Paul Bew
IRELAND
The politics of enmity 1789–2006
613pp. Oxford University Press. £35 (US $65).
978 0 19 820555 5
R. F. Foster
LUCK AND THE IRISH
A brief history of change 1970–2000
228pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. £20.
978 0 713 99783 5
Much of Paul Bew’s remarkable, formidably researched and fluently written
survey of more than 200 years of Irish history is about squandered
opportunities and missed chances. These include the failure to grant
Catholic emancipation in Ireland until 1829, and the manner in which the
message of Wolfe Tone and the 1798 rebellion – to promote the “common name
of Irishman” in place of the existing political and religious divisions –
was “cruelly mocked”. Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen’s University
Belfast, takes the impact of the French Revolution as the starting point for
the debate about the status of Catholics in Ireland. At that time, the
possibility existed of one of two extremes taking hold in Ireland in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Protestant Ascendancy, or the
radical, Jacobin alternative. Bew devotes much attention to Edmund Burke,
who, he maintains, “had a profound insight into the angle of vision of
Catholic Ireland living cheek by jowl with an entire community that
considered itself superior”. Inspired by Burke, leading politicians in
Britain began to consider the argument that the security of Britain required
some kind of rapprochement with Catholic Ireland, but they failed to treat
the issue with any urgency.
The conception of a union of Britain and Ireland that might lead to “one
people” was powerful, but dependent on the reduction of political
differences, religious animosities and local prejudices, as William Pitt the
Younger discovered in having to deal with the sense of indifference,
“perhaps even contempt”, in British politics that threatened to undermine
the union. Daniel O’Connell won Catholic emancipation on the basis of the
strength of popular mobilization rather than “the abstract justice of the
case”, the difficulty for the future being that “Ireland’s celebrated
culture of agitation” was now fully formed. There was always a degree of
inconsistency in O’Connell’s career, but he was a major force in British
high politics, and Bew’s dissection of him – his alliances, successes and
failures, including his sectarian stand on higher education – is absorbing
and convincing, showing how O’Connell brought the Irish question back to the
centre of British politics in 1844–5.
The potato famine that followed these years prompted some members of the
British political class to suggest an Irish ethnic inferiority or laziness.
In the House of Commons, in December 1847, John Walters, MP for Nottingham
(and proprietor of The Times) argued that “If Nigger were not Nigger,
Irishman would be Nigger”. But this was not representative of mainstream
opinion; the real problem was the lack of belief in state intervention, and
there was plenty of blame attached to the Anglo-Irish landlords. The Irish
nationalist John Mitchel accurately encapsulated the mood between Britain
and Ireland in 1847: “In Ireland, a vague and dim sense that they were
somehow robbed, in England, a still more vague and blundering idea that an
impudent beggar was demanding their money with a scorch in his eye and a
threat upon his tongue”. In tandem with a triumphal sectarianism and
violence in Ulster, the atmosphere was rancid, facilitating the emergence of
the Fenian impulse, which, in harnessing the disgruntled emigrant Irish,
was, Bew points out, “decisive proof that a greater Ireland beyond the seas
now existed”.
There was also a changed class bias to Irish nationalism, with urban artisans
and clerks adding their voice, and a Fenian proclamation during the
rebellion of 1867 that “expressed with great clarity a nationalist,
democratic and agrarian radical message”. The Fenian movement claimed 50,000
members, which represented, Bew suggests, “a formidable mass nationalism by
any serious comparative European criteria”, while also intensifying
sectarian animosities in Ulster, where it had a significant appeal to
Belfast working-class Catholics. The leader of the Home Rule campaign in the
late nineteenth century, Charles Stewart Parnell, is subjected to a rich and
textured analysis by Bew, as are the contradictions that lay at the heart of
Parnellism – “active flirtation” with Fenians but also a mild hesitancy and
concentration on Parliament. Parnellism survived its maker, and his eventual
successor, John Redmond, is given credit for attempting to break down
sectarian divisions. Bew’s narrative falters slightly in not devoting enough
attention to the legion of the excluded who planned the 1916 Rising, the
mood of despair within nationalism that produced it, and the failure of
Redmond and his generation to appreciate what was going on at grassroots
level. Bew highlights the British over-reaction to the Rising, the
manifestation of “an emotional hardening” that did so much to create the
“politics of the gun” between 1919 and 1923. He recognizes, without
sermonizing, that during 1916–21, Sinn Fein created a high level of
expectancy as to the likely outcome of the War of Independence, which
ultimately resulted in a poisonous civil war after the split in Sinn Fein
over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921.
