Daniel Hannan writes:
Like most British people, I love Ireland. It’s a separate country, but it’s not really foreign. The Irish talk as we talk, dress as we dress, eat as we eat (and, tragically, drink as we drink). We watch the same television programmes, follow the same football teams, shop at the same chains. We share that half-humorous, half-cynical mode of conversation that sets us apart even from other Anglosphere nations.
In fact, Britain and Ireland are joined by pretty much everything except politics: history and geography, habit and outlook, commerce and settlement, blood and speech. It’s significant that you usually hear Irish words in the context of some state office or government function: while our people have carried on their custom of intermarriage and intermixture, the two governments have remained stubbornly apart.
Perhaps it was inevitable, at least at first. The early Irish leaders were, if not always anti-British, at least determined to flaunt their separateness by distancing themselves from whatever Britain was doing (though, during the Second World War, many Irish citizens felt differently, and rushed to enlist in the British Army, winning 780 decorations including seven Victoria Crosses). I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Irish politicians were initially attracted to the EU partly because the Brits disliked it – though it wasn’t long before, like all politicians, they also acquired a personal stake in the system.
Yet, almost overnight, the old antagonisms have been wiped away. The euro crisis pushed the two kindred nations together, and the Queen’s visit sealed their alliance. At dinner in Dublin at the weekend, most of the people I spoke to started from the premise that the EU was a disaster, and that Britain and Ireland should forge a closer relationship within the Anglosphere. One questioner asked about joining sterling, another about forging a joint foreign policy. A man who described himself as a lifelong republican wondered whether, if Alex Salmond succeeded in securing a ‘devo max’ settlement, it might not become the basis of a confederation throughout the British Isles.
True, it wasn’t a representative audience, being largely made up of libertarians and conservatives. But the changed attitude can be felt everywhere. When Mark Reckless, the Tory grandson of a Fianna Fáil TD, commissioned an opinion poll in the Republic, he found that 43 per cent of Sinn Féin voters wanted to swap the euro for the pound. Almost every day brings some new rapprochement. While I was in Dublin, the government announced its plans to rehabilitate the 5,000 men who had deserted the Irish armed forces in order to fight for Britain in the Second World War.
Whenever I read the history of Britain’s relations with Ireland, I want to weep at the missed opportunities. Almost any of the Liberal Home Rule Bills could have averted partition, and the horrors that followed. Even as late as 1916, the blood-dimmed tide might have been stopped up. Had the government not responded with such unconscionable brutality, the Easter Rising might now be remembered as a slightly opéra bouffe episode, backed only by a few fanatics: more Southern Irish Catholics died in British uniform on the first day of the Somme offensive than participated in it. I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine Ireland having evolved into a self-governing Dominion in the way that, say, New Zealand did.
‘Was it needless death after all?’ asked Yeats. Probably. But how last-century it all now seems. Ireland has become Britain's closest ally in the EU. All changed, changed utterly.
Let this stand as a warning to the Scots. The EU - the making of Scottish Nationalism, when you compare where it was 40 years ago with where it is today - will let you have all the trappings of statehood. Provided that you are prepared to have your Budget debated on the floor of the Bundestag before your own Cabinet has been made aware of its contents. You have more self-government now that you could possibly dream of as a small member of the EU. You had before devolution.
And then there is the matter of the Scottish Regiments. The Irish did not keep the Irish Regiments. Nor have Irishmen - Southern, Catholic Irishmen - ever stopped joining them because they were still part of the British Army. On the contrary, they carried the Queen Mother's coffin, and last year they were the first to greet their newly married Colonel in his red coat.
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What he fails to mention is that the IRA was co-founded by Captain Jack White DSO, that one of Ireland's most noted nationalists was Robert Erskine Childers DSC or Michael Collins' Aide de Campe was Emmett Dalton MC.
ReplyDeleteWhy did such men turn on the British state?
It is true that the Irish state did not take over the UK Irish regiments most of whom were disbanded at a ceremony at Windsor Castle. But then it was the companies of the IRA which took over as the army of the new state - unfortunately one half did not think the state legitimate whilst the other half did. Hence the civil war with pro-treaty IRA becoming the Free State Army and the anti-Treaty becoming the Irregulars.
UK government demanded the continuance of recruiting rights as part of the independence deal. In return those who serve in any person who serves in a foreign army (whilst UK or the Foreign Legion) is automatically barred from serving in the Irish one.
Why would he want to? In order to do what, exactly? The same would apply in Scotland, which has militaria as a part of mainstream culture far more than in England.
