But things are about to change. The succeeding Tipping generation is rather more perspicacious and better informed, and its militant instincts become attached to an ideology. This is true at least of the family it suits my purpose to concentrate on – for you needn’t worry that I’m about to delve into the procreative histories of all the Tipping offspring of Matthew and his wives. For the moment at least, I’m sticking to the progeny of one son, Henry and his wife Mary Anne Dowds – quite enough to be going on with. Four daughters and six sons were born to this pair between 1888 and 1906. All of them grew up devoted to Ireland and their mother, but at odds with their father – except perhaps the youngest, Bertie, the sole beneficiary, in 1938, of Henry’s will. Henry was not likeable. Even if he failed to manifest the backstreet truculence attributable to his brothers, Henry possessed a nasty feral streak of his own (according to his grandson Harry Tipping), and would sometimes incite his sons to bash one another in the face, this being his idea of fun. The sons were great pals, as it happened, and if they went along with this, it really was only a game as far as they were concerned. Family solidarity was strongly developed in this branch of the Tippings – with father in his brown grocer’s overall, maybe, excluded from its benefits. (Though Henry did stick up for his sons when they got into trouble, as we shall see.) The girls in particular had no cause to love their father, whose position on women’s rights was not advanced. Despite this, I think, Mary Anne Dowds kept her husband more or less in order, and exerted as much of a civilising influence in the home as she could manage.
Outside the home, other, enlightening, nationalist and cultural influences were mustering. In 1892, in a lecture delivered to the Irish Literary Society in Dublin, you had the Protestant Gaelegoir Douglas Hyde calling for the total ‘de-anglicisation’ of Ireland, and, in furtherance of this object, going on to found the Gaelic League (with a little help from Glenarm man Eoin MacNeill, and others). It was a crucial moment in the history of Ireland: ‘I have said again and again,’ wrote Padraig Pearse, ‘that when the Gaelic League was founded the Irish revolution began.’ The existing Henry Tippings were only babies at the time, too young to sit up and take note of what was happening in the sphere of nationalist politics; but for reasons of birthright, location and so on, they were predestined to be responsive to all the exhilarating forces coming at them from various directions.
The first of the family, Anne Theresa, was born in 1888. Once she’d come of age, the eldest Tipping daughter washed her hands of Lurgan and its turmoil by emigrating to Rhodesia and passing out of this story. (She kept in touch with her family, though.) A batch of brothers followed the birth of Anne Theresa, starting with Matt in 1890 and interspersed with Lily, May and Monica (Monny). By the time the oldest were into their teens and twenties, an Irish cultural revival was dominating the social climate of the day. Just after the turn of the century, people like the young Quaker nationalist Bulmer Hobson were flocking to join the junior branch of the burgeoning Gaelic League which met in a hall in Albert Street in Belfast, poring over Irish-language primers to the detriment of their nerves and eyesight, and flinging themselves with abandon into violent games of hurling at the back of the old Falls Park. The caman – hurling stick – became a symbol of a new and exuberant nationalist aithbheodhchaint.2
Some time during 1902, and in collaboration with Constance Markievicz, Bulmer Hobson conceived a brainchild, Na Fianna Éireann – an organisation geared to train up boys, North and South, in the ways of patriotic thought and activism. (It only got going in the North after 1910.) The young Lurgan Tippings got themselves enrolled in the local Fianna branch as soon as they were of an age to do so, and joined with a will in its marches, merrymaking, and Gaelic games. I don’t know if any of them ever became adept Irish-speakers, but they were great at Gaelic football. They were energetic goalkeepers, players and administrators of the team known as the Lurgan Davitts. All were deeply attuned to the Fianna’s raison d’être, which – here comes an irony – was devised by a Protestant Irishman as a strenuous riposte to the Catholic Boys’ Brigades which functioned at the time as a kind of recruiting centre for the British Army.43
Hobson’s biographer, Marnie Hay, tells a story about the young Quaker taking over a class of boys in a building attached to St Paul’s Church on the Falls Road in Belfast, and proceeding to dun into their more or less attentive heads the Lord’s Prayer in Irish. He had them chanting away in unison, ‘Ar nAthair ata i Neamh ...’, while people passing by in Cavendish Street outside wearing shawls and caps might have wondered what the hell was going on. Marnie Hay records the surprise of the St Paul’s curate on entering the classroom and finding a Protestant engaged in this activity.
