Normal View Dyslexic View
Research Article
How the British have misunderstood Ireland and Northern Ireland
Paul Bew*†
bewp@parliament.uk
Abstract
This article probes the mainstream UK structure of feeling—to use the classic term invented by Raymond Williams—on the Irish question. It argues that there was, and is a historic inability in a largely peaceful stable society to face up to the life and death issues, more recently those connected with political violence, posed by Ireland. The material covered ranges from the Irish famine of 1846 to 1850, to the war of independence 1919 to 1921 and the modern Ulster Troubles. It notices how often the need to preserve a comfortable often, but not always, liberal self-image involves a significant neglect of Irish realities. The article arises from a British Academy Lecture delivered on 31 May 2023.
Keywords
Irish famineIrish questionIrish war of independenceliberal self-imagepolitical violenceUlster TroublesIreland is often seen as Britain’s greatest political and moral failure. Important new books continue to debate on the historic ill treatment of the ‘indigenous Irish’ (Carroll 2023). Irish historians like to note with a certain amusement that, as soon as the British thought they solved the Irish question—whether it be Catholic emancipation in 1829 or land in 1903—the Irish simply changed the question. So why have the British never understood Ireland or Northern Ireland?
It is tempting to answer this question laconically with a reference to The Spectator’s observation of 1881: ‘Nothing irritates a quick-witted race [the Irish] like being governed by a slow-witted one … stronger and more stupid’.1 The fact is, this is a useful starting point, because it gives an early indication of the complexity of the issue. The Spectator of 1881, edited by R.H. Hutton, was profoundly interested in Ireland. It had been sympathetic to the disruptive policy of ‘obstruction’ led by Parnell in the Westminster parliament in the late 1870s. It was particularly hostile to any suggestion that Irish MPs should not have equality of treatment in the House of Commons.2 In 1881, The Spectator strongly supported the policy of radical land reform in Ireland as a means of defusing the seismic revolutionary crisis on the island. But it refused to support Gladstone’s conversion to home rule in 1886 and, in effect, became one of the mainstays of Liberal Unionism in the United Kingdom politics.
Gladstone conceded that R.H. Hutton was not an arrogant anti-Irish elitist—as he felt so many other English Home Rule opponents were. This gestures to a key and neglected problem in British historiography: the role of personal value systems and intellectual self-image and the striving for a sense of moral superiority. Such a striving is always an obstacle to objective analysis of concrete conditions.
As I delivered this lecture on which this article is based in Glasgow, perhaps I can start with an example which is local but also indicative of a wider issue in British intellectual life. An interesting example of where historical research at a high level interacts with popular culture. At every Glasgow Celtic home match, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ is sung with its reference to the Irish famine and ‘Trevelyan’s corn’ leaving the country while thousands starved. This is a reference to Sir Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in British famine policy. Of course, it is obvious that it was not ‘Trevelyan’s corn’ but rather that of Irish farmers seeking to realise a profit and sustain their families. But it does establish Sir Charles Trevelyan as a figure of unique wickedness in the story of the death of perhaps one million citizens of the UK, in defiance of the profound promises of prosperity and equal treatment made at the time of the Act of Union of 1800.
What was Britain’s precise role in the Irish famine of 1846–50 which took almost a million lives? Even anti-Irish-nationalist writers like the great narrative historian, J.A. Froude, or the high Tory Westminster Gazette conceded that the famine death toll reflected badly on Westminster rule and on the legitimacy of the original project of a Union supposed to guarantee prosperity and equality of treatment (Bew 2023: Ch2). Nevertheless, in the late 20th century, a historiographical consensus established itself amongst a leading cadre of outstanding historians, including Boyd Hilton in Cambridge and Cormac Ó Gráda in Dublin, that there was a clearly defined intellectual clue as to Britain’s failure to save lives.3 It was claimed that Charles Trevelyan, the leading policy-maker in the Treasury, following his ‘Clapham Sect’ religious beliefs, felt that the Irish were lazy, over productive of children and deserving of God’s punishment. The original source for this belief, never checked, was an article by a respected Oxford scholar, Jenifer Hart, in the English Historical Review (1960), drawing on a correspondence between Charles Trevelyan and his friend Father Mathew, the legendary pro-Temperance Irish Catholic priest: though interestingly, Hart does not mention the priest. The trouble is that Trevelyan said no such thing. When Father Mathew raised the possibility that the famine was a divine punishment, Trevelyan insisted instead on the role of man. Jenifer Hart, the original source, was regarded as a potentially dangerous subversive by MI5 at the time, but it is more likely that she simply muddled up her notes taken in Newcastle when she got back to Oxford. What is more interesting is the dramatic intensity of the fashion she inadvertently created.
