Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  In retrospect, one could see that the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, when more than a third of the Republic’s population flocked to greet him in Phoenix Park, had marked the high point of traditional Irish attitudes and practices. Ninety per cent of the population were still attending Mass at least once a week. In the subsequent decades numerous incremental changes took place which some observers believe have added up to a social revolution, notably in the fields of public and private morality, the position of women, the relations of Church and State, of declining deference to authority and of increased understanding of the North. ‘The first two decades of the 20th century brought Ireland independence,’ wrote an Oxford historian, ‘but the final two brought a social revolution whose consequences were probably even more far reaching.’83

  In the 1990s, headlines from Ireland placed these moral upheavals in the Republic alongside a political impasse in the North and signs of a historic economic reversal. The Republic’s presidential election of 1990 was won by Mary Robinson, an activist of the Pro-Choice movement; after one term she departed to become UN Commissioner for Human Rights and to be replaced by another woman of similar profile, Mary McAleese. In 1992, the appalling ‘X-Case’, in which the attorney-general of the Republic had taken steps to prosecute a teenage victim of rape, provoked a national referendum on the right to information on abortion; the Church’s defeat on this relatively minor issue punctured its dictatorial pretensions for good.

  In the North, a beleaguered IRA had redirected its bombing campaign onto the British mainland. The Brighton Bombing of 1984 nearly killed the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.84 Frightful atrocities occurred at Canary Wharf in London and in Manchester. But a parallel policy of the ‘bullet and the ballot-box’ was then adopted. While the Provos persisted – as they saw it – in matching violence with violence, their political wing, Sinn Féin, sought to reap the benefits of open politics. The architect of the policy was Gerry Adams (Gearóid MacAdhaimh, b. 1948), the grandson and great-grandson of Fenians, an activist of NICRA, an ex-internee, a survivor of assassins, allegedly an ex-IRA commander, and the president of Sinn Féin since 1983.85 To avoid prosecution, Adams claimed disingenuously that his party was totally independent of the Provo terrorists. Yet his strategy bore fruit. Mainstream nationalists found their way into public discussions, floating the possibility of a settlement. In the crucial Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993, Prime Minister John Major joined the Republic’s taoiseach in affirming that the Northern Ireland Question should be solved exclusively by Irish people from North and South. The British government was distancing itself from the fighting. The first of a string of ceasefires followed. They happened to the accompaniment of an unprecedented boom in the Republic’s economy; never before in living memory had Dublin been far more prosperous than Belfast.

  In the later 1990s sporadic violence recurred. But as the death toll passed the 3,500 mark, killing fatigue set in on all sides. Senator George Mitchell, the US president’s emissary, breathed life into preliminary talks. The war of words did not abate. The loudest mouth in Northern Ireland characterized the pope as ‘the Anti-Christ’, called Gerry Adams ‘the devil’s dinner partner’, President McAleese ‘dishonest’ and the queen ‘a parrot’.86 But prospects of peace were improving.87

  The Belfast Agreement of April 1998 – otherwise known as the Good Friday Agreement – was clearly a very important if ambiguous achievement. To some, it was only ‘a Sunningdale for slow learners’, for others a masterly model for all long-running ‘peace processes’. It was signed by Prime Minister Tony Blair for the United Kingdom, by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern for the Republic, and by all the Northern Ireland parties except the Democratic Unionists. Put to referendums in both the North and the Republic, it won approval by 71 per cent and by 84 per cent respectively. Of its eighteen provisions, a key clause bound all signatories to the pursuit of their objectives ‘by peaceful and democratic means’. Groups and individuals were henceforth free to work for a reunited Ireland or for the preservation of the United Kingdom, but not with guns or bombs. There were three additional strands: one devoted to internal arrangements in Northern Ireland, a second to contacts between Northern Ireland and the Republic and a third to the British Isles and Ireland as a whole. In the view of Britain’s Northern Ireland Office, ‘the political and peace processes… have brought huge benefits and change’.88

  The most immediate response, however, was horrific. On 15 August 1998, four months before the Agreement came into force, a car bomb exploded without warning in Omagh, killing 29 people and maiming 300. A dissident group calling itself the ‘Real IRA’ was publicizing its dissent.89 In that same year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the leaders of Northern Ireland’s two moderate parties. David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party and John Hume of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) had shunned the violent elements within their respective Unionist and Nationalist communities, and were judged to be makers of peace.90

  On Armistice Day 1998 President McAleese joined Queen Elizabeth II in a symbolic act of reconciliation at the Messines Ridge near Ypres in Belgium. Messines was the site of a battle in June 1917 where 20,000 Irish soldiers – Protestants from the 6th Ulster Division and Catholics from the 16th Irish Division – had shed their blood side by side in the British service. Now, after eighty years’ silence, the two women stood facing the sunset, and paid their respects to the fallen. After the ceremony, they inaugurated the Island of Ireland Peace Tower.

