338. Ireland: Home Rule, Mutiny - and Civil War?

[@shamsam4]

The buggery joke had me laughing at work!

[@brendonbonner3309]

@papi8659 You are so right. The Belfast Telegraph of 26 June 2017 said; "Having been a fraction of the North’s at independence, the Republic’s industrial output is now ten times greater than that of Northern Ireland."

[@marblackCanada]

Hello, I live in the back of beyond Province of N.B.,and their is a high school named after Law in Rexton N.B.

[@yvtvdehvyvyde]

Is there any group of people on earth less likable than British lords?

[@papi8659]

At the end of the day the Empire couldn't cope with notions of equality for Irish people with equal civil liberties and human rights . The Irish were right to leave and have over time become a wealthier and more successful society than the rump UK . Northern Ireland of course became a slum and a dump mired in sectarian conflict . Scotland should leave too before it loses the capacity to do so. It's already too late for Wales sadly ....

[@johnmckiernan2176]

A few things that came to mind while listening to this, things I don’t feel were emphasized enough. 1) It should be of no surprise that there was an extreme anti-Catholic streak within the Liberal Party, as it was historically peppered with non-conformist radical Protestants who were even more extreme in their views towards “Popery” than was Lloyd George. Hand in hand with their laissez-faire economic views was a theological understanding that such economics were complementary with a so-called Protestant work ethic, an understanding that self-reliant earnest and sober labouring towards prosperity was a sign of Providence’s favour, of being part of an elect. Any cursory reading of the remarks of Charles Trevelyan, the functionary involved in famine “relief” during the 1840s on behalf of the Whig government of the time, for instance, will reinforce a sense that Catholics (and particulary Irish Catholics involved in subsistence agriculture) were viewed by some as a kind of parasitic, intrinsically wicked, weight upon decent society, especially when they became wards of the state due to crop failure. 2) I think the notion that Belfast was in some way comparable, at the turn of the 20th century, to Newcastle or Manchester, is more than a little disingenuous. The name of the city is neither English nor Latinate, as is the case with such northern English cities; it’s pure Irish Gaeilge (Béal Feirste, “mouth of the sandbar”), more than half of its traditional townlands have similarly Irish etymologies and a good number of its modern suburbs, too. At this time a large number of Irish Catholics (some of them bilingual) already lived in the city - attracted by economic activity - and there were still Gaeltachts (Irish speaking areas) in nearby Antrim and in the Sperrin mountains at that time. This was a patchwork society, for all of the insistence of the covenanters that “Ulster” was a coherent political-religious entity. Similarly, Ulster as a nine-county whole was majority Irish-identified and Catholic at partition and remains so. The conflation of Ulster with first the minority faith and ethnic community in counties Down, Antrim and formerly Derry, and latterly with the statelet set up for them is a deliberate one and it is not good faith politics, even leading to bizarre ahistorical conspiracy theories such as the one that states the myths of the ancient Ulster Cycle chronicle Britons living in Ireland and their wars against the Gaelic Irish. 3) The Home Rule Crisis was the last time Ireland “mattered” in UK politics? Um, Brexit, for one, where Ireland’s allyship with 27 European states effectively put the UK at a disadvantage when negotiating with the EU bloc, to long-lasting economic and societal effect. This podcast effectively and rightly emphasizes how Ireland and its political dilemmas affected and affects Britain, but hardly mentions how British dealings with Ireland and the solutions it proposed and imposed on Ireland affect Britain’s international reputation, its soft power and its reputation in matters of realpolitik. Spoilers; said reputation is not enhanced, not by a long shot. I would also argue that the very existence of an English-speaking constitutional republic on the UK’s doorstep (one, moreover, functioning via proportional representation voting to deliberately prevent minority or plurality rule and thus governed largely by consensus) represents an existential threat to the UK status quo, its dualistic, oppositional Westminster enmities and its aristocrat-peppered governing class. I would further argue that this is one reason why English (perhaps British) media outlets persistently depict Ireland as more socially conservative and economically backward than it is, as established interests are terrified at the prospect that republican government by such means leads to, on average, a wealthier and more just society. Which, in the last 30-40 years in Ireland, it has. This has a knock-on effect not only on debates surrounding Scottish independence, but on ones surrounding constitutional reform in the UK. 4) In what way did the minority of Protestants in the Republic “lose out”, as is claimed by one of the presenters? The first president was a Protestant, the poet laureate of the state (Yeats) was a Protestant, the finest university (Trinity College) remained majority protestant for a half century, multiple Protestants served and still serve (often alongside Jews) as government ministers, the best fee-paying schools, which often dominate results tables in Dublin and beyond, are Protestant in ethos, the biggest musical export ,U2, is two thirds evangelical Protestant. Are we seriously claiming that, say, Irish Protestants’ lack of access to the contraception and divorce rights they desired in the republic is comparable to the reduction of Northern Irish Catholics to the status of subaltern, deprived of rights in education, housing, employment and council voting and herded into gerrymandered Stormont constituencies where their votes never materialized into proportionally just and acceptable political representation? The 5-10% of the Irish public of protestant faith were never put in a position remotely comparable in terms of repression, and I state that as someone descended very recently from both communities. 5) There is one crucial word missing in the treatment of the Curragh mutiny; sedition. I do not refer to the UVF covenanters nor the machinations of the IRB which were humming away in the background. I refer to the Conservative and Unionist Party, whose direct, underhanded and unconstitutional dealings with army officers at the Curragh are now a matter of historical record. The language here used is unfortunate, but has become standard, that the officer class, particularly that part of it of Anglo-Irish heritage, did not want to “enforce Home Rule” on their neighbours and relatives in Ulster. By “enforcing Home Rule”, what is actually meant is enforcing the expressed will of the representatives of all subjects of the United Kingdom as legislated by the sovereign parliament at Westminster. This is not merely a betrayal of Irish aspirations toward self-autonomy, it is open sedition by a party not in government (and thus without any mandate) against laws negotiated and set into statute by the governing body of the United Kingdom. Why are historians so loath to use the definitive word, sedition? It’s sedition. Undermining of sovereign government, in this case using army structures. Overall, this series does a great job in highlighting a period of history that is often hidden to English listeners (even those with good overall historical knowledge). The fact , for example, that a future educated and celebrated historian can pass through a decade and a half of UK schooling and never hear the name John Redmond, as highlighted, is mindblowing to an Irish listener. It does not, however, illustrate all aspects of the period as even-handedly as it presumes. If I, as an Irishman, had been living at the time, I would have backed Home Rule. The actions of the Conservative Party and the army, on the other hand, might well have set me on the course towards republican radicalism, and I think the argument that the actions of the Easter 1916 rebels set some kind of martyr example for the Irish public is somewhat overstated by conventional histories. Westminster had shown it could not be trusted, that it was not impartial.

