The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  Parnell himself refused to accept this conclusion, and in the first months of 1891 toured Ireland relentlessly in an attempt to rebuild support. At this time, too, he and Katharine O’Shea were married, the ceremony taking place in June at a registry office near Brighton: ‘I and my wife are perfectly happy,’ he said. ‘As for myself I can truly say I am now enjoying greater happiness than I have ever experienced in the whole of my previous life.’8 The marriage was deeply offensive to mainstream Catholic opinion (‘Charles Stewart Parnell has divorced himself from holy Ireland’).9 In Ireland, Parnell’s speeches were met with vituperation or icy silence, and his new wife was condemned as ‘debased and shameless’.10 A series of by-elections in counties Kilkenny, Sligo and Carlow were won by the anti-Parnell faction; but the approaching general election would perhaps give Parnell the chance to demonstrate that his following in Dublin had held strong in the face of the scandal, thereby providing the opportunity to reunite the entire party under his leadership. In fact his position was wholly lost, and Parnell would not survive to see the election: the frantic pace of his life had taken its toll, and his vitality had been steadily undermined by kidney disease and other health problems. He died of heart failure at Brighton on 6 October 1891.

  Could Parnell have brought about Home Rule? It is, in truth, difficult to imagine how this could have been achieved: irrespective of the arithmetic in the House of Commons, the forces ranged against the measure would always have been daunting. The House of Lords was firmly in opposition, and at this time there was no parliamentary mechanism to neutralize its veto. Large sections of the Liberal Party remained hostile to the very notion of Home Rule; so too were the Tories and the unionists of Ulster. Following Parnell’s downfall, however, the Belfast political establishment breathed a sigh of relief at what appeared to be a lucky escape; nationalists had, by contrast, been given a glimpse of a promised land only to have the prospect whisked away. For the poet William Butler Yeats, the loss of such a man was a calamity: he came to represent the nobility, integrity, reserve and self-control of a leader overcome by a horrid barbarism; a noble stag, as he later implied in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, pulled down to his death by the ‘hysterical passion’ of the Irish hounds.11 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce too displayed a sort of acute Parnellite melancholia: the lost leader was again a victim of the Irish, who were ‘an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter’.12

  The delicately calibrated movement Parnell had built with such care was now rent asunder; and, although this rupture would in time be patched over, the party would never capture hearts and minds as it had done under his leadership. A weary Gladstone, who had become prime minister for the last time in 1892, did indeed introduce another Home Rule bill in the following summer, but in the full and certain knowledge that it would be thrown out once more. He retired at last in 1894; and his successor as Liberal leader, Lord Rosebery, showed himself to be wholly uninterested in dealing with the now shattered Irish party. The Conservatives, under Lord Salisbury, took power once more in 1895: their attitude to Irish agitation remained chilly, although they were pragmatic enough to attempt to alleviate discontent through a policy of ‘constructive unionism’. Home Rule would be killed by kindness, by which was meant ‘killing it with money’: additional land reform measures were passed; and money was invested in the depressed west of Ireland in the form of new railways, harbours and other infrastructural projects.13 And in the meantime, the ghost of another idea was beginning to circulate: that of dividing Ireland in some as yet undetermined fashion, and allowing the unionist-dominated northeast of the island to secede.

  As a long century drew to its close, hopes of Home Rule had been dashed – and yet the question of Ireland’s future had certainly not been laid to rest. This future, for many in Ireland, was rather more nuanced than had ever been allowed for by either Parnell or Butt or indeed O’Connell, each of whom had been impelled by a vision of self-government and political autonomy that paid scant attention to the broader state of Irish culture. Some, of course, could take pride in the solid range of national cultural institutions now established in central Dublin: these included the National Library, which moved into its new Kildare Street premises in 1890; and the National Gallery, an imposing fixture on Merrion Square since 1864. The Royal Irish Academy and Royal Dublin Society, meanwhile, had been steadily amassing a collection of priceless objects in gold and silver that had been lost for centuries and these, together with booty gathered abroad by Irish soldiers and collectors, formed the core of a new Museum of Science and Art (later the National Museum). Some of the objects contained in such collections – the Tara Brooch, for example, and the Ardagh Chalice, rediscovered in 1850 and 1868 respectively – certainly fed into the notion of an ancient Irish nation. For the most part, however, this activity was cool, orderly and rational, lending weight to the notion of the city as a national capital, and of the Irish nation as being in peaceful and eternal communion with Britain.

  The monument to Daniel O’Connell unveiled on Dublin’s Sackville Street in 1882, however, told a rather different story: the Liberator himself was accompanied by representations of Hibernia, Patriotism, Fidelity, Eloquence and Courage. These were distinctly arresting ideas, and they appealed to a restive element in Irish society: that evolving constituency of educated middle-class Catholics – schoolteachers, small farmers and civil and public servants – who were conscious of their Irish identity and anxious to do something to conserve and energize it. The Irish language was continuing its slow – many felt, terminal – decline, and many nationalists believed that Ireland as a whole was in danger of losing its cultural identity. To these observers, the parliamentary process in general and post-Parnell Irish party in particular held no allure; instead, they sought a cultural revolution.

