Unhappy the Land

The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?

Liam Kennedy

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781785370281
• eBook ISBN: 9781785370472
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Social Sciences

InUnhappy the LandLiam Kennedy poses fundamental questions about the social and political history of Ireland and challenges cherished notions of a uniquely painful past. Images of tragedy and victimhood are deeply embedded in the national consciousness, yet when the Irish experience is viewed in the larger European context a different perspective emerges. The author's dissection of some pivotal episodes in Irish history serves to explode commonplace assumptions about oppression, victimhood and a fate said to be comparable 'only to that of the Jews'. Was the catastrophe of the Great Famine really an Irish Holocaust? Was the Ulster Covenant anything other than a battle-cry for ethnic conflict? Was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic a means of texting terror? And who fears to speak of an Irish War of Independence, shorn of its heroic pretensions?

Kennedy argues that the privileging of 'the gun, the drum and the flag' above social concerns and individual liberties gave rise to disastrous consequences for generations of Irish people. Ireland might well be a land of heroes, from Cúchulainn to Michael Collins, but it is also worth pondering Bertolt Brecht's warning: 'Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.'

PART 1

THE LONG VIEW

CHAPTER ONE

A Most Oppressed People?1

Introduction

Ireland’s past is not a foreign country. For the plain people, unionist as well as nationalist, it is familiar, static and reassuring. It sometimes seems, as Theodore Hoppen says, ‘as if time itself has lost the power to separate the centuries’.2 For unionists and Protestants, even at the end of the twentieth century, images of massacre, of siege, of insecure victory still carry a powerful charge. For Catholics and nationalists, there are the 700 years of oppression at the hands of the English and, for some, the unfinished business of the British presence in Ireland. For all the emphasis by historians on complexities and discontinuities, there is a popular sense of deep continuities, of enduring patterns which stand outside of historical time.

The contemporary use to which workings and re-workings of the past have been put, from at least the time of the Union onwards, is perhaps the primary reason for this. But there are deeper reasons. Embedded in the Irish historical consciousness is an understanding, partaking almost of the status of an archetype, that the past in Ireland is uniquely painful. Once framed in terms of misery and catastrophe, as exemplified by repeated and unspeakable wrongs, history assumes a mythic continuity. This beguiling framework, which speaks as much to the emotions as to reason, has been enormously influential in shaping historical thought on Ireland, both at the level of folk history and of academic writing.

The Exceptionalism of Ireland

A nation with such a strange history must have some great work yet to do in the world. Except the Jews, no people has so suffered without dying.

A Popular History of Ireland3

Such traumatic conceptions of the past are most pronounced within Irish nationalism but have gained a degree of acceptance in some unionist writings also. It was a unionist, after all, fearful of the malign heritage of history, who remarked that ‘Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget.’4 Not that nationalist Irishmen, or women for that matter, were likely to forget, or be allowed to forget. The political and agrarian agitations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries articulated a vast legacy of historic wrongs, ranging from conquest, confiscation and penal laws to forms of servitude unparalleled in the civilised world. The champion of home rule and land reform in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, had little difficulty in convincing a meeting at Balla, in County Mayo, in late 1879 that they were challenging ‘the most infamous system of land tenure that the world has ever seen (cheers)’.5 To a more sceptical audience in the House of Commons a few years later, he affirmed that Ireland ‘was the most miserable country on the face of the earth’.6 Parnell could be less sweeping and more specific in his use of comparisons. Reports of the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ in the later 1870s had excited and troubled the sensibilities of liberal Britain. Throwing this concern back in the face of Gladstone and his fellow liberals, the emerging leader of the Home Rule movement pronounced that Ireland had suffered much more at the hands of the English than the Bulgarians at the hands of the Turks.7

The architect of conservative Home Rule, Isaac Butt, who had a particular interest in the agrarian question, repeatedly talked of the slavery of Irish tenants due to insecurity of tenure.8 Wiggins’ ostentatiously-titled The ‘Monster’ Misery of Ireland had a similar theme.9 The enslaved status of the Irish people, both politically and culturally, was a veritable obsession with the Young Irelanders, a group of romantic nationalists associated with the Nation newspaper in the 1840s. John Mitchel, a Young Irelander who supported the southern confederate cause during the American civil war and hence had more than a passing acquaintance with slavery, raged not only against Irish slavery but also against the ‘long agony’ of Ireland, and its ‘tale of incredible horror’. The case and the cause of Ireland was ‘a horror and a scandal to the earth’.10 Some of Mitchel’s complaints, which have not found their way into the canon of grievances, were a little unusual. Writing of the reaction to his trial and conviction in 1848, he was convinced there were ‘many thousands of men then in Ireland, who longed and burned… to earn an honourable death’. He continues that, alas:

the British system disappointed them even of an honourable death… A man can die in Ireland of hunger, or of famine-typhus, or of a broken heart, or of delirium tremens; but to die for your country, – the death dulce et decorum, – to die on a fair field, fighting for freedom and honour, – to die the death even of a defeated soldier, as Hofer died: or so much as to mount the gallows like Robert Emmet, to pay the penalty of a glorious ‘treason’, – even this was an euthanasia which British policy could no longer afford to an Irish nationalist.11

