Part 3

It is often said that Irish people pay too much attention to history. This is not true. Irish people pay very little attention to history.

Some Irish people do pay attention to a mixture of half-truths and folk mythology about the past. At meetings in Free Derry Republican speakers would quite unself-consciously reel off the names and speak with natural emotion of those who had gone before in the fight against oppression and of the fate which had befallen them. Each name triggered remembrance of that particular phase of the struggle and excited the tingling realization that what we were about was yet another episode—perhaps,
hopefully, the last—in the long chronicle of our nation’s distressed indomitability. ‘If you really love me,’ wrote Sean Heuston to his sister in 1916 just before the British shot him, ‘teach the children the history of their own land and teach them the cause of Caitlin ni hUllachain never dies’ (Capuchin Annual, 1966). Sean can rest content that we were well enough taught.

There is a large body of opinion in Catholic Ireland which holds that that is half the trouble: that since 1922 successive Southern Irish governments, aided by the media, have bombarded the people with propaganda about the evils done to Ireland and about the continuing evil of partition; that the Catholic schools, including those in the North, have pumped children full of history, and a history distorted so as to idealize the gun. Thus, the theory goes, young men in places like the Bogside turn easily to the waging of unnecessary war.

It is an easy point of view to argue. The traditional Catholic view of Irish history does contain a great deal of myth which it is not difficult to debunk. A Catholic child in the Bogside, for example, would gather at an early age that Wolfe Tone, who led the United Irishmen’s rising in 1798, was a Protestant who came over to our side. One would not gather that Tone, the ‘Father of Irish Republicanism’, took his inspiration from the French Revolution, was as bitterly opposed to the Catholic church as any Orangeman and, if he had had his way, would have sponged the church from the face of the Republic he hoped to build. One gathered too that in every subsequent generation the Irish people—or at least the majority, Catholic section of it—rose against the English oppressor, sometimes in arms, sometimes in constitutional movements, and that there were direct links between each stage of the struggle. This is not true either. The Irish people as a whole never rose. Whole peoples rarely do. And there was little organizational or political continuity between the movements which did arise. The Catholic emancipation movement which was led by Daniel O’Connell in the 1820s, for example, owed nothing to Tone’s ideas. It was conservative, constitutional and anti-republican. The radical and thoroughly unconstitutional Fenian movement of the 1860s had nothing in common with O’Connell. And so on.

But underlying all the mythology there is a deep stratum of truth. The Irish people, particularly the Catholic Irish people, were exploited and oppressed for hundreds of years by Britain. The overwhelming majority of them were born in misery and reared in squalor. They lived from day to day, fighting to tear some dignity from life, most of them finally to die amid the ugliness in which they first saw the light of day. And knowing that one of the reasons for their condition was that the country was ruled by Britain.

If the movements they threw up lacked any continuity neat enough to please the detached historians’ sense of order, they did not lack in the desperation of their adherents’ search for a remedy. Irish history is hair-raising. In that it is not dissimilar from the history of many other countries. History almost everywhere is terrible. The main reason why Republican rhetoric about the past continues to evoke a gut response from many people in Ireland is that most of it is true. That it is encrusted with myth alters nothing essential. Some people need myths, need them to glorify their history in order to push away the grim reality of the way they have to live now. If the traditional Republican account of Irish history has been most fervently believed in the Catholic ghettoes of the North, in the Bogside and Creggan, Ardoyne and Ballymurphy, it is because the people who live there, ground down by oppression and with no apparent possibility of escape, have needed an ennobled history, have needed to postulate a line of continuity between the glorious struggles of the past and a liberation yet to come. When a man lives in a world of bookies’ slips, varnished counters and Guinness spits he will readily accept an account of the past which tends to invest his living with dignity. Observers such as C. Cruise O’Brien, such circumstances of life being beyond their range of experience, may find it difficult fully to understand this.