  One result was the foundation in 1884 of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) with the intention of promoting interest in such specifically Irish sports as Gaelic football and hurling and in the process countering British cultural dominance. The organization frowned on such ‘British’ sports as cricket, tennis and rugby; and it banned policemen and soldiers from membership. The Gaelic League, meanwhile, was founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893 to foster the Irish language and Irish culture in general: Hyde was a Protestant and his vision was of a national language owned by all of the population, regardless of their denomination. Religion, indeed, was replaced in Hyde’s vision by race: a common Gaelic Ireland that could take its place alongside the modern nations of the world. Joyce, in ‘The Dead’, would capture the popularity of such language-based cultural politics among a certain Irish middle-class constituency: his sharp-tongued Miss Ivors castigates those who prefer to study foreign cultures and languages, who cannot feel her fervent affinity with the ‘national’ language. But the league soon assumed both an explicitly Catholic and a sharper political edge.

  Ancient history and myth were additional tools in this gathering discourse. The Fenian movement had looked to the legendary Fianna of ancient mythology, using a notional version of the past as a means of influencing the contemporary world, and now others would rework history in a similar fashion in order to create heroes and villains, winners and losers. The writing of Standish James O’Grady well exemplifies this move, his work of the 1870s and 1880s acting as a midwife to the Irish cultural revival and his self-imposed task of revivifying the myths and legends of Irish history for a modern audience. His version of the history of Ireland was, by his own admission, very largely a work of fiction: an act of reaching back in order to resolve how best to move forward; of creating a glorious and distant past as a means of counteracting the recent bad times of the Famine.

  O’Grady’s History of Ireland, indeed, was a book that directly inspired the greats of what became known as the Irish Literary Revival: Yeats, who was already publishing poems in English based on a mythical Irish past, declared that his readings set him directly to work on his ‘Wanderings
of Oisin’, noting that ‘the only person who while belonging to the head class has the central fire of the old people is O’Grady. Everything he does is a new creation, a new miracle.’14 Yeats, his aristocratic confidante Augusta Gregory, the young Protestant playwright John Millington Synge and others combed the rugged western littoral in search of a culture in contact with its past, unadulterated by the contamination and grubbiness of the modern world. The past was being mined and refashioned to suit contemporary needs; and in particular to satisfy the present desire for self-government. Yet Yeats’ notion of a ‘head class’ also indicated the character of his national vision. For one thing, his language was English – and his new national literature was explicitly an English-language project. For another, he – like Gregory and Synge – were Protestants: they were alert to Ireland’s Protestant heritage and they believed in the importance of a Protestant stake in the country’s new future. Yeats was prepared to treat with the Catholic middle-class interests who were driving much of the nationalist debate – but it remained to see whether such a philosophical gap could be bridged.

  In these closing years of the nineteenth century, then, the various elements of Irish nationalist culture had so very much to say for themselves that each struggled to be heard; and it was unclear whether, in the midst of such a national debate, a consensus could ever be reached on any future national shape or direction. In the face of this ongoing tumult – and with the clash of unionism and nationalism continuing all the while – it was perhaps easy for the authorities to become complacent. Yet change was on the way – although it would take an event thousands of miles away on the southern tip of Africa to galvanize matters fully: to direct once more the disparate currents of cultural nationalism into explicitly political channels.

  Part Five

  Two Irelands

  Chapter Ten

  Schisms

  On 21 June 1897 the aged Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Around 3 million people gathered in London to witness the events of Jubilee Day, which included a three-hour-long royal procession through the streets of the city, followed by a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. Victoria herself had made it clear that the Jubilee must be connected explicitly with a celebration of the British Empire, so the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, ensured that representatives were brought together in London from each British possession, protectorate and colony, with an accompanying march-past of some fifty thousand imperial troops. Chamberlain’s own views on the empire were perfectly clear: ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen…. It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world’s surface unless you make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.’

  Chamberlain had every reason to be complacent about the future: the empire was at its zenith, and Britain remained the hub of world commerce. And yet discordant voices could be heard. The Scottish labour activist Keir Hardie, for example, baldly condemned Victoria and her large family as parasites. In Ireland, a gathering in Dublin of the disaffected resulted in a march by torchlight from the castle through the centre of the city: at the heart of the throng was an empty coffin, symbolizing the death of the empire. The march was dispersed by the police; the coffin tipped into the river Liffey. Even in this jubilee year, then, the British imperial project faced opposition. Looming events in Ireland and in Africa would soon make this fact abundantly clear.

