Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  THE PEACE PROCESS

  The British government took two further steps towards resolving the Northern Ireland problem when it stated in late 1989 that it would respond positively to an end to IRA violence, and said in late 1990 that Britain had no ‘strategic or economic interest’ in Northern Ireland, which meant that it would only retain the province on the basis that the majority of the people there wished it to. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke (1934– ), also tried to build inter-party co-operation in what came to be known as the Brooke Initiative in early 1990 (which was more or less the start of the peace process). Brooke tried to base this on the idea that the constitutional parties in Northern Ireland had no real barriers to talking to one another, and, hence, moving the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement forward. Various proposals for a change in how Northern Ireland was to be governed (by a commission made up of members from Northern Ireland, London, Dublin and the European Community) were put forward by the SDLP, but were rejected by unionists. Although these talks and the issues they raised lasted through 1991 and most of 1992, the problems and disagreements (which included such matters as the venue of the meetings and who would chair them, as well as more long-standing issues) between the various parties caused them to collapse by November 1992.

  Throughout the early years of the 1990s, John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, had been holding talks with Gerry Adams from Sinn Féin, attempting to bring Adams’s party into the constitutional process of seeking reform in Northern Ireland. The British government, under the new Secretary of State, Patrick Mayhew (1929– ), had publicly stated its willingness to allow Sinn Féin to participate in political talks if they would renounce violence and try to convince other hard-line republicans to do the same. A further sense of Sinn Féin taking a more moderate stand came on 24 April 1993, when Hume and Adams issued a joint statement that the Irish people had a right to self-determination, and, more importantly, that the way this right was to be exercised was ‘a matter of agreement between the people of Ireland’. This seemed to indicate that Sinn Féin were willing to take the concerns of unionists into account. Mayhew had also publicly stated that, although the identity and aspirations of unionists were safe-guarded in national and international law, there was ‘also the aspiration to a united Ireland, an aspiration that is no less legitimate’. This recognition of nationalist feelings was a major step forward in understanding the different groups in Northern Ireland.

  In December 1993, the British Prime Minister, John Major (1943– ), and the Irish taoiseach, Albert Reynolds (1932– ), issued their Joint Declaration that ‘it is for the people of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.’ The 1993 Declaration also emphasized the need for all interested parties (including those in Britain and the United States) to have ‘full respect for the rights and identities of both traditions in Ireland’. This was welcomed by constitutional nationalists, who saw the British withdrawal from specific interest in Northern Ireland as a positive step forward. Militant nationalists, however, resented the renewed emphasis on the separateness of Northern Ireland. Unionists remained worried that the British government was gradually accepting moderate nationalist arguments about the future of Northern Ireland. One of the most important things about the Declaration, however, happened privately. Reynolds made it known to militant republicans that, if the Declaration was not enough to stop the violence, he would continue to work with the British government to bring about peace in the north, even if it meant leaving republican parties such as Sinn Féin out of the negotiations. This seems to have helped bring about the IRA ceasefire of 31 August 1994.

  SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE IN THE REPUBLIC

  The Northern Ireland troubles were not the only important issue in Ireland. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Republic addressed important social concerns. Two main social issues, abortion and divorce, rose in the 1980s. These would attract worldwide attention and have some influence on how Protestants in Northern Ireland perceived the Republic. From 1981 to 1983 there was a campaign to add a ban on abortion as an amendment to the Irish constitution. Previously, there had been strong laws against abortion, but many anti-abortion activists thought that only a constitutional ban would prevent the legalization of abortion in the future. A Pro-Life Amendment Campaign and Anti-Amendment Campaign fought a heated battle during the public debate. In the September 1983 referendum on the issue, the amendment was passed by a majority of sixty-seven percent to thirty-three percent, with a low turnout. Also, the taoiseach during these years, Garrett FitzGerald, attempted to make some aspects of the Republic’s social life and constitution more palatable to northern unionists and Protestants. In 1986, he proposed to remove the Republic’s constitutional ban on divorce. Not only was this a needed reform for the Republic, he argued, it would improve relations with the north, and make any future co-operation between the Dublin and London governments seem less worrisome to northern Protestants. As in the referendum on abortion, those who opposed divorce liberalization were more organized and more powerful. In the June 1986 divorce referendum, the constitutional ban was upheld by 63.5% to 36.5%. But the votes against the liberalization of abortion and divorce law cannot be solely explained in terms of the influence of the Catholic Church. Public opinion amongst Protestants in Northern Ireland was also strongly opposed to abortion, and the anti-divorce campaign made much of the complicated changes that would have to be made to property inheritance law if divorce had been approved. FitzGerald, however, saw the defeat of the legalization of divorce as a blow to his plans to improve north–south relations (in November 1995, however, another divorce referendum passed with a slim majority). In 1992, other referendums removed the restriction from travelling abroad to obtain an abortion, and made contraception more available.

