The Irish Question 1840–1921 9781487576004

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THE IRISH QUESTION

1840-1921

hy the same author THE IRISH FREE STATE ITS GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS THE GOVERNMENT OF NORTHERN IRELAND A STUDY IN DEVOLUTION SOUTH AFRICA 1906-1961 THE PRICE OF MAGNANIMITY

THE IRISH QUESTION A Commentary on Anglo-Irish Relations and on Social and Political Forces in Ireland in The Age of Reform and Revolution

by

NICHOLAS MANSERGH M.A., D.LITT., F.B.A.

My mind is upon Erin, Upon Loch Lene, upon Linny, Upon the land where the Ulstermen are, Upon gentle Munster and upon Meath COLUMCILLE, GREETING TO IRELAND TRANS. KUNO MEYER

THIRD EDITION

1975

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS TORONTO

BUFFALO

NEW AND REVISED EDITION UNDER THE TITLE

The Irish Question

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1965 SECOND IMPRESSION 1968 THIRD EDITION 1975

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing

for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or

review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this puhlication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

Third Revised Edition

©

George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1965, 19:75

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1940 UNDER THE TITLE

Ireland in The Age of Reform and Revolution Reprinted in 2018

Published in North America by Universi~y of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo Reprinted in paperback 1978 ISBN 0-8020-2227-8

(cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8020-2227-1 (paper)

Printed in Great Britain

TO DU.NA

CONTENTS page

INTRODUCTION

15

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION:

THEMES

II

REVISIONIST 17

PART I. IRELAND UNDER THE UNION: THE OPINIONS OF SOME CONTEMPORARY OBSERVERS I. The State of Ireland in the Early Years of Union: Contemporary Observations and some Reflections upon them.

37

The State of Ireland: The Testimony of Travellers and Commissioners; Land Tenure: The System and its Economic and Social Consequences; The Economists: Doctrine and Diagnoses; Statesmen: Their Neglect and Indifference.

II. European and Irish Nationalisms: The Views of Italian Nationalists on the Nature of the Irish Question

76

Ireland: The Old World and the New; The Italian and Irish National Movements; Count Cavour on Ireland; Mazzini on Ireland.

III. The Communist International and the Irish Question

103

The Marxist Approach to Ireland; Marx, Nationality and the Class War; Engels on Ireland; Marx on Anglo-Irish Politics; Ireland and the Proletarian Revolution; Some Reflections on the Marxist Interpretation of the Irish Question; The Verdict of Lenin.

PART II. REFORM: ENGLISH STATESMEN AND THE REPEAL OF THE UNION IV. The Liberal Conversion to Home Rule. 'My Mission is to Pacify Ireland'; Gladstone's early and limited Interpretation of his Mission; The immediate circumstances of his conversion; The Home Rule Govern-

1 33

CONTENTS ment; The Secession of the Whigs; The Secession of the Radicals; Parnell's Miscalculation; The Liberal-Nationalist Entente; Aftermath.

IO

V. Some English Statesmen and tke frisk Question 1880-1914 page 175 Joseph Chamberlain: A Radical alienated and avenged; Lord Randolph Churchill: A Tory Beguiler; Herbert Henry Asquith: Liberal Epilogue; Some Concluding Reflections.

VJ. Tke Ulster Question, 1886-1921. Three Critical Years

204

1886: Ulster will Fight; September 1913 to July 191 ◄: Deadlock; 1920: The Unionist State.

PART III. REVOLUTION: DOMESTIC AND EXTERNAL FORCES. VII. The Political, Economic and Social Background to the Sinn Fein Revolution

243

The Nationalist Party in Decline; The Conflict of Economic Interests; The Influence of the Land Question; Labour and Sinn Fein; Epilogue.

VIII. The Influence of the Romantic Ideal in frisk Politics IX. Tke frisk Question in World Politics

267 290

European Reactions to the Irish Question; American Reactions to the Irish Question, 1914-21.

CONCLUSION X. Some General Reflections on tke Development of Anglo-frisk Relations 1840-1921

307

BIBLIOGRAPHY

326

INDEX

333

INTRODUCTION

A generation ago it was frequently remarked that the Irish question had never passed into history because it had never passed out of politics. That is no longer true. Anglo-Irish relations, though liable to be a source of recurring friction while the Border remains, are not now the subject of unending and embittered political controversy either in England or in Ireland. For that the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921, was chiefly responsible. By transforming the character of Anglo-Irish relations, it removed the major cause of conflict. The petition for a reform of the constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, so persistently pressed for so many years at Westminster by Irish Nationalist Members, had therein found its answer-though not as the result of Parliamentary debate--and henceforward the pattern of Anglo-Irish relations was determined by negotiations between two sovereign States. The Irish Question as it was understood in Victorian England had passed into history. This book aims at throwing light on the nature of Anglo-Irish relations in that long, last phase of the Union, which opened when Repeal became the declared goal of Irish nationalist endeavour and closed when that goal was finally attained. It is intended, however, not to provide a history of Anglo-Irish relations 1840-1921, but rather to offer a commentary upon some of the more important aspects of them. It is the case that the problems of which the book treats have been suggested by the period it covers, but it is the problems, not the period, with which it is at root concerned. This happens to be in accord with Lord Acton's injunction that one should study problems not periods, but it was in fact an approach suggested by less abstract considerations. There are already in ezjstence some few chronicles covering this highly significant period in English as well as in Irish history, but in them the recording of events has precluded much in the way of critical analysis of the interaction of short-term policies and underlying causes. Here the emphasis is otherwise. It is the principal purpose of this book to explore some questions that possess enduring historical significance and in so doing to illuminate the background to policies, whose merits are often disputed with insufficient awareness of the practical preoccupations and the theoretical preconceptions of those by whom they were

12

THE IRISH QUESTION

first formulated. This book is, therefore, essentially an essay, or rather a series of essays, in political and historical analysis. As such it is inevitably selective, but not, I hope, arbitrary in its choice of topics. The time has perhaps come when it is necessary, as it was not when this book was published in its earlier form, to emphasize the importance of the task. The Irish Question was the most significant problem in politics which confronted English democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It failed to provide a solution. Why? Was the Question not in fact susceptible of a democratic solution? Or alternatively was it one which a democracy was ill-fitted to resolve? Or was it because the Irish social system and her economic circumstances worked against or even precluded an otherwise seemingly natural political solution? Or because Irish intransigence made it unattainable? Or was it because English statesmanship was insular and unimaginative? To these questions many categoric but few convincing answers have been given. This book is written in the belief that a reappraisal of contemporary evidence of a kind that may serve to place in perspective the growth and gradual development of those forces which were to prove dominant in moulding the future history of Ireland, affords a fruitful approach to an assessment of the nature qf the Irish question and to an understanding of the difficulties of resolving it peacefully. For the history of nineteenth-century Ireland is more than a prologue to the events of the twentieth and has a character of its own, which is all too often distorted by those who, neglecting all else, confine their attention to the signposts which point to the developments of a later age. Irish history would be a simpler, but a less rewarding subject, were it indeed the case that all the signposts pointed one way. Gibbon in his Autohiography confessed that he shrank in terror from the prospect of writing a history of England under the Stuarts, because in such a history 'every character is a problem, and every reader a friend or an enemy', and the author was supposed 'to hoist the flag of parry' and then having done so was 'devoted to damnation by the adverse faction'. The terrors which determined Gibbon to seek a more congenial field, may be thought fanciful by comparison with those which await the writer, who ventures in a critical spirit into the field of modem Irish history. It is a field some parts of which at least, it may well be for this reason, have remained almost unexplored and if I may not claim indulgence for courage (or temerity), perhaps some allowance may reasonably be made for the difficulties in assessing evidence on topics subjected to varying and controversial analyses over a con-

INTRODUCTION

13

siderable period of time. 'Where to find the absolute truth', reflected Alexis de Tocqueville in July 1835, after some hours spent discussing the state of Ireland, first with the Catholic priest and then with the Protestant rector of a small distressed parish near Tuam in Co. Galway.1 Historians, and not least Irish historians, are, however, less aspiring. They would be well content with relative truth, and in the search for that more modest goal, the observations of travellers from other countries and the commentaries, especially of some distinguished European observers of the nineteenth-century Irish scene, may serve, even where factual precision is lacking, to widen the view and to prompt some critical enquiry into large, but often neglected topics. Of course these visitors, experienced and eminent men though many of them were, neither discarded their preconceptions nor assumed a mantle of impartiality when they embarked upon their Irish travels. It was, however, because of, rather than in spite of this limitation that they looked on Ireland's past and present problems as at once a part and an outcome of European history and, in so doing, they not only shed some new light upon them, but asked questions of lasting and fundamental significance. They, at least, did not think that the signposts all pointed one way. This book is based upon an earlier work, Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, published in 1940. Since that time there have been many specialist studies treating of episodes or events of great and sometimes dramatic moment, which both individually and collectively have contributed much to the extension and enrichment of our knowledge of nineteenth-century Irish history. In so far as is consistent with the design of the book, full account is taken of what may be not unfairly described as the revolution2 that has taken place in modem Irish historical studies and thinking in the last quarter of a century. It is, moreover, a revolution whose force is by no means spent. In the course of rewriting I have also made use on particular points of the evidence to be found in certain collections of private papers, notably the Gladstone and the Campbell-Bannerman papers in the British Museum, the Camarvon papers at the Public Record Office, the Asquith papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Redmond 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Journzys to England and lr,land, edited by J. P. Mayer (London, 1958), p. 173. For the record of his conversations see pp. 160---73. 1 Irish Historical Studies, the Journal of the Irish Historical Society and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, which were founded in Dublin and Belfast respectively in 1936 to promote the scientific study of Irish history, has been an important, possibly determining, factor in bringing it about.

