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Colm Ó Lochlainn, “Editorial”, in The Irish Book Lover, Vol. XVIII, No. 2 (March & April 19 30): ‘[...] And now [following the cessation of The Irish Statesman] almost alone among the weeklies stand The Leader, still independent, still edited by the veteran D. P. Moran. Is it too much to hope that The Leader ’s message - economic and National - will once more find a welcome in the minds of those Irishmen who set their country’s good above the clash of contemporary political endeavour The Philosophy of Irish Ireland after thirty years still rings true, and the walls of Jericho have not yet “come atumbling down”. The re-Gaelicising of Ireland connotes the revitalising of Irish life. In the Church, in the schools, in commerce, and in sport there is a broad field for National work. If The Leader leads will Ireland follow?’ (p.34.)
Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 (Oxford UP 2007) ‘opens by unearthing D.P. Moran’s 1904 parody of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an allegory of Irish politics [...]’ (See Roy Foster, review of in London Review of Books (13 Dec. 2007).
Dr Dan Mulhall (H.E The Ambassador of Ireland at the Court of St James), to lecture on ‘AE Russell and DP Moran in 1923: Partitioned Irish Intellects’, in Centre for Research into the Arts and Humanities [CCRASH] in Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DT, 14 Sept. 2014, 17.00-18.00.
F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (1971), among numerous remarks, ‘D. P. Moran ... found[ed] The Leader in 1900 ... remained ‘editor and proprietor for the next thirty-six years’; note that Moran’s book forms the title of Lyons’s chapter, ‘The Battle of Two Civilisations’ [Chap. 5]; see also allusions on pp.22, 34, 37, and 96.
Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), quotes, ‘A certain number of Irish literary men have “made the market” - just as stockjobbers do in another commodity - in a certain vague thing, which is indistinctly known as “the Celtic note” in English literature ... an intelligent people is asked to believe that the manufacture of the before-mentioned ‘Celtic note’ is a grand symbol of Irish national intellectual awakening. This, it appears to me, is one of the most glaring frauds that the credulous Irish people ever swallowed.’ (Tuohy, p.105).
David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester UP 1988), [Moran grasped the nature of the power struggle] ‘Irishmen ... [are] ... in competition with Englishmen in every sphere of social and intellectual activity, in a competition where England has fixed the marks, the subjects and had the sole making of the rules of the game’ (Philosophy of Irish Ireland, p.22). Moran reminded his readers of the crushing defeat of the Spanish in its recent war with the United States and predicted a similar outcome for [Fenian/IRB] Irish insurrection... [W]hereas Griffith’s Gael ... was primarily a linguistic and historic construct, only incidentally Catholic, Moran’s Gael was pre-eminently Catholic. As he reminded readers of The Leader [sic] in August 1901, ‘the Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation [also cited in Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London: Routledge 1982; 1991 edn. p.243], a position which, allied to his triumphalism, resulted in the strategic location which produced a hard-line exclusive position ... Moran argued for a concentration on the language movement, ‘A distinct language is a great weapon by which we can ward off undue foreign influence and keep ourselves surrounded by a racy Irish atmosphere’ (Philosophy &c., p.25); his policy therefore was to advocate the insulation of the Irish from the contagion of Anglo-Saxonism, ‘the English-speaking race, in the meshes of which we are interwoven by a thousand material and immaterial ties, is making the pace and we must either stand up to it - which I fear we cannot; isolate ourselves from its influence - which we largely can do; or else get trodden on and swallowed up - which it appears to me, is, if we keep on as we are going, inevitable (Philosophy &c., p.12); Moran argued that the people should broadly re-convert to Irish-speakers, while the attachment to metropolitan culture must be undermined by ‘an active vigilant and merciless propaganda in the English language. Anglicisation must be fought all along the line on every day of the week.’ (p.81). Moran insistently criticised parliamentarians along with big business for hypocritical talk about nationality; his targets were characterised by epithets which stigmatise them as not truly Irish; parliamentarians were “sulky West Britons”; Protestants were “sourfaces”; apers of metropolitan ways were “West Britons” if of the upper classes and “shoneens” if of the farming classes. J. J. Horgan asserted that Moran had an immense contemporary influence [only] undermined in practical aspect by a diagnosis which left the field open to the more positive combinations of culture and politics in Griffith, Connolly, and Pearse. [92]. Bibl., Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: J Duffy, MH Gill, The Leader n.d. [1905]). Further: ‘The hostility that Moran and Griffith manifested to each other and to Yeats and his protégés was part and parcel of the general struggle between the editors of The Leader and The United Irishman both for readers and relative political superiority in a terrain dominated by the parliamentarians. In this struggle for influence one of the key weapons that each employed was castigation of other for failure to show a proper regard for the sensitivities to be associated with the ‘national’ ideal [Hence] the press campaign which greeted the Playboy of the Western World ... [97]. Further: ‘On all sides one sees [49] only too much evidence that the people are secretly content to be a conquered race, though they have not the honesty to admit it ... There is nothing masculine in the character; and when the men do fall into line with green banners and shout themselves hoarse, is it not rather a feminine screech, a delirious burst of defiance on a background of sluggishness and despair’ (Moran, The Leader in 1899; reprinted in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland [J Duffy/MH Gill, The Leader 1905], p.6); ‘disadvantages ... of the national disposition’ (p.13) - remarks accepting Renan and Arnold’s analysis of the Celtic ‘genius’ as ‘feminine’ [50]. Bibl., George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Croom Helm 1982).