Protestants, too, have had a mythology, and it has supplied source material for an equally rich fund of educated sneers. It too is now being derided, by a growing section of ‘enlightened’ Protestant opinion. Protestants have believed that for almost four hundred years their community has been besieged by rapacious Catholic hordes intent on the destruction of the civil and religious liberty won by the Reformation, and that it was the Orange Order which provided the organizational framework for the successful prosecution of their struggle; that every movement against the link with Britain, or against Partition, has been motivated, however hiddenly, by a desire to extend the hegemony of Rome over them and that the retention of the link with Britain guaranteed against this. Rome Rule meant return to the dark ages, envelopment in black superstition, the loss of civil and religious liberty, the loss of the right of a sturdy people to think for itself won, at terrible cost, when the Reformation shattered medieval papal power. Some of this is true. Moreover, the organizations embodying the Orange mythology—the Orange Order and its associate institutions—offered the people of crumbling areas like the Shankill in Belfast and the Fountain in Derry a sense of vigour and a colourful life-style in sharp contrast to the workaday drudgery which was their normal lot.

The difference between the two traditions is most sharply evident in accounts of the founding of the Northern state. There is a Catholic folk-myth which holds that in the early part of this century the Protestants, blackmailed and befuddled by sectarian loyalist propaganda, chose, against their own interests as Irish people, to retain the link with Britain; that had it not been for the agitational activities of Carson and Craigavon, supported by the British Tories, the Protestant masses might well have seen that their real interests lay in joining with their fellow Irishmen in the South to create an independent republic. As against that, there is a Protestant legend telling that in order to prevent their economic ruin and their ideological domination by totalitarian Catholicism the Protestant people rose and, by setting up the Northern Irish state, won freedom for their community.

Before partition the Protestant myth was promoted by a powerful section of the British establishment. This did not happen because the British establishment believed it to be true or that endorsement of it would lead to equitable political arrangements in Ireland. They endorsed it because its practical implications met the requirements of the overall British interest in Ireland. When Randolph Churchill decided in 1886 to ‘play the Orange card’ he did so because his class, then in its imperial heyday, was best served by meeting the central Unionist demand—that Ireland remain within the Empire. When, in the changed circumstances of 1912‒20, the Unionists gave up hope of holding all Ireland within British rule and campaigned instead for partition, they were, again, and for precisely the same reason, supported by the British Conservative Party and their cause was trumpeted by The Times.

The fact was, and is, that the Republican tradition, for all the distortions of history contained within it, stemmed from a genuine, if episodic, anti-imperialist struggle; the Orange tradition was, objectively, pro-imperialist.

After partition the two traditions provided the official ideologies of the new states. The North became a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ and the Protestantism of the state was demonstrated by the destruction of local government democracy in areas where Catholic representatives were in power, the systematic exclusion of Catholics from the civil service and from sectors of private industry, and the use of state forces and of the law to discourage Catholics from attempting to change this situation. The ideology was most stridently expressed when sizeable sections of the Protestant people broke, or attempted to break, from the Unionist Party. When that happened the Unionists’ unique political apparatus, the Orange machine, went into action, drowning dissident voices with bible-and-thunder rhetoric, herding the masses back into Orangeism and isolating those who refused to return. For a long time it was very successful. Although the Unionist Party and the system over which it presided was never able to supply the Protestant working class with the means for a decent life—despite discrimination—it managed on the whole to retain mass Protestant support.

One of the reasons why it was so successful was that in the South of Ireland the counter ideology was being promulgated with equal vigour. All the main parties in the South have until very recently described themselves as ‘Republican’ and insisted that the main purpose of their activity was to bring about a united Ireland. Much of the argument between them, particularly during election campaigns, has been about which of them was best equipped to do this.

