A Short History of Ireland [3 ed.] 9781139782418, 9781107009233

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A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND

This third edition of John O’Beirne Ranelagh’s classic history of Ireland incorporates contemporary political and economic events as well as the latest archaeological and DNA discoveries. Comprehensively revised and updated throughout, it considers Irish history from the earliest times through the Celts, Cromwell, plantations, famine, Independence, the Omagh bomb, peace initiatives, and financial collapse. It profiles the key players in Irish history from Diarmuid MacMurrough to Gerry Adams and casts new light on the events, North and South, that have shaped Ireland today. Ireland’s place in the modern world and its relationship with Britain, the US and Europe are also examined with a fresh and original eye. Worldwide interest in Ireland continues to increase, but whereas it once focused on violence in Northern Ireland, the tumultuous financial events in the South have opened fresh debates and drawn fresh interest. This is a new history for a new era. john o’beirne ranelagh is the author of The Agency: the Rise and Decline of the CIA (1986, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the National Intelligence Book Prize) and Thatcher’s People (1991, a Financial Times Best Book).

A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND third edition JOHN O’BEIRNE RANELAGH

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107401945 First edition © Telstore Ltd 1983 Second edition © Cambridge Publishing Ltd 1994 Third edition © John Ranelagh 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1983 Second edition 1994 Reprinted with new material 1999 Third edition 2012 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Ranelagh, John. A short history of Ireland / John O’Beirne Ranelagh. – Third Edition. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-40194-5 (pbk.) 1. Ireland – History. 2. Northern Ireland – History. I. Title. DA910.R36 2012 941.5–dc23 2012007515 isbn 978-1-107-00923-3 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-40194-5 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition Preface to the updated edition Preface to the third edition Map of Ireland: the Pale and Irish plantations 1 Beginnings

page vii ix xi xiv xvii xxii 1 7 25 31 37

Gaels Patrick Vikings English

2 Ascendancy

50

Tudors Plantation Cromwell Penal times ’98

52 57 64 75 87

3 Union

97 106 117 123 134

O’Connell Young Ireland Famine Fenians

4 Home rule?

145

Parnell Reform Nationalists Divide

150 163 171 182

v

Contents

vi 5

Rising Blood Collins Treaty

6

South De Valera Republic Haughey Corruption Choices

7

North O’Neill The IRA Direct rule Peace? Talks Agreement Endgame Paisley

8

192 207 218 228

244 260 273 285 291 294

300 309 314 325 331 336 346 353 360

Another country

368

Metamorphosis Crash

374 383

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history Select bibliography Index

392 397 405

Figures

1 Ogham stone. Image © Michael Jenner/Robert Harding 2 Celtic gold: the Broighter Boat, reproduced by kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland 3 Clonycavan Man, reproduced by kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland 4 Patrick’s Confessio, Book of Armagh, fo. 22r. The Board of Trinity College Dublin 5 Book of Kells, fo.32v. The Board of Trinity College Dublin 6 Book of Leinster, p. 29. The Board of Trinity College Dublin 7 Depositions, 1641. The Board of Trinity College Dublin (A.1.36) 8 Daniel O’Connell © The Trustees of the British Museum (PPA290945) 9 Young Ireland Proclamation. MultiText Project in History 10 Famine – Dublin Memorial. Courtesy of Fáilte Ireland 11 Destinations of overseas emigrants from Ireland 1821– 1920 12 Charles Stewart Parnell. National Library of Ireland 13 Notes written by Gladstone on Irish home rule, 1893. © The British Library Board, Add/39927 F.68 14 Glenoe village, co. Antrim 15 Gaelic League membership card. MultiText Project in History

vii

page 8 10 14 27 33 41 70 114 121 130 131 157 160 166 174

viii

List of figures

16 First World War recruiting poster. The Board of Trinity College Dublin (A.1.26) 17 Countess Markievicz, ‘Points of Attack’. Lissadell Collection 18 1916 Rising, reproduced by kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland 19 Poem by Michael Collins. Source: www. generalmichaelcollins.com 20 Michael Collins. General Photographic Agency/Getty Images 21 De Valera’s notes of an Inner Cabinet meeting, 24 July 1921. Reproduced by kind permission of UCD–OFM Partnership 22 Four Courts surrender © Press Association 23 De Valera with Countess Markievicz. Lissadell Collection 24 1932 election poster. Reproduced by kind permission of UCD–OFM Partnership and Fine Gael 25 John Hume. Belfast Telegraph 26 Chuckle Brothers: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, 2007. EPA (European Pressphoto Agency b.v.) 27 The Queen shaking hands with Martin McGuinness, 2012. © Paul Faith/epa/Corbis 28 Front page of the Irish Daily Star, 23 November 2010. © Daily Star

198 204 205 213 218 229 237 247 259 318 362 365 388

Preface to the first edition

Ireland’s history is distinguished by two special characteristics. First, a recognisable Irish nation, of course over time itself a conglomerate of many ‘nations’, distinct from a British nation, with its own language, customs and lore dating back to the Iron Age, survived right into the nineteenth century. This gave Irish nationalism a particular force. Second, over the centuries of increasingly powerful and centralised British government, ruling social and political pressures combined first to make Irish people feel and then to believe that they were inferior. This is one of the worst things that any nation or race can do to another. It results in the most terrible of paradoxes where in practical matters there is a desire equally to welcome and to oppose, thus ensuring that failure accompanies success, and despair and a sense of futility underlie the whole of life. As many Irishmen were government spies, agents and informers as were national heroes; emigration became almost the only way of escaping depression. To the present day many Irish writers find it somehow necessary to practise their art away from home. In modern times the complexities of economic development, international arrangements and the rejection of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland have begun to change traditional attitudes. The very concept of a unitary Irish nation has been challenged, and the reality of Ireland’s connections with Britain has begun to be faced honestly for the first time by politicians. In the last quarter of the twentieth century we can, I think, say that Ireland’s people are at last considering themselves in relation to an Irish world for which they themselves accept responsibility. I would like to thank Charles Davidson, Sean Dowling, Susannah Johnson, Joseph Lee, Deirdre McMahon, Victor Price, David Rose, ix

x

Preface to the first edition

Richard Rose, A. T. Q. Stewart and Norman Stone who have all helped me most generously with their knowledge and advice. I owe them all a great debt: my accuracies are their achievement; any inaccuracies are mine. To my wife, Elizabeth, I owe most thanks of all. grantchester, 1982

Preface to the second edition

Since I wrote this book twelve years ago, there has been a great change in mainstream Irish nationalism and in the awarenesses of the Republic. Roman Catholic moral and social teaching, militating against contraception, divorce, abortion, pushing Ireland apart from the liberal values at the heart of the European Union, have given way to a more secular sensibility. American Catholic attitudes have replaced traditional Irish ones: there is hostility to Church leadership and control. There is a general indifference to traditional Gaelic culture. Terror has become a way of life for malcontents in the North, of which terrorists are a part. They have confirmed their debasement of a struggle that was noble and have fundamentally conditioned Irish nationalism and unionism for most Irishmen. Very few of the men and women involved in the Irish fight for freedom in the 1916–21 period could identify with those who act in the name of the IRA and its splinter groups today. Unionists of the same period would undoubtedly reject those ‘loyalists’ who have also chosen terror as a weapon. The balance of this book is weighted to the period after 1800 in which modern Ireland has been formed. Terrorism and its attendant horrors in Northern Ireland, spilling at times into England and the Republic – and even occasionally further afield – have forced the Republic effectively to moderate its claims to the whole island of Ireland. At the same time, the less organic, federal and provisional nature of the union between Northern Ireland and Britain (i.e., England, Scotland and Wales) has become steadily clear as United Kingdom (i.e., Britain and Northern Ireland) governments have committed themselves to observe only majority verdicts by voters within the North on the future of the province, and not to xi

xii

Preface to the second edition

consider the views of British voters on the matter. Indeed, Westminster governments and the people of Britain by no means crave possession of Northern Ireland: unionists in the North are acutely conscious of this. Assertions to the contrary are a combination of misrepresentation and misappreciation that now suits terrorists and their supporters. Similarly, in the Republic, people are conscious that Irish unity will involve terrible costs that they are by no means certain they wish to pay. The fact that IRA terror has not been applied in the Republic indicates that the IRA knows that they cannot play with politics in the South, and that any tolerance they may enjoy there would be jeopardised by the least activity. The United Kingdom’s resolve to combat terrorism and, with some exceptions, the tempered way in which the resolve has been discharged, consistently demonstrated by successive governments and the security forces over the last quarter-century, commands respect, not least in the South. I am conscious of sometimes using the terms Catholic and Protestant to distinguish between the two principal communities in Northern Ireland. In doing this, I am in line with journalists and commentators over the last twenty-five years who have formed the appreciation of most people. And it has been the case that local politics in the North have reflected religious divisions more than anything else. But to promote religious background as the dividing element in the North is inaccurate. It is certainly one of the main classifications, but economic, social and political distinctions are equally important and cut across religion: a religious war is not taking place in the North. About 40 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland is Catholic; about 33 per cent of Northern Ireland Roman Catholic voters support Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA: the rest vote for anti-Sinn Féin parties; some vote for unionists. The probability is that there would have to be much more than a simple Catholic majority in the North before a majority of voters would endorse unification with the Republic: being Catholic does not mean being a supporter of immediate unity with the South. It is the case today that Northern Protestants are overwhelmingly unionist, but some have been among Ireland’s foremost nationalists and radicals. Michael Farrell, one of the founders of the People’s Democracy movement in the late 1960s that energised the civil rights campaign beginning the present troubles, was a Protestant.

Preface to the second edition

xiii

Neither the United Kingdom nor the United States fills the imagination of Irish people any more. The other countries of Europe are ever more real to them today. They see the United Kingdom as a clapped-out old place, and not a threatening imperial presence: Charles Haughey, Irish taoiseach in the 1980s, was the last political leader who perceived the United Kingdom in imperial terms. Irish people have recognised that they cannot live off memories forever. Finally, it should be remembered that politicians, whom we elect yet love to disparage, have been called by terrorism to put their safety, their families’ safety, and their lives on the line time and again. The Conservative Party spokesman on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, was killed by a bomb in his car at the House of Commons in 1979. Anne Wakeham, the wife of the Conservative chief whip, and Sir Anthony Berry, MP, were killed in a bomb explosion in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference in 1984. In the same explosion, Norman Tebbit, a cabinet minister, was severely injured and his wife, Margaret, was permanently crippled. Ian Gow, MP, who had been a junior minister in Northern Ireland, was killed by a bomb in his car at his home in 1990. The men and women in the security forces and many individuals in all walks of life in Northern Ireland have been called constantly to risk injury, and their lives, every day. Near the end of Chapter 7, I have provided a table of some of the deaths terrorism has inflicted in the North: space prevents a full account. I am indebted to all those who made suggestions and corrections to the first edition of this book; for any mistakes that remain and any that may be new, I am responsible. grantchester and bergen, November 1993

Preface to the updated edition

This edition has been written as the prospects for more peace in Northern Ireland, and a consequent drop in terrorism, seem bright. The terrorism of the past thirty years, however, is not the culmination of Irish history. Nor has it been the inevitable outcome of government policies or socio-economic conditions. It is a result of generations of romanticising Irish nationalism which, with few exceptions, and in common with nationalism everywhere, has been the passion of idealistic but narrow-minded and limited men and women. The important Irish history of the last part of the twentieth century is how the people of the country have moved away from historical positions and assumptions, have been more interested in making money and enjoying life, have broadened their horizons, and have affirmed democratic principles. Ireland is certainly not ‘the most distressful country’. People in Northern Ireland have sensed that the violence that has afflicted them has meant that the benefits of membership of the European Union, so clear in the Republic, have passed them by. They sense that a great opportunity of the past fifty years has been denied them. Irish people generally, along with most people in the developed world, have recognised that the end of the Cold War has meant that power is no longer vested in politicians and attention-seekers. The disgracing of President Clinton, the ineffectiveness of individual politicians, the surrendering of responsibility to public opinion through referendums and government-by-press-leak, have accelerated this process. Engineers, entrepreneurs, administrators are more important in practical ways, and are understood to be so. The key to the 1993–8 peace process in Northern Ireland has been the expression of popular will, coupled with the resolution of ordinary people to xiv

Preface to the updated edition

xv

live full lives despite bombings, beatings and killings all around. Politicians have, of course, played an important part, but they have been following democratic impulses, not forming them. Terrorism has been the expression of a handful of malcontented men and women determined to indulge the most vile activities because democratic activity would confirm their relegation to the fringes of society. No democratic person could be opposed to the peace process; the only anti-peace constituency was a sectarian one. The process therefore in itself acted to highlight the real nature of people and groups, forcing extremists down its path. Indeed, the horrors perpetrated by opponents of the process only forced their submission to it as they came to understand that they might be able to go on killing, but that would be all that they would ever achieve, and that they would lose all respect in their own communities. The process that brought this about saw a better understanding of the issues involved, with notable – and brave – political compromises being made by men and women on all sides (although not by all on all sides). Perhaps most important for the long-term prospects for peace was the realisation in the professional Irish community overseas that the Irish Republic was not what their imaginations, coloured by history and mythology, had held it to be. It was no longer the old sod. It was – is – an independent country with its own agenda, no longer dependent upon foreign remittances. President Clinton, by opening the White House to representatives of the IRA and ‘loyalist’ (to distinguish them from the unionist mainstream, asserting loyalty to the British Crown) terror groups willing to discuss peace prospects, forced them to account to a wider world for their actions, and made support for terror more problematic among Irish-Americans. The United States, a futureoriented country, has a future-oriented Irish community that now feels somewhat freer of ancestral obligations. It has been able to revert to its standard role as a friend to humane impulses. After thirty years of terrorism, IRA and ‘loyalist’ terror acts no longer serve to rend emotions. Terrorism is seen as completely base. IRA and ‘loyalist’ terrorists have merged in the minds of outsiders. No real distinction is made between their acts either at home or internationally. They both do things that all terrorists do. Exhaustion has set in about them, and within their own ranks. The hopelessness of their actions has come to be recognised even by their own activists.

xvi

Preface to the updated edition

Eamon Collins, a member of the IRA for twelve years from 1975, expressed all this well: I had come to ditch almost everything and everybody not connected in some way to the IRA. It had become my whole life, and I was beginning to ask myself what sort of life I had. I went through the motions of enjoying myself, but how could I live happily when I spent most of my time in the company of people whose business was death? And I was one of them. Always looking for people to kill, finding people to do the killing, constantly exposing myself to danger, more and more danger. There was no respite . . . I had become addicted to the struggle: operations became my fix. But I often asked myself: when will my final fix arrive? The one that will kill me, put me in prison, or break me? . . . I had been involved in a great many IRA operations which I now regarded as pointless and meaningless.1

The success of security forces in the United Kingdom and the Republic in combating terror over decades, the weakening of support abroad, and the refusal of the political establishments to be coerced by terror, meant that the IRA and ‘loyalist’ terrorists were being beaten. The peace process provided them with a face-saving way out. Terrorists are seen as the unsuccessful Irish. Unfortunately, losers have long memories, and that will be the everlasting problem. Terrorism will not leave Irish history: it is embedded in it. For the past two hundred years, terror and peace have come and gone as memories of terror fade. The Irish Republic was formed because of terrorist activity. The IRA’s entry into peace negotiations, despite public relations successes, came about because its leaders recognised that their killings and bombings and beatings were futile: it did not come about because they became democrats overnight. Peace in Northern Ireland in 1998, ominously, was accelerated by the IRA threatening to kill dissidents intent on continuing a terror campaign. On 15 August 1998 a car bomb in Omagh resulted in the immediate deaths of twenty-eight people: the largest number of dead in any single incident. The best that can be hoped for is that terrorism may be quiescent for long periods. It will not go away. grantchester and bergen, September 1998

1

Eamon Collins with Mick McGovern, Killing Rage, London 1997, pp. 157–8, 277.

Preface to the third edition

One of the greatest upheavals in financial history was unfolding as this edition was being written. Ireland was in the spotlight, its economy devastated. Every year from 2010, the national debt was set to increase by about €3,200 for each man, woman and child. Interest payments alone on the debt amounted to about €1,000 per capita per year. Nevertheless, the strength of the Irish wealth achievement during 1988–2007 – the ‘Celtic tiger’ – was such that Ireland had a surplus balance of trade throughout the disaster. But confidence, based on real economic performance, became hubris. Ireland is now in uncharted seas, without excuses for its failures. While this is a short history, I cover the confrontation between terrorism and constitutional government at some length. The slow wearing down of the IRA – a combination of ruthless terror, counterterror and ever-growing exhaustion – is instructive to a wider world, not least in its combination of resolution and compromise. The process has already taken on the hue of another era. The flow of Irish history has been of a country big enough to maintain a rich identity, but too small to defend itself. From the twelfth-century English invasion of Strongbow there was a gradual erosion of Irish prosperity, intensified by the seventeenth-century Protestant settlements and confiscations, followed in the eighteenth century by the rise of an extraordinary Anglo-Irish aristocracy (as Yeats was famously to point out), ruling a people forbidden education and squeezed into peasantry, brooding and apart, caricatured as protohumans. The terrible famine of the 1840s produced an agonising reinvention through the death and flight of millions and an intense enraging memory rekindling deep national passions. Irish died as a language, but the passions lived in English – and in America. xvii

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Irish emigrants proved to be great achievers and gave Ireland international presence. Independence from Britain, still perceived as the greatest empire the world had ever seen, was a disappointment as emigration figures attested until the end of the twentieth century. Then came the tiger and the Irish, from being a great achieving people only abroad, were now great achievers at home too. The passage into a future-oriented world-connected tiger country took Irish people away from their history. From an exaggerated preoccupation with the past as an explanation of the present, people cut loose and floated into hyper-prosperity. By 2004 most people in the Republic saw Northern Ireland as outdated. Desire for unification enjoyed lip service but had no mass appeal. The North had turned from being the modern part of Ireland to being the oldest part. Religion had probably been the greatest single vital force of the Irish nation, but the tiger converged with a secular world remarkably fast. From the 1990s, if not before, no Irish archbishop had the standing of the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, created Lord Bannside. Contemporary Ireland is not the country that Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Eamon de Valera or the men of 1916–21 envisaged. None of them were modernisers (had he lived, the buccaneer and bureaucrat Michael Collins might have been): they were either intellectuals or rural fundamentalists. It is not the country that the IRA or Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness claimed they wanted. It has left them all behind. It is not a self-sufficient and self-preoccupied united Gaelic state. For five hundred years, England was the most important factor in Ireland. In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States came to dominate Irish aspiration. The 1916 Rising, celebrated annually into the 1970s, was then disregarded by the state until 2006. The revolutionary antecedents of the Republic are seen by many as an embarrassment, not least in light of terrorism in Northern Ireland in the name of Irish nationalism. Ireland today is disillusioned and resigned, coming to terms with dashed dreams and ruinous self-deception. My family, the O’Beirnes (‘ei’: there is no ‘y’ in Irish) of Ranelagh in Wicklow can with some imagination trace its lineage back to the sixth century. The O’Neills can go a birth or two further: our two families are among the oldest recorded in Europe and we have both

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been active for Ireland. For generations we were tied to each other through fosterage. My father took part in the 1916 Rising and fought against the Treaty but was never enamoured of Eamon de Valera or Fianna Fáil. For him, Michael Collins’s death was the country’s great loss. He came to believe that the Republic did not warrant the sacrifices he and so many others had made. When the Provisional IRA was formed, he opposed them and so received one of the first letter bombs ever sent in Ireland. Recognising that it was a bomb, he demonstrated great dexterity in his seventies, throwing it into the kitchen sink where it exploded. My Ph.D. research was into the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1914–24. I interviewed many men and women from that period. Robert Barton, a signatory of the 1921 Treaty, remembered playing cricket with Parnell and having tea with Gladstone in No. 10 Downing Street. Joe O’Doherty, on the governing body of the Irish Volunteers and later the IRA, told me of sitting on his aged grandfather’s knee and listening to his tale of taking part in the 1798 Rising, escaping a government agent’s provocation when, bent over cutting hay, he saw that the man behind him was wearing boots: rebels could not afford any. And de Valera, President of Ireland in his nineties, explained that he was almost blind but could see something from the corner of his left eye, so I sat where he might see as he recalled hearing news of the Treaty in Limerick and being driven to Dublin to hear more. Despite proddings, I have maintained the spelling Connaught. It is not used so much today because it is Anglo, but I like the look and warm feel of the spelling in preference to the hardness of Connacht. Deirdre McMahon has been wonderful as ever with help and advice, sharing her insights and knowledge unstintingly. Timothy Dickinson and David Rose distributed their linguistic corrections and judgments with kindness. Michael Jones commented on the text frequently and astutely. Tony Craig scythed the chapter on the North. Michael Watson at Cambridge University Press guided and shaped this edition, and I am grateful to the production and design team for their support, diligence, corrections and suggestions: Chloe Howell, Joanna Breeze, Patricia Harper, Mike Leach, David Cox and Philip Riley. I owe them much.

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Preface to the third edition

Finally, a brief note is in order on the cover painting, Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out by Sean Keating, RHA (1889–1977), whose title is a quotation from Romeo and Juliet (Act 3, Scene 5), where Romeo tells Juliet that dawn is breaking. It is probably Keating’s most important painting, with the Ardnacrusha Dam on the River Shannon as the backdrop. He described it as welcoming ‘the dawn of a new Ireland’ and provided this explanation: The title suggests that the dawn has come, when the dim candlelight of surviving medievalism in Ireland is fading before the rising sun of scientific progress, exemplified by the Shannon electricity works, which form the background of my picture. The stage Ireland and the stage Irishman are typified by the skeletons hanging on the left from one of the steel towers, which support the electric transmission lines. Beneath are the types of Irish workmen. In the centre of the foreground are two men. One represents the capitalist, who carries under his arms plans for industrial development. A gunman confronts him menacingly. The two symbolise the constant antagonism between the business elements and the extremists, which hinders the material progress of the State. The priest, reading, represents the unchanging Church ever present when spiritual guidance is needed but concerning itself only with a kingdom that is not of this world. In short, my picture depicts the transition of Ireland from a country of ancient stagnation to a state of freedom and progress.

English and Scottish English

Coleraine LO

Strabane TYRONE

Donegal

Ballymena

U L S T E R Omagh Dungannon

LE

M AY O Castlebar Westport

Lisburn Craigavon Downpatrick Armagh DOWN ARMAGH Newry

Cavan CAVAN

N Dundalk

LOUTH

ROSCOMMON Roscommon

W

A

Y

Athlone

Maynooth

Tullamore O F FA LY Portlaoise

KILDARE Dublin Naas Curragh

L E I N S T E R LA OIS

C L A R E Ennis

M U N S T E R Mallow

Killarney K E R R Y

Dun Laoghaire Bray

Wicklow WICKLOW

Carlow

Limerick Thurles TIPPERA RY Cashel LIMERICK Tipperary Tralee

Drogheda

M E AT H

WESTMEATH

DU BLI N

C O N N A U G H T

Kells

Longford LONGFORD

Tuam

G A L Galway

Clones

IM Carrick-onShannon

R

SLIGO

IT

Sligo

Ballina

Belfast

A GH NA MO

Enniskillen FERMANAGH

Larne

RY ER ND

DONEGAL

The Pale (c.1450)

ANTRIM

O ND

Derry

Letterkenny

Scottish

Kilkenny CARLOW KILKENNY WEXFORD New Ross Wexford

Waterford WATERFORD Dungarvan

N

C O R K Macroom Bealnablath

Cork

Youghal Cóbh

W

E S

Bandon Bantry 0 0

Ireland: The Pale and the Irish plantations

10 5

20 10

30 15

20

40

50 km

25

30 miles

chapter 1

Beginnings

Bones found in a cave in County Waterford in 1928 indicate that the first Irishmen may have died before 9000 bc. But the evidence is unreliable, and in any case they would not have survived the last cold cycle of the Ice Age around 7000 bc. The first significant human habitation dates from the middle of the seventh millennium bc. In the previous twenty-five thousand years a variety of animal life had flourished, notably the giant Irish elk with antlers spanning up to 10 feet; great hairy mammoths, hyenas, wolves and foxes. As temperatures changed, Ireland variously experienced tropical forests, tundra and open vegetation. The landscape had been formed earlier still. The Mourne Mountains and other famous landforms were created some 75 million years ago as molten lava cooled. Drumlins and deep valleys such as the Gap of Dunloe were sculpted and gouged by the gigantic force of ice two hundred thousand years ago. About nine thousand years ago, as the world’s warming climate melted the ice cover, sea levels rose, and Ireland lost its land link with Britain and became an island on the north-western corner of the European continental shelf, separated from her neighbours by shallow seas. A fall of 350 feet (106 metres) in sea level would once again connect south-east Ireland to Wales, while a fall of about 600 feet (182 metres) would lay bare the sea floor to France as well as the continental shelf 150 miles out into the Atlantic, west of the provinces of Munster and Connaught. Britain retained her land connections with the European mainland across the southern reaches of the North Sea to Belgium, the Netherlands and north-western Germany far longer. This explains why Britain, unlike Ireland, has snakes: by the time they reached western Britain after the Ice Age, Ireland was already an island 1

2

A Short History of Ireland

(although legend has it instead that Saint Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, banished the reptiles). However, before the rising sea submerged these land bridges, the first humans to settle in the British Isles trekked across them, probably from Scotland. When these too had been submerged, around 6700 bc, Ireland was left alone facing the Atlantic. These first settlers found a country whose principal geographical characteristics had been formed. Of its 20 million acres (about 8.1 million hectares), an eighth were hills and mountains with inhospitable rocks bared by ice, wind and rain. Much of the rest was wooded, but by 3000 bc another eighth had become bog as trees and other vegetation collapsed into lakes and streams. Not until the twentieth century had the remaining 15 million acres, most of it good productive land, been adequately exploited by improving agricultural efficiency and afforestation policies. But eight and a half thousand years ago, before mass human habitation, Ireland like Britain was covered by dense deciduous forests, with lakes, mountains, streams and rivers only breaking the cover. Thus was provided the habitat for animal life and food and shelter for the first Irishmen. The first communities were composed of Mesolithic (middle Stone Age) people. There are conflicting opinions about their origins and first settlements. They did not live by farming, but instead gathered plants, leaves and grasses and hunted wildlife. For the most part, they seem to have lived by the sea or beside lakes or rivers. It is likely that they undertook sea voyages, but in very primitive craft, probably skinclad coracles similar to those that survive to the present day in the west. This primitive economy lasted undisturbed for over two thousand years until knowledge of domestication of animals and plants arrived in Ireland during the fourth millennium bc. Even then, Mesolithic ways of life continued for perhaps two thousand years after the first farmers began to settle in the country. Little is known of Mesolithic man in Ireland. No Mesolithic tombs (one of the principal sources of evidence for archaeologists) have been discovered, and significant traces of only one Mesolithic community have been found, at Mount Sandel in co. Londonderry, where excavations have revealed the postholes of round huts, approximately 20 feet (6 metres) across, with central hearths and associated pits. The Mount Sandel site is likely to have been a winter residence, more substantial

Beginnings

3

than those used at other times of the year. The other main source of information about these people comes from the large number of their rubbish dumps that have been found. They contain the remnants of seafood – molluscs, crustaceans and fish – birds and sometimes mammals, together with flint and stone implements and chippings produced in the course of tool making. There is no direct evidence of the linguistic and religious culture, let alone the ethnic composition of these Irishmen. But what these excavations do make clear is that from about 3500 bc Neolithic (late Stone Age) farmers began to arrive and to assimilate the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In comparison to Mesolithic settlers, Neolithic farmers were sophisticated and technically advanced. They also made a major impact on the natural landscape, clearing large tracts of land, using polished stone tools to till and plant the soil. Herds of sheep and cattle were kept, and Neolithic communities penetrated far inland. Their agricultural way of life and domestication of animals complemented the coastal fishing and hunting economy of their Mesolithic predecessors, and this is the probable reason why both ways of life coexisted for so long. The Neolithic settlers in Ireland originated in the Middle East from where they were gradually forced to emigrate as the expanding population in their homelands increased the pressure to seek new farming lands. By about 5000 bc they had moved through the Balkans, pushing along the Mediterranean coast into France and Spain, and then northwards to the Low Countries and Britain. Bringing their own crops and livestock, they probably sailed in coracles to Ireland across the sea from Spain, Portugal and Brittany. The evidence is unclear, but they may have also introduced the art of pottery, decorating and shaping pots with round bottoms for storing food, and heavier flat bottoms for cooking. The most impressive Neolithic settlement in Ireland so far discovered was at Lough Gur on the Knockadoon Peninsula, about 12 miles (20 km) south of Limerick city. Excavations mainly in the 1930s and 1940s revealed the domestic structures of an early Irish farming community. Houses were built with stone foundations; some houses were round, some rectangular, their wooden frame walls filled with turves. Their builders used polished stone axes with wooden handles and picks made from the antlers of deer. Bones were shaped into needles,

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awls and other domestic implements for spinning wool and making clothing and material for warmth. Flint arrow- and spearheads clearly indicate that the new settlers hunted as well as farmed. Bone and stone bead bracelets and ornaments demonstrate that they were probably as interested in their appearance as we are today. They even set up stoneaxe factories, but the most striking remains of the Neolithic farmers are the massive stone megaliths and dolmens they raised over their dead. There are several different types of Neolithic burial site in Ireland, suggesting that these settlers arrived from several different places and in successive waves. There is some evidence that the first Neolithic mortuary monuments may have been constructed of timber, only to be superseded by those of stone construction. Whether of stone or wood, these monuments all consisted of a central chamber or gallery, covered with earth to form a mound. The earliest stone tombs, dating from around 3000 bc, are reckoned to be those known as ‘court cairns’, whose predominance in the northern half of the country suggests that a particular Neolithic immigrant group was associated with them. These buildings are characterised by a long, straight-sided stone gallery with a stone-slab roof covered with earth, incorporating an open court – sometimes in the middle of the gallery but more often at one end. The tombs were collective, with the dead, sometimes cremated, sometimes buried, being interred in the galleries with personal artefacts, thus indicating belief in an afterlife. The court was apparently used for burial and doubtless for religious rites. Tombs of other traditions also abound. Passage graves are especially numerous in the north and east, forming some of the most spectacular examples of Stone Age architecture. These graves are usually found grouped in hilltop cemeteries, with a stone passage leading to a burial chamber, all covered by an earth cairn. The earliest date from about 2800 bc and the leading example of a passage grave site, and one of the most significant in western Europe, is on the river Boyne, at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, near Drogheda, co. Meath, dating from about 2500 bc. Here, as with other passage graves, the stone walls of the burial chamber are decorated with elaborate spiral, zigzag and meandering carvings. The dead were cremated and, as with those of the court cairn people, were placed in the chamber together with pottery, beads and tools. At Newgrange, the extent and intricacy of

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the carvings suggest that some of the patterns may have had a religious significance, possibly even depicting highly stylised human faces and figures. Newgrange was designed by its builders so that the sun could enter the chamber only once a year, around midwinter day, suggesting that the passage grave people may have had a knowledge of astronomy and involved the sun in their worship. The existence of passage graves and similar artwork outside Ireland – notably in Brittany and the Iberian peninsula – supports the observation that these settlers belonged to a group of seaborne immigrants enjoying ancestral traditions and connections with the developing urban civilisations of the Mediterranean. More than this, from the size and positioning of passage grave sites, archaeologists have been able to suggest something of the society of their constructors. While the graves are grouped in cemeteries and used communally, the larger ones seem to have been the repositories of chieftains and their families, with smaller graves being grouped around them: evidence of a hierarchical social order preserved in death. Another type of chambered tomb, dolmens, built during the Neolithic era, probably derived from the court cairn people. They were single-chamber tombs, with standing stones supporting a large capstone (‘dolmen’ in Breton; there are many in Brittany) that was then covered with earth to form a mound. Concentrated in the north and east, they tend to be further inland than court and passage graves, suggesting that their builders had penetrated woodland more deeply, and were thus later than the court grave and passage grave peoples. Some capstones weigh perhaps 100 tons: stark testimony to the ingenuity and engineering ability of these Stone Age people. The fourth type of tomb, and broadly a later one, is the wedge form consisting of a single main chamber whose walls and ceiling are formed of stone slabs in a rectangular layout, narrowed at one end to produce a wedgelike effect. Almost forty have been found, predominantly in the south-west, often close to metal deposits, indicating that they were raised by Bronze Age rather than Neolithic people. It may well be that the wedge tomb builders were among the first groups in Ireland to use metal, and that their farming economy was more dependent upon cattle and grazing than their Neolithic predecessors’, since these graves are usually found on light, well-drained soil. The dead, cremated or, if whole, in a crouched position, were

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placed inside the wedge-stone box along with pots, ornaments or other furnishings. Tombs were dedicated to individuals, not groups, although they are often clustered together. Metalworking of copper, gold, silver and lead developed in the Near East around 3500 bc, and experimentation with alloys led to the discovery of bronze in the latter part of the third millennium bc. Its toughness made complex casting possible and also gave a harder cutting edge to tools and weapons. In the period before 2000 bc new migrations swept Europe, ultimately reaching the British Isles. The folk that brought the Bronze Age to Ireland are known as the Beaker people from their distinctive pots, and probably came from Britain to the north and east of Ireland around the end of the third millennium. As with the Neolithic immigrants, it seems that they supplemented rather than supplanted the Stone Age peoples of the country: the continuation of large stone (megalithic) graves after their arrival suggests this, as does a continuation in the agricultural patterns of life. Their burial practices were not so elaborate as those of the Neolithic farmers, although they often used the same sites. They employed cist-like graves, often grouped in cemeteries, usually scooped into the flat earth. Little evidence remains of how Bronze Age people in Ireland lived, although we know more about them than their Neolithic and Mesolithic precursors. While their burials employed stone, their dwellings were less permanent, usually constructed of wood and earth. But in Lough Gara, on the borders of counties Sligo and Roscommon, draining revealed a concentration of lake island buildings – crannogs – dating from the Bronze Age, on artificial islands built in or near the lake edge, which formed platforms for wooden buildings surrounded by a defensive wooden fence. Crannogs were built from these early days – indeed, there is some evidence of their presence in Neolithic times – and were lived in right into the seventeenth century ad. Stone circles also date predominantly from the Bronze Age, which lasted in Ireland until around 700 bc. While no circles compare with Stonehenge in England, or are as extensive as the stone works at Carnac in Brittany, a number are monumental in scale. At Grange, near Lough Gur, co. Limerick, for example, there is a stone circle surrounded by a massive outer bank and a standing stone ring of 150 feet (45 metres) across. These circles probably varied in purpose, some

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being for religious and ritualistic use, others perhaps to facilitate astronomical measurements. Single standing stones were also first erected during the Bronze Age, sometimes to dignify graves and sometimes perhaps as boundary markers. Such stones continued to be erected into the early Christian era some thirteen hundred years later, many being ‘converted’ to Christian use by engraved crosses and ogham inscriptions. Ogham was the first written form of Irish, dating from a very early period of Christianity. Its letters, based on the Roman alphabet, are represented by lines, up to five in number, set at various angles on either side of a stemline. Frequently found in southern Ireland, ogham stones are rare elsewhere (see Figure 1). Those that have survived usually tell us the name of a person followed by that of an ancestor; the script was used for epitaphs and memorials. But before the arrival of Christianity, the Celts came to Ireland, providing the nation’s basic gene pool to the present day. Archaeologists debate what ‘Celt’ means, some arguing that typical Celtic Iron Age remains (about 800–50 bc in Europe) as found in central Europe are rare in Ireland and that a ‘proto-Celtic’ group, rooted in the earlier Bronze Age (about 2900–700 bc) Beaker culture, absorbed Celtic attributes, and that this – rather than a mass migration – was what Celticised the people of Ireland. Others argue with perhaps better evidence that the Celts originated along Europe’s Atlantic coast during the Bronze Age. Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in 1189 about the Irish, held it was ‘the territory of the Basques from which the Irish originally came’. Genetic studies have established that he was correct: Irish and Welsh Celts today come from a common stock with the Basques. gaels More is known about the Celts than about any other European prehistoric people outside Greece and Italy. They had (and have) a markedly high proportion of O-type blood and a predisposition to cystic fibrosis (indeed, Ireland today has, relative to population, the highest incidence of cystic fibrosis in the world, one person in every nineteen carrying the recessive gene). In Ireland alone, the archaeological evidence is vast: over 30,000 Celtic ring forts and sites can still

Figure 1 Ogham stone There are about four hundred stones carved with Ogham script – a series of lines and notches – mostly in Old Irish, concentrated in south-eastern Ireland. There are also stones in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and south-eastern England. Wood was probably used as well for inscriptions, which commemorate people. The script may have developed in the first century bc, but the stones date from between the fourth and eighth centuries ad and may have marked boundaries and land ownership. Ogham was used by Gaelic scholars as recently as the eighteenth century to convey the rules of poetry and grammar.

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be seen. Greek and Roman sources give us vivid descriptions of ancient Celtic society. The Celts themselves mostly transmitted knowledge orally, so not until the advent of Christianity in Ireland, which brought with it the skill of writing, did Celtic Irishmen – the Gaels – transcribe their tales and sagas, laws and annals. Through these and classical records, however, a detailed picture of Iron Age life is available. The Celts probably came from the lands around the Caspian Sea from which they emigrated south, east and west. Sociologists and linguists have detected important similarities between Celtic language, laws, customs and religion and those of Hindu civilisation. Two Celtic groups populated the British Isles, the Gaels and the Brythoni. The Brythoni settled in what is now Britain; the Gaels occupied Ireland and some of Scotland. The Gaelic language, related to Gaulish, was the direct forebear of the Irish language today. Exactly when the Celts arrived is not clear, but by 500 bc they seem to have made Ireland a completely Celtic country. They brought with them the Iron Age culture (see Figure 2). Iron was stronger than bronze, and iron ploughs dug deeper and lasted longer. The Bronze Age settlers were always quick to adopt new metallurgical discoveries, and thus no clear break between the two cultures can be determined. The first recorded mention of the Celts, in the sixth century bc, places them in France and Spain. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century bc, described them as one of two western European peoples living along the Danube and in the Pyrenees. Because the Celts came to live on the periphery of Europe, particularly in Ireland, they avoided assimilation into the Roman Empire and the later turmoil of the Hunnish, Gothic and Vandal invasions of the Dark Ages. Consequently, two special features characterise the Irish Celtic heritage. First, more of its artefacts survive than for any other Celtic group. Second, its language and culture survived right up to modern times, remaining widespread to the end of the nineteenth century. Gaelic and Euskara (the language of Basques) are, in fact, the oldest living vernaculars in the West. And since oral tradition was a strong element in this culture, a continuous Irish historical consciousness endured. It took the famines of the 1840s and 1850s, together with emigration and English-language educational policies, to bring the general use of the Irish language to an end.

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Figure 2 Celtic gold: the Broighter Boat Part of the Iron Age first-century-bc Broighter Hoard discovered in 1896 in a field near Lough Foyle, co. Londonderry. The boat is unique, measuring 7.25 inches x 3 inches (18.4 cm x 7.6 cm) and weighing 3 ounces (85 g). It has finely wrought benches, rowlocks, two rows of nine oars, a steering oar, grappling tools, three forked implements, a yardarm and a spear. It was most probably part of a religious offering to a Celtic god and, as such, belonged to the finder. However, in 1903 the UK government, represented in court by Sir Edward Carson, successfully sued for ownership of the Hoard on the grounds that it was not religious but was treasure trove and so belonged to the Crown. It is now in the National Museum, Dublin.

The earliest written evidence of Ireland and its people can be dated from the ninth century bc when Homer in The Iliad described the north-west of Europe as ‘A land of fog and gloom . . . Beyond it is the Sea of Death, where Hell begins.’ About four hundred years later a

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Carthaginian sailor, Himilco, left a record of a voyage through the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar), northwards up the coast of Portugal to the Bay of Biscay and along the coast of France. He saw Celts sailing ‘at high speed’ in coracles and learnt of ‘the Sacred Island (so the ancients called it). This lies amid the waves, abounding in verdure, and the race of the Hierni dwell there widespread.’ Several centuries later, in the first century bc, an unflattering picture was recorded by the Greek geographer Strabo. Sensibly noting that ‘We relate these things, perhaps, without having trustworthy authorities’, Strabo portrayed the Irish Celts thus: more savage than the Britons, [they] feed on human flesh and are enormous eaters. They deem it commendable to devour their deceased fathers as well as openly to be connected not only with other women but also with their own mothers and sisters . . . The natives are wholly savage and lead a wretched existence because of the cold.

In fact, the Celtic Gaels of Ireland possessed a highly sophisticated society. Their massive stone forts, built along the coast of Ireland (or ‘Erin’ as they called it) and on hills in the interior, suggest a warlike and precarious existence. Inside the forts – some of which encompassed as much as forty acres – lived whole communities, largely dependent upon cattle grazing the land and fields around. Smaller communities and isolated homesteads also abounded, often – as with the stone forts – on or near Bronze Age sites, thus indicating that the Gaels accepted and, perhaps, assimilated older religious customs. They enjoyed a tribal social organisation without any political unity but having in common a language, religion and culture. Independent tribal chiefs and kings were dominant in their own usually small areas. Only once, at the beginning of the eleventh century ad, were most Gaelic tribes united under one high king, Brian Boru, and then only for his lifetime. The Gaels differed from other Celtic groups in maintaining the system of kingship for so long, but in most other respects they were similar to the Celts of France, the Gauls. In his History of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar provides one of the most detailed accounts of Celtic society. He distinguished three broad social groups: Druids, warriors and farmers. Druids were both the repository of Celtic knowledge and wisdom and the teachers of

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succeeding generations. Druids underwent up to twenty years of study, learning the sagas, laws and religious practices of their people, and accurate recitation was demanded: It is said that they commit to memory immense amounts of poetry, and so some of them continue their studies for twenty years. They consider it improper to commit their studies to writing . . . They also have much knowledge of the stars and their motion, of the size of the world and of the earth, of natural philosophy, and of the powers and spheres of action of the immortal gods, which they discuss and hand down to their young students.

Celtic religion taught of an afterlife and an immortal soul that passed into another body after death. The god of the underworld, Dis, was held to be the common father of mankind. Human and animal sacrifices were conducted by the Druids who were also the priests. Over four hundred different Celtic gods are known. Most can be identified as local or tribal deities, but about one hundred appear to have been generally worshipped. The Roman poet Lucan noted that the Celts worshipped three in particular: Esus, the god of arts and crafts, the patron of traders and travellers, whose Greek equivalent was Hermes and who, by all accounts, was the most popular; Taranis, probably the equivalent of Zeus (coming from the Irish word torann, meaning ‘thunder’), and Teutatis, probably the generic name of the god of each tribe. Tuath, the Irish for ‘tribe’, comes from the same linguistic root as Teutatis, and in the Gaelic sagas, warriors frequently pledge themselves by swearing ‘by the god by whom my tribe swears’. Lug was another important deity, probably of harvests and fertility, and has lived on in the place names Laon, Leon, Loudon and Lyons in France, Leiden in the Netherlands and Leignitz in Germany (now Legnica in Poland). He was celebrated in Ireland by the Gaels on 1 August, from which festival can be traced today’s Garland Sunday. Streams, rivers, springs and trees were also incorporated in Celtic religion, some rivers, like the Boyne, even being regarded as divine. The earth itself was worshipped, in female form, as mother, defender and provider. Bulls, bears, boars and horses were seen as possessing divine powers. In the great Gaelic saga The Tain, the supernaturally endowed brown-and-white bulls carry this memory, surviving the Church’s enmity, of the bull god.

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From about 400 bc, the Celts competed with Rome, sacking the city itself in 387 bc. In the centuries that followed, however, Roman legions conquered the Celts in Spain, France, England and central Europe, though even then Celtic tribes continued to harass their oppressors. Strabo describes the Gauls as ‘madly fond of war, highspirited and quick to battle, but otherwise straightforward and not of evil character’. Diodorus Siculus, a first-century-bc Greek, notes in his history of the world, Bibliotheca Historica: Physically the Gauls are terrifying in appearance with deep-sounding and very harsh voices. In conversation they use few words and speak in riddles . . . They are boasters and threateners and given to bombastic selfdramatisation, and yet they are quick of mind with good natural ability for learning . . . When the armies are drawn up in battle array they are wont to advance before the battle-line and to challenge the bravest of their opponents to single combat, at the same time brandishing before them their arms so as to terrify their foe. And when someone accepts their challenge to battle, they loudly recite the deeds of valour of their ancestors and proclaim their own valorous quality, at the same time abusing and making little of their opponent and generally attempting to rob him beforehand of his fighting spirit. They cut off the heads of their enemies slain in battle and attach them to the necks of their horses . . . and they nail up these first fruits upon their houses.

Diodorus’ account is remarkably similar to descriptions of battle in the Gaelic sagas, and highlights the importance Celts gave to individuals of courage and endurance (see Figure 3). The particular customs of the Gaels were first recorded in the seventh century ad by monks who overcame their abhorrence of paganism and set down the records of their forebears, providing us with an extensive account of the political and cultural organisation of Ireland in the centuries before and during the Dark Ages. Along with the artistic wealth of the Gaels, attested by the surviving volume of golden objects and ornaments, Gaelic Christianity with its piety, learning and artwork not only made Ireland legendary throughout Christendom, but also has provided Irishmen with a source of profound pleasure and pride. Gaelic society, in common with that of most other lands of its time, was divided into a rigid hierarchical order of three broad social groups, the aristocrats, the freemen and the slaves. Aristocrats included not

Figure 3 Clonycavan Man

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only tribal kings (ri), but also warriors (flaithi), judges (breitheamh or brehons), Druids (draci), poets (fili), historians (seanchaidhe) and a number of professional advisers (aos dana) who shared with the king the duties of guarding the well-being of the tribe (tuath), organising feasts and sacred occasions, and applying the law. Poets and historians had a particularly honoured place, and a poet’s satire was an especially powerful sanction since (it was believed) it could bring disgrace, physical disfigurement and even death upon its victim. By the fourth century ad there were five leading Gaelic kingdoms that, despite fluctuating fortunes, remained ascendant for eight hundred years. Roughly, they corresponded to the historical provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught with the fifth and smallest in the counties of Meath and Westmeath. Each of these kingdoms was dominated by one or two families. In Munster, it was the Eoganachta clan; in Ulster the Ui Neill; in Leinster the Ui Muiredaig and Ui Faelain; in Connaught the Ui Briuin and in Meath the southern Ui Neill family. Within these kingdoms, about 150 lesser ones were grouped. There was no central control in the country and kings depended upon their own personal qualities for authority, unlike the Roman system where rulers exercised power from capital cities through bureaucracies. Even when particularly mighty kings sought recognition as High King (ard ri), all that could be expected was respect – sometimes with tribute, sometimes with fealty – from other provincial kings, and political and military alliances against an enemy. High kings would take hostages to secure loyalty or as a token of dependence, and would expect help in time of war. From the ninth century ad, some high kings tried to

Figure 3 Clonycavan Man (cont.) An Iron Age man dug up by a peat-cutting machine in March 2003 near Clonycavan, co. Meath. He has been dated to about 300 bc, aged at about thirty and standing about 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 metres). It is thought he was murdered or sacrificed. He was tortured and then killed by three strikes to the head, probably with an axe, that split it open. He was also wounded in the chest and disembowelled. His hair was set in a peak, held in place by a gel probably imported from the Basque area on the borders of France and Spain, paralleling descriptions of the first-century-bc mythological hero Cuchulain whose hair in battle stood on end.

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assert sovereignty over the whole country, but before this such claims were unknown. The distinguishing feature of the Gaelic aristocratic class (apart from its ‘academic’ groups) was that its members possessed (or belonged to families that possessed) clients and vassals, with all the authority and influence that this involved. The highest grade of nobleman was the chief (toisech, from which comes the modern Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister) of a large number of other nobles for whom he was responsible to the king or overlord. The class of freemen (cele) had at least twenty-seven subdivisions consisting of grades of farmers, merchants and tradesmen, and was the foundation of Gaelic society. Cattle provided the calculus of wealth, the basic unit of value being a young heifer. The highest grade of freeman was a cattleman (boaire), precisely described in Críth Gablach, a Gaelic law tract: All his household goods are in their proper place: a cauldron with its spit and handles; a vat in which a measure of ale may be brewed; a cauldron for everyday use; small vessels – iron pots and wooden kneading-boards and mugs, so that he does not need to borrow them – a sink; a bath . . . [His larder] is capable of receiving a King or a Bishop or a scholar or a brehon from the road, prepared for the arrival of any guest . . . He owns seven buildings: a kiln; a barn and a share in a mill so that it grinds for him; a house of twentyseven feet; an outhouse of seventeen feet; a pigsty; a shelter for calves and a shelter for sheep. He owns twenty cows; two bulls; six oxen; twenty pigs; twenty sheep; four domestic boars; two sows; a riding horse . . . He has pasture which sustains sheep without need to change ground. He and his wife have four suits of clothes.

Freemen were the clients of nobles, paying rent in return for protection and cattle. Property ownership was vested in family groups (fine) which included all relations in the male line of descent for five generations. This was the case for members of the aristocracy as much as for freemen and throws light on the origin of fingal, the murder of kinsfolk, the most serious crime in Gaelic law: if one branch of a family monopolised the kingship for four generations, then other branches risked losing their royal status and thus descending in the social order, and so might murder their own kinsfolk. To avoid this, heirs were often elected during a king’s lifetime. As long as a man was a member

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of the royal family group and sound in limb and mind, he was eligible for kingship. In practice, the most powerful family member was usually elected. Slaves (mug) were usually those unfortunates captured in war or placed in bondage as criminals. They might obtain their freedom by practising a skilled profession, such as that of smith or physician. A female slave could be worth six heifers. The two principal centres of Gaelic Ireland were Emain Macha, recorded as the city ‘Isamnion’ on the map of Ireland drawn by Ptolemy of Alexandria in the second century ad, now known as Navan Fort, near Armagh, and Tara in the valley of the river Boyne in co. Meath. Both were ancient sites upon which the Gaels erected massive ring forts: at Emain Macha the huge 40-foot-wide circular earthwork encloses eighteen acres; at Tara the central earthwork alone encloses over twelve acres. Emain Macha, political centre of the Ulster kingdom, was probably abandoned after being destroyed in the middle of the fifth century during a war between Ulster and Connaught, coinciding with the advent of Christianity in Ireland and the foundation of the primacy of Armagh. Tara lasted longer as a political centre and a centre of pagan worship – until it was abandoned about 560. Later it enjoyed a revival as the royal seat of the kings of Meath and ultimately of the high king of Ireland (see Figure 6). By the mid fifth century, Tara was principally a religious centre with an established hold on the imagination of the Irish people – a hold that remained powerful up to modern times. In 1798, Irish rebels spontaneously gathered there, as if possessed by some ancestral memory. In 1843, Daniel O’Connell organised one of the largest assemblies in Irish history at Tara, clearly calculating that folk knowledge of the site was an important force in his campaign for Irish home rule. The Irish Sea protected Gaelic society, providing a barrier first against the legions of Rome and then against the vandalising European tribes of the Dark Ages. As a result, uniquely in Ireland there was preserved an Iron Age culture distanced, museumlike, from the mainstream of European development. Gaelic society, based as it was on a system of local allegiances, remained a series of tribal monarchies right into the Middle Ages, its longevity due in no small part to the stability provided by the Brehon Laws.

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Gaelic law was carefully devised and was interpreted by the brehons, who held an exalted social position. The Brehon Laws stipulated in exact detail the rules, penalties and privileges governing social and political intercourse. No one was above the law. The great books of early Christian Ireland record the legend of Saint Patrick in 438 ad ordering that the laws and customs of Gaelic Ireland be written down. But for some considerable time after Saint Patrick, brehons continued to learn and pass on the laws orally from one generation to the next. Nothing escaped their jurisdiction. They enumerated the duties, obligations, rights and privileges of each class of person, from king to slave. The principles governing property management were specified, as were detailed rules affecting building, brewing, bee-keeping and milling, as well as complex, sophisticated rules concerning the relations between father and son, master and servant, ruler and subject, husband and wife. In addition, the laws specified the characteristics of each rung of the social ladder down to how many vessels of milk and ale and how many sheep and cattle were required to qualify for each one. The brehons received fees for their judgments from those in dispute. Fair and careful judgments were, in turn, secured by the laws which made brehons personally liable for damages, besides forfeiting fees, in the case of a false or unfair decision. ‘Every brehon’, lays down the body of third-century-ad laws in the (later) Book of Aicill, ‘is punishable for his neglect: he is to pay a money-fine for his false judgment.’ The laws and brehons were held in great respect, and their influence obviously permeated the whole of life. ‘There are three periods of evil for the world’, we learn from the Seanchas Mor, the collection of fifth-century civil laws, ‘the period of a plague, of a general war, and the dissolution of oral contracts . . . The world would be evilly situated if express contracts were not binding.’ Three principles were embedded in the laws. First, every freeman had a right to use communal land: to be deprived of this right constituted a grave injustice. Second, every freeman who failed to meet his obligations to his lord or king would face the same process as any other debtor, and so would not be arbitrarily penalised. Third, the right to compensation or retribution ultimately lay with the injured person.

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The Brehon Law of Compensation provides an example of the intricacy of the Gaelic administration of justice. In the earliest times, the Law of Retaliation prevailed, but was gradually replaced by that of Compensation. The person injured sued and, if the offender responded, the case was heard by a brehon according to the law. Penalties took the form of fines. If an offender refused to submit to this process, or if he refused to pay a fine or a debt, then the process of Distress came into effect whereby the injured person could seize the offender’s property – almost always his cattle – after giving notice of his intention (and so providing some days’ grace for the offender to meet his obligation). Property was seized in three stages. First, the injured person, accompanied by witnesses, claimed the property but did not remove it. This was followed by the second stage, a formal stay of one or more days, during which the offender had to give a pledge – usually valuable goods or a member of his family as hostage – that he would meet his debt at the end of the stay when his pledge would also be returned. At the final stage the injured person actually removed property to the value originally stipulated by the brehon. If the offender refused to give a pledge, then there was no stay and the property was removed immediately. If, having given a pledge, the offender still refused to pay, then his pledge was kept and, if a hostage, could be sold or used as a slave or bondsman until the debt was worked off. If an offender defied all these proceedings the injured person could resort to direct retaliation. In cases where an offender or debtor was superior in rank to the creditor or injured person, the plaintiff could secure the right to arbitration by fasting outside the defendant’s door, a procedure held in some awe, for it is clear that great dishonour fell upon a defendant who refused to respond to it: ‘He that does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all; he who disregards all things shall not be paid by God or man.’ From the Brehon Laws comes our knowledge of the system of fosterage. Children were often placed in the care of foster-parents, sometimes because of friendship, more often accompanied by a payment varying with the social ranks of those concerned. Boys were fostered until the age of seventeen and girls until fourteen.

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Foster-parents had the duty of teaching boys the martial arts, how to ride and how to swim, and how to play board games. Fostered children had the duty of supporting their foster parents in old age. The system served to maintain harmony between neighbours and tribes, and its ties remained close. The legendary hero Cuchulain’s slaying of his foster-brother Ferdia in single combat forms one of the tragic climaxes of the Táin saga. The Brehon Laws rarely imposed capital punishment, preferring an elaborate system of compensation, which also had the benefit of preventing long vendettas and establishing the law as the preferred arbitration procedure. Victims of physical injury were entitled to ‘sick maintenance’ from the culprit, which involved the payment of a fine as well as the costs – lodging, food, medical – of the cure. In cases of murder, a fine was paid to the dead man’s family, double that required for manslaughter. Many qualifying circumstances had to be taken into account: the reason for the murder; provocation; social rank etcetera, so the brehon making judgment had to possess diplomatic skills on top of legal erudition. The murderer of a freeman, for example, faced a fine (payable in cattle) which could be from one to thirty head depending upon his social position, plus twenty-one head if the murder was not malicious or forty-two head if it was. If the culprit did not pay, his family was held responsible: if they did not pay the fine, they had to hand the culprit over to the victim’s family. Only then could the offender be executed, but he could also be put to work or sold as a slave. Failing this, an offender’s family had to expel him and accept a levy on their property to free them from responsibility. Those expelled had to leave their tribe or clan as well, becoming outlaws upon whom their victims’ families were free to exact revenge; or to avoid being outlaws, they had to join another tribe in return for protection. Other modes of punishment also operated, although not applied by brehons who were only entitled to exact penalties of compensation. Blinding was one of the most common for a king or chief defeated in battle. It was done by jabbing a needle into the eye, and one of the principal reasons for the practice was that a disfigured person was not eligible to serve as a king or chief; blinding thus ensured the complete subjection of a defeated rival or enemy.

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The position of women under the laws compared with that of men, and was honourable. Divorce was freely allowed, and marriages could be ended by common consent, with wives enjoying most of the same rights as their husbands. For an aristocrat, ‘To his wife belongs the right to be consulted on every subject,’ and more generally, husbands did not own wives: ‘It is only contract that is between them.’ Property was shared by wives and could not be disposed of without consent. But custom provided that while husbands could take secondary wives, a wife who committed adultery might be burnt alive. Women were expected to fight in time of war, and were only exempted from martial duty in 697 by the Synod of Tara. They had the right to pursue a case at law and to recover debts equally with men, and could inherit property, although men enjoyed primacy in this respect. But if a man had no sons, his daughter inherited; in any event, daughters were always entitled to a dowry out of the general estate. The power of the Brehon Laws, and the enduring loyalty of the Irish people to them, was demonstrated by their extraordinary survival through centuries of warfare and invasion. Four centuries after the Norman-English first set foot in the country, their descendants often adopted Irish forms, customs and language, much to the anger of Anglo-Irish governments. The Irish state papers of the sixteenth century are peppered with legislation and complaints against the continuing widespread resort to brehons and their ancient code. From 1919 to 1921, the rebels’ Dáil courts even attempted to revive the Brehon code as a national Irish alternative to British justice. Together with the laws, Gaelic sagas have reached through the centuries as a source of inspiration to generations of Irishmen. Those that have come down to us were transmitted orally, in many cases for over a thousand years, before being written down, most that survive being transcribed by Christian monks from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. They provide us with a fascinating picture of the way of life and the values of the Gaels, and can be compared to the Homeric epics. Indeed, only the classics of Greece and Rome give a more complete account of pre-Christian Indo-European societies. But unlike those classics the tales of Gaelic Ireland were not assimilated or recounted by any single author, and the styles of different storytellers can still be discerned in versions of the same tale.

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Four great collections or ‘cycles’ of the sagas have survived: the Mythological cycle, which gives an account of pre-Christian times; the Ulster or Red Branch cycle, which roughly covers the first two centuries ad (still pre-Christian in Ireland); the Fenian cycle, which deals with the period from the third century ad to around the seventh century, and the King cycle, which recounts the history of Ireland in the first millennium ad. The earliest manuscripts of the sagas are later in date than the tales they tell: the story of the encounter between Oisin, the last of the Fenians, and Saint Patrick, for example, was not written down until 1750. The sagas are, of course, lore not history. However, they provided a romantic vision of early Ireland which came to lie at the heart of the Gaelic revival in the last years of the nineteenth century, when scholars translated and publicised them, providing heroic inspiration for modern Irish nationalism. Their tales of magic and mystery, of heroes overcoming impossible difficulties, are thought by some to have inspired the French romances about the Holy Grail. In the sagas, the Fomorians are the first inhabitants of Ireland, dark and evil, always sinister. After them come Partholon and a small band of followers, who are credited with clearing land for farming and forming lakes and rivers. Three hundred years to the day after their arrival, Partholon’s followers died of a mysterious illness, to be succeeded by the Nemedians who clear more land and form more lakes, but eventually leave the country for lands in northern Europe. Next come the Firbolgs, whom the tales credit with founding Tara and dividing Ireland into five kingdoms, living in peace for only thirty-six years until the Danaans arrive from the northern islands of the world in a great fleet of ships which they burned on the shore after disembarking and defeating the Firbolgs in a great battle near Cong, co. Mayo. The Danaans bring with them four treasures: the Lia Fail, a stone which cried out when each new king was inaugurated (a 5-foot-tall granite stone at Tara and the Stone of Scone in Westminster Abbey at present compete for recognition as the original); Dagda’s Cauldron, an inexhaustible vessel named after their ancient chief; the magical sword of their king, Nuada; and the spear of their god-hero, Lug. Scholars have speculated that the Danaans may have represented the original Gaels (though the cycle of invasions is duplicated in Sanskrit conquest myths at the other end of the Indo-European

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world). Lug and Dagda were also Gaelic gods – Lug even became the prototype of the Arthurian Lancelot – and the sagas, despite being recorded by pious monks horrified by pagans, consistently cast the Danaans in a kindly light and present their Milesian successors, the last race of invaders to take possession of Ireland, in the same terms. It could be that the Milesians were a late invention designed to distinguish between Christian and pagan Ireland. However, all this is an attempt to extract history from myth. The sagas tell how the Milesians came from Spain and, overcoming spells cast against them, overthrew the Danaans in two great battles and divided Ireland into a northern and a southern kingdom. With the Milesians came the great poet Cir, who went to the northern kingdom, and the great harpist Cennfinn, who went to the south. In this way the sagas explained why in later centuries northern Ireland was known for its poetry and southern Ireland for its music. The sagas also credited the Milesians with providing Ireland with its names – Banba, Fodla and Eriu (the dative case of which is Erin) – originally the names of three queens they met when they first landed and whom they promised to name the country after. These traditions preserve the qualities of the Gaelic order and enable scholars both to judge other evidence more easily and to gain insight into the character of the age. More than this, some tales actually deal with historical figures, while others have historical significance. The Voyage of Bran surviving in an eighth-century text from the Red Branch cycle, for example, provides evidence of the Gaels’ involvement with the sea and possible voyages of exploration. One of the greatest of the tales, the Táin Bó Cúailnge – the Cattle Raid of Cooley – has historical roots, reflecting probable generations of conflict that took place between rival Gaelic tribes in Connaught and Ulster. Part of the Red Branch cycle, it had been forgotten for generations until revived in the late nineteenth century by scholars and poets, fired by its epic quality. The saga’s hero, Cuchulain, personifying Gaelic warrior virtues, is presented as always fighting honourably, and in him can be seen the Gaelic ideal of a warrior aristocracy exhibiting courage, honesty, learning and martial prowess. In death, Cuchulain remains true to these qualities as, mortally wounded, he ties himself to a high stone by a lake, where, gripping

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his sword, he dies facing his enemies. This scene not only inspired the leadership of the 1916 rising against British rule, but also the Irish artist Oliver Sheppard, who in 1936 took the figure of Cuchulain in death for his statue in Dublin’s rebuilt General Post Office to commemorate that suicidal assertion of national spirit. For several hundred years in the early Christian era, Gaelic warriors dominated much of Britain, becoming known as Scotti to the Romans (for whom Irish wolfhounds were Scottici canes) and thus, ultimately, giving Scotland its name. Irish Gaelic kingdoms were established in Wales, Cornwall, England north-west of the Pennines, and Scotland. In turn, the Irish took the name Goidil (Gaels) for themselves, from the Welsh Celtic Gwyddyl, during the fourth century ad. The Fenian cycle of tales relates to this period, illustrating the sophisticated nature of Gaelic society on the eve of Christianity’s arrival in Ireland. The tales recount the deeds of Finn MacCool and his Fenian warrior band, who are analogous to one of the great Celtic legacies to the modern world: the mighty legend of King Arthur and the Knights of his Round Table. To become a Fenian, a warrior had to know the laws of poetry and to submit to four rules: always to choose a woman for a wife on the grounds of her good manners and virtue rather than because of her wealth; never to be violent towards a woman; always to accede to pleas for help, and never to flee from fewer than ten champion warriors. A Fenian’s family and tribe also had to agree not to seek revenge should he be killed. The Gaels’ concern for the arts, for chivalry, and for law, and their knowledge of the nature of mankind, are all apparent. Their interest in history (as well as drama) is clearly attested in the King and Fenian cycles where historical figures are often woven into the narrative. Together, the sagas give us a window onto the Gaelic world. They also provide us with prototypes and analogues for some of the most famous themes of Western literature: the tale of Diarmuid and Grainne in the Fenian cycle, for example, is at least an analogue of, if not the prototype for, the tragic European romance of Tristan and Iseult. Ireland has one of the oldest systems of patrilineal surnames, some of which have actually been traced through DNA analysis to a single ancestor. Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fifth-century Ulster-based high

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king, may be the progenitor of perhaps 3 million men worldwide and 1 in 12 Irish men alive today. Certainly, the O’Neill family group stems from a single ancestor, and he was probably Niall. Today, in northwest Ireland, 21.5 per cent of men carry the genetic fingerprint of a single male ancestor, and the same fingerprint is carried by 16.7 per cent of men in western and central Scotland, and 2 per cent of European New Yorkers. Surnames tracing their ancestry to this single ancestor include (O’)Neill, (O’)Gallagher, (O’)Boyle, (O’)Doherty, O’Donnell, Connor, Cannon, Bradley, O’Reilly, Flynn, (Mc)Kee, Campbell, Devlin, Donnelly, Egan, Gormley, Hynes, McCaul, McGovern, McLoughlin, McManus, McMenamin, Molloy, O’Kane, O’Rourke and Quinn.1 Much of the history and mythology of the Gaels was lost with the coming of Christianity, and much that survived that coming was forgotten over the ensuing millennium. Sometimes, this was because the gods and customs of the Gaels became devils and forbidden rites in Christianity. Sometimes – particularly in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – this was because the ancient lore only existed in Gaelic, itself persecuted and diminished by force and by famine. Sometimes, no doubt, tales and deeds were lost to posterity because a Christian monk could not bring himself to record heathen miracles and heroism. One monk who did overcome such scruples penned at the end of the saga of the Tain which he had helped to write down: I who have written this history, or rather fable, am doubtful about many things . . . For some of them are figments of demons, some are poetic imaginings, some true, some not, and some for the delight of fools.

patrick Christianity probably came to Ireland first through trade with Britain and Gaul (a Celtic land that became France) at the end of the fourth century. By 431, there were sufficient Christians in Ireland for Pope Celestine to send to them a deacon, Palladius, at the request of the

1

Laoise T. Moore, Brian McEvoy, Eleanor Cape, Katharine Simms, Daniel G. Bradley, ‘A Y-Chromosome Signature of Hegemony in Gaelic Ireland’, American Journal of Human Genetics, February 2006.

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Church of Gaul. Nothing is known of Palladius’ mission except that he may have been killed or returned to Rome shortly after he landed. The following year, according to the usually received chronology, Saint Patrick came with a few companions. A great deal of controversy surrounds ‘the Apostle of Ireland’, the country’s patron saint. In the first place, there is some debate about the dates of his life. He wrote a partial autobiography, his Confessio, the earliest (although incomplete) version of which is to be found in the ninth-century Book of Armagh, which indicates that he was born around 390 (see Figure 4). However, some of his disciples lived well into the sixth century, suggesting that he arrived in Ireland around 456 and died around 490. This extended time span may mean that there were, in fact, two or even three Patricks, but this problem remains unsolved. The traditional day of his death, 17 March, has become Ireland’s national day and, despite uncertainty, 461 ad is generally assigned as its year. In the Confessio, Patrick tells us he was born in a town which he named as ‘Bannavem Taberniae’, and speaks in general of England as his birthplace and the home of his parents which lay in the west, probably near Bristol and the river Severn. Sean Dowling has made an interesting case for the town of Avonmouth, near Bristol and on the Severn, as Patrick’s place of origin: To anyone familiar with Irish, the word ‘Bannavem’ should instantly suggest ‘Bun-abhann’, or ‘Rivermouth’. The present English name of ‘Avonmouth’ is the Saxon or Old English translation or half-translation of the original Celtic name. Similar half-translations are ‘Dartmouth’, ‘Weymouth’, ‘Exmouth’, ‘Falmouth’ etc. All these occur in southern England. The Roman name for the Severn was Sabrina, corresponding to a Celtic word ‘Sabarn’ or ‘Sabh(v)arn’. In modern Irish the whole name would be ‘Bunabhann an tSabhrainne’.

From the Confessio we also learn that Patrick’s father was named Calpurnius and was not only a decurion, a member of the RomanEnglish ruling group, but also a deacon of the Christian Church and a landowner. He and others like him suffered at the hands of Irish raiders, and Patrick himself and his two sisters were taken captive in one such raid. For six years from the age of sixteen, Patrick was a slave herdsman in co. Antrim, which occupation gave him plenty of time for quiet

Figure 4 Patrick’s Confessio, Book of Armagh One of the earliest Irish monastic manuscripts, dating from the early ninth century, written mostly in Latin but including the earliest complete narratives written in Old Irish. The Confessio was copied from the original (now lost) written in Latin by Patrick himself, an autobiographical defence against unspecified charges that probably related to his status as Bishop and to financial irregularities. From it we learn that he was probably a Roman citizen and that his missionary work in Ireland probably took place in the mid to late fifth century. ‘I am Patrick, a sinner, a simple countryman, the humblest of the faithful and despised by many. My father was the deacon Calpurnius, son of Potitus, a priest, of Bannavem Taberniae; he had a farm nearby where I was taken captive. I was about sixteen years of age.’ The manuscript is in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

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thought. ‘Every day was spent in frequent prayer,’ he says, going on to describe the love of God increasing in him so much that he would recite one hundred prayers a day, and almost as many each night. ‘I felt no evil,’ he adds, ‘nor was there any laziness in me because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning within me.’ At the age of twenty-two, Patrick escaped back to England a passionate Christian. He probably would have stayed at home with his family but that I saw in the night the vision of a man whose name was Victoricus, coming as it were from Ireland, with countless letters. And he gave me one of them and I read the opening words of the letter which were ‘The voice of the Irish’ and as I read the beginning of the letter, I thought that at the same moment I heard their voice . . . ‘We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more.’

After this vision he left home, perhaps travelling to the South of France to become a priest, but he may instead have gone north to be ordained by Germanus of Auxerre, a soldier-bishop evangelising in England around 430. At any rate it seems clear that Patrick was properly ordained, but more than that is problematical. One of the scribes of the Book of Armagh tells us: In the thirteenth year of the Emperor Theodosius, the Bishop Patrick was sent by Celestine, Bishop and Pope of Rome, to instruct the Irish. Bishop Palladius was first sent, who was also called Patrick by a second name, and he was martyred among the Irish, as the old saints have said. Then the second Patrick was sent by the Angel of God Victor and by Pope Celestine. All Ireland believed, and nearly all were baptised by him.

Against this, however, is the whole nature of Patrick’s Confessio, written to defend himself against charges, brought in an ecclesiastical court in England, which – almost certainly – challenged his claim to be a bishop and his authority for journeying to Ireland as a missionary. The internal evidence of the Confessio and of Patrick’s one other account of his mission, his Letter to Coroticus, clearly indicate that he was never consecrated a bishop, but had to claim the position once in Ireland in order to ordain priests himself to help carry out his work. It further seems that Patrick applied to his English superiors (that is, bishops) for permission to undertake his mission to Ireland, was refused, and went ahead nevertheless, thus forcing an ecclesiastical court to judge his actions. In the Confessio, Patrick even implies that he was found guilty:

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Accordingly, on the day I was condemned, as related above, on that night I saw a writing – it was before my image without honour – and at the same time I heard the Divine voice saying to me ‘With displeasure we have seen the image of a chosen one stripped of title’, nor did he say ‘I have seen’ but ‘We have seen’ as if He joined Himself with me as if He said ‘Who touches you touches, as it were, the apple of my eye’.

Throughout, Patrick was certain of his defence: that in all his actions he enjoyed the sanction of the ultimate authority, God himself, ‘who is greater than all’. The natural reluctance of later Irish monks, claiming succession and legitimacy from Patrick’s mission, to admit that the mission had been undertaken in defiance of his superiors, is the simplest explanation of the confusion about his standing. The Irish Church founded by Patrick, who established its centre at Armagh, rapidly adapted to the circumstances of the country. At first, he succeeded in introducing the concept of bishoprics, as existed in France, with their hierarchical authority. Soon, however, the geography and social nature of the country – without towns, roads or central political unity – demonstrated that this plan was completely unsuitable. So instead of having a number of city-based dioceses and archdioceses, Ireland developed – in contradiction to Patrick’s intentions – a monastic Church more in keeping with Gaelic society. While Patrick ‘baptised thousands, ordained clerics everywhere’ and ‘gave presents to kings’, his colleagues and successors concentrated more upon converting the leaders of Gaelic society, not attempting to interfere with the social structure, thus meshing evangelism with native custom and practice. Pagan Gaelic celebrations were tolerated and sometimes – like the Feast of All Saints – adopted for Christian purposes. The forts and encampments of Gaelic kings and chiefs were made the sites of churches, abbeys and monasteries, although Tara remained a pagan centre well into the sixth century. Legends rapidly accumulated around Patrick’s life. He is credited with having banished the snakes from Ireland from the summit of Croagh Patrick in co. Mayo, and to have established the shamrock as one of Ireland’s national symbols by using its three leaves to explain the mystery of the Trinity to the high king at Tara. His undoubted triumph accounts for the central place he came to hold in Irish tradition. In 1932 the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, on the notional fifteenth centenary of the start of his mission, witnessed the largest

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crowds ever assembled in the city until Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979. A century after Patrick’s arrival, Irish monks began evangelising abroad themselves. Pagan Gaels’ veneration of learning, and the Gaelic class of learned men – the brehons, poets, historians and Druids – found a natural place within the Christian order and lent the Irish Church a special quality. Saint Ninian, an Ulsterman, the first major missionary and teacher after Patrick, established early in the fifth century the monastery of Candida Casa at Whithorn in western Scotland, where many more missionaries studied. By the first quarter of the sixth century, Patrick’s episcopal organisation was succumbing to monasticism, with abbots supplanting bishops as the principal churchmen in Ireland. One such abbot, Saint Finnian, went on to found the monastic school at Clonard, co. Meath, where he instilled the habits of study and scholarship into a group of followers who became known as the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. Two of these, Saint Ciaran and Saint Colmcille (also known as Saint Columba), were to establish monasticism and scholarship as the hallmarks of the Irish Church. Saint Ciaran founded the church and monastery of Clonmacnois on the river Shannon; Saint Colmcille founded the monasteries of Derry, Swords, Durrow and Kells before sailing with twelve followers to Iona on the west coast of Scotland, where he built one of the greatest early Christian monastic schools before dying in 597. The Annals of Clonmacnois state that Colmcille wrote three hundred books in his own hand, and by tradition he is held to be the scribe of the Cathach, the oldest surviving Irish manuscript. From his foundation at Iona, Irish monks converted Scotland and much of England and, as the seventh-century English monk and historian the Venerable Bede was ever anxious to point out, Colmcille and the monks from Iona also played a large part in maintaining Christianity among their converts. The combination of evangelism, asceticism and scholarship epitomised by Colmcille led the Irish Church into its golden age. Their fervour and total dedication to Christianity carried Irish monks outside the British Isles to Italy, France, Spain, Germany and central Europe. From 500 to 800 ad, the Irish Church had no compare in the Christian world. After 800 its missionary work did not stop, but it

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became increasingly involved in the Roman controversy about the date of Easter and the ever-increasing claims of the papacy, while at home Viking raids destroyed domestic stability. Yet the achievement of the early Irish Church exercised a lasting influence upon the development of Christianity. In the three hundred years before the ninth century, expatriate Irish missionaries reintroduced Christianity to areas which had been overrun by the tribes that brought down the Roman Empire. They replaced the custom of public absolution with the Irish Church’s practice of private confession, used by the Catholic Church to the present day. The most prominent of these expatriates was Saint Columbanus, born in the province of Leinster around 543, who with his followers founded the monasteries of Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines in France, St Gall in Switzerland, Würzburg in Germany, Vienna in Austria, possibly a monastery at Prague, and Bobbio in Piedmont in northern Italy where Columbanus died in 615. vikings After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the Dark Ages set in across Europe. Marauding Teutonic tribes ravaged the continent, and the Jutes, Angles and Saxons overran England. In the whole of Europe, Ireland alone remained unscathed, providing a refuge to Christian scholars, more and more of whom escaped there with lasting effect. By the time of the Emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century, if a man knew Greek he was simply assumed to be Irish. Alcuin, the leading scholar at the court of Charlemagne, and Scotus Eriugena (‘Scotus’ meaning ‘Irish-born Irishman’), Europe’s foremost philosopher in the ninth century, both studied at Clonmacnois, where they learned not only the Bible and Christian theology but also the languages and works of classic Greece and Rome. ‘Almost all Ireland, disregarding the sea, is migrating to our shores with a flock of philosophers,’ complained Heiric of Auxerre in 870, observing the sheer multitude of Irishmen in the kingdoms of Europe. The Vikings began raiding Irish monasteries in 795, when Iona was sacked and the grave of Saint Colmcille was desecrated. That same year Vikings also landed on Lambay Island, off the coast of Dublin. Norwegian Vikings conducted these first raids, but they were by no means the first pillagers of Irish religious sites.

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Between the time of Patrick and the arrival of the Vikings, Ireland had undergone considerable political development. By the late eighth century two high kingdoms dominated the country’s many small kingdoms and tribes. In the north the Ui Neill ruled from Tara, while in the south the Eoganachta held sway from the Rock of Cashel. Between them lay the third, smaller province of Leinster around Dublin. Starting in the eighth century and throughout the ninth century, the Ui Neill and Eoganachta struggled for supremacy, in the process destroying more monasteries, churches and abbeys than the Vikings would. As a result, there was no united Irish resistance to the Vikings, and many kings and chiefs allied with the invaders. By the late eighth century the outstanding artistic achievement of the early Christian era, the Irish illuminated manuscript, was already perceived as being too vulnerable to violence, and the perfection of the sturdy stone- and metalwork began to absorb the artistic energies of Irish monks. The finest, though not the earliest, illuminated manuscript is an eighth-century copy of the Gospels, the Book of Kells, now the pride of the library of Trinity College, Dublin (Figure 5). By the time its three scribes started writing, Vikings had already landed in Britain. Indeed, it is likely that the book was begun on Iona and moved to Kells for safety and completion. Its first illustration is the earliest representation of the Virgin and Child in a western manuscript. Written in Latin, the language of the Church which Saint Patrick introduced to Ireland, it employs a script recognisably the precursor of Irish script today. Each page of the Book of Kells, and of every other Irish manuscript of the period, is witness to a fantastic amount of painstaking work and skill. For the scribes, it was another way of communing with God. Metalwork flourished beside the art of illumination during the Dark Ages and later. Ireland had a much longer history of making exquisite metal objects than it did of writing and illumination. Christian Irish metalworkers were able to draw upon countless generations of knowledge, skill and experience to work the croziers, chalices, crosses and other objects of devotion which the Vikings prized so much. From the ninth century onwards, as Viking raids intensified, the skills of the calligrapher and the metalworker combined in the third great Irish art form, the stone high crosses. While churches and monasteries could have their manuscript and metal

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Figure 5 Book of Kells, fo. 32v. Christ enthroned, one of ten full-page illustrations in the Book of Kells. Used for sacramental purposes, it projected the majesty of Christianity with bright colours, intricate design and artwork, and bold text.

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treasures plundered and destroyed, the craftsmen of the crosses must have realised that their stonework would not attract the Vikings. Stone crosses of simple design date from the eighth century, but by the ninth century complex configurations of biblical scenes – usually of the Crucifixion and the disciples and Christ – were incorporated within the shape of the cross. During the ninth century, however, the high cross itself developed, and the designs became more intricate. At Moone, co. Kildare, the high cross is 17 feet tall and contains scenes of Daniel in the Lion’s Den and Adam and Eve on the point of eating the apple. In the face of ever-deadlier Viking incursions and domestic anarchy, and as Christianity became established, stone began to be used in building as well. Small, boat-shaped churches and beehive-like stone cells began to be constructed in the eighth century; many can still be seen in the south-west. Stone round towers were built on religious sites from about 900 until 1150. Tall, thin, with conical roofs and doorways some distance from the ground, these probably fulfilled the dual function of bell- and watchtowers. No other buildings are so unmistakably Irish: only two have been discovered outside Ireland, both in Scotland. Put together, the change from inflammable manuscripts and wood to lasting stone crosses and buildings reflected the great terror the Vikings inspired. One Irish monk, probably in Switzerland where he had escaped Viking predations, one stormy night wrote thankfully in the margin of his manuscript: The wind is fierce tonight Ploughing the wild white ocean; I need not dread fierce Vikings Crossing the Irish Sea.

For two hundred years the raids continued, savaging not only Ireland but also Britain and much of Europe. Christianity in western Europe, which had only with difficulty survived the fall of Rome, again found itself under severe attack. Had it not been for the Viking urge to settle and willingness to adopt Christianity, Christian Gaelic society might have been completely lost. Viking kingdoms were established in Normandy, southern Italy, eastern and northern England as well as in Leinster, where in 841 the Norse king Thurgesius founded Ireland’s first city, Dublin, at the mouth of the river Liffey. In 851 after a great

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naval battle in Carlingford Lough, the Norwegian Vikings were expelled by their Danish kinsmen, who proved just as anxious to relieve monasteries of their treasures. Viking Dublin became the dominant port of the Irish Sea, and into the twelfth century was one of the largest slave-trading centres in Europe. The Vikings were not a purely destructive force in Irish history. By the second half of the ninth century, their raids had given way to settlement, intermarriage and trade with the Irish, even bestowing the name Ireland: the old Gaelic of Erin or Eire tacked to the Scandinavian word land. As the struggle between the Eoganachta and the Ui Neill dragged on, Viking settlers began to be drawn into the fabric of Irish politics. By the early tenth century, the Ui Neill had defeated the Eoganachta (at the battle of Ballaghmoon in 908) and subdued the Viking settlements in all but Dublin, where the Vikings had made common cause with the clans of Leinster and allied for their independence against the Ui Neill. This was the high point of Ui Neill success. Towards the end of the ninth century, the Vikings’ attention had shifted to Iceland and northern France, but from the beginning of the tenth century their interest in Ireland resumed, and it continued for about eighty more years. In 914 before the Ui Neill could extend their domination over the east of the country, a great Viking fleet landed a new wave of invaders at Waterford. Within six years they had established themselves in Dublin and had founded towns at Limerick, Cork and Wexford. In 977, King Olaf of the Sandals defeated the Ui Neill high king Domnall and extended his kingdom from Dublin to the Shannon, subjecting the Irish in Meath to oppression so severe they called it a ‘Babylonish captivity’. As the end of the tenth century approached, two important events had taken place. The Vikings in Ireland, despite their ferocity, had in the main accepted Christianity, and Brian Boru had become High King of southern Ireland. Brian Boru has been compared to Alfred the Great, and his twelfthcentury biographer made Alfred the model for his hero. His outstanding achievement was to enforce his authority in varying degrees over all the people of Ireland – Viking settlers included – and to defeat the Danes. The extent of his authority was not unusual – the greatest of the Ui Neill kings in the three previous centuries had enjoyed

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comparable power – but he overthrew Ui Neill hegemony and made the high kingship a sought-after prize in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He did not found a national monarchy or create a nation, but his career sparked the subsequent vision of an all-powerful high kingship for which later leaders contended. Brian was born around 940 into the Cenneidigh clan of north Munster, and took the name ‘Boru’ from the town of Borime, near Killaloe in co. Clare. He rapidly proved himself an able warrior and strategist in countless battles against the Danes who had conquered much of Munster. In 968 he won a notable victory regaining Cashel, which he re-established as the seat of the Munster kings. From 976 Brian ruled southern Ireland as King of Munster, and from 1002 he was the first high king whose authority was national. He reasserted the ecclesiastical primacy of Armagh, and in 1004 demonstrated his own supremacy by conducting a grand progress through the country, marching northwards from his palace at Kincora (near Killaloe), always keeping the sea to his left, through Connaught and Ulster to Armagh, south through Meath to Dublin, which he entered in triumph and where he received homage from the Viking settlers, then through Leinster and Munster back to Cashel. For all his triumph and his claims, however, Brian always faced resistance. The families of Leinster, always reluctant vassals to the Ui Neill, found Brian no different. During the ninth and tenth centuries they had frequently allied with the Danes of Dublin against the Ui Neill hegemony, and by 1014 Brian faced a serious challenge in the shape of a Leinster–Dublin–Viking alliance. On Good Friday, 23 April 1014, the two sides joined battle at Clontarf, outside Dublin. They were evenly matched, but the Danes were eventually driven back to the beach, where an exceptionally high tide drowned hundreds before they could reach their ships. During the battle, Brian himself was killed at the moment of victory. As the Vikings themselves admitted in Njal’s Saga: ‘Brian fell, but won at last.’ No other high king would ever attain his supremacy. Indeed, not until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I did any ruler of Ireland compare with Brian in authority. Clontarf was not fought by Brian or the Leinstermen and their allies for the sovereignty of Ireland, although in subsequent nationalist tradition it was portrayed as such a battle. It was really one more

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bloodletting in the constant struggle for provincial and regional mastery. Brian’s victory consolidated the Boru dynasty, and Brian’s descendants ruled Munster and much of Ireland for the following 150 years. In contrast to England at this time, where the Danish king Canute had established his dominance, in Ireland the Danes after Clontarf firmly opted for commercial life. After 1014, Danes were a minor political force in Ireland. Danes in their towns of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick controlled Ireland’s wine trade, and their commercial ties not only began to concentrate the wealth of Ireland in Leinster, but also to develop a quality of separateness from the rest of the country. Separateness was manifested in two ways. First, Danes in Ireland naturally felt strong connections with Danes in nearby England. Second, and as a corollary, the Irish Danes followed the practices of the Roman Church, which asserted the primacy of bishops and held sway in England and western Europe, rather than the abbotdominated Irish Church. Thus the English Church was interested in reforming the Irish Church and in extending its influence over Ireland. Together, these elements were to fuel conflicts and eventually to involve England directly in Irish affairs. But before this happened, Irish art and architecture would flower again. english During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Irish monks and scribes began to record Gaelic poems and sagas. The Book of Leinster and the Book of Armagh were written then. Before this, the monks had concentrated upon Latin transcriptions of religious texts, but with the passing of the first flush of enthusiasm for asceticism and evangelising which had characterised the early Irish Church, they had become more worldly and their monasteries more secular. In this way, the ancient pagan heritage was preserved in the monasteries. In addition, Irish versions of the Trojan Wars and the Roman Civil War were written as the scribes experimented with their new-found freedom. The art of the high cross reached its climax with refined, sophisticated carving, and metalwork attained a new mastery with the extraordinarily fine Cross of Cong, commissioned in about 1123 by Turloch

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O’Connor, King of Connaught, to enshrine a relic of the True Cross. Church building became more elaborate: the splendid HibernoRomanesque Cormac’s Chapel on the Rock of Cashel was begun by King Cormac MacCarthy of Munster in 1127. It incorporated ribvaulting in the chancel roof, a technique which the Crusaders had brought back from the Near East and was first used in the choir of Durham Cathedral, completed in 1093. Rib-vaulting at Cashel less than forty years later was a testimony to Irish adventurousness at this time, as well as to wide-flung contacts. The Romanesque style soon came to govern ecclesiastical building throughout the country, culminating in Clonfert Cathedral in co. Galway, completed in 1164. However, the Irish Church with its rejection of episcopal authority was becoming increasingly anomalous. Between 640 and 1080 there was no written correspondence between the Irish Church and the papacy; no Irish armies took part in the Crusades. Both these facts reflect how distanced Ireland was from mainstream European politics and society. While this preserved Gaelic culture, it also meant that Gaelic culture shaped the Irish Church. By the eighth century, before the Viking onslaughts, Gaelic customs had given rise to lay abbots, married clergy, pluralism, and family succession to ecclesiastical office. In the Roman Church, which by the twelfth century had succeeded in establishing its dominance in Britain and Europe west of the Volga, reforms had largely ended similar abuses and had created an episcopal hierarchy recognising papal authority in Church affairs. Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) in the programme ‘Unity and Purity’ declared Ireland to be within his jurisdiction and, to carry out papal wishes, the English archbishops of Canterbury revived their claim to be supreme over Ireland. Canterbury’s claim dated from the sixth century when Saint Augustine was appointed first archbishop by Pope Gregory I with authority over the British Isles as a whole. This authority remained nominal until, after their conversion, the Danes in Ireland chose to join the Danes in England and recognise Canterbury’s ecclesiastical primacy over Armagh and the Irish abbots. Thus a constant pull was exerted from England upon Leinster, Dublin and the other towns of Ireland’s eastern seaboard, and on occasion archbishops of Canterbury used their claim to press the case for reform of the Irish Church upon the high kings. Recognising the need for reform, Irish

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Church leaders set about reorganisation on Roman lines and sought papal approval for their efforts. In 1150 an Italian, Cardinal Paparo, was appointed first papal legate to Ireland, and in 1152 he attended a synod at Kells, co. Meath, convened by the Irish abbots and bishops. There, armed with his papal authority, he ratified a Roman episcopal organisation of the Irish Church establishing thirty-six bishoprics and four archbishoprics at Cashel, Tuam, Dublin and Armagh, the last-named holding the primacy. In return for Dublin’s selection as the metropolitan see for Leinster, churchmen there at last accepted Armagh’s authority instead of Canterbury’s. However, in order for the reforms to overcome generations of different practice, the support of a powerful, central political authority was required. Such an authority did not exist in Ireland – at any one time there were at least three leading kings with competing claims – and so in 1155, by the papal bull Laudabiliter, Pope Adrian IV granted the Lordship of Ireland to the powerful King Henry II of England ‘to reveal the truth of the Christian faith to peoples still untaught and barbarous’. In the middle of the twelfth century Ireland, while constantly warring internally, was not ‘untaught and barbarous’, and it was Christian. Statements to the contrary in Laudabiliter, however, were designed to sustain papal requirements for reform of the Irish Church and to justify the selection of Henry II as a papal agent in this respect. Pope Adrian IV was the only English Pope in history – born Nicholas Breakspear at Abbot’s Langley, near St Albans – and held high notions of papal supremacy over all other rulers. No doubt he saw that Henry II’s assertion of power over Ireland would offer an opportunity to gain control of the Church there too. The Pope’s right to grant such an authority derived from the ‘Donation of Constantine’, supposedly of 325 but subsequently shown to have been an eighth-century forgery, whereby the papacy claimed the power to assign temporal sovereignty over all islands converted to Christianity. In Laudabiliter Pope Adrian IV refers to this while neatly formulating papal supremacy: ‘That Ireland, and indeed all islands on which Christ, the sun of justice, has shed His rays, and which have received the teachings of the Christian faith, belong to the jurisdiction of blessed Peter and the holy Roman Church is a fact beyond doubt, and one which Your Majesty

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recognises.’ In return for papal authority for entering Ireland, Henry II was required ‘to pay to St Peter the annual tax of one penny from each household, and to preserve the rights of the churches of that land intact and unimpaired’. The Pope’s blessing was clear: We regard it as pleasing and acceptable to us that you should enter that island for the purpose of enlarging the boundaries of the Church, checking the descent into wickedness, correcting morals and implanting virtues, and encouraging the growth of the faith of Christ; that you pursue policies directed towards the honour of God and the well-being of that land, and that the people of that land receive you honourably and respect you as their lord.

Thus began England’s formal claim to Ireland, a claim which, if the Irish were obedient to the head of the Church, was to be accepted without opposition. Controversy has raged as to whether Laudabiliter, like the ‘Donation of Constantine’, was a forgery of English kings to justify their Irish enterprises. No copy of the bull has been found in the Vatican Library, and the only existing text comes from the Conquest of Ireland of the English-Welsh Gerald de Barry (known as Giraldus Cambrensis), written between 1186 and 1189. However, there is other contemporary evidence for Laudabiliter, and it is now generally accepted as authentic. Most important, the Irish accepted it without question at the time. A year after the Pope made Henry II the Lord of Ireland, the high king, Turloch O’Connor, died. The O’Connor family had ruled Connaught for several generations before becoming dominant during the twelfth century. Ten years later, in 1166, Turloch’s son Rory became high king, but before he could properly establish his authority, Henry II, fourteen years after having been granted them, decided to exercise the rights set down in Laudabiliter. He was prompted to do so by Diarmuid MacMurrough, king of Leinster. MacMurrough has been remembered only as a villain, the man singly responsible for Ireland’s subjection by Britain. A villain he was, but more besides. Under his auspices was written the Book of Leinster, a great anthology of literature and history (see Figure 6). He built churches and monasteries (he also destroyed some), and was a master of intrigue. He was mercilessly cruel: in 1132 in an attempt to place a relation of his as abbess of the convent at Kildare, he had the rival

Figure 6 Book of Leinster The plan of the banquet hall at Tara when it was the seat of kings, showing the hierarchy of seating according to social standing and profession. The hall was huge, measuring about 755 feet x 90 feet (about 230 metres x 27 metres). Diarmuid MacMurrough probably commissioned the Book around 1160. It was compiled over the next seventy-five years, passing from MacMurrough to Strongbow, to Strongbow’s daughter, Isabel, and then remained with the Earls of Pembroke. It is a compilation in medieval Irish of genealogy and various myths and tales and is now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

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abbess raped by a common soldier to render her unfit to continue office. He was also a man of passion, and therein lay his own and Ireland’s undoing. In 1152 he ran off with the wife of a rival king, Tiernan O’Rourke, Prince of Breffny. O’Rourke never forgave Diarmuid for this and long plotted his revenge. In 1166 he managed to gather the other sub-kings and chiefs of Leinster in his support and drove Diarmuid from Ireland, little realising that Diarmuid’s implacable determination to retain his kingship matched O’Rourke’s hatred. Giraldus Cambrensis described Diarmuid: [He] was tall in stature, and of large proportions, and, being a great warrior and valiant in his nation, his voice had become hoarse by constantly shouting and raising his war-cry in battle. Bent more on inspiring fear than love, he oppressed his nobles, though he advanced the lowly. A tyrant to his own people, he was hated by strangers; his hand was against every man, and the hands of every man against him.2

Diarmuid travelled to Bristol where he had religious and trading contacts and there learned that Henry II was in France. In the early spring of 1167, Diarmuid caught up with the roving king in Aquitaine, sought his support in regaining his kingdom, swore fealty and, if he did not already know, learned about Laudabiliter. For Henry, Diarmuid’s request for help no doubt presented an opportunity to distract his own unruly subjects in Wales and the Marches from causing him trouble (underemployed knights, Henry had found, gave rise to lawlessness), and so he gave Diarmuid money and authority to recruit support in England and Wales. Diarmuid returned to Bristol where he was approached by Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known today as Strongbow: ‘His complexion was somewhat ruddy,’ said Giraldus Cambrensis, and his skin freckled; he had grey eyes, feminine features, a weak voice, and short neck. For the rest, he was tall in stature, and a man of great generosity, and of courteous manner. What he failed to accomplish by force, he succeeded in by gentle words. In time of peace he was more disposed to be led by others than to command. Out of the camp he had more of the air of an ordinary man-at-arms, than of a general-in-chief; but in action the mere soldier was forgotten in the commander. With the advice of those about him 2

Giraldus Cambrensis, The Conquest of Ireland (London, 1894), pp. 196–7.

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he was ready to dare anything; but he never ordered any attack relying on his own judgment, or rashly presuming on his personal courage. The post he occupied in battle was a sure rallying point for his troops. His equanimity and firmness in all the vicissitudes of war were remarkable, being neither driven to despair in adversity, nor puffed up by success.3

Strongbow was restless because Henry had not confirmed his title of Earl of Pembroke and had given to others some lands to which Strongbow thought himself entitled. He agreed to support Diarmuid in Ireland, in return for which Diarmuid promised Strongbow his daughter in marriage and the succession to the kingdom of Leinster over the rights of his own sons. Men whose surnames are now amongst the most common in Ireland joined the enterprise: Robert FitzStephen, Strongbow’s first cousin, FitzStephen’s halfbrother Maurice FitzGerald, and Richard Fitzgodebert de la Roche, leader of a group of Flemish mercenaries. In this piecemeal fashion began the English invasion of Ireland in the summer of 1167. The great Norman territorial enterprise throughout western Europe that began in the tenth century was actually a tremendous expansion of Danish capacity in a system of feudal conquest that was over time assimilated, but never eliminated. While Henry spent most of his life dealing with inward-turning Norman, English and French forces, the English Strongbow represented the last outward wave of Norman migratory conquest. Diarmuid rallied support in south Leinster, and then bided his time for nearly two years, all the while urging his new allies to intervene in strength on his behalf. On 23 August 1170 Strongbow landed at Crook, near Waterford, with two hundred knights and a thousand soldiers. Two days later Strongbow captured Waterford in one day, pausing in the town’s cathedral to marry Diarmuid’s daughter as had been agreed three years earlier. Within a month, on 21 September, Diarmuid and Strongbow had occupied Dublin. Leinster, Ireland’s richest province, was completely in their hands. The invaders regarded themselves as Englishmen, not Normans. Superior weaponry played a large part in the English success, but so did the personal courage and military skill of their leaders. They used to great effect the longbow, which 245 years later was to destroy the 3

Ibid., p. 226.