He needn’t have been surprised, really. It was Protestants who saved the language when native Catholic Irish-speakers were desperate to gain a bit of fluency in English and rise in the world. It was Protestants, by and large, who had the leisure and resources to go about the work of collecting and preservation. They were rectors’ sons like Douglas Hyde, businessmen like Robert MacAdam, or ex-Trinity students like Samuel Ferguson, whose commitment to Gaelic culture and unionist politics has often been remarked. Ferguson acknowledged absolutely no incompatibility between the two. The term that quickly came into being was ‘cultural nationalism’, with the unspoken exclusion from it of any political follow-up.
If you’d been around, say, in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920, you might have found it a bit of a strain to grapple with all the overlapping, contradictory, competing, evolving and ingrained versions of Irishness floating around in the public sphere. First of all you had the fundamental divisions, Protestant and Catholic. (‘Not men and women in an Irish street,’ William Allingham lamented, ‘but Protestants and Catholics you meet.’) But being Protestant, in many people’s eyes, needn’t debar you from proclaiming an Irish identity, being a Gaelic-speaking aficionado or embracing separatism (to whatever degree). There were liberal Protestants and diehard Protestants (I’ll get to the latter shortly). Among Catholic nationalists were many who welcomed the enlistment of non-Catholics to the national cause, holding fast to Wolfe Tone’s idea of an inclusive nation. They thought it didn’t matter what faith, or non-faith, you subscribed or didn’t subscribe to, as long as you had the good of the country at heart. But then there were others for whom the concept of being Irish was absolutely entwined with Catholicism, who believed you couldn’t be one without professing the other. And it mattered that you were a ‘cradle Catholic’ of impeccable lineage like my great-grandmother Ellen Jordan, rather than simply adopting the faith like the renegade Leslie of Castle Leslie in County Monaghan (say) who changed his name from John to Shane and went about clad in a saffron kilt.
The Church had for some time been increasing its hold over its adherents, and by the turn of the century it had many of them in its vulturine grip. In 1902, an actual ‘Catholic Association’ came into being to oppose Protestant influences and impose a priestly formulation on cultural activities (let alone daily activities). Clear the way for D.P. Moran and his ‘Irish-Ireland’ movement. ‘The Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation,’ the author of The Philosophy of Irish-Ireland unequivocally declared. Short shrift was given in this philosophy to Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s campaign to add dignity to Ireland in the face of ongoing ‘Paddy-and-shillelagh’ slurs. A different brand of dignity, decidedly church-based if not positively awash in holy water, was postulated by Moran’s Irish-Irelanders. It might be embodied in pious peasants or dressed-up ecclesiarchs. But it didn’t reside in emblems extracted from sagas and folk-tales – perish the pagan thought – or in a cornucopia of crepuscular allurements. The literary achievement of the Revivalists was beside the point when the spirit of the nation eluded their best efforts. The Catholic spirit of the nation.
It isn’t too hard to understand the resistance of Orange Ulster to all this, or even to accord a little, just a little, credence to the slogan of the day: Home Rule is Rome Rule. But alas, the Orange v
ersion of ethnic identity carried an obduracy and intolerance all its own. Clear the way, again, for Sir Edward Carson and his Ulster Volunteers recruited from Orange Lodges and geared to the fullest extent to withstand any impulse in Ireland towards democracy. You can see the shade of the ‘No Surrender’ bard William Blacker presiding over Protestant preparations for defiance, when it seemed the spectre of Home Rule was about to become a reality.