ReplyDeleteFiji is technically not in the Commonwealth (at least pending the probable restoration of democracy by the restoration of the monarchy), but the Fijians continue to join the British Army in very healthy numbers. And at least the Fijian Army stages coups. What would a Scottish Army do? About as much as the Irish Army does.
In which case, why join it? No one would. They would carry on joining the very regiments in which their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers had served. Just as the Irish have always done.
The Aberdonian is right in his main point but the UK does not retain recruitment rights in Ireland. Foreign governments are not allowed to recruit in Ireland.
ReplyDeleteThen what does it tell you, that the British Army recruits healthily there?
ReplyDeleteHow many Irish citizens from the Republic joined the British Army last year? About 10, wasn't it?
ReplyDeleteClearly enough to annoy you.
ReplyDeleteNot at all. If certain Irishmen are sufficiently Anglophile to the point that they want to die for their 'Mother Country' (would that every West Brit felt so inclined!) I'm more than happy to let them do so.
ReplyDeleteThe whole of this archipelago is that Motherland, the red saltire on her Flag never having been any word of a lie.
ReplyDeleteThe Irish were vigorous participants in British imperialism, and especially in its military aspects. It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth.
When he visited Ireland, Blessed John Paul the Great condemned “the use of force by Irishmen, overwhelmingly Catholic Irishmen, against the continuing British presence”. Happy Saint Bridget’s Day.
You can keep the St Patrick's Cross (actually the Geraldine arms) on the Union Flag. We don't miss it. As St Patrick isn't a martyr, it's laughably stupid to represent him with a Cross anyway.
ReplyDelete"It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth."
The main Irish missionary movement in modern times begins with the foundation of the Maynooth Mission to China in 1916. One of its founders was inspired by the 1916 Rising and the way in which 'those young boys are prepared to die for Ireland' (see 'On God's Mission' RTÉ documentary, March, 2010), comparing their sacrifice for Ireland's national liberty with the sacrifice of the missionary for the faith.
Irish Catholic settlers in the colonies were hardly distinguished for their loyalism. Even today the Irish descended constituency in Australia is a bastion of republican sentiment.
I agree with the then Bishop of Limerick, Thomas O'Dwyer, who in 1916 responded to attacks on Irish emigrants in Liverpool (travelling to America) with the words: "Their crime is that they are not ready to die for England. Why should they? What have they or their forbears got from England that they should die for? It is England’s war, not Irelands."
"Blessed John Paul the Great condemned “the use of force by Irishmen, overwhelmingly Catholic Irishmen, against the continuing British presence”."
Can you give a source for this? I googled it and all I got was your blog and a comment you made at the Spectator.
It is in my next book, out by the end of this month or no one will be more annoyed than I.
ReplyDeleteYours is a very odd traditional Catholicism, if it would rather have a tricolour than a saltire. Not that there is anything very English about Saint George’s Flag, either. It was confined to ecclesiastical use until a football tournament in 1990 and it belongs at least as much to, among many other places, several strongly football-playing parts of Spain and Italy.
I am not only talking about organised missionary activity, and in any case, during the 1798 Rebellion, the staff and students of Maynooth sent a Declaration of Loyalty to the King. That Royal College of Saint Patrick would not have existed without the patronage to which its name bore witness, the only means whereby the formation of Catholic priests was possible on Irish soil. The tiny number of priests who adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them “the very faeces of the Church”.
It was the Orange Lodges that opposed the Act of Union of 1800, the best thing that ever happened to Ireland, which incorporated one of the most backward countries in Europe into what became in the nineteenth century the most advanced country in the world, an advance not least by the efforts of Irish Catholic labourers throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
The consequent improvements in Ireland’s agriculture, industry, education, infrastructure, welfare provision, honest and responsible administration, and so on, were almost incalculable, and enjoyed the strongest possible support of the Catholic Church, without which many, most or even all of them could not have happened, especially at local level.
What about the Potato Famine? Well, what about it? It was a natural disaster, which would have happened anyway. It was not as if Queen Victoria had poisoned the potatoes. But trying to make that point can be like trying to explain to the blight-wavers that they must be descended from survivors rather than exclusively from victims, a point which it can be almost as difficult to make in relation to the Holocaust, suggesting that that will be just as difficult when the 1940s are as distant as the 1840s are today.
Furthermore, what does anyone imagine to have been the conditions of the rural poor in England, Scotland or Wales in the 1840s? That is the context in which it is necessary to assess the enormous efforts made by Westminster, in partnership with the Church, to relieve the Famine, efforts of which an Ireland outside the Union could not have dreamt.
And it must be repeated that an Ireland outside the Union would still have had to have dealt with exactly the same situation.
