'Productive Investment': Thomas Kinsella and the Consolidation of the Irish State

A nation’s virtue depends on its interaction with the past. The nineteenth-century French philosopher, Ernest Renan, said that for a nation to exist, ‘it had to agree to remember a certain number of things and also to forget a certain number of things’ [1]. In Ireland’s case, a post-colonial legacy has always threatened to invade and destroy the integrity of present day statehood. The potential of this destructive force has depended on how Irish citizens have interacted with the island's shared history. 

Thomas Kinsella, a Dublin-born poet, saw Ireland’s problematic past as a focal point to consolidate a new national identity. To engage with the flux of their nation’s birth, Irish citizens must welcome ingenuity. Kinsella said,

I believe now that love is half-persistence,

A medium in which from change to change

Understanding may be gathered.

National understanding comes through a love for transformation – a face-to-face interaction with the past, going ‘from change to change’, consolidating a collective identity through major breaks with a former self.

Familiar landmarks like King John’s castle in county Meath remind visitors of a past imperial presence. From Kinsella’s standpoint, the castle sits upon ‘dark foundations’, taunting tourists with its past wrongs.

                                                          Views open inward

On empty silence; a chapel-shelf, moss-ground, unreachable.

King John directs at the river a grey stare, who once

Viewed the land in a spirit of moderation and massacre.

The first step towards a nation-state’s consolidation is acknowledgement – a welcome nod towards a former reality, in which Ireland and its people were objects to a foreign dynasty. Kinsella’s vision of King John viewing the land in ‘moderation and massacre’ reflects upon the English imperial gaze. Historical sites remain in the present day to demonstrate how far the nation has come.

After acknowledgement comes acceptance. Once a nation accepts the past, it may begin to deprecate (or defend) its ancestor’s actions. This is a psychological process which gives a sense of moving beyond dead identities. 

Kinsella digs into ancestral memory to make judgments of Ireland’s past. In ‘A Country Walk’, the poem’s speaker ruminates on a grassy plain.

I passed a marshy field: that shallow ford

A place of bloodshed, as the tales agree.

[. . .]

There the first Normans massacred my fathers

Then stroked their armoured horses’ necks, disposed

In ceremony, sable on green sward.

Twice more the reeds grew red: when knot-necked Cromwell

Despatched a convent shrieking to their Lover[.]

The field becomes a battlezone, an arena between two warring tribes: oppressor and oppressed. Kinsella’s tone of Irish victimcy separates the identities of the new nation from its past rulers, establishing each other’s ground in the face of newly set national borders.

Next, educational reform furthers the state’s consolidation, and Kinsella compares the Ireland of the imperial age with the Ireland of the later twentieth-century to assert the state’s transitional move away from its former self.

. . . And Dublin Castle used the National Schools

To try to conquer the Irish national spirit

At the same time exterminating our ‘jargon’

- The Irish language, in which Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget

And Saint Colmcille taught and prayed!

 

Edmund Ignatius Rice founded our Order

To provide schools that were national in more than name.

Kinsella references the names of Irish icons to make a clear, impassioned argument: that imperial England’s greatest crime was its attempt to stamp out the Irish language. Kinsella’s mention of Edmund Rice – a late eighteenth-century figure who established a Christian order for poor schools in Ireland – invokes the need for education to further a nationalist project and redeem the new nation’s heritage. This way, education is the lifeblood of national identity, maintaining its growth over a long period of time.

Finally, a new state needs a new set of cultural symbols. In addition to his poetry, Kinsella worked for the Irish government. As a civil servant, he embarked on a governmental project that involved representing Ireland in international terms. In 2018, the writer Adam Hanna interviewed Kinsella, focusing on Kinsella’s relationship to the Irish state. Readers of Kinsella, Hanna argues, view Ireland during a transformative period: ‘the developing lineaments of mid-century Irish bureaucratic modernity’ [2]. Part of this transitional moment in Irish history involved projecting the state’s image abroad. 

In ‘Nightwalker’, Kinsella imagines the ideal aspects of this project, aiming to place Ireland among the top ranks of an international role call. He mentions the civil service and its plans to shape and ‘develop [a] community/On clear principles with no fixed ideas’, falling quickly into a dream vision of the Irish state with open doors.

Robbed in spattered iron she stands

At the harbour mouth, Productive Investment,

And beckons the nations through our gold half-door:

Lend me your wealth, your cunning and your drive,

Your arrogant refuse. Let my people serve them

Holy water in our new hotels[.]

This is about cultural capital, the sort of project which delineates Irish identity in the European arena of nations, dividing them on cultural grounds. Signifiers like ‘holy water in our new hotels’ demonstrate Kinsella’s core ideas, whilst his language draws our attention to the ways in which both citizens and governmental bodies consolidate a freshly born nation-state, attempting to solidify its national identity, showing a stable image of itself to the world. 

Both a civil servant and artist, Kinsella captured images of Ireland in transition and, in so doing, played an integral part in its consolidation as a nation - at home and beyond.

Notes: 

[1] Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Acutest Ear in Paris: A Review of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis’ in C. Hitchens (ed.), Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Atlantic Books, 2005), p. 122.

[2] Adam Hanna, ‘Thomas Kinsella: The Poet and the Irish State, 1958-1968’ in PN Review, 44/6 (2018), pp 36-42.

Source:

Thomas Kinsella, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007).

The Pepper Canister, Dublin
(oil on board)
by Peter Pearson (b. 1955)