Anyone who spends a few carefree hours in Phoenix Park today will still find many of the attractions that so delighted the young Winston Churchill over a hundred years ago. The ancient herd of fallow deer still grazes on the park’s verdant grassland; the wide open spaces where Lord and Lady Randolph spurred their chargers still welcome riders. The Furry Glen, the People’s Garden and the Dublin Zoo are in place, as are the ruins of the Magazine Fort (1611) and the Testimonial Monument (1864) to the celebrated Dubliner, the duke of Wellington, who was (probably) born at 24 Upper Merrion Street.
Other landmarks have either changed or disappeared. The Viceregal Lodge is now the Áras an Uachtárain, the official residence of the Irish president. The Little Lodge is called Ratra House, in memory of the Republic’s first president, Douglas Hyde, who died there; and its shrubberies still bloom. They even tell visitors about the ghost of a little boy who wanders the park in search of his grandfather.25 The Deerfield Residence, once the home of Ireland’s chief secretary, now houses the US ambassador, and medieval Ashdown Castle, newly renovated, the visitors’ centre. There one can buy refreshments, souvenirs and guidebooks. One learns, for example, that the park’s name has nothing to do with phoenixes, but is a corruption of the Gaelic name, fionn uisce, meaning ‘clear water’. One can also read about the Phoenix Park murders of 6 May 1882, when two leading British officials were knifed to death by a Fenian group calling themselves the ‘Irish National Invincibles’. One of the victims, Lord Frederick Cavendish, was the chief secretary; the other, Thomas Henry Burke (1829–82), was the permanent secretary, the top civil servant of the day. Burke was a Catholic from Galway, but seen by his assailants as a ‘castle rat’. Three years earlier, he met his young neighbour, Winston Churchill, and gave him the present of a toy drum. The death and the drum are both recalled in My Early Life. The statues to Lord Carlisle and to Field Marshal Gough – the latter unveiled by ‘the formidable grandpapa’ – stood in the park until the 1920s, but have since vanished.
The purging of British statues in Dublin went to considerable lengths, but was never completed. In addition to Carlisle and Gough, the nationalists expunged Admiral Nelson from O’Connell Street, King William III from College Green, and Queen Victoria herself from Merrion Square. But interesting exceptions were made. One statue, which once held pride of place in front of Leinster House, was moved to the side of the Dáil, to Leinster Lawn, and is still there in the company of assorted republicans and nationalists. Queen Victoria repeatedly begged for it to be erected, as it was in 1908, seven years after her death, to the memory of Albert – not of Monaco, but of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Since that time, Ireland has been a central player in a historical process that may be described without too much hyperbole or sense of anticipation as the break-up of the United Kingdom. The process, whose seeds were barely perceptible in the early twentieth century, was to surface fifteen years after Queen Victoria’s death and continued to develop for the rest of the century amid the alternating pulsations of centrifugal and centripetal forces. In the early twenty-first century it reached a significant new stage after the introduction of devolution, but was still some distance, even in Ireland, from its ultimate vanishing point.
II
If Ireland’s contemporary history begins anywhere, it is with the Easter Rising of 24 April 1916. In a move calculated to exploit Britain’s wartime preoccupations, a few hundred Irish patriot-rebels stormed the General Post Office in Dublin, raised republican flags and pronounced the advent of the Irish Republic:
POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND
Irishmen and Irishwomen. In the name of God and of the dead generations, from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to the flag and strikes for her freedom.26
Fighting with British forces lasted for seven days. The surviving insurgents were rounded up, and their leaders tried for treason; ninety were condemned to death. Fifteen of them, including the seven signatories of the Republic’s Proclamation – Clarke, MacDiarmid, MacDonagh, Ceannt, Pearse, Connolly and Plunkett – were executed. The British response was harsh, perhaps because plans for German involvement had been uncovered; the insurgents would not have risked a military operation without hopes of heavyweight foreign assistance. As it was, the executions were creating martyrs. Éamon de Valera, commander of the Irish Volunteers’ Third Brigade, was lucky to be reprieved (see below).27 A republican song from the days immediately after the Rising exudes undiluted bitterness:
Take away the blood-stained bandage from off an Irish brow;
We fought and bled for Ireland and will not shirk it now.
