ABSTRACT
Among the May 1899 inaugural performances of the Irish Literary Theatre was a scene from W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen that involved the breaking of a statue of the Virgin Mary by a starving Irish peasant.1 It was a strange start to a complicated history. Two months before, Irish Roman Catholics (then 84 per cent of Dublin’s population (O’Brien 1982: 282-3)) had experienced a major setback when unionist pressure forced the British government to abandon its plans to establish a separate Catholic university (Gailey 1987: 125-31). For Ireland’s middle-class Catholic élite (precisely those who strongly supported the notion of a national theatre) the absence of a separate university related directly to their lack of higher educational opportunities and their consequent disadvantage, relative to Irish Protestants, in terms of entry to the professions (Morrissey 1983: 168-70; Gailey 1987: 130-1; Paseta 1999: 5-16). And yet, apart from a small group of students from the Royal University, the Catholic Primate, Cardinal Logue, and a well-known polemicist, Frank ‘Crank’ Hugh O’Donnell, Yeats’s play did not provoke any serious public objection. Those protests that were made were isolated and unsupported – derided not only, and most famously, by James Joyce in his essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ –
but by the well-known nationalist advocate and later founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith.