It is, of course, correct to say that some important figures in British politics did believe in the role of a punitive providence during the famine, but Trevelyan, who was in charge of policy, did not. Still less did he believe that the peculiar characteristics of the Irish had vindicated this punishment. He was a providentialist like John Bright, W.E. Gladstone and the Catholic priest and friend he was corresponding with; he simply did not believe that God was punishing the Irish for various unfortunate character traits, like laziness, drinking too much, having too many children.
I should perhaps record my own perspective. I was working in the manuscripts room in Newcastle University library in 1993 when I realised that Hart had misread the Trevelyan correspondence with Father Mathew. I gasped audibly and the librarian smiled at me and said that an Australian scholar had visited the library some weeks before and reacted the same way. That Australian scholar was Robin Haines, author of Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine (2004).
Hart had written:
Trevelyan believed that the Irish famine was the judgement of God on an indolent and un self-reliant people, and as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs would arise. (Haines 2004: 4)
But, as Haines demonstrates, this was a ‘misreading of what Trevelyan actually said’ in the correspondence with Father Mathew. Trevelyan wrote: ‘Like you I regard the prospects of Ireland with profound melancholy, but I fear much less for the judgement of God than for the aggravation to the ignorance, the selfishness of the Evil Passions of Men.’ This last phrase is clearly a reference to the Irish landlords not the suffering peasantry, as Trevelyan’s numerous comments in his correspondence, at this moment, confirm. Robin Haines concludes ‘Rather than taking a naively providentialist view of the disaster, Trevelyan blamed the landlords’ (Haines 2004).
Jenifer Hart, however, showed her 1960 English Historical Review article to Cecil Woodham Smith. Cecil Woodham Smith employed it in her popular and highly influential book on the famine. According to Woodham Smith:
The great event with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. (Woodham Smith 1962: 59)
Peter Brown, the celebrated scholar of antiquity and the greatest living Irish historian, has endorsed the Hart-inspired consensus on the role of Trevelyan, in a passage which plays openly to the question of self-image:
Not surprisingly with such a past, a growing boy in Ireland (whether Protestant or Catholic) did not pick up the respect for common sense and for the beneficent power of institutions that was taken for granted, across the sea, in England. (Brown 2023: 6)
Jenifer Hart was an able, leftist academic, but ironically she is now better known for this error in transcription than, for example, her probing commentary on her one-time lover, Isiah Berlin’s draft inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin 2013: 638; Caute 2022: 173–5; Ignatieff 1998: 131–2).
But why then was Hart’s error of transcription so seductive in the modern era? One might speculate that it offers an escape from the Irish Marxist revolutionary James Connolly’s view that the Famine represented the triumph of the market and the laws of capitalism: an unhealthy, old-fashioned view to hold in the era dominated by the collapse of communism. Perhaps this goes too far. One thing is clear, however: to concentrate on financial constraints, as a new scholarly book has done so well, is regarded by many as unbearably prosaic (Read 2022: 182–3). There was something all too comforting in the location of responsibility at the door of a religious belief set which we have all outgrown and left in the past. The Hart-inspired interpretation was comforting to self-image because it allowed us to condemn Trevelyan without condemning ourselves. It also allows us to avoid the sprawling dimensions of the problem.
In 1980, Perry Anderson complained that not even the horror of the famine induced the ‘Irish peasantry to think in new ways about the market’ (Anderson 1980: 28). The Irish peasant is hardly alone.4 In the four decades since these words were written in the era of the collapse of communism, respect for the laws of the market has become ever-more hegemonic (Bew & Patterson 1982: 22). Hence the need to fill the intellectual gap with an explanation for British government failure on the famine by such strong reference to ethnic and religious bigotry, a modern hate crime. This provokes some consideration of the pattern of British thinking about Ireland.
