Episode 9: CHESTERTON AROUND THE WORLD SERIES: “Chesterton and Ireland”

Welcome to Episode 2 of our series: Chesterton around the World.

 

In today’s episode we will speak with Professor Dermot Quinn about “Chesterton and Ireland”.

 

Chesterton travelled to Ireland for the first time in 1918, while there he wrote a series of articles for the New Witness that were then published in his 1919 book entitled Irish Impressions. In the book he writes,

 

“I went to Ireland at the request of Irish friends who were working warmly for the Allied cause, and who conceived (I fear in far too flattering a spirit), that I might at least be useful as an Englishman who had always sympathized as warmly with the Irish cause.”

 

He goes on to say:

 

“I need not explain the motives that made me do the little I could do; they were the same that at the moment made millions of better men do masses of better work.”

 

As we can read his reason for visiting Ireland the first time, in the first paragraph of the book he writes about his first impressions,

 

                  When I had for the first time crossed St. George’s Channel, and for the

                  first time stepped out of a Dublin hotel on to St Stephen’s Green,

                  the first of all my impressions was that of a particular statue, or

rather portion of a statue. I left many traditional mysteries already

in my track, but they did not trouble me as did this random glimpse or

vision. I have never understood why the Channel is called St George’s

Channel; it would seem more natural to call it St. Patrick’s Channel

since the great missionary did almost certainly cross that unquiet

sea and look up at those mysterious mountains.

 

We invite you now to listen to our conversation about Chesterton and Ireland, a country he visited in 1918 and in 1932.