14

THE IRISH QUESTION

papers in the National Library in Dublin and the archives of the State Department, Washington. This has meant a book very considerably enlarged, new in the greater part of its content, but retaining the design and purposes of its predecessor. The book belongs, in that last sense, to its own time. This, I think, is as it must and should be. But the lapse of nearly a quarter of a century since the earlier work was published has caused me to make revisions more personal in kind. My own reflections and research on Anglo-Irish history in the intervening years have led me to develop the argument or extend the enquiry in respect of topics, which seem to me to have acquired enhanced interest with the passage of time. I have also qualified assertions which seem to me now to have been too strongly phrased and modified, or altogether removed, exuberances of style which now appear to me no longer tolerable. 'I had too much fondness for my productions to judge of them at first,' wrote Alexander Pope in the preface to his Collected Works first published in 1716,1 'and too much judgment to be pleased with them at last.' In this Pope was speaking for many authors. My thanks remain to Professor George O'Brien, D.Litt. of University College, Dublin; to Mr R. B. McCallum, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford; to Dr G. D. Ramsay, Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, with whom I had many discussions on the comparative validity of the essentially political and the economic interpretation of nineteenth-century Irish history, which I still remember with pleasure and profit; and the late Miss Olive Armstrong, Lecturer in Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin, for criticism, comment and advice in the preparation of the earlier edition of this book. My greatest debt remains to my wife, who has read both editions in proof and prepared the indices for each of them. N. MANSERGH

St Jolin' s College, Camhridge. July, 1964

1 Tli4 Works of Alexander Pope, Esquire; with. explanatory Notes and Ad,litions never hefore printed, was first published in Ireland in M,D,CC,XL by A. Bradley and T. Moore, Booksellers in Dame-Street, and it is from this edition (p. 8) that my quotation is taken.

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION

In this new impression I have taken the opportunity of correcting certain errors, re-arranging or rewriting certain paragraphs and qualifying certain judgements, chiefly in chapter III, as a result of comments made by reviewers and also by Mr N. B. K. Mansergh. More substantially, a Preface on Revisionist Themes has been added and, also, a supplementary bibliography of works published since 1965. N.M.

June 1974

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The extracts from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Correspondence 1846-95 and from Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann are reprinted by kind permission of Martin Lawrence Limited and the extracts from W. B. Yeats's Collected Poems, and from his Last Poems by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan. I am indebted to the Trustees of the British Museum for leave to consult the Gladstone and the Campbell-Bannerman papers, to the Public Record Office and to the National Library, Dublin, respectively for permission to use the Carnarvon and the Redmond papers, to Mr Mark Bonham-Carter for allowing me to study the Asquith papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and to the State Department, Washington, for giving me access to material in their archives.

PREF ACE TO THE THIRD EDITION REVISIONIST THEMES

Since the second edition of this book was published in 1965 the people of Ireland have had occasion to mark the fiftieth anniversaries of three of the climacterics of their revolutionary era-the Easter Rising, 1916, the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921. The first climacteric had placed its imprint upon the image of a nation; the second had partitioned Ireland; and the third, while resting on the twin principles of unity and autonomy, had in practice left open the road to the discarding of the former. None of these anniversaries provided an occasion for celebration throughout Ireland. The reasons were not far to seek. Nineteen-sixteen had seen the Proclamation of an All-Ireland Republic conceived in terms of threefold coincidence of nation, state and island, all of which was ·repudiated by the Unionist minority in the north-east; the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, had given statutory authority to the contrary presumption of two communities or nations, and two states within one island and for that reason was anathema to the majority; while the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921, moving uneasily from initial admission of the principle of unity to acceptance of continuing division on minority demand, 1 remained, in this respect, wholly welcome neither to minority nor majority. But while none of the anniversaries gave ground for rejoicing in the whole of Ireland, the first two of them were occasions for celebration in the greater and lesser part of it respectively, and the third a source of qualified satisfaction. The first anniversary, in respect both of time and significancethough assessment of the latter becomes the more debatable as the perspective lengthens-that of the Eastern Rising, was commemorated throughout the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland with nostalgic memories of armed revolution, heroic selfsacrifice and strong emotional overtones with-it was almost in excess of the appropriate-the last Commandant to surrender, at Boland's Mill in 1916, Eamon de Valera, residing in Arus an Uachtarain, 1 Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland. Arti~le I stated that 'Ireland ... shall be styled and known as the Irish Free State'; Article 12 allowed Northern Ireland by an address approved by both Houses of the Parliament of Northern Ireland within one month of the ratification of the Treaty to opt out of the Irish Free State. This option was exercised.

18

THE IRISH QUESTION

the former Vice-regal Lodge in Phoenix Park, welcoming back to Dublin the British officer to whom he had surrendered fifty years before, and presiding over the ceremonies, a living symbol of the triumph of republican-nationalism over monarchical-imperialism. It was also commemorated by the minority in the six counties, especially in the Catholic streets of Belfast, over a period of some three weeks, with overtones there of challenge to the authority of Sir Terence O'Neill's administration at Stormont. 1 The anniversary of an Act of Parliament is not ordinarily an occasion of popular note, but then the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 was no ordinary Act. It had founded a state, albeit a subordinate one. When the Act was given effect on May 24, 1921, the American Consul in Belfast had reported on the scenes of enthusiasm in Belfast: 'The City was gay with flags and bunting. Everywhere the Union Jack was flown, and in many streets, particularly in the working-class districts, every house was decorated with loyal emblems at the thought that the day "witnessed the birth into the world of a Nation, as the people of Ulster are fond of phrasing it" '. 2 Such scenes did not recur in 1970-1, when the certainties of fifty years were draining away and the Unionist majority in the Six Counties, their security still entrenched behind the political institutions established in 1921, felt their natural inclination to celebrate tempered by anxieties for the future of a Unionist-controlled enclave that constitutionally remained part of a larger United Kingdom, but contained an unreconciled nationalist minority and was geographically situated in an island predominantly nationalist in sentiment. As for the Anglo-Irish Treaty, there was cause for satisfaction fifty years later in that historically it had allowed to the twenty-six counties freedom to achieve freedom, and for dissatisfaction in that it had been the occasion of dual division manifested in civil war within the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State and of implicit reaffirmation of the partitioning off of the six north-eastern counties from the rest of Ireland. Reflection on questions to which history supplies no answers-had de Valera gone to London for the Treaty negotiations, would the break in Sinn Fein ranks that led to civil war have been avoided or, alternatively, had the British ultimatum of December 5, 1921 been rejected by the Irish delegation in the interests Cf. T. W. Moody, The Ulster Question, 160,3-1973 (Cork, 1974), p. 47. Despatch from American Consul, Belfast, to the Department of State, Washington, May 2.5, 1921. State Department Records 841 d 00/365. 1

2

PREF ACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

of continuing Irish unity would Lloyd Goerge have embarked on immediate and terrible wara...rather than rejoicing was accordingly the order of the day on December 6, 1971. As the centenary celebrations of the outbreak of the French Revolution are said to have ushered in 'the golden age' of French revolutionary studies before the First World War, 1 so the anniversaries of the great landmarks of the revolutionary years in Anglo-Irish relations helped at least to focus historical interest on the period and its immediate antecedents. 2 That focus was sharpened by the suspension of parliamentary institutions and the introduction of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972. It was also somewhat changed. The violence in the Six Counties suggested, first, the need for some more critical reassessment of the role of force in Anglo-Irish history, and its effects upon community relations within Ireland, than had been apparent in anniversary comment; then the desirability of some further probing of the relevance of concepts of Irish nationhood to understanding of the deeper causes of contemporary conflict, and finally some closer scrutiny of the origins of the Northern Ireland polity. In so far as the time for historical revisionism had come, these had claim to be principal revisionist themes. Professor Lyons concluded his biography of John Dillon,3 who succeeded John Redmond to become the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, with the observation that Dillon had learned through 'harsh experience that patriotism was not enough'. But the biography itself suggested another and no more comfortable lesson, namely that 'constitutionalism was not enough'. That had long, or in some cases always, been the conviction of Pearse and the physical force men behind the Rising and by 1914 it was a conclusion also reached by Carson and Craig, and questionably also by Bonar Law. The first was no matter for surprise. There was a tradition of violent revolt in Irish republican-nationalism-the dead generations to whom appeal was made, and of 'Yhom it was recalled in the 1916 Proclamation1 that six times during the past three hundred years 1 R. C. Cobb, Modern French History in Britain, 56th Raleigh Lecture at the British Academy, 1974. A feature of the French revival was apparently the kindling of interest in local history; something that remains neglected in Ireland where Dublin perspectives continue to prevail. 2 The works listed in the Supplementary Bibliography provide some evidence of this. ' F. S. L. Lyons, John Dillon. A Biography (London, 1968), p. 484. • The proclamation is reprinted' in D. Macardle's The Irish Republic (New edition, Dublin, 1951), pp. 166-7.

