Are Nationalists Right? The Question of Moral High Ground
Word Count: 4,667
Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes
Summary: The essay argues that Irish nationalism has been morally undermined by dominant liberal, Anglophile, and leftist voices. It calls for a revival of unapologetic moral conviction and intellectual leadership to restore legitimacy to the nationalist cause.
Why are Irish public intellectuals always apologising for their country's nationalism? Turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper, sit in on an academic lecture. History, current affairs, arts, sports, it makes no difference. Whatever the setting or context you will find the Gaelicist position turned upside down and emptied of moral authority. The Devil's advocate is judge, jury and executioner. One can be a nationalist within safe prescribed boundaries, but to take it to its logical conclusion is deemed to be unreasonable, if not downright immoral. They of course appeal to the “middle-ground” or to notions of “value-free history”, but in practice they simply defend officialdom's redoubt against the marauding wild Irishry.
There are currents in Irish academia and media going back to the founding of the state which are Anglophile and even unionist. There are also the inevitable Marxist and left-wing priors which drift to the fore from the 1960s and 1970s. Both strands have cooperated to monopolise between them the language of moral legitimacy. That is to say, they have been allowed to litigate the modern world through their own very narrow frameworks of right and wrong. Irish republicans as the primary vehicle for national assertion have either had to adapt their rhetoric to this new moral order (liberal democratic and socialist talking points) or be cast out as neanderthals. The spiritual and ethno-communitarian aspects of nationalism have been placed outside the acceptable moral pale and therefore dispensed with. From the point of view of nationalism it amounts to an admission of disbelief in foundational moral truths.
Moral Framing
The following quotation is from a lecture on the poet James Clarence Mangan by Bridget Hourican, a historian and journalist who has written a biography of Mangan. The context of the quotation is her attempt to disentangle Mangan from the aura of Irish nationalism and to portray him as a more ambivalent, cosmopolitan figure. He was perhaps too pure a poet to deliver Young Ireland style ballads to the measure of Thomas Davis. However, when faced with the horrors of An Gorta Mór, Mangan produced a series of devastating poetic works that shook Ireland. It was not what editor of The Nation Charles Gavan Duffy wanted, but it was what he got. The fact that these works were not the stirring call to arms that Davis might have written is cited as a positive repudiation of Duffy and of what some today would call “narrow nationalism.” For the purposes of this article, it is an interesting window into the moral framing of mainstream academic Ireland.
“As well as bringing his lyric beauty to the nationalist project in ‘The Nation’ he also brought all his ambiguity, his subtlety, his scepticism, his undermining... After the Second World War there was great hand-wringing in Germany over the whole romantic movement. People said that the romantic emphasis on cultural distinctiveness had led to Nazism. Of course a lot of things led to Nazism but cultural nationalism can be a crude instrument... if you look at the other poems in ‘The Nation’ and Duffy's obvious agenda with his emphasis on these rough manly Teutonic ballads... I think Ireland was lucky that at this moment that the greatest poetic talent in the country happened to be someone who was very peculiar and was completely incapable of picking up a flag and waving it in this wholehearted way.”
The implication being that it was better for the Irish to starve and emigrate by the millions rather than rise in violence against an oppressive regime. Why? Because nationalism leads to Hitler. This is the default moral framing. One might think it is profoundly insulting to Mangan to suggest that he pacified the Irish people in this way, but apparently that is a price worth paying to disentangle his reputation as a national poet from the dirty business of Irish nationalism.
What kind of moralism is this really? Daniel O'Connell's strange mantra that “liberty is too dearly purchased at the price of a single drop of blood” is cherished by mainstream liberal historiography and its institutional and political patrons. But such a mantra is only ever selectively practiced. The Irish state for instance is morally comfortable endorsing any military action by the Ukrainian government, but not by Hamas or even Hezbollah, despite their commitment to the Palestinian cause. And their moral attitudes to historical acts of violence committed in the name of Irish nationhood are nothing short of schizophrenic.
The appeal to the moral high-ground is also a course available to nationalists. “Moral force” was the phrase reclaimed for advanced nationalism by Terence MacSwiney: “a man of moral force is he who, seeing a thing to be right and essential and claiming his allegiance, stands for it as for the truth, unheeding any consequence.” Traditionally associated with O'Connell and constitutional agitation, MacSwiney reconciled “moral force” with “physical-force.” MacSwiney: “The true antithesis is not between moral force and physical force, but between moral force and moral weakness.” The supplication of will and violence to the cause of pure idealism as embodied by MacSwiney's ultimate and terrible sacrifice is the story of the revolutionary period up to its momentary triumph and sad unravelling.
Oddly the phrase seems to have disappeared today from the vocabulary of national resistance even in its earlier more pacifistic meaning. It is strange that in an age consumed by hyper-moralising that it is exactly the moral argument that has been lost. There cannot be moral force without a moral cause. One either believes one is in the right or one believes one is in the wrong.
