Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  In the same year, T. Desmond Williams published The Irish Struggle, 1916–1926. Among other things, he emphasized what he saw as the ineffectual efforts of Connolly and his Irish socialist movement. W. I. Thompson argued in his 1967 Imagination of the Insurrection: Dublin 1916 that the Easter rebels had concentrated too much on their visions of the kind of Ireland they wanted the Rising to bring about. Noble ideas about blood sacrifices, and poetry glorifying the struggle they were about to embark on, blinded them to what he saw as realism (i.e. the hopelessness of their plans). Other important questions about the Rising were raised around the time of its fiftieth anniversary. Perhaps the most important was: why did it fail to spark a more general uprising against British rule in Ireland? J.C. Beckett argued in 1967 that there were really two revolutions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. The first was a slow process of reform and change in religious rights (e.g. Catholic Emancipation), land ownership and education ultimately brought about by British legislation. The second revolution was not only the Easter Rising but the establishment of the Free State. Beckett did not argue that the first revolution necessarily laid the groundwork for the second, but that there seemed to be some connection. This led other historians to consider whether the conditions that the first revolution brought about by the time of the last major land reform in 1909 prevented the growth of mass discontent in the country as a whole. Patrick Lynch argued that land reforms may have been particularly instrumental in the absence of a general social uprising following the political and military one during Easter Week (Lynch, ‘The Social Revolution that Never Was’, in Desmond Williams (ed.), The Irish Struggle, 1966). Even though there may have been no general social rising to follow the militant one, it was clear that the Rising provided a political alternative to the constitutionalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party. This greatly affected the domestic politics of the Free State.

  Another article which discussed the political (and, indeed, moral) after-effects of the Rising was written by a Jesuit priest and sent to Irish Historical Studies in 1966. It was not published until 1972, partly because it was highly critical of Pearse and of the effects of the Rising on subsequent Irish history. Father Francis Shaw’s article was more of an essay about an historical event rather than a researched article, but it gained a lot of attention and encapsulated a strain of thought about the Rising that argued that it was damaging. For the most part, Shaw was highly critical of Pearse, especially his use of Christ as an allegory for Irish patriotism. Further, he said, Ireland was not in need of a blood sacrifice to cleanse itself, and the Irish nation was not generally suffering. Reforms under the Union had brought about general improvements in the lives of people. But most of all, Shaw argued, the Rising was politically damaging and led directly to partition, the civil war (see chapter seven), and the lack of recognition for the Irishmen who had died in the First World War. The Rising ended any hope that some sort of Home Rule might be put in place, because the unionists saw that nationalists would never be satisfied unless they could completely overthrow British rule. Partition was the result. Further, the civil war came about because the rebels and their ideological descendants could never accept the compromise solution of a twenty-six-county Free State. Their stringent republicanism ultimately caused more suffering, he argued. Finally, the lack of respect for the Irish dead of the First World War (because they had fought for what the rebels saw as a foreign and oppressing power) ‘kept the fire of hatred burning’, which hurt Irish families of the war dead. This could hardly ease the nation’s wounds, he thought.

  The next generation of historians, interestingly, turned back to biography in an attempt to analyse the meaning of the Rising. For Ruth Dudley Edwards and Austen Morgan, studying the psychological attributes of leaders of the Rising, and trying to understand the philosophical and literary influences on them, could bring to the surface the true motivations for the Rising. Dudley Edwards concentrated on Patrick Pearse. Her 1977 biography of him explained his vision of a post-rebellion Ireland, which would be distinctly different from the kind proposed by John Redmond and the Home Rulers. Pearse saw Ireland after 1916 as Gaelic, self-sufficient economically, and, of course, politically independent. In this, he showed how important this vision of Irishness would be in creating a new nation based on ancient traditions and an unbroken link with past Irish heroes. Not only would this new Ireland be historically sound, it would bring about great changes in the Irish people. Ireland would become communal, removed from the excesses of the modern world, and the people would be happier and more considerate of their fellow countrymen. For Pearse, then, the Rising would not end in 1916. The ideas behind it would fashion the country, its people and its politics for generations. Austen Morgan’s 1988 biography of James Connolly examined his writings fully and analytically. Morgan argued that, in the years before the Rising, Connolly gradually modified his ideas about socialism and internationalism. In short, he moved towards a more closed, national focus. He changed his ideas about the future of an Irish workers’ state with broad support from the populace, to concentrating on the military overthrow of British government in Ireland. Morgan went so far as to argue that, at the time of his death in 1916, Connolly no longer held strong socialist convictions. Further, his internationalist ideas had also been abandoned, and he considered Irish politics only.