What lent plausibility to Unionist propaganda were not actual attempts by Southern governments to assimilate Northern Ireland but their ceaseless, strident declarations that Northern Ireland ought to be assimilated into the South. Which is a very different thing. This rhetoric was accompanied by the gradual institutionalization of Catholic teaching in Southern law so that the state into which Southern leaders said the North ought to be incorporated became, more and more clearly, a Catholic state. The more Catholic it became the more repulsive to the Northern Protestants did united-Ireland rhetoric sound.

Any ideology which is propounded or accepted by a large group of people is based on the economic interest of a class. Protestant Unionism was based on the interests of the owners of land and industry in the North of Ireland. Nationalism was based on the interests of the owners and potential owners of industry in the South.

The owners of land and industry in the North of Ireland needed, for commercial reasons, to retain the link with Britain. Potential capitalists in the South, if they were going to have an industrial infrastructure at all, needed protection from British competition. In 1922 the two classes agreed to part. By that time the essential characteristics of the movements they led and the ideologies of those movements had already been decided.

For almost four decades they went their separate ways. In the South, through successive changes of government and variations in economic strategy, the attempt to build up native Irish industry proceeded. It involved a short-lived ‘economic war’ with Britain, ‘Buy Irish’ campaigns, opposition to—and sometimes destruction of—foreign goods being offered for sale. The fierce anti-British, ‘Ireland-for-the-Irish’ propaganda which constituted the official ideology of the state was a reflection of all this. In ideological terms it expressed the economic needs of the establishment. It served too, to divert the attention of those elements—workers and small farmers—discontented with their lot under the new order, away from the rising Dublin bourgeoisie towards putative and more distant culprits. The Catholic church was used, and was more than willing to be used, to isolate and politically to destroy anyone who threatened seriously to disrupt the set-up.

In the North, the constant reiteration that ‘Ulster-is-
Protestant-and-British’ was, equally, an ideological refraction of the economic needs of property. Here, unlike the South, there was no need after partition to create anything new, rather a need to retain access to British markets and sources of raw material already enjoyed. The ‘threat’ from expansionist, Southern, Catholic Nationalism without which no speech from a Unionist leader was complete encouraged the preservation and intensification of a creed, as opposed to a class, consciousness; encouraged the Protestant community, all classes within it, to act and react as a whole, under the leadership of the established political bosses. That is, under the leadership of those making the speeches.

North and South, it was a neat arrangement. Each ideology fed on the other. But it could not last. By the nineteen-fifties things had changed. In the South the industries created behind a protective tariff-wall had reached the limits of their growth. Further development could not be sustained by the small home market. The economy ground to a halt, almost went into reverse. It became nccessary to discard economic isolationism and to seek reintegration into wider, commercial empires. That meant, in effect, reintegration into the British market.

Something similar happened in the North. The industries which had given the Northern economy its original dynamic—linen, shipbuilding, heavy engineering—were in decline in the years after the Second World War. The nature of the economy changed as the slack created by this decline was gradually taken up by new enterprise. The new enterprise was financed from outside, mainly from the British mainland.

By the end of the fifties the economic basis of partition was being eroded. The interests of the dominant classes, North and South, converged. And, by the same token, the British interest in Ireland changed.

While British economic interests in Ireland were concentrated in the North, successive British governments, Liberal, Tory and Labour, were content to allow the Unionist Party to get on with the job of ruling in whatever way it saw fit and using whatever means it claimed were necessary. On occasion this meant allowing the armed supporters of the Unionist Party to massacre Catholics. But once the South tore down the tariff-walls and the barriers to outside investment crumbled, things changed. The British interest now lay, not in giving uncritical support to an Orange government in the North, but in balancing between the Orange and the Green, between North and South, between Protestant and Catholic capitalism in Ireland. That was to become very significant in August 1969.

