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.

My mother was not welcomed into this family who considered themselves to be a cut above buttermilk and no member of it attended the wedding which took place in Dublin. She was seen as a flighty city girl who had probably trapped my father into the marriage and had no experience of business or country life and, most of all, she came from an impoverished and dubious background and did not bring any dowry with her. While my father was alive she was treated with a reluctant acceptance and was happy and enjoyed a good standard of living. However, when I was just three years old, my father died six months before the death of his own mother and everything changed. The business was still in the name of my grandmother but would have passed to my father, as the eldest son, if he had lived. After his death it is thought that some members of the family brought pressure to bear on their mother to change her will and cut out my mother--this is what happened. Having escaped from the morass that was the Joyce family life in Dublin and enjoyed for some ten years the comforts of life as the wife of a man who was a reasonably big fish if in a very small pool, she was now thrown back on her own resources without any help whatever from her husband's family. Life reverted to being a continual struggle similar, if not so extreme, as the one she had experienced as a child in Dublin. It was about this time that it came to be known to the family that she was the sister of James Joyce, that awful writer in foreign parts. This was the final blow. The association was seen as bringing shame and disgrace on the good name of the Monaghan family. One of my father's sisters, my aunt Molly, is reputed to have said at my grandmother's funeral, "Isn't it the mercy of God that our dear mother died without knowing that her beloved son was married to the sister of that anti-Christ, James Joyce." "Anti-Christ" was a term in fairly general use in the Ireland of the time. My two sisters and I were educated to the end of secondary level through a trust fund set up by my grandmother but there was no question of university so that when we had completed school we each got positions in different banks in Dublin and my mother returned to live in her native city. She had some very good friends in Oughterard and she was treated with kindness by the local people, but after my father's death her life was a continual struggle. When I got married in 1954 she came to live with me and I like to think that her later years were better and happier than her earlier experience of Dublin. She died in 1966 at the age of 76.

This then was the Ireland and the atmosphere in which I grew up. I do not remember when I first heard of James Joyce or learned that I was related to him but I cannot remember a time that I did not know of this relationship. It was not always comfortable to live with this knowledge though, on the other hand, I cannot remember encountering any overt antagonism just, on occasions, some sharp intakes of breath on people learning of my connection with the man. I spoke recently with a man whom I had not seen since leaving primary school in Oughterard all those years ago. He was the son of the principal teacher and he says that I once asked him out of the blue if he had ever heard of James Joyce and that he had replied that he was a Galway footballer. My mother was proud of her eldest brother and had copies of Dubliners and Portrait which she read, but at the same time she was conscious of his reputation in Ireland and would say to my two sisters and myself that while we should never deny that we were related to Joyce, we did not have to advertise the fact either. James Joyce was not a subject that came up for much discussion at the Monaghan tea table or, indeed, at any other time, and I grew up with very little knowledge of my mother's family background and of the awful years of poverty and hunger spent in Dublin's north inner city. This was just too painful a time for my mother or for two of her sisters, Eva and Florrie, to remember or talk about. Eva and Florrie were the youngest surviving sisters of James. They never married and lived lives of quiet desperation together in an apartment in Mountjoy Square just yards away from 14, Fitzgibbon Street, the first home of the Joyce family in 1893, in the ...