What form did these preparations take? First you had ‘Ulster Day’, 1912, when a ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ against Home Rule was signed by nearly half a million Ulster men and women, all afire with loyalist indignation. Ulster Volunteers take over local fields, set up rifle ranges in them, and practise shooting in anticipation of a civil war. They wear badges proclaiming ‘No Surrender’. The future poet George Buchanan, eight years old at the time, observes these activities going on in the vicinity of Larne where his father is a Protestant rector. ‘Ping-ping! The shots strike the targets. The Volunteers are learning how to kill.’4 A short time later comes the famous gun-running episode of April 1914, when arms and ammunition from Germany are brought ashore at various seaports along the northern coast. George Buchanan continues his lively account:
... all through the night, on the road beside the rectory, we can hear the cars and we can see the trees constantly illumined by their headlamps. In the morning it is understood that an extraordinary event has occurred. A ship from Germany landed a cargo of arms at Larne Harbour. The police barracks were surrounded and the telephone wires cut. Already the arms have been distributed to points through the province, some being concealed under chancel floors in Protestant churches.
But the wind is taken out of anti-Home Rule sails by overwhelming events occurring elsewhere. It’s 1914, and an entire world war is about to engulf the nations. The Protestant sons of Ulster, jettisoning their Orange outrage for the moment, rush to enlist in the British Army – which only a month or so earlier they’d planned to engage in battle – and distinguish themselves at the Somme and other major theatres of conflict. So do thousands of Irish Catholics, among them my grandfather Brady – though in deference to a nationalist imperative he enlists with the Dublin Fusiliers rather than any of the Ulster regiments. He does so in the company of Lurgan friends and connections-by-marriage, including his wife’s half-nephew two times over, Henry and Mary Anne’s son Frank Tipping. I believe these innocent recruits would all have regarded the prospect of training and fighting as something of a lark, before hell set in around them. I think of the Heaney poem about Francis Ledwidge, the ‘Tommy’s uniform’, the ‘haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave’. Some of the Lurgan army boys with their Catholic faces came home to tell the ghastly story, and some, like my grandfather, didn’t.
A few months earlier, in the autumn of 1913, the Irish Volunteers had come into being as a counterblast to Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. While the latter were motivated by the most implacable determination ‘to resist Home Rule to the very death, [and] keep “the Covenant of God”’,5 the former held fast to the primary purpose of fighting for Ireland. Some among the Irish Volunteers achieved this purpose, when 1916 came around; while others, like their Ulster Protestant counterparts, though from an entirely different standpoint, were undergoing bombardment elsewhere. I don’t want to go into the reasons why, after 1914, some Irish Volunteers joined the British Army without relinquishing their nationalist principles, while others stuck to their republican guns. Most of us know the reasons, and the outcome, the uneasy resolution imposed on the country by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. As many historians have pointed out – with more or less glee – what unionists acquired after 1922 was a version of the Home Rule against which, with so much hullabaloo, they had previously set their faces.
On the scale of ironies, though, that’s only about halfway up. It was the nationalist version they’d resisted, and that had been warded off, even if the terms of the eventual compromise were thoroughly satisfactory to no one. On the subject of ironies – here’s another which I can’t resist noting, having come across it while reading Jonathan Bardon’s History of Ulster. It concerns Sir Edward Carson and his muddled family. It was a cousin of Carson’s, I learn, called Maire Butler, a member of the Gaelic League, who coined the imperishable term ‘Sinn Féin’. And, ‘...we in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin,’ thunders Carson in 1920, addressing an assembly of twenty-five thousand Orangemen, ‘no Sinn Féin organisation, no Sinn Féin methods ...’. The comforting solidarity of ‘Ourselves’, it seems, can accommodate or repudiate whomever it pleases. ... But we needn’t be surprised by anomalies of consanguinity, which pop up to intrigue us all over the place, once we start to look for them. Take another pair of unlikely cousins, Charles Stewart Parnell and Sir Basil Brooke6 – and then imagine yourself located somewhere above the whole cat’s cradle of Irish affairs, looking down in bemusement.
