THE CONDITION OF affairs suggested by the term ‘the Irish Troubles’ was already some three centuries old when Columbus discovered America. A degree of strife between the inhabitants of the islands of what now constitute Ireland and the United Kingdom existed long before the discovery. For example, St Patrick, whom legend has established as the Irish National Apostle, was a Briton brought to Ireland, supposedly in 432, by Irish pirates after one of their frequent forays against the neighbouring isle. But in our day the ‘Irish Troubles’ are generally understood to refer to a murderous dispute which, for the past quarter of a century only, has come to involve the English and the Irish in a sectarian quarrel in the north-eastern part of Ireland commonly, but erroneously, referred to as ‘Ulster’. Like many stereotypical depictions of the Anglo-Irish relationship, depending for their coloration on considerations such as whether they are Irish or English, Nationalist or Loyalist, the varying calculations as to when and how the Troubles began contain both truth and distortion.
The tragedy of the last twenty-five years did come upon the two islands both gradually and suddenly – like bankruptcy. In fact, as we shall see, in a very real sense there was a bankruptcy, of policy, which led to the Troubles bursting upon an unsuspecting population with appalling suddenness. But the Irish agony had been building up slowly also, rooted in complex factors, one of which, geography, pre-dates the dawn of history: others involve the outworkings of two forms of colonialism, those of Mother Church and Mother England.
Geography has decreed that Ireland’s head almost nestles on Scotland’s shoulder, being separated by only some twelve miles of water between the Antrim coast and the Mull of Kintyre. And while her buttocks, the south-eastern coasts of Wexford and Waterford, are further removed, they are still no more than eighty miles from the coast of Wales. It was in this area that the first serious Norman penetrations occurred during the late 1160s. To the physical force school of Irish nationalism the Norman coming is generally regarded as the starting point for ‘eight hundred years of British oppression’. The Norman invasion, and what preceded and followed it, requires a more complex interpretation than that, but it does provide a most important signpost to the present ‘Troubles’.
By the time the Normans arrived, geography had dictated that the two islands had both shared and escaped great events together. The Romans conquered England but, having looked across the turbulent Irish Sea and weighed up the difficulties of subduing the equally tempestuous inhabitants of the then thickly forested isle to the west, decided not to attempt to extend their imperium to Ireland. Insularity therefore ensured that, unlike its neighbour, Ireland did not become influenced by Roman laws and culture or, for some centuries, by significant changes in living patterns such as the development of cities. These only began to sprout after the arrival of the Vikings in the ninth century, long after the Roman legions had vanished. Gaelic society continued to be centred on cattle rearing, rather than on tillage.
But indicators such as the near-Pharaonic knowledge of mathematics and building skills needed to construct huge tombs, like that at Newgrange in Co. Meath, or the survival of skilfully worked golden artefacts suggest that Ireland had achieved high levels of learning and wealth long before the coming of Christianity. It was the subsequent concentration of wealth – generated by the learning – in the monasteries which first attracted the Vikings to the country. The power of the Vikings was broken in 1014 at the battle of Clontarf, in which armies of the provinces of Connacht and Munster, under Brian Boru, defeated those of Leinster, under King Maelmordha, for the high-kingship of Ireland. Viking contingents fought on both sides, but the destruction of Maelmordha’s forces also entailed breaking the grip of the Norse King Sitric on Dublin, which because of its fleets and anchorage facilities had effectively grown into the commercial and political capital of the country. Thereafter pockets of Norse influence remained throughout the country, notably at Wexford and Waterford, but the dominant influence became Gaelic once more.
Although Irish cultural achievement was considerable, the achievement lay, and continued to lie, against a different religious backdrop to that occurring in England. As far back as the Synod of Whitby, in the seventh century, Anglo-Saxon monks, inspired by the teachings of Rome, had successfully led the charge against Irish practices which had established themselves not only in Ireland but throughout Northumbria. Unlike the Roman custom of leaving the skull bare, surrounded by a fringe of hair, the Irish monks tonsured themselves at the front. They also calculated Easter as occurring on a different date to that favoured by their Roman-influenced counterparts.
By the time of the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 the effect of such controversies had been heightened and added to by reports that Irish Christianity had wandered into barbarity, far from the path aspired to by the Gregorian reformers favoured by Rome. Geography, with its consequential virtually unbroken Celtic tradition in matters social and cultural, had resulted in the growth of marked incompatibilities between the Celtic and Latin churches. These, as the distinguished historian Dr F. X. Martin has noted, ‘found expression in attitudes towards marriage, celibacy of the clergy, baptism and the sacramental system, control of church lands’.1 Where the question of control was concerned it should be noted that Celtic usage had resulted in great abbeys frequently passing into the hands of powerful families whose appointees exercised far greater ‘clout’ than did the bishops appointed by Rome.
It did not matter that the Irish also possessed a distinctive and highly developed religious tradition renowned for both its scholarship and its missionary zeal, to a degree that caused Thomas Cahill to claim that the Irish ‘saved civilisation’. As Cahill points out:
Without the zeal of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded civilisation throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.2
Cahill is supported in his evaluation of the Irish contribution by another independent authority who judged that:
The travels and settlement of Irish monks and scholars on the Continent of Europe, that complex movement of expansion… is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the early Middle Ages. There is nothing in pre-Carolingian Europe that could match it in either extent or lasting effect. In Northern France and Burgundy, in the territories of modern Switzerland, Northern Italy, in the Rhine Valley, in Franconia, in Bavaria and in the Salzburg area, the Scotti, as the Irish were called until the eleventh century, have left their traces. They were as famous for their learning as they were for their religious zeal and for the rigour of their monastic rules, no less known was their wrangling spirit, which involved them in many a controversy. Even in the Carolingian Empire they played an important role, which was not always to the liking of their continental colleagues.3
It was certainly not to the liking of their neighbouring colleagues. When the time became opportune, Anglo-Norman statecraft and Vatican geopolitics would act in concert to further Anglo-Norman imperialism at the expense of the Irish. As a result of direct anti-Irish lobbying with Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, by his compatriot, the celebrated philosopher and clerical diplomat John of Salisbury, Salisbury was later able to write with accuracy: ‘In response to my petition the Pope granted and donated Ireland to the illustrious king of England, Henry….’4
Thus was papal policy towards Ireland set. Adrian’s plans for the Irish were carried forward by his successor, Pope Alexander III. Despite the fact that Henry II was out of favour with the papacy, because of the murder of Thomas à Becket, the Pope issued the King with letters ordering the Irish to be subject to him. But this confabulation between Christ and Caesar required one more ingredient for success. It was to be forthcoming from Ireland. One of the ironies of history is that Salisbury’s initiative on behalf of Anglo-Norman imperialism was given its final successful impetus by an Irishman, Diarmuid MacMurchada, King of Leinster, who invited the help of Henry II in putting down his local enemies. After much parleying and delay a party of Norman knights and their followers arrived on the Wexford coast in 1169, capturing the major cites in the area, Waterford and Wexford, and eventually gaining control of Dublin. In return for his support of MacMurchada, the Norman knight Richard FitzGilbert – or Strongbow, as he is better remembered in Ireland – was given MacMurchada’s daughter, Aoife, in marriage and succeeded him as King of Leinster.
MacMurchada to this day is execrated by some in Ireland for thus initiating both the ‘eight hundred years of British oppression’ and its corollary, ‘The Full National Demand’ of later generations of Irish nationalists. The Demand, which the IRA are still making as this is being written, is that the British presence be removed and Ireland be ruled by the Irish. MacMurchada was in fact probably not a great deal bloodier, nor more treacherous, than other leaders of the period, merely more innovative and far-seeing. For example, he secured the position of abbess of a great convent in Co. Kildare for a female relative by having his soldiers abduct and rape the existing abbess. As the post could only be held by a virgin, the rape debarred her from continuing. In one sense there was ample precedent for MacMurchada’s Norman initiative: previous Irish kings had made copious use of Viking mercenaries in their incessant wars.