The Void of Disenchantment
What is understandably downplayed by dissident nationalists is the toll on human imagination entailed by endlessly splintering movements. The drive for what seems like purity may have unforeseen costs. One aspect of the Treaty split was that it stranded prominent intellectuals like Eoin MacNeill and aloof eclectics like George William Russell on the perceived reactionary side. Another was that anti-Treaty intellectuals like Seán Ó Faoláin and Frank O'Connor were profoundly disenchanted by their experiences and quickly detached themselves from radical republicans. Put both things together and you have a massive loss to nationalist intellectual life. Other great minds were martyred in those years and others played relatively thankless roles on the fringes of the new state. The people who one relies upon to morally justify one's cause are the writers, thinkers and sympathetic clergy.
The result was that even some men who had supported moral force in all its forms in the period 1916-1922 sought new moral horizons in the years after. Other ways to justify a national ideal or something more universal. Ó Faoláin's biographies of Hugh O'Neill and Daniel O'Connell are full of frustrated revisionism and despair. O'Connor's biography of Michael Collins is in certain ways an apology for his earlier anti-Treaty stance. Like other writers and artists they became enemies of what they saw as crude Gaelic chauvinism which in practice made them enemies of simple Gaelic reassertion. It became fashionable to disdain the Irish state as an inward looking backwater of clericalism and middlebrow prejudice. Both Ó Faoláin and O'Connor notably came to resent their onetime mentor Daniel Corkery, who today is remembered as an eccentric holdout of the old Gaelicist tradition. Corkery complained about the “literature of collapse”, a term with which he critiqued writers like Séan O'Casey and Liam O'Flaherty, and which remains a prophetic term for much artistic output in Ireland to this day. What he resented was the disenchantment and alienation which characterised serious Irish literature in the post revolutionary years. “Our national consciousness,” he wrote, “may be described, in a native phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing. It is not English, nor Irish, nor Anglo-Irish.” Though he did his best to correct the trend through works like The Hidden Ireland, nothing could stem the growing revisionist mood. The moral case for national struggle had been muddied and splintered by the Civil War and its aftermath. There was also the troubling matter that nationalism had not led to general prosperity and so bled legitimacy on that front. A generation of British trained Irish historians would open another gaping wound.
The Moral Monopoly
Traditional nationalists could only do so much to stem the tide of Anglophile and Marxist revisionism which overtook Irish media and academia in the second half of the twentieth century. When anti-Catholic violence swelled up in the late 1960s an intellectual defence of traditional nationalism faced an uphill battle. The Provisional IRA when it emerged to confront the threat were portrayed as backward-looking, atavistic, fascistic, and anti-intellectual. When Conor Cruise O'Brien rejected “Sinn Féin's mystical concept of the people” as a “cult of the dead” it was a revelation that the intellectual high-ground in Irish politics and nationalism would be fought with a moral rhetoric that was socialistic and utilitarian; over time it would empty the accepted truths of “faith and fatherland” of much of their persuasive power. By the time of the Good Friday Agreement, the whole three decades of conflict could be summarised in most people's minds as “Violence is bad, make it stop.” Small wonder Michéal Martin could claim during the 2024 general election campaign that the Provisional IRA were solely responsible for the Troubles and receive little or no push-back. More recently one of his TDs even claimed that the British never targeted civilians in Ireland. And the worst part is he probably believed it.
In contrast the “Official” IRA which became the Workers Party was quietly filed away/rehabilitated as a progressive, sophisticated operation (albeit folly) in which a generation of young intellectuals, politicians, and media personalities sowed their wild oats. Many spent the rest of their careers endeavouring to cut the moral high-ground from under the feet of nationalists.
Intellectuals are difficult people. F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous mantra said that: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In ideological politics this ability is frequently a handicap. It leads to disenchantment and inertia. The single-minded fanatic is often what is needed to carry the thing forward but he is not always the best at justifying his actions to a broader audience. In ideological politics optimism is a necessity. Optimism in the face of what appears like certain defeat. The dyed-in-the-wool intellectual is more likely an extreme pessimist and therefore an unnatural propagandist. But he is needed to make the case for the defence. The problem is solved (if it can be solved) only by a strong coherent moral cause that reduces the pitfalls of nihilism and self-doubt. The intellectual is an idealist and dies without an ideal. His ideal is a substitute for optimism whereas for the fanatic no distinction is necessary.
