War and Peace

Ireland since the 1960s

Christine Kinealy

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231136
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In War and Peace: Ireland Since 1960, Christine Kinealy explores the political triumphs and travails in Ireland over the last five decades. War and Peace provides a thorough and up-to-date account of the unfolding of "The Troubles, " the three decades of violence and social unrest between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant unionists. In addition, Kinealy examines the Republic of Ireland's entry into the European Union in 1973, its often contentious relationship with England, and the changes in emigration during the period. Of additional interest to Kinealy is the effect of the women's movement, which has given rise to the election of two female presidents, proving Ireland's ability to accept and internalize change.

ONE

Fault Lines

In 1960 Northern and Southern Ireland remained politically divided, separated by an artificial partition imposed in 1920 as a result of the passing, by the British Parliament, of the Government of Ireland Act. During the intervening four decades, the physical divide, although unprecedented and imposed without majority consensus, had become embedded in the everyday life of the Irish people and the psychological reality of Irish politics. Consequently, demands for reunification were low on the political agenda on both sides of the border. The IRA, however, who remained the torchbearers of the pre-Partition demand for a united, independent Ireland, had been involved in a guerrilla, border campaign since 1956 (referred to as ‘Operation Harvest’). It demonstrated the lack of support for the IRA and their tactics. By 1962 the campaign was over, and the IRA had been discredited and weakened.

Yet, while the republican struggle had little support in reality, in memory it was being lionized. On 5 February 1960 the epic documentary Mise Eire (‘I am Ireland’) was put on general release in the Irish Republic. The title was derived from a poem by Patrick Pearse, the rebel leader executed in 1916. It presented an idealized view of Ireland’s revolutionary fight for independence. It contained a montage of events, including original footage of ‘The birth of the Irish nation’.¹ A follow-up, Saoirse (‘Freedom’), was made eleven years later.

Ireland’s republican past was also remembered in 1965 when the British government, under the Labour Party leader, Harold Wilson, agreed that the remains of Roger Casement could be returned to the Republic, on the condition they were not taken to the North, where Casement had asked to be buried. Casement, an executed hero of 1916, was thus given a state funeral and burial in the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, with full military honours. Despite ill-health and against medical advice, Éamon de Valera, the only surviving Commander from the Rising, attended. The following year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. On 8 March, Nelson’s Column, which had dominated the Dublin skyline in O’Connell Street for almost 150 years, was blown up, probably by former members of the IRA.² Its demise marked a symbolic break with Ireland’s colonial past. The anniversary was also commemorated officially by the Irish government. The state-sponsored memorial, which was overseen by Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach and a veteran of the Rising, provided a platform for glorifying Ireland’s republican struggle. Yet, only a few years later, the Southern state was distancing itself from all associations with republicanism, past and present, refusing to get involved with any further commemorations and even banning one planned to be held in Dublin in 1976.

July 1966 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, one of the most violent conflicts of the First World War. Thousands of Irishmen had been killed in the first few days of fighting, including members of the 36th Ulster Division, many of whom had been former members of the original UVF. Traditionally, this anniversary was ignored by the Southern State, some believing that Irishmen who supported Britain in the First Word War were traitors. In 1966, however, the Irish Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, acknowledged their sacrifice:

In later years it was common – and I was also guilty in this respect – to question the motives of those men who joined the new British armies formed at the outbreak of the war, but it must in their honour and in fairness to their memory be said that they were motivated by the highest purpose.³

For Northern Ireland unionists, honouring the men who died at the Somme was regarded as an important part of their history. To mark the fiftieth anniversary, the Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, travelled to France. His visit ended abruptly when he had to return to deal with sectarian violence on the streets of Belfast.⁴ Ironically, a revived UVF had declared war on the IRA. Fifty years after both the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme the same groups were still fighting the same battles within Ireland, suggesting that partition had done little to resolve political differences.

