Abstract
This essay concerns the aesthetic category of “quaintness.” The quaint is argued here as useable as an aesthetic-political tool with which to construct cultural authenticity or the sense of a preserved past and the maintenance of social order within a hyper-globalised world. The essay makes its argument through consideration of Irish identity aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s; specifically, the postcards of the John Hinde Studio and the urban design schemes of the Tidy Towns programme. These quaint phenomena contributed to Irish post-war liberal modernisation and its fostering of international tourism, presenting a particular commercialised image of the “pre-modern” and the “traditional.” Confrontation between the tourist economy and Irish Traveller populations is used to highlight the political functions of quaintness.
A Farm House in Ireland
A Farm House in Ireland (), credited to Joan Willis, is one of many images the John Hinde Studio made of Irish rural life throughout the 1960s and 70s. Alongside initiatives such as the Tidy Towns competition, which started in the late 1950s, the studio’s commercial postcards illustrate the aesthetic yet highly mediated construction of quaint environments in Ireland. The colour saturation of A Farm House in Ireland is immediately striking. It serves to emphasise the green and yellow-hued grassed landscapes so associated with Ireland, framed as uniquely Irish. Contrasting the darkest greens are the whites of the sky’s many clouds and the white render of the traditional cottage’s walls. The thatched roof of the cottage is neat and well-maintained but still more like the fur of an animal than the surface of a twentieth-century architecture. A donkey stands in the photograph’s centre foreground, between two children: a boy in blue and a girl in yellow (perhaps its owners). The two children are watched from just outside the cottage’s front door by a woman who we can assume is their mother. Another child stands beside her. Through this construction of the scene, we can read the cottage as a feminine space—maintained and cared for by a woman. The visual relationship between matriarch and children speaks to the broader organisation of the postcard image: while the scene is playful and charming, with a sense of innocence, it is also highly ordered, intentional, and structured. The flowers and hedges are joyous and lively but are well-maintained and manicured; they are walls to a place of private domestic life and agricultural industry. The place is dignified, and it can look after itself. The postcard image conjures a highly imaginable past, a past cultivated in the present through the labour of tradition. One that the viewer might expect to be encountered through visiting; through, for example, a stay in the farmhouse as a bed-and-breakfast guest. The purpose of this stay would not be to experience the sense of loss and sadness defined by nostalgia. Instead this experience would be one of warmth and reassurance by way of knowing that some things from the past have not been lost. A tourist from the urban centres of Ireland, Western Europe, Britain or America in the 1960s may well have entered a patronising relationship with the people and place of this image, but it is hard to imagine an attitude holding this scene as fundamentally “uncivilised.” This image offers a version of civilisation more attuned with the past, with tradition, with simplicity—a place where life is more easily ordered. The scene depicted is quaint.
Figure 1. A Farm House in Ireland, Joan Willis, John Hinde Studios, c.1960, The John Hinde Archive/Mary Evans Picture Library.
Quaintness, Aesthetics, Politics
The quaint can be understood as a category of significant aesthetic importance for contemporary Ireland’s mediated national identity—visible globally in examples from Temple Bar’s traditional pubs in central Dublin, horse drawn carriages, and leprechaun suits, to Martin McDonagh’s 2022 remote west coast island village blockbuster The Banshees of Inishirin, to perhaps even great Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor’s use of the nationalist folk ballad “The Foggy Dew,” performed by Sinéad O’Connor, as fight entrance music. This paper argues that its deployment constituted, aesthetically and politically, an aim to construct cultural authenticity and the maintenance of social order within a globalising, post-war world.
It is, however, primarily concerned with how the quaint clarifies the work done in visual depictions of Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s. It is focused on the role of quaint aesthetics in the promotion and development of rural Irish environments that supported the country’s modernisation and tourism industry. It explores, through the category of the quaint, the way in which aesthetics help construct political communities. Quaintness will be shown to provide a conservative experience of the past in the present, in ways similar to yet distinct from other aesthetic modes. The paper’s exploration below of the confrontation between Tidy Towns competitors and Irish Traveller populations highlights, in particular, the political functions of quaintness.
It is necessary to survey the similarities and differences between quaintness and its adjacent categories so as to clarify and strengthen its conceptual use. Beginning with the term itself, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of quaint as “attractively strange or old-fashioned” is a seemingly positive one, similar to “charming” or “delightful.” “Old-fashioned,” though, implies a particular relation to time and history. Daniel Harris argues in Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism: “Quaintness reproduces the past selectively, editing out its discomfort, inconvenience, misery, stench and filth and concentrating instead on its carnal pleasures, its ‘warm and homey feelings’.”Footnote1 For tourists, successful quaintness enacts an aesthetic illusion, the corruption of which removes the historical displacement of the quaint place, which when performing correctly, implies a positive separation from the present. By projecting backwards, the quaint avoids this judgement by the future. Separation from the present is its aesthetic precondition, though in this way quaintness may relate generally to a disjuncture between empirical and aesthetic concepts of time elaborated by Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, “aesthetic time is to a degree indifferent to empirical time, which it neutralizes.”Footnote2 With regards to quaintness, this is demonstrated in the case of Mennonite or Amish communities in North America, whose economic existence often relies on selling the gap between “real” and aesthetic time as a touristic experience.Footnote3 Such aesthetic constructions of time also rely on the privileging of particular “traditional” and “authentic” historical images over others deemed politically undesirable.
The quaint is a term that is unlikely to be self-imposed. In fact, it may only be possible for quaintness to be a matter of an outsider’s gaze. A town or village may be affectionately referred to as quaint by urban tourists, but it is unlikely that the town or village people would self-identify this way.
