Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

stress laid by Reformers on vernacular services, more was done to produce a printed religious literature. The editors of this enterprising Irish series have commissioned ten volumes of about 75,000 words each, printed in a cheap but attractive format. Written by specialists but calculated to appeal to students in schools as well as colleges, they aim to provide an up-to-date account, based on recent research, of the whole of Irish history. The present series will be followed by ten volumes of documents. Such an enlightened initiative provides a precedent which all of us teaching Welsh history at any level ought seriously to consider following in a manner appropriate to our needs. Swansea GLANMOR WILLIAMS NATIONALISM IN IRELAND. By D. George Boyce. Croom Helm, 1982. Pp. 442. f 14.95. This is a long, cool look at the historical development of the sense of Irish nationality and its transformation in the nineteenth century into the Irish nationalism of today, tied closely to Gaelic culture, Roman Catholicism and a largely mythical view of the country's past. The main theme is a close survey of Irish development, based on printed materials, including the Irish provincial press. The story is handled with dispassionate astringency. Ireland is unusual because of its variegated cultural and political mixture in the past, a mixture strenuously denied by its remarkably narrow and vociferous modern concept of nationalism. Different peoples have spilled over into the island or deliberately invaded it, and it was not until the seventeenth century that a single government could claim to control the whole of it. The first significant statements of national identity came in the eighteenth century when Ireland was governed on a dual system, with executive power lodged in Britain and legislative power divided between Britain and a traditional Irish Parliament totally in the hands of the Anglo-Irish minority. This meant that Irish institutions of government, the law and its courts, parliament and its electoral system, were in the hands of a small segment of the population possessed of a sense of national identity, and the bulk of the population owned to a different culture but lacked the institutions to give it a historic framework. Dr. Boyce establishes various dates as crucial determinants in the growth of modern nationalism. 1641 does not matter very much to him, but Cromwell's campaign created the sectarian division of politics, the war of William III gave both Catholic and Protestant their historical myths, Union broke the institutions which had sustained the Protestant nation and left national consciousness available to be picked up by the Catholics, and this they achieved in the first campaign of O'Connell. Only after this did the cultivation of Gaelic become a part of nationalist ethos. The idea that language was a vital part of a nation's historical identity, an idea probably borrowed from German thought, was still secondary to the religious links of Irish nationalism in the twentieth century. Dr.