In 1938, J.L. Hammond published his monumental, superbly researched Gladstone and the Irish Nation with Longmans. One significant reviewer, Robert Lynd, endorsing Hammond’s message of Gladstone’s greatness felt that the timing was right ‘to attract a far larger body of readers than it would have found 20 or 30 years ago’ (Lynd 1938). In fact, the book failed to sell, unlike Hammond’s other works, as war loomed. Winston Churchill’s sharp critique of Gladstone’s record—even though he spoke as a liberal Home Ruler himself—was tacitly accepted. Churchill wrote at this moment:
Gladstone was blind to the claims and cause of Protestant Ulster resistance. He displayed an indifference to the rights of people of Northern Ireland which dominated the liberal mind for a whole generation. He elevated this myopia to the level of a doctrinal principle. In the end we all reached together a broken Ireland and a broken United Kingdom. (Churchill 1937: 88)
But in recent times, Gladstone’s Irish record has attracted passionate admirers. Professor Roy Douglas wrote in 1988 that Gladstone:
possessed a vision and moral authority which few men in politics have ever approached. Nowhere was that better seen than on the question of Home Rule, Gladstone’s determination to bring about was an exceptionally farsighted statesmanship. A hundred tragic years on, who today doubts that the rejection of Home Rule in 1886 was an unqualified disaster both for Ireland and for Britain? (Douglas 1988)
Roy Douglas was a substantial historian of Liberalism and a Liberal parliamentary candidate. He was also an external examiner in Belfast during some of the most horrible years of the ‘modern’ Ulster Troubles. It is easy to see how he came to this conclusion. The idea that, if only Gladstone’s wisdom had been more widely recognised, so much misery might have been avoided—the deaths in the Anglo-Irish War and Irish civil war and the deaths of the Troubles. The United Kingdom might still include Ireland.
However, the actual implementation of devolution in the Blair era has not worked out as planned. This is not a judgement either way on domestic social policy in, say, Scotland but a judgement on the impact of the devolution settlement on the political stability of the United Kingdom. When the Scottish devolution bill was passed, page after page in the Hansard of both houses of Parliament is full of the endless expressed certain view that Scottish separatism would seriously weaken as a result of devolution. No such development has taken place—quite the opposite in fact. This does not mean that there is a viable or desirable alternative to Scottish devolution or, indeed, Northern Irish devolution. In fact, it should be recalled that Tony Blair’s famous Balmoral speech in 1997 underlined a concept of devolved UK—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—which he supported and was essential to winning support for the United Kingdom. It is here, however, the case that Scottish nationalism is threatening the devolution settlement.
Roy Douglas was not to live to see this. But, in a profound recent essay, the Cambridge Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Professor Eugenio Biagini, has, undeterred, stated bluntly, ‘Gladstone was right about Ireland’ (2023).5 Biagini makes it clear that he thinks that Gladstone’s policy of home rule was correct, vindicated by the subsequent tragic history of Anglo–Irish relations. Gladstone was opposed in his time by the ‘enemies of change’; worse still, he is regarded by many ‘modern historians as both delusional and self-interested’. Indeed, Lord Lexden (formerly A.B. Cooke and, with J.R. Vincent, the co-author of the classic anti-Gladstone tome, The Governing Passion, 1974) has insisted on the ‘self-interested’ description.
For Lord Lexden, Gladstone ‘laid claim to special, divinely given insights which too many historians have taken seriously’ (2021: 6). He added: ‘How lucky Gladstone has been that there always have been historians ready to take at face value that he acted at all times from the purest motives untainted by party political considerations’ (Lexden 2021: 6).
The strangest gap in British political historiography is the patchy discussion of the impact of Irish political violence in the forty years since the publication of Charles Townshend’s valuable Political Violence in Ireland by OUP. Historiography mirrors the tone of the bulk of conventional political oratory. As Lord Lexden has put it succinctly:
In the wake of the Fenian threat in 1867 both parties agreed—as they would again and again in similar circumstances over the next century and a half—that greater attention must be given to Irish policy. They would try to pretend that their response was wholly unconnected with Irish violence (dismissing terrorism in the late twentieth century as ‘mindless’), but it was, of course, the shadow of the gun and the bomb that they sought to remove by taking new initiatives.
This is perhaps a necessity of political life, but there is no particular reason why historians should imitate it. The point here is not to denigrate pro-Gladstonian historiography, not even to support the more cynical conservative tradition of Gladstone interpretations. The intention here is to escape the terms of this debate and to reach the deeper meanings; in particular, is it possible to say more about the British tradition of coping with political violence?