THE IRISH QUESTION

20

they had asserted in arms the right of the Irish people to national freedom and sovereignty included, moving backwards in time, the Fenians of'67 and the rebels of'98-but the second, finding expression in an implicitly and then an explicitly stated threat of forceful resistance by Ulster Unionists to the creation of a Dublin-dominated Home Rule, 'Rome Rule', parliament was the manifestation of a new force in Irish affairs. In the first instance the use of force was conditional theoretically, and in the second actually, upon the apparent insufficiency or evident failure of constitutional methods to achieve national or community aims, which were in the one case autonomy for the whole of Ireland and, in the other, assurance of continuance of the Union or, failing that, the establishment of quasi-autonomous status within the United Kingdom for the largest area which Unionists might reasonably hope to control in perpetuity. But if constitutionalism were not enough on the one side to extract Home Rule from the British rulers of Ireland, and on the other to safeguard minority interests against Home Rule, did that mean that in each instance force, threatened or actual, was a sufficient, and even satisfying, substitute? Until very recently the great majority in the Republic and a majority in Northern Ireland would have answered in the affirmative. Such they would have asserted was the unchallengeable lesson of history. Nor would such an assertion be easy to contravert. Force, or the threat of it, delivered the goods, or most of them, where constitutionalism after long trial had not. Furthermore it was not only that force, or the threat of force, had been substantially successful; it was also that in each instance recourse to force had been recommended as the necessary, even the right, means to the attainment of desired ends. 'Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.' She was not called upon to fight, but the Ulster Unionists indicated their readiness to do so, and, in face of it, the British Liberal Government retreated from their own proclaimed goal of an all-Ireland parliament. The precedent was pondered. When Eoin MacNeill was asked by an English journalist how the revolution in Ireland had been brought about he replied: 'Mainly by Carson.' 1 The answer, albeit facile, was understandable. Carson scorned reliance on constitutionalism alone, where survival of the Union was at stake. But while others, ever mindful of the example of the dead generations, certainly noted the Ulster Unionist example, they decided 1

F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), The Scholar Revolutionary, Eoin MacNeill

1867-1945

and the Making of the New Ireland (Shannon, 1973), p.

IOI.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

21

on force 'should constitutional methods fail', by reason, not of the fortuitous initiative of their hereditary foes, but of the deep impulse of their own tradition. 1 Self-sacrifice and force were the twin themes of Pearse's traditionalist gospel. He shrank neither from the one nor the other: 'bloodshed', he wrote, 'is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood'. And, he proclaimed, in no negative terms, that his country would not find 'Christ's peace until she has taken Christ's sword'. 2 The principal consequence of the acting out of his Messianic creed was the attainment, remarkable by any criteria of historical experience, of all save one of nationalist Ireland's principal objectives. Historians faithfully wrote out the popular verdict-by a self-sacrificing resort to force, and against all the odds, one of the most dramatic national revolutions of the modern world had been successfully carried through. Only in respect of unity was it incomplete. That incompleteness was not the consequence of the use of force: on the contrary it was already foreshadowed, even predetermined. Should not, therefore, the argument ran, the same means be employed to complete it? If not, why not? The circumstances, indeed, might be different, but the heirs to the national-republican tradition were not all easily to be persuaded that a national revolution was a once for all affair and that the means which were successful in that one case ought not to be tried in another. These are not questions to which historians supply the answers. In the fulness of time they record and expound the answers which others have given. By virtue, however, of their professional preoccupation with enquiry and explanation, historians are apt to reduce to terms of cause and consequence matters about which contemporaries felt in terms of challenging, uplifting, desolating or terrifying personal experience. Destruction, violence, fear, intimidation, while given full play in polemical writings, are apt to figure in sophisticated historical works in the context of general analysis little calculated to pierce the consciousness of their readers. To the generation which experiences it, the effects of force upon their lives are real and tangible and the consequences of its use usually unpredictable; to succeeding generations the reverse obtains, the impact upon life becoming unreal, the outcome susceptible of statement with the result that succeeding generations are disposed to exaggerate the consequences and to 1 2

For a contrary conclusion see ibid., pp. 108-14. Quoted F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London, 1971), p. 336.

22

THE IRISH QUESTION

discount the price--especially in anniversary season. This is so even in an Irish setting, where war and civil war were episodic in character. An aging man may yet glance involuntarily as he passes at a place on a roadside footpath where, as a boy more than fifty years ago, he saw the bloodstains fresh from the shooting with a shot gun at close range of an alleged informer, memories still fresh upon him. But to another generation such an incident has little meaning, since it remains important only as an isolated part-reflection of the totality of an experience of war and civil strife which has not been shared. The totality itself is difficult to convey 1 and only in micro-history or biography, can it be transmitted with something of the impact of the original experience-unless indeed there be present cause to stir the imagination and reimpose the pattern of past reality. In Ireland because there is such present cause there is a new look, revisionist may be rather too strong a term, at the roots of violent revolt, the nature of its achievements and such price as may have been exacted for its use. In comparative terms, if no other, such re-examination may be rewarding. There have, after all, been other successful national movements in the twentieth century and a principal one among them was enjoined by its leader, a Hindu Mahatma, to rely upon means other than force, to use satygraha, total self-giving not in violent but in non-violent resistance, as the means by which to attain the end of national independence. Certainly any such revisionism, even if essayed in widening perspective, has its limits; it is, for example, unlikely to restore the tarnished image of constitutionalism in Ireland, though it may well lead to closer scrutiny, if not of the validity of force in the Irish context of fifty or more years ago, then of the points at which organised revolt passed to unorganised violence, at which planned insurrection opened the way to violence without considered political purpose-something in the past condemned by Fenians and by Marx, as it is today by his followers. Nineteenth-century European observers of the Irish scene, as related in the first part of this book, noted the endemic violence in Irish social life and sought to probe the causes of it. For the most part they discounted the rather simple notion that Irishmen were naturally or unnaturally predisposed to violence and their preoccupation was with one fundamental question. Was such violence a manifestation of 1 Herbert Butterfidd in The Discontinuities Between the Generations in History: Their Effect on the Transmission of Political Experience. Rede Lecture (Cambridge, 1971), has some interesting reflections on this in the context of inter-generational relations.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

23

resentment at cruel, social injustice as Gustave de Beaumont, among others, concluded, 1 or, additionally or alternatively, as others enquired, of the upsurge of a repressed nationality? Was there behind it only a land question or was there an Irish nation and a renascent nationality? Historically the answer seemed clearly to be in the national terms. But in the process of formulating it a further question emerged, namely, what was the Irish nation? What were its distinguishing features? Was it actually as well as notionally coincident with the island of Ireland? By reason of such questions, conceptual abstractions, as necessarily they were and must needs remain, continued to have a relevance to unity or division within Ireland deeper than even the most important question of means. In a unitary society, the concept of the nation whether explicit or implicit, is likely, perhaps through association with great triumphs, or indeed disasters, to be invested with deep, unifying, romantic significance; in a plural society the more explicitly that concept is formulated, the more likely it is to be divisive. The reason is that the greater the success in translating the inner feeling and impulses of a community into language, almost inevitably to be communicated in part in emotional imagery-'the great lapis lazuli dome, where the gods of our race had a home'-the more likely it is to underline for those who are not members of that community a feeling of alienation. Professor Eoin MacNeill, a, or some would claim, the founder and first secretary of the Gaelic League, who later as first President of the Irish Volunteers, counselled and at the last moment countermanded the Easter Rising, 1916, expressed the view of the substantial majority of the Irish people in asserting that every inch of the island was to be claimed as part of the Irish nation, 2 though not all of that majority would have followed him in contending that the Gaelic language was a principal distinguishing bond of the nationality comprising it. To both assertions, the minority in effect responded by re-emphasising its separateness. Members of that minority in Ulster claimed that they were part of another nation, heirs to another cultural tradition. If the emphasis were to be placed upon the Gaelic character of the nation, the cultural difference was not in debate on either side. But what of the geographical frontiers of Irish nationhood, the determination of which, theoretically, must needs stem from See below p. 56. Donal McCartney, 'MacNeill and Irish Ireland', in Martin and Byrne, op. cit., pp. 75--98. 1