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Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 1994): remarks on “Irish-Ireland”: the slogan was the coinage of a brilliant and pugnacious journalist, D. P. Moran. Moran was intensely Catholic and intensely nationalist, a thorough-going Faith and Fatherland person, fully in tune with the basic ideology of the Christians Brothers, but recklessly idiosyncratic in his personal formulation of the same [33] ... may have had clerical backing for the foundation of his paper, and both his paper and his Irish Ireland movement had significant, if discreet, support from the Hierarchy ... The Leader was the most exciting thing in Irish journalism ... sharply written, hard-hitting, taboo-breaking, and animated by [34] a well defined sense of purpose ... committed journalist ... a great hater ... It would probably not be quite fair to say that Moran hated Protestants, but it would be very near the truth. ... saw ... his mission was to subject what remained of the Protestant Ascendancy by putting the fear of God into the minority in Catholic Ireland ... The files of The Leader from 1900 to 1914, constitute the only sustained explicit exposition of Catholic nationalism that we have. Through the 18th and 19th c. the whole area is covered with a fog of dissimulation and pseudo-oecumenism. After 1921, in the new Irish State, that fog decorous descends again and has never lifted this. [35] Further cites The Leader’s endorsement of rural intimidation of Protestants [4 March 1905; here 42], and elsewhere speaks of Moran’s ‘sharp and bitter, little mind’ [54].
Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Poolbeg 1994), quotes extensively: ‘Most of the heroines of modern British drama are prostitutes’ (under the heading “The British Mind in Ireland”, 6 Oct. 1900); against ‘Sourfaces’, 9 Feb. 1901 (under heading “A Sad Day” on those who mourned Queen Victoria), ‘There is something very distinctive about the face of the average loyalist, it is characteristic in its way as that of a Jew ... They all understand one another especially when employment is to be given. These brick-complexioned and sourfaced whole and part foreigners rule the country’; reference to “Jewman Bull” (26 July 1902); denounced Protestant bishop of Limerick, Dr Bunbury, as a ‘bigot’ for defending Jews of Limerick against Catholic anti-Semitism (23 April to 4 June 1904); ‘If a man is in doubt whether he is a Sourface or not let him look in the glass, if two men or women are in doubt let them look at one another. These are not infallible tests, for as a man may smile and smile and be a villain, so may a man smile and be a Sourface. A Sourface is not a Protestant, or a toy Atheist, or a Unionist. A Sourface may be any of these things. It very often happens that a Sourface is a Protestant, or professes to be one; but he is not a Sourface because he is a Protestant, but because he is something else besides’ (Leader, 11 May 1901). ‘Castle Catholics’, ‘Shoneens’, and ‘West Britons’. Moran’s declaration of principle: ‘We want to go back to the Gael, the matrix of the Irish nation. If the Gael is to be raised, the proper place for the sympathetic Palesman is behind the Gael until he becomes absorbed. But it would appear that the price of the tolerance and of the alliance is that the Gael speaks under his breath and says “Thank you” when one per cent of the former graciously smiles on him. Ireland has two religions and the majority cannot talk about their religion above their breath, for fear of appearing bigoted, intolerant, and offending our patronisers’ (5 Jan 1901); ‘There was a time in Ireland when public opinion was Irish; it was then Catholic as well. That was when the Irish Gael lived freely and in honour in his own land. And the faith which he intertwined with patriotism was the traditional Catholic faith handed down to him from Patrick. Meanwhile the alien colony became firmly rooted in the land and tried to totally extinguish every vestige of Irish Ireland – and almost succeeded. Aliens in race, and mostly aliens in religion they tried to plant their religion, language, in a word their whole civilisation on the conquered country [and on] the Native Irish as distinct from the alien settlers.’ (8 June 1901); ‘Why should Irish Catholics try to prove their tolerance when they have never been toler[ated]? Let those who have been intolerant prove that they have given it up. (31 May 1902). Further, Moran refers to Yeats’s movement as ‘an assembly known by the strange name, National Literary Society’, and continues, ‘We would point out that the West British way of looking at things may have been in keeping with the spirit of ten years ago, but though the ‘National’ Literary Society does not know it, we have advanced a little in the last ten years. would it not be time they ceased talking nonsense in this society or else shifted it over to Birmingham?’ [55]. T. W. Rolleston responded, ‘Are Davis and Ferguson and Yeats and AE to be nothing to the Irish Catholic because he is a Catholic and are De Vere and Griffin and Morgan to be nothing to me because I am a Protestant? (Leader, 5 Jan 1901). [55] ‘The few non-Catholics who would like to throw in their lot with the Irish nation must recognise that the Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation, just as the English Catholic recognises that England is de facto a Protestant nation. We desire to realise an Irish Ireland and let the non Catholics help in the work or get out of the system. Their kin have robbed us and enslaved and interrupted our development as a nation. They owe us restitution.’ [59; cont.]
Conor Cruise O’Brien (Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, 1994), quotes further ‘[on W. B. Yeats:] ‘He sometimes writes poetry which no Irishman understands, or rather which no Irishman troubles his head to read; he thinks Catholics are superstitious and he believes in spooks himself; he thinks they are priest-ridden and he would like to go back to Paganism; he is a bigot who thinks he is broadminded; a prig who thinks he is cultured; he does not understand Ireland [...]. However, he means well, and he might be left to time and experience for the acquirement of sense, only that he has no small distractive power, in this unthinking and cringing land. Of course this description does not apply to any individual’ [the last phrase described by O’Brien as an uncharacteristic ‘perfidious disclaimer’]. [59] On Diarmuid and Grainne: ‘They have offered an insult to our mind and heart, by their misrepresentation of the story in its moral aspect. The character of Grainne has been gratuitously defiled by the hand of the English mind. From the beginning of the Fenian story to the end there is not one line that could be twisted into a suggestion of unfaithfulness on her part ... the vile woman of this coarse English play ... Let the English mind in future write plays for itself. We will have none of them.’ (Leader, 2 Nov. 1901, under heading ‘The English Mind’) [60]. Quotes Moran’s grudging reception of Cathleen Ni Houlihan: ‘Mr Yeats is beginning to see the light’ (11 April 1902). Further: ‘The Irish people are Christian, they believe in the morality of the Catholic Church, and they will not suffer any attempt to pervert their opinions on such matters, or to misrepresent their attitudes towards such problems’ (“The Philosophy of an Irish Theatre”, 21 Oct. 1903); sneers at West Britons in the stalls, ‘Kathleen Ni Houlihan makes Irish patriotism quite harmless, if not respectable’ (“At the Abbey Theatre”, 7 Jan. 1905). On Synge’s Playboy, ‘Mr Synge has apparently outraged Irish piety and the authorities of the theatre are, we think unwise in fighting the cause of what they call “freedom of judgement” with such a weapon as The Playboy of the Western World” (Leader, editorial, 2 Feb. 1907); ‘The unmistakable vigorous and spontaneous outburst of disapproval which practically put an end to the last act of Mr Synge’s gruesome farce at the Abbey Theatre last Saturday can only be regretted on the grounds that it was so long delayed ... Attacks on filial affection, the sacredness of life and the modesty of women ... an undercurrent of animalism and irreligion [... &c.] (review of Playboy, idem. [2 Feb. 1907]). [83.]