There is, therefore, a pro-Gladstonian tradition and an anti-Gladstonian tradition. But what is striking is the absence on either side of any sustained discussion of political violence and, in particular, the role of assassination which is such a marked feature of the period. Interestingly when an acclaimed English scholar like Professor Michael Burleigh writes Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder (2021), there is no discussion of the UK. Yet the history of the United Kingdom is marked by a serious Irish tradition of assassination of political figures—from Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882 to Airey Neave in 1979 and many thereafter—almost all of them highly effective in the pursuit of Irish republican political objectives.
In 1879–82, Ireland was in the grip of a revolutionary crisis—passionate agrarian militancy fuelled by the Irish National Land League led by Charles Stewart Parnell. On 2 May 1882, Gladstone released Parnell from prison after Parnell had promised to use his lieutenants to put down the violence of the Land League. On 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the new Chief Secretary, was brutally assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin by the Irish National Invincibles—potentially a hugely embarrassing event. Jasper Tully, MP for Roscommon, later confessed:
The situation was extremely awkward and complex for all the parties concerned. It had not come to light at that moment that the knives used in Phoenix Park had actually lain for some days in the offices of the English branch of the Land League in Westminster Chambers, and that the secretary of the organisation, Mr Frank Byrne as he afterwards avowed in the United States had been sent over by his wife those knives to James Carey in Dublin. In many respects this was an appalling situation for the Parliamentary leaders, and everything must have looked very black indeed, to those who had any inkling on the true position. Yet it was the genius of Parnell found a way out. He had compromised Gladstone, the head of the Government, by the Treaty. Gladstone dare not move hand or food in a hostile direction. He was at the mercy of Parnell. (Tully 1940)
Tully’s dramatic commentary has evoked no response. His point is, however, a serious one. In April and May 1882, Gladstone entered into secret negotiations with Parnell, which led to his release from internment on 2 May 1882. In effect, Parnell offered to wind down the agitation with the use of the men of violence who were prominent in this movement. There were good reasons for Gladstone’s move: he felt—the point is open to dispute—that the existing policy of repression was leading nowhere. At this point, it is worth recalling that Gladstone had a brief infatuation with the idea that clever intelligence and police work could destroy Irish conspiracy (Gladstone 1990).
Tully’s argument, however, touches on a deeper point: the silence in British liberalism on the subject of political violence. In part, this silence exists because it provokes difficult questions for an enlightened self-image. It is possible to argue about the events of 1882. It is possible that Parnell did not actually meet Patrick Joseph Sheridan, a key enabler of assassination, on the eve of the Phoenix Park murders, to win him over to acquiescence in the Parnell–Gladstone deal (Maume 1995, 2000). But there is no doubt that Parnell offered Sheridan’s name to Gladstone as an example of the sort of person he wanted to control. There is a serious argument recently stated by Professor Ged Martin which argues that constraints of time and place make it unlikely that such a meeting took place;6 though there is indisputable evidence that Parnell met someone—either Sheridan or a close ally—in Dublin at precisely this moment. The Sheridan meeting adds a real whiff of cordite to the story; Parnell was visibly neuralgic on the subject of Sheridan for the rest of his life. He was possibly aware that Sheridan designed the oath for the Invincible assassins and certainly aware of his general role. But the basic political meaning of all this is clear enough: the possible Parnell–Sheridan meeting is not necessarily central to the issue. We know for sure that Gladstone entered into a negotiation with a man he had denounced in the strongest possible terms and the leader of a movement which he had described as ‘rapine leading to the destruction of the Empire’. In exchange for his release and some further agrarian reform, Parnell was released and handed a huge ethno-nationalist victory over the British government. In turn, Parnell gave a promise to employ some of his colleagues—involved heavily in violence—to stop it.
Tully is right here. Gladstone was ‘trapped’ by the Kilmainham Treaty. Even the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish—a much-loved figure—could not release him. There was, therefore, no real intense Liberal discussion of what had happened. Of course, the Tories raised again and again Gladstonian hypocrisy and even complicity in violence—without, it should be said, any great subtlety. But with Liberalism the silence was deafening: the characteristic tone was set of a large part of the British political mind. Irish violence set a problem which was characteristically dealt with by self-deception and ruthless pragmatism, later by Lloyd George in 1920–1 and by Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. Consistency with existing liberal values (the rule of law) was never allowed to get in the way.
