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A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground (1977)

The subtitle of this book is The Roots of Conflict in Ulster. The author’s own introduction is pithy and explains its structure; it deals with five themes in less than 200 pages: the Plantation of Ulster, the siege of Derry, the United Irishmen, Belfast riots in the nineteenth century, and the partition of Ireland. The title was suggested by a remark of Sir Walter Scott. In 1825 he commented on Ulster that he had never seen a richer land or a finer people, but ‘Their factions have been so long envenomed, and they have such narrow ground to do their battle in, that they are like people fighting with daggers in a hogshead.’ Stewart, an historian at Queen’s University Belfast, writes in the introduction that the book wrote itself almost in defiance of his will, that he suffered from whatever is the opposite of writer’s block, and ideas kept tumbling onto the page from his head almost despite himself. On first reading it in the late 1970s, I had a similar sensation, but one of being unable to put it down and a fascination with this description of a view from the other side of the narrow ground, being as I am a Dubliner of nationalist tradition, whereas the author was of Ulster unionist stock. The book made me acutely aware that I only knew Ulster from outside rather than inside. It is certainly even now a book that Irish people from the other provinces of the island should read. Much to the surprise of the author, the book had a quiet, almost underground, success. He remarked himself, ‘And in time it became a kind of vade mecum for journalists venturing into the Heart of Darkness.’

A central theme of the book is that outsiders to Ulster, in particular the British Government, tend to have certain misconceptions. The first is that the violence in Northern Ireland is rooted in religious intolerance and the other is that all violence there is of the same kind. The conclusion is that the two sides must be reconciled. That means one side or the other must give in, he argues. ‘No two communities divided in this way by culture and religion can ever be “reconciled” in the sense that is meant, they can only be accommodated in a political system.’1 Stewart also argues that the deepest divide is not religious difference but rather national allegiance, a characteristic that tends to correlate with religious affiliation, but which is independent of it. There have always been some nationalist Protestants and quite a few unionist Catholics, and also there are many people who recognise the problematic ethnic structure of Northern Ireland and who are normally willing to put up with it.

The book goes on to point out that much Scottish immigration to Ulster long antedated the ‘planting’ of 1609, and Antrim and Down, the counties of eastern Ulster closest to Scotland, were never planted. Those targeted for plantation were indeed six in number, but only four were in modern Northern Ireland; two (Donegal and Cavan) are now in the Republic of Ireland. The plantations were only very partially successful and most native Irish stayed put, benefitting from the fact that their labour was needed to build the plantation towns and till the fields. The Gaelic aristocrats, deprived of their lands, fled the country or retreated to mountain fastnesses as embittered outlaws or rapparees ‘on their keeping’. The bulk of the native population stayed put and remained Catholic. The situation became static and has not changed much in three centuries. Even in towns and cities the original three-way division into Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter tended to be quite literally set in brick and stone with the evolution of segregated streets or quarters for each religious group. It is often forgotten that similar segregations existed elsewhere in Ireland: Dublin had its peripheral communities of Irishtown, Ringsend and The Liberties where Catholics (‘the mere Irish’) were permitted to live, and the mediaeval small city of Kilkenny has an Irishtown whose vernacular architecture is still distinct from that of the ‘English’ main town. However, it is only in Ulster that these almost mediaeval distinctions are still alive and kicking. In the other three provinces of Ireland they are forgotten.

Scottish immigration into the North of Ireland in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, reinforced the pattern by a natural rather than an artificial process, as like tended to associate with like. Ulster became a crossroads, and many of the migrants continued, a generation later, on to the American colonies. The new migrants tended to settle in the east rather than the west of Ulster, and even now the two clusters of Protestant population have different cultural characteristics and political allegiances from each other:

The upshot of these events was the creation of a permanent community in Ulster that feels itself, accurately or otherwise, to be under siege. Events such as the Catholic rising of 1641 and the Siege of Londonderry in 1689 gave rise to a series of symbols which still resonate over three centuries later. The simple fact that the Protestants of Ulster are a small minority of the population of the entire island gives continuous force to the sense of being surrounded and, perhaps, threatened by the ‘native’ mainly Catholic majority on the island, usually about four to five times the demographic weight of the Protestant Ulster minority on the island. It is strange that ‘Lillibulero’, that song of relief and triumph celebrating the defeat of James II at the Boyne in 1689 should have a chorus in pidgin Gaelic: An Lile ba léir é, ba linn an lá (It was clearly the [orange] lily, the day was with us). Brother Teague had to get the message in his own tongue after Aughrim’s great disaster of 1690. The narrow ground was institutionalised.2