Juxtaposed against this imagined, heroic, and idealized, view of Ireland and her political struggle as shown in Mise Eire was the fact that in the 1960s Ireland (north and south) remained poor, socially conservative and economically underdeveloped. The Republic also remained tied to the Catholic Church, but a Catholic Church that proved unwilling to embrace many of the changes heralded by the Second Vatican Council. Censorship had been part of the Irish Free State for most of its brief existence. The censorship of publications, including books, had been introduced in 1929. In 1942, when most of the world was involved in fighting the Second World War, there was a debate in the Irish Seánad (Upper House), concerning the recent banning of the innocuous, and now classic, Tailor and Anstey. Sir John Keane, the speaker who objected to the ban, pointed out that since the censorship laws had been passed, 1,600 books had been banned. Mr O’Donovan, who opposed him, answered by saying,

Since our last meeting, I have seen references to the fact that we, the Irish people, by adopting this so-called high standard, or assumption of a higher standard than other peoples, would make ourselves ridiculous to the people of the world. I think that we should demonstrate by our votes that we have the greatest confidence in the members of the Censorship Board in the magnificent work they are doing. Although it does not come within this motion, if possible we should look for extended powers to enable the board to stop vulgarity as well as indecency.⁵

Senator O’Dwyer, agreeing with these sentiments, pointed out:

We know that conditions in the outside world are very bad at the moment. In Europe, America and all countries there is an increasing tendency towards immorality and lawlessness. The literature from these countries portrays the lawlessness and degeneracy into which the masses of people there have sunk. It is by such literature they are endeavouring to destroy the youth of this country, just as the youth of these other countries have been destroyed by evil literature.⁶

Despite these fears, the censorship of publications was liberalized in 1946. However, the reaction to Edna O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical novel The Country Girls, about two young women who escaped to Dublin to find freedom, suggested that this vision of purity extended into the 1960s. The Country Girls was the first part of a trilogy published between 1960 and 1964. Shortly afterwards, it was banned by the government of the Irish Republic. Three of her other books written in the 1960s were also banned.

O’Brien had been born in County Clare in 1930. Like other Irish writers before her, she sought refuge and literary freedom in exile. She had moved to London in the late 1950s, and the reception of her books informed her decision to remain there. When interviewed, she admitted: ‘James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have.’⁷ O’Brien did return to Ireland periodically, though, to speak out against censorship, often carrying copies of her banned books with her.⁸

The continuation of censorship into the 1960s suggested that the dream of Éamon de Valera (and, clearly, of many other people) of creating ‘a really Irish Ireland’, by which was meant a monolithic, Catholic, Ireland, had been realized.⁹ But what was the economic and social cost of realizing this aspiration? For some writers, such as O’Brien, it was not an Ireland that she could live in. Furthermore, where did Northern Ireland, or indeed the Protestant minority in the Republic, fit into this exclusive vision of Irishness? And for how long could the Irish Republic remain hermetically sealed from an increasingly secular western world that had discovered the ‘beat generation’, ‘angry young men’ and ‘teenagers’ in the 1950s? How would Ireland, north and south of the border, cope with the move into the swinging sixties? A significant change to the censorship laws was made in 1967 when the period for which a book could be banned for being indecent or obscene was limited to twelve months – although any book could subsequently be re-banned. Nonetheless, the impact of this legislation was immediate with thousands of books being unbanned.¹⁰

Throughout the 1960s Ireland was being exposed to external influences in a number of ways. Large-scale emigration in the 1950s meant that links between Ireland and the outside world were inevitable. Even more importantly, the advent of television changed Ireland in the 1960s, exposing the population to an outside world that itself was changing at a rapid rate. An Irish state radio broadcasting service had begun in January 1926, with the foundation of a public radio station, Radio Éireann, based in Dublin. Those who worked for this new service were employed directly by the government and hence were civil servants, which inevitably limited the opportunity for critical or truly independent broadcasting. In 1960 a new service, also known as Radio Éireann, was established and an Irish television service was launched on the last day of 1961. The popularity of this medium was evident from the rapid increase in the number of homes that possessed a television. In 1963 there were 237,000 homes; by 1971 this had increased to 536,000. Almost half of these homes were able to receive British channels in addition to Irish transmissions.¹¹ In 1966 the broadcasting service was renamed Radio Telefis Éireann (RTÉ). Its first Chairman was Dublin-born Éamonn Andrews, who achieved fame on British television with the popular shows What’s My Line? (1951–63 and 1984–7) and This is Your Life (1955–87).¹² Ultimately, responsibility for the new service lay with the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and the 1960 legislation made clear his ability to censor any material under what was to be referred to simply as ‘Section 31’. The advent of ‘the Troubles’ later in the decade was to result in some of the most controversial uses of this ability to censor material, primarily directed against those sympathetic to the Republican movement.

