The Act of Union in 1800, whereby the Irish Parliament in Dublin was dissolved and Ireland became part of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland), ruled from London naturally diminished Dublin as a city. Politicians went to live in London and property prices fell.
In the 19th century Catholics were enfranchised and became eligible to sit at Westminster. However, culturally Dublin became a bit of a backwater until towards the end of the century when there was an Irish literary revival. It coincided with renewed demands for Home Rule and a revival of interest in the Irish language and even Gaelic football.
Two prominent members of this literary Renaissance were Lady Gregory and WB Yeats. Lady G, born Isabella Persse in 1852, married Sir William Gregory a governor of Ceylon thirty-five years older than her. In 1892 she was widowed. WB Yeats needs no introduction. They founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904 with a significant contribution from Edward Martyn, a Jesuit and a Republican who was the first president of Sinn Féin in 1905 but, more relevantly, a playwright, musician, man of culture and rich to boot.
These three are popularly credited as founders of the theatre but they needed Annie Horniman’s help, or rather money, to bring the project to fruition. Her father was Frederick Horniman, a rich tea merchant who founded the Horniman Museum in East London. She, among many diverse interests, was a theatre manager and patron.
The Abbey Theatre flourished, not least because there there was a plentiful supply of work by GB Shaw, Seán O’Casey, John Synge and, of course, Lady Gregory and WB Yeats. After the creation of the Irish Free State the Abbey, in 1925, became the first theatre anywhere in the world to receive a state subsidy. All went well until it burnt down in 1951.
It took longer than one might expect to be re-built. The ruins were not demolished for ten years but in 1966 a modern Abbey opened and, fifty years after the Easter Rising, put on O’Casey’s, The Plough and the Stars. When it had first been put on at the Abbey in 1926 it was controversial. The play is a tragi-comedy set in a Dublin tenement before and during the ill-fated Rising. It was rather soon to deal with such a sensitive subject, especially as O’Casey is not wholly sympathetic to the rebel cause.
I was at prep. school at Castle Park in 1966 and a group of us were taken to the Abbey to see it. I had been taken to pantomimes and we put on school plays but this was my first professional play and it made a great impression.
The Plough and the Stars is on now at the National Theatre in London, a hundred years after the Easter Rising. The sets are excellent, the English cast less so. A lot of O’Casey’s humour did not get through to me but the drama after the interval is powerful and moving.
Listen to Off to Dublin in the Green and if you’d like to sing along with The Dubliners here are the words.
I am a merry ploughboy and I ploughed the fields all day
‘Till a sudden thought came to my head that I should roam
away
For I’m sick and tired of slavery since the day that I
was born
And I’m off to join the I.R.A. and I’m off tomorrow morn.
Chorus: And we’re off to Dublin in the green, in the green
Where the helmets glisten in the sun
Where the bayonets flash and the rifles crash
To the echo of the Thompson Gun.
I’ll leave aside my pick and spade and I’ll leave aside
my plough
I’ll leave aside my horse and yoke I’ll no longer need
them now
I’ll leave aside my Mary she’s the girl that I adore
And I wonder if she’ll think of me when she hears the
rifles roar
And when the war is over and dear old Ireland is free
I’ll take her to the church to wed and a rebels wife
she’ll be.
Well some men fight for silver and some men fight for
gold
But the I.R.A. are fighting for the land that the Saxons
stole.
Edward Martyn, although an ardent Roman Catholic, was not a Jesuit: he never took any orders and left his archive to the Carmelites (his personal papers were burnt when their priory on Kensington Church Street, London was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War).
Thank you for correcting me. I read that he had been educated at two Jesuit schools before he went up to Oxford and erroneously thought that made him a Jesuit.
” the land that the Saxons stole”. I don’t think so. It was the Normans under Henry II who invaded Ireland in 1171 following the Irish regional king Dermot Mac Murrough’s request to him for military assistance against his Irish enemies. So if anyone “stole” the land it was the Normans who had, of course, already “stolen” England from the Saxons in 1066. Before 1171 many more or less independent kings engaged in a relentless struggle for power in Ireland, but it had remained uninvaded even by those most successful stealers, the Romans.
You are a better historian than the lyricist who wrote this as a recruiting song for the IRA in 1916.