Conor Cruise O’Brien (Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, 1994): O’Brien makes the explicit assertion in several places that Moran’s Leader reveals with unique blatancy the sectarian basis of Irish nationalism. He gives a full account of Moran’s attacks on W. B. Yeats, initially unsuccessful in the era of Diarmuid and Grainne and Cathleen Ni Houlihan, but finally triumphant in the period of The Playboy riots, which O’Brien considers that Moran effectively orchestrated. His term for the anti-establishment campaign that he was conducting was ‘The Great Twist of the Sourfaces’; his invariable name for Irish Protestants was ‘Sourfaces’; First issue of The Leader (1 Sept. 1900), carried a welcome from W. B. Yeats, referring to ‘the many attacks you have made upon and the movement I represent’, this being a reference to the attacks on his The Countess Cathleen (1892). O’Brien writes, ‘The great value of D. P. Moran’s The Leader is that it allows us to watch, from 1900 to 1904, some of the forces at work beneath the official rhetoric. It would be a mistake to assume that these forces disappeared fro the culture (after 1916) when all we know is that their public expression came to be discountenanced by the leadership of the newly dominant school of nationalism.’ [91]
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D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Routledge 1982): ‘Moran has been criticised for his alleged “racism” [E. Norman, History of Ireland, p.222]; but his real purpos was to spell out, regardless of cant and humbug, the principles which others accepted but preferred not to examine too closely. Moran denied tht he was running a Catholic journal, or that he was maintaining that no one but a Catholic could be an Irishman. Be, he retorted, “when we look out on Ireland we see that those who believe, or may be immediately induced to believe, in Ireland as a nation are, as a matter of fact, Catholics’; ‘In the main non-Catholic Ireland looks upon itself as British and as Anglop-Irish’, he alleged; and those non-Catholics who would like to throw in their lot with the Irish nation ‘must recognise that the Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation.’ (p.243; & seq.)
R. F. Foster, ‘Varieties of Irishness’ [Inaugural lecture], in Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland, ed. Maurna Crozier [Proceedings of the Cultural Traditions Group Conference] (Belfast: IIS 1989), pp.5-24, quotes Moran: ‘The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs’ (p.7); quoted more extensively in J. C. M. Nolan, ‘The First President of Sinn Féin: Edward Martyn’, Irish Studies Review, No. 15, Summer 1996, pp.27-33, p.30; also cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 1994, p.25 [adding ‘for D. P. Moran the Gael notoriously had to be ‘the element [...&.]’; also cited also in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cape 1995): ‘Nationality or Cosmopolitanism?’, noting that it is prefaced with the ‘more telling observation that “no one wants to fall out with Davis’s comprehensive idea of the Irish people as a composite race drawn from various sources’ (D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, Dublin 1905, 37ff.; cited in Kiberd, p.156.), and followed with the observation that ‘the old canard that “the Gael must be the element that absorbs” was never seriously entertained by the writers’ (p.156.)
Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Irish Nationalism (Cambridge UP 1992) - writing on the supposed anathemisation of Moran in the “Cyclops” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘[...]Joyce’s unflattering portrait of Dublin life in itself in no sense attests to his anti-nationalism. The alternative cultural nationalist movement was not simply devoted to pious self-congratulation. Even D. P. Moran railed against the Yeatsian project no as unflattering, but as artificial, or historically and culturally unfounded. Moran’s entire polemical campaign was directed towards the excoriation of the Irish, and in his writings he continuously bemoans the absence from Ireland of any tradition of any “literature of national self-criticism.” He claims [page] that its place instead is filled by nationalist politicians, who habituate their electorate to flattery, windy oratory and empty invective, and collude in the propagation of myth and the “hysterical artificial stimulation of racial hatred.” The broad democratic popular base of the national movement, the Catholic Irish nation, he considered guilty of tolerating and supporting such cant. Moran say th edanger inherent in offending the Irish self-image at the moment of their attempt to confront English rule in Ireland directly, but persisted in spite of it: "If this view in any way sootes the conscience of the English for their own country’s cruel injustice in Ireland I cannot help it." it is particularly ironic for Moran that is is himself best remembered as a puerile name-caller and bigot, and as such has been interpreted as providing material form Joyce’s portrait of the the citizen in Ulysses’s twelfth chapter. In face, his own satiric portrait of the corrupt Irish nationalist in The Philosophy of irish Ireland closely resembles Joyce’s representatio of the hypocritical rhetoric of the Cyclops [quotes]: “Was it not Fergus O’Connor, of Chartist fame, something of a giant in physique, who told a gaping English mob that only for famines every Irishman would be as fine a specimen as he? and you will meet men every day who will ask you how in the world could Ireland be prosperous considering that England stole our woollen industry from us some hundreds of years ago?” In the light of this, we can appreciate the existence of elements in Joyce’s selective, homogenizing and unflattering portrait of the Irish which align it with a nativist rather than a Yeatsian kind of cultural politics.’ [q.pp.; available at Google Books - online; accessed 03.02.2015.)