The difference was that the Normans would not so much assist Irish kings as supplant them. Henceforth the King of England considered himself the King of Ireland. Norman methods of warfare, involving chain mail, the use of cavalry and the building of castles, devastated the lightly armed Irish foot soldiers. There was not only a clash of culture, but of agriculture. Norman expertise furthered tillage to the disadvantage of the semi-nomadic, cattle-herding natives. And, more lastingly, the Normans’ arrival henceforth meant that what happened in, or to, England affected Ireland, and vice versa. However, though Ireland lay too close to England for independence, unlike the other Celtic regions of Wales and Scotland, she lay just too far away for complete conquest. Though successive British kings and generals arrived in Ireland imbued with the same attitude towards the natives as that displayed by the whites towards the aborigines of both Australia and North America, insurgency – be it of native origin, or in concert with some enemy of hers, Spain or France – continued throughout the centuries to be a problem for England. Off her western approaches there now lay a green Cuba.
The underlying military policy used to address that problem is concealed in a famous, deceptively innocent, couplet commemorating an incident which occurred at a creek near Waterford the year after the first Norman party landed at Wexford:
At the creek of Baginbun
Ireland was lost and won.
Here some hundred Anglo-Normans defeated roughly ten times that number of Norse and Irish, taking seventy of them prisoner. By way of terrorising those who would oppose the invaders and their ally, MacMurchada, these had their limbs broken and were then beheaded and their bodies thrown over the cliffs. And so it continued through the ages and the monarchies: the Tudors, Stuarts, Cromwell, William of Orange. The English throne continued with varying degrees of success to exert its influence in Ireland, through making invasions and settlements, the difficulties posed by geography and terrain being partially compensated for by the Irish tendency to either feud amongst themselves, or follow Diarmuid MacMurchada’s example of entering into alliance with the outsiders. While all this meant that it was generally the native Irish who went over the cliffs, there were a number of other consequences.
To begin with, as the Irish normally came off second best in set-piece military encounters, and did far better when they used the tactic of employing the bogs and forests to harry and hide, a tradition of guerrilla warfare entered Irish folklore to emerge finally with a degree of success in the early part of the twentieth century. Secondly, the Reformation gave a new religious coloration to the pursuit of imperial aims, the Irish, including the ‘old Irish’, as the descendants of the original settlers became known, continuing faithful to Rome, whereas the Crown forces were Protestant. This distinction became particularly significant for our day during the rule of James I. He added to the pro-Protestant policies of the Tudors, and their resultant slaughter, by ‘planting’ six of the north-eastern counties of Ulster, in the process creating the new county of Londonderry around the hinterland of the ancient settlement of Derry. The plantation involved settling both English colonists and Scottish Presbyterians and Episcopalians on confiscated Irish lands. The planters with the biggest holdings, known as Undertakers, were forbidden to have Irish tenants. Smaller estate holders, known as Servitors, were permitted to take Irish tenants but, if they did so, their rents were increased. The planters’ descendants still live in the area, some of them as keenly aware of the dangers, real or imagined, posed by their Catholic neighbours as were their ancestors during the periods of ferocious warfare involving Protestants and Catholics which ensued throughout the seventeenth century.
The massacres by Catholics of Protestants, which occurred in the religious wars of the 1640s, were magnified for propagandist purposes to justify Cromwell’s subsequent genocide. In a very Irish fashion the Williamite wars – and one battle in particular, that of the Boyne, in 1690 – which followed the butcheries of Cromwell and his generals have been thoroughly misrepresented subsequently for contemporary political purposes. The leitmotif of today’s Orangeman, emblazoned on banner and gable end, is the image of his icon, William of Orange, armoured, mounted on a white charger, sword aloft, as he leads the Protestant forces to victory. In the words of a famous Orange song, he ‘fought for the freedom of religion… on the green grassy slopes of the Boyne’.
In fact William was fighting for the English crown against his rival James II as part of a far wider European campaign in which the Pope was opposed to Louis XIV and his allies and supported a coalition which included William of Orange. The papacy was thus on the side of the Protestant William, not the Catholic James. On learning of William’s victory the Pope was so delighted that he arranged for the celebration of a Pontifical High Mass in Rome and ordered a Te Deum and the ringing of church bells.
Despite the Pope’s exultation, William’s victory meant that Irish Catholics had cause to mourn, not celebrate. A factor which frequently bedevilled Irish affairs, and which, as we shall see, re-entered the scene yet again in the post-1968 period in manner both decisive and malign, now re-emerged: the attitude of the dominant Protestants. An enlightened ruler, William had successfully concluded his campaign at Limerick by negotiating a reasonable treaty – by the standards of the time – and sailed off to his wider European theatre leaving the treaty’s administration in the hands of the victorious Protestant settlers who had fought alongside him. To them the term ‘Catholic’ equalled ‘treacherous’, and they interpreted the treaty not in terms of equity, but as a means of ensuring Protestant ascendancy.
The effects of the penal laws further depressed Catholics, making it nearly impossible for them to own property, receive an education, or enter the professions without renouncing their religion. The penal laws bore severely on English Catholics also, but the difference between the Irish and the English Catholics was that in Ireland the laws were used as a means of subjugating a race as much as a religion. Edmund Burke described the penal code as a
machine of wise and elaborate contrivance and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.
The effect of these laws on the swelling Irish underclass was brought home to me by two chance conversations conducted many years apart and on different sides of the globe, in Seoul and in London. The London encounter was between myself and an Irish professor of history who was describing a recent tour of old English farmhouses. ‘You know, ’ he said, ‘I have always thought of myself as an Anglophile, but it came home to me, looking at ordinary artefacts, I’m not talking about grand stuff that you’d see in castles, but dishes, knives, forks, jugs, plates, things like that that have survived from as far back as the sixteenth century, how little of that sort of thing exists in Ireland – and the reason. Just when people would be getting a little prosperity, every fifty years or so there’d be some new devastation and they’d be pounded back into the slime.’
The other observation came from a Korean presidential adviser who had been Korean ambassador to Washington. I commented on his impressive knowledge of the poet Yeats and he told me that his initial interest in Irish culture had come about because the Japanese used English colonial practice in Ireland as a headline for their own policy in Korea: extirpation of native culture, systems of land-holding, and inculcation of feelings of inferiority where things like language and traditional dress were concerned. It was an unexpected and telling illustration of the reasons why a nineteenth-century Irish school text instructed the learner to be thankful because he or she was a ‘happy English child’.
London regarded the Protestant settlers in Ireland not merely as members of the favoured Church but as bulwarks of the Crown. For example, during the 1770s forces raised amongst northern Protestants were used to put down Catholic peasant agitation in the south. Against this backdrop, in 1762 the English Government intervened to abort a scheme, promoted by a Colonel Alexander McNutt, to populate Nova Scotia with Ulster Protestants. Hardy, self-reliant, and, unlike their dispossessed Catholic counterparts, generally possessed of a trade, money, and a woman kinswoman, be it sister or spouse, the Ulster planters were ideally suitable for dealing with the challenges of Canada’s lonely opportunities. Accordingly the scheme was at first given official backing, but on further investigation a government committee vetoed it in fright at the prospect that it might lead to ‘depopulation of Protestant communities in Ireland’.5 It is idle, but nevertheless beguiling, to speculate that, had it not done so, there might be no ‘Ulster Troubles’ today.
