Robin Bury Blog, Thursday, 20 December 2012

Olivia O’Leary gave one of her regular thoughtful talks on RTE Radio 1 a few weeks ago. She is, it appears, from a quite strong nationalist background. She was perplexed that Irish women had not been more demonstrative following the unnecessary death of Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital. She was persuaded that their relative silence was caused by centuries of ‘colonial’ rule, or the hangover from ‘colonial’ times.

She would not be alone in this. Prionnsias MacAonghusa in 1902 thought somewhat condescendingly of his fellow countrymen, following their acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty, that “The mind of the slave, of the hireling, and the vagabond is still fairly dominant in Ireland” concluding “it does not matter if Irish people or foreigners are running the state”. There would be those today who could take up this cry: the troika now run the state and heaven knows where they will take us, particularly as we have indicated we may have to default on our due payment in March 2013.

The historian, Stephen Howe, in his survey of Ireland in an imperialist context (Ireland and Empire, Colonial legacies in Irish history and culture, Oxford, 2000) comments on such views saying, “All this suggests how, in important spheres of discourse in and about Ireland … the concept of colonialism has been so inflated as virtually to be emptied of meaning”.

What did Irish patriots say about Ireland being a colony of Britain in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries? Well, not what O’Leary and MacAonghusa might have thought. During the Boer War, Michael Davitt thought the blacks in South Africa had no rights, confining his sympathy for the Africaners, as Howe tells us. Douglas Hyde, looking at the Red Indians, argued that the Irish could not be compared to “a savage tribe”. Arthur Griffith thought Ireland could not be compared to Britain’s non-European subjects and, more tellingly, Erskine Childers thought “Ireland is no colony. She has no claim based on colonial rights”. He argued that separation was nothing to do with being governed as a ‘colony’ but rather should be judged on its own merits within the context of the peoples of the two islands who were multi-national and multi-racial and deeply interwoven over centuries. He advocated there should be a dual monarchy, as in Austria-Hungary.

Ireland had some 86 MPs in Westminster during most of the nineteenth century. It was part of a federation. Yes, British troops were stationed in Ireland but arguably to prevent the minor rebellions that occurred in the nineteenth century. The concept of Ireland being a colony is recent and is post-independence, promoted by some in the Derry/Londonderry Field Day group such as Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin and Declan Kiberd. They see Northern Ireland in particular in a colonial context. But in historical European terms it is arguable that almost all parts of Europe were invaded and colonized. Did not the Celts colonize Ireland? As Howe says, “All European history is colonial history”. Ireland has no monopoly here, no call for blaming the Normans, the new English, the Cromwellians and Williamites for creating the “mind of the slave”. This thinking has more to do with the myths created by Irish nationalism than reality. It surely serves anglophobia well. Time to move on.

More next time on why violence in 1916 onwards led to what Tom Garvin has described as a nation Preventing the Future and may not have been in Ireland’s best interests.

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Robin Bury Blog, Monday, 10 December, 2012

There is much commotion about celebrating various historical milestones now and in coming years. We have had the Ulster Covenant marked in Dublin and Belfast, an event that encouraged, if not ensured, the partition of Ireland. If in doubt, read David Fitzpatrick’s Solitary and Wild: The salvation of Ireland, a biography of Frederick MacNeice, father of poet Louis MacNeice and bishop of Down and Connor. He opposed the signing of the Covenant thinking it would divide Irish people and lead to violence and even civil war. He wanted a federal Ireland in the UK with parliaments in Dublin and Belfast and a Council of Ireland. A Redmondite style solution where there was a paper, not a bullet trail. So why celebrate the signing of the Covenant especially when perhaps a third of Ulster Protestants did not sign it? I suppose next Ulster Protestants will celebrate the landing of 35,000 rifles in Larne in 1914 to arm the UVF. More threatened violence, more tribal and religious hatred. MacNeice was right.

In the South, I suppose we will be asked to mark the triumph of Sinn Fein in 1918 when a third of the electorate did not vote, there was widespread impersonation and intimidation and the victorious Sinn Fein was unable to control the 1920–21 IRA campaign of violence directed against Irish Catholic policemen. This guerrilla war was led by the Sinn Fein Minister of Finance, while also at the heart of the IRA campaign as director of organisation and intelligence. In fact, the dual role of Michael Collins, part time Minister of Finance and part time organiser of the murder of British intelligence officers and hundreds of Irish policemen, shows the hand in glove nature of Irish politics at that time, politics as violence and as democracy. A two headed hydra bringing the South to a civil war and the enforced emigration of some 35,000 Protestants. Let us not forget that our present Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has a portrait of Michael Collins over his desk, a man who was hardly an exemplar of democratic principles.

I will be out of the country in 2016. I will not be celebrating. We have been over and over this ground. Yet Irish historians, save for Ruth Dudley-Edwards and Father Shaw S.J., seem reluctant to take sides. One commentator, not a historian, said if the British had not shot the leaders, they would be a footnote in Irish history. Probably even condemned and ridiculed. Why? They were a secretive minority within a minority, a group of self-appointed men (well there were two women, Countess Markievicz, a woman who turned on her class from a posh mansion in the west and Maud Gonne, another extremist, this time English, wife of MacBride who beat her up, yet tirelessly she mourned his death, draped in mourning weeds for years after his execution).

After the 1916 rebellion had been put down, about 250 innocent Irish men, women and children lay dead. For what? Home Rule was on the statute books, Irish Catholics owned the land of southern Ireland, controlled local government, enjoyed a free press, freedom of religion and free universal education. So what were Pearse, a cross-dresser, probable paedophile (see Tanner’s Ireland’s Holy Wars) and Clarke, MacBride, Connolly and the rest of the blood sacrifice men up to? Ireland was ‘free’ in a democratic, meaningful way, as part of a federal UK, multi-racial and multi-national. Today it is a stricken country.

Let us now look over the ocean to Canada. There to this day an Irishman, D’Arcy McGee, is celebrated. Why? Well he brilliantly, as a Catholic politician, played a major role in bringing the provinces of Canada together in a confederation in 1867 … for all about this read Thomas D’Arcy McGee by David Wilson. McGee had been a Fenian, a physical force man. He put all that behind him in Canada. He grew up and wanted an inclusive Canada, willing to compromise and avoid ethno-religious strife. Fenians from the USA murdered him in Ottawa in 1868 for being a man of decency and tolerance, abhorring violence.

Where is our equivalent of D’Arcy McGee to celebrate in 1914, 1916 and 1918?

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By Brian Walker

Irish Times, Opinion –­ Monday, March 12, 2012

Recently the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Michael Jackson, warned that Church of Ireland primary schools are “under a creeping threat”. This follows comments last October by Ian Coombes, headmaster of Kilkenny College, that the Protestant secondary school section faces severe problems.

The situation of southern Protestants is obviously of prime interest for the people of the Republic. Less obviously, but very significantly, their position is also of interest to people in the North, especially members of the Protestant and unionist community.

In 1995, Dr John Dunlop, former moderator of the Presbyterian church in Ireland, wrote: “More than any other single factor, the observed decline in the Protestant population in the Republic has confirmed northern Protestants in their prejudices and fears.”

> Read more

Prof Brian Walker is a member of the school of politics at Queen’s University Belfast. His book A Political History of the Two Irelands: From Partition to Peace has just been published.

Photo: Queen’s University of Belfast, Centre for Irish Politics