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The Irish Difference
A Tumultuous History of Ireland's Breakup With Britain
Fergal Tobin
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The Irish Difference
A Tumultuous History of Ireland's Breakup With Britain
Fergal Tobin
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An Irish TImes Book of the Year 'The beauty of this book is in the telling: The Irish Difference lays out its themes and chronologies with impeccable clarity, and is full of fascinating detail... Exemplary.' Irish Independent For hundreds of years, the islands and their constituent tribes that make up the British Isles have lived next door to each other in a manner that, over time, suggested some movement towards political union. It was an uneven, stop-start business and it worked better in some places than in others. Still, England, Wales and Scotland have hung together through thick and thin, despite internal divisions of language, religion, law, culture and disposition that might have broken up a less resilient polity. And, for a long time, it seemed that something similar might have been said about the smaller island to the west: Ireland.Ireland was always a more awkward fit in the London-centric mini-imperium but no one imagined that it might detach itself altogether, until the moment came for rupture, quite suddenly and dramatically, in the fall-out from World War I. So, what was it - is it - about Ireland that is so different? Different enough to sever historical ties of centuries with such sudden violence and unapologetic efficiency. Wherein lies the Irish difference, a difference sufficient to have caused a rupture of that nature?In a wide-ranging and witty narrative, historian Fergal Tobin looks into Ireland's past, taking in everything from religion and politics to sports and literature, and traces the roots of her journey towards independence.
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PART ONE
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
ONE
FAITH AND FATHERLAND
THE MOST OBVIOUS place to begin with is religion, from which no discussion of anything Irish can escape for long. It can be exasperating, especially for liberal post-religious people, who are disproportionately represented among opinion-formers: journalists, academics and the social gratin of the urban elite. Oh, you know, those tiresome sectarian quarrels, such as subsist in Ulster, are just so – so archaic. Well, yes, but only if you know no history and are incurious about the world.
Otherwise, you’ll note that well within living memory crimes against humanity and something not far short of genocide returned to the European continent. Yugoslavia, patched together after the collapse of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans following World War I and run with an iron fist by Tito following World War II, fell apart with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. It descended into a vile civil war, whose principal markers were sectarian: Catholic Croats against Orthodox Serbs and all against the Bosnian Muslims.
The world’s two most unstable powder-kegs are the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. In the case of the latter, the unity of British India was shattered by religious conflict, as Muslims carved out their own state of Pakistan (part of which became Bangladesh in due time) leaving Hindus as a dominant majority in India proper. For decades, India was formally secular in its politics but the hyper-nationalists now in power use religion unapologetically as their principal marker of difference and their standard of allegiance.
Border disputes between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, are frightening. In his memoir Reporter, the renowned American journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a senior US foreign policy official as saying that a threatened Indian invasion of Kashmir – the disputed border province – was ‘the most dangerous nuclear situation that we have ever faced… It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.’
It is hardly necessary to rehearse the mess in the Middle East. It’s not just Jew against Muslim, although it’s that as well. The founders of Israel were, for the greater part, secular Jews, many of them non-observant. But successive waves of immigrants have brought in deeply religious Jews and they are over-represented among the new settlements on the occupied West Bank. Whereas the founders of Israel relied on the Balfour Declaration and land acquired by proper legal purchase – the latter, of course, hotly disputed by Arabs – the newer, religious Jews claim their warrant to the land from a covenant made with their god three thousand years ago. And we know, without fully comprehending, the fissiparous tendencies within Islam which have been such a trigger for the mayhem in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
Confessional allegiance tore Latin Europe apart at the time of the Reformation. At the Bavarian town of Augsburg in 1555, a formula was agreed that kept the peace between Protestant and Catholic for two generations. The Latin formula which summarized the agreement was cuius regio, eius religio, which effectively meant that the king or ruler of any territory could choose between the old church or Reform and his decision was binding on his people. Persons for whom this created a crisis of conscience were allowed a period of grace to remove to another territory whose ruler had made a choice more congenial to them.
This rickety formula worked for almost seventy years but when it fell apart the result was the Thirty Years War, the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I. It retarded the development of Germany for two centuries. Estimates of fatalities are problematic; Peter Wilson, the leading anglophone historian of the war, suggests a population loss within the Holy Roman Empire (which includes most of modern Germany) of 15 to 20 per cent. As he points out, even the lower figure is sufficient to make the Thirty Years War the most destructive conflict in all of European history. By comparison, population losses in the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of casualties in World War II, were 12 per cent.