Tucked away in a relatively obscure Irish provincial journal and published posthumously in 1940, it is not surprising that Tully’s article received no comment at the time. It remains, however, an article which possesses considerable intrinsic interest. The first point it makes is that Tully was a connected person: a Roscommon MP throughout the period up to 1918. He was, for example, a close friend of Joseph Richard Cox, MP, member of the Invincibles, the assassination conspiracy. Every contextual point that is made here by Tully is verifiable independently—the weapons used by the murderers of Thomas Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park in 1882 were brought into Ireland by the Land League/Home Rule routes that he specifies. This much was known at the time, at least by February 1883, to the government. Why then persist with the Gladstone policy of appeasement?
Tully, in effect, argues that Gladstone, having released Parnell, had effectively dismissed his Chief Secretary, and was too far down the road to retreat. He was trapped by the ‘genius’ of Parnell. In fact, while it is reasonable to talk of the political genius of Parnell in some contexts, this was, from a Parnellite assessment, merely unintended good fortune. However, what is truly remarkable is the failure to discuss the perceived reality (from an Irish MP’s point of view) in British historiography; in short, the way in which a radical new departure in policy—the dropping of a conventional law and order perspective—can not only liberate but, in certain senses, ‘trap’ and as a consequence initiate a defensive, rhetorically overblown advocacy of the new policy.
Gladstone had sought to mislead parliament by neglecting Parnell’s mention of P.J. Sheridan and other conspirators in 1882 as part of a deal and got away with it in 1882. In February 1883, following the revelations about Sheridan at a Dublin court case in which the Phoenix Park assassins were on trial, William Edward Forster, the former Irish Chief Secretary, launched an attack on the Parnell–Gladstone deal. ‘The blood of the House’ (O’Connor 1926: 276) ran cold, as one Parnellite MP admitted, but over the next day or so the mood in favour of Forster’s denunciation evaporated (Bew 2023: 98–9).7 Liberals comforted themselves with the evidence (correctly interpreted) that Parnell was increasingly moderate, while refusing to face up to the obvious fact that Irish nationalism had won a major victory over the British government for the first time in its history and was now on the march in ways which were about to threaten the stability of the United Kingdom. A march which was, of course, soon to be legitimatised by the exposure of Times-sponsored forgeries against Parnell.
There is an interesting though, of course, not precise echo in the modern era. Famously, Sir John Major played the key role in establishing a Committee for Standards in Public Life based on the ‘Nolan Principles’—selflessness, honesty, openness, integrity, leadership, accountability and objectivity. Yet Major’s dramatic statement in the House of Commons in 1993 in denial of negotiation with the IRA, at the very time he was doing so, was never cited as a contradiction with the Nolan Principles. As Chairman of the Committee for Standards in Public Life in the years between 2013 and 2018, I was often forced to contemplate this oddity. Violence exists in one place and mainstream British political thinking exists in another and never the twain shall meet, a subject for reflection as opposed to pragmatic response.
To give some more pertinent detail, in November 1993, John Major told the House of Commons that the very idea of talking to Gerry Adams or the IRA ‘would turn my stomach. We will not do it’ (Selden 1997: 423). On 28 November, The Observer published details of an extensive and highly relevant ‘back channel’ dialogue between the British government and the IRA. Anthony Selden wrote: ‘all hell let loose’ (Selden 1997: 423). But within a few short days, parliamentary opinion had quietened down—as in 1882. Parliament tacitly acknowledged that the Prime Minister had been ‘economical’ with the truth, but in the context of the hunger for peace and stability he was given a pass. Nor was this a fundamentally unreasonable assessment. Far from it, it is a proof, yet again of inconsistency of British attitude towards Ireland: normal rules of engagement—PMs should not mislead the House of Commons—are quietly dropped without comment. Let us be clear. There is no intention here to criticise Major’s strategy in opening a back channel with the IRA. This whole process has now become rather romanticised (Taylor 2023), but it was, nonetheless, a rational course of action.
