20

Michael Sheehy, Divided We Stand (1955)

The partition of Ireland in 1920 remained for a long time something that was regarded by many, if not perhaps most people interested in Irish affairs, as something temporary, an improvisation which would eventually be replaced by some kind of all-Ireland settlement. This assumption was shared by many nationalists and unionists and also by many bien pensant observers in Britain. In Dublin, during the Second World War, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid looked forward uneasily to this imminent possibility. This assumption of the inevitability of Irish unity was often shared by unionists. This in turn fuelled an acute paranoia among Ulster Unionists, and an aggressive militarism among some nationalists in both North and South. It further encouraged a rhetoric of irredentism that helped de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party to win election after election in the South. This anti-partitionist rhetoric in turn copper-fastened the political power in office of a particularly stubborn ‘no surrender’ strand of Ulster unionism in Stormont. Discrimination against Catholics in electoral politics, government employment and public housing was legitimated by their being perceived as the enemy within. In a milder way, discrimination against Protestants was similarly rationalised in the South. As the Ulster child’s rhyme put it quite accurately:

Lord Craigavon had a cat

It sat upon the fender.

Every time it saw a rat

It shouted ‘no surrender!’

De Valera had a cat.

It sat upon the grate.

Every time it saw a rat

It shouted ‘Up Free State!’

In reality, the Second World War had the effect of intensifying the partition of the island. Northern Ireland participated in the conflict, and suffered the consequences in the bombing of Belfast by the Luftwaffe. It also enjoyed the development of the British welfare state after the war; coming to experience a level of popular material well-being which the South could only dream of, the latter’s economy being agrarian and stagnant for years after 1945. The two parts of Ireland had very different economies; nationalists claimed that they were complementary, and that independent Ireland had been robbed of its industrial arm. In the coming decades the South was to skip the smokestack phase of industrialisation and go directly to light industry such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, service and information production. On the other hand, the North was to suffer severely from deindustrialisation and political instability.

Back in the 1950s, each part of Ireland pretended that the other part did not exist, or was ‘foreign’ in some way. Some strange relics of the old unity persisted: Lifeboats were organised on a British Isles basis and Irish lighthouses were organised on an all-island basis. GAA sports and rugby were still organised on an all-Ireland basis, but there were two soccer teams. Weirdly, there were three cycling teams, two of them partitionist and one anti-partitionist. However, the two parts of Ireland were becoming different countries because their collective experiences had become very different. Each became increasingly and almost pathologically ignorant of the internal politics and culture of the other. Nevertheless, the reigning assumption of the inevitability and imminence of reunification lingered on. In 1955, a young man called Michael Sheehy published a little book whose title still reverberates; ‘divided we stand’ is as true today as it was back then. However, it received very hostile reviews in the Dublin newspapers of the time. It argued the obvious but much-denied point: that Northern Ireland existed in obedience to the collective will of the great majority of its inhabitants. Furthermore, it was not simply a device imposed by a tyrannical or imperialist British Government but was rather the only logical peaceful solution to a perennial Irish problem: the irreconcilable political ambitions of the two sets of inhabitants of the island. Unionists’ ideal solution was a continued union of Britain and Ireland, whereas nationalists demanded an independent united Ireland. One ideal excluded the other. A federalised United Kingdom might have provided a compromise, but the Easter Rising of 1916, permitting a revolutionised generation of new nationalist leaders to seize power, led to the ensconcing in power of an aggressive and uncompromising all-Ireland separatism. In effect, the North was militarised in 1912 by the threat of an all-Ireland Home Rule government emerging in Dublin with the blessing of London. This was followed by the militarisation of the South, as both sides ran guns into the island in preparation either for an anticipated all-Ireland civil war or an anti-imperialist rebellion. Sheehy remarks:

It was in the second decade of the present century that democratic ideas, through the leadership of President Wilson, became a vital force which no liberal power could ignore or flagrantly disregard. By an unfortunate irony it was at this time that the South engaged in an exhausting effort to throw off the English yoke, thereby adopting and asserting an extreme nationalism which had the effect of dividing Ireland. This national effort was in large part unnecessary and the spiritual division it caused a national tragedy. The great difference in scope between the restricted Home Rule Act of 1920 and the dominion status which Britain granted Ireland in 1921 was not, as the South would have us believe, the sole outcome of her own efforts. The powerful tide of democratic ideas was making British policy in Ireland impossible to sustain, even in relation to opinion in Britain. What gave it a semblance of justification in the years after the 1914–18 war, and thus made it politically feasible, was the position of the North which the Republicans wanted to coerce into a united Ireland. This created a contradiction which democratic opinion, in Britain or abroad, was unable to resolve. The Southern demand for self-determination involved an explicit refusal to grant self-determination to the North. The fight for Irish freedom was thus also, paradoxically, a fight for Irish coercion.1

Tragically, among the Sinn Fein leaders in 1921, no one was more acutely aware of its essential truth than one Eamon de Valera, who said as much in private during the secret Dáil debates on the Treaty, but not in public. In private he argued that any attempt by nationalists to coerce the North into a united Ireland would open nationalists to the accusation that they were doing to the unionists what they accused the British of doing to themselves: forcing them to join a polity which they did not wish to join. Dev’s noisy anti-partitionism was strictly for electoral consumption.

