A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  At one stroke Gerald Balfour had destroyed the political power of the old Protestant Ascendancy in the Irish countryside. Nationalists won huge majorities in local elections, and Unionists only just managed to achieve a majority in the province of Ulster. However, it was left to Balfour’s successor, George Wyndham, to knock aside the last pillars of the Ascendancy.

  Episode 207

  ‘DE-ANGLICISING THE IRISH PEOPLE’

  Parnell’s creation, the Irish Parliamentary Party, remained shattered and demoralised in the years following the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893. John Dillon, elected leader of the anti-Parnellites in 1896, described the behaviour of two of his fellow-mps in 1898. One of them ‘appeared yesterday in a horrible state of intoxication and voted in the wrong lobby’, and another ‘has been drunk for several days and was in a most beastly condition while I was moving the adjournment yesterday.... An increasing number of them are prepared to throw themselves into oceans of whiskey and into nothing else.’

  Just two years later, however, in January 1900, the Irish Party reunited under the leadership of the Parnellite John Redmond. But as long as the Conservatives remained in office there could be no hope of a separate Irish parliament.

  A great-grandson of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, George Wyndham seemed to have inherited some of his forebear’s revolutionary zeal on taking office as Irish Chief Secretary in November 1900. Mafeking had been relieved in the South African War, the ‘Khaki Election’ had been won, and the time seemed right to demonstrate to all the benefits of the imperial connection to Ireland. This was an island, Wyndham felt certain, best governed in the manner of a crown colony. He told his mother that Ireland was the ‘Cinderella’ of the Empire, ‘poor and hurt ... but one of the first family’. In a letter to a friend he outlined his hopes for Ireland:

  If only we could turn the river of imperialism into this backwater spawned over by obscene reptiles: if one could change these anaemic children into full-blooded men! They are part of the Aryan race.... ‘Ireland a nation’. Yes & ah! no.

  Wyndham declared his preference for ‘surgery’ rather than ‘medicine’. And surgery he did indeed apply—to the Ascendancy, the landlords of Ireland. Wyndham triumphed over his critics because, for once, Nationalists and Unionists found themselves in agreement. On 2 September 1902 the landowner Captain John Shawe-Taylor wrote to the press inviting landlord and tenant representatives to seek a final solution to the Irish land question. Lord Dunraven chaired a conference which gathered together Unionists, including the Irish Unionist leader, Colonel Edward Saunderson, while John Redmond headed a delegation of Nationalists.

  All agreed to recommend that a massive scheme of land purchase be undertaken at once by the government. To Wyndham’s delight, a unanimous paean of praise for Dunraven’s report from Nationalists, Unionists and the British press forced the government’s hand. In 1903 Westminster passed Wyndham’s Land Bill. This encouraged landlords to sell entire estates, the immense sum being advanced to the tenants by the Treasury. Tenants were to pay back the government in annuities over sixty-eight and a half years; these annual payments were actually lower than the rents previously demanded.

  Wyndham’s Land Purchase Act was an immediate success, though it took further legislation in 1909 to compel all landlords to sell. Most landlords were glad to be relieved of their estates. They no longer had the stomach to stand up to impudent and unruly tenants. Happy to pocket lump sums from the Treasury, they kept only their demesnes, many later managed by organisations such as the National Trust, An Taisce, the Irish Georgian Society and the K Club. Others cleared off immediately, never to return.

  The land issue virtually dropped out of the Irish Question. In revolutionary France they guillotined the aristocrats; in eastern Europe the landlords fled before the advancing Soviet armies in 1944 and 1945; in Mao’s China the landlords faced execution in their tens of thousands; in Ireland landlords, clutching their cheques, disappeared in just a few years with hardly a murmur.

  Wyndham despised Ulster Unionists. In 1904 he observed: ‘My contact with the Ulster members is like catching an “itch” from park pests.’ In that year Wyndham alienated them completely. A plan to give Ireland devolution was being drafted in Dublin Castle. As an Irish Nationalist MP gleefully pointed out, ‘devolution’ was simply the Latin word for Home Rule. Wyndham denied having seen the devolution proposals. He was lying. He resigned in the spring of 1905, to dissolve rapidly in alcohol thereafter.

  Not only Wyndham’s career but also the Conservative policy of ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’ was in ruins. The majority of the Irish had no wish to embrace the imperial dream. They wanted to rule themselves. The resilient strength of Irish national feeling found powerful expression in a lecture given in 1892 by Dr Douglas Hyde, entitled ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising the Irish People’. He declared:

  I wish to show you that in anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.

  His words were to have a powerful impact.

  Episode 208

  TWO NATIONS?

  Modern nationalism, which could be said to have originated in revolutionary France, sped along rapidly extending railway lines to engulf every part of Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. In the course of that century some nationalities such as the Greeks, Serbs and Romanians won their independence; the Italians united themselves into one kingdom in 1870; and in the following year the Germanic peoples allowed themselves to be conquered into unity by the Prussians. Over much of the rest of the European mainland, however, ancient dynasties held sway over the sprawling empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. The Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern and Ottoman dreams of imperial glory conflicted profoundly with the mounting demand for national self-determination.

  As modern communications steadily eroded parochial sentiment, peoples discovered their national identity. Poets and other writers, historians, musicians and artists fed a multiplicity of national passions. Every nationality emphasised its individuality and distinctiveness, generally using language as the badge of identity. Some, such as the Poles, separated by three powerful empires, seemed to yearn in vain for freedom. For others, independence appeared to be just around the corner.