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French knights at Agincourt. The Irish, accustomed to fighting on foot without armour, had no real defence against the invaders’ arrows and cavalry. It is ironic that, because of his success, Strongbow now found his whole enterprise at risk. A century earlier, William the Conqueror had established his Norman kingdom in England to the consternation of the French kings, setting off the centuries-long conflict between England and France. Henry, alarmed that his vassal might secure sufficient wealth and power to challenge his authority, simply ordered Strongbow and the other adventurers to return to their homes by Easter 1171, and, in order to prevent further reinforcements from reaching them, he also placed an embargo on all sailings from England and Wales to Ireland. For any who refused to obey, the penalty was to be forfeiture of their lands in England, Wales and France. Strongbow and his colleagues tried to change Henry’s mind by promising to hold their newly won lands in the King’s name. While waiting for Henry II’s reply, however, in May 1171 Diarmuid MacMurrough died and Strongbow had to undertake a new campaign in Leinster – because of Henry’s embargo, without hope of reinforcements – to force acceptance of his claim to the kingship. He found himself under such severe pressure from Rory O’Connor, who laid siege to Strongbow in Dublin during the summer of 1171, that he offered to submit to him, ‘to become his man and hold Leinster of him’. O’Connor would only agree to the English keeping the towns of Dublin, Waterford and Wexford, and Strongbow refused to accept these terms. He was saved from defeat only by the courage and skill of one of his lieutenants who, with a surprise attack, routed O’Connor’s army and lifted the siege. In September, Strongbow heard from Henry that he could, after all, keep his new lands on condition that he held them in the King’s name and that the King himself would have Dublin, Waterford, Wexford and extensive tracts of land in Leinster. Henry, forced by Strongbow’s success to intervene in Ireland, found that the establishment of a potentially rival kingdom in Ireland was now under way. On 17 October 1171, Henry himself landed at Waterford with 500 knights and over 3,500 men-at-arms and archers. It was a formidable army, calculated to impress not only Strongbow but also the native Irish. The following day Strongbow did homage, and most of the

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kings and chiefs of Leinster and Munster followed suit as Henry travelled to Lismore and then to Cashel where he arranged for a synod which, while dealing with matters of Church practice, also secured the recognition by each Irish bishop of Henry’s overlordship of Ireland. The synod also helped Henry make peace with the papacy which, since the murder of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170, had threatened him with excommunication. As a result of the synod of Cashel, Pope Alexander III, Adrian IV’s successor, wrote congratulating Henry personally, conferring on him the title ‘Lord of Ireland’, congratulating the Irish bishops for accepting Henry, and congratulating the Irish leaders who had sworn him fealty. It was almost inevitable that in 1175, three years after Henry himself had returned home, Rory O’Connor should travel to England and, with the Treaty of Windsor, swear allegiance to Henry. By 1250, less than eighty years after Strongbow first landed in Ireland, three-quarters of the country was under English control, with only the rocky lands of Connaught and west Ulster not penetrated. Within a generation of the invasion, most of the leading churchmen in Ireland were English, and they secured the wishes of the papacy, decreed by the synod of Cashel, that ‘the divine offices shall be celebrated according to the usage of the Church of England’. They also ensured that the Church in Ireland would be loyal to the English Crown. This loyalty, even in the centuries after the Reformation, remained in the Irish Church. After the Reformation, popes often supported English Protestant monarchs because they recognised, as the English empire expanded, the usefulness of having an influence on those who ran the empire through the ever-faithful Catholic Irish. The English brought to Ireland not only a strong military tradition, but also a different English legal structure of common law based upon the personal ownership of land and not, as in Irish Brehon Law, ownership vested in an extended family or clan. To protect their lands, and to enforce their laws, the English built castles, at first with earth and timber, but soon with stone and mortar. Dublin Castle, which was to become the seat of English government in Ireland, was begun in 1204 by King John (of Robin Hood fame) on the site of the old Norse fort which dominated the city from the

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southern banks of the river Liffey. John also commenced the building of St Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland’s first cathedral. The walled towns of Galway, New Ross, Athenry and Drogheda were founded, and other towns were built all over Ireland. The fortified nature of English buildings testified to the Englishmen’s own warlike qualities as well as to the fact that they were clearly invaders, surrounded by hostile and resentful Irishmen. They are given to treachery more than any other nation, and never keep the faith they have pledged . . . So that, when you have used the utmost precaution, when you have been most vigilant, for your own security and safety . . . then begins your time to fear; for then especially their treachery is awake, when you suppose that, relying on the fullness of your security, you are off your guard. That is the moment for them to fly to their citadel of wickedness . . . by taking the opportunity of catching you unawares.4

Why the invaded should not try to rid themselves of the invaders by any means escaped Giraldus. He was a brilliant propagandist seeking to cast a rosy glow on the exploits of his relatives (Strongbow was a cousin) while castigating the native Irish as immoral and undisciplined and thus of no real threat to upright, courageous and evervigilant Englishmen. Perceptions such as his were to colour English views of the Irish for centuries afterwards, and still find an echo today. The yoke of obedience was never properly positioned by the English in Ireland. Up to the Famine of the 1840s, English authority was problematical in large sections of the country. The first Irish Parliament was recorded in 1264, established on the English model, with Anglo-Irish representatives coming from every part of the country except Connaught and west Ulster. By 1300, some towns and boroughs were also represented, but with the exception of brief periods in the seventeenth century, not until 1922 did an Irish parliament represent the majority of the native Irish people. One of the first laws passed by the thirteenth-century Parliament prohibited the Anglo-Irish from wearing Gaelic dress because it confused relationships between the governors and the governed. The relationship that the parliament established with the bulk of the 4

Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland (London, 1894), p. 135.

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Irish people was to last five centuries. It was a parliament of and for the ruling group in Ireland and, unlike England where Parliament came to represent wider and wider interests, in Ireland the Parliament remained the possession of narrow interests always conscious of their fragile position. There were not enough Anglo-Irish ever to release them from dependence upon the political disorganisation of the native kings and chiefs they lived amongst, and from time to time this dependence itself was challenged. In 1258 the leading native Irish leaders united behind Brian O’Neill, the senior member of the great Ulster family, and declared him King of Ireland. In 1263 a number of Irish leaders invited King Haakon IV of Norway to lead them against the Anglo-Irish, but this unity was short-lived. A severe threat to Anglo-Irish security came in 1315 from Scotland after the defeat the previous year of King Edward II of England by Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. Conquest of Ireland was a natural step in the Scottish king’s dream of a Celtic kingdom. His brother, Edward Bruce, landed at Larne in September 1315 and within a year controlled most of Ireland north of Dublin. Had Edward Bruce and his troops been less rapacious, the invasion would probably have received widespread Irish support and succeeded. As it was, the Bruces lost their early Irish allies, and when in 1317 Pope John XXII supported Edward II by excommunicating Bruce’s clerical allies, the back of the invasion was broken. Edward Bruce was defeated and killed at Dundalk the following year by an Anglo-Irish army reinforced from England. In the first two hundred years after the invasion, the Anglo-Irish were able to look, in extremis, to support from England. But when in 1337 the Hundred Years War between France and England began, Anglo-Irishmen had no choice but to accept and make the best of their minority position. This was not too difficult since willingness to compromise was one of their attributes, and since the invasion also brought some benefits. They offered peace and stability to those who submitted to them, in contrast to the feuding which had characterised the relationships between native Irish kings. They did not, in general, attempt to dismember Gaelic society, preferring instead to encourage native Irishmen to continue to farm and herd as before. Only the Gaelic nobility was displaced, and then only because they challenged the Anglo-Irish for power. Individual Gaelic leaders who accepted

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Anglo-Irish sovereignty were treated as equals, and intermarriage was common. As the years went past, succeeding generations of Anglo-Irishmen became more and more Gaelicised in their ways, adopting the Brehon Laws and the customs of the country. Just as in previous centuries with previous invaders, the Gaels assimilated the Anglo-Irish too. A measure of the extent of this process is illustrated by the Statutes of Kilkenny, promulgated by the government in 1366, which decreed that the two races, English and Gaelic, should remain separate: marriage between the races was made a capital offence, and AngloIrishmen were forbidden to play the Irish harp or speak Gaelic. The fears underlying these edicts were largely justified, and the statutes themselves were a confession of defeat. The government responsible for the Statutes of Kilkenny was effective only in an area of Leinster around Dublin that was coming to be known as the English Pale. The wealth of the province and of the city had attracted the attention of most of the English settlers as well as of the English Crown. Thus it naturally became a haven for English immigrants and of English law and practice. The statutes, which remained in force until 1613, were part of a constant effort to prevent the English Pale from being assimilated in the same way as the AngloIrish. As the Statutes of Kilkenny explained: Whereas at the conquest of the land of Ireland and for a long time after, the English of the said land used the English language . . . Now many English of the said land, forsaking the English language, fashion, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion and language of the Irish enemies, and also have made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies.

By the close of the fourteenth century, the Anglo-Irish had become more Irish than English, and many of them contributed to the revival of Gaelic literature and culture that took place during the period 1200 to 1400. Gerald FitzMaurice, third Earl of Desmond, who from 1367 to 1369 served as Justiciar (the King’s Deputy) of Ireland, was known to his contemporaries as ‘Gerald the Poet’ for his Gaelic compositions (he is credited with being the originator of Gaelic love poetry) and, as the Annals of the Four Masters later declared, he ‘excelled all the English and many of the Irish in knowledge of the

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Irish language, poetry and history’. Resurgent Gaelic chieftains, often with the support of Gaelicised English families, gained control of more and more land. Art MacMurrough in 1376 was able to reestablish a Gaelic kingdom of his own in Leinster. The cost of defending the Pale and of buying off neighbouring chiefs and warlords such as MacMurrough began to tell heavily upon the English royal exchequer. In 1394, during a lull in the Hundred Years War, King Richard II came to Ireland with a large army to reassert royal authority. He was the first English king to set foot in Ireland since Henry II in 1171–2. MacMurrough submitted to him, only to rebel immediately after Richard’s departure, killing in battle Roger Mortimer, the childless king’s heir. Richard returned to Ireland in 1399 to bring MacMurrough to terms, but instead found his own crown challenged in England by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster. The king sailed back to England to meet deposition and death in the Tower of London. For the next hundred years, English rule in Ireland was in practice confined to the area of the Pale. England had never achieved conquest. The invaders simply became a different group of warring chiefs, conforming to the practices and customs around them. And they were from the outset viewed by the Irish not as conquerors, but as another group vying for wealth and power. Giraldus Cambrensis, writing at the time of the original invasion, quoted one of the invaders, Maurice Fitzgerald, lamenting that his kinsmen in Ireland were regarded with mixed feelings by Henry II: What then do we look for? Is it succour from our own country that we expect? Nay, such is our lot, that what the Irish are to the English, we too, being now considered as Irish, are the same. The one island does not hold us in greater detestation than the other.5

Over time, the low numbers of the invaders produced a defensive psychology to explain their situation to themselves and to England. Portrayal of the Irish as racially and culturally primitive (despite the assimilation that actually took place) was a particular result, producing propaganda that flourished for eight hundred years.

5

Giraldus Cambrensis, The Conquest of Ireland (London, 1894), p. 223.

chapter 2

Ascendancy

From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries the Church, like the Anglo-Irish, became more and more removed from English influence and control. The religious orders – Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustinians – which had arrived with the English invasion had been instrumental in reforming the Irish Church, helping to enforce the payment of tithes and establishing a diocesan episcopate and a parochial system. However, by the early thirteenth century, the discipline and practices of the Irish Church had degenerated, and the Synod of Kells’ acceptance of papal authority subordinated the Irish Church to the papacy at the most sordid period in the history of the popes. As early as 1221, a visiting French monk noted, ‘In the abbeys of this country the severity of Cistercian discipline and order is observed in scarcely anything but the wearing of the habit.’ The Irish clergy were noted for the familial character of their profession. In 1250 the Bishop of Ossory complained to the Pope about hereditary succession to the parishes of his diocese. Decrees from the primate of Armagh (who was always from the Pale, a foreigner or an Englishman) and from various provincial synods in the fifteenth century had little effect. In 1546 a visitation of the rural deanery of Tullaghoge, co. Tyrone, revealed some of the clergy as ‘concubinary’. Mahon, son of Bishop Turlough O’Brien of Killaloe (1483–1526), became Bishop of Kilmacduagh (1503–32) and married a cousin. Their son, Turlough, became Bishop of Killaloe (1556–69) like his grandfather, and like his father also married a cousin, a daughter of the first Earl of Thomond. Amongst the laity, Gaelic customs predominated. Divorce, secular marriage, fosterage and common property ownership remained widespread, among native Irishmen and the Anglo-Irish outside the Pale as 50

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well. Amongst the laity, two great Anglo-Irish families (from the fourteenth century onwards known as ‘Old English’) dominated the scene: the Butlers in their earldom of Ormond, who remained substantially loyal to the Crown, and the FitzGeralds in their earldoms of Desmond and Kildare, who came to resist the Crown and any government unless it was their own. They conducted their affairs like the chieftains around them, according to the Brehon Laws and private agreements, with little reference to any outside authority. As with the O’Neills and O’Donnells of Ulster, who regained supremacy in their areas, this state of affairs remained unchallenged until the Reformation. All built fortified tower houses as strongholds, the ruins of over two thousand of which still dot Ireland. During the same period in England, windowed manor houses were the order of the day, reflecting the deep difference in political and social conditions between the two countries. The turmoil of the times in Ireland inevitably affected England. In September 1447, King Henry VI appointed Richard, Duke of York, as his Lieutenant in Ireland in an attempt to divert the duke’s ambitions to take Henry’s crown. Richard proved a wonderfully skilled politician. Landing near Dublin with about six hundred troops, he acknowledged his English and Irish ancestors including Brian Boru, and made plain his wish to secure the support of all Irishmen in his coming struggle for the throne. Accordingly, he promoted and favoured those – regardless of ancestry – who submitted to him. As one contemporary observer put it, ‘ere twelve months come to an end, the wildest Irishman in Ireland shall be sworn English’. His son George, afterwards Duke of Clarence, born in Dublin three months after Richard’s arrival, was baptised in the capital. The event was celebrated by the ordinary people of Dublin, and thereafter the white rose of York always attracted Irish support: forty years later the imposter Lambert Simnel was crowned King of England in Dublin in the belief he was George’s son. When Richard returned to England in September 1450, he left behind a country broadly loyal to him. When he was forced to flee after his defeat at the battle of Ludlow, the second major battle of the Wars of the Roses, he returned to Ireland where his supporters controlled the country, and the Irish Parliament not only ordered the arrest and execution of a royal messenger who arrived with writs

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against him, but also went so far as to give the first clear statement of Irish independence. It was an Anglo-Irish Parliament, not a Gaelic one, but it reflected an Irish perception: The land of Ireland is, and at all times had been, corporate of itself by the ancient laws and customs used in the same, freed of the burden of any special law of the realm of England, save only such laws as the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons of the said land had been in great council or Parliament there held admitted, accepted, affirmed and proclaimed.

Only the personal line of the Crown was now considered to connect Ireland with England: the Irish Parliament was claiming sovereignty in its own country. Richard left Ireland in 1460, only to be killed at the battle of Wakefield. The following year the Yorkist cause triumphed, and Richard’s eldest son became King Edward IV of England. Loyalty to York continued after the first Tudor, Henry VII, became king in 1485. The Justiciar, Garret More FitzGerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, supported the claims of Lambert Simnel, and subsequently in 1491 of Perkin Warbeck, to be the Yorkist pretenders to the throne. FitzGerald, king of Ireland in all but name, persistently fought for Anglo-Irish freedom. Generations of English neglect had forced the Anglo-Irish to become self-sufficient and to compromise in a multitude of ways with Gaelic Ireland. They never became completely Gaelicised, but by the end of the fifteenth century, Anglo-Irishmen could count on general support whenever they challenged English rule: common identity was strong enough gradually to make the Crown aware that it must subdue and eventually recolonise the country.

tudors Henry VII took the first steps to re-establish the English Crown’s authority in Ireland outside the Pale. In 1494 he appointed Sir Edward Poynings his Deputy to bring the country to ‘whole and perfect obedience’. Poynings was completely loyal to his King. He was also an able soldier and administrator (FitzGerald wrote to a northern Gaelic chieftain that Poynings ‘is a better man than I’) and he quickly set about reducing the power of the Anglo-Irish. He called a Parliament of picked men at Drogheda which early

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in 1495 passed measures known as Poynings’ Law. This law, which remained in force until 1782, declared that an Irish Parliament could only meet with the King’s permission, and then could only pass laws previously approved by the King and his English Council. Poynings’ immediate purpose was to prevent another Simnel or Warbeck securing the blessings of an Irish legislature, or another more legitimate pretender finding in Ireland the protection and support Richard of York had found in 1459. The cost to the royal exchequer of supporting Poynings’ Irish administration began to tell. When FitzGerald swore to Henry VII that he would not support threats to the Tudor dynasty, the king decided that ‘since all Ireland cannot rule this man, this man must rule all Ireland’ and in 1496 FitzGerald succeeded Poynings as Deputy. For the next thirty-eight years, the FitzGeralds (‘Geraldines’) ruled Ireland on the unwritten understanding that as long as there was no Irish threat to the English Crown, and as long as most of the expense of Irish government was defrayed from Irish sources, the kings of England would leave the country alone. Had Henry VII’s Tudor successors maintained this policy, even Poynings’ Law, administered by men like FitzGerald, might have secured a degree of Irish freedom and an acceptance of English claims to Irish lordship which would have averted the strife and bitterness of the next four hundred years. Henry VIII and his Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, in contrast viewed Ireland as an untapped resource. Refusing to accept the hard experience that the country was always a net cost to the Exchequer (£16,000 in 1520) whenever the Crown actively tried to run its government, they viewed Ireland instead as being full of ‘the King’s decayed rents and embezzled lands’. The Earl of Surrey, appointed Lieutenant in 1519, was recalled two years later after reporting that he would need an army of over five thousand, with munitions, fortifications and supplies to match, in order to bring Ireland firmly under royal control. The Paledominated Council of Ireland (the small group of peers who ruled Ireland in consultation with the Deputy) regularly reported to the king that the Geraldines were plotting against him, and warned that the Pale was shrinking quickly under native pressure. In 1534, the Earl of Kildare’s eldest son, ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald, Lord Offaly, indeed rebelled, sending for aid to Pope

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Paul III at the very moment Henry VIII had broken with the Church. A royal army quickly defeated Silken Thomas who, together with five of his uncles, was put to death at Tyburn in 1537. But while Silken Thomas had sought only to take advantage of the schism for immediate political purposes, nevertheless by his appeal to foreign power and the Pope he established what was to become the traditional pattern of Irish dissidence and subversive nationalism. England’s difficulty was henceforth seen as Ireland’s opportunity; England’s enemies were to be Ireland’s friends. And while Catholicism was certainly a common denominator between Ireland and many of England’s enemies, it was always the national appeal, not the religious, which motivated Irishmen: in 1919 Irish nationalists despatched an envoy to the new, implacably atheist Bolshevik government of Russia to request ‘sympathetic recognition for Ireland as a sister state’, simply because Britain was supporting that government’s opponents. Henry VIII’s breach with Rome marked the beginning of this international element in Irish nationalism. The institution of an English-regulated Church after the English invasion was also to be the single most revolutionary event in Anglo-Irish relations. By the end of the sixteenth century, Ireland was a persistent source of anxiety to English governments as England’s Catholic European enemies proved again and again willing to fuel the flames of Irish nationalism with religious antagonism. Ireland’s location, both close to the British mainland and lying across England’s maritime links with her growing empire, meant that even if England could not fully exploit Ireland’s wealth, her strategic importance could not be overlooked. In 1579, Pope Gregory XIII and Philip II of Spain launched an expedition billed as a crusade which landed at Dingle, co. Kerry. The following year a papal force landed at Smerwick, also in Kerry. In 1601, over 3,000 Spaniards landed at Kinsale, co. Cork, to help an Irish rebellion. In 1690, Louis XIV of France sent a 7,000-strong army to Cork which later fought for James II at the Battle of the Boyne. In 1798 over 4,000 French soldiers landed in Ireland to help a very different rebellion. During the Second World War, one of Churchill’s principal fears was that German U-boats might find Irish bases. Another consequence of the Henrician Reformation was that the endurance of Catholicism in Ireland added a further element to those

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of language, culture, geography and tradition which separated her from England. This was not, however, immediately the case. The Reformation at first took as much hold in Ireland as in England. The Act of Supremacy which in 1534 declared Henry VIII supreme head of the Church in England did not extend to Ireland. Three years later, in December 1537, after some opposition, the Irish Parliament passed its own Act declaring Henry to be ‘the only Supreme Head on Earth of the whole Church of Ireland’. The great age of Irish Christianity had been past for some time. The Church in Ireland was kept alive largely by the efforts of the friars: the episcopal hierarchy was more concerned with accumulating wealth and with the politics of Tudor government than with proselytising. In 1515, one observer reported, ‘There is no Archbishop, no Bishop, Abbot or Prior, Parson nor Vicar, nor any other person of the Church, high or low, great or small, English or Irish, that is accustomed to preach the word of God, saving the poor Friars beggars.’ By 1517 the great cathedrals of Clonmacnoise and Ardagh were in ruins. When Henry VIII in 1536 appointed as Archbishop of Dublin George Browne, the English Augustinian who had married him to Anne Boleyn, the Irish bishops welcomed him. They also accepted with little resistance the king’s claims to religious supremacy. When the monasteries were suppressed in Ireland, as in England, the Irish bishops, nobles and chiefs proved just as willing as their English counterparts to despoil them. Over four hundred Irish monasteries and abbeys were sold to laymen under Henry and his daughter Elizabeth I. The Ulster Irish chief, Turlough Luineach O’Neill, for example, in 1575 personally insisted upon securing the right to ‘all the lands of monasteries, abbacies and of other spiritual buildings’ within the lands granted to him by the Crown. Moreover, in Ireland, in contrast to England, there was no popular resistance to the Reformation: no Pilgrimage of Grace, no martyrs, no Sir Thomas More. In 1541 when the Irish Parliament passed an Act declaring Henry VIII to be King of Ireland, there was no opposition. From that time to the present day, English monarchs were to claim their Irish title as of right endorsed by Parliament and not, as had been the previous claim to the ‘Lordship of Ireland’, derived from the papal grant to Henry II four hundred years earlier.

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The Irish Reformation Parliament did not represent more than about nine counties and between twenty and thirty boroughs, and even among these only the Anglo-Irish ruling groups. In 1515 an investigation Henry VIII ordered, ‘The State of Ireland and Plan for Its Reformation’, described the nature of the country and the problems of governing outside the Pale: And first of all to make his Grace understand that there may be more than sixty countries, called regions in Ireland, inhabited with the King’s Irish enemies; some regions as big as a shire, some more, some less, unto a little; some as big as half a shire and some a little less; where reigneth more than sixty chief captains wherein some call themselves Kings, some Princes, some Dukes, some Archdukes, that liveth only by the sword and obeyeth to no other temporal persons, but only to himself that is strong, and every of the said captains maketh war and peace for himself . . . Also there be thirty great captains of the English folk that follow the same Irish order . . . and every of them maketh war and peace for himself without any licence of the King.

In 1541 the king took steps to rectify this state of affairs and to extend his authority by having the Irish Parliament enact laws of Surrender and Regrant under which all land in Ireland was deemed to belong to the Crown, who would ‘regrant’ it to those loyal to him. This was a final body blow to the Gaelic customs of Brehon Law and the common ownership of property. Those Irish chiefs who surrendered their lands and swore fealty would have their lands regranted to them personally. The chief of the Ulster O’Neills, Con, submitted on this basis in December 1541, taking the title Earl of Tyrone and having his eldest son recognised as successor rather than his other son, Shane, or his nephews who had traditional Gaelic claims to be considered. As a result of Surrender and Regrant, Con’s grandson, Hugh, was to find that after a failed rebellion his rights to his lands and his authority within them were at the disposal of the Crown. Under Edward VI (reigned 1547–53) and Mary Tudor (1553–58), Henry VIII’s son and daughter, the area in which royal government was effective was extended. In a series of campaigns launched from the Pale against the chiefs of Laois and Offaly who resisted the Surrender and Regrant legislation, royal armies established the first modern forts at Maryborough (now Portlaoise), co. Laois, and Philipstown (now Daingean), co. Offaly, which were to become the springboards for a new Tudor policy.

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plantation In 1521, the King’s Lieutenant, the Earl of Surrey, first suggested plantation as a means of subduing Ireland by replacing disloyal Irishmen with loyal English colonists. In June 1550, in the middle of Edward VI’s reign, the English privy council decided ‘that Laois and Offaly, being the countries late of the O’Connors and O’Moores, should be let out to the King’s subjects at convenient rents, to the intent it may both be inhabited and also be of more strength for the King’s Majesty’. The first planters, however, found that those they attempted to dispossess could fight back, and the government decided in the face of persistent and effective Irish resistance that too great a military presence would be required to sustain the plantation, and this first attempt collapsed. It was under the devoutly Catholic Mary that the first effective plantations took place. When Mary came to the throne in 1553, Protestantism was already waning in Ireland. This was partly because of the small number of towns and the lack of a strong and numerous middle class, which elsewhere in Europe provided the foundation congregations of Protestantism. It was also because of Tudor insensitivity and short-sightedness in attacking Gaelic society while simultaneously attempting revolutions in church and state. The Irish Reformation Parliament in 1536 had also passed a law to promote ‘English Order, Habit and Language’, essentially reaffirming the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366. The Gaelic language was prohibited along with Gaelic dress – saffron-dyed clothing, moustaches, long hair and forelocks. The brehons and Gaelic poets and harpists were banned. Intermarriage between the native Irish and the English was again forbidden, and in certain circumstances was made treasonable. In 1549 the Mass was banned. The English-language Book of Common Prayer, drawn up by the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, was foisted upon the Irish Church, the overwhelming majority of whose members spoke nothing but Gaelic. The Book was translated into Irish in 1612. Irishmen found that on top of the English view of them as an inferior race, English government had found a new method of oppression through religion. It was not that there was any particular Irish wish to remain Catholic, but there was a wish for Christian rites which in practice was denied by the banning of the Mass and the

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prohibition of Gaelic. There was no rejoicing when the Catholic Mary came to power. Dowdall, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh whom she appointed, urged plantation as a policy, writing to the Queen that the solution to the problem of the rebellious Irish – his own flock – was to drive out or kill them, and settle their lands with Englishmen. In its pursuit of mastery, Tudor government was not swayed by religious distinctions. Mary’s plantations, again in Laois and Offaly – renamed King’s and Queen’s Counties – were conducted on military lines and were of a garrison nature, with planters being left in no doubt that their presence in Ireland was intended to secure royal authority and to defend it in arms whenever called upon to do so. Tudor government, however, while ruthless in exacting its requirements, might be conciliatory when this was politic. In 1520 Henry VIII sent a dispatch to Surrey, which laid out an approach to Irish government that, despite some lapses, was to underpin the rationale of English/British administration ever afterwards: The King expects to get lands back which he had wrongfully lost, he does not wish to oppose injustice by injustice . . . Like as we being their sovereign lord and prince though of our absolute power we be above the laws yet we will in no wise take anything from them that righteously appertains to them so of good congruence they be bound both by law, fidelities and allegiance to restore unto us our own.

What successive English governments never properly understood was that, for the Irish to accept English fair play, no matter how fair, was to submit to English claims and English rights over Ireland. A successful measure of conciliation was Queen Elizabeth I’s establishment in Dublin in 1592 of the first university in Ireland, only one college, Trinity, being founded. It was part of an attempt to counteract the growing tendency for young Irishmen to study in Continental countries hostile to England. For its first thirty years, the university, although Protestant, freely accepted Catholics and taught Irish language and literature; in its whole existence it never banned Catholics per se. The ruthless side of Tudor government, however, left deeper memories. From 1566 to 1583, the Munster FitzGeralds, Earls of Desmond, maintained a more or less constant guerrilla war against

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the government and its agents, receiving help from Spain and, in 1580, from Pope Gregory XIII. Coercion and martial law became the rule in Munster during this period. One of the English commanders, Sir Walter Raleigh, slaughtered every member of an Italian mercenary invasion force in the service of Spain in 1580. His half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, frankly described ‘putting man, woman and child to the sword’. Sir William Pelham, Lord Justice of Ireland, explained his tactics to the queen in 1579: ‘I keep them from their harvest, and have taken great preys of cattle from them, by which it seemeth the poor people . . . offer themselves with their wives and children rather to be slain by the army than to suffer the famine that now in extremity beginneth to pinch them.’ The poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen, who had come to Ireland as Secretary to the Deputy in 1580, pictured Munster after the rebellion had ended with the capture and execution of the fourteenth Earl of Desmond in 1583: Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves. And if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue there withal; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast. Yet sure, in all that war there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they themselves had wrought.1

Following the Desmond rebellion, over 500,000 acres of FitzGerald land in Munster were confiscated in 1584 by the Crown and regranted to ‘undertakers’. They brought a new twist to the scheme of plantation. Where previously English planters were expected to control their native tenants, the undertakers agreed to repopulate their lands with English settlers, driving out the Irish. Raleigh was given 40,000 acres; Spenser 4,000. However, the plantation was only partly successful: it faced the perennial problem of attracting colonists in sufficient numbers to defend themselves against the understandably vengeful dispossessed surrounding them. In 1591, 1

Edmund Spenser, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland (London, 1596).

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when The MacMahon of Monaghan was charged with treason and his lands were confiscated, Elizabeth rejected a plantation settlement in favour of dividing MacMahon’s lands amongst his neighbours. The most serious Irish rebellion since the English invasion was generated directly by Elizabeth’s determination to establish Tudor government throughout the country. Hugh O’Neill, leader of the Ulster family, had been brought up at her court and was an unexpected rebel. He had served in the armies which put down Desmond. In 1582 his loyalty had been rewarded with the title Earl of Tyrone and a grant of the O’Neill lands. Then, in 1588, he helped survivors of the Spanish Armada wrecked on the Ulster coast and in 1591 organised the escape of Red Hugh O’Donnell and of his cousins, Henry and Art O’Neill, from Dublin Castle where they were being held hostage for the good behaviour of their clansmen in Ulster. In 1593, Red Hugh organised a rebellious confederation of Irish chiefs and, like the FitzGeralds in Munster some years before, sought foreign aid with an appeal to the forces of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In 1595 Hugh O’Neill joined with O’Donnell in open revolt, calling for a national rising as champion of ‘Christ’s Catholic religion’. This was a watershed in Irish history: for the first time since Rory O’Connor had attempted to expel the Anglo-Irish, O’Neill stirred the glimmerings of a national resistance. Furthermore, the appeal for and expectation of foreign support in the name of a common faith demonstrated that a Catholic Ireland could find powerful allies, and that Anglo-Irish relations would never again be a purely bilateral affair. O’Neill’s rebellion was marked by early success. In 1598 at the Battle of Yellow Ford on the Blackwater river near Armagh, he ambushed a government force of over 4,000, killing more than half, including the commander. He began to be spoken of as ‘Prince of Ireland’, a harking back to his family’s ancient claims to the high kingship. In the winter of 1599–1600 he made what amounted to a royal progress through Munster. To deal with him, Elizabeth despatched Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, as Deputy. He arrived in February 1600 and immediately proposed to ring Ulster with forts and create famine ‘as the chief instrument of reducing this Kingdom’. O’Neill appealed to Spain, stressing the religious aspect of his struggle by sending to the Pope for blessing of his war as a Catholic crusade.

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In September 1601 about 3,500 Spaniards landed unopposed at Kinsale, co. Cork. In November, O’Neill and O’Donnell marched south to meet them, and on Christmas Day the Irish army fell upon Mountjoy as he besieged the Spaniards in Kinsale. Within hours O’Neill was defeated. It was a crucial defeat, marking the end of the war and the beginning of the end of Gaelic Ireland. O’Donnell went to Spain to canvass further support, but died there in September 1602, probably poisoned by an Irish agent of Mountjoy. Hugh O’Neill returned to Ulster, finally submitting to Mountjoy on 23 March 1603, one day before Queen Elizabeth died. Ulster, the last unconquered province, was thrown open to English rule, and at her death Elizabeth was the first English monarch who could properly claim control of most of this second kingdom. The legacy of Elizabeth’s Irish wars, however, was long and bitter on both sides. After his submission, O’Neill journeyed to London where he was received by the new Scottish Stuart king, James I. Sir John Harington, an English commander who had fought against O’Neill for years, spoke for many after seeing O’Neill’s reception. ‘How did I labour after that knave’s destruction. I adventured perils by land and sea, was near starving, ate horse flesh in Munster, and all to quell that man who now smileth in peace with those that did hazard their lives to destroy him.’ For some time, the king and Deputy Mountjoy pursued a liberal policy, going so far as to tolerate Catholicism. But in 1605, with the fears of a Catholic seizure of power inflamed by Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, the pressures on James to demonstrate that he was not a closet Catholic himself forced a tougher line. Religious toleration was ended and a new Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, used Surrender and Regrant to whittle away the O’Neill and O’Donnell lands. O’Neill was on the point of arguing his case in London when Red Hugh’s younger brother, Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, pre-empted him by plotting a secret flight to France. O’Neill realised that Chichester and the government would believe this to be another scheme for foreignassisted rebellion and would implicate him, and thus felt no option but to join the flight. On 4 September 1607 the two earls set sail with ninety-nine followers in a French ship from Rathmullan, co. Donegal, never to return. O’Donnell died in Rome the following year and was buried in the Franciscan church of San Pietro di Montorio on the Janiculum hill.

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Eight years later O’Neill was laid to rest beside him with royal honours. English agents who had kept an eye on the great earl during his last years reported that in the evenings after dinner he had only one subject of conversation: ‘his face would glow, he would strike the table, he would say that they would yet have a good day in Ireland’. Sir John Davies, Attorney General of Ireland, saw O’Neill’s exile as enabling the government to complete the work of Saint Patrick, ‘for Saint Patrick did only banish the poisonous worms, but suffered the men full of poison to inhabit the land still’. To Irishmen, however, this Flight of the Earls, as it soon became known, embodied a desperate determination never to submit. Over the next two centuries it fell largely to exiles to keep the flame of an Irish nationhood alight. At home, Irishmen found that if they did not abide by English law and custom, their future was limited. As the nineteenth-century Irish unionist historian William Lecky wrote with grave honesty, to Tudors and Stuarts ‘the slaughter of Irishmen was looked upon as literally the slaughter of wild beasts’. The flight of the earls had the immediate consequence that their lands were seized by the Crown and designated in 1608 the new counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. A committee appointed in London to prepare a detailed scheme of plantation recommended in January 1609 that planters should outnumber the native Irish. The following year its proposals were put into effect, and Scottish and English settlers were invited to colonise the seized lands. As in the earlier Munster plantations, undertakers were granted lands cleared completely of their native inhabitants which they paid rent to the Crown for and agreed to populate with imported tenants. Evicted Irishmen were only allowed to live in certain areas. The most striking development, however, was the creation of twenty-three new towns including Belfast, each laid out in a grid pattern with a central square or ‘diamond’. The guilds of the City of London were granted the towns of Derry and Coleraine and the lands around, both Derry and co. Coleraine being renamed Londonderry after the city guilds’ investment there (the use of the older ‘Derry’, while commonplace, reflects nationalist sentiment opposed to London’s ‘theft’). By September 1610 the reorganisation was complete, and within three years most of the settlers had arrived. The counties of

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Down and Antrim had been settled privately and for the most part before the great Ulster plantation of James I, providing an adult English population of about 7,500 in 1622. To this was added a new, largely Scottish, group of about 13,000 settlers in the Ulster plantation, bringing the Anglo-Scottish population of Ulster to over 20,000 in the early 1620s. While more planters settled in Ulster within a shorter space of time than in any other plantation, still there were not enough to make the settlement viable without native labour and therefore tenants. The settlers’ fear of the natives contributed to their feelings of insecurity. ‘Although there be no apparent enemy,’ an observer wrote in 1610, ‘nor any visible main force, yet the wood-kern and many other (who have now put on the smiling countenance of contentment) do threaten every house, if opportunity of time and place doth serve.’ In Derry, settlers worked ‘as it were with the sword in one hand and the axe in the other’. Two developments flowed from this state of affairs. Many undertakers defaulted in their payments to the Exchequer because their expected rent income did not materialise as the settlement fell below its planned numerical strength; and many native Irishmen quickly came back as tenants and labourers for desperate landlords on lands they had themselves once owned. To the Irish, the slaughters and plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the attack on Gaelic society, could only be explained in racist terms. To the planters and the government, however, the Irish were traitors who refused to accept the rights of conquest. O’Neill’s rebellion encouraged them simply to regard every Irishman as a traitor, and so brutal measures were felt to be justified. At the same time it must be pointed out that the Crown dealt as harshly with English traitors and opponents, who had to face the tortures of the Star Chamber. English martyrs (there were few Irish ones) were burnt alive at the stake or hanged, drawn and quartered. Outside the British Isles, religious intolerance was even more severe. In South America the conquistadores indulged in an orgy of plunder and slaughter which makes Ireland’s experience minor in comparison. The Roman Catholic Inquisition, instituted in 1229, was in full flood with the Counter-Reformation. On St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1582, in France the government encouraged mobs to

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murder thousands of Huguenots. English government in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has to be seen in relation to the age. cromwell Throughout the Tudor period, and despite their Gaelicisation, the Old English families had always ultimately regarded themselves as conquerors. The original invaders were their forebears and, as Henry II had been quick to realise, the enterprise had been undertaken for selfish purposes, not in the interests of the Crown. As Lord of Ireland, the English king had exercised authority in the country by papal gift. Once Henry VIII, however, determined to be King of Ireland in his own right, fundamental questions were raised. Old English families like the FitzGeralds, and Gaelic families like the O’Neills, saw that by maintaining their Catholic faith they could advance logical and legal arguments against royal authority and thus secure their lands in the face of the Surrender and Regrant legislation which underpinned the Ulster plantation. The Catholic Church, by a diplomatic policy of appointing native Irishmen to native, and Old English to Old English, sees, successfully encouraged a perception in which the cause of Catholicism came to be identified with the cause of a ‘free’ Ireland during the seventeenth century. The first demonstration of this new development came with the Irish Parliament of 1613. Since 1543, the Parliament had met only four times (compared to the English Parliament’s convening about twenty times over the same period with many separate sessions), and there had been a twenty-fiveyear lapse by the time the 1613 Parliament met. It differed from its Tudor predecessors in several respects. Unlike the English Parliament which excluded Catholics, the Irish Parliament still accepted them; of the 232 members, 100 were Catholic. Most were Old English, although eighteen native Irishmen had seats. The insecurity of land titles in the face of royal claims had generated a (largely Catholic) parliamentary opposition to the Crown, which while loudly protesting about religious and constitutional issues was concerned to establish claims to property and ownership and not to seek religious change. Since the Parliament had been summoned to ratify the

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Ulster plantation, this opposition and the reasons for it marked a significant change in the politics of the Old English. As was to be shown during the reign of Charles I, the Old English were to identify more and more with the native Irish in resisting English and Scottish encroachment, appealing directly to the King over the heads of Dublin officials. Thus, after the Flight of the Earls, despite their qualms about their security of tenure Irish landlords, both Old English and native, reconciled their position by accepting royal claims in theory while resisting them in practice. They demonstrated this in the 1613 Parliament by a boycott of the Parliament while they appealed to James I for satisfaction, leaving the Protestant MPs to legalise the seizure of the Ulster lands, and to attaint the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell for treason. However, this opposition reflected only a section of the governing group. The Parliament formally abolished Brehon Laws, and the whole panoply of English procedure – juries, assizes, and common law – was introduced instead. The new laws simply meant that the persecution of Gaelic Ireland was backed by yet more law. Gaelic customs remained, and the Brehon Laws continued to be enforced in areas remote from central government for generations to come. The Irish people were to find that apparent conformity with official regulations was the simple way of getting by, keeping their Gaelic sensibilities hidden and secret and for themselves. Faced with the obvious resistance of the Old English and the surreptitious opposition of the Irish to their government, the Stuarts increasingly placed the Irish administration in the hands of men sent from England. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, sent by Charles I in August 1633 as Deputy, did more than any other administrator to emphasise the differences between the governors and governed. He came determined to establish an Irish administration independent of local influence and controlled by himself alone as the King’s representative. At the same time he faced the perennial problem of the cost of ruling Ireland, made onerous by the constant need for a large army both to subdue rebels and to repel potential invaders. By 1625, when Charles I became King, the yearly cost of this army was in the region of £70,000, and the government began to cast about for money-raising schemes to meet this cost. The Old English were no longer trusted with the defence of the country: they had become too

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closely identified with the native Irish and their loyalties to each other rather than to the Crown. So in 1628 Charles intimated his willingness to grant his ‘Grace and Bounty’ to them, making concessions to the Old English on religious, constitutional and property issues, in return for their being ready to pay for his army and administration. The ‘Graces’ were important to the Old English, seeming to acknowledge that they enjoyed a special standing and favour in the eyes of the Crown. Of course, had they really enjoyed such a position, then the Crown would not have needed to bargain with them to pay for its army. One of Wentworth’s first acts was to summon an Irish Parliament of picked members which he manipulated to secure subsidies; he then refused to confirm the Graces. The Old English were helpless. They might grumble and complain, but they did not alone have the strength to defy this chicanery, let alone Wentworth’s singleminded and unscrupulous purpose of imposing effective government – the policy of ‘Thorough’ which Archbishop Laud was to employ with disastrous results in England. To Wentworth, ‘Thorough’ was a function of government’s financial strength and independence. Wentworth’s investigations convinced him that Ireland could produce much greater revenues. The weakness of land titles (curing which was to have been the most important element in the Graces) was an obvious source of potential income. Landlords and tenants with weak titles would be faced with the choice of paying for security, or having lands taken and sold by the Crown. The whole province of Connaught was claimed in this way, with between half and onequarter of the land designated for plantation, and the remainder confirmed for considerable fees to the sitting landowners. Old English and native Irish were treated alike, being subject to fines and confiscation on the least excuse, and sometimes with forged documents. The Earl of Cork was forced to surrender some Church lands and fined £15,000 for not fulfilling the terms of his original grant. The City of London guilds had to pay a fine of £70,000 and lost their charters in Ulster for similar reasons. Wentworth conceded religious toleration to Catholics in return for a payment of £20,000, although in 1634 for the first time Catholic students at Trinity College were compelled to take the Oath of Supremacy. Those who refused could still attend the university, but could not receive degrees, scholarships or fellowships.

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When Charles I went to war with the Scottish Presbyterians in 1639, Wentworth forced Scottish Protestants in Ulster to take the hated ‘Black Oath’ swearing allegiance to the King. Puritan and Presbyterian clergymen were replaced and dismissed as the Deputy sought to extend royal authority and to increase royal revenue through the Anglican Church of Ireland by first establishing uniform discipline with the Church of England, fierce anti-Catholicism, and then securing the ecclesiastical charges due to the Catholic Church before the Reformation. Article 80 of the Church, adopted in 1615, uniquely declared the Pope to be the ‘man of sin’, usually taken to be the Antichrist, in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians: so far from being the supreme head of the universal Church of Christ, that his works and doctrine do plainly discover him to be that man of sin, foretold in the holy Scriptures whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of his mouth, and abolish with the brightness of his coming.

In 1634 the Church of England’s 39 Articles were adopted in addition and, to the present day, while the 39 are accorded precedence, the fiercely anti-Catholic original 104 Articles have not been repealed. Wentworth succeeded in increasing royal revenues, but at the cost of forcing into opposition every powerful group in the country and some, like the London guilds, powerful in England too. By consistently acting as if he regarded the people of Ireland either as papists who would be prepared to pay for toleration, or potentially rebellious Scots who could be coerced through fear of native Irish revolt, Wentworth achieved the worst fears of his predecessors: an Ireland broadly united against the government. After he was recalled by Charles in November 1639, the Catholic Old English, the native Irish, and the Protestant New English (the Tudor and Stuart landlords, planters and administrators) combined with English Puritans at Westminster in the revolutionary Long Parliament to throw off Wentworth’s controls, to attaint him, and to bring him to his death in May 1641. It was only when the Puritans began to press for an end to the toleration of Catholics in 1641 that this strange alliance dissolved. What did not dissolve was the Catholic–Irish coherence that Wentworth had presumed and so had precipitated. Irish exiles in Europe had kept in touch with their homeland and proved willing to accept their Old English coreligionists as allies.

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The growing conflict in England between king and Parliament, and the growing strength of intolerant Puritanism, suggested that this was not just an opportune but a necessary moment for revolt to regain their lands. So it happened. An all-Ireland revolt was planned and then betrayed on the eve of its commencement on 23 October 1641. Nevertheless, in Ulster where many former landowners lived in the woods and mountains, it went ahead under the leadership of Sir Phelim O’Neill, a leading member of the dispossessed premier family of Ulster. The rebels captured Dundalk and besieged Drogheda. The Irish administration found itself in a quandary, not knowing whether to turn to the king or to Parliament, but within a year it became clear that the rebels recognised the Crown’s authority (but not its officers). They claimed that they were taking arms against the actions of overbearing administrators, and were prepared to support the king if he would recognise their claims. In addition, since Puritans and Presbyterian Scots planters in Ulster suffered the brunt of the rebellion and were offered support from Scotland and the Long Parliament, the divisions of the English Civil War were naturally reflected in Ireland. It is especially worth noting that even native Irish rebels from the outset of the rebellion (which was to last over eight years) accepted the right of the English Crown to rule Ireland. Not until the mid-nineteenth century were Irishmen to rebel for complete independence. Under James I, Catholic priests had been banned from entering Ireland, and fines had been imposed for non-attendance at Church of Ireland services. Thus the demands for toleration and the active participation of priests were natural to the rebellion. The general English view that Catholics were naturally traitors because the papal claim to the right to approve or depose rulers overrode the sovereignty of the King, seemed to be vindicated. But the rebellion was not religious: it arose simply from the ownership of land. In May 1642, Catholic priests met with the native Irish and Old English leaders to form the Confederation of Kilkenny. The Catholic Primate of Ireland, Archbishop O’Reilly of Armagh, had taken the lead in forming the Confederation, giving the rebellion a moral and quasiparliamentary framework, declaring that they were waging a just war against Puritans ‘who have always, but especially in recent years, plotted the destruction of the Catholics, the destruction of the Irish,

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and the abolition of the King’s prerogatives’. A supreme council set up in Kilkenny acted as the rebels’ government, and a general assembly – a parliament in all but name – was organised and met in October 1642, taking an oath to defend the Catholic faith and rights of the Crown, and asserting that they were upholding the royal authority against the English Parliament. The Confederation was plagued by internal arguments between the Old English, worried about their security of title, the native Irish exiles, worried that they had no lands at all, and the Catholic clergy who hoped for a religious war. Nevertheless, the Confederation maintained itself in common loyalty to the king and in military opposition to the Long Parliament. And despite clerical pressure, the Kilkenny assembly consistently refused to discriminate against Protestants, preferring instead to concern itself with landownership. Owen Roe O’Neill, who had fled with his uncle Hugh, the great Earl of Tyrone, in 1607, and subsequently risen high in the service of Spain, returned in the summer of 1642 to lead the Confederate forces. By that autumn he controlled the whole country apart from Dublin, parts of Ulster and a handful of towns. In Ulster, the outbreak of the rebellion in 1641 had been marked by the massacre or death from privation of about 12,000 Scottish and English planters, the consequence of indiscipline and private vengeance, not of policy; Sir Phelim O’Neill punished those of his soldiers found guilty of murder, and many times Catholic priests intervened to save planters’ lives. Nevertheless, lurid accounts of atrocities soon circulated, and northern Protestants felt what would prove an enduring sense of being surrounded and infiltrated by pitiless enemies. The myth that the 1641 rebellion had as its object the wholesale extermination of Ulster Protestants is still powerful in Northern Ireland. In 1646 a pamphleteer, Sir John Temple, claimed 300,000 people had been slaughtered – about three times more than the total Protestant population at that time – and his estimate rapidly entered Ulster Protestant folklore (Figure 7). Twenty-eight years later, the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, visited Ireland and believed he could smell the victims’ blood: ‘The earth and air smelt methought of the corruption of the nation, so that it yielded another smell to me than England did; which I imputed to be Popish massacres that had

Figure 7 Depositions, 1641 ‘Drowning Men, Women & Children by hundreds upon Bridges & casting them into Rivers who drowned not were killed with poles and shot with muskets’, and ‘Mr Blandry, Minister, hanged after pulled his flesh from his bones in his wife’s sight.’ Anti-Catholic propaganda from James Cranford, Teares of Ireland (London, 1642), illustrating depositions taken mainly from Ulster Protestants about atrocities suffered during the 1641 rebellion. Atrocities did take place, but not on the scale depicted. Cromwell, however, seems to have believed that large-scale killings and torturing did happen and used this as an excuse for his massacres at Wexford and Drogheda.

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been committed, and the blood that had been spilt – from which a foulness ascended.’ Over two hundred years later, William Lecky concluded that ‘the Irish massacre of 1641 seems to me one of the great fictions of history, though a great number of murders were committed. The consensus of modern English historians, however, about it is so great that it is hardly possible to shake the belief in the English mind.’ The deaths and tales of massacres and associated atrocities were seized upon by both sides in the developing English Civil War to raise money, to gain support, and to justify the confiscation of even more property. The Long Parliament passed the Act for Adventurers in March 1641, which made 2.5 million acres of land all over Ireland available for plantation. Charles I used Confederate forces against the English parliamentary army in Ireland, but after the Irish Parliament expelled Catholic MPs as rebels in June 1642, and the Confederation in reply demanded that the King repeal Poynings’ Law and grant religious toleration, his options were limited. As was soon clear, investors had more faith in the English Parliament’s ability to fulfil its promises than in the King’s. Charles tried to meet the Confederates’ demands. He showed himself willing to compromise on nearly all the differences that lay between them and the Crown, but found the intransigence of the increasingly priestdominated Confederates impossible to overcome. In February 1647 his proposals for a settlement were rejected by the Kilkenny assembly, and the Deputy, the Earl of Ormond, decided to surrender Dublin (practically the only area under outright royal control) to parliamentary forces, preferring, as he said, ‘English rebels to Irish rebels’. In 1649, after the English rebels had executed the King, the pacification of Ireland and the defeat of the Confederates was given priority by Parliament, now dominated by Oliver Cromwell. The presence of royalist garrisons, the Confederation of Kilkenny’s royalist sympathies, and its antagonism to Protestantism, made the subduing of Ireland urgent in the eyes of Cromwell. Owen Roe O’Neill’s army had proved at the battle of Benburb in 1646 that it was a formidable military force. During the battle, O’Neill’s forces had killed over 3,000 Scottish soldiers of a parliamentary army and had routed the remainder, a victory which secured Ireland (temporarily) for the Confederates. On 15 August 1649, Cromwell, with 12,000

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men of the New Model Army, landed at Ringsend, Dublin, to join the 8,000-strong parliamentary army that had successfully defended the city for over two and a half years. On 11 September he stormed the royalist stronghold of Drogheda, entering both the town and history with a terrible vengeance. The stories of enormous slaughter and of horrible atrocities at the outbreak of the rebellion in Ulster had deeply impressed Cromwell and he imputed the most evil motivations to the rebels. He came to Ireland determined to establish the authority and government of the Long Parliament’s English ‘Commonwealth’; to enforce the 1642 Act for Adventurers by repaying investors with Irish lands, and to avenge the ‘massacre’ of 1641. This last purpose seems to have dominated his thoughts at Drogheda where, when the town fell, the 2,600 men of the royalist garrison were put to the sword on his orders, in his own words ‘Knocked on the head’, along with many of the townspeople. Cromwell reported, ‘We put to the sword the whole number of defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives.’ He went on to justify his action as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ and argued that ‘it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future’. Seventeenth-century rules of warfare allowed the slaughter of garrisons taken by storm after refusing to surrender. This had happened during the English Civil War, although it was rare. But the killings at Drogheda were recognised by all as excessive. By his own testimony, supported by many others, Cromwell admitted that the butchery was indiscriminate. He even made a convoluted attempt to blame the Irish themselves for his excesses, stating in a broadsheet he had printed in Cork in January 1650, ‘You, unprovoked, put the English to the most unheard of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or age) that ever the sun beheld.’ From Drogheda he went on to Wexford (the royalist garrisons of Trim and Dundalk deserted their posts as soon as they heard what had happened at Drogheda), and on 11 October 1649 he inflicted another slaughter as ferocious as the first. Terror worked. New Ross surrendered to him without a fight on 19 October, followed by most of the towns in Munster. Owen Roe O’Neill, realising that a united Confederate–royalist resistance was the only hope of defeating

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Cromwell, was attempting to make an alliance with the Irish royalist commander, the Earl of Ormond, when he died in November. O’Neill’s death removed the only military leader who might have faced Cromwell with any chance of success. By July 1650, Commonwealth armies controlled all Ireland except Connaught. The merciless slaughters at Drogheda and Wexford were acts of policy. Cromwell’s measured frightfulness contrasts with the spontaneous 1641 Ulster outrages. In the Irish popular memory, where myths are often as important as facts, Cromwell’s actions needed no embellishment and cast long shadows. Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach 1997–2008, visited the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, in London: I walked into the room that day in 1997 and there in front of me was a huge portrait of Oliver Cromwell . . . Robin had that little smirk on his face as he sidled up to me, and asked, ‘So what do you think of him, then?’ ‘He’s a murdering bastard,’ I shot back, ‘that’s what I think of him.’ That wiped the smile off Robin’s face. The officials froze. You could see them, thinking, ‘Jesus, what are we going to do now?’ No one was saying anything. I let that hang there for a while before I said, ‘Use another room next time, but let’s get on with it now.’2

Ahern could still expect a London audience to be defensive about Cromwell; in Dublin where an unheard-of prosperity was then booming, his point would have sounded anachronistic: memory, while alive, was no longer convincing as an excuse for anger. Oliver Cromwell had been the lightning rod of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. He came from a shipwrecked family: he was a farmer on land he did not own. His great-great-grand-uncle, Thomas Cromwell, had risen to the heights of power under Henry VIII, but then had been executed and the family had declined. Thomas’s sister, Katherine, from whom Oliver descended, married a Welshman, Morgan ap William; Oliver’s father dropped William or Williams for the Cromwell name. Macaulay considered Oliver to be the greatest prince to have ruled England. He was a transformer. Lord Auchinleck, James Boswell’s father, remarked to Dr Johnson, ‘God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a lith in their neck’ – he taught kings that they had a joint in their necks. Cromwell was at his most terrible in Ireland largely because he had no grasp on power there, and 2

Bertie Ahern (with Richard Aldous), The Autobiography, (London, 2009), p. 199.

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because he regarded Roman Catholicism as odiously sinful. His view was that by rebelling in the cause of Catholicism, the Irish had submitted themselves to the harshest rules of war. He believed he had a private link to God, and this made him certain: ‘But perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me,’ he said, explaining his dissolution of Parliament in 1653, ‘I would not consult flesh and blood.’ He was a man of extremes. By the standards of his time he was tolerant (readmitting Jews to England) and merciless, declaring that ‘Necessity hath no law.’ His son, Henry, became Lord Deputy of Ireland (1657–9) and was widely liked and admired for moderating his father’s planting and deporting policies while recognising the problems facing the planters. Oliver Cromwell returned to England in May 1650 and next tackled Ireland legislatively. On 2 March 1653, the English Rump Parliament voted to unify Ireland with Britain, abolished the Irish Parliament, providing for thirty Irish members in a new English Parliament of 460 MPs. Further acts decreed the transplantation of Irish landowners to the inhospitable terrain of Connaught and co. Clare. Over 11 million acres were confiscated in the interests of about 1,000 adventurers and 35,000 soldiers. Irish landowners found east of the river Shannon after 1 May 1654 faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies. About 44,000 people moved west into Connaught in the winter of 1653–4. It was not an exodus of the entire native population: as in previous plantations and confiscations, many stayed behind to become labourers and brigands (or ‘Tories’ as they were called). Still, ‘To Hell or Connaught’ became a proverbial phrase among later generations of Irishmen as a result of the Cromwellian plantations. In 1685, at the accession of King James II, only 22 per cent of the land of Ireland was owned by Catholic Irishmen. The new settlers faced the same problems as previous planters and adventurers. It is thought that less than a quarter of the soldiers granted lands actually settled in Ireland: most preferred to sell their rights. The need for cheap labour to sustain the plantation system induced a drift east of native workers, back across the Shannon from Connaught. Like previous settlers, the Cromwellian planters were gradually to become Irishmen themselves. Only in the north where there remained a considerable number of settlers from earlier plantations did differences endure, sustained by strong anti-Catholicism,

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the result of Cromwellian Calvinism augmented by the powerful myths of 1641. penal times When the monarchy was restored in Britain in 1660, there was a general expectation that Cromwell’s land settlement would be reversed. The Irish Parliament was re-established, and the union between Ireland and England was dissolved. Some of the grander royalists like Ormond had their lands returned, but Charles II refused substantially to upset the Cromwellian plantation system. Understanding that he owed his throne to those who had been leaders under Cromwell, he rewarded them with promotion and security. In 1672, midway through his reign, Cromwellian settlers owned 4.5 million of the 12 million profitable acres in Ireland, Catholics 3.5 million, and pre-Cromwellian settlers the rest (mostly in Ulster). When the openly Catholic James II succeeded his brother in 1685, many Catholics in Ireland thought that at last there would be a land settlement in their favour. Instead, James’ insistence upon his prerogative at the expense of Parliament generated another English civil war. In 1688 James’ ecclesiastical and parliamentary opponents invited the Protestant William, Prince of Orange and ruler of the Netherlands, grandson of Charles I as well as James II’s son-in-law, and his wife Mary to become joint sovereigns of England (legally unified with Wales by 1542), Scotland and Ireland. He accepted, invaded England in November 1688 and dispossessed James who, after the disintegration of his Scots loyalists following their victory at Killiecrankie in June 1689, could only look to his Irish kingdom and King Louis XIV of France to sustain him. This posed a dilemma to settlers, particularly in Ulster. As devout Protestants, they were frightened by the Catholic James. On the other hand, they were loyal to the Crown and recognised James as their legitimate king. When he sent a garrison north to Derry, the town’s leading men, including the Protestant Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry and the military commander, Colonel Robert Lundy, decided to admit his forces. However, some of the townspeople were more alarmed than their leaders by the prospect of being subjected to a Catholic (although royalist) garrison that also raised

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the spectre of the 1641 ‘massacres’. The apprentice boys – youths and young men indentured to trades – were often Presbyterians, not conforming to the Church of Ireland, and thus on the counts of age and inclination more likely to disregard established authority. Just before James’ troops arrived, thirteen apprentice boys took matters into their own hands and slammed shut the gates of Derry on 7 December 1688. The very boldness of the action swung opinion in their favour. Colonel Lundy had to flee in disguise, and his name has been a word of derision in northern Ireland ever since. In March 1689 James landed at Kinsale with a small French army, and was accepted throughout most of the country as the lawful monarch. He soon assembled an Irish army composed of loyalists, Catholic and Protestant, prepared to face an English Protestant government. For the first time since Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion a century earlier, Irishmen of all sorts were acting together as a nation and not in rebellion: they were supporting an English king in his attempt to regain his throne. In April, James laid siege to Derry, cutting it off completely. Finally, on 28 July 1689 a Williamite fleet led by the ship Mountjoy breached the boom placed across the river Foyle by James’ men in the nick of time, since starvation had the town on the edge of surrender. ‘No surrender’ had been the apprentice boys’ cry, and ‘No surrender’ has remained the Protestant watchword in northern Ireland ever since. In May 1689, two months before Derry was relieved, James had summoned what has become known as the Patriot Parliament in Dublin. It was the last Irish parliament until 1921 to have Catholic members (224 out of the 230 members of the Irish House of Commons were Catholic), and its main concern was to legislate in the interests of landlords expropriated by Cromwell. It was an AngloIrish assembly defending the Anglo-Irish Catholic governing class penalised by the Cromwellian settlement; it did not concern itself with seeking redress for the poorer native Irish classes labouring on the farms and estates of landlords and planters. However, the parliament’s activities were overtaken by events. James and William met in battle on the banks of the river Boyne on 1 July 1690 (12 July in the Catholic calendar which Britain adopted in the next century). James was defeated and fled to France where he died in 1701, never setting foot in the British Isles again.

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Irish resistance continued for over a year after the Boyne. An Irish army, 14,000 strong, commanded by some French generals sent by Louis XIV, and Patrick Sarsfield, an Irish soldier trained in France who had served in James II’s Lifeguards, continued to harry Williamite forces in the south. In October 1691, Sarsfield and his colleagues surrendered under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick. It was an honourable settlement, guaranteeing the rights and property of the men of the defeated army should they take oaths of loyalty to King William and Queen Mary. Those who wished were allowed to sail into exile. Along with 11,000 officers and men, Sarsfield chose exile. There were already 5,000 Irish soldiers in France in the French army’s Irish Brigade, and Sarsfield and his followers joined them. James created Sarsfield Earl of Lucan in 1691, and Louis XIV appointed him a Marshal of France. Two years later he was mortally wounded fighting as a French officer against William of Orange at Landen in Flanders. ‘Oh, that this were for Ireland!’ he is reported to have said as he bled to death. The Irish Brigade was soon christened the ‘Wild Geese’, and for generations to come Irishmen were to flock to its colours as opportunities were denied them at home. Irish Brigades were formed in other European armies too. Fourteen Irishmen became Field Marshals in the Austrian army. Count Peter de Lacy (1678–1751), born in Limerick, became a general in the Russian army and Governor of Livonia. Don Alexander O’Reilly (1725–94), born in Ireland, became a Spanish field marshal and governor of Spanish Louisiana. The nineteenth-century President (and Marshal) MacMahon of France traced his descent directly to an eighteenth-century Irish exile. William’s victory placed mastery in Ireland firmly in the hands of the Anglican Ascendancy governing class – large Anglican landowners descended from sixteenth-century English settlers: Scots Presbyterians in Ulster and Cromwellian soldier-planters in central Ireland were not in this class. It was the group with governmental experience in Ireland, which also enjoyed the most powerful connections with political and ecclesiastical leaders in England. By the close of the seventeenth century, Catholics in Ireland had had their landholdings reduced to 14 per cent of the useful land – one-third less than when James II had come to the throne. This large-scale dispossession by the Ascendancy ground on for the next hundred years. Suspicious of the

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native Irish and insecure as to their standing in English esteem, they resorted to harsh law and hard landownership to strengthen their position. In 1695 the Ascendancy-dominated Irish Parliament embarked on the body of anti-Catholic legislation known as the Penal Laws. Completed in 1727, these endured for over a century. They were similar to such measures in Britain, and were modelled on the antiProtestant codes of Louis XIV in France. But unlike Britain and France, where persecuted groups were a minority, in Ireland Catholics were a conclusive majority. Religion was used as a cloak for economic expropriation. In this, the Irish Parliament was supported fully by its Westminster overlord which employed Poynings’ Law to keep Parliament in Dublin an instrument of its power. At first, Irish MPs were satisfied with this relationship. They were colonists and, just like the colonists in America, all they wanted of Britain was military and legal support for their programmes of exploitation. Later, just as in America, Irish parliamentarians were to resent their subservience to Britain as their business successes were perceived at Westminster as threatening English merchants’ and landowners’ interests. When that time came, what was rarely admitted was that they owed their wealth to the master-race status conferred by the Penal Laws. By 1701, Ireland had been effectively occupied. About 27 per cent of its population was then of Scots or English origin. Military campaigns and plantations had transformed most of the country and imposed English law and government everywhere. Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion had been the last stand of Gaelic Ireland which began to wither with his defeat. By 1641 Irish rebels held a different perspective: the Confederation of Kilkenny accepted the right of the Crown to govern Ireland, complaining only about the nature of its government. After the Treaty of Limerick, the majority of Irishmen who still regarded themselves as Gaelic left their country for good. A large part of the Wild Geese was drawn from native Irish and Old English noble families: thousands left Ireland between 1690 and 1730, levelling the last barrier between the Irish people and their foreign rulers. The eighteenth century in Ireland completed the process of subjugation, as the Penal Laws put an end to the ancient Gaelic order and reduced the nation to peasanthood.

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The first Penal Law laid down that no Catholic might possess ‘gun, pistol or sword, or any other weapon of offence or defence under penalty of fine, imprisonment, pillory or public whipping’. Over the next thirty years, a host of such laws were passed by the Irish Parliament. The 1697 Banishment Act ordered all Catholic bishops, priests and monks to leave Ireland. Catholics might not inherit land from Protestants; take leases of more than thirty-one years; buy land or enjoy mortgages. Catholic landowners were required to will their lands to all their sons equally unless one of them became a Church of Ireland Anglican, in which case he would inherit the whole estate. The 1704 Registration Act required priests to be registered, only one to each parish, and to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. The Irish Privy Council even attempted to secure legislation to castrate unregistered priests ‘which they are persuaded will be the most effectual remedy’, an indication of the virulent religious rancour that held sway in Protestant Ireland. Other Acts forbade Catholics to enter a profession or receive a formal education. In 1727 they were denied the vote in parliamentary elections. Together, the laws worked under cover of religion to suppress the Irish nation, clearly stating the Ascendancy’s identification of Catholicism with native Irish nationality. Edmund Burke, in a famous phrase, described the laws as ‘a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, 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’. By the reign of George I, the Irish Lord Chancellor was able to say ‘The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.’ It was one thing to pass laws; it was another to enforce them. The main purpose of the Penal Laws was to prevent any Catholic Irish challenge to Ascendancy control, so they were only seriously invoked when there were signs of trouble. This happened in 1714 when Louis XIV recognised James II’s son as King James III of England, Scotland and Ireland, and in 1715 when there was a Stuart rebellion in Scotland. By the time George III came to the throne in 1760, however, it was clear that there would be no Stuart restoration, and the laws had fallen into general disuse. In 1766, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the successor of James ‘III’, was denied recognition as

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King by the Pope. In 1774 the unstitching of the laws began with an act allowing Catholics to take an oath of allegiance. By then, the laws had succeeded in reducing the land owned by avowedly Catholic landowners to 5 per cent. They had another consequence as well. The Penal Laws had discriminated against all those who were not members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, so Dissenters suffered together with Catholics. Thus Presbyterian ministers, like Catholic priests, were unable to perform legal marriage ceremonies. Like everyone else, they had to pay tithe to the Church of Ireland. The 1704 Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery had included a clause requiring officeholders and members of Parliament to belong to the Church of Ireland, thus debarring Dissenters as well as Catholics from office. Dissenters were, however, able to inherit land and property and take part in most of the activities of the state. During the eighteenth century, the industrious and numerous Presbyterians of Ulster became rich and influential as they developed their agricultural holdings and textile industries, and increasingly resented their second-class status. Thousands of Ulster Dissenters – an average of 4,000 a year throughout the eighteenth century – preferred to go back to Britain or emigrate to America: they were the first wave of transatlantic Irish immigrants. Catholic emigration remained small because until 1780 Catholics faced discrimination on religious grounds in the colonies too. ‘The Presbyterians of the North’, wrote the Viceroy, Lord Harcourt in 1775, ‘are in their hearts Americans.’ Ten presidents of the United States and various legendary frontiersmen have descended from Ulster Protestant stock, including Davy Crockett, ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Woodrow Wilson. The Irish Dissenters who did not emigrate gradually came as the eighteenth century progressed to identify more with their Catholic countrymen than with their English governors. By the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of this common political and religious discrimination (and because of Nonconformist traditions), many of the leaders of Irish nationalist movements were intellectually independent northern Irish Presbyterians. This continued even into the nineteenth century, changing only when the currents of religious and economic difference were exploited for political purposes, returning northern Protestants fully to their separate identity.

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William III was always more moderate than his parliaments in his attitude towards the Irish and religion (his grandmother was a Catholic). He had personally taken steps to ensure that the Treaty of Limerick was fairly implemented, and he resisted penal legislation. During the reign of his devout successor and sister-in-law Anne (1702–14), the Ascendancy secured the harsh discriminatory legislation they desired to protect their political and economic supremacy against what they saw as the sullenly resentful, Catholic, pro-Stuart Irish. The determination with which they pursued their security was, however, undermined by Parliament at Westminster. Since the early seventeenth century the English Parliament had set itself to protect English agricultural, commercial and mercantile interests against both the Crown and foreign and colonial competition. It was a parliament of lawyers, landowners and merchants. In 1696 despite Irish Ascendancy protests, an Act was passed prohibiting goods from the colonies being exported directly to Ireland. In 1699 a further Act placed heavy duties on Irish woollen goods and forbade them to be exported anywhere but England, thus imposing a crude monopsony. Since the English wool industry was threatened by Irish wool, this legislation effectively crushed the Irish industry. Linen weaving was allowed because it did not compete with any English counterpart. In 1719 a Declaratory Act complemented Poynings’ Law and confirmed the right of the British (following the 1707 union of England and Scotland) Parliament to legislate for Ireland, thus stripping the Irish Parliament of any final power. These Acts were not the fruits of official British policy towards Ireland, but of particular economic interests at Westminster. Nevertheless, the significance of these measures of economic and political discrimination against Ascendancy interests in Ireland was constitutional, stirring an awareness amongst all sections in Ireland that their status was inferior to that of their counterparts in England. William Molyneux (1656–98), an Irish Anglican philosopher and friend of John Locke, published while MP for Trinity College, Dublin, his famous The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated. Molyneux anticipated later Ascendancy (and American) politicians who applied his observations rather more widely than he intended. He argued that England and Ireland were separate kingdoms united only by a common Crown,

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and that therefore Ireland had as much right as England to legislative and commercial independence. ‘I have no other notion of slavery’, he wrote, ‘but being bound by a law to which I do not consent.’ By order of the Westminster House of Commons, his pamphlet was publicly burned by the common hangman. The Church of Ireland was a minority faith, ministering to only about one-sixth of the population and completely identified with the Ascendancy. It made very little effort to proselytise until the nineteenth century, and its members proved content to remain in a minority as long as they could rule the country. The Church itself and its clergy were made comfortable by the tithe, and appointment to an Irish bishopric could make an English cleric wealthy. At the same time, the supremacy of Irish Anglicans was fragile. Some, like William King (1650–1729), Archbishop of Dublin, were conscious of the faults and weaknesses of their position. ‘The world’, he wrote, ‘begins to look on us as a parcel of men who have invented a trade for our easy and convenient living.’ But even Archbishop King, while striving to make his Church popular, still supported the Penal Laws as the best means of securing the Ascendancy’s political and economic position. The fears of the Ascendancy for its dominance over the Presbyterians of Ulster as well as over the native Irish could be justified. The Stuart claims to the British Isles provided a rallying point for Catholics and the prospect of French and Spanish intervention in support of the Stuarts. Mindful of this danger, during the Scottish campaign of Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1745–6, the Irish government suspended some of the Penal Laws as a way of cooling popular sentiment towards him, but he had no real support. Archbishop Hort of Tuam burst in upon a studiedly calm Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Chesterfield: ‘The peasants are rising! The peasants are rising!’ Chesterfield, who had realised Bonnie Prince Charlie was no real danger, pulled out his watch and looked at it, ‘About time, don’t you think?’ More serious was the constant reminder in the French army’s Irish Brigade of native Irish antipathy to Britain and the Ascendancy, which steadily supplied the brigade with recruits throughout the century. At the Battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745 during the War of the Austrian Succession, just as a British column was breaking the French army in two, the Irish Brigade, led by Lord Clare, shrieking ‘Remember Limerick’, counterattacked the Coldstream Guards and

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turned the battle into a French victory: it was the only conclusive French land victory over British command since the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). In 1756, revealing the fear that the Irish Brigade might one day fight in Ireland, the Ascendancy Irish Parliament passed an Act imposing the death penalty on any native-born Irishmen who returned after fighting for France. This had no effect on Irish emigrants seeking French military service. A regiment of the Irish Brigade under Count Dillon fought for George Washington during the American Revolution. During the French Revolution, the Irish Brigade sided with the Crown. Count Daniel O’Connell, the brigade’s last commander, offered its services against the revolution to King George III. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the restored Louis XVIII of France dissolved the Irish Brigade. Irish exiles served in other armies too. Ambrose O’Higgins, born in co. Meath in 1720, entered Spanish military service and became Viceroy of Peru, where he died in 1801. His natural son, Bernardo O’Higgins, became the liberator and national hero of Chile and its first president. John Barry (1745–1803), born in co. Wexford, emigrated to the American colonies and founded the American navy. In command of the brig Lexington in 1776 he captured the Royal Navy’s warship HMS Edward. Richard Hennessy (1720–1800), born in co. Cork, fought at Fontenoy, settled in Cognac and founded the famous Hennessy distillery. The success of men like these contrasted with the poverty, lethargy and suppression of their kinsmen in Ireland. They also showed that Irishmen were naturally capable of effective and enterprising organisation, and were not necessarily inferior to any one. Jonathan Swift drew attention to this contrast, commenting upon the achievements of Irishmen in foreign armies, ‘which ought to make the English ashamed of the reproaches they cast on the ignorance, the dullness and the want of courage of the Irish natives; those defects, wherever they happen, arising only from the poverty and slavery they suffer from their inhuman neighbours’. The Ascendancy’s ‘inhuman’ attitudes, reflected in the Penal Laws, also coloured their behaviour. The Irish exodus consisted, in general, of the Irish aristocracy, removing a dynamic element of Irish society with which the Ascendancy might have made deals. Broadly, what was left was the Irish poor who had nothing to deal with.

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The nobility and gentry of England provided a model for the Ascendancy. The elegant Georgian architecture of so many Irish towns and cities, and the beautiful country mansions such as Castletown House and Carton House of which Ireland today is justly proud, were all built during the eighteenth century by Ascendancy landlords. The Duke of Leinster, with an income of £20,000 a year from his Irish estates, built a town house in Dublin – Leinster House – with grounds so large that it now contains both houses of the Irish Parliament – Dáil and Seanad Éireann – the National Library, the National Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland. The Ascendancy middle class also prospered. Arthur Guinness (1725– 1803) made a fortune by introducing ‘Guinness’s black Protestant porter’, making his name and symbol, the harp, synonymous today with Ireland. Throughout, however, the Ascendancy remained a colonial class that, unlike previous English rulers in Ireland, never came fully to identify with the country. Jealous and nervous of their position, they soon developed distinctions of their own. Sir Jonah Barrington, writing in 1827, sharply defined Ascendancy Ireland, distinguishing three sorts of Irish gentry: ‘half-mounted gentlemen’, ‘gentlemen every inch of them’, and ‘gentlemen to the backbone’, the ‘halfmounted’ being on familiar terms with their servants and tending to carry lead-weighted whips with which they beat incautious peasants. The superior categories of gentleman tended to leave the professions and trade to the middle classes, concentrating on their estates. Arthur Young, the essayist, agricultural experimenter and surveyor, spent 1776 to 1778 in Ireland, noting: A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect or anything tending towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security . . . Landlords of consequence have assured me, that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives or daughters sent for to the bed of their master, a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people live.3

3

Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland (London, 1780), pp. 127–8.

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The conditions of life for the vast majority of people in Ireland varied considerably. Many lived in squalor, while others were more prosperous. These disparities, together with the restrictive Westminster legislation offending Ascendancy sensibilities, combined to produce not only a sense of separateness both from its English models and from the native Irish on the part of the Ascendancy, but also devastating criticism of its role and of government from within the group. One man, more than any other, is identified with this critical voice: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Swift was an unexpected critic and lampooner of his own class. Born in Dublin, he graduated from Trinity College and became secretary to the Williamite statesman Sir William Temple. In 1694 Swift was ordained in the Church of England, and over the next two decades he developed a reputation in London as a wit and conversationalist. In 1704 he published two books anonymously, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. He came to support the pro-Stuart faction in British politics – the Tories – writing broadsheets and articles in their cause. He also made the mistake of not hiding from his contemporaries his brilliant intellect and biting wit, with the consequence that he was not trusted. When his patron, Robert Harley, became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1710, Swift hoped for advancement and even a bishopric, but was disappointed (largely because his free observations on religion had alienated Queen Anne), and in 1713 he accepted the best offer made to him and became Dean of St Patrick’s. He regarded this as banishment. With the eclipse of the Tories by the Whigs at Anne’s death the following year, Swift’s hopes for recognition ended, and he spent the rest of his life in Ireland. As a result of his disappointment, but also because of his experience as dean, Swift became the arch satirist of government in Ireland. Two years before his appointment as dean, he had written to a correspondent, ‘You are in the right as to my indifference to Irish affairs, which is not occasioned by my absence but contempt of them,’ but by 1720 he was acutely interested in Irish affairs, anonymously publishing a pamphlet against the 1719 Declaratory Act and advocating resistance to it by boycotting English imports and buying only Irish goods. In 1724 he wrote the Drapier’s Letters – his authorship was an open secret – which played a large part in preventing ‘Wood’s Halfpence’, the corrupt introduction of a new copper coinage into Ireland,

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arguing that ‘government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery’. Three years later in A Short View of the Present State of Ireland he singled out the practice of absentee landlordism, estimating that half the net revenues of Ireland were taken out of the country and spent in Britain. Ever-increasing rents, the source of most revenue to landlords and thence through taxation to government, Swift declared, are ‘squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars’. In 1729 Swift published his classic masterpiece of savage irony, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, in which he suggested that poor and rich alike might benefit by the sale of poor children as food for the rich, ‘a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food’. His most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, which he wrote in his own name and published in 1726, was a thinly disguised political satire. It gained him celebrity and popularity, and while it does not deal with Ireland, its rage at misery and depravity must have swelled from Swift’s Irish experiences, and analogies with Lilliput and Brobdingnag are to be found in early Irish folk tales. Swift’s fury against Whig-English misdoing has led, no doubt to his own amusement, to his being regarded as an Irish patriot. A contemporary and friend of Swift, the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), born near Kilkenny, became Church of Ireland Bishop of Cloyne and a leading spokesman for reform in Ireland. In 1736 in the Querist journal he published articles in which he rhetorically wondered ‘whether a foreigner could imagine that one half of the people were starving in a country which sent out such plenty of provisions?’ and ‘whether it be not a vain attempt to project the flourishing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive of the bulk of the natives?’ He had lived for some years in the American colony of Rhode Island, where he had owned slaves. ‘The negroes’, he wrote, ‘in our Plantations have a saying “If negro was not a negro, Irishman would be negro.” And it may be affirmed with truth that the very savages of America are better clad and better lodged than the Irish cottagers.’ Ascendancy Ireland produced other noted literary and political figures during the eighteenth century. Edmund Burke (1729–97),

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born in Dublin to a Protestant solicitor and a Catholic mother, educated in a Quaker school in co. Kildare and at Trinity, Dublin, where he was a founder of the college historical society, eventually became a Whig member of Parliament for various English constituencies, making his home in London. Between 1780 and 1792 he wrote three pamphlets on Ireland, arguing for conciliation rather than coercion, drawing parallels with the revolt of the American colonists, and pointing out that insensitive handling of colonial aspirations by Britain had caused bitter resistance to British government in both places. His most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790 towards the end of his life, argued for more cautious policies. It also provoked Thomas Paine to reply with his Rights of Man. Burke’s political thought, together with Benjamin Disraeli’s, was to become the philosophy of modern British conservatism. Two playwrights, Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), both born in Ireland and, like Burke, Trinity graduates, also made their careers in London. Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer (1773) and Sheridan’s The School For Scandal (1777) are amongst the most frequently performed plays in the English language. Sheridan served as a Whig MP for Stafford for thirty-two years from 1780. Unlike Burke, he admired the principles of the French Revolution. He eloquently opposed the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1800. ’98 Beneath the surface of privileged, wealthy Ascendancy society, there survived a vibrant but hidden Gaelic Ireland which clung to what it could of its language, religion, customs and lore, though stripped of power and denied its natural leaders through emigration. When scrutinised by its rulers, it seemed to conform to the laws and regulations which bound its submission, but when alone it maintained its self-awareness and essential independence of spirit. The Gaelic poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, successors to the ancient brehons, bards and scholars, were vital to the survival of a Gaelic world after the Flight of the Earls. They developed the aisling form of poetry (all in the Irish language, difficult to capture in English translation).

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Couched in terms of lament, reflecting the Gaels’ awareness of their oppressed state compared to their exploits in the past and the achievements of their kinsmen in exile, aisling poetry generally presents a vision of a beautiful maiden (symbolising Ireland) pining for the return of her lover who will rescue her from her sorrow (Ireland’s sore state under foreign rule). Eogan O’Rahilly (1670–1726) is one of the few Gaelic poets of this period whose name has come down to us. His poems, and those of others, possess qualities fully equal to the metaphysical and neoclassical poetry of his English contemporaries. O’Rahilly’s ‘The Reverie’, superbly translated by Frank O’Connor, is a masterpiece of the aisling art: One morning before Titan thought of stirring his feet I climbed alone to a hill where the air was kind, And saw a throng of magical girls go by That had lived to the north in Croghan time out of mind. All over the land from Galway to Cork of the ships, It seemed that a bright enchanted mist came down, Acorns on oaks and clear cold honey on stones, Fruit upon every tree from root to crown. They lit three candles that shone in the mist like stars On a high hilltop in Connello and then were gone, But I followed through Thomond the track of the hooded Queens And asked them the cause of the zeal of their office at dawn. The tall Queen, Euvul, so bright of countenance, said ‘The reason we light three candles on every strand Is to guide the King that will come to us over the sea And make us happy and reign in a fortunate land.’ And then, so suddenly did I start from my sleep, They seemed to be true, and the words that had been so sweet – It was just that my soul was sick and spent with grief One morning before Titan thought of stirring his feet.

Nationalistic themes provided the material for all these poets. In bardic schools in the seventeenth century, and in their smaller successors the courts of poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century, Irish poets met and determined the style and subject matter of poems to be submitted to the next school or court, imparting to

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Gaelic poetry a special coherence, centring on personal and national misfortunes, extolling the virtues of native pride. An Irish Romantic poet of another tradition, Thomas Moore (1779–1852), was as popular during his lifetime as his friend Lord Byron. His poems – which included ‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls’ and ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ – gained him recognition as the national poet of an Ireland losing its own voices to those of English, and remain favourite expressions of Irish feeling. The other principal expression of Irish feeling apart from poetry during the eighteenth century took the form of agrarian unrest. A great deal of misconstruction has surrounded the landlord–tenant relationship in Ireland, and too much significance has often been given to absentee landlordism. The simple fact is that the peasant mass of the people bitterly remembered that their ancestors had owned the land not very long before; thus passivity was shot through with resistance. Estates were often well managed and profitable: between the 1720s and 1770s rent income perhaps trebled. Rents to absentees, as a proportion of the total, fell in the same period from between one-fourth and one-sixth to one-eighth. Professional estate managers were frequently concerned with the welfare of tenants, and did much to dampen the state of suppressed Land War which otherwise would have been general. Tenant farms of 100 to 150 acres were common, and some tenants had 4,000 and even 10,000 acres. As a result, while there was still a great deal of agrarian violence, it was usually prompted by specific causes: tenant-right was not demanded by name. Only in the nineteenth century did tenants’ rights become the main object of agrarian agitation, with demands for security of tenure and compensation for improvements at the fore. Secret, oathbound peasant/tenant societies, strongly sectarian, sprang up as the instruments of agrarian unrest during the later eighteenth century. The Munster Whiteboys, formed around 1760, were the earliest such group, motivated by the enclosure of common lands. Named after their white shirts, the Whiteboys terrorised landlords in the south and west, murdering, robbing, burning crops and houses and maiming cattle. In 1763, official reports, no doubt influenced by panic, claimed that about 14,000 men mobilised in

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Tipperary; that about 40,000 beseiged Derry, and that 20,000 marched against taxation. The Oakboys in the north in the 1760s and their successors, the Steelboys, in the 1770s were Presbyterian societies, similar to the Whiteboys and using the same methods, formed to resist increased rent and rate demands. Common to all these societies was opposition to the tithe paid to the Church of Ireland. But because they lacked coordination and educated leadership, and were formed to voice specific, regional complaints, these societies never gained the dignity of national movements. Still, two important results sprang from the unrest: direct confrontation with Ascendancy landlords lasting decades undermined deference, and common distress brought Catholics and Dissenters to an awareness of common objectives, helping to form the alliance that attempted national revolt in 1798. The American (1775–81) and then the French (1789–99) revolutions fused popular complaints in Ireland to political agitation, sparking a renewed national resurgence. The debates and arguments surrounding both revolutions had an electric effect on the British and Irish political and intellectual worlds. Many of the complaints of the American colonists were echoed by the Ascendancy in Ireland, as Jonathan Swift had neatly summed these up two generations before: Were not the People of Ireland born as free as those of England? Have they forfeited their Freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair a Representative of the People as that of England? . . . Are they not Subjects of the same King? Does not the same Sun shine on them? And have they not the same God for their Protector? Am I a Freeman in England, and do I become a Slave in six hours, by crossing the Channel?4

The stress of war opened the first opportunity for political reform. The dispatch of Irish regiments to the American colonies in the 1770s meant that the government had fewer resources to call upon, and thus forced a more conciliatory response to calls for reform. In 1778 the Scottish-American privateer, Paul Jones, raided Belfast Lough and captured a Royal Navy ship. All the Viceroy could offer to those citizens of Belfast who appealed for protection was half a troop of unmounted cavalry and a half-company of invalids. Merchants and 4

Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters, Vol. iv (Dublin, 1742), pp. 92–3.

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industrialists were set on ending the trading restrictions they had laboured under since the reign of William III. The Ascendancy wanted to govern without interference from Westminster, and Catholics and Dissenters wanted religious toleration. With the American war of independence (in which France was now a belligerent) naturally shifting perspectives and colouring practical calculations, George III’s government agreed in 1779 to the removal of many of the duties that hampered Irish trade. At the same time, the Irish Parliament decided that the government’s military weakness in Ireland made relaxation of the Penal Laws advisable and passed Gardiner’s Act of 1778 allowing Catholics to buy land freely for the first time in nearly a century. In 1780 the Test Acts preventing Dissenters from taking part in politics were repealed; and at last in 1782 the Ascendancy won their principal demand and obtained Westminster’s agreement to repeal Poynings’ Law and the 1719 Declaratory Act, thus restoring to the Irish Parliament the right to legislate for Ireland without restraint. In 1783 Parliament at Westminster passed a Renunciation Act giving up its claims to legislate for Ireland. The Ascendancy’s demands had been spearheaded by the Irish Volunteers, a militia formed in 1779 nominally against French invasion, but also to press the British government for reform. They were led by three Anglican Irish Parliamentarians, Henry Grattan (1746– 1820), Henry Flood (1732–91) and the Earl of Charlemont (1728–99); all three also led a Patriot Party in the Irish Parliament demanding greater rights for the Ascendancy. Within a year of their formation, forty thousand Irish Volunteers (all Protestants: Catholics were still not allowed to bear arms) – ‘the armed property of the nation’ as Grattan called them – were drilling in public. After securing the independence of the Irish Parliament in 1782, Grattan hailed the ‘King, Lords and Commons’ of Ireland in national terms: I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation. In that new character I hail her!

He spoke justly both for himself and for the Ascendancy, but his perception was not shared by the mass of the Irish people who still faced economic, social, political and religious discrimination. The

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Irish Parliament for which Grattan and his Patriots campaigned was the instrument of Ascendancy domination. As Gustave de Beaumont was to note some decades later about the Ascendancy: ‘They said that they were Ireland and they ended by believing it.’ Grattan at least realised that the Irish nation consisted of far more than the Ascendancy, and urged both religious toleration and political representation for Catholics. ‘The Irish Protestant’, he declared, ‘could never be free till the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave . . . I should be ashamed of giving freedom to but six hundred thousand of my fellow-countrymen when I could extend it to two million more.’ In 1796 he proposed in the Irish House of Commons to allow Catholics to become MPs, but was defeated by 143 votes to 19. Dejected and in bad health, he resigned his seat the following year. He returned to politics to oppose the union of Britain and Ireland, and spent the rest of his life campaigning for Catholic emancipation. His career was a testament to the fact that Irish history must be seen not purely as a question of Catholic against Protestant. Rather it was another example of nationalist sentiment taking shape among foreign occupiers discriminated against by their mother country. They were naturally resentful and sought a new but uneasy identity as colonists. Unlike Grattan, most of the Ascendancy were concerned simply to strengthen their position as the country’s unchallenged rulers and owners. Henry Flood in 1783 defended the Penal Laws on the grounds that ‘ninety years ago four-fifths of Ireland were for King James. They were defeated. I rejoice in that defeat. The laws that followed were not laws of persecution; they were a political necessity.’ He argued against political toleration for Catholics on the grounds that a Catholic political order in Ireland would use power to undermine the constitutional link with Britain – a link the Ascendancy, however resentful, depended upon to maintain their supremacy. The refusal of the Ascendancy to extend the rights they claimed for themselves to their Catholic and Dissenting countrymen – at a time when American and French cries for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ filled the intellectual and political air – generated popular rebellion led from an unexpected quarter: a combination of radical Anglicans and northern Irish Dissenters. The leader of this new nationalism was a young man, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), the son of an Anglican Dublin coachmaker, who had graduated from Trinity College and

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been called to the Irish Bar in 1789. Quickly tiring of the law, fired with enthusiasm for the principles of the American and French revolutions, he turned to politics. In 1791 he formed the Society of United Irishmen at Belfast, seeking political reform and religious equality for all. His pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, elaborated the society’s objectives in an effort to convert Dissenters to his views. In his autobiography he explained: To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country – these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter – these were my means.5

Tone’s supporters included Henry Joy McCracken, a Belfast Presbyterian textile manufacturer, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had been cashiered from the British army for proposing a republican toast at a Paris banquet in 1792 – in which year Tone organised a Catholic Convention of elected delegates which petitioned for political and religious toleration. The Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), faced by the threat of war with France, decided that conciliation was necessary in Ireland, and pressured the Irish Parliament to pass a Catholic Relief Act in January 1793, which gave propertied Catholics the right to vote and to enter the professions, but not to become MPs. Barely had the Act been passed than Revolutionary France declared war upon Britain (1 February), and promised to help the people of any nation to overthrow their rulers. Tone and the United Irishmen determined to take advantage of this commitment and plotted rebellion, but were discovered by the authorities, and forced underground. Tone managed to get away to France. In the winter of 1796 at Bantry Bay he returned with a French fleet of forty-three ships carrying 15,000 troops, but was blown back by storms to France. Leonard McNally, an Irish barrister, playwright, founder member of the United Irishmen and spy for the government, correctly warned his employers that they had had a close shave: 5

Theobald Wolfe Tone, The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ed. William Theobald Wolfe Tone (Washington, 1831), p. 62.

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The whole body of the peasantry would join the French in case of an invasion . . . The sufferings of the common people from high rents and low wages, from oppressions of their landlords . . . and tithes, are not now the only causes of disaffection to Government and hatred to England; for though these have long kept the Irish peasant in the most abject state of slavery and indigence, yet another cause, more dangerous, pervades them all . . . This cause is an attachment to French principles in politics and religion lately imbibed, and an ardent desire for a republican Government.6

Since its foundation in Belfast, the United Irishmen had grown. The society’s founder membership was drawn from northern Irish Dissenters aroused by Tone’s ideals, resentful of discrimination, and armed with weapons issued to their fathers as Irish Volunteers twenty years before. By 1795, government spies were reporting between 2,000 and 3,000 United Irishmen groups country-wide, characterised by a new belligerence reflecting French revolutionary slogans. Tone indicated the lengths to which they were prepared to go in their demand for social liberation, threatening the Ascendancy (whom he yet hoped to win over): ‘If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property.’ In a free Ireland, he would accept the Ascendancy’s economic position, but if they did not support him in achieving this freedom, then he was prepared to challenge that also. In the middle of May 1798, warned by its spies that a United Irishmen rebellion was planned for the 23rd of the month, the government cracked down. The leaders were nearly all arrested. The yeomanry and militia forces, formed by loyal landlords, tenants and small farmers in 1796 when the danger of invasion seemed great, roamed the country torturing and flogging suspected United Irishmen. This savage attempt to prevent rebellion brought it about. On 23 May, despite the loss of their leaders, thousands of United Irishmen, especially in the counties of Wexford, Wicklow and Mayo, took up their pikes and scythes, ambushed government patrols, and killed officials and landlords.

6

Quoted in William Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. vii (London, 1890), p. 143.

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Without leaders, the rising, which lasted for three weeks in Wexford, quickly degenerated into vengeful butchery, with massacres of Protestants in the towns of Wexford and Enniscorthy. Captured gentlefolk were often spitted upon pikes, and near New Ross 184 Protestant men, women and children were slaughtered. An equally grim retribution was exacted upon the rebels after their defeat at Vinegar Hill on 13 June. In northern Ireland, news of the sectarian killings in Wexford alienated many Protestant United Irishmen, but others rose in defence of their original ideals. Henry Joy McCracken led an attack on Antrim town on 7 June where the rebels sang the ‘Marseillaise’, but he was captured some days later and hanged in Belfast. By the middle of June the rebellion was crushed. In France, Wolfe Tone feverishly organised an expeditionary force. On 22 August a thousand troops landed at Killala, co. Mayo, under the French General Humbert, but surrendered after some skirmishes. The following month James Napper Tandy, who had been in France with Tone during May and June, led a small force to seize Rutland island off the Donegal coast, but he sailed away upon learning of Humbert’s surrender. On 12 October, Tone himself was captured after his fleet of nine ships was defeated by the Royal Navy off the Donegal coast. Brought to Dublin, he was tried by court martial and sentenced to hang. He pleaded to be shot like a soldier and, before he knew that his execution had been stayed by the court, slit his throat with a penknife, dying by his own hand. The 1798 rising was wrongly seen by the Ascendancy as a Catholic one. The Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, and whose generalship had defeated Humbert, was quick to denounce ‘the folly’ he saw in ‘substituting Catholic instead of Jacobin as the foundation of the present rebellion’. Sir Hercules Langrishe, an independent conservative Irish MP, was clear that 1798 was ‘French politics and French success, it was the jargon of equality which had been diffused through a deluded multitude by designing men’. Despite the fact that priests had led the sectarian Wexford revolt, the Catholic Church was firmly opposed to the rebellion, seeing in it the hand of anti-clerical and anti-papal revolutionary France. Within a week of the outbreak of the rising, the president of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth and twenty-eight prelates signed a public

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address condemning the rebellion and calling for the defence of ‘our Constitution, the social order and the Christian religion’. While in the whole of Ireland, sixty priests were implicated in the revolt, fifteen Presbyterian ministers and nine licentiates or probationers were also arrested, and of these one minister and one licentiate were executed. ‘The spirit of plunder and popular domination’, in the words of Langrishe, combined with ‘French politics’ – not religious feeling – had led this attempt ‘to break the bonds of society and set up the capriciousness of the popular will against the stability of settled government’. Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen became the model for later Irish nationalists. Their colour, green, became established as the national colour. Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, co. Kildare, is to the present day the site of annual pilgrimages and demonstrations by nationalist groups, determined, in his words, ‘to break the connection with England’. Unfortunately, the United Irishmen’s attempt to transcend religious differences has not survived. Tone’s rational republicanism was anti-clerical: he himself rejoiced when Pope Pius VI was arrested by the French in the spring of 1798, writing in his diary that this was ‘an opportunity to destroy for ever the papal tyranny’. Many of his Irish nationalist successors, however, were prepared to accept that identification of nationalism with Catholicism to which the Ascendancy rushed but was only first brought about a generation later by Daniel O’Connell, ‘The Liberator’.

chapter 3

Union

The Penal Laws had helped make a natural connection between Catholicism and reform in Ireland. In 1791 a Catholic Committee, first formed in 1759, was revived to petition for relief and enjoyed some success, notably with the Catholic Convention of 1792 which Wolfe Tone had organised and which had played an important part in securing the Catholic Relief Act. The Catholics who took part in the Convention and who formed the Catholic Committee were, for the most part, substantial Cork and Dublin merchants who shared many of the Ascendancy’s aspirations and commercial objectives. The great majority of Catholic Irishmen (in common with the mass of people everywhere except in the new United States of America) were not represented anywhere. And while the Ascendancy ruling class was connected to the governing classes in Britain, ordinary people in both countries had little contact with one another before the Industrial Revolution attracted Irish labourers to British cities. Bishop Berkeley, Arthur Young and Jonathan Swift were actually making clear to their English readers an Irish way and condition of life quite unlike that which obtained in England. The Catholicism of Ireland was simply the highlight of a separate cultural (and by 1800 an increasingly separate national) identity. The Stuart, Cromwellian and Williamite plantations of the seventeenth century had crushed Gaelic culture into pretty much the property of the peasantry alone, with only a few old Gaelic families (for example the O’Byrnes of Wicklow and the O’Connells of Kerry) managing to survive with some land, maintaining Gaelic cultural and social habits well into the eighteenth century. Hedge schools – illegal roadside gatherings (laws passed in 1696 and 1710 prohibited Catholic teachers and education, and sending children abroad) – grew up 97

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during the eighteenth century, with priests and the successors to the ancient Gaelic brehons and poets teaching peasant children, keeping alive their language, the history and stories of Gaelic Ireland, and even Latin and Greek. John O’Hagan, a distinguished nineteenth-century Dublin barrister and writer, gave a succinct pen portrait of the schools: Still crouching ’neath the sheltering hedge, Or stretched on mountain fern, The teacher and his pupils met feloniously to learn.

