A History of Ireland in International Relations

Owen McGee

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788551151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Concentrating on Ireland's international relations rather than domestic party politics, this essential new history of the Irish state synthesises existing research with new findings, and adopts fresh perspectives based on neglected European and American debates. It examines the evolution of Irish diplomacy from six consulate officers in the 1920s to sixty ambassadors in the 2010s and provides an overview of a century of Ireland's diplomatic history that has previously only been examined in a piecemeal fashion.

The author's original research findings are focussed particularly on Ireland's struggle for independence in a global context, and his original analysis gives an account of how the economic performance of the Irish state formed a perpetual context for its role in international relations even when this was not a priority of its diplomats.

Equal attention is paid to the history of international Irish trade, the operations of bilateral Irish relations, and multilateral diplomacy. It highlights how the Irish state came to find its role in international relations mostly by means of the UN and EU and analyses this trend in the light of international relations theory and European history.

1

Ireland’s Place in World History:
From the Fianna to the First World War

If ancient Greece and Rome were the cradle of European civilisation, for much of history Ireland existed independently from this idea of civilisation. German scholars of the Celtic west of Europe have suggested that the Irish were ‘the most important and influential of the Celtic peoples’, but Celtic culture was driven forcibly from the European continent by the Roman Empire.1 The Irish produced one of the earliest forms of written language and received Christianity early, but rather than diocesan churches they promoted monastic orders whose illuminated manuscripts were noteworthy for developing a uniquely Celtic artistic imagery. Irish monks also served as missionaries abroad, including in central Europe. Nevertheless, a defining trait of Irish society was its ambivalent attitude to the sea. Although the Irish were self-consciously islanders, they were not a great seafaring people and most always chose to live inland. Irish explorations of the Atlantic and the North Sea were not unknown, but were limited because of the harshness of the climate on the Atlantic coastline. Here circular stone forts had existed since the earliest times, but they were seemingly designed to guard against attacks by land rather than invasions by sea.2

Despite a broadly similar culture across the island, scholars have often considered that a greater degree of political unity existed between Ulster, in the north of Ireland, and Scotland than between various parts of the island of Ireland itself.3 Before and after the arrival of Christianity, northern Irish kings resided near the northeast coast of Ireland, which is only a short distance from the west coast of Scotland.4 Law tracts in the Irish language (Gaeilge) show that their yearly dues, unlike that of all other Irish kingdoms, included ships.5 Both medieval Irish wonder voyage literature and the earliest Irish heroic sagas of the Fianna emanated from this region. Irish voyage literature involved the discovery of fantasy islands with magical qualities. Although similar metaphors existed in ancient Greek literatures, Irish belief systems were noticeably different. Befitting the status of the Irish as northern Europeans, a spiritual notion of otherworldly ghosts rather than a Mediterranean belief in underworld demons was paramount.6 Meanwhile, the geopolitics of this literature was rooted in northern Irish familiarity with the numerous islands off the western coast of Scotland: ‘Dáil Éireann’, the title of the modern Irish parliamentary assembly, is itself a name derived from ancient Irish kingdoms, including Ulster kingdoms that encompassed western Scottish isles.7 From the sixth until the sixteenth century, a northern O’Neill dynasty, with roots in the west of Ireland, frequently claimed to be the legitimate rulers of the whole of Ireland. The fact that the Christian church established its ecclesiastical capital (Armagh) within the O’Neill kingdom probably bolstered their purely secular claim to rule, but it was rarely, if ever, recognised.8

The western Scottish isles were considered to be a homogenous Kingdom of the Isles during the short-lived North Sea Empire of King Cnut, an eleventh-century Danish king who also conquered England and whose daughter married the Holy Roman Emperor. Cnut’s equating secular rulers’ powerlessness before God with their inability to command the seas may have reflected the influence of an Irish Christian culture in which sea voyages were often considered to serve ‘a penitential function’.9 Despite centuries of raids by sea, Scandinavian culture never became a dominant force in Ireland. On the east coast, the future capital of Dublin minted coinage for Cnut and became a trading centre with a focus on Wales and northern England. In the early eleventh century, forces led by Brian Bóruma (Boru), a southern Irish king who hoped to receive recognition as king of all Ireland, defeated Danish-backed forces in this region, but Irish society remained very poorly equipped to deal with invasions by sea.10 As a result, native Irish kings were completely unable to deal with a Norman invasion by sea in the late twelfth century, which also introduced to Ireland the practice of feudalism. This was a Latin legal system under which land was assigned to individuals purely on the basis of royal decrees. For four centuries, this new, centralised legal and political order would coexist alongside a native Irish society characterised by local dynastic kingdoms.

