Inventing Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page B

their own self-interest. By rights Céitinn could have enjoyed the traditional status of a "saoi re héigse" (a man of learning): it was the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601 which had prevented this. But he was acute enough to sense in Spenser his own mirror-image: a court poet deprived of a court, a learned man who had somehow lost his full entitlements. If history is what gets written in books by life's winners and tradition is what gets remembered and told among the common people, then Spenser must finally be rated an historian and Céitinn a traditionalist. Lacking a printing press, Céitinn had no opportunity to publish Boras Feasa on its completion in 1640; but hundreds of copies circulated in manuscript, and the book became much admired for its lucid style and for the feelings of self-worth which it instilled in Irish speakers. Throughout the same period, after its publication in an abbreviated version in 1633, Spenser's View was widely available in Ireland and in England in printed form.
    A major part of Céitinn's project was his demonstration that the Irish were not foils to the English so much as mirrors. Against the view of them as hot-headed, rude and uncivil, Céitinn offered a portrait of the ancient Irish as disciplined, slow to anger but steadfast thereafter in pursuit of their rights, urbane and spare of utterance, and so on ... to all intents, the very model of an English knight or squire. To scant avail. In centuries to come, English colonizers in India or Africa would impute to the "Gunga Dins" and "Fuzzi-Wuzzies" those same traits already attributed to the Irish. The fact that the Irish, like the Indians, can on occasion be extremely cold, polite and calculating was of no great moment, for their official image before the world had been created and consolidated by a far greater power. The occupiers also projected many of their own flaws onto the Irish and then, like parents who are dismayed to find their weaknesses repeated in their own children, felt nonetheless quite at liberty to criticize the Irish for these failings. English understanding of Ireland based itself on a limited number of ideas; as Céitinn feared, such ideas fed off one another far more than they drew sustenance from actual life.
    Eventually, Irish intellectuals deduced that the intent of English policy was straightforward: to create a "Sacsa nua darb anim Éire" (a new England called Ireland). This was undeniably true: but, because it remained an open space in which all kinds of desires and loathings might find their embodiment, Ireland also began to appear to English persons in the guise of their Unconscious. In that covert sense, the effect of official policy was the creation of a secret England called Ireland The notion had obvious dangers, especially if Ireland were to be imagined as

a feminine landscape, whose contours needed only to be laid bare: but as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, it also revealed its positive literary uses. InGeorge Farquhar's andRichard Brinsley Sheridan's plays, Anglo-Irish gentlemen returned in dishevelled desperation to remind the London smart-set of the cultural price being paid for empire by its sponsors on the periphery, a place often repressed from official consciousness.Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village could, in a somewhat ironic manner, bring the consequences of rural clearances to the attention of his more sensitive metropolitan readers; andJonathan Swift could write of Ireland as a laboratory in which the discrepancies between official pretence and raw underlying realities were starkly posed. In the Drapier's Letters Swift asked how a free man in England could lose his autonomy simply by crossing the Irish Sea. His Modest Proposal that Irish children under six be roasted as meat for English tables, though seriously discussed by some myopic readers, was for many a sharp reminder of the way in which English policy was viewed in Ireland. For here was a land where the