  Other important changes in the religious life of the Republic were taking place. In the 1980s, there was a renewal of devotional practices such as pilgrimages (which had always been popular, but which had a boost during this time). Also, there were several cases of reported visitations by the Virgin Mary in the form of statues that moved, smiled and even spoke in 1985. Attendance at religious services was higher than almost anywhere else in the world. There was also, however, a reduction in the number of men entering the priesthood. Further, there seems to have been an ‘Americanization’ of Catholic practice, meaning that increasing numbers of Catholics came to believe in the broad message of the church, without feeling compelled to follow the specific social and personal demands of their bishops and the Pope. Perhaps the most damage was caused to the church by the scandals that rocked it in the early 1990s. The Bishop of Kerry was revealed in 1992 to have fathered a child and used church money to support it. Priests were caught in shady Dublin men’s clubs. Even with these mounting problems, the Catholic Church was still a powerful part of life in the Irish Republic in the 1980s and 1990s. As the next chapter shows, the centrality of the Church in Irish life would be severely questioned, and eventually damaged, in the early twenty-first century.

  Party politics also changed during this period, and the diversification of support for parties changed politics in the Republic significantly. A new political party, the Progressive Democrats, was founded in 1985 and quickly garnered much support for their idea of reducing the size of government and its role in running the economy. The Labour party continued to play its role as coalition-maker, although Fine Gael–Labour relations weakened when Fine Gael tried to rein in government spending. And, in 1989, Fianna Fáil went into coalition with the Progressive Democrats, the first time that Fianna Fáil had to rely on another party to form a government. Further, a major change in the appearance of Irish politics took place on 9 November 1990, when Mary Robinson (1944– ) was elected president.

  Robinson, a noted international lawyer and human rights campaigner, was the first wom
an president of the Republic. Her election has been seen as a triumph of the diversification of party politics (she was nominated by the Labour party, while most previous presidents had been Fianna Fáil members), and of an emergence of a more progressive attitude towards women. But her election owed more to a scandal that ruined the Fianna Fáil candidate than to these other interpretations. All this, however, was not nearly as important as the changes that Robinson seemed to symbolize in Irish life. Her high international profile, and her campaigning for human rights, drew international attention immediately, something which previous presidents simply had not done. The presidency is a largely ceremonial office, and although Robinson pushed the limits of ceremonial restriction by increasing her own public exposure, there was ultimately little that she could directly change in Irish politics. But the symbol of a female head of state and the serious consideration that she attracted outside Ireland did a great deal to modernize the international view of Ireland. Ireland’s international profile was further enhanced in the 1980s and 1990s by the popularity of Irish music groups. Both traditional Irish music (as played by groups such as the Chieftains) and modern pop music (represented by U2 and other groups) gained worldwide recognition.

  Perhaps most important, however, was the further close development of the Irish Republic and the European Community, and the dramatic economic improvements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The economy recovered in the late 1980s and 1990s as a result of reforms in finance and government economics, as well as more sophisticated economic relationships with the international community. By the mid-1990s, economic growth in the Republic was much higher than anywhere else in the developed world, which prompted the nickname ‘The Celtic Tiger’, and the ‘greening’ of economic relations with Britain and the rest of the European Union. Irish exports to the EU rose dramatically in th 1990s (and at a time when overall EU growth was not as healthy). Problems persisted, however. Unemployment was higher than expected in a buoyant economy, and the economic successes of the 1990s were not followed by enough improvements in social conditions. At the time it seemed that these important changes resulted from three basic trends in economics in the Republic. The first was a more moderate and prudent level of government borrowing and more vigilant attention to the balance of payments and inflation (but the next chapter shows the hollowness of this belief). The second was a move away from economic shadowing of Britain, and of comparing economic successes with Britain. And the third was a much greater emphasis on the Republic’s place in Europe and the international market. Not being blinkered by looking only at the British economy (which, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been a poor performer over the long term), and thinking of itself in European and world terms made the economy much more flexible and potentially powerful. Joining ‘Euroland’ (the eleven countries that planned to adopt the Euro as a currency) in 1999, while Britain stayed on the sidelines, was symbolic of this highly significant change in outlook and economic sophistication.

  INTERPRETATIONS

  It will take a good deal of time and historical distance before the ‘triumphs’ of the 1980s and 1990s can get adequate attention from historians. And there will be as much debate about their causes and meanings as any other aspect of Irish history. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, however, have been interpreted in a number of different ways. Perhaps more than any other aspect of Irish history, the difficulties in the north have had their own impact on how historians have considered Irish history of all periods, and in some cases have changed the ways those histories have been written. The Troubles have been so influential that they have caused some of the most prominent Irish historians to change their own interpretations in subsequent editions of their books.

