by Fergal Keane
The claustrophobic Catholicism and bitter politics did not stifle cultural expression in north Kerry. With the English gone there were the new targets for the pens of angry young men, and the poets and playwrights flourished. As in the days of the Gaelic bards, satire became a potent weapon. During the bitter election campaign of 1951, my uncle, John B, and several friends decided to challenge the prevailing Civil War politics. Sick of the old bitterness they put up a mock candidate, Tom Doodle, with the campaign message ‘Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Kaboodle to Doodle’. On the night before the Taoiseach was due to appear at a rally in Listowel, the Doodle campaign arranged for their candidate to arrive by train where he was met by a brass band and a crowd of several thousand. To cheers he outlined his promises, chief among them that ‘every man would have more than the next’.* Inevitably, created as it was by young men of high spirits, the hour of Doodle passed and the old politics continued undisturbed well into my adulthood.
I look back on my grandparents’ generation and see a people exhausted and traumatised by conflict. Their horizons were narrowed by the desire for stability, above all else, in a country that was beggared and a wider world staggering between mass conflagrations. I cannot blame them for the inherited narrow ground on which I took my first steps. They wanted to hold what they had and add a few acres, a few more head of cattle, send their children to college, or get them into the civil service. In ‘Strong Beams’ the poet Máirtin Ó Direáin wrote tellingly of that rural mind for whom the memory of dispossession was just a generation away:
Stand your ground, soul:
Hold fast to everything that’s rooted …22
Dev was driven by the desire to establish beyond all question or threat the sovereignty of Ireland. His Ireland would be economically self-sufficient and culturally independent. Instead it was blighted by unemployment and mass migration. Because of this it is tempting to regard de Valera as a failed leader. I held to that view for much of my life. But wider reading, the influence of more dispassionate historians, has given me a more rounded view of the man and his times. Now I think of him, at least in his larger vision, as a romantic hobbled by a failure of imagination when it came to economic and social progress. His lyrical imagining was of an Ireland as ‘the home of a people’:
who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.23
This speech is regularly held up as an example of Dev the obscurantist. But the context is all-important. He was speaking on the radio on St Patrick’s Day, 1943, while war raged in Europe and totalitarianism preached a doctrine of invincible might, where humanity was reduced in Hitler’s words to mere ‘biological plasticine’. Set against the inhumanity of fascism and Stalinism, de Valera’s bucolic Ireland offered a consoling idea. In a time of fear Dev was offering a tempting vision whose symbols – land, family, secure homes – would have resonated deeply across the nation. It was a vision of its time, not unlike the promised land of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) with its celebration of the ‘way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build’, although rooted in devout religiosity that would have appalled the American writer. Dev was neutral in the sense of not joining the war as a combatant, but carefully balanced his neutrality in the direction of the Allies; he interned captured Germans but allowed Allied airmen to reach Northern Ireland. Had Ireland entered battle as Churchill wished, the prospect of a renewed civil war was real. The IRA had not vanished and the prospect of Irishmen being sent to war as allies of England was too close to the memory of Redmond and the Volunteers of 1914. Dev knew well that if he entered that war he could have no guarantees about the kind of Ireland that would emerge.
De Valera stepped down as Taoiseach in 1959, two years before I was born. Yet the Ireland in which I spent my early years was smothered in his essence. Fragments of memory: an old man getting out of a car accompanied by an army officer. I think it is at my Irish-speaking school, perhaps the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, and in my mind children are singing for him an old ballad fashioned anew by Pearse as the marching song of the Revolution.
Oró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile,
Oró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile,
Oró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile,
Anois are theacht an tsamhraidh.
(Oh-ro, you’re welcome home,
Oh-ro, you’re welcome home,
Oh-ro, you’re welcome home,
Now that summer’s coming.)
The song was about routing the foreigners. The great sixteenth-century pirate queen Grace O’Malley and a thousand warriors would return home from over the seas to drive the English out.
Dev still talked about the unity of the island. Officially it was his party’s most important priority. But the Catholics living under Unionist rule in the six counties hardly merited a debate in the Dáil. The north was marooned in the zone of forgetting by the governments in Dublin and London. When conflict exploded in 1969 national passions briefly surged. Then came the long attrition with its thousands of dead. When the violence did cross the border – the bombings of Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, for example – the effect was to reinforce our desire to be left alone. Thirty-three people were killed and we briefly experienced the terror that haunted the lives of our fellow islanders to the north. It was part of the same story that had overtaken my grandmother and her brother in their youth. Yet its virulent quarrel over faith and identity made it ineffably different. For my people, the north was always too far away, the conflict with the Unionists too complex, and the memory of the Civil War too haunting for them to do anything but mind their own business. Partition did not begin for them with the Government of Ireland Act in 1920. It had been part of the psychological atmosphere of the family into which I was born and reared since at least the late nineteenth century. Ulster was the troublesome country of the Home Rule riots, sectarian murder gangs, burning houses; it was also the industrial north with its linen mills and shipyards, and it was the home of a flinty Protestantism whose adherents believed they were the elect of God. It was the place that the great nationalist leaders, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, had taken trouble to avoid setting foot in for most of their political careers.
