The history behind My Father Left Me Ireland
Editor’s Note: Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an occasional “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.
Because it is July Fourth weekend, it seems just right to litigate the idea of revolution against Britain.
Crawford Gribben wrote a nice review of My Father Left Me Ireland in the Wall Street Journal for Father’s Day weekend, and he raises some questions that I’m all too happy to answer. Gribben reviews the book as a historian and writes that, “The paradoxical combination of revolutionary politics and conservative nostalgia makes ‘My Father Left Me Ireland’ a profoundly American book.”
Gribben holds that it is odd for a conservative like me to admire a revolutionary like Patrick Pearse, who led the Easter Rebellion of 1916. And not only admire him, but claim that this Pearse, the Gaelic insurrectionist, in some ways corrects the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke, the man credited with founding modern conservatism. Gribben writes: “‘Pearse corrects Edmund Burke,’ he claims, but only in the way that revolution corrects constitutional democracy.”
Gribben goes on to make a straightforward argument:
He was, after all, a revolutionary, and the events of the “Easter Rising” in which he participated were as chaotic as their consequences were cruel. In Dublin, on Easter Monday, half a century of legal nationalist involvement in constitutional politics ended. A small group of armed men invoked the “name of God and . . . the dead generations from which [Ireland] receives her old tradition of nationhood.” They announced the birth of an Irish republic and promised “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all.” The rebels seized control of positions around the city until they were crushed by British military might. All seven men who signed the proclamation were executed, along with several others.
This is a variation of a very old argument known more in Ireland than in the United States. Stated even more expensively it might run like this: By 1914 the great aspiration of the Irish Parliamentary Party, a Home Rule parliament restored to Dublin underneath the Parliament of Westminster, was guaranteed, even if implementation had been suspended for the duration of the Great War. The Irish Parliamentary Party had been a tough and tenacious steward of Irish interests, had it not? And further, because Ireland’s representation in the Westminster Parliament had been based on population numbers at the start of the 19th century, before the Great Famine caused a dramatic divergence in the respective populations of the two Isles, Ireland’s ministers of Parliament were overrepresented in Parliament by the turn of the 20th century. The rebels of 1916 had inflicted casualties on innocents; their rebellion wrecked central Dublin. The tradition of physical-force nationalism cut against political moderation in Ireland, inspiring not only the bloody Anglo–Irish war beginning in 1919 but the subsequent post-treaty civil war. Later the “Ghosts” Patrick Pearse wrote about, in some way inspired the campaign of terror by Irish nationalists in the Troubles.
And further, the Irish state that was bequeathed to Irish people at the end of this process was now set in such opposition to the United Kingdom and took on economic policies aimed at establishing political sovereignty rather than focusing on economic growth. Because this state would not be restrained by Westminster, it made the laws of Ireland less liberal in areas of education, divorce, and free speech. Gribben gestures toward these criticisms of the Irish state in his review.
Before getting to why I praise Pearse, it is necessary to explain why I think the Rising was just. I simply disagree with Gribben that the Rising ended constitutional politics in Ireland. In my judgment, the government under prime minister Lloyd George and King George repeatedly sought to undermine the legitimate democratic achievement of Home Rule by extra-constitutional means, worst of all by enflaming the fears of Irish Protestants and all but encouraging civil war.
The best that can be said is that the crackup of constitutional politics in Ireland was a tragedy of the Parliament Act, which allowed the House of Commons to pass a bill over the veto of the House of Lords so long as it did so for three consecutive years. It was the passage of the Parliament Act that cemented the alliance between the Irish Party and the Liberals and led to the passage of Home Rule. Those following the ongoing perturbations of Brexit should already see the problem of having a democratic result but a years-long delay in implementation; it invites opponents of the democratic result to take extreme measures to make implementation of the result impossible.
It was in this period, between the first passage of the Home Rule bill in 1912 and during the ever-delayed implementation, that Irish politics became dangerously militarized. Protestant unionists were the first to form paramilitaries in response to the passage of Home Rule. The formation of the Ulster Volunteers, a band that the Irish Unionist Edward Carson had threatened may “march to Cork,” led the Irish nationalist Eoin MacNeil to promise “the greetings of ten times their number” of National Volunteers. He formed a paramilitary by that name to defend Home Rule. Guns flooded into Ireland. A pattern of the British government stopping shipments of weapons to Irish nationalist volunteers and allowing them to Ulster Unionists emerged even if it wasn’t intended policy. Unionists were explicit that their opposition to being governed by a national Parliament with a majority of Roman Catholics in it trumped constitutionalism.
