Page 157 - Gullivers

The result is high farce and much humour but O’Brien’s intent is serious. Irish identity has been hijacked and has been moulded to a certain politicised script – that of the earnest nationalist ideal of pietistic peasants and pedantic believers in the myth of a romanticised, rural Irish race. This is effected through an unexamined embrace of all the clichés of Irish identity embodied in mythology, legend and more recent revivalists’ narratives. O’Brien has found in Swist’s writing a means of exposing the fallacy of subscription to these through exposing them – through taking the maxims of the cultural revivalists creeds and exposing the absurdity of their current application. The artistic renaissance that accompanied the movement to independence was, for O’Brien, now over, its energies gone, hijacked by more trivial and absurd preoccupations and repressive authorities eager to enforce limitations on creative enterprises that did not fit their narrow nationalistic ideals.
An Béal Bocht or The Poor Mouth (1941) is an attack on the revivalist ethos
in both political and cultural matters that idealised rural peasant life as the essential Irish life, thus failing to attend to the economic depravation of a large section of the population. It also traces a continuum of misrepresentation
of the Irish from the Victorian stage Irishman, through to the current stage
Gæl and the obsessive adoption of Gælic identities now being promoted.
The grinding poverty of the rural Irish had lest them with no sense of identity,
let alone any possibility of embracing a legendary and heroic affiliation with Cúchulainn or other ancient Gæls promoted at the time by the revivalists as models for contemporary manhood. With their identity continually hijacked over generations and now with their own willingness to adopt and adapt to the recent Gælic profile the Irish population were willing participants in their own tragedy.
This great satiric work relates the tale of the hapless O’Coonassa family and especially the elder son of the household, initially named Bonaparte but renamed Jams O’Donnell by the English schoolmaster who also renames all children in this way. Bonaparte’s family live in dire poverty in Corch Dorcha, sharing their
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 151