Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as
colorful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years
before the 1916 Rising, public battles were fought in Ireland over
French paintings, a maverick priest, Dublin slum children, and
theatrical censorship. Controversy was "popular," wrote George
Moore, especially "when accompanied with the breaking of chairs."In
her new book, Lucy McDiarmid offers a witty and illuminating
account of these and other controversies, antagonistic exchanges
with no single or no obvious high ground. They merit attention, in
her view, not because the Irish are more combative than other
peoples, but because controversies functioned centrally in the
debate over Irish national identity. They offered to everyone
direct or vicarious involvement in public life: the question they
articulated was not "Irish Ireland or English Ireland" but "whose
Irish Ireland" would dominate when independence was finally
achieved.The Irish Art of Controversy recovers the histories of
"the man who died for the language," Father O'Hickey, who defied
the bishops in his fight for Irish Gaelic; Lady Gregory and Bernard
Shaw's defense of the Abbey Theatre against Dublin Castle; and the
1913 "Save the Dublin Kiddies" campaign, in which priests attacked
socialists over custody of Catholic children. The notorious Roger
Casement British consul, Irish rebel, humanitarian, poet forms the
subject of the last chapter, which offers the definitive commentary
on the long-lasting controversy over his diaries.McDiarmid's use of
archival sources, especially little-known private letters,
indicates the way intimate exchanges, as well as cartoons, ballads,
and editorials, may exist within a public narrative. In its
original treatment of the rich material Yeats called "intemperate
speech," The Irish Art of Controversy suggests new ways of thinking
about modern Ireland and about controversy's bluff, bravado, and
improvisational flair."
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