A strong communal spirit took root: meithaels, a voluntary system whereby peasants assembled to perform the intensive farmwork on one holding after another, began to develop during the seventeenth century (and lasted into the twentieth century in the west of Ireland). Priests, often the only comforters of the people, came, together with Catholicism, to have a new hold as the most widespread and vigorous voice of national identity. Denied education at home, thousands of Irish priests were educated at Irish colleges founded abroad, notably in the Spanish Netherlands, France, Portugal and Spain, at Salamanca, Valladolid, Lisbon, Douai and Paris. Ordained, they returned to Ireland and a life of persecution and poverty in the cause of their faith. Their consolation was flocks of devoted worshippers who often congregated in the open to celebrate Mass. The French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, travelling in Ireland in the 1830s, was told by a priest in Connaught, ‘The people give the fruit of their labours liberally to me, and I give them my time, my care, and my entire soul . . . Between us there is a ceaseless exchange of feelings of affection.’ The suppression of Catholicism and its partial consequent identification by the Irish people as ‘theirs’ surged in a massive expression of national faith when the Penal Laws were lifted. In 1800 there were only 120 nuns in the country; in 1900 about 8,000. Similar increases took place of priests, monks and Christian Brothers, so much so that Irish missionaries became a staple of the Church’s efforts worldwide. Oppression also strengthened the Church’s part in education. Many priests had won credit for the Church teaching in hedge schools. This fostered in the Irish Church a commitment to education that was to give it control of the majority of schools in the nineteenth century and

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later, and awaken a concomitant commitment to education among Irish people. Most children did not go on to secondary education until the mid twentieth century, but the beneficial effects of these commitments were very real: in 1900, illiteracy in Ireland was just 12 per cent. By the close of the eighteenth century, economic differences had begun to accentuate those of religion and culture. In northern Ireland where Dissenters (mostly Presbyterian) were a majority, these differences were clearly apparent. The province of Ulster was markedly more prosperous than the rest of the country. Visiting Ireland in 1778, John Wesley noted, ‘No sooner did we enter Ulster than we observed the difference; the ground was cultivated just as in England and the cottages not only neat, but with doors and windows.’ The linen industry, which grew and flourished after the collapse of the Irish woollen trade, was the hub of this prosperity, accounting for over 70 per cent of Irish exports by 1800. It had been encouraged and subsidised by the Irish government – the Irish Parliament during the eighteenth century granted bounties on exports of canvas and sailcloth. Since Irish linen did not compete with an English industry, it was allowed to enter Britain duty-free. In 1711 a Linen Board was established in Dublin to encourage the trade, but despite its attempts to spread the manufacture throughout the country, the industry remained concentrated in the north. By 1782, when a Linen Hall was built in Belfast, linen exports – amounting to nearly £2 million a year by the 1770s – were no longer routed through Dublin, but went direct from Ulster. The financial security enjoyed by people of all sorts involved in the industry meant that there was a discernibly higher standard of living in the north by the end of the eighteenth century, helping to generate the growth of a middle class which, as was shown by the United Irishmen, did not identify with the Ascendancy and had much in common with the Catholic Committee, drawn from a group that had also prospered during the century. Between 1700 and 1800, Anglo-Irish trade alone expanded tenfold, from £800,000 to £8,300,000 annually. While the major proportion was made up of income from the linen trade, exports of beef (and, illegally, of wool) played their part. An average of 100,000 head of cattle were slaughtered every year, and Irish beef was shipped to the

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Americas and elsewhere at considerable profit. Cork came to be known as the slaughterhouse of Ireland, and by 1800 had a population of 80,000. The Industrial Revolution had a strong effect in the latter eighteenth century, not only in the introduction of steam power in mills and foundries, but also manifest in the growth of credit and banking. The Bank of Ireland, founded in 1783 by royal charter, soon came to govern credit. The increased supply of money reflected the growth of trade, which saw a three- to four-fold increase between the 1720s and 1770s, and then trebled again by 1797. The population of the country as a whole grew enormously during the eighteenth century (though by no means as fast as the money supply) – from an estimated 1.1 million in 1672 to 2 million in 1732, 4 million by 1788, 5.3 million in 1800, and in 1821, at the time of the first census in Ireland, 6.8 million. In 1800, the population of Britain was 10.5 million: a rebellious, populous Ireland working with France was a real threat to Britain. Roads and stagecoaches spread, easily connecting Dublin and the major towns and cities for the first time. Improved sailing techniques and ship design made Irish ports accessible to European and transatlantic traders, facilitating trade – and potential invasion. The eighteenth century saw Britain involved in continental and colonial wars, and struggling to meet the costs. Irish economic success was valuable. The Ascendancy Parliament was expected to keep Ireland secure, loyal and peaceful – and paying taxes: its existence, and the position of the Ascendancy, depended on this. Agriculture, the greatest Irish industry, despite the Penal Laws (which had proved only intermittently enforceable), was dominated by farmers holding leases on the one hand, and labourers/cottiers on the other. There was not a straightforward Protestant landlord/ Catholic tenant labourer division on the land: divisions were far more complex. Agricultural prices throughout the century rose sharply relative to industrial prices, raising rural well-being (reflected in the population explosion): the Whiteboys and the Oakboys were men who had something to lose and something to gain, not men who turned to violence as a last desperate throw for survival. The yeomanry and militia forces which both sparked and subdued the 1798 rising were composed principally of Irish Catholics of a landholding or commercial group, as were many of the leaders of the United

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Irishmen. Tone’s threat to unleash the ‘men of no property’ – the peasant labourers – was directed as much against the Ascendancy as against an element of his own supporters anxious to improve their social and financial standing. The Presbyterian settlers of Ulster were excluded – as were Catholics – from participation in political power and were seen by the Ascendancy as a comparable threat. Ireland’s increased prosperity, and its strategic geographical position, made it a valuable British possession particularly during the last three decades of the eighteenth century as Britain grappled first with the American Revolution and then with Republican and Napoleonic France. William Pitt the Younger recognised this early in his career. He also realised that war, with its barriers to trade, could adversely affect the prosperity of large sections of the economy and thus foment discontent. For him, the 1798 rising was proof of this danger, and he determined to press for union between Ireland and Britain as the way to end discriminatory economic policies and counteract the economic nationalism of the Ascendancy. ‘Ireland is like a ship on fire,’ said Pitt; ‘it must be extinguished or cut adrift’. Aware too of Catholic alienation, Pitt planned Catholic emancipation as part of the union. In 1792 he had written to the Viceroy, the Earl of Westmorland, that ‘the idea of the present fermentation, gradually bringing both parties to think of a union with this country, had long been in my mind. The admission of the Catholics to a share of suffrage would not then be dangerous.’ Within weeks of the 1798 rising beginning, Pitt was at work winning Irish support for union. Opposition to Pitt’s initiative was largely concentrated amongst the Ascendancy, reluctant to surrender the profitable power and position their own parliament and administration afforded them, and fearful of the political consequences of Catholic emancipation. In January 1799 the Irish House of Commons rejected Pitt’s first Union Bill by 111 votes to 106, even though Pitt had reluctantly agreed to drop Catholic emancipation from the Bill and to pursue it only once union was agreed. The issue of Catholic emancipation, combined with union, faced Pitt with opposition from another source. In the north, contemporaries and successors of the Oakboys and Steelboys had come to regard their Protestant religion almost as a trade union as they competed fiercely with Catholics for jobs in burgeoning industries. The Peep O’Day Boys protected the interests of Protestants, and the Defenders

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those of Catholics, from the 1770s on. The United Irishmen’s appeal to northern Irish Protestants, though marked, was limited, and the Peep O’Day Boys gathered the bulk of Protestant and ex-Irish Volunteer support in the north. On 21 September 1795, the Defenders were routed by the Peep O’Day Boys in a brawl called the Battle of the Diamond at a crossroads near Armagh. To consolidate this victory, the Loyal Orange Association – the Orange Order – was founded, oathbound to ‘support and defend the King and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant ascendancy’. Not only were sectarian divisions again being felt, but also the fundamentally conditional loyalty of Ulster Protestants to the British government was being spelt out. They would only be loyal and obedient as long as the government maintained what they saw as their interests. Pitt’s conciliatory Anglo-Irish union they perceived as a Trojan Horse for Catholic emancipation which, since it would give Catholics political power, was likely to result in a growth of their economic power at Protestant expense, and so they opposed it. The crudely sectarian 1798 rising in Wexford reawakened Protestant fears of a Catholic backlash like that of 1641, and the Orange Order’s membership swelled. In order to overcome opposition to union, during 1799 and 1800 Lord Cornwallis, the Viceroy, and Lord Castlereagh, the Chief Secretary, were entrusted by Pitt with the job of ‘managing’ the Irish Parliament. Places, pensions and peerages were poured out as inducements to Irish politicians to vote for union. Irish nobles were offered promotions in the peerage: over fifty parliamentarians were ennobled or promoted. £1,250,000 was spent in bribes and ‘compensation for disturbance’. By the time the second Union Bill was debated in the Irish House of Commons early in 1800, Cornwallis’ and Castlereagh’s management had worked, and the Bill passed by 158 votes to 115. Henry Grattan, who had returned to politics to fight union, reckoned that only seven MPs who voted for the Bill were unbribed. In the House of Lords the Bill passed by 75 votes to 26. On 1 August 1800, George III signed the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, establishing the United Kingdom. On 1 January 1801 the Act came into force. The Act was corruptly secured. Lord Cornwallis complained to a friend, ‘My occupation is of the most unpleasant nature, bargaining

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and jobbing with the most corrupt people under Heaven. I despise and hate myself for ever engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved.’ Bribery has been associated with the Act by historians ever since, but it should also be remembered that at the time political power was regarded as a possession with a market value. In England, MPs bought and landlords sold parliamentary constituencies; bribery of voters was commonplace. For the Ascendancy, their political power had a price and Pitt showed that he was prepared to pay it. In addition, there was a strong rational argument for union: Ascendancy position and power depended upon British power and authority, and though they never realised this clearly, the consequence was that the Ascendancy had to satisfy the British government with their stewardship. When Ascendancy and commercial interests began to compete with British, when the Irish Parliament demanded separate power and gave force to Ascendancy economic nationalism, and when the Ascendancy Irish government failed to prevent a rising in 1798, it was not surprising that Pitt should decide upon union, if only to reassert control over Britain’s oldest colony. This point was made during the debates on the Union Bill when the Earl of Clare, Lord Chancellor of Ireland and a leading advocate of union and who, coming from an Old English family (Fitzgibbon), knew something of the title to Irish lands, explained: The whole power and property has been conferred by successive monarchs of England upon an English colony composed of three sorts of English adventurers who poured into this country at the termination of three successive rebellions. Confiscation is their common title and from their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of this island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation. What was the security of the English settlers for their physical existence? And what is the security of their descendants at this day? The powerful and commanding position of Great Britain. If, by any fatality, it fails, you are at the mercy of the old inhabitants of this island, and I should have hoped that the examples of mercy exhibited by them in the progress of the late rebellion would have taught the gentlemen who call themselves the Irish nation to reflect with sober attention on the dangers which surround them.

The first and immediate consequence of the Act of Union was the ending of the 500-year-old Irish Parliament. For Pitt and the

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Westminster Parliament, the Act was also a move to strengthen the security of the British Isles by bringing Ireland directly under the control of Westminster where, in any case, ultimate responsibility had always rested. Grattan and the ‘Patriot party’, who in 1782 had succeeded in securing greater power for the Parliament than it had known since Poynings’ Law came into effect in 1495, having opposed union, regarded the Act as ending Ireland’s national identity. In fact, while the Act translated Ascendancy parliamentarians from Dublin to Westminster, the majority of Irish people were not affected. As Lord Cornwallis accurately observed, ‘The mass of the people of Ireland do not care one farthing about union.’ Twenty-eight Irish peers, four bishops and 100 Irish MPs were given seats in the new United Kingdom Parliament in London. Administratively, however, Ireland remained separate from Britain with its own civil service functioning from Dublin as before. The King’s representative, the Viceroy, became the Lord Lieutenant. Lord Lieutenants had real power (including charge of defence and later police) and patronage. Under the Lord Lieutenant was the Chief Secretary, usually a member of the Cabinet in London, who directly administered Irish government. The head of the Irish civil service was the Undersecretary, a permanent civil servant. Some Undersecretaries held office for over twenty years. The established Churches of both countries were united as the Church of England and Ireland, and Ireland’s financial contribution to UK expenditure was fixed at twoseventeenths of the total. As the nineteenth century progressed, it became clear that the Act of Union was having ever more far-reaching repercussions. While at first its effects seemed slight, the transfer of Irish politics to London meant that a significantly larger number of substantial Irish landlords tended to remain absent from their estates. With the removal of the political excuses to which the existence of two parliaments lent itself, Irish discontents could be squarely placed at Westminster’s door, thus inflaming Irish separatism. The union could be blamed for all Ireland’s problems. Interestingly, however, during the nineteenth century, Irish politics came to concentrate on a demand for home rule and the re-establishment of an Irish Parliament, rather than on the older revolutionary demand for complete independence. Irish Anglicans and Dissenters came to be the chief supporters of union as the political system became more democratic, seeing in it a

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safeguard that they would not be swamped by the natural Catholic, nationalist majority. Irish emigrants as full-fledged British subjects labouring in British industrial cities brought with them an implacable resentment against the given order, leaving a permanent mark upon the British political scene. The first violent resistance to the new order came on 23 July 1803 when a small (50–60 persons) Dublin slum mob, led by a selfappointed general, Robert Emmet (1778–1803), attacked Dublin Castle (the seat of Irish administration), on its way dragging the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Lord Kilwarden (who had stayed Wolfe Tone’s execution), and his nephew from their coach and murdering them. Kilwarden died in heroic character, crying ‘Let no man suffer for this but by the laws of my country!’ It is only fair to his miserable lynchers that they probably mistook him for a hated judge, Lord Avonmore. Emmet was captured, eloquently defended by the government spy Leonard McNally, and, refusing a clergyman, publicly hanged, drawn, quartered and beheaded in Dublin. His ‘rising’ was really an epilogue to 1798. He had spent some time in France, where he had travelled after leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in protest at being disciplined for his membership of the United Irishmen. The youngest of seventeen children of Ireland’s leading physician, according to subsequent government reports he had used a £3,000 inheritance from his father to finance his rebellion. Emmet’s oratory and romantic nature, however, captured the imagination of the Irish people. His housekeeper Anne Devlin (whose uncle, Michael Dwyer, was involved in Emmet’s plans) bravely hid him. When he was arrested it emerged that he had refused the chance of escaping, insisting upon seeing his fiancée, Sarah Curran (whose staunchly emancipationist and nationalist, but firmly constitutionalist father disapproved of the match), and was caught on his way to an assignation with her. His speech from the dock has become a classic expression of Irish nationalism: Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed and my memory in oblivion until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

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The steadfast, irrevocable determination that Emmet espoused has always been part of the pulse of Irish nationalism. Its romantically idealised attraction has been expressed in countless ballads and songs sung everywhere there are Irishmen. The bloody futility of his enterprise and its complete failure were usually ignored, and instead the sole fact that he stood against the government – against imperial Britain – became all-important and a moral victory to subsequent generations of nationalists. Time and again Irish nationalism exhibits this perverse resolution, with defeat after defeat nevertheless inspiring further resistance, and always being presented in romantic terms to great emotional effect. Abraham Lincoln remembered as a boy reading Emmet’s speech from the dock by the firelight of his Kentucky cabin, and the text adorned many an Irish-American home, as it did Irish cottages. A century later James Connolly, the Irish labour leader, placed great significance on Emmet’s slum support, convinced that it was in 1803 that the Irish proletariat came of age. If it did, its maturity was reflected by a rejection of violence and a preference for constitutional politics for the next sixty years. o’connell The Catholic Church (with the possible exception of one bishop) had supported Pitt and the Act of Union because of his promise of emancipation and because the government undertook to subsidise various Catholic institutions and to endow the clergy throughout the country. Pitt realised that emancipation would remove most Catholic grievances and thus encourage both the mass of people and the more wealthy Catholics to support the union and bend their efforts to the general prosperity of the new kingdom. It is debatable whether emancipation would actually have had this effect if it had come with union. As it was, George III withheld his consent implacably, refusing to compromise his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith in Great Britain and Ireland: ‘I would rather give up my throne’, said the king, ‘and beg my bread from door to door throughout Europe than consent to such a measure.’ Pitt, having given his word otherwise, resigned, and by the time emancipation was granted a generation later, Irish politics and Anglo-Irish relations had been transformed by a brilliant Irish Catholic barrister, Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847).

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O’Connell came from an old Gaelic co. Kerry family which, protected by mountainous terrain, had managed to hold much of its ancestral land. His father had circumvented the problems of being a Catholic landowner in penal times by leaving his property in the legal possession of a Protestant friend. Many of the Gaelic ways survived in Kerry, and O’Connell was fostered at an uncle’s home at Derrynane where he learned Irish and became versed in the songs and legends of the people. Like many better-off Catholics, he was sent to France to finish his education. The Revolution had just started, and there another uncle, Count Daniel O’Connell, royalist colonel of the Irish Brigade who had also been Inspector-General of Infantry, looked after him. Horrified by that country’s descent into revolutionary terror and violence, the young O’Connell became convinced of the wisdom of constitutional over revolutionary action. Returning from France in 1793, O’Connell was one of the first to take advantage of that year’s Catholic Relief Act which allowed Irish Catholics to enter the professions, and he began reading for the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in London. On the same day that Lord Edward FitzGerald was arrested, 19 May 1798, O’Connell was called to the Irish Bar. By then he had become a radical utilitarian in politics and, while sympathising with the ideals of the United Irishmen, he was as horrified by their violence in 1798 as he had been by what he had seen in revolutionary France. In 1803 he joined a yeomanry corps of Dublin lawyers in the aftermath of Emmet’s attempted rebellion. At the same time, he was making a mark for himself in the national cause. He had spoken out publicly against the Act of Union, and soon after the Act was passed threw himself into reviving the Catholic Committee, pressing for emancipation. The committee at first was controlled by the remaining Catholic aristocracy who showed themselves willing to accept emancipation with safeguards – or ‘wings’ as contemporaries phrased it – so that the government should have some control over the appointment of Catholic bishops and priests. By 1808 O’Connell dominated the committee, having taken the initiative away from the Catholic nobility and placed it in the hands of his middle-class supporters, resolutely arguing the case for emancipation without wings and, significantly, enjoying the support of the Catholic Church for his stand. In 1812 when the Catholic Committee dissolved, split over O’Connell’s

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refusal to accept the wings, he had become the acknowledged leader of the movement. When he killed a member of the Dublin Corporation in a duel in 1815, his position was so strong that he was not arrested. However, the divisions within the Irish and English Catholic communities caused by O’Connell’s approach meant that the traditional advocates of emancipation could not count on united Catholic support. Henry Grattan, who after the Act of Union spent the rest of his life as an Irish MP at Westminster championing the cause of ‘winged’ emancipation, on two occasions found O’Connell – supported by the Irish Catholic Church – lined up against him. In 1821, a year after Grattan’s death, a Catholic Relief Bill with wings was passed by the House of Commons but thrown out by the Lords. That same year, the scenes of almost hysterical Catholic loyalty which greeted George IV during his visit to Ireland showed that for emancipation to win through, the government must be confronted by practical reasons for its necessity. This O’Connell realised, and he turned his energy to harnessing emancipation and the Church to the great motive force of Irish nationalism. Under his leadership, emancipation became a quasi-national purpose, and within a few years, in the words of Gustave de Beaumont, he made Ireland ‘a nation constitutionally in revolt’. Under his tutelage, Irish people came to believe that Catholic emancipation meant their emancipation. The strength and organisation of the Catholic Church was the key to O’Connell’s campaign in the 1820s. With the repeal of most of the Penal Laws during the 1780s, the Church had been able to organise itself formally. In 1802 the Christian Brothers teaching order opened its first school, signifying a revived expansionist element in the Church as a whole and a determination to provide formal Catholic education for the mass of the people. Irish seminaries were opened, thus making the priest’s vocation more easily accessible to Irishmen from humble backgrounds who had not been able to afford the inescapable costs of education abroad during Penal times. In turn, this meant that an Irish priesthood developed in touch with and representative of the broad mass of the Irish people. It was to this revived and reorganised Church that O’Connell turned for support. He was convinced that if he could impress the government with the unanimity of Catholic Ireland on the question of emancipation, then

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success would follow. And the Church, commanding the loyalty and support of over 80 per cent of the country’s population, was ideally placed to mobilise the masses O’Connell needed. In 1823 O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil, a barrister and playwright, formed the Catholic Association of Ireland. It was a professional and middle-class grouping. The following year its membership took off when it broke with tradition and allowed Catholic peasants as associate members at one penny a month. The ‘Catholic Rent’, as it was called, raised an enormous amount of money for the association. Over £1,000 a month was collected on average, and by March 1825, £19,000 had been raised. With the active involvement of the Catholic clergy, subscriptions were collected at church gates on Sundays, and branches of the association – often with priests playing prominent parts – were formed in nearly every parish in Ireland. In 1828, although prohibited as a Catholic from taking his seat, O’Connell won one of the two co. Clare constituencies in a general election. The following year, fearing insurrection, the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, forced an Emancipation Act through Parliament. On 13 April 1829 the Catholic Relief Act received the royal assent from a reluctant George IV who capitulated only when Wellington threatened to resign. The duke even had to fight a duel with a fellow Tory peer, Lord Winchilsea, who opposed him (Wellington fired wide; Winchilsea fired in the air). The Act allowed Roman Catholics for the first time since 1691 to stand for and sit in Parliament, and to hold all public offices except those of the Regent, the English and Irish Lord Chancellorships, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Ancillary legislation tacked on wings, removing the forty-shilling freeholder – the voters who overwhelmingly supported O’Connell – from the electoral register, with the consequence that the number of voters in Irish counties fell from about 100,000 to 16,000. This was designed to reassure those who feared that Catholic democracy would mean Protestant disability. In this it was unsuccessful, and from the 1820s sectarian rioting in northern Ireland became increasingly commonplace. Ironically, the very group who benefited from emancipation – the Catholic commercial and professional class – had broadly the same economic and social interests as its Protestant opponents, while the group whose public demonstrations had brought

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emancipation about – the Catholic peasantry – did not benefit from the measure. Planter/native, Protestant/Catholic divisions were more intensely felt than class interests. As Alexis de Tocqueville learned from a peasant during his travels in Ireland in the mid 1830s, ‘The law does nothing for us . . . To whom should we address ourselves? Emancipation has done nothing for us. Mr O’Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament. We die of starvation just the same.’ The major consequence of O’Connell’s campaign for emancipation was that the mobilised peasantry became a coherent political force. The fact that they were first used to redress a Catholic grievance (although O’Connell presented the drive for emancipation in national terms), and were often led by priests at the parish level, reinforced sectarian divisions and firmly linked Catholicism to nationalism. At the same time, the campaign’s constitutional nature and success was immensely important: for the rest of the century revolutionary Irish politics was largely rejected in favour of the parliamentary procedures to which O’Connell wedded his movement. That the campaign was successful, and was almost the first Irish political campaign so to be, had a profound psychological effect: O’Connell was hailed as ‘The Liberator’ and venerated as the uncrowned king of Ireland; after 1829 any cause he advocated was guaranteed mass support. His rabblerousing political style encouraged the grandest hopes amongst people of the humblest sort while firmly alienating opponents: a useful credential to use against those who suspected his moderation. Thirty years after the union the people of Ireland were experiencing a host of fundamental social and economic changes. Almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, Britain had been at war with France. The effect on the Irish economy was sharp, overall increasing prosperity, as reflected in the vast increase in population. In turn, this had a marked effect on the use and ownership of land. Not only was there increased bitterness about the ownership of land by a few, but because the supply of European agricultural produce was largely denied to the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars, the value of Irish land and its produce increased dramatically, and Irish landlords and farmers fared well. Of the estimated 5.5 million people in Ireland in 1815, 90 per cent lived and worked in the countryside’s 14 million then profitable acres, 90 per cent owned by about 5,000 men – the Ascendancy. Ascendancy

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landlords usually sublet to independent tenant farmers, many of whom also owned land outright themselves. Between 5 and 10 per cent of tenants were ‘strong farmers’ who owned or rented more than thirty acres. During the Napoleonic Wars they began to grow wheat to meet demand for flour, changing from dairy farming in the process, and thus giving more and better employment to poorer sections of the agricultural community. Smaller farmers – those with between five and thirty acres – were the most numerous tenant group. They concentrated on dairy farming and wheat and flax growing and shared with the cottiers the potato as their staple diet. Cottiers, the majority of people on the land, were mainly farm labourers enjoying the use of small plots in part return for their labour. Many were itinerant, and they often formed the bulk of the population of the rapidly growing towns and cities, huddled into atrocious housing, or emigrating to work in Scotland and England. Ireland’s industry was much less successful than its agriculture. After the union, protective duties were removed on both sides of the Irish Sea, with the result that the Irish cotton and wool industries, which competed with their English equivalents, felt the full weight of technically advanced English competition. By the 1820s the woollen and cotton industries were collapsing; only linen survived. This collapse coincided with a general recession following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Agricultural prices and land values plunged, leaving the 1820s a decade of severe commercial and agricultural contraction, bringing grave hardship to the lives of millions of cottiers and small farmers. Agrarian unrest boiled up in the harshest times, and secret peasant societies again formed: Carders, Threshers, Whitefeet and, most common, Ribbonmen. As with the Whiteboys and Oakboys before them, these societies acted to protect peasant interests, terrorising – often murdering – bigger farmers, landlords and their agents. When the Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1829, it was against this background of violence and depression that the Duke of Wellington became convinced that acquiescing to O’Connell’s demands was the only alternative to civil war. O’Connell exploited his position fully after 1829. Like many Irish nationalists after him, he began publicly to blame the union for Ireland’s ills. In fact, the union was not responsible for the post-1815

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recession, and during the 1820s Ireland enjoyed a net surplus in its financial transactions with the UK Exchequer as well as in the value of its export trade. In 1838, a report organised by Thomas Drummond, Undersecretary for Ireland, noted: Signs of growing prosperity are, unhappily, not so discernible in the condition of the labouring people, as in the amount of the produce of their labour. The proportion of the latter reserved for their use is too small to be consistent with a healthy state of society. The pressure of a superabundant and excessive population . . . is perpetually and powerfully acting to depress them.

In these circumstances, however, it was easy instead to blame the union, and calls for its repeal certainly satisfied the labouring people who had supported O’Connell’s struggle for emancipation and whose hopes had been raised by him. In 1829 O’Connell retired from the Bar and became a full-time politician, supported for the rest of his career by public subscription amounting in some years to over £16,000 – the ‘O’Connell Tribute’ – a mark of the esteem he was held in amongst the ordinary people of Ireland. Soon after O’Connell took his seat in the House of Commons on 4 February 1830, together with about thirty other Irish Catholic MPs known as O’Connell’s Tail (the first Roman Catholic MPs in modern history), he began to work for the repeal of the Act of Union. But while in his campaign for emancipation he had found allies in British Catholics who had faced as much discrimination as their Irish coreligionists in the previous forty years, and in the Whig politicians who supported reform in principle, when it came to repeal of the Union O’Connell was very much on his own. British politicians, with the memory of Napoleon still fresh and the strategic importance of Ireland for trade and defence in mind, would not support repeal. In addition, sectarian rioting in northern Ireland was becoming frequent during the 1820s, ominous for Irish nationalism. Some of those who might have been expected to support the Liberator were hostile to him, seeing him as a ‘West Briton’ – someone prepared to make Ireland English in all but name in return for the spoils of office. They remembered that in 1825 O’Connell had actually accepted a proposal for emancipation with wings attached – conditions that he had loudly rejected for the previous twenty years (the resultant legislation passed the Commons but was

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thrown out by the Lords) – and they were convinced that his purpose was self-aggrandisement. They were also alarmed by the identification O’Connell had fostered between Catholicism and nationalism, realising (correctly) that sectarian divisions in Ireland would only be deepened and would lend themselves to political exploitation by the opponents of O’Connell and Irish nationalism. Thomas Francis Meagher, a later revolutionary nationalist, scornfully dismissed the Liberator’s triumph of emancipation as only enabling ‘a few Catholic gentlemen to sit in Parliament and there concur in the degradation of their country’. Despite the fact that he had no hope of moving Parliament to repeal the union, O’Connell soon found that there were distinct benefits to be had in exchange for his support of others’ measures, particularly those of the Whigs and Radicals. Indeed, during the 1830s O’Connell developed what was, in effect, a parliamentary alliance with the Whigs, and his periods of intense repeal agitation after 1830 coincided with Tory governments. When the Whigs were in power, O’Connell preferred to concentrate on lesser, more immediate reforms. His method of seeking change – constitutionally, backed by mass support – and the way in which he used his parliamentary following to support other parties in return for concessions, acted as a model for the Irish Parliamentary Party of Parnell and Redmond in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth centuries. Forces far greater than politics – famine and emigration – combined to halve Ireland’s population between 1841 and 1901, destroying the peasantry upon whom O’Connell had depended. Nevertheless, constitutional methods almost succeeded in ending the union, and only the First World War prevented Ireland achieving home rule. Revolution became the preferred method only of a distinct minority, appealing to the memory of 1798 and to the trans-sectarian idealism and patriotism of the United Irishmen and Wolfe Tone. As a result, two strains of Irish nationalism developed: popular constitutionalism and secret revolutionary conspiracy, in competition and increasingly hostile to each other. In 1840 O’Connell founded a Repeal Association on the lines of the old Catholic Association, including a Church-collected subscription. The following year, with the Whigs out of office, O’Connell began a

Figure 8 Daniel O’Connell Most cartoons of his 1844 trial for conspiracy were published in England and were anti-O’Connell. One series of twelve cartoons entitled ‘Hints and Hits’, published over six weeks in Dublin in early 1844, supported him. In no. 10 in the series, O’Connell is a Saint Patrick figure, singing a nationalist song while ‘driving the foreign toads and vipers from the land’ including Wellington, Peel, The Times and the Church of Ireland, drawn with a reptilian tail of ‘endless plunder’ and the face of Archbishop Richard Whately of Dublin stating, ‘O’Connell will be the death of us’.

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loud campaign for repeal. As in the 1820s, Protestants were again stirred into opposition by the fear that their interests would be subsumed by Catholic interests in a self-governing Ireland. O’Connell launched a campaign against the tithe exacted from Catholics and Dissenters alike to support the Church of Ireland, and when in 1838 the government, having already set about abolishing half the Church’s archbishoprics and bishoprics, agreed to a 25 per cent reduction in the tithe, many Anglicans saw this as an attack (although Presbyterians and Quakers were delighted). They feared for their official position as the Established Church, for their lands, and for their jobs which were concentrated in the linen, shipbuilding and engineering industries which depended upon British markets and British ports. The Repeal Association was seen as a threat by the government, not only because of its implicit threat to the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom, but also because of the volatile nature of the ‘Monster Meetings’ (as The Times called them) that O’Connell organised at historic and emotive sites. In 1843, which O’Connell declared the Year of Repeal, a ‘monster meeting’ at Tara gathered between an estimated 750,000 and a million people (modern experience usually reduces such impressions: how such a mass would have moved through railwayless Ireland stretches imagination). As thousands of people made their way to another ‘monster meeting’ at Clontarf that October, the government banned the meeting and (to the dismay of his followers) O’Connell obeyed. Wholly committed to a peaceful approach, he called for a ‘Council of Three Hundred’ to form a national representative body, forcing the government to act against him personally on the grounds of conspiracy and ‘intimidation and demonstration of great physical force’. In 1844, at the age of sixtyeight, O’Connell was found guilty and imprisoned for three months before the House of Lords set aside the sentence (see Figure 8). When he emerged from prison, he recognised the hopelessness of his campaign. The Young Irelanders, a group of bright young organisers and journalists who had played a vital part in the creation of the Repeal Association, were moving to break away, convinced that O’Connell’s constitutional policy might secure reforms, but would never make Ireland free. In addition, the peasantry was becoming increasingly alarmed at the failure of potato crops, a sinister prelude to

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the great famine. In failing health, O’Connell left Ireland for the last time in January 1847 to make a scarcely audible appeal in the House of Commons on behalf of his starving countrymen: ‘Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her she cannot save herself. I solemnly call on you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.’ His prediction was deadly accurate. From Westminster he embarked upon a pilgrimage to Rome, dying in Genoa on the way. His heart was sent to Rome where it now lies in an urn in the Church of St Agatha; his body was brought back to Dublin where, after the biggest funeral that Ireland had ever witnessed, it was laid in Glasnevin Cemetery on 5 August 1847. Dead, O’Connell was as controversial as he had been alive. John Mitchel (1815–75), a Young Ireland Presbyterian who in later years became a constitutionalist, brushed him away as ‘next to the British Government the greatest enemy Ireland ever had’. He blamed O’Connell for the failure of the Young Irelanders’ insurrectionary plans in 1848 – the year after the Liberator’s death – writing in his Jail Journal: Poor old Dan! Wonderful, mighty, jovial and mean old man! With silver tongue and smile of witchery and heart of unfathomable fraud! What a royal yet vulgar soul, with keen eye and potent sweep of a generous eagle of Cairn Tuathal – and the base servility of a hound, and the cold cruelty of a spider!. . . Think of the ‘gorgeous and gossamer’ theory of moral and peaceful agitation, the most astounding organon of public swindling since first man bethought him of obtaining money under false pretence. And after one has thought of all this and more, what then can a man say? What but pray that Irish earth may lie light on O’Connell’s breast, and that the good God who knew how to create so wondrous a creature may have mercy upon his soul?

It was a harsh, bitter-sweet tribute for the man who had obtained for the mass of Irishmen greater liberty and greater coherence than any other Irish leader since the English invasion. His success was resented by revolutionary nationalists who never accepted that Irish freedom could be obtained peacefully. O’Connell was never able completely to exorcise the republican and revolutionary ideas of Wolfe Tone, and thus, ultimately, his patient, long-suffering constitutionalism was always vulnerable to the appeal of violent action. The Young Irelanders and the Fenians who followed him were to ensure that the threat of revolt was maintained.

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The following generations of Irish nationalists, remembering the failure of O’Connell’s peaceful attempt to achieve home rule for Ireland and the horror of famine which seemed to cap his career, blamed him for his deference to legality and for his constitutionalism, neglecting to remember the bloody failure of violence in 1798, or the hope that Pitt’s espousal of emancipation gave for constitutional progress and reform. O’Connell was right to try another approach: ‘that no political change whatsoever’, as he put it, ‘is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood’. young ireland The Young Ireland movement was essentially grouped around the weekly Nation newspaper, founded in October 1842 by Thomas Davis (1814–45), a Protestant barrister, poet and graduate of Trinity College, Dublin; Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903), an Ulster Catholic journalist; and John Dillon (1816–66), like Davis a barrister and graduate of Trinity, from a prosperous co. Mayo Catholic merchant family (Trinity itself never barred Catholics from studying, but until 1793 they could not take degrees). The movement’s aim was to ‘establish internal union and external independence’. Largely influenced by the doctrines of the Italian republican nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, it was modelled on Mazzini’s revolutionary society Young Italy and earnestly adopted his vision of a republican brotherhood of nations bound by non-sectarian principles of Christian charity. The Nation enjoyed a great deal of influence, regularly selling over 10,000 copies, and becoming the first weekly paper to circulate throughout Ireland. It proselytised for the ideals of the United Irishmen, drawing no distinction between Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, Stuart, Cromwellian and Williamite traditions, regarding them all as Irish. It printed the ancient Gaelic tales, told Irish history, praised Irish culture, art and craftsmanship, and publicised Davis’ poems, one of which – ‘A Nation Once Again’ – became in the twentieth century Ireland’s unofficial national anthem: When boyhood’s fire was in my blood, I read of ancient freemen, For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,

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The Nation also carried a manifesto by Davis that was to become the definitive explanation of modern Irish nationalism: We repeat, again and again, no hatred of the English. For much that England did in literature, politics and war, we are, as men, grateful. Her oppression we would not even avenge. We would, were she eternally dethroned from us, rejoice in her prosperity; but we cannot and will not try to forget her long, cursing, merciless tyranny to Ireland; and we do not desire to share her gains, her responsibility or her glory.

Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin – the early-twentiethcentury nationalist party – was to describe Davis as ‘the prophet I followed throughout my life, the man whose words and teachings I tried to translate into practice in politics’. Davis throughout lent broad support to O’Connell’s Repeal Association, but after his death (of fever) his successor as editor of The Nation, John Mitchel, brought Young Ireland firmly to advocate rebellion. Mitchel was born in Dungiven, co. Londonderry, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Like Davis and Dillon, he qualified as a barrister and was a Trinity graduate. After 1845 he rapidly became convinced by the famine of the futility of anything but revolution were conditions in Ireland to be changed, and used The Nation as his platform. He was the first nationalist since 1798 to demand an Irish republic. A breach with O’Connell was inevitable, and in 1846 it came over a combination of O’Connell’s willingness to strike another alliance with the Whigs in return for posts in government for some of his supporters and relations, and his opposition (in line with that of the Church) to establishing the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges. Mitchel led the attack on O’Connell on both issues, accusing him of compromising the principle of repeal by his actions. O’Connell replied, ‘It is, no doubt, a very fine thing to die for one’s country, but believe me, one living patriot is worth a whole churchyard full of dead ones,’ and he insisted that members of the Repeal Association should pledge rejection of physical force.

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The Young Irelanders left the Repeal Association, driven toward revolution by the suffering and destitution wrought by the famine (1846 was one of the worst years). In 1847 Mitchel began to publish in The Nation a series of letters from James Fintan Lalor (1807–49), the son of an O’Connellite MP and gentleman farmer from Queen’s County (present-day co. Laois), who advanced the radical argument that the nature of landownership in Ireland lay at the heart of the famine and acted to circumvent Irish independence: ‘A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises or ever can be raised; or on which a nation can safely rest.’ While recognising the validity of private property rights, Lalor held that ‘the entire soil of a country belongs as of right to the entire people of that country’. Prodded by Lalor, Mitchel translated this argument into a campaign for security of tenure for tenants. The campaign was unsuccessful. Irish peasants struggling to stay alive amidst terrible famine did not have time or energy for political campaigns, and the majority of Young Irelanders found Mitchel and Lalor dangerously extreme. Early in 1848, Mitchel and Lalor left Young Ireland, rejecting Duffy’s and Dillon’s arguments that a strong and independent Irish Party at Westminster offered the best hope of achieving national aspirations, and founded the United Irishman. In it, Mitchel openly advocated rebellion, a ‘holy war to sweep this island clear of the English name and nation’. Not surprisingly he was arrested in May 1848 on a charge of treason felony, a new crime established by the Treason Felony Act which received the royal assent in April that year and which was specifically designed to circumscribe such firebrands – ‘any person who, by open and advised speaking, compassed the intimidation of the Crown or Parliament’. Mitchel was the first person arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation under the Act. He served his sentence in Bermuda and then in Tasmania, before escaping to the United States in 1853. Lalor, always an invalid from a congenital spinal disease, was also arrested in 1848. He was soon released on health grounds, and he died the following year. Without Lalor’s radical intellectual leadership, contemporary revolutionary nationalists remained fixated upon their political purpose of Irish freedom, refusing to accept that economic and social reform might be the

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locomotive of national independence. As Lalor put it, they ‘desired not a democratic, but merely a national revolution’. This was made quickly apparent by the abortive rising organised by another Young Irelander, William Smith O’Brien (1803–64). An unlikely rebel, O’Brien was born into a wealthy co. Clare family and sent to Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected the Tory MP for Ennis in 1828. In 1843 he joined the Repeal Association, proving himself a radical and critical member and winning the respect of The Nation in the process. He jocularly referred to himself as ‘Middle Aged’ Ireland, bridging the gap between O’Connell’s ‘Old’ Ireland and Young Ireland, but in 1846 he sided with Mitchel against O’Connell over the Queen’s Colleges, advanced by the Tory prime minister (and O’Connell’s old political enemy) Sir Robert Peel as a compromise to still demands for a Catholic university. O’Brien became the unofficial spokesman of Young Ireland in the House of Commons, and as the famine progressed, became more extreme himself. After Mitchel’s arrest and transportation in 1848, O’Brien called for insurrection as the only way of alleviating famine distress and securing Irish freedom. He was also fired by the demagogic and popular Chartist campaign in Britain for electoral and social reform, and by the popular rebellions against autocratic government sweeping across Europe that year. His determination to rebel was aided by public calls for revolution in the columns of the Irish Felon (the successor to the United Irishman which was suppressed when Mitchel was arrested), edited by Lalor and John Martin (1812–75), another Ulster Presbyterian minister’s son. In the closing days of July 1848, O’Brien and a motley assembly of half-starved peasants clashed with forty-six members of the Irish Constabulary (the national police force formed in 1836) in what has become known as the ‘Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’ at Ballingarry, co. Tipperary (see Figure 9). O’Brien was captured soon afterwards and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and he joined John Mitchel in Tasmania. He was released in 1854 but played no further part in Irish politics. ‘The people’, he explained, ‘preferred to die of starvation at home, or to flee as voluntary exiles to other lands, rather than to fight for their lands and their liberties.’

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Figure 9 Young Ireland Proclamation Meagher was arrested and transported to Australia; Dillon and Doheny escaped to France and then to the United States. In 1852 Meagher also escaped to the USA, where like Doheny he made his career. Following an amnesty, Dillon returned to Ireland in 1855 and in 1865 was elected MP for Tipperary. He became an opponent of nationalist violence and a supporter of the Union. His son John Dillon (1851–1927) was the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and his grandson James Dillon (1902–86) was leader of Fine Gael, 1957–66.

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The ‘revolt’ of O’Brien and the Young Irelanders in 1848 was a ludicrous affair. However, their movement was important to the future pattern of Irish republican nationalism. They revived the principle of a non-sectarian Irish republic first put forward by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, evolving the ideal of an Irish nationhood resting on cultural heritage. They found – as did their successors – that the weight of the Catholic Church was firmly on the side of politicians prepared to work within the Westminster system. ‘It is my sincere belief’, wrote O’Brien shortly after his arrest, ‘that it was through the instrumentality of the superior order of the Catholic clergy that the insurrection was suppressed.’ The Times of 2 August 1848 reported that ‘altogether there is no doubt that the Roman Catholic clergy here, as a body, have used their influence and most creditably for the preservation of the public peace by discountenancing rebellion’. Yet, while facing up to the fact of the Church’s opposition to revolutionary nationalism, Young Ireland ignored the growing Protestant opposition to their ideal republic – the Orange Order had been reconstituted in 1845 – paradoxically calling for reconciliation without seeing that their goal made this impossible. In this, too, every one of their successors followed suit. Even when the Irish Civil War was fought in 1922–3 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty which partitioned Ireland in response to Orange and Unionist opposition to home rule, the actual ground of the fighting was not partition but the question of whether men and women who for the previous six years had fought for a republic could in all conscience take an oath of allegiance to the British king. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was some recognition of the significance of Young Ireland and the nature of the difficulties they faced in attempting revolt in the midst of famine, and at the moment when the peasantry were discarding the remnants of Gaelicism. Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), later to become the first President of Ireland, put this point in a lecture he delivered in Dublin in 1892, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’: Thomas Davis and his brilliant band of Young Irelanders came just at the dividing line, and tried to give to Ireland a new literature in English to replace the literature which was just being discarded. It succeeded and it did

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not succeed. It was a most brilliant effort, but the old bark had been too recently stripped off the Irish tree, and the trunk could not take as it might have done to a fresh one. It was a new departure, and at first produced a violent effect. Yet in the long run it failed properly to leaven our peasantry who might, perhaps, have been reached upon other lines.

Yeats, however, though he had absorbed Davis’ teachings in his youth, came to disagree with him profoundly over his willingness to subordinate art to politics. To recommend this method of literature, he wrote, ‘was to be deceived or to practise deception’. In 1848 such arguments would have been academic. The Irish peasantry had been reached by one other devastating line, the great famine of 1845–9, the worst catastrophe of Irish history. famine The 1841 census divided the 8,175,124 people of Ireland into four categories according to their relative wealth: property owners and farmers of more than fifty acres; artisans and farmers with between five and fifty acres; labourers and smallholders with up to five acres, and a numerically insignificant fourth category, ‘means unspecified’. Some 70 per cent of the rural population were in the category of labourers and smallholders with five acres or less. They were spread throughout the country in three distinct patterns: a prosperous farming class and poor labouring class in the midlands and the south; a prosperous east and north, and an extremely poor and numerous class of impoverished smallholders in the western and south-western seaboard counties. The ravages of the great famine matched this distribution, with the west and south-west hardest hit, and the labouring and impoverished smallholding groups bearing the brunt of starvation, sickness and death. Fever followed famine nationwide, but as far as death from starvation was concerned, the labouring population suffered almost to the exclusion of other groups. Thus in the midlands and the south, the prosperous farming class did not starve during the years of the ‘great hunger’. The famine was never general in the rural community. Between 1841 and 1851 the population fell by nearly 20 per cent, to 6,552,385. Total deaths were estimated by the census commissioners in the same period at 1,383,350 – certainly an underestimate since where

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whole families died, no returns were made, and not until 1864 was registration of births, marriages and deaths made compulsory. The commissioners estimated that in the same period another 1,445,587 Irish people emigrated – mostly to Britain (fares were cheaper to Britain than anywhere else) and America. The direct cause of the famine and its attendant demographic earthquake was the persistent failure of the potato crop in the years 1845 and 1846, and its partial failure over each of the succeeding five years. By tradition, Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with introducing the potato to Ireland from America in 1586. Within two centuries it had become the principal vegetable food of the peasantry. It needed little labour to plant and harvest. It yielded a large amount on a small acreage, and so was ideally suited to the small tenant farmer. Together with buttermilk, it provided sufficient nutrition to sustain life and a reasonable state of health. Adam Smith gave it backhanded praise, declaring, ‘The strongest sedan-chair carriers and the most beautiful whores are potato-fed Irish.’ By 1845 it had become the sole food of about one-third of the people, and bread, meat, grain or cornmeal graced only the tables of the better-off. Thus the effect of a potato crop failure could be devastating, and the effect of consecutive failures could be fatal famine on a very large scale. Famine had struck in Ireland many times before. In 1740–1 an estimated 400,000–500,000 had died because of potato blight (a proportion about as high as in 1845–9). During the nineteenth century before 1845, there had been famines in 1807, 1817, 1821–2, 1830–4, 1836 and 1839. However, while always accompanied by death and emigration, potato crop failure and famine had also always been localised. In 1845 the first signs of potato crop failure came in September when discolouration on the leaves of potato plants was noticed. When the crop was dug in October, hopes that the failure would be small-scale and localised as in previous years were dashed, as reports came in from most of the country that there was no crop at all. The actual cause of the failure was phytophthora infestans, potato blight, whose spores, carried by wind, rain and insects, had come to Ireland from Britain and the European continent. A fungus devastated potato plants, producing black spots and a white mould on the leaves, soon rotting the potatoes into pulp. The following year the blight was general, and by the beginning of 1847 it was clear that a

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disaster of unprecedented magnitude was under way. Despite the fact that there was no blight in 1847, because of the small supply of seed potatoes the healthy crop that year merely reduced the extent of famine; it did not end mass starvation. Typhus, dysentery, scurvy, hunger oedema and relapsing ‘yellow’ fever brought mass death to regions which had escaped the worst in the previous years. 1848 saw widespread, though partial, crop failure again. In December, an outbreak of cholera began which lasted until July 1849. Hundreds of thousands of people in various stages of starvation died from this and other fevers, nearly all of them from the poorest section of the community, the small tenants and landless labourers. By the summer of 1847, 3 million people, nearly half the population of Ireland, were being fed by private charities – often organised by the Quakers – or at public expense. So many people died in so short a period of time, that only mass graves could accommodate them, often in ground specially consecrated for the purpose. Emigration soared from 75,000 in 1845 to 250,000 in 1851. Thousands of emigrants died during the Atlantic crossing (in 1847 there were 17,465 documented deaths) in ‘coffin ships’ plying a speculative trade, often little more than rotting hulks. Thousands more died of sickness at disembarkation centres. The famine lasted in one part of the country or another for five years to 1849, with its effects lasting much longer still. The 1851 census revealed greatly enlarged towns and cities, multitudes in workhouses, and large numbers receiving outdoor relief, especially in the west and other poorer districts of the country. Famine struck hardest in the west and the north midlands where most of the population had been concentrated since Cromwell’s clearances. In Connaught as a whole, 64 per cent of farms were smaller than five acres. Through these ‘congested districts’, famine diseases spread like wildfire. Between 1841 and 1851 the population of county Mayo fell by almost 20 per cent. An estimated million people died during the famine. The danger inherent in dependence upon one particular source of food had not escaped the awareness of the government in London. In 1832 famine had been accompanied by cholera. At the same time, the political philosophy of the day was laìssez-faire, non-intervention by government in the belief that the unrestrained forces of the market were most efficient; in common with advancing nineteenth-century

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European practice, all British parties were wedded to it. Nevertheless, the response of the Tory government under Sir Robert Peel in 1845–6 was prompt, efficient and interventionist. Peel (1788–1850) was a politician noted for his dedication to effective administration. Born in Lancashire, the son of a textile mill owner, he entered politics in 1809 as a Tory MP for Cashel, co. Tipperary. In 1812 he was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland, serving for six years – the longest of any Chief Secretary in the century. His tenure of office in Ireland was marked by the imaginative – almost experimental – nature of his policies and by the mutual animosity between him and Daniel O’Connell (who dubbed him ‘Orange Peel’, referred to him as ‘a raw youth, squeezed out of I know not what factory in England’, likened Peel’s smile to ‘the silver plate on a coffin’, and was challenged to a duel by Peel in 1815). In 1814 Peel created a police force, the Peace Preservation Police, quickly known as ‘Peelers’; the following year he created a precedent by establishing a state grant for primary education, and during the famine of 1817 he demonstrated his flexibility and willingness to flout the common wisdom of the day by providing £250,000 for relief works. In 1829 he led in the debate on Catholic emancipation, supporting it in the House of Commons while the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, pressed it grimly in the Lords. Prime minister himself in 1835 and again 1841–6, Peel showed himself willing to concede reform, but unwilling to consider constitutional changes, and he steadfastly opposed O’Connell’s Repeal Association. In 1845 he granted an annual endowment of £26,000 to the Catholic seminary Maynooth College, and with the Provincial Colleges Act he introduced the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges – the first state-created university colleges in British history – in an attempt to open higher education to Catholics. By the end of the year, mounting famine in Ireland had convinced him of the need immediately to abolish the Corn Laws (tariffs on grain imported into the UK which in effect subsidised UK farmers) so as to lower the price of bread. The fundamental farming and landowning interests of the Tory Party were enraged. Peel persevered, splitting his party and losing office the following year when, with Opposition Whig support, he forced the repeal of the Corn Laws through Parliament: Benjamin Disraeli, the young Tory MP for Maidstone, leapt to prominence and

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ultimately the leadership of the Conservative Party by spearheading the revolt against Peel on this issue. Repeal of the Corn Laws was only one of several measures Peel applied to offset the famine. In November 1845 he appointed a scientific commission to decide what should be done: they incorrectly diagnosed the nature of the potato blight, and so were ineffective, but that was not Peel’s fault. He himself recognised that the first priority had to be the provision of food, and he personally authorised (without Cabinet approval) the purchase of £100,000 worth of maize from the United States for distribution by a Relief Commission he set up to coordinate emergency work. To provide employment and thus money for starving Irishmen to buy food, early in 1846 he fought through Acts to fund improvements to Irish harbours and roads. He encouraged voluntary relief committees (about 650 had been formed by August 1846) and established special food depots which released food supplies onto the open market to ensure that local traders would not be able to raise prices and capitalise on misery. Having split his party over the repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel was voted out of office at the end of June 1846. His successor, the Whig Lord John Russell, came into office just as it was becoming clear that, for the first time, the whole potato crop of Ireland was blighted. In 1846, Ireland was faced with famine of an altogether greater magnitude. This was compounded by Russell. Unlike Peel, who had pragmatically concentrated upon ensuring that there was enough food to feed those in desperate need, Russell was a doctrinaire exponent of laìssez-faire. He also headed a minority government, dependent upon the votes of Tories who had found Peel too liberal. So, while the Whigs had supported Peel over the repeal of the Corn Laws, and while Russell himself had a liberal record, in order to stay in office he found it necessary to stick to political principles generally acceptable to Tories. In October 1846 Russell set out his approach to the famine: It must be thoroughly understood that we cannot feed the people . . . We can at best keep down prices where there is no regular market and prevent established dealers from raising prices much beyond the fair price with ordinary profits.

He emphasised employment rather than food for famine victims in the belief that private enterprise, not government, should be

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responsible for providing food, and that the cost of Irish relief work should be paid for by Irishmen. Peel’s Relief Commission was abolished, and all public relief work was put in the hands of civil servants in the Board of Works who, on top of all their normal responsibilities, manfully tried to find work for nearly 750,000 starving people. Workhouses were built where, in return for hard (and often pointless) labour, starving peasants were paid starvation wages. The great Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle toured Ireland during the famine and recorded witnessing ‘human swinery’ conditions in workhouses. Tens of thousands of people died during the winter of 1846, forcing the government to accept that its policies were not working and that Peel’s policy of state intervention in food supply and distribution was the only alternative. In March 1847, Russell authorised the general distribution of food to the destitute, defined to exclude anyone who held so much as a quarter of an acre, with the result that hundreds of thousands gave up their holdings in order to stay alive. Private initiative did much to relieve the misery. Many individual landlords did the best they could for their tenants. Soup kitchens, freely feeding starving peasants, were established by landlords and notably by the minute but formidable Society of Friends and by the British Relief Association. Unfortunately, some evangelical Anglican clergymen, particularly in the west of Ireland, brought distrust to the notion of soup kitchens with ‘Souperism’: offering nourishment in return for conversion. Early in 1847, a large government-sponsored soup kitchen programme was established, which by August was feeding 3 million people daily. Russell and his colleagues never conceived of interfering with the structure of the Irish economy in the ways that would have been necessary to prevent continuing catastrophe. There was no attempt to reform tenancies or agricultural practices. Instead, landlords (who were responsible for the rates of their tenants on holdings valued at £4 or less, even if rents were not paid) in some cases evicted tenants as a way of reducing rate bills (in 1850, about 104,000 people were evicted), and farmers and merchants could export grain and cattle without government hindrance. One of the most remarkable facts about the famine period is that an average £100,000 worth of food left Ireland every month: almost throughout, Ireland remained a net exporter of food.

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In addition to private and government schemes, the Poor Law unions administered the bulk of relief work. The 130 unions in Ireland had been established in 1838 with the Irish Poor Law Act, extending the British Poor Law system to Ireland. Under this system each Union was supervised by a Board of Guardians consisting of local ratepayers, responsible for workhouses where the destitute would be set to work for subsistence wages. The Unions were supported by local rates; whole districts were bankrupted by the Unions’ expenditure during the famine. In an attempt both to contain such overcommitments and to extend relief, in 1847 the government increased the number of Unions to 162. The extent of their work can be judged by the numbers employed on relief works: 114,600 in October 1846; 570,000 in January 1847, 734,000 in March. Over £7 million was spent by the government in grants and loans during the famine, much of this through the Poor Law Unions. It must be said that the government in London never properly appreciated the sheer magnitude of the famine disaster. Official insensitivity was also something which other subjects in the UK faced: between June and October 1848, for example, 72,000 people died of cholera in England and Wales without the government intervening. It must also be pointed out that in the midst of the most awful suffering, starving Irishmen did little to help themselves. There were food riots, but no real uprising (1848 was a fiasco), and despite government encouragement, sea and river fishing was not taken up: it was as if famine victims simply passively awaited death as their inevitable fate. ‘The forbearance of the Irish peasantry’, declared the 1851 Census Commission, ‘and the calm submission with which they bore the deadliest ills that can fall on man can scarcely be paralleled in the annals of any nation’ (Figure 10). Charles Edward Trevelyan (1807–86), Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and knighted in 1848 for his services to Ireland, was the civil servant most involved in Irish famine relief. Like Russell and Sir Charles Wood (Chancellor of the Exchequer 1846–52), Trevelyan firmly believed in the principles of laìssez-faire, opposed new expenditure and the raising of taxes, and advocated national self-sufficiency. He was convinced of Malthus’ theory that any attempt to raise the standard of living of the poorest section of the population above subsistence level would only result in increased

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Figure 10 Famine – Dublin Memorial Emaciated bronze figures sculpted and cast in 1996–7 by Rowan Gillespie (b. Dublin, 1953) at his foundry in Blackrock, and sited on Customs House Quays, Dublin. The Illustrated London News in 1847 depicted harrowing famine scenes accurately echoed in these figures. At the age of seven, Gillespie was sent to boarding school in England and stayed to study art. He then went to Norway for several years, where he was impressed by the art of Edvard Munch, whose influence can also be seen in these figures. He returned to live in Ireland in 1977.

population thus restoring the previous situation, aggravated and enlarged. In October 1846 Trevelyan wrote that the overpopulation of Ireland ‘being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual’. Two years later, after perhaps a million people had died, he decided, ‘The matter is awfully serious, but we are in the hands of Providence, without a possibility of averting the catastrophe if it is to happen. We can only await the result.’ Sir Charles Wood replied in the same vein to an Irish landlord who in 1848 had written to him describing what was actually happening: ‘I am not

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at all appalled by your tenantry going. That seems to me a necessary part of the process . . . We must not complain of what we really want to obtain.’ Imprisoned by their attitudes, these men could stand by, convinced that they should not interfere in the famine’s divine correction of the unruly, rebellious, treacherous Irish. As the Times leader of 30 August 1847 put it, ‘In no other country have men talked treason until they are hoarse, and then gone about begging for sympathy from their oppressors. In no other country have the people been so liberally and unthriftily helped by the nation they denounced and defied.’ ‘The great evil with which we have to contend’, Trevelyan himself declared in 1846, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’ The long-term consequences of the famine were manifold and tremendous. The most notable was the tradition it firmly established of emigration, principally to the United States. Between 1845 and 1855, nearly 2 million people had emigrated from Ireland to America and Australia, and another 750,000 to Britain. By 1900 over 4 million Irishmen had crossed the Atlantic, and as many lived abroad as in Ireland (Figure 11). In the century up to 1930, it is estimated that one

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Figure 11 Destinations of overseas emigrants from Ireland 1821–1920

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person out of every two born in Ireland emigrated. Between 1951 and 1961, net emigration from the country as a whole amounted to 437,682. There were other drastic consequences too. Potatoes declined rapidly in importance as the farmers and tenants who were left changed from tillage to grazing sheep and cattle. This in turn ended the practice of farm subdivision, and one son came generally to inherit the farm intact. Emigration or a threadbare existence were the choices facing younger children, and practically every census between 1851 and 1961 showed a decline in Ireland’s population (a 0.46 per cent population increase was reported in 1936–7, and an increase of 1.96 per cent was shown in 1951). Part of the loss reflected the increasing age at which most Irish people married: in 1900 in rural Ireland the average age at marriage for men was thirty-nine and for women thirty-one. Late marriage had been a characteristic of the Irish farming community before the famine, with only the labouring/cottier class enjoying early marriage. After the famine, the labouring/cottier class (which was hit hardest) was much reduced, and farmers became the largest single class on the land, a phenomenon reflected not only in characteristically late marriage, but also in a change in the nature of landownership. Indeed, the famine affected the farming community only slightly, and so it emerged actually stronger. As labourers and cottiers died or emigrated, leaving their smallholdings, so small farmers extended their plots. In 1845 there had been nearly 630,000 holdings of up to fifteen acres (each basically supporting a family); by 1851 there were only 318,000. In the same period, the number of holdings of fifteen acres or more increased from 277,000 to 290,000. The famine also ended the widespread use of the Irish language. Gaelic, the natural language of 4 million Irish people in 1841, ten years later was spoken only by 1.7 million; in 1911 by only 527,000. ‘The Famine’, wrote Douglas Hyde in 1891, ‘knocked the heart out of the Irish language.’ Speaking Irish had become firmly identified with poverty and peasanthood, with famine and death. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Irish-speaking parents joined wholeheartedly with priests and teachers in forcing children to speak only English. English was identified with success and well-being. It was the language of commerce, and the language of likely more prosperous

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emigrant relatives too. The 1831 National Education Act had established English as the language of Ireland’s first national primary school system. Hedge school teachers before the national schools were introduced had used tally sticks, the bata scóir which Irish-speaking children wore around their necks, as a crude disciplinary measure. National school teachers adopted the bata scóir to help them end Gaelic: every time a child was heard speaking it, a notch was cut in the stick; at the end of the day the notches were counted and the child was punished for each offence. There is a depressing fatalism about the bata scóir, used by Irish people themselves and not forced upon them by any official edict. The great native Irish cultural force embodied in the language was consciously thrust aside by the very people whose national identity and pride it had sustained for centuries. No doubt this was a symptom of their wretched, repressed state in which they perceived survival as depending upon their ability to conform to the image of their oppressors and governors. It is when people lose confidence in themselves that extremism flourishes. In many ways, Patrick Pearse and his colleagues in 1916 represented the last generation which had a coherent sense of Irish language and culture. Even then, while admiring a legendary past and attempting to emulate the legendary Gael, English was their language: their rebel proclamation of an Irish republic in 1916 was printed and published only in English; the orders they gave their army were in English; the letters and poems they wrote just before their executions were in English. Despite their rejection of the thought, their country had been Anglicised by a combination of education, social pressure and the famine. Irish emigrants carried one other significant mark of the famine abroad: their hatred of Britain. Britain was blamed for the famine, and was the object of all their rage. Irish emigrants to the United States came to form a body of political opinion consistently hostile to British interests. In both world wars, American isolationism was strongly supported by Irish-Americans. Substantial financial and propaganda support has come from America for every Irish national movement from the nineteenth-century Home Rule Party to the IRA. American politicians and presidents have found it prudent, for domestic political reasons, to use their influence on Britain in Irish interests. In 1919–20,

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Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s political leader at the time, considered himself better employed in America, where he raised over $5 million in less than two years and tried to influence the 1920 American presidential election in the Irish interest. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding both exerted pressure for an Irish settlement upon Lloyd George’s government. It was from America, too, that the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the most effective of all Ireland’s revolutionary national movements, was financed and sustained from its foundation in 1858. fenians Some of those who emigrated from Ireland during the famine, and some of the Young Irelanders who had contemplated rebellion, such as Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–67) who in 1853 escaped from transportation and reached America, determined to organise further rebellion. John Mitchel, another Young Irelander, instead adopted an O’Connellite approach after escaping with Meagher. He became a farmer in Tennessee and vociferously espoused the Confederate cause in the American Civil War, refusing to accept that Negroes or Jews had the same rights as Irishmen. He returned to Ireland in 1874 and the following year was elected MP for North Tipperary, only to be unseated on the grounds that he was an escaped convict. A second election again returned him, but he died shortly afterwards in Newry, where he is buried. Meagher settled in New York, where he entered politics and was admitted to the Bar. When the American Civil War started, he raised the New York Irish Brigade for the Union – (the 69th, 88th and 63rd New York Volunteers) – and was commissioned Brigadier General. He planned to battle-train Irish soldiers who would set out at the end of the war to liberate their own country. But his brigade was successively decimated at the battles of Antietam (September 1862), Fredericksburg (December 1862) and Chancellorsville (May 1863), thus thwarting his hopes. After the surrender of the Confederate forces in 1865, Meagher was mustered out of the army with the rank of Major General of Volunteers and was appointed Acting Governor of Montana Territory. During a flood of the Missouri in 1867, he fell from his boat and drowned.

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Another Young Irelander, James Stephens (1824–1901), quite independently shared Meagher’s hopes for an Irish-American-supported rebellion. Unlike Meagher and Mitchel, Stephens had avoided arrest in 1848 and fled to France where he learnt about the Carbonari, a Franco-Italian revolutionary secret society. He returned to Ireland in 1856 resolved to form a similar Irish society. For a year he journeyed all over Ireland, covering three thousand miles mainly on foot, assessing opinion and gathering supporters. Then, on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1858, in Dublin, he formally established the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, later named the Irish Republican Brotherhood – the IRB. In rural areas the new society benefited from the tradition of agrarian secret societies, and hundreds of men took Stephens’ membership oath: I . . . do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God that I will do my utmost at every risk while life lasts, to make Ireland an independent democratic Republic; that I will yield implicit obedience in all things not contrary to the law of God to the commands of my superior officers, and that I shall preserve inviolable secrecy regarding all the transactions of this secret society that may be confided in me. So help me God. Amen.

Six months later, Stephens sailed to New York, where he raised money and support for the society with the help of two other Young Irelanders, John O’Mahony (1815–77), and Michael Doheny (1805– 63). O’Mahony had escaped to France with Stephens in 1848 and had stayed with him until 1852, when he moved to New York. He remained closely in touch with Stephens, sending him $400 early in 1858, which Stephens used as seed money for the IRB. In New York, on the day that Stephens founded the IRB, O’Mahony founded an auxiliary secret society, which he named the Fenian Brotherhood after Finn MacCool’s legendary band of warriors, the Fianna. Michael Doheny was a founder member of the Fenians, having escaped directly to New York after 1848. There he practised law and campaigned for Irish nationhood. Under their leadership, the Fenians (as both the Fenian Brotherhood and the IRB rapidly became known) prepared for another rising. However, while Stephens was a capable organiser and the acknowledged Fenian leader or ‘head centre’, his efforts towards actually taking up arms were marked by procrastination. Seven years after

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founding the IRB, Stephens (who had returned to Ireland in 1860) promised his American supporters that there would be a rising in 1865. With typical optimism he claimed that there were 85,000 Fenians in Ireland armed with 50,000 guns, and that there were a further 15,000 Fenians in the British army waiting for his word to mutiny. A Fenian organiser in Britain, Michael Davitt (1846–1906), sent Stephens reports which buoyed his claims, while an organiser in Ireland, John Devoy (1842–1928), estimated that out of a British garrison of 25,000, some 7,000 were members of the IRB. As events were to prove, these estimates were wild exaggerations. On 11 November 1865, seven weeks before the end of the year Stephens had promised would be known for a Fenian rising, he was arrested and imprisoned in Richmond gaol, Dublin. A fortnight later, with the help of John Devoy and some Fenian warders, he escaped and made his way to Paris and then New York. Using the title ‘Chief Organiser of the Irish Republic’, with this escape Stephens caught the popular imagination, becoming a national hero. However, his constant attempts to delay a rising for one reason or another (he had called off one planned rising in December 1865, and tried to postpone another twelve months later), and his autocratic ways, alienated much of the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood, and early in 1867 he left New York and returned to France, in fear for his life. For the next twenty years he lived as an impoverished journalist in Paris until 1886 when, through the intercession on his behalf of the Irish Party leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, and with the help of a public subscription, he returned to live quietly and in comparative comfort in Dublin. The government was learning not to make martyrs. Stephens had been betrayed in 1865 by an informer in the Dublin offices of the Irish People, the newspaper he had established in 1863. The men involved in this newspaper – like those involved twenty years earlier with the Young Ireland newspapers – came to dominate revolutionary Irish nationalism. John O’Leary (1830–1907), an agnostic, Thomas Clarke Luby (1821–1901), a Protestant and Charles Joseph Kickham (1828–82), a devout Catholic, were joint editors of the paper; Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915), a relaxed west county Cork Catholic, was the business manager. They were also the leaders, under Stephens, of the IRB. Under their control, the Irish People was stridently republican, and in September 1865 it was

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suppressed by the authorities; O’Leary, Luby, Kickham and Rossa were arrested and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment under the Treason Felony Act. John Devoy, who briefly acted as head centre after Stephens’ arrest in November, was arrested in February 1866. Together with O’Donovan Rossa and Luby, he spent five years in English prisons before all three were released in 1871 on condition they did not return to Ireland until the full period of their sentences had expired. All went to New York, where Luby and Rossa became journalists and Devoy became one of the most influential leaders of the Clan na Gael, the successor organisation to the Fenian Brotherhood. Devoy, in fact, came to personify exiled Ireland. He played a crucial part in the IRB’s attempt to secure German support for the 1916 rising, and despite a stormy relationship with Eamon de Valera in 1919–20, he acted as the chief Irish-American organiser and fundraiser for the IRA. Kickham was released from prison in poor health in 1869 and O’Leary in 1874, both becoming active supporters of the revival of Gaelic literature towards the end of the nineteenth century. Kickham’s patriotic novel Knocknagow became the most popular book in Ireland. In 1915, Rossa’s body was brought back to Dublin from New York and given a massive funeral on 1 August. At the graveside in Glasnevin cemetery, Patrick Pearse gave the funeral oration, ending with the famous cry: ‘The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’ Thomas J. Kelly (1833–1908) succeeded Stephens as head centre after the IRB deposed Stephens in December 1866. He had emigrated from Galway to the United States, and fought with the 10th Ohio Regiment during the Civil War. In 1865 he returned to Ireland as an emissary from the Fenian Brotherhood, charged to urge a rising on Stephens, took part in Stephens’ rescue from Richmond gaol and accompanied him on his escape to America. In January 1867 he travelled to London where, with the title ‘Acting Chief Executive of the Irish Republic’, he planned a rising for 11 February, to be preceded by a raid on the British army’s arms depot at Chester Castle. The raid was abortive; leading Fenians were arrested, and the rising had to be postponed. A new date was set – Easter Sunday – but internal dissension, government spies and blizzards ruined Kelly’s plans. On

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Easter Sunday, only a handful of Fenians turned out, and most of the leaders were rounded up. If 1848 was tragi-comedy, 1867 was farce. Kelly was apprehended in Manchester with a colleague, Timothy Deasy. A week later, they were freed from a police van by a Fenian rescue party, and one of the police guards, Sergeant Brett, was shot dead. Kelly and Deasy were never recaptured. Kelly made his way back to America and relative obscurity; Deasy also went to America where he entered Massachusetts politics. Three of their rescuers were less fortunate: William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien were arrested and charged with Brett’s murder, found guilty, and hanged on 23 November. Three weeks later, on 13 December, Fenians tried to free some prisoners from Clerkenwell gaol in London by blasting the prison wall. The explosion killed twelve people outright (over the following weeks, a further eighteen died of injuries; another 120 had been wounded), and did not succeed in freeing the prisoners. Public opinion was enraged, and the Fenians became firmly established in British minds as odious murdering terrorists. A Fenian, Michael Barrett, was eventually executed for the Clerkenwell explosion at the last public hanging in England. A different perception of the Fenians existed in Ireland, however, and Allen, Larkin and O’Brien soon became the ‘Manchester Martyrs’; annual commemorations of their execution still take place. It was never proved that any of the Martyrs had actually shot Brett, although in law all those found to be involved in an act in which murder is committed are equally participes criminis, and they were convicted in the popular press before their trial had commenced. Two others charged with them avoided the death penalty – one was given a free pardon following representations from journalists covering the case; the other, Edward O’Meagher Condon, had his sentence commuted, but not before he said from the dock ‘I have nothing to regret, or to retract, or take back. I can only say “God Save Ireland”.’ ‘God Save Ireland’ was immediately taken up as a catchphrase, becoming the title of a ballad, which in turn became the marching song of the IRB and, during the nineteenth century, the unofficial national anthem. The trial and execution of the Martyrs on flimsy evidence also reduced Irish faith in British justice and helped to encourage a romanticisation of Fenianism and to nourish the IRB myth.

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In America even before the flop of 1867, the Fenian Brotherhood had broken into factions. One group under the command of an emigrant from co. Monaghan and a former Union general and Indian fighter, John O’Neill (1834–73), launched an ‘invasion’ of Canada in the summer of 1866. Between six and eight hundred Fenians crossed the Niagara in flatboats near Buffalo, New York, and occupied the town of Fort Erie. Some days later another Fenian force crossed over from Vermont. Both groups were easily routed, but not before they had operated as the ‘Irish Republican Army’, the Fenian army of the Irish Republic which they regarded as existing in theory, if not in fact. O’Neill was arrested by the American authorities and imprisoned for a while. On his release he abandoned Irish nationalist activities, and he worked for the last years of his life for a firm of land speculators. Four years later Mark Twain made the episode a subject of a sharp sketch, ‘An Unburlesquable Thing’, alluding to the tie between American-Irish nationalism and American politics: There is one other thing which transcends the powers of burlesque, and that is a Fenian ‘invasion’ . . . [M]en who were insignificant and obscure one day find themselves great and famous the next. Then the several ‘governments,’ and presidents, and generals, and senates get by the ears, and remain so until the customary necessity of carrying the American city elections with a minority vote comes around and unites them; then they begin to “sound the tocsin of war” again – that is to say, in solemn whisperings at dead of night they secretly plan a Canadian raid . . . and as no news travels so freely or so fast as the ‘secret’ doings of the Fenian Brotherhood, the land is shortly in a tumult of apprehension . . . [T]hen, hurrah! they cross the line; hurrah! they meet the enemy; hip, hip, hurrah! a battle ensues; hip – no, not hip nor hurrah – for the US Marshal and one man seize the Fenian General-in-Chief on the battle field, in the midst of his ‘army,’ and bowl him off in a carriage and lodge him in a common jail – and, presto! the illustrious ‘invasion’ is at an end!1

The Fenians felt their theoretical Republic to be necessary to counteract opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. Religious loyalty was almost as powerful a force as nationalism on Irishmen. For centuries they had not been in conflict, and O’Connell had fused 1

The Galaxy, July 1870.

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them in a powerful combination to achieve Catholic emancipation. However, after emancipation, about 80 Irish MPs could be looked to by the Church for support in the parliament of the world’s greatest empire. By the 1850s, the Church was identifying more and more with the British government, using its influence to secure O’Connell’s legacy of nationalist legalism and democracy. Irish bishops might campaign for social reforms, but not for Irish independence, and certainly not for physical-force nationalism. The Fenians, the 1916 rising, the IRA in 1920 and 1922 were all condemned by the Church. Of course, the arguments against violence weighed heavily, but they were also seen as justifying conformity with British law and British practice. As Dr Paul Cullen (1803–78), Archbishop of Dublin, put it in 1865 (the year before he became the first Irish cardinal), if the Irish people were fairly treated ‘revolutions and conspiracies, Whiteboys and Fenians, would no longer be heard of, and people would be happy and peaceable, and a source of strength to the empire at large’. Successive British administrations had acknowledged the special position of the Catholic Church in Ireland, starting with that of William Pitt the Younger, which from 1795 provided the Catholic seminary, the Royal College of St Patrick at Maynooth, co. Kildare, with an annual government grant, fixed at £9,250 in 1808. In exchange, the college’s staff and students took an oath of loyalty to the British monarch: I . . . do take Almighty God and his only Son Jesus Christ my Redeemer to witness, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to our most gracious sovereign lord King George the third, and him will defend to the utmost of my power against all conspiracies and attempts whatever, that shall be made against his person, Crown and dignity; and I will do my utmost endeavour to disclose and make known to his Majesty, and his heirs, all treasons and traitorous conspiracies which may be formed against him or them; and I do faithfully promise to maintain, support and defend, to the utmost of my power, the succession of the Crown in his Majesty’s family against any person or persons whatsoever.

When the president of Maynooth led the condemnation of the 1798 rising, and when the Church – which came to consist of Maynoothtrained priests – increasingly opposed rebel Irish nationalists, people in Ireland were not surprised. In 1845, Peel increased the college’s

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grant to £26,360 per year. In 1871 the grant was discontinued, replaced by a capital endowment of £369,000. Peel’s support of Maynooth was part of his attempt to introduce a system of higher education in Ireland acceptable to the Church. In 1845 he had established three university Queen’s Colleges at Galway, Cork and Belfast. In 1850 they were linked to form Ireland’s second university, the Queen’s University, open to Catholics and Protestants alike. At first the new colleges were accepted by the Church, but as it became clear that the government would not allow any change in their non-denominational character, denying any Church the right to control the curriculum or academic appointments, and would not itself fund chairs of Theology (although private endowments for this purpose were allowed), the Catholic hierarchy soon opposed the colleges. They were denounced as the ‘godless colleges’, as ‘a grave danger to the faith of Catholics’. Papal rescripts condemned them. The Bishop of Clonfert refused the sacraments to parents of Queen’s students. In 1854 the Church founded its own Catholic University in Dublin (the English theologian Fr John Newman, later Cardinal, was its first Rector) in opposition to Queen’s, and in 1871 extended this opposition to Trinity College, banning Catholics from attending it – a ban which Trinity itself had never imposed, even during Penal times. In 1908 the Queen’s Colleges in Cork and Galway were amalgamated with the Catholic University to form the National University of Ireland. Queen’s College in Belfast became the Queen’s University of Belfast; Trinity and the private Presbyterian Magee College in Derry remained separate institutions in a denominationally divided higher education system. The ban on Catholics attending Trinity was renewed as late as 1956 by the Archbishop of Dublin, and it remained in force until 1970. Altogether, the Church’s influence in education, let alone on politics in Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, was an impressive testimony to its power, not lost on Protestants in northern Ireland and elsewhere. In the 1860s, however, the Fenians were the first to feel the full strength of the Church. As a secret oath-bound society, the IRB was anathema to the Church. Four papal bulls, ‘In Eminenti’ (1738), ‘Providas’ (1751), ‘Ecclesiam’ (1821) and ‘Quo Graviora’ (1825), had all condemned secret societies. Physical-force Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century was

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distinguished by the large number of Protestants involved, and this no doubt contributed to the Church’s antipathy to it. Finally, the IRB was actually pledged to rebellion. Four conditions for rebellion to be justified were required by the Church, and it was rare for them to be met. They were a formula designed to maintain the status quo. First, the government rebelled against must be habitually and intolerably oppressive. Second, rebellion must be a last resort after all other means of opposition had been tried and failed. Third, there must be a reasonable chance of success and of not making matters worse. Fourth, resistance to established authority must enjoy approval by a popular majority. No wonder that in 1861, three years after its formation, Archbishop Cullen excommunicated members of the IRB ipso facto. Early on, the Brotherhood had foreseen the Church’s hostility. John O’Mahony in 1859 had declared that Fenianism ‘is neither anti-Catholic nor irreligious. We are an Irish army, not a secret society.’ James Stephens in 1859 changed the IRB’s original oath in an attempt to bring the society into conformity with O’Mahony’s line of argument, dropping reference to secrecy. Throughout its life the IRB argued that it was the government of an Irish Republic, and therefore constituted a valid and de jure authority which, it held, circumvented the Church’s objections and enabled it for over sixty years to recruit successfully among Catholic Irishmen. In 1864 the Irish People carried the argument further in a clear call for Church and state to be separate in a future independent Ireland: ‘We saw from the first that ecclesiastical authority in temporal affairs should be shivered to atoms before we could advance a single step towards the liberation of our suffering country.’ This call, together with their dedication to physical force, was the Fenians’ most important legacy. Still, the Church’s opposition was unremitting. Immediately before the attempted Fenian rebellion of 1867, Bishop Moriarty of Kerry cursed the Fenians in resounding terms: Oh, God’s heaviest curse, his withering, blighting blasting curse on them . . . When we look down into the fathomless depth of this infamy of the leaders of the Fenian conspiracy, we must acknowledge that eternity is not long enough, nor hell hot enough to punish such miscreants.

In 1870, on the initiative of Cardinal Cullen, the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition (otherwise known as the Inquisition),

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with the authority of Pope Pius IX, banned the society and declared its members excommunicate. In the 1920s the IRA faced the same opposition: Bishop Cohalan of Cork on 12 December 1920 issued a decree excommunicating its members. On 10 October 1922, during the civil war, the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland declared in a joint pastoral that the Irish Free State was the legitimate government (as opposed to the government of the Irish Republic which the IRA insisted had been functioning since 1916), and that the IRA, ‘the Irregulars’, were guilty of ‘murder’, ‘robbery’, ‘criminal destruction’ and ‘molestation’. Just over ten years later, in complete contrast, the Catholic hierarchy in Spain endorsed the rebellion of General Franco against the legitimate government of the Spanish Republic. Ecclesiastical opposition to extreme Irish nationalism, while official and pronounced, was not, however, uniform. There were always ‘patriot’ priests and bishops who were prepared to give comfort to those whom their superiors and colleagues opposed. When the Manchester Martyrs were executed, prayers and masses for them were said in churches all over Ireland. This ambivalence within the Church enabled the IRB to argue that Church opposition was based on ignorance. Charles Kickham, the head of the IRB from its reorganisation in 1873 until his death, had masterminded the Fenian response. In the IRB Constitution he drafted, the President of the IRB was declared to be the President of the Irish Republic. The Constitution also established a government of the Republic with military and judicial powers. For members of the IRB after 1873, this was the only government they recognised. It gave them all the moral authority which, as practising Catholics, they needed. In 1920, the chaplain of the 3rd Cork Brigade, IRA, Father Dominic, OFM, Cap., used the IRB argument to explain away Bishop Cohalan’s excommunication of IRA men: Now kidnapping, ambushing and killing ordinarily would be grave sins or violations of Law. And if these acts were being performed by the [IRA] as private persons (whether physical or moral) would fall under the excommunication. But they are doing them by and with the authority of the State and the Republic of Ireland. And the State has the right and duty to defend the lives and property of its citizens and to punish even with death those who are aiming at the destruction of the lives or property of its citizens or itself.

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To the present day, this is the argument advanced by the IRA. In 1938 the IRA felt it necessary to obtain the endorsement of their rump government of the Irish Republic for a bombing campaign in England, and in 1971 the Provisional IRA called a press conference to announce that they enjoyed the endorsement of the same rump government for their campaign of violence in Northern Ireland. Ghosts can be powerful.

chapter 4

Home rule?

The Fenians’ attempt at rebellion and their subsequent atrocities in 1867 forced Westminster’s attention upon Ireland. ‘Fenianism’, wrote the philosopher John Stuart Mill, burst ‘like a clap of thunder in a clear sky, unlooked for and unintelligible’. It had confounded the assumption that had grown since the meek submission to the famine by the Irish people that social reform was an adequate substitute for political independence, and that coercive measures could be enforced when necessary if reform was also pursued. Thus habeas corpus had been suspended at nearly all times of political and agrarian unrest (1798; 1848); the Treason Felony Act (1848) had been used against nationalist agitators, and at the same time Acts were passed granting emancipation (1829), establishing state-supported primary (1831) and higher education (1845), and reducing the tithe (1838). Mill was one of the first to realise that a better description of England’s Irish problem might be Ireland’s English problem. In 1868 he published an essay, ‘England and Ireland’, pointing out that Fenianism involved the ideal of freedom and was not simply wanton criminality. ‘The difficulty of governing Ireland’, he wrote, ‘lies entirely in our own minds; it is an incapability of understanding.’ Englishmen liked to explain Irish malcontent as the product of ‘a special taint or infirmity in the Irish character’, but this was wrong. Instead, he said, There is probably no other nation of the civilised world, which, if the task of governing Ireland had happened to devolve on it, would not have shown itself more capable of that work than England has hitherto done. The reasons are these: first, there is no other nation that is so conceited of its institutions and of all its modes of public action, as England is; and secondly, there is no other civilised nation which is so far apart from Ireland in the character of its 145

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history, or so unlike it in the whole constitution of its social economy; and none, therefore, which if it applies to Ireland the modes of thinking and maxims of government which have grown up within itself, is so certain to go wrong.

Mill was attacked by the Saturday Review as ‘the most recent and most thoroughgoing apostle of Communism’. The Irish landlord Lord Bessborough bluntly declared, ‘Mill ought to be sent to penal servitude as a Fenian.’ One man, however, who was influenced by Mill was William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). In 1868 Gladstone had come to lead the Liberal Party, a fusion of new Radicals, old Whigs, and ex-Tory supporters of Sir Robert Peel: Gladstone himself was one such. He termed Mill ‘the saint of rationalism’. Unlike Mill, Gladstone had always paid attention to Ireland, predicting just before the famine: Ireland! Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm, that Minister of God’s retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us these great social and great religious questions – God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face and to work through them.

Fenianism and the Clerkenwell explosion concentrated his thoughts, and in 1868 he successfully fought a general election with the slogan ‘Justice for Ireland’, declaring as he became prime minister for the first time, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ One of his first acts, in 1869, was to disestablish the Church of Ireland, a logical supplement to Catholic emancipation. (The Disestablishment Act also provided for the purchase by tenants of Church of Ireland land – one of the first steps taken by government towards encouraging peasant ownership.) The 1861 census had revealed that there were only 690,000 Anglicans among Ireland’s 5.7 million population, which meant that the fivesixths of the people who were not Anglicans were paying tithes to the churches and clergy of the Church of Ireland. Gladstone followed disestablishment with a Landlord and Tenant Act in 1870 which, for the first time, involved government in protecting tenants in their relations with landlords, who were now required to pay up to £250 to tenants unjustly evicted; tenants were also helped to purchase their holdings by being able to borrow up to two-thirds of the purchase price from the government. The Act was not particularly

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successful – only 877 tenants took advantage of it to buy their land – but it was important because, as with the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, it was conceived and introduced by a government without any violent political or social agitation preceding it in Ireland. Both Acts strengthened the appeal of constitutional political action in Ireland at a time when violent action was again threatening. The pattern of landownership had altered significantly since the famine. Small farmers had generally expanded their holdings at the expense both of the smallest farmers and of cottiers and labourers – the people who died during the famine and who formed the bulk of emigrants during it and afterwards. Furthermore, many landlords had suffered financially as the result of the famine’s demands on their rates through the Poor Law system: two Encumbered Estates Acts had been passed in 1848 and 1849 by which landlords who failed to meet their financial obligations could sell their estates to effect repayment. Within ten years, 3,000 estates totalling 5 million acres – one-quarter of the land of Ireland – changed hands under the Acts, sometimes going to speculators but more often, it seems, to other landed families. In all these cases, however, the tenants on the estates simply found themselves with new landlords, many of whom were convinced that congested smallholdings had been the main factor in turning blight into catastrophe. As a result, and in order to make estates more efficient, by the end of the famine the rate of evictions soared; between 1849 and 1852, over 300,000 tenants were dispossessed. These were the people who emigrated or became itinerant labourers, usually finding subsistence-level work in different parts of Britain according to the season. Some must have starved. However, throughout the 1850s and 1860s in Ireland, rural prosperity increased, and not only did farmers and landlords enjoy an improved standard of living, but folk of the poorest sort did too. By 1870, per capita tobacco consumption (a useful index of the living standard of the lower classes) had risen to the English level. Rural prosperity, however, did not mean an end to agrarian disturbance, and in some cases actually set it off. The replacement of impoverished smallholders and cottiers by larger tenant farmers in the interests of estate efficiency often resulted in trouble. In 1850 a Tenant Right League was founded by Charles Gavan Duffy and an influential journalist and English Quaker who converted to Catholicism, .

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Frederick Lucas (1812–55). The aim of the League was to secure the ‘Ulster Custom’ of fair rent, fixity of tenure while rent was paid, and the right of free sale of one tenant’s holding to another. The ‘Three Fs’ as they were known existed in practice principally in Ulster, and the Tenant Right League’s campaign to extend them to the rest of the country attracted the initial support of the Ulster Tenant Right Association founded three years earlier by William Sharman Crawford (1781–1861), a Protestant co. Down landlord and Liberal MP for Dundalk. Together, Crawford, Duffy and Lucas campaigned to make the Ulster Custom the national law, with financial compensation for tenants for eviction and for improvements they made to their properties. Gavan Duffy’s and Lucas’s idealistic concern for evicted tenants was not reflected by the league’s members, who were, in the main, prosperous tenant farmers frightened by the prospect of eviction in a period (1847–53) of agricultural depression. In Ulster, the Tenant Right League initially enjoyed the support of solid (Presbyterian) tenants who were becoming aware of their precarious legal position if (Anglican) landlords wished to evict them. However, in 1851, as the result of a papal conferment of territorial titles upon Catholic bishops in England, anti-Catholicism swept England, and Ulster support for the League (which in the south was closely associated with Catholic priests) rapidly withered away. After the July 1852 general election, about forty Irish MPs formed themselves into the Independent Irish Party to secure the Tenant Right League’s objectives and the repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act (passed in 1851 and forbidding Catholic bishops to use UK territorial titles). The Independent Irish Party’s religious concern alienated Crawford (defeated in the general election) and any residual Ulster support. Over the next year, as agricultural prices improved, support for the Tenant Right League declined and the Party began to split between those willing to take office without securing the Party’s programme, those who saw themselves as champions of Catholic interests (known as ‘the Pope’s brass band’ for their ostentatious piety and clericalism), and those who placed land reform as their principal objective. Lucas died in Rome in 1855 while seeking the Pope’s support against the alleged hostility of the Irish bishops to the Tenant Right League. That same year Gavan Duffy emigrated to Australia,

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disgusted with the Independent Irish Party and despairing of the league’s hopes: It has been attributed to me more than once before that when I left Europe in 1855 I declared that Ireland was like a corpse on a dissecting table; but I never said so. What I said was essentially different. I described the conditions of the country at that time . . . I declared that ‘till all this be changed there was no more hope for the Irish cause than for a corpse on the dissecting table’.1

Within four years both the League and the Party had collapsed. In Australia, Duffy entered politics, becoming Premier of Victoria in 1871; he was knighted for his services there two years later, and retired in 1880 to Nice, where he died. His son George was one of the signatories of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty which established the Irish Free State. In the 1860s, Fenianism frequently attracted the attention of the mass of the Irish people. As David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, pointed out: ‘Fenianism, with all its fraud and falsehood, with all its braggart cowardice, and with that hatred of religion which marked its every utterance, found sympathy and raised strange hopes in the Irish poor. And unfortunately, the Irish poor means the Irish people.’ After the abortive 1867 rising, Gladstone’s legislation produced a reaction in favour of peaceful politics. Irish wrongs were increasingly seen as stemming from the union, and though it was by no means clear that the union was harming the Irish economy, Isaac Butt (1813–79), the son of a Church of Ireland rector in co. Donegal, was able to exploit the issue to revive O’Connell’s call for its repeal. Part of Butt’s purpose was to wrest the initiative in Irish politics away from the Fenians, and in 1870 he founded the Irish Home Government Association, replaced in 1873 by his Irish Home Rule League. Butt had succeeded O’Connell as Ireland’s foremost barrister. In 1848 he had defended William Smith O’Brien and other Young Irelanders and in the 1860s many leading Fenians, including John O’Leary. A Tory as a young man, he came to favour Irish independence, but rejected it in politics on the pragmatic grounds that no British government would accept outright repeal of the union. 1

Freeman’s Journal, 14 March 1891.

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Accordingly, he developed the home rule proposal, whereby an Irish parliament, subordinate to Westminster, would nevertheless control domestic affairs, leaving Westminster responsible for foreign and defence matters. With the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 for UK parliamentary elections, home rule was given a fair test: the 1874 general election gave Butt and his supporters 59 of the 103 Irish seats in the House of Commons. Within three years, however, Butt – who was generally described as ‘an old-fashioned gentleman’ – had fallen out with most of the other Irish Home Rule MPs who were adopting the filibuster as a means of drawing attention to themselves, and who in any case were more radical than their leader. In 1877 he lost the leadership of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, which he had founded in 1873 to gather the support of emigrant Irishmen, to a young and energetic MP, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91). In 1880, a year after Butt’s saddened alcoholic death, Parnell also became leader of those Irish MPs who had formed themselves into the Irish Parliamentary Party. parnell Parnell was a Protestant landlord and High Sheriff of Wicklow, having inherited the family estate at the age of thirteen when his father died. He was brought up under the influence of his strongminded American mother who proclaimed (rather than practised) anti-British opinions and whose father, Admiral Charles Stewart, had achieved fame as Captain of the USS Constitution during the war of 1812. In 1875, aged twenty-nine, Parnell won a co. Meath seat as a Home Ruler in a by-election, rapidly gaining notoriety in the House of Commons. He was a passionate mineralogist and prospector, proud, cold and inflexible, indifferent to most people and to criticism. Unlike many colleagues, he understood that his constituency was Ireland, and he appealed determinedly to Irish concerns – and prejudices. He was the classic outsider, British and American, hard to describe as Irish. He was hated by British parliamentarians and political journalists whose cry, within a year of his entry to the House, was ‘Something really must be done about Mr Parnell.’ His extremism also attracted the attention of the IRB.

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In 1877 and again in 1878, Parnell met leading members of the IRB and Clan na Gael, the organisation in the United States founded in 1867 as the successor to the Fenian Brotherhood. He impressed them as favouring ‘the absolute independence of Ireland’, and John Devoy – now one of the Clan na Gael leaders – proposed a ‘New Departure’ to Parnell and the IRB whereby the physical-force separatists would cooperate with the constitutionalists for specific objectives on the basis of a ‘general declaration in favour of self-government instead of simple federal home rule’ and the pursuit of ‘a vigorous agitation of the land question on the basis of a peasant proprietary, while accepting concessions tending to abolish arbitrary eviction’. In 1879, Charles Kickham, president of the IRB, decided that the society could not formally cooperate with constitutionalists, but that individual members might. Shortly afterwards Michael Davitt (1846– 1906), a Fenian imprisoned in 1870 and released in 1877 following a campaign led by Parnell for the amnesty of Fenian prisoners, approached Parnell to lead a new campaign for land reform. On 21 October 1879 Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in Dublin with Parnell as its president: the New Departure had produced its first fruits. Davitt threw the prestige and the support the IRB enjoyed amongst the peasantry behind Parnell, while Devoy galvanised Irish America behind him too. During a visit to America in the winter of 1879–80, Parnell seemed to affirm his part of the bargain by stating in a speech at Cincinnati that he wanted to cut ‘the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England’. Michael Davitt had been born in the west of Ireland in co. Mayo where, when he was four, his family had been evicted from their farm. They moved to Lancashire where Davitt worked as a child labourer in a cotton mill until 1856 when in a mill accident his right arm was torn off by machinery. He joined the IRB and was involved in the attempted raid on Chester Castle in 1867, and until his arrest three years later he acted as a weapons buyer for the Fenians. He was always interested in Irish land reform, and he joined the New Departure because he became convinced that methods short of rebellion offered more hope of achieving it. He was also attracted by Parnell’s radicalism and by a statement to peasants the MP made at Westport, co. Mayo, in the summer of 1879: ‘You must show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip on your homesteads and lands. You must

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not allow yourself to be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847. You must not allow your small holdings to be turned into large ones.’ Davitt’s Land League rapidly became a mass political and social movement, guaranteeing Parnell’s Irish Party faithful support while Parnell campaigned for land reform. In 1879, agriculture was in the throes of severe recession. Three bad harvests after 1876 had brought to an end the prosperity of the 1850s and 1860s. Evictions, reflecting both a renewed drive for efficiency and an inability to pay rent, rose from 463 in 1877 to 1,238 in 1879 and 2,110 in 1880. Foreign competition, facilitated by the advent of transoceanic steamships, brought lower agricultural prices, so farmers faced not only a fall in output but also a fall in income. Smallholders also suffered severely from the loss of output, and the combination of their distress with the fear and worry of decline amongst farmers of even the larger sort found expression in the Land League, giving that organisation a powerful force. Echoing the arguments of Lalor and the Young Irelanders, the Land League’s Declaration of Principles spelled out its radical nature: The land of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland, to be held and cultivated for the sustenance of those whom God decreed to be the inhabitants thereof. Land being created to supply mankind with the necessaries of existence, those who cultivate it to that end have a higher claim to its absolute possession than those who make it an article of barter to be used or disposed of for purposes of profit or pleasure.

This assessment of the relationship between land and nationality was shared by Parnell and the Fenians, Davitt and Devoy. It was at the heart of the New Departure, and it had the important effect of reducing – if only for a time – the antagonism between revolutionary and constitutional nationalists, moderating the one and making more extreme the other. By 1887 a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) report (‘Royal’ was added to the title in 1867 in recognition of the Constabulary’s efforts in subduing the Fenians), marked ‘very secret’, stated that of the eighty-three Parnellite MPs, twenty-one were probably members of the IRB; two were probably former IRB men, and four more were fellow travellers. For nationalists of all sorts, the Land League marked an important development because it tested for the first time the willingness of the

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government to support the Ascendancy class as landlords and not as governors. In 1876 an official analysis of the rents of Irish landlords was used by Michael Davitt to show that of the 19,288 men who owned Ireland, 110 owned over 4 million acres (20 per cent of the country) and 1,878 others owned over 9.5 million acres. Altogether, nearly 70 per cent of the land of Ireland was owned by fewer than 2,000 people, while some 3 million tenants and labourers did not own any significant property at all. Accordingly, the Land League demanded the redistribution of landownership to tenants, with compensation for landlords. It also maintained a simultaneous demand for the Three Fs. The aggressive nature of the Land League was denoted by its slogan, ‘Rent at the point of the bayonet’, and its campaign was soon called the Land War. Rents were withheld until the last possible moment, and in some areas a policy of ostracising land-grabbers (tenants who took an evicted tenant’s holding), landlords and their agents was followed, with the public endorsement of Parnell. At Ennis, co. Clare, in September 1880, the newly elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party said: When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shopcounter, you must show him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.