The insider–outsider dynamic at play in the quaint can be seen in its historical operationalisation. For example, the “low-intensity aesthetic fondness” to which Grace Lavery refers as one sense of the term in Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, is particularly concerned with the outsider’s gaze.Footnote4 Lavery explores the contradictory position of the quaint subject in the self-awareness of Japanese writers and artists of the nineteenth century, who understood that western fetishisation of their work aided desired effects of globalisation at the cost of losing “a sense of historical efficacy.”Footnote5 By way of example, Lavery relays the case of Sir Edwin Arnold’s praise for Japanese culture as “fairy-like,” “lovely,” with “almost divine sweetness of disposition” and “charm of demeanour.”Footnote6 Arnold’s impressions were received by an editor at the Tokyo press as an implicit slight, rendering Japan valuable only as an aesthetic object, not a nation to fear—a condescending insult to its industrial and military power. In this sense, the quaint gaze can be understood by its subject as patronising, and therefore quaintness likely survives best in cases where the benefits of this patronage make the power imbalance worthwhile, regardless of any potential reluctance.
In contrast, cuteness may sit near and sometimes overlap with quaintness, but as an aesthetic category it pertains to that which is inherently corporeal. As originally theorised by Konrad Lorenz, cuteness is tied to an evolutionary function. It is based on the aesthetic of the juvenile figure, an aesthetic produced primarily by human babies but also by infant animals, and by objects and images that abstract and exacerbate features which, on a biological level, encourage humans and perhaps other animals to protect their young.Footnote7 The quaint’s association with a sense of age and pride points at one distinction between quaintness and cuteness. More significantly, cuteness relates to the body as either a living thing or anthropomorphised object: a cottage can be cute like a pet, or in contrast to a larger abode (i.e., a kitten to a cat); but it can be quaint in itself. Quaintness is not limited to corporeal objects and subjects.
The dignity of the quaint requires constant maintenance. The conservative dedication of quaintness could be described as a kind of sternness, particularly visible, for example, in anti-litter posters made by the Longford Tidy Towns committee, which ask rhetorically, “Why are you Littering?,” before answering on your behalf with a ticked box for all the following options: “I’m stupid,” “I don’t care about my town,” “Mammy still cleans up after me,” and “All of the above.”Footnote8 Sternness or strictness implies discipline, and so it can be said that the quaint is an aesthetic of discipline, which makes it easy to understand how, despite its seeming innocuity, the quaint can come into association with social discipline. But, as with sternness, if visible manifestations of social discipline become too intense, they start to bring the quaint aesthetic into crisis. Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting claims the cute as “an aesthetic response to the diminutive, the weak, and the subordinate” and “simple or formally non-complex and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening.”Footnote9 While the evolutionary role of the cute informs Ngai’s concept of cuteness, her position builds on Daniel Harris’s Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism and Lori Merish’s essay “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple” in an analysis of the cute as something which, in its passivity and weakness, encourages conflicting emotional responses. As stated by Ngai: “the cute object’s exaggerated passivity seems likely to excite the consumer’s sadism or desire for mastery as much as her desire to protect and cuddle.”Footnote10 The cute, as a ubiquitous aesthetic category of consumer capitalism, is a form through which commodities may be as likely to incite physical or sexual violence as they are to invoke love, care, and kindness. The contradiction of cuteness is in the extremes of response it receives, from loving care to horrific abuse. Quaintness is an anachronistic aesthetic bridging past and present, which corresponds to a political organisation of a community as a whole. Quaintness does not invoke the same intense reactions of love and violence as cuteness might.
Cuteness is sometimes used synonymously with kitsch. Therefore, quaint, cute and kitsch may, in common usage, be synonymous or overlap: a quaint town might also be described as cute or have shops that sell items described as cute or kitsch. However, as Clement Greenberg argued in his influential 1939 essay, kitschness is “mechanical and operates by formulas”—it is inherently tied to mass (re)production.Footnote11 Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste documents the kitsch as based on the aesthetics of the product-object—the mass-produced or mass-producible object—which may or may not pretend to come from the past. The kitsch tends not to convey a holistic image of life as with the quaint. Dorfles’s anthology offers a broad landscape of kitsch cultural fragments from a variety of twentieth-century regimes, but none convey a picture of life in the manner of the quaint image with which this essay began. A quaint town is not an object for sale in itself, though it might sell kitsch objects; kitsch implies consumerism in general. In Kitsch, for example, the first image used to represent the “archetypical image conjured up by the word” is a series of Donald Duck garden gnomes.Footnote12 Other examples of mass-produced (and usually diminutive) simulacra Dorfles discusses include a Mona Lisa towel and spectacle case, Modigliani paintings on ceramic plates, paintings of Hitler as a medieval knight (Hitler is described as an “ardent follower of the kitsch”), John and Jacqueline Kennedy portrait ceramic plates, and a teacup with a swastika on it.Footnote13
Kitsch is shown to often be political, most visibly and obviously in Nazism and other fascisms, but also in Stalinism and liberal democracy. A major difference in the ideology of kitsch and the ideology of the quaint is a matter of consciousness and explicitness. Greenberg and Dorfles reveal that kitsch is seemingly capable of serving almost any political programme, so long as the programme is aimed at mass dissemination, especially among an under-educated public. Whatever the ideological basis of the political programme, it is always explicit through kitsch, which offers an aesthetic of easy and immediate answers. The quaint’s relationship to political ideology is much subtler, much less immediate. It is an aesthetic through which politics are softened. For example, the north-eastern German town Jamel, described in the media as a “Neo-Nazi Town,” is identified with a hand-painted mural of a white nuclear family surrounding a baby (the baby is too ugly to be cute).Footnote14 The mural’s depiction of a rural German ideal is, I argue, quaint. It is not a mass-produced political object adorned with a swastika as per the fascist kitsch documented by Dorfles. The aesthetic contradiction of the quaint is a political contradiction: a form through which systematised cultural order appears natural and wholesome. The quaint furthermore becomes political in relation to that which it disregards: that which its tidy order regards as untidy and disordered or barbaric. Where the kitsch is an aesthetic of politics-as-surface, the quaint is an aesthetic of politics-beneath-the-surface.
