Tuesday 24 August 2010

Whitelaw Whitewash?

I suppose so. But if it had been up to him and Mick McGahey, then the miners' strike would have been resolved. Alas, they had to answer to Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill respectively. Alas for them. And alas for everyone else.

Speaking of Thatcher, she was a Cabinet Minister while this was going on, just as she was when European Community law was being made supreme over that of the United Kingdom, when our historic fishing rights were being signed away, when the only British Government ever seriously to consider doing so was coming within hours of withdrawal from Northern Ireland, when the ancient counties were being abolished, when schemes for Scottish and Welsh devolution were being devised, and when she herself was closing so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, all under a Prime Minister who in his earlier career had laid waste to small and family business by abolishing Resale Price Maintenance.

And what of this strange, strange case? However much the man at the centre of it would have been horrified by the fact, it illustrates the long and very friendly partnership beween the Catholic Church and the British State in Ireland. 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 its strong anticlerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland's two biggest problems.

In reality, those two biggest problems are the abiding legacies of the two main streams feeding into Irish separatism. The Orange Lodges 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. 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.

But 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.

Protestant 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 and Catholics than their contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, had either for the "Indians not taxed" 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, 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 Gladstone years 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.

The other main stream feeding into Irish separatism arose out of the urban Catholic bourgeoisie that the Union had so greatly expanded and entrenched. But it was largely directed from outside Ireland, and very often from thousands of miles away. It was, and is, the wannabe leprechaun pretensions of those who, if they had ever seen what they saw as the pure Gaelic folk-culture at all, had only ever done so from their carriage windows, so that they had no understanding whatever of people whose circumstances compelled them to live like that, people who warmly welcomed the drastic elevation of their condition by the alliance of Throne and Altar, however many tears that may have brought to the eyes of those whose wholly detached world had by then passed from Jacobinism to Romanticism, and who for the most part did not live in Ireland.

When those fantasists seized their moment during the international distractions of 1916, almost no one in Ireland had ever even heard of them, and barely any more people took them remotely seriously. By the time that the Home Rule legislation, with its built in delay until after the War, actually came into effect, then even the "official" reasons given for it by its proponents no longer applied.

Tendencies very much like both of these, and no less pernicious than either, are now apparent in the Nationalist nomenklatura of Scotland, in Wales's ruling oligarchy of those whose use of Welsh as a cordon sanitaire in English-speaking areas expresses their disdain for the Welsh-speaking and English-speaking common herds alike, and in the mounting clamour for an independent or heavily devolved England which in reality amounts to nothing more than the White Van Men of the South East, but bolstered from time to time by a sort of sub-Tolkien nonsense which nevertheless includes the waving of a Norman flag confined to ecclesiastical use until a football tournament in 1990.

Speaking of flags, that red saltire on the Union Flag was, and is, no word of lie. The 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.

12 comments:

  1. Fascinating post, as usual!

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  2. Next you'll be telling us that Catholicism is a religion of peace.

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  3. Anonymous, very many thanks.

    Oliver, of course it is.

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  4. Fascinating - yes.

    A load of Uncle Tom Gibberish - very definately.

    Like the way you skipped over the Famine and the fact that most Irish Protestants did not like paying the tithes either as they were not CoI but Scots-Irish Calvinists.

    Anyway you are parliamentary sovereigntist who believes Parliament can do what it likes. It did - it abolished the tithes.

    Or Queen Victoria offering £5 to help with famine relief.

    Or that George III vetoed Catholic emancipation.

    Or that it took nearly 30 years after your precious union to get Catholic emancipation.

    Next you will be whining about the disestablishment of the CoE in Wales (a pet scheme of DLG). Or the Scottish disruption.

    The voice of young Foggeyism. The new William Hague.

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  5. Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. A position no longer espoused by any political party, despite PR on both sides of the Border.

    A Northern Nationalist, probably. Very odd lot, no less peculiar than people who march behind Union Flags while wearing bowler hats. Just ask them in the Republic. They would find you far more difficult to assimilate than they would find the other side, which is why they don't want you. But then, you don't want them, either. If you did, then you would vote for the "dissident Republicans", the only people still advocating a United Ireland.

    Glad you mentioned the Famine, though. What do you think that conditions were like in England in the 1840s? That is the context in which the Famine needs to be seen. Instead, you do a Sinead O'Connor impersonation.

    So you ignore the Public Works Acts, the assistance for the development of harbour installations, the introduction of 'high farming', the landlord and tenant legislation, the land reclamation legislation, the compulsion of the Irish landlords to do more through the Poor Rate, and all the other good done by Westminster in, to and for Ireland in the 1840s.

    You do realise, don't you, that you must by definition be descended, not from the people who died in the Famine, but from the people who survived?

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  6. Paddy Pascagula is not the name of a Anglo-Irish landlord who wants the C of I to be funded by the tithes of Gaelic Catholic and Scots-Irish Presbyterians.

    It is the name of a "wannabe leprechaun" (I love that) who wants his distant relatives to carry on living in the alleged Celtic purity of rural squalor.

    Those are the two roots of Irish Nationalism. Imagine how much more social democratic the whole of Ireland would be by now if most of it had never left the United Kingdom. Imagine how much more Catholic and rural British social democracy would be if it had always included the whole of Ireland.

    Must be descended from the people who survived the Famine, not from the people who died: priceless.

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  7. As is your penultimate paragraph. Thank you very much indeed for that.

    I wonder if his definition of an Uncle Tom extends to the greater number of people from the officially neutral Free State than from Northern Ireland, where there was no conscription, who joined the British Armed Forces during the War?