2

24

THE IRISH QUESTION

judgement upon the question whether the differences within Ireland were properly to be thought of as differences between majority and minority or between members of two different nations-unless indeed the most drastic view be taken that those who were not part of the Irish nation ought not to be, or to remain in Ireland. As always, much depended on the changing concept of a nation and its apparent validity at any given point in history. MacNeill, who at different times worked closely with both Hyde and Pearse and who influenced, or reflected, much of the distinctive, self-consciously militant Gaelic ideology of emerging post-Home Rule Irish nationalism, wrote of nationality as the type of civilization which a people has developed, which has become that people's tradition and is distinctive of that people. It was will and spirit that made a nation and MacNeill, a Gaelic scholar and a historian who could reasonably claim to have revolutionized thinking on Irish history in the early medieval period, was convinced that an Irish nation had existed from antiquity based on 'a positive conscious nationality', 'more real and concrete than was ever the conception of nationality in ancient Hellas', 1 with Thomas Davis, singing of 'a nation once again' accordingly to be rebuked, not as by Yeats for subordinating poetry to politics, 2 but for confusion in terminology. What had existed down the ages, the nation, did not need to be recalled into being; for 'nation' Davis should have substituted 'state', his poem thereby gaining in exactitude what it lost in euphony. Yet such definition of terms, while helpful, did not of itself suffice. There was the question of recognition of Irish nationality and, in the case of British statesmen, of policy or action based on recognition or the absence of it. Generally speaking such recognition was not forthcoming in the nineteenth century with Gladstone, as nearly always in Irish matters, a qualified but debatable exception. Against the view expressed later in this book 3 that there was no evidence that even Gladstone, at any time before the formation of his second ministry 1880--5, sensed that the Irish question might go deeper than problems of government, Church and land and might lie in the existence of a distinct Irish nationality, it has been argued~ that there are indications of his awareness and acceptance of the national principle firstly, and Ibid., p. 84. 3 Seep. 141 below. See below, pp. 272-5. • E. D. Steele, 'Gladstone and Ireland', Irish. Historical Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 65, pp. 58-88: see pp. 79-82 especially. 1

2

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

by analogy, in his restoration of the Ionian Islands to Greece in recognition of their common nationality and secondly, and more immediately, in a speech in the House of Commons in 1866 in which he argued that 'we are a United Kingdom made up of three nations' and that Parliament should aim at 'not making the opinion of one country decide and settle the questions belonging to the others .. .' Yet of the first it might be said that acknowledgement that Greekspeaking islands should be reunited with Greece in accord with the principle of nationality seems rather less than convincing as an indication or pointer to a corresponding recognition that the people of English-speaking Ireland (as it then was) might be of a nationally distinct and distinguishable from the English while, indeed, the setting of the second, in which the above quoted observations were made, seems expressly intended to discountenance any such notion. What Gladstone said was: 'We are a united people with a common government and a complete political incorporation.... But we are also a united kingdom made up of three nations, of three countries welded politically into one .. .' 1 These are hardly the words of one who had discovered the existence of a distinct nationality in Ireland. Moreover Gladstonian reference to 'three nations'-Wales suffered by omission -implied most of all the equation of Ireland with Scotland which was a familiar feature of his, as also, and not incidentally, of Chamberlain's, speeches. For the remarkable thing about Scotland was that there were no serious political manifestations of national sentiment at this time-in the index to the relevant volume, E .L. Woodward's, in the Oxford History of England 2 there are but two Scottish entries, one on 'Scotland, Church of' and the other on 'Scotland, the Free Church of'. That Gladstone should equate Ireland, which he visited but once, with Scotland where he conducted the most famous ofhis electoral campaigns, would seem to underline his lack of insight into the nature of the Irish question until very late in his life, though even so and here there is hardly occasion for debate, Gladstone's insights went further than any of his principal English associates or rivals. But, had he perceived the existence of a separate nationality, as Balfour did in the days of his political eclipse, Glastone could hardly here repudiated notions of ultimate separation with such fervent conviction. For nineteenth-century continental observers the first and funda' Hansard, House of Commons Debs, 8 Feb. 1966, Vol. CL XXXI, coll. 271-2. The Age of Reform 1815-1870 (Oxford, 1938), p. 654.

2

2.6

THE IRISH QUESTION

mental question about Ireland was not couched in terms of oblique Gladstonian allusion, but was phrased in terms of direct enquiries into the reality of that nationality.' Cavour doubted it and Mazzini concluded that those who believed in it were in all sincerity mistaken, partly because of the absence of a distinctive spoken language, but chiefly because of the lack of a distinct principle of life or national mission. In respect of the first, Hyde, Pearse, de Valera and the men of 1916 as a body agreed with Mazzini, but believed that the lack was remediable and ought to be remedied. MacNeill, indeed, went further than Mazzini. To him the Irish language was 'the chief thread' of Irish nationality, 'the most indisputable sign of an Irishman's nationality', with the Irish speaker as 'the truest and most invincible soldier of his nation'. Implicit in this dominant Irish-Ireland concept 2 of the nation was the transcendentalist notion of nations formed by the will of God with, in the Mazzinian phrase, 'their own irrefutable boundary marks'. Furthermore MacNeill, but seemingly not in conscious reply to, and perhaps indeed oblivious of, Mazzini's contributions in this field, reformulated the notion that each nation had a particular vocation, a special destiny. This is precisely what Mazzini had been unable to discern in the case of Ireland and by reason of which he concluded that Irish claims to a separate nationality were not wellfounded.3 MacNeill who regarded the early Christian period when 'the Irish were the schoolmasters of Europe' as the greatest in her history, no doubt by reason of this, was predisposed to believe that Ireland's destiny was to be a teaching nation, setting an example to the rest of the world with 'our ancient ideals, faith, learning, generous enthusiasm, self-sacrifice-the things best calculated to purge out the meanness of the modern world' .1 The concept of the Irish nation formulated in the 1916 Proclamation was necessarily impressionistic. But it had its distinguishing characteristics. First it was 'her old tradition of nationhood' received from the dead generations to which appeal was made and which might reasonably be interpreted to mean a Gaelic concept of the state; secondly there was an assertion of socialist aims which implied a socialist republic. The first reflected the ideals of Pearse and the second 2 Martin and Byrne op. cit., p. 82. See below esp. Ch. 11. See belcrw pp. 98-9. • Martin and Byrne, op. cit., p. 87. The bias against 'the modern world' was an element in Irish nationalism which did not appeal to Ulster Unionists in respect of industry and commerce-though, it touched a sympathetic chord in respect of opposition to social and cultural change. 1

3

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

those of Connolly. They were not necessarily either compatible or incompatible. The Sinn Fein leaders themselves do not appear to have debated what may have appeared to be potentially dividing abstractions, de Valera, for example, having no recollection of having had discussions with Connolly about national, still less international socialist objectives, while even at the last in the GPO itself the sacrificial enterprise was thought of in a nationalist setting that was traditional and timeless. 1 The Republic itself, the Gaelic overtones and the appeal to the past implied as a goal a nation-state that derived from Irish-Ireland but embraced all-Ireland. There was, however, no suggestion of exclusivity in the concept of the Republic and none of 'Rome Rule'. On the contrary the Irish Republic claimed the allegiance of every Irishman and Irish woman and in return would cherish equally all the children of the nation oblivious of differences 'carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past'. Nonetheless Ulster Unionist repudiation of the Republic was inevitable, altogether apart from the time and circumstances in which the Republic was proclaimed, though of these it may be remarked that no moment was better calculated to achieve an impact; nor none better to crystallize division. A republic in being, even though it comprehended equally all Irishmen irrespective of cultural origin or religious faith, would still have been a republic and a republic symbolised an ideal of an Irish nation, in being during and despite centuries of alien rule, which inspired the national sentiment of the majority, but in so doing confirmed the fears of the minority. On this reckoning the Easter Rising can hardly be said to have created divisions; only to have given a cutting edge to the line of division. In significant measure this shows yet once again the power of concepts to attract or repel. Both are generally heightened by the abstraction in formulation associated with dramatic revolutionary protest, when romanticism is apt to supersede reality, though in time reality, usually accompanied by some degree of disillusion, reimposes itself. In the case of Ireland the Republic that was proclaimed by implication was to be comprehensive, seemingly secular 2 and socialist; the Cf. F. Fitzgerald, The Memoirs of Desmond Fit{gera/J (London, 1968), Chap. 8. Buanreacht na I,' Eireann (Constitution oflreland), article 44, recognizing 'Ihe special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of Ihe Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens', unless it be regarded as a statement of fact, implied a retreat from the 1916 Proclamation. 1