By the mid-1950s, it was evident that a new generation of political leaders was waiting in the wings in the South and the old revolutionaries were outliving their welcome by staying in government. A mild rebellion against the orthodoxies of the Irish revolution took place. Sheehy’s book was a harbinger of this shift, which eventually took the form in the late 1950s of a mainly middle-class movement called Tuairim (Opinion), which interestingly confined its membership to those under forty years of age. Tuairim set itself to analyse various nationalist and religious sacred cows. One of these was to be the critical examination of partition. Almost in anticipation of this, and probably in reaction to the Sheehy book, Frank Gallagher, a well-known veteran of the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, published in 1957 a denunciation of partition in a well-researched study, The Indivisible Island.2 As David Hogan, Gallagher had previously published a well-known propagandistic account of the revolution in Ireland, The Four Glorious Years. During the war years he was de Valera’s information officer, unkindly labelled ‘Dev’s Dr. Goebbels’ by British journalists. In the later book, Gallagher gives us a potted history of the English, later British, conquest and governance of the island, emphasising in particular the classic imperial tactic of fomenting conflict among the natives so that London rule of all could be facilitated. The antagonism between Catholic and Protestant could, it was argued, be blamed on the British as could pretty well everything else. Partition was a device to discourage the complete independence of the island in defiance of the wishes of the great majority of its inhabitants.

Certainly there was truth in much of Gallagher’s argument, although it could be pointed out that the origins of Irish divisions were rather beside the point: these divisions had long had a life of their own, and it was beyond the power of any British or Irish government to do very much about them other than recognise and accept their enduring reality. Irish disunity was being exacerbated by nationalist hostility and inability to compromise. This was precisely the argument to be made in a long review of The Indivisible Island written by an up-and-coming young lawyer, Donal Barrington. Barrington was a scion of a well-known Irish family with impeccable nationalist roots in the old Fenian separatist movement of the 1860s. He was Tuairim’s first President and a founding member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. ‘Uniting Ireland’ was first published in Studies, the well-known Jesuit learned journal. It was later reissued as the first of a series of Tuairim pamphlets.3 These pamphlets were to be a major force in changing Irish public opinion about all kinds of topics in the sixties. In ‘Uniting Ireland’ Barrington remarks cuttingly:

The weakness of the Nationalists was that they never fully understood the nature or violence of the Unionist opposition to Home Rule, and never believed that the Unionist leaders would go as far as they subsequently did [in 1912]. Redmond saw Home Rule as something to be won from England rather than something to be created in Ireland. He was prepared to give the Unionists guarantees to protect them against victimisation in a United Ireland, but he did not see what more he could do. Home Rule was something to be implemented by means of an Act of the British Parliament, and, if the Orangemen resisted it, the British Army were to coerce them into obedience.

This paradox, that the Irish Nationalists ultimately relied on the British Army to coerce all Irishmen to live together, illustrates the poverty and weakness of the Nationalist position.4

Partly influenced by these writings, in the years of Seán Lemass’s premiership, official overtures were made to Northern Ireland, and the anti-partitionist official propaganda became muted. Lemass had evidently made up his mind that Northern Ireland was going to be a permanent entity in one legal form or another. At Lemass’s insistence, the North was not to be referred to in official documents or in broadcasting as ‘the Six County Area’ but by its official title of Northern Ireland. This process of political thawing culminated in the Taoiseach’s 1965 visit to Terence O’Neill, the Prime Minister of the province. The Dublin Irish Independent nominated O’Neill as Man of the Year. Unfortunately, the resulting era of good feelings was to be replaced shortly by a new wave of violence, culminating in a generation-long organised assault on the North’s defenders by a new and more ferocious version of the IRA. The enduring determination of the North to defend itself and not to be absorbed into an all-Ireland state became ever more obvious as the violence went on. The necessity for civil rights for the Catholic minority in the North became increasingly pressing. Furthermore, the quiet resistance to IRA propaganda in the South, reflected in the Dublin government’s determination not to permit the Republic to be sucked in to a sectarian war of sorts became obvious to everyone. Much of this new understanding was first adumbrated by Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland, published in 1972, a book that shows internal signs of building on the literature examined in this chapter. Eventually, the necessity of a new treaty between the two Irelands and facilitated by London, Dublin, Washington and Brussels dawned on pretty well everybody. This in turn led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and what to date seems to be an enduring peace. Sheehy was vindicated by history as a prophet discounted and ignored in his own land. It was a very expensive discounting and ignorance.

TG

Notes

1Michael Sheehy, Divided We Stand (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), p.35.

2Frank Gallagher, The Indivisible Island (London: Gollancz, 1957).

3Donal Barrington, ‘Uniting Ireland’, Studies, 46, 184 (Winter 1957), pp.379–402.

4Ibid., p.163.