Ireland the Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 PAUL BEW
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Ireland The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 PAUL BEW 2007 1 Preface The King shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath, And in the cup an union shall he throw. (Hamlet,V.. 268–9) It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream,V.. 1179) At the end of October 1904, D. P. Moran’s The Leader —strongly Catholic nationalist in tone—published a clever pastiche of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this version, ‘The Bigots of the Wood’, which takes place near Castle Saunderson, the ‘home’ of Colonel Saunderson, the landlordist Ulster Unionist leader of the day, Puck, the Fairy, amuses himself by playing tricks on the enemies of the Irish cause: An Orangeman drunk I diverted from home, And now he is sunk in a bog cursing Rome. With signs and guiles a Freemason I led For fully six miles from his home and his bed. Puck then encounters a ‘caste of bigots’—Bottom, Billy, Boyne, Howler, and Scorcher—all rehearsing a play, ‘The Triumph of the Saved?’ The Protestant and unionist ‘Bigots of the Wood’ roar out their lines—‘Now is the Summer of our discontent | Made roaring winter by the Winds of Rome’—and celebrate their triumphs over everything, Catholic and nationalist. The author of the pastiche (‘J. M. W.’, the pen-name of John Swift) makes it clear that this is also a triumph over the values of toleration: For our mighty Bottom an ambush soon got ’em And proudly o’er them the victor’s flag waved. Sound the loud timbrel o’er famed Sandy Row, etc., Now where’s toleration and Ireland a nation? Vanished and melted like last winter’s snow. Exasperated, Puck places asses’ heads on the whole unsavoury crew: ‘perceiving each other’, the bigots set up ‘a horrible screaming’, and with cries of Popery and witchcraft ‘rush madly off in various directions’. As the dawn breaks, Puck reluctantly removes their beastly heads: for ‘bigots viii Preface always should wear asses’ heads’. The Leader’s pastiche perfectly expresses the mutual contempt which characterized the relationship between the two main traditions—Protestant, ‘British’, and unionist on the one hand, Catholic and nationalist on the other—on the island of Ireland at the beginning of the last century, and is not so much diluted at the beginning of this century, as the violence which met the Ulster Unionists in the ‘Love Ulster’ march in Dublin in February 2006 demonstrated. Such animosity is the theme of this book. The book is about the conflict between the Protestant British—both on the British ‘mainland’ and in Ireland itself—and the Catholic Irish. It is perhaps more particularly about the ideas and attitudes which underpin that conflict: it is about rationaliza- tion and self-justification. During the nineteenth century mainland Britain became both less ardently Protestant and less emotionally engaged in this Irish battle of communal wills: in 1852 Benjamin Disraeli described ‘hatred of the Pope’ as one of the defining features of English public opinion; his biographer, J. A. Froude, however, noted the ‘decay’ of such protestant feeling by the late 1860s. In the 1880s British liberalism detached itself from the cause of Irish Protestantism: the Tory leadership stuck with it for much longer, but was visibly losing enthusiasm by the late 1930s. Irish neutrality in the Second World War re-created a new type of London unionism. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century Britain was perceived to have formally declared itself neutral, save perhaps for a vestigial element of concern for the protestant community in Northern Ireland, expressed in support for the principle of ‘consent’, the idea that Northern Ireland could only leave the United Kingdom when a majority within Northern Ireland so desired it. This is the conflict which, for many, defines the modern Irish question. Norrey Jephson O’Conor, in his Changing Ireland, published by Harvard University Press in 1924, wrote that ‘many laymen outside of Ireland’ had come to accept a particular view of that history as a history of ‘tyranny supposedly unexampled in modern times—a great and supposedly liberal nation taking unfair unadvantage of a smaller’. At the heart of this relationship is the problem of the management of enmity. The union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801 was, above all, presented as a sophisticated attempt to manage that enmity: a new benign framework for Irish development. Not everyone accepted British professions of good faith. At the time, anti-union writers seized on the reference to ‘an union’ in Hamlet as a suitably ambiguous and threatening image: after all, the King wishes to place ‘an union’ (a jewel) in Hamlet’s goblet at a moment when he wants to see Hamlet destroyed. Did not Britain, despite all the deceitful Claudius-like professions of good-will, not really