by Bury, Robin;
Moving forward, Howe believes essentially that despite recent work by ‘revisionist’ historians such as Roy Foster, Francis Shaw (on 1916), Conor Cruise O’Brien and F.S.L. Lyons in Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890–1939, the impact on the Catholic, nationalist narrative has been weak. Roy Foster has acknowledged that ‘by 1972 new textbooks were being used in schools and universities and new questions were being asked. But what might seem most striking is how little this affected the popular (and paradoxically Anglocentric) version of Irish history held by the public mind’.35
Howe takes Irish historians to task though for their ‘insularity’:
Neither conceptual boldness in integrating Irish themes into wider international currents, nor comparative work of any degree of sophistication … has been much in evidence. An implicit or explicit belief in Irish exceptionalism seems widespread even of scholars most critical of nationalism. Revisionism has been an attempt to broaden the definition of the nation, to qualify its appeal, or to liberalise it, not to supplant it or step outside it altogether. The other side of this coin perhaps follows naturally: that modern Irish historical writing has little international influence.36
Irish historians have, in essence, been disappointing in terms of international influence.
Some comparison of the original form of secular republicanism that was the ideal of the 1798 rebels with what eventually emerged in Ireland might be instructive. Compared, for example, with France, the Irish seem to have departed significantly from the secular ideal, possibly because Irish republicans became characterised by the things they were against rather than what they favoured. Was Republicanism embraced by the early twentieth-century Irish revolutionaries just because it was not the British system, rather than any real love of republican ideals.
As regards the relationship between Church and State, the difference may be that the French Catholic Church was identified with the old monarchy, whereas in Ireland the Catholic Church had the later advantage of having once being suppressed by the British monarchy, though by 1914, Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed all the civil and religious freedoms of Protestants in Ireland.
How does this relate to the tiny Protestant minorities, forced to go down the Catholic, nationalist road since 1921 and before? We have seen the results. Exceptionalism meant exclusivism. Protestants after all have until recently been looked on as the remnant of Britain’s garrison in Ireland, as the upholders of the British presence and policies. Yet by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were a spent force, as we have seen. When the Free State came into being, they were a powerless minority, albeit with important privileged positions in commerce, the legal profession, medicine and manufacturing, positions which after almost a hundred years of independence have faded away.
One interesting cultural issue is the tendency of middle-class Catholics, particularly urban, to adopt what might once have been seen as ‘Protestant culture’ activities and the so called garrison sports – rugby- and cricket-playing schools, tennis and hockey clubs. When Protestant schools opened their doors to them, admiration for ‘Protestant ethos’ meant no shortage of Catholic parents wanting to enrol their children.
How are Protestants seen in today’s Ireland? It is hard and ill-advised to make sweeping generalisations as Protestants are by definition far from a monolithic people. Some value the British connection of the past and see themselves as Irish and British. Mary McAleese, when President of Ireland, ‘urged a new sense of culture of acceptance and inclusion be built, following the success of the Belfast Agreement.
In Church of Ireland churches throughout the State Remembrance Day is marked by selling poppies and prayers for the dead. The British Legion has carried the torch. Until recently the Catholic Irish who served and fell in two world wars have been forgotten. But not so today. Kevin Myers is a shining light in making this happen, revealing the innumerable Irish men who fought in the First World War through his ceaseless research. He has unearthed countless Irish families, Catholic and Protestants, who, in a sea of nationalist fervour following 1916, had too often sought anonymity post the First World War. His recently published book, Ireland’s Great War, is a study of Irishmen who played a part in the defeat of the Central Powers. Myers also did much to expose the disgraceful neglect of the Memorial Gardens designed by Edwin Lutyens at Islandbridge, Dublin, where HM Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath on 18 May 2011, Kevin Myers being present, not invited as an individual by the organisers, he went with the Royal British Legion delegation.37
A peace park was built at Messines in Belgium by people of Ireland and HM Queen Elizabeth II and President Mary McAleese opened it in 1998. President McAleese acknowledged that: ‘Respect for the memory of one set of heroes was often at the expense of respect for the memory of the other.’38 In 2003 she said:
The old vanities of history are disappearing. Carefully hidden stories like those of the Irish who died in the First World War are coming out of shoe boxes in the attic and into the daylight. We are making new friends, we are influencing new people, we are learning new things about ourselves, and we are being changed.39
The ‘one set of heroes’ no doubt refers to the extreme, self-appointed fanatics who led a doomed rebellion in 1916 when up to 200,000 of their fellow Irishmen and women were fighting with Britain in Europe.
But surprisingly Mary McAleese seems to draw the line on where and how far to extend new friendships. She opposes Ireland re-entering a huge club of friends, an anti-colonial organisation (not that Ireland was a ‘colony’, as Stephen Howe has pointed out40), the Commonwealth of Nations, radically changed since Ireland left it in 1949. Leaving the Commonwealth in 1949 was perhaps childish and counter-productive. Foreign policy was created and guided after 1949 by the advanced nationalist, Sean McBride, Minister for External Affairs. The then Taoiseach, A.J. Costello, seems to have been persuaded by him, claiming that leaving the then British Commonwealth would ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’. Thirty years of needless violence later followed in Northern Ireland.