Bew’s last two chapters trace the experiences of the two states, North and
South, ruled by men who “believed not so much in the economy of truth as the
necessary brutality of truth”. He is critical of Eamon de Valera, who was in
power from 1932–48, as someone who “ruled supreme as the philosopher king of
Irish pastoralism and frugal comfort”. This is a simplification of the man
who maximized the sovereignty of the twenty-six counties with determination
and often sophistication, in the 1930s, secured the legitimation of
democratic institutions and was determined to implement an independent
foreign policy. Bew is critical – wrongly, in my view – of the policy of
neutrality during the Second World War that resulted. It was not a moral
failure but a necessity for self-preservation, though it is difficult to
dispute the truth of the assertion that, in the area of social services, “if
one was poor and vulnerable it was better to be born on the Northern side of
the Irish border”.
Bew’s chapter on the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s is a
judicious account of hate-fuelled violence and the contrast between hollow
rhetoric and furtive, behind-the-scenes scrambling for a way out, with the
backdrop of “the usual mistrust and ethical antagonism of Ulster politics”.
In the Republic, he suggests, not enough people listened to the Taoiseach,
Jack Lynch, when he asked, “Would we want to adopt the role of an occupying
conqueror over the million or so six-county citizens, who at present support
partition?”. The eventual acceptance of this logic – notably by Bertie Ahern
in the 1990s (who is praised for the “studied” moderation with which he
approached Northern Ireland) came slowly. But Ahern, when the war was over,
still wanted to play the Green card. Despite all the talk of reconciliation,
the decision by the Irish government to reintroduce the military parade
(abandoned in the early 1970s) to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of
the 1916 Rising in 2006, confirmed that there are still, in Ireland, “two
histories, separate and in conflict”. For Bertie Ahern, politics is, once
again, local, but as Bew recognizes, Britain should be feeling a large
measure of historical guilt for the mistakes of successive governments in
their approach to Ireland.
R. F. Foster has been asked on several occasions to update his seminal Modern
Ireland 1600–1972, published in 1988, an often biting and controversial
survey, which was refreshing in its determination to interrogate cherished
assumptions. It was seen as one of the leading “revisionist” texts of the
1980s, and it is unsurprising that publishers would be interested in seeking
Foster’s view of the transformation of Ireland in the past thirty years,
during which he spent much time immersed in his study of W. B. Yeats,
producing the definitive Life of the poet in two volumes.
Roy Foster thus combines a good grasp on the politics of Irish history-writing
with deep immersion in the cultural world of twentieth-century Ireland, and
he has made the right choice in deciding to write a new volume rather than
an addition to his large survey history. Luck and the Irish is a skilfully
written and thoughtful book, based on the Wiles Lectures delivered in
Belfast in 2004, in which Foster moves fluidly through a variety of themes
without reaching grandstanding conclusions. The book’s title may be taken by
some to be patronizing, and Foster’s occasionally caustic put-downs will
annoy others, but they should not diminish the brilliance of the writing,
which places him as a historian in a league of his own. The perspective of
an Irish “exile” in Oxford on the vast changes in Irish society in recent
decades is also something that should be welcomed as a constructive
corrective to some of the more insular and self-congratulatory assessments
of change in Ireland.
