9 Continuity and Change Everything Changes and Nothing Changes

9 Continuity and change Everything changes and nothing changes. Before the onset of the Irish revolution, the struggle between constitutional nationalism and unionism dominated Tyrone politics. This contest revolved around control of local government, which the unionist élite held and the Catholic middle class, through the auspices of constitutionalism, in whatever guise, sought to usurp. By 1923 unionist dominance was incontestable and the Catholic bourgeoisie, after a flirtation with separatism, were rapidly returning to their constitutional roots. The Catholic Church’s eventual control of education only consolidated this trend, helping to create ‘a state within a state … equipped with its own social infrastructure of Catholic, schools, hospitals, sporting activities, newspapers, businesses, and the sectarian’ AOH.i Having petitioned de Valera to secure their class interests in December 1921, they then pledged allegiance to the Free State and the delusionary Boundary Commission. After 1925 the church and middle class came to terms with the unionist administration; retention of denominational control of education remained paramount. The northern government that emerged from the revolutionary period reflected the socio-economic and political relationships within unionist civil society, which pre-dated the unsuccessful revolution. While James Craig famously told Stormont that ‘All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State’, he merely echoed remarks made in 1906, when he claimed to be ‘an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards’.ii Orangeism underpinned the unionist campaign against home rule and the subsequent consolidation of the northern government. Tyrone unionists accepted the lead provided by Belfast and élite British circles not only because they shared ideological assumptions, but also out of self-interest. A paramilitary police force, a gerrymandered electoral system, preferential economic treatment in government and private employment explained the devotion of Tyrone unionists to the Belfast regime. The Catholic civil society, which existed in parallel, harnessed many of the same social divisions. It also registered a long list of grievances against the Stormont administration. By 1923 the Catholic middle class once more coalesced around a Devlinite brand of Hibernian nationalism, arguably just as sectarian in ethos as its Orange counterpart. In Dungannon respectable nationalist businessmen and priests joined the Knights of Columbanus, and included Joe Stewart, the Devlinite urban councillor and draper.iii The gravitational pull of these sectarian forces generally succeeded in maintaining a strange equilibrium. Writing in 1939, Stewart, then a Stormont MP for East Tyrone, claimed that during elections, although the Hibernians appeared unenthusiastic, ‘young men and women with Republican tendencies were my best workers and supporters’ and ‘all the priests without exception took a leading part’. He did admit, however, that the ‘Kelly gang’ had proved a disruptive influence.iv This alluded to the Kelly family from Dungannon, who had played an active part in republican politics for generations past and would continue to do so. The parallel societies predated partition, which merely reinforced them. The Catholic, nationalist middle class and clergy carved out a niche to protect their mutual interests, acting as a check against any radical attempt to challenge the status quo. Thoroughly disgusted by their revolutionary experience, they formed a surrogate establishment, which largely rendered onto Caesar, rejecting republicanism as a viable political alternative. Alice Donnelly described the machinations of the ‘old gang’ of clergyman and Hibernian in 1924, when Mary MacSwiney electioneered for SF in Cookstown. Harbison employed ‘his whole battery’; while clerical condemnation meant that ‘even those who have sons in jail say they’d be afraid to vote’. Hibernians and priests warned that anyone who supported SF would have their names sent to the MHA and would ‘be arrested if not killed in their beds and their houses burnt out.’v SF’s poor showing in the October 1924 general election and subsequent northern elections demonstrated that republicanism was, once again, the preserve of a minority, the creed of significant numbers of the nationalist working class.vi The obstinate militarism of some though not all of those who took the republican side accelerated this eclipse. This mentality can be traced to the rejection of the perceived politically hypocrisy and self-interest apparent in the Devlinite machine. However, the subordination of politics during the emergence of SF weakened republicanism. The primacy of the trench-coated flying columns in mythology ignores the reality of guerrilla warfare. As Tyrone demonstrates without a critical mass of support within the local populace, the revolutionary, to invert Mao’s analogy, is a fish out of water. Across the majority of Ireland, the republican demand took root and facilitated guerrilla warfare, because, as the correspondent for the British left-wing Daily Herald noted, ‘the invisible Republic exists in the hearts of the men and women of Ireland and wields a moral authority which all the tanks and machine guns of King George cannot command. vii The British government had the military capacity to conquer Ireland; it lacked the ideological resources. The general desire for peace and the manner in which Collins in particular articulated the Treaty drastically reduced popular republican support. In the south other avenues were pursued, such as the electoral panel or even parliamentary attendance without taking the oath, but the British government blocked any concessions and militarized the question themselves. This militarization was apparent in the North even before the Treaty. As Charlie Daly wrote to his brother in the wake of the meeting with Dick Mulcahy on 18 January 1922, ‘it seems curious we must risk our lives for the sake of a cause that has been handed over to the enemy. Of course the Northerners must fight for their existence under whatever government is in power.’viii Therefore, the two predominant blocs in Tyrone society before 1912 still held sway at the end of the period. Nevertheless, much had changed. Before 1912 Ireland was a unitary component of the United Kingdom. By 1923 the island contained two parliaments. The Dublin parliament ruled twenty-six counties as a British dominion with powers approaching an independent state. In May 1922 Lloyd George highlighted that unlike the Free State, the NI was not a dominion.ix Nonetheless, the six-county administration controlled internal affairs, most significantly, security matters, which underpinned wholesale discrimination against the sizeable nationalist minority. This study has been chiefly concerned with the cause of partition, and why Tyrone, with its nationalist majority, finished the period on the northern, unionist side of the border. Partition, in its final form, relied primarily on the actions of the British state, whether unilaterally through the GOIA or, in the case of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in concert with the majority element of the revolutionary Dáil. SF represented a nationalist, bourgeois revolution, not dissimilar to numerous independence struggles across the globe in the twentieth-century. Its ideology, as understood in its founding document, the 1916 Proclamation, was both secular and republican. It also spoke of social equality and laid the blame for the schism within the nation at the door of British imperialism. Nevertheless, many who sheltered under the SF umbrella were socially conservative and lukewarm on the republic, including Arthur Griffith himself. Significantly, the first attempt to implement the SF policy ended in acrimony before the 1910 elections, when the IRB criticized Griffith’s monarchism and attempted rapprochement with the Healyite AFIL.x The Anglo-Irish Treaty constituted the foundation document of the Irish counter-revolution, for it consummated the Healyite-Griffithite alliance. The Healyites eventually dominated Tyrone separatism, as they did the new Free State, after the purge of ‘revolutionaries, Irish-Irelanders and most especially the militarist- republicans’ from the government.xi Tim Healy, the first southern Governor General, remarked that SF ‘won in three years what we did not win in forty … in broad outline, they have got what was denied us by Gladstone, Asquith and Bannerman’.xii His nephew, Kevin O’Higgins, the dominant member of the Free State cabinet after August 1922, boasted how ‘we were the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’.xiii Clearly, SF achieved a level of southern autonomy unimaginable, or even unappealing, to the IPP. Nevertheless, the revolution also reinvigorated a wider republican demand, which resonated in Tyrone long after the period of study and to which even Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government had to pay lip service. Yet an examination of Free State policy on two key issues relevant to Tyrone, internment and the Boundary Commission, demonstrates Treatyite shortcomings. The Free State government had proposed non-recognition in the North, provided, and then withdrew, financial support to national schoolteachers, and let several hundred internees rot on the Argenta. Yet, their entire strategy since June 1922 had recognised the northern administration.xiv Nonetheless, many Free State supporters in Tyrone recognized the obvious inconsistency of this

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