Dublin in the time of Joyce.

I was born in 1925 and grew up in an Ireland that was not greatly different to the country from which James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled on 8 October, 1904. True, there were changes. We had achieved an independence of sorts from England and twenty-six of the thirty-two counties in the country were now governed from Dublin. The umbilical cord, however, had not been cut and six northern counties remained and still remain under British rule which has resulted in the festering sore that is Northern Ireland today. We had also experienced a particularly vicious civil war between the forces who, after the war of independence, supported the Treaty with England and those who opposed it. The civil war left bitter memories and divisions and these memories and divisions had an enormous and almost cataclysmic effect on the social and political life of the country until comparatively recent times. During this period when we were slowly coming to terms with the difficulties of governing ourselves and running the country, th ere was mass unemployment and grinding poverty for a large portion of the population, and the way of life was determined more than ever by the dictates of an autocratic Catholic Church. We had adopted existing British laws and taken on board their civil service and judicial systems and the only real difference was in the people who occupied the positions of power within these systems. The minions of the British Government were replaced by members of the emerging Catholic middle class who looked for leadership and guidance to the hierarchy of that same Church. Molly Ivors and her friends had come into their inheritance.

In 1932, after a General Election won by Fianna Fail, the political wing of the anti-treaty Forces in the Civil War, Eamonn de Valera became Taoiseach or Prime Minister, a position he was to hold for an unbroken period of sixteen years. There followed long years of isolationism when the words "Sinn Fein," the title given by Arthur Griffith to the political party he had founded at the beginning of the century, came to mean what they said. Roughly translated Sinn Fein means ourselves alone. De Valera started a so called economic war with England during which there was a boycott on the export of Irish goods to England and on the importation of certain English goods to Ireland, and since England was the main customer for our produce which was largely agricultural, this rather futile exercise caused additional hardship, particularly in rural areas. In many ways De Valera, who had his army of fanatical supporters for whom he could do no wrong and an equally committed, though slightly smaller, band of people for who m he could do no right, was an idealist with a vision of an Ireland, Gaelic and Catholic, that would not be contaminated by the influences of an outside world which he regarded as materialistic and pagan. He dreamt of a country where comely maidens would dance, virtuously, at the crossroads while strong, manly youths engaged in healthy athletic pursuits. The comely maidens and the manly youths were not encouraged to meet except in the public gaze or until marriages had been arranged and throughout the country there was this overwhelming preoccupation with mortal sin and, in particular, with the sin of sex. Human nature being what it is the maidens and youths did come together, if clandestinely, and there are wonderful stories, most probably apocryphal, of priests in country parishes keeping a nightly vigil and beating the bushes and hedges with hawthorn sticks to flush out courting couples.

In 1929 the Censorship of Publications Act, designed to protect the minds and morals of the innocent Irish people from the evils of the printed word, became law. Under the terms of the Act any reader who was offended by a word, phrase or action in a book or magazine could complain to the Censorship Board who would adjudicate oil whether the book or magazine was a danger to public morals and they very, very often came up with the decision that the publication should be banned. Given the mindset of people at the time, the result was that quite innocuous publications came to be banned sometimes for their very titles, which would have given "The Sweets of Sin" no chance at all. It is ironic to learn that Ulysses was never banned in Ireland under this Act but was prohibited from being brought into the country under some section of the Customs and Excise Acts. Copies of the book were confiscated at points of entry and, of course, were never on sale openly in bookshops in Dublin until the middle to late 1960s. In an Irish solution to an Irish question and in much the same way, as Mr. Deasy explains to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, that the Jews were never persecuted in Ireland because they were never let in, so the Irish people were saved from being contaminated by this terrible book. Enterprising enthusiasts (and there were some) smuggled copies into the country disguised under the dust covers of more innocent volumes such as Mrs. Beeton's Cook Book. It was in this manner that I got my first copy of Ulysses in 1952, but my mother never owned a copy.

My mother, who was one of the twenty three sisters James Joyce once claimed to have, married my father, Jack Monaghan, in 1918 and went to live in a small village called Oughterard in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, and it was there that I was born and grew up. It is a nice coincidence that it is in Kilcummin graveyard on a hill near Oughterard that James Joyce buries Michael Furey in "The Dead." It is just a coincidence since Joyce wrote the story in 1907 long before my mother went to live in the village. In many ways Oughterard was a microcosm of the Ireland of the time.

It was a very small village but it contained all the elements, attitudes and prejudices that went to make up the country as a whole. There was still a sizeable remnant of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the local Protestant church had a reasonable congregation each Sunday. The members of this congregation took little or no part in the life of the village apart from employing locals as servants or farm workers. The vast majority of the inhabitants were Catholic and among these there was an established hierarchy where tuppence ha'penny looked down on tuppence. This hierarchy was headed by the Catholic clergy, followed by the doctor, the school teachers (there were, of course, separate schools for boys and girls) and some shopkeepers who had prospered and been educated beyond basic primary level; my father's family would come into the last category. The Monaghans ran what was for the time and place, a successful business--a business that had been created and developed by my widowed grandmother who rule d everything with an iron fist though the day to day business was run by my father, the eldest son.