Yet another term—picturesque—is often used pejoratively as a synonym for quaint. However, while the picturesque refers to many things that are not quaint, a quaint image will inevitably be simultaneously picturesque.Footnote15 This is not to say that quaintness is limited to a certain facet of the picturesque; rather, the quaint and the picturesque have overlapping aesthetic qualities and signifiers. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, writing in the Architectural Review in 1944, identified the semantic issue: “In modern usage Picturesque = quaint, a meaning having almost nothing in common with the eighteenth-century use of the term.”Footnote16 The quotidian is the space through which the quaint and the picturesque unavoidably overlap. However, each term leads back to distinct sets of concerns. For the picturesque this relates to the relationship between the everyday object and the art object; whereas quaintness is a commonplace for more recent history organised by a mild yet highly ordered traditionalism. It is a grey aesthetic, not a “high” art object. The pictorial frame to which the picturesque is bound is one that the quaint can wander beyond due to its generalised, minor condition. A modern, brutalist architecture may be claimed as picturesque for its deference to imageability, honesty and the irregular surface.Footnote17 Quaintness, however, remains structurally apart from the modern environments associated with brutalism. Quaintness is always about temporal distance. In this sense the quaint, unlike the picturesque, might also always transmit something like what Alois Riegl referred to as “age value,” even if the age value of quaintness is not necessarily that of physical degradation.Footnote18
The ultimate distinction between the quaint and the picturesque can be revealed through language: actions, behaviours and people themselves can be described as quaint but not as picturesque—while the former implies a kind of life (extending to patterns of speech, gestures, music, and smell), the latter does less so, limited to that which can be housed within the picture frame.
Jacques Rancière’s work on the politics of aesthetics offers, in this sense, a useful tool in the formulation of the quaint as a category of analysis.Footnote19 The aesthetic of quaintness may be considered in terms of what Rancière has termed the “distribution of the sensible,” by which he refers to “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”Footnote20 The construction of community is simultaneously political and aesthetic; the mapping of what is and is not common, accepted and therefore visible. Quaintness is an aesthetic that, following Rancière, constructs “people qua work of art” and therefore renders invisible those peoples who are undesirable.Footnote21 Like the other aesthetic categories considered above, quaintness transcends disciplinary and cultural-industrial boundaries. It is an aesthetic which, per Adorno and Horkheimer, may be guilty of “derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk.” Quaintness is not just an architectural, interior, fashion, or photographic style, but an aesthetic lifeworld constructed by many things, though not in the high-cultural artistic sense envisioned by Wagner.Footnote22 The quaint here serves to explain an aesthetic utilised in the construction of political community in a more holistic, pervasive sense than those terms casually used as its synonyms. Quaintness invokes the inseparability of politics and aesthetics in late modernity.Footnote23 As we move on, quaintness speaks to an aesthetic regime which, in the context of modern Ireland, corresponds visually to an economic and social order.
Rurality
A sampling of dictionary examples of common usage demonstrates an association between quaintness and rurality: “The area of full of quaint little villages”; “The fishing village was very quaint”; “a quaint village”; “a small quaint town with narrow streets”; “the town is quaintly old-fashioned.”Footnote24 The quaint may be operationalised in tourism as its aesthetic is a way to help sell a rural experience to outsiders. But the old-fashioned, pleasantly out-dated nature of a quaint rural community, compared to the cities or large towns from which tourists may have come, is not just a matter of juxtaposition between the urban and its converse, but also a juxtaposition of the actual conditions of rural life against ostensibly traditional, pre-modern quaint country living, which, far from existing naturally without mediation, requires intentional, laborious preservation.
The discrepancy between quaint images of the countryside—in terms of its labours, technologies and cultures—and the actual industrial nature of the contemporary developed countryside was at the heart of the polemical 2020 exhibition Countryside: Future of the World.Footnote25 One of the exhibition’s image installations bluntly compared a “THEN” with a “NOW.” The word THEN was superimposed over an image immediately understandable as the countryside’s “olden days,” a c.1909 photograph by Sergey Pokudin, the title of which translates as Peasant Girls (). The photograph can be understood as quaintness constructed and operationalised through an image. Three peasant girls are positioned symmetrically, holding plates of monochromatic foods just above their waists. Behind them is an ageing timber vernacular architecture. There is a performed discipline and seriousness in the image, but it is neither hostile nor threatening. In contrast to “THEN,” the word “NOW” is superimposed over an image which (like many others in the exhibition) illustrates the radically unquaint aesthetics of the contemporary industrial countryside: a massive, mega-structural interior coloured by pink UV light, evoking a sense of automated, robotic inhumanity, where labourers seem to be working a machine instead of working “the land.” In curator Rem Koolhaas’s words, “[t]o allow the city to thrive, the countryside has had to become a brutally functional machine.”Footnote26 Quaint imagery of the contemporary western countryside therefore requires an intentional act of framing, one to which Koolhaas’s curatorial perspective offered a counterpoint.
Figure 2. Young Russian peasant women in front of traditional wooden house in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov. Early colour photograph from Russia created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.
The discrepancy between the contemporary industrial reality of the countryside and its historical image does not pose a threat to places that can be characterised as quaint. Quaint towns and villages, though, provide an experience of what has been “lost” to industrial modernity. They make it seemingly possible to continue to access and experience traditional rural life.Footnote27 Distance from the industrial present is a precondition of the quaint’s aesthetic effect. However, the effect falters when ties to the power networks of the present are visible. Take, for example, the controversial and widely circulated collage image by Irish Instagram artist spicebag.exe in which a nineteenth-century painting by Daniel MacDonald of a famine-era eviction is juxtaposed with a contemporary photograph of an eviction conducted by Irish police (gardaí) in 2018 ().Footnote28 Both artworks—the contemporary collage and original painting—depict a background landscape and cottage not unlike the setting of the Hinde postcard shown at the outset. The foregrounded violence makes the scene fundamentally unquaint, with the temporal distortion of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century visuals in spicebag.exe’s image pushing this anti-quaintness even further.
Figure 3. Garda Eviction, Mála Spíosraí, 2021, @spicebag.exe.
When placed in the context of political violence, the once quaint setting reveals its durability, its contemporaneity, its lack of charm and innocence—its grounding in the present as opposed to a peaceful and innocent past. The quaint gaze requires its objects to be innocuous, and so when a quaint village breaks with the expectations of this gaze, it enters a crisis, while also revealing the role the quaint plays in social order and political idealisation. Nowhere is this role thrown into greater relief than in the place given to quaintness in the systematic maintenance of small towns.
