Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Article 2 of the Bunreacht reasserted the concept of a national territory covering the whole island of Ireland, as in the Act of 1542. This provoked howls of protest in Belfast, which claimed that Northern Ireland’s existence was denied. Yet Article 3 specifically stated that Éire would not govern anywhere beyond the twenty-six counties. Widest of the mark was the accusation that the Bunreacht of 1937 had created an Irish ‘Republic’. Acutely conscious of the painful sensitivities of the 1920s, De Valera needed no instruction on this point. Neither ‘the Republic’ in English, nor any Gaelic equivalent, found a mention. He had long since learned the virtue of constructive obfuscation.

  In this same period, De Valera was extremely active in the League of Nations. His speech in 1936 on ‘The Failure of the League’ underlined the selfishness of the Great Powers and their disregard for small nations. It helped him to the League’s presidency, and strengthened his hand in dealings with Britain.63 In 1938 Éire succeeded in terminating an Anglo-Irish trade war, and in regaining the three ‘Treaty Ports’ of Spike Island, Berehaven and Lough Swilly which the Royal Navy had occupied since 1922. It was edging its way towards full sovereignty.

  During the Second World War, Ireland immediately declared an ‘Emergency’ accompanied by strict neutrality. The Emergency was explained by the need to restrain the IRA, which had traditional pro-German sympathies and which perpetrated several anti-government bombings. (Evidence would emerge long afterwards of De Valera’s complicity with British Intelligence on this issue.) The policy of neutrality was genuine, seeking to avoid commitment either to Britain or to Germany. De Valera’s temerity caused immense anger in London, where the British government had assumed that all the dominions would automatically take Britain’s side. British attitudes were still largely configured in imperial mode, and, since Irish harbours were sorely needed for the campaign against German U-boats, a real danger arose that British forces would reoccupy them. Churchill first tried to tempt De Valera by dangling the prospect before him of a reunited Ireland. When this failed, he swallowed his fury. He knew how much trouble the ‘Irish Question’ had caused only twenty years earlier. In any case, Britain’s resources were hopelessly overstretched. But Éire did not tempt fate by cosying up to the Third Reich. Indeed, as the Nazi star waned, intelligence was shared with the British. Nonetheless, De Valera’s defiant, not to say gratuitous gesture in April 1945, when he visited the German embassy in Dublin to present his condolences on Adolf Hitler’s death, exceeded the normal demands of protocol. Despite his American roots, he made no parallel gesture on the death of President Roosevelt.64

  After the war, Ireland could have expected British retribution. Yet Clement Attlee’s Labour government was less bullish than Churchill’s Conservatives might have been, and amid a torrent of post-war crises Ireland did not figure high on Britain’s priorities. The decision in 1947 to abandon India, and the collapse of the Empire, deflated Britain’s imperial pretentions for good.

  By 1948, therefore, having after some delay repealed Emergency powers, John Costello’s interparty coalition, which had taken over from De Valera, felt confident enough to initiate the final break with Britain, and the British government felt sufficiently contrite to bow to the inevitable. On 18 April the Republic of Ireland Act was introduced to the Dáil. In five brief clauses, it renamed the state, cancelled the External Relations Act (1936), gave executive authority to the president, formally withdrew from the Commonwealth, and established the date of its completion exactly one year later.65 De Valera, the republican, though out of office, had finally triumphed after thirty-three years of struggle. Asked what his greatest mistake had been, he confessed: ‘to have opposed the Treaty’. Foster calls him an ‘old political shaman’.66 He would serve two presidential terms under the new dispensation.

  In the meantime, the rules of the British Commonwealth were amended so that republics were not automatically excluded. Ireland did not seek to benefit. Then Attlee’s government moved the Ireland Act (1949), which both recognized the Republic and confirmed Northern Ireland’s separate status. The British were at pains not to disturb the huge number of Irish people who were living and working in Britain.

