This is provincialism

It is now almost 40 years since I heard that Lennox Robinson was
looking for young men and women to train as county librarians. I was
just out of jail; I had no skill except some vague qualification as a
teacher of Irish, and at that timeex-jailbirds were not considered
sufficiently loyal to be employed as teachers, but I knew at once that
I was the very sort of person Lennox Robinson was looking for.

I must say that when we met he did not seem to feel the same. I should
have to spend a year or so studying librarianship somewhere in the
North of Ireland at 30 shillings a week, and even in the 20s you could
not support yourself away from home on 30 shillings a week.

I explained this to him but he dod not seem impressed. He just looked
ineffectual and sad.

It was my mother who finally decided the matter by promising to
contribute and extra half crown to my salary, and a few weeks later I
was on my way to Sligo with a small cardboard case and a holy picture
inside, because mother thought that in a backward place like Sligo I
might find it hard to come by a holy picture.

I paid twenty-seven and sixpence for my lodgings and had the rest
to spend on cigarettes, drink and women, in that order. I am afraid I
never even got to the drink.

After a week Robert Wilson, the Librarian, began to, descrlba me as
“the untrainable assistant.”


Training:

I didn't think a great deal of training was necessary for what we had
to do. We had the usual 40 or 50 branches, and every three months we
sent them . 25 or 50 books in a box.

We had a printed cataogue of the /Three Thousand Best Books/ which
were the basic stock of each library, and from this the local
secretary—usually the schoomaster—made his selection, but as we
rarely had more than one copy of any book he usually didn't get more
than four or five of the books he asked for.

The /Three Thousand Best Books/, whoever selected them, were no great
shakes, and like the /Hundred Best After-Dinner Stories/, plunged whole
provinces in gloom

Besides, the idea of rural libraries behind it was based on city
libraries of Victorian days, which were charity institutions, and one
of the first things we young librarlans were taught was the importance
of having only one copy of a book instead of the 20 or 30 or even 50
that people wanted to read.

To have more than one decreased our basic stock, which was calculated
by “titles.” A library with 50,000 titles was more useful to an
imaginary research student, and nobody explained to us that we were
not dealing with research students.

It was when we were establishing Wicklow County Library that I first
came into my own, because before the first meeting of the committee a
clerical member tabled a resolution that it should adjourn /sine die/,
which would mean no library.


Jailbird

Lennox Robinson at that time had got us all into trouble with a story
in “Tomorrow.”

The librarian did not know what to do, but I had a jailbird friend
teaching Irish there—he is now a Circuit Court Judge, so I had
better be careful of what I say of him—and he agreed to appear at
the first meeting as a representative of the Carnegie United Kingdom
Trust and vote against the resolution.

Perhaps I sound like a voice from the past, but in those days a good
Irish speaker who was also a good I.R.A. man was worth a good many
votes on any committee, and the Wicklow County Library got itself
established. As a result I also got an increase of salary, from
30/- to three pounds ten.

Today things are easier for young librarians, but at the same time I
don't think it would be much use to them to produce an ex-I.R.A.
man, no matter how well he spoke Irish.

Today we have long, bitter, irrelevant controversies about the revival
of Irish, which always ignore the fact that the revival of Irish is
merely part of a movement that involves the revival of Ireland, and
Irish /is/ dying because we have forgotten that.

The first essential for a revival of Irish is the revival of Irish
literature in English, because only when we learn to preserve our
national identity in the one way shall we learn to preserve it in the
other.


‘Ulysses’

Today, in our literature, our theatre, our television, we are a mere
province of England, and an unimportant one at that.

We have just celebrated Bloomsday in style. The opening ceremony was
attended by a Minister who had just cheerfully banned Edna O’Brien’s
last book: we had dramatic performances and lectures—everything on
God’s earth except a single copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” on display in a
single Dublin bookshop.

Can you imagine yourself as an outsider, looking at that, and not
thinking how very funny and how typically “Irish” it all was?

That is provincialism. It is the task of librarians to circumvent it.


Sunday Independent, 1962-07-29