But let us recall there was a similar back channel approach to the IRA in 1975 offering similar vague but suitably enticing language (Britain is seeking ‘structures of disengagement’ from Ireland). In the early 1990s, this became the island ‘will be as one’ (Hennessey 2000: 67–115). But the difference is not the language of apparent concession; the difference is the relative weakness (though not absolute defeat) of the IRA brought about by a morally dubious process of intense penetration of the IRA by agents. This, as the work of Operation Kenova has already revealed, involved a decision to allow agents to murder or comply with murder to protect their cover. In fact, this was a precise repeat of British strategy in 1920/21, but no one commented upon it: carrot and stick, vague political promises combined with ruthless threat. Father Patrick Ryan, one of the IRA’s most effective killers, perhaps the most effective, stepped back in the early 1990s from the movement because he was aware that it was deeply penetrated by British agents (O’Leary 2023: 242).8 It is also the reason why senior IRA leaders in the Troubles were revealed to be themselves British agents as, indeed, they had been in 1920/21 (O’Rawe 2023).9 By refusing to face up to the texture of what really happened—and I say this as an ardent supporter of the political process which led to the Good Friday Agreement—but, if we eulogise uncritically the ‘peace process’, we condemn the next generation to a form of political infantilism. Because Professor Biagini is acutely right on one key point: when he protests that it is indefensible to leave these burning Irish questions in some kind of intellectual ‘quarantine’ (Biagini 2023). His words are worth noting:
Given the continued relevance of these issues, you would expect the academic establishment in this country to be seriously concerned with them. Ireland is externalised and quarantined—as if it were something we can somehow expel from our understanding of ourselves.
I said earlier that the great scholar, Peter Brown had written: ‘A growing boy in Ireland (whether Protestant or Catholic) did not suck up the respect for common sense and for the beneficent power of institutions that was taken for granted across the sea, in England’ (Brown 2023: 7). Is this an intuitive respect for the placid wisdom underlying great institutions? It is correct to say that those of us raised in Ireland do or did, at any rate, feel this way. There was no sense in the Ireland of 20th century—north or south—of the hegemony of common sense and its beneficent embodiment in stable institutions. Both the Dail and Stormont were pockmarked by recent violent conflict, conflict destined to return after 1969. Peter Brown adds:
Altogether, the history of Ireland could not be presented as a steady progress. It was punctuated by catastrophes and by all too many examples of decline and fall. In the past four centuries, Ireland had witnessed the collapse not of one ruling class, but of two. The traditional Irish aristocracy had been ruthlessly pushed aside by Protestant adventurers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, largely (though not invariably) newcomers from Britain. But no sooner were these families established than they also began to decline. The agricultural depression after 1815, the catastrophe of the Great Famine of the 1840s, and the mobilization of the Land League … severed their links to the land. (Brown 2023: 7)
All of this is true. One can point to how much the Irish land war is not simply against the external enemy—the British state and the landlord class—but also an internal class struggle within the Irish peasantry (Bew 1978, 1982). But the famine still proved to the majority of Irish that the promise of prosperity embedded in the Act of Union of 1800 was a sham and delusion. As for the defeat of the Irish aristocracy, Professor Alvin Jackson has shrewdly noted
it is … striking and suggestive that the demise both of Austria-Hungary and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was immediately preceded by the retreat of those powerful aristocratic interests which in association with monarchy had once served to bend their respective states. (Jackson 2023)
But since 2016, British institutions and political culture have been thrown into a state of unresolved shock by the Brexit crisis. Ireland has been intimately involved in that crisis. In 2008–10, Ireland experienced an intense financial crisis which destroyed significant parts of its banking sector. David Cameron, the newly elected British PM, was told by Angela Merkel it was the UK’s responsibility rather than the EU’s responsibility sort out the Irish mess. This would involve the investment of many billions. Cameron demurred on the grounds that the long difficult political history of Anglo–Irish relations made it impossible. But by 2017 the boot was on the other foot. The joint UK–EU document of 2017 represented a successful EU mobilisation, employing Ireland as the weapon of choice. The UK failed to defend the Good Friday Agreement in favour of Irish-sponsored ideological notions like the island economy. The GFA in 1998 was explicitly based on cooperation between two economies on the island. By 2023, British weakness in Europe (thanks to the Ukrainian war) was greatly reduced and Europe’s need to punish had also receded. This is the context of the Windsor Framework. Ireland still faces Britain with self-confidence. Its recovery has long been completed: thanks to its unique tax haven status it has stunning GDP figures but rather less good average living standards—which helps to explain why a radical popular nationalist party like Sinn Fein, which refuses to disavow the IRA campaign of terrorism, looks likely to form the next Irish government. Professor Biagini asks why the British want to put these issues to one side—the answer is that they are too difficult to contemplate, just as the Ulster Troubles were (Bew & Bew 2018).