Irish Tidy Towns
The Irish Tidy Towns competition provides an example of a consistent, enduring project of quaintness in Ireland. It was born from a major period of liberal modernisation during which Ireland’s cultural and aesthetic projects were pushed in multiple directions. The 1960s saw the rise in scale of both (formally declared) Tidy Towns and tourism as well as of the project of Irish modernism, including the construction of some of Dublin’s most prominent high-rise modernist architectures, such as Liberty Hall and the Ballymun Flats.Footnote29
The first annual Irish Tidy Towns competition began in 1958. The competition, organised by Bord Failte (now Failte Ireland) and the Department of Rural and Community Development, describes itself as having developed out of the 1953 National Spring Festival “An Tostal” (The Gathering), which also produced the annual Spring Clean Campaign, a kind of non-competitive predecessor to Tidy Towns. While still largely concerned with the cleaning of towns, the competition judged a broader aesthetic performance involving various scales of architectural renovation, urban design, and gardening. The competition can be understood within a broader constellation of international anti-litter and post-war regeneration movements. The Keep America Beautiful campaign was also established in 1953.Footnote30 One year later, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes passed the Keep Britain Tidy Resolution.Footnote31 The Irish Tidy Towns success as a competition was followed by other initiatives in the Anglo-American world, such as the Australian Tidy Town Awards, running since 1968 as a part of Keep Australia Beautiful.Footnote32 In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Beautiful Awards commenced in 1972 as part of Keep New Zealand Beautiful.Footnote33 Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Best Kept Village Award has been run since 1959 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The recurrence of the verbs “keep” and “kept” emphasises preservation and a sense of historical continuity.Footnote34
The beginning of the Tidy Towns competition in Ireland came at the same time as the First Programme for Economic Expansion (1958–63) under Sean Lemass as Prime Minister (or Taoiseach) and T. K. Whitaker as the Governor for the Central Bank of Ireland. This was an era of liberal economic ascension, often mythologised as part of the birth of modern Ireland and the end of a dark period of protectionist stagnation with origins associated with the Anglo-Irish Trade War.Footnote35 It was a period also defined by an intensified interest in tourism, which was set to become of growing importance to the Irish economy in an increasingly globalised world. Flights by Aer Lingus (then Aierlinte Eireann) became transatlantic on April 28, 1958, connecting Dublin to New York via Shannon Airport, allowing for an influx of American diasporic tourists. Footnote36
By the 1980s, Irish tourism authorities could look back on the Ireland of the 1950s as having “displayed the symptoms of an introverted and demoralised society.”Footnote37 The Irish Tourist Board’s A Report on Bord Failte’s Tidy Towns Competition 1958–1982, frames the parallel success of the Tidy Towns competition against what it read as the “death wish” of the 1950s, a pessimistic mood informed by mass emigration and high levels of unemployment.Footnote38 It casts the era brought to a close across that decade by Lemass and Whitaker as one of despondency and pessimism fed by isolationism and protectionism, which had set Ireland aside from the post-war growth enjoyed elsewhere in Europe. The competitive beautification of Irish towns followed two interrelated logics. Firstly, the tidying of towns, through various grades of what might be called urban renewal, would instill townspeople with a perhaps otherwise lacking sense of pride and purpose. More importantly, the Tidy Towns competition was seen as a way to make largely rural settings more appealing to American or European tourists. In this way, the pride and purpose of townspeople would be further improved by the newfound jobs of a sustainable tourism industry, which could in turn commodify these towns’ non-urban qualities.
The logic is described by Eric G. E. Zuelow in Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity Since the Irish Civil War. He notes the overlap between Éamon de Valera’s policy statement visions of Ireland and the country’s depictions of itself in tourist guidebooks. He quotes de Valera making a radio broadcast on Easter Sunday in 1943, and his invocation of a thriving rural Ireland: “a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.”Footnote39 Zuelow argues that the vision was not just a message for tourists and foreign governments; it was also a way of “bolstering the native self-image” and emphasising that tourism could bring economic prosperity to rural areas where agriculture or fishing industries were in decline.Footnote40
In 1982, the Tourist Board published a pamphlet entitled The Mile Tree Book.Footnote41 The pamphlet tells the story of how a fictional town (Mile Tree) becomes aware of its touristic potential, but, also, its inadequacies. The town consults Bord Failte and embarks on a journey of improving its tourist accommodation and tidying itself up—a model narrative for other towns to emulate. The process of tidying was intensive, but not a matter of costly architectural or urban renovation. The Tidy Towns grading categories in its infant days were: effort involved; overall effect; general cleanliness and tidiness; condition of streets and sidewalks; appearance of industrial and commercial premises; colour and colour harmony; and absence of unsightly objects.Footnote42 A 1965 film from the Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) archives shows reporting on the year’s Tidy Town winner, Virginia, County Cavan, which was awarded 92 out of 100 marks. The reporter paraphrases representatives of the town in saying that it was not “big projects” that won the title, but rather “attention to detail” and “sheer methodical hard work.”Footnote43 As an example of this attention to detail and sheer methodical hard work, the camera pans past 140 carefully clipped Yew Trees in front of the town’s church. The reporter also narrates that there are five new flower beds in the town and barrels of flowers lining streets; that nearly all houses in the town have been given a new coat of paint (along with the flower barrels); and that the biggest project was “a complex of things” at the lake: a fishing pier, a launching ramp, and a boat haven. A common practice of Tidy Towns competitors is the assembly of before and after photographs—photographic series that depict the transformation of derelict sites (insufficiently quaint in their implication of social disorder via dirtiness and untidiness) into clean and charming images. As well as before and after images, it is common that the town is documented in its completed, tidy state. In doing so, a narrative is presented of the town as a whole, a cultural and ideological entity, implicitly outlining its boundaries. The 2008 Aughrim Tidy Town video, Beautiful Aughrim—Tidy Town of County Wicklow contains a similar sequence of images to those in the report on Virginia from 1964.Footnote44 The town’s ethos is clear: it is clean, conservative and welcoming to those who care to enjoy its well-kept scenery. This combination of inwardness and welcome highlights a contradiction explicit in political debates over Irish tourism in the twentieth century—a tension between fear that globalisation and migration would corrupt Ireland’s authentic traditional ruralism, and an argument for a commodification of this very rural image for the sake of its economic success.