Ireland’s geographic position reinforced this stand-off, one probably unwanted by anyone on the island, but imposed structurally on everyone. Ireland was the back door to Britain and therefore vital to the security of a great empire. England was unsympathetic to Catholicism and was menaced by two great Catholic powers in succession, Spain in the seventeenth century and France in the eighteenth. Gradually the nationalist majority on the island developed a Prester John psychology, seeking help from an anti-English great power far away. Spain and France were touted as saviours at first, America in the nineteenth century, and Germany for a while in the twentieth. This mainly rhetorical tradition heightened Unionist paranoia. Each side on the island fed the other psychologically, and the process was particularly immediate and intense in the North. By the 1790s, the revolutionary events in America and France had opened up several incongruous gaps on each side of the narrow ground. Presbyterians in Ulster were sympathetic to their American revolutionary cousins and read Paine’s The Rights of Man avidly. Down south, Catholics heard of the fall of the Bastille and the execution of a king with excitement and anticipation. In the North, they talked of democracy and annual parliaments. In the south they whispered of agrarian revolution. In the words of a well-known and rather sinister little song of the 1790s:

Oh the French are in the bay,

They’ll be here without delay,

And Ireland shall be free,

From the centre to the sea,

Says the Shan Van Vocht.3

The Sean-Bhean Bhocht is, of course, the Poor Old Woman, or Ireland. In the Aisling or ‘vision poetry’ of the eighteenth century, the country is commonly depicted as a woman who has been forced to marry a bullying neighbour and who longs for gallant foreigners to come to the rescue and restore to her the Four Green Fields that have been stolen from her by Yellow John (Seán Buí) or John Bull. The catastrophe of 1798 resulted in a series of badly timed risings in Presbyterian Ulster, Catholic Wexford and Connacht. Perhaps 50,000 people were killed in battle and massacre during the Year of Liberty. A sectarian massacre of Protestants took place in Wexford and had an immediate impact on the Ulster Protestant community. All their paranoid fears seemed to be vindicated. A solidarity between Ulster Protestant and Dissenter was formed which has never been broken since. British rule was re-established quickly and the Irish parliament was abolished, an Act of Union being hurried through it in 1800 in dubious circumstances. Direct Rule from London had arrived in Ireland, and not for the last time.

In a wonderfully entitled chapter (‘Landscape with Bandits’) Stewart looks at the roots of violence in Ireland. He regards it as of archaic origin, and as endemic, even in times of peace. ‘Social historians have been vaguely aware of these patterns for a long time; political historians virtually ignore them.’4 Travellers’ tales and government surveys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries confirm this epidemic character at that time. The pattern is that of the secret army, the local public band which commonly had a captain, passwords and a strange title. The tradition, it is argued, stretches from the woodkerne of Elizabethan times to the Provisional IRA, and, although he does not make the point, the orange and loyalist local gangs in Belfast and elsewhere. Stewart draws in particular on the classic 1836 work of George Cornewall Lewis, On Local Disturbance in Ireland. Lewis drew in turn on government blue books which studied the phenomenon in 1815 and the 1830s.5 Stewart does not quite make this point, but the objectives of the violence were quite delimited, and anyone not involved in the quarrel commonly remained unmolested even in areas notorious for their violence. Innocent travellers were commonly treated with extraordinary courtesy and kindness, even though the area might be a murder triangle. There are many instances where local bands actually protected innocent or unknowing travellers. Family feuds and agrarian grievances fuelled much of the fighting and burnings-out. Repetitive patterns of Catholic versus Protestant violence, initiated in Ulster border regions in 1784, became traditional and broke out again and again throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early 1960s, local people in Northern Ireland could accurately forecast the coming of a new ‘troubled time’ in a few years.6

In light of this background, the author asks, how can it be argued that the partition of Ireland is the cause of the violence in Ulster? Partition, he argues, is more a consequence of the violence than its cause. His grim conclusion is: ‘partition is preferable to an [all-Ireland] civil war’.7 Stewart concludes by urging a constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland which recognises these unpleasant realities and their immutability short of genocide. It took time for this message to sink into the often impenetrable minds of both British and Irish governments. But it did eventually sink in.

TG

Notes

1A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground [1977] (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p.10. Emphasis added.

2The Irish, though pidgin, is superior to the IRA’s Tiochfaidh ár Lá.

3See Stewart, Narrow Ground, p.106.

4Ibid., p.115.

5George Cornewall Lewis, On Local Disturbance in Ireland [1836] (Cork: Tower, 1977).

6Personal observation in Northern Ireland in 1964.

7See Stewart, Narrow Ground, p.157.