  In the early 1990s, there was a reaction against these somewhat critical revisionist interpretations of the Easter Rising. The most important of these, interestingly, came from the Field Day Theatre Company. Their edited volume, Revising the Rising (1991), contained a mixture of essays from historians, literary critics and other non-academic commentators. Some of the more important ideas to come out of this collection were those of Declan Kiberd, Tom Garvin and Arthur Aughey. Kiberd argued that the connection between the Easter rebels and the modern IRA has been overstated. The ideals of the Easter rebels were far removed from those of the modern IRA. The rebels, therefore, cannot provide an enduring ideological inspiration for militant republicans in the second half of the twentieth century. Tom Garvin stressed that there was at least one important characteristic shared by the rebels and the constitutional nationalists led by the Irish Parliamentary Party. This was a kind of inclusiveness (or at the very least anti-sectarianism) common to both types of nationalism. Previous scholars, in their emphasis on the differences between the militant and the constitutional nationalists, have undervalued this important link, Garvin argued. Aughey, a unionist, argued that the 1916 Rising sits very uneasily with contemporary politics in the Irish Republic. In Northern Ireland, militant nationalist rhetoric relies heavily on the idea of a strong link between the rebels then and the rebels now. In the Republic, however, there is a recognition that nationalist politics have moved beyond the ideals of the Easter rebels. This has manifested itself, among other things, in the country’s willingness to remove its constitutional claims on Northern Ireland (see chapter nine). Yet the Rising is considered part of the political history of the Republic, and generations of politicians (particularly those from Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil) have used it as part of their rhetoric. This has caused an ideological tension within modern republicanism.

  INTERPRETATIONS – PARTITION

  The collapse of Home Rule and the partition of Ireland have also received a good deal of historical attention. The debate over the dividing of Ireland has taken a different course from that over the Rising. Its central concerns are to explain why the late attempts at Home Rule failed, and why the island was partitioned in 1921. As in interpretations of subsequent periods of Irish history, the debate has focused on nationalists, unionists and the role of the British government.

  The traditional nationalist interpretation was most fully set out in Frank Gallagher’s The Indivisible Island: the History of the Partition of Ireland (1957). He argued that partition was mainly a solution that helped British politicians solve British party-political problems. Gallagher thought that unionist attachment towards Britain was not as st
rong as it had appeared, and that their fervour had been whipped up by British Conservatives. This interference from Britain was what kept the division between nationalists and unionists alive. It was, therefore, the British who partitioned Ireland. Although she does not argue as polemically, Catherine Shannon reached some of the same main conclusions in her Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland (1988). But she was more interested in perceptions of the Irish among British politicians than Gallagher was. Racial ideas about the difference between the British and Irish, and the attitude that the Irish might well be able to govern a backward and agricultural area like southern Ireland but would be lost trying to run the more sophisticated north-east Ulster economy, meant that British politicians could never have seriously considered a united Ireland run from Dublin.

  The competing interpretation, however, stresses the depth of unionist feeling, and their severe opposition to a united Ireland. When most other explanations had been tested and found wanting (see the Interpretations section in chapter eight), it became clear to many historians that unionist feeling was deep and genuine, whether or not those feelings were based on a balanced reading of Irish history. Peter Gibbon’s Origins of Ulster Unionism (1975) makes this case strongly. Patricia Jalland’s The Liberals and Ireland: the Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (1980) is perhaps the most sophisticated and in-depth analysis of the third Home Rule bill. She also found Ulster unionism to be a profoundly held ideology, but rather than blame Irish nationalists for not recognizing this, or British Conservatives for whipping it up, Jalland concentrated on the failure of British Liberals (from Gladstone onwards) to understand the depth of feeling. This meant that Home Rule started from a basically untenable position, and that partition was the inevitable result. Alvin Jackson has also shown how strong Ulster unionism was, but his The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (1989) makes the case that, far from being strong allies of the Conservatives, unionists distanced themselves from both British parties because they trusted neither. Their diehard political stance may be more accurately understood as a lonely one, based on self-interest and the survival of what they saw as their heritage. This ultimately tied the hands of both the British government and the Irish nationalists, and partition, although the ‘least bad’ option, was the only one left.

  INTERPRETATIONS – NATIONALISM AND UNIONISM

  Although nationalism and unionism certainly existed before (and after) the period covered by this chapter, the years under consideration were particularly important for the development of these two main political ideologies over the rest of the twentieth century.