The resolution of this tension is discussed in Cronin and O’Connor’s Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity: “Critics failed to see how Ireland could present itself in Industrial Development Authority (IDA) and refers to IDA Ireland advertising as a progressive, modern economy and at the same time, in tourism advertising, offer the image of a lackadaisical pre-modern culture, inhabited mainly by old men and (rusting) bicycles. Yet, what the modernists were unable to anticipate was that it was ultimately the pre-modern that would attract the post-modern.”Footnote45 A similar tension may be identified in the quaint aesthetics of Tidy Towns. They claim authenticity and tourist commodity not as binary poles but as simultaneously achievable, maintaining an agreed distance between authentic locals and tourist outsiders. The quaint plays an important aesthetic, superficial role in visually ordering this distance and mediation: facilitating and therefore defined by an authentic subjectivity; viewed from the outside as a strange yet comforting object, a relic from the past. Tourism might always rely on cultural or geographic distance, but quaintness relies on temporal distance. Quaintness provides for both the “in-” and “outsider,” an aesthetic-political barrier against the alienating and displacing effects of capitalist globalisation. In this way, the quaint can be construed as an attempt to mitigate what Mark Fischer describes as capitalism’s “massive desacralization of culture,” an attempt to sell the idea that some places and cultures still refuse to be standardised into “modern culture,” inviting the commodification of an anti-commodified object.Footnote46
The John Hinde Studio
Considering other imagery and aesthetic projects of rural identity underway when the Tidy Towns came into existence allows their quaint aesthetics to be understood within a constellation of rural tourism imagery.Footnote47 The career of English photographer John Hinde (1916–97) provides a telling example. The work of the Hinde Studio was incredibly important to advertising 1960s rural Ireland as a tourist destination, particularly through postcards.Footnote48 The studio’s images frame and construct quaintness, and not just from a perspective in the present. They were, at the time of production, already depicting an experience of quaintness that tourists-as-outsiders could come to rural Ireland and pay to enjoy.
Three categories of the studio’s iconic postcards are relevant to this observation: those framing rural life, those of tourist adventure through rural landscapes, where buildings and people are particular but few, and those of urban Ireland (primarily Dublin).Footnote49 The main differences between the first two categories are in the human subjects and modes of transportation depicted. The former typically contain brightly-clothed villagers, often beside donkeys. In a portrait titled Collecting Turf from the Bog, Connemara, Co. Galway (), the orange hair and freckles of each child is particularly vivid (along with the girl’s red shirt above her vernacular dress) against the mildly dark green of the bog and centred donkey. This category of Hinde photography is therefore characterised by hyper-saturated (and climatically disingenuous) shots of green land, blue oceans and sky, and innocent yet colourful displays of authentic places, plausibly having survived many waves of tumultuous Irish history. These images are also consumable by tourists—a consumption depicted in the next category of Hinde photography, which zooms out to show tourists observing or navigating Irish landscapes, driving cars instead of horse-drawn carriages. The most explicit staging of the tourist odyssey narrative is shown in the photograph Bloody Foreland, Co. Donegal (), where the car of a visibly middle class group of four, presumably two couples, has parked on a road above a littoral village building beside an extensive series of stone ruins close to the ocean.Footnote50 While it seems they have stopped to read the map, the view beside them captures most of the group’s attention. Irish Thatched Cottage, Bunratty, Co. Clare (), taken by Hinde protégé Elmar Ludwig and included in the John Hinde Archive, also shows a particularly staged scene of what appears to be a farewell between visitors and hosts, involving the kind of setting, architecture and warm goodbye archetypical of the traditional Irish bed and breakfast experience.
Figure 4. Collecting Turf from the Bog, Connemara, Co. Galway, John Hinde, date unknown, The John Hinde Archive/Mary Evans Picture Library.
Figure 5. Bloody Foreland, Co. Donegal, David Noble, John Hinde Studios, c.1960, The John Hinde Archive/Mary Evans Picture Library.
Figure 6. Irish Thatched Cottage, Bunratty, Co. Clare, Elmar Ludwig, John Hinde Studios, c.1960, The John Hinde Archive/Mary Evans Picture Library.
There is a clear quaintness to Hinde’s “attractively strange or old-fashioned” imagery, activated by the cosmopolitan outsider. This type of outsider is often included as a subject in the photos, suggesting the perception of these scenes as quaint was very much considered part of their experience by tourists of the period. It is tempting to consider this idealised rural imagery nostalgic, but the technicoloured joy of Hinde’s aesthetic seems to dismiss the sadness that may be inherent to nostalgia. The pictures are pleasant, slightly surreal, and in many cases, portray encounters with anachronisms. Nostalgia and quaintness both trigger in the mind’s eye an image of the past, real or imagined, but nevertheless plausible as to what once was and what has been lost. Nostalgia and quaintness can both be used to help transform an historical image into a political tool. Nostalgia is, however, differentiated from quaintness by its painful affect, tied to a sense of longing or loss. As Susan Stewart writes in “Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia”: “In the early modern period the notion continues that nostalgia involves not merely a desire for return in time, but also a condition consequent to a severing from a place of origin. Thus nostalgia is linked to conditions of exile—whether exile from place or from childhood itself.”Footnote51 Quaintness is, to some extent, an attempted antidote to nostalgia as a pervasive condition of modernity, a symptom of alienation manifested aesthetically. Hinde’s quaint imageries and De Valera’s vision of “countryside bright with cosy homesteads” are not expressions of loss. They claim, materially, that what nostalgia yearns for can be accessed in the present, maintained as a real community.
