Britain and Ireland

From Home Rule to Independence

Jeremy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582301931
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Jeremy Smith explores relations between Britain and Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with a story that still raises deep passions and bitter disagreements both among historians and within wider public opinion. This examination attempts to chart a more dispassionate course between the various contending positions and has enormous relevance to the unfolding events in both Northern Ireland and Britain as the united Kingdom moves towards a federal constitutional structure. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Incorporates a large amount of research on Irish history during the last two decades and gives particular focus to the dramatic events between the Easter rising of 1916 and the intense negotiations surrounding the Treaty in the autumn of 1921. For those interested in the history between Ireland and Britain.

Part One: The Background

1

Irish History and the Historians

Until the 1950s, the dominant interpretation of nineteenth-century Ireland represented the period as the climax of seven centuries of struggle between an emerging Irish nation and a tyrannical English imperialism [Doc. 1]. That struggle, dating from the twelfth century when England began meddling in Irish affairs, was formalised in 1801 with the Act of Union that absorbed Ireland into the United Kingdom. From this point on, Ireland’s story was primarily a nationalist struggle to throw off English colonial rule and recover her liberty, and after numerous political campaigns, violent agitations and a war of liberation she finally achieved independence from Britain in 1921. In other words, Ireland’s history was a deliverance tale, with the nationalist perspective forming a central spine to any understanding of her past.

From the 1940s onwards, this began to change slowly as historians revised their opinions on many of the key episodes in the nationalist interpretation. In place of a ‘Brit-bashing version of history’ [190 p. 2] they offered alternative understandings, which criticised the traditional view of Irish history and which were, according to them, more balanced, less partisan and more thoroughly researched. So extensive and broad was this questioning of orthodoxies that by the 1980s few of the cherished nationalist verities survived intact. Commentators and historians, particularly those critical of assaults upon the traditional nationalist paradigm, now spoke, rather disparagingly, of a new ‘revisionist’ interpretation of Irish history and of a fully developed school of ‘revisionist’ Irish historians [Doc. 2].

The Nationalist Interpretation

According to the ‘grand nationalist narrative’, a distinct Irish people, based upon a distinct Gaelic language and culture, had already long existed before the first of several English invasions from the twelfth century. Over time the native Irish were dispossessed of their historic rights in order to safeguard England’s interests. Their land passed into the hands of an English ruling elite and their political rights were subjugated. The Irish Parliament was gradually reduced to subservience under the British Crown, through Poynings’ Law in 1494 which made its legislative powers subordinate to the English Privy Council, and later extended with the Declaratory Act of 1720 which reaffirmed British parliamentary supremacy[12; 27]. More significantly, the religious freedom of the Irish was curbed given their sturdy refusal to desert the Catholic Church following the English Reformation in the sixteenth century. Despite attempts to force Protestantism onto Ireland, with the plantation of Scottish Presbyterians into the province of Ulster from 1610 and Cromwell’s bloody campaigns and resettlements of the 1650s [34], the majority of Ireland’s population kept the Catholic faith. Since England remained resolutely Anglican, it was a situation pregnant with difficulties. These came to a head with the attempt by James II to return England to Rome. Irish support for his venture simply confirmed, for the English, the disloyalty and danger posed to their security by a Catholic Ireland. The subsequent overthrow of James II in 1688 and arrival of the new Protestant King of England, William of Orange, encouraged the English to conclude that if they could not force Ireland into the Anglican Church they could at least marginalise and suppress it as a potential threat. As such, Britain established a Protestant Parliament in Ireland, ruled by a small, landed, non-Catholic elite and buttressed by the Anglican Church of Ireland. This elite, known as the Protestant Ascendancy, now dominated the political and social life of Ireland. Through a series of Penal Laws Catholics lost political rights: from 1728 they were unable to vote, hold office in the army, administration and government, gain employment in the professions, or enter a university. Restrictions on Catholic ownership of land tightened; by 1703 they held just 14 per cent of the land [67; 97]. Thus by the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland was an occupied nation whose land had been stolen, whose political power had been seized and whose religious freedoms had been denied by an alien, English, Anglican ruling ascendancy, backed by the British state. Yet in the breast of every true Irishman and woman (implicitly ‘true’ meant Catholic) burned the desire to throw out the English and re-take control of their country.