One of the first to suffer this moral Coventry was the co. Mayo land agent for Lord Erne, Captain Charles Boycott, whose name has since become a synonym for ostracism. Fifty Orangemen and over 1,000 troops helped harvest the crops on the Erne estate, at an estimated cost to the government of £10,000 or, as Parnell put it, ‘one shilling for every turnip dug from Boycott’s land’. Despite its novelty and the attention it gathered, the boycott played only a small part in the Land League’s campaign. The rent strike and sheer violence were the most frequently employed weapons in the Land War. Throughout the country, Land League members resorted to lawlessness in the old Whiteboy and Ribbonmen traditions. Hayricks were burned, landlords’ cattle were maimed, and some landlords were murdered.

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Agrarian outrages recorded by the RIC soared from 2,500 in 1880 to over 4,400 in 1881. The prime minister, Gladstone, was obliged to crack down. He warned, ‘If there is still to be fought in Ireland a final conflict between law on one side and sheer lawlessness on the other, then I say, gentlemen, without hesitation, the resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted.’ In March 1881 he secured a Coercion Act suspending habeas corpus in Ireland. The next month he introduced a Land Law Bill designed to defuse the Land War. It guaranteed the Three Fs to all tenants (except leaseholders and those in arrears with their rent) and established land courts to fix fair rents. Parnell and the Land League, however, refused to endorse the Bill, and after it became law the immediate reduction in agitation Gladstone had expected did not materialise. Gladstone accused Parnell of ‘marching through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire’ and blamed him directly for the continuing violence of the Land War. On 12 October 1881, Parnell was arrested under the Coercion Act and imprisoned without trial in Kilmainham gaol in Dublin. ‘The Chief’, as he was called by his followers, became a hero overnight by being imprisoned. All the country’s leading patriots, throughout history, had at some time in their careers been incarcerated by the government, and now Parnell joined them in this distinction. Within a week of entering Kilmainham, on 18 October, Parnell joined other leading Irish Party MPs in signing the ‘No Rent Manifesto’ calling upon supporters of the Land League to withhold rent payments. This was intended to increase the pressure on the government to include leaseholders and tenants who were in rent arrears within the benefits of the Land Law Act. It resulted in the government instead declaring the Land League illegal. The campaign did not obtain the support of the mass of tenants largely because the Act was already working in favour of the two-thirds of tenants throughout the country who were not leaseholders or in arrears with their rents. The one-third excluded from the Act, however, resorted to violence. Over the next seven months, 3,498 agrarian outrages were recorded compared to 2,633 outrages in the equivalent period twelve months earlier. Both Gladstone and Parnell were convinced by this that some arrangement had to be found to end the violence. In an informal understanding known as the Kilmainham Treaty they came

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to an agreement that in return for the Irish leader’s support for the Land Law Act and his promise to try to end agrarian outrages, the government would end coercion, release Land League leaders from prison and pass legislation waiving tenants’ rent arrears, thus bringing these tenants within the framework of the Act. Parnell was released on 2 May 1882, from his point of view having secured an excellent bargain. He was always willing to use the threat of violence to secure political objectives, and he was personally ambivalent about violent action. However, he was also very aware of the danger to his leadership posed by men of violence who could always depict him as being too cautious, or insufficiently enthusiastic about a course of action. Thus his release enabled him to reassert his authority in Ireland in exchange for general promises of support for Gladstone and the Land Law Act, and in return for specific guarantees from the government. Parnell’s interest in defusing violence gave the Act the chance Gladstone wanted. Agrarian outrages soon diminished. The land courts reduced rents by an average of between 15 and 20 per cent. The legislative security of the Three Fs met the principal demands of the Land League’s supporters (though only a few – 731 – tenants made use of the land purchase provisions of the Act by which a Land Commission advanced three-quarters of the purchase price to be repaid over thirty-five years at 5 per cent). Above all, the Act in practice demonstrated that the democratic age was unfolding at the expense of the Ascendancy landowning class, who could no longer assume their interests would be held paramount at Westminster. Four days after Parnell’s release from Kilmainham, on 6 May 1882 an act of violence threatened not only the Kilmainham Treaty but also Parnell’s career. The Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Thomas Burke, were both horribly murdered with surgical knives in Dublin’s Phoenix Park as they were walking together on Lord Frederick’s first evening in Ireland as Chief Secretary. The atrocity was the work of a breakaway group from the IRB, the Irish National Invincibles. Parnell immediately wrote to Gladstone offering to resign as an MP and retire completely from politics if the prime minister thought it would serve any purpose. His offer was refused. In January 1883, twenty-six men were arrested for the murders; one of them, James Carey, turned Queen’s evidence resulting in five

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executions and two sentences of penal servitude. Carey, who had taken a leading part in the murders, was set free and with government help sailed secretly for South Africa. He was followed by an Invincible, Patrick O’Donnell, who murdered him on the Melrose Castle sailing from Cape Town to Natal. O’Donnell himself was immediately arrested and was hanged for the murder at London’s Newgate prison in December 1883. As a consequence of the renewed fears of Fenian violence conjured up in Britain by the Invincibles, Gladstone’s government created the Special Irish Branch of the police force at Scotland Yard. There had been an earlier Special Irish Branch in 1869–70, but this new one was given permanent status and was the precursor of today’s British Special Branch. There was another dramatic sequel to the Phoenix Park murders. In 1886 in a series of vindictive articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’ complete with pages of facsimiles of letters, The Times accused the Irish leader of condoning the killings and of being directly implicated in Land War crimes, including murder. Parnell fought these charges for three years until he was completely cleared in February 1890 by a special parliamentary commission (Figure 12). The letters The Times had used were proved forgeries. Richard Pigott, a sometime pornographer, journalist and Irish home ruler, confessed to having forged them, fled to Spain and committed suicide. Vindicated, Parnell was universally acclaimed. He was also able to exploit fully the position his party had gained in the 1885 general election as it became clear that Gladstone had been converted to the principle of home rule for Ireland. Yet Parnell walked a fine line. Pigott’s forgeries were believable because Parnell was generally seen as a supporter of violence. Kipling wrote a poem after the commission’s findings were published, ‘Cleared – In Memory Of A Commission’, with the punchline: The learned Court pretends We are not ruled by murderers, But only by their friends.

There were three significant changes in the Irish Party MPs returned at the 1885 general election. First, the eighty-six Irish MPs elected (one was MP for an English seat) were the largest number the party had obtained until then. The party eclipsed the Liberal Party in Ireland and saw the elimination of the Conservative Party in southern Ireland,

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Figure 12 Charles Stewart Parnell He impressed his contemporaries by being calm. He was conservative by nature and there is some evidence that he favoured the Conservative rather than the Liberal Party. Throughout the Commission of Inquiry (1888–9) into allegations that he had condoned murders, and the case he brought against The Times for defamation in 1890 (he received an out-of-court settlement of £5,000), he appeared relaxed. Gladstone led a standing ovation for him in the House of Commons upon his vindication. Parnell married Katherine O’Shea in June 1891 and died three months later of a heart attack.

thus marking the pattern of future Irish politics. Second, all eighty-six were pledged to vote together, and party funds provided salaries and expenses for those deemed in need (the first time this had happened in British politics), thus reducing the attractions of office, reinforcing

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party loyalty and developing a coherent voting power in the House of Commons. Third, the massive enfranchisement of new voters carried out by the 1884 Reform Act had increased the Irish electorate from about 230,000 to over 700,000. This in turn had influenced and made more representative the composition of the Irish Party: the number of Catholic Irish Party MPs went up from fifty-five in 1880 to seventy-five; the number of MPs who were farmers and shopkeepers went up from two in 1880 to twenty-two; the number of MPs who were landlords like Parnell went down from twenty-three in 1874 to five in 1885. In addition, from October 1884 the Irish Party enjoyed the full and public support of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops, who looked to it to secure legislation favouring Catholic teaching, especially in education, in Ireland. Priests rapidly came often to play leading roles in constituency party selection committees. The combination of these changes reinforced Gladstone’s conversion to Irish home rule. The Liberal leader by 1885 had become convinced of the justice of the home rule case, but had remained silent in public on the issue while he tried privately to secure its agreement by the Conservatives. On 17 December, at the end of the general election, some newspapers published a strong indication by Gladstone’s son, Herbert, that his father favoured home rule. This, known as the ‘Hawarden Kite’, came too late to influence the election results which gave the Liberals 335 seats to the Conservatives’ 249, a majority of 86, the same number of seats as Parnell’s Irish Party now had. In January 1886, Gladstone at the age of seventy-six formed his third administration and announced his intention of pressing ahead with home rule for Ireland. On 8 April he introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill, in his opening speech indicating the reasons that had converted him: I cannot conceal the conviction that the voice of Ireland as a whole is constitutionally spoken. I cannot say it is otherwise when five-sixths of its lawfully-chosen representatives are of one mind on this matter . . . I cannot allow it to be said that a Protestant minority in Ulster, or elsewhere, is to rule the question at large for Ireland.

In reply, his opponents – including Liberals on this issue – argued that home rule would be only a first step to complete independence. One fiery Orangeman, William Johnston MP, declared that if the Bill

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passed and an Irish Parliament were set up, ‘the dictates of that Irish Parliament would be resisted by the people of Ulster at the point of a bayonet’, while a leading Liberal, Lord Hartington, MP for Rossendale, speaking in the House of Commons, put another point echoed by Orangemen: The Parliament which would be restored would not be a Protestant, but would be a Roman Catholic Parliament. The Established Church has been swept away; and instead of a Roman Catholic priesthood, which at the time of the Union was without political influence at all, we have a Roman Catholic clergy wielding a large political influence.

Gladstone was also accused of simply trying to stay in power by ‘buying’ Parnell’s support, but in fact as a result of his conversion he lost the support of nearly one-third of his Liberal MPs, and not even the Irish Party’s votes were enough to secure the passage of the Bill. It was defeated on 8 June 1886 by 343 votes to 313, with 93 Liberals voting against their government. Six weeks later, Gladstone resigned. In 1893 during Gladstone’s fourth administration his second Home Rule Bill was passed by the House of Commons but rejected by the House of Lords (Figure 13). The ‘Grand Old Man’ of British politics retired at the age of eighty-four the following year, warning that ‘ruder and more dangerous agencies’ would flourish again in Ireland if home rule was not passed. Gladstone’s personal commitment to home rule was the most important factor in the Liberal Party’s adoption of it as policy. Parnell, in 1890 at the height of his power and fame having been completely exonerated of any involvement in the Phoenix Park murders or Land War crimes, was brought down by one of the most sensational divorce cases of the century, splitting the Irish Party in the process and so leaving Gladstone alone capable of instituting home rule. Mrs Katherine O’Shea, the wife of the Independent Irish MP for co. Clare, Captain William O’Shea, had begun an affair with Parnell in 1880. Between 1882 and 1884 she bore Parnell three children. The Captain, despite later claims to the contrary, it seems was well aware of the relationship between his leader and his wife and used it to secure political advantage for himself: it was strongly suspected that he was blackmailing Parnell as well. Nevertheless, Parnell went to

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Figure 13 Notes written by Gladstone on Irish home rule, 1893 These notes illustrate Gladstone’s concern to secure meaningful Irish selfgovernment within the British Empire while protecting the interests of Irish (Protestant) unionists.

great lengths to keep the affair secret, adopting extraordinary disguises, as William O’Brien, MP for Mallow, recalled forty years after meeting Parnell one day in December 1886 in dense fog at Greenwich: I suddenly came upon Parnell’s figure emerging from the gloom in a guise so strange and with a face so ghastly that the effect could scarcely have been more startling if it was his ghost I met wandering in the eternal shades. He

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wore a gigantic fur cap, a shooting-jacket of rough tweed, a knitted woollen vest of bright scarlet and a pair of shooting or wading boots reaching to the thighs – a costume that could not well have looked more bizarre in a dreary London park if the object had been to attract attention.

In fact, the affair was widely known, even in government circles. The Liberal Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, had Parnell followed by detectives for political purposes, and received regular reports of the Irish leader’s visits to Mrs O’Shea. In 1889 Captain O’Shea filed for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, and in February 1890 named Parnell as co-respondent. The effect was shattering. The moral case for Irish home rule as recognition of a separate Irish nationality had helped secure the vital support of the numerous and politically well-organised British Nonconformists for the Liberal Party. The O’Shea divorce case presented Parnell as being immoral, and organised Nonconformism made it clear to Gladstone that it would not support the Liberal Party if it cooperated with an adulterer. The case sullied the cause of home rule. It resulted in the Conservative Party, Nonconformists and the Catholic Church all denouncing Parnell as unfit to lead anything, let alone to be in public life, and it meant that Gladstone and the Liberal Party could no longer cooperate with the Irish Party while Parnell led it. Parnell refused to step down. His Party, which at first supported him, at a famous meeting on 6 December 1890 in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons rejected his leadership: forty-five of the seventy-two MPs present at the meeting opted to continue the alliance with the Liberals that Parnell and Gladstone had forged in 1886. Three days before the Committee Room 15 meeting, the standing committee of the Irish hierarchy had condemned him too. ‘Parnellism’, proclaimed Bishop Nulty of Meath, ‘springs from the root of sensualism and crime.’ In the Irish Parliamentary Party as a whole, Parnell had the support of a minority – thirty-two MPs. Parnell argued that the majority of his colleagues, by deserting him in favour of the Liberal alliance, had compromised the independence of the Irish Party. He was theoretically correct in this assertion, but the anti-Parnellite Irish MPs demonstrated more sober political judgment. Unlike Parnell, who was prepared to rend the Irish Party and

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set aside the cause of home rule in favour of the cause of his own continued leadership, the anti-Parnellites sought to maintain the home rule cause and the Liberal alliance upon which, in practical political terms, that cause depended. Nevertheless, Parnell had brought nationalist Ireland closer to realising its dreams than any other man. Despite the O’Shea divorce case and the opposition to him from the Church and within his own party, he could still inspire Irish people. He fought back, proving his courage and leaving a legacy of unflinching determination which was to act, in W. B. Yeats’ phrase, as a ‘tall pillar, burning in the gloom’ for future Irish leaders. Suffering from illness, Parnell in 1891 launched himself on a speech-making tour of Ireland to regain his support, but in three successive by-elections between December 1890 and July 1891, his candidates were defeated by anti-Parnellites. In May he married Katherine O’Shea in a civil ceremony. Five months later on 6 October, aged forty-five, he died in Hove, Sussex. James Joyce in his autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist depicted dramatically the respect and the hatred which Parnell had generated in the last year of his life and which lasted after his death: Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: – Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend! The door slammed behind her. Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. – Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

The Irish Party for the next nine years mouldered in mutual recriminations and in-fighting, losing its parliamentary effectiveness and coming to the point of collapse. After Gladstone retired in 1894 having tried and failed to achieve home rule with his second Bill, the Conservatives held power from 1895 to 1905, and the cause seemed hopeless. In addition, a powerful Irish unionist opposition to home rule was developing parallel to the growth of an Irish cultural and literary nationalism which had nothing to do with constitutional politics. Together, these developments began to tighten the springs of extremism from which violence was to uncoil.

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reform The 1885 general election, followed by another the following year after Gladstone’s third ministry collapsed over the first Home Rule Bill, marked a vital political shift in the UK. The almost complete elimination of the British parties from southern and parts of northern Ireland, and their replacement by the Irish Party, demonstrated the overwhelming popularity of home rule in Ireland. Gladstone’s and the Liberal Party’s espousal of home rule in 1886 seemed to make it only a matter of time before the Irish Party’s cause was successful: despite the moral and idealistic arguments advanced by Gladstone, practical arguments that a home-ruled Ireland (with Britain responsible for foreign and defence matters) would provide an independent financial base to pay for Irish tenants’ land purchases (thus removing a burden from the British taxpayer) weighed more heavily. The defection over home rule of a wing of the Liberal Party under Lord Hartington, representing the old Whig landowning interests in the party, had been expected. What had not been foreseen was the simultaneous defection of another wing under Joseph Chamberlain who contradicted the argument that home rule would benefit British taxpayers and instead argued that British taxpayers would face a heavier burden if the flow of taxation from Ireland to the Exchequer ended. Unlike his erstwhile colleagues in the Liberal Party who believed that Irish tenants’ desire to own their land would best be met by selling it to them through an Irish parliament to which they would pay their debt rather than to the alien British one, Chamberlain agreed with the Conservatives that land reform could be encouraged without granting home rule too. He also was convinced that home rule would herald the break-up of the British Empire. ‘Where in all this is the integrity of the Empire?’ he asked, stating that home rule was ‘tantamount to a proposal for separation’ and that he ‘would prefer that Ireland would go free altogether from any claim on the part of this country, provided also that we might be free from the enormous responsibility a sham Union would certainly entail’. Chamberlain and Hartington together led ninety-three Liberal Unionists into the lobby with the Conservatives, defeating the first Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons and the second Home

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Rule Bill seven years later in the House of Lords. Parnell’s death and the subsequent ineffectiveness of the Irish Party did nothing to change their minds, and in 1892 the Liberal Unionists became officially part of the Conservative and Unionist Party. For the Conservatives, the events of 1886 provided a political base which was to make them the dominant British party for the next eighty years. The addition of the Liberal Unionists gave them a builtin electoral majority. The debate over home rule gave them the opportunity to rally behind the union and the empire; it also gave them the opportunity of securing between fifteen and twenty-five Irish Unionist seats in the House of Commons – a noteworthy proportion of the 336 seats needed there for an absolute majority. In January 1886 the National Union of the Conservative Party (the policy coordinating body of the party) decided to seize both opportunities and launched a campaign to maintain the Anglo-Irish union. Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95), a leading member of the Conservative Party, travelled to Belfast in February where, using the slogan ‘Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right’, he played in his own words ‘the Orange card’ – stirring up the Orange Order to anti-home-rule sectarian riots. ‘I decided some time ago’, he explained, ‘that if the Grand Old Man went for home rule the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.’ Five months later, Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Lord Randolph had made a name for himself and a small band of followers as ‘the Fourth Party’ in the House of Commons by wittily and intelligently criticising Gladstone while at the same time scoring points over his own party leaders amongst whom he thus expected to be propelled by parliamentary if not public acclamation. His February 1886 speech in Belfast made an indelible mark on Irish politics. Before he spoke on behalf of the Conservative Party, the Orange Order had declined in strength. It had suffered a major defeat when Gladstone’s disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was passed in 1869, and by 1886 many Irish unionists had come to accept that home rule was inevitable. Sectarian animosities in northern Ireland, however, prevailed throughout the century and could always be stirred up. When the Conservative Party publicly declared itself firmly in support of the

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union, not only were Irish unionists’ hopes revived, but their political allegiance went to Churchill and his party. And since Churchill had chosen the Orange Order as the most readily available, effective means of mobilising Irish unionism, not only were religious differences again emphasised, but also the membership and influence of the Orange Order increased. Within a year, 73,000 Orangemen volunteered to resist home rule by force if necessary, and as the debates on the first Home Rule Bill proceeded at Westminster, they were marked by rioting and disturbance in northern Ireland where Irish unionism was concentrated. Industrialisation in Ireland during the nineteenth century had taken place principally within a thirty-mile radius of Belfast and consisted of the relatively highly paid textile, shipbuilding and engineering industries. The 1911 census showed that 22 per cent of the population of Ulster, compared to 14 per cent in the other three provinces, were engaged in industry and commerce. The rest of Ireland not only was agricultural and less prosperous than the north-east, but also did not provide a market for the north-east’s products. This in turn made Belfast’s factory production orientated towards Britain, its largest market and the staging post for re-exports, giving people of all classes in the industrialised north-east a vested interest in the union. In Ulster as a whole, the Ulster Custom had a similar effect in rural areas where increasingly prosperous tenants slowly diminished the power of the landlords, coming to share similar interests with them, and with both tenants and landlords making profits from the sale of foodstuffs to the industrialised towns and cities of Ulster which in turn depended upon the British market. Thus people in northern Ireland possessed a homogeneity made peculiar by the additional factor of religion (see Figure 14). Not only were the majority of people in north-east Ulster Protestants (landlords tended to be Anglican; workers and others were often Nonconformists – frequently Presbyterian – though of course areas within the north-east had Catholic majorities), but the majority of industrial and commercial concerns were owned by and employed mostly Protestants. In 1911, Protestants comprised 76 per cent of the population of Belfast and held 92 per cent of the city’s jobs in shipbuilding and 88 per cent of the jobs in engineering industries.

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Figure 14 Glenoe village, co. Antrim A Northern Irish hamlet, photographed in the 1890s, presenting an ordered and peaceful image of life in Scots-Irish rural Ulster. Glenoe was a popular tourist destination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of its scenic site and a nearby waterfall.

Protestant workers were prepared to accept the political leadership of their Protestant employers in return for employment. Northern Protestant unionist politicians speedily realised that religious discrimination as the basis of political allegiances had the added benefit of stifling strong labour movements. As Ramsay MacDonald, the British Labour Party leader, declared in 1912 in the House of Commons, ‘Whenever there is an attempt to root out sweating in Belfast, the Orange big drum is beaten.’ The Liberals’ support for home rule, and the increased and determined support Conservative opposition to it found among Irish unionists, forced the Conservatives to come up with an Irish policy of their own. They perceived Irish peasants’ land hunger as irrational, but nevertheless as being the basis of their opposition to the union. This was translated into a policy which maintained that there was no

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real demand for home rule in Ireland, but that there was real demand for land reform, and so by attending to this real demand (by selling tenants land with a series of beneficial reforms) they could kill home rule with kindness. The policy had the advantage of fighting nationalists (who, since Lalor, had used land reform arguments for home rule) on their own terms. It also was able to meet renewed land reform agitation in 1886 after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill. The mid 1880s saw another bout of economic recession which had the effect of falling prices, profits and opportunities in agriculture. Once again, tenants fell into arrears with their rents on a large scale and the Land League became active in their support, launching a Plan of Campaign under which tenants on estates where rents were considered excessive lodged a ‘fair’ rent with trustees who offered the total collected to the landlord. If the landlord refused to accept, he would receive no rent at all, and the money collected was to be used to fight evictions and to support those evicted instead. The Plan of Campaign was conceived by Timothy Healy (1855–1931), an Irish Party MP who was to become first Governor General of the Irish Free State. He split with Parnell in 1886 over the Galway by-election when Parnell forced Captain O’Shea upon the constituency despite local objections and the fact that O’Shea refused to take the Irish Party whip. Healy remained a firm opponent of Parnell, taking a lead in deposing him from the Irish Party’s leadership in 1890–1. His plan was never endorsed by Parnell, but three other members of the Irish Party took up Healy’s idea: Timothy Harrington (1851–1910), William O’Brien (1852–1928) and John Dillon (1851–1927). Harrington, MP for the Harbour Division, Dublin, and secretary of the Irish Party, outlined the Plan of Campaign in an article published in United Ireland (the organ of the Land League and the Irish Party, founded in 1881 by Parnell). O’Brien, MP for Mallow, was the editor of the paper. Dillon, MP for east Mayo, had been imprisoned with Parnell in Kilmainham in 1881–2, and from there had been one of the signatories with Parnell of the No Rent Manifesto calling upon tenant farmers to ‘pay no rent under any pretext’. With the Plan, all three hoped to revive the agitation and disturbances which had characterised the earlier Land War and thus not only force concessions which they believed the House of Commons would not otherwise make, but also demonstrate that home rule and land were

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inextricably connected no matter what Conservatives and unionists might think. Within months, some 20,000 tenants were involved on 116 estates. In December 1886 the government declared the Plan of Campaign ‘an unlawful and criminal conspiracy’, and Parnell exerted his influence to limit its operation. Nevertheless, for five years the Plan continued. Just as in the Land War, landlords were attacked and sometimes murdered; animals were killed and injured. In Britain, where people were traditionally kind to animals, the commonplace maiming of them during the Land War and Plan of Campaign fuelled racist dislike of the Irish. Cartoon depictions of the Irish as simian monsters were common in Britain and the United States before the 1880s, but the Plan helped generate particular ill-feeling. The Plan of Campaign had some success in reducing rents (the average rent reductions imposed by the Land Courts in the later 1880s rose to nearly 30 per cent), but the violence of the campaign (although never as extensive as Land War violence) in the long run was selfdefeating. The Conservative Chief Secretary from 1887 to 1891, Arthur Balfour (1848–1930), saw the Plan as a crucial test of his party’s policy. He resolved to combat it with a mixture of strict law enforcement and coercion, while steadfastly pursuing the policy of land reform. He was determined to make the union succeed, and clearly stated his approach upon taking office: I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing the obedience to the law, but at the same time I shall be as radical as any reformer in redressing grievances . . . Hitherto English governments . . . have been all for repression or all for reform. I am for both.

Accordingly, he lent full support to landlords carrying out evictions. He used the RIC to protect those embroiled in conflict with the Plan and selectively to arrest Plan ringleaders. Sometimes he sanctioned wholesale estate clearances. In September 1887 he won the title ‘Bloody Balfour’ for defending the RIC who at Mitchelstown, co. Cork, had fired into a crowd of Land Leaguers killing three people and wounding others (the ‘Mitchelstown Massacre’). In 1889 he sanctioned the use of battering rams to effect evictions. By May 1891 the Plan, denied popular support in Britain because of its violent methods, came to an end (though on 101 of the 116 estates originally

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involved, the tenants in fact won), with tenants holding out on only eighteen estates. As instrumental as Balfour’s coercion in ending the Plan was the expense the Plan undertook in Tipperary where, following a wholesale estate eviction, it financed a new town – New Tipperary – and tried to support the inhabitants. Parnell and the Church had publicly opposed the Plan, with Pope Leo XIII in 1888 issuing a rescript condemning both the Plan and boycotting as contrary to the teaching of the Church. Of the Plan’s leaders, Harrington sided with Parnell in the O’Shea divorce case. He became Lord Mayor of Dublin (1901–2), and remained an Irish Party MP until his death. Dillon and O’Brien became anti-Parnellites. O’Brien maintained his land reform activities, forming the United Irish League in 1898 in an attempt to renew agitation. Together with Dillon, he played a leading part in reuniting the Irish Party in 1900 under the leadership of the Parnellite John Redmond (1856–1918). In 1918 Dillon became leader of the party, but he was defeated in the general election that year and retired from politics, dying nine years later in London. O’Brien did not contest the 1918 general election and ten years later, like Dillon, also died in London. The ‘kind’ part of Conservative policy was implemented by Balfour with the same determination as the coercive part. One of his first decisions as Chief Secretary was in 1887 to introduce a Land Act extending the 1881 Land Act to leaseholders (approximately 100,000 people). The following year he brought in another Land Act doubling to £10 million the amount set aside by the 1885 Act (the ‘Ashbourne’ Act, named after Lord Ashbourne, the Conservative Lord Chancellor of Ireland who drafted it) which enabled tenants to borrow from the government the full purchase price of their land, to be repaid over forty-nine years at 4 per cent interest. Between 1885 and 1888 over 25,000 tenants took advantage of these Acts to purchase between them 942,600 acres. In 1891 Balfour’s third and most important Land Act came into effect, advancing £33 million at preferential interest rates to tenants who wanted to buy their farms: it was an enormous leap in the scale of government participation, amounting in one stroke to three times as much as had been provided by all previous Acts. In addition, Balfour established in 1891 the Congested Districts Board to purchase land in the ‘congested’ parts of the south and west

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of Ireland, redistribute it to tenants, and make improvements to farm buildings and organisation. By the time the board was wound up in 1923, it had spent £11 million, redistributed 2.5 million acres to 59,510 tenants, and encouraged the fishing and some home industries in the poorest parts of the country. Balfour’s younger brother Gerald, Chief Secretary from 1895 to 1900, amended the 1891 Act with a Land Act of his own in 1896 which did away with many of the earlier Act’s restrictive clauses and increased still further the funding made available for land purchase. In 1898 he carried through an Irish Local Government Act which gave Ireland the British system of local government. This was one of the most important conciliatory measures implemented by the Conservatives. It was instrumental in shifting decisively political power away from the old Ascendancy landowning interests to the democratic nationalist majority of farmers and shopkeepers. It also provided through local authorities the administrative and fiscal experience which was a training ground for self-government. In 1903 George Wyndham, a Conservative and Gerald Balfour’s successor as Chief Secretary (1900–5), sponsored the greatest Land Act of all. It advanced the then revolutionary notion that landlords should be encouraged to sell estates entire rather than piecemeal, and that sales should proceed if three-quarters of the tenants on an estate agreed. Wyndham personally became increasingly upset by social conditions in Ireland, and his representations to London on the subject finally cost him the secretaryship. In 1909 a Liberal Land Purchase Act introduced an element of compulsion to such estate sales. By 1921, as a result of the Wyndham Act, the government since 1903 had advanced nearly £100 million; over 11 million acres had changed hands, and over 250,000 tenants had bought their land. The Act was praised by John Dillon as having ‘the effect of changing the whole character of the peasantry. Instead of being careless, idle and improvident, they have become like the French peasantry, industrious and economical, even penurious.’ It effected possibly the most far-reaching piece of social reform in Ireland since the union, irreparably weakening the economic and political base of the landlord class while consolidating an agrarian-based conservative society with Catholic values centring on the family, land inheritance and the Church.

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The vast majority of Irish people after the famine, conscious of the ever-likely recurrence of disaster, instinctively calculated precisely the number of people each individual holding could sustain, while supporting a social order which maintained the economic security granted by the Land Acts. Thus the post-famine phenomena of emigration and late marriage were secured by legislation and a popular instinct for survival. Demoralisation was also present, but the emigration of those most frustrated meant that those who stayed benefited from greater security. This was the age of industry and the social, political, industrial and technical improvements that characterised the time did not reach most people in Ireland because of land hunger and emigration. The popular legislation passed by English politicians in the seventy years after the famine pressed (together with the collapse of the Irish language) the anglicisation of Ireland. With justifiable pride, politicians at Westminster looked upon their reforming legislation as solving the Irish problem. Together with Karl Marx, they made the mistake of thinking that economic problems were more significant than political ones. Kindness had beneficial results; it had valuable social and political consequences, but it could never hope to extinguish the Irish perception of centuries of unkindness and injustice. The immediate victims of land reform were the Anglo-Irish landlords who lost their land and their incomes. Unintentionally, the immediate beneficiaries of reform, the Irish people, were to suffer in the longer term. The Land Acts transformed Ireland from a country of millions of landless peasants to a much less numerous nation of peasant proprietors: a great obstacle to industrial development and a framework of deeply conservative values. Myriad smallholdings sustained fewer and fewer people and conspired to encourage emigration and to deflect modernity from Ireland until the end of the twentieth century. nationalists The seventy years after the famine witnessed not only the profound social, economic and political changes encapsulated in land reform legislation, but also a resurgence of Gaelic and Orange sensibilities. But while Orangeism was directly politically and economically

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motivated, Gaelicism – at least to begin with – was not. Indeed, a cultural idealism encompassing Protestantism and unionism, Catholicism and nationalism was the basis of the Gaelic renaissance of the later nineteenth century. It did have an important political element which harked back to the idealism of Grattan and Wolfe Tone, but it was far more concerned with reawakening interest in every element of the Irish past so as to restore pride and selfconfidence in all Irishmen. In 1841 the Archaeological Society of Ireland was formed. In 1884 the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was founded ‘for the preservation and cultivation of our national pastimes, and for providing amusements for the Irish people during their leisure hours’. Michael Cusack (1847–1907), a teacher, and Maurice Davin (1864– 1927), a noted athlete, co-founded the GAA at a meeting in the billiard room at Hayes’ Commercial Hotel in Thurles, co. Tipperary. Cusack (who liked to be called ‘Citizen Cusack’ and was the model for the Citizen in James Joyce’s Ulysses) was acting in connivance with the IRB which in 1883 had resolved to initiate an athletic organisation as another way of propagating nationalism and attracting young men who might be recruited to its cause of national independence. The IRB preferred to remain in the background so that the GAA would not be obviously ‘Fenian’ and therefore suspect in the eyes of the Church and the authorities. Within three years, under IRB influence the GAA had become ostentatiously political, introducing a rule banning members of Crown forces and prohibiting its own members from participating in non-Gaelic games. Cricket was especially frowned upon: hurling (today Ireland’s national game), Irish football (the ball can be handled) and handball were the three sports most actively encouraged. From 1887 onwards, the GAA was regarded by the Special Branch of the RIC as an adjunct of the physical force national movement, and its activities and members were regularly reported. In 1891, two thousand Fenian-minded GAA men marched with their hurley sticks draped in black in Parnell’s funeral cortege. From 1913 to 1916, the GAA provided excellent cover for IRB men practising military drill, using hurley sticks as substitutes for rifles. The Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, Dr Thomas Croke, a notable ‘patriot priest’ who had supported the Land League and was the founding patron of the

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GAA, summed up the spirit of the association in a letter he wrote to the organisers in December 1884 (quoted by them with approval). He decried the fact that Ireland was: importing from England not only her manufactured goods, which we cannot help doing, since she has practically strangled our own manufacturing appliances, but together with her fashions, her accents, her vicious literature, her music, her dances and her manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to the utter discredit of our own grand national sports and to the sore humiliation of every son and daughter of the old land . . . And what have we got in their stead? We have got such foreign and fantastic field sports as lawn tennis, polo, croquet, cricket and the like – very excellent I believe, and health-giving exercises in their way, still not racy of the soil but rather alien on the contrary to it, as are indeed, for the most part, the men and women who first imported and still continue to patronise them . . . If we continue travelling for the next score years in the same direction that we have been going in for some time past, condemning the sports that were practised by our forefathers, effacing our national features as though we were ashamed of them, and putting on, with England’s stuffs and broadcloths, her masher habits, and such other effeminate follies as she may recommend, we had better at once, and publicly, abjure our nationality, clap hands at the sight of the Union Jack, and place England’s ‘bloody red’ exultantly above the ‘green’.

The somewhat fanatical anti-English attitude voiced by Croke remained with the GAA. However, the GAA also really did help foster a new sense of Irish pride, catching the imagination of rural Ireland as well as that of intellectuals concerned about the apparent impoverishment of Irish culture. In 1893 the most important Gaelic revival organisation, the Gaelic League, was founded by three academics: Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), Eoin MacNeill (1867–1945), and the Rev. Eugene O’Growney (1863–99). The Gaelic League was dedicated to the ‘de-Anglicisation of Ireland’, but unlike the GAA it was also determinedly non-political and non-sectarian. Hyde, a Protestant and later first President of Ireland, was a unionist, MacNeill was a supporter of the Irish Party, and O’Growney was a Catholic priest–scholar. Hyde’s 1892 lecture ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ was the inspiration behind the Gaelic League: ‘In order to de-Anglicise ourselves’, he said, ‘we must at once arrest the decay of the language.’ The League set out to save the language and extend its use. It published Irish-language

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textbooks, encouraged the GAA and organised traditional dances – ceilidhs. In 1901 Hyde’s play Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Straw Rope) was the first Irish-language play ever to be performed in a professional theatre (the author played the leading role). By 1904 there were 593 branches of the Gaelic League with a membership of over 50,000 (Figure 15). It successfully pressed to make Irish an essential subject for entry to the National University of Ireland, and in 1908 Hyde became the first professor of modern Irish at University College, Dublin. O’Growney’s language textbook, Simple Lessons in Irish, became part of the paraphernalia of nationalists, enjoying one of the largest and longest print runs of any book in the British Isles. Membership of the League became almost a sine qua non of membership of the IRB, and IRB influence (as with the GAA) forced the politicisation of the League and Hyde’s resignation as President in 1915 in anger at it. After the failure of the 1916 rising,

Figure 15 Gaelic League membership card Along with the Gaelic Athletic Association, the League, while at its start not a front for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, provided a recruiting and meeting ground for extreme nationalists. Eoin MacNeill, later to lead the Irish Volunteers, was its founding secretary. Its objective was (and is) to promote the Irish language as a living, practical medium.

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the League was unique amongst nationalist organisations in not being banned, so providing revolutionary nationalists with their only cover for reorganisation. Despite its success as a nationalist organisation, however, the League failed in its specific objective of reviving the Irish language. The 1891 census established that there were 680,000 Gaelic speakers in Ireland compared to 1.7 million in 1851. The 1926 census revealed an 18 per cent fall – 120,000 – in the number of Gaelic speakers since 1891, despite over thirty years of Gaelic League activity. After the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922, the League successfully campaigned to make Irish compulsory at primary-school level. In 1923 it succeeded in making Irish an essential qualification for entry to the civil service (a requirement dropped in 1975). As a result, the language became more of a job ticket than a national exercise, and while the 2002 census found 1,570,894 Irish speakers and 2,180,101 people who did not speak Irish, the reality is that many fewer people actually do speak the language, with (in 2003) an estimated 20,000–30,000 fluent speakers in Irish-speaking communities (Irish Times, 6 January 2003). The sheer vitality of ancient Irish literature had always attracted scholars, but as publicised by the League, Gaelic tales had an effect that crossed national boundaries. Standish James O’Grady (1846– 1928), a man of letters, played a leading part in this development by publicising in English the folk tales, songs and myths of the Gaelic past. O’Grady was largely responsible for the ‘rediscovery’ of Cuchulain, quickly turned by Yeats and others into a symbol of nationhood. Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852–1932), the wife of Sir William Gregory, an Irish landlord and one-time Whig Undersecretary for Ireland, was one of those who became an ardent admirer of Gaelic legends and tales as a result of O’Grady’s writings and Gaelic League publicity. Meeting Yeats in 1897, she became his patron and threw open her home at Coole Park, co. Galway, to the brilliant generation of Irish writers inspired, like her, by the Gaelic past. In 1904, Lady Gregory and Yeats founded Dublin’s Abbey Theatre for the performance of Irish plays by Irish playwrights. It opened with performances of Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News. The list of Irish writers who came to prominence in the years around the turn of the century reads like a catalogue of literary giants.

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William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and James Joyce (1882–1941) were the two greatest Irish writers of the twentieth century. Yeats, born in Dublin, was brought up and educated in England. He was instrumental in translating Irish literature to a worldwide English-speaking audience, thus ensuring that it did not become a narrow, nationalistic and parochial affair. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Joyce, also born in Dublin, was educated at Ireland’s leading Jesuit private schools – Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College. Unlike Yeats, Joyce was more interested in Ireland’s present than her past. He was the first modern world literary figure from Catholicism. He tapped into cosmopolitan cultures far outside Britain’s – and Ireland’s – cultural settings. From 1904 until his death he lived in Italy, Switzerland and France, not returning to Ireland for the last twenty-seven years of his life. He found Irish life, particularly the influence of the Catholic Church, constricting and oppressive although his major novel, Ulysses, while being banned in Britain and the United States, was never prohibited in Ireland. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), along with Yeats and Joyce, was one of the greatest writers in English of the twentieth century. He was born in Dublin too, but after his mother moved to London when he was eighteen, he made his career there, choosing his subjects from British rather than from Irish life. Only one major play, John Bull’s Other Island, written in 1904 at the request of Yeats, concerns itself with Shaw’s homeland. Nevertheless, throughout his life he maintained his interest in Ireland, defending the Easter Week rebels of 1916. In 1925 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. In his will he endowed the National Gallery of Ireland with the royalties from his play Pygmalion; the revenues from My Fair Lady, the film version of the play, have made the gallery one of the wealthiest in the British Isles. Other notable men of letters springing from Ireland at this time included George Moore (1852–1933), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), John Millington Synge (1871–1909), and Sean O’Casey (1880–1964). With the exception of Joyce and Moore who were both born Catholics, all were Protestant (although Wilde converted to Catholicism). Moore converted to Anglicanism and Joyce repudiated the Church. The writings of the Irish literary renaissance helped restore an honest sense of dignity and pride in things Irish. In the process of

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achieving this honesty Irish writers often had to brave the prejudices and antagonism of some of their countrymen who, like Arthur Griffith, sought to use every means including literature to further the cause of Irish nationalism. Synge’s play In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), in which the heroine runs off with a traveller, was denounced by Griffith because ‘all of us know that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world’. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) caused an outcry with a line ‘It’s Peegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself’, indicating that Irish chastity might not be perfect. O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars (1926) was met with riots because it presented IRA men as less than heroic. The fact that O’Casey had organised for the IRB and the Irish Citizen Army before the 1916 rising was forgotten in the uproar. Yeats also faced a certain opposition from narrow nationalists. In 1894 he had joined a breakaway group from the IRB, the Irish National Brotherhood, entering police reports as ‘a literary enthusiast, more or less of a revolutionary’. This, together with his literary eminence, gave him a special position with nationalists and when in 1925 as one of the first senators of the Irish Free State he spoke against the legislation that made divorce illegal in the Free State, he was able publicly to condemn the Catholic, conservative attitudes of the state’s new rulers. The social and cultural oppression of the new state, like the political and economic oppression of the old, maintained the pressure to emigrate on all those who would not conform. Joyce, Shaw, Wilde and O’Casey all left Ireland to practise their art. The Catholic social and cultural attitudes responsible for this diaspora of Irish talent also lent weight to Protestant unionist opposition to Irish nationalism. From the 1880s onward, Protestant unionists argued for the maintenance of the Act of Union on the grounds of economic and social advantage. Lord Randolph Churchill’s cementing of the virulently anti-Catholic working-class Orange Order to the foundation of what became the Irish Unionist Party ensured a mindless component of religious bigotry in the politics of unionism. Very rapidly, the cry of ‘Defend our Protestant religion’ became, like the ‘Orange card’, shorthand for the political mobilisation of northern Irish Protestants in defence of what they perceived as their economic and social

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freedoms which would somehow be destroyed in an Ireland independent of Britain. Despite the fact that this attitude persists to the present day, and that various actions (like the 1925 repeal of divorce legislation) by Dublin governments since 1922 helped justify northern Protestant fears, upon examination religious distinctions emerge as convenient tags and not as central to political divisions. Northern Protestants provided much of the leadership of Irish nationalism throughout the nineteenth century. Northern Protestants in the early twentieth century were instrumental in reviving the IRB, which launched the 1916 rising. Southern Catholics, in the majority in Southern Ireland, have never entrenched discrimination against Protestants in jobs or housing. And while northern Protestants entrenched discrimination against Catholics in jobs in Northern Ireland, this was because of the convenience of the religious tag which meant to a Protestant that a Catholic was a nationalist, disloyal to the union, and a member of a feckless, inferior nation prepared to undercut hard-working Protestants. If Irish Catholics were black, it would be seen that the parallels with Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s would explain many of the illogical and logical reasons for Protestant Irish unionism and for Irish nationalism. This awareness has given rise to an academic and political debate as to whether or not there are two nations in Ireland. The concept of nationalism depends upon a national territory and government carrying the natural allegiance of the community. This is, of course, an artificial concept and in the absolute sense nationalism is a myth. However, in the real world people both accept the national concept (it is, after all, a salutary concept helping to counteract selfinterest and to provide cohesion to the state), and actively provide their allegiance to it. In Ireland, northern Protestant determination to maintain the union, and the countervailing pressure of (mostly Catholic) Irish nationalists, has called into question the proposition that there is one nation in the country with a sense of common nationality, geography, history and culture. Those who argue that there is only one nation ignore northern Protestant protests that they do not share a common culture or history and attribute the political and social divisions between unionists and nationalists to British manipulations. In particular, Churchill’s playing of the Orange card in 1886 is seen as a conspiratorial move to divide the Irish working

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class in the interests of British capitalism and imperialism. They do not accept that Churchill – however cynically – exploited attitudes and feelings that were natural to Protestants concentrated in predominantly working-class northern Ireland. Taking account of this, in 1973 the Socialist Workers Association for a Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland published a pamphlet, One Island, Two Nations, arguing that northern Irish Protestants are ‘a distinct nation, or at least part of one’, and that Catholic imperialism, not British, has been responsible for working-class divisions on religious lines in Northern Ireland. Northern Protestants proved their separate nationality, the Socialist Workers Association claimed, when in 1912 ‘the ability of its ruling class to rally all its members into a common alliance ready if necessary to fight for a national objective’ was successfully demonstrated. The proponents of the two nations theory assume social class to be the natural bond of nationhood. Thus working-class Protestants in Northern Ireland naturally fall into the category of nation. The logic of this argument fails, however, when pressed: on the one hand, it is patently absurd that every class (even if only those that are numerically large are considered) has claims to separate nationhood, and on the other hand northern Protestants are not distinct from other British or Irish communities, themselves part of a British or Irish nation encompassing differences seen as distinctive in Northern Ireland. The conditional loyalty to Britain exhibited by northern Irish Protestants, and their own part in Irish history, has made them different in their attitudes but not distinct in national terms (despite the fact that they themselves often reject an Irish identity) from either Britain or the rest of Ireland. They do have some of the characteristics of a nation (principally a keen self-awareness) but to be a separate nation they would have to be prepared to maintain themselves against all comers, and this has not been the case. A more accurate awareness of Irish nationality is that there is an Irish (Catholic) nation and a distinctive social and economic (Protestant) community which is emphasised by its own geographical place in Ireland. This community straddles both the Irish and the British nations exactly as was intended by the original plantation policy. Its members are true victims of geography and history.

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Opposition to the cause of home rule for Ireland in 1886 had mobilised northern Irish Protestants for the first time in a coherent political form. In 1885 a political association of unionists, the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (ILPU), was founded in Dublin to contest parliamentary elections against home rulers. In 1891 it became the Irish Unionist Alliance, reflecting southern Irish unionist interests, always more patrician than northern unionism. With Gladstone’s public conversion to home rule, in January 1886 the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union was formed in Belfast in competition with the ILPU, reflecting Ulster rather than Irish unionism with direct (though unofficial) ties to the Orange Order. Also in January, an Irish Unionist Party was formed by Irish Unionist MPs in the House of Commons. By 1912, Irish unionism was controlled by the Joint Committee of Unionist Associations (established in 1907), the largest and dominant part of which was the Ulster Unionist Council which had been formed in 1904 as the central and coordinating executive for Ulster opposition to home rule. The galvanising of Irish unionism was given new impetus in 1906 when the Liberals won a landslide general election victory with a majority of 106 seats over all other parties combined, ending twenty years of almost uninterrupted Conservative and Unionist government. The Liberals had made no mention of home rule in their election campaign, and most Liberals were glad to be rid of the proposal which had divided their party and helped spell electoral defeat for so long. However, in 1907 the MP for North Bristol, Augustine Birrell (1850– 1933), already in the Liberal Cabinet for the Board of Education, was switched to become Chief Secretary for Ireland. His influence began to rekindle Liberal interest in Irish home rule. His very first act was to present an Irish Council Bill to Parliament which – had it been accepted – would have provided a small measure of home rule. The Bill was furiously criticised by unionists as too much and by nationalists as too little, and was withdrawn by the government. Birrell then turned to land reform, securing the 1909 Land Purchase Act which helped force landlords to sell land to tenants. Until the 1916 rising ended his career, Birrell was popular and respected, and he became the longest-serving Chief Secretary in Irish history. He became friendly with the leaders of the Irish Party, particularly John Dillon and John Redmond.

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The Irish Party’s Parnellite and anti-Parnellite wings had reunited in 1900 under the leadership of Redmond, an able and experienced politician who proved his qualities as far as his party was concerned by playing a major part in securing with Wyndham the 1903 Land Act. Through the influence of his father, an MP, Redmond was appointed a Clerk of the House of Commons, one of the main positions of the institution, affording an intimate knowledge of the parliamentary process and of parliamentarians. He entered politics himself in 1881 as MP for New Ross. From 1885 he was MP for North Wexford, and from 1891 until his death he sat as MP for Waterford. He refused to regard the Liberals as betrayers of home rule after their 1906 election victory, preferring instead to maintain the Irish Party’s unofficial alliance with them that had existed since 1886, and supporting the tremendous programme of social reform undertaken by the Liberal government, from April 1908 led by Herbert Henry Asquith (1852– 1928). The determination of Asquith and his colleague the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (1863–1945), to press ahead with expensive and radical reforming legislation despite strident Conservative opposition brought Ireland once again to the forefront of politics. Coupled with the ever-increasing expense of Britain’s arms race with Germany, measures such as the introduction of old age pensions, labour exchanges and unemployment benefits required large increases in taxation. In 1909, in order to raise the necessary funding, Lloyd George introduced his People’s Budget which, though passed by the House of Commons, was defeated in the House of Lords where the Conservatives enjoyed an hereditary majority. In December 1909, Asquith called a general election on the issue of whether a Commons-based government or the Lords ruled the country. He won with a greatly reduced majority which gave Redmond’s seventy-five Irish Party MPs the balance of power for the first time since 1885 (eight more Irish MPs were members of the land reform All for Ireland League, and they tended to vote with the Irish Party at Westminster). In return for the party’s continued support of the Liberals, Asquith agreed to introduce a home rule Bill. In many ways, this deal was a lifeline for the Irish Party which for over thirty years had campaigned unsuccessfully for home rule. By 1910 in Ireland there were several incipient competitors (both constitutional

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and revolutionary) for the party’s dominance of nationalist politics. One in particular, the Sinn Féin party (meaning ‘We Ourselves’), consciously set out to force the pace of agitation for home rule. divide Sinn Féin was founded on 28 November 1905 by a disparate group of nationalists some of whom, like Arthur Griffith (1871–1922), were opposed to any idea of combating the Irish Party in elections, while some, like Bulmer Hobson (1883–1969), were revolutionary nationalists anxious to defeat the Irish Party so as to swing public opinion towards violent, rather than towards non-violent agitation. Griffith is generally credited as the father of Sinn Féin because of his leading part in organising the new party (despite the fact that from the start it took a form he had opposed) and because of his role in developing a party philosophy through his book The Resurrection of Hungary: a Parallel for Ireland (1904). In this he argued for a dual Anglo-Irish monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model of the Ausgleich of 1867, with the reintroduction of Grattan’s Irish Parliament – ‘the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland’ – which would govern an independent Ireland made self-sufficient by import and export controls. Griffith was an enigmatic figure. A man of imagination and unexpected practicality, he had enjoyed an early flirtation with the IRB, and although there is evidence that he remained a member of the society until 1916, after 1905 he devoted himself to constitutional politics. By 1907 Griffith and Sinn Féin were divided about contesting parliamentary elections and by-elections. In 1907 a Sinn Féin candidate had an impact in the North Leitrim by-election fighting on an abstentionist platform (if successful, Sinn Féin candidates would not take their seats at Westminster). This was the only parliamentary contest Sinn Féin took part in until 1917. Under Griffith’s influence, it instead concentrated on organising the Irish county councils to coordinate their support for home rule and thus pressurise the Irish Party further. By 1911 Sinn Féin was almost moribund. Many of its members had left with Hobson in 1910, angry with Griffith’s moderate constitutionalism. The remaining members figured more prominently in police reports than in politics as Redmond’s success at Westminster made Sinn Féin’s objectives seem unnecessary.

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In 1912 Asquith introduced the Liberal Party’s third Home Rule Bill, having the previous year secured with the Parliament Act the supremacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords. At this point, seeing that the last constitutional obstacle to home rule had been overcome, Irish unionists became desperate. The Home Rule Bill was passed three times by the Commons in 1912, 1913 and 1914, and each time it was rejected by the Lords. Nevertheless, as required by the Parliament Act, the Bill would automatically become law in 1914. The Home Rule Act would set up an all-Ireland parliament in Dublin, with control over all matters except defence and foreign policy. It seemed that at last the hopes of Grattan, O’Connell, Parnell and Redmond would come true. But at 11 p.m. on 4 August, the UK declared war on Germany. King George V signed the Bill into law six weeks later, on 15 September, but all parties agreed that the Act would not be implemented until the war was over. Other events in the years since 1910 had threatened civil war over Irish home rule, and made the advisability of major constitutional change at the outbreak of war dubious in the extreme. Under the leadership since 1910 of the Dublin-born barrister and MP for Dublin University (Trinity College’s formal name) Sir Edward Carson (1854– 1935), Irish unionists in northern Ireland in 1912 had sworn an oath to fight against home rule. Carson was a brilliant lawyer, tactician and orator. In 1895 he had devastated his classmate Oscar Wilde in crossexamination during the writer’s libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry, resulting in Wilde’s imprisonment for ‘gross indecency’. On 28 September 1912 Carson led 471,413 unionists in signing ‘Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant’: Being convinced in our conscience that home rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as to the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn covenant throughout this our time of threatened calamity 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 in

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the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority.

Once again, the conditional loyalty of northern Irish Protestants was being clearly expressed. They would deny Parliament’s authority unless Parliament did what they wanted. Stressing this even further, Carson went so far as to set up a ‘provisional government’ for Ulster that would commence the day home rule came into effect, and (through the Orange Order) established a quasi-army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in January 1913 with the help of Lord Roberts, VC, Britain’s most distinguished military commander. The UVF was under the command of another leading military man, General Sir George Richardson, a retired veteran of the Indian army, who had over 100,000 men drilling and training regularly within weeks of the formation of the force. A defence fund was collected in subscriptions and donations amounting to over £1 million which was used to buy arms in Germany. Fourteen weeks before the First World War started, on the night of 24 April 1914, twenty-four thousand rifles and three million rounds of ammunition were landed illegally by the UVF at Larne, co. Antrim, after telephone wires had been cut, the local police locked up and the town taken over by detachments of the UVF. The actions of Carson and the UVF were clearly criminal, if not treasonable, in the same way as the actions of the Young Irelanders and the Fenians. Carson revelled in the danger he courted and in the challenge his activities represented to the government. He told a London audience in 1912 before travelling to Belfast that ‘he intended when he went over there to break every law that was possible’. ‘I do not care twopence whether it is treason or not,’ he declared. ‘I do not even shrink from the horrors of civil commotion. I am a rebel, a Sussex-Irish rebel, and all my Ulster friends are all rebels.’ Asquith’s government preferred officially to ignore Carson and the UVF, unwilling to lend them further notoriety by arresting him or openly confronting the UVF. The government’s problems were increased by the full-blooded support given to Carson by the Conservative Party led by Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923), the Canadian-born son of a Presbyterian minister who had emigrated from Ulster. Bonar Law, at a

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Conservative rally at Blenheim Palace, Oxford, on 27 July 1912, proclaimed, ‘I can imagine no lengths of resistance to which Ulster will go which I shall not be ready to support, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.’ As a result, Asquith could not count upon the usual understandings between British governments and oppositions, or on broad political support. The extraordinary activity of Irish unionists, and the equally extraordinary statements on the part of the Conservative Party, which prided itself upon its respect for law, were the results of deep-rooted fears. The unionists were convinced that a united home-ruled Ireland would undermine their economic base and directly threaten their social values. And along with the Conservatives, they were also frightened that Irish home rule would lead to the break-up of the British Empire by which they set so much emotional and political store. There were states in India and colonies in Africa and the Far East which had just as good a claim as Ireland to self-government – sometimes better. In addition, they were conscious of the war clouds building up over Europe and saw home rule as a danger to British morale. At the time, these were strong arguments, and only one man was prepared to act against Carson, the Conservatives and the UVF: the youngest member of Asquith’s Cabinet, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill (1874–1965). Churchill was the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill but, unlike his father, he enthusiastically supported home rule. In 1915 Winston was demoted within the Cabinet as part of the Unionist price for their cooperation in the wartime coalition; six months later he left the Cabinet of his own accord. In February 1912 he travelled to Belfast to campaign against Carson, and was forced to speak in a field outside the city as he was denied the use of the Ulster Hall (where his father had played the Orange card in 1886), threatened by a mob, and burnt in effigy on the Shankill Road. At Bradford on 14 March 1914 he uttered a clear warning to unionists and Conservatives: if they really were involved in a ‘treasonable conspiracy’ and not just in ‘loose, wanton and reckless chatter’, he said, ‘Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof.’ Three days earlier he himself had gone forward and ordered the Royal Navy’s 3rd Battle Squadron to hold exercises sixty miles from Belfast in the Firth of Clyde in a show of strength to impress the government’s opponents.

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At Churchill’s prompting, the government also ordered Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Paget, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, to prepare to defend weapons depots in Ulster and to send troop reinforcements to the province. Paget, who had a reputation for excitability, resisted these instructions on the grounds that they might increase tensions in Ulster and that the railwaymen of the Great Northern Railway, Orange to a man, would refuse to move his troops. On 19 March at a final conference on these orders in London, Paget had to be told not to be ‘a bloody fool’ after he had aggressively admitted his unionist sympathies, but he secured the verbal agreement of Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that officers domiciled in Ulster would be allowed to ‘disappear’; all other officers would have to obey orders. In Dublin the following day, Paget called his officers together. He gave them a colourful account of his instructions, referring to the government as ‘those swine’ and painting a picture of inevitable bloodshed in Ulster as a consequence of their decisions. That evening at the Curragh military camp twenty-five miles from Dublin, Brigadier General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough, his three colonels and fifty-five officers of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade notified Paget that they would resign rather than move against Ulster unionists. Three days later, Gough and his three colonels were assured in London by Sir John French and Major General (later Field Marshal) Sir Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, that the troops under their command ‘will not be called upon to enforce the present Home Rule Bill in Ulster, and that we can so assure our officers’. Wilson, who was a fanatical unionist, quite improperly kept Carson and Bonar Law informed of the government’s plans, and when Sir John French told him in confidence that the government proposed ‘to spray troops all over Ulster as if it were a Pontypool coal strike’, Wilson reported every word. The prime minister, Asquith, disavowed the assurance Gough and his officers had been given. French and the Minister for War, Colonel Jack Seely, resigned, accepting responsibility for it. But the damage had been done: an impression had been created that the British army could not be relied upon to do its duty if that meant opposing unionists in Ireland. The Curragh Mutiny, as these events were called, reduced the force of Churchill’s and the government’s determination to implement

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home rule by blunting the possibility of military action against the UVF. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson declared that Carson ‘ought to be hanged for treason’, but all Asquith could say was ‘I have rarely felt more hopeless in any practical affair.’ Similarly, Redmond and the Irish Party preferred to let Asquith’s Liberal government deal with Irish unionists directly, placing their confidence in the legislative rather than the political process, but refusing to compromise on the principle of all-Ireland home rule enshrined in the 1912–14 home rule legislation. While Carson and his followers were in practice prepared reluctantly to accept home rule for most of the country in return for a ‘county option’ (whereby the counties with unionist majority populations – the four north-eastern counties of Down, Antrim, Armagh and Londonderry – could opt out of a home-ruled Ireland and remain governed directly by Westminster), the Irish Party maintained that the unionists were bluffing and that they would accept all-Ireland home rule once it was implemented. Having successfully withstood a threat from extreme nationalists in Sinn Féin, the Irish Party after 1912 was more concerned to secure home rule, in the process largely ignoring the implications of social unrest made evident by the activities of James Larkin (1876–1947) and the Dublin lockout of 1913. ‘I have got a divine mission’, Larkin would proclaim, ‘to make men and women discontented,’ and he found personal contentment in doing so. He also found abundant cause for his cry in the slums of Dublin: one-third of the capital’s population of about 350,000 typically lived in one-room tenements, without light, water or sanitation. Unemployment was chronically high, averaging 15 per cent, and even for those with jobs average pay was £1 per week – 12.5 per cent below the poverty line – while unskilled labourers (the largest single grouping of employment) could expect only about twelve shillings a week. Sickness, especially tuberculosis, was rife, and the death rate between 1901 and 1911 was the highest of any city in Europe, averaging 24.7 per 1,000 people compared to 17.3 per 1,000 in the country as a whole. It was not surprising that given these conditions ‘Big Jim’ Larkin should soon gather a mass following for his socialist and trade union projects. He was a practical syndicalist, regarding class struggle in the form of industrial action as more effective than conventional politics in securing for the trade union movement the control of the means of

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production. ‘I am a rebel and the son of a rebel,’ he would declare. ‘I recognise no law but the people’s law.’ In 1909 he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) with headquarters at Liberty Hall, Dublin. From 1910 he was aided by James Connolly (1868–1916), his second-in-command. Both men had been born in Britain of Irish parents – Larkin in Liverpool and Connolly in Edinburgh – and both spoke with the accents of their birthplaces, often causing amusement amongst their Irish followers. However, within four years of the founding of the ITGWU, Larkin and Connolly had succeeded in securing improved wages and conditions for many of their supporters. In 1911 they founded a weekly newspaper, The Irish Worker, which enjoyed an average circulation of 20,000 and was sued for libel seven times in its first year of publication. It also attracted the attention of the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police both for its socialism and for its nationalism. The combination of socialism and nationalism especially distinguished Larkin and Connolly from other British and European socialists of the time. It also markedly influenced the subsequent development of Irish socialism which has not been able to dissociate itself from Irish nationalism and identify with a greater socialist internationalism. ‘Nationalism without socialism,’ wrote Connolly, ‘without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin, is only national recreancy.’ Fundamentally, both Larkin and Connolly were nationalists first and socialists second. In an article by Connolly published in The Workers’ Republic (a successor to The Irish Worker, which had been suppressed by the government in 1915) on 8 April 1916, this prior nationalist loyalty was made clear: The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil.

This view was regarded by other nationalists with great suspicion, and by unionist workers in the north as risible. The ITGWU remained essentially Dublin-based, disaffiliated from 1909 to 1911 from the Irish Trades Union Congress, and madly unpopular with the leaders of the

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Irish Party (many of whom were Dublin employers) as well as with Arthur Griffith and his Sinn Féin. Griffith criticised ITGWU strikes and policies as detrimental to the growth of Irish capitalism which he regarded as the bedrock of national independence. In particular, the Dublin employers’ lockout of ITGWU members in 1913 spurred Griffith to outright attack. The Dublin lockout of ITGWU members was organised by a supporter of the more conservative elements of the Irish Party, William Martin Murphy (1844–1919), a rail and tramway tycoon, to force the collapse of the union. In August 1913, under Murphy’s direction, the Employers’ Federation which he had founded demanded written undertakings from their workers that they would not join the ITGWU or any other union. Those who refused were dismissed. The lockout lasted six months, with 25,000 workers and a further 25,000 of their dependants being affected. Larkin and Connolly were condemned on nearly all sides with only some of the more extreme nationalists – among them Pearse, Countess Markievicz and the artist William Orpen – lending them support. An official inquiry criticised the employers for imposing anti-union restrictions and criticised Larkin’s favourite tactic of the sympathetic strike. The Church condemned the locked-out workers and ‘Larkinism’. The British Trades Union Congress, while helping to support the families of ITGWU members, refused to take sympathetic strike action. Griffith encouraged dissension amongst workers by accusing Larkin and Connolly of playing England’s game. Their ‘new unionism’ was an English import, as far as Griffith was concerned, and the lockout confirmed his view that they were ‘doctrinaires whose ultimate message to man is to give up his God, his country, his family and his property and be happy’. In February 1914 the ITGWU collapsed and men returned to work on the employers’ terms. Eight months later Larkin went to the United States to raise funds. He was there for nine years, throwing himself into trade union activities and sabotaging cargoes to Britain during the First World War, and in turn being thrown into Sing Sing prison for these activities. He was released in 1923, returned to a triumphant welcome in Dublin, and spent the rest of his life in Irish trade union and Irish Labour Party politics.

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During the lockout, Connolly had formed the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) to protect pickets in clashes with the police. After Larkin left for America, both the remnants of the ITGWU and the ICA came under Connolly’s direct control. With the help of dedicated organisers (one of whom was the playwright Sean O’Casey), Connolly concentrated on forging a new, strongly nationalistic trade union movement, and became increasingly strident in his calls for armed rebellion against British rule. His ICA flag depicted a silver plough and stars on a green background: the plough symbolising the dignity of labour; the stars the hopes of man, and the green the nation, Ireland. Part of Connolly’s hope was to provide a nationalist and socialist counterpart to the Ulster Volunteer Force through the ICA: in this he failed and the ICA remained a minuscule, though tightly knit, force of only just over two hundred men. Another, non-socialist organisation, the Irish Volunteers, instead became the nationalist counterpart to the UVF. In October 1913, in reaction to the development of the UVF, a Midland Volunteer Force was formed by nationalists in Athlone. Denis Moran (1872–1936), the owner–editor of The Leader, an influential nationalist journal (it had led the vitriolic criticism of Synge in 1907 for his Playboy of the Western World), was one of the first to see the significance of the Midland Volunteers, and used his columns to urge the formation of ‘Irish Volunteer Companies’ on the Midland model throughout the country. This idea was taken up by Bulmer Hobson within the IRB, and the society’s leaders decided to try to create just such a force in the same manner as they had created the Gaelic Athletic Association: by themselves remaining in the background but controlling the organisation through pliable front men. Almost immediately, a front man innocently presented himself: Eoin MacNeill, the co-founder of the Gaelic League. MacNeill, independently of any IRB influence, had published an article entitled ‘The North Began’ in the Gaelic League journal An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light or The Flaming Sword) on 1 November. In this article, MacNeill praised the founding of the UVF as giving a lead which nationalists should follow in order that Irish home rule should not be set aside by unionist militancy. Within days he was approached by IRB representatives, and he accepted their proposal that he form and front an Irish Volunteer organisation with their secret help. On 25 November the Irish Volunteers were founded in the Rotunda Rink in

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Dublin, with Eoin MacNeill as their leader. From the start, MacNeill made plain that the object of his Volunteers was ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland’. He was a supporter of the Irish Party, and pledged himself against the use of the Irish Volunteers against the party’s interests. The Volunteer motto, ‘Defence Not Defiance’ (the same motto as the 1779 Volunteers), accurately summed up MacNeill’s constitutional and anti-revolutionary approach. This was to result in the most severe consequences for the IRB and their directly revolutionary plans.

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With the formation of the Irish Volunteers, the revolutionary hopes of the IRB were given a major boost. For forty years the society had vainly tried to mobilise opinion and attract more than a few members. By the turn of the century, it had lost much of its sense of purpose, and its members seemed more concerned with the details of Dublin municipal politics than with the cause of Irish independence. In December 1907, Thomas Clarke (1858–1916) was sent from the United States by the old Fenian John Devoy to revive the IRB. Clarke’s father was a member of the Church of Ireland and a soldier (he rose to the rank of sergeant) in the Royal Artillery. His mother was a Catholic, and although his parents’ marriage was Anglican, Clarke was baptised a Catholic at Parkhurst, Isle of Wight, where his father was serving when he was born. In 1880 he emigrated to the United States and joined Clan na Gael. Three years later he travelled to England to take part in an unsuccessful Fenian dynamite campaign against military and police installations. He was caught and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Upon his release he was made a freeman of the city of Limerick before returning to America in 1899. When he came back to Ireland in 1907, he was fanatical in his determination to launch another Irish rebellion using the IRB in conjunction with financial support from Clan na Gael. Clarke soon gathered around him an equally dedicated group of young IRB men, mostly (like Bulmer Hobson) from the north. One of them, Sean MacDermott (1884–1916), a barman in Belfast, became business manager of an IRB-financed newspaper, Irish Freedom, established in 1910 by Clarke to act as a vehicle for extreme nationalist opinion. By 1912, Clarke was treasurer and MacDermott secretary of the IRB, which could boast 1,500 members, all dedicated to rebellion. 192

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The following year with the formation of the Irish Volunteers, the IRB’s membership formed the activist core of Volunteer companies all over the country. IRB members – unknown to MacNeill – secured most of the leading appointments in the organisation and effectively controlled it. However, this control was short-lived. Within ten months, over 180,000 men had enrolled in the Volunteers, forcing Redmond and the Irish Party to participate. Redmond was frightened that the Volunteers might forget their motto and revolt or take some challenging action which would upset the home rule arrangements, and he was also frightened that they might become a political force appealing to Irish people over the head of the Irish Party. Accordingly, he demanded control of the organisation. The provisional committee of the Volunteers (the governing body) on 15 June 1914 decided by eighteen votes to nine to accept Redmond’s demand on the grounds that otherwise there would be a split and that factional in-fighting would only weaken their purpose of ensuring that home rule was implemented. The IRB’s control was over. Clarke and MacDermott were furious, particularly because Hobson and five other members of the IRB on the provisional committee had voted to accept Redmond’s demand. Hobson argued that since Redmond’s enormous popularity would ensure that he controlled the mass of Volunteers whatever happened, it was better to roll with the punch and to maintain whatever revolutionary impetus was possible from within. Clarke and MacDermott accused Hobson of having betrayed the IRB: ‘When they demanded to know how much I had been paid by Redmond for selling the Volunteers, I realised I could not discuss policy on that level or work with people who thought like that. I was shocked to find that men so sincere and devoted had such paltry minds.’ From this point on, the IRB became even more secretive, with Clarke and MacDermott only trusting an inner circle, developing a secret society within a secret society. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Clarke arranged a meeting with a number of the more extreme nationalist leaders (including Connolly and Griffith but excluding MacNeill) in Dublin on 9 September. They all agreed that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, and that advantage should be taken of the war to launch another Irish rising. The Irish Volunteers were the

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most obvious sizeable potential rebel grouping, particularly since their dramatic arming in the last days of July 1914, with rifles and ammunition smuggled from Germany by Erskine Childers (1870–1922) in his yacht the Asgard. Erskine Childers had been a Clerk of the House of Commons after passing the civil service examinations in 1894 with the third-best results. He was a skilled yachtsman and the author of an enormously popular and influential book, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), based upon his own nautical experience in the North Sea. The book gave a fictional account of German plans to invade England and was cited in the run-up to the First World War by those who were convinced of Britain’s military unpreparedness for war. He himself became convinced of the justice of home rule for Ireland, and in the summer of 1914 he collected £1,500 with his friend Sir Roger Casement (1864– 1916), which they used to buy 1,500 rifles and 45,000 cartridges in Germany and Belgium. On 26 July 1914, Childers sailed the Asgard into Howth harbour outside Dublin with 900 rifles and 26,000 cartridges. In a carefully planned operation, eight hundred Dublin Volunteers landed Childers’ cargo. (A week later a yachting friend of Childers brought the remaining rifles and bullets to Kilcoole, co. Wicklow.) As the Dublin Volunteers marched back into the city with their new rifles, they were stopped by a mixed force of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who managed to confiscate only nineteen rifles from the Volunteers, who rapidly dispersed. The soldiers and police were jeered and booed by slum crowds as they returned to Dublin. In Bachelor’s Walk, the Borderers panicked and fired into the crowd around them, killing three and wounding thirty-two people. The victims were given large funerals, and memorial services were held for them in churches throughout the country. An inquiry into the incident censured officials and led to the dismissal of the Assistant Commissioner of Police. Different lessons were learned by the different groups involved in these events. The police and civil service judged that firm action against the Volunteers was likely to be penalised by the government, and this contributed to the ease with which Volunteers drilled and paraded even after the start of the world war. The Volunteers were confirmed in their view that while the authorities were prepared to

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arrest (and shoot) Irish nationalists, they were not prepared similarly to act against Irish unionists engaged upon similar gunrunning and militarist enterprises. Carson and Redmond both set aside their differences with the outbreak of war and supported the fight for ‘the freedom of small nations’ against Germany. Special arrangements were made for the Ulster Volunteer Force to enrol en masse in the British army in a new division, the 36th Ulster Division. Similar arrangements were refused the Irish Volunteers. The Ulster Division elected its own officers, which was a smack across the face for Redmond: the government was saying that there would be one set of Irish citizen troops, but not another. In an important sense, the descendants of the planters were being armed with privilege by the government, while the ‘native’ Irish were being treated as second-class. Despite being naturally resentful at this second-class treatment, Redmond made a speech to an Irish Volunteer parade at Woodenbridge, co. Wicklow, on 20 September 1914, saying ‘Go on drilling and make yourselves efficient for the work, and then account yourselves as men, not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the firing line extends, in defence of right, of freedom, and of religion.’ Faced with this clear call to enlist, tens of thousands of Irish Volunteers did so. The IRB minority in the Volunteers decided that since in practice the organisation had been split by Redmond’s call between those who would fight for the United Kingdom (the majority) and those who would not, they might as well make the split formal. Eoin MacNeill, who had willingly fronted for the IRB at the formation of the Volunteers, agreed to lead the anti-Redmondite faction and on 21 September, 12,000 of them split away, keeping to themselves the name Irish Volunteers and leaving over 100,000 Redmondites to the new name of Irish National Volunteers. Four days later a small group of IRB volunteers and Citizen Army men under the leadership of Tom Clarke and James Connolly prepared to break up a recruiting meeting at Dublin’s Mansion House to be addressed by the prime minister, Asquith, and John Redmond. They had to drop their plan when troops turned out to protect the meeting, but there could be no doubt about their rebellious, revolutionary intentions. MacNeill was fully aware of the IRB’s purpose, but he thought that he had sufficient influence amongst Volunteers

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generally to moderate IRB extremism. In this mistaken belief he was encouraged by some of his closest henchmen in the Volunteers who, unknown to him, were also members of the IRB. The Director of Organisation and press secretary of the Irish Volunteers was Patrick Pearse (1879–1916), the son of a Protestant Nonconformist English stone-carver and a Catholic Irish mother. His father had successfully established a business in Dublin, and Pearse grew up in a relatively comfortable home. He joined the Gaelic League in his teens, and developed a passionate interest in the Irish language and Gaelic culture and lore. In 1908 he founded a bilingual private school, St Enda’s, at Cullenswood House (it had been Lecky’s home) in Dublin, and five years later he was a founder member of the Irish Volunteers. He was, like Eoin MacNeill, a supporter of the Irish Party, but in December 1913 he joined the IRB having been converted by the arguments for physical force. An excellent orator, he gained national notice on 1 August 1915 with his ‘The fools, the fools, the fools!’ graveside speech for the old Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, in which he also declared: Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The defenders of this realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think they have foreseen everything.

Four months earlier, in May, he had joined a top secret IRB military committee (from which MacNeill was excluded) formed by Tom Clarke to plot a rebellion. Clarke’s military committee was a subcommittee of the IRB’s Supreme Council. Under Clarke’s chairmanship, Sean MacDermott, Eamonn Ceannt (1881–1916) and Patrick Pearse were its founder members in May 1915. Ceannt was a senior IRB man and a leading member of the Gaelic League. He was also Commandant of the 4th Battalion, Dublin Brigade, Irish Volunteers. They were charged with the responsibility of organising and launching a rebellion before the end of the war. Their first plan was for a rising in September 1915, but they had to cancel their arrangements after MacDermott was arrested and imprisoned for four months just after the committee’s formation, and after their plans to obtain arms from Germany that year failed.

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In July 1914, Sir Roger Casement had travelled privately to New York where he met John Devoy and other leaders of Clan na Gael. Devoy, kept fully informed by Clarke, had already been in touch with the German ambassador to the United States, and had asked for German military support for an Irish rebellion. A month later, just after the outbreak of war, Casement sailed to Germany with Devoy’s blessing, hoping to secure support for Clarke and Devoy’s plans and to form an Irish Brigade from prisoners of war. In November 1914 he succeeded in bringing the German government to announce, in a document he himself had drafted, that as far as Ireland was concerned, ‘Germany desires only a national prosperity and a national freedom.’ In forming an Irish Brigade he was much less successful, obtaining only fifty-five recruits from among Irish prisoners by 1916. Before 1916, revolutionary Irish nationalism was the province of a small minority: the IRB and its fellow travellers. The overwhelming majority of Irish people either wanted home rule under Britain or union with Britain. Full Irish independence was not regarded as practical in economic and political terms. Britain may have been the age-old enemy, but the new age of the twentieth century had brought with it a pragmatism which made old idealisms look unnecessary and out of place. Unionist and home-rule Irishmen volunteered in great numbers for the British army, happy to bury their differences and to fight for the maintenance of the British Empire and the freedom of small nations on the European mainland. Over 200,000 Irishmen had joined up by the end of the war, and 49,000 never returned. Sean O’Casey described the scene in Dublin as thousands marched to the troopships: ‘The stoutest men from hill, valley and town came pressing into the British army. Long columns of Irishmen went swinging past Liberty Hall down to the quays, to the ships waiting to take them to a poppy-mobbed grave in Flanders.’ As they marched they sang ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, giving the war its song. By voluntarily joining up (conscription was not introduced in Ireland), Irishmen were voting with their feet (and their lives) in favour of the constitutional cooperation with Britain epitomised by John Redmond, and against the complete separation of the two countries desired by the IRB (see Figure 16). Popular rejection of their objectives did not dismay the IRB. Clarke’s military committee pressed ahead with its plans, organising

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Figure 16 First World War recruiting poster

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a nationwide rising. James Connolly had been taken in as a member because of his persistent threats to launch a rebellion with his minuscule Citizen Army. He taunted that the Volunteers might march well, but would they ever fight? And Clarke and his colleagues worried that unless Connolly was made privy to their plans, he would jeopardise them by forcing the government to tighten security. Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887–1916), a poet, joined the committee after he travelled secretly to Germany in 1915 on IRB instructions to help Casement secure military support for their planned rising. He was co-treasurer and a member of the Executive of the Irish Volunteers (the controlling body). In April 1916, the last person to join was Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), another poet, who had been Pearse’s first member of staff at St Enda’s. He was also Director of Training on the headquarters staff of the Irish Volunteers, and he had organised the Volunteers’ collection of the rifles and ammunition from Erskine Childers at Howth in 1914. These seven men were responsible for the Easter 1916 rising. Working through the normal channels of command, most of which they controlled, the members of the IRB military committee prepared the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army for rebellion. Drills, route marches and mock attacks on strongpoints were practised in Dublin and in the countryside. Through John Devoy, who was in close touch with the German ambassador in Washington, the committee maintained contact with Sir Roger Casement in Germany. Together, they arranged early in April with the German government for a ship, the Aud, disguised as a neutral Norwegian trawler, to land 20,000 rifles in Tralee Bay between Friday 21 and

Figure 16 First World War recruiting poster (cont.) Around 56,000 Irishmen were in the British military at the start of the war. About 25,000 Ulster Volunteers, 24,000 Redmondite Volunteers, and 80,000 men without Volunteer experience enlisted after August 1914. Redmond believed that home rule would be implemented after the war and urged his countrymen to enlist. Redmondites joined the 10th and 16th (Irish) Divisions, which had British officers. Redmond’s brother, Major Willie Redmond, was killed during the battle of Messines in June 1917. During 1918, the 10th and 16th Divisions were broken up, with units being spread among other divisions, a move suggesting distrust on the part of the high command.

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Monday 24 April. Easter Sunday, 23 April, was the actual day set for the rebellion. They also seem to have expected much more help than the Germans were in fact prepared to give. Casement, aware of the committee’s misapprehensions, sailed to Ireland in a German U-boat, intending when he arrived to warn Clarke and to do his best to stop the rising which he was convinced would otherwise fail dismally. The Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, and the Undersecretary for Ireland, Sir Matthew Nathan, had been alerted by RIC and DMP reports to the fact that rebellion was being considered by some Irish Volunteers who might be in touch with Germany, and a ‘German landing at an early date’ was rumoured. Birrell, noting Irish recruiting figures, the popularity of Redmond and the handful of Irish as opposed to National Volunteers, refused to take the reports seriously, saying ‘I laugh at the whole thing.’ Nathan agreed, insisting that the Volunteer leaders did not intend insurrection. Wimborne alone pressed for the arrest of Volunteer and Citizen Army leaders and the suppression of both organisations. However, Birrell and Nathan argued that this would probably spark the revolt Wimborne feared, and the government decided not to take repressive action. A month before the rising, Birrell had written to Lord Midleton, the leader of the southern Irish Unionists who, like Wimborne, was worried by Volunteers’ parades and posturings, arguing that ‘to proclaim the Irish Volunteers as an illegal body would be in my opinion a reckless and foolish act and would promote disloyalty to a prodigious extent’. The actual plans of Clarke and the military committee for a rising remained secret, ensuring that for the first time in modern history an Irish uprising would have the advantage of a large measure of surprise. The surprise was by no means total, and largely reflected the misjudgments of Birrell and Nathan. In the week preceding Easter Sunday 1916, all the rising plans went wrong. Within two weeks of the start of the world war, the Russian navy, unknown to the Germans, had captured the German naval code and offered it to the British Admiralty. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, immediately sent a destroyer to Murmansk to collect the code, and for the rest of the war British intelligence was able to read German naval messages. As a result, Birrell and Nathan had foreknowledge of the arrival

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of the Aud and of the intended rising. They put the RIC and DMP on alert and prepared to arrest Volunteer leaders on Easter Saturday. The conspirators also encountered serious opposition to their schemes from Eoin MacNeill who, as President of the Volunteers, could command the obedience of most of its members. He all along maintained that the Volunteers’ purpose was to defend the 1914 home rule settlement, and that defiance of the government could only be sanctioned in defence of Volunteer arms. Accordingly, the military committee planned to circumvent MacNeill’s authority by pretending that mobilisation of the Volunteers for the rising was simply another routine drill. In this way they calculated that the majority of Volunteers, whether approving or not, would find themselves taking part in a rebellion and be faced with a fait accompli. At the same time, in order to ensure that their plans for rebellion were implemented (and not simply the ostensible manoeuvres), the military committee saw to it that most Volunteer officers were sworn into the IRB: it was thus presumed that the military committee’s orders would be loyally followed despite anything MacNeill might command. In the days before Easter Sunday, the committee attempted to persuade MacNeill to rebellion. On the Tuesday before Easter he was shown a document proclaiming the confiscation of Volunteer arms and the arrest of Volunteer leaders. This ‘Castle Document’, which purported to have been drawn up by the authorities in Dublin Castle, the seat of government in Ireland, was probably forged by Joseph Plunkett and Sean MacDermott (though possibly on the basis of a genuine draft document). The important points were that it accurately reflected Castle plans and that MacNeill believed it and so adopted a more belligerent stand himself. The following day – Wednesday 19 April – he ordered the Volunteers to prepare to defend their arms. On Thursday, Bulmer Hobson discovered that the planned rising was only forty-eight hours away and told MacNeill, who immediately realised that he had been duped all along and wrote out orders cancelling the Easter Sunday nationwide manoeuvres. However, instead of issuing these orders at once, MacNeill sought out members of the IRB military committee and argued with them to stop the rising. He wavered himself and reluctantly agreed not to stand in their way after they had revealed to him the full extent of their

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preparations, including their contacts with Germany. Then, when he heard the news on Easter Saturday that the Aud had been intercepted by the Royal Navy, and that Sir Roger Casement had been arrested near Tralee, co. Kerry, within hours of landing from his submarine, MacNeill decided that the rising was doomed to failure and finally issued his orders cancelling the manoeuvres which he knew to be a cover for insurrection. The Irish Volunteers had been established as a counterweight to the Ulster Volunteers, not the British army, and it was very likely that most Volunteers would have been dismayed to find themselves at war with Britain. MacNeill sent couriers all over the country to deliver his order and to tell local Volunteer commanders to do nothing on Sunday, and he published a cancellation notice in the Sunday Independent for all to see. In Dublin Castle, the authorities monitored developments and, seeing MacNeill’s notice, decided that they could relax and that there would be no trouble. Wimborne alone still pressed for the arrest of between sixty and one hundred leading Volunteer and Citizen Army men, receiving the necessary authorisation from London on Easter Monday when it was too late. Despite the almost complete collapse of their plans, the military committee decided to press ahead. Patrick Pearse, using his position as director of organisation of the Volunteers, presented MacNeill’s cancellation order only as a delay, and himself ordered the Volunteers to mobilise on Easter Monday instead. James Connolly did the same with the Citizen Army. Monday was a sunny bank holiday, and thousands of Dubliners had left the city for the day, many going to the Fairyhouse races. Passers-by paid little attention to Volunteers and Citizen Army men gathering in front of Liberty Hall. Altogether, perhaps only seven hundred men and boys turned out because of confusion over MacNeill’s Sunday cancellation (though afterwards, allegations of cowardice were made against many who knew what was planned but did not turn out). At midday Connolly and Pearse marched with one group into Sackville Street (renamed O’Connell Street in 1924), wheeled left halfway up and rushed into the General Post Office (GPO). They arrested a British officer who had been buying stamps, and turned everyone else out of the building which they made their headquarters for the next five days. There James Connolly addressed his men and told them that they were no longer members of the Irish Citizen Army or of the Irish Volunteers,

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but of ‘the Army of the Irish Republic’. The IRA was back in the field for the first time since the Fenian ‘invasion’ of Canada in 1867. Other groups occupied strategically placed buildings and positions in the city. Boland’s Bakery Mills, which commanded the main road into Dublin from Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), was occupied by members of the 3rd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, Irish Volunteers under their commandant Eamon de Valera (1882–1975). De Valera, born in New York of an Irish mother and Spanish (possibly Cuban or Mexican) father, was to become the dominant personality in Irish politics after 1922, and the political leader of Irish nationalism after 1918. Under his command, 3rd Battalion outposts on Northumberland Road and Lower Mount Street (Clanwilliam House) put up some of the most determined resistance during the rising, killing or wounding 234 British soldiers, over half the total British casualties of the whole rebellion. Another (Citizen Army) group tried to capture Dublin Castle, but after killing the policeman on duty, they were repulsed by the guard (see Figure 17). Dublin’s Four Courts, the College of Surgeons on St Stephen’s Green, the South Dublin Union, the Mendicity Institution and Jacob’s biscuit factory – all buildings covering access roads to the city centre – were occupied and held in the name of the Irish Republic proclaimed in posters put up by the rebels all over the capital. Patrick Pearse read the proclamation on two occasions to curious crowds in Sackville Street during Easter Monday afternoon: Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

Seven signatures – those of the seven members of the IRB’s military committee – with Thomas J. Clarke heading the list, followed the text of the proclamation (see Figure 18). It was their rebellion, and it was to be the most successful, though one of the most short-lived, in Irish history.

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Figure 17 Countess Markievicz, ‘Points of Attack’ Born Constance Georgina Gore-Booth, daughter of the explorer and Irish landlord Sir Henry Gore-Booth, in 1900 aged thirty-two she married the widower Count Casimir Markievicz whom she had met while studying art in Paris. They had a daughter, Maeve, and settled in Dublin in 1903. Five years later the Countess was a member of Sinn Féin and an active suffragette, and Maeve was raised by Sir Henry and his wife, Lady Georgina. In 1911 Markievicz was arrested for protesting against the visit of King George V to Ireland. In 1913 she joined the Irish Citizen Army, becoming a lieutenant in it. That year her husband returned to his estates in the Ukraine. In 1914 she was involved in the Howth gunrunning, and in 1916 she was second-in-command of a group of ICA men building barricades in St Stephen’s Green.

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Figure 18 1916 Rising Because of a shortage of lettering, the document was printed in two halves. On Easter Monday, 24th April 1916, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, controlled by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, occupied various points in Dublin

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Little fighting took place in Dublin in the two days that followed the seizure of the GPO. Looters ransacked the shops in and around Sackville Street. An unsuspecting party of Lancers was fired on as they rode past the GPO on Easter Monday afternoon. On Tuesday night, troops from Britain and the Curragh military camp began to arrive, and on Wednesday afternoon they started to close in on rebel positions. Many of the soldiers who had come direct from Britain thought at first that they were in Belgium, only realising their mistake when ordinary Dubliners started to cheer, encourage and welcome them. Food and drink was pressed upon them by local people, appalled by the rising. By Thursday, British units had penetrated the side streets around the GPO and had started to shell the building. On Friday evening, the centre of Dublin was a mass of flames. On Saturday afternoon, 29 April, at 3.45 p.m. Pearse, now entitled President of the provisional government of the Irish Republic and Commander-inChief of the IRA, surrendered. Outside Dublin, hardly any fighting (or rebellion) had taken place. MacNeill’s countermanding order and couriers had succeeded in arresting revolt. At Ashbourne, co. Meath, Volunteers clashed with the RIC, killing eight and wounding fifteen. In Galway, a group of Volunteers attacked the RIC station at Oranmore, killing one constable and wounding two others. Five Volunteer brothers, the Kents, at their farmhouse in Castlelyons, co. Cork, fought a gun battle with the RIC on 2 May, three days after Pearse’s surrender, killing an RIC head constable. In Dundalk, Enniscorthy and parts of Ulster and Munster, Volunteers mobilised and there were some skirmishes, but no other real fighting took place. The rebellion was confined almost completely to Dublin where £2.5 million damage was caused – the equivalent of about fifty thousand years’ income for the average family. The rebellion’s success lay not in itself, but in the effect of the government’s reaction. Figure 18 1916 Rising (cont.) including the General Post Office where Patrick Pearse read aloud the proclamation. It was an IRB rebellion, and the Citizen Army and Volunteers involved became ‘the forces of the Irish Republic’. Thomas Clarke as President of the IRB held the Presidency of the notional Irish Republic and thus headed the signatories; Pearse was ‘Commander-in-Chief’ and ‘President of the Provisional Government’.

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blood During and immediately after the rising, Irish people were confused and dismayed by what had happened. Twenty-nine Irishmen in British regiments; fourteen Irishmen in the RIC; five Irishmen in the Training Corps (known as ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ because of their age and from the initials ‘GR’ on their buttons and buckles); three Irishmen in the DMP, and six members of the Redmondite Irish National Volunteers had been killed fighting the rebels. Total casualties were over 3,000, including 132 soldiers, RIC and DMP killed and a further 397 wounded, and 60 rebels killed. Tens of thousands of families with husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in the British army naturally reacted violently against those they saw as stabbing in the back soldiers fighting in France and Flanders. Everybody realised that the rebels had been more than foolhardy, and there was almost unanimous initial support of the government’s attitude to them as traitors. The rebel proclamation referring to their ‘gallant allies in Europe’ was cited as evidence of their collusion with Germany, embroiled in total war with the UK. Redmondite National Volunteers patrolled Sackville Street, helping troops and police keep order. Rebel prisoners were jeered and booed as they were marched to prison. General Sir John Maxwell had arrived as Commander-in-Chief in Ireland on Easter Friday 1916, and for him the operation of martial law provided a clear course of action. He had fought in the Boer War and had served in the Sudan and Egypt. To him, the rising in Ireland was an act of supreme treachery for which he was going to teach ‘these infernal fellows a lesson they would not soon forget’. He told Lord Wimborne, ‘I am going to ensure that there will be no treason whispered for a hundred years.’ Probably fewer than a total of 900 men and women had taken part in the rising. During the week, a steady trickle of new recruits had joined in: about one thousand rebels were recorded as surrendering on the Saturday after Easter. Within four days Maxwell had convened courts martial for them while arresting 2,500 more people, including Arthur Griffith and Eoin MacNeill, and charging them with complicity in the rising. One woman and 120 men were tried by the courts martial: 90 were sentenced to death. Patrick Pearse was the first to be condemned. At

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his trial his courage impressed his judges, and the President of the court was reported to be ‘terribly affected by the work he had to do’. Early on Wednesday morning, 3 May, Pearse was shot by firing squad in Kilmainham gaol. Tom Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh were shot to death that same morning. The next day Patrick Pearse’s younger brother, William, and three other men were executed. On Friday John MacBride, husband of the suffragette and Irish nationalist agitator Maud Gonne (with whom Yeats had declared himself hopelessly in love), was also shot in Kilmainham. He had not known about the rising plans and had been as surprised as the rest of Dublin on Easter Monday, but like his friend Michael O’Rahilly (‘The’ O’Rahilly) who was killed charging from the GPO during the fighting, MacBride had felt impelled to join the rebels. He had been second-in-command of a small Irish Brigade that had fought for the Boers during the Boer War, and many believed that his execution was British revenge for this, rather than for anything he had done during Easter week. By the end of the first week in May, opinion was changing. Redmond himself was worried by Maxwell’s handling of the situation. He realised that public opinion was slowly swaying towards the rebels as a result of the executions. The socialite Countess of Fingall, a liberal unionist promoter of Irish culture, wrote that she was ‘watching a stream of blood coming from beneath a closed door’. George Bernard Shaw warned the government that they were ‘canonising their prisoners’. The prime minister, Asquith, heeded these warnings and sent two telegrams to Maxwell saying that he hoped there would be no more executions except in special cases. Maxwell obviously considered that there were several more special cases: four more executions took place on 8 May and another the following day. The drawn-out pace of executions was now changing men’s minds just as Redmond had feared. John Dillon, deputy leader of the Irish Party, himself demonstrated the extent to which this had happened when on 11 May in the House of Commons he lost his self-control and shouted, ‘I am proud of their courage and if you were not so dense and stupid, as some of you English people are, you could have had these men fighting for you . . . it is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, however misguided.’ The following day the last two of Maxwell’s executions took place: of Sean

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MacDermott and James Connolly. Connolly, whose ankle had been shattered by a bullet in the GPO, was shot strapped to a chair. MacDermott who, with Clarke, had masterminded the rising, in his letter to his family expressed the romantic feeling and the theory of blood sacrifice that had inspired them all. You ought to envy me. The cause for which I die has been rebaptised during the past week by the blood of as good men as ever trod God’s earth . . . It is not alone for myself I feel happy, but for the fact that Ireland has produced such men.

The rebel leaders had believed that rebellion was necessary if only to keep alive the flame of Irish freedom, and they calculated – correctly as it turned out – that their deaths in that romantic cause would inspire another generation of rebels. Theirs was a conservative, elite rebellion, not a populist one. With the exception of James Connolly, they did not call for social change. Their effort was also to reimagine Irish stereotypes to a noble level, away from the drunken ape-like protohumans portrayed in nineteenth-century English and some American journals. Thomas MacDonagh represented their core: ‘he looked a man of the Gironde,’ said his friend Padraic Colum, ‘a party, by the way, that he often spoke of’.1 The Girondins – in contrast to the Jacobins of eighteenth-century revolutionary France – maintained a place for women, were secularist, did not curry popular support but expected to achieve popular success, and – while democrats – were willing to use force to achieve their ideals. Interestingly, all those executed, despite being in most cases irreligious, chose to die as Catholics. Perhaps they calculated that being apparently at one with the Church, and not against it, would give their dream of independence a greater opportunity to be adopted by Irish people generally. Sir Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook), told the story of telephoning Tim Healy, who was in Dublin during Easter Week. Aitken wanted news of the rising: ‘Is there a rebellion?’ ‘There is!’ said Tim. 1

Padraic Colum, Introduction, Colum and E. J. O’Brien (eds.), Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (London, 1916), p. xxiv.

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‘When did it break out?’ ‘When Strongbow invaded Ireland!’ ‘When will it end?’ ‘When Cromwell gets out of Hell!’2

This was an entirely mythic perspective. During the nineteenth century as an Irish middle and professional class took root, a Catholic nationalism vied with the IRB’s determinedly non-sectarian approach. The 1916 rebels addressed conventional nationalist issues and looked for a real, not a mythic history, although their vision was romantic – and simple. Years later, de Valera voiced something of this: The Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their lives to things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.3

The fifteen executions which took place between 3 and 12 May were not considered harsh by Maxwell and many in authority. On 21 February the battle for Verdun had begun with tremendous loss of life. In April and May preparations were under way for the crucial battle of the Somme which began on 1 July and which was to cost 600,000 Allied dead and wounded – 400,000 of them British. Pearse, in a poem he had written only hours before his death, had noted Irish people’s scorn for the rising. The poet and storyteller James Stephens, an eyewitness of events in Dublin, described how women in particular were ‘viciously hostile’ to the rebel prisoners as they were paraded through the streets of Dublin. Seven Roman Catholic bishops denounced the rising, and the Irish Catholic described Pearse as ‘a crazy and insolent schoolmaster’, ridiculing the rebels as ‘rogues and fools’. Local councils passed resolutions calling for ‘the severest punishment’ and deploring ‘the outbreak which brings the blush of shame to every honest Irishman’. Eamon de Valera was sentenced to death, but this decision was set aside because of the shift in opinion and pressure from Asquith to stop 2 3

Lord Beaverbrook, The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George (London, 1963), p. 96. Address by the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, RTÉ, 17 March 1943.

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executions. De Valera, who had commanded the Boland’s Bakery Mills outpost during the rising, after Connolly’s execution was the senior surviving rebel leader. By 10 June Tim Healy was writing to his brother: I never knew such a transformation of opinion as that caused by the executions. Besides, the looting by the soldiers and ruffianism against innocent people – the ill-treatment of the prisoners, the insolence of the military in the streets, the foul language used to women, and the incompetence shown by officers, have aroused a contempt and dislike for which there is no parallel in our day. The small boys are singing, ‘Who fears to speak of Easter week!’. . . They have lost the hearts of the people beyond all hope of retrieving their mistakes. Clerics have discovered that ‘the probable hope of success’ needed to justify rebellion does not necessarily mean military success, and that Pearse achieved his object and ‘builded better than he knew’. His executioners would now give a good deal to have him and his brother back in jail alive.4

The fourteen men executed in Dublin were buried in quicklime in Arbour Hill barracks. Thomas Kent, condemned for his part in the affray at his home in Castlelyons, co. Cork, was executed and buried in Cork gaol. Sir Roger Casement, captured before the rising started, was sent to the Tower of London charged with high treason. From a purely legal standpoint he had no defence to the charge. To discredit him perhaps with an eye to preventing him being found guilty but insane, however, his diaries revealing his homosexuality were photographed and circulated to journalists with the tacit approval of ministers. It should be stressed, however, that the judge in the case did not see them. John Redmond was so shocked by them that he refused to campaign on Casement’s behalf, and so it was with many others too. Early on the morning of 3 August 1916, Casement was hanged in Pentonville gaol, becoming the sixteenth Irish martyr of that year. His speech from the dock on the fourth day of his trial is a classic statement of Irish nationalism: If true religion rests on love, it is equally true that loyalty rests on love. The law I am charged under has no parentage in love, and claims the allegiance of today on the ignorance and blindness of the past . . . Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not restraint. The government of Ireland by 4

T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (London, 1928), Vol. II, p. 328.