  Nonetheless, years passed before some of the Agreement’s main provisions bore fruit. The creation of a governmental Executive from all parties elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly was made possible by Sinn Féin’s willingness to suspend its ideological objections and to work pro tempore within an institution that was ultimately responsible to the British Crown. The first attempt, under David Trimble as first minister, broke down over slow progress in disarming the paramilitaries. The setback was remedied by the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, and the Executive finally got down to business the next May. Votes were moving from the moderate centre towards the two extremes, but not to the detriment of co-operation. The redoubtable Ian Paisley of the DUP,91 now more restrained in his public pronouncements, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin,92 once sworn enemies, became first minister and deputy first minister respectively.

  Other elements had moved faster. By the Good Friday Agreement, the Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the six counties. The North-South Ministerial Council, and the potentially important British-Irish ‘Council of the Isles’, started work.93 British army bases were closed. Reform of the police system was initiated, and commissions on human rights, equal opportunities and parades went into business.

  As with every previous step, the Good Friday Agreement brought about a new round of singing. One of the themes hailed hopes of reconciliation:

  In the battered streets of Belfast,

  Can’t you hear the people cry?

  For justice long denied them

  And their crying fills the sky.

  But the winds of change are singing

  Bringing hope from dark despair.

  There’s a day of justice dawning.

  You can feel it in the air.

  There’s a time laid out for laughing,

  And a time laid out to weep

  There’s a time laid out for sowing

  And a time laid out to reap

  There’s a time to love your brother

  And a time for hate to cease,

  If you sow the seeds of justice

  Then you’ll reap the fruits of peace.94

  Simultaneously, with no ulterior motives in mind, the BBC World Service held a competition to find the world’s most popular song. The winner could hardly have been predicted. Beating India’s national hymn ‘Vande Mataram’, it was a very old song from Ireland:

  When boyhood’s fire was in my blood

  I read of ancient freemen,

  For
Greece and Rome who bravely stood

  Three hundred men and three men.

  And then I prayed I yet might see

  Our fetters rent in twain,

  And Ireland long a province, be

  A Nation Once Again.

  (refrain) A Nation Once Again,

  A Nation Once Again,

  And Ireland long a province, be

  A Nation Once Again.95

  One suspects that the e-mail voting skills of Irish expatriates in 2002 were still superior to those of the average Indian.

  In the decade when Northern Ireland was tending its wounds, the Republic was stoking the fires of a different sort of catastrophe. The economic boom went to Irish heads. People told ‘We are richer than the Germans’, felt that they could spend money like water. Property developers launched grandiose projects; consumers piled up mountains of debt, splashing out on luxurious homes, foreign holidays and expensive cars; and irresponsible bankers handed out excessive credit without a thought for tomorrow. Politicians acted as if the party would never stop. ‘The boom is getting boomier,’ chortled Bertie Ahern, in 2006. ‘We behaved like a pauper who had won the lottery,’ said someone else. The behaviour seemed all the more reprehensible since it coincided with the inquiries and reports that comprehensively exposed the shortcomings of the Catholic Church. Eventually a leading Irish commentator, foreseeing disaster, described his country as ‘A Ship of Fools’.96

  Damien Dempsey was the songster who set the national mood to music:

  Greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy

  So greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy

  Now they say the Celtic Tiger in my home town

  Brings jewels and crowns, picks you up off the ground

  But the Celtic Tiger does two things

  It brings you good luck or it eats you for its supper.

  It’s the tale of the two cities on the shamrock shore.

  Please Sir can I have some more,

  Cos if you are poor you’ll be eaten for sure.

  And that’s how I know the poor have more taste than the rich

  And that’s how I know the poor have more taste than the rich.

  Hear the Tiger roar – I want more

  Hear the Tiger roar, I want more, more, more.97

  The Republic’s distress coincided with the North’s convalescence. No one could pretend, of course, that the ‘Irish Question’ had reached its terminus. Pockets of tension remained in Ulster. Various minorities still felt embattled. The Orangemen were still marching, and protesters still attempting to block their way. Dissident IRA-men were still planning their ‘spectaculars’, and exploding bombs. Mind-sets changed slowly. Yet a return to large-scale bloodshed was unlikely,98 and a distinct shift in attitudes to Ireland’s painful history could be observed. ‘Where previously our history has been characterized by a plundering of the past to separate and differentiate us,’ said the Irish president in a London lecture, ‘our future now holds the optimistic possibility that… we will re-visit the past more comfortably and find… elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately over-looked.’99 ‘Today we salute Ulster’s honoured and unageing dead,’ declared Northern Ireland’s incoming first minister, ‘… Protestant and Roman Catholic… Unionist and Nationalist, male and female, children and adults, all innocent victims of the terrible conflict.’100 ‘The reality is, that it’s now 2009,’ wrote the president of Sinn Féin in his Leargas blogspot, ‘not 1969 or 1920 or for that matter 1690. And we’re all living in an Ireland governed democratically by all-Ireland institutions, and by powersharing mechanisms in the six counties.’101 In January 2010 a marathon negotiating session involving both British and Irish prime ministers broke the latest deadlock in Northern Ireland, enabling the Executive to resume business.