Daniel O’Connell, who was rather more engaged with the possibilities of glorious living, was quick to invoke the sufferings of the Irish people to make a political point. His opposition to the extension of the English poor-law system to Ireland, for example, was predicated on the claim of a ‘misery and destitution that are unequalled on the face of the globe’.12 Nor was this all. A few years later in an Address to the Inhabitants of the Countries subject to the British Crown, he charged: ‘England has inflicted more grievous calamities upon Ireland than any country on the face of the earth besides has done upon any other. In the history of mankind there is nothing to be compared with the atrocity of the crimes which England has perpetrated on the Irish people.’13

Protesting Ireland’s misery goes deeper in historical time. A correspondent to the American paper, the Shamrock, in March 1812, contrasted the natural advantages of Ireland, in terms of climate and soil, with the misery of its inhabitants: ‘yet with all these advantages, they are the most oppressed people on the face of the earth’.14 Naturally, these protestations emanated from literary as well as political milieux. Thomas Moore, a contemporary of O’Connell, was one of those, to paraphrase Yeats, who sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong. Though a more complex figure than his status as national bard would imply, Moore’s ‘Irish Melodies’ were replete with sweet melancholy: ‘lov’d island of sorrow’ (from ‘She is Far From the Land’), ‘the ruined isle’ (from ‘Weep On, Weep On’), ‘ages of bondage and slaughter’ (from ‘The Song of O’Ruark’), ‘the long night of bondage’ (from ‘Erin, Oh Erin’), ‘hapless Erin’, ‘my lost Erin’ (from ‘Tis Gone and For Ever’).15 Sighing harps, the riveting of chains, Erin betrayed and enslaved by the Saxon: here were the soft-focused images that, with the superlatives of the politicians, would help fashion a national rhetoric to thrill the generations of newly English-speaking Irish people.

It may be tempting to regard, or disregard all this as the preserve of politicians, polemicists and minor poets. But, outside the economic sphere, Irish history is moved by little else. That is, if one includes British as well as Irish practitioners. Phrases coined, initially and self-consciously as hyperbole, could mutate over time into articles of faith and a call to action. ‘In the evening I was in a whirl; my mind jumped from a snatch of song to a remembered page of economic history’ (as the revolutionary Ernie O’Malley exclaimed at the start of the Easter Rising in 1916).16 Moreover, these preconceptions, often unacknowledged and sometimes barely recognised, have infiltrated the writing of Irish history. Such classic works as K.H. Connell’s The Population History of Ireland were conceived within this framework of ideas (though interestingly not his later Irish Peasant Society) while the mood of K.A. Miller’s monumental history, Emigrants and Exiles, is burdened by gloom and pessimism.17 The point is more explicit in Robert Kee’s fine trilogy, The Green Flag, the first volume being entitled, The Most Distressful Country. In the words of Kee: ‘For over seven centuries the history of the people who lived in Ireland had been a folk-trauma comparable in human experience perhaps only to that of the Jews.’18 This would find a resonance on the walls of West Belfast today. On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Great Famine, that vast tragedy was being projected through a series of mural paintings as the Irish holocaust.19 The film-maker Kenneth Griffith took as axiomatic ‘the inherent tragedy of Irish history’.20 Among Irish-Americans, Thomas Gallagher spoke no more than the accepted wisdom: Irish history was one of ‘centuries of turmoil, conflict, and suffering’.21 A compatriot of his went much further: in an unusual sequencing of ideas, Thomas Jackson believed that in Ireland ‘genocide was… aided by the natural calamity of the Famine’.22 A most scholarly, but also one of the most sweeping expressions of the catastrophic dimension to Irish history came from the pen of the Cambridge don, Brendan Bradshaw. Mentioning explicitly the problem of writing a history of the Jews – whose past, as is generally acknowledged, was marked by catastrophe – Bradshaw felt that a similar interpretative problem arises in the Irish case. ‘That such a challenge is posed to the historian of Ireland will hardly be disputed, seared as the record is by successive waves of conquest and colonisation, by bloody wars and uprisings, by traumatic social dislocation, by lethal racial antagonisms, and, indeed, by its own nineteenth-century version of a holocaust.’23

Beyond Ireland

The folk-trauma of Irish history can of course be explored within its own spatial and temporal frame, as is the way with ethnocentric history. But there is an invitation, an implicit one at least, to go beyond Ireland, to look at other folk. How does this self-image of exceptional suffering and victimhood, which belongs primarily to the nationalist community in Ireland, look when viewed in comparative terms? This, of course, begs a number of further questions. What particular issues should be brought into the reckoni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Long View
• Part 2: Famine in Ireland
• Part 3: The Revolutionary Decade
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index