However, arguably, as the century closed, it was the Protestants who had given London most pause for thought. As the flag of revolution was unfurled in America and France, the Protestant ruling class set up their volunteer force, in 1782, ostensibly to defend Ireland from any foe. The strength of the Irish Volunteers forced the British to agree to the setting-up of a parliament in Dublin the following year. It was of course subservient to the House of Commons and, like the Volunteers, dominated by the landowning Protestant Ascendancy, chiefly Anglicans or Church of Ireland. The Anglicans looked with disfavour on one section of Protestantism, almost with as much disfavour as they did Catholics. These were the Presbyterian Dissenters in the north of Ireland, who also suffered a certain amount of disability under the law, thereby encouraging some of them to make common cause with the Catholics. However, the concerns the Dublin parliament addressed, with varying degrees of success, were the concerns of Ireland: the destruction of the Irish woollen trade in favour of Britain’s; edicts forcing Irish merchants to sell their produce to England, not its colonies; the evils of absentee landlordism; and, significantly, defence. Moreover, the mere existence of a parliament in Dublin served to concentrate the wealthy, decision-taking echelon of the country in the capital so that the arts, commerce, and social life flourished. A Catholic middle class emerged.
In a sense the British rulers were back where Henry II had found himself when his knights invaded Ireland in the first place, back in 1169. The knights had speedily grown so powerful that the King had to come to Ireland at the head of an army to take personal control of the developing situation. Now, five hundred years on, the government in London felt an equal compulsion to take control of events in Ireland, but by different methods. For at the same time the Catholics, their eyes also fixed on what was happening abroad, came to be organised into a secret, oath-bound society, the United Irishmen, founded by middle-class Protestants. The aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters in setting up an Irish republic which would separate from England.
In the same year, 1795, following a sanguinary skirmish between Catholics and Protestants at Loughgall in Co. Armagh, another important society was founded in the ranks of the Catholics’ opponents. The Orange Society, which swiftly became the Orange Order, held its first Twelfth of July demonstration the following year, 1796. To this day the Order is a powerful political and economic force in Northern Ireland. Also in that year, one of the United Irishmen’s principal leaders, Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant, generally regarded as the father of Irish republicanism, made contact with the Directory in Paris with a view to acquiring arms and soldiers with which to put teeth into the United Irishmen’s doctrines.
The country was in such a state of turmoil that one peer, Lord Moira, told the House of Lords that Ireland existed in ‘the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under… creating universal discontent and hatred of the English name’. A principal source of the opprobrium attaching to things English was the behaviour of the British Army, whose members were frequently forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholics. Its commander-in-chief, General Abercrombie, issued a famous general order which described the army as being ‘in a state of licentiousness which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy’. Not surprisingly, Abercrombie subsequently resigned. He was replaced by General Gerard Lake, whose prescription for dealing with the state of rebellion which broke out, or was provoked, in that blood-drenched year of 1798 was: ‘take no prisoners’.
Suffice it to say that between the enforcement of Lake’s order, by both regular troops and Protestant militia, and the sometimes savage reaction to it by Catholic insurgents, the 1798 rebellion fully lived up to the traditions of frightfulness established with such frequency over the previous centuries. It is the aftermath of the rebellion which concerns us. The rebellion itself, and in particular the capture of Wolfe Tone and a part of the French fleet which he was bringing to Ireland, gave the British a pretext for proroguing the Irish parliament. By the Act of Union of 1800, it was amalgamated with the British parliament. Gladstone later said of the bribery and intimidation which secured the Irish votes necessary for the passing of the Act mat there was ‘no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man’. The parliament had represented the interests of some half a million Anglo-Irish Protestants, the Ascendancy as they were known, not the other three million who inhabited the island. The latter were Catholics whose voice counted for little or nothing. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Irish representation did have Irish interests at heart, and it took a massive exercise in bribery and coercion to secure the 162 votes (out of a total of 303) by which the Union passed. Instead of representing their constituents and legislating for themselves in Dublin, Irish parliamentarians, some one hundred in all, henceforth had to travel to London where they were in effect rendered impotent through being subsumed into an assembly approximately 650 strong. The seventeen MPs who are today returned from Northern Ireland owe their positions to the Act of 1800.
But before we come to the events which reduced the Irish representation at Westminster by over 80 per cent, it is necessary to examine briefly what happened in Ireland after the Union. Economically Dublin began to decay as the centre of power shifted to London and society went with it. Bereft of their patrons, both arts and crafts entered upon a period of prolonged decline. Throughout the country the scourge of absentee landlordism grew more pronounced. Too often London lifestyles came to be maintained by the subdivision of holdings into ever more numerous, and therefore smaller, rent-producing units. One consequence of the attempt to maximise yields from smallholdings was the reliance on the potato which created the great famine of the 1840s. I say ‘great famine’ advisedly, because in fact fertile Ireland had been afflicted by some ten other serious famines, accompanied by war, pestilence and starvation to the death, in the previous five hundred years.6 One of the landmarks of Ireland is the Obelisk standing atop of Killiney Hill, overlooking Dublin Bay. It was erected as a relief work during a famine which occurred one hundred years before the major nineteenth-century famine.
Unlike many of its predecessors this famine was not attributable to war, or invasion, but to crop failure. It was clearly foreseeable as there had been lesser potato crop failures on fourteen occasions between 1816 and 1842. But the system of administration was so inefficient and so geared to the interests of the Protestant Ascendancy that nothing was done.
An assimilative, energetic race like the Irish could not be completely subjugated, of course. Catholics found loopholes in the penal laws to slip into positions of some prosperity in trade and commerce. A certain leniency in the entry regulations to the legal profession, combined with the availability of education on the Continent for those who could afford it, produced a number of successful Catholic lawyers, of whom the most eminent was Daniel O’Connell. To paraphrase Joyce, it became possible for some Irish Catholics to achieve a relatively prosperous domicile by silence and cunning. But, particularly in the west and north-west, the general position of the Irish peasants was one of near helotry, living out their lives in conditions of poverty and disease which objective English observers adjudged unfit even for the rearing of animals. Fear of famine was the great underlying political reality of peasant Ireland.
Sex being one of the few outlets from their wretchedness, the Catholic peasantry produced children in such numbers that not even the virulent fevers of the time could prevent a population explosion which the failure of the potato crop in the 1840s turned into a nightmare.
However, while the Act of Union stunted the political and economic growth of Irish Catholics, it had the opposite effect on their Church and its clergy. Rome was not unmindful of the merits of being brought more closely into the orbit of a great imperial power and at the same time gaining a powerful bulwark against the spread of godless French republicanism. Symbolically enough, the year which saw the formation of both the United Irishmen and the Orange Order also saw the opening of the great Catholic seminary, St Patrick’s, at Maynooth, Co. Kildare. The British allowed this substantial relaxation of the penal laws largely on the basis that it was cheaper to fund Maynooth professorships than to pay Crown prosecutors. They got value for their money, with the natural conservatism of the Church and its abhorrence of secret societies being continuously deployed against Irish revolutionary forces.
The greatest mass movement to emerge in the country following the Union was Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation. Emancipation was finally conceded in 1829. This was followed in 1837 by the Tithe Commutation Act which put an end to a major source both of Catholic grievance and of sectarian conflict. The Catholics had been forced by law to contribute a tithe of their income to the upkeep of a church which was not theirs. But, as one historian has noted, in some cases the tithe ‘had been racked up by lay impropriators, and in other ways, until it often reached nearer to a quarter of the produce than one-tenth’.7 The injustices of the system eventually led to a ‘tithe war’ in which the tradition of underground secret agrarian societies came alive once again in Ireland. The ‘tithe war’ culminated in the ‘Rathcormack massacre’ in Co. Cork during May 1834. A score of peasants were killed and several more injured during fighting which broke out over the collection of forty shillings in tithe arrears from a Catholic widow. The resultant adverse publicity led to a blunting of Tory opposition to the passing of the Commutation Act.
By that time O’Connell had built up what deserves to be regarded as the first successful non-violent civil rights organisation in history, the Catholic Association. Its strength was based on organisation, moral force and the influence of the clergy, who, because of their education and respected place in Irish society, occupied positions of authority throughout the Association. O’Connell’s success therefore carried with it the demerit of creating a bogeyman figure for either anti-clerical Nationalists, or Protestant propagandists: the Priest in Politics. O’Connell’s other great cause, repeal of the Union, was not a success. The repeal movement lost momentum in 1843 after the British proclaimed illegal a huge meeting which he had intended to address at Clontarf. Fearing a slaughter if he went ahead, O’Connell called it off and his authority suffered something of the same diminution as did that of the Danes because of the earlier, bloodier, battle of Clontarf. The famine provided an apocalyptic eclipse of O’Connell’s career. He died during its worst year, ‘black forty-seven’.