The Hinde Studio’s photography of the Irish countryside, such as the image Farm House in Ireland with which this essay began, are images of quaintness; which is also to say that they are images devoid of conscious tension, the kind of tension visible in the image by spicebag.exe introduced above. Their tension is subconscious, their undesired objects and peoples removed and exported elsewhere. This subconsciousness (and not absence) informs an aesthetic with a historically specific social order: one of control; one that understands itself to have enemies; and one that may therefore be defined both in terms of what it is, and what it is not. Together, the Hinde Studio’s photographs and the manicured Tidy Towns give up images of quaint, controlled landscapes operating on exactly these terms. Turning, now, to a different set of images, we might better understand what was, indeed, displaced or concealed in that process, thus revealing something more of the politics of quaintness.
Enemies of Tidiness
The Irish state’s photographic documentation of its Traveller community in the 1960s provides a sharp contrast to the iconography of the Tidy Towns competition and the imagery produced by the John Hinde Studio.Footnote52 These complicating images of rural Irish life appear most prominently in the 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy—the nature of its construction of the Traveller population already clear from the title.Footnote53 The report also uses images as tools to calibrate the normal and the acceptable, but in this instance in relief. It includes several pages of high-resolution black and white photographs, the first photograph () depicting horse-drawn caravans. These caravans are not technologically dissimilar to those represented by the Hinde Studio, but without colour, or staged drivers, they appear stark and sombre.Footnote54 The critical component to the image is the ground plane, which here is also grassy but raw, worn and littered with rubbish. This untidiness disqualifies it from quaintness. The next image in the report is a portrait of a Traveller woman sitting half-inside a small tent supported by a stick. The photograph is labelled “Tent Dwellings.”Footnote55 The woman shown is not particularly distinct from the rural women of the Hinde photographs. However, pictured here with a crude tent, which holds many of her worldly belongings, and with a foreground of weed-like horse-torn grass, this is a portrait we are encouraged to read negatively. The image, in the context of the Report, forms part of the state’s argument against the Travellers’ life practices as outmoded, uncivilised, dirty and disordered. Where the Hinde photographs frame old-fashioned Irish life as evocative of dignity and purpose, offering a measure for contemporary rurality, the images in the Report of the Commission on Itineracy visually define delinquency and irresponsibility for the state. Despite their content, these are not quaint images; they show, however, the edges of the quaint as an aesthetic category infused with a conservative political and social ideology, directing the eye to a perceived untidiness and social disorder that in the quaint is suppressed, ordered and civilised. The political and aesthetic are entangled through the representation of a visually constructed and delineated community, kept explicitly apart from the representations of rural life maintained in Tidy Towns and popularised by Hindes.
Figure 7. Horse-drawn caravans from the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 1963, Commission on Itinerancy. Copyright Houses of the Oireachtas.
Quaint, commodified rural imagery played an important role in the rebirth of 1960s Ireland. The images of the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy demonstrate the visual framing of the other to this project of modernisation. When read alongside the Hindes imagery, the Report’s depiction of Travellers casts them as an anachronism. Cast in greyscale rather than technicolour in the popular imagination, the Report framed their past as a backwards place of poverty, immoral and uncivilised, and so Travellers were, as Brian Fanning has put it, “depicted as enemies of progress.”Footnote56 Aesthetically, this depiction manifests the tension between an idealised, utopian-nostalgic Irish rurality and a dystopian one. The history of the Tidy Towns competition as an initiative shaped by forces of economic liberalisation can also be connected with the history of Irish Travellers and their denigration by those very same forces. The Travellers situation—the “problem,” as it was framed—can be understood as a foil for a project of quaintness, and the recurring conflict around Traveller halting sites a manifestation of the imperative to advance this project. The quaint’s ideological and functional role in social order and discipline is clarified through confrontation—real, social, political and aesthetic.
Jim Mac Laughlin helps place these examples into a wider phenomenon, arguing in “Nation-Building, Social Closure and Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland” that the treatment of Travellers as a social anachronism in Ireland has corresponded to the history of national modernisation, with anti-Traveller classism and racism further fuelled by “rural fundamentalist nationalism.”Footnote57 Mac Laughlin locates the societal shedding of the unsettled as a general tendency of modernisation.Footnote58 Considering such quaintness initiatives as the Tidy Towns Competition as products of a nationalist modernisation allows us to distinguish the quaint from what might otherwise be cast as a reactionary, nostalgic desire for a truly pre-modern Ireland in which the nomadic life of Travellers was, in fact, normative. The quaint images of the John Hinde Studio reveal a particular constructed (rather than recovered) past to be preserved. The decidedly unquaint images in the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy both evoked an unwanted past and clarified the aesthetic programme of its selective reinstatement.
The Report provides a clear portrait of the position of Travellers in Irish society in the early 1960s.Footnote59 Across sixteen parts concerned with the “problem of itinerants,” it arrives at general recommendations for a number of actions, including that Travellers should be induced to settle, that voluntary efforts at a local level should be assisted by trained personnel, and by state financial aid when necessary, and that financial assistance should be offered to those who settle in houses.Footnote60 Una M. Crowley has discussed the Report’s influence on subsequent policies towards Travellers, arguing that it had a significant effect in the settlement biopolitics of the era. She describes the Report as the spark for a concerted national programme of settlement, assimilation and “rehabilitation”:
Within a few years of the publication of the Report in 1963 there was a spread of institutions (both formal and informal) and surveillance into every aspect of Traveller life where before there was very little (for example, into aspects of cultural development, health, hygiene, parenting, housework, training schemes, education, accommodation and so on). It was not the case of established methods of disciplining and controlling Travellers declining (in fact evictions, prosecutions and harassment continued unabated) but that it was augmented with newer more subtle and systematic methods of discipline and control.Footnote61
Begging by itinerants is a major problem associated with their way of life and next to trespass is probably the greatest single cause of hostility on the part of the settled population. Apart from the demanding effect on themselves it is a source of considerable irritation and annoyance and when carried on in places of tourist or visitor resort, where it is usually prevalent, it must be injurious to the tourist traffic. Visitors are usually recognised as such and more persistently importuned.Footnote63
Conclusion
The imagery of Ireland produced by the John Hinde Studio and the aesthetic ambitions of the Irish Tidy Towns competition together demonstrate the aesthetic-political construction of the quaint. It is at once a term that explains the visual values of community commercialised by the outsider’s gaze—a framing of past values for a present-day market. But the quaint is also, as the paper has shown, cultivated as a self-conscious internal measure provoking action against that which digresses from the norms it represents. Quaintness is an aesthetic that cultivates a sense of peacefulness and harmlessness, but this cultivation requires order and constant maintenance, and implies a social and political discipline. When quaintness is a community’s defining quality, it sets an aesthetic order for an inside and an outside, a criterion for what is and is not permitted, and a demarcation that curates social life pictorially. In this sense, its aesthetics are inseparable from its politics.