2

THE IRISH QUESTION

Republic that emerged was incomplete, Catholic and micro-capitalist. It could not have been otherwise. Yet the force of ideas and ideals is not to be soon assessed or hastily discounted; history is not confined within fiftieth anniversary celebrations. The Proclamation of the Republic did not subsume the rule of a Catholic majority over a Protestant minority; it stated on the contrary that all would be equally cherished within the confines of a restored nation. This was a statement from which there is no easy road back without going back on the revolution itself. Its significance may be gauged by considering the alternative, as it was once put with impeccable logic in an Asian setting. On August 25, 1945 the President of the All-India Mahasabha, Dr S. P. Mookerjee, wrote to the British Viceroy setting out the reaction of this Hindu organization to the possible exclusion of the Muslim majority areas from an independent India. He wrote: 'Regarding Pakisthan you should know our standpoint. We stand by the doctrine that India's geographical and political unity which is a reality must continue intact and there can be no compromise on this issue on any consideration whatsoever ... the claim of Pakisthan is based on the plea that minority Moslems must not be coerced into accepting a system of administration which will be dominated by Hindus. But may I ask what is Pakisthan itself except that it constitutes a tyranny of the majority over the minority?' Substitute Ulster for Pakistan and Irish republicans would endorse each point that is made until they reached the conclusion, namely that the will of the majority of the Indian people, by which Dr Mookerjee meant the majority Hindu community, must prevail. He was thinking in terms of religious division and recognized religious predominance. This, Irish republicanism, like mainstream Indian National Congress republicanism, has, though not with equal consistency, refused to do. All Irishmen, so the 1916 Proclamation read, were equal in their obligation of allegiance and their right to have their interests cherished. The will of the majority might incline to a Gaelic Catholic nationstate but the professed aim was the different one of bringing together those historically, or artifically, divided, into the all-embracing nation-state of which they were a part. On this line of thought there were in Ireland neither two nations nor two communities, but one people despite differences in culture or distant origin.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The Irish settlement 1920-1 was contrived by politicians whose range of options was limited by the triangular situation within which they had perforce to work. Yet constantly, when the record is closely examined, one finds the intrusion, almost always unwelcome to them, of concept or theory. Nowhere, as indeed one might expect, is this more evident than in the making of Northern Ireland, because at almost every point behind the argument lay the deeper question, were there in Ireland two nations? Or two communities? Or only contrived divisions? As viewed from London some outline answers to these questions in the shape of a working hypothesis may be seen emerging, usually implicitly from recorded cabinet discussions on the drafting of the Act of 1920, which brought Northern Ireland into statutory existence and from the considerations which were advanced for determining debatable issues in particular ways. That workin~ hypothesis may be summarized as follows. A demand for self-government on the. part of the large majority of the Irish people, expressed first in electoral returns over more than a generation, and later in growing support for those prepared to use force to obtain it, ought, consistent with British interests, to be conceded on grounds of principle, irrespective of whether it was at root a 'national' or a something less than 'national' demand. On the same line of reasoning, subject to the same criteria of authenticity, i.e. electoral returns over a generation, or more, and readiness in extremity to use force, the demand of a minority in Ireland should also, subject again to British national interest, be respected. The minority had no right to stand in the way of the legitimate aspirations of the majority; the majority had no entitlement to refuse to the minority the same degree of self-determination conceded to, or obtained by, them. If for the majority this meant the abandonment of the idea of national unity, and if for the minority it meant the abandonment of their objection to self-government, or home rule, these were sacrifices consistent with the application to majority and minority alike of the then fashionable Wilsonian principle of self-determination. On this line of thinking any settlement should reflect the wishes of the majority and minority sections of Irish opinion about their future government and in so doing, assert by implication that it was Ireland that was, so to speak, selfdetermining its own division. In the retrospect of half a century such a working hypothesis, even on its own terms, seems rather less than adequate. The provision of

30

THE IRISH QUESTION

the Act which partitioned Ireland, 1 might be construed in terms of self-determination, if each self-determining population had constituted a long-established political community. But this was not so. In the preceding five centuries of British rule, Ireland had been regarded as an entity, in earlier centuries with a parliament of its own and since 1800 as one of the kingdoms merging in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. If that Union were to be undone then, even having regard to British precedent alone, should not the exercise of self-determination be by Ireland as a unit, since it was as a unit that the Irish Parliament had approved of Union? If not, why not? In logic, the answer ought to have been the emergence in Ireland of something more than a minority· community, namely, a separate nation. It was indeed asserted that this had happened. Redmond, in condemning the two-nation theory as 'an abomination and a blasphemy', displayed realistic sensitivity to the fundamental nature of the implicit challenge. Yet usually the claim was advanced in a qualified form, namely, not that a minority as such constituted a nation, which would imply the emergence of an independent state, but that members of it were part of another nation. That theoretical position was in 1920-1-and Lloyd George explored it in the latter year-and remains to this day, inconsistent with dominion status or, still more, with a um, but altogether consistent at all times with what is now called integration. But acceptance of this view, significant though it is in its own context, does not in any way resolve the conflict in principle between the two fundamental concepts-that of self-determination on the basis of an historic nation by its people as a whole on the one hand and that of equal regard for minority and for majority views on the other. Both concepts have claims upon the allegiance of the liberal and enlightened and both have attracted the allegiance of those who are neither. Both also have important implications. Of the first view, that of Ireland as a nation, there was not, or, alternatively, there ought not to have been, any third i.e. Ulster Unionist, party in the negotiation of an Anglo-Irish settlement, while on the second there was such a party which had, and ought, to be taken into account, both in principle and in practice. In the course of the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921 Arthur Griffith, once more restating the Irish contention that Ireland was a nation and that its destiny should be determined on that 1 See below ch. VI, 'The Ulster Question, 1886-1920' generally and especially the last section sub-titled '1920: The Unionist State'.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

31

assumption, asked Lloyd George to explain how it had come about that Liberal governments had abandoned the principle of Irish oneness, to which indeed in Gladstonian-Asquithian days they had pledged themselves. Lloyd George replied in these terms: 'Attempts have been made to settle the Irish problem since 1886 on the basis of autonomy. Gladstone, who was the outstanding figure of his time with 40 years of political experience, tried to do it but he came up against Ulster ... We tried from 1911 to 1913. Ulster defeated Gladstone, Ulster would have defeated us. Mr Churchill and I were for the [Home Rule] Bill, Mr Chamberlain and the Lord Chancellor were opposed. They with the instinct of trained politicians saw that Ulster was the stumbling block. They got the whole force of the opposition concentrated on Ulster. Ulster was arming and would fight. We were powerless. It is no use ignoring facts however unpleasant they may be. The politician who thinks he can deal out abstract justice without reference to forces around him cannot govern. You had to ask the British to use force to put Ulster out of one combination in which she had been for generations into another combination which she professed to abhor and did abhor, whether for political or religious reasons. We could not do it. If we tried the instrument would have broken in our hands. Their case was "Let us remain with you." Our case was "Out you go or we fight you." We could not have done it. Mr Churchill and I warned our colleagues. Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith discovered it. I cannot say I discovered it because I was always of that opinion. You have got to accept facts. The first axiom is whatever happened we could not coerce Ulster.' 1 It would be an over-simplification to say that here was an argument between principle and pragmatism, but it would be correct to say that in 1920-1 the pragmatists prevailed. This cut both ways. The Government of Ireland Act, 1920, certainly did not accept the concept of Ireland as a nation with her own irrefutable boundary marks. Far from if. It conceded that Ulster could not be coerced and in so doing created a boundary that assuredly lacked its irrefutable contours. But equally it neither sanctioned a two-nations theory nor abandoned the concept of unity. The discussions in Cabinet,2 and especially those in 1 Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Vol. III, Ireland 1918-1925 edited by Keith Middlemas (London, Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 129-30. 2 The author analysed these developments in longer perspective and greater detail

32

THE IRISH QUESTION

December 1919, concerned with the formulation of the provisions of the 1920 Act, make clear that the conceptual halfway resting place with unity as the long-term goal, was deliberately chosen, the specific conclusion reached by the Cabinet on December 3, 1919 being that 'a united Ireland with a single parliament of its own bound by the closest ties with Great Britain', was 'the ultimate aim'. It is true that at a subsequent cabinet meeting this was questioned on the ground that lifelong Unionists would prefer that there should be no looking forward to a single parliament in Ireland. But the general trend of cabinet opinion, so the minutes read, remained in favour of adhering to the earlier conclusions. 1 The Cabinet predisposition to ultimate unity did not prove readily susceptible of translation into practice. Was the establishment of a local parliament in Northern Ireland, to take a key question, consistent with that long-term aim? The Cabinet concluded that it was, chiefly on the ground that all Irishmen would then be in large measure self-governing. This was a little too easy. Then there was the further and also key question, if there were to be local parliamentary institutions, what should be the area of their jurisdiction? Should the separate parliament be for the whole of Ulster or only for the six counties? 2 In retrospect, and despite its neglect by historians, this has claim to be regarded as the most important question thrown up by the events of the revolutionary era. One argument for the six-county area was the advantage of having people under a Northern Ireland Parliament as homogeneous as possible. But the critics of this view, which approximated to a twonations concept, were hard to convince, and, on December 19, 1919, once more urged in Cabinet that if the ultimate aim of the Government's policy were a united Ireland, it would be better that the jurisdiction of the Northern Parliament should extend over the whole of Ulster, which included Roman Catholics and Protestants, both urban and rural districts, and by its size was more suited to possessing a separate parliament. Logic, however, yielded to political pressures. Contrary views were entertained by the Ulster leaders, and they in a paper read to the Tenth Irish Conference of Historians at University College, Cork, in May 1971, entitled The Government of Ireland Act 1920: Its Origins and Purposes.