The following year, 1848, the Young Irelanders’ Revolution, which was in effect nothing more than a burst of outraged idealism on the part of a group of O’Connell’s more radical young opponents and disillusioned former followers, petered out in a fracas in the widow McCormack’s cabbage garden. However, the Young Irelanders are respected by separatists of the physical force tradition for ensuring there was a rising in every generation, even in the appalling aftermath of the famine.
In all, the famine years consigned some one million people to the grave, a further million to emigration and probably condemned a further million to a half-life of poverty and near-starvation. Previously there had been heavy emigration from Ireland, particularly after the Napoleonic wars when agricultural prices fell steeply. But this swelling tide of human misery carried with it, to America in particular, a lasting characteristic of anti-British feeling that forms part of the tradition of continuing support for physical force which, to a degree, continues to assist the IRA today.
In his novel Paddy’s Lament the novelist Thomas Gallagher quotes statements from Gladstone, and by the London Times, prophesying the effects of the famine on the Irish diaspora, principally in America.
Gladstone wrote to his wife referring to ‘that cloud in the west, the coming storm, the minister of God’s retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half atoned injustice’. The Times said:
We must gird our loins to encounter the nemesis of seven hundred centuries’ of misgovernment. To the end of time spread over the largest inhabitable area in the world, and confronting us everywhere by sea and land, they will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made.
Significantly, the passage from Gallagher’s work using the quotations was reprinted in the newsletter8 of an Irish-American ginger group which also recorded the success of the Irish-American lobby in defeating an anti-IRA move in the Senate. The right-wing Senator Jesse Helms, a friend of Ian Paisley, was forced to drop a planned amendment to the Senate Appropriations Bill which would have cut off all aid to Ireland until the IRA surrendered its weaponry.
Another outcome of the famine which had a lasting impact was the formulation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The IRB – or Fenian movement, as it became popularly known after the legendary Irish version of the Samurai – was founded in 1858 in Dublin, and the following year spread to New York, where the movement became known as Clann na Gael (Family of Gaels). Like the United Irishmen, of which it was a lineal descendant, it was an oath-bound secret society whose revolutionary objectives were as much anathematized by the Church as by the British. Bishop Moriarty of Kerry produced one of the more celebrated denunciations, saying of the Fenians that: ‘Eternity is not long enough nor hell hot enough to punish such miscreants.’9
But despite being greatly feared and hated, the Fenians’ significance, like that of the Young Irelanders, lay less in the field of actual revolution than in the impetus which it gave to a body of revolutionary ideas concerning republicanism, separatism, identity and a consciousness of being Irish whose historical hour did not strike until the following century. The British infiltrated the movement with informers, and a planned uprising in 1867 fizzled out with nothing much in the way of military activity beyond some dynamite explosions in London and other cities which were the precursors of the contemporary IRA bombing campaign. Hangings, floggings, jailings and transportations added new martyrs to the Irish physical force tradition, and constitutional Ireland turned to other movements.
The O’Connellite demand for repeal became adapted to a call for Home Rule. Under Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster, this call came close to success. He did succeed in exerting sufficient pressure on Gladstone to commit the Liberals to supporting Home Rule. But in 1890 Parnell was cited as co-respondent in a divorce case. In the ensuing controversy the party split, and Parnell died prematurely the following year. He had managed to unite the three major streams of Irish self-assertion under his leadership: firstly the parliamentary party itself, which he had made into a formidable force through a strategy of giving or withdrawing his support to either the Liberals or the Conservatives according to the circumstances of the moment; secondly the Fenians, who agreed to put their energies at his disposal; and lastly the Irish Land League, founded by an ex-Fenian, Michael Davitt, with the objective of rectifying the crisis on the land.
A combination of the Land League’s activities and the adoption by the Conservatives of a policy known in Ireland as ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’ ultimately did lead to a solution of the land issue. Throughout the later part of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, a series of reforming Acts facilitated the buying-out of the landlords and the creation of a peasant proprietorship. But politically Parnell’s fall meant that the life force of the people began to express itself through cultural and sporting channels.
It was the era of the so-called Celtic Dawn. An Irish literary renaissance, spearheaded by Protestant intellectuals like Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, centred on the Abbey Theatre. Another Protestant, Douglas Hyde, founded the Gaelic League, which generated widespread enthusiasm for the idea of restoring the Irish language. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded by a Catholic, Michael Cusack, attracted even more widespread support for the ancient Irish sport of hurling, and for a hybrid version of rugby and soccer, Gaelic football, which also gave rise to Australian Rules ‘footie’. All this energy, coupled with a corresponding enervation on the part of the Protestant Ascendancy, inevitably had a political effect also.
At Westminster John Redmond accomplished the Herculean task of both uniting the pro- and anti-Parnellite wings of the Irish party and persuading Herbert Asquith’s government to once more bring forward a Home Rule proposal for Ireland. By now the contours of the present Irish Troubles had established themselves both in north-eastern Ireland and at Westminster. Dependent for his continuation in government on the support of Parnell and his Irish votes, Gladstone had put forward a Home Rule Bill in 1886. Introducing it he had said:
I cannot conceal the conviction that the voice of Ireland as a whole is at this moment clearly and constitutionally spoken. I cannot say otherwise when five sixths of the lawfully chosen representatives are of one mind on this matter… certainly I cannot allow it to be said that a Protestant minority in Ulster, or elsewhere, is to rule the question at large for Ireland. I am aware of no constitutional doctrine tolerable on which such a conclusion could be adopted or justified.10
Gladstone had described the situation regarding Home Rule with both eloquence and accuracy. However, he was about to be presented with a ‘constitutional doctrine’ which made nonsense of his efforts, and the efforts of many who came after him, to apply democratic principles to the Irish situation. That doctrine was summed up by Randolph Churchill, the man who coined the phrase, before a Belfast audience: ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ Churchill is also generally credited with being the man who introduced into British politics the tactic of ‘playing the Orange card’, that is, using the situation in northern Ireland for English electoral advancement. As Gladstone was making up his mind about Home Rule, Churchill wrote to a friend: ‘I have decided some time ago that if the GOM [Gladstone] went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play.’11 The emotion generated by the Tory/Unionist alliance defeated Gladstone’s proposal and his government fell. His assessment of the support in Ireland for Home Rule was borne out: eighty-six Home Rulers were returned, as against seventeen opposed. However, the election also returned a Conservative government, thus rendering the Irish Home Rule representation impotent.
From the time of the plantations by Scottish settlers, the province of Ulster as a whole had developed differently from the rest of Ireland, and particularly so during the nineteenth century. Politically, the experiences of the Presbyterians – who, because they too were discriminated against by the Anglicans, though to a lesser extent than the Catholics, had thrown in their lot with the Catholics during the 1798 rebellion – had been so traumatic that Anglicans and Presbyterians now formed a united front on the Union against their Nationalist and Catholic neighbours on the Home Rule issue.
The system of land-holding for the planters had traditionally been more liberal than in other parts of the country; the land issue was not the source of discontent it was in the south and south-west. Moreover, as in other countries, the north had become more industrialised than the south. Linen, ship-building and heavy engineering generated wealth, employment – and friction. By the time of the First World War, Belfast had an only too well founded reputation for bigotry and sectarian strife. Catholics, attracted by the jobs, frequently came into conflict with Protestants. The Protestants got most of the jobs, certainly the more skilled, craft-worker positions, but there was sufficient work about for a thriving Catholic community to have established itself in and around the main west Belfast artery of the Falls Road, where it existed in resentful proximity to its Protestant counterpart, the Shankill Road.