  Nonetheless, the clumsy wording of the Ireland Act sowed the seeds of future conflict. One clause stated, bizarrely, that ‘Ireland shall not be regarded as a foreign country for the purpose of any law’. Another stated that the status quo in Northern Ireland could not be changed without the express consent of the Stormont parliament,67 effectively handing the Unionists a built-in veto on all reforms. This created the impression that the British government was retracting with the left hand what had just been granted by the right, and, in the eyes of many, provided the rallying point round which the near-defunct IRA could rise again. Henceforth, the clandestine IRA reverted to the fundamentalist brand of republicanism that condemned it to be treated as a pariah both in the South and the North.

  The clause also lay at the root of a long-running wrangle between Britain and Éire’s head of state. According to the Bunreacht of 1937, the head of state’s official title in English was ‘president of Éire’. But British officialdom refused to use it, and invitations were politely turned down for decades. When the Commonwealth Conference determined in 1953 to regulate its affairs at the start of a new reign, therefore, Ireland was no longer a member. Queen Elizabeth II became ‘queen of Canada’ and ‘queen of Australia’ but not ‘queen of Ireland’. Though Irish people had played a prominent part in creating the human substance of Empire and Commonwealth, their representatives did not participate in the post-imperial club. Instead, they poured their enthusiasm into the Marian Year of 1954, an ultra-Catholic occasion that jarred with prevailing attitudes in Britain.

  In 1962 an embarrassing legal anomaly was discovered. As part of a legislative spring-cleaning exercise, it was found at Westminster that the original Crown of Ireland Act (1542) was still on the statute books. It had been left untouched in 1801 when the Kingdom of Ireland had supposedly been abolished; and again in 1921–2, when the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom. Henry VIII’s Act laid down, among other things, that all the Tudor monarch’s heirs and successors were to be ‘kings of Ireland’ in perpetuity. For the legal purists, the implications were astonishing. Elizabeth II did indeed belong to the heirs and successors of Henry VIII. So by right of inheritance if not by coronation, she was still queen of Ireland. The Act was promptly repealed.68

  Also in 1962, the latest of the IRA’s long-running ‘border campaigns’ came to an end. Notwithstanding appearances, pockets of the diehard IRA had lived on, and for six years they had pursued a series of typical hit-and-run actions on the border of Northern Ireland. One incident, the inglorious raid on the Brookeburgh barracks of the RUC in County Fermanagh on New Year’s Day 1957, left two young men dead and produced one of the most poignant of modern Irish ballads. Written by Dominic Behan, brother of the playwright Brendan, ‘The Patriot Game’ pours scorn on the Irish Republic and on British forces alike:

  Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,

  For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.

  It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,

  And it makes us part of the patriot game.

  This Ireland of ours has too long been half free.

  Six counties lie under John Bull’s tyranny.

  But still De Valera is greatly to blame

  For shirking his part in the patriot game.

  And now as I lie here, my body in holes

  I think of those traitors who bargained in souls

  And I wish that my rifle had given the same

  To those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.69

  It was recorded by Liam Clancy and in the United States by Bob Dylan, who said of Clancy: ‘the best ballad singer I’ve ever heard’.

  Nonetheless, despite such setbacks, relations between the Irish and British governments had been slowly but steadily improving. Both had sought to join the Eu
ropean Economic Community, and both had been fended off by General de Gaulle. It was a welcome milestone, therefore, when the Republic of Ireland joined in 1972 with the United Kingdom and Denmark as entrants to the EEC. It was a day when Irish eyes were indeed smiling.

  Unfortunately, the same half-century in Northern Ireland was marked by rigid ossification. The Unionist-Loyalist majority in the six counties, having gained control in 1920, strained every sinew to maintain its dominance; in time their intransigence led to a violent backlash from the excluded minority. Ironically, at the very time when Britain and Ireland were entering into neighbourly partnership, the Unionist and Nationalist communities of Northern Ireland were entering into a thirty-year intercommunal bloodbath.70

