Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland,
Kevin Whelan (Four Courts Press, €24.95 / £39.99)
The cover of Kevin Whelan’s new book, which shows early Christian beehive cells on the Skelligs, might give the hesitating purchaser the impression that he deals in detail with developments from the introduction of Christianity to Ireland.
But in fact the text moves quickly over Early and Medieval Ireland, for in some forty pages he passes over these early periods to arrive at the Post-Reformation period by page 42 (out of some 280).
Indeed, the book only really begins with the 18th century, so the main focus is not even on early modern Ireland, but it is modern Ireland, say from the Georgian period onwards, that is treated in detail. As Kevin Whelan is an authority on 1798 and the rebellion in Wexford, it could be said that this is the period he is happiest with.
The overall focus in keeping with that perspective is on rural Ireland. The effects of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, on death in the Irish landscape and vernacular religion as it found expression in the wider rural landscape.
Relics
There then follow two long sections dealing with the material relics of Irish Protestantism up to the significant 1922, followed by shorter accounts of the Catholic Revival over the course of the late 18th century and the long 19th century. What might have been thought of as the most consequential aspect of this period, the emergence of Ireland as the highly urbanised culture of today, is perhaps not fully dealt with, for Whelan concerns himself with the two totemic cities, Belfast and Dublin, in which religious culture took on vigorous and violent aspects.
By using the term ‘Protestant’ he slides over the complex nature of reformed religious expression in the city”
Only some thirteen pages are devoted to Catholicism in the new State, which hardly seems to account for what we can see around us. This is followed by a two page conclusion, which evokes that strange “flying ship” of the ancient annals and Seamus Heaney poem (which, by the way may not even be Irish, but imported) and a short vignette of what he sees as the uselessly large Galway Cathedral.
A table on page 235 lays out the numbers of places of worship which suggests the varieties nature of religious expression in the city. But by using the term “Protestant” he slides over the complex nature of reformed religious expression in the city.
Nothing here of the Seventh Day Adventists, the several Gospel Halls, the Scientologists, the Mormons, or the Chinese Grace Churches. The numbers given for Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Baha’i and Hebrew Congregations does suggest the cosmopolitanism that characterises and enlivens modern Dublin.
Spirituality
This is part of a shift in feeling from religion to Spirituality which seems now common all over Western cultures. Another table on page 230 is also unrevealing, dealing with religious practices in Europe, seeing this only in terms of Christians practising and not practising, and religiously unaffiliated, with no reference to African or Asia religions which are so obvious now in Europe’s daily life.
Though the text runs to an inherent briefness in its treatments, it has many moments suggestive of further research. The whole complicated question of “the Irish Catholic Empire” and “Catholic colonialism” – modern colonialism is indeed a Catholic invention – is touched upon and illustrated with a hurling team at Hanyang in China in 1921, quite the equal of those Kikuyu Irish dancers from 1960s Kenya.
Nor have we fully considered the fact that Kipling’s boy hero Kim is the son of an Irish soldier named O’Hara by an Hindu woman”
But the nature of Irish involvement with the Empire – that is the British, rather than the American empire – is a complex one, which includes such things as that moment when one of “the Bantry Gang” who was an MP for the Irish Party rose in Westminster to complain that his native place was not receiving enough contracts for the making of uniforms for the Indian army in 1900s.
Nor have we fully considered the fact that Kipling’s boy hero Kim is the son of an Irish soldier named O’Hara by an Hindu woman.
Bibliography
It should be noted that aside from its footnotes the book comes with an immense and detailed 26 page bibliography, to which is added the even more useful list of “Fifty National Maps of Religion”, resources which will enable all kinds of micro-researches to be made by local historians and others.
So though his comments are often very brief , the book as whole will prove valuable to many readers and researchers. It seems that if religion itself is in a quavering state in Ireland, religious history is alive and growing.