As for the subject of my immediate interest, my own family connections: half of them were signing the Covenant at the appropriate moment, while the other half were shaping up to be republican activists. (All right, I’m simplifying things to underscore the point.) My Craig grandfather certainly celebrated ‘Ulster Day’, at least in spirit,7 along with his father and brothers. But the outbreak of war with Germany placed him in a double bind. He didn’t volunteer to join the British Army – well, how could he? He was half-German himself and disinclined, I am sure, to take up arms against his close relations. I don’t even know if he was eligible for army service, given his background. But I do know that no hint of ‘Hun’ affiliations would have passed his lips, or those of his children.
One of the most cogent and entertaining discussions of confusion and complexity in Ulster politics was published in 1919, and has long been out of print. It is James Winder Good’s Ulster and Ireland. I’ve already alluded to this study here and there, and I applaud it again for its adept engagement with contemporary – and perennial – issues, and for its liberal stance. It employs the kind of logic that undermines ideological idiocies. I recommend it to any student of Ulster inconsistencies. The mode in which it is written is that of satirical common sense. For example, when Good points out that ‘during the progress of the Home Rule controversy the unionist case has been twisted right round’, you want to stand up and cheer. First, in his speeches, Sir Edward Carson expressed vehement sentiments culled from Fitzgibbon and Castlereagh, but before the thing was over, Good says, ‘his denial of the right of British statesmen to intervene in Ulster was uncompromising and passionate enough to have satisfied Wolfe Tone himself’. Sinn Féin Abu.
And here is my own fundamental contention in a nutshell. Compiling a list of speakers on a Protestant platform, all of them immersed to the hilt in the business of preserving Ulster’s Orange integrity, Good is surprised – or perhaps not surprised – to find names like Maguire, Murphy, Quinn, Moriarty, MacNeill, O’Neill and O’Donnell occurring over and over among the denouncers of ‘Romanism’ and Fenianism. The names themselves, he says, ‘are the best refutation of the doctrines their bearers preached’. Quite so.8 And just occasionally, against the grain of Ulster fixity, you find the bearer of such a name endowed with sufficient aplomb to revel in the contradictions thereby adumbrated. I’m thinking of someone like the nineteenth-century anti-Papist firebrand cleric Dr Kane, Grand Master of an Orange lodge and pioneering member of the Gaelic League. ‘My Orangeism,’ Kane said (quoted by Good), ‘does not make me any less proud to be an O’Cahan.’ And an even more thoroughgoing proponent of the eccentricities-of-allegiance school of behaviour was the lawyer John Rea (c.1822–1881), whose Belfast house sported Orange and Green flags flying side by side, no doubt to the bewilderment of his neighbours. At one moment, Rea appears at the head of a procession of Orangemen asserting their right to public assembly and free speech, and at the next moment, mounted on a horse and waving a green flag, he’s leading nationalists engaged in a similar demonstration. John Rea’s label for himself, ‘her Orthodox Presbyterian Britannic Majesty’s O
range-Fenian Attorney-General for Ulster’, might put us in mind of Walt Whitman’s ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, / I am large, I contain multitudes’.9 Alas, the general run of Ulster’s larger-than-life figures were all on the side of their own preferred faction.
The exceptions like John Rea are heartening, but they’re only exceptions. They do, however, recur from time to time to bolster the sense of limitless possibilities in Ulster affairs. Alongside the sticklers for sects are those who refuse to be constrained by factional requirements of any kind. Like Dr Kane before him, Frank McCollum of County Antrim was Grand Master of an Orange Lodge in the 1960s, and at the same time chairman of the Irish Musicians’ Association, Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann, when a branch of the latter was established in his home town of Ballycastle. Well, traditional music, as the fiddle-player Alex Kerr was fond of pointing out, ‘knows no border, nor no creed’.10 This is true, or ought to be true, but immediately a contradiction arises when you consider the effect of certain ‘traditional’ party tunes on the tempers and dispositions of clashing partisans. Anything, anything native to Ulster can be turned to an integrating or a disintegrating purpose.
A Twisted Root Page 21