Visually Belfast differed in appearance from other Irish cities like Dublin or Cork. It was a red-bricked Mancunian look-alike set down in the Irish countryside. That countryside also looked different to what one would have seen around Cork or Dublin. Instead of the unkempt lusciousness of the south there was the neat fertility of the Scottish lowlands. Opposition to Home Rule was thus the external, political manifestation of a series of fundamental differences between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Tory espousal of the Unionist cause also introduced a different approach by the Conservatives to that normally associated with parliamentary democracy.
The ‘playing the Orange card’ strategy had the twin results of enshrining a fundamentally anti-democratic strain in Conservative thinking on Ulster and giving to the Unionist cause the incalculable benefit of the support of one of the great political parties of England in their efforts to negate the returns from ballot boxes in Ireland. The outcome was to be amply demonstrated in 1912 during the third major effort to introduce a Home Rule measure for Ireland. The Liberals, under Herbert Asquith, were once again dependent on the Irish parliamentary party. Introducing the Bill, Asquith echoed Gladstone’s arguments and pointed out that over the previous twenty-five years four-fifths of the Irish electorate had consistently returned Home Rule candidates. To no avail: the near treasonous behaviour of the Conservatives overpowered all rational political argument on the issue. As the distinguished historian Nicholas Mansergh has stated:
No stranger episode is to be found in the history of Conservatism than in the abandonment of pretensions in the three years before the First World War to be the party of law and order.
The principal actors in the drama of Tory/Unionist resistance to Home Rule were the Conservative Party leader, Andrew Bonar Law, and the Unionists’ leader, Edward Carson, a Dublin-born lawyer. Apart from a desire to return the Tories to power via the Orange card, the Scots-Canadian Bonar Law had strong Ulster connections. His father had been a Presbyterian minister in the province. In addition, his London hostess was the doyenne of Unionism, Lady Londonderry, whose house in London was also Carson’s second home. Carson had been an indefatigable Crown prosecutor in Ireland. Operating in a world of ‘packed’ juries and coercive legislation, he had implemented the ‘stick’ portion of Chief Secretary Arthur Balfour’s policy of ‘the carrot and stick’, as it was known to Nationalists. The slow pace of reform on the land issue, ‘the carrot’, with its consequential widespread agrarian outrage was balanced by an equally widespread application of coercion. One of the great ‘remember’ cries of the period was ‘remember Mitchelstown’. It was the Mitchelstown incident in Co. Cork which really launched Carson. He was the Crown prosecutor in a case against William O’Brien, one of the leaders of the land agitation, which became a cause célèbre in 1887 after police had fired on a crowd of stone-throwing demonstrators, killing three of them and wounding many more.
Carson went on to become one of the leading barristers in English legal history. An ‘ugly hatchet-faced man’, he had a type of mind not uncommonly met with at the bar: ‘Ruthless, defiant, with thinly veiled contempt for democracy’, he made no bones about his methodology, saying flatly that he ‘intended to break every law that is possible’. Bonar Law’s rhetoric was even more extreme. At the Balmoral show grounds in Belfast, standing under the largest Union Jack in the world (48 feet by 25), on 9 April 1912 he solemnised the ‘wedding of Protestant Ulster with the Conservative and Unionist Party’, in the presence of some 100, 000 spectators, and a platform that included seventy MPs. His speech included emotive comparisons between the siege of Derry during the Williamite war and the contemporary situation:
Once again you hold the pass, the pass for the empire. The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates. The government have erected, by their Parliament Act, a boom against you to shut you off from the British people. You will burst that boom. That help will come, and when the crisis is over men will say to you in words not unlike those used by Pitt – you have saved yourselves by your exertions, and you have saved the empire by your example.
This could have been defended on the grounds of being delivered merely for local consumption, but speaking later in the summer, at Blenheim Palace on 24 July, after several incidents of sectarian violence had already occurred in northern Ireland in the wake of his April speech, Bonar Law made it clear that he was consciously lending his position to violent resistance to Home Rule. Reading his remarks, even at this remove, it appears incredible that they could have been uttered by a man who was not only leader of the Conservative Party, but also a potential prime minister of England. He said:
We regard the government as a revolutionary committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud. In our opposition to them we shall not be guided by the considerations or bound by the restraints which would influence us in a normal constitutional struggle. We shall take the means, whatever means seems to us most effective, to deprive them of the despotic power which they have usurped and compel them to appeal to the people whom they have deceived. They may, perhaps they will, carry their Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons but what then? I said the other day in the House of Commons, and I repeat here that there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities… Before I occupied the position I now fill in the party I said that, in my belief, if an attempt were made to deprive these men of their birthright – as part of a corrupt political bargain – they would be justified in resisting such an attempt by all means in their power, including force. I said it then, and I repeat now with a full sense of the responsibility which attaches to my position, that, in my opinion, if such an attempt is made, I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.
The foregoing was, as Asquith said, a ‘declaration of war against constitutional government’. But Bonar Law and Carson continued unimpeded as they made it clear that they intended to back up their words with deeds. Later in 1912, on 19 September, Carson called a press conference at Craigavon, the mansion near Belfast owned by Sir James Craig, the heir to a whiskey-distilling fortune, at which he revealed that the Unionists had drawn up an Ulster Covenant, based on the old Scottish Covenant. It contained the following:
Being convinced in our consciences that home rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the empire, we… loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V… do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn covenant… to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a home rule parliament in Ireland… and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority.
This was no empty formula. Some 470, 000 people signed the Covenant and 100, 000 more were enrolled into an Ulster Volunteer Force. A senior English officer, General Sir George Richardson, was placed at the head of these ‘loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty’. As an indication of how the UVF was looked upon by the British ‘officers and gentlemen’ class, it should be noted that Richardson was suggested for the post by one of England’s most eminent soldiers, Field Marshal Sir George Roberts, on the grounds that Richardson ‘knew men and war from fighting the Pathans and the Afghans on the North-West Frontier’. Richardson did not have to depend solely on his NWF experiences; there were frontiers of influence readily open to him a great deal closer to home. Supporters of the Orange card strategy included members of the Establishment such as Waldorf Astor, Lord Rothschild, Lord Milner, Lord Iveagh, Sir Edward Elgar and the Duke of Bedford. Considerations of the indivisibility of empire, or affection for Irish Unionists, were not uppermost in these gentlemen’s minds, convulsing their dinner parties, and those of society London generally, with heated controversy over the ‘Ulster crisis’. As a historian of Unionism, Patrick Buckland, has pointed out:
Not only was the unionist leadership more responsive to Ulster unionism. The party at large was more inclined to endorse the vehemence of Ulster unionists… Unionists [i.e. Conservatives], furious with frustration at their continued exclusion from power, were… willing to adopt almost any means to defeat the Liberals and return to office.
The Duchess of Somerset articulated the feelings of Tory grandees when she wrote to Carson in January 1914 that ‘this country will follow you now and we shall all help you to see this thing through and this vile government will go out’.
But in their public support for the Unionists Conservative apologists concentrated their fire not on party advantage but on large questions of empire and of religious freedom, summarised by Rudyard Kipling in lines from a poem he wrote for the Tory Morning Post:
We know the hells declared
For such as serve not Rome –
One law, one land one throne.
If England drive us forth
We shall not stand alone.
Lest anyone labour under the illusion that their activities stopped short at poetry readings, the Unionists also formed a provisional government ready to take over the province should Home Rule be applied. The Curragh Mutiny drama played out during March 1914 ensured that it would not. The Curragh incident began when a majority amongst the British officers stationed at the principal Irish base, the Curragh Camp in Co. Kildare, let it be known that they did not wish to be involved in forcing Home Rule on their fellow Conservatives in the north. They were confronted neither by enforced resignations, nor courts martial. In fact they were not confronted at all. Having been summoned to London, their leader, Brigadier H. P. Gough, came back to the Curragh from the War Office with a document, the last paragraph of which, written in his own handwriting, read as follows: ‘I understand the last paragraph to mean that the Troops under our command will not be called upon to enforce Home Rule and we can so assure our officers.’
