The Mandarin, the Musician and the Mage

List of Tables

Table 1. Population (Millions) 1841–2021

Table 2. Life Expectancy at Birth 1950–2017

Table 3. Women in the Labour Force (21st century)

Table 4. Net Migration 2009–2021

Table 5. Percentage of Adult Population Completing Third-Level Education 1960–2019

Table 6. Constant GDP 1920–2020

Table 7. Perception of EU Responsiveness to Interests of Members

Table 8. Trust in the EU by Member States

Table 9. Importance of Religion/Faith to Personal Identity

Table 10. Changing Mores

Table 11. Births Outside Marriage

Table 12. Pride in Country

Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book was work carried out for a PhD, which was awarded from the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin in November 2009. I would therefore firstly express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Catríona Clutterbuck, who was given the unenviable, some might say impossible, task of introducing a modicum of academic rigour to someone thoroughly absorbed, some might say contaminated, in the rough and rowdy ways of the advertising business for the previous forty years. I was also fortunate to have the support of other members of the College of Arts and Celtic Studies staff: Lucy Collins, P. J. Mathews and Frank McGuinness. I would also like to acknowledge the support I received from colleagues in the Smurfit Business School, Damien McLoughlin and Maeve Guthrie. I am particularly grateful to Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha for her patience, dedication and footnoting and formatting skills, and to the library staff in the UCD James Joyce Library, who were incredibly helpful in tracking down awkward source material. Particular thanks are due to Eamon Maher, the Editor of the Re-Imagining Ireland series, and Tony Mason, commissioning editor at Peter Lang, who skilfully guided me through the publishing process. I also benefitted from a personal technical support team: Margaret Gilsenan, Martha Fanning and David Fanning. Finally, I have dedicated this book to my late wife Kaye, who was there for the book’s long gestation but who sadly died before it came to fruition.

Introduction

This book is based on the premise that a Second Irish Revival took place during the period 1956–1966, that it shared many of the characteristics of the much commented on Celtic Revival from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and that a critical element of the new revival was an active opening out to the rest of the world following three decades of withdrawal.

The Second Revival is examined through the lives of three men whose careers and personal lives crossed during these years. T. K. Whitaker was the architect of the economic plan that provided the main impetus to the economic growth which began in the 1960s. Seán Ó Riada’s significant musical output transformed Irish traditional music, provided the country with some much-needed self-confidence and inspired numerous musical groups to export Irish music to every corner of the world. Thomas Kinsella ploughed a lonelier furrow, but his translations of ancient Irish literature performed a similar, albeit lower key, role to Ó Riada’s.

Over sixty years ago, in 1956, a particularly draconian budget was introduced in an attempt to correct a severe imbalance in Ireland’s finances. In the proceeding decades hundreds of thousands had fled the country, and a much commented on book from that period, The Vanishing Irish, predicted that Ireland was haemorrhaging people so fast that the country was in grave danger of imminent extinction:

The Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been analysed in depth in terms of its literary impact, but Mathews’s influential examination of the period presents a much more rounded perspective, showing how it was a time of economic as well as cultural development.2 It will be shown that, although the economic developments of the years 1956–1966 have been widely commented on, the parallel cultural output and intense questioning of existing orthodoxies have not been connected to date, and that when viewed together they justify the ‘revival’ appellation. The opening up of Ireland to the outside world, which was a key feature of the second revival, needs to be understood in the wider context of what is now referred to as ‘globalisation’. It will be argued that the three men featured as exemplifying the second revival were all indebted to important global ideas and influences for their own careers, but that a critical factor in their success in widely different disciplines was an ability to filter these outside influences through a thorough knowledge and understanding of Irish history, heritage and culture.

Finally, as we prepare to cope with the formidable challenges facing small countries in the world of the 2020s, consideration will be given to whether the experiences and example of the three men might have some relevance for Ireland in the immediate future.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I will examine the contribution of Whitaker, Ó Riada and Kinsella to the second revival of the mid-twentieth century. Part II will describe the transformation of the country in the sixty-five years from 1956 to 2021 and Part III will consider whether we now need to consider the possibility of a new revival.

The economy responded almost immediately to the Plan, and the average annual growth in GDP during the 1960s was over 4 per cent, easily the highest of any decade since independence. Whitaker always emphasised the importance of psychology to economic development, and the first green shoots of economic growth were soon followed by greater cultural self-confidence, exemplified by the extraordinary reaction to Seán Ó Riada’s theme music for the film Mise Éire. In the words of Thomas Kinsella, the music managed to ‘startle the heart of a whole people,⁴ and throughout the 1960s there was a renewed interest in traditional Irish music, culminating in the ‘most eagerly awaited gig in the history of Irish music’,⁵ Ó Riada sa Gaiety, in 1969. Meanwhile in the literary field Thomas Kinsella was engaged in a parallel exercise of cultural retrieval and transformation. His publishing career had begun in the early 1950s when, at the request of Liam Miller, who was bringing Irish publishing back to life with the Dolmen Press, he had undertaken the translation of a number of Old Irish poems, and this was to lead to his fifteen-year-long engagement with a new translation of Ireland’s Iliad, The Táin. This restoration of what he referred to as ‘part of the bedrock of our imagination’ ←4 | 5→was begun in the mid-1950s and completed in 1969, the year of the Gaiety concert, in an elegantly produced edition with specially commissioned illustrations by Louis le Brocquy.

Kinsella’s contribution to the second revival will also be documented, and it will be argued here that his early translations and excavation of ancient Irish texts were a preparation for an as yet under-recognised, yet crucial, element of his contribution to national revival: the remarkable fifteen-year Jungian exploration of his immediate family history and the mythic origins of Ireland leading to his self-defining line; ‘and I always remembered who and what I am’.6 It will be shown that Kinsella’s Jungian period was facilitated by his exposure to American poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell, which was heightened in the mid-1960s when he began to divide his time between Ireland and the US. Similar connections between local and global will be traced in the careers of the other two men.

Whitaker’s interest in the success of French economic planning in the 1950s influenced his own economic thinking, and Ó Riada’s early involvement with jazz was a factor in the way his traditional music ensemble Ceoltóirí Chualann presented solo players who remained soloists while also playing together.