The Union: Last Hope of Catholic Ireland

Writing in the Mail on Sunday last week, Peter Hitchens suggested that the only thing those concerned could now do was work to preserve what they could of Protestant Ireland following Northern Ireland’s incorporation into the Irish Republic at Easter 2016. But that incorporation would be at least as much of a threat to what remains of Catholic Ireland, which now hardly exists outside the United Kingdom.

A Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome. Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against Home Rule, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence and its strong anti-clerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.

Jean Buridan’s theory of princely absolutism, held by the Stuarts and their anti-Papal Bourbon cousins, was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ, subsequently the inspiration for all three great British political movements. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end.

By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment. These are very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, especially via Diaspora Irish participation in the Labour Movement.

Such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom. Even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support. She who led the assault on these things remains a Unionist hate figure, since the Anglo-Irish Agreement is an integral part of any Thatcherism honestly defined, like the Single European Act, the ERM, and the decadent social libertinism inseparable from decadent economic libertinism.

Only an industrial or post-industrial economy, not one built on the sands of EU farm subsidies and film-making, can make provision such as existed before Thatcher. A "United Ireland" (such as has never existed outside the United Kingdom) would exclude therefrom people who would otherwise participate in it.

Northern Ireland has both a large middle class and a large working class, like the rest of the United Kingdom, but unlike the Irish Republic. Gaelic-Irish Catholics are to be found in large numbers in both. Many middle and working-class people in Great Britain are ethnically Gaelic-Irish, devoutly Catholic, or both. At least one such sits in the British Cabinet. Ruth Kelly was born in Northern Ireland, and her four children all have unmistakably Gaelic-Irish names.

Middle-class expansion since the Second World War, like the civilised intellectual and cultural life of the pre-Thatcher working class, was in no small measure due to the Catholic schools. The only way to maintain the Catholic school system in Northern Ireland is to keep Northern Ireland within the Union.

For each of this Kingdom’s parts contains a Catholic intelligentsia, whereas the Irish Republic’s is the most tribally anti-Catholic in the world. There are precious few Mass-going, and no ideologically Catholic, politicians, journalists, radio or television producers, or other public intellectuals there. Rather, the memories of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are venerated. Anyone who objects to even the most extreme and shameless decadence is accused of wishing to "return" to "the bad, old, repressive Ireland".

Certainly, no Opus Dei member could possibly sit in the Republic’s Cabinet. The Republic’s Catholic schools, among much else, are doomed. But then, with complete theological illiteracy, the mere existence of the Irish Republic has always been popularly regarded there as expression enough of Catholicism, regardless of anything that that Republic did or did not do, and regardless of anything that might or might go on there. This is Nationalism masquerading as Catholicism, Nationalism instead of Catholicism. In a word, it is idolatry.

So the Catholic case is for the Union. Look at the Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist votes in largely or entirely Catholic wards. Even Ian Paisley’s huge personal vote could not happen without Catholic support. With no corresponding Nationalist vote in Protestant wards, the Union, simply as such, is manifestly the majority will of both communities. As for Paisley’s theological opinions, the definitive Catholic answers to them have been available for centuries.

And the all-Ireland case is for the Union. As is appreciated in the Irish Republic, what is now Northern Ireland has been profoundly different from the rest of the island, but very like Great Britain, since long before any prospect of partition. That is precisely what necessitated partition. The Irish Republic does not want, and could not sustain, the incorporation of Northern Ireland.

Bloody Sunday could not have happened in (at that time) totally integrated Plymouth, Aberdeen or Swansea, because anything like it in an English, Scottish or Welsh city would have brought down the government of the day.

Furthermore, the grievances giving rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the first place would never have arisen under total integration. That Movement was explicitly for equal British citizenship, not for a "United Ireland". And it identified education, health care, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights.

It is total integration that would ultimately be in the interests of all. That includes the Catholics of Northern Ireland. And that includes the Sinn Féin constituency, as that party has now acknowledged by deciding to support the Police and the justice system both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic as presently constituted, thus recognising those two states as the permanent reality.

Following that decision, and following an election campaign largely about water rates rather than the constitutional question, the integrationist case is now completely unanswerable.