The Conservative parliamentarian Bonar Law gave a speech in which he accused his government of being
a Revolutionary Committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud. . . . In our opposition to them we shall not be guided by the considerations or bound by the restraints which would influence us in an ordinary Constitutional struggle. . . . They may, perhaps they will, carry their Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons but what then? I said the other day in the House of Commons and I repeat here that there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. . . . I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.
This is not a mere allusion to civil war but the openly stated threat of it. And this was no backbencher. By 1913, although it was Redmond’s Irish party keeping a Liberal as prime minister in a coalition government, Lloyd George was playing golf with the new head of the opposition, Bonar Law. It was in this environment, with Redmond effectively cut out, that King George, Augustine Birrell (the Liberal Party’s chief minister for Ireland), and Herbert Asquith convinced themselves that once the threat of civil war to oppose Home Rule could be established, Redmond would simply have to consent to some kind of exclusion of Ulster from Home Rule, or even to a partition of Ireland. In other words, the government had no appetite to quell the threat of civil war but in fact hoped to make good use of it to force Irish parliamentarians to abandon their democratic achievement. There was a kind of anxiously learned helplessness on the part of the government in effecting Home Rule. See incidents such as the Curragh Mutiny.
But even this wasn’t the end of the extra-constitutional maneuvers. Ronan Fanning in his excellent book on Britain’s Ireland policy, Fatal Path, writes about the maneuvers of the Dublin Unionist and parliamentarian Edward Carson:
Privately, Carson was edging towards an exclusionist compromise. Publicly, he amplified the plans for revolution. On 24 September 1913, 500 delegates of the Ulster Unionist Council approved a plan to delegate its authority to a provisional government of 75 members (led by a Commission of Five chaired by Carson) which would seize power the moment the Home Rule Bill became law. A military council was established and the work of government departments delegated to committees on finance and business, on law, on education, and customs, excise and the post office, and so on. The meeting ended with a resolution to create an indemnity guarantee fund of £1 million to compensate the members of the Ulster Volunteer Force who might be wounded and the widows and orphans of those killed in the anticipated fighting. Carson personally pledged £10,000; a quarter of a million was guaranteed before the meeting ended, and Belfast’s business community ensured that the fund had surpassed its target of £1 million by 1 January 1914. The spotlight on military preparedness intensified when a series of UVF parades throughout Ulster culminated with another massive demonstration at Balmoral in south Belfast on 27 September taking the form of a review of the Belfast division, four regiments of fourteen battalions comprising 12,000 men, led by the UVF’s sixty-six-year-old commander-in-chief, General Sir George Richardson.
The effective separation between parliamentary endorsement of Home Rule for all of Ireland in 1913 and 1914 looks farcical when in the shadow of the government’s actual preparations for banging through partition, and exclusion, even if it meant inflaming the threat of civil war. Carson was able to confidently tell a Tory backbencher “he had known for a long time that the government would not force Home Rule on Ulster. So it is all play acting.”
By the time the war came, the British government practically exulted in the excuse it had to delay the Irish question, passing a suspensory act, and putting Home Rule on ice. Asquith’s letters and notes at the outbreak of war show him positively thrilled to see the end of “that dismal Curragh business . . . now it is all dead and securely buried as Queen Anne.”
But now instead of civil war, Redmond was head of the Parliamentary party, and the political leaders of Ulster’s Unionists were put into a recruiting-drive footrace to prove their bona fides to a government that would later settle their differences. The men who came from Ulster’s Protestant paramilitaries were put into the 36th Ulster division together and given symbols acknowledging their political identity. The recruits from the Irish Volunteers were given no such honors in the 16th. This was an impossible position for Redmond, and it is no surprise that a recruitment pitch to Irish men to join the war to free small Catholic nations such as Belgium had a disenchanting effect. The war cabinet eventually included the most militant unionists Bonar Law and Edward Carson.