We held on in her struggle, in answer to her call
And because we sought to free her / we are placed against a wall.28
In those same years, the strong Irish presence in the British army was underlined by the most famous of all the Great War’s marching songs. A battalion of the Connaught Rangers was heard singing it as they marched out of Calais for the Front. Recorded by John McCormack, it quickly became a runaway hit:
It’s a long way to Tipperary
It’s a long way to go.
It’s a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know.
Good-bye, Piccadilly,
Farewell Leicester Square,
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary
But my heart’s right there.29
The unhurried beat is perfect for swinging along in unison. The melody is compelling. And the bittersweet words are anything but warlike. Tipperary is now known to untold millions round the world who would not otherwise know where it is.
As Britain concentrated all her resources and attention on the war effort, attitudes in Ireland fermented. The insurgents’ political organization, Sinn Féin, meaning ‘Ours Alone’, and its secret military wing, the IRB, attracted far more sympathizers after the Rising than before it. It claimed that the British were reneging on Home Rule, not merely postponing it, that the British government was beholden to the Unionist lobby, and that Irish patriots would have to fight for their rights. In October 1917, Sinn Féin’s convention openly advocated ‘international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic’.30 De Valera, amnestied, became the party’s chairman.
The Unionists, for their part, were dedicated to the integrity of the United Kingdom and regarded Sinn Féin and their like as a bunch of mutineers. Men like Sir Edward Carson – a Protestant barrister from Dublin, who had brought down Oscar Wilde – or Churchill’s friend F. E. Smith, later earl of Birkenhead, saw British law as the sole fount of legitimacy. They waved their Union Jacks, and revered the Ulster Volunteers who had been slaughtered on the Western Front. With few exceptions, they were also supporters of the Protestant Ascendancy. Both the Anglo-Irish landowning class and the Presbyterians of Ulster were embattled Protestant minorities in a largely Catholic land.
The songs to which the Unionists marched drew on a rich and ancient repertoire. ‘King Billy’, that is, William III of Orange (d. 1694), invariably figures as the chief hero, and the pope as the chief villain:
Sons, whose sires with William bled
Offspring of the mighty dead
When the Popish tyrants fled
And this fair land left free.
Yield not now to Popish guile
Trust them least when most they smile
Sun the crafty fowler’s toil.
And keep your liberty!31
The sectarian fervour gripping ‘loyalists’ and ‘Unionists’ had barely changed since the seventeenth century.
In 1917–18 the British government organized a multi-party convention which debated the implementation of Home Rule inconclusively. Then, early in 1918, it sought to bring Ireland into line with Great Britain by introducing military conscription. Objectively, the policy appeared even-handed, and in fact was never applied. But in the fragile Irish context i
t provided the pebble that set off a landslide,32 refanning passions that might otherwise have died down. Almost everyone united against it – the Church, the unions, the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party and the local councils. Prime Minister David Lloyd George thereupon made the fatal mistake of threatening to withhold Home Rule ‘until the condition of Ireland makes it possible’.33
A new chapter opened as the Great War closed. At the general election of December 1918, Lloyd George was whipping up support for ‘squeezing Germany till the pips squeak’. But in Ireland, demands for total independence had risen to the top of the agenda, and pushed out other concerns. Of 105 Irish MPs elected, 73 belonged to Sinn Féin. They promptly turned their backs on Westminster, and on 21 January 1919 those of them who were not in British prisons assembled in the Round Room of Dublin’s Mansion House as a separate Dáil or parliament. The Papal Count George Plunkett (1851–1948), father of three condemned sons, and Eoin (John) MacNeill (1867–1945), military commander and medieval historian, kept order. The Assembly voted to sever links with Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland was proclaimed for a second time, in Gaelic, as if the United Kingdom did not exist. Éamon de Valera was appointed the chief executive, and the Republic’s armed force, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), was formed from a variety of amalgamated units, including the IRB. Instructions were drawn up for ambassadors to be sent to the Peace Conference in Paris, and an ‘Address to the Free Nations of the World’ was framed. The session was finished within an hour and a half.
