Anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.
Anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.
O n July 17, 1920, just days after the boisterous Orange parades in Ulster, the Irish Republican Army assassinated Royal Irish Constabulary divisional commander Colonel Gerald Smyth as part of its broader campaign in the Anglo-Irish War. Smyth was a Protestant Ulsterman from County Down. The fiery Irish Unionist, Edward Carson, reacted with fury. Carson, a Dublin lawyer, rapidly became the political tribune of Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule and then its will for self-government. “We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin,” he warned at a rally. If the government failed to protect unionists from them, “we,” he intoned, “would take matters into our own hands. We will reorganize.”
It was that simple: We will get violent, and you know it’s true. On this threat, Northern Ireland was built. But just the threat itself. If Ulster had ever openly, in an undisguised, acknowledged, and officially organized way, engaged in what Ulstermen sometimes threatened, it would have provided Parliament at Westminster the political will to put it down and force it to make terms with the majority on the island of Ireland. Parliaments are built, constitutions reordered, and a union maintained on the threat alone.
That is one thread underneath the narrative in the brilliant, thorough, and exhaustive account by historian Charles Townshend in The Partition: Ireland Divided 1885-1925, which came out in time for the various centennials marking the creation of this strange statelet.
The Partition is partly shadowed by the present reality of Brexit and the re-emergence of the Irish border as a political issue in Downing Street. Townshend goes to some lengths recounting the awkward way that Westminster dealt with the Irish border 100 years ago — much as it dealt with it more recently — with impatience, a preference for clean abstractions over the jigsaw reality of Irish county and parish lines, and exasperation. In this regard, Townshend’s treatment is authoritative, readable, and often mordantly funny. It also has some of the tragedy of Ronan Fanning’s magisterial treatment of U.K.–Irish relations in this time period, Fatal Path, which clearly informed Townshend in sections on Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s own sectarian passions.
However, I came away from the book less impressed with the ever-plodding nature of Westminster when it comes to Ireland than I was by the sheer willful, politically canny creation of Northern Ireland itself. This is an unwelcome feeling for someone with my last name and historical passions. That Northern Ireland should be celebrating centennials at all is a remarkable tribute to the power, organization, and yes, the militancy, of Ulster’s Unionists.
Because the story of Northern Ireland’s conception and creation really begins with Westminster desperately trying to mollify the concerns of Irish nationalists, not its Unionists.
From 1907 to 1916, Augustine Birrell served his majesty’s government as chief secretary for Ireland. His real task was keeping John Redmond, the nationalist leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, happy with the Liberal government that depended on the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party to stay in power.
The only thing that would make John Redmond happy was the passage of Home Rule, the re-establishment of a devolved Parliament in Dublin, a dream since the premiership of Gladstone. Home Rule was the great nettle of Parliamentary politics. Previous attempts to pass it had been blocked by the veto of the Tory-dominated House of Lords in Gladstone’s era. But an alliance with the Irish Parliamentary Party was the only path for the Liberals to power in government. Because the number of Irish seats had been fixed at the Act of Union, before the Famine and waves of emigration brutally culled Ireland’s population, Irish MPs were overrepresented in Parliament. Internally, Liberals were then divided on Home Rule, and the Conservative and Unionist Party was united against it. But the Parliament Act, which would remove the Lords’ veto, cut the opposite way, uniting Liberals and dividing Conservatives.
The version of Home Rule proposed in legislation was “ostentatiously designed to save the union,” according to Townshend. The Home Rule Parliament could levy taxes, but not tariffs, and it had no control over foreign policy. Westminster even added a section forbidding a Dublin parliament from making the validity of a marriage dependent on any religious belief or ceremony, a kind of constitutional Protestantism that acted as a rejoinder to Pope Pius X’s recent document, Ne temere, which required that the children of mixed Protestant–Catholic marriages be raised Catholic.