  The British government itself was experiencing a change of heart. The Saville Inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ reported in June 2010, firmly rejecting the whitewash of the earlier Widgery Report and condemning killings by the British army as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’. It destroyed the notion that the ‘Provos’ could be blamed for everything. The new prime minister, David Cameron, made an unreserved apology in the House of Commons, and the chairman of the official Unionists (the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP), once the bedrock of British control in Ulster, resigned: in 2010 the UUP vote had slumped from 46 per cent in 1974 to 15 per cent.102 The first minister of the province, Peter Robinson of the DUP, was embroiled in a damaging scandal.103 Times were changing. The city of Derry/Londonderry, where the initial killings had taken place in 1972, was chosen as the UK’s ‘City of Culture’.

  The Republic, meanwhile, was sinking deeper into the mire. Though the financial bubble had burst in 2008 in line with the global recession, the most serious consequences did not surface immediately. The Fianna Fáil government took over the debts of two failing banks, the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster, and pretended that the problem was solved. In the spring of 2010, when Greece was forced to accept a Eurozone bail-out, ministers in Dublin were still mocking suggestions that Ireland might have to follow suit. But self-criticism crept into public debate. ‘We’re very narcissistic,’ one woman lamented; ‘we believed our boom was better than anyone else’s.’ And moral reflections returned. ‘People lost interest in the other world,’ commented the abbot of Glenstal, ‘while they were so successful in this one.’104 The government denied all until reality caught up with them in November. Inspectors from the EU Commission and the IMF flew in to examine Ireland’s books. Their investigations led to an 85-billion-euro rescue package that would tie the Republic into austerity, tax rises and social pain for decades to come.105 The Celtic Tiger, if not dead, was floored. The Republic found itself in intensive care; a land of smiles became a land of woe, and its image as a brave pioneer evaporated.

  Political meltdown followed swiftly on economic meltdown. The taoiseach, Brian Cowen, announced his imminent departure, his government’s reputation in shreds. In a mere five years, Ireland’s position in the Quality of Life Index had dived from 5th in the world to 41st, sixteen places behind the United Kingdom. Inward immigration had stopped, and outward emigration had restarted at the rate of 1,000 per week. Unemployment was soaring. Popular anger reached fever pitch. A general election brought forward to 25 February 2011 voted massively for change. Fianna Fáil was battered by the voters, its representation in the Dáil falling from 70 to 16. Its coalition partner, the Green Party, was annihilated. Fine Gael triumphed, increasing its seats from 51 to 68; its leader, Enda Kenny, hastened to form a cabinet. The Labour Party almost doubled its representation, from 20 to 35, and Sinn Féin’s tiny support was more than tripled, from 4 seats to 13. Gerry Adams, who had resigned from his unoccupied seat at Westminster, topped the contest in County Louth, in the nearest part of the country to Belfast; he had declared his ambition of becoming the Republic’s president within five years. Sinn Féin’s decline had been arrested, but the ‘fortress of democratic republicanism’, which it had once founded, looked distinctly sick.106 Éamon de Valera ‘was spinning in his grave’.107

  James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) was completed in the year that the Irish Free State was proclaimed. One of the characters says, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ Despite the passage of nearly a century, the sentiment still strikes chords. The British nightmare is perpetuated by the Irish Question still hanging like a millstone round London’s neck; the Republic’s nightmare is fed by shame that so many accomplishments have repeatedly been squandered, and the nightmare of principled republicans by their inability to win majority backing. In Northern Ireland, the most recent nightmare has ended, but people have woken up to an apparent stalemate.

  Hence, as the centenary of the Easter Rising rose over the horizon, the main participants in the chain of conflicts – the British, the Irish, the Unionists and the republicans – had all been duly chastened; everyone’s pride had been humbled in turn. The long retreat of British rule in I
reland had slowed to an imperceptible crawl. The British queen, who still reigned over six Irish counties, accepted an invitation to visit Dublin for the first formal royal visit there since her grandfather’s in 1911.108 Unionists were holding on to their corner of the island, but only by sharing power. Nationalists and republicans, in whose eyes the country was only three-quarters free, were marking time, believing it to be on their side. Monarchy in Ireland had still not vanished. It had reached a moment reminiscent of a king of Ireland’s famous last words; lying on his deathbed in 1685, Charles II, who was equally king of England and king of Scotland, apologized for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’.109