Their opportunity came during the dramatic political events of the 1780s and 1790s. Against a backdrop of revolution in America, calls for greater independence for Ireland came from Volunteer groups, set up in the 1770s to protect Ireland from the enemies of Britain, as well as from the Patriots, a group of landed Protestants inside the Irish Parliament. Desperately short of money and militarily overstretched, Britain relented to the pressure in 1782 by repealing the Declaratory Act and allowing the Irish Parliament the right to introduce its own laws. This experiment in partial independence, operating under the title of Grattan’s Parliament after one of the Patriot leaders, lit the fuse to a much bigger explosion against British control, with the outbreak of rebellion in 1798. It was led by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, who demanded an Irish republic ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils’ [27 p. 15]. Here, for nationalist historians, were the Irish people at last rising up to throw off their chains and demand their freedom, only to be crushed by the ruthless repression of the British military and to witness the suppression of Grattan’s Parliament. Refusing to recognise the veracity of Irish national sentiment, Britain now forcibly assimilated Ireland into her political structure with the Act of Union. Union provided the clearest example of English imperialism, the sacrifice of Ireland’s national destiny at the altar of England’s strategic, political and economic interests.

Resistance to British rule, though crushed, was not forgotten by the Catholic majority. Instead it was re-directed, by the 1820s, into more constitutional channels under the leadership of an Irish lawyer, Daniel O’Connell. His movement to emancipate Catholics from their legal discrimination mobilised much of Ireland behind him and was followed in the 1830s and 1840s by an unsuccessful campaign to repeal the Act of Union itself. National sentiment also flowed behind the Young Ireland movement, a group of enthusiasts who pursued a cultural and literary path to independence by reviving ancient Gaelic ‘myths’ and stories. Meanwhile the Fenians, a political group named after ancient Irish warriors, maintained Tone’s commitment to violent revolution as the only true path to Irish liberation. In addition to demanding independence, Nationalists laid the economic problems of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland at the feet of the English. The tragedy of the Great Famine (1845–51), in which over a million Irish people died, was caused by English maladministration and rigid commitment to the ‘laws’ of political economy; many even assumed it was manufactured by the English to teach the Irish a lesson and dampen their national sentiment. It was also a sign of Ireland’s failure to join in the modernisation process that was transforming society on the British mainland, the cause of which again lay with English mismanagement. Similarly, problems with the land, and particularly the habitual tensions between tenants and landlords, were part of a wider struggle between the dispossessed ‘Irish’ farmers and an English, Anglican landowning class. Indeed the cause of Ireland’s rural impoverishment, her economic backwardness and her agricultural depression lay firmly with the evils of landlordism, which extracted wealth to London, evicted tenants at will and exercised a brutal, harsh regime across the Irish countryside. If Union provided the framework for English oppression, then the landlords were the shock-troops of English imperialism. For historians, the struggle for the land was part of a larger struggle for Ireland.

Indeed it was the struggle over the land that re-energised the nationalist movement, sleeping since the collapse of O’Connell’s repeal campaign but now under the inspiring leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. By the early 1880s, Parnell repaired and strengthened the nationalist organisation, enabling it to win mass support across Ireland, except in Ulster, and force a British government to offer them Home Rule in 1886. Again, however, Ireland’s national destiny was betrayed by the English, who orchestrated an alliance of Irish landlords and Ulster Protestants, alongside the wider British Establishment, in order to defeat Home Rule. Without leadership, following Parnell’s untimely death in 1891, the nationalist movement declined and Ireland returned to a state of brooding resignation. National enthusiasm flowed into cultural spheres, reviving the Gaelic language and Gaelic sports. Some, notably the Fenians, kept the ‘physical-force’ tradition alive with a belief that only violent insurrection would rid Ireland of England. But their ‘self-evident prescience’ was out of tune with the general apathy of the period, forcing upon them a lonely if principled wait on the margins of Irish politics, for their call to come in the future.

That moment finally arrived at Easter 1916 when a small band of Irish nationalists, led by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, rose in rebellion and took on the might of the British Empire. Though defeated and subsequently executed, the men of 1916 re-ignited the nationalist cause in Ireland and rallied the Irish people against English rule. Under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and his Sinn Féin party, a united Irish nation now rejected colonial rule and pressed for independence, only to be met by yet more brutal oppression from the British government. This time the Irish did not buckle under the weight of English coercion but engaged in a war of national liberation between 1919 and 1921. Britain threw all she had against them, endorsing murderous methods that recalled the worst excesses of Cromwell, but was unable to defeat the massed Irish nation and particularly its military forces, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Exhausted and nearly bankrupt, the British government at last gave way in 1921 and granted Dominion status to Ireland. Seven centuries of colonial domination came to an end.