    And I wonder if he imagines that the people of the Falls Road or the Bogside will ever vote themselves into a situation in which they had to pay to visit the doctor? A situation in which the people of the 26 Counties would not have found themselves since the Forties if they had never left the United Kingdom. Just as, in that case, there would never have been the 1967 Abortion Act or the 1969 Divorce Reform Act in the United Kingdom.

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  8. Maybe his Uncle Toms include the Irish Catholic labourers who turned the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into the most advanced country on earth in the century after the Union, to the tremendous benefit of Irish Catholic labourers throughout Great Britain and Ireland?

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  9. There's certainly plenty of food for thought here. At least four points do need bringing up, though.

    "You do realise, don't you, that you must by definition be descended, not from the people who died in the Famine, but from the people who survived?" is a common trope nowadays, but isn't necessarily true. It is probable that many if not most Irish people are descended from both groups. All it would take for this to be the case is for one ancestor to have been the child of someone who died in the famine.

    Regarding the question of what conditions were like in England at the time, it bears remembering that Ireland remained a net exporter of food to Britain during the Famine, and I'm fairly sure that a quarter of Britain's population didn't die or emigrate during the period.

    Your comments on how Ireland would have gained from the NHS and also shared in the 1960s divorce and abortion act if it had remained in the UK don't quite work either, I'm afraid. Most people in Ireland wanted Home Rule as late as 1916, and devolved government within the UK would have happened were it not for the War of Independence etc. British legislation of healthcare, abortion, and divorce wouldn't have had any remit in an Ireland responsible for its own internal affairs.

    For what it's worth, most people I know in Ireland, and all the major Irish political parties in the Republic, and Sinn Fein and the SDLP in Northern Ireland all advocate a united Ireland. The fact that they accept that this must be brought about by peaceful means with the consent of both communities in Northern Ireland, rather than at gunpoint, doesn't mean they don't want it. And sure, it'd be hard work. That doesn't mean they wouldn't man up to do it.

    - The Thirsty Gargoyle

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  10. You are on fire today, Tim.

    Then there were the Irish Catholics who massively predominated in numerous union branches and local Labour Parties when the Parliamentary Labour Party unanimously voted against the partition both of the United Kingdom and therefore also of the Irish Catholic ethnic group throughout these Islands, when the first Labour Government refused any independent role to the Irish Free State at the League of Nations or to countenance the issuing of passports without the words "British Subject", and when the Attlee Government became the first ever to accept the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.

    That last was opposed in Parliament only by a handful of Soviet agents and fellow-travellers. In the wider Labour Party and Movement, there was absolutely no comeback at any of these measures from the enormous Irish Catholic element. Uncle Toms? Must have been...

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  11. DL is an imperialist redneck of the high tory school of delusion. The only problem is that he is so deluded that he does not recognise that he is a high tory.

    And of course Tory is Irish for cheat.

    As for my lineage, Pascagula is a Spanish name. Remember that many a sailor from the Armada found himself marooned on this green paradise.

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  12. Most people's definition of Home Rule was what already existed: Tory and Liberal Governments alike running Ireland in close consultation with the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Easter Rising, shouted down from the streets of "the most British city in the Empire" was representative of no one but the participants.

    Without it, or without capitulation to it, the whole of Ireland would have got the NHS a generation later, and Irish votes at Westminster would have been key to sparing the whole of these Islands the abortion and divorce free-for-alls a generation after that.

    The Southern parties in favour of a United Ireland? That old chestnut? Not for decades. No one would vote for them if they were.

    Britain set up Fianna Fáil. No one else could have engineered that 1926 secession from Sinn Féin, which duly went on to hang the IRA.

    Likewise, only Britain could have engineered the 1933 merger of the Blueshirts, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, complete with a commitment to Commonwealth membership (which in those days necessitated retention of the monarchy, and a very high degree of integration in foreign policy and defence), albeit for a United Ireland as the ultimate aim. Fine Gael went on to be outmanoeuvred into declaring the 26-County Republic that neither it nor anyone else then wanted as such, but it got its own back when it came to the choice of the first President, himself an antidote to the ahistorical association of the Irish language with Nationalism.

    The Irish Labour Party has always been funded by trade unions which exist throughout these Islands and are headquartered in Britain, and in Conor Cruise O'Brien it returned to the Dáil probably the only full-blown Unionist ever to sit in it.

    In the run-up to the 2011 State Visit, at least one Fianna Fáil branch is raising funds, both for itself and for its local hurling team, by raffling tickets to meet the Queen, whom it describes simply as "the Queen".

    Sinn Féin has accepted that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland cannot be changed without the consent, not only of the majority of voters there, but also of the majority of those who define themselves by their opposition to any such change. In other words, the majority of those voting No would have to vote Yes. Since that is impossible, change is impossible. Sinn Féin has signed up to this.

    "Dissident" paramilitary activity raises the question of what we are paying for; Fianna Fáil hanged the IRA, as we had set it up to do. But no "dissident Republican" contested the 2010 General Election, and the Workers' Party failed to contest West Belfast for the first time in living memory. Northern Nationalism as a political, rather than a cultural, phenomenon is now manifestly minimal. Any statement of such aspiration is, on any objective criterion, the very last thing made by means of a vote for Sinn Féin.

    Almost never does anyone else now seem to wish to seek election on that basis, either. Those of that mind may set off bombs, or engage annually in an almost ritual example of drunken teenage rampaging. But they know that they no one would vote for them, and that quite possibly so few people would sign their nomination papers that they could not present themselves in search of votes in the first place.

    Beyond those under the combined influence of alcohol or other intoxicants and adolescent levels of testosterone, everyone now concedes, by deed even if not necessarily by word, that the Catholic, left-wing and all-Ireland cases are all for the Union. They regret only, in all three of those terms, the 1922 partition of the United Kingdom and of the Irish Catholic ethnic group throughout these Islands. So must we all.

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