Religion was the ideological question of the era, as keenly felt as the rivalry between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century. The Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus summed it up: ‘This is a fight between God and the Devil.’ And in this fight, Ireland proved to be the great exception. It did not follow the Augsburg formula. The English crown had embraced the Reformation and Protestantism became a key marker of English – and later British – identity, especially in contrast to menacing continental Catholic powers – first Spain, then France.
Ireland, which had been a lordship of the English crown since 1172, was declared a sister kingdom in 1541. And yet, in most of the island, the Reformation failed. Diarmaid MacCulloch sets the context: ‘In Elizabethan Ireland… the Protestant Reformation became fatally identified with Westminster’s exploitation of the island and made little effort to express itself in the Gaelic language then spoken by the majority of the population. Ireland became the only country in Reformation Europe where, over a century, a monarchy with a consistent religious agenda failed to impose it on its subjects.’
The only country in Europe! Our theme is Irish exceptionalism and here it is laid bare in respect of the supreme question of the age. For this was not just dissent on an insular but on a continental scale. It is tempting to see all of subsequent Irish history as a footnote to the failure of the Reformation. That’s far too schematic: history is a series of accidents and contingencies. We know only what happened – and then that imperfectly – and cannot even imagine what might have happened had Ireland, like England, Scotland and Wales, embraced some form of Protestantism.
INEVITABLY, RELIGION WILL weave its way through this book. Of all the things that made the Irish difference and that eventually detached most of Ireland from the British state, it is foremost. Before the Reformation, there were cultural tensions between the Old English and the Gaelic lords. But these were frontier warlord tensions. They were not so urgent as to prevent intermarriage between the two groups; the gaelicization of the Old English to a degree that offended English sensibilities; or military alliances – usually short-term, opportunistic and provisional – between the two. In aggregate, it amounted to a reasonably coherent provincial warlord culture, with a top-dressing of urbanity in small port towns like Dublin and Waterford.
What never happened in pre-Reformation Ireland was an open revolt against the crown. The crown was vastly far away, below the horizon in London, as uninterested in Ireland as Ireland was in it. The modern idea of a centralized royal (or republican) sovereignty, projecting its power into remote places, did not exist in Ireland any more than it did in most of France until after the Revolution. This was an antique world which we can only apprehend through a glass very darkly.
There was no need to rebel against the crown, because the crown didn’t matter. It did not trouble the Gaelic lords of Ely O’Carroll in the Irish midlands any more than they troubled it. What troubled the Ely O’Carrolls was the nearness and potency of the Kildare FitzGeralds, just next door. The fact that the house of Kildare acted as some sort of point man for this faraway crown was neither here nor there as far as the Ely O’Carrolls were concerned. We all have our eccentricities.
The problem was those old school-day twins, the Renaissance and Reformation. They marched together – and the effect was transformative. The story is well known and requires only the briefest summary here. Henry VIII’s understandably desperate desire for a male heir eventually caused him to cast aside his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favour of the younger (and hopefully more fertile) Anne Boleyn. In doing so he managed to alienate the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Catherine’s nephew. The Pope might have nodded Henry’s divorce through, in the cynical way of the papacy, but at the material time he was effectively a prisoner of the emperor, who naturally wanted to protect his aunt.
All this got caught up in the early Reformation, the great theological fissure in the Latin Christian church begun in 1517 when Martin Luther proposed doctrines that were offensive to the papacy. By the time the dust had settled in England, Henry had secured his divorce, broken with Rome and declared himself sovereign in church affairs; he had encouraged Protestantism without fully embracing it himself. In asserting sovereignty in church affairs, he also embraced the fashionable new concept of Renaissance kingship, which entailed a more powerful central state and the submission of over-mighty provincial magnates – something that would have dire consequences for the Kildare FitzGeralds, as we shall see later.
The encroachment of royal authority upon traditional semi-independent magnate power in the provinces was resented, and not just in Ireland. But it took a fatal twist in Ireland by becoming mixed up with the religious question. Basically, the Irish magnates didn’t want Henry VIII all over them, nor did they want the Reformation. So resentment towards the importunities of the king became enmeshed with loyalty to Rome. When the revolt of Silken Thomas, 10th earl of Kildare (p. 43ff, chapter 2), broke out in 1534, it was thought by the Kildares to be just a traditional reminder that the king should do as his predecessors had done for the most part – keep his distance and let the Kildares get on with doing what they did best, namely running Ireland while nominally acknowledging the king’s lordship – happily occluded below the far horizon.
Too bad for the Kildares, the world had changed. Lenin’s remark that there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen might almost have applied. By asserting an aggressive new royal dispensation, Henry turned what might otherwise have been an exercise in magnate muscle-flexing into a revolt against the crown. He was asserting a centralizing policy which meant that resistance perforce became rebellion. It was a fundamental change to the rules of the game. Henry was alert to it; the Kildares were not, or at least not yet.