The Working of the Official Mind.

1 CAB 23/18, 10 December, 1919. The diverging views of Ulster and English Unionists, which were of considerable significance at this juncture, are analysed by D. G. Boyce in 'British Conservative opinion, the Ulster Question and the Partition of Ireland, 1912-1921', Irish Historical Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 65 (March 1970), pp. 89-u2. 2 The earlier, pre-war suggestion of four did not come under review.

PREF ACE TO THE THIRD EDIT I ON

33

proved conclusive. The Ulster Unionists had entertained doubts at least since 1916, about the ability of a Northern Parliament to govern the three additional Ulster counties, where there were large nationalist majorities, and when their leaders conveyed to the Cabinet their readiness to work a local parliament, they coupled it with the rider that they 'greatly preferred' that the scheme should be applied to the six 'Protestant counties'. The reason for the rider, as Captain Craig put it later in the House of Commons, was that the best way to safeguard Ulster was to 'save as much of Ulster as we knew we could hold. To try to hold more ... would seem an act of gross folly on our part.' 1 It may be it was an act of grosser folly to try to hold so much. Did the outcome in respect of area then represent a triumph for the two-nations concept? The answer is qualified, not least because the area excluded had itself no evident 'national' content. Indeed, one of the most striking consequences of an arrangement to ensure that one third of the people of Ireland were not placed under a Dublin government, allegiance to which would have been anathema to them, was to place one third of the population of the six counties of Ireland under allegiance to a Belfast government, which was anathema to it. Michael Collins put the point to Lloyd George in the Treaty negotiations on October 14, 1921. 'You and Northern Ireland', he said, 'are faced with the coercion of one third of its area.' The allegiance, he proceeded, of the majority in Tyrone and Fermanagh, more than half Armagh, a great deal of Derry and a strip of Antrim would be with the authority they preferred, namely a Dublin Parliament. Lloyd George did not contest the statement. He commented on it, however, as follows: 'The real unit was Ulster. It was an old province and a recognised unit ... That would have been a unit but it was felt to be handing over a large Catholic population to the control of the Protestants . . . Therefore we had to get a new unit . . . 2 That new unit might have been determined, theoretically at least, on the basis of a second nation, or part-nation. That would have had a logical base; it could have provided, as a six-county area never could, an approximation of a Protestant people for a Protestant Parliament. It would also have necessitated a less than six-county area. That was a price Ulster Unionists were far from being prepared 1 House of Commons Debs, Vol. 127, col. 992. 'Jones, op. cit., Vol. rn, pp. 129-31.

THE IRISH QUESTION

34

to consider, let alone contemplate; yet the new unit-and this seems the most important inference to be drawn from perusal of cabinet records-was on the British, as distinct from the Ulster Unionist side, determined, however improbable this appeared in succeeding decades, within a concept of continuing unity. This was further reflected in the provisions of the 1920 Act itself. The establishment of separate parliaments in Section 1 was, on paper, in part counterbalanced by the constitution of the Council of Ireland in Section 2. 'A fleshless and bloodless skeleton', Asquith termed it, and apart from the restricted range of its advisory functions, he appreciated more clearly than any other critic the implications of parity as between North and South, as between minority and majority, in its composition. 'It is left', he said, 'to an Ulster minority for all time to veto, if it pleases, the coming into existence of an Irish Parliament.' 1 So much was evidently true. None the less the bias towards unity was there, as it remained in December, 1921, the Articles of Agreement being for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, with its provisions applying to the whole of Ireland, unless and until Northern Ireland exercised its freedom to opt out. In an Irish context what mattered was the exercise of that option. The opening of a Northern Ireland Parliament on June 22, 1921 was for nationalist Ireland the symbolic moment of a division sanctioned by the legislative enactment of a Parliament at Westminster, from which the large majority of Irish members were absent, on the ground that it was an alien parliament or in the earlier phrase of Arthur Griffith, 'the parliament of the conqueror'. Yet in retrospect, as indeed at the time, the moment loaded with potentialities of provocation was a little softened by royal restraint in language. When General Smuts had lunched with the King on June 13, he had found the King anxiously preoccupied with the speech he was about to deliver in Belfast, his preoccupation heightened by rumours that the Home Office were drafting 'a bloodthirsty document'. Smuts suggested an alternative draft, which he communicated to Lloyd George. It proved unacceptable, as it stood, to the Cabinet, neither Balfour nor Austen Chamberlain liking what they termed its 'gush', nor 'the innuendo of oppression' which lay behind it. 2 But enough remained for the speech to be accepted as a gesture of reconciliation. Among other things the King said: 'This is a great and critical occasion in the 1

2

House of Commons Debs, Vol. 127, coll. 1112-313. Jones, op. cit., Vol. 111, pp. 75-9·

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

35

history of the Six Counties, hut not for the Six Counties alone, for everything which interests them touches Ireland.' That, the Irish dimension, was not again accorded explicit recognition by a British government until after the fiftieth anniversary of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 had come and gone. It is not only historians who need to engage from time to time in revisionist exercises.

PART I

IRELAND UNDER THE UNION: THE OPINIONS OF SOME CONTEMPORARY OBSERVERS

CHAPTER I

THE STATE OF IRELAND IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE UNION CONTEMPORARY OBSERVATIONS AND SOME REFLECTIONS UPON THEM

The most terrible thing is that there is nothing terrible.

TURGENEV

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne, England was already confronted with the consequences of the greatest failure in its history. The passing centuries had witnessed the attempts of Englishmen to conquer Ireland. The task that seemed more than half accomplished by the ruthless efficiency of the predatory barons, who owed allegiance to the great Angevin king, was nearly all undone two centuries later when the feckless Richard of Bordeaux was trapped among the Wicklow hills. It was resumed with force and finesse by the Tudors, who saw in Ireland at once a menace to their security and an outlet for the superabundant vitality of Renaissance England. A generation ambitious 'to seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory' undertook, among more distant but scarcely more hazardous enterprises, the colonization of Ireland. The names of the Planters, or Undertakers as they were known, reflected the brilliance of an heroic age. Edmund Spenser was among them and while living at Kilcolman castle under the Ballyhoura hills he added two cantos to The Faerie Queen. Nearby, in the demesne of Doneraile 'among the coolly shade of the green alders', he walked conversing with Philip Sidney and with Walter Raleigh1-that 'tall handsome bold man' who was 'damnable proud' and who may indeed be thought of as the prototype of all Elizabethan planters. Raleigh acquired some 40,000 acres of Munster land, but despite still vivid tradition in Youghal, he lived but briefly in his house beside St Mary's 1 C£ Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court. The story ofan Anglo-Iris/a family from t!u tim. of CromwJI to t!u present day (London, 1942), pp. 3-4-

THE IRISH QUESTION

Church and, regrettable as it may seem, neither planted the first Irish potatoes in its garden1 nor was dowsed with water under the mulberry tree by a housekeeper, who thought he was on fire, when he was smoking tobacco. 2 But it was the case that all his vast estates, after years of neglect, were bought by a more businesslike adventurer, Richard Boyle, the Great Earl of Cork, for a mere £1,000.3In this there was something symbolic. The reputation of the Elizabethan settlers, won for the most part in other fields, remains; but their Irish enterprise, lacking all sustained sense of purpose, proved deservedly transient. And so in succeeding centuries the sombre tale of Plantation, of rebellion, of Cromwellian violence, of civil and religious war, of the penal Code, mocked the illusion of a final Elizabethan settlement. The English invasions of Ireland were unending because the conquest was never complete. And all the while through the long years of adversity, pressure from without was consolidating within a core of resistance to the invader, which depended in the last resort, not upon destructible material forces, but upon a slowly maturing and finally indestructible conviction that Ireland should and would be free. Resistance and rebellion were always unavailing, for a povertystricken and ill-disciplined people, whose distaste for compromise left them disunited in many crises, could not hope successfully to challenge the resources of an island power whose heritage was the dominion of the sea. Yet in as much as manifestations of the will to resist kept alive the spirit of resistance, they were not barren of result. While the sporadic rebellions were wasteful of lives that could ill be spared, it may well be that nationalist historians are right in saying that, by such sacrifices alone, was Ireland enabled to nourish a tradition so vivid, so emotional, so fanatical as to resist the miasmata of failure and despair. As Napoleon had fanned to flame nationalism in conquered Germany and in Italy, so, too, the English rulers of1reland, having failed while yet there was time to take the measures necessary to conciliate a not• Milton Waldman in his biography, Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1950, New Edition), p. 45 despairs of controverting a legend that has persisted almost unquestioned from the seventeenth century until now. So do I-but magna est veritas et praevalehit I 1 An illustration by Alfred Croquis (D. Madise, R.A.) in The Reliques of Father Prout (coll. and arranged by Oliver Yorke, London, 186o) combines something of both stories in that it shows Raleigh directing the planting of the first potato in Ireland with smoke rising in a small cloud from his pipe. a The tomb of the Great Earl, one of the most splendid and elaborate pieces of late Renaissance sculpture in Ireland, is in St Macy's Church at Youghal: Raleigh's body is buried in the Tower of London, his head havfng been given to his widow after his execution.

