That is only war: Irish writers and the emergency

Ireland was neutral during the Second World War---the period is known only as "The Emergency." Cut off from the rest of the world, Irish men and women began to question just what Ireland had become in the twenty years since independence. To the Anglo-Irish, Ireland's natural link with Britain had been severed forever by upstart shopkeepers intent on forcing their dead language and foreign religion on an oppressed minority. To former republicans, Ireland's revolutionary promise had been betrayed by a conservative bourgeoisie who cared more about cutting the sexy bits out of novels than fighting for the rights of small nations. And the first generation to grow up in an independent Ireland began to doubt the value of an inheritance that included widespread poverty, international irrelevance, and reactionary leadership. Three Irish writers expressed the way that the war affected these different sections of Irish society. Although Elizabeth Bowen spent most of the war in London, her attention was almost exclusively devoted to Ireland---she visited Ireland for the Ministry of Information, and her major literary works of the period included a memoir of her childhood in Dublin and a history of her family's estate in County Cork. Sean O'Faolain founded the literary magazine The Bell and criticized the government in scathing editorials. The young civil servant Brian O'Nolan (aka "Myles na gCopaleen," aka "Flann O'Brien") published a parody of that most sacred of nationalist texts, the rural autobiography, and excoriated Irish society from the position of an insider in his thrice-weekly column in the Irish Times---he attacked Gaelic enthusiasts in Irish, bureaucrats in officialese, and intellectuals in jargon. Historians have largely overlooked these writers, and literary critics have rarely placed them in the context of Emergency Ireland. Using a wide range of sources, including essays, letters, novels, recently declassified official documents, memoirs, newspapers and magazines, I suggest that the Emergency changed the way the Irish thought about Ireland. Although these writers came from different backgrounds, they reached some kind of consensus on Ireland during the war: their country could tolerate, and in fact required, criticism.