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England rests on restraint, and not on law; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty . . . For if English authority be omnipotent – a power, as Mr Gladstone phrased it, that reaches to the very ends of the earth – Irish hope exceeds the dimensions of that power, excels its authority, and renews with each generation the claims of the last. The cause that begets this indomitable persistency, the faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of lost liberty – this surely is the noblest cause ever man strove for, ever lived for, ever died for.

No one else was executed for involvement in the rising, but 1,867 men and women out of the 3,500 originally arrested by Maxwell were interned and gaoled in Britain – the rest were released after questioning in May and June. Most of those interned were held at Frongoch camp in Wales where a young and energetic Corkman, Michael Collins (1890–1922), was quickly recognised as a natural leader. Collins had left Ireland in 1906 to work in London as a clerk. There he became an active member of the GAA, the Gaelic League and the IRB, returning to Dublin towards the end of 1915 to take part in the rebellion he and other IRB men knew was coming. He fought as aide-de-camp to Joseph Plunkett in the GPO during the rising, and was arrested with the rebel leaders. In Frongoch, he gathered around him a group of men from west Cork, often referred to as ‘the Mafia’ by other prisoners, and with their help he organised the IRB in the camp and listed those who would be willing to continue the fight for the Irish Republic proclaimed during the rising (Figure 19). On 23 December 1916, Collins and 600 others were released from internment. Hundreds more had been given their freedom in previous months. The Chief Secretary for Ireland admitted that the political consequences of keeping so many men interned without trial for so long were more dangerous than letting them go. In January 1916, conscription had been introduced in Britain, leaving Ireland excluded because informed opinion, including Carson’s, considered that more troops would be needed to enforce it there than would be raised by it. By December, over 90,000 southern Irishmen had already volunteered for the British army since the start of the war, and on the battlefields of Belgium and France they might start to wonder for precisely which small country’s freedom they were fighting. There was also the ever-pressing need for more troops as casualties mounted in

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Figure 19 Poem by Michael Collins In Frongoch after the Rising, Collins termed himself ‘Capt IRA’, one of the earliest references to the Irish Republican Army that he and his colleagues had formed when they came together during the Rising under the command of Pearse.

the trenches and shell holes of the Western Front (a serious attempt was even made at one stage to conscript those prisoners in Frongoch who – like Collins – lived in Britain), and Irish government officials advised that Irish opinion, pacified by the release of prisoners, would

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be more likely to veer back towards support of the war effort and thus produce more volunteers. Perhaps most important, however, was the need the government felt to take American opinion into account. As the First World War ground on, the prospect of prying the United States from its policy of neutrality to hasten an Allied victory over Germany and Austria– Hungary was too precious for Britain to jeopardise. Within a week of James Connolly’s execution, the British ambassador in Washington had reported an anti-British shift in American opinion. Made anxious by the change in Irish opinion and by its effect in America, Asquith and his Cabinet decided to try and implement the 1914 Government of Ireland Act before the end of the war. An Amending Bill enabling the six most unionist and Protestant counties of northern Ireland to vote themselves temporarily out of the operation of the Act had been passed by both houses of Parliament in 1914 but had not received the royal assent. This provision became the nub of negotiations during the summer of 1916 with Redmond’s Irish Party and Carson’s Unionists conducted by Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions in the War Cabinet. Lloyd George had a difficult task. In May 1915, Asquith’s Liberal government had given way to a coalition government to pursue the war. Liberals, Conservatives, Irish Unionists and Labour, with Asquith remaining as prime minister, formed the new government in which Redmond and the Irish Party were not included (Redmond refused Asquith’s invitation to join). Sir Edward Carson was appointed Attorney General, becoming for a time a senior member of the Cabinet (he resigned in October 1916 in protest at the failure to aid Serbia and at the way that Asquith was running the war). Thus Lloyd George was faced with the task of reconciling the aspirations of the vast majority of Irishmen for home rule with the domestic political requirements of Asquith’s coalition partners. With inspiration and guile, he held separate discussions with Unionists and Irish Party leaders, persuading the former – despite their long-standing opposition to the principle of home rule – to accept it for all but their six north-eastern counties, and persuading the latter that this arrangement was only temporary. When Redmond found out that Carson had been privately assured ‘We must make it clear that at the end of the provisional period Ulster

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does not, whether she wills it or not, merge in the rest of Ireland,’ he demanded that Lloyd George publicly deny this and make clear instead that a united, home-ruled Ireland was the prospect. On 22 July 1916, Redmond was officially informed that the proposed settlement of a divided Ireland was to be permanent in the terms of the assurance Lloyd George had given to Carson, and the negotiations ended with Redmond refusing to accept the proposals. Nevertheless, as Tim Healy pertinently said, ‘Redmond has left the Irish cause in a worse position than it ever was placed in by his concession of the six counties, as it can’t be obliterated.’ It was also significant that the Unionists had at last accepted the principle of home rule. But most of all, the breakdown in negotiations coupled with the apparent acceptance of partition by the Irish Party indicated to many Irishmen that if they wanted self-determination they would have to find another party and, quite possibly, another (revolutionary) method too. In December 1916, Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as prime minister, having secured the support of the coalition partners for an aggressive war policy. Carson joined Lloyd George’s government as First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he held until July 1917 when he was moved without departmental responsibility to the War Cabinet itself before resigning six months later in protest at the government’s overruling of his proposals for Ireland and its war strategy. One of the most important tasks facing Lloyd George remained the problem of Ireland with its continuing effect on American (and Dominion) opinion. Within three weeks of becoming prime minister, he had ordered the release of the remaining Frongoch prisoners as a gesture of goodwill towards Irish nationalists. In May 1917 he took up Redmond’s idea of an Irish Convention involving unionists and nationalists in another attempt to reach a settlement, and the following month as the Convention met at Trinity College, Dublin, he ordered the release of the remaining 1916 rebels who were met by thronging, cheering crowds in Dublin. De Valera was immediately adopted as the Sinn Féin candidate for a by-election in East Clare which he won with more than twice the number of votes cast for his Irish Party opponent. A revitalised Sinn Féin was now coming forward to give voice to the ideals of the rising. Of the nine parliamentary by-elections Sinn Féin contested between February 1917 and June 1918, it won six. The party boycotted the

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Convention which ended in April 1918 without any agreement being reached. Redmond, having been fooled once, was unwilling to accept partition and in any event was forced to take an intransigent stance in order to combat Sinn Féin’s growing popularity. Sir Edward Carson and the Unionists, once again reassured privately by Lloyd George that nothing would be agreed without their consent, would not be budged from their refusal to accept a united, home-ruled Ireland. Redmond died in March 1918 knowing that the Irish Party, which for over forty years had dominated Irish politics, was broken. Sinn Féin had been catapulted to prominence by the 1916 rising which had been popularly (and incorrectly) presented as ‘the Sinn Féin rebellion’. In October 1917 a Sinn Féin ard f heis – party conference – was held in Dublin and party policy was agreed. Griffith’s monarchist home rule bias was dropped in favour of ‘securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic. Having achieved that status the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of government.’ Successful Sinn Féin parliamentary candidates would not take their seats at Westminster and would instead form an Irish national ‘Constituent Assembly . . . to speak and act in the name of the Irish people’. Eamon de Valera was elected President of the party in place of Griffith. By the time of the first post-war general election in December 1918, Sinn Féin’s popularity was such that of the 105 Irish MPs returned, 73 were Sinn Féiners. John Dillon, Redmond’s successor as leader of the Irish Party, was defeated in East Mayo, which he had represented since 1885. Only 6 Irish Party MPs were elected, and 26 Unionists. Among the successful Sinn Féin candidates were Michael Collins (South County Cork), Eamon de Valera (East County Clare), Arthur Griffith (West County Cavan) and the Countess Markievicz (St Patrick’s, Dublin). She had been sentenced to death in 1916, reprieved, imprisoned and then released in June 1917. In December 1918 she became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. Refusing to take her seat, she enabled Lady Astor to become the first woman actually to sit in the House twelve months later. Sinn Féin’s electoral success was dramatic. It forced the issue of Irish independence since the party’s demand for an Irish Republic implied the break-up of the UK, which was something that the

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government, maintained after the war as a Liberal–Conservative coalition under Lloyd George’s premiership, was not prepared to contemplate. Pressing its point, Sinn Féin proceeded non-violently, setting up its constituent assembly, named Daíl Éireann (Parliament of Ireland) in Dublin’s Mansion House on 21 January 1919. Forty-two of the Sinn Féin members, including de Valera, were in gaol, exiled or avoiding arrest, on suspicion of involvement in what the government called a ‘German plot’ in 1918 to launch another Irish rising before the end of the war, or in some cases because they had opposed with too much fervour the government’s proposals during the war’s final year to extend conscription to Ireland. The German plot was unfounded, but had been building up, and at the time was taken seriously. Arthur Conan Doyle picked out the German connection to Irish rebels that had existed in his last Sherlock Holmes story, ‘His Last Bow’, written in 1917, wherein Holmes convinces a German agent of his Irish credentials in order to infiltrate German intelligence: It cost me two years, Watson, but they have not been devoid of excitement. When I say that I started my pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbereen, and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realise that the matter was complex.

The twenty-seven members who attended the Dáil’s first session quickly agreed a Declaration of Independence reaffirming the 1916 Republic and established a government of their own for it. A hero of the 1916 rising, Cathal Brugha (Charles Burgess, like Patrick Pearse the son of an Englishman), was elected first President of the Dáil on the understanding that he would step down in favour of de Valera when he was free. Michael Collins became Dáil Minister for Home Affairs. A ‘Democratic Programme’ was also approved which, echoing the arguments of Lalor and the Young Ireland movement, declared ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland . . . all rights to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare’. Two months later, Collins became Minister for Finance and Brugha Minister for Defence in a reshuffle carried out by de Valera, who had escaped from prison, upon his appointment as Dáil President.

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Figure 20 Michael Collins Taken from a film shot in 1921 and so less well-defined than a still photograph, this portrait captures the intensity and toughness of the man.

collins Michael Collins was the mainspring of post-1916 Irish nationalist activity (Figure 20). Immediately upon his release in December 1916, he had thrown himself into the work of organising for another rebellion. His energy, organising ability and determination gained his rapid advancement in the IRB, to which he was committed. He soon came to dominate the IRB, becoming its secretary early in 1917. Within Sinn Féin, he was recognised as the principal organiser, and within the Irish Volunteers, more properly known as the Irish Republican Army after 1916 (although the term did not become common until 1920), he was the leading tactician and strategist. He was determined to avoid a repeat of 1916 which he described as ‘bungled terribly costing many a good life. It seemed at first to be well-organised, but afterwards became subjected to panic decisions and a great lack of very essential organisation and co-operation.’ Using the IRB and money and connections supplied to him by Mrs Tom Clarke, he organised IRB circles throughout the country to

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provide the nucleus of Sinn Féin and IRA groups. In November 1917, a month after the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, he arranged a secret IRA convention at which de Valera was elected President of the army. In March 1918 Collins masterminded the formation of an IRA general headquarters (GHQ) staff, securing the appointment of a close and trusted colleague, Richard Mulcahy (1886–1971), as Chief of Staff while himself preferring the key position of Adjutant General from which he could concentrate on training and preparing the secret army for rebellion. On the IRA’s governing executive (elected at the 1917 Convention), he held the post of Director of Organisation. He devised the stunning escape of de Valera and two others from Lincoln gaol on 3 February 1919 by using IRB contacts to smuggle them a key to the prison’s locks. Throughout the national movement his ability and efficiency became legendary. Collins’ organising genius was vital to all sections of the national movement which, after 1918, became an uneasy alliance between constitutional and revolutionary nationalists. Divisions constantly flared up, and the device of having de Valera as President of all the important constitutional and revolutionary organisations (except the IRB whose hidden hand, often in the form of Collins himself, was in every organisation) was made ineffective by his long absences in prison or, after 1919, in the USA. Despite its wide influence, the IRB was regarded with suspicion by many and with animosity by some leading nationalists. De Valera was vehemently opposed to the continuation of the IRB, leaving the society after the rising. He argued that the time for secret societies was over and that given the enormous renewed popularity of the cause of Irish independence, the machinations of the IRB were positively dangerous. Brugha was opposed to the IRB for a different reason. He was convinced that the 1916 rising had failed because IRB men had not turned out as planned, and ever afterwards he opposed the society. After 1918, Brugha also became increasingly hostile to Collins, accusing him of using the IRB to extend his influence. These tensions were superimposed upon the traditional hostility between constitutionalists and revolutionaries, and the result was fragility at the heart of the independence movement. Sinn Féin members of the Dáil had won the 1918 election with the promise that they would take the case for Ireland’s independence to the Peace Conference which

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had followed Germany’s surrender ending the First World War. But as the conference proved reluctant to take up the Irish cause and to interfere in what Britain held was a domestic political matter, so revolutionaries like Collins began to make the pace of Irish revolt. The constitutionally minded Dáil was always hesitant about acknowledging the IRA or assuming responsibility for IRA activity. To begin with, the IRA’s GHQ staff, who were nearly all members of the Dáil as well, were also reluctant (with the exception of Collins) to authorise attacks on British soldiers and the RIC. As a result, IRA activity was at first carried out by local units on their own initiative (often prompted by IRB men) in defiance of their superiors in Dublin. In 1918 a Tipperary IRA leader, Sean Treacy, disturbed by the constitutional approach of Sinn Féin, had declared ‘If this is the state of affairs, we’ll have to kill someone and make the bloody enemy organise us!’ On 21 January 1919, the day the Dáil first met, Sean Treacy and his IRA group, acting on their own, shot dead two RIC men at Soloheadbeg, co. Tipperary, inaugurating the ‘Troubles’. By 1920, the Dáil tacitly accepted the IRA’s violent activity. Still, not until March 1921 did the Dáil formally recognise the army that had been fighting on its behalf, and de Valera was able to declare ‘From the Irish Volunteers we fashioned the Irish Republican Army to be the military arm of the Government. The army is, therefore, a regular State force, under the civil control of the elected representatives.’ In fact, this was not actually the case since the IRA never completely accepted the Dáil’s authority. The political value of keeping the Dáil distanced from the IRA was perceived by the Dáil’s and the IRA’s leaders as being outweighed by the danger of having two sources of authority competing for the loyalty of nationalists. Therefore, in August 1919, members of the Dáil and of the IRA both took an oath of allegiance to ‘defend the Irish Republic and the government of the Irish Republic which is Dáil Éireann against all enemies, foreign and domestic’. In order to accommodate this new oath, the IRA, which had a constitution of its own requiring its members on oath to recognise the authority only of its own governing body, the Executive, now drafted a new constitution. The lingering suspicion of constitutionalists in the Dáil was reflected in its clauses, with the IRA Executive insisting upon the right to approve the appointment of the Dáil Minister for Defence.

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Together with the oath of loyalty to the Irish Republic, this was to have a profound effect upon Irish history within two years. Eamon de Valera was the man under whose leadership the disparate elements of Irish nationalism grouped. His was the public face; Collins’ the clandestine face. While Collins secretly planned and prepared for violent confrontation with the police and military forces of the United Kingdom, de Valera constantly emphasised Sinn Féin constitutionalism and the popular endorsement by Irish voters of the party’s 1918 election platform. De Valera went to America in June 1919, four months after his escape from gaol, convinced that the key to Irish independence lay in bringing American opinion to bear on Britain. Arthur Griffith was left as acting President of Sinn Féin and the Dáil, and Cathal Brugha (who, as Minister for Defence, was responsible anyhow) as acting President of the IRA. For the next eighteen months, de Valera campaigned in America, raising $5 million and mobilising IrishAmerican politicians in an unsuccessful attempt to secure pro-Irish independence platforms in both the Republican and Democratic Parties’ presidential election conventions in 1920. While de Valera was away, undeclared war began in earnest between the IRA and British forces in Ireland. By September 1919, Collins had succeeded in penetrating the Dublin Castle headquarters of the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the plain-clothes detectives who were the British government’s principal intelligence group in Ireland. Several G Division personnel sympathetic to the nationalist cause voluntarily acted as Collins’ agents, and on one occasion Collins was even able to read the file on himself, so extensive were his contacts. In September, he also formed his ‘Squad’ of hand-picked gunmen entrusted with the killing of police agents, informers and detectives. The previous month, IRA groups all over Ireland had attacked RIC barracks, as a result of which the Dublin Castle authorities banned most nationalist organisations including the Dáil, Sinn Féin and the IRA. The Dáil continued to meet in secret, but its suppression showed that Lloyd George’s British Liberal–Conservative coalition government was prepared to meet force with force if necessary. By the end of the year, it was clear that the struggle for Irish independence was going to be violent and bloody.

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With the connivance of Collins, local IRA leaders carried out more and more attacks on British forces despite both frequent orders to the contrary from IRA GHQ and the refusal by politicians in the Dáil to recognise the IRA or support IRA activities. In December 1919 the IRA’s chief of staff, Richard Mulcahy, made it clear to a party composed of members of Collins’ Squad and Dublin IRA men who ambushed Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, that the Dáil and IRA leadership might have to repudiate the ambush as part of the effort to present a constitutional and responsible front. During 1920, as growing numbers of IRA men went ‘on the run’ in the countryside, they were formed into flying columns (the most famous being that led by Tom Barry in co. Cork) carrying out guerrilla attacks on British military formations and on the RIC. Outside Dublin, Cork carried most of the burden of the war. Two lord mayors of Cork, who were also the local IRA leaders, died during the fight. Thomas MacCurtain was shot dead in his own bed on the night of 19 March 1920: the coroner’s jury investigating his murder found that it ‘was organised and carried out by the Royal Constabulary’. His successor in the IRA and as lord mayor, Terence MacSwiney, was arrested at an IRA meeting in the City Hall five months later and immediately went on hunger strike in protest. He starved for seventy-four days, dying in Brixton gaol on 25 October. In northern Ireland, by contrast, there was less IRA activity than in Dublin and Cork, as local leaders and IRA GHQ quietly accepted that majority opinion was against them. The main thrust of the IRA campaign was against RIC men and their barracks. Collins recognised that the RIC, drawn from the Irish people themselves, was the IRA’s single most dangerous opponent, and so he set about intimidating RIC men with violence and by implementing a policy of ostracising RIC families. By the end of June 1920, fifty-five RIC and DMP men had been killed and seventy-four had been wounded, and by the end of July 1921, two thousand of the ten thousand regular RIC had resigned from the force. In order to protect the widely flung RIC, in the spring of 1920 hundreds of RIC barracks were evacuated. In April that year, 315 of the evacuated buildings were burned down in one night in the IRA’s largest operation of the war. Four weeks later, the Irish Times stated ‘The King’s government has virtually ceased to exist south of the Boyne and west of the Shannon.’

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To meet the IRA campaign, Lloyd George and the Cabinet determined to strengthen the RIC with ex-servicemen and officers recruited in Britain. In March 1920 the first reinforcements arrived in Ireland dressed in a mixture of RIC green–black and army khaki ‘pending the arrival of RIC uniform’. On 28 April a group of them rampaged through Limerick breaking shop windows and assaulting civilians, so earning the title ‘Black and Tans’ after a local pack of hounds. In July 1920 the Auxiliary Division of the RIC was formed. They wore the RIC uniform with distinctive glengarry caps and golden harp badges. Together, these two adjuncts of the RIC earned the fear and hatred of nearly everyone in Ireland. Their purpose was never clearly spelled out, but their actions proved them to be as terroristic in concept as they perceived the IRA to be. On 20 September, Black and Tans sacked and burned part of the town of Balbriggan, co. Dublin, as a reprisal for the shooting of an RIC head constable, killing two townspeople. Three days later, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the dedicated unionist who as Director of Military Operations in 1914 had plotted with those involved in the Curragh mutiny, recorded in his diary that ‘the police and the Black and Tans and the 100 Intell. officers are all carrying out reprisal murders’. On 28 September, Wilson protested to the prime minister against reprisals on the grounds of military principle: I had 1½ hours this evening with Lloyd George and Bonar Law. I told them what I thought of reprisals by the Black and Tans and how this must lead to chaos and ruin. Lloyd George danced about and was angry, but I never budged. I pointed out that these reprisals were carried out without anyone being responsible; men were murdered, houses burned, villages wrecked . . . I said this was due to want of discipline and this must be stopped. If these men ought to be murdered then the Government ought to murder them.

As the Westminster Gazette pointed out, ‘Unless the Government take very stern and convincing steps to stop reckless reprisals on Irish towns, these reprisals will begin to horrify the world even more than the crimes which provoked them.’ The government decided to make their reprisal policy official by sanctioning retaliation against the IRA by destroying property. The first official reprisal occurred on 29 December 1920 at Midleton, co. Cork, where six houses were destroyed following an ambush nearby in which three RIC members

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were killed. In the period between the unofficial reprisal at Balbriggan and the official one at Midleton, the scale of fighting in Ireland had increased dramatically. On 14 October 1920, Sean Treacy, who had started the shooting at Soloheadbeg, was killed in Talbot Street, Dublin, after a running gunfight with soldiers and detectives. Ten days later Terence MacSwiney died. On 1 November, an eighteen-year-old IRA man and medical student at University College, Dublin, Kevin Barry, was hanged in Mountjoy gaol for his part in an ambush attempt. His death, following so soon after MacSwiney’s, made a profound impression on public opinion everywhere. On 9 November, in a speech at London’s Guildhall, Lloyd George misjudged opinion and his government’s effectiveness and stated ‘We have taken the steps by which we have murder by the throat.’ Within two weeks, on Sunday 21 November, murder at the hands of Collins’ Squad caught twelve British officers by the throat. Vinnie Byrne, a member of the Squad, went to confession: ‘I shot a man, Father.’ ‘What did you do that for?’ ‘In the fight for freedom, Father.’ ‘Do you believe in your heart that what you are doing is right?’ ‘No doubt about that, Father.’ ‘Then God bless you.’

Most but not all of the twelve were involved in undercover intelligence work. Their deaths began what became known as Bloody Sunday. That afternoon at Croke Park, Dublin, where a Gaelic football challenge match was being played between Tipperary and Dublin, Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, incensed by the shootings that morning and thinking that an IRA meeting was taking place at the grounds, fired upon spectators and the teams. Twelve people were killed including a child, a woman and a Tipperary player. In the evening three men being held on suspicion of being members of the IRA were riddled with bullets by Auxiliaries in the guardroom of Dublin Castle. Despite the danger, Collins attended their funeral. A week after Bloody Sunday, Tom Barry’s flying column successfully ambushed eighteen Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, near Macroom in co. Cork, killing seventeen of them. Two weeks later, Auxiliaries and

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Black and Tans went on another rampage, burning parts of the centre of Cork city to the ground, causing damage estimated at £3 million. Just as the IRA Executive had feared in 1919 when they agreed the oath of allegiance to the Dáil as the ‘Government of the Irish Republic’, the level of violence so frightened constitutionally minded Dáil members that peace moves began which demonstrated that there were Sinn Féiners prepared to accept less than an Irish republic – a point Lloyd George was quick to grasp. On 30 November Roger Sweetman, the Dáil member for North Country Wexford, wrote to the press suggesting a conference ‘to put a stop to bloodshed in this country’. Three days later the Sinn Féin Galway County Council passed a resolution: ‘As adherents of Dáil Éireann [we] request that body to appoint three delegates to negotiate a truce.’ Two days after this, Father Michael O’Flanagan, acting President of Sinn Féin (Arthur Griffith had been arrested in the clampdown that followed Bloody Sunday), sent a telegram to Lloyd George: ‘You state you are willing to make peace at once without waiting for Christmas. Ireland also is willing. What steps do you propose?’ Michael Collins, acting President of the Dáil after Griffith’s arrest, saw the danger of an open split between the Dáil and the IRA on the issue of peace, and warned, ‘There is a very grave danger that the country may be stampeded on false promises and foolish, ill-timed actions.’ Still, conversations between Sinn Féiners and emissaries from Lloyd George continued. In a note from Arthur Griffith smuggled out of Mountjoy gaol, Collins found that Griffith had gone so far as to submit a formula for a truce to Lloyd George. Learning of all this in messages from Collins, de Valera not surprisingly decided that it was time he left America and returned to Ireland. On Christmas Eve 1920, he arrived in Dublin. Knowing of his return, the British Cabinet decided that he should not be arrested unless some definite criminal charge could be laid against him: Lloyd George had recognised the value of keeping a line open to those behind the IRA (a policy that later UK governments also followed in Northern Ireland). The day before de Valera’s arrival in Dublin, a new Government of Ireland Act replacing the 1914 Act came into force. The product of a year’s debate and discussion at Westminster, the Act partitioned Ireland along the lines set out by Lloyd George in 1916, and provided for two home rule governments in Ireland, one in Dublin for twenty-six

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counties and one in Belfast for six north-eastern counties where unionists were a large electoral majority. Provisions were made for the eventual unification of Ireland, but only when and if the northern unionists wanted it. Incorporated in the Act was Carson’s proposal for a Council of Ireland which he described as ‘the biggest advance towards unity in Ireland’. It was conceived as a forum for the discussion of matters of mutual interest between North and South and as a possible means of regaining unity. Disappointed by his failure to maintain the union, and by the measure of self-determination forced upon Northern Ireland, Carson in 1921 left the House of Commons, taking a seat as Baron Carson of Duncairn in the House of Lords as a Lord of Appeal. There, although a judge, he continued to make political speeches. Ironically, unionists were now the ones who accepted home rule. Despite the fact that the Act implemented partition, the IRA and the Dáil still maintained their public determination to fight on for their all-Ireland Republic, completely independent of Britain. They refused to accept the Act. However, under the Act a general election was held in the twenty-six counties on 19 May 1921 to return members for the parliament of Southern Ireland. The Dáil decided to adopt these elections as its own and Sinn Féin, unopposed in 124 of the 128 new constituencies, swept the board. The four Dublin University seats of Trinity College were won by Unionists. Six days later another general election was held in the six counties for the Parliament of Northern Ireland; forty Unionists and twelve Nationalists (the old Irish Party now in alliance with Sinn Féin in the North) were returned. Sinn Féiners elected in both elections (130 in all) now formed the second Dáil which maintained itself as the parliament of an all-Ireland Republic. The four southern Unionists from Trinity College formally met as the Parliament of Southern Ireland and immediately adjourned. De Valera, aware of the differences between the Dáil and the IRA and realising that a constitutional rather than a revolutionary solution to the Irish Troubles had been made probable by partition, determined to demonstrate his own authority as nationalist leader. He also needed to test the IRA’s willingness to take orders from the Dáil government. Accordingly, at his direction, the Dáil ordered the IRA to destroy the Dublin Customs House, the beautiful eighteenth-century masterpiece of the architect James Gandon.

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The Customs House was the centre of nine civil service departments, including the Revenue and the Local Government Board. Despite Collins’ opposition to the scheme on the grounds that the attackers would probably all be captured along with their weapons, and that this would be a loss the IRA could ill afford, on the afternoon of 25 May 1921 the 120 (or thereabouts) members of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA who had arms systematically burned the building to the ground. Five of the attackers were killed by troops and police who quickly arrived on the scene. Eighty were captured. These losses crippled the Dublin IRA. Collins at one time reckoned that in all Ireland he could field perhaps a maximum of three thousand men. He was constantly badgered for arms and ammunition by IRA commanders, and by June 1921, owing to lack of guns and bullets, the IRA had resorted to burning unionists’ houses and property. A new British military policy of saturating areas of IRA activity with troops and RIC had successfully placed the IRA on the defensive. When George V opened the new Parliament of Northern Ireland in Belfast on 22 June and appealed ‘to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget’, the moment was opportune. Lloyd George responded, glad of the chance to convince his Conservative coalition partners and the United Kingdom that he was doing all he could to reach a satisfactory settlement and end violence in Ireland. He wrote a letter to de Valera ‘as the chosen leader of the great majority in Southern Ireland’, inviting him to attend a peace conference with Sir James Craig (1871–1940), the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Carson’s successor as Unionist leader. De Valera, after consulting his own supporters and northern and southern Unionists, and with the approval of Collins and the IRA leadership, finally agreed. A truce was signed and at midday on Monday, 11 July 1921, fighting between the IRA and British forces stopped. Collins is reported to have said afterwards to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, ‘When we were told of the offer of a truce we were astounded. We thought you must have gone mad,’ because in his judgment the IRA could not have lasted more than another three weeks. He was also under no illusions as to what the truce meant: ‘Once a truce is agreed and we come out into the open,’ he wrote to a

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friend, ‘it is extermination for us if the truce should fail . . . we shall be, in the event of a truce, like rabbits coming out from their holes.’ Since Soloheadbeg in January 1919, over 1,500 people on both sides had been killed during the Troubles. treaty On 12 July 1921, de Valera arrived in London and for ten days negotiated with Lloyd George about a settlement (Figure 21). He also saw Sir James Craig who asked, ‘Are you going to see Lloyd George alone?’ ‘Yes’, replied de Valera. ‘Are you mad?’ said Craig. ‘Take a witness. Lloyd George will give any account of the interview that comes into his mind or that suits him.’ By 1921, the cleverness and duplicity of the ‘Welsh wizard’ were legendary. After several months of jockeying for position, a conference was agreed without any preconditions as to the unity or independent republican status of Ireland. Nevertheless, Lloyd George privately assured Craig and the Unionists that their six counties would remain under their control. On 11 October a delegation of five plenipotentiaries led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, and appointed by de Valera and the Dáil to negotiate a settlement, met Lloyd George and other members of the British Cabinet at 10 Downing Street. De Valera was a collegiate politician greatly dismayed by the prospect of dissent in Sinn Féin and the IRA. He stayed behind in Dublin not because he was frightened of the inevitable compromises negotiations would produce (as his opponents alleged), but probably because he took to heart the experience of President Wilson who had been destroyed politically by his personal involvement in the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War. Wilson had been unable to deliver on some key promises, making him look hypocritical and ineffective, and Congress had rejected the peace treaties he had negotiated. Another reason to stay behind was the inherent weakness in the republican movement: that dogmatic republicans might split away from the first indication that the Irish republic for which they had fought might not be obtained. By staying back, de Valera believed he could monitor and control dissent, and by requiring the plenipotentiaries to report back to him and his cabinet before they agreed any

Figure 21 De Valera’s notes of an Inner Cabinet meeting, 24 July 1921 Reporting back from London on the progress of his discussions with Lloyd George about a treaty, de Valera was asking for the views of his close associates. In these notes, their positions can be seen emerging. Everyone was aware of the likelihood of a split in republican nationalism. Griffith is recorded as saying that there would be a ‘bigger split if refuse’; Collins famously as saying that a treaty would be a ‘Step on road’ and a ‘Free Dominion a step’. Cathal Brugha was already splitting: a treaty ‘will be turned down. We shall resign.’ De Valera – ‘P’ for President – can be seen trying to keep doors open with ‘we, like any other republic, can consider an invitation. I will not lead into a cul de sac – some one else can.’ Interestingly, Eoin MacNeill is referred to by de Valera as ‘JMcN’ – the J standing for James, the English form of his name, by which he was generally addressed.

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Figure 21 (cont.)

settlement, he thought his absence from the negotiations would buy the Irish delegates time for reflection at the crucial moment. In the event, de Valera was disappointed on both counts and, as William Cosgrave, later to become the first prime minister of the Irish

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Free State, argued in the Dáil, it was a pity to have ‘their best player among the reserves’. Just before 3 o’clock in the morning of 6 December the Irish delegation signed their acceptance of an Irish Free State, ‘faithful to H. M. King George V, his heirs and successors by law’, and a partitioned Ireland, in the ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’ – commonly called the Treaty. Over the following seventeen years, Irish Free State governments negotiated with the British government the details of each article, and the resulting agreements technically constitute the Treaty. During the negotiations, Lloyd George had insisted upon the partition established by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, and that Southern Ireland would give allegiance to the British Crown (the focal point of unity in the UK and for the British Empire and Commonwealth). De Valera and his cabinet had instructed Griffith and Collins that they should not agree to such allegiance or to partition. However, early on in the negotiations, Griffith had privately agreed to Lloyd George’s suggestion of a Boundary Commission which would adjust the border between North and South, on the grounds that a fair-minded commission was bound to reduce the area of Northern Ireland such that, he thought, it would become economically unworkable. As someone who did not object to monarchy in principle, Griffith was more interested in a united Ireland than in an Irish republic. Only hours before the Treaty was signed, Lloyd George revealed Griffith’s agreement on partition to the startled delegation, and Griffith announced that he, personally, would sign the Treaty even if none of the others did. Then, as Sir Austen Chamberlain, a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, later recounted, the prime minister declared that the agreement of each delegate was required and held up two envelopes, saying: I have to communicate with Sir James Craig tonight. Here are the alternative letters I have prepared, one enclosing the Articles of Agreement reached by His Majesty’s government and yourselves, the other saying that Sinn Féin representatives refuse the oath of allegiance and refuse to come within the Empire. If I send this letter it is war – and war in three days! Which letter am I to send?

Ten months later Lloyd George was to fall from power in part because he contemplated going to war with Turkey: his threat of war in

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Ireland was real. Understanding this, and thus denied time to consult de Valera and their colleagues in Dublin, Collins and the other delegates followed Griffith and signed. Lloyd George, a radical Liberal, was leading a Conservative Unionist government that he was convincing to concede far more than home rule to a terrorist rabble. His threat arose from the choice of extremities facing him: to destroy Irish resistance in order for him to survive politically, or to announce a triumphant settlement that would be electorally popular. The Irish delegates rationalised their acceptance on the grounds that the Dáil’s acceptance was also necessary, so that by signing they were simply opening a debate on the Treaty and were not presenting the Dáil with a fait accompli. Yet before going to bed that night, Collins wrote to a confidant: When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London’s streets. Cold and dark in the night air. Think – what I have got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied with the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this – early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, ridiculous – a bullet might just as well have done the job five years ago. These signatures are the first real step for Ireland. If people will only remember that, the first real step.5

This was the reflection of a steady man who, for all his youth, had thought things through. With the Treaty, Lloyd George had detached nearly 25 per cent of the land area of the UK – about the same percentage of land that Germany lost after the First World War – and one of the poorest parts, saving the Exchequer millions of pounds, leaving Griffith, Collins and their friends to stew in their own juices. It also meant that Westminster no longer had to deal with a significant Irish party, thus simplifying British politics enormously. The Treaty was not a setback to the UK or to the British Empire, already dismantling with the creation in 1907 of semi-autonomous Dominion status for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Most people in Britain and Ireland, weary of bloodshed and violence, welcomed the Treaty. However, the oath they had taken 5

Letter to John O’Kane, quoted in Edward O’Mahony, Michael Collins, His Life and Times (www.generalmichaelcollins.com, 1996), Chapter 8.

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to the Irish Republic weighed heavily with those who had fought for it, and one by one each Irish nationalist organisation split, the majority in each case opposing the Treaty except in the Dáil where a small majority of members supported it. The IRB, pledged to an Irish Republic since its formation sixty-four years earlier, now headed by Collins, advised its members to make up their own minds. In the Dáil, the debates were emotional and bitter. Collins supported the Treaty on pragmatic grounds: that it gave freedom and security in the form of the Irish Free State as well as being a major step towards the republican ideal. He also emphasised that the history of Ireland was not, as so many people maintained, one of constant armed resistance to British rule; it was a history of ‘peaceful penetration . . . It has not been a struggle for the ideal of freedom for 750 years symbolised in the name Republic. It has been a story of slow, steady economic encroach by England . . . Nobody notices, but that is the thing that has destroyed our Gaelic civilisation.’ He was convinced that the Treaty gave Ireland a unique opportunity to halt this penetration; that it was a means of ‘going forward to our ideal of a free independent Ireland’. He argued that the 1916 Republic was asserted but never established; that the 1918 Dáil election was the point at which a republic, supported by a majority of Irish voters, came into being. Legitimacy, in his view, lay with the electorate. De Valera opposed the Treaty, countering it with an alternative of his own, ‘Document No. 2’, in which he proposed ‘External Association’ with the British Commonwealth whereby the King would be recognised only as head of the Commonwealth and there would be no oath of allegiance. Partition and the other substantive points of the Treaty were incorporated in the document, but it was defeated in the Dáil debates. De Valera then argued that to accept the Treaty would be to deny the Republic, and then Ireland would only have the freedom Britain would allow. He told an anecdote of his days in prison to make this point: ‘Our warders told us that we could go from our cells into the hall, which was about fifty feet by forty. We did go out from the cells to the hall, but we did not give our word to the British jailer that he had the right to detain us in prison because we got that privilege.’ Hardly a word was said on either side about partition, and the arguments centred on the issue of the oath, the Crown and the Republic.

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The Dáil voted to accept the Treaty on 7 January 1922, dividing sixty-four to fifty-seven. De Valera broke down in tears and resigned as President of the Irish Republic and head of the Dáil government. He was succeeded as President of the Republic by Arthur Griffith. On 14 January, under the terms of the Treaty, a new government – the provisional government of Ireland – was formed – self-appointed – by supporters of the Treaty, with Collins as its chairman. Its function was to take over the administration of Southern Ireland until the Irish Free State was formally established. Until then it was answerable only to the British government and not to the Dáil or to the Parliament of Southern Ireland. This resulted in a tangled conceptual and technical situation. The Dáil and its government, now led by Arthur Griffith, had decided to accept the Treaty. But the Treaty established the bicameral Parliament of Southern Ireland set up by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act as the sole legitimate Parliament, and so the Dáil was no longer a valid assembly as far as supporters of the Treaty were concerned. There was a natural reluctance to admit this fact, and proTreatyites blurred these distinctions by arranging that the provisional government and the Dáil Cabinet consisted of the same people. The two governments ran in harness, sharing meetings and responsibilities and rarely clarifying the difference between them. Griffith remained head of the Dáil government of the Irish Republic; Collins was a member of Griffith’s Dáil Cabinet as Dáil Minister for Finance. For de Valera and opponents of the Treaty, the Dáil government was the only authority they recognised. As de Valera said immediately after the vote in the Dáil to accept the Treaty: The Irish people established a Republic . . . Therefore, until such time as the Irish people in regular manner disestablish it, this Republic goes on. Whatever arrangements are made [the Dáil] is the supreme sovereign body in the nation; this is the body to which the nation looks for its supreme Government, and it must remain that – no matter who is the Executive – it must remain that until the Irish people had disestablished it.

Together with his supporters, he refused to attend meetings of the Parliament of Southern Ireland, to obey decisions promulgated in the name of the provisional government, or to take the oath of allegiance to the King.

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Few Irishmen regarded the Treaty as a victory. Arthur Griffith was even more pragmatic than Collins: ‘The principle I have stood on all my life is the principle of Ireland for the Irish people. If I can get that with a Republic, I will have a Republic; if I can get that with a monarchy, I will have a monarchy.’ Opponents of the Treaty, however, concentrated in the IRA, were absolutely determined to resist all compromise on the complete separation of Ireland from Britain for which they had fought. The spectre of civil war began to loom large, and Collins began to wonder if the Treaty was worth it. Ever since 1920 there had been murderous attacks by Orangemen on Catholics in Belfast, culminating in over 250 deaths in the first six months of 1922. Collins became more and more angry about his inability to do anything about these killings, on one occasion declaring to a group of northern IRA officers that ‘Lloyd George can have his bloody Treaty’ unless the attacks stopped. He went even further, and in June 1922 began to send arms which his provisional government obtained from the British to the IRA in Dublin to replace their weapons which in turn were being used by the IRA in the North: not the action of a committed supporter of the Treaty. However, at the same time the provisional government began to recruit a new army, the National Army, of its own, often from former British army men, to replace – and if necessary to oppose – the IRA. For the overwhelming majority of the IRA, the Treaty was a betrayal of the Republic they had fought for. As 1922 progressed, the significance of their 1919 oath of loyalty to the Dáil as the government of the Republic became clear. Arguing that by accepting the Treaty the Dáil had betrayed the Republic, they withdrew their allegiance, re-investing their own Executive with all powers and declaring loyalty to the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 (now, in their view, without a government even if – as de Valera said – Arthur Griffith was technically head of the Republic’s government although he was disloyal to it). They also cited their own constitution and refused to accept the authority of the Dáil (and provisional government) Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy, who tried to assert control over them. The fact that Mulcahy was also IRA Chief of Staff was held to be secondary to his ministerial office. At an IRA convention in March 1922 banned (ineffectively) by the provisional and Dáil governments, the IRA elected Liam Lynch (1890–1923), Officer

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Commanding their 1st Southern Division, to succeed Mulcahy as Chief of Staff. Based in Cork, one of the areas where anti-Treaty feeling was strongest, Lynch was a tall, studious, shy man with a strong religious bent. He now became the focus of attention as the IRA repudiated their allegiance to the Dáil on the grounds that it had ignored the oath to the Republic, and declared once again that their own Executive was the only body whose authority they would recognise. A minority IRA group for whom Lynch was too cautious broke away and occupied the Four Courts in Dublin, hoping that the National Army would attack them and thus force Lynch and the rest of the IRA to attack the National Army in turn, thus providing in themselves the anvil upon which to break the embryonic Free State. Finally, events came to a head, but not in the way Collins or the IRA expected. On Thursday 22 June, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was murdered on the steps of his home in Eaton Square, London, by two IRB gunmen possibly acting at Collins’ behest, implementing an order he may have given only days beforehand. At the time, however, the British government held the Four Courts IRA responsible (and there is circumstantial evidence that this was correct) and pressured the provisional government to act against them. The following Monday one of the Four Courts men was arrested by soldiers of the National Army, and in retaliation the Four Courts IRA captured the National Army’s deputy chief of staff. Two days later, at 4.07 a.m. on the morning of 28 June, Collins’ men opened fire on the Four Courts with 18-pounder guns borrowed from the British army earlier that night, and the Irish civil war began in earnest (Figure 22). Fighting and skirmishes between the IRA and the National Army had occurred in many parts of the country with increasing frequency in the weeks before the Four Courts was attacked. Various unsuccessful attempts had been made to resolve differences between pro- and anti-Treatyites, and Collins and de Valera even agreed to an electoral pact for the Southern Irish general elections held on 16 June. Under this pact, an official panel of Sinn Féin candidates was divided between the two sides in such a way as to preserve the pre-election balance between them. In Cork, four days before the poll, Collins in the eyes of de Valera broke the pact by asking electors ‘to vote for the candidate you think best of’.

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Figure 22 Four Courts surrender From 28 June to 5 July 1922 the army of the Provisional Government of Ireland, commanded by Michael Collins, bombarded the Four Courts occupied by socialist republicans who refused to accept the government’s authority or to accept the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. During the republican surrender a huge explosion demolished the Public Record Office containing a thousand years of historical documents. Republicans were accused of deliberately destroying the records, perhaps as an effort to obliterate the past in order to effect radical social engineering as in the Soviet Union. More likely, an accident set off the republican munitions store in the building.

In subsequent speeches, Collins spoke strongly in favour of the pact. Nevertheless, 75 per cent of votes were cast for pro-Treaty candidates. Collins and his supporters came to see themselves as defending democracy: but then, as the IRA pointed out, no one had voted for the 1916 rising or for the Troubles which had produced the Treaty and the step towards full independence which Collins was now defending. It was never made clear which assembly – the Dáil or the Parliament – the elected candidates would actually sit in, and before this was resolved the civil war had begun.

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Part of the explanation for the civil war lay in the youthfulness of those involved. Even in 1916, Tom Clarke had been regarded as old, aged only fifty-eight; Connolly was forty-eight, while Pearse, MacDermott, Plunkett, Ceannt and MacDonagh were all in their late twenties to mid thirties. After their executions, the leadership fell to even younger men. Six years later in 1922, de Valera was forty; Griffith fifty; Collins thirty-one and Liam Lynch thirty-three. They all shared a patriotic idealism, but many of their followers (often younger still) found themselves unable to reconcile the pragmatic approach of the pro-Treaty side with the pure idealism of a Republic which had attracted them in the first place to fight and to campaign against Anglo-Irish union. De Valera had consistently argued with the IRA against resorting to violence again. However, after the attack on the Four Courts, events swept him aside. He had been in the United States or in prison for most of the time between 1916 and 1921, and so was not really known by or in touch with rank-and-file anti-Treatyites. By June 1922, because of his political defeat in the Dáil, he was no longer president of the Dáil’s Irish Republic or head of the Dáil government. His conviction that the differences between the pro- and anti-Treatyites should be settled peacefully (and therefore constitutionally) struck the IRA as defeatist, and his influence waned dramatically. He admitted his own helplessness and, forced to choose, opted to re-enlist as a private in the 3rd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, IRA, relinquishing the leadership of the Republican side in the civil war to the chief of staff of the IRA, Liam Lynch, in Cork. In 1831, Prince Adam Czartoryski had resigned as head of the Polish provisional government in protest at outrages in Warsaw and enlisted as a volunteer in the insurgent army fighting Russia. It was a precedent that de Valera almost certainly knew and now emulated. He was playing to an international as well as a national audience, always conscious of history and of dignity. Six weeks after the attack on the Four Courts, Arthur Griffith died of a brain haemorrhage, leaving both the presidency and the headship of the Dáil’s by now nominal Irish Republic vacant. After marching in Griffith’s cortege, Collins journeyed to Cork where, on 22 August during an ambush at a place called Beal na mBlath, on a misty evening at twilight, he was killed by a bullet through his head. He had apparently been seeking contact with Lynch to put a stop to the

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fighting, dangerously depending upon his reputation and (probably) IRB connections to see him through areas controlled by the IRA, declaring, ‘They won’t shoot me in my own county.’ But they did. Many years later de Valera would remark, ‘That fellow had it coming to him.’ His death ended hope of an early peace. Collins was esteemed by both sides in the civil war, and made an impression on the British politicians he dealt with. His legend grew after his death: Yizak Shamir, a prime minister of Israel (1983–84; 1986–92), as a young man admired Collins, taking the codename ‘Michael’ as second-in-command of the Stern Gang, a terrorist group modelled on the Squad. Collins was the most representative Irishman of the republican leaders after 1916. He came from a farming family in Cork and as a youth emigrated to London where he worked as a post office clerk. He was highly intelligent. He thought carefully about Ireland, about Irish identity, and about democracy. Strongly secular, he was in no thrall to the Church. He was not averse to killing, but he was not a wanton killer (neither he nor de Valera probably ever killed anyone), seeing guerrilla warfare and assassination as necessary activities for a weaker side. He was a logical man: murder was more effective than battle in open fields. As head of the provisional government, he restrained reprisals: after his death, reprisal became policy on both sides. He thought of himself as operating within a legitimate government, probably from the proclamation of the Republic in 1916 and certainly from 1918, writing days before he was killed: Ireland’s story from 1918 to 1921 may be summed up as the story of a struggle between our determination to govern ourselves and to get rid of British government and the British determination to prevent us from doing either. It was a struggle between two rival Governments, the one an Irish Government resting on the will of the people and the other an alien Government depending for its existence upon military force – the one gathering more and more authority, the other steadily losing ground and growing ever more desperate and unscrupulous. All the history of the three years must be read in the light of that fact.6

Collins appealed to a civil majority and after 1918 had strong evidence that a civil majority supported the Dáil and its Republic. In 1922 he tried to take over as much of the existing Irish government apparatus 6

Michael Collins, The Path To Freedom (Cork, 1996), p. 64.

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as possible: not, for example, making any attempt to politicise the civil service or the courts. He wanted power to make a country, not diktat. Up to the Treaty he enjoyed excellent working relations with de Valera and, as President of the IRB, had a masterly grip on IRA organisation. He was an energetic and effective administrator, and was referred to by admirers as ‘the Big Fellow’. He was cut down seven weeks ahead of his thirty-second birthday. He never reached his zenith. Within the next twelve months, seventy-seven IRA men were executed by National Army firing squads, and many more were ‘shot while trying to escape’. In comparison, the British had executed twenty-four men between 1919 and 1921 (though several hundred more were killed in other circumstances). Erskine Childers, who after 1918 had become the principal propagandist of the Irish Republican cause, was one of the first to be executed. After his capture by the National Army, Childers had applied for an order of habeas corpus and appealed for his liberty to the Dublin High Court. No judgment had been delivered when, at dawn on 24 November 1922, he was shot by firing squad at Beggars Bush Barracks in Dublin, solely on the authority of the provisional government. Three days later the IRA retaliated by announcing that the members of the Parliament of Southern Ireland who had voted to support the government’s policy of executions might themselves be shot by the IRA. On 6 December, the anniversary of the Treaty, the Irish Free State formally came into existence, with the members of the provisional government forming the new state’s first government answerable to the Southern Parliament. The following day the government of Northern Ireland exercised its Treaty option of contracting out of the Free State and remaining separate. Also that day, Brigadier Sean Hales, a member of the Southern Parliament who had supported the execution policy, was shot dead in a Dublin street by IRA gunmen. The next morning, ‘as a reprisal for the assassination of Brigadier Hales’, four leading Four Courts IRA men who had been imprisoned since June were shot by the National Army in Mountjoy gaol. More than any other event of the war, these executions shocked people to the core and seared the bitterness of fraternal strife upon the Republican mind, providing future generations with a hatred of the Free State and of those who participated in it.

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With the formal establishment of the Free State, the constitutional positions of the two sides in the civil war had become clarified. William Cosgrave (1880–1965), a founder member of Sinn Féin and of the Irish Volunteers, had succeeded Collins as chairman of the provisional government in August 1922, subsequently becoming the first President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) of the Irish Free State. He made it clear that as far as he and his supporters were concerned, ‘the functions of the second Dáil came to an end on June 30th . . . The sovereign assembly of Ireland is now the Parliament elected in June last.’ However, the second Dáil had never been suspended or superseded by a third Dáil (although the Southern Parliament, for political purposes, confusingly referred to itself as the third Dáil and subsequent Parliaments continued this practice in sequence). This meant that the IRA was able to ‘reclaim’ the Dáil, reform its government, and so present a political and constitutional front to match that of the Free State. Thus it was that the IRA’s Executive at the end of October 1922 had called upon ‘the former President, Eamon de Valera, and the faithful members of Dáil Éireann, to form a Government, which they have done’. At the same time, de Valera continued to urge the IRA to stop fighting, declaring that the IRA and not himself or Republican politicians had to accept responsibility for the civil war: ‘The Army Executive must publicly accept responsibility. There must be no doubt in the mind of anybody in this matter. This pretence from the pro-Treaty Party that we are inciting the Army must be ended by a declaration from the Army itself that this is not so.’ The IRA did not make such a statement, instead indicating its distrust even of Republican politicians by reserving to itself the right to make final decisions in the matter of peace and war, and by giving only conditional allegiance to de Valera’s new government ‘in all its legitimate efforts to maintain and defend the Republic’. Reluctantly, de Valera accepted this compromise. However, as the weeks went by the hopelessness of the Republican cause became more and more apparent. The Free State enjoyed popular support; its ruthlessness demoralised the IRA and made it hard for IRA men to find refuge, and the rapidly growing National Army with its British equipment and ex-IRA leadership soon controlled most of

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the twenty-six counties. De Valera, his government, and most of the IRA had to stay in hiding. Nevertheless, Liam Lynch was determined to fight to the bitter end, refusing de Valera permission to attend IRA Executive meetings on the grounds that he was preaching defeatism. On 10 April 1923, Lynch was killed in the hills near Clonmel, co. Tipperary; on 27 April de Valera and Frank Aiken, Lynch’s successor as IRA chief of staff, jointly published an order to the IRA to stop fighting: they were beaten. The Free State ignored the IRA’s unilateral ceasefire. On 2 May two IRA men were executed by a National Army firing squad. Three weeks later, de Valera issued another message: ‘Soldiers of the Republic, Legion of the Rearguard: the Republic can no longer be defended successfully by your arms. Further sacrifice of life would now be in vain.’ What was left of the IRA hid their guns and went home or emigrated. There was no formal end to the civil war, just as there had been no formal start. The Free State government stopped their executions, but continued to arrest and imprison those suspected of IRA membership; in October 1923, over 11,000 prisoners were in gaols or camps. They started a mass hunger strike in protest at their continuing detention. Forty-one days later, after several men had died, and after fierce hatreds had divided those on strike from those who had given up or refused to strike, the fast was called off. Then, in dribs and drabs, the men were released. De Valera, who was arrested and interned without charge for a year, was the last to be released, in July 1924. There was a small sequel to the civil war in 1924. Because fighting was over, the National Army – sixty thousand strong and costing £18 million per year – was reduced in size and many of its officers were reduced in rank as an economy measure (or because many officers held rank above their ability). In February, these changes were published in ‘GHQ Staff Memorandum No. 12’. Many of those affected were members of a semi-secret ‘IRA Organisation’ within the National Army. They were principally men who had been close associates of Michael Collins (most of the Squad were involved) before the civil war days, and after Collins’ death had found themselves increasingly out of sympathy with the new leadership of the Free State. They did not like the number of former British army personnel at all levels of the National Army; they were worried by the

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prospect of finding that the Free State was the end for which they had fought, not the stepping stone to that end, and they felt passed-over and insecure. The GHQ memorandum about army jobs sparked off a ‘mutiny’ by the IRA Organisation, culminating in the arrest of most of its members and in the resignations of the Minister for Defence, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, and the Chief of Staff, Quartermaster General and Adjutant General of the National Army. The Free State government emerged stronger than before as it soon became clear that the IRA Organisation spoke only for itself and had little support outside its own ranks.

chapter 6

South

Right into the 1970s the events of the seven years after 1916 dominated political and cultural life in Southern Ireland. Parties won and lost elections as much for their policies as for their echoing of civil war divisions. Between the two principal parties there was no doctrinal difference. Competing policies and promises were exchangeable and they attracted support largely on the basis of which civil war side they represented. This was compounded by the initial youthfulness of Free State politicians on both sides. The British had executed the old Republican leadership in 1916, thereafter killing and executing mostly minor figures. The civil war had seen a more extensive cull but not a generational change. As time went on, this was translated into an extraordinary longevity amongst the political elite. Thus in 1959 Sean Lemass (1900–71) became Taoiseach (prime minister) having fought in the GPO in 1916, in the IRA during the Troubles, and in the Four Courts IRA in 1922; he retired from politics, as Taoiseach, in 1966. Eamon de Valera, Lemass’ immediate predecessor as Taoiseach, although older than his colleagues, was head of government for twenty-two years and then served as President of Ireland for fourteen years to 1973. Time and again, the hopes and myths expressed during the Treaty debates were held up by politicians as justification for votes and for policies, and the same hopes and myths were held up by the IRA as justification for the continuation of their violent struggle for a united Ireland. The polarisation of attitudes and the energies consumed by the civil war prevented any immediate radical social or political changes in the Free State. At the end of the war, the government and its supporters (largely drawn from amongst the strong farmers and businessmen who had backed the old Irish Party) clearly opted for conservatism. 244

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They welcomed the home rule the Treaty had obtained and were content to govern Ireland in the British manner, with only the addition of Irish language requirements in education and the civil service. Repressive social legislation catering to Roman Catholic sensibilities (although it should be said that this was a time of conservative reaction worldwide) was early on the agenda of the Southern Parliament. A Censorship of Films Act was passed in 1923; an Act prohibiting divorce followed in 1925 and a Censorship of Publications Act followed in 1929. The social and economic reforms which had been advocated by some members of Sinn Féin and the IRA during the Troubles were set aside, partly because most reformers had opposed the Treaty, and partly because the challenges and the rewards of government and state creation proved attractive enough. W. B. Yeats, a senator from 1922 to 1928, opposed this repression, speaking memorably against the 1925 legislation on divorce: If you show that this country, Southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North. You will create an impassable barrier between South and North, and you will pass more and more Catholic laws, while the North will, gradually, assimilate its divorce and other laws to those of England. You will put a wedge into the midst of this nation . . . You will not get the North if you impose on the minority what the minority consider to be oppressive legislation . . . [W]hen the Committee was set up to draw up the Constitution of the Free State, it was urged to incorporate in the Constitution the indissolubility of marriage and refused to do so. That was the expression of the political mind of Ireland . . . In the long warfare of this country with England the Catholic clergy took the side of the people, and owing to that they possess here an influence that they do not possess anywhere else in Europe . . . I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority. We against whom you have done this thing, are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.

Secular expression soon became the province of journals and intellectuals. The Dublin Magazine (1923–58) became the country’s leading

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literary publication, providing an opening for most of the country’s writing and poetic talent. Later The Bell (1940–54) was more radical because it felt Ireland was failing. The great achievements of the government were to establish their new state with popular, democratic support, and then to force its acceptance on politicians who had opposed the Treaty. In March 1926, de Valera split Sinn Féin and the IRA for a second time (the first split having occurred over the Treaty) by proposing that attendance at the parliament of Southern Ireland should become ‘a question not of principle, but of policy’. Again, the IRA (Sinn Féin was – and still is – its political arm and voice) could not bring itself to accept this compromise on principle. The civil war had been fought largely over principles, and this was one of the more important. De Valera personally admitted that he was swapping Republican idealism for political expediency, and seriously urged Sinn Féin to expel him so that its purity would not be tarnished by his action. He resigned his leadership and membership of Sinn Féin and in May formed a new party, Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny – the Irish legend on the insignia of the Irish Volunteers), subtitled ‘The Republican Party’. He had taken the name from the same band of heroes – the Fianna Éireann – in the mythological Ossianic cycle that the Fenians had chosen: the parallels were intentional. It was described by his successor, Sean Lemass, as ‘a slightly constitutional party’. Its objects were to secure ‘the political independence of a united Ireland as a Republic’; to restore the Irish language; to implement land reform and to make Ireland economically selfsufficient (see Figure 23). The formation of Fianna Fáil marked the general return to constitutional procedures to resolve differences and disagreements. Only a very weak IRA (Frank Aiken, chief of staff of the IRA, and many other IRA men joined Fianna Fáil) and a much reduced, electorally insignificant Sinn Féin continued the tradition of revolutionary action (the IRB had disintegrated during the civil war, rent by conflict over the Treaty). The Constitution of the Free State had originally provided one of the best hopes of averting the civil war since many believed that it would be ‘Republican’ in concept. Michael Collins had been chairman of the drafting committee and had privately assured anti-Treatyites that many

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Figure 23 De Valera with Countess Markievicz Condemned to death after the Rising, Markievicz’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment on the grounds that she was a woman. In 1917 she was released under a general amnesty. She joined de Valera in opposition to the Treaty and was a founding member of Fianna Fáil. Her husband, daughter and stepson were with her when she died in Dublin in June 1929 aged fifty-nine. Yeats, a friend who did not approve of her politics, wrote two poems, ‘On a political prisoner’ and ‘In memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’, that commemorate her.

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of their anxieties would be removed by the Constitution. Collins actually did try to produce a constitution which would have made the Irish Free State a republic in all but name, but found the complete intransigence of Lloyd George and his government on the matter impossible to overcome since their opposition was firmly grounded in the text of the Treaty. When the Constitution was finally published on 16 June 1922 (the day of Southern Ireland’s general election), it was seen to be anything but republican and it heated up the simmering civil war. The Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, as agreed in the Treaty, was incorporated. The Parliament of Southern Ireland was to be called the Oireachtas and was to consist of the King, plus an upper house, the Senate, appointed by the government and a lower, proportionally elected house, Dáil Éireann. The King was head of state and his representative in Ireland was the Governor General (the first was Timothy Healy, Parnell’s old opponent from Irish Party days), who took up residence in the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, Dublin. The Westminster Parliament passed the Irish Free State (Constitution) Act 1922, giving the Constitution legal force and demonstrating that the Free State owed its existence to Westminster, not Dublin, exactly as Republicans had claimed. At the end of the civil war in 1923, Southern Ireland was in dire straits. Unemployment throughout the 1920s (and the 1930s) remained at chronically high levels, ameliorated not by effective government policies, but by the great sore of emigration. By 1926, 43 per cent of Irish-born men and women were living abroad, constantly reinforcing the tradition of departure dating from the famine years of the 1840s. Of Southern Ireland’s 2.9 million population in 1926, over 800,000 were living in ‘overcrowded conditions’ (more than two persons to a room), mainly in the slums of Dublin where the scale of infant mortality was horrendous: the average death rate of children in the slums aged between one and five years was 25.6 per 1,000. For the new state, it should have been a clear priority to clear the slums and improve the conditions of life of their inhabitants, particularly since so much political capital had been made from these conditions during the years of British rule. Following the first Free State general election in August 1923, instead of tackling these

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economic and social disasters head on, the new Cumann na nGaedheal government (the pro-Treaty party founded in March 1923 by William Cosgrave) ignored its own radical Sinn Féin heritage and that of its parliamentary ally the Irish Labour Party, and zealously pursued a policy of balancing the budget. Virtually every governmental act was seen in terms of the budget rather than in terms of the electorate. The result was politically disastrous in the long run for proTreatyites, while also helping to sustain the habit of violence in Ireland. Republican, anti-Treaty politicians immediately benefited, as people reasoned – and were encouraged to do so – that reform was more likely to come from them. In turn, in the crucial first years of the new state, this also tended to justify the violent opposition of the IRA which, like the politicians, rapidly seized the politics of social and economic injustice as its own, presenting itself as the harbinger of a national idealism betrayed by the Free State. In fairness to Cumann na nGaedheal, however, the civil war had inevitably dampened any reforming ardour there was in the government as it was naturally forced to look to Britain for military and economic support. With the end of fighting in 1923, the government had to deal with rebuilding the infrastructure of local government and services. Railways, roads, bridges had all been destroyed on a large scale since 1919. Many local authorities had ceased to function, along with the services they provided. A police force, the Garda Siochána, had to be established as successors to the RIC and the DMP. The creation of Northern Ireland had left the Free State with very little industry, and so new industry as well as agricultural prosperity were vital. It was not surprising, therefore, that the government opted for conventional economic policies, concentrating on administrative efficiency. The Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 instituted a major piece of administrative reform by reorganising the civil service into eleven departments including a new department of lands and agriculture (agriculture was made a separate department in 1928) – a recognition of the fact that the Free State was an agricultural country with 61 per cent of the population in 1926 living outside towns or villages. Continuity of personnel and system was maintained with the preTreaty British civil service. In 1935 a Commission of Inquiry reported

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that there had been no disturbance ‘of any fundamental kind’ in the civil service and that ‘the same main tasks of administration continued to be performed by the same staffs on the same general basis of organisation and procedure’ as had been the case under British administration. This was an exceptional achievement in any circumstances, and Cosgrave’s government deserved full praise for it, especially since upon this civil service (which numbered only about 20,000 in the 1920s, and around 35,000 in the 1960s) fell the entire burden of administering the country through civil war, depression, and major constitutional changes. At the same time, the 1924 civil service reform made no attempt to change the way in which government was conducted, nor did it seek to change the attitudes, assumptions and practices of the civil service itself. It demonstrated that the Free State could be seen as a rational extension of the British system (and thus, by inference, of Britain) and that revolutionary experiments such as the Dáil courts which had been advocated by Sinn Féin during the Troubles were not going to be indulged. The Dáil courts were abolished (the last sat in 1922) and the Courts of Justice Act, 1924, was passed which together with the Garda Siochána Act, 1924, re-established the rule of law in the twenty-six counties with an unarmed police force and a court system which quickly gained the acceptance and the respect of most sections of the community. The 1925 Local Government Act rationalised local authorities and the services they provided, notably by setting up boards of health in county council districts to administer poor relief. No longer was public assistance linked directly to the British workhouse system. Instead, the able-bodied were relieved as far as possible in their own homes, while the old, the sick and the infirm were looked after in hospitals or county homes. The conditions of life for those on public assistance were still harsh, but poverty was not treated by the state as if the poor themselves were responsible for it. The government also completed the tremendous land reform legislation introduced by previous UK governments by passing a Land Act and a Land Law Act in 1923 which together reconstituted the Land Commission (established by the 1881 Land Act) as the government’s own agency for transferring land to tenants, made compulsory the sale of land designated for transfer to tenants under

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previous Land Acts, and removed and reduced rent and purchase payment arrears. Nevertheless, the hopes and the enthusiasm that had characterised the nationalism of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly were lost. A special, distinctively Irish society – the sort of society which nineteenth-century nationalists had dreamed about – was set aside in favour of one imitating Britain, economically backward and dependent upon Britain but, since no longer part of the disparate United Kingdom, vulnerable to Catholic pressure. In many respects, the Ireland envisaged by Pearse and most of the men of 1916 and 1919– 21 was not the Free State. In Pearse’s words: A free Ireland would not, and could not, have hunger in her fertile vales and squalor in her cities. Ireland had resources to feed five times her population; a free Ireland would make those resources available. A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, would diminish extravagant expenditure (as on needless judges and policemen), would beautify the cities, would educate the workers (and also the non-workers, who stand in direr need of it).

Some measures did accord with this recipe. The Shannon scheme, begun in 1925, was completed in 1929. It involved the government in massive state intervention to provide a national electricity supply by means of water-powered generators in a weir system on the river Shannon near Limerick city. The Electricity Supply Board was created to regulate the service and was given £10 million to fund the system. One of the greatest achievements of the government was the successful re-establishment of the rule of law. But it was essentially British law, not Irish. The Brehon Laws, which the Dáil courts had tried to establish, may have been impractical in the twentieth century, but at least they were Ireland’s own. The point was that the young ministers and parliamentarians of the Free State surrendered the high ground of idealism for the harsh practicalities of administration, leaving that ground to their political opponents and to the IRA. Within four years of the end of the civil war, the political consequences of this surrender became clear. In June 1927, just over a year after its formation, Fianna Fáil won forty-four seats in the Free State’s second general election, while

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Cumann na nGaedheal’s representation slumped from 63 to 46 seats out of the 153 in the Dáil. However, de Valera and his followers could not bring themselves to take the oath of allegiance to the King required by the Treaty and so were turned away when they tried to take their seats. A fortnight later, on Sunday 10 July, Kevin O’Higgins, the 35-year-old deputy leader of Cumann na nGaedheal, Minister for Justice and acting Minister for External Affairs, was assassinated on his way to Mass. O’Higgins was the strongman of the government in that his hard work and intellectual energy underpinned much of the government’s activity and policy. He was (incorrectly) blamed by Republicans for masterminding the execution policy pursued by the government during the civil war, and his death was at the hands of three ex-IRA men acting on their own initiative. They were never caught or officially identified. In reaction to his death, the government passed its fourth Public Safety Act imposing severe penalties, including death, for membership of the IRA, and an Electoral Amendment Act which changed election law with the effect of forcing Fianna Fáil either to take their seats and the oath of allegiance to the King, or to pursue their principles to the point of probable political oblivion. De Valera and Fianna Fáil, having in practice recognised everything about the Free State except the oath, now chose to accept the oath rather than forfeit their seats in the Dáil. On 11 August 1927, Fianna Fáil’s elected representatives swore allegiance to King George V and his heirs and successors, and took their seats as Teachta Dála (TDs – Dáil deputies). Ever afterwards, de Valera and his supporters insisted that they had not, in fact, taken the oath, and went to extraordinary lengths to prove their case. De Valera later explained in the Dáil: I said ‘I am not prepared to take an oath. I am not going to take an oath. I am prepared to put my name down in this book in order to get permission to go into the Dáil, but it has no other significance.’ There was a Testament on the table and in order that there could be no misunderstanding I went and I took the Testament and put it over and said, ‘You must remember I am taking no oath.’

These manifestly absurd antics impressed few. They did, however, reveal the passionate intensity behind de Valera’s struggle against the Treaty and the depth of feeling on the anti-Treaty side. Whether or

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not the Treaty was a step towards freedom was irrelevant at this stage: what mattered was which side had been taken in 1922. It also mattered that in law Fianna Fáil TDs had taken the oath and entered fully into Free State constitutional politics. The Cumann na nGaedheal government must be presumed to have realised that by forcing Fianna Fáil into Parliament, the consequence would be that sooner or later Fianna Fáil would form a government. It was entirely logical that this should have been both the government’s awareness and intention since its members had fought the civil war for the rule of law and for the Free State Constitution. Ensuring Fianna Fáil’s participation in the constitutional process was perhaps the most important action of Cosgrave’s government (although it must be remembered that Fianna Fáil no doubt privately welcomed being ‘forced’ into the Free State: there was no other point in their formation than their preparedness and wish to enter Free State politics). Also important was that members of Fianna Fáil, representing much of the post-1916 Irish Republican idealism, brought with them into the Free State most of the anti-Free State side with, as de Valera was to demonstrate, Collins’ stepping-stone approach to the Treaty as their policy. In this they had little competition since, after Collins’ death, Cumann na nGaedheal had shown itself content to make the Treaty work as an end in itself. The deeply divisive debates over the Treaty and what it had really obtained for Ireland underpinned Free State politics. On this level, as well as on the economic level, Cumann na nGaedheal steadily lost ground to Fianna Fáil. The Army Mutiny in 1924, while helping the government demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law, nevertheless tokened its loss of idealism and a disillusion at its core. Within months of the mutiny, a major political crisis confirmed to everyone that the government was not seeking to develop the Treaty, but was – as Republicans claimed – treating it as a final agreement. Article 12 of the Treaty had provided that if Northern Ireland decided not to join with the South in a united Ireland, then a Boundary Commission consisting of three persons would be set up to ‘determine, in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’. It was

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never clear whether this meant that major or only minor boundary changes were contemplated. Nationalists assumed that there would be major changes; Northern unionists were adamant that only minor changes in the existing six-county boundary would be considered. In 1924, despite attempts by the Northern government to avoid boundary negotiations, a Boundary Commission was appointed consisting of Joseph R. Fisher, a leading Northern Irish Unionist; Eoin MacNeill, the Free State Minister for Education, and Justice Richard Feetham of the South African Supreme Court who was a neutral chairman. Throughout 1925 the commission deliberated. MacNeill (and the Free State government) were under the impression that the British government, as had been indicated to Collins during the Treaty negotiations in 1921, would support the Free State in securing that the Boundary Commission would recommend the reduction of Northern Ireland from six to four counties, thus making it too small, they thought, to be viable economically or politically, and making unification with the South inevitable. Such a deal was given further credence by the fact that (based on the 1911 census) in the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone there was a Catholic (and therefore presumed nationalist) majority, and that in parts of the counties of Londonderry, Armagh and Down this was also the case. By the end of 1925, however, it was clear that Justice Feetham interpreted Article 12 quite differently, agreeing with Fisher that the Article dictated that the concern of the Commission was not the size of Northern Ireland, but the detailed arrangement of the existing boundary between North and South. On 7 November the Morning Post newspaper broke this story, from which Irish nationalists accused Feetham of bowing to Unionist political influence. He resigned. MacNeill, having failed to secure significant boundary changes, also resigned both from the Boundary Commission and from the Free State government, forcing a political crisis. By prior agreement between the Dublin, Belfast and Westminster governments, the findings of the Boundary Commission were to be legally binding. MacNeill’s resignation meant that in order to prevent official presentation and publication of the findings, which, in view of the popular expectations in the South that the commission would

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substantially reduce the North, would be politically very damaging, the Free State government had to act swiftly to save face and to come up with an alternative acceptable to Belfast. Accordingly, on 3 December 1925, a tripartite agreement was signed in London between all three governments, revoking the powers of the Boundary Commission. In exchange, the boundary between North and South remained unchanged and the Treaty’s provisions for a Council of Ireland were effectively annulled, thus satisfying Northern unionist demands. In order for the Free State government to emerge with some credit, Britain agreed to release the Free State (and Northern Ireland) from its Treaty obligations to meet part of the UK’s national debt and certain British military and police service pensions. North and South, it was agreed, would in future meet together to resolve differences and to discuss matters of mutual interest ‘in a spirit of neighbourly comradeship’. Nothing could hide the fact that this was a major setback for the Free State and for Irish nationalism. De Valera and his supporters leapt to attack the government for selling out ‘our fairest province’ by accepting the permanence of the North–South border in practical terms. De Valera’s criticism was firmly based in the romantic idealism he shared with the IRA of an undivided Irish Republic. While this view doubtlessly encouraged de Valera to enter constitutional politics in the Free State as the best means of controlling and influencing political developments in Ireland, the IRA took a different course. For them, the Boundary Commission debacle reinforced the conviction that the only way to secure concessions from governments, let alone unification of Ireland, was by force. In Southern Ireland, no one apart from the unfortunate government seemed to recognise the harsh realities of religious and political division with Northern Ireland. De Valera was never able to accept a responsibility for undermining the government, denying it political support at home when it was most needed in the national interest. For its part, the IRA was never able to accept that politics – not force – had secured whatever lasting advantages Ireland enjoyed in relation to Britain. It may have been politics backed by force or the threat of force, but it was constitutional activity that had secured the 1921 Treaty, and it was the supporters of constitutionalism who had defeated the IRA in the 1922–3 civil war. The IRA, while consistently

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regarding the Treaty as a defeat, were not able to see that it had been a defeat of force and that force had not, in the IRA’s own terms, actually secured a lasting advantage from Britain. The inaccurate view that force alone provides solutions persisted into the present in IRA mythology and was reflected in the cry for ‘arms, not argument’. Nevertheless, by maintaining the romance of an indivisible Republic, both de Valera and the IRA in different ways were to hand on to succeeding generations the simplistic notion that force, particularly when applied at times of Britain’s difficulty, offered the best hope of ending partition and securing a united Irish Republic. The Cumann na nGaedheal government was also determined to prove its nationalist zeal, and strove to prevent de Valera and his supporters from painting it as ‘West British’. It had some success in this effort, and its cultural policies recognisably survived successive administrations into the 1970s. Gaelic League idealism was met in education: the Irish language became a compulsory subject in all schools, a natural corollary to the Free State Constitution’s declaration that Irish was ‘the national language’. Knowledge of the language was made a requirement for entry to the civil service, the legal profession, the Garda Siochána and the armed forces. In sport, Cumann na nGaedheal catered to Gaelic Athletic Association ambitions by holding a national sporting festival in 1924, the Taillteann Games, in an effort to re-create the legendary Gaelic games festival which had last occurred around 1100. Sadly, in both cases the effort was misconceived. Patrick Pearse had once castigated the English system of education in Ireland as the ‘murder machine’ because of its imposition of English upon Irish-speaking children. The fact was, however, that by 1922 English was commonplace, with children of all classes being encouraged at home to use it in preference to Irish. In addition, with the establishment of an Irish government in Dublin, people assumed that the work of cultural nationalism was properly a government concern, and their own enthusiasm could be directed elsewhere: while in 1922 there had been 819 active branches of the Gaelic League, by 1924 there were only 139. In 1965 a government White Paper reported that while most people favoured support for the Irish language in principle and equated it with ‘national or ethnic identity, or as a symbol of cultural distinctiveness’, only about 4 per cent of the

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population outside the Gaeltachtai (those few areas where Irish was generally spoken) used the native language ‘very frequently and intensively’. It would seem that once the obvious British presence was removed, and with it some of the social pressure to conform to a British ideal, then the cause of the Irish language weakened because it was no longer so clearly necessary for an Irish nationalist to resist the steady encroachment of English. In 1926, some 543,511 people (18.3 per cent of the population) lived in Gaeltachtai; in 1971 the figure was 70,568 (2.4 per cent). Since then, there has been a genuine resurgence of the language, but as a second language: English is predominant and few now speak only Irish. The 2004 census, including schoolchildren attending compulsory Irish classes (and therefore perhaps not really native speakers), found about 1.6 million Irish speakers: in 2010 an estimated 100,000 (about 2 per cent) lived in Gaeltachtai; about 165,000 people in Northern Ireland speak Irish. The state-supported Irish-speaking Teilifis na Gaeilge – TG4 – has about 50,000 regular viewers, and there is at least one Irish-speaking school in every county in the Republic. In sport, cultural nationalism was more successful. The Taillteann Games of 1924 failed to establish a national sporting festival as much because sports (at least in democracies) are a voluntary leisure activity for most people, attracting audiences and participation depending upon the excitement they generate, as because in the wake of the civil war government schemes were rejected by many. As a result, Gaelic games remained the province of the GAA, developing in competition with soccer and cricket, so that by the 1970s Gaelic football and hurling were attracting mass followings not because of state compulsion but because the games are first and foremost fast-moving and exciting. The GAA has always maintained itself as an avowedly nationalist organisation, until 1971 banning its members from playing or attending ‘foreign’ games and, until 2001, echoing its original antipathy to the RIC by refusing membership to those in the police or armed forces in Northern Ireland. In its foreign policy, the Cumann na nGaedheal government quietly achieved a notable, lasting success. Faced by de facto Dominion status in the Treaty, the Free State applied itself to making this status co-equal with that of the UK within the Commonwealth.

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Irish diplomatic missions were appointed to non-Commonwealth countries. The Free State became a member of the League of Nations. At the Imperial Conferences of the British Empire and Commonwealth, Irish ministers took the lead in insisting upon the right of Dominions to exercise sovereignty equal to that of the UK. The term ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ by the early 1930s had generally superseded the use of ‘British Empire’. In December 1931, the UK Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, at last formally recognising the co-equality of the Dominions with the UK and the right of Dominion parliaments to reject or change British legislation affecting them. Within the Commonwealth, it was generally conceded that this advance in the constitutional relationship with Britain was in large part due to the pressure exerted by the Irish Free State, South Africa and Canada. The Statute of Westminster effectively established the political independence of the Free State in relation to Britain (as Winston Churchill pointed out during the debates on the statute, it meant, for example, that the Dáil could legally repudiate the Treaty), justifying to many the original acceptance of the Treaty and the civil war fight for constitutional advance. However, less than three months after the statute’s enactment, Cumann na nGaedheal was decisively defeated at the polls in the March 1932 general election (Figure 24). The last years of the government had been marked by domestic political failure to the point that even the success of the Statute of Westminster was perceived in Ireland as confirming Cumann na nGaedheal as the ‘Commonwealth Party’, as de Valera tauntingly called them during the election campaign. Defeat was largely the government’s own fault. It had made no strong appeal to idealism throughout its tenure of office, preferring instead to argue its case on pragmatic grounds. It was not even the ‘Commonwealth Party’: it was nationalist, but it allowed de Valera and Fianna Fáil the nationalist flag with hardly any fight. With a kamikaze-like determination in the face of ever-deepening world recession, with unemployment soaring as factories closed and exports dropped, budgets were balanced by decreasing public expenditure and actually reducing the salaries of public employees. An austerity budget was even introduced on the eve of the 1932 general election. To the surprise of no one outside the government, Fianna Fáil won 72 of the Dáil’s 153 seats with

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Figure 24 1932 election poster

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44.5 per cent of the poll, compared to Cumann na nGaedheal’s 57 seats and 35.3 per cent of the poll. de valera The 1932 general election was a watershed in the development of the Irish Free State. Cumann na nGaedheal peacefully handed over power to Fianna Fáil (in coalition with Labour and some Independents), the party of those who had been ruthlessly and completely defeated in the civil war ten years earlier. There was some discussion amongst some army officers about staging a military coup to prevent Fianna Fáil’s assumption of power, but this was speedily squashed by members of the outgoing government and senior officers. Fianna Fáil TDs and ministers took office with revolvers in their pockets – one Fianna Fáil TD was observed assembling a sub-machine gun in a telephone box in Leinster House – only to find that these precautions were unnecessary. The new state had established itself, and demonstrated a political maturity which was to confirm its constitutional ethos. That Fianna Fáil had completely accepted constitutional procedures was not immediately apparent. In September 1931, de Valera had founded a national newspaper, the Irish Press, to present Fianna Fáil opinion, which was frankly pro-IRA, still centring on the debates of 1922. In the Dáil, the party had defended IRA members against prosecution by military tribunals under a Public Safety Act passed in October 1931. That same year Fianna Fáil and the IRA had marched together in the annual commemoration of Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown. During the 1932 general election, IRA units had actively Figure 24 1932 election poster (cont.) Sean O’Casey’s 1923 play Shadow of a Gunman revolved around a lodger mistakenly thought to be an IRA killer. This poster used the connection to imply that a victory for de Valera’s Fianna Fáil would mean that gun rule would replace law and order. The Cumann na nGaedheal government depended on its record of providing stability after the 1922–4 civil war. But without clear policies to deal with the collapse of trade as a result of the Great Depression, it was vulnerable to Fianna Fáil’s promises of protectionism, new housing and social security benefits. The election result saw Fianna Fáil become the largest party in the Dáil but 5 seats short of an overall majority. However, the Labour Party agreed to support de Valera, thus enabling his first Free State government.

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campaigned for Fianna Fáil, employing peculiarly forceful canvassing. De Valera in the Dáil just before the election described IRA men as ‘animated with honest motives’, and gave every indication that a Fianna Fáil electoral victory would mean the vindication of the stand the IRA had made in 1922 against the Treaty. In the first years of Fianna Fáil government (there was another general election in February 1933 which Fianna Fáil won with 49.7 per cent of the poll, obtaining an overall majority for the first time in the Dáil with seventy-seven seats), de Valera seemed to be justifying this expectation. One of his very first acts as President of the Executive Council was formally to write to James Thomas, UK Secretary of State for the Dominions, giving notice of his intention to remove the oath of allegiance from the Free State Constitution and to suspend land annuity payments (those sums payable by Irish tenants to the UK Exchequer in repayment of loans advanced to them for the purchase of land under the various Land Acts from 1870 onwards). Both these issues were close to the IRA heart which had become increasingly socially conscious during the 1920s. Under the tutelage of Peadar O’Donnell, the leading theoretician of republican socialism in the IRA, by 1931 the IRA had gone so far as to found Saor Eire, ‘an organisation of workers and working farmers’ as it described itself, with three objectives: 1. To achieve an independent revolutionary leadership for the working class and working farmers towards the overthrow in Ireland of British Imperialism and its ally, Irish Capitalism. 2. To organise and consolidate the Republic of Ireland on the basis of the possession and administration by the workers and working farmers of the land, instruments of production, distribution and exchange. 3. To restore and foster the Irish language, culture and games.

O’Donnell left the IRA in 1934 and founded the Republican Congress to press for socialism achieved constitutionally, but had little effect: socialism did not sit well in Catholic, conservative, agricultural Ireland. The IRA, faced by a conservative Cumann na nGaedheal government and a constitutionally minded but strongly nationalist Fianna Fáil, had for the moment also decided that socialism offered the best means of obtaining the revived, re-Gaelicised Ireland of their dreams. As Cumann na nGaedheal looked to Britain as a model, and as Fianna Fáil committed itself to enter the procedures of the Free State, the IRA

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turned left. An IRA mission travelled to Moscow asking for arms (unsuccessfully). Information the IRA received from a sympathiser in Scotland Yard was sold to Soviet agents. Some IRA officers even received military training in Russia. With de Valera in power, many in the IRA thought that his Free State government would couple socialist reforms with an aggressive nationalism, and accordingly lent Fianna Fáil their support. Fianna Fáil’s election manifesto in 1932 had concentrated on the issues of the oath, economic self-sufficiency and land annuities, and had stepped delicately around the issue of a thirty-two-county Irish republic. In government, de Valera was quickly perceived to have meant no more and no less than he had said. His determination to abolish the oath and to suspend land annuity payments to Britain, and generally to establish a relationship with the UK akin to that he had advocated in his ‘Document No. 2’ ten years earlier where the King would be recognised by a united Ireland only as Head of the Commonwealth with which Ireland would be associated, soon resulted in serious conflict between the two countries and the need at home to establish confidence in his government while he pursued his policy. The IRA, increasingly irked by de Valera’s fundamental conservatism in domestic matters, began to revert to violence, forcing de Valera to choose between its radical idealism and the opportunities of government. Before he had to make this choice, however, de Valera brought the Free State into an ‘Economic War’ with the UK. At the end of 1932, in response to de Valera’s demands for the abolition of the oath and land annuities which he then proceeded to implement unilaterally, Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government imposed a tariff on Irish agricultural produce entering the UK. One purpose in this action was to try to destabilise Fianna Fáil in Irish opinion (the British government thought Fianna Fáil would not last six months). De Valera retaliated by imposing duties on British exports to Ireland. It was a ridiculous ‘war’ on de Valera’s part. Since 96 per cent of Irish exports went to Britain, British tariffs had a far greater impact upon Ireland than Irish tariffs had upon Britain. But de Valera held to a pastoral vision of Ireland – and of economics – that inevitably lowered living standards. He considered prosperity to be an enemy:

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You say ‘lower’ when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable, and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one.1

The notion that Ireland could be self-sufficient and enjoy a reasonable standard of living was misplaced. Imported fuel, machinery and raw materials were essential to Irish economic survival. But in the cause of self-sufficiency and ending the oath and land annuities, de Valera was dogged. For him, it seems clear, the conflict was a re-enactment of that over the Treaty. He was obsessed by the issues involved. Irish agricultural exports dropped from £35.8 million in 1929 to £13.5 million in 1935, with cattle exports being specially affected, dropping from 775,000 head to just over 500,000 by 1933; in 1934 Britain imposed a quota of 50 per cent of the 1933 figure. Total UK exports to Ireland fell from £43.5 million in 1929 to less than £18 million in 1935. There were some benefits to the Free State, but they cost dear. By 1936, acreage under wheat had risen from 21,000 in 1931 to 255,000 in response to government calls for self-sufficiency in food, but agricultural prices slumped with the drastic fall in exports, so Irish farmers fared badly all the same. By 1935 the traditional release of emigration had stopped functioning as a consequence of the world recession. Protectionism – for that was the nature of the tariff conflict with Britain – did result in a major increase (40 per cent between 1931 and 1936) in Irish industrialisation, particularly in footwear and leather goods (benefiting from cattle surpluses and low prices) and in areas where domestic output had been low: glass, paper, metals, bricks. A £1 million road-building programme was instituted to mop up unemployment, and for the first time Dublin slum families were rehoused and slum clearances were begun. National income, on the other hand, fell by about 3 per cent between 1931 and 1938, while the UK in contrast experienced an increase of about 27 per cent. In 1931, Irish incomes had averaged 61 per cent of those in Britain; by 1939 they averaged 49 per cent. Between 1932 and 1938, Irish industrial exports fell by one-third and 1

Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Dublin, 2004), pp. 112–13.

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agricultural exports were more than halved. Looking at the consequences of the Economic War and of sixteen years of Irish government, W. B. Yeats tellingly wrote: Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: ‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.’

The decline in people’s standards of living, while abroad there was a general recovery from the recession which had followed the great stockmarket crash of October 1929, meant that emigration rapidly rose again in the later 1930s, further contributing to a decline in potential home demand for Irish goods and services. Between 1936 and 1946, emigration averaged 18,711 people a year, compared to an annual average of 16,675 between 1926 and 1936. In fairness to de Valera and his policy it should be remembered that the recession began in 1929 (three years before Fianna Fáil came to power), but the Economic War accentuated the recession. By 1935, faced by the economic consequences of his relations with Britain and of the world recession, de Valera agreed to compromise. Britain also wanted an end to the conflict: its coal, iron and steel industries had suffered from the loss of the Irish market. A coal–cattle pact was reached between both governments that year by which Britain agreed to allow her Irish cattle imports to increase by onethird, and de Valera agreed that the Free State would only import coal from Britain. On 25 April 1938, a settlement took place which ended the ‘war’. Against British claims of £104 million for land annuities and other payments, £10 million was accepted. Both countries also dropped most tariff restrictions, although developing Irish industries were allowed continued protection. Britain also handed over the naval bases (the ‘Treaty ports’) retained by the Royal Navy under the 1921 Treaty and gave up her rights to their use agreed in the Treaty. In many ways this was an act of appeasement by Britain. By relinquishing her rights and surrendering her claims, Britain took an important step to gain Southern Ireland’s friendship. Perhaps the really significant element in the settlement, however, was that it represented a coming of age in de Valera and Fianna Fáil. At last they had recognised and accepted that Ireland was, in fact, economically dependent upon Britain and was not self-sufficient. The handing

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back of the Treaty ports confirmed the reality of Dominion status and Dublin’s independence of action (as was to be demonstrated by Southern Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War). Altogether, the settlement established the conditions of modern Irish development: political freedom at home and in foreign policy combined with economic cooperation with Britain. At home during the 1930s, Fianna Fáil also matured. Growing disenchantment in the IRA with de Valera’s policy of using the Treaty as a stepping stone to greater independence (the IRA traditionalists really wanted another fight with Britain), and growing disenchantment among radical/socialist IRA members with tariff protection (which was seen as supporting Irish capitalism) led to the IRA opposing Fianna Fáil. De Valera’s refusal to purge proTreatyites from the military and civil forces of the state, while wise in the interests of democracy and conciliation, was another source of IRA anger. However, a great deal of this opposition was defused by de Valera who granted those who had fought against the Treaty the same military pension rights as those who had fought for it. The IRA was further weakened in 1934 when the minority socialist element broke away to concentrate on proselytising for republican socialism, with many ending up in an Irish Brigade fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Those that remained in the secret army were increasingly involved in street violence, fighting the Blueshirts, an organisation of pro-Treaty supporters, many with 1919–21 IRA experience. The Army Comrades Association had been formed in 1932 from former Free State National Army members. Its purpose was to promote the welfare of its members, but it soon became a quasi-military volunteer force supporting Cumann na nGaedheal and pro-Treatyites generally who feared Fianna Fáil would deny them free speech and other democratic rights. In July 1933 Eoin O’Duffy, who had been dismissed by de Valera as Commissioner of the Garda Siochána immediately after the February 1933 general election, took over the leadership of the Army Comrades Association which was renamed the National Guard. At about the same time, its members began to wear a uniform of dark trousers and a blue shirt (thus the popular name Blueshirts), ostentatiously modelling themselves on the fascist movements of Europe, including a Nazi-style salute, and began to pick

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fights with IRA men and the IRA with them. The Blueshirts might have aped German and Italian fascists, but they always voiced democratic principles even if their actions did not match. In September 1933 de Valera banned the Blueshirts, whose members then combined with Cumann na nGaedheal and the small National Centre party (representing farmers and ratepayers) to form a new political Party, Fine Gael or the United Ireland Party, under O’Duffy’s leadership (Cosgrave stepped aside as leader in his favour). After the first flush of enthusiasm, the new party found that Fianna Fáil’s grip on power was strong. In 1934 the Fianna Fáil government introduced legislation to prevent uniforms being worn, and banned the Blueshirts in their new incarnations as the Young Ireland Association and then the League of Youth. By the end of the year, Fine Gael was in disarray and O’Duffy had resigned as leader after the parliamentary party made it clear that it would have no truck with violence and illegality. Cosgrave reassumed the leadership. In January 1935 the party’s strongest plank – an appeal to farmers against the consequences to agriculture of the Economic War – was significantly weakened by the coal–cattle pact. In 1936 the Senate, where opposition to Fianna Fáil in Parliament was concentrated, was abolished. O’Duffy’s final exploit was to lead a group of six hundred Blueshirts to Spain in 1936 to fight for the fascist side there. He died in Dublin in 1944 and was given a state funeral. The thuggery and fighting between the IRA and the Blueshirts turned opinion against both groups. When in 1935 and 1936 IRA execution squads began to murder opponents, culminating in the murder of the 72-year-old retired Admiral Somerville at his home in co. Cork (he was accused of being a spy because he gave local youths references for the Royal Navy), de Valera with widespread public support cracked down, proclaiming the IRA an illegal body in June 1936. In the process, Fianna Fáil demonstrated at last that it might be ardently nationalistic, but it was also constitutional. From this point on, party politics were able to develop without either of the major parties ever considering an appeal to extra-parliamentary forces for support. In 1937 de Valera introduced a new constitution which, with amendments, has remained in force ever since. ‘I wrote most of the Constitution myself,’ he told the British ambassador in 1967:

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I remember hesitating for a long time over the American Presidential system. But it wouldn’t have done – we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship, which is what the American system really is – Ministers not responsible to Parliament – that would never do . . . Still, I admit I was tempted – look at the way de Gaulle rules France . . . absolute rule . . . very efficient.2

The position of Governor General – the King’s representative in Ireland – was abolished. In its place a popularly elected President was designated as head of state (Douglas Hyde, the founder of the Gaelic League in 1893, was the first President). The name of the twenty-six counties was changed from Irish Free State to Eire or Ireland. No mention was made of ‘Republic’in the Constitution (de Valera was always conscious that the 1916–21 struggle had been for an independent united Irish republic, and he never claimed that the twenty-six counties represented this ideal), but the effect of the Constitution was nevertheless to make Ireland a republic in all but name. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, understood this, describing Ireland as a ‘foreign country’ as a result of the new constitution and asking his intelligence people to establish a network there (they said it was too difficult). The title of the head of government was changed from President of the Executive Council to ‘Taoiseach’. The national territory was declared to be ‘the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas’ (this clause was repealed following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998), but ‘pending the re-integration of the national territory’ the laws of Ireland would only apply to the twenty-six counties. A two-chamber parliament was restored with a lower, proportionally elected house, the Dáil, with full legislative power, and an upper, partly appointed house, the Seanad (Senate), with powers only of delay (it rapidly became a house for failed Dáil TDs and the exercise of government patronage). Article 44, which was to become the subject of controversy, recognised the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church as representing the religion of ‘the great majority of the citizens’, but at the 2

Diarmuid Ferriter, Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Eamon de Valera (Dublin, 2007), p. 218.

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same time guaranteed ‘freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion’. In a 1972 referendum, Irish voters overwhelmingly supported the removal of the section of Article 44 giving the Church its ‘special position’. One of the conditions that recurred in the Constitution, however, was that various rights (freedom of expression, assembly, religion) would be ‘subject to public order and morality’. In turn, this was interpreted in a distinctly Catholic manner, an indication of which was Article 41, under which the state was required to try to ensure that women should not be forced to work and that their most valuable activity was at home: 1. In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 2. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home . . . no law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage.

This was reinforced by Church teachings on the family, marriage, sexuality, contraception, abortion and divorce – all of which promoted a view of women as child-bearers and homemakers and argued against state intervention in domestic matters. The Church was always suspicious of any social initiative, but we need to keep in mind that while yesterday’s common assumptions may seem condescending or worse today, in 1937 the relegation of women to inferior roles was not seen as such, and while industrial development creates interesting work, in a peasant economy ‘women’s work’ can be pretty dreadful: there was a justification for enshrining women at home. Another perhaps surprising point is that the special position of the Church in the Constitution was regarded as a liberal move: de Valera had withstood great pressure for the Church to be established as the state religion. On the other hand, the intense ultramontane nature of Irish public life in the early to mid twentieth century supported the Church’s reactionary force: its principle of ‘protecting’ women was then already coming to be deemed discriminatory and divisive. Later it was seen as a mechanism for keeping women in their place. In Ireland the Church had a position similar to that in Italy and Spain but without parallel in the English-speaking world. There was no

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public conflict between Church and state until a referendum on contraception in 1979. The Constitution was criticised only by a minority. Most people welcomed it as an enlightened combination of the liberal values of parliamentary democracy and Catholic moral teaching. At the time there was a common wisdom in the Catholic world that Catholic social principles could be applied to secular life to create an overtly Christian state. This was what de Valera had set out to do, establishing on the one hand the separation of Church and state and on the other the primacy of Catholic moral teaching and the state’s obligation to abide by it. Southern Irish Protestants accepted Article 44, experience already having proved to them that their welfare was not threatened by Catholic Ireland. Political opponents principally criticised the office of President because, some thought, it would be used by de Valera to extend his personal power. Douglas Hyde’s unopposed election to the office soon demonstrated that such fears were groundless. The President, elected in his own right, would always be guaranteed authority as co-guardian with the Dáil of people’s rights. The IRA from 1922 onwards faced the full force of Church disapproval. Its members had been excommunicated for their opposition to the Free State in 1922–3, and its political initiatives were also condemned. Saor Eire was described as ‘communistic’ by the Church and this contributed to its rapid collapse (a month after its formation it was banned by the government with Church support). After 1932, Fianna Fáil policies and demeaning skirmishing with Blueshirts further reduced IRA appeal. The 1937 Constitution even persuaded some of its members of the legitimacy of the renamed Free State – Sean MacBride, IRA chief of staff, resigned from the secret army because he was satisfied by de Valera’s Constitution. However, as a result of the government’s failure to reunite the country in its 1938 settlement with Britain, the IRA gained new life. Border posts and customs houses were attacked during November and December that year. In December, the rump of the second Dáil – those anti-Treatyites elected to the Dáil in 1921 who had also stayed away from Fianna Fáil – handed over its theoretical powers as the government of the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 to the IRA’s Army Council. For the IRA, this was an important constitutional

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move. Once again it gave them a theoretical legitimacy to defend the Republic they had been fighting to establish ever since 1916. With the loss of men like O’Donnell and MacBride, the traditionalists who saw violence as the only answer to partition were firmly in control. On 12 January 1939 an IRA ultimatum was sent to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, demanding that the British withdraw from Northern Ireland within four days or else face the consequences of ‘appropriate action’ by the IRA. Not unexpectedly, neither Halifax nor the British government replied to or complied with this ultimatum, and so the IRA launched its ‘S-Plan’: a bombing campaign in England reminiscent of the Fenians in the 1860s and 1880s, aimed at disrupting services. On 16 January, seven explosions severely damaged some power stations and cables in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Alnwick. More explosions occurred the following day. On 4 February, large time bombs were detonated in London in the Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square underground stations, and there were other explosions in the city and in Coventry. Two days later, a large bomb was set off against the wall of Walton gaol in Liverpool. Bombings continued throughout February and March. On 29 March two large bombs damaged Hammersmith Bridge in London. The next day more bombs went off in Birmingham, Liverpool and Coventry. On 31 March, seven bombs exploded in London. During April, Sean Russell (who had succeeded Sean MacBride as IRA Chief of Staff) travelled to the United States to raise money from Irish-American groups to continue the campaign. On 5 May, two tear-gas bombs went off in Liverpool cinemas and four bombs exploded in Coventry and two in London. Later in the month, cinemas were set on fire in London and Birmingham. On 9 June a letter-bomb campaign disrupted post offices and postal services. On the evening of Saturday 24 June, as crowds came out of cinemas and theatres, a series of explosions around Piccadilly Circus in London brought down the front of the local Midland Bank and caused chaos as people panicked. On 26 July, bombs went off at London’s Victoria and King’s Cross stations; the following night three massive explosions in Liverpool destroyed a bridge and wrecked the post office in the city centre. On 25 August a bicycle bomb exploded in Coventry killing five people instantly and injuring another sixty. Over the next eight months eleven people were killed and over 120 were injured.