Fatally, Silken Thomas now rather desperately – seeing that these strange new rules were in play – appealed to anti-Reformation sentiment. He tried to contact recusants in England and Wales, denounced the new Lutheran theology and appealed (without success) to the Pope and the emperor. Here, right at the start of the entire Reformation saga – less than twenty years after Luther first announced his novel theology – a bit of local Irish bother inflates into an unprecedented rebellion against royal authority both in church and state. That junction of faith and fatherland, first made in the 1530s, proved incredibly durable. Every subsequent difficulty between the two islands bore this watermark.
From here on, rebellions came thick and fast. The other branch of the FitzGeralds, the earls of Desmond in central and west Munster, rose in the 1570s. The Ulster Gaelic lords followed suit in the 1590s, as we’ll see in greater detail later. The recusant Old English maintained a strained relationship with an English crown that was, by the end of the sixteenth century, decisively Protestant. The Ulster rebellion of 1641, directed at the recently planted Protestant colony, was openly sectarian, something that burned itself into the collective memory of Ulster Protestants ever after. Cromwell was hardly a religious neutral. He dispossessed nearly all Catholic landowners in Leinster and Munster and established new settlers – all reliably Protestant – who mutated in time into the fabled ascendancy.
Religion was the immoveable object resistant to all dynamic forces. Even in the 1790s, when under the influence of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, a new kind of nonsectarian nationalism was proposed, it ended in tears. There was a major rebellion in the south-east, mainly in Co. Wexford, ostensibly in the name of this newly minted secularism, which collapsed into a number of horrible sectarian massacres. In effect, it became a Catholic rebellion. A less vigorous regional revolt broke out simultaneously in east Ulster: it turned out to be a wholly Presbyterian affair, reflecting the grievances of that literate and talented bourgeois community against Anglican social and political pre-eminence. Even here, religious confession was a marker of revolt.
A more enduring tradition in Ulster had begun three years earlier. In 1795, the Orange Order had been founded. It is, of course, still with us. Far from being literate and bourgeois, it was the latest iteration of lower-class rural sectarian solidarity. There had been a number of rough, rural secret societies antecedent among poor Protestants, in particular the charmingly named Peep o’ Day Boys. The Orange might be considered a consolidating exercise for such groups.
Enlightenment non-sectarianism became a theoretical minor key in nineteenth-century Irish republicanism. In practice, nationalism of every kind was overwhelmingly a Catholic project. It is true that it attracted some enlightened Protestant support throughout the century, although in ever-diminishing numbers. It is notable that the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 contained not a single Protestant, unlike various eruptions in the preceding century. In Ulster, the doings of 1798 had disabused most Protestants of any residual Enlightenment liberalities. As the nineteenth century went on, that community found the Orange Order and a reactionary evangelical theology ever more congenial, the better to maintain deep water between themselves and the Catholics. The liberal Presbyterian tradition, a residue of 1798, atrophied.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT ITERATION of Irish nationalism was given its most famous formula by Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98) who wished ‘to unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. It was a noble ambition, but it barely survived the fires of the Wexford rebellion in 1798; thirty years later, when Daniel O’Connell mobilized the mass movement that began modern Irish nationalism, it was on an openly Catholic agenda. That has remained the major key in the nationalist symphony until very recently. But the minor key was never quite silenced. That non-sectarian dream of a secular Irish identity remained an important part of the republican and separatist element in the nationalist tradition. The mainstream was unapologetically Catholic – even under the leadership of such a conspicuous Protestant as Parnell, who was canny enough to make the requisite accommodations with Mother Church, knowing very well which side the nationalist bread was buttered on – but rather like the quiet, still voice of conscience, the non-sectarian ideal troubled the nationalist soul.
It did not trouble it sufficiently to stop the independent state that finally emerged from the historical process from being a hyper-Catholic, introverted backwater for forty years, and happy to be so. But it was there, all the same, nagging away quietly. It is one reason that, for all the excesses of the new Catholic state, it never became a mirror image of the brazenly sectarian arrangement north of the border. It ultimately had the means to slough off the influence of the church – which had seemed overwhelming at the midpoint of the twentieth century – and assume a more secular direction. Reform in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, was imposed from without, usually against howls of anguished protest from Protestants, the echt volk being extruded extra muros by ‘liberal’ metropolitan bullies.
The seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster was the nearest example of a successful British colonizing exercise in Ireland, in that it established a tenacious and rooted Anglo-Scots community on the land, all reliably and implacably Protestant. That conquest endured, unlike all other previous plantation schemes in Ireland, which were marginal at best. There was nothing marginal ab...