the future. He criticised the methods used in excavating the Bronze Age burial site at Knockast, Co. Westmeath. He did not agree with disturbing the remains of the dead and he questioned the use of bone measurements to acquire useful archaeological data.105 He described their work at burial-sites as ‘ghoulish performances’ and posed the question: ‘If it is permissible, today, to rifle a Bronze Age cemetery, will it not also be permissible, in the years to come, to excavate the consecrated burial grounds of today?’106
The Irish Free State in a Global Cultural Context
The Harvard Mission work took place during a time when, Terence Brown asserts, the Irish Free State, was ‘notable for a stultifying lack of social, cultural, and economic ambition’.107 This popular idea of cultural barrenness has persisted despite being challenged in a collection of essays edited by Joost Augusteijn entitled Ireland in the 1930s.108 Auguesteijn argues that, in this decade when Fianna Fáil came to power, attempts were made to develop the Free State into ‘an entity which was not only politically but also socially, culturally and economically independent and which dealt with its citizens in a purely Irish manner’.109 This theme is explored in a diverse range of papers whose topics include the Irish language revival, the cottage schemes for agricultural labourers and the centenary celebrations for Catholic Emancipation. While archaeological initiatives are not included in his book, they can also be considered as part of this wider cultural continuum.
Native cultural achievements in the early decades of independence, including the work of the Harvard Mission, are often not recognised by cultural historians as there has been a tendency to view cultural history through the lens of the censorship laws. In Brown’s opinion, the relationship between Irish-Ireland ideology and ‘exclusivist’ cultural and social pressures culminated in the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929.110 There was also the enactment of the Censorship of Films Act, 1923. In Brian Fallon’s opinion the importance of the censorship laws has been ‘much overplayed’.111 Indeed, the analysis of native cultural achievement celebrating archaeology, literature, ancient manuscripts written in the Irish language, oral traditions, folklore, the rural way of Irish life and Catholicism has been severely limited by this methodology and has resulted in a skewed view of this period as culturally underachieving and stagnant. The placing of ‘Anglo-Irish’ literature on a pedestal as the defining Irish cultural expression of this period means that the intellectual movement of this era, which was not purely a literary one, has not been fully analysed to date. Ian Morris, an archaeologist and historian at the Stanford Department of Classics, wrote that archaeology is ‘cultural history or it is nothing’.112 The history of other forms of successful native Irish cultural endeavour likewise are essential in the writing of Irish cultural history in the early decades of independence.
According to Paul Delaney, the post-colonialist writer, Seán O’Faoláin, ‘helped to shape the ways in which subsequent generations of readers viewed the cultural history of the Free State’.113 O’Faoláin, who was not a trained historian, eschewed native achievements in favour of what he considered to be an internationalist agenda in an English-speaking world.114 The interpretation of culture through a broader lens shows how native cultural achievement was also internationalist in its scope. Cultural ideologues such as Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill were very influential in the creation of a cultural identity for the independent state and the institutionalisation of native forms of cultural expression. Hyde’s ideas about cultural revitalisation in his speech was later developed by MacNeill in his own writings and in his work as a public intellectual.115 However, in a recent book, Histories of the Irish Future by Bryan Fanning (2015), exploring intellectual history through the writings of Irish thinkers, cultural nationalists such as Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde are omitted. The impact of Hyde’s speech, ‘The Necessity for deAnglicising Ireland’ on the intellectual and cultural life of twentieth-century Ireland has been underestimated. The ideas contained in it were essential to the cultural underpinnings of the nationalist state. Eoin MacNeill’s academic work, as a cultural activist in the public sphere and in his cultural work abroad, was also essential to the process of state formation. His leadership of cultural institutions such as the Irish Manuscripts Commission which he cofounded in 1928, serving as its first president, was crucial to the post-colonial writing of Irish history and its establishment as a viable academic discipline in Irish universities. After the destruction of the Public Records Office at the Four Courts on 30 June 1922 during the Civil War, the importance of an organisation dedicated to the publication of original historical source materials in English and Irish was crucial.116 State cultural institutions were based on and validated by the important writings and ideas of Hyde and MacNeill, and very important cultural and scientific work such as that of the Harvard Mission was also facilitated during this period of cultural renewal.
Cultural Protectionism and Diaspora Nationalism
The much criticised censorship laws can also be interpreted as a form of cultural protectionism in this period. Peter Martin points out that Irish nationalists combined ideas about censorship with their objections to British and Anglo-American culture.117 This combination of ideas about social, cultural and racial purity of the Irish was to underpin nationalist ideology It was also an expression of fears about the degeneracy of the race reflected in social problems and a perceived decline in the physical quality of the race and in the quality of cultural production. It is also worth noting that censorship in the 1920s and 1930s was not peculiar to Ireland and can be placed in an international context.118 The agenda of the Harvard Mission to Ireland merged with the nationalist, Celtic agenda of the Irish Free State Government. Paradoxically, while Ireland was culturally and economically protectionist, her sights were fixed firmly on Europe and, to a lesser extent America, for cultural sustenance. However, native Irish cultural institutions and projects held their own in European and global cultural contexts. The Harvard Mission, which itself was an expression of Irish diaspora nationalism, involved American academics at the height of their professions, bringing international expertise to the discipline of Irish archaeology. The popular idea of insular self-obsession is belied by the fact that international expertise was actively sought by the Irish Free State Government. Examples of this include the seeking of a keeper of Irish Antiquities with European archaeological expertise, such as the German, Walther Bremer, an expert in German archaeology and Celtic culture who was appointed in 1926; Adolf Mahr, the Austrian Celtic archaeologist, succeeded Bremer in 1927 as Keeper of Irish Antiquities and was later appointed to the position of Director of the National Museum in 1934; American/Harvard expertise in archaeological methodology and physical anthropology was embraced with enthusiasm; Danish expertise was acquired for the Quaternary Research Committee; and Scandinavian expertise was sought for the establishment of the Folklore Commission. Some important senior state jobs in the economic and cultural sector in the Irish Free State were held by Germans during the 1930s. Heinz Meking was the chief adviser with the Turf Development Board; Ludwig Mühlhausen was a Professor of Celtic Studies; Colonel Fritz Brase was head of the Irish Army’s School of Music; Otto Reinhard was Director of Forestry in the Department of Lands; Robert Stumpf was a radiologist at Baggot Street; Friedrich Herkner was Professor of Sculpture at the National College of Art; Friedrich Weckler was chief accountant of the ESB from 1930 to 1943; and Oswald Muller Dubrow was Director of the Siemens-Schuckert Group, which built the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme.119 A dam and power station was constructed at Ardnacrusha, Co. Limerick on the River Shannon and the first national electrification grid in Europe was created. It was opened by W.T. Cosgrave in 1929. Trips to the Shannon development were offered by Great Southern Railways.120 This massive undertaking cost the state £5.2 million, an astronomical sum at the time.121
Political progress was expressed through scientific and technological progress and the scheme became ‘a potent symbol of a new post-Treaty Ireland, as an indigenous source of energy to power industrial development’.122 The view was expressed in the Irish Statesman that this project reflected the ‘attitude of mind proper to a self-governing nation’123 This attitude of mind was also evident in the paintings of the artist, Seán Keating. Keating was commissioned to create a series of paintings on the theme of ‘the dawn of a new Ireland’, to celebrate this industrial achievement. One of the most famous of these paintings was Night’s Candles are Burnt Out, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1929.124