  The most important work on interpreting the situation in Northern Ireland is John Whyte’s Interpreting Northern Ireland (1989). In it, he outlines four major schools of interpretation. But those four schools are actually based on how the conflict in Northern Ireland is perceived, and who the antagonists are. Most scholars do not, however, attribute the complexity of the Northern Ireland problem so simply to one of these conflicts. They almost all agree that it is a combination of two or more. Whyte argued that those who think that the dominant conflict in Northern Ireland is between Britain and Ireland may be termed ‘traditional nationalists’. Those who see the two main antagonists as Southern Ireland against Northern Ireland may be said to belong to the ‘traditional unionist’ interpretation. A perceived capitalist versus worker conflict feeds the Marxist interpretation. And Protestant/unionist against Catholic/nationalist within Northern Ireland itself is called the ‘two-community’ or ‘internal conflict’ school. Whyte used ‘traditional’ to refer to the historical nationalist and historical unionist interpretations of the problems in Northern Ireland, but many nationalists and unionists today think that the major conflict is within the Northern Ireland community (and so belong to the fourth interpretative school). This does not mean, however, that modern-day nationalists do not wish for a united Ireland, or that modern-day unionists do not wish to retain the Union with Great Britain. What it does mean is that these two contemporary groups believe different explanations about the causes of the Troubles than their political forebears did, but that they still desire the political outcomes that previous generations of nationalists and unionists wanted. Identifying these four different interpretative groups, however, should not imply that each of them has retained fossilized ideas for generations. All four interpretative schools, especially the traditional nationalist and the traditional unionist, have undergone transformations and subtle reinterpretations within their general framework of ideas.

  The traditional nationalist interpretation of the partition of Northern Ireland and the Troubles since 1968 is based on the idea that Ireland is (and has been for hundreds of years) one nation, and that the British are responsible for partition and keeping Ireland divided. This interpretation has its origins in the period 1916–23. Soon after the partition of Ireland, various commentators (including government commissions) in the Irish Free State published books and pamphlets explaining the division of the island as largely the fault of the British government. This idea lasted until the late 1950s. The basic argument was that the British government stoked up unionist opposition to the idea of a unified Ireland with a parliament in Dublin, and that unionists and Protestants in Northern Ireland have only been able to sustain their dominance with British support. The best example of this interpretation is 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, that Prime Minister Balfour, for instance, insisted on it to maintain his position in the House of Commons and prevent a rebellion of those British Conservatives who allied with recalcitrant unionists (see chapter seven). Without this interference from Britain, he claimed, the nationalist and unionists groups in the early twentieth century would have been able to reach some sort of agreement for a unified Ireland. Further, he said it was only British economic support and subsidies that kept the border a viable political division. Without such propping up, Irish groups on both sides of the divide would have united because they shared a number of common interests.

  This interpretation was quite influential in the Irish Free State and in the first two decades of the Republic. It was used as justification for article two of the constitution of Éire, which laid claim to the counties of Northern Ireland. By the late 1950s, however, many nationalists had begun to question the validity of this interpretation. Strong majorities in Northern Ireland continually voted to retain the union with Great Britain. This led to a recognition amongst some influential nationalist writers that there were two distinct groups in Ireland, nationalists and unionists, and that the unbridgeable gap that existed between their ideas of what should comprise the Irish nation was the main reason that the British were forced to use partition. These nationalists, such as Donal Barrington
(who published a pamphlet entitled Uniting Ireland in 1959), argued that the problem in Northern Ireland lay with the unionists being unwilling to join a united Ireland. The solution, according to this revision of the nationalist interpretation, was to persuade these unionists to change their minds. The advent of the Troubles in the late 1960s caused nationalists to revise their interpretation even further. Garrett FitzGerald, an economist from University College Dublin who would later become taoiseach, argued in his Towards a New Ireland (1972) that, although Ireland was one nation, a significant group within that nation, the Ulster Protestants, mistrusted the rest of the country. They were afraid of what would happen to them under what they saw as ‘an authoritarian Southern Catholic state’. What needed to be done, according to FitzGerald, was to change those things in the Republic that kept northern Protestants opposed to unification. These included reducing the formal and informal power of the Catholic Church in the governance of the Republic, amending laws (such as that on divorce) that Protestants found offensive, and to change the attitude of many in the Republic who saw northern Protestants as British imports and not native Irish. This gradual change in nationalist writing has come a little closer to the internal conflict interpretation, which will be discussed below. It is important, however, to remember that most nationalists, by definition, have not changed their fundamental political view that Ireland should be united. They have, however, shifted their emphasis of explanation away from the responsibility of Britain in ultimately causing the problems in Northern Ireland.