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Bernie Leacock, ‘Introduction to the Collected Polemical Writings of D. P. Moran’ [UUC Diss., 1996]: returned Ireland, 1899; Irish reading limited to Fr. O’Leary’s “Seadna”; articles in An Claidaimh Soluis incl. ‘One Hundred Years of Irish Humbug’; A. P. Graves: ’For now to our infinite dolour/Moran effects a new collar/At large on his neck you can view it/The while its wearer grins through it’ (NLI Graves Papers); cf. Yeats: ‘the preceding epoch with its democratic bonhomie [that] seemed to grin through a horse collar’ (his comment on ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, in Full Moon in March, 1935; Jeffares, comm., 1984; supported Gen. O’Duffy, then changed his mind; wrote obituary of O’Higgins in The Leader: ‘O’Higgins was very keen on emphasising that in national or public work it was not what you did that should count but what you were able and prepared to do - in other words, if you [the public] have no use for us get others and don’t keep us on out of gratitude for what we have done’ (Leader, July 16, 1927); shared with O’Higgins the belief that a reduced N. Ireland was more likely to survive and therefore resisted that outcome of the Border Commission; could not accept de Valera as a statesman in view of his hypocritical oath on entering the Dáil; on O’Connell, ‘started the method of gaining influence over the people by flattering them’ (Leader, 6 Sept. 1931); also regarded him as the originator of the ‘gerrymandering of reality’ (23 Dec. 1905); saw contemporary politics in Ireland as less concerned with democratic aims than personal ambition; turned to lower middle (his own) class; detested William O’Brien, leader of aggressively agrarian party; caricatured him as ‘John Francis High Faluter’, a Twaddelite opposed to Tweedelites in the novel Tom O’Kelly; feared legislative independence for anglicised Irish and obliteration of Gaeldom, along lines of Scottish highlands lowlands split; learned from David Hume: ‘is it not strange, at a time when we have lost Princes, our Parliaments, our independent govt., even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy in our accent and Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in these circumstances, we shou’d rally be the People most distingu[ish]’d for Literature in Europe?’ (quoted in Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment, Croom and Helm, p.12.)
Bernie Leacock (‘Introduction to ... D. P. Moran’, 1996) - cont.: Tim Healy known as Brutus; ‘Politics, Nationality and Snobs’, New Ireland Review, Nov. 1899: ‘what of the large numbers of shallow unthinking people who when they have done their work think of nothing but amusement? How are all these to be Irish; for if they cannot be made true to their country the nation as a nation is bleeding to death ... politics only requires the special devotion of a few, the partial help of a considerable number, and from the rest nothing but opinion in conformity with nationalist sentiment’; style formed in T. P’s leader called ‘What We think’, in a polemic style adopted by Moran; ‘Is the Irish Nation Dying’ (New Ireland Review, Dec. 1898): ‘if we regard countries as several collections of human energies, then one is differentiated from another by certain general characteristics affecting the manner in which these energies are put forth. A characteristic way of expressing thought, a distinctive language, is usually the most prominent mark of a nation. Then there will be found a native colour in arts, industries, literature, social habits, points of view, music, amusements, and so on, throughout all the phases of human activity. ... There are certainly some traits to be found in Ireland which stamp the people as a distinctive race even yet; but they characterise her torpor and decay rather than her development’; Moran encouraged to set up his own paper by Finlay; m. Teresa O’Toole; start of The Leader attrib. by Stanislaus Joyce to Jesuit funding; ‘The Pale and the Gael’ (New Ireland Review, June 1899): [revolutionary movement] a brilliant foreign kind of picture which we can never find a place for on the ragged Irish canvas that we are familiar with.’ Further: ‘The Gaelic Revival’ (New Ireland Review, Jan. 1900): ‘there is a certain body, tainted with Unionism, I believe, who preach a propaganda of industrial co-operation and economic progress which, whatever its shortcomings may be, no man may reasonably oppose, and which every man is at liberty to improve upon if he can. But they are sneered at by the Empire wreckers of the streets. During several nights recently large crowds have spent hours in the public thoroughfare cheering for Kruger and praying for the defeat of English arms - no taint of Unionism about that. Let us follow the inevitable sequel. Several of the crowd in due course look about for employment, but the economic conditions of the country are so desperate that their search is in vain ... as a last resort [they] enlist in the Queen’s army ... let me put it plainly ... which of these parties is in reality working in the interests of the Empire as against the interests of Ireland?’ [Cont.]