Young Irish people have emigrated for over two centuries to Commonwealth countries including Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They willingly helped to build many of the fifty-three countries in today’s Commonwealth, which consists of 2.2 billion people. Some 21 million people of Irish descent live in Commonwealth countries today.41 It says more about Ireland than the Commonwealth that Ireland has not re-entered a club of countries that share a common past. We also might bear in mind that Irish economic and social mismanagement resulted in many Irish people relocating to the Commonwealth. The pretence among the political elite that Ireland’s place is primarily in the Continental continues, when the languages, cultures and customs of countries in the EU are such that Irish people are not attracted to work in there. It seems, however, that re-entering is a bridge too far for Fine Gael, especially as it took Ireland out. It also appears not to be a consideration of reconciliation for any political party and the Department of Foreign Affairs takes a surprisingly strong negative attitude in the face of hugely improved Anglo-Irish relations. Some might argue that Ireland’s long history of being ruled by Britain is different from the experience of all other countries in the Commonwealth, but after almost a century of independence a more informed and mature view might indicate reconciliation.
Going back to the time when the Normans were invited to help an Irish chieftain, Dermot MacMurrough, it is clear that the Irish warring classes were in alliances with their English counterparts to gain control over rival Irish kingdoms. Moreover it suited as and where appropriate the Irish warlords to bring their vassals to heel when they got out of hand by using their English warlords if necessary.
But as time moved on Ireland became an integral part of the Empire that they played a huge role in building and most Irish people were proud of being part of the Empire until the extremists of 1916 decided to become ‘freedom fighters’. Freedom from what? The country descended into a bloodbath, finally emergin
g as a theocracy masquerading as a democracy. Perhaps the question needs to be asked of all those who oppose Ireland’s Commonwealth membership, like Mary McAleese, why would Commonwealth members welcome into their fold a country with a long history of hatred of England since 1916.
Mainly thanks to the work of ex-President Mary Robinson, and later of Mary McAleese, in May 2011 HM Queen Elizabeth II paid a State visit to Ireland, the first visit of a British monarch since 1921. Mary McAleese was President during this visit, which marked reconciliation and perhaps a beginning of the end of past grievances and misunderstandings. The Queen spoke about Britain’s involvement in Ireland, saying: ‘With the benefit of hindsight we can all see things we wish had been done differently or not at all.’ The visit was hugely successful, marked by spontaneous warmth of the Irish people for a hugely popular monarch.
It could be argued that a new way forward is needed. Perhaps we now at last need to lay aside arguments about historical origins, narrowly defined identities and ancient quarrels and claims. Old arguments about real and perceived wrongs have embittered our political and social landscape for far too long and it is time to replace them with the recognition of the multiple relationships of the people on the two islands, bound by history for millennia. We share a common heritage with the Scots, the Welsh and the English.
Perhaps as part of this process southern Irish Catholics, and Irish historians,42 need to get over their belief in Irish exceptionalism, in believing they were the MOPE (most oppressed people ever) and that the centuries of dominance by a once world power demanded a strong, unmandated violent reaction. This obsessive dwelling on historical wrongs is a barrier to diplomatic progress. The ‘you started it’ justification is used. As we know, the Irish invited the Normans to invade, unlike the Saxons in England who were conquered by a Norman invasion in 1066. They have somehow put that behind them. And many other countries in the British Empire broke away, from India to Kenya to South Africa, without leaving a lasting legacy of popular enmity, of Anglophobia, inflamed by admiring those violent unmandated few at the expense of peaceful constitutionalists. Instead today countries once in the British Empire embrace the benefits of a departed imperial master such as democracy, the rule of law, free press, strong infrastructures (the British brought rail networks, particularly in India) and the primary world language, English. They value friendships with a much-changed United Kingdom and the expression of this reality is marked through membership of the Commonwealth of Nations.
History is a tale of invasions and conquests that resulted in the confluence of cultures and the mingling of traditions. The popular culture of Ireland is largely Anglophone and American. Irish people are deeply interwoven with English people over many generations by blood and in economic/business life.