At the beginning of the sixties it did not occur to the economic planners who were guiding Northern and Southern Ireland closer to one another, and guiding them, together, towards a closer economic relationship with Britain, that the gutters of Belfast and Derry might run red as a result. But the gutters in the Falls and the New Lodge Road, the Shankill, Ballymacarret and Bogside did, and the reason why they did was that ideologies and the political institutions which embody ideologies do not necessarily exist in a constant state of adaptation to the changing needs of the class in whose interest they were originally built. They can resist change. They can have a life of their own and in certain circumstances they fight for their life.

As the more far-seeing sections of the Belfast and Dublin establishments moved hesitantly towards one another they were, in effect, betraying the beliefs which, for decades, they had claimed to cherish and which they had demanded that their people, under pain of national apostasy, accept as eternal truths. The anti-British, united-Ireland propaganda which had blared forth from Dublin for decades had to be stilled. The anti-Catholic,
pro-partition hysteria which had been the stock-in-trade of Belfast governments for just as long had now to be calmed. It was inevitable that there were those who would shout ‘traitor’. In other circumstances that might not have mattered. In other circumstances it might have been possible to dismiss the objectors as ‘backwoodsmen’, gradually to isolate them and to move forward into a new era—rather as the British Conservative Party dealt with those who objected in principle to postwar welfare legislation.

That could not happen in Northern Ireland. The main political representatives of Northern capitalism, the Unionist Party, had not just proclaimed their ideology from election platforms—which is all their more fortunate Southern counterparts had ever found it necessary to do. The Northerners had had to put their ideology into practice. They had had to create a vast and intricate apparatus which, day in, day out, ensured that political decisions and public life in every part of the state conformed to a predetermined pattern. The apparatus was the Orange machine, as remarkable a piece of political equipment as has existed anywhere. It involved tens of thousands of people, each of whom had an interest in the machine retaining its central position in the power structure—indeed in its retaining its position as the power structure. And that interest did not forever coincide with the overall needs of the Northern Ireland economy. By the sixties it was in sharp conflict with it.

The Unionists had had to create such a machine. Discrimination was necessary in Northern Ireland. It was necessary in order politically to disarm the Catholics. It was necessary, too, if the Unionist Party was going to retain the vital allegiance of its ‘own’, the Protestant community. Because, contrary to the image of Northern Protestants commonly projected backwards into history, all classes within that community did not automatically act and react together. What emerges most starkly from a study of the Orange machine is not the ease with which it was able to contain the mass of Protestants, but the continual difficulty it experienced; not its efficiency but its fragility. There has not been a decade since the foundation of the Unionist Party in which it has not been challenged from within for the leadership of the Protestant community. Thus the machine needed constantly to be tended, needed to be fuelled and refuelled with the spoils of discrimination—jobs, houses and social prestige—which could be paid out to the faithful to endow them with a sense of privilege. The threat from without had constantly to be inflated and ‘dealt with’ in order to discourage and buy off the threat from within, if for no other reason.

The new economic pattern in Ireland in the sixties made the Orange machine redundant. Northern-Protestant and Southern-
Catholic capitalism could not come together as economic common sense demanded while the main political expression of Northern Protestantism continued to brow-beat the Catholics within its territory.

Hence ‘liberal-Unionism’. And thus the heightened expectation of Catholics that they were about to get their ‘rights’. And, in reaction, the habituated response of the Orange machine. And thus 5 October and August 1969, the British army. The British army enmeshed in the machine, internment and Bloody Sunday. Direct rule: Northern Ireland up for grabs, chunks of political masonry falling from the monolith; the Provos blazing, going for bust, now at last to destroy it for ever. Furtive Protestant guerrillas in twos and threes with small-arms at night in the back streets of fringe areas of Belfast, waiting. British cabinet ministers wringing their hands in horror on the telly and talking on about ‘gunmen’. ‘The psychopaths have taken over,’ chirruped Mr Roy Hattersley, former Secretary of State for the Army.

The psychopaths have not taken over. There is a war in Ireland because capitalism, to establish and preserve itself, created conditions which made war inevitable. Essentially, there is no other reason. There rarely is for war.