IRELAND IN THE EARLY YEARS

41

unfriendly people, were confronted at the last by an Irish ideal which, alien to their outlook yet fostered by their misrule, was to prove a source of strength more resilient, because it was more single-minded, than any which a great Empire could command. At the accession of Queen Victoria the catastrophic climax of British rule in Ireland lay in the distant future, yet its coming was not hidden from the sight of the observant. Nassau William Senior, the first Professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford, a man so remarkable for his qualities of mind and judgement that Count Cavour acclaimed him '/'esprit le plus eclaire de la Grande-Bretagne', was moved to discard his customary restraint in language and in the use of imagery and to write on a visit to Ireland in 1843: 'When Irish questions, or rather the Irish Question (for there is but one), has been forced on our attention, we have felt, like a dreamer in a nightmare, oppressed by the consciousness tha,t some great evil was rapidly advancing-that mere exertion on our part would avert it, but that we had not the power to will that exertion.' 1 It was psychologically a revealing reaction to the state of Ireland after some forty years' of government under the Union. THE STATE OF IRELAND: THE TESTIMONY OF TRAVELLERS AND COMMISSIONERS

Th~ condition oflreland in the middle years of the nineteenth century, or at least all of it outside Ulster, dismayed and distressed those who saw it-from Italian nationalists to Communist internationalists, to Frenchmen, Germans, Americans and by no means least, to Englishmen, whether economists, officials or more ordinary voyagers. Some of them left records of their impressions and of these one of the most substantial and more rewarding was written by Gustave de la Bonniniere de Beaumont, a scion of the lesser nobility in France, the lifelong friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, the companion of his American journeys of political exploration and finally his literary executor. De Beaumont was brought up on the small family farm of the Chateau de la Borde by the valley of the Sarthe where the life of the countryside pursued its accustomed ways. De Tocqueville, who stayed with the de Beaumonts, received impressions there which he felt threw 1 Journals, Conversations and Essays relating to lreland(London, 1868), 2 Vols., Vol. I, p. 19. Nassau Senior was descended from Spanish creoles who became British in the Bahamas and were first known as El Senor.

42

THE IRISH QUESTION

new light on the human heart. 'These "brave gens",' he wrote,1 'calm of imagination and tranquil of heart, find pleasure where I should never have been able to imagine that any existed. They ~e the liveliest interest in the growth of a tree, in the raising of a crop, in the hatching of a brood. They continue interested in such things for years and desire nothing more, while men who have shaken the world have often died of chagrin at being unable to do more.' Such simple, inherited interests served de Beaumont well in the writing of his observations on Ireland and if, by comparison with de Tocqueville, who visited the country but once and alone in 1835 and recorded his impressions for the most part in dialogue form, 2 de Beaumont's narrative lacks something in directness and in purposefulness of enquiry, it compensates by its descriptions and understanding of rural conditions. De Beaumont had travelled widely, both in the New World and the Old, when he came to write of the state of the Ireland of pre-famine years; and he did so with a vividness that still strikes a chill of horror to the heart. In an opening, carrying overtones of the challenging aphorism with which Rousseau had prepared his readers for the political doctrine of Le Contrat Social, his imagination finds an exciting, and possibly for readers in this more prosaic age, a disturbing, outlet. 'L' lrlande a eti,' he begins,3 'par un destin fatal jetee sur I' Ocean aupres de I' Angleterre, a qui elle semble enchatnee par !es memes liens qui unissent I' esclave au maitre.' But thereafter de Beaumont's descriptions of life in pre-Famine Ireland, enlivened, if not perhaps always enriched, by some flights of style and fancy, offer vivid, illuminating and often penetrating commentaries on what he saw. M. de Beaumont was most affected by the poverty that was apparent in Ireland wherever he travelled, save only in Ulster. The country itself, despite its beauty and the richness of its soil, seemed to him impoverished because of continuous mist and rain blowing across from the Atlantic. It was the victim of its climate; and while 'ces montagnes elegantes, ces grands lacs, ces praieries eternelles, ces co/lines aussi fratches que /es vallees' 4 delighted the traveller with their beauty in the bright sunlight, M. de Beaumont saw them nearly always half hidden under leaden skies. The countryside, too, in most parts, having been G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New Yark, 1938), p. 21. J. P. Mayer (London, 1958). s L'lrlantk Sociale, Politique et R.eliguuse (Paris, 1839) 2 Vols., Vol. I, p. 187. The book is prefaced by a lengthy historical introduction. •Op.cit., Vol. I, p. 189. 1

a Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, edited by

IRELAND IN THE EARLY YEARS

43

despoiled of trees, was bleak and so on a spring day it failed to give that impression of renewed vitality for which the traveller had looked. But if a countryside, whose charm may elude those who do not know and love it well, depressed this French aristocrat, with memories of his home by the sunlit, wooded valleys of the Sarthe, it aroused in him emotions in full accord with those prompted by the sight of the condition of the people themselves. 'I have seen the Indian in his forests and the negro in his irons', wrote M. de Beaumont, 'and I believed, in pitying their plight, that I saw the lowest ebb of human misery; but I did not then know the degree of poverty to be found in Ireland. Like the Indian, the Irishman is poor and naked; but he lives in the midst of a society which enjoys luxury and honours wealth•••• The Indian retains a certain independence which has its attraction and a dignity of its own. Poverty-stricken and hungry he may be, but he is free in his desert places; and the feeling that he enjoys this liberty blunts the edge of his sufferings. But the Irishman undergoes the same deprivations without enjoying the same liberty, he is subjected to regulations: he dies of hunger. He is governed by laws; a sad condition, which combines the vices of civilization with those of primitive life. Today the Irishman enjoys neither the freedom of the savage nor the bread of servitude' . 1 The language of one generation rarely carries conviction to the men of another and M. de Beaumont's description, with its but halfdissipated illusions about the happiness of the 'splendid savages' so dear to the Romantics, so seductive to French travellers in the New World from the Marquis de Lafayette to Alexis de Tocqueville himself, might inspire little confidence, were it not that the accumulation of personal impressions and the factual evidence as to the dreadful poverty of Ireland at this time are alike, and as it were, independently irrefutable. De Tocqueville's notes on the conditions he observed on his journey to the south by Carlow and Waterford to Kilkenny, and on to the south-west by Mitchelstown to Cork, precisely recorded in relation to area, at least explain why de Beaumont was stirred to write in such terms, while his account of what he saw in a Dublin poor-house2 -brief, factual and quite horrible-brings a sharper and more painful realization of the depths to which Irish misery could sink at this time than any of the more eloquently phrased generalizations of his friend. Nassau Senior, who was assuredly little disposed to exaggeration, 1

2

Op. cit., Vol I, pp. 204-5. Jour114Ys, pp. 129-30, 136, 158 and pp. 121-2 for his account of his poor-house visit.

44

THE IRISH QUESTION

wrote of 'a population more unhappy in itself, and the cause of more unhappiness to all who have to deal with it, than any other civilized and free community in existence', 1 whilst the Report of the Commission appointed in 1843 by Peel to enquire into Irish agrarian problems with Lord Devon as Chairman and with a wholly landlord membership, remarked upon the 'patient endurance which the labouring classes have generally exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain'.2 M. de Beaumont shared this opinion and considered that the wretched condition of the Irish people could scarcely be compared with that of any other country. Elsewhere the traveller might see some, even a majority of the population, destitute, but nowhere else was there to be found a whole nation of poor. To understand the social state of such a country it was necessary to recall only 'ses miseres et ses souffrances; I' histoire des pauvres est celle de I' lrlande'. In order to appreciate the measure oflrish poverty all preconceived ideas as to the distinction between rich and poor must be put aside. In other countries only those who were unemployed or who begged were considered poor, but in Ireland farm labourers and even small farmers suffered a degree of poverty such as was almost unknown elsewhere.3 And the wretchedness of the Irish people did not lessen with time; it was permanent because its cause was permanent, and famine, its most dread manifestation, constituted a recurring climax. The Irish countryside itself affords many contrasts between wealth and poverty. The rich grass lands of Meath give way to the barren beauty of the west, the Golden Vein where feed the cattle for which Ireland is famed and the wide plains of Tipperary are bounded on the north by hills and bog and by the Galtee mountains on the south, while out to the west lies the windswept, rocky soil of the County Clare. M. de Beaumont looking out over the Lakes of Killarney from Muckross Abbey saw on the one side uncultivated fields, marshy wastes studded with patches of heather, with here and there a stunted fir tree, and on the other at the foot of a range of mountains, rich and smiling Op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 23. Report from H.M. Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law anJ Practice in Rupect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland (Dublin, Alexander Thom for HM so, 1845), p. 12. 3 de Tocqueville on his journey from Kilkenny to Mitchelstown found relays of children importuning passers-by almost all the way. He assumed from the houses that they must be the children of beggars. He was assured this was not so-that the houses were the homes of small farmers. Journeys, p. 158. 1