The big change apparent in those thirty years, “perhaps decisively and
forever, is a question of attitude”. Foster traces this change through
economics, politics, the decline of religion, women’s liberation, the
cementing of partition and the impact of Irish literature. Whether the
collective transformations represent Ireland’s Great Leap Forward or are the
product of a series of interconnected crises, it is too early to pronounce
on, but, in teasing out these different themes, Foster delivers an
insightful and often wryly funny analysis, which does not shy away from
opinion and speculation. He is influenced by and gives credit to a variety
of sources, such as the current affairs magazine Magill, which marked a
breakthrough for investigative journalism in Ireland, when launched in 1977,
and he follows the conclusions of economic historians such as Cormac
O’Gráda, that Ireland’s low tax, low public debt economy, and development of
social partnership are the result of the “Celtic Tiger” economy rather than
its cause. But Foster also acknowledges “a sometimes spectacularly unequal
prosperity”. He devotes much attention to the decline of the influence of
Catholicism and the rise of the women’s movement, which helped set the
“terms that enforced a revolution in the traditional Catholic Church’s place
in Irish life”, and he points to the accuracy of the Protestant essayist
Hubert Butler’s prediction in 1970 that à la carte Catholicism would become
a kind of Protestantism, with Catholics devising their own spiritual and
moral solutions.
In the chapter on Fianna Fáil and Irish politics in the past thirty years,
Foster distinguishes between those interested in policy, such as Paddy
Hillery, Ireland’s first EEC Commissioner, and those interested in politics,
such as Charles Haughey and the likes of Padraig Flynn and Seán Doherty,
Fianna Fáil ministers in the 1980s who were rewarded “well beyond their
capacities”. He castigates as a “sanctimonious delusion” the arguments put
forward by commentators that the corrupting relationship between property
developers and politicians was justified because it existed “to create the
environment which the Anglo-Irish enjoyed and that we as a people could
never aspire to”. This is an angry chapter, and Haughey, the “Napoleon of
the Third Republic of Ireland”, who dominated Irish politics from 1979 until
1992, is dissected and exposed as a fraud. Last year, a tribunal report
found that, in accepting huge sums of money from businessmen over many
years, Haughey had debased Irish democracy.
In looking at the Troubles, Foster, like Bew, heaps praise on Jack Lynch,
whose “sane and careful” response to the Northern crisis stood in contrast
to the machinations of Haughey and what Foster calls “time warped
Irish-Americans” – though he is not right to dismiss the march on the
British Embassy after Bloody Sunday in 1972 as “an angry Dublin crowd
choreographed by local Republicans”. It was a lot more than that. Foster’s
likes and dislikes become apparent (in contrast to Haughey, Garret
FitzGerald, the Taoiseach during 1982–7, is seen as far-sighted and
realistic). This chapter is a reminder of why the sheer longevity of the
Troubles entrenched partition; Foster, echoing Bew, highlights the emergence
of neo-Nationalist rhetoric in the twenty-six counties at the end of the
peace process. He acknowledges that it is still too early to tell whether,
as some assert, the peace process led to the Balkanization of local
political culture in Northern Ireland, and to communities becoming more
divided than ever.
Foster’s concluding chapter, demonstrating a confident grasp of a variety of
cultural forms, highlights achievements in literature, poetry, theatre and
film that suggest a “dramatic development in confidence and innovation”,
with attention devoted to the Irish writers who have transcended previous
literary inhibitions while also revealing “the power and suggestiveness of
historical themes in the creative literature”. He makes it clear that the
manipulation of memory has been central to much of what Ireland has made of
itself during the past thirty years. At the same time, Foster laments the
casual attitude to architectural and archaeological heritage, a “fascinating
and often depressing barometer of Irish attitudes to the past”.
Unfortunately, he remains curiously resistant to the charms of Irish
sporting endeavour; there is no mention of the contribution the Gaelic
Athletic Association has made to Irish cultural confidence. In concluding,
Roy Foster has little doubt that Ireland has changed for the better, because
“good luck was maximised by good management”, but Luck and the Irish is a
balanced work that gives equal billing to the uncritical celebrants, and the
sceptics, of the impact of the “Celtic Tiger”, while offering his own
distinctive, original and elegant insights.
Diarmaid Ferriter is a Senior Lecturer in Irish history at St Patrick’s
College, Dublin City University, and a broadcaster with RTE. His new book,
Judging Dev: A reassessment of the life and legacy of Eamon de Valera, was
published in October.