wish to destroy Ireland? All the other great experiments since—Home Rule, partition and Preface ix independence, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, and the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998—have been conceived as attempts to divert the full flood of rage into a place of relative calmness. Partition based on the principle of consent remains the order of the day in Ireland: but it is also the case that the recently revised constitution of the Irish Republic declares it to be the ‘firm will’ of the Irish people to achieve political unity on the island of Ireland, admittedly only with the support of a democratic majority in Northern Ireland. These issues—and this great unresolved and ambiguous project—pro- vide the context for this book. To treat the problems raised with any degree of seriousness, it is necessary to re-create the worlds of the political class in London, Dublin, and Belfast and to study their interaction. But it is also important to convey the mood of popular politics. In this work, as in others, I have laid particular emphasis on the press, including the vibrant Irish provincial press: inevitably, such sources tend to reflect the passions of particular localities, sometimes in a very unmediated, even crude, way. One rather intellectual Irish viceroy in the 1860s, Lord Kimberley, referred to a ‘despicable’ Irish press, in which there were only two ‘tolerably able papers’, the Northern Whig of Belfast and the Cork Examiner.Thereisafair amount here from the Whig and the Examiner, but I have employed many of the more ‘despicable’ organs as well. In his Wiles Lectures, given in Belfast in 1985, Eric Hobsbawm declared: ‘To be Irish and proudly attached to Ireland—even to be proudly catholic Irish or Ulster protestant Irish—is not in itself incompatible with the study of Irish history.’ He adds: ‘To be a Fenian or an Orangeman, I would judge, is not so compatible … unless the historian leaves his or her conviction behind when entering the study.’ These are interesting remarks. The issue of objectivity in the writing of Irish history is a fraught one. The fact remains that very many people in Ireland, Fenians and Orangemen in particular, regard their history as almost a personal possession and resent what is often seen as a subversive and impious challenge by scholars in ivory towers. Given the scale of the emotional investment that has traditionally been made, it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that, for all its sound and fury, the tale might not entirely have the comforting significance attributed to it. Even when this doubt surfaces, there is always, as ‘The Bigots in the Woods’ shows, the absurdity of the opposing ‘collectivity’ to reassure and keep one warm at night. Ernest Renan, the friend of the great nineteenth-century Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky, pointed out, in a famous lecture on nationalism, that, in the formation of national consciousness, sacrifice is more important than success and historical error more important than historical truth. Such a context creates an almost insoluble problem for historians. x Preface As William Cooke Taylor, one of the most interesting of the Irish historical writers to be discussed in the following pages, honestly noted in the 1847 preface to his own study of Daniel O’Connell: ‘Professions of impartiality from Irishmen are not unjustly received with suspicion.’ In his memoir published in 1895, William O’Connor Morris wrote: ‘To this hour Ireland has produced no genius who has been able to bridge over the chasm existing between her divided people, to do justice to the sons of English and Scottish colonists, and to portray the habits and life of the Catholic Irishry.’ William Cooke Taylor therefore made a reduced claim for his work. ‘This writer, therefore, limits himself to claiming perfect accuracy in his statement of facts—many of them little known; the soundness in his opinions is a very different question, which he leaves to be solved by his readers.’ The author of this work makes a still more reduced claim: he has attempted to achieve accuracy in the statement of facts, little known or otherwise. Acknowledgments In the writing of this book I have incurred four major debts to insti- tutions—to Magdalene College, Cambridge, for a Parnell Fellowship, 1996–7; to the British Academy for the support of a research assistant—the excellent Gorden Gillespie—in the same year; to the Burns Library, Boston College, for the visiting Burns Professorship in 1999–2000; and to the Institute of Governance at Queens University, Belfast, for a visiting fellow- ship 2001–2. Without the knidness and support of all these institutions this work could not have been completed. I owe a particular debt to the librarians who work in the Henry Collection at Queens, but also to Robert O’Neill and John Attebury at the beautiful Burns Library, with its outstanding collection of Irish material.