2

IRELAND IN THE EARLY YEARS

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fields, woods of an almost tropical vegetation, a countryside at once fertile and extraordinarily beautiful. And he felt that the contrast between richness and poverty presented there reflected something characteristic of Ireland, not only of its countryside but also of the people who dwelt in it. The contrasts of nature were equalled by contrasts in the state of man. 'In Ireland the traveller', he noted, 'sees magnificent castles and wretched cabins: but no house which stands midway between the palaces of the great and the hovels of the indigent, for in this country there are only rich and poor.' 1 M. de Beaumont believed the violent contrasts in living conditions in Ireland to be the outcome of a process, which had acquired momentum through the centuries, and by which rich and poor pursued their separate ways, the one leading to great wealth, the other to abject poverty. As the wealth of the one class increased, so the resources of the other diminished, till by the middle years of the nineteenth century, the country was inhabited by an aristocracy small in number living in great luxury, and the great majority of the people living in the lowest depth of poverty. The oversimplified history and the epigrammatic distinctions, in which de Beaumont delighted, suggest a society in which the divisions were even more rigid and the contrasts even more pronounced than was in fact the case. When he writes that the incomes of landowners sometimes reached sums 'dont l' enormitl nous para£tpresque chimerique', when he describes the magnificent clothing of the rich in this impoverished island, their splendid castles, their huge demesnes, their mountains and fields, their woods and lakes and notes how the luxury of their life and the ostentation of their wealth stood out against the misery of the people, is he not allowing a natural emotion to influence judgement? The condition of Ireland was deplorable, the contrast between wealth and poverty in the opinion of the time as well as of later generations inexcusable, yet none the less it is also the case, as de Tocqueville had occasion to note more than once, that the resources of many landlords were quite unequal to their responsibilities and to the state they sought or felt obliged to maintain. Nor is it to be doubted that the wealth of the greater Anglo-Irish landlords was equalled, and indeed generally much surpassed, by that of the land-owning classes and the new industrial elites in other countries,2 that the magnificence of their Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 198. Arthur Young in his Travels in lrelana in 1777 remarked that 'There is a very good society in Dublin in a Parliament winter; a great round of dinners and parties..•• The 1

2

THE IRISH QUESTION

country houses, which were in all too many instances indifferently designed, straggling buildings, composed of a central block with 'wings' added at various periods as capital allowed or pretension dictated, could scarcely bear comparison with the 'stately homes' of England, and still less with the Chateaux of the Loire. The 'luxury', too, of the lives of the Anglo-Irish landlords is frequently exaggerated. If abundance of food and wine-Father Mathew's Temperance movement was to gain few adherents among the ruling classes-be accounted luxury then the indictment is valid, but if by luxury is to be understood, not somewhat primitive pleasures, but the refinements of civilization in the art of life, then the charge must be disallowed. 'The savoir-vivre is but moderately advanced in Dublin', wrote John Gamble, an Army surgeon in 1810 and we know Dublin contrasted favourably with the provinces in this respect. On the other side, too, M. de Beaumont compares the conditions of the people with those of the Indians in America. But he does not compare them with those of the factory workers in England and Franee, where even the children toiled in the coal mines some eighteen hours a day, with those of the Ruthenian peasant under his Magyar lord, with those of the Sicilians under Bourbon tyranny; or with those of the Spaniard toiling for the welfare of the high-bred nobles of Castile. Only a contemporary observer could have determined with finality what such a comparison would have revealed, but it is, to say the least, doubtful whether conditions were worse in Ireland than in Central Europe, in Spain or in the two Sicilies. 1 The point, though it deserves to be considered, little blunts the edge of criticism, for was it not the proud boast of Englishmen that they excelled all others in the art of government and that their country had acquired a standard of civilization unknown to the peoples of central and southern Europe? The style of living may be guessed from the fortunes of the resident nobility and great commoners; there are about thirty that possess incomes from seven to twenty thousand pounds a year'. The standard of living among the wealthy impressed him as differing in nothing from that in England. C. Maxwell, Duhlin Under the Georges (Revised edition, London, 1956), P· 314. 1 While there is much valuable information about agricultural conditions in, for example, B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500-1850 (London, I 963), it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to secure reliable statistical evidence of rural conditions in the former Habsburg Empire or in Spain, or the two Sicilies of a kind to make comparisons worth while. Lahour in Agriculture, by L. E. Howard (Oxford, 1935), published under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was in many respects a pioneer work but it gave an account of agricultural conditions only lince 1919.

IRELAND IN THE EARLY YEARS

47

boast, which was not on the whole ill-founded, seems strangely insubstantial when it is found necessary to compare the consequences of British rule in Ireland with those of the rule of the most backward and tyrannical governments in Europe. There are other and more personal considerations to be borne in mind. Travellers, and by tradition especially Gallic travellers, are tempted to generalize from what they themselves have seen. M. de Beaumont travelled much in the West and he was a witness to the ravages of famine in Connaught in 1835 and 1837. They made a deep and dreadful impression upon him. But in the West in general, and Connaught in particular, living conditions were worse than elsewhere in Ireland. The Census of 1841, 1 showed that the pressure of population upon resources was greater in Connaught than in any other province. Some 30 per cent of all the uncultivated land in the country was in that province, nearly 2,000,000 of its 4,392,043 acres being uncultivated, 78 per cent of its people were dependent upon agriculture and, more densely populated than either Munster or Leinster, Connaught had 386 people to the square mile of arahle land as against 335 per square mile of arable in Ireland as a whole. 2 The proportion of very small holdings was greater than in any of the other provinces since Ulster, though more densely populated and having also a high proportion of very small holdings, possessed a diversified economy, which qualified both its dependence on agriculture and the pressure of population on the land. De Beaumont recognized the distinctive character of Connaught; he wrote of it as 'le type de la vieille lrlande' which, it appeared, 'la nature ait pris a caiur de le distinguer des autres provinces' and he noted that there was no part of the country where recollection of war and conquest was more lively or where 'l'Anglais et le protestant ne sont detestes d'une haine plus religieuse et plus nationale'.3 De Tocqueville 1 &port of the Commissioners appointed to talce the Census of Ireland for the year 1841 (Dublin, Alexander Thom for HM so), Par!. Papers, 1843, xxiv. 2 Census &port p. xiii and T ah/es of Rural Economy pp. 452-3. See also and generally E. R. R. Green's contribution on 'Agriculture' in The Great Famine edited by R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams and published for the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, Dublin, 1956, pp. 89-128. There is some discrepancy between the figures given by Dr Green on p. 89 and those given above. Dr Green, using the same census S01,l!'ces, states that 43 per cent of the uncultivated land in the country was in Connaught, which would appear to be an overstatement, and that the number of people per square mile of arable in Ireland as a whole was only 217, which would seem to be an understatement. 2 Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 193-4-

THE IRISH QUESTION

passing through Ennis seated on the top of the diligence was told by his companion, an old man, of 'the fate of a great many families and a great deal of land, passing through the times of Cromwell and of William ill with a terrifying exactitude of local memory'. 1 To the West of the Shannon and along that 'stony sea-board, far and foreign' recollection of the harsh Cromwellian alternatives of 'Hell or Connaught' indeed remained, and for long after de Tocqueville and de Beaumont's time, even though in London clubs it was thought that it might be more civilized to forget about them. But de Beaumont, sympathetic, understanding and appalled by the consequences of forcible transplantation still apparent to him two centuries later, would seem to have allowed his impressions of that one province to have imposed something of a stereotype upon his conclusions on the state of the country as a whole outside Ulster. Or to put the point-and it is one of some importance--rather differently, and perhaps more exactly, he would seem to have taken insufficient account of the gradations in the conditions, which we know existed, between the comparatively fertile and less densely populated south and east and the comparatively infe· ·1e and more thickly populated west and which were an important element in the social and economic condition of Ireland at the time. The Devon Commission gave graphic illustrations of these differences in plates published with their Report, showing standards in houseaccommodation, in education (in terms of reading and writing) and the amount of capital invested in livestock in the counties of Ireland. The highest proportion of fourth class accommodation-and to qualify for it housing conditions had to be on a level lower than would seem endurable by human beings in Irish climatic conditions-was all in the W estem counties, Roscommon, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Clare, Mayo and Kerry and included all the counties of Connaught. In terms of literacy Galway and heavily populated Mayo came on their own at the bottom of the list, as they did also in terms of property invested in livestock. The contrast here was very marked, Meath at the top of the list with £155 invested in livestock per 100 acres, had more than twice as much as either Mayo or Galway with £6