  As with the Easter Rising, much of the early work done on nationalism was based on biographies of those considered to be nationalist heroes. Much popular material argued that there was a continuity of nationalist ideology from Theobald Wolfe Tone in the late eighteenth century to Patrick Pearse in the early twentieth century. Like many other aspects of Irish history, this began to be revised between the two world wars. A main interpretative struggle took place over which individuals and groups could be said to have sustained Irish nationalism after the Famine. F.S.L. Lyons argued that the Irish Parliamentary Party had been the main vehicle for nationalist expression, rather than republican militants (see his Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910, 1951). He also tried to return Charles Stewart Parnell to the consititutional side of nationalism in his 1977 biography. Republicans, he argued, had ahistorically claimed him for their side. Also, later work, especially that by D. George Boyce and Tom Garvin, stressed the diversity of nationalist thinking and action. In his Nationalism in Ireland (1982), Boyce argued that there was no real continuity of nationalism from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, and that diversity in nationalist thinking was set in place by the time of O’Connell (who had very different ideas of Irish nationalism from Tone, who, in turn, also had very different ideas from Henry Grattan). The differences in nationalism, he argued, grew from there. Tom Garvin argued that the differences between militant and constitutional nationalists in the nineteenth century were more complicated than previously thought. At times, their ideas and purposes merged, but often they were in complete opposition, and any reading of Irish history which shows them merging within the Home Rule movement is too simplistic.

  Another aspect of the early interpretation of Irish nationalism was that its ideas and actions sprang from Irish brains alone. This can also be seen as part of the idea of separateness and self-sufficiency that would define much of political and economic policy in the Irish Free State and Republic in later years (see chapters eight and nine). Alan O’Day’s reinterpretation of this idea, however, argued that members of the Irish Parliamentary Party were heavily influenced by reform traditions within British politics. O’Day’s 1977 English Face of Irish Nationalism shows how dependent radical Irish nationalism and republicanism were on British radical thinkers and political organizers. Further British influence was shown by Charles Townshend, who argued in an article in 1981 that much of the government’s policies in the nineteenth century (such as the provision of elementary education since 1831) helped create an atmosphere wherein nationalism could grow.

  Another important aspect of the continuing reinterpretation of Irish nationalism concerns geography. Traditional nationalist interpretations implied that nationalism was a countrywide ideology and was expressed in various parts of the country in similar ways. More recent interpretations, however, have stressed regional diversity, and, in fact, have argued that the national nature of the campaigns of O’Connell and Parnell were unusual, rather than commonplace. K. Theodore Hoppen argued that the immediate post-O’Connell period saw a revival of local political identities and loyalties (Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832–55, 1984). This built on earlier work which showed that not only were there different levels of nationalist activity in different areas, but that the activity itself was often of a different nature. Munster, for instance, saw a great deal of militant nationalism in the early twentieth century, whereas Connacht was less violent, but more expressive of nationalism at the ballot box. (See David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution, 1977; and A.C. Hepburn and E. Rumpf, Nationalism and Socialism in Ireland, 1977.)

  Revisionist ideas about Irish nationalism, as about other topics, have undergone re-appraisals. But nationalism as an issue has perhaps attracted the most attention, because it seems to go right to the heart of Irish identity and current Irish politics. The major critic of revisionism has been Brendan Bradshaw, who wrote a seminal piece in Irish Historical Studies (‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, vol. 26, 1988–9). Although focusing mainly on the pre-modern period, Bradshaw had general criticisms to make about the revision of nationalism and Irish history in general. In short, he argued, revisionists have removed the professional study of history from the public sphere, and have ignored the importance of history in the popular mind as a way to understand the past and to give ideas about the future. Revisionism, with its emphasis on ‘value-free history’ (an early goal of the revisionists of the 1930s and 1940s), has, Bradshaw argued, produced work only of interest to scholars, which the public could not understand, or would find boring. The revisionist emphasis on the complexities of Irish history has also understated the level of suffering the native Irish endured during various conquests and other events such as the Famine, Bradshaw maintained. Nationalist heroes, movements and events have been dissected too stringently by the revisionists, he argued, and this has resulted in the loss of a scholarly basis for an Irish national identity. Bradshaw’s ideas, however, were heavily criticized, both in the pages of Irish Historical Studies and in the popular press, on a number of points. Much of this commentary has been on Bradshaw’s specific examples from pre-modern history, but some of it has been on the broader implications of his ideas about nationalism and history. These include the argument (denied strongly by Bradshaw in subsequent writings) that
his ideas present an uncritical approach to nationalism and seek to revive traditional interpretations. This, it has been said, only heightens the divisions in Irish society and between the Republic and Northern Ireland.