The Purtills and Con Brosnan did not go to war to capture Belfast and impose Gaelic Catholic supremacy on the entire island of Ireland, but to be masters in their own place, believing they might build a more prosperous happy country outside the British Empire. Their own freedom of religion had been secured a century before. There were no loyalist ghettos in Listowel or Tralee and the local Protestants had long ceased to represent any kind of overlordship. In his later years when he spoke of the Protestants of Listowel, my father became wistful. He compared them frequently and favourably to the Catholic clerics of the district. His Protestants were the local rector and his family, and a daughter of the manse for whom he harboured a secret longing. In those days romantic visions swam eternally before him.
II
In my own barony of Iveragh in the County of Kerry … there are no Protestants in the world, less apprehensive of Roman Catholics, or Papists, than they are. We live in perfect harmony.
Daniel O’Connell, House of Commons Select Committee on Ireland, 1825
If I seem preoccupied with the fate of the Protestant minority it is because I have witnessed, so often, the trampling underfoot of religious and ethnic minorities around the world. We are to be judged, rightly so, on the way we treat those outside our inherited trib
al identity. The Civil War was won by the side they had favoured but the world they knew was gone. The Protestants began to leave. In north Kerry they were few to begin with and they faded out rather than vanished. By the start of the twenty-first century the Protestants of Listowel and its hinterland had all but vanished. This was not like Smyrna in September 1922 when massacre and fire drove the Greeks and other Christian minorities out of Asia Minor. Nor was it like Bosnia decades later when the mosques were blown up and everybody of the wrong religion was taken out and killed. There were no speeches from politicians denigrating the minority, much less declarations ordering their expulsion, or lists of victims to be slaughtered – all of which typify my own experience of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Yet Protestants left the south in large numbers in the period of the Revolution and in the decade that followed.
Between 1911 and 1926 the Protestant population fell by thirty-three per cent. Take an even longer timeframe and the Protestant decline reflects the immense shift in social, economic and political power in the south. Between 1861 and 1936 the population dropped by sixty-one per cent. Some of this was down to the departure of Protestants in the British administration. Declining birth and marriage rates further eroded the numbers. Some, especially in the border counties, preferred to take their chances in the Protestant state up north.* The burning of the big houses, the targeting of those who were known or suspected to be sympathetic to Crown forces, the retreat of the order which had guaranteed their security, all combined to create a pervasive unease. One leading Presbyterian wrote that the ‘break up of the big estates … and the transfer of the army, police and government officials as well as businesses of various kinds to the North, or across the water to Great Britain, have diminished our numbers and depleted the strength of our congregations. To those who knew the Ireland of the last century … the contrast is at once startling and depressing.’24 These were not colonial settlers in the modern sense of the term, with a century or less of the earth beneath their feet. Some pre-dated the Dutch who landed in South Africa in 1652 by nearly a century and the Pieds-Noirs of Algeria by 300 years.
In the spring of 1922, during the Truce and on the eve of the Civil War, there was an outburst of violence against Protestants in West Cork. Thirteen men were killed in the last week of April. All of the dead had survived the War of Independence and might have had cause to believe the worst was over. Motives for the massacre in the Bandon Valley were probably mixed: score-settling for the killing of a local IRA leader during a raid on a Protestant house, the suspicion that some of the victims had provided intelligence to the British and would do so again if the war restarted, and the murky territory of buried resentments that only neighbours of long standing would comprehend.* Did raw sectarianism play a part for some of the assailants? The young Irish historian John Dorney puts it well, I think: ‘Republican guerrillas were not in the main motivated by sectarianism [but] sectarianism was a fact of Irish life and where people’s loyalties were called into question, such divisions could be lethal.’ I can only write from the perspective of my own experience of civil war in other places. When members of a minority are targeted in a wave of violence they immediately feel their isolation. Bonds of neighbourly trust established over centuries can fray in an instant. ‘Are we next?’ … ‘Are they going to kill us all?’
If you were a Protestant in the Bandon Valley in that dark April of 1922 such a massacre might easily have seemed the signal for the start of a pogrom. Whatever their motives, could the killers have been unaware of this fact? In the north of Ireland, Catholics were being terrorised by Protestant gangs, a campaign that was overtly sectarian. It would have been logical for the Protestants of West Cork to see the violence inflicted on them as sectarian revenge.