  The situation at the southern tip of Africa was at this time highly unstable and marked by political and commercial tension between the British (in the colonies of Natal and the Cape) and the Boers, the Calvinist descendants of the original Dutch-speaking colonists. For the British government the region had long been of the utmost geopolitical importance, since the Cape controlled the vital sea lanes between Europe and India; as a result Britain had formally acquired the Cape Colony in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Many Boers then migrated northwards to assert a measure of independence from the British; in time they established the twin republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, in the process asserting control over the African majority population. These republics were autonomous entities that nevertheless existed in a state of permanent friction with the British authorities, in whose eyes they were anomalies in the context of a now almost wholly colonized continent. Furthermore, they stood in the way of the desired continuous belt of British occupation from the Cape north to Cairo.

  The discovery first of diamond deposits in the Orange Free State and later of gold in the Transvaal had transformed this already tense situation. The uitlanders or foreign workers who began to migrate to the region were for the most part British, and their increasing presence would ultimately provide an opportunity for British intervention. The result was the annexation in 1877 of the Transvaal and the attempt to create a Union of South Africa (as seen in Chapter Nine, a process hampered in the Commons by Parnell and his supporters) that would be controlled by British interests. The resulting First Boer War of 1880–1 produced a series of defeats for the British, confirmed the autonomy of the two Boer states and led to the resumption of a fitful peace in the region. Yet migrant workers continued to flood into the Boer republics to work in their burgeoning mining industries: eventually, the uitlander population of the Transvaal outnumbered that of the Boers.

  In 1895, a British attempt to incite an uitlander rising against Boer rule in the Transvaal – the so-called Jameson Raid – failed: in its aftermath, the two Boer states drew together in a tighter alliance and to prepare for war. The jingoism of the British press on this issue, however, ignored the stark fact that the empire’s military strength at the Cape was weak: Britain was simply not in a position to easily win a war against the Boers on their home ground. Tensions came to a head in September 1899, when Chamberlain demanded the extension of voting rights to all uitlanders living and working in the Transvaal; the Boer authorities refused and in their turn demanded the removal of the British troops clustered on the borders of the Republic. On 11 October the Boer governments took the initiative: their forces crossed into Natal and the Cape Colony and the Second Boer War began.

  Events in southern Africa had long been of great interest to Irish nationalists. It was not difficult to see the Boers as the put-upon victims of monstrous imperialist aggression – an independent-minded pastoral culture that wanted only to be free of the predatory British. Moreover, connections with the region were relatively strong: great floods of Irish emigrants might not have washed up on the shores of southern Africa as they had in Australia and North America, but a small core of Irish had gone to the Transvaal in the hope of making their fortune in the goldfields. They included John (‘Foxy Jack’) MacBride, a shopkeeper’s son from County Mayo, who had emigrated in 1896; and the Irish-language enthusiast and Gaelic League founder member Arthur Griffith, who had come to Johannesburg in 1897 for a two-year stint with a gold company. Griffith found the atmosphere on the high veldt much to his liking: Boer society, he said, demonstrated that ‘God Almighty had not made the earth for the sole use of the Anglo-Saxon race’.1

  This thousand-strong community was more than ample, in those days of improving communications, to spread the word quickly and efficiently of Boer suffering at the hands of the British; and its political complexion was demonstrated in the form of the boisterous celebrations that took place at Johannesburg to mark the centenary of the 1798 rising. With the outbreak of war, the sight of another small, white Christian nation struggling for freedom electrified Irish nationalism. Constitutional politicians had already patched up their bitter post-Parnell factionalism, with the result that a united Irish Party now re-established itself under the leadership of John Redmond. The movement had been only mildly invigorated: its performance – lacking the heady energy of the Parnell era – was frequently anaemic. Yet it remained the dominant force in nationalist politics for years to come.

  Other nationalists, meanwhile, continued to reject th
e parliamentary route. Shortly after his return from Africa, for example, Griffith established the United Irishman newspaper, which would provide a vital media platform in the succeeding years. It first appeared in March 1899, and enabled further airing of the plethora of fiery debates and disputes that at this time characterized Irish cultural life. The United Irishman was kept afloat financially with the assistance of Maud Gonne, the wealthy daughter of an English army officer who is best known for her long association with the poet W. B. Yeats. Early in her life Gonne had come to identify fiercely with the world of nationalist Ireland, and she penned many campaigning pieces for the paper.

  These were exciting times – so exciting, indeed, that there was neither time nor inclination to reflect on certain problematic aspects of the African situation. The deeply ingrained anti-Catholic nature of Boer society was widely recognized: it was for this reason that England’s Catholic bishops lent their support to the British government’s policies in Southern Africa. In Irish nationalist circles, by contrast, this question of religion tended to be dismissed: national liberation was what mattered, and other factors were regarded as essentially immaterial. As to the marginal place allotted to black Africans in Boer society, the prevailing lack of attention given to this question reflected much broader European racist attitudes – to which Irish nationalism was certainly not immune.