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From International Socialism (1st series), No.59, June 1973, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Innishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland
Hugh Brady
Allen Lane, £2.95
This book has been getting a lot of attention in Ireland. ‘The West’ is not the popular cause among liberals it was in the mid-1960’s. However, the complete absence of any serious writing in the last 40 years on the rural communities of Ireland (or – more importantly – on the urban working class) means that a book like this is bound to make an impression.
It is all the more pleasing, therefore, to report that it is a good book. To those socialists in Britain who think ‘imperialism in Ireland’ has to do only with military repression in the North, and economic exploitation of workers north and south, and for whom the west of Ireland is a playground seen through the haze of drunken holidays, I can only say – get hold of this book and read it.
It is not always easy to read. But it does show implicitly and explicitly – how imperialist domination has held back and distorted Ireland’s economic and social development right through to the country’s most remote recesses.
Hugh Brody’s book is not overtly Marxist, but then I’m not sure what it would look like if it was, except that the explanation of historical change in the western communities would be more firmly located in the overall context of Irish social and economic development over the last 100 years. Brody makes a couple of references to wider changes which he considers connected with the ‘demoralisation’ of the poor rural communities, but does not take it further.
Some of the more strictly sociological material is not immediately digestible, and there is often a curious imbalance between that material and the near-literary descriptions of personalities and incidents. But when you read that one third of ‘Inishkillane’s’ households are made up of chronically isolated people, or that 131 out of the 436 parishioners are ‘chronically sexually isolated’, and when Brody shows you what that means in a story about a man who sobs, vomits, sits slumped in a chair, and cries, out of loneliness, then you begin to feel the havoc that has been wreaked on these communities.
The explanation Hugh Brody gives for the changes he sees rests largely on the idea that the values of urban, commercial, capitalist, go-getting culture have been transmitted into the poor, rural, ‘traditional’ communities through the emigrants, through their letters, their return visits, the money they send back, and so on.
If that were a sufficient explanation there would be no good reason I can see for dating the most crucial turning-point about 30 years ago as Hugh Brody does. The lack of a wider historical horizon is a real weakness.
If you think the only problems Irish socialists have is a divided working class, and a powerful union bureaucracy, read this book. It’ll change your mind – and that’s a powerful thing for any book to do.
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Last updated on 25.12.2007