Birrell knew there would be resistance in the more Protestant and Presbyterian north, which anticipated a Dublin Parliament to be the vehicle of “Rome Rule.” He wrote:
Ulster has cried “Wolf” so often and so absurdly that one is inclined to ridicule her rodomontade, but we are cutting very deep this time and her yells are genuine. . . . Great ferment and perturbation of spirit exists — mainly fed among the poor folk by hatred of Roman Catholicism and amongst the better to do by the belief that under a Home Rule regime Ireland will become a miserable, one-horsed, poverty-stricken, priest-ridden, corrupt oligarchy.
Birrell predicted that only two counties, Antrim and Down, would have anti–Home Rule majorities. And that if there were a transition period, “say five years, Antrim and Down might stand out and that at the end of that time there should be a fresh referendum to settle their fate. If this was done,” he concluded, “there could be no Civil War.”
For a government minister to predict the possibility of civil war with such certainty is no small thing. And just over a decade after this prediction, with far greater drama than Birrell anticipated, the credible and terrifying threat of Ulster’s violence effected a (mostly) bloodless revolution. Birrell had put to paper the first vision of Northern Ireland. It was far too modest compared with the reality. Not two, but six counties of Ireland were excluded — ahead of time — from what was to become the Irish Free State in 1922. Not five years, but 101 years later, Northern Ireland is still there.
Much has been made of Irish nationalist delusions about the North, especially in the last 30 years of historiography. Eoin MacNeill, a nationalist and Ulsterman, squinted his eyes when he looked at the increasingly militant resistance to Home Rule brewing in Ulster, and he saw it as an island-wide shared intransigence at Westminster. His essay, “The North Began,” expounded on this theme and claimed preposterously that Edward Carson, like Orangemen and Presbyterians, was “at heart a home ruler.”
MacNeill’s case was that Ulster could not be separated from Ireland, not in a coherent way. And he was correct that the heartland of Gaelic Catholic culture, predating the Plantation, was found in Ulster, including “the city that Saint Patrick founded, the city that Saint Columba founded, or the tombs of Patrick, Brigid and Columba.” Read today, MacNeill’s reflections resonate uneasily with Vladimir Putin’s essay about the origins of Russia in the Kiev Rus.
MacNeill worked himself toward the conclusion that if Carson’s Volunteers — a Protestant Ulster militia — ever marched on Cork in a civil war with his own Irish Volunteers, it would paradoxically show the unity of the island in its determination for self-government.
“It is not to follow, and it will not follow, that any part of Ireland, majority or minority, is to interfere with the liberty of any other part,” MacNeill assured his readers. As a prediction for a united Ireland under Home Rule, this is unknowable. As a prediction for the divided Ireland that came into being, it was entirely wrong.
What happened is that Carson’s Volunteers never marched on Cork. And MacNeill’s Volunteers (against his countermanding order) did launch a revolution in Dublin in 1916. Irish nationalists, first a small section, then a much larger one, resorted to organized and sustained violence first. And they did achieve some of their goals along the way. After many decades of practicing constitutional nationalism, and the dissolution of the old Fenian networks, the re-emergence of a violent Irish nationalism did catch the United Kingdom by surprise.
But their response in putting down the rebellion, and imprisoning hundreds of suspected sympathizers who had not participated it, only further radicalized Irish society. And this in turn only highlighted the danger of crossing a majority in Ulster. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,” was no empty slogan.
The built-in delay between the first passage of Home Rule in 1914 and the promised implementation of it at least three years later allowed for and encouraged extra-constitutional opposition. This is yet another parallel with Brexit, where the referendum preceded any form of implementation for years, allowing constitutional brinksmanship by normally subordinate figures in the U.K.’s system: the speaker of the House and the Supreme Court. But in the case of Home Rule, and the can-kicking on Ulster, the extra-constitutional opposition took the form of militarization. Unionists armed, and then republicans did the same. But republicans made their war first, and their priority wasn’t uniting all of Ireland, but breaking the connection between Dublin and England.