The default position of the broad English intelligentsia is a polite uninterested deference to the latest Irish aggravation and, indeed, a polite lack of interest in or enthusiasm for those in Ireland who still uphold the Union. Ireland can engage, but only when it fits into some preexisting widespread assumption of the intelligentsia: for example, the wrongness of Brexit. The failure to consider that there might be more to it than that—in the shape of relatively independent Irish political problems—helps to explain why, seven years after the referendum and numerous joint UK–EU statements affirming the Good Friday Agreement, its institutions are, very regrettably, in crisis. None of this negates the reality that the pro-Brexit campaign wilfully ignored the inevitable problems that would be created in Ireland. Ireland, it would appear, is playing merry hell with the placid conclusions of British political wisdom.
It was Ireland (more specifically, Catholic emancipation in 1829) which provoked Lord Melbourne’s famous phrase ‘What all the wise men promised has not happened and what all the damned fools said would happen has happened.’ By this, Melbourne meant that Catholic emancipation had not stabilised Irish society which was then caught up in Daniel O’Connell’s massive ‘repeal’ movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Of course, it is true that without Catholic emancipation there would probably have been a civil war in Ireland. It is also true that, but for the delay in implementing a measure more than half-promised at the time of the Union in 1800, the Union itself would have had more of a chance. But Melbourne’s drôle observation is hardly in conflict with reality.
To give a more modern example, in 1938 the Anglo–Irish Agreement—in which the UK surrendered its port facilities in Ireland—was hailed again and opposed only by the ‘damned fools’. ‘Chips’ Channon’s diaries celebrate Winston Churchill’s isolation on this point (Channon 2021: 863–4). At the end of the war, the Admiralty—which had supported the 1938 deal—noted that it had cost the lives of five thousand British sailors. The study of Ireland and Anglo–Irish relations—requires a strong nerve and a willingness to live with a certain intellectual anarchy. The peace process, for example, was a good thing,10 but its sine qua non was the playing of dirty tricks by British intelligence in the late 1980s and 1990s, as in 1920/21. Neither side—the IRA or the British—wishes to talk about this reality and that is perfectly understandable. It is not only the British who are troubled by the requirement of a comfortable self-image. But it is the function of historians to penetrate behind the froth of self-serving narratives on all sides.11
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1
The Spectator (22 January 1881).
2
The Spectator (18 May 1878).
3
See Bew (2007a: 196–202).
4
Perry Anderson’s remark rather hides the way in which a nationalist political economy—accepting the market—attempted to modify the roles of practical economy.
5
Professor Biagini’s (2007) British Democracy and Irish Nationalism is a forceful statement of this thesis. Less enthusiastic is Bew (2007b), ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in Dungan’s Speaking Ill of the Dead.
6
See Professor Ged Martin’s Martinalia website (https://www.gedmartin.net/), which offers a critique of Patrick Maume’s articles which had provided new evidence that such a meeting may well have taken place.
7
Suggestively, William Drummond King’s portrait of the ‘Men Who Made Home Rule’, including Patrick Egan and Thomas Brennan, two of the Invincible paymasters, hangs today outside the Strangers’ Dining Room in Parliament. See Dwyer (2022).
8
O’Leary describes Ryan’s mood in the early 1990s: ‘You see when I came home that time from Brussels with the level of support I had here, I could have started up another outfit, and I thought about it for a while, but the British knew too much and that it was a waste of time. I came to the conclusion that the IRA were so infiltrated, right at the decision-making level, that it was only lambs to the slaughter; fellows were getting killed for nothing so I pulled back.’ See also Godson (2024).
9
On 1920/21, see, for example, Winter (1955: Ch 9).
10
See Bew (2007c).
11
Though it may be worthy of respectful note to acknowledge that Sir Patrick Mayhew, who as John Major’s Secretary of State knew so much about this process, acknowledged in his valedictory dinner with Irish officials that he found it morally distasteful. This, according to the most recently released state papers, Sunday Independent (30 December 2023).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a04
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 326
Article download count: 14
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Bew, P. (2024), ‘How the British have misunderstood Ireland and Northern Ireland’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a04 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a04Crossref
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May 2023
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July 2023
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