of Ireland to the Chicago World Fair in 1933 and 1934.125 In a New York Times Magazine article, ‘The Shannon stirs new hope in Ireland,’ it was noted that it was ‘the outward sign of transforming forces liberated by the Treaty settlement that are destined to create an Ireland that need no longer turn wistfully to the past for its golden age’.126 However, nationalist governments in Ireland continued to look to the future through the perceived achievements of the Irish nation expressed through cultural production during its past golden ages, Celtic and Christian. During the construction of the Hydroelectric Scheme there was much contemporary debate about the preservation of national monuments. One example was the contested treatment of St. Lua’s Oratory, a medieval ruin which was moved from Friar’s Island to the grounds of St. Flannan’s Roman Catholic Church in Killaloe.127
Catholic Identity and Material Culture
The identity of the Irish Free State as Celtic and Catholic was important to the first two nationalist governments. The Cosgrave government organised the centenary of Catholic Emancipation in 1929. The de Valera government oversaw the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, described in the Round Table journal as ‘a hosting of the Gael from every country under the sun’. There was much appropriation of material culture for Catholic purposes in the celebrations of the Eucharistic Congress in 1932. The congress became ‘a culminating event in the Irish national struggle’, in which images of the past played an important role.128 For example, replicas of round towers were erected at College Green and St. Stephen’s Green. St. Patrick’s bell was borrowed from the National Museum for use in the Pontifical High Mass on 26 June 1932.129 The sound of St. Patrick’s bell at the event was described by the Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton, as follows:
It was as if it came out of the Stone Age; when even musical instruments might be made of stone. It was the bell of St. Patrick, which had been silent for 1,500 years. I know of no poetical parallel to the effect of that little noise in that huge presence. From far away in the most forgotten of the centuries, as if down avenues that were colonnades of corpses, one dead man had spoken. It was St. Patrick; and he only said: ‘My master is here.’130
The association of St. Patrick’s bell exclusively with Catholicism in this way was an appropriation of an archaeological artefact for use in the construction of an identity for Ireland which was different culturally and socially from their Anglo-Saxon neighbours. In his address at the Eucharistic Congress at a state reception at Dublin Castle in honour of the Cardinal Legate, de Valera stated that ‘At this time when we welcome to Ireland this latest Legation from the Eternal City, we are commemorating the Apostolic Mission to Ireland, given fifteen centuries ago to St. Patrick, Apostle of our Nation’.131
The Eucharistic Congress was described as ‘a flashpoint in the formation of a specific Irish Catholic identity’.132 More than a million people attended masses in the Phoenix Park over five days. Adolf Mahr was commissioned to write a book, Christian Art in Ancient Ireland: Selected Objects Illustrated and Described, for the event. It was presented by de Valera to the Cardinal Legate at Government Buildings on 23 June 1932.133 Volume II of the book was completed by Mahr’s successor, the archaeologist Joseph Raftery, in 1941. In his review of Mahr’s book, Cyril Fox wrote in 1932, that ‘we warmly congratulate the Government of Saorstát Éireann on this new evidence of their appreciation of “the vital function which art has in the life of a nation.”’134 This viewpoint about art and the nation provides an interesting counterpoint to that espoused by Brian P. Kennedy on the importance of art in independent Ireland.135 The cultural revival, prior to 1922, was infused with the Protestant ethos of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and others but was supplanted by a catholicisation of culture in the newly independent state where ‘Celtic’ was assumed to be synonymous with Catholic. Indeed, Celtic Art was a politically hot topic as it was considered essential to the identity of the state and the prospect of discovering valuable Celtic objects was a core ambition of the Harvard archaeologists. While Hyde advocated an inclusive religious ethos, the cultural vision of the first two nationalist governments under Cosgrave and de Valera was a Catholic one. As modernist thinking did not necessarily take the form of secularism in the interwar period, expressions of Catholicism fitted the broader cultural regenerative model, driven by nationalist ideology.
This cultural blossoming became imbued with the catholicity of the newly independent State. The ‘Early Christian Period’, in archaeology, for example, came to be seen as exclusively Catholic. This is also reflected in the setting up of the Academy of Christian Art in 1929 which was under the patronage of Saints Patrick, Brigid and Columcille. Article iv of its constitution stated that ‘For reasons of doctrine and ritual the academy shall include none but Catholics’.136 In 1922, the Central Catholic Library in Dublin was established.137 It was de Valera’s view that ‘the Irish genius has always stressed spiritual and intellectual values rather than material ones’.138 This emphasis on the spiritual was also expressed in the foreword to the catalogue, The Pageant of the Celt, performed at the Chicago World Fair in 1934. One example of this type of sentiment included the statement: ‘We who have seen our world wrecked on the reefs of material philosophy must seek our own rebirth and the salvation of our heirs in the beacon light of that Celtic philosophy which in other days saved the world for Christian ideals’.139 The Pageant of the Celt, narrated by Micheál MacLiammóir, covered a 3,500-year period of Irish history in nine scenes, from the arrival of the ‘Milesians’ in prehistory to the 1916 Rising.140 It was reported in the Chicago Herald that John V. Ryan, President of Irish Historical Productions, Inc., and a Chicago attorney, composed the ‘richly poetic version of Ireland’s history’.141 The objective of the pageant was ‘to present a spectacle worthy of their Celtic past, and reveal to Americans of Celtic tradition a glimpse of their rich racial heritage’.142
A Century of Progress in Irish Archaeology
An official Irish Free State exhibition was displayed in the modernist Travel and Transport building at the Chicago World Fair in 1934, the theme of which was ‘A Century of Progress’.143 This was organised by Daniel J. McGrath, the Irish Consul-General in Chicago and centred around antiquities in the National Museum. An ‘impressive effort’ involved the collaboration of the National Museum of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland to present ‘A Century of Progress in Irish Archaeology’.144 Artefacts and copies of them included ‘Celtic’ cultural items from the Early Christian Period and ‘Celtic’ cultural items from the Early Bronze Age. Artefacts discovered by the Harvard Mission archaeologists included a cast of the Viking gaming board and an electrotype of a bronze hanging bowl from Ballinderry 1 Crannóg, Co. Westmeath. The antiquities were considered at the time to be very important because of ‘the all-European and indeed, universal importance of Irish archaeology’.145 Editions of the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Journal of the Co. Louth Archaeological Journal were displayed. Also exhibited were popular guides on archaeological sites; a copy of the National Monuments Act, 1930; the ‘List of scheduled monuments in the care of the Commissioners of Public Works’; and some Office of Public Works (OPW) Annual Reports with descriptions of famous sites such as Glendalough, Clonmacnoise and the Rock of Cashel. A photographic album compiled by the Dublin optician and antiquarian Thomas Holmes Mason, MRIA, contained photographs of the well-known archaeological monuments in their natural settings including Newgrange, Dowth, Dun Aengus, the Skelligs, Glendalough, Monasterboice and Clonmacnoise. The archaeological exhibit was part of a wider cultural package which reflected the ideas and values and aspirations of the Irish Free State. Included were facsimiles of the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow; stills from the film Man of Aran, paintings by Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry and George Russell (AE), books and cards from the Cuala Press, tapestries from the Dún Emer Guild and books in the Irish language.146
The correlation of race, religion and cultural expression was typical of the period. The idea that a pure race would produce a pure cultural product was an idea common in archaeological discourse. MacNeill’s academic tour of universities in the United States in 1930 not only attracted the Harvard Mission to Ireland, but the Mission’s work in turn gave scientific credence to Irish archaeological and medieval historical scholarship. MacNeill, who can be seen as a cultural ambassador