Quaintness may be similar in specific ways to terms that appear to be its synonyms, such as cuteness (which is inherently corporeal), kitchness (tied to mass re-production), picturesque (always pictorial even if experienced as “real” space), and the nostalgic (related to feelings of loss); but quaintness, more so than any of these other terms, sits at the intersection of images and their corresponding ways of life as a whole. Such images depict rural, old-fashioned, manual life, largely ambivalent towards the incursions of modernity. In the context of contemporary globalisation, quaintness still offers a valuable and influential mode of constructed yet deceptive “authenticity” and “tradition,” even if this construction is engendered by the same state and market forces which erode other aspects of society or ways of life one might read as authentic and traditional in competing terms.
This essay serves as a tool with which to strengthen quaintness as an aesthetic-political frame for historical and contemporary cultural analysis. The significance of this tool is in its ability to deconstruct that which is framed as “authentic” and “traditional” for ideological ends, a framing which centres particular versions of the past, disregarding or actively suppressing others that fail to conform to their values. This deconstruction invokes Adorno’s aforementioned point on the potential disjuncture between aesthetic and empirical time. The Tidy Towns competition, for instance, used an arguably reactionary image of Irish culture for the sake of liberal modernisation, which suppressed the traditional way of life of Irish Travellers. The potential for quaintness to curate an image of everyday life grants it a political power far greater than the adjacent terms analysed. Therefore, quaintness may help us read ideologies of the present across cultures in terms of how they politicise history and make use of aesthetics in doing so. The possibility for “tradition” to be utilised for the sake of opposing political programmes strengthens rather than weakens the usefulness of the quaint, as it allows for a deeper reading of which versions of the past are and are not cultivated by a particular ideological vision for the present. This possibility for conflict between ideas and corresponding images of past and present—conflicts often described as “culture wars”—reveals less a sense of one image of the past as correct and another as disingenuous, but rather a sense that all political communities require aesthetic construction and curation, especially if they claim to maintain or return to certain historical realities.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Felix McNamara
Felix McNamara writes about aesthetics, ideology and history. He currently teaches at the University of Sydney.
Notes
1 Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 25. Harris analyses quaintness as an aesthetic category within North American consumer culture, alongside concepts such as coolness, zaniness, the futuristic, deliciousness, the natural, the glamorous and cleanliness.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 107. In considering political and aesthetic equivalencies it also seems that political concepts of time rely on aesthetic definitions: in contrast to the steady march of empirical time, politics concerns stasis, acceleration, or reversal.
3 For further reading see George M. Kreps, Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Charles Hurst, Robert Blair and Marty Kreps, “The Impact of Tourism on the Amish Subculture: A Case Study,” Community Development Journal 32, no. 4 (1997): 354–67.
4 Grace E. Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23.
5 Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite, 23.
6 Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite, 23.
7 Konrad Lorenz, “Die angeborenen formen möglicher Erfahrung,” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5, no. 2 (1943): 235–409; Melanie L. Glocker, et al., “Baby Schema in Infant Faces Induces Cuteness Perception and Motivation for Caretaking in Adults,” Ethology 115, no. 3 (March 2009): 257–63.
8 “Irish Town’s Anti-littering Sign is Going Viral for its Pure Irish-Mammy-Style Scolding of Rubbish Droppers,” Irish Post, September 25, 2019, https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-towns-anti-littering-sign-going-viral-pure-irish-mammy-style-scolding-rubbish-droppers-171741.
9 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 53, 59.
10 Included in Rosmarie Garland-Thompson’s Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: NYU Press, 1996), Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 66.
11 From Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939), 11. Susan Stewart, “Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia,” Raritan 19, no. 2 (1999), 77–78. Greenberg’s essay is anthologised in Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 116–26.
12 Dorfles, Kitsch, 14.
13 Dorfles, Kitsch, 66.
14 “Inside the 'neo-Nazi village' of Jamel,” BBC News, September 6, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-37280504.
15 John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 110.
16 Hastings quoted in Macarthur, The Picturesque, 1. Architectural debate over the picturesque as a low cultural category vs. a serious aesthetic term is highlighted by Macarthur in a special issue of the Journal of Architecture, on “Townscape Revisited.” Macarthur points out: “Banham wrote that the picturesque represented ‘the most debased English habits of compromise and sentimentality.’ Pevsner’s role at the AR was to show that the picturesque was a sophisticated theory and cultural practice with an honourable history in which Townscape was the next step.” John Macarthur, “‘The Revenge of the Picturesque,’ Redux,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 5 (2012), 643.
17 See Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1966) for Banham’s investigation of ethical (and hence political) and aesthetic interrelations with regards to architecture. Compare Macarthur, The Picturesque, 106.
18 Alois Reigl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin,” Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–51.
19 Primarily, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004).
20 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12.
21 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.
22 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947), 97.
23 Though it should be noted that Rancière argues for a more fundamental interrelation of aesthetics and politics than the historically specific focus of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, as noted in The Politics of Aesthetics, “There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the age of the masses” (13).
24 “Meaning of Quaint in English,” Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/quaint; “Quaint (adjective),” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quaint; “Quaint,” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/quaint; “Quaint,” Britannica Dictionary, https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/quaint.
25 AMO, Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, Countryside: The Future, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 20–March 12, 2020; October 3, 2020–February 14, 2021.
26 Edwin Heathcote, “Rem Koolhaas’s Countryside at the Guggenheim Remakes Rural Life,” Financial Times, February 22, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/fc136dba-530b-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f.
