One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future. Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in ... Read more...
One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future.
Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in a post-unity scenario will be extremely challenging to the complacent nationalism of the present-day Republic (where in many circles ‘unionist’ is a dirty word). But it may be the only way of bringing a significant element of unionism on board. And it is very far from the unitary state Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail have traditionally been wedded to. It seems to me to involve a constitutional system somewhere along the spectrum between federalism and confederalism, with a key continuing role for the British government. In any case, these are the kind of ultra-complex arrangements – as nuanced as anything in the Good Friday Agreement – which we need to begin to discuss in this republic.
“In fact, there appears to be zero discussion here about the crucial issue of what happens to the unionists at the end of the Union as we have known it. Instead, we in the Republic sail blithely into an unexamined future with a brainless consensus that in the end the good guys of Irish nationalism will win out over the Northern bigots and stooges of British imperialism, and then we will live together happily ever after in harmonious unity.”1
One of the extremely difficult things we may have to do is to revisit the pieties of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ period between 1916 and 1923, with its total ignoring of the unionists. This is ‘holy grail’ territory for many people in the South, to be touched at your peril. This was clear in the debate in recent weeks about the development of the General Post Office site in O’Connell Street, the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising. Aontú called it “sacred ground” and Sinn Fein insisted that the government, which is proposing mixed commercial and cultural use for the site, had “turned its face against the preservation of our revolutionary history.”
Last year saw the publication an important ‘revisionist’ book which should have made at least some of us look at the ‘revolutionary’ period with new, more critical eyes. It was Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement by Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit priest and philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago. Unfortunately it was almost completely ignored by Irish newspaper and magazine book editors and reviewers (its exorbitant price didn’t help its circulation either).
This is a very rich, dense and iconoclastic book and I can only give a flavour of it in this short blog. Murphy believes the 1998 Agreement is “potentially the most important political event in 20th century Irish history.” Potentially because it is much too early to judge whether it has actually transformed relations between unionists and nationalists (the signs after 27 years are not good). Murphy argues that: “Such transformation requires the two communities to change their interpretations of the past, including the 1912-23 period.”
He goes on to make three claims about that period: a) “the [1916] Rising and War of Independence distracted attention from the primary problem that had stalled the implementation of Home Rule for several years, namely unionist resistance; b) the nationalist resort to arms exacerbated the unionist sense of being under siege and made partition more likely and more bitter. In consequence, it seems that c) Ireland experienced both a political step forward, with the advent of self-governance north and south, and a political step backwards, with the derailing of political activity by civil conflicts and exacerbation of intercommunal division.”
The 1912-1914 Home Rule crisis meant that no longer was nationalism’s primary challenge to “wrest power from Britain” (Home Rule was on the statute book, albeit postponed until the end of the First World War), but how to relate politically to the Protestant and unionist communities “so as to get their consent to being governed mainly by Catholics.” The 1916 Proclamation wrongly dismissed unionist opposition to Home Rule as something “artificially created by the British Government”, and “the Rising amounted to a denial that the unionist challenge even existed.”
Murphy believes hindsight “enables us to say that the long-term consequences of the 1916 Rising were largely bad.” He stresses that “the 1916 leaders are not responsible for what the Provisional IRA did between 1970 and 1998, but for the disruption of the Home Rule process and exacerbating the division between unionist and nationalist Ireland…The so-called War of Independence, while formally directed against British rule, in practice was a war against other Irish people: RIC constables, constitutional nationalists and Protestants in the north.”
He goes on: “The so-called War of Independence was pointless, given that by January 1919, before it began at [the] Soloheadbeg [ambush], senior British politicians were informally letting the new majority nationalist party, Sinn Fein, know that dominion status for Southern Ireland could be on the table: just what the Treaty provided three years later.”
Thus the war “merely achieved the minor good of speeding up the process of gaining total independence from Britain, at the cost of widening the gap between the south and the north, making Irish unity more unlikely, and violently traumatising the people.”
Looking back from the perspective of the Good Friday Agreement, agreed by the leaders of the unionist, nationalist and republican communities, Murphy says the failure of both nationalists and unionists in the 1912-23 decade was “their refusal to recognise the political right of the other community to exist…The nationalist failure manifested as ignoring or dismissing the unionist reality, the unionist failure manifested as contempt for and fear of Catholics.”
He also stresses the “native versus settler dynamic” which is still a factor in Northern Ireland today. “Protestants were acutely aware of nationalists’ long memories of dispossession, and sensed the nationalist gut-conviction that they really had no right to be in Ireland. On the Catholic nationalist side, there was some willingness to tolerate their presence – on nationalist terms: if they wouldn’t agree to such terms, the attitude could be summed up as ‘the colonists could go back to where they came from.”
Too many of the new nationalist/republican leaders dismissed unionist resistance as unreal or unimportant. De Valera said in 1920 that unionist Ulster was “a thing of the mind only.” Murphy comments “it is easy to summarise Sinn Fein’s policy on unionism: it didn’t have one.” Most, if not all SF leaders, had this blinkered view of the North. Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background, was one of the few who didn’t. He criticised the fantasy of the Dail’s declaration, at its first meeting in 1919, that an all-Ireland republic existed. He called this “the beginning of a persistent campaign of make-believe and self-deception…it had become obvious that an All-Ireland Republic was utterly unattainable without the consent of the opposing Northern Protestants.”