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Some of those involved were arrested, but it was the advent of draconian security measures with the Second World War that actually brought the IRA’s campaign to an end. The effect of the IRA bombings was in Britain to alienate public opinion completely and encourage Hibernophobia, and in Ireland first to shock and then to horrify people, and to bring to bear the full wrath of Fianna Fáil and the government against the IRA. Throughout 1938 and 1939, de Valera conducted an anti-partition campaign, and at first could not believe that the IRA (which he knew to be very weak) was behind the bombings. There was even a suggestion that it was an Orange plot to discredit his attempts to settle the border question peacefully. Soon realising that the IRA was, after all, responsible, de Valera cracked down as harshly as Cumann na nGaedheal before him. IRA and Republican marches and demonstrations were banned. In June an Offences Against the State Act was passed providing for trial by military tribunal and for the arrest and detention of people without trial. Having declared Ireland neutral at the outbreak of war, during the Emergency (as the period of the Second World War was called in Ireland) de Valera’s government executed six IRA men, allowed two more to die on hunger strike in prison (another died in 1946, after the war), and shot three while they were attempting to escape or avoid arrest. Abortive Nazi overtures to the IRA during the war helped justify de Valera’s actions on the grounds that IRA activity against Britain might compromise Irish neutrality and possibly even force Britain to invade the South. To the IRA, however, these executions and deaths were the final proof that de Valera was a ‘Free Stater’, a puppet of Britain, as willing to compromise the national ideal for the reins and patronage of power as Cosgrave and the Cumann na nGaedheal government of 1922–32 had been. The public reason for de Valera’s statement of neutrality in September 1939 was the continuation of partition. In truth, Irish public opinion was still often anti-British, and de Valera would have faced serious opposition within Fianna Fáil and the country as a whole if he had chosen to join Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth in the war; the issues of the civil war sixteen years earlier remained fresh. Fine Gael, although more seriously divided on the issue, broadly

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supported the policy (James Dillon, son of John Dillon and deputy leader of Fine Gael, courageously opposed neutrality on moral grounds, and was expelled from the party as a result). Winston Churchill offered the possibility of a united Ireland after the war in return for Irish participation, but de Valera adamantly refused, not convinced that Churchill could force unionists to agree to unity and seeing neutrality as the proof that he had secured effective independence for the twenty-six counties. In 1919 he had written that ‘our whole struggle is to get Ireland out of the cage in which the selfish statecraft of England would confine her – to get Ireland back into the free world from which she was ravished – to get her recognised as an independent unit in a world league of nations’. While he was personally sympathetic to the Allies, neutrality was also de Valera’s chance to give effect to his view of Anglo-Irish relations. During the war years, faced by harsh economic conditions as trade plummeted, about 93,000 Irishmen emigrated – nearly all to Britain because of the hazards of the Atlantic crossing – finding work in munitions factories, docks, the railways. About 60,000 southern Irishmen served in the British army during the war. Allied airmen who came down in Ireland were allowed home, while Germans were interned. But punctiliously observing the forms of neutrality, in 1945 de Valera even went so far as to pay his condolences officially to the Nazi minister in Dublin upon the death of Hitler. Privately he explained, ‘to have failed to call upon the German representative would have been an act of unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation . . . [T]he formal acts of courtesy paid on such occasions as the death of the head of a State should not have attached to them any further special significance.’ With the end of the war in Europe, Churchill in his victory speech broadcast to the world by the BBC on 15 May 1945 insisted upon condemning Ireland’s neutrality: Had it been necessary we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera . . . With a restraint and poise to which, I venture to say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera Government to frolic with the German and later with the Japanese representatives to their hearts’ content.

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Three days later de Valera replied on Radio Éireann, Ireland’s national broadcasting organisation (it began transmissions on 1 January 1926 as ‘Radio 2RN’, a phonetic play upon ‘to Éireann’, changing its name in 1932), reaching perhaps a tenth of the audience Churchill had enjoyed. It was a brilliant reply, touching the nation’s consciousness, rebuking Churchill: Mr Churchill makes it clear that in certain circumstances he would have violated our neutrality and that he would justify his action by Britain’s necessity. It seems strange to me that Mr Churchill does not see that this, if it be accepted, would mean that Britain’s necessity would become a moral code . . . Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?

In 1948, Fine Gael in coalition with the Labour Party and Clann na Poblachta, a new, ardently republican party formed in 1946 by Sean MacBride and other leading ex-IRA men, won the general election and ended sixteen years of uninterrupted Fianna Fáil power. The new taoiseach was John A. Costello (1891–1976) of Fine Gael. William Cosgrave had retired from politics in 1944, with Richard Mulcahy (the 1919–21 IRA Chief of Staff and Collins’ successor as Commander-inChief of the Free State National Army during the civil war) then becoming party leader. Largely because of continuing civil war animosities, Mulcahy was not acceptable to Clann na Poblachta as head of the coalition, and so Costello, a barrister who had been Attorney General from 1926 to 1932, became a compromise leader. His government (prompted strongly by Clann na Poblachta) quickly turned its attention to the social issues de Valera had left to one side while he asserted Irish sovereignty and wrestled with the economic hardship of the Emergency. republic The great achievement of the Fine Gael/Clann na Poblachta/Labour coalition was its successful effort to eradicate tuberculosis, masterminded by the young and idealistic Clann na Poblachta Minister for

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Health, Dr Noel Browne. He mortgaged part of future health service revenue to raise the funds necessary to build, equip and staff the hospitals and clinics needed to fight the disease which regularly accounted for 3,000–4,000 deaths a year. Within a few years, deaths from tuberculosis became relatively infrequent: 1,600 in 1952; 694 in 1957. The most startling change was the declaration of a republic. On 7 September 1948, while on a visit to Canada, Costello at a press conference confirmed speculation that a republic would be established. This caught many ministers by surprise: it had not been discussed in full Cabinet. Still, it was consistent with Clann na Poblachta’s republicanism and so not opposed by that party; it was immaterial to Labour, so accepted by them, and despite the traditional pro-Commonwealth leanings of Fine Gael, they too accepted it for the sake of party and coalition unity and because it was thought (erroneously) that by calling the country a Republic, the IRA would no longer feel justified in resorting to violence. In fact, the change had no effect on the IRA, and merely served to make more permanent the partition of Ireland. Before 1949 there was always the hope that within the British Commonwealth, Northern Ireland and the South might one day unite peacefully. After 1949, Northern Irish unionists were even more estranged. Reforms were undertaken in other areas as well. In 1949 the Land Rehabilitation Project was introduced, which over ten years used massive state aid (£40 million) to develop 4 million acres of profitable land which had not been used (or had fallen into disuse) because of lack of investment. An Anglo-Irish trade agreement in 1948 secured higher prices for Irish agricultural exports to Britain. The statesponsored Industrial Development Authority was founded in 1949 to plan and encourage industrial investment and expansion. It subsequently became a model sought out by many other countries because of its success in combining public and private enterprise: in 1979 it negotiated some 1,500 new industrial projects creating about 35,000 new jobs over the following five years. Another attempt at major reform, however, resulted in one of the most significant political controversies in Ireland. As part of his effort to improve Irish health services, Noel Browne sought to implement a scheme along the lines of the

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British welfare-state national health service. Particularly concerned by the high level of infant mortality in Ireland (in larger towns the rate was over 100 deaths per 1,000 births – ten times more than that for tuberculosis alone), he decided to introduce free health education and care for all mothers and children up to the age of sixteen – the Mother and Child Scheme. The Irish Medical Association opposed the scheme (even going so far as employing a private detective to report on Dr Browne), arguing that it was socialist and that by introducing a state interest in patients it would interfere with the doctor–patient relationship. As in Britain, where the medical profession had employed the same arguments in opposing the National Health Service before settling down to it, these points could have been overcome. But Browne also faced the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy who wrote to the Taoiseach, Costello, declaring that the scheme threatened the sanctity of the family. In the view of the bishops, the effects of the scheme would be in direct opposition to the rights of the family and of the individual and are liable to very great abuse . . . If adopted in law they would constitute a readymade instrument for future totalitarian aggression. The right to provide for the health of children belongs to parents, not the state. The state has the right to intervene only in a subsidiary capacity, to supplement, not to supplant.

Browne strove to allay the bishops’ fears, telling Costello, ‘I should have thought it unnecessary to point out that from the beginning it has been my concern to see that the Mother and Child Scheme contained nothing contrary to Catholic moral teaching,’ but to no avail. He refused to compromise on the free nature of the scheme and, denied the support of the Cabinet and his own party (Costello told Browne the government could not support a scheme the Church found objectionable on moral grounds, and Sean MacBride, leader of Clann na Poblachta, asked Browne to resign), Browne left the government in April 1951, releasing the correspondence on the affair to the press. A month later, as a result of defections from Clann na Poblachta over government proposals to increase the price of milk, the coalition lost its majority in the Dáil, and after the ensuing general election de Valera formed another government. The affair demonstrated the power of the Church and the conservative nature of the state, convincing Northern Irish Protestants,

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for example, that a united Ireland would be a clericalist Ireland. In an editorial on Browne’s resignation, the Irish Times pointed out that not only had the free Mother and Child Scheme as well as a promising political career been lost, but ‘the most serious revelation, however, is that the Roman Catholic Church would seem to be the effective government of this country’. The British ambassador in Dublin, Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, reported to London that the affair had ‘brought out the dominating position and authority claimed by and conceded to the Roman Catholic hierarchy’ and that ‘above all, the effect of the incident has been to set back decisively any prospects that there might have been (and these were never more than the slightest) of an understanding between North and South over partition’. The collapse of the scheme, the fall of the government and Browne’s resignation cannot be attributed solely to the influence of the Church. There were tensions about policy generally within the coalition, and there were tensions within Clann na Poblachta and between Browne and MacBride which also contributed. The influence of the Irish Medical Association was also considerable. Nevertheless, the point was that the relationship between Church and state was crucial to the whole affair. The Church certainly did not seek the conflict, nor did it do anything except make its opposition to the scheme clear. In contrast, at the same time in Northern Ireland, the UK’s free National Health Service was being introduced with muted objection from the Church, making the North–South divide clear. The Church had a genuine, if fuddy-duddy concern that a free scheme might encourage extramarital sex, and it also considered that it had a proper interest in the moral life of people, and the state did not. Its opposition was sufficient to decide the government, and this the bishops knew. However, it was a pyrrhic victory. Most people resented the Church’s influence against the scheme, and anticlericalism, always a strong element in Fianna Fáil, was strengthened. Over the next twenty-five years episcopal influence declined and the Church itself became far more liberal in its attitudes. In 1973 the Church actually welcomed the introduction of a free health service. In 1979 the government was able to withstand Church pressure and legalise the sale of contraceptives to married persons in chemists’ shops on production of a doctor’s prescription.

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In 1951 de Valera’s government was in a minority in the Dáil, only surviving with the support of some Independent TDs. Nevertheless, it passed some of the most important legislation of the post-war years. A Health Act in 1953 introduced a means-tested medical service for those ‘unable to provide by their own industry or other lawful means the medical or surgical appliances necessary for themselves and their dependents’. Every person applying for the service was scrutinised on their ability to pay (in 1958, 28.5 per cent of the population was recorded as being eligible for free attention, a striking comment on the country’s standard of living). In 1952 an Adoption Act permitted adoption (as long as the adopting parents were of the same religion as the child and its parents – the Church’s influence again), and a Social Welfare Act coordinated state benefits and pensions for widows and orphans, as well as instituting a compulsory national insurance system involving contributions from employers and employees. These measures, together with Browne’s successful health legislation, established an embryonic welfare state (clearly modelled on Britain). However, of more immediate concern to the electorate was the country’s dismal economic situation. Years of high inflation and the continuation of rationing into 1954 (it had begun in 1939 as an Emergency measure) lost Fianna Fáil support. In an attempt to reduce inflation, the government increased the tax burden from £98 million to £103 million in 1953–4. In May 1954, hoping for popular endorsement, de Valera called a general election, only to return instead to opposition with fewer seats (sixty-five) than at any time since 1932. Costello became Taoiseach for the second time of a coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour with Clann na Poblachta and Independent support in the Dáil. The 1954 general election revealed a political development of significance: a two-party system was growing with Labour always a consistent third. In the 1951 election, Fine Gael’s strength in the Dáil had increased from thirty-one seats to forty; in 1954 it went up again to fifty. Fianna Fáil maintained its Dáil strength throughout (sixty-eight seats in 1948; sixty-nine in 1951; sixty-five in 1954). Independents and newer parties were beginning to be squeezed out (Clann na Poblachta went from ten seats in 1948 to two in 1951 and three in 1954; Independents went from twelve to fourteen to five). Fianna Fáil, in power for twenty-one of the state’s thirty-four years,

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had become the dominant party, but Fine Gael had recovered to become the alternative. The odd thing was that there were still few doctrinal differences between the two parties, and while civil war divisions were always close to the surface, political contests had become concerned principally with efficiency and competing electoral promises. This has remained the characteristic of Irish politics to the present. Electoral phenomena such as the initial success of Clann na Poblachta or the return of pro-IRA Sinn Féin candidates in the 1981 and subsequent general elections did not affect the two-party domination: that took the calamity of 2008–10. Labour, which might have been expected to make an appeal – at least occasionally – to a larger audience, found that the reforming legislation of Fianna Fáil and coalition governments satisfied the electorate. Another problem Labour faced was that its origins – echoing those of the British Labour Party – were firmly rooted in industrial trade unions and the cities, and it did not have a natural appeal for the conservatively minded agricultural community that comprised half the population, and that de Valera appealed to. Emigration, rather than socialism, was the impoverished Irishman’s answer to social discontent and lack of opportunity. Emigration was an intractable part of Irish life until the mid 1960s and Lemass’ time as Taoiseach (1959–66) in succession to de Valera. Tom Garvin, who would go on to a distinguished career as an historian, recalled the sense of hope and opportunity that Lemass’ taking office brought to a sixteen-year-old boy: I remember walking down the Rathmines road in Dublin with a friend, who remarked, ‘You know, Tom, we mightn’t have to emigrate’. The upturn in the economy, which had started hesitantly in 1957, could be sensed, even at our very low level; something had changed. The departure of the Old Man to the president’s residence in Phoenix Park symbolised that change.3

From an average of 18,711 emigrants a year in the ten-year period ending in 1946, emigration rose to an average of 23,913 a year in the period 1946–51; 39,352 a year in the period 1951–6; 42,400 a year in 1956–61. Unlike other European countries where emigrants were usually married men who brought wives and children with them, a 3

Tom Garvin, Judging Lemass: The Measure of the Man (Dublin, 2009), p. 205.

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majority of Irish emigrants were women, mostly single and young. In the 1960s, for the first time since the famine, emigration fell dramatically, averaging 16,121 a year between 1961 and 1966 and 10,781 a year in 1966–71. The relationship between emigration and living standards is a complex one, but without doubt the rapid decline of emigration can be correlated with the rapid economic development of the 1960s, as can the fact that in 1966, for the first time, Ireland recorded an increase in population (2.33 per cent), confirmed in 1971 with another increase (3.27 per cent) bringing the population to 2.978 million. The improvement in standards of living and the buoyancy of the Irish economy were due, in large part, to economic planning. The idea that bureaucrats can actually plan anything successfully is somewhat quaint, but in Ireland it happened. It should also be said that the 1960s worldwide was a time of increasing prosperity and world trade, and Ireland would have enjoyed some benefit in any case. But the coincidence of bureaucratic awareness, pragmatic governments and favourable economic circumstances made a tremendous difference. The 1922–32 Cumann na nGaedheal government was the first to experiment in a form of economic planning with the setting up of bodies like the Electricity Supply Board and the Agricultural Credit Corporation, which by regulating power and credit were to become central features of the Irish economy. While it was always accepted that the state was primarily responsible for creating suitable economic climates through taxation and monetary policies, the proposition that the state should also be involved in detailed matters such as job and industry creation was new, reflecting the influence of the economist John Maynard Keynes. Of course, in Ireland as elsewhere, economic intervention by the state had occurred – the Land Rehabilitation Programme and the Shannon scheme were massive examples – but it had been haphazard, not part of a coherent plan. In January 1949, Costello’s government published a White Paper, Ireland’s Long Term Recovery Programme, setting out expectations on imports and on production (mainly agricultural and mainly for export). This was required by the United States in exchange for Marshall Aid, £47 million of which Ireland received in 1948–51. The programme was actually produced by the Department of External Affairs and not the Department of Finance which, at the time, did not

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approve of the idea of economic planning, preferring the conservative, classical economic notions of the free market. Seven years later the attitude of the Department of Finance changed with the appointment of T. K. Whitaker (b. 1916) as its Secretary during Costello’s second coalition government. Ken Whitaker had entered the civil service in 1934 and had joined the Department of Finance four years later. His appointment to the senior post in the department, like all such appointments, was made by the government of the day, but was not an exercise in political patronage: the tradition of an independent civil service established during the Union in the nineteenth century survived the civil war and subsequent political turmoils. One of Whitaker’s first actions was to write a memorandum urging long-term planning aimed at expanding the economy, implicitly recognising that an industry-based Irish economy could not be self-sufficient but would have to import and export to survive. That same year the coalition government passed a Finance Act which provided tax incentives for exporters. The coalition was defeated in a general election in March 1957 (Clann na Poblachta had withdrawn its support, citing as the reason lack of progress on ending partition, thus forcing an election; continuing economic difficulties resulted in the defeat), and de Valera became Taoiseach once again at the age of seventy-four, leading a Fianna Fáil government with seventy-eight seats in the Dáil – an overall majority of ten. This government was to be one of the most energetic post-war administrations, publishing Whitaker’s memorandum as a White Paper, Economic Development, in November 1958. De Valera retired as Taoiseach in June 1959 when he was elected President; he was re-elected in 1966, serving altogether for fourteen years as head of state. He died in 1975. As President of the Executive Council and then Taoiseach, he had run the affairs of Ireland for twenty-two of the state’s first thirty-seven years. The party he founded and dominated, Fianna Fáil, was in power for thirty-seven of the state’s first fifty years. His interest in a revived peasant, Gaelic Ireland pronouncedly influenced the country’s development, providing a natural political corollary to the conservative nature of the country as was demonstrated in his Constitution, which remains in force. Despite his unusually successful political career, de Valera was an outsider. He did not fit into any norm of Irish leadership. Michael

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Collins’ early death had cleared his way. He was a cosmopolitan, at the age of two sent by his mother from New York to Ireland where he was reared by his grandparents, and then chose to be Irish. He was not an abandoned child, but a child set aside. He yearned to belong and determined to create and shape something that he would belong to. His passion for the 1916 Republic was very real, not least because he found, after the executions of its leaders, that he ‘owned’ it. After the civil war, he bent himself to create his country as set out in his Document No. 2. He was a man of powerful will with a strong sense of himself and his position. He was narrow, but his narrowness rested on principle; he was not a self-deceiving man. James Dillon considered that he ‘never did anything which at the time of doing he believed to be wrong. When he acted, he would act ruthlessly and inflexibly and never look back.’ ‘Nature never fashioned me to be a partisan leader,’ said de Valera. ‘Every instinct of mine would indicate that I was meant to be a dyed-in-the wool Tory or even a Bishop, rather than the leader of a Revolution.’ At times he spoke like an absolutist (as during the Treaty debate and the Economic War), but he was a most effective pragmatist (as he demonstrated when he formed a Free State government ten years after the Treaty). He generated strong loyalty amongst those he worked with, and was personally warm, charming and friendly. He was often referred to variously as ‘The Long Fellow’, ‘Dev’ and ‘Chief’. Many people who initially distrusted or disliked him were won over by his frankness and sincerity (W. B. Yeats was one such). Despite his conservatism, he could surprise. His love of rugby angered the GAA. He established the Institute of Advanced Studies in 1940, personally inviting Erwin Schrödinger to be its first Director of the School for Theoretical Physics. He conferred dignity on the new state. Charles de Gaulle’s decision, after resigning the French presidency in 1969, to stay with President de Valera was an acknowledgement of that dignity. De Valera’s successor as Taoiseach was Sean Lemass (1899–1971), an old IRA man who had proved to be one of the ablest and most astute Fianna Fáil ministers. Between 1932 and 1939 he was Minister for Industry and Commerce and used his position to implement interventionist policies to sustain employment and the economy during the trade war with the UK. He developed state corporations – ‘semi-state bodies’ – modelled on the 1927 Electricity Supply Board,

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to operate commercially. Aer Lingus, the Irish Sugar Company and the Turf Development Board (later Bord na Móna) were all established by Lemass. He used his influence to support a major house building and rehousing programme (132,000 houses were built), and during the Emergency as Minister for Supplies he managed rationing and the efficient direction of resources so that the economy did not grind to a halt. As Taoiseach from 1959 until 1966 (Fianna Fáil lost eight seats in the 1961 general election before its economic policies began to have real effect, and Lemass then headed a minority government), he implemented Whitaker’s recommendations. Foreign companies were offered tax-free periods while they established themselves in Ireland and began production. Firm administrative measures were taken to streamline state bodies and, with tax benefits, to encourage export industries. The government pressed banks to make credit available for economic expansion and generally removed restrictions. Results came quickly. In 1960 the volume of exports from the twenty-six counties exceeded the 1929 volume for the first time. By 1966, exports by volume were 59 per cent above the 1929 level. Agricultural output rose by 9 per cent in the 1960s, but the real growth came in the industrial sector where output increased by 82 per cent between 1959 and 1968. Unemployment rapidly fell in consequence. Real incomes rose by 4 per cent a year from 1959 to 1963. The move from economic nationalism to economic internationalism inherent in this export-orientated policy also involved recognition of Ireland’s economic dependence upon Britain, her traditional principal trading partner (47 per cent of Irish exports went to the UK in 1979; 50 per cent of imports came from the UK). Thus when Britain applied for membership of the European Economic Community in 1961, Ireland followed suit not only because membership was a logical step to take on behalf of Irish exports penetrating the European market, but also because British membership and Irish exclusion would have been disastrous for the Irish economy, forcing a repeat of the Economic War of the 1930s with EEC tariff barriers being raised in Britain against Irish goods. Along with Britain, Ireland was finally admitted to membership of the EEC in 1973. Imaginative policies, notably in education and low business tax and incentives, from the 1960s onwards provided a framework within

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which economic development took place. Many US companies were quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided and established themselves in Ireland, especially after Ireland became a member of the EEC thus enabling tariff-free European trade. The changes that followed were dramatic, representing a sea-change in politics away from civil war memories and the narrow nationalism of Griffith’s Sinn Féin which had coloured the major Southern Irish parties after 1922. Instead, Ireland became an aspiring, modern, industrialised nation no longer trammelled by political and cultural romanticism, tuned into a wider world. The economy became hugely dependent upon trade. Gross domestic product in 1990 was $33,900 million, giving a per capita earning rate of $9,690 and an impressive real growth rate of 4.1 per cent per year. Agriculture, right into the 1960s the most important sector, remained significant, accounting in 1990 for 10 per cent of the economy and 5 per cent of the workforce of 1,293,000 people, providing 85 per cent of the Republic’s food needs. Industry – principally food products, construction, brewing, textiles, pharmaceuticals, clothing, chemicals, machinery, transportation equipment, glass and crystal – accounted for 37 per cent of gross domestic product and about 80 per cent of exports, and employed about one-quarter of the workforce. Services, largely in public employment, accounted for about 57 per cent of employment. The principal exports of the Republic in the years up to 1990 were chemicals, data processing equipment (an industry that grew up during the 1980s), industrial machinery, live animals and animal products. The main imports were food, animal feed, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, machinery, textiles and clothing. In 1987, after years of deficit, the balance of payments was brought into surplus, and in 1990 exports amounted to $24,600 million and imports to $20,700 million. About 34 per cent of exports and 41 per cent of imports were to and from the UK, high but lower than in previous decades, demonstrating the far-reaching changes in dependencies that membership of the European Community (EC) had brought since 1979: 50 per cent of Ireland’s exports and 25 per cent of imports in 1990 were to and from members of the EC other than the UK. The rate of inflation, which reached double digits in the late 1970s, was down to 3.3 per cent in 1990.

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A significant caveat to impressive economic performance in the 1970s was the proportion of the workforce employed by public bodies. Between 1967 and 1982, public sector employment increased from about 138,000 to about 226,000. An additional 70,000 people were employed by semi-state bodies, a number that remained fairly constant throughout the 1970s. In a period of growth such as the 1960s and 1970s, such a proportion of the labour market dependent upon the state could be – and was – justified in terms of the equitable distribution of national wealth. State-sponsored employment was seen in civil service and government circles as a way of creating jobs and reducing emigration: ministers praised public sector employers for increasing their staffing levels. To some extent it was a form of spreading the risks of modernisation, with the state adjudicating taxpayers’ payment of the bulk of the cost. But as growth declined and recession bit in the 1980s, this policy required higher taxes and thus reduced national competitiveness, especially since the public sector does not actually make items that could be sold or exported. Changing the balance of employment away from state services and towards productive enterprises was a necessary and painful process for the country, resulting in severe political controversies during the 1980s. High unemployment – 16.6 per cent in 1990 (along with Spain, the worst rate in western Europe) – and increased rates of emigration (an estimated 280,000 people left Ireland in the 1980s), however, were the prices paid for change. For more than twenty years after 1959 the population grew and emigration declined, with the result that by 1981 more than half the inhabitants were under thirty. In 1979, the population numbered 3.368 million; in 1991 it was 3.489 million, and it continued to grow. The birth rate in 1991 was almost twice the death rate – 15 births per 1,000 population; 9 deaths per 1,000 population. But emigration during the 1980s at an estimated average rate of 28,000 annually (it varied yearly between 5 and 13 emigrants per 1,000 population) meant that while the national population remained young, many younger people still left. An important difference underlay renewed emigration compared to previous exoduses. In the 1980s, emigration was fundamentally a function of Irish achievement; emigrants were not driven by want or persecution. High levels of unemployment had an effect, but this

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was only one factor. Emigrants were well-educated (Ireland achieved one of the highest general levels of education in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s) and skilled workers, looking for opportunities that Ireland could not offer. And they now looked for opportunities in new lands in Europe and not simply in the traditional emigrant destinations of Britain, North America and Australia. The political effects of these social and economic changes were enormous, not least upon the desires and ambitions of a young electorate, changing the traditional preponderances of Irish politics. Younger voters did not know what the quarrels conditioning the party system were about. The influence of the Church and Catholic morality greatly diminished, and the traditional Fianna Fáil–Fine Gael polarities broke down in the 1980s (although not to the degree that the youthfulness of the country in 1981 had suggested). Nevertheless, the 1980s were to be politically volatile as younger voters increasingly made themselves felt. There were five general elections and three referendums. Fine Gael changed leaders once, Labour three times, and Fianna Fáil split with the creation of a new party, the Progressive Democrats. haughey Charles Haughey (1925–2006) was Lemass’ son-in-law. His family had come from the north, and his father had served in the Free State army, but Haughey did not let that govern his political leaning. He was one of seven children, growing up on a north Dublin housing estate. He was a keen sportsman and a scholarship-winning student: everyone he encountered noted his intelligence. He studied accountancy at University College, Dublin, and law at King’s Inns. He founded a successful accountancy firm and became a career politician as a minister in every Fianna Fáil government from 1960, and Taoiseach of four governments between 1979 and 1992. After a scandal in 1969 he had returned to the back benches and served as a loyal party member, working successfully to regain support within Fianna Fáil. But he was the first leader never to win an overall majority in the Dáil, and his tenure was marked by deepening rifts within the party. Economic and social (as is the case in democracies) rather than nationalist issues had become the heart of politics in the Republic, and

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Haughey’s political efforts were dominated by the need – broadly agreed by Fine Gael and Labour – to cut the country’s deficit and public spending. In December 1979 he was elected leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in succession to Jack Lynch (who had succeeded Lemass). Eighteen months later, with a twenty-seat parliamentary majority, he called an election. Despite winning more seats than any other party, Fianna Fáil lost its majority. Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael formed a government with the support of Labour. FitzGerald’s mother was a Belfast Presbyterian and a Republican sympathiser during the civil war; his father was a leading nationalist journalist and Free State politician (first Foreign Minister of the Free State) in the 1920s. Perhaps as a result of this heritage, Garret had a deep emotional commitment to peace in the North. He was an almost stereotypical member of what might be termed the Irish nomenklatura: that small group of metropolitan, well-educated men and women who did not emigrate, preferring to inhabit universities, the civil service, nationalised industries, newspapers and magazines at home, peppered with stints abroad. FitzGerald (1926–2011) had a career typical of the Irish elite, enabled by being part of a small talent pool in a small country. He was a barrister, research and schedules manager for Aer Lingus for eleven years, a university lecturer in economics for fourteen years, a journalist, and a television commentator. He was variously Irish correspondent for the BBC, the Economist, and the Financial Times. He entered politics in 1965, and at the age of forty-six in 1973 became the Republic’s Foreign Minister. Following Fine Gael’s defeat in the 1977 general election, he became party leader. As Taoiseach in 1981, FitzGerald inherited Haughey’s problem: how to overturn the 1960s and 1970s political consensus on economic management without losing elections. With more than 20 per cent of the electorate dependent upon state jobs, the reductions in public expenditure necessary to contain deficits had very direct political consequences. In January 1982, the Dáil by a single vote rejected a cost-cutting Fine Gael budget that proposed to reduce subsidies on milk and butter, and to impose value added tax on children’s clothes and shoes. On 18 February, thirty weeks after Fine Gael took office, there was another general election. Fine Gael lost two seats; Fianna Fáil gained seven seats and, with the support of the three Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party (the political wing of the Official IRA) TDs and two

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Independents, Haughey became Taoiseach for the second time on 9 March 1982. Haughey’s second term in office was marked by internal party wrangling and public scandal. Desmond O’Malley, Minister for Industry and Commerce in the 1977–81 Fianna Fáil government, challenged Haughey’s leadership immediately after the February election. He was finally persuaded to withdraw in the name of party unity. Another senior Fianna Fáil TD, George Colley, refused a Cabinet position when he was denied the position of Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), and then in June made a thinly veiled public attack on Haughey in a speech whose theme was ‘low standards in high places’. There followed a summer of scandals. Haughey’s election agent was charged with personation; a double murderer was arrested in the Attorney General’s apartment; newspapers carried allegations (in due course shown to be true) of illegal phone tapping by the government. In October, a Fianna Fáil TD proposed a vote of no confidence in Haughey’s leadership, and a month later the government lost such a vote prompted by its proposals to cut back the health service, forcing another general election. On 24 November 1982, Fianna Fáil won seventy-five seats (a loss of ten), Fine Gael seventy (a gain of seven) and Labour sixteen (a gain of one), while five seats went to others. Garret FitzGerald became Taoiseach for the second time at the head of a Fine Gael/Labour coalition. The Troubles and terrorism in the North, reawakened in 1969, inevitably impinged upon politics, not least by fuelling an awareness that Ireland was out of step with Britain and much of Europe in areas of social policy. As the 1980s opened, it was still impossible to divorce and illegal to purchase contraceptives without a doctor’s prescription, or to have an abortion in the Republic. In 1981, anti-abortion campaigners – the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) – concerned that abortion might one day be legalised, secured a pledge from Haughey to hold a referendum to make clear that while not specifically prohibited in the Constitution, it would always be illegal. FitzGerald honoured the pledge in September 1983, and in a low poll (54.6 per cent), by a two to one majority voters rejected abortion in all cases except when a mother’s life might be threatened by an unborn child. It was an interesting result on two grounds. First, the Church had campaigned vigorously for a big anti-abortion vote, but

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the turnout was disappointing, an index of its reduced authority. Second, there was a clear division between rural Ireland and Dublin on the issue, suggesting that as Dublin grew (as it had been steadily), the balance of opinion could well change towards a more cosmopolitan view. Within ten years such a change had taken place. Contraception next generated division. Church control of women was policed by the theology of sexual relations and was a central battleground in women’s issues. In 1985 a Bill allowing the sale to people aged eighteen or more of condoms without prescriptions, and the sale of other contraceptives, but only from chemists and health boards, was passed by the Dáil despite the opposition of Fianna Fáil and the Church. Desmond O’Malley refused to toe the Fianna Fáil line on the issue and voted for the Bill: in February he was expelled from the party. Later in the year, another Fianna Fáil TD, Mary Harney, was expelled for supporting the Anglo-Irish Agreement whereby the Republic recognised the position of Northern Ireland within the UK and in return was recognised by the UK as having status in Northern Irish affairs. Together, O’Malley and Harney in December formed a new party, the Progressive Democrats. In January 1986 they were joined by two more TDs defecting from Fianna Fáil. On 26 June 1986 came a referendum on divorce. The Church waged a vigorous campaign to maintain the ban embedded in the Constitution. Early opinion polls indicated a large majority of people in favour of legalising divorce, but as the campaign progressed, anti-divorce spokesmen placed telling emphasis on the provisions of Irish law that, unless simultaneously reformed, would see the erosion of divorced women’s legal and financial rights. The result, in another relatively low turnout – 59 per cent – was 63.5 per cent to keep the ban. As in the 1983 vote on abortion, there was a strong Dublin–rural split. In January 1987, four Labour ministers resigned from FitzGerald’s coalition when it was proposed to cut public expenditure by £300 million, thus forcing a general election held on 17 February. Economic issues dominated the three main party platforms, but there was broad agreement between them on the need for austerity in order to strengthen the country’s economy and reduce emigration: 30,000 people were estimated to have left the country in 1986 alone.

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The Anglo-Irish Agreement did not become an election issue: Fianna Fáil, having opposed the agreement, now undertook to honour it. The Progressive Democrats argued for radical economic remedies, and gained substantial support in consequence, winning fourteen seats and displacing Labour, with twelve seats, as the third party. Fianna Fáil won eighty-one seats and Fine Gael fifty-one. When the Dáil met on 10 March, Charles Haughey was elected Taoiseach (by the Speaker’s casting vote) for the third time. He pledged to continue with economic reform, and Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats supported him in this. In May 1989, Haughey called yet another election, seeking to capitalise on the popularity that economic reform had apparently won for his government. He had more than halved the budget deficit, increased the annual rate of growth in the economy to over 4 per cent per year, and for the first time in many years had secured and maintained a surplus in the balance of trade for over a year. These successes were due in large part to Ireland’s membership of the European Community, especially the benefits accruing from the easement of trade. Community membership had a transforming quality for the country, enabling and accelerating change and improvement. Levels of unemployment (17 per cent) and emigration (an estimated 40,000 in 1988; 43,000 in 1989), however, remained high, and public expenditure cuts had affected welfare and social services and thus poorer families who traditionally tended to support Fianna Fáil. The election was held on 15 June, and the result brought disappointment to Haughey, who had been hoping to obtain an overall parliamentary majority. Fianna Fáil won seventy-seven seats, Fine Gael fifty-five, Labour fifteen, the Workers’ Party (having dropped its Sinn Féin association) seven, the Progressive Democrats six, and others six more. After two weeks of bargaining, a Fianna Fáil/ Progressive Democrat coalition was formed, and Haughey was elected Taoiseach for the fourth time. It was the first time in its history that Fianna Fáil was partner in a coalition. Garret FitzGerald resigned the leadership of Fine Gael soon afterwards, saying that it was time for younger men to take the lead. He was succeeded by Alan Dukes, who had been his Minister for Finance. Haughey was to receive a further disappointment in the 7 November 1990 presidential election. His candidate, Brian Lenihan,

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a leading Fianna Fáil stalwart and Minister for Foreign Affairs, entered the campaign as favourite. Controversy arose about Lenihan’s actions nearly nine years earlier in January 1982. It was alleged that he had tried to put political pressure on the President, Patrick Hillery, an old Fianna Fáil colleague, over whether or not to call an election at that time. Lenihan denied making telephone calls to the President, but then a tape recording was released in which he was heard to admit that he had made the calls. He was defeated by Mary Robinson, who had made a name for herself as a leading campaigner for divorce, contraception and women’s rights. Robinson gained nearly 52 per cent of the vote, becoming the Republic’s first female President. Like FitzGerald, Robinson came from the Irish elite. Both her parents were doctors. She was sent to finishing school in France, then attended Trinity College, Dublin, to study law, going on to obtain a master’s degree at Harvard Law School in 1967. Coming back to Dublin, she married Nicholas Robinson, the son of a Protestant banker and a former political cartoonist of the Irish Times. She had three children and made a legal career as an advocate for women’s rights, joining the Labour Party and serving in the Senate for twenty years. In 1985 she left the party in protest at its refusal to support her view that unionists should have been involved in the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; five years later she accepted Labour’s nomination for the presidency. In the presidential election she won the support of most women, particularly after Fianna Fáil tried to smear her as a bad wife and mother. One scandal too many finally tripped Haughey. Early in 1992, Sean Doherty, a former Fianna Fáil Minister for Justice, revealed that Haughey had been fully informed of illegal government phone tapping that took place in 1982. The Progressive Democrats threatened to withdraw from the coalition, forcing Haughey’s resignation on 30 January. Margaret Thatcher, who as British prime minister throughout the 1980s dealt repeatedly with Haughey and FitzGerald, compared the two men: Mr. Haughey had throughout his career been associated with the most Republican strand in respectable Irish politics. How ‘respectable’ was a subject of some controversy . . . I found him easy to get on with, less talkative

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and more realistic than Garret FitzGerald . . . Charles Haughey was tough, able and politically astute with few illusions and, I am sure, not much affection for the British . . . Garret FitzGerald prided himself on being a cosmopolitan intellectual. He had little time for the myths of Irish Republicanism and would have liked to secularise the Irish Constitution and state, not least – but not just – as a way of drawing the North into a united Ireland. Unfortunately, like many modern liberals, he overestimated his own powers of persuasion over his colleagues and countrymen. He was a man of as many words as Charles Haughey was few.4

Such a description Haughey undoubtedly wore with pride. corruption Sean Lemass – one of the few senior politicians who did not make money out of politics – had battled cronyism as a minister and taoiseach for over three decades. ‘[He] was quite unpopular among many F[ianna] F[áil] TDs, in particular those . . . who built their political fortunes on patronage and jobbery,’ Jack McQuillan, a Clann na Poblachta TD, recalled. ‘L[emass] didn’t believe in jobbery and wanted to shield the operations of the semi-states from the Dáil for this very reason, many of the FF people appointed to boards etc. operated them as fiefdoms.’5 With Lemass’ support, in 1958 the chairman of Aer Lingus warned each Fianna Fáil TD, ‘not to recommend any person for employment’: the airline wanted properly qualified people. The everdeepening culture of jobs-for-the-boys, looking the other way that was, in the end, to pass into outright criminality had entrenched itself within twenty years of Fianna Fáil first coming to power. The new prosperity ushered in under Lemass and Whitaker afforded lucrative opportunities for politicians and businessmen (notably in construction), posing a dilemma that was recognised even at the time: Lemass and the civil service lacked the experience to regulate the greedy aspects of rapid new prosperity. Their knowledge was of a different era and kind, familiar with agricultural matters, emotionally engaged with the prideful aspects of establishing a new 4 5

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 388, 393. Tom Garvin, Judging Lemass, The Measure of the Man (Dublin, 2009), p. 135.

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country emerging from the sacrifices of the Economic War and of battling for food and energy during the Second World War. Protectionism had characterised the first decades of the Free State and Republic, a policy that Lemass had been central in applying; moving to welcome freer trade and non-state entrepreneurial effort was his great achievement, but this transformation preoccupied him; behind this, greed took root. Haughey came to personify the corruption pervading politics. He led Fianna Fáil throughout the 1980s and all the while there grew unsavoury rumours about the sources of his increasing wealth. He admired business, boldly stating in his 1957 maiden speech in the Dáil, ‘The trouble with this country is that too many people are making insufficient profits.’ He launched a Fianna Fáil fundraising body, Taca (‘support’ in Irish), in 1969. A Cabinet colleague, Kevin Boland, recalled a Taca meeting with ministers: We were all organised by Haughey and sent to different tables around the room. The extraordinary thing about my table was that everybody at it was in some way or other connected with the construction industry.6

Haughey was aggressively nationalist about the North and still saw Britain as an imperial power. His perceived anti-Britishness harked back to an earlier generation and also made it difficult for him convincingly to endorse Anglo-Irish agreements and cooperation in the war against terrorism. He took pride in subtle domestic political arrangements. As Taoiseach, he was open to ideas and prepared to undertake economic and social reform – albeit at the prodding of coalition partners. Garret FitzGerald referred scathingly to Haughey’s ‘flawed pedigree’, an intentional ambiguity that highlighted rumours of financial shenanigans (later proved to be accurate) and of involvement in gunrunning, and warned that Haughey had ‘an overweening ambition, which [people] do not see as a simple emanation of a desire to serve but rather as a wish to dominate, even to own, the state’.7 Haughey’s profligate lifestyle (contrasting with his public warnings that the country must not live beyond its means) and corruption were

6 7

Kieran Allen, Fianna Fáil and Irish Labour (London, 1997), p. 138. In Dáil Éireann, 11 December 1979.

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laid bare in the late 1990s, beginning with the 1997 McCracken Tribunal set up specifically to investigate payments to Haughey and another ex-minister. McCracken established that Haughey had received undeclared payments and had undeclared accounts in the Ansbacher Bank in the Cayman Islands. He was found to have obstructed the tribunal. Criminal charges were brought against him, but a 1999 trial was postponed indefinitely because of prejudicial comments by the then Tánaiste, Mary Harney. In May 1999, Terry Keane, a Sunday Independent gossip columnist and wife of Ronan Keane, soon-to-be Chief Justice, revealed on RTÉ TV’s The Late Late Show (the world’s longest-running chat show) that she had been Haughey’s mistress for twenty-seven years and that he was the mysterious ‘sweetie’ she had referred to for years in her ‘Keane Edge’ columns. The Moriarty Tribunal, also established in 1997 to investigate payments to politicians, reported in December 2006. It found that Haughey had received more than £8 million in ‘unethical’ payments from businessmen and wealthy individuals in return for using his position and influence to secure concessions for them, including the reduction by £22.8 million of a tax bill for the supermarket owner Ben Dunne. He had been given £50,000 by a Saudi businessman, Mahmoud Fustok, for supporting his application for Irish citizenship. He organised an appeal for a liver transplant operation for his colleague Brian Lenihan and was proved to have appropriated a £20,000 donation. Of the £270,000 raised, only £70,000 was spent on Lenihan. Haughey’s was a reflexive corruption. Soon after he became Taoiseach in 1979, Allied Irish Banks wrote off a £1 million overdraft that he had run up: in the Tribunal’s view this was an undeclared payment by the bank to him. He used public moneys personally, and to finance Fianna Fáil. Moriarty, validating Garret FitzGerald’s warning twenty-seven years before, concluded that Haughey had engaged upon ‘devaluing democracy’. Haughey paid a total of €6.5 million in back taxes and penalties and in 2003 sold his co. Dublin estate, Abbeville, for €45 million to settle legal fees. He was emblematic of a sad feature of developing Fianna Fáil and, ultimately, political culture. In power for so much of Ireland’s independence, Fianna Fáil’s representatives were worth buying – and Haughey sold. He used his narrow nationalism to wash his

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Third World activities: silently asserting that he stood in a tradition of heroic effort that justified favours, deals, and corruption. The test of a society’s enforcement of honesty is that it acts when the transgression becomes apparent. In Ireland, no one looked hard at the time. People shrugged and assumed that corruption went with power. In 2008 another Fianna Fáil taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, resigned after official enquiries into undeclared payments, gifts and loans. Corruption had become a habit, part of the continuing ‘understandings’ of Irish politics, as one report made clear: Ireland is regarded by domestic and international observers as suffering high levels of ‘legal corruption’. While no laws may be broken, personal relationships, patronage, political favours, and political donations are believed to influence political decisions and policy to a considerable degree. The situation is compounded by a lack of transparency in political funding and lobbying.8

choices Albert Reynolds, who had unsuccessfully challenged Haughey for the party leadership in November 1991, was elected Taoiseach and party leader in his place. Reynolds faced a rapid succession of major political crises. Within days of his taking office, in the ‘X’ case (so called because the identity of the girl in question was protected by law) the High Court ruled that a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl, allegedly raped by her best friend’s father, could not travel to England for an abortion and banned her from leaving the country for nine months. The girl was reported to have threatened suicide if she was forced to bear the child. The Supreme Court overturned this ruling. In its judgment the court criticised ambiguity in the 1983 anti-abortion constitutional amendment, and held that European Community law guaranteeing freedom of movement overrode the High Court’s ban. The girl travelled to London and had an abortion. Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) wrote a powerful, thin-veiled novel, Down By The River (1997), about the case. The

8

Transparency International, ‘Ireland 2009’ (Berlin, 2009). This paper is available at transpar ency.ie/sites/default/files/NIS_Full_Report_Ireland_2009.pdf.

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affair aroused intense debate and interest, calling into question the basis of the Republic’s legislation when set against its international undertakings and the experience of thousands of Irish women: an estimated four thousand women went every year to Britain for abortions. Reynolds promised another abortion referendum. The nature and future of the European Community became central issues in a further referendum held on 18 June 1992. The Maastricht Treaty, signed by the heads of government of the EC in December 1991, creating the European Union (EU) and devolving more authority to European bodies at the expense of national parliaments, required ratification by each member state. Some weeks earlier, Denmark had rejected the Treaty in a referendum, and suddenly Irish voters were placed in the position of effectively determining the future of the European Community. A second rejection of the Treaty would have forced its collapse generally, and thus set back the cause of a more integrated and centralised EU. In the event, in a 57.3 per cent turnout, nearly 68 per cent of voters endorsed the Treaty. Four months later, the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat coalition government fell apart when Reynolds accused Desmond O’Malley of dishonest testimony to a judicial inquiry into fraud in beef exports. O’Malley and the Progressive Democrats resigned from the government. Reynolds had forced the issue in the hope of gaining an overall majority – his standing was high in opinion polls – and of calming unrest within Fianna Fáil: the party did not like the coalition with the Progressive Democrats and blamed O’Malley and his colleagues for the resignation of Haughey and the defeat of Lenihan. In the resulting November 1992 election, however, Fianna Fáil obtained its lowest number of seats – 67 – in nearly forty years; Fine Gael fared even worse with 45 seats, and the Progressive Democrats won 10. Labour made sweeping gains, winning 33 seats. Three separate referendums on abortion issues raised by the ‘X’ case took place at the same time as the election: on the right to receive information about abortion services, the right to travel for an abortion, and a mother’s right to life in cases of a life-threatening illness or event to her. The wording of the right-to-life referendum was regarded as unsatisfactory by all sides, which combined to urge its rejection. The other two referendums passed with large majorities. The Church, obviously aware of the strength of feeling and the change

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in attitudes in Ireland, issued a low-key statement reiterating its opposition to abortion. Not until January 1993 was another coalition put together, this time between Fianna Fáil and Labour. Under pressure from Labour, Reynolds, now Taoiseach for a second time, promised extensive social reforms. In May, the sale of contraceptives in the Republic was made legal without age limit. In June, homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised, and the age of consent was lowered to seventeen. Government and public opinion for decades had been winking at these practices, and there had been a negligible number of prosecutions. In contrast to Spanish habit into the 1970s, for example, people were not routinely stopped and questioned at ports of entry to see if they possessed contraceptives. It was, in fact, a rare prosecution – the Dublin management of the Virgin chain of stores in effect challenged the government to prosecute them by publicising the selling of contraceptives – that had triggered reform of the law. The two Bills involved were passed by the Dáil without a vote, reflecting the changed attitudes the awakening of a young electorate in the 1980s and the ‘X’ case had generated. The coalition government also continued legal reforms that had been put in train by Haughey to secure the rights of women if they divorced, and announced that a referendum on divorce would be held in 1994 after the reform legislation was in place. The referendum took place in November 1995. A bare majority – by 9,000 votes (50.3 per cent to 49.7 per cent), the population of a village – voted in favour of allowing divorce. In the 1994 elections, Albert Reynolds’ Fianna Fáil/Labour government was defeated, and John Bruton, the Fine Gael leader, came in as Taoiseach of a Fine Gael/Labour coalition. Reynolds had worked closely with John Major and John Hume (leader of the Northern nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, SDLP) in promoting the Northern Ireland peace process, and Bruton, despite misgivings (he worried that he might be seen as a John Redmond, too willing to compromise with Britain), continued this: it was an important sign that a new generation was in charge and that the attitudes of Haughey were no longer dominant in Irish politics or in Fianna Fáil. In June 1997, Bruton gave way to a Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat government led by Bertie Ahern, Reynolds’ successor as leader of Fianna Fáil,

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who continued the Reynolds/Bruton policy of full support for the peace process. Ireland had come of age. The change in Irish politics from the days of Haughey’s predecessors was underpinned by a succession of scandals that markedly reduced the authority of the Church and of politicians and civil servants. In 1992, the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, admitted to having fathered a son and to a long-time affair with the boy’s mother. He resigned as bishop. The Church sent him to South America to work as a priest in relative obscurity. Another priest, Brendan Smyth, some years later was publicly revealed to have abused children over a thirty-year period and to have been protected by the Church from prosecution or publicity in that time. Even when the Smyth case became public, the Church’s reaction was inadequate, resulting in a noticeable reduction in its popular authority. On 28 November 1996 another referendum was held to amend the Constitution so that courts could refuse bail to a person ‘charged with a serious offence’. The government was responding to public dismay at the way in which some people on bail were caught committing crimes. In a small turnout (32 per cent of voters), a majority endorsed the change. A year later, presidential elections took place, caused by the resignation of Mary Robinson to become the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. All the parties nominated female candidates. Derek Nally (the only male candidate) stood as an independent. Mary Banotti, a niece of Michael Collins and a divorcee with a daughter, represented Fine Gael. Adi Roche, a respected charity and aid campaigner, was the Labour candidate. Mary McAleese ran for Fianna Fáil, beating Albert Reynolds for the party’s nomination. Dana (Rosemary Scallon), a pop singer and the first Irish winner of the Eurovision song contest (in 1970), ran as an independent Christian candidate. McAleese was a formidable candidate, unlike most previous Fianna Fáil nominees. She was young (born in 1951 – but not the youngest candidate: that was Adi Roche), a devout but independent Catholic, the eldest of nine children, from the Falls Road in Belfast, highly educated and with successful careers in journalism and academic law in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Her parents had lost their home and business (her father was a publican) in Belfast violence in

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the early 1970s. She graduated from Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1973 in law, and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1974 where she specialised in criminal and family law. In 1975 she was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College, Dublin. Four years later she joined RTÉ as a journalist and presenter. In 1981 she returned to the Reid professorship, continuing part-time with RTÉ. In 1987 she was appointed Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen’s, Belfast, beating David Trimble (who had once taught her and who was to become leader of the Ulster Unionist Party) for the post. In 1994 she was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s: the first woman and the first Catholic ever to have held this position. She won the presidential election with more than 50 per cent of the votes, and more than twice as many votes as her nearest challenger, Mary Banotti. On 22 May 1998 two referendums were held simultaneously: one to ratify the Good Friday Agreement on cementing the peace process in Northern Ireland, which necessitated changes to articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution laying claim to the territory of Northern Ireland; the second to enable the constitutional amendments made necessary by ratification of the Treaty of Amsterdam effectively establishing the single European currency, the euro, outlined in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Both referendums resulted in resounding ‘yes’ votes: 94 per cent of those who voted supported the changes to articles 2 and 3, and 61.7 per cent endorsed the Amsterdam treaty. The Irish Republic consequently committed to introduce the euro, a politically rather than economically based currency designed to promote a united Europe. Few people in any country understood that joining it meant surrendering sovereignty: ten years later that was all too plain. In the decades after 1960, economic revival, generally improved prosperity, population growth and the shedding of traditional Catholic influence renewed overall confidence in the nation. Emigration, once a harbinger of hopes and energies denied, in the 1980s paradoxically testified to renewed drive in the country as young people entrepreneurially sought wider opportunities abroad. Membership of the European Union (until 1 November 1993 the European Community) also aided national confidence, not least by lessening dependency on Britain. It expanded imagination and

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opportunity enormously. In foreign affairs generally, Ireland’s confidence steadily grew. Following entry into the United Nations in 1955, successive governments pursued a policy of broad support for Western democracies tempered by a keen anti-colonialism and concern for the Third World. Irish military units formed important elements in UN peacekeeping forces in the Congo, Cyprus, Kashmir, Yugoslavia and the Middle East. Within the European Union, Ireland voted for expanded membership and federalism. Following the referendums of the 1980s and later, by the mid 1990s a liberal social agenda had been realised.

chapter 7

North

Unlike the Free State after 1921, Northern Ireland did not experience a civil war. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act had partitioned Ireland and established parliaments for both Southern and Northern Ireland (the six Ulster counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. The other three Ulster counties – Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan – were placed in Southern Ireland). Northern Ireland was a new and unique part of the United Kingdom, in area 5,452 square miles (slightly larger than Yorkshire and less than one-fifth of the area of Ireland) with a population of 1.256 million (in 1926) composed of a 2:1 Protestant majority over Catholics which was translated politically into a permanent Unionist supremacy. Between 1929 and 1968 in the Parliament of Northern Ireland, Unionists held never fewer than thirty-four of the fifty-two seats, and never less than two-thirds of the Northern Ireland seats at Westminster. The first general election for the fifty-two-member Parliament held in May 1921 returned forty Ulster Unionist Party MPs. In fact the Ulster Unionist Party won every general election and formed every government until the Parliament was suspended in 1972. Its connections with the Orange Order were always close: every single Northern Ireland prime minister was a member of the Order. Unionists had consistently argued for the continuation of the union between Ireland and Britain, and had not sought the creation of Northern Ireland but had accepted it, in the words of Sir James Craig, its first prime minister, as ‘a supreme sacrifice in the interests of peace’. The concept of the province had been to secure unionist control and to meet the undoubted objections of unionists to being governed by those whom they perceived as disloyal Irish nationalists. As Walter 300

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Long, Carson’s predecessor as Irish Unionist leader, in 1920 reported to the British Cabinet committee on Ireland, ‘the new province should consist of the six counties, the idea being that the inclusion of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan would provide such an access of strength to the Roman Catholic party, that the supremacy of the Unionists would be seriously threatened’. Sir James Craig (1871–1940) succeeded Sir Edward Carson as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party in 1921 upon Carson’s appointment as a Lord of Appeal. Carson was an Irish, not an Ulster Unionist. He had fought for the Anglo-Irish union and once it was destroyed he retired from the fray. Craig’s government established the police and administrative systems that were to dominate the province for fifty years. While in Southern Ireland the 1921 Treaty modified the provisions of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, in Northern Ireland the Act went into force unchanged. The Parliament of Northern Ireland consisted of a popularly elected House of Commons and a twenty-six-member Senate; twenty-four senators were elected by the House of Commons, and the other two were the Lord Mayor of Belfast and the Mayor of Londonderry (usually called ‘Derry’). A Governor performed royal functions. It was a devolved government: the overriding sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament was stated in section 75 of the Act as being ‘over all persons, matters and things in Northern Ireland’. The Northern Ireland Parliament was specifically entrusted with responsibility for ‘the peace, order and good government’ of the province. Tumult surrounded the province’s formation. Anti-Catholic riots were taking place in the streets of Belfast while King George V opened the Northern Parliament there in June 1921. Between 1920 and 1922 nearly three hundred people were killed in riots and shooting incidents, mostly in Belfast. In 1922 alone, 232 people were killed including two of the new parliament’s Unionist MPs; nearly a thousand more were injured; four hundred people (nearly all IRA men) were interned and more than £3 million worth of damage was done. To meet this disorder, the Parliament passed the Constabulary Act in June 1922, setting up the Royal Ulster Constabulary in succession to the Royal Irish Constabulary, under the control of the Northern Irish Minister for Home Affairs.

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Like the RIC, the RUC was armed and combined a civilian and a military role which was strengthened by its close association with the ‘A’, ‘Β’ and ‘C’ Ulster Special Constabulary, formed in 1920 to combat the IRA in the north. One-third of all RUC places were intended for Catholics, but less than 20 per cent of the force were Catholics at any time. IRA intimidation at first prevented Catholics joining the Constabulary, but it was also perceived as a unionist and Orange force by Irish nationalists who, in any case, chose not to believe that Northern Ireland would last very long – chose, that is, to believe that Irish unity was inevitable – and thus stayed apart from the institutions of the province. In such circumstances, discrimination and allegations of discrimination were easy. Since nationalists did not want Northern Ireland to exist, they had no incentive to make it work. They were encouraged in this attitude by successive Southern Irish governments which consistently advocated the principle of Irish unity. In practical terms, the fact was that Northern Ireland governments were firmly anti-Irish nationalist and the Constabulary forces saw the Catholic community in general as a threat to the province’s security, so even if Northern nationalists had not abstained from the workings of the province, the likelihood was that they would have faced discrimination in any case. Along with the Orange Order, the Special Constabulary was in the vanguard of anti-Catholicism. Special Constables were drawn nearly entirely from membership of the Ulster Volunteer Force which had been re-formed by Colonel Wilfrid Spender, a pre-1914 UVF veteran, and Sir Basil Brooke, a wealthy landowner and future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. ‘A’ Specials were attached full-time to the RUC for six-month periods, ‘B’ Specials were part-time (and the most numerous), and ‘C’ Specials were a general reserve for emergencies. As a result, by the middle of 1922 there were over 50,000 full and parttime policemen in Northern Ireland: one to every six households in the province. The ‘A’ and ‘C’ Specials were disbanded in the 1930s; the ‘B’ Specials became a permanent adjunct of the RUC. On 1 August 1969, ‘B’ Specials numbered 8,906 constables, not one of whom was a Roman Catholic. They were disbanded in 1970 and replaced by the volunteer Ulster Defence Regiment under military control. To enable the RUC and the Special Constabulary to restore order in 1922, the parliament following earlier British precedents enacted

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the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act by which the Minister for Home Affairs could ‘take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and order’. The minister could delegate his powers to any RUC officer he chose. In addition there was a blanket provision which effectively gave the minister or his delegate sweeping power: ‘If any person does any act of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland and not specifically provided for in the regulations, he shall be deemed guilty of an offence against the regulations.’ The Act was renewed each year from 1922 to 1933 and then made permanent, remaining in force until 1972 when it was replaced by Westminster’s Northern Ireland Act and direct rule. Similar legislation to counteract IRA activity and the threat of violence was enacted in the South (the 1939 Offences Against the State Act in the South is, with amendments, still in force): Northern Ireland was not alone in this respect. To the unionist majority in Northern Ireland, these measures were necessary to deal with the one-third of the province’s population that did not really accept its legitimacy. To the nationalist minority, these measures confirmed unionist domination. After the boundaries of the six counties were settled in 1925 and the provision for a Council of Ireland was dropped, it became clear to some Northern nationalists that the best hope for their community was constitutional opposition within Northern Ireland (although the Nationalist Party itself did not become the Loyal Opposition until 1965). The Nationalist Party, formed in the north in 1921 from the old Irish Party, was led by Joseph Devlin (1872–1934), who having abstained in 1921, in 1925 took his seat in the Northern parliament (from 1932 housed at Stormont, outside Belfast, in an impressive and specially built parliament house), and at Westminster. Despite the fact that the bulk of Irish industry was in the North, one of his major points was that Northern Ireland was not economically viable: the same point that Michael Collins had believed in 1921. They both overlooked the fact that, overall, the North was more prosperous than the South and that ‘the poor’ were better off in the North too. Northern economic viability was simply geared more directly to Britain’s and world trade. Nevertheless, the Northern economy was exceptionally vulnerable to changes in world trade and prosperity, and nationalists were able to

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play upon this. In 1921, unemployment in the North averaged 18 per cent. In the fifteen years to 1939 it averaged 23 per cent, comparable with the levels in Wales and North-East England. Its industries, though large, were labour-intensive and not diverse – linen, shipbuilding and agriculture – and all were vulnerable to British and world competition and changes in world trade. By 1933, as a result of the great depression, employment in the Belfast shipyards had dropped from about 20,000 in 1924 to about 2,000, and the Harland and Wolff yards did not launch a single ship. Private and corporate investment tended to be concentrated in British industries and government securities rather than in Northern Ireland, thus denying Northern industry capital for expansion, re-equipping, research and development. However, in 1938 Westminster agreed to meet Stormont’s budget deficits, and this gave Northern Ireland stability for the first time, removing one of the nationalists’ principal arguments. The arrangement did not change economic conditions, it merely subsidised them, and unemployment has proved a persistent problem in Northern Ireland for most of its existence. In this state of decline, competition for jobs kept sectarian divisions alive. Riots, which had died down in the late 1920s and early 1930s (in 1932, unemployed Protestants in Belfast had even demonstrated in support of unemployed Catholics who had been attacked by ‘B’ Specials), began again. In 1935, sectarian riots during the summer marching season (the Orange Order every year traditionally celebrated on 12 July William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne and on 12 August the raising of the siege of Derry) ended with eleven people dead and six hundred injured. Riots have featured prominently in the history of the province. Riots in the late 1960s heralded four decades of violence and bloodshed unleashed by the RUC, the IRA and various ‘loyalist’ groups. Discrimination also fuelled divisions. In the Northern Ireland civil service, separate political loyalties, social and educational disadvantage and discrimination meant that Catholics never applied for jobs in proportion to their population numbers. As a result, as late as 1969, of the 209 people in the technical and professional grades of the civil service, only 13 were Catholics. Of the 319 in higher administrative grades, 23 were Catholics. Of the 115 people nominated by the government for service on nine public bodies, only 16 were

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Catholics. This was the result of two generations of abstentionism and discrimination in a province where the answer to the question ‘Which school did you go to?’ told any Northern Irishman any other’s religion, probable political allegiance and social condition. Unemployment, always high, also tended to be concentrated amongst Catholics: in 1972 a survey indicated that average male unemployment was twice as high in Catholic areas as in Protestant. In local elections, gerrymandering took place, sometimes on a large scale. One of the clearest examples was the city of Derry. In 1966 the city’s electorate consisted of about 20,000 nationalists and about 10,000 unionists, yet the city corporation was Unionistcontrolled (and had been ever since the North’s 1922 Local Government Act had ended proportional representation for local government elections). The reason for this was threefold. First, the local election franchise (as opposed to the general election franchise) was limited to ratepayers and their wives which meant that the generally poorer nationalist population suffered (in Derry, this had the effect in local elections of reducing the total nationalist electorate by one-quarter to about 14,500, while the unionist electorate was reduced by one-eighth to about 8,800). This restricted franchise system remained in force until 1969 when one person one vote in local as in general elections was finally instituted. Secondly, a business vote gave firms up to six votes depending upon the rateable value of their property. This had been the case in the UK as a whole until 1946, but with the Elections and Franchise Act passed by Stormont in 1946, the system was retained in Northern Ireland until 1969. While various studies have shown that in general Northern Ireland’s peculiar franchise only had a small electoral effect, it is also clear that in some areas like Derry the effect could be significant. Thirdly, constituency boundary revisions were conducted by local authorities and Stormont governments. In areas with nationalist majorities, Stormont governments generally saw to it that boundaries were drawn so that the nationalist vote was concentrated in one constituency. In Derry, about 10,000 nationalist voters were in one ward and returned eight councillors; the unionist vote was split between two wards returning twelve councillors between them. In parliamentary elections for both Stormont and Westminster, similar boundary

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juggling ensured large Unionist parliamentary majorities and the largest parliamentary constituencies in the UK. With two-thirds of the province’s population Protestant, Unionists were bound to dominate electorally in any case. If Westminster had taken action earlier to increase Northern Ireland’s parliamentary representation (five new parliamentary constituencies were created in Northern Ireland by Westminster in 1981, after sixty years bringing the number from twelve to seventeen), then there would have been greater Catholic/ nationalist representation. Tied into electoral discrimination was housing which, as in the rest of the UK, was a local government matter. Since the franchise in local elections was geared to rates, this meant that the building of houses could affect the vote unless the occupants shared the political allegiance of the area. Sometimes in urban areas, authorities ran out of land to develop and, with larger families amongst Catholics (although it should also be noted that Catholic emigration from the province was higher than Protestant), this meant that in general Catholics faced more crowded housing conditions than Protestants, as Unionist local authorities opted at times simply to stop building houses rather than risk jeopardising Unionist majorities by housing Catholics (and therefore, it was presumed, nationalists) in Protestant areas. No secret was made of this. In 1936 Omagh Rural Council, Unionist-controlled although the electorate was two-thirds nationalist, stated that despite the need for housing in their area they were reluctant to build houses because ‘our political opponents are only waiting the opportunity to use this means to outvote us in divisions [i.e. electoral districts] where majorities are close’. A Unionist member of Enniskillen Borough Council in 1963 baldly declared, ‘We are not going to build houses in the south [unionist] ward and cut a rod to beat ourselves later on. We are going to see that the right people are put into these houses and we are not making any apology for it.’ However, local concentrations of people on religious/political grounds did not mean that one section of the population was housed while the other was not, and by the late 1960s discrimination in housing – while always emotive – was no longer significant. Where there was discrimination, both Nationalist and Unionist local councils were at fault. There was some discrimination against large Catholic families (local authorities could decide whether applicants

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for housing with large families had demonstrated need or social irresponsibility) with a 12 per cent difference against Catholics in the proportion of families with more than six children assigned public housing. But because large families were five times more numerous among Catholics than among Protestants, Catholics still constituted 78 per cent of all large families in public housing. With generally high levels of unemployment and poor housing (the 1961 census found that 51 per cent of all households lacked modern amenities such as a fixed bath or hot-water tap), there was great competition for public housing and public jobs (it was the same in the South), with individual cases of discrimination receiving publicity and colouring attitudes. In nearly all cases where discrimination did occur, religion was the deciding factor, sustaining a sectarian (rather than an economic) division in the North. On both sides a spoils system operated in politics with the electoral winner taking all. Until the 1960s, leaders of both communities did little to bridge the divisions between them. Sir James Craig, created Viscount Craigavon of Stormont in 1927, prime minister until his death in 1940, declared in the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1934: I am an Orangeman first and a politician and a member of this Parliament afterwards . . . All I boast is that we have a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.

Sir Basil Brooke, prime minister from 1943 to 1963, upon his appointment as Northern Irish Minister for Agriculture in 1933 dismissed the 125 Catholic workers on his estate to set an example to other landowners. ‘Catholics’, he was reported as saying, ‘were out to destroy Ulster with all their might and power. They wanted to nullify the Protestant vote and take all they could out of Ulster and then see it go to hell.’ John Andrews, prime minister from 1940 to 1943 (and a descendant of a United Irishman of the 1790s), in 1933 investigated the employment of porters at the Stormont Parliament and reported, ‘I have found that there are thirty Protestants and only one Roman Catholic – there temporarily.’ This was matched to a certain extent by de Valera’s 1937 Constitution in the South favouring the Roman Catholic Church; by Cardinal MacRory, Primate of Ireland, stating in 1931 that ‘the

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Protestant Church in Ireland is not even a part of the Church of Christ’,1 and, more understandably but no less provocative to unionists, by Nationalist politicians in the North declaring that they refused to recognise the Crown. There were some moments of mutual goodwill as, for example, in 1936 when two bishops, one Anglican and one Catholic, together called upon their flocks to live together harmoniously, but bigotry, discrimination, fear and hatred on both sides were more general. De Valera’s Economic War in the mid 1930s emphasised partition: tariff barriers were placed between the South and the North as part of the UK. The Second World War helped reinforce partition, briefly reviving the North’s economy and clearly separating the six counties from the neutral twenty-six in the South. By the end of the war, Belfast shipbuilders had launched more than 170 warships; Northern Irish farmers had doubled the area of land under cultivation, and the government had provided training ground for 120,000 American troops. ‘Without Northern Ireland’, said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘I do not see how the American forces could have been concentrated to begin the invasion of Europe.’ Derry and Belfast had provided important air and naval bases during the battle of the Atlantic, and in 1945 the German U-boat fleet was directed to surrender at Derry. After the war, Ireland’s decision to leave the Commonwealth and to declare itself a republic necessitated the passing of corresponding legislation, the Ireland Act, by Westminster to recognise that Ireland ‘ceased, as from the eighteenth day of April, nineteen hundred and forty-nine, to be part of His Majesty’s Dominions’. It was another brick in the wall of partition, and the Act gave a clear guarantee to the North which has since been the basis of Unionist politics: Northern Ireland remains part of His Majesty’s Dominions and of the United Kingdom and it is hereby affirmed that in no event will Northern Ireland or any part thereof cease to be part of His Majesty’s Dominions and of the United Kingdom without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland.

The development of the British welfare state further strengthened the barriers between North and South. A national health service came 1

Irish News, 18 December 1931.

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into effect in Northern Ireland in 1948, providing free health care for the whole population in contrast to the South. That same year saw the introduction of national insurance in the North, providing greater social security benefits than existed in the South. The most important welfare measure, however, was the North’s 1947 Education Act extending grants for university and higher education, raising the school leaving age to fifteen, and for the first time providing free secondary education on the model of the British 1944 Education Act. The effect of the Act was that poorer (and therefore predominantly Catholic) students at last benefited from (secular) higher education. The first generation to come through the new educational system reached maturity in the 1960s when students everywhere seemed to be demonstrating and protesting, and provided the impetus for the civil rights movement culminating in the strife that tore the province apart. o’neill Captain Terence O’Neill (1914–90), who had succeeded Sir Basil Brooke (created Viscount Brookeborough in 1952) as prime minister in 1963, courageously tried to accommodate the liberal spirit of the decade without splitting the Unionist Party. The post-war growth of mass communication had brought a questioning of authority, reflected in the USA by a wide disposition to protest forcefully which in turn was adopted by people in most other countries. The tactic of civil disobedience was seen to be particularly successful as distinguished protesters in Europe and the United States were manhandled by police as they sat and prayed and sang against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. O’Neill sought to improve relations with the South, and thus reduce tensions and offer hopes. He was the first Northern Ireland prime minister to visit a Catholic school. He emphasised the importance of economic expansion to improve living standards and to reduce job competition and unemployment. In 1964 he created a Ministry for Development; the following year his New Towns Act established the new town of Craigavon and eight other growth areas. He granted recognition to the Dublin-based (and therefore ‘alien’) Irish Congress of Trade Unions. A new sense of opportunity and

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good feeling was generated amongst Catholics and Protestants. Without telling his Cabinet colleagues, he invited Sean Lemass, the Irish Taoiseach, to meet him at Stormont. On 14 January 1965, Lemass came. It was the first meeting between Northern and Southern prime ministers since December 1925 and caused great division in unionism. In November 1965, O’Neill called an election and won with an increased vote for the Unionist Party. The Nationalist Party, recognising O’Neill’s efforts to conciliate its supporters, agreed to become the official opposition for the first time in its history. The problem O’Neill faced, however, was that his actions were mainly symbolic, changing little while encouraging Catholic hopes and increasing the fears of hard-line unionists. ‘What do a bridge and a traitor have in common?’ asked the Reverend Ian Paisley, one such hard-liner. ‘Both cross to the other side.’ Brian Faulkner (1921–77), Unionist prime minister from 1971 to 1972, later considered that O’Neill’s meetings with Lemass ‘started the slide away of support for O’Neill within the Unionist community’: by 1969, defections and resignations (including some leading ministers and two future prime ministers) from O’Neill’s government over the by then connected issues of conciliation and security forced his resignation at the end of April 1969 in the interests of party unity. Before this happened, however, civil disobedience and violence had come to plague the streets of Northern Ireland. A new generation of Catholic nationalist and Republican leaders had formed the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in February 1967 to campaign against discrimination and unemployment. A series of demonstrations and then riots followed during 1968. Protestant Unionist counter-demonstrators saw in NICRA a new, sophisticated attempt to undermine the North, playing on O’Neill’s conciliatory style. Unionists did have a point: some ex-IRA men were in NICRA (although the IRA itself stayed apart), and the first NICRA mass meeting was followed by a song which the organisers had intended to be ‘We Shall Overcome’, but those gathered rendered instead ‘A Nation Once Again’, the unofficial anthem of Irish nationalism. On 9 October 1968, People’s Democracy was founded by students at Queen’s University as a radical, socialist offshoot of NICRA. To many, People’s Democracy (as distinct from NICRA)

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was the principal instigator of violence in the North, a view subsequently endorsed by the journalist and political commentator Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien: They emerged as the left-wing of the Civil Rights movement, but they weren’t really interested in Civil Rights, they were interested in revolution which they saw or said they saw in terms of class, but which in Northern Ireland conditions could only be, as usual, Catholics versus Protestants. They denied that. They said that was a bourgeois deception and had much rhetoric to that effect. What they were after in the long term was revolution. In the short term it was confrontation, and in particular they sought to discredit the bourgeois government of Terence O’Neill. They played, I think, quite deliberately into the hands of his right-wing opponents because all this brought revolution, or at any rate turmoil into being. They therefore marched in Protestant areas, allegedly to spread their non-sectarian views, but in reality to provoke, and they did provoke . . . and both their activities and the reactions to them helped to undermine the government of Terence O’Neill and to destroy the moderate centre in Ulster, for which I think they bear a terrible responsibility before history.2

Whether the few hundred members of People’s Democracy were quite so central to the collapse of the moderate centre of opinion and the government of Terence O’Neill is problematical. What is certain is that People’s Democracy in late 1968 and early 1969 was at the centre of nearly every violent confrontation between civil rights demonstrators and the RUC and unionists. A civil rights march on 4 January 1969 from Belfast to Derry, organised by People’s Democracy, was attacked just outside Derry at Burntollet Bridge by a Protestant mob wielding cudgels with nails hammered through. The RUC gave the marchers no protection. Later that day, RUC and ‘B’ Specials ran amok in Derry’s Catholic Bogside district. In retaliation, the residents there sealed off the Bogside and declared it ‘Free Derry’. These events combined to break the alliance that had been developing under O’Neill’s fosterage between moderates in both communities in the North. Faith in reform through democratic processes and the law had been bludgeoned away by the actions of protesters, the RUC and ‘B’ Specials, leaving the campaign for civil rights in the more radical hands of People’s Democracy, and the protection of Catholics increasingly in the hands of the IRA. 2

‘Ulster – What went wrong?’ BBC World Service, 8 June 1981.

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During the summer of 1969, serious rioting began in Derry. Gerry Fitt, a leading member of NICRA at the time, recalled: It all began because of another one of those days that we have to celebrate and commemorate in Northern Ireland. The 12th August 1969 was the anniversary of closing the gates of Derry in 1689, and they are always occasions which spark off trouble. After the parade had passed there was the usual sporadic street rioting and the police did use very strongarm tactics to intimidate those who were engaged in the riot, to such an extent that the whole situation escalated and got out of hand. Then I think for the first time in Northern Ireland we saw the use of the petrol bomb . . . They were able to keep off the police by burning them, by throwing them from the top of the flats, etc. They were able to keep them out of that area for two days. In the meantime it was getting massive publicity in all the media here in the United Kingdom and further afield. And it looked like a siege. Derry is a city of sieges, all throughout its history. And then one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland . . . issued a statement and called upon the nationalist people in Belfast to come out on the streets to engage in activity against the police and so withdraw the police force from Derry where almost the total police force of Northern Ireland were in action over the previous two days . . . The sum total of that was that on 14th August there was fierce sectarian murdering and killing between the Falls Road and the Shankill, and factories were bombed, places were looted. It was the worst outbreak of violence that I can ever recall in Northern Ireland.3

The leader of the civil rights movement who called for nationalists in Belfast to come on to the streets was Gerry Fitt himself. Four months earlier on 30 March and in April, just before O’Neill resigned, some bombs had gone off at power stations in the province. At first it was thought to be the work of the IRA, only later emerging that hard-line unionists had been responsible: they had hoped that the IRA would be blamed and that O’Neill would be forced to resign because he was providing insufficient security. O’Neill resigned on 16 April for other reasons, but these April bombs had another, far more important effect: they led to the first influx of troops to Northern Ireland when on 20 April the Ministry of Defence in London announced that 550 soldiers would be dispatched to aid the civil authority, but not to deal with demonstrations or public order. 3

Ibid.

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This was the first distinct Westminster involvement in Northern Ireland since 1922. By August 1969, as a result of the summer rioting, tension was high in the province. On 13 August the RUC, exhausted and frightened by the scale of violence in Derry (seven hundred of the RUC’s total force of three thousand were involved in the Bogside riots), allowed B Specials to patrol Belfast in armoured cars with 9 mm Sterling sub-machine guns. By 15 August, eight people had been killed by the police forces; total casualties were ten dead and 145 civilians and four policemen wounded by gunfire. A subsequent commission of inquiry under Lord Hunt, Chairman of the Parole Board of England and Wales, led to the disbandment of the ‘B’ Specials in October and the disarming of the RUC (not for long: by 1971 the force was armed again to deal with violence). On 14 August 1969 at 5 p.m. in Derry, British troops took to the streets (welcomed by Catholics) to enforce law and order for the first time in fifty years. Before 1966, Northern Irish affairs were seldom discussed in Westminster. The British Home Secretary answered for Northern Irish matters there, but whenever matters of substance were raised, the convention was to defer them to the Northern Ireland government. Between 1945 and 1969, the British Home Office had no civil servants working full-time on Northern Ireland. There were no formal channels of control or supervision of the Stormont government or parliament, beyond the financial and budgetary arrangements monitored by the Treasury. For the Westminster government, the violence of 12–15 August 1969 was the turning point, and direct intervention followed. IRA men had fired at the RUC in Belfast and had retaliated against Orangemen who attacked Catholics. Civil rights ceased being the central issue, to be replaced by physical-force Republicanism versus unionism, Catholics against Protestants. The British Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, began to pressure the Northern government to reform the RUC and to talk to Catholic leaders. ‘Free Derry’ and other Catholic ‘no go’ areas were left alone. In June 1970 the UK general election changed the government and under the new Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, Reginald Maudling became Home Secretary. Deciding that Callaghan’s policy had not worked (attacks on troops and police with firearms and explosives

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were becoming common, and IRA activity within the Catholic community had dramatically increased), Maudling allowed the security forces to move into Catholic ghettos. One such operation in July in the Lower Falls area of Belfast uncovered 208 weapons, 250 lb (113 kg) of explosives and 21,000 rounds of ammunition. Five people were killed during the operation and seventy-five were injured. The army, which in 1969 had been welcomed as protectors by Catholics, now became as hated by them as the RUC, confirming to many that the IRA was their best protection. Many moderate Catholics blamed Maudling for unleashing the army and thereby fuelling tensions and violence. In the House of Commons, Maudling stated that the IRA had declared war on the British government. During 1970, twenty-five people died and there were 153 explosions. O’Neill’s successor in April 1970 was Major James Chichester-Clark (1923–2002), under whose premiership the first deaths in the streets occurred. The new prime minister tried to reduce tensions by establishing ombudsmen to deal with complaints against central and local government. Housing was taken away from local authorities and placed with a Housing Executive which allocated housing on the basis of need. Chichester-Clark secured the passage of an Incitement of Hatred Act to prevent discrimination in jobs. A Ministry of Community Relations and an Independent Community Relations Commission were established. The ratepayers’ franchise in local elections was abolished. Local government was reorganised, as a result of which in the local elections of May 1973, Derry passed out of Unionist control. But the reforms were too late. the ira After 1945, the IRA concentrated on forcing Northern Ireland into union with the Republic. Its secondary purpose became the imposition of a socialist society in a united Ireland. The riots and demonstrations that began in the North in 1968 were not, however, inspired by the IRA who, like the Northern government, were taken by surprise. In 1956, the IRA had launched an abortive campaign against Northern Ireland. With men drawn almost completely from the South, they tried to organise guerrilla columns

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in the six counties, but were driven out by the combination of a broadly hostile civilian population and an efficient RUC. In 1962, the IRA formally called off its campaign, and over the next six years its leaders decided that political rather than military activity offered the best hope of Irish unification. In 1968, Cathal Goulding, the IRA chief of staff, announced that the IRA was for socialism and against violence. When the violence flared in the North, the more traditionally minded (and more numerous) members of the secret army broke away from the official IRA leadership in December 1969, forming the Provisional IRA (and its political counterpart, Provisional Sinn Féin, calling itself ‘Sinn Féin, Kevin Street’ after its Dublin address to distinguish itself from the official Sinn Féin party). The Provisionals believed that there would be large-scale killings of Catholics in the North unless they intervened. The Official IRA argued that by intervening the Provisionals would ensure the sectarian nature of Northern conflict and throw away any hope of workingclass, socialist solidarity between Protestants and Catholics. To what extent this hope was realistic is uncertain, but there is no doubt that the Provisionals confirmed religion rather than civil rights as the principal division in the North. The Officials, with some lapses and splits, maintained a separate identity. The advent of the Provisionals was crucial to the conflict in the North because, with some financial support from Irish-Americans and, by roundabout means, the supply of sophisticated Soviet weapons, they rapidly became an effective guerrilla/terrorist force. The effect of Northern violence on the South was considerable, forcing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to reassess their traditional approach to Irish unity. Fine Gael in the late 1960s and during the 1970s came to recognise that Northern unionists’ desire to remain within the United Kingdom meant that the prospect of Irish unity had to be seen as long-term. Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, found itself more consciously committed than ever before to the principle of unity in the short term. Jack Lynch (1917–99), Lemass’ successor as Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach from 1966 to 1973, in reaction to violence in the North warned in August 1969 that Ireland ‘can no longer stand by’ and mobilised the army in border areas to provide refugee camps for fleeing Northern Catholics, sending shock waves through Northern

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Protestant communities who for a while thought that the South was about to invade the North. In 1971 his government in the European Court of Human Rights charged the British government with torturing fourteen terrorist suspects in Northern Ireland. In January 1978 the court exonerated Britain of the charge of torture, but found against her for degrading and inhuman treatment. Lynch also consistently maintained that unity could only come about through consent and not through violence, and took steps to demonstrate the South’s willingness to take account of Northern Protestant fears by securing the end to the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘special position’ in the Irish Constitution, and by passing a harsh Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act to crack down on the IRA. However, some of Lynch’s Cabinet colleagues were less committed to the idea of unity by consent, and gave the Provisionals active support instead. In April 1970, Liam Cosgrave (W. T. Cosgrave’s son, b. 1920), leader of Fine Gael, alleged that members of Lynch’s government were providing arms for the Provisional IRA. In May, Lynch dismissed two senior ministers: Charles Haughey, Minister for Finance, and Neil Blaney, Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries. Kevin Boland, Minister for Local Government, and Michael O’Morain, Minister for Justice, resigned in sympathy with Haughey and Blaney. Haughey (who had been a strong candidate for the Fianna Fáil leadership in 1966 after Lemass’ retirement), Blaney, John Kelly (a Belfast Citizens’ Defence Committee organiser and brother of Billy Kelly, the Provisional IRA Belfast commander), and an Irish army officer, Captain James Kelly, were then charged with conspiracy to import arms and ammunition illegally. The four were found not guilty, but during their trial it emerged that they had been involved in or had knowledge of discussions with the IRA; that in August and September 1969 it seemed that they had similarly been involved in persuading IRA traditionalists to break away and form the Provisional IRA on the understanding that the Provisionals would not indulge in Southern politics or operations; that something in the region of £30,000 of Irish government money which had been designated for relief work in the North had instead been used to import five hundred pistols and ammunition – the direct cause of the Arms Trial, as it became known, because the weapons were discovered by the customs authorities at Dublin airport. It also emerged that some IRA men from Derry had been trained in the

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autumn of 1969 at an Irish army camp in Donegal. As a result of these events, Boland and Blaney left Fianna Fáil. Haughey refused to leave the party, consistently maintained his innocence, and finally succeeded Jack Lynch as party leader and Taoiseach in December 1979. After 1970, Fianna Fáil’s dedication to constitutional rather than revolutionary means to bring peace to Northern Ireland and to achieve Irish unity was constantly doubted by Northern unionists. The party lost the 1973 general election (primarily, it seems, because there was a general feeling that after sixteen years of uninterrupted Fianna Fáil government, it was time for a change), and Liam Cosgrave, Taoiseach of a Fine Gael/Labour coalition government from 1973 to 1977, established what became a bipartisan policy of full cooperation with Britain against the IRA, as Fianna Fáil, in power again from 1977 to 1981 under Lynch and then Haughey, demonstrated. The nagging worry of Irish governments and citizens, however, was that the horrors taking place in the North would spill over to the South. The myths of Irish history, where gallant freedom fighters through the ages have faced hopeless odds challenging the might and the authority of Britain in Ireland, meant that amongst large sections of the community there was a surrender to romance where the IRA was concerned. Irish governments had to walk a tightrope to contain this romance without being perceived by the electorate as British puppets. However, Northern nationalists never trusted the South to protect their interests: intergovernmental agreements were all very well, but they did not change nationalist perceptions. The ever-increasing level of violence in the North determined Northern politics. The deployment of more and more troops and more and more money kept resolution in British hands. Public expenditure per head in Northern Ireland rose from £239 in 1967–8 to £387 in 1971–2, compared to £223 in 1967–8 and £308 in 1971–2 in England. In 1988–9, the province was a net cost to the Exchequer of about £1,900 million, about £1,250 per head, and in 1995–6 about £2,000 per head. The first soldier was killed by the IRA in February 1971, and Chichester-Clark resigned as prime minister when his demand for tougher security measures to curb violence was refused. Brian Faulkner, his successor, had more success in this respect, persuading Heath to allow internment without trial of all those suspected of terrorist violence.

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Figure 25 John Hume Stopped and searched during a Derry demonstration/riot in 1971. Hume was more interested in civil rights and social justice than extreme nationalism, and regarded his work establishing credit unions to help poor people as his ‘proudest’ achievement. He was considered the father of the Northern Ireland peace process. Unusually for a Northern Irish nationalist, he was a useful spin bowler and the only Catholic member of the City of Derry cricket team. Such non-sectarian activity won him greater acceptance amongst unionists than most other nationalists. From 1979 to 2001 he led the Social Democratic and Labour Party. In 1998 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with David Trimble.

Internment began on 9 August 1971 and lasted until 5 December 1975 during which time 2,158 people were interned. As a policy, it was disastrous, turning Northern Catholics completely against Unionist government while simultaneously experiencing the highpoint of horror and IRA activity (Figure 25). Of the 173 deaths from violence in Northern Ireland during 1971, only twenty-eight happened before internment was introduced. Catholic resentment at what was seen as yet another attack on the Catholic community led to more riots, culminating with ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30 January 1972, when in Derry soldiers killed thirteen people, some of whom may have been

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themselves firing at troops, but this was never proved. One civilian later died of wounds. A tribunal under Lord Justice Saville was appointed in 1998 to investigate the events of Bloody Sunday. Twelve years later the inquiry reported, having taken evidence from more than nine hundred witnesses and officially having cost about £191 million (this was thought to be unrealistic: in 2005 a UK minister had stated that the real cost was then about £400 million). During the course of hearings, Martin McGuinness, who acknowledged that he was second in command of the Derry IRA at the time, refused to provide information about arms dumps and his command centre. It was alleged that he had fired the first shot that day, thus to some extent justifying the soldiers’ firing. Saville found that McGuinness ‘was probably armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun’ but that there was no evidence he fired the weapon and that he provided no justification for the soldiers opening fire. The conclusion of the tribunal was clear. While ‘there was some firing by paramilitaries’, firing by soldiers ‘was in most cases probably’ caused by the mistaken belief among them that Republican paramilitaries were responding in force to their arrival in the Bogside . . . In this belief soldiers reacted by losing their self-control and firing themselves . . . it is at least possible that they did so in the indefensible belief that all the civilians they fired at were probably either members of the Provisional or Official IRA or were supporters of one or other of these paramilitary organisations; and so deserved to be shot . . . The firing by soldiers of 1 PARA on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.

Bloody Sunday was a turning point. The day’s events, including scenes of troops being petrol-bombed and spat at and firing at suspected IRA snipers, like the previous three years’ violence, were brought in colour to a worldwide television audience. Convinced that Northern Ireland institutions could not gain Catholic confidence, the Heath government decided to invoke its powers under section 75 of

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the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, proroguing Stormont and imposing direct rule from Westminster in March 1972. William Whitelaw was appointed the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Whitelaw faced a double threat from unionists who deeply resented their loss of control and British lack of confidence in them, and from the Provisional IRA which mounted its most sustained effort to disrupt the province and bomb Britain out of Ireland. He tried hard to win broad support by announcing in May 1972 a £35 million expansion of the Belfast shipyards providing 4,000 new jobs in a traditionally Protestant industry. He demonstrated his willingness to compromise by meeting Provisional IRA leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in London in July (it came to nothing: the IRA would not compromise). Having failed to stop the IRA campaign, he launched Operation Motorman on 31 July when he sent the army into ‘no go’ areas, finally ending them. In 1973 he began interning ‘loyalist’ terror suspects (in the nine months following direct rule, eighty Catholics and thirty-eight Protestants were killed), showing Catholics that security measures were not aimed at them alone. In the twelve months after Motorman, the number of shooting incidents was halved, and the number of explosions fell by one-third compared to the previous twelve months. David Ervine was nineteen years old in 1972 when he joined the UVF, the most murderous of the ‘loyalist’ paramilitaries. Later, after being convicted by a Diplock court (introduced in 1972 with no juries in an effort to prevent intimidation of witnesses) and serving six years in the Maze (a prison complex purpose-built for terrorists) he became leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (seen as the political wing of the UVF). [M]y experience of the institutions was that they were corrupt as [expletive deleted], and if I thought they were as corrupt as [expletive deleted], and I was a defender of the status quo, how much more when the young Nationalist got his first glimpse. I wonder was he surprised at the degree of [expletive deleted] that exuded from those institutions, or did they just reinforce the rightness of his cause?4

4

Ervine, quoted in Ed Moloney, Voices from the Grave (London, 2010), p. 357.

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Ervine bravely used his influence and position to reach across the divide in the North. He died of a heart attack in January 2007. Gerry Adams and David Trimble stood at his funeral. Ervine was a forthright representative of a debate within unionism. In the decade before direct rule, the Unionist Party had found itself increasingly divided between those who favoured reforms and concessions to the nationalist community, and those amongst the predominantly rural and urban working-class rank-and-file unionists who felt that their middle- and upper-class leaders were no longer in touch with their feelings or problems. The populist Reverend Dr Ian Paisley gradually was coming to speak for many unionists as violence and IRA activity drove them back to their first principles: that Catholics were nationalists out to subvert Unionist government. In the conservative, rural society of Northern Ireland such perceptions had great influence since information was often transmitted primarily by word of mouth rather than by books and newspapers, and opinions were formed by personal experience of being caught up in the Troubles – of having a friend killed; being questioned by police, army, illegal organisations etc. Class politics never took hold in the North because political and sectarian loyalties were always stronger. In April 1970, standing as a Protestant Unionist, Paisley won O’Neill’s old Stormont constituency in a by-election, catching the popular drift with his comment on O’Neill that he was ‘a man beneath contempt who talked of progress and who every day on his way to Stormont passed 200 houses with no water and never thought to do anything about them’. The ‘big house’ Unionist leadership, represented by O’Neill and Chichester-Clark, able to fraternise with British politicians on an equal social footing, increasingly concerned to preserve democratic processes in the face of violence, was easily portrayed as out of touch and out of step with the fundamentalist unionism of Ian Paisley and working-class Protestants. On the nationalist side, politics changed. The Nationalist Party (no longer regarded by Catholics as capable of enunciating their interests) was swept aside by the civil rights campaign of 1968–9. Austin Currie, Nationalist Party Stormont MP for East Tyrone, took a lead in the civil rights movement and was a founder member in 1970 of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), along with Gerry Fitt, Republican Labour Party Westminster MP for West

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Belfast since 1966, who became party leader, John Hume, a Derry Catholic community leader and NICRA activist, and Patrick Devlin, a Belfast politician and ex-chairman of the Northern Irish Labour Party. The SDLP rapidly gained the full support of Catholic voters, throughout the 1970s successfully competing with the Provisional IRA’s appeal to Catholics that violence would secure justice, maintaining a basic support for peaceful procedures. It was a difficult political path, leading the SDLP at times into contradictory positions. Thus in 1974 the SDLP shared (limited) power with Unionists under Brian Faulkner, but refused to offer unconditional support to the security services. Nevertheless, its part in opposing the IRA in defence of democratic methods to resolve differences commands respect. Northern Ireland’s other new party was also founded in 1970: the Alliance Party. It was formed by a group of moderate middle-class constitutionalists previously uninvolved in politics, its leader, Oliver Napier, having been a liberal Catholic Belfast solicitor. The stated aim of the party has been to attract unionist and nationalist support to break away from sectarian divisions in the province. Its electoral support came principally from the North’s middle class and hovered around 10 per cent throughout the 1970s, compared to 15 to 30 per cent for the DUP, 20 to 30 per cent for the Official Unionists, and the SDLP’s average of 25 per cent. Against this backdrop William Whitelaw in October 1972 published a statement of his objectives. His purpose was to devise a new form of government in the province which would ‘seek a wider consensus than has hitherto existed’ and ‘to be such as will work efficiently and will be capable of providing the concrete results of good government’. He publicly recognised that the question of Irish unity was a central issue, and on 8 March 1973 he held a referendum in the North on the question. The SDLP, establishing its own nationalist credentials, boycotted the poll (in July 1971 the SDLP had withdrawn from Stormont in protest at the ‘institutions of government’ and, echoing the creation of the first Dáil in 1919, had established a shortlived alternative ‘Assembly of the Northern Irish People’). In a 59 per cent poll, 58 per cent of eligible voters (i.e. 99 per cent of the poll) voted to stay within the UK. Catholics abstained (and were advised to do so by the SDLP and the IRA).