The British press watched in disbelief. British journalists, like many participants, were not well attuned to the proceedings:
Twenty-eight Sinn Féin members of parliament were here… But there must have been at least two thousand others in an improvised Strangers’ Gallery. Many other thousands waited outside, but a strong body of the Sinn Féin Volunteers kept an effective and sometimes a rather stupid guard.
It would have offended against the national spirit, of course, to carry on the debates of the National Assembly in the language of the Sassenach, and the result was a self-denying ordinance which kept some members quite silent and even reduced others to mere French.
It was a very quiet and rather stilted National Assembly. Probably nine-tenths of those there did not know what it was saying, and when the instructed raised a cheer, the Speaker broke into English to tell them that the rules of parliament did not allow it. The Mansion House, which gives it hospitality to all comers, had provided a few seats for the benches, and, roped off from [the rest the room] these made the House.34
In 1919–20 a massive campaign of civil disobedience brought the British administration in Ireland to its knees. Taxes went unpaid, government offices were boycotted, dockers refused to handle British army supplies, orders from London went unheeded. But formal recognition proved more elusive. The British government was not willing to recognize a state within the state; and it persuaded foreign countries to follow suit. Representatives of the Irish Republic who travelled to the Peace Conference in Paris were not admitted. Lenin, who accepted a loan from Ireland for Soviet Russia, was the sole foreign leader to acknowledge the Irish Republic’s existence.
The first hostile act against British forces occurred on 21 January 1919, when a couple of lone marksmen killed some officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Tipperary. The British government reacted with restraint, merely designating a Special Military Zone in the south-west. Similarly, the Dáil made no haste to declare war. The majority of IRA leaders favoured guerrilla-style tactics like those of the South African Boers, whom they greatly admired, and a minority led by Arthur Griffith favoured passive resistance. Even so, violence spread. IRA raids provoked RIC reprisals. Hundreds of policemen were shot, and scores of country houses belonging to Anglo-Irish landowners were torched. By the summer, an undeclared armed conflict variously called the ‘Anglo-Irish War’ or the ‘War of Irish Independence’ was well and truly ignited.
In 1920, the British government lost patience. Reluctant to deploy the regular British army, which was in the throes of demobilization, it raised two notorious auxiliary formations to bring the rebels to heel. One of them, the RIC Reserve Force, universally known from the colour of their uniforms as the ‘Black and Tans’, were recruited from hardened war veterans, paid 10 shillings per day, and exempted from normal military discipline. The other, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC, known as the ‘Auxies’, were drawn exclusively from ex-British army officers. Together, they burned, plundered and murdered their way round Ireland. Regular courts were suspended, and subsidies halted to non-loyalist districts. In the autumn Westminster introduced new legislation. The Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (1920) provided for martial law, internment and death sentences without trial. In December the Government of Ireland Act (1920), passed under Unionist pressure, attempted to limit the contagion by dividing the island into two parts – Southern Ireland, made up of twenty-six counties, and Northern Ireland, containing the remaining six. Each was to have its own assembly. Contrary to intentions, the partition proved permanent.
The initial years of military struggle against the British brought the IRA to the peak of its popularity. Lacking comparable firepower, its leaders avoided open battle with professional British troops, and were duly denounced as terrorists. But by keeping up their attacks and staying in the field, they created an impasse in which the British began to review their policies. The misdeeds of the ‘Black and Tans’ strengthened the Irish cause with every day that passed:
They burned their way through Munster,
Then laid Leinster on the rack.
Thro’ Connacht and thro’ Ulster
Marched the men in brown and black.