What this assurance meant in practice was spelled out a month later, on 24 April, when police and customs officials stood idly by as 300 tons of rifles and ammunition were landed illegally from Germany for the UVF at three separate locations, Bangor, Donaghdee and Larne. Whoever was going to enforce Home Rule, it would not be the British Army. In the event there was no pretence at enforcement. Shortly after the Great War broke out, and on 18 September 1914, Asquith sidelined the Home Rule issue by formally introducing Home Rule to law but accompanying the measure by an Amending Bill which suspended its operation until after the war.
Though the crisis thus appeared to pass inconclusively, it had in fact thrown up the formula which the British would later use in what for many years appeared to be a successful attempt to solve the Irish question: partition. Partition had been formally proposed by Bonar Law at a conference convened by the King at Buckingham Palace on 21 July 1914. He suggested the exclusion of six of Ulster’s nine counties from the working of the Home Rule Bill. This was opposed by both Redmond and Carson, Redmond on the grounds that the six excluded counties – Armagh, Antrim, Down, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone – contained sizeable Catholic minorities. Instead he sought a system of option whereby counties could opt for or against Home Rule depending on their religious coloration.
Carson objected on the cunningly chosen grounds that nine counties would be the best solution, because the increased Catholic representation from the remaining three Ulster counties, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, would be a force for the eventual coming-together of the two parts of the island! The sincerity of this argument need not detain us long; Carson was opposed to Home Rule for any part of Ireland but he was keenly aware that the Liberals, and many Conservatives, supported the county option idea, and did not wish to leave himself open to charges of obduracy. Later the Unionists would abandon the pretext of favouring ultimate unification, but before looking at how and why this was done it is necessary to examine how nationalism reacted to the Home Rule crisis, because it was this reaction which led to the establishment of today’s republic.
Throughout most of the controversy the vast bulk of Nationalist opinion supported John Redmond. People expected England to keep faith. The Unionists could huff and puff all they liked, but the ineluctable fact appeared to be that the majority in favour of Home Rule in the House of Commons was over 100 votes. That was the significant statistic, not how many people signed a strange-sounding covenant in Belfast. Moreover, in the middle of the controversy, during 1913–14, people’s attention became focused on the great industrial dispute between the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, led by Jim Larkin and James Connolly, and the Dublin employers, led by William Martin Murphy. After Murphy dismissed workers who refused to resign from the IT&GWU, Larkin declared a general strike of his members. Murphy and the other employers responded by declaring a general lock-out. Connolly and Larkin were both arrested. Clashes between strikers and police became commonplace in Dublin. In November of 1913 a citizens’ army was founded to protect the workers from police brutality. This tiny but significant unit was shortly to be subsumed into another, larger grouping.
For, unknown to the public, the IRB had secretly become reorganised. Imbued with the conviction that Home Rule was a sham – and indeed a fact overlooked in the welter of controversy was that the financial provisions of the Bill were so limited that Ireland would have had less independence than Britain’s other colonies – the IRB had decided that the time was approaching for an implementation of Wolfe Tone’s dictum that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. The formation of the UVF gave the IRB the chance it had been waiting for. Eoin MacNeill, a respected scholar, was persuaded by colleagues in the Gaelic League, who unknown to him were members of the IRB, to write an article in the League’s newspaper, An Claideamh Soluis (The Sword of Light), proposing that the Green tradition should have a corps to match that of the Orange in order to withstand any effort to frustrate the introduction of Home Rule by force. The article appeared on 1 November 1913. The response to it, an overflowing public meeting in the Rotunda, Dublin, on the 25th, showed how the behaviour of the Conservatives and Unionists had begun to affect Nationalists. The meeting unanimously adopted the Volunteer Manifesto which proposed the setting-up of ah Irish volunteer corps all over the country in order to frustrate the plan
…deliberately adopted by one of the great English political parties… to make a display of military force and the menace of armed violence the determining factor in the future relations between this country and Great Britain.
The government, which of course had made no response to the formation of the UVF, reacted by issuing an order banning the importation of arms into Ireland. This was the order which the UVF openly flouted a few months later. The hatred of the Unionists for Home Rule was genuine enough and understandable against a background of centuries of sectarian warfare. In fact, in view of this background it was a major blunder on the part of the framers of the first Home Rule proposals not to have incorporated in the Bill safeguards for those of the Protestant tradition. Failure to do so gave a patina of reality to the ‘Home Rule is Rome rule’ argument which became embedded in the Unionists’ resistance. Nevertheless it was not the genuineness of the Unionists’ resistance which gave it its strength. That came from Conservative backing in press, parliament, and security forces.
The numbers who signed the Covenant were certainly impressive. But in assessing them, British governmental reaction to similar, earlier, manifestations of Catholic feeling has to be borne in mind. O’Connell, for example, had addressed a peaceful meeting of 750, 000 people at Tara in Co. Meath in favour of repeal of the Union. It was the largest gathering seen in Ireland until the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. But the reaction of the British was to threaten bloodshed if he went ahead with his planned meeting at Clontarf, and to arrest O’Connell. In 1860 The O’Donoghue brought a petition to London seeking an Irish plebiscite on self-determination. The petition contained 423, 026 signatures, but it was ignored. In a rural country with a strong oral tradition, where politics was the staple diet of fireside conversation, it appeared to Nationalists that history was not so much unfolding before their eyes as merely repeating itself.
This impression was heavily underscored when the Rotunda Volunteers staged a mini-version of the UVF gun-running (1, 500 rifles as opposed to 35, 000) at Howth on 14 July 1914. In contrast to the proceedings at Bangor, Donaghdee and Larne, which had been overseen by British officers, the army made a bungled attempt to seize the Howth weaponry. As a result a riot developed at Bachelors’ Walk and frightened soldiers fired on a stone-throwing mob, killing four people and wounding dozens more. ‘Remember Bachelors’ Walk’ joined Mitchelstown in the litany of Ireland’s Stations of the Cross.
However, mainstream Nationalist sentiment still supported John Redmond. It did not matter that he did not join the wartime coalition cabinet, although both Bonar Law and Carson did. Nor that Irish Nationalists, including his own son, were refused commissions. Even though he made a recruiting speech two days after the Home Rule Bill was adjourned, thereby causing a split in the Volunteers, the largest segment of the movement followed his leadership, becoming known as the National Volunteers. As a result tens of thousands of young Irish Nationalists went to their deaths wearing British uniforms, believing that they were fighting for the freedom of small nations. A tradition, built up over centuries, of ‘listing for the Crown’ and ‘taking the King’s shilling’ was not easily eradicated. Nevertheless a small section of the Volunteers did remain opposed to recruiting. These, still nominally led by Eoin MacNeill, but in fact controlled by the IRB, became known as the Irish Volunteers. Through manipulation of the Irish Volunteers the IRB now stood on the threshold of the greatest alterations in the relationship between Ireland and England since the coming of the Normans in 1169.
To the accompaniment of much undercover negotiation involving Clann na Gael leaders in New York and the German foreign service, the IRB leadership had decided that the Great War offered an ideal opportunity to implement Wolfe Tone’s teaching about taking advantage of England’s difficulties. Unknown to MacNeill, who still believed the Irish Volunteers’ mission to be wholly defensive, an uprising was planned for Easter 1916. Though no German aid reached the rebels, and MacNeill destroyed whatever slim prospect they had of success when he did hear of the plot, by countermanding it, so that only some six hundred Volunteers, backed by the tiny Citizens’ Army, actually went out to fight, chiefly in Dublin, Ireland, in the words of Yeats, was ‘changed utterly’ by the rising of Easter Week, April 1916.