  The regime which prevailed in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1972 was based on an anachronistic mixture of sectarian prejudice, pseudo-democratic manipulation and social oppression. Arguably, in a segregated society, it was also responsible for the defensive, introverted and sometimes extremist attitudes that grew up on the opposite side of the sectarian divide. The province’s parliament, which met at Stormont Castle, had a built-in Protestant-Unionist majority that was maintained by gerrymandering in marginal constituencies. The province’s long-serving prime ministers, notably Viscount Craigavon (formerly Sir James Craig), 1922–40, and Lord Brookeburgh, 1943–63, were paragons of immobility. The province’s twelve Westminster MPs, a bulwark of the Conservative and Unionist Party, allied with the British Tories in all the most reactionary causes of the day, and the Province’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, recruited almost exclusively from Protestants, routinely turned a blind eye to all misdemeanours except those committed by Catholics. The province’s oldest and most influential organization, the Orange Order, was devoted to the defence of the Protestant Ascendancy, and its own parades in the annual marching season in July used the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne as the pretext for celebrating anti-Catholic triumphalism. Thousands of marching columns, bedecked in bowler hats, pinstripe suits and umbrellas flaunted their Orange sashes and Union Jacks, deliberately passing through Catholic districts in order to cow the natives. The whole tenor of official life was conducted in the aggressive-defensive mode initiated before the First World War. ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ was a common cry. Marching, drilling, flag-waving, loyalty to ‘the Crown’, and shouts of ‘We will never surrender’ set the dominant tone. The minority community – Catholic, Irish Nationalist, Republican, and roughly 40 per cent of the population – were simply expected to knuckle under. While attitudes both in Britain and in southern Ireland evolved, attitudes in Ulster froze.

  One element of the Ulster mind-set stressed the ancient link with Scotland. Scottish Presbyterians, though numerically dominant, had long played second fiddle to the Unionist establishment, which tended to have English landowning and (Anglican) Church of Ireland connections. (The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of the Revd Ian Paisley would eventually get the upper hand over the official Unionists.) Especially when supporting Glasgow Rangers football club, the Ulstermen sang of ‘The Hands across the Water’ – the common Scottish bond:

  And it’s hands across the water

  Reaching out for you and me,

  For King, for Ulster, for Scotland

  Helping keep our people free!

  Let the cry be ‘No Surrender’

  Let no one doubt our Loyalty

  Reaching out to the Red Hand of Ulster,

  Is the hand across the sea.71

  The immediate origins of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ can be traced to the late 1960s. A republican celebration in Belfast of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising – to match the concurrent festival in Dublin72 – provoked a public declaration from the newly formed paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) that all IRA supporters would be killed. The first murders began. Two years later, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), modelled on its counterpart in the United States, started mass demonstrations calling for an end to discrimination against Catholics in housing, employment, healthcare and political representation. The demonstrators were brutally assaulted both by Protestant mobs and by the RUC. Their first rally, on 27 April 1968, was to protest against a ban on republican Easter parades.

  In August 1969 the ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in Derry (or Londonderry as it was more generally known in the north) saw a more menacing outbreak of rioting. It also saw the emergence of the Provisional IRA, the ‘Provos’, an armed paramilitary splinter group, which promised to take on the UVF using its own methods.73 The Northern Ireland prime minister of the time, Sir Terence O’Neill, milder and less confrontational than his predecessors, had once caused a scandal by visiting a Catholic school, and showed sympathy for the besieged minority. He called in the British army to protect them. The decision proved fatal. Instead of holding the ring, the army took sides, identifying loyalists as allies and ‘Provos’ as the enemy. In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment gunned down thirteen unarmed Catholic demonstrators.74 Further rioting ensued. The British government blamed the government of Northern Ireland. The parliament at Stormont was suspended. The province looked forward to three decades of military law and of ‘Direct Rule’ from London.

  Britain’s good intentions of ruling impartially soon lapsed. The Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973, which proposed power-sharing between the two communities,75 was aborted by a paralysing wave of loyalist strikes. No effective action was taken against them. Thereafter, the British authorities merely sought to contain the violence. The army, military intelligence and MI5 worked closely with the RUC. The Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a new security force, was largely Protestant in its make-up, and was infiltrated by the UVF. The Provos and other clandestine republican formations were classed as criminals and terrorists, whereas, despite their similarly brutal conduct, the UVF and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) were not. The policy of internment without trial in the purpose-built Maze Prison at Long Kesh was directed overwhelmingly at Catholic suspects, provoking hunger strikes and a further downward turn in the spiral of violence. Nothing was done to rein in loyalist marches, and well-meaning reconciliation groups, including churchmen from both sides and the ‘Peace People’ who received the Nobel Prize for their efforts, were sidelined.76