The Normans created new, fortified town walls and castles to subjugate local populations while also encouraging native Irish chieftains to act as mercenaries in Anglo-Scottish wars.11 Through such military expeditions, the Irish learnt new methods of horsemanship, archery and shipbuilding, while fortified stone dwellings, akin to tower homes rather than castles, became more common. Ulster soldiers who fought as part of Edward I’s invasion of western Scotland (1296–1304) were able to re-establish themselves as local Scottish lords, in the process making the west coast of Scotland and the Kingdom of the Isles nominally safe for the Norman kings of England while also being considered an acceptable arrangement by opposing Scottish kings.12 This allowed many Irish chieftains to occupy a secure middle ground in Norman society that seemed to guarantee political stability. As a result, many reacted unfavourably when Donal O’Neill, calling himself ‘King of Ulster and, by hereditary right, true heir of the whole of Ireland’, supported the Scottish Bruce dynasty when it defied secular and clerical rulers by launching a major, albeit unsuccessful, invasion of Ireland (1315–18). This campaign claimed that the Irish and Scottish nations were one, that both aspired that ‘God willing, our nation may be restored to her former liberty’, while O’Neill would defend his actions by sending a remonstrance to Pope John XXII, in which he accused the Normans of England of inherent treachery and argued that it was the Irish alone who had ‘eminently endowed the Irish church’.13

A desire to emphasise an inheritance to rule that predated Norman times surfaced across Irish-speaking society during the fourteenth century, including in Scotland and the Kingdom of the Isles, which retained its own coronation rites, bishop and legal system, including a record-keeper and weights-and-measures officer.14 Gaelic chieftains also expected none but their own family members to hold high ecclesiastical office. This was a cause of tension because in the eyes of the diocesan church, which was urban and Latin speaking, Gaeilge speakers’ sense of values was less Christian than the new Norman settlers.15 Particularly in the northern half of the country, Irish society was predominantly rural, nomadic and caste-based, and dealt not in currency but exclusively in goods and even (in the post-Viking age) people.16 It has been suggested that the closest international parallel with Irish society at this time can actually be found in Japan, where a similar bardic, as well as military-chieftain, culture existed, and ‘constant feuding between the clans … was not the ideal circumstance for traders and merchants’.17

Although Irish music and culture partly became a tool of Christian expression, reputedly at English insistence, churchmen condemned the arts of poetry and music that, in Irish society, were not used for mere artistic or entertainment purposes. Instead, they were used to celebrate the status of an Irish bardic tradition as the supposed custodian of literally all values, learning and sense of history, dating back to the earliest times.18 A native style of music, played on bagpipes or the wire-strung harp, existed to accompany such recitations, but this musical art form was ‘not merely not European’ but was ‘quite remote from it’, being ‘closer to some forms of Oriental music’, practiced from the Middle to Far East, in its combined use of grace notes, improvisation and historical storytelling.19 Irish culture became self-referential and historicist to a high degree because of the absence of an Irish-speaking population abroad with which to engage in cultural exchanges, except in Scotland. Critically, however, this link with Scotland began to decline during the later fourteenth century. Continental political ties developed among the Scottish nobility through their intermarriage with the French during the Anglo-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but no corresponding development took place within Ireland. Instead, intermarriage between Irish and old Norman families created a greater degree of insularity within Irish society, as did a growing religious use, by the fifteenth century, of Irish rather than Latin as the language of communication.20

The Irish adapted to urban, or Latin, culture better in the southern half of the island. By the fourteenth century, Gaeilge-speaking Irish noble families acted alongside the...