The people of Dublin at first execrated the rebels: the business community because of the destruction caused, chiefly by British shelling, during the week-long fighting; while the working class were stirred to wrath by the ‘separation women’, who were receiving separation allowances because their husbands were fighting in the war, and who viewed the proceedings as stabbing the lads abroad in the back. Prisoners were booed as they were led to the dock for transhipment to prisons in England. However, British policy soon had the effect of swinging the popularity pendulum in the opposite direction. Sixteen of the rising’s leaders were executed, including all seven signatories of the Proclamation of a Republic for all Ireland. The rising had begun with the reading of it on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. Amongst those shot were James Connolly and Padraig Pearse. Pearse was a well-known writer, orator, and educationalist, whose writings became after his death the inspiration of revolutionary Ireland. Connolly had been so badly wounded during the fighting that he had to be propped up in a chair to face the firing squad.
Apart from creating martyrs, the British compounded their error by a nationwide round-up of suspects. So many innocent people were arrested and incarcerated in England that not only was wrath swiftly converted to sympathy, but the IRB’s infectious doctrines, inculcated in camp and prison, were later carried to the four corners of the land on their release. The prisoners provided a fertile source of propaganda in America too, where the feelings of famine-recalling Irish-Americans were of considerable concern to the pro-British Woodrow Wilson in his efforts to win support for America’s entry into the war on Britain’s side. The chorus of ‘remembers’ became ever more damning and more insistent, both in Ireland and throughout the Irish diaspora, as the contrast between the treatment of Orange and Green dissidents began to sink in. Realising their mistake, the government ordered the prisoners released within months. It was too late: they returned home, metamorphosed in the public imagination from murderous vandals into revolutionary heroes, to be cheered back on to the streets they had been booed off from.
As by now news of the horrors of trench warfare was also circulating, recruiting fell off, which, coupled with the limitation of opportunities for emigration, created a potentially explosive pool of manpower for nationalist radicals to draw on. And draw on it they did. There is no need to go into the intricacies of the struggle which eventuated. Suffice it to say that the lack of response to honourable John Redmond’s painful toil at Westminster destroyed his and his party’s credibility. ‘Remember John Redmond’ joined the litany. This particular incantation, carrying with it damaging implications of contempt for moderation in politics, and for parliamentary methods generally, bedevilled Irish political life for decades afterwards, and still affects Northern Ireland.
Politically, Nationalist Ireland turned to Sinn Fein (We Ourselves), which before the rising had been little more than an opinion group. The party had been formed by a gifted journalist, Arthur Griffith, who preached separatism, self-sufficiency and a dual monarchy for Ireland and England on the lines of the Austrian-Hungarian example. He saw this as the formula for resolving the claims of Loyalists and Nationalists. However, sections of the British media had mistakenly described the rising as a ‘Sinn Fein rebellion’ because of the success of Griffith’s book, The Resurrection of Hungary.The newspaper assessment of Sinn Fein became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having successfully frustrated an attempt to introduce conscription to Ireland the party won seventy-three seats in the 1918 general election. The Unionists won their customary one-fifth of the poll, 315, 394 votes out of a total of 1, 526, 910. However, the Irish parliamentary party retained a mere seven of their former eighty seats. Home Rule was a dead letter.
Following the election Sinn Fein withdrew from Westminster, set up its own parliament, known as the Dail, in Dublin, and, in reiteration of the demand made in the proclamation of 1916, declared an all-Ireland republic. From then on the Volunteers became known generally as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Spearheaded by the genius at the head of the IRB, Michael Collins, regarded as the father of modern urban guerrilla warfare for his work in building up an underground intelligence network which defeated the British secret service, the IRA ultimately brought the British to the conference table.
The course of the war need not concern us here. Sufficient to say that if a historical template were cut out and superimposed over the North’s troubled counties today, it would fit all too well. Ireland became used to the techniques of ambush, justification of civilian casualties, elimination of spies, demoralisation of police forces, propaganda, and the consequential retaliation: the formation of special forces, the Black and Tans, ex-service men so called because of their black and khaki uniforms, and the Auxiliary Police Cadets. These last were so christened in order to give the impression that this was a ‘police war’ aimed only at putting down a handful of unrepresentative criminals. The ‘auxies’ were ex-officers who, like the IRA, were brave men, elected their own officers – and made their own rules: repression, murder, retaliatory destruction of property, torture, unacknowledged shoot-to-kill policies, the use of the judicial system as part of the counterinsurgency methodology, propaganda. In guerrilla warfare, as in other spheres of human activity, there is little new under either the sun or the Irish rain.
However these activities did produce two new developments. Under pressure from both the IRA and public opinion, particularly American public opinion, the British moved to meet the conflicting claims of Orange and Green by partitioning Ireland. Firstly, under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, the Unionists were given a parliament in Belfast to rule over their portion, the six counties in which they predominated, that part of northern Ireland that is today erroneously known as ‘Ulster’. The opening of the northern parliament facilitated the establishment of a truce and an invitation to the Nationalists to come to London later in the year for negotiations. As a result of these, the south and south-western parts of the country were ultimately hived off into a Roman Catholic–dominated Irish Free State with the same constitutional status as either Australia or Canada. This state evolved into today’s Republic of Ireland.
The irony about partition is that it worked in the area which most bitterly resented it, the Catholic zone. The enforced acceptance came about as follows. The treaty which Michael Collins brought home from London at the end of the tortuous negotiations was rejected by his great rival, Eamon de Valera. In July 1921, before the negotiations began, de Valera, who was then the leader of Sinn Fein, had seen Lloyd George alone in London for a number of tête-à-tête meetings. However, having been fully informed of what was on offer, he managed to evade going back to London for the treaty negotiations, which were conducted by plenipotentiaries led by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.
Collins had warned even before the truce was declared that once it came into operation his principal weapon, secrecy, was gone. He and his underground army would be like rabbits coming out of their holes. His intelligence network had left him in no doubt as to the extent of the forces in men and money which the British were deploying to bolster the Unionists’ resistance to any encroachment on the six-county state. If he did not seize the opportunity of setting up an imperfect twenty-six-county state, the British might not withdraw from the south either. There was precedent for such missed opportunities for Ireland in Parnell’s career and what had happened to Home Rule. Conservative Party members and senior figures in the army, like Sir Henry Wilson, who had been one of the architects of the Curragh Mutiny saga, were strongly opposed to such withdrawal, arguing that it was ‘giving in to terrorism’. Collins did not regard the treaty as a perfect solution but as a ‘stepping stone’, as he put it, to full and final freedom. Eventually, after one of the most sterile and rancorous debates in Irish political history, the ‘stepping stone’ argument carried the day and the treaty was accepted by a majority of the southern electorate.
The sizeable Catholic minority in the northern state viewed the treaty with considerable apprehension because of the prospect of being handed over to the tender mercies of the Unionist and Protestant majority. But their fears found little resonance in the Dail debates. Knowing that he could do little or nothing about the reality of partition – the northern parliament had been in existence before Lloyd George sent for him in the first place – de Valera and his cohorts concentrated their fire on the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown which dominion status entailed. Incredible as it might appear today, partition was almost overlooked in the endless arguments about the Oath, and forms of government. The result was one of the most pointless civil wars recorded since Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, described how a conflict broke out between two factions over which end of an egg should be topped. Many sincere young men in the IRA believed that they had taken an oath to an Irish republic and that it was wrong to stop short of this goal. The Machiavellian de Valera appears however to have been motivated, at least in part, by rivalry with Collins and pique at the fact that the treaty was signed without his consent. Certainly in subsequent years he did more to validate Collins’s ‘stepping stone’ theory than anyone else in the manner in which he jettisoned the IRA and used the Free State apparatus to work towards dispensing with the link with the Crown.