Bernie Leacock (‘Introduction to ... D. P. Moran’, 1996) - cont.: Hyde wrote article in Irish Ecclesiastical Record (1891) urging clergy to assist preservation of national character through language movement; Eoin MacNeill ed. in turn The Gaelic Journal, 1894-99; Fáinne an Lae 1898-99; an Claimdheamh Soluis, 1899-1901; Fr. Peter O’Leary [Ó Laoghaire], with others in the League Executive, in favour of Munster Irish; cancelled long-running serialisation of his ‘Seadna’ in Gaelic Journal, 1894-97; Moran joined O’Leary, together with P. J. Keawell, Norma Borthwick, asst. eds., of An Claidheamh Soluis; Fr. Patrick Dineen backed Bernard Doyle, rebel editor of Fáinne an Lae, in attempt to break Executive’s stranglehold; campaign to have Moran made ed. of An Claidheamh Soluis prior to appearance, March 1899; not published in League organ due to vendetta by MacNeill; found publication through Borthwick’s Irish Book Co.; carte blanche to write for An Claidheamh Soluis; ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’, An Claidheamh Soluis (March 1900); suspicious of Pan Celtic Movement; Tom O’Kelly includes Patriotic and Literary Club debate on Grattan’s Parliament; T. P. O’Connor availed of reduction of newspaper taxes in founding Star; after a rupture with O’Connor, Moran worked in London on The Estates Gazette; IAOS regarded by some Catholics as socialist; The Leader funded priv. by Gaelic Leaguers supporting ed. independence from the Gaelic League Exec.; Moran reported on the International Scientific Congress for Catholics in Munich; early issues of The Leader supported Healy, whose character he whitewashed (’stormy petrel’); supported O’Leary and caint na ndaoine; James Gore, solicitor and treasurer of Irish Volunteers; Moran attacked by mob during Gaelic League Language Procession, Dublin March 1905, resulting from criticism of treatment of Irish by school managers; ‘Literary Expression’ (Leader, 19 Jan. 1901): ‘to take pains to interest the public as you wish to reach is a different thing from playing down to what is low and unworthy in them, than which we admit there are few things more contemptible; Yeats: ‘I think Moran is merely puzzled as so many self-taught men are puzzled at finding a mysterious hierarchy, governed by standards they cannot understand. The first result of a man’s thinking for himself, when he had no cultivated tradition behind him, is that he values nothing but the obviously interesting, the obviously forcible.’ (Letter to Lady Gregory, 23 Jan. 1901; Letters, ed. John Kelly & Schuchard, OUP 1994, Vol. 3, p.19.)