The killings were not officially sanctioned by the IRA; commanders, like the legendary Tom Barry, condemned the slaughter and rushed to the area to prevent further outbreaks of violence. A Republican irredentist in the Civil War, Barry wrote years later that Protestants were not required to support the rebellion against Britain. His words are probably a fair summation of the official nationalist outlook:
What we did demand was that they in common with Catholics should not commit any hostile act against us and that they should not actively aid the British troops or administration. The majority of Protestants accepted this position, and let it be said that we found them men of honour whose word was their bond. Aloof from the National struggle, they did not stand with our enemy and they lived their days at peace with their neighbours in spite of all British propaganda, and the bigotry and intolerance of the very small section of bigoted Catholics. Alas, religious bigotry was not confined to the Protestants for the ignorant and petty-minded Catholics, too, had their fair share of this ancient curse.25
On the other side the leading pro-Treatyite politician Kevin O’Higgins also spoke out in the Protestants’ defence. ‘These people are part and parcel of the country,’ he wrote, ‘and we being the majority and strength of the country … it comes well from us to make a generous adjustment to show that these people are regarded, not as alien enemies, not as planters, but that we regard them as part and parcel of the nation, and that we wish them to take their share of its responsibilities.’26 The IRA plan in the War of Independence and Civil War had not been ethnic cleansing. The men of the Flying Column in north Kerry did not set out to eliminate Protestants. But they killed Arthur Vicars because they saw him as a loyalist and a friend of the British Army, and his death would have reinforced the sense of minority vulnerability.
On the eve of the Second World War the Church of Ireland newspaper the Christian Irishman offered a gloomy assessment of Protestants’ position in the new state: ‘Protestants enjoy toleration at the moment but that is very largely because they no longer possess anything, either power or property, which others want. It is the toleration we accord to the dead.’27 This was not entirely true. Political power had certainly vanished. The Catholic middle classes dominated the world of agriculture and commerce. But the majority of Protestants were not reduced to penury by dispossession. The Protestants who stayed largely kept their heads down and got on with farming or business. They maintained a healthy representation in the business sphere. As more and more intermarried with Catholics their numbers dwindled further, the Catholic decree Ne Temere insisting that children of a mixed marriage be raised in the faith of Rome.28 By the twenty-first century, the Protestant population stood at only thirty per cent of its pre-revolution figure.
The new state of the 1920s and ’30s was very far from the Republic which would ‘cherish equally the aspirations of all its children’ proclaimed by Pearse on the steps of the General Post Office in 1916, or the all-Ireland utopia of Wolfe Tone where Catholic, Protestant and dissenter and all would go by ‘the common name of Irishman’.29 Observing the Catholicisation of the new state, W. B. Yeats, appointed a senator by the Free State government, waded into the debate over the ban on divorce in 1926. To Yeats the bill represented the marginalisation of Protestants and he denounced the clericalist drift in one of the finest political speeches in Irish history. ‘[We] are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.’30 It was high Protestant exceptionalism and its tone might have aggravated the likes of James Joyce, whose fiction was already the most modern in the English-speaking world. But the nation at large was preoccupied with economic survival and ill-disposed to listen to Yeats’s anguished polemic. In 1957, the Anglo-Irish writer Brian Inglis captured the illusions and uncertainties of life as experienced by the people of the big house:
For those of us who grew up in post-Treaty Ireland, the problem was of assimilation. The Free State was at first in the Commonwealth; we sang ‘God Save the King’; Irish politicians we regarded as silly or sinister; and we thought that the Irish, the real Irish, were happy-go-l
ucky peasants out of Castle Rackrent, anxious to keep on your-honouring us, but afraid to do so, the way irresponsible agitators like Dev might get them shot in the back. To realise that the agitators were our masters; that the national anthem – What a laugh! – was ‘The Soldier’s Song’; that we might need Irish to get a job, was a shock. We could get out of the country; or lapse into the social coma of the Punchestown circuit; or adapt. And adapting was not easy.31
The majority who stayed on after independence did adapt, however. The contribution made by Protestants to the Republic spanned business, politics, the arts and academia. They did exist not as representatives of some exalted caste. The teenage Protestants I met as an adolescent in Cork were very different to the marooned gentlefolk described by Brian Inglis. My friends belonged to another Protestant Ireland. They came from farms in County Cork or had parents who worked as craftsmen or businesspeople in the city. They were part of the social mainstream. I knew them through my mother who taught in a Protestant school in Cork. When she arrived back in her home city from Dublin, jobless and exhausted after the break-up of her marriage, it was the kindness of a Protestant neighbour that saved the hour. Johnny Hornibrook bore the same family name as one of those killed in the Bandon Valley massacre back in 1922. Yet he was a close friend of my maternal grandfather, Paddy Hassett, an IRA veteran. It was another reminder of the essential lesson: the past cannot be understood as a story of simple tribal allegiances. Human relationships complicate every historical narrative and get in the way of absolute conclusions. Johnny Hornibrook interceded on my mother’s behalf with the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, who put his considerable influence behind her job application. She was highly qualified and an inspirational teacher. The children of Cork Grammar School were lucky to have her. So it came about that I danced at school hops with girls who had names like Pritchard, Brookes, Newenham, Wolfe and Payne. They were the descendants of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers but as Irish in their being, outlook and belonging as any Catholic child. We lived in an Ireland in which all kinds of social barriers were collapsing. The Cork of my mother’s childhood where Catholic and Protestant children might shout ‘Catty Watty’ or ‘Proddy Woddy’ at each other – the most notorious sectarianism she can remember – was gone.