27 (Then) Prince Charles invoked a populist quaintness in opposition to the perceived elitism of 1980s high-tech architecture in his famous “monstrous carbuncle” speech of 1984 at the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA): “What I believe is important about community architecture is that it has shown ‘ordinary’ people that their views are worth having; that architects and planners do not necessarily have the monopoly of knowing best about taste, style and planning.” A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace, May 29, 1984.
28 Sarah Burns, “Artist behind Garda Eviction Image Believes ‘People are Missing the Point’,” Irish Times, April 3, 2023, https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2023/04/02/artist-behind-garda-eviction-image-believes-people-are-missing-the-point/. As noted in this article, much of the controversy around spicebag.exe’s image came after its resharing by Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin.
29 For further reading on the complex conditions between buildings, national identity and history in Ireland, see Ellen Rowley, “1966: The Binary Conditions of Irish Architectural Modernism,” in A History of Irish Modernism, eds. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 394–418. For an interdisciplinary aesthetic exploration of the politico-temporal tensions of twentieth-century Irish modernity, see also: Linda King and Elaine Sisson, eds., Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922–1992 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011).
30 “Mission and History,” Keep America Beautiful, https://kab.org/about/approach/mission-history/.
31 “Our History,” Keep Britain Tidy, https://www.keepbritaintidy.org/our-history.
32 “About,” Keep Australia Beautiful, https://www.sustainablecommunities.com.au/about/.
33 “Beautiful Awards,” Keep New Zealand Beautiful, https://www.knzb.org.nz/programmes/rewards-and-recognition/beautiful-awards/.
34 “The History of the Wiltshire Best Kept Village Competition,” Countryside Charity Wiltshire, https://www.cprewiltshire.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2021/03/BKVC-History-Mar-2021.pdf.
35 Indeed, Sean Lemass was Minister for Industry and Commerce during the Trade War (1932–38).
36 Sean Lemass had a role in the formation of Aer Lingus (April 15, 1936) and many other “semi-state” companies when he was the Minister for Industry and Commerce for the Free State of Ireland.
37 AnCo/Bord Failte, A Report on Bord Failte’s Tidy Towns Competition 1958–1982 (Dublin: Failte Ireland, 1982), 8.
38 AnCo/Bord Failte, A report on Bord Failte’s Tidy Towns Competition, 8.
39 Eric G. E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National identity Since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 118.
40 Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish, 118.
41 AnCo/Bord Failte, A Report on Bord Failte’s Tidy Towns Competition, 1982 (reproduced 2017), 17–20. https://www.tidytowns.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/History-of-Tidy-Towns-1958-1982.pdf.
42 AnCo/Bord Failte, A Report on Bord Failte’s Tidy Towns Competition, 23.
43 “Virginia County Cavan is Tidiest Town in Ireland 1964,” Raidió Teilifís Éireann archives, https://www.rte.ie/archives/2015/0831/724722-virginia-is-tidiest-town/
44 Joseph Flynn, “Beautiful Aughrim—Tidy Town of County Wicklow,” YouTube video, 2:40, August 16, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogTAIuMXbYY.
45 Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor, eds., Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity (Clevendon: Channel View Publications, 2003), 2–3.
46 Mark Fischer, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 6.
47 See, for example, the National Museum of Ireland’s collection of twentieth-century Irish Travel Posters: https://www.museum.ie/en-ie/collections-research/collection/irish-travel-posters?page=2.
48 Hinde’s images captured perfectly the imagery described by Éamon de Valera on his Easter Sunday broadcast in 1943 (see footnote 54).
49 These included the work of many other photographers who worked or trained with Hinde.
50 The photograph was taken by David Noble, another member of Hinde’s studio.
51 Stewart, “Proust’s Turn from Nostalgia,” 77–78.
52 Irish Travellers are a historically nomadic ethnic minority. See, for instance, Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Jim Mac Laughlin, “Nation-Building, Social Closure and Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland,” Sociology 33, no. 1 (1999): 129–51; Bryan Fanning, “New Rules of Belonging: How Travellers Came to be Depicted as Enemies of Progress,” An Irish Quarterly Review 104, no. 415 (2015): 302–12.
53 Commission on Itinerancy, Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, August 1963.
54 Commission on Itinerancy, Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, un-paginated insert between 40–41.
55 Commission on Itinerancy, Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, un-paginated insert between 42–43.
56 Fanning, “New Rules of Belonging,” 302–12.
57 Mac Laughlin, “Nation-Building, Social Closure and Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland,” 129.
58 Mac Laughlin, “Nation-Building, Social Closure and Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland,” 129.
59 An event which was hardly surprising. In “‘Menace to the Social Order’: Anti-Traveller Discourse in the Irish Parliament 1939–59,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 75–91, Jane Helleiner examines the long history of rarely challenged attacks on Travellers in the Dáil, which preceded the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, and the ideological processing of Traveller discrimination through the modernisation project of the 1960s.
60 Commission on Itinerancy, Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 11.
61 Una Crowley, “Liberal Rule through Non-liberal Means: The attempted settlement of Irish Travellers (1955–1975),” Irish Geography 38, no. 2 (2005): 128–150.
62 Crowley also notes the correlation of the Traveller “question” to the development of the tourism industry through debate in the Dáil Éireann dating from April 15, 1958. Crowley, “Liberal Rule through Non-liberal Means,” 131.
63 Commission on Itinerancy, Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 90.
64 “Halting Site Bonfires Disgrace,” Kilkenny People, August 22, 2014, https://www.kilkennypeople.ie/news/kilkenny-news/58853/Halting-site-bonfires-disgrace-.html; Lynda Kiernan, “Traveller Halting Site has Portarlington Community ‘Inflamed’ on Laois Offaly Border,” Leinster Express, February 21, 2018, https://www.leinsterexpress.ie/news/portarlington-/298409/traveller-halting-site-has-portarlington-community-inflamed-on-laois-offaly-border.html; Southern Star Team, “Local Fury over ‘Unofficial’ Halting Site with Animals at Scenic Spot in Bantry,” Southern Star, January 14, 2020, https://www.southernstar.ie/news/local-fury-over-unofficial-halting-site-with-animals-at-scenic-spot-in-bantry-4198938.