, but was refused admission.

Hugh Lane is quoted by Mac Diarmid on the subject of public ownership of art: "I never sell a picture until I am driven to it. And if I sell it to some millionaire it is lost, I don't see it again, it may not give any very great pleasure to him and it is lost to everyone else. But if I give a picture to a gallery, that is really good business. It is as much mine as ever, I still possess it, I can see it when I like and everyone else can see it too." Such democratic sentiments are at odds with the current emphasis on personal possession of art as a way of enhancing one's status.

Following the first night of George Bernard Shaw's play, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, on 25 August 1909, WB Yeats and Lady Gregory sent a telegram to the author: "Glorious reception splendid victory where is the censor now."

Lady Gregory, mistress of serious cultural spin, had seen an opportunity for the Abbey Theatre to regain the nationalist credentials it had lost in the Playboy riots two years before, by defying the Lord Lieutenant to put on Shaw's play, which had been banned under England's ridiculous censorship laws. Shaw, for his part, wanted to stir up trouble for the censorship apparatus.

Both aims succeeded beautifully: nationalist Ireland flocked again to the theatre which had risked its patent for an anti-colonialist principle, and Shaw got his play produced (it's not a very good play, but that was incidental to the controversy), and a major debate on the censorship issue.

McDiarmid goes a little astray on the subject of the "Save the Dublin Kiddies" dispute, making connections between Irish folktales of child abduction and the anxieties manifested on the part of the Catholic clergy and their supporters. It is really a straightforward story of bullying priests preventing socialist women, most of them not Irish, from providing welfare to undernourished children affected by their parents being locked out. It is a depressing example of the arrogance and lack of compassion on the part of the church at the time, as beautifully captured by James Plunkett in Strumpet City. In the event, only 18 children got through the baying crowds singing 'Faith of our Fathers', to be cared for by, ironically, good Catholic families in Liverpool.

The Casement controversy is still with us, a small number of people still convinced that the explicit "black diaries", which provide accounts of a large number of homosexual encounters, were forged by the British authorities to stifle the movement to seek clemency for him, when he was sentenced to hang for treason in 1916.

For most people with an interest in the subject, the diaries' authenticity is beyond doubt, proven by scholarship, handwriting tests and textual analysis. McDiarmid takes us through the various eruptions of the controversy, in 1937, 1956, his re-interment in Dublin in 1965 (and the alleged appearance of his ghost in a Belfast bar), 1973, the publication of the diaries in 1994 and the Royal Irish Academy symposium in 2000.

She tracks the gradual defusing of the issue, to the current situation where hardly anyone has a problem with Casement's sexuality.

McDiarmid has imag-inatively marshalled the facts and contexts of these disputes, and the wealth of source material she has used, often mentioned in the body of the text rather than consigned to footnotes, testifies to the level of research carried out. There is a useful set of short chronologies of events. She writes fluidly and clearly, with judicious use of anthro-pological analysis and a keen sense for literary resonances.

The book has a special interest for Dubliners, three of the controversies and bits of the other two being located there.