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In May 1973, Whitelaw piloted a Constitution Act through Parliament that replaced the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and set up a proportionally elected unicameral seventy-eight-member Assembly with an Executive to be appointed from it by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. This Executive and Assembly were to enjoy powers similar to those of Stormont, but not including sole control of the judicial system or the police. The SDLP, the Alliance Party and Unionists under Brian Faulkner lent broad support to the Act. A minority of Unionists broke with Faulkner at this stage, joining Paisley’s Democratic Unionists and the Vanguard Party (launched in 1972 by a former Unionist Party minister, William Craig, to oppose direct rule) in rejecting the Act on the grounds that the SDLP (who they still perceived as Catholics disloyal to the union with Britain) could have a place in the Executive, and that the Act left the Secretary of State with too much power (i.e. that unionist supremacy was not guaranteed). These unionists also felt that since Unionist candidates commanded majority electoral support, any arrangements that did not result in Unionist government were undemocratic. In elections for the Assembly in June, Faulkner’s Unionists won twenty-two seats; the anti-Act Unionists won twentyseven seats between them, and the SDLP consolidated their position as representatives of the Catholic community with nineteen seats. On 21 November 1973, Faulkner’s Unionists, the SDLP and the Alliance Party agreed with Whitelaw to cooperate in an Assembly power-sharing Executive. Brian Faulkner was designated Chief Executive with Gerry Fitt as Deputy Chief Executive. Whitelaw left at the end of November, being succeeded by Francis Pym. On 6–9 December a tripartite conference between the British and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive designate was held at the Sunningdale Civil Service College, Berkshire. A wide measure of agreement was reached. The Irish government accepted that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of the electorate in the province decided otherwise. It was agreed to set up a Council of Ireland with certain executive functions, and it was agreed to improve anti-terrorist cooperation between North and South. On 1 January 1974, the power-sharing Executive took office. On 4 January the Unionist Party made its deep reservations about the Executive and Sunningdale clear to Faulkner, and he

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resigned as party leader, then forming his own party, the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI). Faulkner’s party enjoyed some success to begin with, but by 1979 had ceased to be of electoral significance. The Official Unionist Party (as the old Unionist Party distinguished itself from 1974 and into the 1980s), while maintaining a willingness to reform Northern Irish society and political institutions, refused to accept Whitelaw’s most important proposal – power-sharing with nationalists – and formed the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) as a loose cooperative arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party and the Vanguard Party. The UUUC won eleven of the twelve Northern Irish Westminster seats in the February 1974 general election: unionist and Protestant Northern Ireland had clearly opted to uphold, albeit with moderation, the principle of Protestant supremacy in the province in opposition to power-sharing. The IRA also made plain its opposition to power-sharing by stepping up its attacks on troops and police, hoping to force the SDLP to take sides with the Executive and so risk being seen as ‘traitors’ by the Catholic community. In an attempt to win credibility after the UUUC’s victory, Faulkner sought modifications to the Sunningdale Agreement, emasculating the proposed Council of Ireland. The Agreement was by then rapidly becoming a dead-letter because hard-line nationalists in the South had challenged it in Irish courts on the grounds that it implied a surrender of the Irish Constitution’s claim to sovereignty over the whole of Ireland, forcing Liam Cosgrave’s government to defend itself by stating that the government supported the Constitution’s all-Ireland claim. Accordingly, Dublin could not legally recognise the North’s existence, and so was not able to implement the agreement to extradite people wanted in the North for terrorist crimes. It also meant that unionist suspicion of the South as a sanctuary for terrorists was reinforced. While negotiations were beginning on modifications to Sunningdale between the Executive, the Irish government and the new British Labour government, a new organisation, the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC), called a province-wide strike against the Executive and the Sunningdale Agreement. The UWC had been formed by the leaders of the three main Unionist parties – Harry

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West (Faulkner’s successor as leader of the Official Unionists), Ian Paisley and William Craig – combining with Protestant defence and terrorist groups – the Ulster Defence Association (a vigilante coordinating body, organised on military lines, and the largest Protestant paramilitary force), the Ulster Volunteer Force (the counterpart of the Provisional IRA), sometimes illegal and heavily involved in assassinating Catholics, and the Orange Volunteers (Orange exservicemen, closely linked to the Vanguard Party). Their strike, which began on 14 May 1974, lasted for fifteen days and brought the province to a halt. On 29 May, faced by a complete shutdown of all services, the Unionist members of the Executive resigned, forced to accept that power-sharing and Irish involvement in the North was unacceptable to nearly all unionists. After only five months, the Executive collapsed. direct rule At the time, many people thought that the February 1974 general election, coming so soon and so unexpectedly after the start of the power-sharing experiment (Heath’s government could have continued in office without an election until mid-1975), was responsible for the Executive’s failure. However, in retrospect it seems that unionist fears and antagonism to Sunningdale were deep-rooted, and that while the Executive alone might have gathered support, linked as it was in Sunningdale to a Council of Ireland, it was destined to fail. In the two decades after Sunningdale, successive British governments followed a dual policy of battling terrorism while seeking political arrangements that would reduce terrorist activity and condition the more extreme unionists to be more flexible about compromises British governments made with nationalists and the Republic. In turn, this generated responses in the South, not least because the well-being of the Republic was affected by the state of the North. Common ground for effective compromise between unionists and nationalists in the North narrowed after 1974. Unionists came to reject power-sharing; nationalists came to insist upon it. In March 1976, Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State 1974–6, publicly recognised that compromises were unlikely, saying in the House of Commons that while direct rule was not intended to be permanent, the

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government ‘does not contemplate any major new initiative for some time to come’. The consequence of this was a de facto policy of administration in the hands of unionists. Roy Mason, Rees’ successor from 1976 to 1979, determinedly continued this policy – ‘positive’ direct rule, he called it – and had success: the number of people murdered in terrorist attacks dropped and arrests of terrorists increased. In May 1977 Mason faced down a ‘loyalist’ strike against direct rule that sought to echo the effect of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike. His handling of the strike, constant refusal to deal with the IRA or ‘loyalist’ terrorists, and insistence that the UK government would not withdraw from the North, promised a measure of stability and thus reassured most people. It also meant that direct rule was proving to be the system that least exacerbated divisions in the North. Within ten years, the logic of this situation – full integration of the North with Britain – was to become Unionist policy. Direct rule lasted more than twenty years, from 1972 to 1974 under the 1920 Act, and after 1974 under the Northern Ireland (Temporary Provisions) Act, renewable annually, endowing the Secretary of State with the considerable executive functions permitted by the 1973 Constitution Act. Labour and Conservative governments in Westminster maintained a broad agreement on the government of the North, although Labour, in opposition throughout the 1980s, in 1981 changed from straightforward support of democratic majority wishes in the North to a policy of seeking withdrawal by actively campaigning for a united Ireland. This was to energise and make explicit what had been implicit in British policy since 1972. Labour’s 1988 policy document Towards a United Ireland – Labour’s Plan for Peace detailed steps by which the administration of the North would be increasingly harmonised with the South so as eventually to weave a pragmatic unionist acceptance of Irish unity. ‘While consent must, by definition, be freely given,’ Labour declared in the document, ‘no group or party will be allowed to exercise a veto on policies designed to win consent for unification.’ In 1989 at the Labour Party Conference, the party leadership defeated a resolution calling for withdrawal from the North, but the party’s preponderant desire for withdrawal was clear.

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Following the 1979 UK general election that saw Margaret Thatcher become prime minister for the first time, her Conservative government attempted unsuccessfully to replace direct rule with a new devolved government in the North. Humphrey Atkins, Mason’s successor as Secretary of State (1979–81), chaired a Constitutional Convention in 1980 that foundered on the intransigence of parties in the North. Thatcher and the Irish taoiseach, Charles Haughey, then met in Dublin in December and took an important step to improve dealings between Britain and the Republic. Amid much speculation and profound unionist suspicion, the two leaders agreed on still closer cooperation on security matters, the establishment of joint civil service working parties on matters of mutual interest, and on regular meetings between British prime ministers and Irish taoiseachs (in Irish, the plural is taoisigh). In a phrase that stirred hopes and fears, the two leaders referred to the ‘totality of relationships within these islands’. This was the start of a major shift in nationalist awareness, signalling a move away from traditional anti-British positions, and the jettisoning of a nationalist sense of being patronised by Britain. Extreme nationalists and ‘loyalists’ correctly feared that Britain and the Republic recognised that their common interests were greater than historical antipathies. Three years later, the main political parties in the Republic – Labour, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – joined with the SDLP in a review of nationalist attitudes. Meeting in Dublin as the New Ireland Forum, they published a report in May 1984 reaffirming the objective of a united Ireland to be obtained by peaceful means, but adopting a principle already at the heart of British policy: that the consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland was a precondition to any change in the status of the North. ‘The political arrangements for a new and sovereign Ireland’, said the report, ‘would have to be freely negotiated and agreed by the people of the North and by the people of the South.’ It was a very important step for nationalist politicians to take. Acceptance by constitutional nationalists North and South of the principle of consent in Northern Ireland represented an unequivocal success for British policy (and thus a considerable political and personal risk for nationalists). It also removed a strong unionist

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argument against dealing with nationalists. Furthermore, it clearly placed the SDLP and the parties of the Republic on the side of democratic progress, against Sinn Féin and the IRA. In 1985, Garret FitzGerald frankly stated the new nationalist position (and alluded to the background Southern fear that Northern violence would spill over into the Republic): No sane person could wish to change the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority of its people. That would be a recipe for disaster and could, I believe, lead only to a civil war, that would be destructive of the life of people throughout our island.5

The change within mainstream Irish nationalism was not met by unionists or the IRA. Unionists considered that agreeing to political compromises with nationalists in the North and to any acknowledgement that the Republic had an interest in the affairs of the North would risk a real surrender of their British citizenship and identity. To most unionists, every change after 1969 seemed to threaten their status, and they viewed every step taken by governments in Westminster and Dublin as possible stealthy erosion of their position. Because of direct rule, elections became, in effect, plebiscitary, demonstrating support within and between unionist and nationalist parties, in the process squeezing out the Alliance Party. Traditional unionism decayed, and a large number of unionists felt politically homeless after the introduction of direct rule. As a result abstentionism grew, and apparent electoral gains were often less substantial than appeared. Unionist votes in the decade after Sunningdale steadily drifted towards hardliners, especially Ian Paisley. Between 1983 and 1985, votes for Paisley’s Democratic Unionists grew from 20 per cent of those cast in the 1983 Westminster general election to 23.4 per cent in the 1985 local government elections, while Ulster Unionist (as the Official Unionist/old Unionist Party was now termed) support fell from 34 to 29.8 per cent. On the nationalist side, Sinn Féin won 13.4 per cent of the votes in the 1983 election compared to 17.9 per cent for the SDLP, and 11.8 per cent compared to 17.6 per cent in 1985. 5

Irish Times, 20 November 1985.

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For the IRA, violence increasingly became an end in itself. Sinn Féin’s electoral performance was seen as an endorsement of violence, and the party’s connection with the IRA (made apparent in 1981 by Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s publicity director, who asked at the party’s annual conference, ‘Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?’), was used to provide respectability for IRA violence, especially in the United States. Spectacular terrorist acts designed to attract publicity and generate support, particularly among IrishAmericans, became a feature of IRA activity. Noraid, a US-based organisation ostensibly gathering support for the nationalist community in the North, was linked to funding for the IRA. In October 1984, at the British Conservative Party conference in Brighton, the IRA detonated a bomb in the Grand Hotel where Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet were staying. Five people were killed and more than thirty were injured. Among the dead were an MP, Sir Anthony Berry, and Anne Wakeham, wife of the Chief Whip. Norman Tebbit, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, was severely injured and his wife, Margaret, was crippled. Claiming responsibility, the IRA declared: ‘Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country, torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky. But remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’6 In a revealing juxtaposition, Gerry Adams gave his account: I and some of my friends were wounded in a murder attack by loyalists. It later emerged that the gang which gunned us down in Belfast city centre was acting with the knowledge of British military intelligence. Later the same year, an IRA bomb attack in Brighton almost killed Margaret Thatcher, architect of the hunger strike deaths, and her Cabinet.7

Behind IRA terror and statements of intransigence, however, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and others in the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership were trying to move towards conventional politics. Adams made a telling admission in June 1979 at the Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown, Dublin, that ‘to date our most glaring 6

Time, 22 October 1984.

7

Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn (Dingle, 2001), p. 319.

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weakness lies in our failure to develop revolutionary politics’. Pope John Paul II, when visiting Ireland in September 1979, had made a speech at Drogheda calling for peaceful steps to be taken by all involved in violence in the North. This started a dialogue between Adams – elected president of Sinn Féin in 1983 – and various clerics, ultimately developing into the peace process ending most IRA and ‘loyalist’ terror twenty-six years later. The path that Adams walked was fraught. In 1986, Continuity IRA split from the Provisionals who had agreed to recognise the legitimacy of the Irish government: the 1922–3 civil war had been fought on this issue. Continuity was, in theory, as much opposed to the Irish government as to the Northern government. After the Provisionals decided to take part in peace discussions and made it clear that they would be prepared in principle to decommission weapons, the Real IRA split from them, refusing any part of the peace process. The Real IRA claimed to be the lineal descendant of the post-1986 Provisionals: at ‘war’ with the North, not with the Republic. With this yet-to-come history, convincing anyone of his peaceful bona fides, let alone convincing his own followers to stop terror, was a brave, dangerous and most difficult achievement. Terrorism and unionist unwillingness to make any more concessions, however, did not prevent Margaret Thatcher’s government, first with Charles Haughey and then with Garret FitzGerald, negotiating to strengthen cooperation against terrorism and to improve stability in the North. On 15 November 1985, at Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast, the residence of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Thatcher and FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. With the force of international treaty, the Agreement gave the Irish Republic the right, within the principle of consent, ‘to put forward views and proposals’ about the government and administration of the North, especially on security, prisons, law and order, individual cases of prisoners, and the composition and role of the Police Complaints Board and the Police Authority of Northern Ireland. The Westminster government’s motive was to affirm and improve the Republic’s support against terrorism and to demonstrate to unionists that the Republic could be a friend. The Republic’s interest was to show that diplomacy could advance nationalist ideals, and to try to keep terrorism locked up in the North.

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peace? The most significant part of the Anglo-Irish Agreement was the Republic’s formal acknowledgement of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. This was the first time since the creation of the Republic that such a statement was given by an Irish government, and it went a long way to counteract traditional unionist objections to the Republic’s claims in its Constitution to the whole island of Ireland. ‘Any change in the status of Northern Ireland’, the Republic formally acknowledged, ‘would only come about with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland [and] the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland is for no change.’ The Republic also undertook further anti-terrorist measures, including adherence to the 1976 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism which made easier the extradition between North and South of those accused of terrorist offences. In exchange, the Republic’s interest in the North was formally recognised. Garret FitzGerald in 1986 summed up the change in nationalist attitudes that the agreement represented: Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable that any Irish government could have won public support for the proposition that unification required the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland. Twenty years ago politicians in the Republic were still espousing the untenable and provocative thesis that unification was a matter that should be decided by a majority in the island as a whole, over the heads of, and against the wishes of, a majority in Northern Ireland.8

The agreement was immediately condemned by the overwhelming majority of unionist leaders who, despite assurances, understood that the Republic’s formal involvement in Northern affairs was an erosion of the North’s position within the UK. In the Republic, Fianna Fáil at first opposed the agreement on the grounds that it diluted national claims, but subsequently accepted it. Terrorists hit out against the agreement, and over the next twelve months the indices of terrorist violence increased. The Provisionals expressed the hardline republican view with a bomb in Enniskillen on Remembrance Day, 1987. Twenty-year-old Marie Wilson was one of 8

Irish Post, 8 November 1986.

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those killed. Her father, Gordon, publicly forgave Marie’s killers and devoted himself to the cause of peace in the North. He was appointed an Irish Senator as a Taioseach’s nominee in February 1993, and in April met two IRA spokesmen and confronted their absolute dedication to violence. I was there to say, for God’s sake, boys, enough is enough. And I got a point blank response. Nothing. There was one man and one woman. The man never took his cap off. He answered yes, no, he passed the shades of grey to the young lady, who was the most articulate. I’ll swear she was a graduate. I could raise an odd wee smile from her, but not from him. He was a hard man. But they were utterly polite. We drank tea and orange juice. They presented me with a typed sheet of paper stating again that they were sorry about Enniskillen and my daughter, and repeated they were not the aggressors, but responded to British aggression. In two words, what they said was, Brits out. And I said, do you mean Protestants out? and they said oh no, we would hope to win Protestants over to our way of thinking. I said, but you have driven Protestants away, you haven’t won over a single Protestant in 24 years and 3,000 dead. I challenged them why, if their targets were the army and the police, they had killed, in Enniskillen, 11 gentle folk? It was the only time I raised my voice in anger. In Warrington, I said, you killed two little boys, on a Saturday morning, where there was no army or police. And they said, that was a mistake. I said, I am tired of hearing the IRA talking about their mistakes. And really, it was then that we agreed that we weren’t getting anywhere . . . I did not expect them to say, ‘Okay, Gordon Wilson, we will do as you say.’ Some called me naive, and said I was made a fool of, and maybe they were right. God knows. But I had hopes. People had told me they couldn’t think of anybody more likely to get something from the IRA, in the way of a little peace. I thought I might, if only a change of emphasis. I was wrong.9

However, the agreement saw greater efficiency in the war against terrorism, notably in increased arrests of terrorists as a result of crossborder military and police cooperation, and a gradual reduction in unionist fears. Sinn Féin, hoping to capitalise on what it considered would be the unpopularity of the agreement, in 1986 ceased its boycott of elections in the Republic. But in the Republic’s 1987 general election, Sinn Féin received only 1.9 per cent of the vote; in 9

The Times, 5 November 1993.

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the Republic’s 1989 general election, its vote fell to 1.2 per cent. In 1997 the party won one seat in the Dáil; in 2002 it won five, and in 2007, four: Northern issues were never popular in the South. The compromises between the UK and Irish governments were not met by greater Unionist flexibility or by less determined terrorism. All Humphrey Atkins’ successors as Secretary of State continued efforts to replace direct rule with power-sharing devolved government. James Prior (Secretary of State 1981–4) called it ‘rolling devolution’ and established an elected Assembly in 1982 with consultative powers which sat until 1986 when the SDLP walked out. In October 1993, against a backdrop of extensive IRA bombings in England and IRA and ‘loyalist’ murders in the North, John Hume, now leader of the SDLP, following secret talks with Gerry Adams, made private proposals to the UK and Irish governments that, said Hume, would bring peace to the North ‘in a week’. Gerry Adams later admitted that convincing his own side to support the peace effort was the greatest difficulty: [T]he most difficult negotiation I found was with your own side. The Taoiseach had difficulties, the most difficult negotiations being with his own side, and John Hume had difficulties, the most difficult negotiation he’s ever done I think. None of us had difficulty with broad popular opinion in Ireland, but we all had difficulties with people within our own constituencies.10

John Major, prime minister from November 1990 to July 1997, met Hume but rejected his proposals. At the same time, Major and the Irish taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, in public hinted at proposals for a Northern Ireland settlement involving both governments and Sinn Féin as long as the party and the IRA renounced violence. Major devoted himself to trying to re-establish peace in the North, spending more time on this than on any other issue during his premiership. Reynolds admired and supported him: Here was a guy with good-will keeping peace at the top of his agenda, a man who was giving the Irish problem more time than any other prime minister since Gladstone . . . It was very difficult for John Major: he had to contend with the British people who had no concept of Republicanism, they simply

10

Quoted in Albert Reynolds (with Jill Arlon), My Autobiography (Dublin, 2009), p. 304.

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didn’t understand. All they saw were the bald facts, and it was almost impossible for him.11

At the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London on 15 November 1993, Major unambiguously invited Sinn Féin to participate in settling the future of Northern Ireland: If the IRA end violence for good, then – after a sufficient interval to ensure the permanence of their intent – Sinn Féin can enter the political arena as a democratic Party and join the dialogue on the way ahead . . . Some would deny them that path on account of their past and present misdeeds. I understand that feeling, but I do not share it . . . There can be no secret deals, no rewards for terrorism, no abandonment of the vital principle of majority consent.

The following day, Albert Reynolds gave Major’s initiative a boost by dropping the Republic’s precondition that there had to be an end to violence before there could be all-party talks on the future of the North. This precondition had previously given the IRA, in effect, a veto on talks involving the South. London and Dublin, said Reynolds, were following ‘parallel’ policies. All these efforts to end direct rule foundered on the intransigencies of nationalists and unionists in the North. Initiatives, if they were to be undertaken, were forced into the hands of Westminster and Dublin, thus confirming a de facto preference for direct rule in both communities in the North. Terrorists refused to end their terror as a precondition to political negotiations; nationalists insisted on participation in the government and administration of the North; full integration with Britain had become a formal Unionist objective, providing a strong argument to reject further compromise with nationalists and the Republic. After all, Unionists pointed out, if Northern Ireland is part of the UK, why should it not be governed in the same way as Wales and Scotland, with the same rights and protections as the Scots and Welsh enjoy? These developments played against steadily increasing violence in the North. The year 1972, following direct rule, was the most violent in Northern Ireland’s history in the half-century since partition. Everyday life in the North encountered police and army checkpoints and patrols, feeding an underlying tension. Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘From The Frontier Of Writing’ (1987) summoned this: 11

Ibid., pp. 318, 320.

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The tightness and the nilness round that space when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration– a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient. So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk. And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed, as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armour-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Two unhappy consequences of terrorism (of which there are many) are scrutiny and restriction. The IRA and their ‘loyalist’ counterparts’ dedication to violence was absolute. Gerry Adams in 1990 stated starkly: ‘The onus is on those who claim that there is an alternative to the IRA’s armed struggle to prove that this is the case.’ Referring to unionists in the North, he declared: ‘The argument that the consent of this national minority, elevated into a majority within an undemocratic, artificially created state, is necessary before any constitutional change can occur, is a nonsense.’12 To extreme nationalists, the only alternative to the unionists’ 12

Irish Times, 17 November 1990.

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immediate consent to a united Ireland was that the IRA should terrorise them into it. IRA men were prepared to die for this belief. In 1981, ten IRA prisoners starved themselves to death in the H-blocks of the Maze prison outside Belfast, despite initial opposition to their hunger strike by Gerry Adams and the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership who saw it as a hopeless diversion from ‘attempts to remedy the political underdevelopment of our struggle’.13 The first to die, Bobby Sands, had been elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in a byelection four weeks before his death. The hunger strikers were attempting to force the UK government to let them wear civilian clothes instead of prison uniform, thus inferring that they were ‘soldiers’ and not criminals: everyone recognised that their real protest was against the division of Ireland. Whatever their reason and the actions that had placed them in the Maze in the first place, Sands and his colleagues had demonstrated extraordinary bravery and determination, revealing intransigent dedication to their cause. A consequence was a sympathetic broadening of support for the overwhelmingly working-class Sinn Féin, and two years later the party was challenging the middle-class SDLP for leadership of the nationalist community. talks The grim destruction of terror slowly forced change on all those involved. During Christmas 1981 after the deaths of Sands and his colleagues, Gerry Adams went for a walk and pondered: There had, after all, been a life before 1969 . . . Many of my childhood friends had died. Too many. For every section of our people there was so much pain. We wanted equality and justice. We wanted freedom. We demanded peace.14

In 1970 the Troubles seemed to be in a backwater. In contrast, the peace discussions initiated by John Hume in 1993 took place as a world question with Ireland, the UK, and the US directly involved. The process was not an attempt to change terrorists’ minds: they 13

Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn (Dingle, 2001), p. 290.

14

Ibid., p. 316.

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would not change. It was a public relations exercise designed to mobilise opinion, especially US opinion, against terrorists and so whittle away at their support and isolate them. It was also to make everyone understand that the UK would only accept a political settlement. Hume’s initiative started a secret exchange with Gerry Adams and the IRA leading to the 15 December 1993 Downing Street Declaration by John Major and Albert Reynolds, wherein the two governments agreed that they would both uphold ‘the wishes of the greater number of the people of Northern Ireland on the issue of whether they prefer to support the Union or a sovereign united Ireland’. The Declaration was greeted with widespread approval – and some unionist misgiving. Terrorists on both sides, however, continued to kill. Then, on 31 August 1994, the IRA announced ‘a complete cessation of military operations’. It had become clear to a majority of the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership that, after twenty-five years, terrorism alone was not going to secure a united Ireland and that constitutional methods might offer better prospects: indeed, the delay in responding positively to the Declaration was a political power play. The IRA was saying that it, not the government, could determine peace or terror and, as events were to prove, would maintain the terror option throughout. John Major cautiously welcomed the IRA ceasefire (pointing out that the IRA had given no undertaking to cease terror permanently), removed the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin and IRA spokesmen, and committed the UK government to a Northern Ireland referendum on the outcome of talks with ‘loyalists’ and nationalists, including terrorists. On 13 October 1994, ‘loyalists’ announced a ceasefire. Eight days later, John Major announced that ‘following a review of their actions, which had been more compelling than their words’, he was prepared to make ‘a working assumption’ that since the ceasefire was being maintained, both sides intended their cessation of violence to be permanent and that therefore exploratory talks with Sinn Féin and ‘loyalists’ would begin. Between December 1994 and 29 March 1995, five meetings took place between government officials and Sinn Féin. Traditional demands were made: Sinn Féin wanted an amnesty for IRA prisoners;

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the transfer of prisoners from gaols in Great Britain to Northern Ireland; the disbandment of the RUC; the return of the army to barracks, and the beginning of all-party talks. The government, reiterating a demand that had first been made secretly in November 1993, insisted that the IRA decommission its weapons and explosives. Sinn Féin, while officially acknowledging for the first time that it ‘had an influence’ with the IRA, conversely insisted that all arms – including those of the security forces – should be decommissioned; that the IRA would not decommission alone; and that all-party talks should take place without preconditions. While a centrally important impasse, the decommissioning issue did not stop talks about talks. The government signalled willingness to compromise by ending routine army patrols in Derry in November 1994; replacing helmets with berets by the armed forces to present a more peaceable image; ending routine vehicle checks on the border with the Republic; and ceasing military support of the RUC on the streets of Belfast in March 1995. On 24 May 1995, Sir Patrick Mayhew (Secretary of State 1991–7) met Gerry Adams for the first time in Washington, DC. Further meetings followed, and another twin-track approach was developed: talks would proceed on all-party talks; decommissioning would be a separate issue. Talks with ‘loyalists’ took place in tandem. Security barriers and huts were removed from central Belfast in July 1995; army units were relocated to Britain, and eighty-eight IRA and ‘loyalist’ prisoners were released on licence in November 1995. Great hope on all sides was invested in the ceasefire and the talks about talks. John Bruton, who succeeded Albert Reynolds as Irish taoiseach in 1994, continued the peacemaking efforts of his predecessor. In Belfast on 22 February 1995, together with John Major, he launched a series of administrative and constitutional proposals that had been worked out by the two governments. Frameworks for the Future outlined a new Northern Ireland Assembly with legislative and executive responsibility, elected by proportional representation. The Irish government undertook to change its constitution to reflect the principle of consent in the North (subject to a referendum – a requirement for constitutional change in the Republic), and to amend articles 2 and 3 of the constitution to remove the claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland. In addition, Northern

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Ireland’s status as a separate political entity would be recognised by the Republic. A ‘North/South body’ of senior Irish and UK civil servants, reporting both to the Dáil and to the Northern Ireland Assembly, with executive responsibilities, was proposed to deal with European Union matters and other matters that the Dáil and the Assembly agreed to delegate to it. Not unexpectedly, both the Ulster Unionists and the Democratic Unionists rejected the Frameworks proposals. Sinn Féin demanded the start of all-party talks without preconditions. The IRA refused a face-saving compromise offered by Sir Patrick Mayhew that they decommission some weapons to demonstrate good faith. They wanted the shadow of the gunman to loom as a threat that if they did not secure their aims in all-party talks, then they would resort to violence once again. US involvement in Northern affairs was crucial to the eventual outcome. Thirteen of the fifty-six signatories of the American Declaration of Independence were of Irish, mostly Ulster, ancestry. An estimated 900,000 – 30 per cent – of the 3 million Americans in 1776 were of Presbyterian Scots or Scots-Irish descent. A majority of Presidents have been of Irish Presbyterian ancestry. Mass Irish Catholic migration after the famine, however, rapidly developed a new Irish-American political group. An estimated 41 million Americans (about 14 per cent of the total population; only GermanAmericans were more numerous) were of Irish descent by 2000, and a majority traced back to Catholic Ireland. The views, the number and the political weight in the United States of these emigrants and their descendants made matters Irish reach much further than Anglo-Irish relationships, and forced the UK from the later nineteenth century onward to consider the effects on the US political consciousness of its Irish policies and activities. By no means all Americans of Irish descent supported the IRA or Irish nationalism, but most maintained an interest in Irish well-being. Britain’s need of US support in wars and for market opportunities meant that during the twentieth century US policy and opinion became the main external concern of British politicians and of foreign policy. The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty was to a significant degree a response to American opinion and congressional inquiries. The IRA, ever since the 1922–3 civil war, had displaced all other

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revolutionary groups and, since its inception, had secured its funding principally from Americans. President Clinton’s administration energised the search for peace in the 1990s. He welcomed Gerry Adams at the White House, and agreed with the UK government in 1995 the appointment of former Senator George Mitchell as the first US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland (Mitchell served from 1995 to 2003) to oversee attempts to persuade the various paramilitary groups to decommission their arms and to bring peace to the province. To achieve this, the UK and Irish governments, with the support of the US government, on 28 November 1995 formally adopted a twin-track strategy to begin all-party talks: track one was to negotiate with all parties, including Sinn Féin and the Unionist and ‘loyalist’ parties. Track two was to negotiate the decommissioning of illegally held arms and explosives. The idea was that difficulties in negotiating one track should not be allowed to influence negotiations on the other track. An international commission, chaired by George Mitchell, was established to investigate possibilities. Harri Holkeri, former prime minister of Finland, and General John de Chastelain, former Chief of the Canadian Defence Staff, were the two other members. The Mitchell Commission consulted with all groups and published its report on 24 January 1996. Republican and ‘loyalist’ paramilitary groups, the commission emphasised, had made quite clear that they would not decommission arms prior to all-party talks. The commission suggested, therefore, that rather than as a prerequisite to talks, decommissioning might take place during talks. The report, in effect, offered a compromise to the terrorists: if they entered all-party talks in good faith, then they would no longer first be required to decommission arms. It also was a warning to them: it would be difficult to sustain American support for Irish nationalist objectives if they rejected Mitchell. The UK government was also pressured by the report: it was caught on the hook of having always demanded at least some decommissioning before allowing terrorists to participate in all-party talks. John Major sought a way out by suggesting an election for a new Northern Ireland Forum, in which context ‘it is possible to imagine decommissioning and [all-party] negotiations being taken forward in parallel’.15 15

House of Commons, 24 January 1996.

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Before this suggestion went any further, on 9 February 1996 the IRA called off its 1994 ceasefire and detonated a massive bomb at South Quay at Canary Wharf in London’s docklands, killing two people, injuring one hundred, and causing millions of pounds’ worth of damage. ‘Loyalist’ terror groups maintained their 1994 ceasefire. An integral part of the business of murder – as with war – is the need to pay lip service to peace. But the reality is always promises and mutilation, pain and death. More IRA bombs followed in London and Manchester and Northern Ireland. A police officer was murdered in the Republic. The IRA’s actions, supported by Sinn Féin, were part of a crude strategy to see how many more concessions might be obtained before they committed to the democratic process. They were taking a calculated risk with their American supporters. Clinton closed doors to Adams and Sinn Féin, while keeping them open to ‘loyalists’ maintaining the ceasefire. It was soon clear that the UK was winning public opinion. Irish-Americans were far less supportive of the IRA than before: they recognised that IRA terror was not far from the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 (by Timothy McVeigh, an Irish-American Catholic). It was also recognised that the UK government over the previous five years had made substantial concessions, notably that Irish unity was possible. The development of North–South coordinating bodies, official and unofficial, also showed that the UK government recognised that ways must be found to prevent a future unionist monopoly of power in the North if peace was ever to have a chance of being permanent. The return to violence did not end the attempts to secure allparty talks and decommissioning, and 10 June 1996 was set as the start of all-party talks – not, as heretofore, talks about talks, but talks themselves – on the future of Northern Ireland. The UK and Irish governments launched a joint effort to secure the success of these talks by agreeing that both governments would consult with all parties except Sinn Féin (which was held to have excluded itself by endorsing renewed IRA violence) in order to see if a broadly acceptable elective process could be agreed, and to consider holding simultaneous referendums in the North and in the Republic on proposals, yet to emerge from the all-party talks, that would create lasting stability.

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Plans for elections to the Northern Ireland Forum were announced by John Major on 21 March 1996. The Forum was, essentially, a confidence-building getting-to-know-you exercise. All-party discussions were separate. The Forum had no executive or legislative powers, and was to meet when all-party talks were not in session. The Forum elections took place on 30 May. They were conducted on a party-list proportional-representation basis – the same as that used in the Republic. The Ulster Unionists topped the poll with 30 seats. The Democratic Unionists won 24 seats; the SDLP 21, Sinn Féin 17 and the Alliance Party 7. The results showed that the Northern electorate was moving towards Paisley and Sinn Féin. All parties that secured representation in the Forum were automatically entitled to take part in all-party peace talks on condition that they accepted the principles of democracy and non-violence set out in the Mitchell report and agreed to decommission. The Forum talks were opened jointly by John Major and John Bruton at Stormont. The way was open for Sinn Féin to take part if it accepted the Mitchell principles. In July 1997 the IRA and Sinn Féin, after fierce internal debate, agreed to accept most of the principles, announced another ceasefire, but still refused to decommission arms. Then in September Sinn Féin publicly accepted decommissioning and entered the peace talks. On 10 October the IRA held an extraordinary army convention. There were two motions: that the Mitchell principles, to which Sinn Féin had agreed, should be rejected; and that the July ceasefire should be ended. The leadership of Gerry Adams (it is said that he had been Chief of Staff of the IRA and was a member of the IRA’s governing Army Council, though he continues to deny membership) and Martin McGuinness (he had been head of the IRA in Derry and Chief of Staff of the IRA, was a member of the Army Council and Sinn Féin’s principal negotiator) was on the line. They won rejection of the two motions convincingly, with the Army Council supporting them unanimously. The IRA’s Quartermaster General, Michael McKevitt, resigned in protest, and with a handful of supporters established the Real IRA dedicated to continuing terror to force Britain out of Ireland. Also in October, Tony Blair (b. 1953), John Major’s successor as prime minister since July 1997, publicly shook hands with Adams and McGuinness, becoming the first prime minister in seventy-six

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years to meet a Sinn Féin delegation. Unionists were angry and alarmed: Blair was signalling that he was willing to go farther than they might wish to compromise with men of violence, as was his counterpart in Dublin, Bertie Ahern: One of the most demanding aspects of negotiating with Adams and McGuinness was having to put the violence with which they were associated to one side. Many said these guys had blood on their hands. But I felt we had to look to the future and I saw them as men who were trying to lead a movement forward . . . Pragmatism was the price of getting the job done.16

Gerry Adams (b. 1948) came from a four-generation Belfast Republican family. A great-grandfather was a Fenian. A grandfather had been in the IRB. His father and five uncles were in the IRA. His mother was in Cumann na mBan, the IRA’s sister organisation. Leaving school at sixteen, he became a barman and joined the IRA. In 1972, regarded as senior in the organisation, he was interned for six months and from then on played an increasingly public role in Sinn Féin while denying any parallel leadership in the IRA. In 1983 he was elected President of Sinn Féin and MP for West Belfast. He had animal qualities: brave, smart, shrewd and keen political sense. ‘Adams is a very serious guy,’ said Ahern. ‘He would never come in with a bundle of jokes. There wasn’t much small talk. Sometimes he could be cross and difficult. He always had it worked out in advance how far he was prepared to go and how he could get there.’ He was a throwback who came to realise that was what he was. Born with a strong sense of historical continuity, he came to discover that he was destroying, not building. Grasping that his authority would evaporate if he moved away from terror, he let himself be crudely defined by ‘The Cause’ while arguing for non-traditional objectives – socialism, appealing to the international Left – distracting attention as he gradually moved to join a less violent world. That no one wanted Northern Ireland and that continued violence would bring it to collapse became his strong, but very private, awareness. There was a middle-class feel about him, and his willingness to operate as a standard political figure was recognised by governments and journalists early on.

16

Bertie Ahern (with Richard Aldous), The Autobiography (London, 2009), p. 198.

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Martin McGuinness (b. 1950) came from Derry’s Bogside, the second-oldest in a family of six boys and one girl, devoutly Catholic but uninvolved in politics. Like Adams, his formal education was limited. He left school (where he had a reputation as a bully) at fifteen to become a shop assistant and then a butcher’s delivery boy. He joined the IRA when he was twenty and rapidly rose in its ranks. He was the chief representative for Sinn Féin during peace talks and was also the IRA contact for negotiators and the decommissioning process. He demonstrated an unusual ability to handle pathological people. He was personable. Like Adams, he was a Janus figure, responsible for many bloody acts while capable of looking beyond violence to civil settlement. In Ahern’s view, ‘While Adams could be narky, McGuinness was more personable. He would ask about my family and talk about sport or fishing. He was more emotional in talks. Gerry would usually be fairly bland about things, so you could never be sure if he was happy or annoyed. If Martin was angry, you knew it.’ Unlike Adams, his move from terrorist to politician was surprising. He was elected MP for Mid-Ulster in 1997. In November 2009 a Belfast Telegraph opinion poll found him to be Northern Ireland’s most respected and popular minister. Tony Blair saw both men in political terms: Then there are Gerry and Martin. They were an extraordinary couple. Over time I came to like both greatly, probably more than I should have, if truth be told . . . Many people, including a large part of British intelligence, thought Sinn Féin and the IRA were indistinguishable . . . I always thought the relationship was more complex than that . . . I know that they both could be clever and manipulative; but so can I. And my sense was that, in certain situations, they were persuading and negotiating with others, not giving orders . . . Ultimately, they understood that the IRA’s existence had become not the way to a just settlement, but the barrier to it. It took real political courage to implement that insight.17

He might have acknowledged that it also took real physical courage. In October 1997 the Ulster Freedom Fighters had withdrawn from the Combined Loyalist Military Command, the ‘loyalist’ terrorist umbrella group observing the ceasefire, and ‘loyalist’ terrorist murders punctuated the end of the year. The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA 17

Tony Blair, A Journey (London, 2010), pp. 196–7.

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carried out bombings and killings, as did the Loyalist Volunteer Force and the Ulster Freedom Fighters. On 25 November 1997, building on the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, the UK and Irish governments launched a ‘process to make progress in parallel on the decommissioning issue and on all-party negotiations’, and talks with Sinn Féin and other parties began. This had come about in large part because of US pressure: President Clinton made frequent direct telephone contact with participants to encourage agreement. The process recognised and used American influence in Ireland. It involved the United States in the day-to-day battle with terrorism, thus reducing both the IRA’s call on Irish-American sympathy and that sympathy itself, and herding the IRA and other terrorists into a clearly defined corner, forcing them towards peaceful politics or to face – and to be starkly revealed in – their own nihilism. Clinton had offered Gerry Adams and ‘loyalists’ the prospect of democratic respectability if they took what he termed ‘risks for peace’. With the ceasefire, Clinton’s effort seemed to have paid off. The UK government had ruthlessly set aside unionist fears in order to reach a position where it was clear – very clear to unionists – that Northern Ireland could be united with the Republic. Continuing talks with Sinn Féin, despite the decommissioning impasse, demonstrated that violence would not veto political progress. The UK government’s hope, and that of the government of the Republic, was clearly that, however raggedly, the men and women of violence should be encouraged into the constitutional fold. In order to achieve that, terrorists had to be shown that they might gain more from talking than from killing. By doing this, John Major was consciously risking the traditional support the Conservative Party received in the House of Commons from Unionist MPs. Unionist leadership, if it accepted the possibility of a united Ireland achieved by democratic process, would also be taking a risk with its rank-and-file supporters who, with traditional marches and demonstrations, had always rejected such a possibility. The DUP and the UK Unionist Party, formed in 1995 to press for full integration of the North in the UK, boycotted the talks in protest at Sinn Féin’s involvement. In December 1997 Billy Wright, leader of the LVF, was murdered in the Maze prison. His followers carried out revenge shootings.

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In January 1998, ‘loyalist’ prisoners in the Maze withdrew their support for the peace talks, but Mo Mowlam (Sir Patrick Mayhew’s successor in July 1997) unprecedentedly had a meeting with ‘loyalist’ terrorist prisoners in the Maze and convinced them to renew their support for the talks. Two days later a relative of Gerry Adams was murdered by the LVF. Thc Ulster Democratic Party left the peace talks after the UFF, to which it was linked, admitted to some of the killings. In February the IRA was blamed for two murders. As a result, Sinn Féin was suspended from the peace talks. The UDP was readmitted. Then the RUC publicly stated that the violence was ‘not the work of the Provisional IRA’,18 and thus exonerated Sinn Féin and the IRA, enabling Sinn Féin to rejoin the talks. George Mitchell chaired them, and Tony Blair personally took part in the final rounds. The result was a marathon final session, now including Sinn Féin, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. agreement The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a finely balanced compromise on all sides. Elements first outlined in the 1995 UK/Irish governments’ Frameworks for the Future document were given substance. The IRA was not required to decommission its arms immediately, but a two-year time limit was set for handing in all weapons. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act, under which Northern Ireland had so far been governed, would be repealed and a new 108-seat Assembly (under the ultimate control of the UK government and Parliament), elected by proportional representation, would become the governing body in the North. A Northern Ireland twelve-member Executive Committee, reflecting the parties in and elected by the Assembly, would become, in effect, the Cabinet: this meant that Sinn Féin could hold ministerial posts. All signatories would undertake ‘total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues’ (meaning that Sinn Féin would no longer condone terrorism); that the parties would ‘recognise the legitimacy 18

The Times, 26 March 1998.

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of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status’ (meaning that until there was a nationalist majority in the North, the province would remain part of the UK); that there would be a North–South Council of the Republic and Northern Ireland governments to develop crossborder collaboration; that there would be a British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference and a British–Irish Council to build cooperation between the national and regional governments in the two countries, and that Ireland, subject to a referendum, would amend the articles of its Constitution asserting sovereignty over Northern Ireland. IRA and ‘loyalist’ prisoners in the UK and in the Republic who accepted the renunciation of terror would be freed (with provision, in effect, for almost all such prisoners to be released within three years). ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’ was the succinct view of the SDLP leader, Seamus Mallon. Not part of the agreement, but given by Tony Blair as a personal undertaking, was that Sinn Féin would not be allowed to take part in the Executive Committee until the IRA decommissioned its weapons. Simultaneous referendums in the North and the Republic would be held to ratify the agreement. President Clinton gave personal assurances to the Unionist leadership on the decommissioning issue. David Trimble committed himself and his party to making the agreement work, despite grave misgivings about decommissioning. The DUP and the UK Unionists opposed the agreement. Gerry Adams, on behalf of Sinn Féin, equivocated, saying, ‘This is a phase in our struggle. That struggle must continue until it reaches its final goal.’19 The use of the term ‘British’ in the Agreement, meaning England, Scotland and Wales and not including Northern Ireland, was a significant indication of British willingness to see a united Ireland – a point not lost on unionists. The whole construction was a tactical exercise motivated by a proper desire to end terror. But it locked sectarian prerogatives into the future of the North, emphasising the separateness of the North from the Republic and Britain, and making future change – while inevitable – a constant temptation for reversion to terror. On 22 May 1998 the referendums on the agreement (and on the constitutional changes required in the Republic removing its claim to 19

The Times, 11 April 1998.

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the whole of Ireland) took place. They were the first all-Ireland electoral event since 1921 and were a coordinated act designed to show that all-Ireland union was a practical possibility and thus undermine the appeal of extreme nationalists while serving as a warning to unionists that they could not assume veto power. Tremendous political will was behind the Good Friday Agreement. President Clinton, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, and Mo Mowlam acted together throughout to campaign for the agreement and to pressurise Sinn Féin and the IRA to renounce violence. The agreement was resoundingly endorsed by 71 per cent of those who voted in the North, and 94 per cent in the Republic. The agreement’s ending of the Republic’s claim to the whole of Ireland was a strange achievement for republicans. As a consequence of IRA intransigence, the people of the Republic, fearful of violence spilling over to them and of being made responsible for a terrorised North, had repudiated the unity of Ireland. The IRA could no longer claim general endorsement by the people of Ireland for its principal objective. In the North, the favourable vote contained a high proportion of nationalists; only a small majority of unionists who did vote supported the agreement. Many unionists did not vote because they could not stomach the idea of erstwhile terrorists having executive authority in Northern government. Thus the presumption of a unionist majority in favour of the agreement was challenged from the outset. The voting system specified in the agreement was complicated. Separate majorities of unionists and of nationalists in the Assembly would have to be achieved before legislation could be passed. A simple overall majority would not be sufficient. However, this meant that a grouping on the nationalist side of representatives of about 18 per cent of the population, and on the unionist side of about 34 per cent, could stop legislation. It was carrying minority rights almost to the point of minority rule. It was a politicians’ compromise, focused on weaning support away from terror. Paisley’s Democratic Unionist opposition meant that in practice it would be extremely difficult for David Trimble to secure a Unionist majority. General de Chastelain had been appointed chairman of an Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, established by the UK and Irish governments in August 1997.

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‘Decommissioning’ was a word of deliberate and possibly dangerous vagueness. It was assumed by most to mean the destruction of weapons. But the Good Friday Agreement, while implying that destruction was intended, did not spell that out. The word ‘destruction’ did not appear in the agreement. Decommissioning might mean that a weapon had only a vital part removed. A part, however, can always be replaced. Explosives presented another problem: they could only be decommissioned by being detonated or by being handed over to democratic authorities. However, decommissioned weapons and explosives were to be left under the control of those who had them: not a measure providing confidence in terrorists’ democratic intentions since weapons left in the control of those who possessed them might very well not be destroyed. The agreement’s public relations advantage of announcing decommissioning was contradicted by this series of vaguenesses. In order to obtain Sinn Féin’s support for the agreement, however, vagueness was necessary. It left terrorists and their political fronts with room to manoeuvre. The IRA and Sinn Féin were immediately and accurately to claim that commitment to peace did not mean the surrender or destruction of weapons. In turn, this prevented successful power-sharing because unionists would not accept anything less than the destruction of weapons. The Good Friday Agreement had set two years after it was ratified by referendums in the North and in the Republic, 22 May 2000, as the date for complete decommissioning. The Commission reported some decommissioning by the IRA and by the Loyalist Volunteer Force, but was unable to achieve definitive destruction. In 2001, the date for full decommissioning of weapons was moved to 2007. It was also agreed that the role and nature of the Royal Ulster Constabulary would be re-examined. The RUC had always been more than a police force: it was also designed as a quasi-military force to defend Northern Ireland. This led to the replacing of the RUC by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), its nature clearly to be a police force, not a constabulary, banned from wearing any badges or emblems associated with Britain or the Republic, and not allowed to fly the Union flag from its buildings. Legislation for this came into effect in November 2001.

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The UK’s determination to achieve a political solution in the North went hand in hand with a willingness to show world opinion that it was not doctrinaire, that it would sacrifice sentiment and unionist sensibilities (unionists had no one but the UK to turn to), would appease the IRA – all in an effort especially to win US opinion and leave the IRA with nowhere to go. Only Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists, always committed both to the symbols of the UK and to the reality of Northern Ireland’s union with Britain, and some terrorists opposed the Good Friday Agreement. George Mitchell remained cautious, ‘Nobody can rule out the possibility that eighteen months from now, they can’t get the Assembly to work, that the whole process simply stops,’ and he warned that there was ‘a presumption of bad faith’ between unionists and nationalists that would make the agreement lucky to survive. It was clear that the UK government had gone as far as it could in pressuring unionists to compromise with nationalists, and that David Trimble had gone as far as he could as well. Emphasising this, in the Assembly elections held in the North in June 1998, Paisley’s Democratic Unionists did very well, coming a close second to Trimble’s Unionists. The SDLP and Sinn Féin both increased their share of the vote. In July the new Assembly met. David Trimble was elected First Minister, and Seamus Mallon his Deputy. The speed with which the Agreement (April) was followed by the referendums (May) and then the Northern Ireland Assembly elections (June) was calculated to ride over ‘loyalist’, unionist and nationalist opposition, utilising the strength of public opinion, expressed in the referendums, on behalf of peace. The accuracy of this calculation was demonstrated during the July 1998 Orange marching season. In 1997 an Independent Parades Commission had been established to mediate and set march routes after confusion and violence at a march by Orangemen down the Garvaghy Road through Drumcree near Portadown in co. Armagh. Fearing renewed violence between marchers and residents, the commission determined that the 1998 march on Sunday 5 July should be diverted. The result was RUC and troops forcibly preventing 20,000 marchers proceeding down the Garvaghy Road. The marchers began a sit-in protest, punctuated by attacks on the security forces. A week later, three young Roman Catholic brothers were burned to death in a petrol bomb attack on

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their home. ‘Loyalists’ were suspected of the outrage. The event destroyed the will of and support for the marchers. The unionist community was rejecting its extremists. Extremist opposition to the peace process continued. On 21 July a mortar attack was launched against the RUC station in Newry, co. Down. The Real IRA was understood to be responsible. The Deputy Chief Whip of the Labour Party in the House of Lords, Lord McIntosh, stated – presumably on the basis of intelligence information – that terrorists were planning to murder the Cabinet. On 1 August 1998 a 500lb car bomb destroyed much of the centre of Banbridge, co. Down. The RUC had twenty minutes’ notice of the bomb in which to clear hundreds of people from the streets: thirty-three people were injured. It was the fourth major explosion by IRA dissidents since February. In the same period there had been five mortar attacks on RUC stations and army posts, and incendiary bombs had destroyed stores in Portadown and Belfast. Police in the Republic, working with their colleagues in the North and in Britain, had helped to foil nine bombing operations in England and the North over the previous ten months. On 15 August 1998 the Real IRA exploded another massive car bomb in Omagh. Twenty-nine people died as a result. The atrocity brought the warnings of ‘loyalists’ and the fears of unionists into sharp relief. It severely damaged the credibility of Sinn Féin and the IRA, bringing the question of IRA violence and decommissioning to a head. The bombing could not be represented as anything but an outrage directed against ordinary people as an act of power and ferocity by an IRA faction. More than any other single terrorist act, Omagh had a cumulative effect. It damaged support for extremists everywhere, drove home to the world the parallel between the IRA and immorality, and demonstrated the ultimate destructiveness of the thirty-year IRA campaign. Reflecting public outrage, the Irish government announced draconian new anti-terrorist laws; the UK government prepared to rush emergency anti-terrorist legislation through Parliament. The Real IRA, realising that it had outraged opinion everywhere, three days after the bombing declared a ‘suspension’ of ‘military operations’ but refused to announce a ceasefire. The nationalist community was now rejecting its extremists.

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A Short History of Ireland

By accepting the Good Friday Agreement, Adams and McGuinness had broken with one of the central assertions of the IRA: that Northern Ireland was occupied by Britain and that they were therefore simply waging a war of liberation. Recognising the fact of partition and the legitimacy of Northern Ireland, anathema to orthodox Republicans, Adams and McGuinness were walking a tightrope between appeasing unionists and IRA hardliners. This was the realpolitik that Mitchell, Trimble and the various governments involved also had to deal with. Trimble made the future plain: Carefully crafted words alone are not enough. The people of Northern Ireland will now judge Sinn Féin on their actions over the coming days. An end to the war means that the weapons of terrorism must be destroyed and all forms of paramilitary violence must cease for good.20

Testing Sinn Féin’s resolve with this unequivocal statement, he invited Adams to meet him to discuss structures and procedures in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Adams accepted. That evening, in a carefully coordinated operation, the IRA visited the homes in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of sixty members of the Real IRA within a ninety-minute period and ordered them to disband within two weeks or else face the prospect of being killed by their excolleagues. One man who was visited in this way described the event: The two men who called at my door said the Real IRA had no right to exist and accused it of misappropriating weapons . . . Some were simply warned ‘action’ would be taken against them if they did not make amends within a fortnight. Others were told they would be shot. The men who called at some doors apologised and said they were only following orders. Others were more intimidating.21

Two days after these visits, Martin McGuinness was presented as Sinn Féin’s representative to the arms decommissioning talks. David Trimble responded by agreeing that the IRA could destroy its own weapons, and Gerry Adams effectively accepted decommissioning for the first time: ‘The Good Friday Agreement is very clear on the issue of decommissioning – it is part of the overall process of conflict resolution, but it is not a precondition, it is not a prerequisite.’

20

The Times, 2 September 1998.

21

Daily Telegraph, 4 September 1998.

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At midnight on 7 September 1998, the Real IRA declared a total ceasefire. It was not to last. Throughout, there were killings, beatings, kneecappings, bombings, at the hands of ‘loyalist’ and republican terrorists. Between 10 April 1998, when the agreement was signed, and 31 October 2000 there were 61 deaths, 278 bombings, 352 assaults and 528 shootings.22 endgame Just as Mitchell had warned, the Good Friday Agreement had not stopped terror. He succeeded in November 1999 in brokering an agreement from Trimble to share power with Sinn Féin despite no evidence of serious IRA decommissioning. This was a major achievement. Ian Paisley had already split the unionist vote, and was gaining on the Unionist Party in elections. There was great suspicion within the Unionist Party that Trimble was conceding too much, both symbolically and in practice, to murderers. His decision to join with Sinn Féin (and other parties) in government was an act of faith on his part that Sinn Féin was working to achieve IRA disarmament. He was taking Mitchell’s warning of a presumption on both sides of each other’s bad faith to heart and choosing to demonstrate that he was willing to take the risk that Sinn Féin might be in good faith. He was challenging Adams and McGuinness to be as brave on their side, but it exposed him to enormous personal and political risk, and he must have understood that he was putting both his life and his career in great jeopardy. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness faced a similar potential risk: in August 2003 Adams acknowledged that there had been death threats against him. It was reported that McGuinness was de Chastelain’s secret go-between with the terrorists. Adams and McGuinness always denied that they were in any senior IRA positions, and this always challenged their credibility. At one meeting when Brian Cowen, later Taoiseach, was present, McGuinness said that he would have to consult the IRA Army Council. Cowen whipped back, ‘Yeah, well, there’s a mirror in the toilet if you want 22

Hansard, 21 November 2000.

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to go in there and talk to them.’23 And when in 2004 Bertie Ahern accused Gerry Adams of being in the IRA, they berated him. Cowen ‘stood up and banged his fist on the table. “You will not speak to the Taoiseach of our country in that way!” he roared. McGuinness jumped up and the two of them stood eyeball to eyeball, neither saying anything.’24 However honest their statements and intentions may have been, they were coloured by perceptions of their past association with violence. On 29 November 1999 following Mitchell’s efforts, the first power-sharing government of the Good Friday Agreement was actually formed. Trimble and Mallon resumed their positions as First and Deputy First Ministers respectively, as they had been eighteen months earlier. Martin McGuinness became Northern Ireland’s Minister for Education. The basis for the new commitment to the agreement was that the IRA would give some sign of decommissioning. On 11 February 2000 the new government and Assembly were suspended because the IRA had not taken any such initiative. On 31 May the Assembly government was reinstated. In March 2001 the Real IRA ended their ceasefire and exploded a bomb at the entrance to the BBC Television Centre in west London. At least ten people were murdered by the Ulster Defence Association in 2002 and 2003 in a war within ‘loyalist’ terrorism, and IRA factions murdered at least two others in this period. Admittedly, there was less murderous violence than there had been ten years earlier, but there was still not peace. On 14 October 2002 the Assembly was again suspended. That month, the Real IRA announced it was disbanding. The Provisionals refused to disband, but insisted that this should not abort the peace process. The issue thus remained unchanged. In the background were the al-Qaida terror attacks that, inter alia, destroyed the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 (9-11). They forced Irish-Americans in particular to recognise that the IRA was a terrorist organisation no different in mode from al-Qaida. For them, the convergence of IRA viciousness with Muslim terrorists was a final shock of recognition.

23 24

Sunday Tribune, 28 October 2007. Bertie Ahern (with Richard Aldous), The Autobiography (London, 2009), p. 198.

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Of course, 9-11 created an acute international awareness of terrorism, making not just Americans but individuals and governments the world over reconsider attitudes and policies. Terrorists were no longer seen as romantic in the West. In 2001, the leadership that had begun the terror campaign in the North was either dead or in their late seventies or older. The murderous violence that they, the police, the army and ‘loyalists’ unleashed had kept Northern Ireland out of the political, cultural and economic mainstreams for a generation. The IRA and ‘loyalists’ could draw upon malcontents and the unemployed, but no one else. Any thirty-year campaign needs either a sophisticated political leadership or a mindset of ‘we will go on to the bitter end’. After 9–11 and the failure during the 1990s to bring about a firm end to violence, the terrorists were living in their own bitter world. Another disquieting element added to the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion: the constant flow of press reports from official inquiries into past events. An inquiry under the Canadian Supreme Court Judge, Peter Cory, in April 2004 reported that British and Northern Ireland security forces had colluded with ‘loyalist’ terrorists against the IRA, including in the murder of two solicitors representing republicans. Throughout the peace process no inquiries were launched into IRA actions, only into British and RUC ones. As the Unionist MP David Burnside put it, ‘Why is the United Kingdom and the United States involved in a so-called international campaign against terrorism when the campaign at home against Republican and so-called loyalist terrorists is one of do-nothing and appeasement?’25 The answer was that the British government was prepared to put its own forces on trial to appease the IRA and win opinion through being seen to be ‘fair’. Truth was a victim of peace. Tony Blair was the first prime minister to contest the IRA’s and nationalists’ territory by demonstrating that they did not have a monopoly of passion. He made clear that the official inquiries should have access to all information, even highly classified security and police reports, and that blame for wrongdoing would fall on official shoulders if the evidence justified it. He confounded all parties by not 25

ePolitix.com 30 July 2004.

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negotiating for political or national interests, but for what he saw as right. This was a political masterstroke that gave him and his government the moral and emotional high ground. Trimble and the Irish government responded to this. The IRA, ‘loyalists’ and hardline unionists as yet did not. In April 2002, six months after 9–11, three Provisional IRA men had been arrested in Colombia and accused of training narco-guerrillas there. The three denied the charge, claiming they were on a fact-finding mission to examine the attempted peace process between the government and guerrillas in Colombia. After first denying any connection, Sinn Féin was forced to acknowledge that one of the men was their representative in Cuba. Two years later the men were acquitted of the charge of training guerrillas, but found guilty and sentenced to terms of imprisonment for travelling on false documents. The whole affair smacked of a desire not to take action that would exacerbate peace efforts in Northern Ireland or Colombia, but severe public relations damage had been done to Sinn Féin and the IRA, especially in American eyes. On 4 October 2002, the police uncovered a Republican spy-ring inside Stormont, triggering the suspension of the power-sharing government ten days later. In November 2003, the UK and Irish governments in cooperation with the United States jointly established a four-man International Monitoring Commission to report every six months on paramilitary activity in the North. Sinn Féin announced that it would not cooperate with the commission on the grounds that it was not part of the Good Friday Agreement, that it was ultimately under the control of the British government, and that it depended upon British intelligence for information. The peace process, however, was succeeding. The UK government’s obvious willingness to concede and appease Republicans was losing the IRA the always limited support it had in Ireland and in the USA. Adams and McGuinness privately argued for conciliation, and succeeded in convincing Sinn Féin and the IRA that real political advance was possible. On 1 September 2003, on the eve of President Clinton’s second visit to Northern Ireland (the first was in 1994), Adams was able to release a statement: Sinn Féin is committed to exclusively peaceful and democratic means to achieve a way forward. We have to work politically to make the Omagh

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bombing the last violent incident in our country, the last incident of this kind. We are committed to making conflict a thing of the past. There is a shared responsibility to removing the causes and to achieving an end to all conflict. Sinn Féin believe the violence we have seen must be for all of us now a thing of the past, over, done with and gone.

With this, he came closer than ever before to declaring an end to terror. The wording of the statement, it was reported, had been agreed by Blair, Ahern and Clinton and was intended to make it easier for IRA men and women to accept an end to violence as well as to make it easier for Unionists and Sinn Féin to work together in the Assembly and the Northern Ireland Executive. The IRA was reported to be prepared to discuss decommissioning with General de Chastelain. All sides in the ensuing negotiations agreed that the object was to carry the greatest number of the IRA away from violence, even if it took a long time. On one occasion Adams forthrightly said that British peace negotiators ‘did not understand how serious it would be if we left a vestige of the IRA in place’.26 Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s political chief of staff, was intimately involved in negotiating with Adams and others, constantly frustrated by their chiselling, never sure of success. In 2003, his mother died: Adams and McGuinness sent me condolence cards and I thought there was a certain irony. My mother came from an Anglo-Irish family and her view of Ireland was formed by the Irish RM books, with their description of the life of the ascendancy and their fox hunts and grand balls in the Irish countryside. Fenians were not her cup of tea and whenever I told her I was off to see Sinn Féin she would say: ‘I am so sorry for you, darling.’ What she would have thought of the two of them marking her death I do not know.27

Powell was indicating how the Irish past can unexpectedly assert itself and that, in contrast to Tony Blair, for him Sinn Féin and the IRA were synonymous – a view that Adams always resisted. In November 2003, scheduled elections were held for the Assembly, although it remained suspended. Paisley’s Democratic Unionists, implacable in their opposition to the Good Friday 26 27

Jonathan Powell, Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (London, 2008), p. 264. Ibid., p. 224.

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Agreement, won 30 seats, overtaking Trimble’s Ulster Unionists (27) for the first time. Sinn Féin (24) overtook the SDLP (18) on the nationalist side. The Alliance Party (6) and others won the remaining seats. Hardline politics was replacing terrorism on both sides. Sinn Féin still refused to endorse the PSNI and in March 2004, acknowledging the importance to it of American support, took out a $25,000 advertisement in the New York Times explaining why. Mitchell Reiss, George Mitchell’s successor as US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland (2003–2007), refused Gerry Adams a visa to enter the US, accused Sinn Féin of ‘massive untruths’ and called on the party to back the PSNI. ‘At best it was enormously misleading, and at worst it was untruthful,’ he said of the advertisement.28 Sinn Féin was losing the battle for opinion. ‘Paramilitary violence, drugs and unemployment have pushed too many of us to despair,’ observed Pat Convery, a Belfast city councillor.29 In 2003, there were 19 suicides per 100,000 people, about 60 per cent higher than the UK average. IRA, ‘loyalist’ and general exhaustion had become pervasive, and the attractions of peace and democratic politics were becoming recognised by hardliners on both sides as the only constructive alternative. The International Monitoring Commission in their first report noted that there had been a marked decline in murders of, and attacks on, men and women in the security forces since January 2003 compared to previous years, but implicated every paramilitary group in continuing violence. It blamed ‘loyalist’ groups for ‘markedly higher levels of violence than Republicans’. In December 2004, £26.5 million was stolen from the Northern Bank in Belfast. The Provisionals, who denied it, were nevertheless credited with the robbery. Paisley’s long-standing refusal to compromise with Sinn Féin or the IRA now echoed widespread unionist feeling. The May 2005 UK general election confirmed the DUP’s ascendancy in the unionist community; it won about 33 per cent of the vote (up from about 23 per cent in the 2001 UK election); Sinn Féin won about 24 per cent (up from about 22 per cent), and the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP each about 18 per cent (down from about 27 per cent and 21 per cent 28

The Observer, 21 March 2004.

29

Time, 1 March 2004.

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respectively). The Ulster Unionists retained only one seat in the House of Commons, and David Trimble resigned as the party’s leader. Significantly, Sinn Féin’s performance was not as strong as their supporters had hoped, indicating that many nationalists were not prepared to trust its (and the IRA’s) undertakings about decommissioning and violence. Trimble’s brave efforts to compromise with Sinn Féin to achieve peace, while ending his career and reducing his party, had solidified the unionist vote with Paisley and established the basic term for peace: the IRA would have to stop; unionists would not accept anything but decommissioning. Finally, recognising that violence was not going to achieve anything more, on 28 July 2005 the IRA announced the end of its ‘armed campaign’ and publicly ordered its members to dump their weapons and engage in non-violent politics. It was not until October 2006, however, that the Monitoring Commission reported that ‘the IRA’s campaign is over’. Aside from the political manoeuvring of the peace process, the IRA and Sinn Féin had to face the hard reality that British intelligence, the army and the RUC followed by the Police Service had deeply penetrated them. In contrast to British tactics in 1919–21, they had dealt with the IRA (and the other terrorist groups) as if they were worldwide enemy intelligence organisations, and not as quasi-military units, using intelligence methodology – research; observation; interrogation; eavesdropping; bribing; blackmail; pressure; influence – rather than armed force. The head of IRA internal security, Freddie Scappaticci, responsible for the ‘nutting squad’ that had murdered an estimated fifty informers, was a British agent, and was reported to have been since 1975. Gerry Adams’ driver and bodyguard, Roy McShane, was an agent. Denis Donaldson, in charge of the IRA’s international relations, was exposed as an informer (and murdered shortly afterwards). The ruthlessness of this operation, extending over decades, let alone its effectiveness, was lost on no one. Together with the Cory Report’s finding of collusion between British intelligence, the army and police and ‘loyalist’ terrorists, it starkly demonstrated British willingness over thirty years to go to any length to confound the IRA.

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Efforts were made by the UK, Irish and US governments to encourage Sinn Féin and the IRA to decommission by carefully leaving doors open to them and indicating that they were not regarded as out-and-out terrorists. The UK government, for example, did not ask the United States to prohibit Sinn Féin and the IRA (and they were not prohibited), but Continuity IRA, the Real IRA, the Orange Volunteers and the Red Hand Defenders were. Convicted terrorists were released early from prison. John Major had overseen the start of the peace process, with its combination of ruthlessness, ambiguity and appeasement. Tony Blair continued and saw it to success, benefiting enormously from the consequences of 9–11 which had driven home to most of the world the arbitrary, bloody, callous horror of terror. paisley The IRA’s decommissioning announcement was the breakthrough that had been the principal objective of the peace process. In October 2006, after three days of talks at St Andrews in Scotland, agreement was reached with all Northern Ireland’s parties that Sinn Féin would endorse the PSNI and would be prepared to share power in an Assembly government. In March 2007, Assembly elections endorsing the St Andrews Agreement confirmed the dominance of the DUP and Sinn Féin, again at the expense of the Ulster Unionists and SDLP. Martin McGuinness recounted the next step: I had my first meeting with Ian Paisley on March 26th, 2007 . . . We were up in the parliament building at the time and Paisley said that maybe I should write to Peter Hain, the British Secretary of State, and tell him to get out of Stormont Castle because we wanted it for our own purposes. That was a very clear indicator to me, and something I’ve learned since, that Ian Paisley and many other Unionist leaders totally abhor being told what to do by British ministers and that his attitude was – we can govern ourselves. That was a comfort to me because that was common ground between us . . . if you had said, even in 2003 for example, that we would be in government with the DUP by May 2007, they would have had men in white coats take you away!30 30

Quoted in Albert Reynolds, My Autobiography (Dublin, 2009), p. 512.

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On 8 May 2007, an Assembly government was formed with Ian Paisley as First Minister and Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister. ‘Up until the 26 March this year,’ declared McGuinness, ‘Ian Paisley and I never had a conversation about anything – not even about the weather – and now we have worked very closely together over the last seven months and there’s been no angry words between us.’31 The two were dubbed the ‘Chuckle brothers’ (Figure 26). ‘I think that peace has come’, said Paisley meeting President Bush with McGuinness in the White House.32 The statistics of terror seemed to confirm Paisley’s view (Table 7.1). Along with most people, Gerry Adams marvelled at the rapprochement with Paisley. Of course I could not be certain that he would come on board, but in fairness, when he did it was with grace and good humour. That humour and his civilised accord with Martin McGuinness went against the grain of those who had been reared in the image of the old Paisley. I am often asked what made him do the deal. He himself explains that he had no alternative, that if he did not accept the St Andrews agreement the British and Irish governments were going to move ahead despite unionism. I think that’s only part of the story. His wife, Eileen, and his family undoubtedly played a big role in his decision, and I think his willingness to reach out and to work positively with Sinn Féin was a genuine endeavour to make things better for the people who live here.33

Tony Blair had a slightly different view: [I]n the most unlikely of roles, Ian Paisley – for years the wrecker, the spoiler, the scourge of all in Unionism who sought accommodation – took over and completed the process.

Table 7.1 Offences committed under anti-terror legislation 2001/2 17

2002/3

2003/4

2004/5

2005/6

2006/7

2007/8

21

26

24

16

7

5

PSNI National Statistics Recorded Crime annual reports. 31 33

BBC News website, 8 December 2007. Guardian, 6 March 2008.

32

BBC, 7 December 2007.

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Figure 26 Chuckle Brothers: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, 2007 To the surprise of everyone – including Paisley and McGuinness – the two immediately began to work happily and well together as First and Deputy First Minister, in public and in private demonstrating an ease and humour that was unexpected. The BBC reported in August 2007, 100 days into their collaboration, ‘Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness seemed to have giggled their way through 100 days of power-sharing. So jovial do they appear that one Ulster Unionist has dubbed them "the chuckle brothers." Another critic complained it was a "giggle a day" instead of "a battle a day".’ It was perhaps a greater surprise that their friendliness lasted throughout the year of Paisley’s term as First Minister.

Ian Paisley was definitely a strange political figure, a product of the unique concatenation of political circumstances in Northern Ireland. He is a genuine and committed Christian, a true God-fearing man; he is a passionate Unionist; he is clever, shrewd, occasionally even sly . . . The unanswered question is: did he change or did the situation change? He would say the latter, and that he was always prepared to make peace if the IRA forswore violence. But I think two things also happened to change him. First, after a long and debilitating illness which, as he used to remark, he knew he would survive (though many hoped his wish was misplaced), he had a sense of impending mortality, political and personal, and wanted to leave behind something more profound and enduring than ‘no surrender’ . . . The other change was that Ian was nothing if not a politician with his ear firmly tuned into the people. In the course of late 2006 and early 2007, he heard the people telling him it was time for peace, and even, in particular,

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time for him to make the peace. During those meetings, time and again it was Ian who wanted to push forward.34

The Reverend Dr Ian Paisley – he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity by the Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina – was the only Western political leader to have founded his own Church (in 1951 at the age of twenty-five), the virulently anti-Catholic anti-Irishnationalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster of which he was head as Moderator until 2008. He was a theocrat, an ayatollah type. He quickly established himself in the populist proselytising tradition of earlier Free Church clergymen. Religions of all hues did not earn much credit for religion in Ireland and, with the franchise of his own Church, Paisley could be what he wanted to be. And that was a Christian fundamentalist who, on religious grounds, demonstrated against the lowering of flags upon the death of Pope John XXIII; denounced Pope John Paul II as ‘Anti-christ’; campaigned against homosexuality (‘Save Ulster From Sodomy’) and abortion, and proclaimed a literal interpretation of the Bible. In 1962 he was arrested in Rome demonstrating against the opening of the Second Vatican Council. In 2010 he went to Glasgow to protest against Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. He built up an organisation, Ulster Protestant Action, ‘to keep Protestant and Loyal workers in employment in times of depression, in preference to their Catholic fellow workers’. After O’Neill met Lemass, Paisley launched a campaign against him, jibing at the ‘big house’ and the ‘fur-coat brigade’ and predicting that ‘O’Neillism’ would mean the end of ‘Protestant supremacy’. Events then began to play into his hands, and as violence increased, so did votes for the Democratic Unionist Party that he founded in 1971. His politics came from his antipathy to ‘popery’, and he was an Ulster nationalist. John Major encountered this element of Paisley’s make-up in the aftermath of the 1993 Downing Street Declaration: Ian Paisley came to Downing Street to deliver one of his most histrionic performances, saying that the ‘iniquitous’ Declaration had been followed by seventy-four bombings, seventy-five shootings and nine murders. He and his deputy, Peter Robinson, ended an acrimonious meeting chanting in unison, ‘The people of Northern Ireland alone,’ to prevent me from speaking.35 34 35

Tony Blair, A Journey (London, 2010), pp. 194–5. John Major, The Autobiography (London, 1999), p. 457.

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Paisley was serious, brave – he must have known that each day could be his last – and a man of his word. He was not a hypocrite: he was remarkably what he seemed to be, but he helped make Northern Ireland difficult. He gave working room to wickedness. After 2006 and the IRA’s and Sinn Féin’s renunciations of violence and acceptance of the institutions and organisations of Northern Ireland (notably the PSNI), Paisley moderated his actions and his tone, turning from declaring Sinn Féin ‘not fit to be in the government of Northern Ireland and it will be over our dead bodies if they ever get there’,36 to working closely with Sinn Féin in government less than a year later. His was a necessary progress: had he not accepted the peace compromise with the IRA and Sinn Féin, he would have found himself in opposition to the very Union that he had spent a lifetime supporting. His congregation, however, found his path upsetting (as First Minister he worked with ex-terrorists and protected homosexual rights, both matters of abhorrence to the Church), and he stepped down as Moderator of the Free Presbyterians in January 2008, thus avoiding a public breach. In May 2008, Paisley, aged eighty-two, resigned as leader of the DUP and First Minister. In June 2010 he was created Lord Bannside. Peter Robinson succeeded Paisley as Moderator and DUP leader. Then, in the 6 May 2010 UK general election, Robinson lost his East Belfast parliamentary seat to the Alliance Party. This followed a scandal involving his wife who arranged a £50,000 gift to a nineteenyear-old (Catholic) man. Robinson saw his party’s share of the vote reduced to 25 per cent compared to 34 per cent in the 2005 election. In consequence, the DUP won 8 seats at Westminster, down from 9. The Unionists lost their single seat and their share of the vote went down by 2.5 percentage points to about 15 per cent. The SDLP won 3 seats but its share of the vote at 16.5 per cent was down by 1 percentage point. Sinn Féin, with 25.5 per cent of the vote, up from about 24 per cent in 2005, won the biggest share of the vote (by 0.5 percentage point) and 5 seats, second to the DUP. Despite his setback in the election, Robinson remained leader of the DUP and First Minister, and was cleared of any wrongdoing in the scandal involving his wife. 36

BBC, 12 July 2006.

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Behind the curtain of decommissioning, political collaboration and promises, however, terror and murder did not go away. In March 2009, the Real IRA claimed responsibility for shooting dead two soldiers, and Continuity IRA claimed responsibility for shooting dead a policeman. The perpetrators were identified and arrested. In 2010, Continuity IRA was held to be responsible for more bombings and shootings. On the ‘loyalist’ side, decommissioning was followed through. In May 2009, an Ulster Defence Association breakaway faction, the South East Antrim Brigade, announced that it would disarm following the murder of a Catholic social worker, Kevin McDaid, by a ‘loyalist’ gang after a soccer match. ‘No one should lose their life because of a football match,’ said their spokesman. ‘We can’t allow

Figure 27 27 June 2012: Queen Elizabeth II at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, shakes hands with Martin McGuinness, former IRA leader and now her Deputy First Minister. ‘It went very well,’ said McGuinness afterwards. ‘I am still a republican.’ In the first six months of 2012 there was an average of one terrorist incident every fortnight. Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, stated, ‘Both republican and loyalist paramilitary groups continue to carry out paramilitary style assaults.’ (Hansard, 16 July 2012)

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Table 7.2 Terrorism: deaths in Northern Ireland 1972 1982 1992 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 British gov’t forces IRA ‘Loyalist’ Civilian Irish security Total

148

58

11

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

70 11 249 1

10 5 36 1

17 3 58 0

0 2 9 0

1 5 4 0

0 1 3 0

1 1 6 0

0 0 3 0

2 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 1

1 0 0 0

479 110

89

11

10

4

8

3

2

0

3

1

Note: 1972 was the year of most violence. 2,088 people were killed in the ten years 1972–81. In the period 1969–2010, a total 19,605 people were charged with terrorist offences. About 60 per cent killed by PIRA and other republican groups, 30 per cent by ‘loyalists’ and 10 per cent by government forces. 1,117 soldiers and policemen, 399 IRA members and 162 ‘loyalists’ were killed. (cain.ulster.ac.uk)

the Republican dissidents to dictate our political agenda any more. They don’t want us to decommission; rather they want to portray us as a threat to the nationalist community and they can then paint themselves as their defenders. We are not falling into that trap.’37 On 27 June 2009 the three principal ‘loyalist’ paramilitary bodies – the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commando and the UDA – announced that they were decommissioning their weapons, and that de Chastelain’s Independent International Commission on Decommissioning had witnessed some of this. In October 2009 the Irish National Liberation Army, a 1974 Marxist IRA breakaway group responsible for some of the worst atrocities, announced that it would cooperate with de Chastelain. In February 2010 the Official IRA confirmed that they had destroyed their weapons, and de Chastelain’s commission was wound up. From then on, people caught with weapons would face the prospect of criminal prosecution and gaol. The overwhelming majority of the approximately 3,570 people killed as a result of terrorism between 1969 and 2010 were men, 37

Guardian, 31 May 2009.

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with almost 26 per cent of all victims aged twenty-one or less. About 53 per cent of the deaths were of innocent people unconnected with terrorists, the police or the army. More Catholics (about 2,500) than Protestants (about 1,000) were killed. The various IRAs together were responsible for about 2,100 deaths – about 650 of them being Catholics. Indeed, Republicans killed more Republicans than any other group and were responsible for almost all British army deaths. ‘Loyalists’ killed about 920 people, about 190 of them Protestants. The British army was responsible for about 315 deaths, and the RUC for about 70 (see Table 7.2.) The peace process was not well-grounded and had not secured a settlement. Two groups of gunmen, both drawn from minorities, had shot their way into a local power-sharing deal that was accepted by a majority exhausted by terror. Public relations exercises by all involved disguised the reality of concessions to criminals: this was the essence of the process. What followed was an effort to restore the rule of law by extending power to the minorities and giving them responsibility for upholding order.

chapter 8

Another country

The Republic’s referendums and constitutional change of the 1990s took place during heady economic performance, enviable to the rest of the world, and extraordinary in its speed. The Economist surveyed the Republic in 1988: Take a tiny, open, ex-peasant economy. Place it next door to a much larger one . . . Infuse it with a passionate desire to enjoy the same lifestyle . . . Inevitable result: extravagance, frustration, debt. Ireland today is bravely facing up to the consequences of a decade of borrowing to pay for better public services than its wealth justified. Its citizens, many of whom have already endured six years of stagnant real incomes, are just beginning to come to terms with the extent to which the country has to change . . . Its gross domestic product is a mere 64% of the European Community average.1

Nine years later the Economist wrote: Just yesterday, it seems, Ireland was one of Europe’s poorest countries. Today it is as prosperous as the European average, and getting richer all the time.2

In 2008 Ireland once more had to face up to the consequence of borrowing. By then, the country’s wealth-creating ability had increased beyond anything imagined in 1988. Ireland had become another country. By 2000, the Republic was the principal base for American companies in Europe. Its very favourable corporate tax regime (12.5 per cent) hosted twelve of the US’s top twenty electronic companies and the top ten pharmaceutical companies. All the Viagra tablets in the world came from Pfizer in co. Cork. Between 1

Economist, 16 January 1988.

2

Economist, 17 May 1997.

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1988 and 2000, GNP growth had been compounding at an average of over 5 per cent every year. The country, with less than 1 per cent of Europe’s population, attracted about 25 per cent of all US investment in Europe. Employment grew by over 400,000; national debt halved. Unemployment decreased to an historic low of 3.6 per cent in 2001. The country had become what Kevin Gardiner, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, in 1994 termed a ‘Celtic tiger’, making a comparison with the rapid growth of the Asian ‘tigers’ a decade earlier.3 The reforms inspired by T.K. Whitaker in the 1950s and 1960s that opened Ireland to foreign capital and investment provided the economic basis of the tiger’s creation. A 1965 report, Investment in Education, that emphasised the inadequate level of education then prevailing (most children only experienced primary school) and how this threatened the country’s ability to develop, resulted in the decision in 1966 to make secondary education free. A rapid consequence was an educational surge that, together with the English language, soon provided a young, quality workforce of international appeal. A high level of education was a paradox of underdevelopment: able people found advancement through teaching because other avenues were not available. A favourable business tax regime, and restrained employer/union/government relations encouraged investment. Membership of the European Economic Community which became the European Community and then the European Union brought free trade with one of the world’s biggest markets. Joining the European Monetary System in 1979 ended the Irish pound’s parity with sterling; abandoning the Irish pound and introducing the euro on 1 January 2002 cemented a turn away from Britain. A great deal of the success of the Celtic tiger resulted from these changes in the economy and education. This success was real, unlike the financial excesses of banks, government, the construction industry, and hundreds of thousands of individuals that came to light in 2007–8. Fifty years of inefficiency, Anglocentricity and underuse of resources (especially female workers) began to be set aside in the 1980s. EU subsidies to Ireland, while huge, did not 3

Kevin Gardiner, ‘The Irish Economy: a Celtic Tiger’, MS Euroletter, 31 August 1994.

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make the tiger. By mid-2008, Ireland had received about € 40 billion in EU support payments since joining in 1973; in any year they never exceeded 5 per cent of Ireland’s GDP (German transfers to the former East Germany were greater in percentage terms) and are estimated to have added about 0.5 per cent to economic growth during the 1990s. The tiger was very much Ireland catching up with a wider world rather than a miracle recipe for economic performance that others could follow. Membership of the EU also opened Ireland to unprecedented experiences. During the 1970s, for the first time since the plantations, immigration into Ireland was greater than emigration. This occurred for a second time between 1996 and 2008. After the accession to the EU of eastern European countries in 2004, the greatest numbers of immigrants were men aged 25–44 from those countries – notably Poland. Economic growth created huge demand for labour in construction, financial services, information technology, pharmaceuticals and health. From a population of about 2.8 million in 1961 (the lowest ever recorded), in 2000 Ireland’s population was about 3.8 million; in 2010 it was, about 4.5 million, and about one person in ten was foreign-born. In 2000, while the UK was still Ireland’s largest single market, it was no longer its dominant market: the US, Japan and members of the EU accounted for about 62 per cent of exports (an increase of 12 per cent since 1990). By 2002 the US had displaced the UK as Ireland’s largest single market. The Republic’s trade surplus at more than twice the value of exports to imports was the highest in the EU relative to GDP, placing Ireland among the 25 top exporting nations in the world. Computers and office products provided 28 per cent of the total (it was the world’s largest exporter of computer software and the second-largest of PC and Mac software after the USA). Other leading exports were nitrogen compounds, electronic circuitry, and medicines. Musical instruments made in Ireland accounted for 12.7 per cent of world trade in them. The statistics of US–Irish trade demonstrate the extent of change (Table 8.1). The United States had captured the imagination of Irish people ever since its independence. Family connections through emigration provided a constant reminder of American opportunity and hope. The Celtic tiger experience added a further American pull and with it

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Table 8.1 The Celtic tiger and the United States

1988 1997 2000 2005 2006 2007 2008

Exports to US

Imports from US

Balance

1,375.0 5,866.7 16,463.4 28,733.1 28,525.9 30,445.0 31,346.5

2,183.4 4,642.2 7,713.3 8,446.8 7,621.5 7,777.0 7,610.8

‒ 808.4 1,224.5 8,750.1 20,286.3 20,904.4 22,668.1 23,735.7

Figures, in millions of US dollars on a nominal basis, may not tally due to rounding. US Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Statistics.

an American set of working conditions (no strong unions; potentially rapid capital turnover; unsentimental investment and employment; cost and profit centre-stage) that further differentiated the Republic from Britain – and from its past. It was an extension of American sensibilities, not British or European ones. Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ryanair (founded in 1985; modelled in 1992 by O’Leary on Southwest Airlines in the US), voiced much of the new, abrasive, dynamic, entrepreneurial business culture that the tiger brought in. ‘Why does every plane have two pilots?’ he asked in 2010. ‘Really, you only need one pilot. Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the [expletive deleted] computer fly it.’ He also suggested charging passengers to use the lavatories and making them stand during flights in order to increase ticket sales. While membership of the EU was the principal attraction of Ireland to non-EU investors, Irish people were sceptical of the ever-increasing concentration of power in the hands of the unelected European Commission, and this risked jeopardising investment. In June 2001 a referendum was held on the Nice Treaty, which expanded the EU to twenty-seven members. It was rejected by an 8 per cent margin. A link was made by commentators between EU economic support for Ireland and ratification, but no significant change in funding took place. After an intensive government-backed campaign in support of the treaty, another referendum was held in October 2002 and it was then endorsed by a margin of 26 per cent. A similar pattern took place in 2008–9 with the Lisbon Treaty

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that effectively instituted a European constitution preparing the EU for federation (with a president and a foreign minister) in all but name. A referendum in June 2008 rejected the Treaty by a 6.4 per cent margin. Then, after another campaign during which the government negotiated agreement that the EU would continue to respect Ireland’s military neutrality, and its position on education, family matters and abortion, and that the European Commission would continue to be composed of one member for each EU state (a real diplomatic success for Ireland), a further referendum in October 2009 accepted the Treaty by a 29.2 per cent margin. The poorer a society, the more any little difference makes a difference; the richer, the more equality advances. Women had a significant part in the surging economy, to the extent that it was also referred to as the ‘Celtic tigress’. The last decades of the twentieth century saw the removal of many discriminatory laws and practices. In 1973, for example, a ban on married women working in the civil service was removed, with the consequence that about three of every five civil servants were women in 2005. From 1990, women entering the world of work provided more than 90 per cent of the increase in the labour force. Three-quarters of younger women (aged 25–34) were in full or part-time employment in 2004 – a slightly higher percentage than in Britain and the United States, but lower than Spain, Poland, France and Germany. Thirty years earlier, two-thirds had been unemployed away from home. Women born in the 1970s onwards had benefited from much higher levels of education, and this had encouraged employment. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, about half of younger women had post-school qualifications, compared to about two of every five men. Demand for labour, the lessening of Church authority and changing attitudes further enabled women to enter more substantial positions in the country’s official, institutional and economic life. Women with younger children, however, remained mostly at home, reflecting the continuing strength of traditional attitudes, generous child benefits that acted to prevent wage discrimination but also encouraged mothers to stay at home, and the low provision and high cost of childcare. An OECD report in 2006 pointed out:

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[I]n Dublin, where day care is about 50% more expensive than elsewhere . . . a Dublin-based family with two young children where one spouse works and earns the average production wage (APW), there is little point for the other spouse to take up a job paid at two-thirds APW: the effective ‘tax plus childcare’ rate is 93%.4

The 2006 Budget planned 50,000 new childcare places by 2010, representing a 20 per cent increase. Overall, during the Celtic tiger years of 1996–2008, about three of every five women were employed – often in health and education – but earned about 10 per cent less than men in equivalent jobs (up from 40 per cent less in 1971). In business and in politics women continued to be underrepresented at the higher levels. Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese (re-elected President unopposed in 2004) were exceptions, as was Countess Markievicz, one of the first female Cabinet ministers (Minister for Labour in the First Dáil, 1919–22) in the world. Between 1922 and 1979, no women served in Irish cabinets. In 1972 the franchise was extended to eighteen-year-olds, and greater female representation in politics might have been expected as a result, but this was not the case. Between 1919 and 1981, no more than six women were ever elected to the Dáil. However, 25 women of 166 TDs were elected in 2007 and again in 2011– the highest number ever but much lower than the EU average. The major political parties remained dominated by men. Between 1920 and 2010, only eleven women held Cabinet positions; in the same period there were thirty-two female Cabinet ministers in the UK and thirty Cabinet members in the US. In 1990, the first woman was appointed head of an Irish government department; in 2005, three of the fifteen government departments were headed by women. No woman headed a major Irish company. Nevertheless, the advance in recognition and opportunity, while later than in most democracies (not least because economic well-being came late to the country), was substantial. Most women, in fact, were not concerned about their numbers in public or business life, dealing with discrimination as individuals and not as a marching regiment. Mary Coughlan, a Fianna Fáil TD in 1993, voiced this view when 4

Boris Cournède, Removing Obstacles to Employment for Women in Ireland, OECD Working Paper no. 511, OECD 2006.

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saying that she was ‘probably happier talking about the state of farming or the level of headage payments or the conditions of the roads, than about gender balance’. Pressure for change had come about principally from outside Ireland through rulings by the European Court of Human Rights, legislation from the European Parliament, and the influence of America where so much is seen to be possible. The sense of possibility was vastly strengthened by the youthfulness of the country – the 2006 census found that over 20 per cent of the population were fourteen years old or less, and that only 11 per cent were aged sixty-five or more. Large-scale emigration in the 1950s and 1960s meant that there were fewer older people in the 1990s and 2000s than otherwise would have been the case, and since 1990 there had been a steady increase in population, with young people – especially women – working in Ireland rather than emigrating. Youthful energies were to be seen flourishing in popular culture with bands, notably U2 in the 1980s and the Corrs in the 1990s, building on earlier performers and groups, reaching major international recognition. Artists, bands and writers benefited from tax concessions introduced in 1969 at the instigation of Charles Haughey, providing the country with a lively creative mix. Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest four times in the 1990s (not, it must be said, a great indicator of youthfulness, but certainly one of energy). The Irish step-dancing spectacular Riverdance premiered during an interval in the 1994 Eurovision Contest and went on to be performed worldwide for more than fifteen years. At the start of the new millennium, Ireland was prosperous and confident, admired abroad, secular in its attitudes and in every aspect – cultural, social, political – noticeably American in its assumptions and values. metamorphosis Ireland’s transformation from a conservative agricultural economy (in 2009 agriculture accounted for 5 per cent of GDP compared with 16 per cent in 1975, and 6 per cent of employment) to a liberal, trade-dependent service and manufacturing economy (in 2009 about 67 per cent of employment was in services and about 27 per cent in industry) brought a host of social and political changes – and

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unforeseen dangers. Rapid population change and the spread of liberal values with the knowledge and often the experience of a much wider world through immigration, US companies and EU membership, contributed to the reduction of Church influence in the 1990s. Northern Ireland’s generation of baleful violence also had effect, forcing governments in Dublin to reform the Constitution and social laws not only in response to domestic pressures, but also in order to reduce tension with and in the North. The changes caught the Church in assumptions that were no longer accepted by its congregation. The homogeneous nature of Southern Irish society, massively Catholic (the 1926 census revealed that 92.6 per cent of the Free State population professed Catholicism), had helped the rapid acceptance of the new state. Between 1850 and 1875, under the organisational genius and direction of Cardinal Cullen, the modern Church had secured its hold on Irish people. Its great strength was that it drew its priesthood and bishops from the people in Ireland, and so was regarded as a national church, even if at times possessed of ultramontane leanings. The ritual of the Mass was regularised in churches (as a result of the Penal Laws, poverty and the establishment of the Church of Ireland, there were few Catholic churches in the country before the famine, and Catholic services were frequently held outdoors or in private homes); the rosary, novenas, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, pilgrimages, shrines and a host of devotional manners were introduced. All were adopted with vast enthusiasm in Ireland, and right into the 1960s Catholic Irish churches were full (a feature of the Irish Church revived by Pope John Paul II’s visit to the country in 1979) and ecclesiastical pronouncements were heeded. In 1970 the Irish Church maintained six thousand missionaries all over the world. Crucial to this strength was the easy identification made between the Church and Irish nationalism. Both had suffered persecution; both harked back to pre-Reformation times. Despite the fact that the Church, particularly under Cullen, consistently sided with the authority of the state against radicals and revolutionaries, it was also perceived in Ireland as sustaining Irish interests. Nowhere was this clearer than in Northern Ireland where being a Catholic was (and is) taken as being synonymous with being an Irish nationalist. The respect for authority that the Irish Church proclaimed (and which

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was integral to the Church’s own functioning) was further sustained by the natural conservatism of a predominantly agricultural society. For such a Church, the sanctity of marriage and the rights of property were taken as absolutes. In a 1927 joint pastoral of the Irish hierarchy, this conservatism was clearly expressed: These latter days have witnessed, among many other unpleasant sights, a loosening of the bonds of parental authority, a disregard for the discipline of the home, and a general impatience under restraint that drives youth to neglect the sacred claims of authority . . . The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress – all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race.

Against this background, it was not surprising that Northern Irish Protestants after 1921 consistently resisted integration with the South. Irish unity within the UK had meant that Irish Catholics were a part of the (Protestant) whole; Irish unity in an independent Ireland meant that Northern Protestants would become a minority in a Catholic whole and they feared that they would be dominated by Catholic sensibilities and restrictions: W.B. Yeats had been entirely accurate about this in 1925. Churchmen in Ireland for generations had for the most part been statesmen first and priests second. William Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin 1885–1921, a powerful political operator spanning Parnell, the rise and fall of the Irish Party, land reform and the war of independence, was central to the maintenance and expansion of Church authority in social, political and educational matters. John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin 1940–72, influenced the drafting of the Constitution. He was, in fact, strongly opposed to the most notable Church article, 44.1.2, giving the Church ‘the special position . . . as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’. Instead, he wanted a clause stating that the Catholic Church was the one true Church, but de Valera refused. A referendum thirty-five years later in December 1972 removed the article, and de Valera signed this into effect as President. Other articles suggesting McQuaid’s hand addressed women, the family, education, and the protection of property owned by religious

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denominations. So did all three oaths stipulated in the constitution: each commences with the statement ‘In the presence of Almighty God’, and allows no other affirmation. The preamble to the Constitution is even more direct in its Catholic basis: ‘In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Eire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial’. No room for Quakers or Jews in those assertions. McQuaid achieved fabled standing as a semi-hidden powerplayer. Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich, Primate of All Ireland 1977–90, was critical of the British in the North. He was personally involved in discussions with the IRA and Sinn Féin, and was targeted for assassination by ‘loyalists’. Gerry Adams reported ‘a shouting match’ between the Cardinal and Margaret Thatcher. ‘He was great,’ said an IRA man. ‘We took it that he was telling us to carry on killing.’5 If Ó Fiaich had known this, he would certainly have corrected such admirers, but the impression he gave was that of a friend to the IRA. He died aged sixty-six in Toulouse after a heart attack in Lourdes where he was on pilgrimage. His successor, 1990–6, Cardinal Cathal Daly, was highly critical of the IRA and was a significant voice in Northern dialogues, writing the speech Pope John Paul II delivered at Drogheda in 1979 denouncing the IRA and calling for peaceful steps to be taken to resolve differences in the North. This was the speech that prompted Gerry Adams to signal willingness to consider proposals and so, arguably, it triggered the peace process. One priest, Father Alec Reid, played a key role for twenty years as a go-between with the IRA and officials in the North, Ireland and Britain. The Church was part of the political and social fabric that no government or individual could ignore. There were well-understood reasons for this, rooted in the Church being a ladder of opportunity – especially educational – in an impoverished land, and being identified with the vast majority of the population with which it shared historic persecution. But this position was regarded as ever more irrelevant. An interesting element in the tiger’s success, important to the Church, 5

Tim Pat Coogan, A Memoir (London, 2008), p. 312.

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was contraception. David E. Bloom and David Canning at the Harvard School of Public Health examined this in a 2003 paper: [T]he legalisation of contraception appears to have given greater impetus to the decline in fertility . . . [T]his decline was occurring in any case, but it apparently received a boost when increasingly common practices were legalised . . . [T]his rapid fertility decline gave rise to a dramatic rise in the share of working-age people in the population. This rise, although not quite as stunning as that in East Asia, had the effect of accelerating Ireland’s economic growth.6

In other words, the nation’s prosperity in part reflected the lessening of Church authority. The writers Edna O’Brien and John McGahern (1934–2006) straddled the change in the Church and in its position in people’s lives. While not focusing on ecclesiastical matters in particular, they examined and challenged authority culture and closed, hard rural life where sexuality was repressed and respect and affection were denied, where people emerged, withered, into adult life. Under pressure from the Church, about 630 different books were banned in 1946–9; about 2,350 in 1950–3, and a record 1,034 in 1954. O’Brien moved to London ‘because something in me worries that I might stop if I lived [in Ireland]’.7 The Country Girls (1960) and her next four books were banned because her heroines’ sexual lives conflicted with Catholic morality. McGahern’s works tracked the state of Ireland. Despair and violence permeate The Dark (1965), and lustful desires are imputed to priests, amongst others. This book also was banned, and McGahern lost his job as a schoolteacher. He was so upset that he could not write for several years, later observing ‘[O]ne has a family in Ireland, and it was quite a social disgrace.’8 He went to England for work, but returned to Ireland and wrote four more books, each tracing social change and none bringing further penalty. His last novel, That We May Face the Rising Sun (2001), is placed in a prosperous and happy country as Ireland then was. It was the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year in 2003. 6 7 8

David E. Bloom and David Canning, ‘Contraception and the Celtic Tiger’, Economic and Social Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, Winter, 2003, p. 244. Donal O Drisceoil, ‘“The Best Banned in the Land”: Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950’, Yearbook of English Studies, 2005. Ibid.

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Since the late 1960s, the Church had become more introspective and less oriented to the powers of this world. There was change in the Church and change in people’s relationship to it. A succession of scandals hit it globally after 1990, generally weakening its hold on its congregations and masking changes in attitudes. In Ireland, distressing evidence of sexual predation and child abuse by priests and within the lay orders of the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers and subsequent cover-ups spanning decades became public. Before this, deference had strangled reporting of abuse. Now, there was no popular resistance to public investigations that started in 2000 into allegations of abuse; fifty years earlier there would have been a spontaneous outcry against inquiry. High Court Justice Mary Laffoy chaired a Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. She resigned in 2003 complaining that her work was hampered by the government and the Department of Education. Her colleague, Justice Sean Ryan, took her place and reported in 2009 that there had been systemic child abuse – beatings, rapes, humiliation – by teachers, nuns and priests in schools run by the Church; that thousands of boys and girls had suffered (more than 2,000 gave the Commission evidence of abuse); and that officials had colluded with Church authorities in cover-ups. Another government inquiry chaired by Circuit Court Judge Yvonne Murphy into abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin found that a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ had operated for at least sixty years, and that ‘State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all.’ The inquiry concluded: The Dublin Archdiocese’s pre-occupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The Archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the State.9

The inquiries and their findings encompassed the real change in the authority of the Church, and in the expectations of people, that had 9

Department of Justice and Law Reform, Report by Commission of Investigation into Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, November 2009.

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taken place in Ireland since the 1970s. Vocations were a barometer of this: in 2007, 160 priests in Ireland died, but only 9 were ordained; 228 nuns died, but only 2 took final vows. Fr Seamus Fullam, who worked in London for fifty years, was struck by the change that suddenly took place in his position: I can understand priests getting involved with women – it’s the most natural thing in the world – but it galls me to think that a priest, who is supposed to be a trusted man, can abuse a little child . . . I was at home in Ireland at the height of a local scandal involving children. I’d adopt a very low profile and wear an open-necked shirt to avoid attention when I went out . . . [I]t has affected all of us very badly . . . I was told recently to leave the Sacristy door wide open so that I could be seen from the church. A little girl came in and I shot out to do some work on the altar, waiting until other people arrived so that I wouldn’t be seen to be alone with her.10

The standing of and respect for the Church had come crashing down in less than twenty years. Simultaneously, worldly values had been promoted. The Northern Ireland peace process was intrinsically secular, further distancing the Church from any central role. The rise of women was also a function of the Church’s decline: developments that altogether made it less and less relevant to a new generation. The older view of the Church lived on in the characterisation of conflict in the North as Catholic versus Protestant. This was not so – most Catholics were opposed to the IRA; most Protestants opposed ‘loyalist’ terror – but it served as a general explanation and so kept religion unnaturally in the forefront. At the heart of the conflict lay economic stress in a descending society. Northern Ireland had been, up to the 1970s, the Irish manufacturing engine. By 2000, the position had been reversed and, while Northern Ireland began recovering from the economic effects of IRA and ‘loyalist’ terror during the 1990s, its manufacturing activity no longer exceeded the Republic’s. Despite recovery since 2005, its GDP per head has always been lower than Britain’s, and since the mid 1990s, lower than the Republic’s too. This was in part a reflection of it having the smallest population of any UK region. In 2008 the UK Economic and Social Research Council confirmed that the gross value of goods and services produced in the 10

Catherine Dunne, An Unconsidered People (Dublin, 2003), p. 147.