  Intercommunal atrocities proliferated, with a constant stream of murders, reprisals, bombings, shootings, house-burnings, beatings, knee-cappings, disappearances, collective punishments, as well as the harshest of words. Belfast was divided into fearful armed camps, each sheltering behind barbed wire, high walls and bricked-off streets. There were parts of town where Catholics or Protestants could not tread for fear of their lives; and in the countryside, there were districts such as South Armagh where British soldiers walked at their peril. The British media made great play at specific outrages such as the assassinations of Airey Neave MP in 197977 and of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, in the same year;78 far less attention was paid to the unceasing bloodletting of lesser human beings in Belfast. Frustrations on the nationalist side of the barricades reached boiling point. A hunger strike began in the Maze Prison when an IRA activist, Bobby Sands, elected to Westminster during his sentence, starved himself to death.79 Recruitment for the Provos soared.

  The Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ produced a new wave of republican minstrelsy. Ballads and protest songs proliferated, and recordings went round the world. ‘My Little Armalite’ celebrated the favourite weapon of the Provos, and ‘Fighting Men of Crossmaglen’ the struggle in South Armagh. ‘The Men behind the Wire’ highlighted the endless ordeal of the internees:

  Armoured cars and tanks and guns

  Came to take away our sons

  But every man will stand behind

  The Men behind the Wire.

  Not for them a judge or jury

  Or indeed a crime at all.

  Being Irish makes them guilty,

  So we’re guilty one an
d all.

  Round the world the truth will echo

  Cromwell’s men are here again.

  England’s name again is sullied

  In the eyes of honest men.80

  Fresh calls came from the Republic to end the ‘Occupation’. The language could be less than polite:

  Go home, British soldiers, go on home!

  Have you got no f—ing homes of your own?

  For eight hundred years, we’ve fought you without fears

  And we’ll fight you for eight hundred more.

  If you stay, British solders, if you stay

  You’ll never ever beat the IRA.

  So f— your Union Jack, we want our country back.

  We want to see old Ireland free once more.81

  Yet gentler tones were heard among the truculence. One of the most popular recordings of the era derived from the revival of an ancient Irish air by the ‘Blind Harper’, with modern words added:

  Just give me your hand

  Is ‘tabhair dom do lamh’.

  Just give me your hand

  And I will walk with you.

  For the world it is ours,

  All the sea and the land.

  To destroy or command,

  If you give me your hand.82

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the singing and the weeping continued, with no sign of resolution.

  In those same decades the grip of the Roman Catholic Church on life in the Republic finally began to slip. The hierarchy opposed a state scheme for free public secondary schools, presumably because it would compete with the Church’s own; censorship and the constitutional ban on divorce were only removed in 1966. Changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council, notably to the celebration of Holy Mass in Latin, helped undermine a priesthood accustomed to the idea of an eternal status quo. But reform was driven above all by demands for women’s rights. The Health (Family Planning) Act of 1979, which permitted the sale of contraceptives on prescription, was a landmark, though it also demonstrated the Church’s powers of obstruction. A Church-backed ‘Pro-Life’ campaign battled its ‘Pro-Choice’ adversaries on abortion, routinely issuing injunctions against actual and would-be offenders. These petty skirmishes concealed a volcano ready to erupt. In 1984–5 the first of an endless flow of sex scandals broke surface. The seminarians of Maynooth College publicly accused their reverend head of predatory homosexual habits; in County Offaly an unmarried fifteen-year-old schoolgirl died horribly giving birth alone on a beach; and in County Clare, a local priest was found battered to death in suspicious circumstances. Step by step, the press gained courage, official denials lost credibility and the truth seeped out. Throughout the twentieth century, and contrary to their own teaching, all levels of the Catholic clergy had been involved in all manner of sexual abuses, from secret concubinage and fathering of children, to rape, molestation, beatings and exploitation of minors. The Garda Síochána had been complicit in the hierarchy’s cover-up. The standing of the Church slumped; the Church’s link to the state weakened, and the country’s image was sullied.