But his change of approach affected only the twenty-six counties. The civil war which he did so much to foment had copper-fastened partition by the time it ended in 1923. It claimed the life of the charismatic Michael Collins with a bullet and that of the overworked Arthur Griffith through a brain haemorrhage. The importance of Collins’s death to the partition issue only became generally known long afterwards as a result of research I conducted while writing his biography. I discovered that Collins, in his capacity as head of government, commander-in-chief of the Free State Army, and, possibly more importantly, head of the IRB, had used the ‘stepping stone’ as a base for undeclared military actions against the north. Apart from the fact that he abhorred partition and intended using the treaty to end it either by fair means or foul, Collins’s seemingly indefensible behaviour has to be understood against the backdrop of the fact that the Catholic population were under severe pressure from the authorities of the Six Counties. In the disorder of the time, undercover squads drawn from the B-Specials (the north’s armed, Protestant militia), the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army seemed to be able to murder Catholics at will. Those deaths in the early 1920s formed part of the litany of ‘remembers’ which accompanied the coming to life again of the IRA in the 1960s. But in the 1920s Collins was the only leader in the Free State cabinet who showed himself willing to respond by assisting the Catholics militarily.
Following his death, his colleagues, none of whom possessed his drive or initiative, had their hands full in merely trying to keep alive the newly formed twenty-six-county state. The aftermath of the death and destruction of the civil war, the waste, and above all the disillusionment – that this was what the independence struggle, ‘that delirium of the brave’, had led to – drained the infant Free State of vision, political energy and financial resources. Trying to maintain an Irish currency in the face of, at best, unsympathetic, and at worst, unfriendly, British treasury officials assumed a far higher priority than events north of the border in another jurisdiction.
It is to the credit of the first Free State administration that democracy survived in such conditions. But so did the border. When, in 1925, the British, in effect, reneged on one of the provisions of the treaty, there was nothing the Dublin Government could or would do about it. One of the arguments in favour of the treaty had been that it allowed for the setting-up of a boundary commission. This, it was hoped by the Nationalists, would redraw the boundary in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants. Had this been done, the most the Unionists could have hoped to control of their six counties would have been an unworkable three and a half. The city of Derry, most of the country around it, and the bulk of Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh would probably have gone to the Nationalists and been ceded to the Free State.
It was intended that the commission be composed of a British, a Nationalist and a Unionist representative. However, the Unionists refused to nominate anyone, while the British concurred in the refusal and appointed a South African instead. The man who originally suggested the commission, Sir James Craig, the Six Counties prime minister, who had succeeded Carson as Unionist leader, said he was prepared for war if ‘one inch of the loved soil of Ulster’ was removed by the commission. No one in authority in London pointed out that this constituted a violation of the treaty. In the circumstances, neither Dublin nor the Nationalist representative on the commission, Eoin MacNeill, had any power to ‘deliver’. Amidst much sabre-rattling in the north and disappointment in the south, MacNeill resigned, and the commission left the border unchanged.
The only subsequent changes to the southern state which need concern us were internal. Prior to the treaty the laws of England were the laws of Ireland. Now, in the south, they were altered to take a Catholic complexion. The legal system was changed to allow for prohibitions on abortion, contraception, divorce and the introduction of censorship. While there was no official policy of discrimination against Protestants, the ethos of the south became unwelcoming to aspects of Protestantism. Ethos, economics, emigration, a lower birth rate, the change in administration all played their part in making the south’s small Protestant population become smaller still.
It fell from 327, 171 in 1911 to roughly 130, 000 fifty years later. When James Craig declared that the Belfast parliament was a ‘protestant parliament for a protestant people’, his hearers understood that custom and usage meant that the Protestants got and would continue to get the jobs and the houses at the expense of their Catholic neighbours. The southern state was much more benign and democratic than that. But it was nevertheless a benign, democratic Roman Catholic state.
The Free State Government, led by William T. Cosgrave, proved itself more committed to democracy than the pursuit of power when in 1927 it encouraged de Valera back into the parliamentary arena from the wilderness to which his war spasm of 1922–3 had consigned him. Five years later he succeeded Cosgrave and began making the southern state appear more republican. The office of governor-general was removed, and so was the Oath. But while thus attempting to placate the republican rump, which had supported him since the civil war, he also sought to assure right-wing elements of his basic conservatism. In 1937 he introduced his own constitution, which was an attempt to marry these conflicting currents. It was a theocratic, frankly sectarian document which recognised God in its preamble and the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church in its text. In Articles 2 and 3 it reiterated the republican ideal by making a specific claim to Northern Ireland. All of these things aroused, and continue to arouse, northern hackles, but did absolutely nothing to tackle the problem of partition. They were nothing but cosmetic window-dressing designed to impress the population of the Twenty-Six Counties.
During World War II Northern Ireland formed a valuable staging ground for the Allies, in particular for flying sorties to protect convoys, and during the Normandy landings. By contrast, de Valera having renegotiated the return of a number of ports deeded to Britain in the treaty which would have been valuable in convoy protection, the south decided to remain neutral. Therefore, to all the historical baggage inclining London towards Belfast’s side of the argument, there was added a great weight of wartime obligation. But this fact was ignored by the south a few years after the war ended – with consequences which persist today. In 1949, a coalition government which had managed to oust de Valera decided to steal his republican clothes by declaring the Twenty-Six Counties a republic.
The Unionists riposted by cashing in some of their wartime gratitude chips to secure from the Attlee government a guarantee that there would be no change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland without the consent of the assembly at Stormont. Even though Stormont was later dissolved by London, that guarantee still exists: the veto which the Unionists continue to employ on moves towards a united Ireland. And now, before turning to examine how Stormont came to be dissolved, a number of points have to be made about the northern state: firstly, its extent.
Carson, as we have seen, during the Buckingham Palace conference claimed that if partition were to come it should be on the basis of nine counties, not six. However, after the war, when the setting-up of the northern state was becoming imminent, this argument was inverted. Craig informed Lloyd George that the Unionists wished the new unit to be based not on the nine counties of Ulster, but on six only. As Lloyd George subsequently explained to his surprised cabinet colleagues, the vastly greater Unionist area which would have resulted, were Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan included, seemed logical, but what Craig wanted was control. The extra land would have brought with it extra Catholics and would, as Carson had said, have made for assimilation into a united Ireland. Accordingly, the Unionists got not a state of nine counties, but a statelet of six. But they also took control. The Catholics under their domination would get not the protections of the law, but its sanctions, forcing them into either subjection or emigration. Control, however, would remain.
Two other provisions which the British and the Nationalists agreed with initially were dropped because of the control philosophy. One was an upper house for the new parliament which would have been weighted to provide a redress for Catholic concerns. Carson vetoed this, flatly saying he was as prepared to take to the streets against the proposal as he had been against Home Rule itself. The other proposal was that the electoral system be by proportional representation as it was in the south. However, the very reason that it was introduced by Collins and Griffith to the south, because it protected minorities, was anathema to the Unionists. The last altercation Collins had before his death with Winston Churchill, who was responsible for Irish affairs, concerned Churchill’s caving-in to the Unionists’ demands that PR be dropped. Churchill, like Lloyd George, wanted the six-county state set up at whatever cost, in whatever shape, for one overriding reason – to get Ireland off the British agenda.
It might have stayed off if the three points concerning extent, structure of government, and the nature of the voting system had been persisted with. Perhaps peaceful assimilation could have taken place. In the event, however, what was created was a fundamentally undemocratic state specifically designed to prevent power changing hands, or to allow reform to take place from within by the normal democratic processes of education, organisation, and the ballot box. In many ways the hard-working, God-fearing fundamentalists of the Six Counties resembled the Boers of South Africa. They developed the same laager mentality and a system of administration very similar to apartheid, albeit based on religion rather than colour. But, unlike the South Africans, no British prime minister warned the Unionists that they must heed the winds of change. London took exactly the opposite approach, hands off, not hands on. The cheques were written, but no effort was made to ensure that the money was spent on maintaining a state that conformed even remotely to British standards. A gathering storm of Catholic grievance burst during the 1960s and a new generation of British decision-takers found that it must return to the old question of Ireland.