Townshend’s account highlights the fact that the Irish war for independence hardly featured Ulster at all — a recognition by Sinn Féin that a majority there was well-equipped to put down any nationalist campaign locally, and to extract reprisals from it. The revolutionary government in Dublin was kicking the Ulster can down the road just as much as Westminster had.
Ultimately, the majorities that emerged in the Irish Free State and in Northern Ireland, respectively, did “interfere with the liberty” of the minorities under them. On the score of relative tolerance, I would rate the Republic as doing better than Northern Ireland. The majority in Ireland imposed laws against divorce that harmed the Protestant minority. But the Free State and the Irish Republic did make gestures of conciliation to its Protestant population. The Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole has often emphasized how appalling it was that so many elected TDs — members of Ireland’s parliament — stayed outside the Protestant church at Douglas Hyde’s funeral in 1949. To my eyes this was perfectly understandable. As republicans the Irish had elected a Protestant to a political role in Ireland — even if just a ceremonial one, the presidency. Those Catholic TDs joined all the other honors given to Hyde that had no religious significance. On political matters they were nonsectarian. As for the religious services, they kept to their church’s prohibitions. That is republicanism.
Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland a holdover ratepayer system attached to the franchise limited Catholic influence in politics. Behind that, a gerrymandering system could produce a two-thirds Protestant majority even in a two-thirds-Catholic city such as Londonderry. When that threatened to fail, a private but organized attempt to bar Catholics from employment or more official but unacknowledged preferences for Protestants in government housing, meant to drive Catholics to the Republic, would be deployed.
The campaign of terror and violence that was launched in response to this oppression brought the direct rule of Westminster back to Northern Ireland and opened many English eyes to what sort of statelet had emerged in their union.
But the Troubles and the uneasy peace settlement imposed after 1998 tended to make Ulster more foreign to Dublin and London equally. Ulster’s form of Unionist patriotism, which proceeds from the Troubles, to the memory of the Somme, and looking centuries backward from there is almost entirely alien to post-Blair Britain. And Ulster’s form of Irish nationalism — focusing on Irish language, and unity, heavily administered and petted by a bloated public sector — is also a mismatch for the Irish Republic, which is more Thatcherite in structure than it cares to admit.
History, however, is full of ironies. Ulster’s founding resistance truly was rooted in the fear of Rome Rule, fear that Protestants would be deprived of their property and their right to practice their religion freely, that they — the Prosperity Province — would be trapped in a corrupt, economically backward basket case of Ireland run from the Maynooth seminary.
Northern Ireland is now the economic basket case in Ireland, still suffering from a deindustrialization that never afflicted the rest of the island. And the Republic of Ireland is governed by a class that views its moral legitimacy entirely through the lens of Ireland’s latter-day escape from Catholicism. It is a state that launders its past failures by inveighing against whichever group of aged nuns can be plausibly blamed for them. Ireland’s unity was once the assertion of the Irish state, but now Irish politics is stalked by an unexamined and unstated dread of that unity.
Since 1998, the crown has been stripped from the police uniforms of Northern Ireland, as the Royal Ulster Constabulary became the denuded Police Service of Northern Ireland. Under a united Ireland, how would a police force by the name of An Garda Síochána police events like the July 12 Orange parades in Belfast anyway? How will the state broadcaster RTE keep to its lawful commitments to fairness when dealing with Ulster’s Protestants in the Dáil who share the pope’s views on abortion? Ireland’s current clerical class may not be as welcoming of refugees from history such as these, if they ever come on board.
Can Northern Ireland hold out, even as demographic trends fate it to have a Catholic majority soon? It is impossible to say. Ulster pledged its freedom, religion, and laws to God in a covenant, but its history tends to prove the godless Machiavelli right that the legitimacy and security of a state is built upon the threat of wild, ruthless, anarchic violence. Northern Ireland was created and survives yet still because Ulster Unionists were feared, not loved. Next week’s bonfires and marches are the visible re-presentation of the threat that keeps the Union going. The drums are beating a fearsome march.