In other words, what we might term the orthodox nationalist interpretation offered a version of Ireland’s past as one of ‘an unbroken tradition of resistance to British rule’ [52 p. 107], a thread or paradigm that was central to any understanding of nineteenth-century Ireland [Doc. 1]. The strength and survival of this interpretation owed much to its usefulness. It furnished the newly created Irish nation-state with a sympathetic ‘past’, a history that supplied a sense of purpose and direction, so establishing an uninterrupted connection between where the nation had come from, where it was, and where it was going. Such a connection gave Ireland an ancestry or ‘bloodline’, equipping its new political leaders with the legitimacy and authority to rule over the Irish people [49]. Having a common national inheritance gave cohesion and unity to Irish society (except for Protestants in Ulster, who created their own cultural inheritance), regardless of their different regional or class identities and their deep political divisions following the civil war of 1922–23. It gave Ireland a shared set of values and beliefs. Society now looked to the self-sacrifice and dedication of Wolfe Tone or the 1916 ‘martyrs’ for moral guidance, evolving what Boyce calls ‘public morality tales’ [39 p. 1]. The bravery of Ireland’s national leaders, be they Tone, Parnell or Michael Collins, leader of the IRA, were used to inspire and instruct the young, their deeds glorified as an example to others. Moreover, the maintenance of the nationalist interpretation owed a great deal to the survival of those political leaders brought to power in 1921: it is instructive to remember that de Valera, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, was President of the Irish Republic until 1973. It was also a representation sustained by deep institutional conservatism within Irish society, in the media, the Church, local government and most importantly in the education system [43].

The Rise of ‘Revisionism’

From the 1940s challenges to the orthodox nationalist interpretation began to appear. A small group of historians, notably R.D. Edwards and T. Moody, set themselves the task of revealing the ‘true’ Irish past by questioning the prevailing ‘nationalist myths’ that dominated academic and popular understandings of Ireland’s history [46]. Through rigorous empirical research and objective professionalism, and associated with a new journal Irish Historical Studies founded in 1938, they offered alternative perspectives on Ireland’s story. New ideas and views appeared across the whole period of Anglo-Irish affairs: indeed some of the earliest reinterpretations were on Ireland under the Tudors. For the nineteenth century, this early ‘revisionist’ impulse focused on the dominating issues of the Great Famine and the land question. The Irish Famine, for example, slowly took on a new appearance as less a catastrophe precipitated by English connivance than one caused by endemic weakness and structural limitations in the Irish economy; British policy was characterised more by muddle and well-intentioned ineptitude than by conscious design [72]. Similarly, problems with the land were no longer laid solely at the feet of a grasping, oppressive, alien landlord class, a characterisation increasingly seen as a fiction. What began to emerge was a more balanced picture: a landlord class less inclined to evict a tenant on a ‘whim’ than to try and reach a compromise or even forgo rent during particularly hard periods; a class less distinct from its surrounding tenantry, in both religious and cultural terms; a class still motivated by older paternalistic concerns, despite being under severe economic strain.

More generally, the nature of Irish politics during the nineteenth century began to alter. Instead of witnessing the inexorable growth of a national liberationist movement in a linear trajectory from Tone to O’Connell to Parnell, and on to Pearse by 1916, a much more complex development was unfolding. It was typified as much by cooperation and co-existence between landlords and tenants or Protestants and Catholics, as by conflict. Nationalist forces suffered retreat, disappointment and division alongside steady advance. And people’s concerns orientated towards everyday, local matters, such as grazing rights, family feuds, employment, rent levels, religious disputes, land squabbles, food prices, local patronage and deference, as much as they did to more altruistic questions of national self-determination [81].

By the 1970s, Ireland’s history looked very different. Fresh and often critical perspectives on most of the key episodes of the nationalist interpretation had been presented. Such perspectives, labelled ‘revisionist’ by nationalist critics, tended to be sceptical of orthodox explanations, less judgemental and more sensitive to the precise nature of Britain’s involvement in Ireland or the activities of Irish landlords. They were intrigued by other traditions within Irish society, such as Unionism, and interested in the diversity of Irish experiences, concerned to challenge widely held and popular assumptions, as well as branch out into new areas [Doc. 2]. For example, through two new journals, Irish Economic and Social History and Saothar, Ireland’s economy under the Union was analysed using economic statistics and theory rather than established preconceptions. Cultural developments at the end of the nineteenth century were investigated. Irish Unionism received its first major study in 1972 [111; 112]. Heroes of the nationalist pantheon were reassessed in terms far from flattering to the nationalist cause. Parnell, for example, emerged as a rather conservative politician, more at home in London than Ireland. De Valera resembled a rather devious figure, obsessed with his position at the head of the nationalist movement. And Patrick Pearse appeared in Ruth Dudley Edwards’s study as a curious, remote and somewhat ‘unhealthy’ individual [263]. Little was spared. Even the ‘foundation moment’ of modern Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916 when the Irish nation rose from its sleep, was re-evaluated as a confused, incompetent and unpopular event, led by an undemocratic group of dreamers. So shocking was this particular reassessment, written at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Rising by Father Francis Shaw, that its publication was suspended for several years. The volume of research brought about a softening in the orthodox nationalist interpretation, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• An introduction to the series
• Note on referencing system
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Background
• Part Two: Analysis
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index