This self-deception continued for 50 years until the outbreak of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. “From 1922 to at least 1972, the official view of successive Irish governments was that unionists had no right to refuse to be part of a united independent Ireland and that Northern Ireland ought not to exist…In the anti-partition campaign around 1950, nationalist politicians travelled the world to present their case for territorial unification to bemused governments. Haranguing the outside world while ignoring unionists achieved only one thing: it confirmed unionists’ conviction that the nationalists were besieging them.”
The official Irish government view – and, it has to be said, the overwhelming popular view – remains that the foundation of the Irish state lay in the 1916 Rising and that “Home Rule constitutionalism was valueless, contributing nothing to the birth of the Irish state and the culture of democratic republicanism.” Home Rulers and the RIC are “excommunicated from nationalist community memory…if contemporary nationalism cannot recognise those groups, its promise to recognise unionism lacks credibility.”
In parallel with this make-believe by Irish governments, “after 1922 the nationalist/unionist divide was worse, with no hope of its resolution. The alleged success of arms in the 1916-22 period has given a cultural hegemony to the armed force tradition that it did not previously have.”
Murphy urges nationalists and unionists to “acknowledge the other tradition as part of Irish society with a right to exist and be respected, even if they might wish the other tradition did not exist. That would be demanding enough for many nationalists and unionists.” He believes that “finding peace in mutual toleration is the modest limited goal to set. Speaking as if all differences can be dissolved is to engage in fantasy, which hinders the goal of live-and-let-live policy.”
“At least up to the 1970s, southern nationalists held that, while Protestants as such were welcome, unionists did not belong; that to claim to be both Irish and British was self-contradictory; and that being a unionist was at least misguided, if not morally wrong. Up to the 1970s, the unionist conviction was that Catholics were socially backward and did not fit in Northern Ireland, since they refused to own it, and hence could never be trusted as equal citizens. Education to counter those stereotypes is slow but has had some effect.”
During the Decade of Centenaries the Fine Gael-led government strongly rejected Sinn Fein claims that the Provisional IRA were the direct descendants of the old War of Independence IRA, and thus their use of violence to complete the unfinished business of Irish freedom and unity was legitimate. Seamus Murphy disagrees: “Government insistence that the foundation of the state lies in the actions of a violent and explicitly non-democratic minority in 1916 is its bowing to the ideological supremacy of the IRA tradition, and accepting its hegemony. That fact is not changed merely by the IRA ceasing operations.” He accuses Irish governments of commemorating violent events, but “neglecting the political and constitutional achievements and the peace-makers.”
He also objects to the “aura of romance and glory” talk of the ‘Irish Revolution’ conveys (quite apart from the fact that it was an extraordinarily conservative ‘revolution’ with little social change dimension). “Commemoration along revolutionary lines can be neither inclusive nor reconciliatory. Endorsing certain kinds of political killing as revolutionary and therefore justified is inconsistent with the 1998 Agreement’s commitment to compromise and recognition of the other: inherently non-revolutionary values…Commemoration should promote ‘justice, equality, parity of esteem, tolerance, a better understanding of other groups, and (to the extent possible) healing of memories.”
He is also strongly critical of memorials to republican and loyalist paramilitaries that glorify them without mentioning their victims; this inflicts “a second symbolic death” on those victims. He contrasts this with efforts to mutually recognise the suffering – murder, maiming and trauma – inflicted across the sectarian divide. He singles out the “great work” of David McKittrick and other journalists in their book, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which he says should be easily and cheaply available, but in fact is scandalously out of print.
Murphy finishes by asking a key question: “Does the way in which a particular historical event or figure is remembered and commemorated benefit or harm contemporary society’s cultural and political life?” His answer is that only when the events of 1912-23 are evaluated against such values as peace, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, recognition of the other, development of an identity to be proud of, and respect for the rule of law (in essence, the values of the Good Friday Agreement) “have we made serious progress in coming to terms with, confronting and adapting our history for the needs of the living.”
Murphy is a passionate advocate for the Good Friday Agreement, with its purposes of “political reconciliation, enough acceptance and mutual recognition between nationalists, unionists and others so that a live-and-let-live political community can be built.” He believes its philosophy clashes with both the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Proclamation, both of which “implicitly rejected the identity, existence and rights of the other community” and thus are “implicated in the violence of that decade and of subsequent decades up to 1998.” There was no recognition in either of these foundational documents that two distinct, even opposed traditions existed on this island and both sides had to accept the other tradition’s right to be such a distinct community. The 1998 Agreement “represents a long-belated rejection of the resort to arms of unionists and nationalists against each other. If that resort was wrong in the 1970-98 period, it must have been wrong in the 1912-23 period.”
He says that Pearse and his fellow cultural nationalists’ “blood-soil-spirit view held that a country in principle could not contain two national identities, since a nation’s identity, land and sovereignty formed an indissoluble unity. No wonder unionists felt there would be no room for them.” He recalls the “almost apocalyptic expression of their terror of being absorbed into the rising cultural nationalism which had no place for their culture.” The Good Friday Agreement “expresses a diametrically opposed view: one can choose one’s identity, and self-identify as Irish, British or both – in effect, whatever one pleases.”
This Northern-born Protestant is proud to be Irish (while understanding some unionist fears about becoming a smallish minority in a nationalist united Ireland). In politics I like how a friend, a distinguished lawyer, chooses to describe himself as a “left-wing, peace-loving Redmondite”. I don’t think the majority of people in this republic are going to heed Seamus Murphy and me for one second when it comes to their hallowed ‘revolutionary’ period. But a few outspoken deviants are always a healthy sign in a democracy.
1 ‘My single transferable blog: the people of the South are not ready for reunification,’ 1 November 2021