We have had plenty of both types in Irish intellectual life over the course of the last fifty years, but almost all of them have been studiously anti-nationalist. It is these people who were able to control the centre and marginalise nationalist voices like Desmond Fennell, etc. Why did they succeed? The politics of resentment which motivated Anglophile historiography was supported by a legacy of legitimacy in economic and institutional spheres. The radical left on the other hand were motivated by the context of international “anti-imperialist” struggle that captured the imaginations of a generation. What both had in common was a desire to “change” Ireland, undo the nationalist version of Irish history and dismantle the Catholic Church. With nationalist intellectuals banished to the fringes of Irish public life and morally discredited by official sanction, they were pushing against an open door. Hence every major political party in Ireland, every radio or television channel, every university or college, is today represented by these types of people. Or rather people who sound like them.
As long as anti-nationalists control the narrative of what constitutes moral force, they will control the perception of national resistance. As long as Irish academics, civil servants, broadcasters, politicians, and business interests all go along with the mantra that “liberty is too dearly purchased at the price of a single drop of blood”, then the battle for moral legitimacy is up-hill. If one surrenders the principle that Ireland is worth dying for, one has surrendered the principle that it is worth living for. Even a peaceful demonstration of moral force (such as through people-power, boycott tactics,etc.) must rely on the unassailable might of the moral position. There is a reason the political wing of the republican movement always maintained the moral position that they were in the right, regardless of what they found themselves having to defend. God knows terrible things happen in war. Notice that the hard-left in Ireland are prepared to stand by Hamas and Hezbollah because that is the moral cost of their support for Palestinian resistance. If they conceded that they would show themselves to be unserious and uncertain. It is a cost they are willing to pay. Notice that the political centre (embodied in the Civil War duopoly) are prepared to use any violence necessary to crush dissident resistance on issues such as mass-immigration because their moral authority resides in their monopoly of force. If they conceded that their use of force was in the wrong it would be an admission that their moral position was wrong. It is the cost they are willing to pay.
A True Thing Is a Good Thing
“It is not that he is a wild person, utterly reckless of all mad possibilities, filled with a madder hope, and indifferent to any havoc that may ensue. No, but it is a first principle of his, that a true thing is a good thing, and from a good thing rightly pursued can follow no bad consequence. And he faces every possible development with conscience at rest--it may be with trepidation for his own courage in some great ordeal, but for the nobility of the cause and the beauty of the result that must ensue, always with serene faith. And soon the trepidation for himself passes, for a great cause always makes great men, and many who set out in hesitation die heroes.” — Terence MacSwiney
The void of disenchantment led to the search for new moral horizons which have now failed. Conor Cruise O'Brien attacked the “cult of the dead” which was nationalism in its purely spiritual form; he put in its place a cult of the living which was at best short-sighted, bankrupt materialism. Both, one might argue, are simplistic strawmen, but they do vaguely represent two sensibilities. One a semi-religious worship of the nation and one's ancestors. The other a stripped down socialism in a national context, but shorn of history. Perhaps what is needed is a cult of those yet to be born. The spiritual aspect restored, the social aspect retained, combined in a new moral paradigm focused on the future survival of a people. It does indeed ring empty to name-check dead martyrs when one does not have a plan for the living. But it is equally empty to deny the living the spiritual context of a continuous nation.
When we look at the broad spectrum of what constitutes national resistance to the current regime, we see many attempts to argue the case from reason or emotion. Many attempts to inspire by action or by rhetoric. Many attempts to project strength or vision or energy. We see attempts to portray a moderate stance so as to court the middle-ground. We see attempts to portray an extreme stance so as to attract radicals and create a wedge that pushes the movement in a certain direction. We see attempts to do politics and attempts to reject politics. But in the end, it is the strong moral component which is too often absent. The single-minded occupation of the moral high-ground and the legitimacy of moral resistance. It is easy to heckle Gerry Adams, but it is more difficult to learn from what he did and adopt his ability to communicate ideas and frame debates. The great strength of Sinn Féin was always their calmness under the media spotlight and the refusal ever to apologise or back down from the premise that they were solidly in the right. We will know that the nationalist movement has leadership when it manifests in such a form.
Attacking the political left from the point of view of some Cold War dialectic that never worked in the first place is not the moral high-ground. Attacking the government for incompetence and hypocrisy is a necessary step, but it is not in and of itself a coherent moral platform. Jumping the gun on every current affairs crime story that does the rounds on social media is not helping one's moral credibility. Importing the accouterments and slogans of amoral Trumpism or latching onto unpopular causes like that of Israel is a total surrender of the moral high-ground. All ideology must be simplified to the unassailable moral facts rooted in their authentic Irish context. Everything else: thrown out.
We will not have intellectuals until we have a moral cause. We will not have a moral cause until we have people who can defend simply and coherently and without nihilism or sadism, a morally defensible idealistic position. Morality is not simply the basis of order. It is the basis of self-defence. We are defenceless because the average Irish public intellectual believes that it is better that Ireland be destroyed beyond recognition than that a drop of blood or sweat be spilled to save it. The priority should be to change that.