The 1916 commemorations were of concern to many, if not most, southern Protestants. This merits little surprise, bearing in mind the Roman Catholic nature of the Rising and its later consequences for the Protestant community in the twenty-six counties. Very few Protestants took part in the Rising and the one Protestant, an Ulster Quaker once prominent in the IRB, Bulmer Hobson, opposed armed rebellion which led to: ‘… barren conflicts over verbal differences of politics which only the contestants, and not many of them, could understand, that these conflicts developed a fanatical bitterness which found its outlet in a civil was …’43
Hobson believed martyrdom was ‘indulgent and damaging’.44 He was cast aside by those who took leadership roles after 1916 and ‘a disillusionment set in that was rapid, intense and permanent’.45
Another Protestant, Warre Bradley Wells, editor of the Church of Ireland Gazette in 1916, was a witness to much of the fighting around Sackville Street where the Church of Ireland premise was located in Middle Abbey Street. He wrote that the Rising was ‘a complete failure with no approval from the mass of the Irish people’.46 In the special edition 25 April–5 May, he editorialised:
The pity of the citizens murdered, the young English soldiers shot down on Irish soil, the callow lads led into treason: the shame of this stab in the back of our brave soldiers in Flanders and Salonika; and the horror of Dublin, fired by the hands of her own sons, and of Irish blood shed by Irish hands.47
The same edition of the Gazette published a letter from the ‘Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd John Henry Bernard, dated 3 May and published by The Irish Times in which he appealed for martial law to continue: ‘Many armed rebels are at large in Dublin still, and can only be averted by the adoption of the sternest measures … no one who lives in Ireland believes that the present Irish Government has the courage to punish anybody’.48
Dr Susan Hood wrote in the archive section of the Church of Ireland library, which published the special 25 April–5 May edition in April 2016, that during the rebellion were, perhaps surprisingly, no sectarian incidents:
Such colourful insights to events as they unfolded sit side by side with the Gazette’s articulation of a middle-ground opinion seriously concerned about the long-term consequences for Ireland as a whole. At pains to point out ‘the religious element did not enter in any way into this unfortunate rebellion’ with ‘no whisper of old sectarian feuds’, it remarked moderate unionist and nationalist Ireland ‘… have learned in an awful personal experience what war means … Easter week has taught us the terror of the sniper’.49
The rosary was recited many times in the GPO by the insurgents, something that would have been abhorrent to the nationalist icon, Wolfe Tone. The Catholic hierarchy as a whole was reluctant to oppose the rebellion. Eamon McCann wrote:
It is said that ‘the bishops condemned the Rising’. This is at best an exaggeration, repeated today in efforts to project the Rising as a secular event. In fact, there were 31 Catholic bishops in Ireland in 1916, of whom only seven explicitly condemned the rebels. Most of the rest kept cannily quiet, before placing themselves soon at the head of the national movement which was to arise from the Dublin rubble.50
George William Russell was another Protestant separatist from Ulster who had lived in Dublin from the age of 11. He was a writer, painter, and poet, editor of the Irish Statesman and friends with many of the leading Irish writers in the early nineteenth century. He was deeply involved in the Theosophical Society which led him to believe that a new messenger would come to bring in a new era for Ireland. Like Hobson and Wells, he opposed 1916, saying: ‘I do not approve of the rising at all. I hate physical force employed in almost any cause …They were all mad and most of them on both sides bad shots and half demented, the whole thing was dreadful.’51
Russell cast a socialist light on the motivation of the insurgents, believing not so much that they fought for a new separate nationalist state, as to redress profound economic grievances among working-class Dubliners:
It was labour supplied the personal element in the revolt. It had a real grievance. The cultural element, poets, Gaels, etc. never stir more than one per cent of a country. It is only when an economic injustice stirs the workers that they unite their grievances with all other grievances.52
Dublin workers were ‘badly housed, badly paid.’53 Russell joined the disillusioned voices which came into being after the Treaty. He was particularly critical of Fianna Fail, which took power in 1932 under Eamon de Valera. He complained about ‘squalid Catholic materialism’ and ‘smug Catholic self-satisfaction’. After Lady Gregory died in 1932 he praised her, writing to Yeats that ‘the Anglo Irish were the best Irish, but I can see very little future for them as the present belongs to that half-crazy Gaeldom which is growing dominant around us’ and was convinced ‘the long cultural revolution wrought by his generation had in fact ended in defeat’.54
Russell turned his back on the Ireland that had evolved after 1921 and went to live in Bournemouth after his wife died in 1932. He died the following year and was buried in Dublin after a huge public funeral, attended by his enemy, Eamon de Valera.
What of the reaction of southern Protestants to the many commemorations? The Presbyteria
n Minister of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, in charge of the commemorations, was anxious that an inclusive theme was adopted, rather than a Catholic, Gaelic emphasis, more in line with the outlook of the new, young, modern Ireland. She expressed her wish that ‘reconciliation’ would be the theme for the various traditions on the island.
This message was powerfully driven home by the erection of a Wall of Remembrance in Glasvevin cemetery in Dublin, inspired by the International Memorial of Notre Dame de Lorette in France. It was officially opened by the Taoiseach on Sunday, 3 April 2016 with representatives of all religious denominations present. There was a reading by a member of the Humanist Association of Ireland.
The names of all who died in Easter week 1916 were included on the memorial by the dates of their deaths starting on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916. There are 488 names, 268 civilians, including 40 children under 17.55 All the British and Irish soldiers serving in the British Army are included with the names of the insurgents. Not surprisingly, Sinn Fein sourly described the wall as ‘totally inappropriate’.