David if it's in your new book then you should be able to supply it now. I've checked the Irish newspapers and that quote is not reported anywhere. Forgive me if I conclude that you made it up.
ReplyDeleteYour whole comment is cut and paste. And also full of errors. For instance you claim "the bishops" (plural) condemned priests who participated in the 1798 rebellion as 'the very faeces of the Church' when in fact that was one bishop (singular) - James Caulfield.
Ireland didn't just suddenly come under the British yoke after the Union. Grattan's Parliament was never really anything more than the Parliament of an English colony, and its composition was of course exclusively Protestant. As the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the Earl of Clare, noted in a speech in the Irish Parliament on 10th February 1800 (ie. *before* the Act of Union): "The whole power and property of (Ireland) has been conferred by successive monarchs of England upon an English colony, composed of three sets of English adventurers who poured into this country at the termination of three successive rebellions. Confiscation is their common title; and from their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation."
Moreover most of the surviving veterans of the 1798 rebellion welcomed the Act of Union.
If you want a relevant modern statement by the bishops on Irish separatism check out this statement that they issued on the War of Independence at their general meeting in 1920. The bishops claim: "Our people were a great Christian nation when pagan chaos reigned across the Channel. They will remain, please God, a great Christian nation when the new paganism, that now prevails there, has run its evil course. Our relations with England have been always a terrible misfortune for us." Or this equally anti-British statement during the Second World War by the northern hierarchy.
The Northern hierarchy, I can believe it. But Northern Nationalists are not normal. They are no more typically Irish than it is typically British to march through the streets behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat.
ReplyDeleteA United Ireland would find it vastly more difficult to assimilate Northern Nationalists than to assimilate Unionists. In any case, the last Life and Times Survey found that only 33 per cent of Northern Catholics wanted a United Ireland, while 52 per cent positively wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom.
However sincerely meant "Isle of Saints and Scholars" stuff might ever be, it is still rubbish. Just read over the statement that you have reproduced. It is beyond ridiculous. A recurring feature of popular Irish historiography.
In fact, Ireland has never had a Catholic culture or intelligentsia (the latter being very much an English thing), merely high levels of Sunday Mass attendance in the twentieth century. But that was as far as it went, and even that is gone now, with proportionately far more Catholics still practising in England than in Ireland.
The Irish Church, and Her Daughters on other shores until alarmingly recently if not to this day, have very largely been peasant-led, and anti-intellectual all the way up to the very top. Hence silly statements such as the one that you quote.
But you do seem to be seeing the point. To the Orangemen, the Union meant Catholic Emancipation, and indeed the necessary Unionist majority in the former Irish Parliament was secured on that very basis, by Protestant Emancipationists who secured the votes of the Catholic commercial class by promising to deliver the Union that would deliver to those voters the right to sit in Parliament. Those voters delivered that majority, that majority delivered the Union, and the Union delivered Catholic Emancipation, which the old Irish Parliament would simply never have countenanced.
ReplyDeleteProtestant pioneers are sometimes produced by Republicans as a sort of trump card. But those believed their own Protestant, “Saxon” nation to be the only nation, as such and with all national rights accordingly, on the Irish island. They had no more interest in or regard for Gaels or Catholics than their contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, had either for the “Indians not taxed” (in a context of “no taxation without representation”, and therefore also of the reverse) or for his own slaves.
They viewed those other inhabitants of Ireland as anti-monarchist opinion has regarded the Australian Aborigines from the Victorian Period to the present day. As Hendrik Verwoerd regarded the non-white peoples of South Africa. As Ian Smith regarded the Mashona and the Matabele. As Canadian politicians and Margaret Thatcher regarded Canada’s Aboriginal peoples when they legislated to nullify the British Crown’s treaty obligations towards those peoples. As those who would weaken New Zealand’s bonds to the Crown regard the Crown’s Maori partners under the Treaty of Waitangi. And as Golda Meir regarded the Palestinians when she denied that they existed at all, a view still widely and deeply held.
Such notions have been ridiculous when viewed from east of the Irish Sea at least since Dr Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But when the Stormont Parliament and its supporters opposed integration because integration meant Civil Rights, then they were in no way out of keeping with the anti-Unionist thinking of their ancestors.
In the meantime, separatist leaders as late as the 1870s had seized on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, with all its implications for the system of tithes, as a nullifying breach of the Act of Union. However, that the only Established Church in Ireland’s history was an Anglican one, however few people might have been in it, is an important example of what is still the utter Englishness of numerous Irish institutions, created by or as a result of the Act of Union. Ireland is an English-speaking country with a Common Law system, the most English place in the world outside England herself.