Bernie Leacock (‘Introduction to [...] D. P. Moran’, 1996) - cont.: John Eglinton, Pebbles from a Brook (Kilkenny: O’Grady 1901), reviewed by John J. O’Toole, Gaelic League activist and playwright, as ‘Imaal’, in The Leader; Eglinton wrote [in answer]: ‘I will persist in seeing thee a virgin mother, made of the nearest thing to God that we know, the magnetic and teeming soil, and will still behold thee beautiful and unprofaned, no palsied bedlam with whiskey on thy breath, and a crucifix in thy hand - two things I never loved.’ (Leader, 13 April 1901); in response to the review, with accused Eglinton of atheism, O’Grady accused Moran and The Leader of sectarianism in his choice of term for Protestants, as “Sourfaces”, ignoring the fact that Moran called Catholics “Idolators” [35]; George Moore briefly wrote for the Leader on his return to Ireland in 1901; Moran attacked Casadh an tSugain on the trivial grounds of the lie told in it, as well as Diarmuid and Grainne (performed with it) on the grounds that Moore and Yeats had reduced her character to the level of Pineroy’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray; Moore’s reply, in The Leader, before ceasing to write for the journal (‘The Thoughtlessness of the Critic’, 19 Nov. 1901): ‘persevere in this extraordinary virtue and fortune awaits you, and though the church may omit to canonise you when you are dead be sure the church has canonised men and women who would not have raised an objection to the little fib which wounded your admirable conscience.’ Moran described by Annie Horniman as the sort of person one could take to ‘a gentleman could take to a club’ (cited in A Frazier, Behind the Scenes, Cal. UP 1990, p.181); Moran recommended that the Irish ‘acknowledge the Crown and stand by the nation, and dish England’s Faithful Garrison in Ireland’ (Leader, 15 July 1911); Griffith accused Moran of harbouring ‘sly pro-British sentiments’ (United Irishman, 12 Jan. 1901); Moran’s involvement in the Ne Timere controversy of 1911, centring on the case of a mixed marriage in Ballymena, not recognised after 1908 because the not conducted in a Catholic church; responding to the Eucharistic Congress of 1932: ‘the great proceedings ... suggest the question why our politicians are so bitter. They kneel reverently at the one altar, and then they go out and say that this prominent man is a traitor and that sort of thing.’; in an obituary for George V, a week before his own death, he expressed envy of the English for ‘being Monarchical’, lamenting the absence of an Irish aristocracy, leaving Ireland to be governed by ‘Intermediate Examination Statesmen with little knowledge of life’, while the absence of ‘born leaders’ meant no governing class existed to ‘absorb able men from labour and other sources’ (Leader, 26 Jan. 1936).; d. 31 Jan. 1936; bur. St. Vincent section of Kilbarrack Cemetery, Co. Dublin.
Bernie Leacock (‘Introduction to [...] D. P. Moran’, 1996) - cont.: Moran born of ageing parents, bi-generational family; mother appears as Mrs Casey, under his mother’s maiden name; older sister a nun in S. American Convent; elder br. emigrated to America after Fenian involvements; Edward, who defended the killers of Carey, earlier detected in military manoeuvres; Moran much apart from these brother in outlook; Moran m. Teresa Catherine O’Toole in Rathmines Church, 9 Jan. 1901, dg. of Waterford shipping agent Thomas Francis O’Toole, one-time Parnellite mayor of Waterford; lived in Donnybrook, Clontarf, and finally Skerries, Co. Dublin; six children of whom a dg. died; close relationship with a dg. Nuala; sons David, Thomas, Ciaran and Eoghan; dg. attended Pearse’s school, St. Ita’s, then Muckross Abbey; boys attended Belvedere; Moran performed volte face on the Englishness of rugby when his son Thomas began to distinguish himself at the game; another son, Eoghan, died mysteriously by drowning at 24 following a game of cards; Ciaran died of pneumonia, both in May 1929; his dg. Nuala took over The Leader on his death (having worked in the Civil Service); fnd. An Realt, a professedly Counter-reformation praesidium of the Legion of Mary, intended to safeguard ‘the natural characteristics of the Irish mind’ and to preserve ‘national Catholic race-consciousness’. (Leacock, UUC doctoral thesis, progressing in 1996.)
