ABSTRACT
‘All talk about nationality is dry and vain … What essential difference is there between an Irishman and an American, or an Englishman, or a Frenchman?’ So says Terence O'Connellan, the London-based Irish editor and MP in W.P. Ryan's 1910 novel, The Plough and the Cross. To the ‘material-looking’ O'Connellan, Irish nationality is merely a rhetorical device used to generate ‘copy’. He cares little for the Gaelic revival and its re-evaluation of Irish identity, seeing the ‘infernal Irish Ireland Party’ as no better than a ‘“National Council” of “will-o-the-wisps”’. He ‘metaphorically’ kisses ‘hands to Eire from his mansion or his luxurious editorial rooms in London’. 1 As his name suggests, O'Connellan is a thinly veiled portrait of T.P. O'Connor, the Irish party MP and newspaper editor. During the 1890s Ryan had worked on O'Connor's London journals, The Sun and Weekly Sun, but by 1910 he was an ardent Gaelic League activist and a leading figure in the Irish Ireland movement, having returned to Ireland in 1905 to further the revival. The character of O'Connellan shows clearly his estimate of his old ‘chief’: that, in accepting the English way of life, particularly its materialism, T.P. had become culturally ‘corrupted’. He had lost sight of his Gaelic self, of what made him Irish (O'Connellan had ‘worked … against nature’). Unable to comprehend the revival, his outlook was more British than Irish. 2 For O'Connor, this was a far cry from the Parnellite heyday of the 1880s, when United Ireland said there was ‘no better Irishman living than T.P. O'Connor’. But in the early 1900s nationality no longer simply meant politics. Instead, new standards of Irishness had arisen based on Gaelic culture, and zealots like Ryan were only too ready to argue that O'Connor did not measure up. 3