They shot down wives and children
In their own heroic way, but
The Black and Tans like lightning ran
From the Rifles of the IRA!35
Over the winter of 1920–21, bloodshed intensified. The worst episodes occurred in Belfast, where ‘loyalist’ mobs attacked Catholic enclaves indiscriminately. The creation of paramilitary ‘B-specials’ to support the Ulster Constabulary was opposed by the Catholic hierarchy, but few Protestant leaders publicly reprimanded loyalist violence.
Three men co-operated in the construction of a truce. General Smuts, the South African champion of the Boers, suggested to King George V that he make a ‘speech for conciliation in Ireland’. The idea was taken up by Lloyd George, who persuaded a reluctant Cabinet to comply. The king’s speech, delivered in Belfast on 22 June 1921, called on all Irishmen ‘to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill’.36 The words were judged to match the public mood. A truce came into effect on 11 July 1921. The forces of the Crown and their militant opponents appeared to have fought each other to a standstill.
At this point, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) reached the first pinnacle in a long career characterized by successive peaks and troughs. Born in the United States, the son of an Irish mother and a reputedly Cuban father, he had grown up in Ireland with his maternal relatives, had learned Gaelic and qualified as a teacher. Known as ‘the Long Fellow’ because of his height, he was a principled republican among comrades holding a variety of constitutional views. He had been saved from execution after the Easter Rising by his American citizenship, and was pushed into prominence by being a rare survivor of the original leadership. In 1917–19 he rose from the position of Sinn Féin’s chairman, to that of president of the Dáil Éireann, and of príomh aire or ‘prime minister’.37
For the whole of 1920, however, the príomh aire had absented himself, disappearing from Dublin to raise funds in the United States. In consequence, he lost ground to his deputies, notably to Michael Collins, ‘the Big Fellow’, sometime head of the IRB and another survivor of the Rising,38 and to Arthur Griffith, one of the original founders of Sinn Féin.39 Griffith, a surprising voice of moderation, h
ad long advocated a ‘two kingdom solution’, such as had pertained prior to 1801, publicizing the idea of a dual, Anglo-Irish monarchy similar to that of Austria-Hungary.40 Among these leaders, there was no common blueprint regarding the nature of the future state.41
Three days after the truce, Éamon de Valera went to Downing Street to sound out Lloyd George, and a priceless scene ensued. De Valera was used to thinking of Ireland’s oppressors as ‘the English’. He had not counted on his British adversary being both a Celt and a native Welsh-speaker. He read out his declaration in stilted Gaelic, then handed Lloyd George an English translation. The ‘Welsh Wizard’ played along with him. ‘So what’s the Gaelic name for your state?’ he enquired. ‘Saorstát’ (‘Free State’) came the reply. ‘I see,’ said Lloyd George. ‘I didn’t hear the Gaelic word for “Republic” in your speech.’ He then launched into a lengthy discussion in Welsh with his personal secretary, T. J. Jones. De Valera, flustered, couldn’t follow. Eventually, reverting to English, Lloyd George delivered the knock-out blow. ‘We Celts don’t have a word for a Republic,’ he announced, ‘because we’ve never had one.’42 If this account reflects even part of the truth, De Valera already knew that one of his key demands – the recognition of the Irish Republic – was unlikely to be met. Nonetheless, on returning to Dublin, he persuaded the Dáil to proclaim him president of the Republic. He was throwing down the gauntlet not only to the British but also to many Irish colleagues.
Work began soon after on an Anglo-Irish Treaty. Its main aims were to design a new political order for Southern Ireland, and to define the border with Ulster, which was to have the right to secede. The Irish delegation at the negotiations was led by Arthur Griffith, assisted by Michael Collins and others, who installed themselves at 44 Hans Crescent in Kensington. Its secretary was the English novelist and Hibernophile, Erskine Childers. The negotiators wrestled in London, while killings in Ireland persisted; they only reached a conclusion after the British threatened to restart a full-scale war. Ratification had to be undertaken in triplicate – by the Dáil, by the British-backed House of Commons of Southern Ireland and by the British Parliament in Westminster. All was completed in January 1922. The king had reason to be satisfied. After a civil war (as he would have seen it) a wayward realm had returned to the fold, and had made its peace with the home country.
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