Bibl. incls. Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.46-47; Brian Inglis, West Briton (London: Faber and Faber 1962); Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers 1877-1902 (Capetown 11989); Donncha Ó Suilleabháin, Conradh na Gaeilge i Londain, 1894-1917 (Dublin 1989), p.27; Mark F. Ryan, Fenian Memories (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son 1945), p.167; A. C. Hepburn, The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland [Documents of Modern History, gen. ed. A. G. Dickens] (Edward Arnold 1980), pp.62-68; quotations from ‘Battle of Two Civilisations’ and ‘The Pale and the Gael’; also from The Leader, 27 July 1901, and letter from Douglas Hyde to Lady Gregory, 7 Jan. 1901 [Berg Collection, NY]; James Kilroy, The Playboy Riots, [Irish Theatre Series 4](Dolmen 1971); John J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse (Browne & Nolan 1948), letter of 15 June 1917; Virginia E. Glandon, Arthur Griffith and the Advanced Nationalist Press, Ireland 1900-1922 [American Univ. Ser., Series IX; History 2] (NY: Lang 1985); F. X. Martin, The Irish Volunteers (Dublin: Duffy & Co. 1963); ‘The Irish Mind’, in Passion and Cunning and Other Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1988); John S. Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 3: 1901-1904 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994); Brian Inglis, ‘Moran of The Leader and Ryan of the Irish Peasant’, in Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed., The Shaping of Modern Ireland (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1960); R. F. Foster, ‘The New Nationalism’, in Modern Ireland 1600-1972, [Chap. 18] (London: John Lane 1988; Penguin 1989), pp.143-60; also articles, Patrick Callan, ‘D. P. Moran: Founder Editor of The Leader’, in Capuchin Annual (1977), pp.274-87; John A. Murphy, ‘Identity Change in the Republic of Ireland’, in Etudes Irlandaises, Vol. 5 (1976|), pp.143-56; Robert Dudley Edwards, ‘D. P. Moran and the Philosophy of Irish Ireland’, in Castleknock Chronicle (1971); Arthur E. Clery, ‘The Gaelic League 1893-1919, in Studies, VIII (Sept. 1919); S. J. Brown, ‘The Press in Ireland’, in Studies, XXV (1936); Daniel J. O’Neill, ‘D. P. Moran and Gaelic Revitalisation , Éire-Ireland, Vol. XII (1977), pp.109-13.
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Elaine Sisson, Pearse’s Patriots: St. Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood (Dublin: Four Court’s Press 2004): ‘To understand the particular anxieties of Irish nationalism an understanding is needed of how Irishness, in the broader discourse of Celticism, had been consistently portrayed as feminine since the middle of the nineteenth century. Initially it was not [Patrick] Pearse, but D. P. Moran, who tackled the complexities of masculinity and Celticism. Moran, a considerable influence on Pearse, is one of the first of what is now understood as a “post-colonial” voice to emerge in Ireland. His analysis of the debilitating effects of imperialism on the psychology of masculinity predates, by almost eighty yars, the now established post-colonial critiques of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon and Ashis Nandy. / [...] The self-styled Irish-Irelanders, spearheaded by Moran, understood themselves to [9] be the “authentic” Gaelic-speaking voice of nationalism. In particular Irish-Irelanders saw themselves in opposition to the more suspiciously anglicised aspects of Irish revivalism such as the literary clubs and theatres, whose members, such as Yeats and Synge, continued to write in English. [...] He maintained that the invention of Irish Celticism alienated Irish people from recognising their older, Gaelic heritage and that the literary movement of the Celtic Twilight (with particular savagery reserved for W. B. Yeats) was embracing Celticism to the detriment of the enormous body of literature in the Irish language. This, to Moran, was not only copperfastening imperial cultural dominance but was a form of self-hatred which sought to “hibernicise” English conventions in literature rather than reviving a genuinely “authentic” Gaelic culture which was dying away. Moran’s disappearing Gaelic Ireland was coined [sic] “Irish-Ireland” and was at odds with Celticism, which he distrusted as anglocentric.’ (p.10.) Further, ‘Moran’s insistence on the masculinity of the Gael as a role model for Irishness rather than the feminised Celt is tied up not only with imperial representations of Ireland but also with the mesh of social and psychological narratives which constructed mid- and late-Victorian womanhood.’ (p.11; ... &c.)
Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008): ‘As the apparently tautological nature of his term suggests, D. P. Moran’s “Irish Ireland” was a highly rigidified and attenuated definition of Irishness. [...] Anglo-Irish writers such as Yeats or Hyde were engaged in a project to de-Anglicize Ireland, to reclaim its cultural and racial purity and identity in a rigorously separatist manner. However, these Protestant, Anglo-lrish intellectuals then became the victims of that same exclusivist and purifying logic which was turned against them by the Irish Ireland movement personified by Moran. The Irish nation was and is a Catholic nation, according to Moran, and the Anglo-Irish thus fail his even more circumscribed litmus test of national beloriging. In fact, the Anglo-Irish were themselves mongrels, exactly the problem rather than the solution to the ills which Moran identified lrish society. So while the grammar of Moran’s argument seems comparable to that of Hyde or Yeats, his ultimate goal is to exclude what he saw as all that is non-Catholic and non-indigenous in order to regain a true, pure Irishness (and thus the Protestant, hyphenated Anglo-Irish had to be expurgated as an unnecessary complication): [quotes “Even if the Anglo-Saxon race ..., &c.”; as supra.]’ (p.21.)
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