[@davidbond8139]

Fascinating comment - thank you. Would be interesting to see what the guys would say in response to your points

[@sarahprosecco]

Great comment, John. Particularly your second and fourth points. I think it's a great podcast and to be fair they know a whole lot more of the complexities, even if only as of late, than the majority of Irish people. It's unfortunate that so many of us are ignorant and only find our grá for a deeper embracement & understanding of all that makes us Irish well after our youth where it could mould who we are, if we find it at all. It's almost a resentment which then turns to melancholy for something you can't quite put your finger on. I believe in some ways we never regained that spirit or connection to what other nations saw as mysterious. Perhaps (to bring up a comment from the previous episode) the fact we weren't one homogeneous group pre British rule, we were tribal but after the massive impact of population loss, in certain regions more than others; due to war and famine; mass emigration; the rising; the civil war, and the church; much of who we were* was well and truly lost* and/or erased as well as due to anglicisation. Hopefully it's still who we *are and it's just temporarily *forgotten. I'm grateful at least for the writers and poets we had, to help keep a record.

[@vincentmcdermott3412]

Great post. Thank you.

[@TitanicDundee]

I agree with what you say but if you look at the record of the Irish Free State and the subsequent Republic, its constitution is heavily influenced by the Catholic church in all areas. Women are subjugated in all spheres and John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, never had his nose out of the political sphere when he was in office. Basically the revolutionaries of the 1910s were secular, socialist and feminist in their general outlook and what did they get in the 1930s - Dev. As a southern Catholic (lapsed) I fully understand the Ulster Prostestant's fear of rule from a Catholic Dublin.

[@johnmckiernan2176]

@@TitanicDundee That's all a bit chicken and egg. It is just as logical and rational to believe that in a 32-county Irish Republic, there is no way that the Catholic hierarchy could have had the same sway over any potential constitution, since the 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 citizens of the minority faith would simply not have accepted such meddling. Partition preceded Catholic hegemonic orthodoxy and repression and the convergent thinking of the near mono-ethnic Free State, rather than being the mere result of it. A self-fulfilling prophecy, there, on the part of the Covenanters. Thank you, though, for reiterating the fact that the likes of James Connolly and Thomas Clarke are not reported to have ever stepped across the threshold of a Catholic Church in their adult lives. The ultra-Catholicism was in the second ranks of the revolutionaries, who staged something of a conservative, culchie coup in the absence of their forebears.