Book Review: These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland, Past and Future by Philip Stephens

Desmond Clifford

When the Queen visited Ireland in 2011, the first monarch to do so since Ireland’s separation from Britain nearly a hundred years earlier, she opened her speech at the official dinner with words of Irish.

In an authentic response, the Irish President, Mary McAleese, mouthed the word, “Wow!”, as the Queen continued, “We can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.”

It was a powerful moment of reconciliation between independent Ireland and the former colonial British power after centuries of tortured history.

On both sides, there was great satisfaction at the achievement, slow in coming, of apparently normalised relations between two sovereign neighbours. Yet within just a few years Brexit rekindled ancient resentments and relations between the two governments sank to a low consistent with the long history of dismal relations between the islands.

Philip Stephens of the Financial Times has, with Irish parentage, like millions in Britain, a foot on both islands.

He tells the story of the last 100 hundred years since Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1922 and became de facto an independent country. Or at least, most of it did. Six counties in the north-east became Northern Ireland, a micro-state linked Britain, as it still is today.

Repellent 

The Irish Free State, as the larger part of Ireland was first known, set about constructing a country as repellent to Ulster’s protestant population as they could make it.

Gaelic, Catholic and anti-British, the Irish Free State fell barely short of full-scale theocracy, with clergy controlling society through a variety of hard and soft instruments of power. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, abused its in-built protestant majority to gerrymander an absolute hold on power and skewed social and economic benefits in favour of its co-religionists and against Catholics. As a whole, Ireland was the last remnant of Europe’s post Reformation politics.

The Free State defined itself by difference from Britain, even as it was economically grimly dependent on its neighbour. The new Irish government pursued economic policies which undermined the well-being of its people, thousands of whom were driven to maintain Ireland’s long history of emigration – including Philip Stephens’ mother (and my parents too, as it happens).

Even today, with Ireland now a prosperous country attracting substantial inward migration, the country’s population is substantially smaller than its pre-Famine highpoint.

Ireland’s independence was achieved through violence – the Easter Rising in 1916, followed by the Anglo-Irish War, then the Irish Civil War.

Britain had failed over half a century to deliver even a limited measure of Home Rule through constitutional means.

Revolutionary generation

Eventually Ireland’s entire constitutional political class was swept away by an impatient revolutionary generation led by figures like Patrick Pearse, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith.

Sinn Fein translates as “Ourselves Alone”, and that’s exactly what they meant. The two sides fought to a stand-still. The revolutionaries could never practically force the British out by force while, equally, the British could never wholly subdue the campaign at a political price it was prepared to pay.

The stalemate led eventually to negotiation and a convoluted constitutional settlement, a divided country and dominion status, which stimulated civil war among the revolutionaries who had irreconcilable expectations.

Although dead at thirty-three, history has been kind to Michael Collins while de Valera’s reputation, lauded in Ireland in his lifetime, has sunk continuously since his death fifty years ago.

When dust settled, Britain and Ireland maintained a thin and unrewarding relationship. Ireland responded to World War Two by adopting a policy of neutrality. De Valera declined Churchill’s offer to unify the country after the war in return for Ireland’s support; he was probably wise to decline this possibly spurious offer (had Churchill consulted the unionists fighting for Britain?!) – although whether Irish neutrality in face of Hitler’s threat to European democracy was a justifiable moral position is debated still in Ireland.  (As an aside, neutrality is very much a live topic in Ireland today in light of the growing concerns about Russian intentions).

In practice, many thousands of Irish people contributed very directly to the war effort and Ireland’s neutrality was nuanced in the Allies favour. Even so, it seems shocking that de Valera as Taoiseach paid respects at the German Embassy on news of the Fuhrer’s death.

There’s a truism in the study of history that one of its purposes is to learn from it and to avoid repeating past errors.

‘Troubles’

When the vicious “Troubles” broke out in Northern Ireland neither the British nor Irish governments knew what to do. The Irish, understandably, felt deeply at an emotional level but had virtually no practical locus or means of intervention.

The British pretended for as long as they could that it was a local issue and no concern of Ireland’s.

Diplomatic relations were conspicuously thin.

Events spun out of control. In 1972, there were nearly 500 violent deaths. British soldiers shot dead 13 protesters on a march in Derry and the government was embarrassed that the only place in the world where its soldiers were killing people was on British streets.

In turn, the British embassy in Dublin was burnt by an angry crowd and a couple of years later a British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was murdered. Growing political interest from the United States made it less and less plausible for Britain to treat Northern Ireland as a purely domestic matter.

The British Government had moments of panic when it contemplated a cut and run from Northern Ireland, though ultimately, and with some reluctance, it accepted its moral and political responsibilities.

It took nearly 30 years for the British government and the IRA to learn the lessons of the 1920s; that Britain could not be removed by force from Northern Ireland and that the IRA could not be fully eradicated.

Eventually, through incremental diplomatic commitment, the ground was prepared for the Good Friday Agreement which ended much, though not all, of the violence.

The Agreement was in large measure a success, assisted perhaps by a sense of exhaustion – political as well as military – among the parties and combatants. The surprisingly warm relationship between Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness and the formerly intransigent, but now avuncular, unionist Ian Paisley came to symbolise a new and rare optimism.

Just as British-Irish relations were settling into this new and positive phase, David Cameron allowed the Brexit genie out of the bottle.

As Stephens correctly notes, “Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had at best walk-on parts in what was essentially an English enterprise.”

Condescension

Traditional British (English, really) condescension towards Ireland asserted itself again through the mouths of characters like Johnson and Gove as Ireland’s interests, and the Good Friday Agreement itself, were trifled with.

Depressingly, a new generation of Irish politicians and diplomats learned to distrust England and elements of its political classes.

Today relations have settled again somewhat, but big questions lie ahead.

At some point, many expect an Irish “border poll” to trigger a democratically expressed wish for Irish unity. What form that unity might take, if it comes to comes to pass, raises many questions.

Surely, it would be a new country, not a simple absorption of the North into the current Irish Republic?  Is the Republic’s population prepared for that?

How would a new country integrate a million reluctant and/ or angry citizens?  Might Northern Irish devolution remain under a changed sovereignty from Britain to Ireland?

There are many outstanding questions, and it would be unreasonable to expect the answers to be easy.  A significant step forward would be the beginning of dialogue on possible options, but that is anathema to most unionists for the time being.

Sure-footed

Philip Stephens guides us through one hundred years of this complexity in a precise and sure-footed way. He is objective and even-handed in his observation, not blinded to British (or English) errors and miscalculations, but not fudging the mistakes and evasions of Ireland either.

Stephens notes, “Constitutional upheaval in Ireland might persuade the English to look again at their relationship with Scotland and Wales.”

It might. But might Ireland’s definitive departure from the United Kingdom also excite questions of a different sort in Wales and Scotland?

Ireland’s journey towards prosperity, notwithstanding setbacks and future challenges, opens belief in the economic possibilities of emerging from England’s shadow and this, too, may also influence the political calculations in Wales and Scotland.

These Divided Isles is published by Faber & Faber and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.