During the summer of 1962 RTÉ launched a programme intended to fill the summer, low season slot. It was known as The Late Late Show. Unusually, it combined entertainment with social discussion and, in the suffocating environment of Ireland, often provided the forum for introducing topics previously not considered suitable for public debate. At the same time, it combined specifically Irish topics with those of international relevance. The time slot allotted – two hours on a Friday evening – also appealed to the viewing public. Within a few years, The Late Late Show had become an institution, interviewing not only politicians and musicians, but anybody in the news in Ireland, and also interviewing celebrities and guests from around the world, ranging from Elton John to Mother Teresa to U2. The first host and the person indelibly associated with The Late Late Show was Gay Byrne, who went on to achieve iconic status within the Irish media. With the exception of one season when he chose to work in London, Byrne hosted the show for 37 seasons and was consequently one of the most recognized, and influential, figures in Ireland. In September 1999, following Byrne’s decision to retire, Pat Kenny became the new host. In May 2009 RTÉ announced that The Late Late Show was to have a new host, Ryan Tubridy, only the third since the show’s origin.¹³

John F. Kennedy

Within a few months of its introduction the new television station was presented with a challenge that propelled it to the centre of international media. In June 1963 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the great-grandson of an Irish emigrant from County Wexford, became the first serving American President to visit Ireland. He spent four days in the country, visiting Dublin, Wexford, Cork, Galway and Limerick. Telefis Éireann broadcast more than fourteen hours of the visit live, while Radio Éireann provided similar coverage for its listeners.¹⁴ Kennedy’s visit was all the more special because not only was he the first Catholic President of the United States, he made it clear that he regarded Ireland as his ‘ancestral homeland’, his family having left there during the Great Famine. The visit was made both personal and emotional by Kennedy’s declaration that ‘I am coming home’. While in Limerick, he declared, ‘This is not the land of my birth but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.’¹⁵ At his family home in New Ross, County Wexford, a banner declared ‘Welcome home, Mr President’.¹⁶ As a special honour, he was invited to address both Houses of the Oireachtas.¹⁷ Kennedy’s speeches about Britain’s historic role in Ireland proved to be controversial. Furthermore:

The visit was unpopular in the United States, proved a security nightmare, and provoked much discussion amongst the political leadership in Belfast, Dublin and London over Kennedy’s attitude to partition. The visit marked a major development in the history of Irish-American relations as it eased tensions over Ireland’s neutrality, marked a shift towards White House activism in Irish affairs, boosted Irish tourism, and fostered increased trading and cultural links between the two countries.¹⁸

Just months later, on 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas. The Irish people mourned his death. The Dáil, as a mark of ‘sympathy and respect’, adjourned. Speaker Dillon said, ‘Our grief here in Ireland is mingled with pride in the knowledge that through the veins of the leader of the free world flowed the blood of Fitzgeralds and Kennedys.’¹⁹

Church and State

The 1937 Constitution had recognized ‘the special position’ of the Catholic Church in the Southern state. At this time, approximately 93 per cent of the population were Catholic and observant, but de Valera was persuaded from making the links between Church and Southern state too clear. For Éamon de Valera, this assertion represented a compromise, attained with a view to not alienating Protestants in the North or in Britain.²⁰ A Vatican Council held from 1962 was only the second one ever convened. Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach, attended its official opening on 11 October 1962.²¹ Bishops from Ireland were present, but they represented just over 1 per cent of all bishops attending. The Vatican Council introduced many changes that brought about a liberalization in church practices. A further purpose had been to promote better relations with the various Protestant churches. The Council also directed that the Mass should be conducted in vernacular languages rather than in Latin, and it encouraged everybody to study the Bible. The Irish bishops, however, identified themselves with a conservative group from Italy, Spain and Portugal, who proved to be staunch opponents of change.²² Famously, despite three years of intense deliberations and having attended every session, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin returned from Rome saying that there would be no changes in church practices. McQuaid achieved further notoriety when he forbade Catholics from attending Trinity College Dublin.²³

The Catholic Church in Northern Ireland also exerted wid...