Peter Costello
The Ongoing Present: A Critical Look at the Society and World in Which I Grew Up
It is always interesting for a reviewer to find in a book a shared experience with the author. In this memoir of Micheál Mac Gréil’s life and career, I came upon an account of his time as a student in Ann Arbour, where I lived for some years before, and indeed where my parents, doing their duty by a fellow Gael, entertained Fr Mac Gréil to dinner.
His Ann Arbour, I am afraid, seems to have been a different place in some ways to mine. I was then studying anthropology, and I was curious to see that it was the reputation of the professor of anthropology, Leslie A. White, that had attracted Mac Gréil to the university.
Leslie White was a divisive figure, and not a man I warmed to. But the author of The Science of Culture attracted Mac Gréil, and a shared socialism and certain determinism perhaps was influential. But those words ‘science’ and ‘culture’ – and their attendant controversies – seem to me to provide the keys to the life and work of Micheál Mac Gréil.
Outlook
The dominant culture that shaped his outlook was that of his native place, a small family farm in Mayo, to which he has returned in his eighties to live out his life. The science is, of course, the inquiring spirit of sociology which he brought to bear on Irish life and attitudes in general.
His quarter of a century as professor at Maynooth made him a significant figure. But it was his two studies Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, and later Pluralism and Diversity in Ireland that made him a truly significant figure. Here, for once, the views and opinions of Irish people were finally quantified and removed completely from the level of soundings taken in pub or taxi (a source beloved of all writers arriving in strange country).
But the publication of that first study coincided with the death of his father. And behind all his work there lies a personality rooted in that now-vanished – or perhaps destroyed – traditional life of Ireland. But “all things flow”. Micheál Mac Gréil more than anyone realises that change is in the nature of things – as the Greeks used to say “you cannot bathe in the same river twice”.
Starting then from the Irish homestead where he was reared, the author records his transit through life, through the social conditions of post-independence Ireland – not a happy time for many – his time in the army, and finally his entry into academic life.
He devotes, significantly, a long section to ‘The Heady Decade’ of the 1960s, an era that still marks so much of what we do today.
He then traces the course of the next three decades with their changing fortunes for Ireland, socially, politically and emotionally, with their weird mix of insurrection and middle class complacency.
In a sense, this memoir is really three books: a personal memoir of early life, a profession account and a survey of our changing times. Indeed, it might well have made three separate books in the hands of a commercial publisher. But here it all comes together. Like the 1960s, it is a heady brew, but one filled with interest.
Irish
Micheál Mac Gréil with his passion for peace, for the Irish language, for small communities and for the disinherited, has always been “a troublesome priest”. But then there does not seem to be much point to the priesthood unless one takes seriously the Gospel injunctions that are so direct – and so easily ignored by so many, in and out of the Church.
In that way, Micheál Mac Gréil, though many not always agree with him, will have to admit that he has been in many ways one of the significant figures in the making of modern Ireland. And for that reason this patchwork account of his life – the prose is workman-like, rather than literary – is well worth reading. It is a book that brings the reader into contact with a man of passionately held opinions.
In this day and age, that can be a very special experience.
