Yan & Friends
 

Breton Humors

Some Cultural and Historical Background

With thanks to Patricia Finnegan and Frank Harrington

Compilers of factors in the genesis of stress and mental ill health amongst the Irish in Britain

• Cultural processes which occurred in the past continue to affect our lives in the present. Throughout our long colonisation we, as a people, have been subjected to a process, which in pursuing its fundamental objective of exploitation, systematically deprived us of our own culture and substituted for it elements of an alien culture which was built up round the experiences of another people. When the most symbolic conquest of all was effected, replacement of the native language, the colonisers refused to accept us equals. The effects of this cultural oppression have had far reaching consequences for the Irish as a people. Present conflicts in Ireland have much to do with the failed attempt of the British to extirpate completely the old pre-colonial Gaelic system and to make the new imposition acceptable to all Irish people.

• While the current political struggle remains to be won, we continue to be oppressed with the reality and trappings of an imposed system whose culture does not give true expression to our interests and aspirations as a people or to our experiences and values as individuals. This is a racist, alien culture which everywhere suggests and implies that we Irish are somewhat "flawed" - a racist culture which can cause us to doubt our worth and our contribution to society and which, throughout its pervasive "common-sense" appeal does inevitably cause some of our people to internalise the negative image of Irishness which for centuries has been and continues still to be, one of its structural features.

• One of the tragedies of the Irish cultural heritage and the lack of understanding about it is that the Irish themselves have been cut off from it so dramatically and tragically for the past 150 years.

• Language is the badge of a society as it is the medium though which culture is transmitted. A Gaeilge is still the badge of our identity although, ironically too many of our nationals don't speak it. It does, however, live on in their minds and hearts. The natural developments of the old Gaelic system were stunted by the imposition of English law in all Ireland in the early 17^th century. However, some aspects have survived to this day, through language, customs and practice e.g.

THE COLONIAL RELATIONSHIP

This had a crucial role in distorting the life and experience of the Irish. Colonialism began in Ireland in1169 when the Normans invaded. Ireland's history since has been one of enduring and extraordinary exploitation throughout the period of over 800 years. From the 12t^h century, Ireland's pastoral economy, which until that time had existed on the basis of semi-autonomous regions, began to be de-established in a systematic and piecemeal way by a new power.

The Elizabethan era signaled an intensification of military repression, combined with a policy of country-wide under-development and selective development of the economy which, from that period onward, became geared to the food needs of England's mercantile markets. This military repression and economic exploitation was accompanied by an attempt to suppress and eliminate the native educated elite and, by a cultural and religious persecution, the aims of which were to bring the Reformation to Ireland and to replace the old Gaelic Order with a directly contrasting value system.

The Irish province of Ulster was planted by King James 1 with thousands of his Scottish Presbyterians followed in 1609 - an act which caused the mass displacement of native Irish from their lands, to the relatively poorer more barren province of Connaught on the Western seaboard. The Cromwellian military campaign in the 1650's continued this repression, with massacres of the inhabitants of several Irish towns besieged by the "Protector's" armies. The native Irish educated leadership had, before this period, been defeated and had fled to the European continent. Irish peasants were sold as slaves to the West Indies and were transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) as convicts and ships-conscripts.

Through the period of industrialisation the Irish economy remained agriculturally based and backward. Large military garrisons kept order in the land and brutally suppressed the repeated armed uprisings of the native people. Absentee English landlords owned the land, which was sub-divided into small plots and let to native tenant farmers at exorbitant rents. These tenants (the bulk of the population) led a subsistence life in a feudal type relationship with their landlords - a relationship however, which lacked the basic protection afforded to the serfs of the Middle Ages whose master's reciprocal obligation to these had been to offer them security and protection in return for their labour.

Since many landlords lived in England and left their sub-devided estates to be managed by agents, a direct contact often did not exist between exploiter and exploited. Many forced evictions took place, at the point of army bayonets - the evicted tenants invariably having their frugal homes burnt down as they left. Exports from Ireland consisted largely of livestock grain and above all people to the expanding towns of the British industrialising economy. No organised country wide system of education existed in Ireland until the foundation in 1831 of the so called 'National' Schools (primary schools). Native people had supported a system of itinerant school masters who, in their hedge schools, were often able to pass on numeracy and literacy in Gaelic. A condition of extreme poverty existed for ordinary people whose staple diet was potatoes and milk.

RURAL POVERTY

This derived from the colonial policy on land ownership and tenure arrangements. Small holdings consisted of one or two acres per family. Size varied from place to place depending on the disposition of the landlord. The people fiercely resisted Land tenure arrangements. Underground secret societies formed to resist the landlord power. These societies operated at night destroying landlords' property and frequently assassinating their agents. This in turn increased military repression against the population.

Because of poverty and periodic famine, large scale selective emigrations occurred, with hemorrhages of people to England and America. Spectacular rural de-populations occurred, which resulted in strains on family ties. The most devastating famines occurred in 1845 and 1849, when the potato crop was widely blighted in successive years. One and a half million people emigrated destitute in famine ships to the USA and to English cities. During these famines, the military and exports of grain and cattle continued from existing stores to the English markets protected granaries.

THE SYSTEM OF PRIMOGENITURE

This was another derivative of colonialism - a devise introduced by the British to ration and order the succession to land tenancies. Under this system, the eldest son became heir to the small holding. He would thus remain at home whilst his brothers and sisters moved into hired service or emigrated to England or America. He would live with and support his elderly father, his relatively younger mother and his grandparents. He would, for economic reasons and because of overcrowding, be unable to marry - usually until his parents died, by which time he might himself be approaching middle age. He would have had a poor formal education, little or no social contact with women and would frequently be socially isolated. He would marry late in life, if he could find a partner - many women having, for economic reasons, left to find work in domestic service or to emigrate. This was a system that produced many social casualties and much misery generally. Its effects are still experienced in parts of rural Ireland today.

THE IRISH LANGUAGE

The Irish language has an unbroken literary tradition that goes back further than any other in Western Europe - except Greek. From approximately 1850-1870 in Ireland great numbers of the adherents of the Irish language seem to have experienced an urge to abandon the milieu of their social development. It involved dramatic interference with the channels through which a highly developed culture was transmitted from generation to generation. Around 1850 the national language went into retreat and within twenty years it was in full flight. This linguistic upheaval is without equal in any modern society enjoying a strong sense of historical continuity and national awareness.

THE SOCIALLY OPPRESSIVE ROLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN IRELAND

Firstly, it should be understood that Irish Catholicism came into its inheritance only by means of the destruction of a rival world and that its first priority was to establish an efficient and disciplined Church organisation loyal to Rome. Hence, its consistent opposition to the nationalist cause throughout the latter part of the 19^th century and 20^th century and in the north east of Ireland to this day the church is breathtaking in its pragmatism even to the point of siding with the forces of injustice to secure its imperialistic ambitions.

The Irish Church was essentially a folk Church but he new Church (it is merely 100-150 years old - i.e. the Church we know today) forced on people a guilt based, individualising religious system, directly opposite to that to which they were used. The Irish thus became a people whose religion was used to cow and frighten them.