ABSTRACT
We think of Irish culture as deeply divided. There are good reasons for this: the main one being that the Irish went through a profound shift in cultural orientation in surrendering one language for another, Irish for English, in the nineteenth century. Ireland, unlike most other European countries, did not have the opportunity of fully experiencing the experiments of individualism, enterprise, collectivity and modernization that are known as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Being a colony of England, Ireland was cut off; her people experienced Europe, in the modern period, that is to say from about 1600, through an English transmission. There were exceptions, such as the Irish propagandists of the Counter-Reformation trained in Louvain and elsewhere, who returned to Ireland to promote the Catholic interest; or the sons of those Catholic houses who were sent to study at Salamanca and Lisbon. But these men could not be said to have constituted themselves into a body of settled opinion, back in Ireland, that affected Irish life and thought. There were waves of rumour and agitation, depending on what crisis was at hand, for which poets and apologists, trained in Counter-Reformation propaganda techniques, were often responsible; but these were frequently contradictory, as between one occasion and another.