It was in this environment that previously devoted Home Rulers such as Pearse concluded in the futility of negotiating in what he deemed a foreign Parliament and instead returned to the tradition of asserting Irish freedom in arms:
There has been nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation. Other generations have failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, failing ignobly, some man among them has redeemed them from infamy by the splendor of his protest. But the failure of the last generation has been mean and shameful, and no man has arisen from it to say or do a splendid thing in virtue of which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode is squalid.
Watching the government openly flirt with those who threatened civil war to delay or alter the democratic achievement of Home Rule certainly would make the words of Charles Stewart Parnell seem more urgent: “England will respect you in proportion as you and we respect ourselves. They will not give anything to Ireland out of justice or righteousness. They will concede you your liberties and your rights when they must and no sooner.”
The lines between lawful constitutional nationalism and the rebels began to fade almost immediately after the 1916 rebellion. The British response included rounding up thousands of Irish men thought to have sympathies with the rebellion even if they did not participate in it. This included Eoin MacNeil, who had tried to halt the Rising.
On the parliamentary side, Irish MP John Dillon delivered an incredible denunciation of the government’s response to the Rising. He charged the government with putting Irish MPs in danger by delaying Home Rule, after their decades of work trying to reconcile the Irish people to a Union that many of them resented:
I do most earnestly appeal to the Prime Minister to stop these executions . . . it is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would be a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin — three thousand men against twenty thousand with machine-guns and artillery [Heckled and responds] . . . We have attempted to bring the masses of the Irish people into harmony with you, in this great effort at reconciliation — I say, we are entitled to every assistance from the Members of this House and this Government.
Surveying all this, I do not think the charge of breaking constitutional politics can be laid solely at the feet of Pearse and his insurgents. Nor do I think the lines between peaceful constitutional politics and the Rising are very clean. In my book I acknowledge that the Troubles and the 30-year campaign of violence by the Provos provided a strong motivation for re-evaluating the legacy of the Rising. One that I think had gone too far. And this tidied-up division of constitutionalists on one side, and men of violence on the other, ends up projecting backward into history the SDLP–Sinn Fein split of Northern Ireland.
Gribben gestures at other criticisms that I’m not sure how to take. He charges me with grasping “toward a stable, contented monoculture.” I’m not 100 percent sure what is meant by this. I thought my book assailed Ireland’s currently self-contented monoculture. He writes somewhat patronizingly about my affinity for the “‘ideal Ireland’ imagined by the rebels” which “was better than the real Ireland, beset with failing banks, corrupt politicians, and negligent clergy.”
Ireland was hardly the only country to struggle with failing banks and corrupt politicians in this era. Yes, revolutionaries aspire to high things. But the question is whether an Irish nation has a right to rule itself. The young Irish state did not, as other Catholic-majority nations of Europe did, fall into fascism, even as its determined nationalist leadership pursued a policy of full separation from the United Kingdom through the 1930s and 1940s. There was much unhappiness in an independent Ireland, though union was no guarantee against it. Now Irish historians seem to slip each other furtive notes about what cannot be said of the Irish state in their reviews of each other. Charles Townsend, in the end of his review of Ronan Fanning’s brisk biography of Éamon de Valera, gestures at the taboos with the subversive observation that de Valeria’s Ireland “was less grim than current orthodoxy would have it.” Yes, especially when compared with other small nations trying to navigate Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.
That is all the history, but it’s worth emphasizing that the reason for my elevation of Pearse is clear in my book. He sees that in some circumstances the preservation of an inheritance — of a nation — may call for radical action and radical sacrifice. Though Pearse praised the rebellions of 1798, he did so because their aim was for “breaking the [political] connection” between Ireland and England, not for their Jacobin politics. The aim of his revolution was the survival and full restoration of a Gaelic Ireland, and breaking the connection was merely the political precondition for each project. My final chapter, some reviewers may have noticed, argues that Pearse’s traditionalism is not, as Declan Kiberd alleges, a way of masking his modernity. It is as genuine and as deeply felt as his ambition for the future.
I’ve been very grateful for the reviews. And am happy that the personal history that informs my book — Irish father, Irish-American mother — gives me not only gratitude for England, where my parents knew each other and where my godmother still lives, but a double gratitude for political independence from Britannia. Happy Fourth of July.