A History of Modern Ireland 1800-1969

ireiana Edward Norman I Edward Norman A History of Modem Ireland 1800-1969 Advisory Editor J. H. Plumb PENGUIN BOOKS 1971 Contents Preface to the Pelican Edition 7 1. Irish Questions and English Answers 9 2. The Union 29 3. O'Connell and Radicalism 53 4. Radicalism and Reform 76 5. The Genesis of Modern Irish Nationalism 108 6. Experiment and Rebellion 138 7. The Failure of the Tiberal Alliance 170 8. Parnellism 196 9. Consolidation and Dissent 221 10. The Revolution 254 11. The Divided Nation 289 Note on Further Reading 315 Index 323 Pelican Books A History of Modern Ireland 1800-1969 Edward Norman is lecturer in modern British constitutional and ecclesiastical history at the University of Cambridge, Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a Church of England clergyman and an assistant chaplain to a hospital. His publications include a book on religion in America and Canada, The Conscience of the State in North America, The Early Development of Irish Society, Anti-Catholicism in 'Victorian England and The Catholic Church and Ireland. Edward Norman also contributes articles on religious topics to the Spectator. Preface to the Pelican Edition This book is intended as an introduction to the political history of Ireland in modern times. It was commissioned - and most of it was actually written - before the present disturbances fell upon the country. It was unfortunate that its publication in 1971 coincided with a moment of extreme controversy, be¬ cause it was intended to provide a cool look at the unhappy divisions of Ireland. Instead of assuming the structure of interpretation imposed by writers soaked in Irish national feeling, or dependent upon them, the book tried to consider Ireland’s political development as a part of the general evolu¬ tion of British politics in the last two hundred years. To that extent it is a ‘British’ view of the ‘Irish Question’. It was not, however, intended to be a view especially in sympathy with ‘ British ’ policies, although those policies receive a reappraisal here. There has never, in fact, been a consistent British view of Irish political questions, and as often as not politicians at Westminster have tended to borrow the analysis of Ireland’s problems suggested by Irish polemicism. When the book was published it elicited a hostile reception from the Irish press. The Dublin Sunday Independent remarked that parts of it read Tike a Black-and-Tan handout’; the Irish Times, on the other hand, wrote that it was Tike a Sunday newspaper reporter hotting up an otherwise dull story’. The Irish Press, another Dublin paper, added that the author was the sort of person liable to discount the sufferings of the Jews at Dachau or elsewhere as ‘figments of the imagination’. Several papers were good enough to hope that after this aberration the author might return to the excellence of his earlier books about Ireland - evidently forgetting that those earlier works had, in their day, been received with equal hostility, and by the same newspapers. In Ireland time occasionally softens the memory; more often, alas, it does not. The author still hopes that some will find this book a useful introduction; the Irish are too great a people not to be able to bear with an external view of their history. Peterhouse, 1972 Edward Norman i. Irish Questions and English Answers It is an extraordinary and unhappy circumstance that the history of Ireland has been conceived as a series of dualisms. Englishmen have often supposed it to be a lamentable chronicle of good intentions frustrated by an ungovernable and ungrate¬ ful people; in Ireland, on the contrary, a review of the past has only too readily suggested an unceasing catalogue of usurpation and oppression. But it is through the screen pro¬ vided by Irishmen themselves, now secure in national inde¬ pendence, that most historical analysis is received. As Sir Charles Gavan Duffy wisely remarked in 1883, his thoughts extending across half a century of political upheaval in which he had himself taken no small part, ‘whenever important interests have been in conflict and one has succumbed, the facts are certain to be misjudged by the next generation, who commonly hear only the story of the successful competitor.’ The history of modern Ireland has primarily been written in terms of the politics of nationalism. It is a history of agitation. The perspective, as a result, is often wrongly drawn; for Ireland has another history as well. While national poli¬ ticians exhausted their energies - which were slow to exhaust - in accumulating the evidences of Ireland’s misgovernment, a new Ireland was in fact being created. The machinery of 9 modern government and social improvement gave expression, often at first imperceptibly, to something which the nationalists’ exposition of Irish history leaves substantially unexplained. Irish nationalists have so unquestioningly resorted to history in order to reveal what to them has seemed the obvious justification of their beliefs that any critical analysis of Ireland in modem times is obliged to make their assumptions a starting point. But a case which is dependent upon historical interpretation, of course, can be tested by historical analysis. And of that there has been a generous surplus. Irishmen are obsessed by history; as John O’Leary, the Fenian apologist whom Yeats actually honoured with lines of verse, once wrote: ‘Most events of the present day have their ultimate roots in the far-away past; most Irish ones being more or less easily traced to the Norman Conquest of Ireland, and by a little ingenuity led back to St Patrick, or even to the Flood.’ Irish confidence in historical evidence is such that it has apparently provided the sole justification, on some notable occasions, for some pretty extreme political action. Thomas Meagher told the judges at his trial for treason-felony in 1848 that ‘the history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it.’ Lloyd George, himself no stranger to political tautology, found himself outclassed by de Valera in the summer of 1921 when they met in London to discuss an Irish peace settlement. ‘ When I tried to bring him down to the present day, back he went to Cromwell again,’ he recorded afterwards; ‘it reminded me of a circus roundabout when I was a boy.’ So mystifying was this simple reduction of Ireland’s problems to a historical formula that nineteenth-century observers ventured to imagine some defect in Irish character. The matter is an important one, for most Englishmen assumed a racial difference at the very centre of their analysis of the Irish question, just as most Irishmen attributed what they liked to suppose was the bru¬ tality of England to the Saxon blood of her inhabitants. There 10 was a ‘stage’ Englishman as well as a ‘stage’ Irishman. Thomas Davis, the theorist of Young Ireland nationalism in the 1840s, though he persistently argued for racial cooperation, still assumed the priority of racial distinctions and could not resist an occasional relapse into the normal culture of his countrymen: ‘ The Saxon plots a vice where the Celt meditates a compliment; and when he falls into habitual immorality he wallows like a hog in the sty of his own moral filth.’ There speaks the authentic voice of Irish nationalism. Even the most sympathetic external observers found an explanation of the country’s ills in the Irish character. ‘The sensuous and excitable nature of the Irish prevents them from undertaking tasks which require sober judgement and tenacity of purpose,’ wrote Engels in 1844; ‘obviously such a people are not able to engage in industry as it is carried on today.’ There were, however, already environmentalists stuffed full of reasons for Irish underdevelopment which, to the modern conscience, sound more agreeable. Thus Goldwin Smith, in Irish History and Irish Character, a series of Oxford lectures published in 1861: ‘If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent depravity or even any inherent weakness.’ But it is the people of Ireland who are themselves the most aware of national characteristics, and who secure for them a priority which might otherwise have diminished. Synge was accused of a libel on the Irish character when the Playboy of the Western World was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. Yet the dialogue of his characters was carefully copied down by the playwright from real conversations overheard among his servants. The Irish, in the end, are their own most cruel detractors. ‘If it rained soup from heaven,’ Brendan Behan once remarked, ‘they’d be rushing out with forks.’ The Irish, of course, are in reality like any other people - 11 subject to circumstance. Most of the characteristics which nineteenth-century commentary found less than attractive were in fact ones which could have described any peasant society. The proof of this was actually provided during the century. Emigration dispersed the Irish people across the world, and in their new lands they revealed new qualities. Emigration in significant quantity had actually begun at the end of the eighteenth, century, and by the end of the nineteenth there were 5 million Irishmen living outside the British Isles. Over three quarters of these were in the United States, the rest in Canada and Australia. The Irish population of England, Wales, and Scotland must, in addition, have considerably exceeded a million by the end of the century. Three prime ministers - Canning, Wellington, and Palmerston - were Irishmen. The diaspora has given the world some distinguished fighting men. Bernardo O’Higgins, the national hero of Chile, was the son of an Irishman who was Spanish governor of the colony.

Load more