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North had been below the UK average for forty years, blaming low labour productivity: Northern Ireland performs poorly when compared with other European countries, the US and Japan. In terms of the various measures of productivity relative to the UK average, Northern Ireland has consistently underperformed since the 1960s. In recent years, there have been some relative improvements but Northern Ireland’s G[ross] V[alue] A[dded] still lies some 20 per cent below the UK average. This is despite increased employment levels being matched by falling unemployment, such that Northern Ireland has amongst the lowest regional unemployment rates in the UK.11

At the end of 2010, over 20 per cent of working-age people under twenty-five in the North were unemployed. The security forces worried that economic decline was fuelling terror activity (there were 39 terror incidents in 2010 compared to 22 in 2009). ‘[W]hat we see is more young people willing to engage [as terrorists],’ a senior police officer stated.12 In contrast, Ireland started resembling the rest of Europe in the 1970s; up to then, the extraordinary Irish community was to be found overseas and not in Ireland. With the Celtic tiger experience, everything changed. Politics moved away from old animosities and Catholic morality, turning to modernising and speedy responses to international trends. Ireland had metamorphosed from an agrarian, nationalist, Catholic country into a bourgeois consumer society where the bills to the past had been paid and where genuine oppression and neglect were uncommon. In the North, political, social, economic and religious violence had held back economic advance. When the Titanic left the Belfast shipyards in 1912, the city was one of the world’s great industrial centres. By 1960, that status had long since been lost. There was no growth. Civil rights protests that ushered change elsewhere in the West here brought thirty-five years of IRA and ‘loyalist’ terror, locking the North in a fragile, limited, sectarian and dependent political economy with little prospect of attracting investment. The province spent itself making murderous squalid history rather than making wealth. 11 12

Economic and Social Research Council, ‘Sub-sectoral Productivity in Northern Ireland’, Swindon, 2008. Financial Times, 24 February 2011.

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This was the point at which Northern Ireland was clearly another country. The IRA and Sinn Féin had some support in the North and (much diminished since 9-11) among some Irish-Americans, but were part of an Anglo-Irish quarrel that most Irishmen and Englishmen, Britain and the Republic, had left behind. Paisley, Robinson, Adams, McGuinness were all dated figures. The vast majority of people in the Republic did not want Northern problems. After he resigned as a minister in 1970, Kevin Boland had tried to start a Republican Party of his own: it failed to gain any significant support. Tim Pat Coogan, a distinguished journalist and editor, noted in 1970 at the start of violence in the North ‘a general attitude on the part of the public that, while Irish unity, like motherhood, was something admirable, the best thing that could be done with the Six Counties would be to cut along the dotted line of partition, tow the Northern segment out to sea, and sink it’. Another journalist, Olivia O’Leary, recounted: In 1971, when internment in the North sent a wave of refugees across the Border, I went to Gormanston camp to see them . . . The people themselves were taciturn – understandable after what some of them had been through. But they made no secret of their contempt for the backward country they’d been forced to flee to, and of their determination to get back to the streets of Belfast as soon as ever they could. It was a sobering reminder that Irish unity would indeed have to be about people more than territory, and that Northern nationalists were in many ways as different from us as Northern unionists. That reality, just as much as the fact of a million steadfast unionists, helped to fade the dream. Republican violence finished it off.13

When Garret FitzGerald established the New Ireland Forum in 1983 in an effort to bring anti-terror parties north and south together to discuss ways of stopping murders and bombings, his colleagues in government thought this a waste of time and a diversion from the people’s real concerns: reducing taxation, dealing with unemployment, and no involvement in Northern Ireland. Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s Director of Publicity, in 1988 angrily responded to a journalist who asked ‘[W]hat about those who don’t want a united Ireland?’ 13

Irish Times, 27 October 2007.

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Tell us. People of the twenty-six counties that don’t want the Six Counties, let us know. If they’re telling us to [expletive deleted] off, telling us that they’re happy with the state they’ve got and [expletive deleted] 1916, then tell us. Because if they don’t want us then I would have to look again at the situation . . . If they think they’ve got an Irish nation inside the twenty-six counties, they should build a wall and lock us out.14

Sinn Féin and the IRA were already looking and realising that violence was a dead end, and that being locked out by the South was more likely. Austin Currie, a founder of the moderate Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, in 1989 successfully sought election to the Dáil as a Fine Gael TD, but encountered great resistance because of his Northern accent and involvement. There was little evidence of this attitude changing over the following twenty years.

crash Being trade-dependent, and not self-sustaining, vastly increased Ireland’s vulnerability to fluctuations in world markets and to changes in consumption in its major export markets. So when the US banking crisis triggered an international financial crisis in 2008, the Irish economy – already suffering from a collapsing property boom (house prices fell by about half between 2007 and 2009) – quickly entered recession. Banks had borrowed about €70 billion from foreign banks to fund huge (and cheap) loans to property developers who could no longer meet their obligations, and they now faced bankruptcy themselves. Bank loans for construction had leapt from about €5.5 billion in 1999 to €96 billion in 2007. The Allied Irish Bank had doubled its loans between 2004 and 2007. About 25 per cent of GDP and 20 per cent of the workforce were in property and construction. The average Dublin couple spent about one-third of their income on mortgage payments. Politicians, local and national, were unrestrained and, as various inquiries showed, corrupt in granting building permissions. About 700,000 new homes had been built between 1996 and 2006, 14

Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion (London, 1989), p. 206.

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amounting to one for every six people – a measure of speculative frenzy since there was no housing shortage. House prices trebled in the same period, at their height in Dublin reaching Manhattan levels. Ghost developments speckled the countryside. In co. Leitrim (pop. about 29,000), nearly three thousand new homes were built despite lack of demand. Government and the civil service spent huge amounts on prestige projects and themselves, creating a debt and credit burden – and unrealistic price levels – that undermined the country’s continuing real export strength. As construction overexpanded, debts began to mount, demand began to slacken, prices began to fall, people found that they had mortgages that exceeded the value of their property, bankruptcies and bad debts mounted, banks took great losses (about €50 billion in worthless property alone) and so reduced credit, and the devastation of crippling debt set in. From a 6 per cent growth in 2006–7, GDP fell from €187 billion to €180 billion in 2008, and to €166 billion in 2009 when about 160,000 of the 2.17 million workforce was unemployed: it was the start of the worst years in the economic history of modern Ireland. Fianna Fáil, in coalition with the Progressive Democrats (until that party dissolved in November 2009) and, since 2007, the Green Party, led every government since 1997. The party could not escape the blame for the financial collapse of the country. Bertie Ahern had been taoiseach from 1997 to 2008, riding the tiger to feckless finance and the property bubble. He resigned following his evidence to the (Flood and then Mahon) ‘Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments’, established in 1997 by the Dáil. The tribunal linked Ahern to Haughey’s tax evasions and investigated a reported total of IR £452,800 of Ahern’s finances in the period 1988–97. It found his testimony contradictory and evasive. It is difficult to identify where the corruption of the Irish political class began. Property, construction, zoning and development were the threads leading back to Fianna Fáil’s Taca fund-raising organisation that Charles Haughey formed in the 1960s. Lemass’ battle against cronyism was an earlier sign. Quite possibly the corruption went back further still: the Táin, after all, is about land and cattle. The journalist Rosita Sweetman wondered about the connection in her 1972 book On Our Knees:

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You may wonder why the Fianna Fáil government doesn’t do something about controlling the price of land, the building of houses . . . The names ‘Gallagher’, ‘McInerny’ and ‘Sisk’ will re-occur constantly on the billboards. Now, if you dig a little deeper you will discover that Mr Matt Gallagher and his brother are two of the biggest building contractors in Dublin, and they’re among the biggest contributors to Taca. And Taca is the fund raising section of the Fianna Fáil party, without Taca Fianna Fáil would go bankrupt in the morning. And if you still don’t see why the government don’t do something about compulsory purchase of land for subsidised housing, and curbing the activities of the private speculators, you’re very naive indeed.15

Corruption is a matter of consciousness, and this changes with time. Independence is always about controlling wealth (thus the real shock when foreign bodies take financial control, as was to happen in 2010). Practices that at one point go unquestioned (for example, jobs for supporters) become years later matters of indignation: sales of military commissions in Britain, for example, were commonplace until the 1870s. Brian Cowen, tánaiste in Bertie Ahern’s third consecutive administration, succeeded as leader of Fianna Fáil and taoiseach in May 2008. Two months later the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum was seen by some as a protest against his government. He was blamed for complacency as Minister for Finance 2004–7 when the property bubble burst, and was then blamed as Taoiseach for the financial crash: it was not a trade or manufacturing crash. After a crash people realise that they are themselves at fault and then seek to blame someone else. Everyone was at fault, but Fianna Fáil had set itself up as the scapegoat. One of the first acts of Cowen’s government was in September 2008 when the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan (son of the earlier politician), guaranteed all bank deposits, seeking to keep the banks under Irish control, calming natural fears that a bank’s collapse would ruin individual depositors. But Irish bankers had incurred debts they could never repay. Their debts were private, yet the government now took them over and Irish people – not the bankers – would have to repay them. Banks were enabled to recapitalise, but every taxpayer was now hostage to banks’ debts – as was to be made explicit two years later. 15

London, 1972, p. 31.

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In 2009 the National Asset Management Agency was hurriedly established to provide credit confidence through the purchase of about €80 billion of banks’ bad loans. In 2010 the Allied Irish Bank was nationalised to protect it from collapse: it had lost over 98 per cent of its value on stock exchanges. The European Central Bank lent €116 billion just to keep Irish banks’ ATMs and credit lines functioning. Ireland’s budget deficit (32 per cent) was now the biggest in the EU. Tax revenues had decreased to the 2003 level of €32 billion (from a peak of €47 billion in 2007), and to meet the deficit, taxation would need to increase by about 20 per cent, thus destroying commerce: a disastrous scenario. Instead of increasing taxes to the point of destroying the economy, borrowing was essential. In November, because of the enormity of banks’ vulnerability and the budget deficit, an EU/ International Monetary Fund loan of € 85 billion was accepted by the government – € 40 billion of this immediately to shore up banks’ debts – together with drastic budget cuts and tax increases that added about €3,500 in extra taxes for the average household. The government had resisted the loan because of the loss of control over the Irish economy that was entailed, and in the grim hope that the country could trade itself out of calamity. Before the loan, Irish government borrowing was about €80 billion. Now it doubled overnight, reaching more than €40,000 for every man, woman and child, more than the country’s annual GDP. When the loan was followed by austerity measures necessitated by budget deficits, purchasing and credit and banks’ income all fell. On top of this were the banks’ debts that the government had guaranteed: the country faced bankruptcy. Since 2006, spending on public services had risen by 70 per cent, as had wages. Welfare benefits were massive. Pay in government and the civil service was increased to the extent that it was proposed that the Taoiseach would receive more than the President of the United States in 2008, becoming the highest-paid government leader in Europe. The disposable income (that is, the income after tax and social security has been paid) of households headed by an unemployed person increased by about 25 per cent to €35,208 between 2007 and 2008. Average disposable household income was €49,043 (2008), about 70 per cent higher than the UK average. In households headed by an employed person it was €60,977. In 2010, Irish civil servants

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were among the highest-paid in the developed world. Unemployment in 2010 stood at about 16 per cent, and had approximately 200,000 foreign workers not left it would have been higher. Despite everything, however, the tiger was not dead. In 2010 industrial output rose by about 12 per cent and exports were, per capita, amongst the highest in the EU. Trade figures showed twenty years of surplus (2009 produced €39 billion, the largest ever). The country exported (€84 billion in 2009) most of what it made and did, and imported (€45 billion) most of what it consumed. But to a greater degree than any other European state, for good and for ill, Irish people were utterly enmeshed with the outside world over which they had no control. The country’s financial disaster was compounded by political and regulatory ineptitude. Nearly everyone had been spellbound by the dream of invincible wealth and had set real values aside. This ostrichlike behaviour was made even more feckless because of the recent reminder of the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s that should have alerted everyone, individuals and officials, not to make the same assumptions, as were made then, of inevitably rising demand, wages and prices. Fianna Fáil had identified with financial excess and sought to make itself the champion of the Celtic tiger, thus providing the party with a stranglehold on power and finance. Excess saw several senior politicians convicted of corrupt acts and sentenced to terms in gaol, but the culture that facilitated corruption did not change. Planning and tax laws were framed to enable speculative construction, weak self-policing, enforcement and ‘light touch’ financial regulation. Jobs-for-the-boys, an uncontrolled civil service, and politicians like bees in a honey-jar of cash produced a system of exploitation and easy money. Fees for access to official information were among the world’s highest, suggesting that investigation was unwelcome. The contrast between public profligacy and private flair in the Irish economy was an unsettling fusion of First and Third World practices. During the debacle of 2008–10, Cowen’s government recognised that excuses had run out and that Fianna Fáil could not escape blame for the misjudgments and disasters now all too public (Figure 28). In the general election that followed on 25 February 2011, with a 70 per cent turnout its share of votes dropped to 17.4 per cent (and 20 seats) – the lowest in its eighty-five years – and its

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Figure 28 Front page of the Irish Daily Star, 23 November 2010

coalition partner, the Green Party, was wiped out. Sinn Féin had its best result in eighty-five years (9.9 per cent/14 seats). In any election, about 25 per cent of voters float: the high vote for Independents (12.6 per cent/15 – matching the greatest number since 1927) indicated that floaters, while not rejecting the traditional parties, were taking a wait-and-see position, serving notice that the new government formed by Fine Gael (36.1 per cent/76 – its best

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result in its seventy-eight years) in coalition with Labour (19.4 per cent/37 – its best result since its formation in 1912) could expect little forgiveness if its performance did not noticeably improve conditions. Having tasted fantastic prosperity, repudiated an agricultural past and lost faith in politicians, Ireland found its identity compromised. Voters were unwilling to grant final authority to anyone. Renewed emigration – an estimated 120,000 in 2010–11,16 about 3 per cent of the population: a huge amount in such a short span – signalled that Irish talent was, once again, deploying abroad rather than at home. Apart from the collapse (but not the elimination) of Fianna Fáil, two new elements emerged. First, while the country’s situation had provided Sinn Féin with its best opportunity in decades, it failed to emerge strongly. It had promised high taxes, high public spending and rejection of EU/IMF requirements that Irish taxpayers should fund the banks’ debts, but a shaken electorate had preferred less radical proposals, and the party’s association with the IRA remained a liability. Second, nevertheless, it now had a claim to be an all-Ireland party. In its manifesto it had called for Ulster’s Westminster MPs to sit in the Dáil, a proposal that it would seek to play in elections North and South. This was nationalist lip service: the average Dáil TD represented about 24,000 people; the average Northern MP about 83,000; a massive under-representation of the North if the Dáil was to be an allIreland parliament. The reality was that Sinn Féin’s opportunities lay in the North: the South would give the Party bare legitimacy, but that was all. This was confirmed in the Northern Assembly elections on 5 May 2011. Sinn Fein won 29 seats (26.9 per cent of the vote), an increase of one compared to the 2007 elections (and up 0.7 per cent); the DUP with 38 won two more seats (30 per cent), and the Alliance Party, while winning one more seat for a total of 8, increased its vote by 2.5 per cent (to 7.7 per cent). The SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, each with 16 seats, lost votes and two seats each. With only about 54 per cent of the electorate voting, it was the lowest turnout of any Assembly election. Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness were re-elected by the new Assembly as First and Deputy First Minister 16

Tribune, 9 January 2011.

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respectively. An opinion poll of 1,205 adults in the North, carried out at the end of 2010, had indicated that 73 per cent wanted to remain part of the UK and 16 per cent wanted to join the Republic, down from 23 per cent in 2007. A majority of Catholics (52 per cent) favoured remaining in the UK, an increase of 14 per cent.17 Admittedly, the fury of the South’s financial catastrophe dominated the time of the poll, but it was still clear that Sinn Fein’s success was as a Northern Ireland party: its republican principles were not very important to its voters. In the Republic, Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny headed the new coalition and found that the financial crisis was far from over. Four of Ireland’s six banks, all state-controlled since September 2008, were undercapitalised and, despite an infusion of over € 46 billion of taxpayers’ money since then, needed another € 24 billion. The money was to come from the EU/IMF loan, bringing the amount the taxpayer would have to fund to maintain banks’ liquidity alone to about €17,000 plus interest per head. In little over a year, Ireland had accepted over € 220 billion increased debt, and Irish people were in the extraordinary situation of giving money to banks in order to borrow from them. Michael Noonan, Minister for Finance, starkly declared, Tuesday 30 September 2008 will go down as the blackest day in Ireland since the Civil War broke out. The 30th September 2008 was the day on which the then Government extended the infamous guarantee to the Irish banks and decided that Anglo Irish Bank should be supported and maintained. It quickly became apparent that Anglo was insolvent in the absence of State support, that the other banks were illiquid and that the banking system was not fit for purpose. The banks were too big for the economy. The JCB and the swinging crane had become the logos of the banks, and Irish bankers were as likely to be funding apartment blocks on the Black Sea or dabbling in property schemes in Singapore, as they were to be investing in the Irish economy . . . The country has been left with an appalling legacy: a legacy of debt, of unemployment, of emigration, of falling living standards and of low morale.18

17

Agence France Presse, 17 June 2011.

18

Dáil Éireann, 31 March 2011.

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Kenny’s government followed Cowen and Lenihan in resisting EU pressure to increase corporate taxation in return for a lower interest rate on the EU/IMF loan. The EU’s stance was institutional – it wanted Ireland to operate at EU levels of corporate taxation (and risk international companies in Ireland moving elsewhere): in 2009, Ireland’s corporate tax revenue produced the equivalent of 2.4 per cent of GDP compared to 1.3 per cent for Germany and 1.4 per cent for France. It was another sign of the underlying resilience of the Celtic tiger and a classic case of lower tax, a vital tiger element, generating more revenue. The disagreement echoed growing popular disenchantment with the EU. Having embraced the EU and stepped away from Britain, the country surfed on the uncontrollable buoyancies of world trade, its low business tax providing its economy’s base as a platform for American firms to penetrate Europe. For the first time since 1922, it now faced the real test of independence: would it gather its talent in common purpose to secure the well-being of generations to come, or would it succumb to resignation and remittances?

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history

9000 bc 7000 bc 7000–6000 bc 3500 bc 3000 bc 2500 bc 2000–700 bc 700–500 bc 500 bc–400 ad 431 432/456–461/490 600–1750 600–900 795–1000 1002–14 1150 1154 1164 1166–75 1169 1171 1264 1315–18 1366–1613

Waterford Man. End of Ice Age; Ireland is still attached to Britain. Mesolithic settlement begins. Neolithic settlement begins. Earliest ‘court cairn’ stone tombs. Newgrange passage grave. Bronze Age Beaker people. Settlement of Iron Age Celts. Gaelic kingdoms and Brehon Laws are established. Palladius is sent to Ireland. Saint Patrick. The Gaelic sagas are written down. Irish missionaries are active in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Viking raids and settlements. Brian Boru is High King. Cardinal Paparo is the first Papal Legate to Ireland. Laudabiliter and the English claim to Ireland. Clonfert Cathedral is completed. Rory O’Connor is High King. Strongbow’s English invasion of Ireland. King Henry II is made Lord of Ireland. First Irish Parliament. Edward Bruce attempts to conquer Ireland. Statues of Kilkenny: apartheid laws. 392

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history 1579–1601 1592 1541 1541 1549 1550–1641 1566–83 1595–1603 1607 1613 1641–9 1642 1649–50 1652–7 1688–9 1690 1690–1791 1691 1695–1829 1698 1729 1745 1760–98 1783 1791 1795 1796 1798 1800

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Papal/Spanish invasions. Trinity College, Dublin, is founded. The Irish Parliament makes Henry VIII King of Ireland. Surrender and Regrant legislation is passed. The Mass is banned. Tudor and Stuart plantations. Munster FitzGerald rebellion. O’Neill rebellion. The Flight of the Earls. The Brehon Laws are abolished by Irish Parliament. Ulster rebellion. Confederation of Kilkenny. Cromwell in Ireland. Cromwellian plantations. ‘No Surrender’: Derry is beseiged by James II. James II is defeated at the Battle of the Boyne. Irish Brigade of the French army flourishes. Treaty of Limerick. The Wild Geese leave Ireland. Penal Laws. William Molyneaux publishes The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated. Jonathan Swift publishes A Modest Proposal. The Irish Brigade, shrieking ‘Remember Limerick!’, secure a French victory at the Battle of Fontenoy. Whiteboys, Steelboys, Defenders societies. The Bank of Ireland is founded. Wolfe Tone forms the United Irishmen. The Battle of the Diamond. The Orange Order is founded. Tone’s French invasion fails. Rebellion. Tone commits suicide. The Act of Union.

394 1 January 1801 1802 1803 1820–30 1821 1823 1828 1829 1840 1841 1842 1843 1845–52 1845 1845–1900 1847 1848 1851 1858 1885–91 1887–91 1890 1900 1903 1904 1905

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history The United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland is established. The first Christian Brothers’ school opens. Robert Emmet’s Rising. Ribbonmen agrarian violence and anti-Catholic sectarian violence in Ulster. The first Irish census takes place. The population is 6.8 million. Daniel O’Connell forms the Catholic Association. O’Connell is elected MP. Catholic Emancipation. O’Connell forms the Repeal Association. The population is 8.2 million, 4 million of whom are Irish speakers. The Nation and the Young Ireland group are founded. O’Connell’s Monster Meetings against the Union. Famine. 1 million die; 1 million emigrate. The Queen’s Colleges are established. 4 million emigrate to the USA. Soup kitchens feed 3 million daily. The Young Ireland revolt is a fiasco. The population is 6.6 million. 1.7 million are Irish speakers. James Stephens forms the Irish Republican Brotherhood ‘Fenian’ secret society. ‘Plan of Campaign’ agrarian unrest. Balfour’s Land Acts fund tenants’ freeholds. Parnell is cited in the O’Shea divorce case. John Redmond becomes leader of the Irish Party. Wyndham’s Land Act transforms land ownership. W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory found the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Arthur Griffith founds the Sinn Féin party.

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history 1907 1909 1911 15 April 1912 1912–14 1916 December 1922 1922–3 22 August 1922 1925–9 1925 1926–9 1939 1939–45 1948 1948–51 1950–1 1951 1958 1965 1967 1968–9 14 August 1969 December 1969 1970 1971–5

395

J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is premiered. James Larkin forms the ITGW trades union. The population is now 4.4 million. The ocean liner Titanic, built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast, sinks. Home Rule is enacted but postponed. Rising. The Irish Free State is established. The Irish Civil War. Michael Collins is killed at Beal na mBlath, co. Cork. The Shannon hydro-electric scheme. A North–South border is established. Sean Keating paints Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out. The IRA embarks on a bombing campaign in England. Ireland stays neutral in the Second World War. Declaration of a Republic. The South receives £47 million in US Marshall Aid. In the South, the Mother and Child healthcare scheme is opposed by the Catholic Church. The population (North and South) totals 4.33 million. Fianna Fáil’s Economic Development White Paper is published. Sean Lemass meets Terence O’Neill in Belfast. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association is formed. Riots and deaths in Northern Ireland. British troops take to the streets in the North. The Provisional IRA is formed. A Dublin arms trial implicates ministers. A disastrous internment policy is in force in the North.

396 1971 30 January 1972 1973 1981 1990 February 1992 November 1992 May 1993 June 1993 31 August 1994 May 1998 15 August 1998 November 1999 2000–9 2001 4 November 2001 2001–2 28 July 2005 May 2007 30 September 2008 2010 2011

Appendix: Timeline of Irish history Ian Paisley founds the Democratic Unionist Party. Bloody Sunday, Derry. The UK and Ireland join the European Economic Community. The population (North and South) is 4.96 million. Mary Robinson is elected President of Ireland. The ‘X’ case places abortion on the political agenda in the South. Referendums enable limited abortion in the South. Contraception is legalised for all in the South. Homosexuality is legalised in the South. The IRA announces a ceasefire. A referendum reforms the Irish Constitution. The Omagh bombing. The Unionist leader David Trimble agrees power-sharing with Sinn Féin. Government inquiries investigate the Catholic Church’s involvement in child abuse in the South. The population (North and South) reaches 6.15 million. The Police Service of Northern Ireland replaces the RUC. The US replaces the UK as Ireland’s main trading partner. The IRA renounces violence. A DUP–Sinn Féin power-sharing government is set up in the North. The Irish government guarantees banks. EU/IMF high-interest loans to the Republic. The population (North and South) is 6.15 million.

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Laing, L., and J. Laing. Celtic Britain and Ireland AD 200–800: the Myth of the Dark Ages. Dublin, 1990. Lawlor, Sheila M. Britain and Ireland 1914–23. Dublin, 1983. Lecky, W. E. H. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 12 vols. London, 1890 (5 vols. of which published separately as A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. London, 1892). Lee, Joseph. Ireland: Towards a Sense of Place. Cork, 1985. Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge, 1989. Ireland, 1945–70. Dublin, 1979. The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918. Dublin, 1973. Litton, Frank (ed.). Unequal Achievement. Dublin, 1982. Longford, Earl of, and Thomas P. O’Neill. Eamon de Valera. London and Dublin, 1970. Lucas, A. T. Treasures of Ireland. Dublin, 1973. Lydon, J. F. The Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages. Dublin, 1972. Lyons, F. S. L. Charles Stewart Parnell. London, 1977. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1880–1939. Oxford, 1980. Ireland since the Famine. London, 1971. Lyons, F. S. L., and R. Hawkins (eds.). Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension: Essays in Honour of T. W. Moody. Oxford, 1980. Macardle, Dorothy. The Irish Republic. London, 1937. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Question, 1800–1922. Lexington, 1968. McCartney, Donal. The Dawning of Democracy: Ireland 1800–1870. Dublin, 1987. MacCurtain, Margaret. Tudor and Stuart Ireland. Dublin, 1972. MacDonagh, Oliver. Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath. London, 1977. Ireland since the Union. 2nd edn, London, 1979. States of Mind. London, 1983. McDowell, R. B. Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801. Oxford, 1979. MacEoin, Uinseann. Survivors. Dublin, 1980. McGarry, Fearghal. The Rising: Easter 1916. Oxford, 2010. MacLysaght, Edward. Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century. Cork, 1939. McMahon, Deirdre. Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish Relations in the 1930s. London, 1984. McNiffe, Liam, A History of the Garda Siochana. Dublin, 1997. MacNiocaill, Gearoid. Ireland before the Vikings. Dublin, 1972. MacStiofain, Sean. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. London, 1975. Major, John. The Autobiography. London, 2010. Mansergh, Nicholas. The Irish Question, 1840–1921. London, 1965. The Unresolved Question: The Anglo-Irish Settlement and Its Undoing, 1912–72. New Haven and London, 1992.

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Martin, F. X. (ed.). Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising: Dublin 1916. London, 1967. Miller, David W. Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898–1921. Pittsburgh, 1973. Queen’s Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective. Dublin, 1980. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford, 1985. Mitchell, Arthur, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919–22. Dublin, 1995. Moloney, Ed. A Secret History of the IRA. London, 2007. Moody, T. W. The Ulster Question, 1603–1973. Dublin and Cork, 1974. Michael Davitt. Oxford, 1982. Moody, T. W., and J. C. Beckett (eds.). Ulster since 1800. London, 1955 and 1957. Morton, Grenfell. Elizabethan Ireland. London, 1971. Murphy, Brian P., Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal. Dublin, 1991. Murphy, John A. Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Dublin, 1976. New History of Ireland, 9 vols., Oxford, especially: Vol. i Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, 2005. Vol. ii Medieval Ireland 1169–1534, ed. Art Cosgrove, 1987. Vol. iii Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, 1991. Vol. iv Eighteenth Century Ireland 1691–1800, ed. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, 1986. Vol. v Ireland under the Union, 1801–70, ed. W. E. Vaughan, 1989. Vol. vi Ireland under the Union 1870–1921, ed. W. E. Vaughan, 1989. Vol. vii Ireland, 1921–84, ed. J. R. Hill, 2003. Nicholls, Kenneth. Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages. Dublin, 1972. Norman, E. R. The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–73. London, 1965. A History of Modern Ireland. London, 1971. Norman, E. R., and J. K. S. St Joseph. The Early Development of Irish Society. Cambridge, 1969. Nowlan, Kevin B. (ed.). The Making of 1916: Studies in the History of the Rising. Dublin, 1969. Nowlan, Kevin B., and M. R. O’Connell (eds.). Daniel O’Connell: Portrait of a Radical. Belfast, 1984. Nowlan, Kevin B., and T. Desmond Williams (eds.). Ireland in the War Years and After, 1939–51. Dublin, 1969. O’Brien, Brendan, A Pocket History of the IRA. Dublin, 1997. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. States of Ireland. London, 1972. O’Broin, Leon. Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1858–1924. Dublin, 1976.

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Michael Collins. Dublin, 1980. O’Callaghan, Sean, The Informer. London, 1998. O’Carroll, J. P., and John A. Murphy (eds.). De Valera and His Times. Cork, 1983. Ó Ciardha, Éamonn. Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766. Dublin, 2000. O’Connor, Frank. The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution. London, 1969. O’Connor, Ulick. The Troubles: Ireland 1912–1922. Indianapolis, 1975. Ó Corráin, Donncha. Ireland before the Normans. Dublin, 1972. O’Day, Alan. Irish Home Rule 1867–1921. Manchester, 1998. O’Donnell, Catherine. Fianna Fáil, Irish Republicanism and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–2005. Dublin, 2007. O’Dubhghaill, M. Insurrection Fires at Eastertide. Dublin, 1966 O’Farrell, P. Ireland’s English Question. London, 1971. England and Ireland since 1800. Oxford, 1975. O’Ferrall, Fergus. Daniel O’Connell. Dublin, 1981. Ó Gráda, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge, 1995. Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939. Oxford, 1994. O’Halloran, C. Partition and the Limits of Irish Nationalism. Dublin, 1987. O’Halpin, Eunan. The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland 1892–1920. Dublin, 1987. O’Neill, Terence. Ulster at the Crossroads. London, 1969. O’Neill, Tomas, and Ó Fiannachta, Padraig. De Valera (in Irish). Dublin, 1968. O’Sullivan, Michael, Sean Lemass: A Biography. Tallaght, 1994. Ó Tuathaigh, Gearoid. Ireland before the Famine, 1798–1848. Dublin, 1974. Ó Tuathaigh, M. A. G., and J. J. Lee. The Age of de Valera. Dublin, 1982. Pakenham, Frank. Peace by Ordeal. London, 1935. Patterson, Henry. The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA. London, 1997. Peck, J. Dublin from Downing Street. Dublin, 1978. Powell, Jonathan. Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. London, 2008. Ranelagh, John. Ireland: An Illustrated History. London, 1981. Rees, Merlyn. Northern Ireland: A Personal Perspective. London, 1985. Reynolds, Albert (with Jill Arlon), My Autobiography. Dublin, 2009. Rose, Richard. Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective. London, 1971. Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice. London, 1976. Ryle Dwyer, T. Eamon de Valera. Dublin, 1980. Irish Neutrality and the USA 1939–47. Dublin, 1977. Michael Collins and the Treaty. Dublin, 1981.

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Shannon, William V. The American Irish. New York, 1964. Sheehy, J. Discovering Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival. London, 1979. Smith, Howard. Ireland, Some Episodes from Her Past. London, 1974. Staples, Hugh B. (ed.). The Ireland of Sir Jonah Barrington (1832). London, 1967. Stewart, A. T. Q.. Edward Carson. Dublin, 1981. The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609–1969. London, 1977. The Ulster Crisis. London, 1969. Sunday Times Insight Team. Ulster. Harmondsworth, 1972. Sweetman, Rosita. On Our Knees. London, 1972. Taylor, Peter, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein. London, 1998. Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. London, 1993. Thompson, W. I. The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916. New York, 1967. Townshend, Charles. The British Campaign in Ireland 1919–21. Oxford, 1978. Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. London, 2006. Ireland: The Twentieth Century. London, 1999. Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848. Oxford, 1983. Travers, Pauric. Settlements and Divisions: Ireland 1870–1922. Dublin, 1988. Twohig, Patrick J. The Dark Secret of Beal Na Blath: The Michael Collins Story. Cork, 1991. Green Tears for Hecuba: Ireland’s Fight for Freedom. Cork, 1994. Utley, T. E. Lessons of Ulster. London, 1975. Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella, Portrait of a Revolutionary: General Richard Mulcahy and the Founding of the Irish Free State. Dublin, 1992. Wallace, Martin. British Government in Northern Ireland: From Devolution to Direct Rule. Newton Abbot, 1982. Walsh, Dick. The Party: Inside Fianna Fail. Dublin, 1986. Watt, John. The Church in Medieval Ireland. Dublin, 1972. Whitaker, T. K. Interests. Dublin, 1983. Whyte, John H. Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1970. Dublin, 1971. Interpreting Northern Ireland. Oxford, 1990. Williams, T. Desmond (ed.). The Irish Struggle 1916–26. London, 1966. Secret Societies in Ireland. Dublin, 1973. Williams, T. Desmond, and R. Dudley Edwards. The Great Famine. Dublin, 1956. Winstanley, M. J. Ireland and the Land Question 1800–1922. London, 1984. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger. London, 1962. Younger, Carlton. Ireland’s Civil War. London, 1970.

Index

abortion, (debate on) legalisation 287–8, 294–5, 295–6 Act of Union (1800) see Union Adams, Gerry xviii, 320, 321, 329–30, 335–6, 340, 346, 347, 358, 361, 377 acceptance of Good Friday Agreement 352–3 biography/personality 343–4 dialogue with moderates/opponents 329–30, 333, 337, 338, 342–3, 352, 353–4 support for peace process 356–7 adoption, legalisation of 277 Adrian IV, Pope 39–40 Aer Lingus 291 agrarian unrest 89–90, 111, 147–8, 153–4 moves to terminate 154–5 peasant/tenant societies 89–90, 100 agriculture 100–1, 110–11 farm subdivision, end of 132 problems under Free State 263 recessions (1870s/1880s) 152, 167 role in modern Irish economy 283 see also agrarian unrest Ahern, Bertie 73, 294, 296–7, 343, 344, 348, 354, 357, 384 Aiken, Frank 242, 246 aisling (poetic form) 87–9 Aitken, Sir Max (later Lord Beaverbrook) 209–10 Alcuin 31 Alexander III, Pope 45 Alfred the Great 35 all-party talks 341–2 Allen, William 138 Alliance Party 322 Allied Irish Bank 383, 386 American Revolution 90–1, 92–3 Amsterdam, Treaty of (1998) 298

Andrews, John 307 Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) 330–1 opposition to 331 support amongst Southern parties 288–9 US influence 339–40 Anglo-Irish Bank 390 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922) 122 acceptability to Irish majority 232 benefits for UK 232 preliminary negotiations 228–31 signing 231 Anne, Queen 81, 85 Apprentice Boys 76 aristocrats, in Gaelic society 13–17 defining features 16 Army Comrades Association see Blueshirts Art MacMurrough, King 49 Ascendancy (Anglo-Irish elite) 77–8, 83–4 critiques 85–6 differences with Westminster Parliament 81, 90–2, 103 domination of landholdings 110–11 internal distinctions 84 objections to Union 101–2 self-interested motives 92 Ashbourne, Lord 169 Asquith, Herbert Henry (later 1st Earl of Oxford) 181, 183, 186–7, 195, 208, 211, 214–15 Astor, Lady 216 Atkins, Humphrey 327, 333 Auchinleck, Lord 73 Augustine of Canterbury, Saint 38 B Specials 302 armed patrols 313 attacks on Catholics 311 bail, refusal of 297

405

406

Index

Balfour, Arthur 168–70 Balfour, Gerald 170 Banbridge (co. Down), car bomb (1998) 351 banks/banking system 100 role in 2008 crisis 385–6, 390 Banotti, Mary 297 Barrett, Michael 138 Barrington, Sir Jonah 84 Barry, John 83 Barry, Kevin 224 Barry, Tom 222, 224 Barton, Robert xix bata scóir, punitive use of 133 Beaker people 6–7 Beaumont, Gustave de 92, 108 Becket, Thomas à, Saint 45 Bede, the Venerable 30 beef, export trade in 99–100 Belfast foundation 62 as industrial centre 165 shipyards 304, 308, 381 Benedict XVI, Pope 363 Berkeley, George, Bishop 86, 97 Berry, Sir Anthony xiii, 329 Bessborough, Lord 146 Birrell, Augustine 180, 200–1 Black and Tans 223–5 government sanctioning of activities 223–4 Black Oath (1639) 67 Blair, Tony 342–3, 344, 346, 348, 355–6, 357, 360, 361–3 Blaney, Neil 316–17 Bloody Sunday (21 November 1920) see Croke Park Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) 318–19 Bloom, David E. 378 Blueshirts 265–6 Boland, Kevin 292, 316–17, 382 Boleyn, Anne 55 Bonar Law, Andrew 184–5, 186, 223 Book of Armagh 26, 37 Book of Kells 32 Book of Leinster 37, 40 Boundary Commission (1924–5) 231, 253–6, 303 impact on Free State politics 255–6 resignations from 254 revocation of powers 255 Boycott, Charles, Capt. 153 Boyne, Battle of the (1690) 54, 76, 304 Breakspear, Nicholas see Adrian IV

Brehon Laws 18–21, 51, 56 abolition 65 basic principles 18 blinding, as punishment 20 compensation 19–20 false judgments, liability for 18 fasting, plaintiff’s recourse to 19 fostering of children 19–20 seizure of property 19 survival/revival in later ages 21, 251 women’s position under 21 Brett, Charles, Sgt 138 Brian Boru, King 11, 35–7, 51 dynastic successors 37 Brighton bomb attack (1984) xiii, 329–36 British army deployment in Catholic areas 313–14 intervention in home rule debate 186–7 (see also Curragh Mutiny) mobilisation in Northern Ireland (1969) 312–14 murder of officers 224–5, 240 proposed reduction of role 338 Bronze Age 5–7 burial sites 5–6 migrations 6 writing 7 Brooke, Sir Basil (later Viscount Brookeborough) 302, 307, 309 Browne, George, Archbishop 55 Browne, Noel, Dr 273–6, 277 Bruce, Edward 47 Brugha, Cathal 217, 219, 221 Bruton, John 296–7, 338, 342, 348 Brythoni 9 Burgess, Charles see Brugha, Cathal Burke, Edmund 79, 86–7 Burke, Thomas 155 Burnside, David 355 Bush, George W., President 361 Butler family 51 see also Ormond Butt, Isaac 149–50 Byrne, Vinnie 224 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 89 Callaghan, James 313 Calpurnius (father of Saint Patrick) 26 Canada, ‘invasion’ of (1866) 139 Canning, David 378 Canute, King 37 Carey, James 155–6

Index Carlyle, Thomas 128 Carson, Sir Edward (later Lord Carson) 183–4, 186, 195, 212, 226, 301 role in home rule negotiations 214–16 Casement, Sir Roger 194, 197, 199–200, 202, 211–12 Casey, Eamonn, Bishop 297 Cashel, Rock of 38 Castlereagh, Lord 102 Catholic Association of Ireland 109 Catholic Church alliances against Protestant rulers 54–5 Anglican split from 54 anti-revolutionary stance 95–6, 122, 140, 269, 377 (apparent) condoning of violence 377 attacks on 67 attempts to suppress 79 (see also Penal Laws) banning of books 378 centrality to Irish life/culture 375, 377 church attendances 375 conditions for rebellion 142 decline in public image 379–80 identified with Irish nationalism 64–5, 67–9, 79, 97–9, 210, 375–6, 380 impact of social/economic change on 375–80 leaders, as statesmen 376–7 opposition to health reforms 275 opposition to IRB/Fenians 141–4 opposition to Land League 169 political influence 245–6, 275–6: opposition to 245–6; weakening of xi, 276, 285, 287–8, 297, 375, 377–8, 380 role in emancipation movement 108–9 scandals affecting 297, 379–80 ‘special position’ in Irish Constitution 267–9 support for UK government 106, 139–41 see also Catholic emancipation; Catholics; Irish Church; priests Catholic Committee 107–8 Catholic emancipation impact on nationalist movement 110 Irish movements for 107–9 limited benefits of 109–10, 113 opposition to 101 passage of legislation 109–10 property qualification 109 UK government plans for 101–2, 106, 126

407

Catholics alienation by UK policies 314, 318 confiscation of lands 74, 77–8 educational establishments 140–1 housing 306–7 in Irish Parliament 64–5, 76 in police force 302 in UK Parliament 112, 139–40 unemployment 304–5 see also discrimination The Cattle Raid of Cooley see Tain Bó Cúailnge cattlemen, in Gaelic society 16 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 155 Ceannt, Eamonn 196, 238 ‘Celtic tiger’, Irish economy seen as 369, 381 Celts 7–13 archaeological evidence 7–9 arrival in Ireland 9 conflicts with Rome 13 debate on meaning 7 genetic characteristics 7 gods 12, 22–3 oral culture 9, 21 origins 7, 9 references in Classical literature 9–12, 13 religion 12 see also Gaels censorship 245 Chamberlain, Austen 231 Chamberlain, Joseph 163–4 Chamberlain, Neville 267 Charlemagne 31 Charlemont, James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of 91 Charles Edward Stewart, Prince (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) 79–80, 82 Charles I, King 65–6, 67, 71 Charles II, King 75 Chartism 120 Chesterfield, 4th Earl of 82 Chichester, Sir Arthur 61 Chichester-Clark, James, Maj. 314, 317, 321 child abuse, by Church personnel 297, 379–80 Commissions of Inquiry 379–80 Childers, Erskine 193–4, 199, 240 The Riddle of the Sands 194 cholera epidemics 125, 129 Christianity, arrival in Ireland 25 see also Irish Church Church of Ireland (Anglican) Articles 67 disestablishment 146

408

Index

Church of Ireland (Anglican) (cont.) offering of nourishment in return for conversion (Souperism) 128 tithes 90, 115 vulnerability of position 82 Churchill, Lord Randolph 164, 177, 178–9, 185 Churchill, Winston 54, 185–6, 200, 258, 272–3 Ciaran, Saint 30 civil disobedience 309, 310–12 civil service 104 female employment 372 pay 386–7 reorganisation (1924) 249–50 Civil War (English, 1642–9) 67–73 Civil War (Irish, 1922–3) 122, 235–43 aftermath 242–3, 244–6, 249 ages of leadership 238 turn in favour of Free State 241–2 Clan na Gael 151, 197 Clann na Poblachta (‘Family of the Republic’) 273–6, 277–8, 280 Clare, Charles O’Brien, 6th Viscount 82–3 Clare, John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of 103 Clarence, George, 1st Duke of 51 Clarke, Kathleen (wife of Tom) 218–19 Clarke, Tom xviii, 192–3, 195, 196, 197–9, 203, 208, 238 class, equated with ‘nation’ 179 Clerkenwell explosion (1867) 138, 146 Clinton, Bill, President xiv, xv, 340, 341, 345, 348, 356–7 Clontarf, Battle of (1014) 36–7 Cohalan, Daniel, Bishop 143 Cold War xiv Colley, George 287 Collins, Eamon xv–xvi Collins, Michael xviii, xix, 212–13, 216, 217–22, 224, 227–8, 238, 297 abilities 218–19, 239–40 and Anglo-Irish Treaty: acceptance of 232, 233, 253, 303; reconsideration 235 acting presidency of Dáil 225 death 238–9, 280 electoral pact (1922) 236–7 formation of killing squad 221–2, 224–5, 242 hostility towards 219–20 infiltration of security forces 221 role in provisional government 234, 239–40, 246–8 role in Treaty negotiations 228, 232

Colmcille, Saint 30 Colombia, IRA involvement in drug-running 356 Colum, Padraic 209 Columbanus, Saint 31 Commonwealth, Irish status within 257–8, 308 Condon, Edward O’Meagher 138 Connaught xix confiscation/redistribution of lands 66, 74 Connolly, James xviii, 106, 188–90, 193, 195, 199, 202–3, 208–9, 238, 251 consent, age of 296 Conservative Party dominant position (1885–1905) 162, 164 Irish policy 166–7, 168–70 policy on direct rule 326, 327 pro-Union stance 164–5, 184–5 Constantine, Emperor see Donation of Constantine Constitution of Ireland 266–9 Church influence on drafting 376–7 criticisms 269 position of Church 267–9, 307 position of women 268 (proposed) amendments 338, 376 Continuity IRA 330, 344, 365 contraception, (debate on) legalisation 287–8, 296, 377–8 Convery, Pat 358 Coogan, Tim Pat 382 Cook, Robin 73 Cork, Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of 66 Cormac MacCarthy, King 38 Corn Laws, repeal of 126–7 Cornwallis, Lord 95, 102–4 corporate taxation 391 Corrs, The 374 corruption, in Irish politics 291–4, 384–5, 387 Cory, Peter, Judge 355 Cosgrave, Liam 316, 317, 324 Cosgrave, William T. 230–1, 241, 249, 250, 253, 266, 273, 316 Costello, John A. 273, 274, 275, 277, 279–80 Coughlin, Mary 373–4 Council of Ireland (proposed, 1921) 226, 255 counties, creation of 62–3 court cairns 4 Coventry, IRA bomb attack (1939) 270 Cowen, Brian 353–4, 385, 387–8, 391 Craig, Sir James (later Viscount Craigavon) 227, 228, 300–1, 307

Index Craig, William 323, 324–5 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop 57 crannogs (Bronze Age dwellings) 6 Crawford, William Sharman 148 Crockett, Davy 80 Croke, Thomas, Archbishop 172–3 Croke Park murders (1920) 224 Cromwell, Henry 74 Cromwell, Katherine 73 Cromwell, Oliver 71–5 harshness of Irish rule 72–3 in Irish popular memory 73 legislative measures 74–5 Cromwell, Thomas, 1st Earl of Essex 73 Cuchulain 20, 23–4, 175 Cullen, Paul, Archbishop (later Cardinal) 140, 142–3, 375 Cumann na nGaedheal (‘Society of the Gaels’) cultural/sporting policies 256–7 economic/social policy 248–51, 279 electoral/popular losses 251–2, 253, 258–60 foreign policy 257–8 policy on Oath of Allegiance 253 Curragh mutiny 186–7 Curran, Sarah 105 Currie, Austin 321–2, 383 Cusack, Michael 172 cystic fibrosis, prevalence of 7 Czartoryski, Prince Adam 238 Dáil Eireann on Anglo-Irish Treaty: debates 233–4; vote of acceptance 234 continuation in opposition to Free State 241 establishment 217 invalidity (1922) 234 moves to end War of Independence 225 oath of allegiance 220–1 rebel courts, 1919–21 21, 250 refusal to accept partition 226 relationship with IRA 220–1 second formation (1921) 226 suppression (1919/22) 221, 241 women elected to 373 Daly, Cathal, Cardinal 377 Dana (Rosemary Scallon) 297 Danaans (legendary people) 22–3 Danes, communities in Ireland (post-1014) 37 religious leanings 37, 38–9 see also Vikings

409

Dark Ages 31–7 monks’ chronicles/transcriptions 13, 37 political developments in Ireland 32 Davies, Sir John 62 Davin, Maurice 172 Davis, Thomas 117–18, 122–3 Davitt, Michael 136, 151–2, 153 de Chastelain, John, Gen. 340, 348–9, 353, 357, 366 de Gaulle, Charles 267, 281 de Lacy, Peter, Count 77 de Valera, Eamon xviii, xix, 133–4, 137, 210, 219, 236–9 authorship of Constitution 266–9, 307, 376 break with IRA 238 election on Sinn Féin ticket 215–17 leadership of Fianna Fáil 246, 252–3, 255–6, 258, 260–1, 262–6, 271, 275, 277, 280 opposition to IRB 219 opposition to Treaty 233–4 personality/qualities 280–1 political pragmatism 246, 252–3, 281 Presidency of Dáil 221, 225, 226, 227: resignation 234; resumption in opposition to Free State 241–2 Presidency of Ireland 244, 278, 280 re-enlistment as private soldier 238 rejection of violence 238, 241, 271 relations with colleagues 281 role in Easter Rising 203, 211 role in Treaty negotiations 228–31 unrealistic ideas/aims 262–3 Deasy, Timothy 138 decommissioning 338, 340, 342–3, 348–9 acceptance 352–3, 365–6 as condition of involvement in talks 347, 349, 354 incentives to 360 Independent International Commission 348–9, 366 time limits 346, 349 vagueness of definition 348–9 see also IRA Defenders 101–2 Democratic Unionist Party 323, 328, 339, 345 electoral success 357–8, 358–9 opposition to Good Friday Agreement 350 role in power-sharing government 360–4 Derry English appropriation/renaming 62–3

410

Index

Derry (cont.) local elections 305–6 siege (1688–9) 75–6, 304 unrest (1969–) 312 (see also Bloody Sunday) Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, 14th Earl of 59 Desmond, Gerald Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, 3rd Earl of 48–9 Devlin, Anne 105 Devlin, Joseph 303 Devlin, Patrick 321–2 Devoy, John 136–7, 151, 152, 192, 197, 199 Diamond, Battle of the (1795) 102 Diarmuid MacMurrough, King 40–4 Dillon, Count 83 Dillon, James 272, 281 Dillon, John (Irish Party MP) 167–8, 169, 180, 208, 216, 272 Dillon, John (Young Ireland activist) 117, 118, 119 Diodorus Siculus 13 direct rule 319–20 activism against 326 cross-party consensus (in UK) 326 duration 326 increased violence in response to 334 plans to replace 327, 333–4; failure 334 ‘positive’ 325–6 discrimination, anti-Catholic campaigns against 310–12 as explicit policy 306 legislative 78–80, 81 social 178, 304–7 see also employment; Penal Laws Disraeli, Benjamin 87, 126–7 Dissenters emigrations 80 identification with Catholics 80 divorce illegality 245, 287 legalisation 288 Doheny, Michael 135 Doherty, Sean 290 dolmens 5 Dominions see Commonwealth Domnall, King 35 Donaldson, Denis 359 Donation of Constantine (325, alleged) 39 Dowdall, Archbishop 58 Dowling, Sean 26 Downing Street Declaration (1993) 337, 345 Doyle, Arthur Conan, ‘His Last Bow’ 217

Drogheda, massacre of (1649) 72 druids 11–12 Drumcree 350–1 Drummond, Thomas 112 Dublin Castle 45–6 Catholic University 141 child abuse in Archdiocese 379 Customs House, destruction (1921) 226–7 founding 34 General Post Office, occupation of 202–6 living conditions 187, 248, 263 lockout (1913) 187, 189 Metropolitan Police, IRA infiltration 221 see also Croke Park murders; Phoenix Park murders; Trinity College Duffy, Charles Gavan 117, 119, 147–9 Duffy, George 149 Dukes, Alan 289 Dunne, Ben 293 Dwyer, Michael 105 Easter Rising (1916) 24, xviii–xix aftermath 207–14, 216 casualties 207 events of rising 202–6 failure of plans 200–2 governmental awareness of plans 200–1 linguistic/cultural consciousness 133 opposition within nationalist movement 201–2 personnel 196, 199 popular opinion: initial disapproval 207, 210; swing in rebels’ favour 208–9, 210–11 preparatory arrangements 199–201 Proclamation 203 reprisals 207–12 survivors’ criticisms 218 Economic and Social Research Council 380–1 economic crisis (2008–10) xvii, 383–91 attempts at recovery 387, 391 borrowings 386 global origins xvii, 383 responsibility for 384–5, 387 economic transformation (1990s/2000s) 368–74 causes 372 role of women 372–4 social change brought by 374–5 Economic War (Ireland/UK, 1932–8) 262–5, 282, 308

Index impact on Irish economy/living conditions 263–4 resolution 264–5 economy (Irish) 283–5 under British rule 99–101, 110–12 dependence on trade 283 dependence on UK 262–3, 264–5, 282: erosion of 370 disposable income 386 EU subsidies 369–70 exports 282, 283 Free State 248–9, 262–5 incompetent management 387 poor conditions (1950s) 277 public service spending 386–7 upturn (1960s) 278–80, 282–3, 298–9 see also economic crisis (2008–10); economic transformation; trade education in Northern Ireland 309 role in improved Southern economy 369, 372 Edward II, King 47 Edward IV, King 52 Edward VI, King 56–7 Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight D. 308 Elizabeth I, Queen 58, 60–1 Emain Macha (Gaelic centre) 17 emigration(s) ix, 78, 248, 278–9, 284, 298 anti-British feeling following 133–4 Dissenters 80 famine-motivated 131–2 impact on population 113 literary 177 military/aristocratic 77, 82–3 (see also Irish Brigade) overtaken by immigration 370 reduction in (1960s) 279, 284 renewal (1980s) 284–5 wartime 272 see also United States Emmet, Robert 105–6, 107 employment breakdown by sector 283 female 372–3 measures to improve 263, 281–2 in the North 304, 381: Protestant vs. Catholic 302, 304–5 poor levels of 187, 248, 258, 284 public sector 284 rises in 284 English (language), enforced use of 133

411

English rule of Ireland (1171–1921) administrators sent from England 65–6 challenges to 46 commercial exploitation 53 conciliatory elements 58 extension of royal power 56 extent of control 45–7 fortifications 45–6 Gaelicisation of ruling class 48–9 harshness of regime 58–60, 63–4 Ireland’s strategic/commercial importance 101 preservation of Gaelic customs 50–1 process of conquest (1167–1250) 43–9 rebellions against 51–2, 53–5, 58–62, 75–7, 134–40 (see also agrarian unrest; 1641 Rebellion; 1798 Rebellion) religious oppression 57–8 suppression of Gaelic traditions 57, 97–8 see also Ascendancy; economy; industry; Irish people; Pale; UK government; Union Enniskillen housing policy 306 Remembrance Day bomb attack (1987) 331–2 Eoganachta (Gaelic tribe/kingdom) 32, 35 Ervine, David 320–1 Eucharistic Congress (Dublin, 1932) 29–30 Europe (continental), Irish attitudes to xiii European Central Bank 386 European Community/Union Irish conformity with standards of 381 Irish membership xiv, 282–3, 298–9, 369 referendums on treaties 295, 371–2 single currency 298 subsidies 369–70 European Monetary System 369–70 Eurovision Song Contest 374 Executive (Northern Ireland) 323 collapse 325 famine (1845–9) xvii, 9, 46, 113, 118, 123–34 absence of self-help initiatives 129 accompanying diseases 125 after-effects 125 areas of greatest impact 123 Britain blamed for 133–4 casualties 123–4, 125 causes 124–5 duration 125 food exports during 128

412

Index

famine (cont.) long-term consequences 131–4 private initiatives to combat 128 as ‘providential’ 129–31 soup kitchens 128 UK governmental response: attempts at alleviation 126–7: compounding of problems 127–31; failure to appreciate scale of crisis 129 Farrell, Michael xii Faulkner, Brian 310, 317, 322, 323–4 Feetham, Richard, Justice 254 Fenian Brotherhood 135–40 1867 rising 137–8 Church hostility to 142–3 dynamite campaign (1880s) 192, 270 English attitudes to 145–6 excommunication 142–3 Manchester Martyrs 138 split into factions 139 see also IRB Fenian cycle (of sagas) 22, 24 Fianna Fáil (‘Soldiers of Destiny’) 285 British attempts to destabilise 262 as coalition partners 289, 296–7 collaboration with Northern parties 327–8 corruption/scandals 286–7, 289–90, 291–5, 384–5, 387 crackdown on IRA 265, 266, 271 defections from 288 electoral disaster (2011) 387–8 electoral platform 262 electoral successes 251–2, 260–1 formation 246 grip on power 266 planned military coup against 260 political maturation 264–5 postwar government/policies 277–8, 280, 281–4, 285–6 refusal/acceptance of Oath of Allegiance 252–3 response to Northern violence 315–17 responsibility for economic crisis 384–5, 387–8 stance on Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) 331 support for IRA 260–1 Unionist mistrust of 317 see also Economic War Fine Gael (‘United Ireland’) 266, 285, 315 collaboration with Northern parties 327–8 role in coalition governments 273–6, 277–8, 286–7, 388–9

fingal (crime in Gaelic law) 16–17 Fingall, Countess of 208, 210–08 Finn MacCool (legendary hero) 24, 135 Finnian, Saint 30 Firbolgs (legendary people) 22 First World War 183 casualties 210 coalition government 214, 216–17 conscription 212–14 Irish enlistments 195, 197, 212 nationalist plans to make use of 193–4 Fisher, Joseph R. 254 Fitt, Gerry 312, 321–2 FitzGerald, Lord Edward 93, 107 FitzGerald, Garret 286–7, 289, 292, 293, 328, 330, 382 personal qualities 290–1 FitzGerald, Maurice 43, 49 FitzGerald family 51, 58–9 see also Desmond; Leinster; Offaly Fitzgodebert de la Roche, Richard 43 FitzStephen, Robert 43 Flight of the Earls (1605) 61–2 Flood, Henry 91, 92 Fomorians (legendary people) 22 Fontenoy, Battle of (1745) 82–3 Four Courts (IRA breakaway group) 236 Fox, George 69–71 Framework for the Future 338, 346 France support for Irish nationalist movements 54, 93–4, 95 see also French Revolution; Hundred Years War; Napoleonic Wars Franco, Francisco, Gen. 143 Free State government(s) administrative reforms 249–51 ages/longevity of leadership 244 cultural/sporting policies 256–7 enduring impact of Civil War 244–6, 252–3 general elections 251–2, 258–60 land reforms 250–1, 261, 262 popular support 246 prioritisation of budgetary concerns 248–50, 258 repressive social legislation 245–6 tendency to conservatism 244–5 see also Cumann na nGaedheal; Economic War; Fianna Fáil; Fine Gael freemen, role in Gaelic society 13, 16 French, Sir John (later Viscount), FieldMarshal 186, 222

Index French Revolution 90, 92–3 Fullam, Seamus, Fr 380 Fustok, Mahmoud 293 GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) 172–3, 256, 257 politicisation 172–3 Gaelic League 173–5, 256 failure of linguistic project 175 politicisation 174 Gaelic renaissance (late 19th/early 20th centuries) 171–7 literary impact 175–7 nationalist hostility to 176–7 Gaels 9 Christianity 13 cultural/political centres 17 currency/exchange 16 election of leaders 16–17 fostering of children 19–20 isolation from European mainstream 17 kingdoms 15–16 language 9 legal system 18–21 (see also Brehon Laws) literature see sagas military dominance 24 monkish chronicling of activities 13 social organisation 11–12, 13–21, 24 stone forts 11 survival of traditions 87–9 system of family names 24–5 see also Brehon Laws; Celts; English rule of Ireland Gallagher, Matt 385 Gandon, James 226 Garda Síochana, formation of 249 Gardiner, Kevin 369 Garvin, Tom 263, 278 George I, King 79 George III, King 79, 83, 91, 102, 106 George IV, King 108, 109 George V, King 183, 227, 301 Germanus of Auxerre, Bishop 28 Germany German Plot (alleged, 1918) 217 nationalist negotiations with 197, 199–200, 207 overtures to IRA (1939) 271 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 59 Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) 7, 40, 42, 46, 49 Gladstone, Herbert 158

413

Gladstone, William Ewart xix, 146–7, 154–6, 158–9, 162, 164, 180 Goldsmith, Oliver 87 Gonne, Maud 208 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 298, 346–53 breakdown 353 commitment to cooperation 346–7 opposition 347, 350 provisions on decommissioning 348–9 provisions on policing 349 referendums on 347–8 voting system 348 wording 347 Gough, Brig.-Gen. Sir Hubert de la Poer 186 Goulding, Cathal 315 Gow, Ian xiii Grace and Bounty, doctrine of 66 Grant, Ulysses S., President 80 Grattan, Henry 91–2, 102, 104, 108, 182 Great Depression (1930s) 264, 304 Greenwood, Sir Hamar 227 Gregory, Isabella Augusta, Lady 175 Gregory, Sir William 175 Gregory I, Pope 38 Gregory VII, Pope 38 Gregory XIII, Pope 54, 59 Griffith, Arthur 118, 177, 182, 189, 193, 207, 216, 221, 225, 228, 234–5, 238, 283 acceptance of Treaty 231, 235 death 238 The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland 182 Guinness, Arthur 84 Gunpowder Plot (1605) 61 Haakon IV, King 47 Hain, Peter 360 Hales, Sean, Brig. 240 Halifax, Lord 270 Harcourt, Lord 80 Harcourt, Sir William 161 Harding, Warren Gamaliel, President 134 Harington, Sir John 61 Harkley, Robert 85 Harney, Mary 288, 293 Harrington, Timothy 167–8, 169 Hartington, Lord 159, 163–4 Haughey, Charles xiii, 285–6, 327, 330, 374 alleged dealings with IRA 316–17 corruption 292–4, 384 personal qualities 290–1 as Taoiseach 286–7, 289–90

414

Index

Healy, Timothy 167, 209–10, 211, 215, 248 Heaney, Seamus, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’ 334–5 Heath, Edward 313, 317, 319–20 hedge schools 97–8, 133 Heiric of Auxerre 31 Hennessy, Richard 83 Henry II, King 39–43, 44–5, 49, 64 invasion of Ireland (1171) 44–5 Henry IV, King 49 Henry VI, King 51 Henry VII, King 52–3 Henry VIII, King 53–6, 58, 64, 73 breach with Rome 54 Herodotus 9 higher education nineteenth-century reforms/institutions 141 Hillery, Patrick 290 Himilco (Carthaginian sailor/writer) 10–11 Hitler, Adolf 272 Hobson, Bulmer 182, 190, 192, 193, 201 Holkeri, Harri 340 home rule ‘county option’ 187 legislative implementation 225–6 opposition 158–9, 162, 180, 183–7 proposals for 149–50, 183 re-emergence on Liberal agenda 180–2 seen as dangerous precedent 185 threat of civil war 183–7 wartime moves to implement 214–16 Homer, Iliad 10 Hort, Josiah, Archbishop 82 housing new projects 383–4 Northern policies 306–7, 314 Humbert, Jean-Joseph, General 95 Hume, John 296, 321–2 Nobel Peace Prize 318 role in peace process 333, 336–7 Hundred Years War 47 hunger strikes 222, 242, 271 in Maze prison 336 Hunt, Lord 313 Hyde, Douglas 122–3, 132, 173–4, 190, 267, 269 Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Straw Rope) 174 ICA (Irish Citizen Army) 190 illuminated manuscripts 32

ILPU (Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union) 180 immigration, increase in 370 Independent Irish Party (1852–6) 148–9 Independent Parades Commission 350–1 Industrial Revolution 100, 165–6 industry (Irish) 111, 165, 171, 283 inquiries 355–6 focus on security forces 355 internment 1920s 301 following Easter Rising 212–14: ending 215 of terrorist suspects (1971–3) 317–18, 320 wartime 272 Invincibles 155–6 IRA (Irish Republican Army) xi, 137 1930s revival 269–71 1939 ultimatum 270 1950s campaign in North 314–15 alienation of public opinion 271 attacks on British forces 221–2; UK response 223–4 breakaway groups 236: intimidation of 352 ceasefire (1994) 337, 345: abandonment 341 Church disapproval/excommunication 143–4, 269 claimed authority for actions 143–4 commitment to violence 262, 270–1, 329–30, 335–6 conflict with Blueshirts (1933–6) 265–6 decommissioning of weapons 349: announcement of 359, 366; proposals for 338, 347; refusal 339, 342–3, 354 defeat in Civil War (1923) 241–2 differences with Fianna Fáil 265 early use of name 202–3, 218 executions of members 240 extraordinary army convention (1997) 342 Fianna Fáil support 260–1 GHQ Staff 219, 220 infiltration by security forces 359 involvement in peace process xvi IRA Organisation (in National Army) 242–3 loss of manpower/arms 227, 246, 265 move away from violence 357, 359, 383 move towards socialism 261–2, 315 oath of allegiance 220–1 official recognition 220–1 organisation 218–19

Index outlawed in South 252, 266, 271 reclamation of Dáil (post-1922) 241 refusal to accept partition/Treaty 226, 235–8 repudiation of Dáil 235–6 response to Boundary Commission 255–6 S-Plan (1939 bombing campaign) 270–1 splits into factions 314–15, 330 wearing down xvii see also Continuity IRA; Official IRA; Provisional IRA; Real IRA IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) xix, 134 Catholic establishment’s disapproval of 141–2 collapse 246 Constitution 143 cooperation with home rule movement 151 formation 135–7 hostility towards 219–20 increased numbers/influence 192–3 internal disputes 195–6, 201–2, 233 links with GAA 172 popular rejection of objectives 197–9 Supreme Council 196 see also Fenian Brotherhood Ireland (geographical entity) animal life 1–2 early human habitation 1, 2–7 geography 2 geological formation 1 Ireland (modern state) age of electorate 285, 374 American companies based in 368–9 anti-terrorism legislation 351 bicameral parliament 267 conformity with European standards 381 declaration of Republic 274, 308 Department of Finance 280 extension of franchise 373 fears of spread of violence 317, 328, 348 formation xvi health reforms 273–6, 277 (see also Mother and Child Scheme) Industrial Development Authority 274 lack of interest in North 382–3 living standards 279–80 political volatility (1980s) 285 presidency 267, 269, 297–8 public sector employment 284 recognition of Northern legitimacy 331, 338–9 renewed spirit of confidence 298–9

415

response to Northern violence 315–17 right to engage in Northern affairs 330–1 secularisation xi state corporations 281–2 two-party system 277–8; breakdown 285 welfare state, moves towards 277 see also Constitution of Ireland; economy; employment; industry Irish Brigade(s) 77, 78, 82–3, 265 Irish Church (medieval) 29–31 architecture 38 conflicts with papacy 39–40 conversion of local leaders 29–31 conversions outside British Isles 30–1 decline in English influence 50 divergences from Catholic mainstream 38–9 familial nature 50 literary/artistic works see illuminated manuscripts loyalty to English conquerors 45 monastic leanings 29–30 pillage of religious sites 31 scholarship 31 see also Church of Ireland Irish Convention (1917) 215–16 Irish Free State 177, 231 agricultural recession 263 allegiance to Crown 248 Constitution 246–8 electricity system 251 formal establishment 240 ignorance of Northern affairs 255–6 imitation of Britain 250, 251 industry 263 legal system 250, 251 living conditions 248, 250, 263–4 local authorities 250 rebuilding of infrastructure 249 renaming 267 (un)employment levels 248 see also Free State government; National Army Irish (language) attempts at revival 173–5, 256–7: failure 175, 256–7 compulsory teaching in schools 256–7 disuse/suppression 9, 57, 132–3 origins 9 resurgence (as second language) 257 Irish Medical Association 275

416

Index

Irish National Land League 151–5 Declaration of Principles 152 Plan of Campaign (1880s/1890s) 167–9 violent tactics 153–5, 168 see also No Rent Manifesto Irish National Liberation Army 366 Irish Parliament 1613 sitting 64–5 1633 sitting 66 abolition (1653) 74 dissolution (1800) 103–4 limitations on powers 56 passing of second Union Bill 102–3 Patriot Parliament (1689) 76 rejection of first Union Bill 101 restoration (1782) 91 Irish Party 1885 election successes 156–8, 163 (apparent) acceptance of partition 215 balance of power 181 competitors 181–2 cooperation with Volunteers 193 disintegration 216 formation 150 handling of home rule debates 187 increased representativeness 158 internal divisions 159, 161–2 invitation to join wartime government 214 responses to Easter Rising 208 reunification under Redmond 181 role in home rule negotiations 214–16 support for Land League 153 Irish people categorisation by economic status (1841) 123 demography 110–11 English stereotyping/demonising 46, 49, 131, 145–6, 168, 357 increased electorate 158 living conditions 85 marriage, age of 132 reimagining of stereotypes 209 second-class status ix, 81–2, 195, xvii–xviii shift in attitudes xviii, xiv–xvi see also national identity Irish People (newspaper) 136–7, 142 Irish Republic see Ireland (modern state); Republicanism Irish Unionist Party 180 role in home rule negotiations 214–16 Irish Volunteers (1779) 91–2, 94

Irish Volunteers (1913) arms/ammunition smuggling 193–4 conflicts with army/police 194–5 disagreements over objectives 201–2 formation 190–1, 192 IRB membership 195 Irish Party control 193 (perceived) discriminatory treatment 194–5 Iron Age 9 isolation of Irish culture 17 ITGWU (Irish Transport and General Workers Union) 188–9 Jackson, Thomas ‘Stonewall’ 80 James I of England/VI of Scotland, King 61, 62–3, 65, 68 James II of England, King 75–7 ‘James III of England’ (son of James II) 79 John, King 45–6 John XXII, Pope 47 John XXIII, Pope 363 John Paul II, Pope 30, 330, 363, 375, 377 Johnson, Samuel, Dr 73 Johnston, William, MP 158–9 Jones, Paul 90 Joyce, James 175–6, 177 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 162 Ulysses 172, 176 Julius Caesar, History of the Gallic Wars 11–12 Keane, Ronan 293 Keane, Terry 293 Kells, Book of see Book of Kells Kells, Synod of (1152) 39, 50 Kelly, Billy 316 Kelly, James, Capt. 316 Kelly, John 316 Kelly, Thomas J. 137–8 Kenny, Enda 390, 391 Kent, Thomas/Kent brothers 206, 211 Keynes, John Maynard 279 Kickham, Charles Joseph 136–7, 143, 151 Kildare, Garrett More FitzGerald, 8th Earl of 52–3 Kilkenny, Confederation of (1642) 68–9, 71, 78 Kilkenny, Statutes of (1366) 48 Kilmainham Treaty 154–5 Kilwarden, Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount 105 King, William, Archbishop 82 Kinsale, Battle of (1601) 61 Kipling, Rudyard 156

Index Labour Party (Irish) 288–9 collaboration with Northern parties 327–8 electoral gains 295 role in coalition governments 273–6, 277–8, 286, 296–7, 388–9 Labour Party (UK) policy on direct rule 326 Laffoy, Mary, Justice 379 laissez-faire, economic doctrine of 125–6 exacerbation of famine 127, 129–31 Laithwaite, Sir Gilbert 276 Lalor, James Fintan 119–20, 152, 167 Land League see Irish National Land League land ownership calls for reform 166–7 changing patterns 132, 147 confiscations under Cromwell 74 Free State reforms 250–1 inequality of distribution 110–11 insecurity of titles 64–5, 66 Land League survey 153 Land War (1880–2) 153–5, 167–8 (proposed) legislation 154–5, 169–71, 181: counterproductivity 171 sale of estates 170 weakening of landlords’ powers 170–1 see also Irish National Land League; plantation(s) Land Rehabilitation Project (1949) 274 Langrishe, Sir Hercules 95–6 Larkin, James 187–9 Larkin, Michael 138 Laud, William, Archbishop 66 Laudabiliter (papal bull) 39–40 authenticity 40 League of Nations 258 Lecky, William 62, 71 Leinster Viking kingdom 34–5 see also Book of Leinster Leinster, James FitzGerald, 1st Duke of 84 Lemass, Sean 244, 246, 278, 281–2, 285 anti-corruption stance 291–2, 384 Lenihan, Brian (sr) 289–90, 293 Lenihan, Brian (jr) 385, 391 Leo XIII, Pope 169 Liberal Party 146, 180–2, 183 rupture with Irish Party 161 split over home rule 159, 163–4 Limerick, Treaty of (1691) 77, 78, 81 Lincoln, Abraham, President 106 linen industry 99, 111

417

Lisbon Treaty, referendum on 371–2, 385 Liverpool, IRA bombings 270 Lloyd George, David (later 1st Earl Lloyd George) 134, 181, 227 handling of home rule/Treaty negotiations 214–15, 228, 231–2, 248 handling of War of Independence 221, 223, 224, 225 negotiating skills/subtlety 214, 228 Locke, John 81 London, IRA bombings 270, 341 Londonderry see Derry Long, Walter 300–1 Lord Lieutenant, office of 104 Lough Gara (Bronze Age site) 6 Lough Gur (archaeological site) 3–4, 6 Louis XIV, King 54, 75, 77, 78, 79 Louis XVIII, King 83 ‘loyalist’ militants ceasefire (1994) 337 commitment to violence 335–6 decommissioning of weapons 365–6 internment 320 strike against direct rule 326 Loyalist Volunteer Force 345, 349 Luby, Thomas Clarke 136–7 Lucan (Roman poet) 12 Lucas, Frederick 147–8 Lug (Celtic deity) 12 Lundy, Robert, Col. 75–6 Lynch, Jack 286, 315–16 Lynch, Liam, Gen. 235–6, 238, 242 Maastricht Treaty 295 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron 73 MacBride, John 208 MacBride, Sean 269–70, 273, 275, 276 MacCurtain, Thomas 222 MacDermott, Sean 192–3, 196, 201, 208–9, 238 MacDonagh, Thomas 199, 208, 209, 238 MacDonald, Ramsay 166, 262 MacMahon, President Patrice de 77 MacMahon, The, of Monaghan 59–60 MacNeill, Eoin 173, 190–1, 193, 195–6, 201–2, 206, 207, 254–5 MacRory, Joseph, Cardinal 307–8 MacSwiney, Terence 222, 224 Major, John 296, 333–4, 337, 338, 340, 342, 345, 360, 363 Mallon, Seamus 347, 350 Malthus, Thomas 129–30

418

Index

Manchester Martyrs 138, 143 marching season 304, 350–1 Markievicz, Constance Georgina, Countess 189, 216, 373 marriage, interracial, prohibition 48, 57 Martin, John 120 Marx, Karl 171 Mary I, Queen (‘Bloody Mary’) 56–8 Mary II, Queen 75 Mason, Roy 326 Maudling, Reginald 313–14 Maxwell, Sir John, Gen. 207–9, 210, 211 Mayhew, Sir Patrick 338, 339 Maynooth (Catholic seminary) 140–1 Maze prison, hunger strikes (1981) 336 Mazzini, Giuseppe 117 McAleese, Mary 297–8, 373 McCracken, Henry Joy 93, 95 McCracken Tribunal (1997) 292–3 McDaid, Kevin 365 McGahern, John 378 The Dark 378 That We May Face the Rising Sun 378 McGuinness, Martin xviii, 319, 320, 329, 342–3, 356–7 acceptance of Good Friday Agreement 352–3 biography/personality 344 confrontation with Southern politicians 353–4 in government 354, 360–1, 389–90 McIntosh, Lord 351 McKevitt, Michael 342 McNally, Leonard 93–4, 105 McQuaid, John Charles, Archbishop 376–7 McQuillan, Jack 291 McShane, Roy 359 McVeigh, Timothy 341 Meagher, Thomas Francis 113, 134 Mesolithic Age/people 2–3 metalwork, Dark Age 32 Midland Volunteer Force 190 Midleton, Lord 200 Milesians (legendary people) 23 Mill, John Stuart 145–6 Minister for Home Affairs (NI) special powers 302–3 Mitchel, John 116, 118–20, 134 Mitchell, George (former Senator)/Mitchell Commission 340, 346, 348–9, 350, 352, 353 Molyneux, William 81–2, 91 monasteries, dissolution of 55 Moone, co. Kildare, high cross 34

Moore, George 176 Moore, Thomas 89 Moran, Denis 190 More, Thomas 55 Morgan ap William 73 Moriarty, David, Bishop 142, 149 Moriarty Tribunal (1997) 293 Morrison, Danny 329, 382–3 Mortimer, Roger 49 Mother and Child Scheme 275–6 opposition to 275 mothers, employment possibilities 372–3 Mount Sandel (Mesolithic site) 2–3 Mountjoy, Charles Blount, Lord 60–1 Mowlam, Mo 345–6, 348 Mulcahy, Richard 219, 222, 235, 273 Murphy, William Martin 189 Murphy, Yvonne, Judge 379 Nally, Derek 297 Napier, Oliver 322 Napoleon I 83 Napoleonic Wars, impact on Irish economy 110–11 Nathan, Sir Matthew 200–1 The Nation 117–19 National Army (1921–4) 235, 236 executions of IRA members 240, 242 ‘Mutiny’ (1924) 242–3, 253 National Asset Management Agency 386 national identity (Irish) ix challenges to ix nationalism 54 1842 manifesto 118 constitutional vs. revolutionary 113 divisions over Anglo-Irish Treaty 232 internal conflicts 219–20 international element 54–5 loss of enthusiasm 251 as minority interest 197 rejection of extremism 351, 355 shifts in Northern groupings/attitudes 321–2, 327–8 theoretical basis 178–9 see also Catholic Church; Republicanism; socialism; names of specific groups/events Nationalist Party (NI) 303 as official opposition 310 Neave, Airey xiii Neolithic Age/people 3–6 burial sites 4–5

Index Mediterranean connections 5 origins 3 surviving evidence 3–4 technological advancement 3 neutrality, in Second World War 265, 271–3 attacked by Churchill 272 defended by de Valera 273 reasons for 271–2 New Ireland Forum 327–8, 382 New Tipperary (Land League town) 169 new towns, creation of 62–3, 309 New York Irish Brigade 134 Newgrange (Neolithic burial site) 4–5 Newman, John Henry, Fr (later Cardinal) 141 Niall of the Nine Hostages 24–5 Nice Treaty, referendum on 371 NICRA (Northern Irish Civil Rights Association) 310 Ninian, Saint 30 No Rent Manifesto 154 Noonan, Michael 390 Northern Ireland boundary-fixing 300–1: electoral districts 305–6 civil service 304–5 consent (to regime change), principle of 327–8, 338 contribution to war effort 308 current political order xi–xii demography 300 economic/industrial decline 380–1 economic viability 303 economy 303–4 education 309 Executive Committee 346 expenditure on policing 317 formation 300 Forum 342 franchise 305 health service 308–9 increase in violence 334–6 industry 304 local government 305–6 parliamentary representation 306 planned administrative harmonisation with South 326 political/religious conflicts xi, xii proposed reduction in size 254 recognition by Republic 331, 338–9 relations with South 309

419

sectarian divisions 304–8; attempts to bridge 308 (see also peace process) seen as anachronistic xviii, 381–2 sending in of troops 312–14 Southern lack of interest in 382–3 on Westminster agenda 313–14 see also direct rule; Northern Ireland Assembly; Northern Ireland Parliament; peace process; UK government Northern Ireland Assembly 323, 333, 350 2003 elections 357–8 2007 elections 360–1 2011 elections 389–90 new form under Good Friday Agreement 346 suspensions 354, 356 voting system 348 Northern Ireland Parliament constitution 301 creation/first elections 226, 300 distribution of seats 300 special powers 302–3 Nulty, Thomas, Bishop 161 Ó Fiaich, Tomas, Cardinal 377 Oath of Allegiance (to British Crown) 248 calls for removal 261, 262 Fianna Fáil’s refusal 252 forced on Fianna Fáil 252–3 Oath of Supremacy 66–7 O’Beirne family xviii–xix O’Brien, Conor Cruise 311 O’Brien, Edna 378 Down by the River 294 O’Brien, Mahon, Bishop 50 O’Brien, Michael 138 O’Brien, Turlough, Bishop of Killaloe (1483– 1526) 50 O’Brien, Turlough, Bishop of Killaloe (1556– 69) 50 O’Brien, William, MP 160–1, 167–8, 169 O’Brien, William Smith 120–2, 149 O’Casey, Sean 176, 177, 190, 197 The Plough and the Stars 177 O’Connell, Daniel, Count 83, 107 O’Connell, Daniel ‘The Liberator’ 17, 96, 106–10, 111–16 conflicts with contemporaries 112–13, 118–19, 120, 126

420 O’Connell, Daniel ‘The Liberator’ (cont.) election to Parliament 109, 112–15 illness/death 115–16 imprisonment 115 posthumous reputation 116, 117 rejection of violence 107, 113, 118 O’Connor, Frank 88 O’Doherty, Joe xix O’Donnell, Patrick 156 O’Donnell, Peadar 261, 270 O’Donnell, ‘Red’ Hugh, Prince 60–1 O’Donnell family 51 see also Tyrconnell O’Duffy, Eoin 265–6 Offaly, ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald, Lord 53–4 Official IRA 315 O’Flanagan, Michael, Fr 225 Ogham (script) 7 O’Grady, Standish James 175 O’Growney, Eugene, Rev. 173–4 O’Hagan, John 98 O’Higgins, Ambrose 83 O’Higgins, Bernardo 83 O’Higgins, Kevin 252 Oklahoma City bombing (1995) 341 Olaf of the Sandals, King 35 Old English families 64–5 religious/constitutional concessions 65–6 O’Leary, John 136–7, 149 O’Leary, Michael 371 O’Leary, Olivia 382 Omagh car bomb (1998) xvi, 351 housing policy 306 O’Mahony, John 135, 142 O’Malley, Desmond 287, 288, 295 O’Morain, Michael 316 O’Neill, Art 60 O’Neill, Brian 47 O’Neill, Henry 60 O’Neill, Hugh see Tyrone, 3rd Earl of O’Neill, John 139 O’Neill, Owen Roe 69, 71, 72–3 O’Neill, Sir Phelim 68, 69 O’Neill, Terence, Capt. 309–10, 321 meeting with Lemass 310, 363 resignation 310, 312 O’Neill, Turlough Luineach 55 O’Neill family 25, 47, 51, xviii–xix see also Tyrone; Ui Neill O’Rahilly, Eogan 88

Index O’Rahilly, Michael 208 Orange Order 102 links with Ulster Unionist Party 300 support for Union 158–9, 164–5, 177–8 Orange Volunteers 325 O’Reilly, Don Alexander 77 O’Reilly, Hugh, Archbishop 68–9 Ormond, James Butler, 12th Earl (later 1st Duke) of 71, 73, 75 Orpen, William 189 O’Shea, Katherine 159–62 O’Shea, William, Capt. 159–61, 167 Paget, Sir Arthur, Lt.-Gen. 186 Paine, Thomas 87 Paisley, Eileen 361 Paisley, Ian, Rev. (later Baron Bannside) xviii, 310, 321, 323, 324–5, 328, 348, 350, 353, 357–8, 358 colleagues’ assessments 361–3 in government 360–3 personality/achievements 363–4 Pale (area of English control) 48–9 Palladius (early Christian missionary) 25–6, 28 papacy see Catholic Church; Irish Church Paparo, Cardinal 39 Parnell, Charles Stewart xix, 113, 136, 150–62, 164, 167–8, 169 divorce case 159–62 imprisonment/release 154–5 rejection by Irish Party 161–2 Partholon (legendary leader) 22 partition acceptance by Treaty delegation 231–2 early plans for 187 end to, wartime proposal for 272 focus of wartime negotiations on 214–16 as grounds for wartime neutrality 271–2 legislative implementation 225–6, 231 Republican agreement to reject 231 wartime reinforcement 308 passage graves 4–5 size/positioning 5 Patrick, Saint 26–30 Confessio (autobiography) 26–9 dates 26 (debates on) ordination 28–9 legends concerning 1–2, 18, 29–30, 62 origins/early life 26–8 Paul III, Pope 53–4

Index peace process xiv, 296–7, 336–6, xiv–xvi degree/manner of success 356–60 early initiatives 330, 333–4 extremist opposition to 351 influence of Church 377 release of prisoners 338, 347 twin-track strategy 340 see also all-party talks Pearse, Patrick xviii, 133, 137, 189, 196, 202–6, 207–8, 210, 217, 238, 251, 256 Pearse, William 208 peasantry improved conditions following Land Act (1909) 170 political mobilisation 110 Peel, Sir Robert 120, 126–7, 140 Peep O’Day Boys 101–2 Pelham, Sir William 59 Pembroke, Earl of see Strongbow Penal Laws (1695–1727) 78–80, 83, 375 enforcement 79–80 relaxation/suspension 82, 91, 98–9 People’s Democracy 310–11 petrol bombs, use of 312 Philip II, King 54 Phoenix Park murders (1882) 155–6 Parnell accused of complicity 156 Pigott, Richard 156 Pitt, William (the Younger) 93, 101–4, 106, 140 Pius VI, Pope 96, 142–3 plantation(s) Cromwellian 74–5 impact on Gaelic culture 97–8 initial proposals 57 repopulation of planters’ lands 59–60 Stuart projects 62–4, 71 Plunkett, Joseph Mary 199, 201, 212, 238 poets/poetry Irish-language, 17th/18th century 87–9 place in Gaelic society 15 politicians, assassination attempts xiii Poor Law/Unions 128, 129, 147 popular culture, Irish 374 tax concessions 374 population (Irish) decline 113, 123–4, 125 eighteenth-century 100 increases 279, 370 potato crop 124–5 blight 124–5, 127 danger of dependence on 125–6 decline in importance 132

421

Powell, Jonathan 357 power-sharing initiatives (in North) 323–5, 333–4, 353 formation of government 354 see also all-party talks; Good Friday Agreement Poynings, Sir Edward 52–3 Poynings’ Law 52–3 priests (Catholic) ban on entry into Ireland 68 as voice of national identity 98 Prior, James 333 Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) 287 Progressive Democrats 288 coalition governments involving 289, 295 electoral gains 289 Protestants equal treatment in South 178 industrial/commercial dominance 165–6 opposition to Catholic emancipation 99– 100 role in nationalist movement 178 separate ‘national’ identity 178–9 sixteenth-century decline 57–8 support for Union 115, 122, 177–8, 376 Provisional IRA 315, 331–2 breakaway groups 330 overseas operations 356 support from Southern politicians 316–17 PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) 349, 358 Pym, Francis 323 Queen’s Colleges, founding of 101–2, 120, 126, 141 Queensberry, Marquis of 183 Raleigh, Sir Walter 59, 124 Real IRA 330, 342, 344, 351, 354, 365 IRA pressure to disband 352–3 1641 Rebellion 67–71 propaganda arising from 69–71 1798 Rebellion 94–5, 100–1 establishment views of 95–6 as model for later nationalists 96 UK response 101 Redmond, John 113, 169, 180–1, 182, 187, 193, 195, 197, 208, 211, 296 role in home rule negotiations 214–16 Rees, Merlyn 325–6 Reid, Alec, Fr 377 Reiss, Mitchell 358

422 Repeal Association 113–15, 126 departures from 119 Monster Meetings 115 Republicanism emergence 118–22 Free State’s failure to provide 246–8 internal divisions 228–30 see also Dáil Éireann; IRA; IRB Restoration (1660) 75 Reynolds, Albert 294–7, 333–4, 337 Rhodesia, Northern Ireland compared with 178 RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) 152 Auxiliary Division 223 IRA targeting 222 Richard II, King 49 Richardson, Sir George, Gen. 184 riots (in North) in 1930s 304 at formation of Northern Ireland 301 Riverdance 374 Robert the Bruce, King (of Scotland) 47 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh, 1st Earl 184 Robinson, Mary 290, 297, 373 Robinson, Nicholas 290 Robinson, Peter 363, 364, 389–90 Roche, Adi 297 Roman Empire, conflicts with Celts 13 Rory O’Connor, King 40, 44, 45, 60 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan 136–7, 196 RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) 301 anti-Catholic bias 311 replacement by PSNI 349 Special Constabulary 302 (see also B Specials) Russell, Lord John 127–8, 129 Russell, Sean 270 Russia, nationalist appeals to 54 Ryan, Sean, Justice 379 Ryanair 371 sagas (Gaelic) 21–5 cycles 22–3 historical basis 23 oral transmission 21 relevance to Gaelic society 24 transcription by monks 23, 25, 37 vision of Irish culture 22–3 Sands, Bobby 336 Sarsfield, Patrick 77 Saville, Lord Justice 319 Scallon, Rosemary see Dana

Index Scappaticci, Freddie 359 Schrödinger, Erwin 281 Scotland, etymology 24 Scotus Eriugena 31 SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) 321–3 collaboration with Southern parties 327–8 Second World War Irish enlistments 272 Northern Irish contributions 308 see also neutrality Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, creation of 320 Seely, Jack, Col. 186 self-sufficiency, (optimistic) calls for 251, 262–3 ‘September 11’ attacks 354–5, 360 Shamir, Yitzhak 239 Shannon scheme (1925–9) 251 Shaw, George Bernard 176, 177, 208–11 John Bull’s Other Island 176 Pygmalion 176 Sheil, Richard Lalor 109 Sheppard, Oliver 24 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 87 Simnel, Lambert 51, 52 Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’) 118, 182, 187, 246 acceptance of Good Friday Agreement 349, 352–3 as all-Ireland party 389–90 broadening of support 336, 342 criticisms of trade union movement 189 divisions over electoral involvement 182 electoral pact (1922) 236–7 electoral successes 215–17, 226 entry into peace talks 342 exclusion from peace talks 341, 346 improved public profile (post-1916) 216–17 invited to participate in devolved government 334 involvement in peace process/powersharing 353–4, 356–7, 360–1, 364 loss of electoral ground 359 meetings with UK government 337–9, 342–3, 345 opportunities limited to North 389–90 organising of rebellion 218–19 participation in Southern elections 332–3, 388, 389–90 refusal to acknowledge PSNI 358 refusal to take seats at Westminster 216 weakness in inter-war period 246

Index slaves, in Gaelic society 13, 17 Smith, Adam 124 Smyth, Brendan, Fr 297 socialism, combined with nationalism 188–9, 261–2 Socialist Workers Association . . . 179 Soloheadbeg murders (1919) 220 Somerville, Henry, Admiral 266 Souperism 128 South East Antrim Brigade 365–6 Southern Ireland (pre-Free State) elections for Parliament 226, 236–7 provisional government 234 see also Ireland (modern state); Irish Free State Spain, Irish Catholic appeals to 60–1 Spender, Wilfrid, Col. 302 Spenser, Edmund 59 sport, Free State policy/events 256–7 see also GAA St Andrews talks (2006) 360 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1582) 63–4 Statute of Westminster (1931) 258–60 Stephens, James (IRB leader) 135–6, 137 Stephens, James (poet) 210 stone constructions Dark Age buildings 34 high crosses 32–4, 37–8 round towers 34 standing stones 7 stone circles 6–7 tombs 4–6 Strabo 11, 13 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of 65–7 Strongbow (Richard Fitzherbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke) 42–5, 46 suicide rates 358 Sunningdale Agreement (1973) 323 challenged in Southern courts 324 failure 325 objections to 323–5 proposed modifications 324 strike in protest at 324–5 Surrey, 2nd Earl of (later 3rd Duke of Norfolk) 53, 57, 58 Sweetman, Roger 225 Sweetman, Rosita 384–5 Swift, Jonathan, Dean 83, 85–6, 91, 97 Drapier’s Letters 85–6, 90 Gulliver’s Travels 86 A Modest Proposal . . . 86 A Short View of the Present State of Ireland 86

423

Synge, John Millington 176 The Playboy of the Western World 177, 190 In the Shadow of the Glen 177 Taillteann Games (1924) 256, 257 Tain Bó Cúailnge (Gaelic saga) 12, 23–4, 25, 384 Tandy, James Napper 95 Taoiseach, office of 16, 267 salary 386 see also names of individual incumbents Tara (Gaelic centre) 17 Tebbit, Margaret xiii, 329 Tebbit, Norman (later Lord Tebbit) xiii, 329 Temple, Sir John 69 Temple, Sir William 85 Tenant Right League 147–9 tenants dispossession 147 moves to protect 146–7 see also Irish National Land League; land ownership; No Rent Manifesto; peasant/tenant societies terrorism xi casualties 366–7 causes xiv, xv concessions to 340, 367 continuing problem xvi exhaustion with xvii, 355, 358, 367, 381–2, xv–xvi impact on Southern politics 287, 315–17, 375, xi–xii International Monitoring Commission 356, 358–9 moves to combat xii, xvi, 325–6, 330, 332, 351, 382 victims xiii see also peace process Thatcher, Margaret (later Lady Thatcher) 290–1, 327, 329–36, 377 Thomas, James 261 Thurgesius, King 34 Tiernan O’Rourke, King 42 Tocqueville, Alexis de 98, 110 Tone, Wolfe 92–6, 97, 101, 105, 116, 122, 260 Tory Party response to Irish famine 126–7 split over Corn Laws 126–7 trade 370–1 Anglo-Irish, eighteenth-century importance to Irish economy 283 US, as main trading partner 370–1 see also Economic War

424

Index

trade unions 187–90 Transparency International 294 transport, developments in 100 Treacy, Sean 220, 224 Treason-Felony Act (1848), arrests under 119, 136–7, 145 Trevelyan, Charles Edward 129–31 Trimble, David (later Lord Trimble) 321, 347, 348, 350, 353, 356 Nobel Peace Prize 318 resignation as party leader 359 response to Good Friday Agreement 352 Trinity College, Dublin 58, 66, 141 Troubles see War of Independence tuberculosis, efforts to eradicate 273–4 Turloch O’Connor, King 37–8, 40 Twain, Mark 139 ‘two nations’ theory 178–9 problems of 179 Tyrconnell, Rory O’Donnell, Earl of 61, 65 Tyrone, Con O’Neill, 1st Earl of 56 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 3rd Earl of 56, 60–2, 63, 65, 69, 76, 78 U2 374 Ui Neill (Gaelic tribe/kingdom) 32, 35–6 UDA (Ulster Defence Association) 325, 354 UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters) 344–5, 346 UK government attitudes to Northern Ireland xii charged with torture 316 coal–cattle pact 264, 266 debates on Northern Ireland 313–14 dual policy on Northern Ireland 325–6 economic policies 81, 91 Irish representation (post-Union) 104 meetings with nationalists 337–9 political shift (post-1885) 163–4 relationship with Irish people 46–9 see also Conservative Party; direct rule; Economic War; Labour Party; Liberal Party; Tory Party; Whig Party Ulster anti-Union feeling/movements 101–2 plantation (under James I) 62–3 prosperity (relative to rest of Ireland) 99, 165–6 see also Northern Ireland Ulster Democratic Party 346 Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union 180 Ulster Unionist Council 180

Ulster Unionist Party domination of Northern politics 300 internal divisions 321 links with Orange Order 300 loss of support 328 moves towards liberalisation 309–10, 314 rejection of peace proposals 339, 345 Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant’ 183–4 Union (of Britain and Ireland) arguments for 103 campaign to maintain 164–5 consequences 103–5 corruption involved in obtaining 102–3 held to blame for subsequent problems 111–12, 149–50 initial proposals 101 movement for repeal 112–15 opposition to 101–2 passing of Act 102–3 violent resistance to 105–6 unionist movement (in North, post-1969) internal violence 354 opposition to Agreement 331 refusal to compromise 328, 333, 334, 358–9 rejection of extremism 351, 355 security forces’ collusion with 355, 359 shift towards hardline attitudes 321, 328, 342 see also names of parties United Irishmen, Society of the 107 formation 93 as model for later nationalists 96 persecution 94 role in 1798 Rebellion 94–6 United Kingdom see Economic War; economy; English rule; UK government United Nations, Irish membership of 299 United States Civil War (1861–5) 134 importance to UK policy 214, 339, 350 influence on Irish economy 370 Irish-based companies 368–9 Irish-descended population 339 migrations to 80, 131–2, 133–40, 339, 370–1 role in Irish imagination xviii, 370–1 role in peace process 339–1, 345, 356 support for Irish nationalism 133–40, 221, 270, 329, 339: withdrawal of 341, 355 trade with Ireland 370–1 see also American Revolution UUUC (United Ulster Unionist Council) 324

Index UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) 302, 325 criminality of actions 184, 185 foundation 184 nationalist counter-movements 190–1 UWC (Ulster Workers’ Council) 3245 Vanguard Party 323 Vikings 31–7 Christianisation 35 fear inspired by 34–5 lack of organised resistance to 32 positive aspects 35 see also Danes Virgin stores 296 Voyage of Bran (Gaelic saga) 23 Wakeham, Anne xiii, 329 Walsh, William, Archbishop 376 War of Independence (1919–21) 221–8 casualties 228 Warbeck, Perkin 52 Washington, George, President 83, 95 wedge tombs 5–6 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of 109, 111, 126 Wentworth, Thomas see Strafford Wesley, John 99 West, Harry 324–5 Westminster see Statute of Westminster; UK government Westmorland, Earl of 101 Wexford, massacre of (1649) 72 Whig Party, mishandling of Irish famine 127–31 Whitaker, T. K. (Ken) 280, 282, 369 Whiteboys 89–90 Whitelaw, William 320, 322–4 ‘Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch, Battle of the’ 120

425

Wild Geese see Irish Brigade Wilde, Oscar 176, 177, 183 William I, King (‘The Conqueror’) 44 William III, King 75–7, 81 Wilson, Gordon 332 Wilson, Sir Henry, Field-Marshal 186, 223 murder 236 Wilson, Marie 332 Wilson, Woodrow, President 80, 134, 187, 228 Wimborne, Lord 200, 202, 207 Winchilsea, Lord 109 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 53 women child benefits 372–3 childcare provisions 373 education 372 employment 372–3 parliamentary representation 373 position under Gaelic law 21 position under Irish Constitution 268 removal of discrimination against 372–3 role in new economy 372–4 Wood, Sir Charles 129–31 workhouses see Poor Law Wright, Billy 345 Wyndham, George 170, 181 Yeats, William Butler xvii, 123, 162, 175–6, 208, 264, 281 comments on Catholic influence 245, 376 nationalist hostility to 177 York, House of, influence in Ireland 51–2 York, Richard, 3rd Duke of (1411–60) 51–2 Young, Arthur 84, 97 Young Ireland 115–23, 152 advocacy of rebellion 119–22 recognition of significance 122–3