  The prospect of national liberation revealed a grave difficulty: nationalities were rarely neatly divided from one another. Often impelled by raw and aggressive racism, peoples in their struggle for freedom competed with each other for the same territory. The Czechs laid claim to Slovakia, on the grounds that it was part of the state originally created by King Wenceslas; but the Magyars also claimed Slovakia as an integral part of the lands of King Stephen, the first Christian King of Hungary. Few thought of asking the Slovaks what they wanted. The Magyar gentry, who ruled all of the eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, regarded the Slav peoples who formed a majority there as inferior, subject peoples. The great Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth looked on his people as a master race, describing the Croats as ‘not enough for a single meal’ and telling the Serbs that ‘the sword shall decide between us’. Kossuth neglected to mention that his mother was a Slovak.

  Ireland too formed part of a great empire. Indeed, Irishmen had done much to extend British dominions. At the top of the equivalent of the British hit parade of 1900 was ‘What do you think of the Irish now?’, an acknowledgment of the part played by Irish soldiers in defeating the Boers. But uncomfortably close comparisons can be made with developments in central Europe and the situation in Ireland. A quarter of the country’s population was Protestant, and, while still happy to be described as Irish, they looked on themselves as part of one large British family. The Ulster Journal of Archaeology ran a series of articles which informed readers that Protestants in Ulster were Anglo-Saxon in race, possessing the inherited virtues of thrift, capacity for hard work and respect for law and order. Using words such as ‘staunch’ and ‘stalwar
t’ to describe themselves, northern Protestants by the beginning of the twentieth century had largely accepted this theory.

  Certainly the majority of Ulster Protestants could claim that their ancestors were Scottish and English planters of the seventeenth century. But they tended to overlook the fact that many native Irish, particularly in eastern Ulster, had dropped the ‘O’ and ‘Mac’ from their surnames, become Protestants, and intermarried with the colonists. The Evangelical Revival had been far more successful in converting Catholics than the Catholic Church cared to admit. This was a time when Irish was fast being supplanted by English. As surnames were anglicised, translated or given pseudo-translations, the memory of ancestral connection was often lost. Many Donnellys in the Coleraine district became Donaldsons; some Laverys on the eastern shore of Lough Neagh became Armstrongs; many of the McBrin family of Co. Down changed their name to Burns, an Argyll surname; some names were easily confused and amalgamated, such as the Scottish Border surname Kerr and the Irish surname Carr; and the O’Carrolls of Dromore, Co. Down, almost all changed their name to Cardwell.

  Three-quarters of the island’s inhabitants were Catholic, and almost all saw themselves as part of a distinct nationality, deserving some form of self-government. By the beginning of the twentieth century most Catholic Irish largely accepted Protestants’ assumption of racial separateness. They were, after all, emphasising their Celtic and Gaelic origins and laying claim to inherent characteristics such as hospitality, passion and love of poetry. These assumptions overlooked the fact that a great many Irish Catholics had Norman, English and, indeed, planter blood flowing in their veins.

  The fact that the peoples of Ireland had become irretrievably blended did not prevent the emergence of the belief that the island was inhabited by two distinct nations. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were to witness a vibrant cultural revival, a fresh and passionate assertion of national identity.

  Episode 209

  CULTURAL REVIVAL

  On 25 November 1892 Dr Douglas Hyde gave a lecture to the Irish National Literary Society, entitled ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising the Irish People’. He concluded:

  I would earnestly appeal to everyone, whether Unionist or Nationalist ... to set his face against the constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions and ideas. I appeal to everyone ... to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines ... because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore—one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming people of Europe.

  Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman and brought up among Irish speakers in Co. Roscommon, believed passionately that the Irish people were turning their backs on a unique and glorious heritage and, as a result, losing their claim to a separate identity.

  The Great Famine of the 1840s, by starvation, fever and emigration, had dealt a severe blow to the Irish language—whose speakers were, of course, largely drawn from the poorest and most vulnerable classes. The 1851 census showed that the proportion of Irish-speakers had fallen to just over 23 per cent. That proportion had dropped to 14.5 per cent by 1891. The decline had been hastened by the tendency for native speakers to regard the language as a badge of poverty and social inferiority. National Schools taught through English and were not allowed to have Irish on the curriculum until 1878. Catholic clergy were given little encouragement to use Irish when training at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

  Disappointment at the rejection of two Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893 helped to galvanise a new generation to restore respect for the language and for a distinctive Irish culture. Hyde provided the inspiration. In 1889 he had written:

  If we allow one of the finest and richest languages in Europe, which, fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four millions of Irishmen, to die without a struggle, it will be an everlasting disgrace and a blighting stigma upon our nationality.

  Eoin MacNeill, a native of the Glens of Antrim who had learned Irish in Connemara, agreed. He was largely responsible for the formation of the Gaelic League in July 1893. The organisation declared that its object was ‘to keep the Irish language spoken in Ireland’. The new movement was particularly successful in the towns and where Irish had died out. After fifteen years the League had 599 branches spread throughout the island. It failed to arrest the steady decline of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas, but the status of the language had been turned around. Dignity had been restored to the Irish language—once denounced by the Morning Post as ‘kitchen kaffir’ and by the Daily Mail as a ‘barbarous tongue’.

  The Gaelic League declared itself to be non-political and non-denominational. There is no denying, however, that the great numbers of mainly young people who met in its branches for the most part had advanced nationalist views. It was through the Gaelic League that future revolutionaries, including Patrick Pearse, Eamon de Valera and Seán T. O’Kelly, acquired their separatist principles. O’Kelly, indeed, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was ordered to use his position in the League to infiltrate its central organising committee with IRB members.

  The Gaelic Athletic Association also became a nursery for future republican activists. P. W. Nally, who co-founded the movement with Michael Cusack in 1884, was not only a renowned Co. Mayo athlete but had also had served a term of prison for his political activities. Indeed, at least four of the seven men who attended the inaugural meeting were Fenians. The GAA, set up for ‘the preservation and cultivation of the national pastimes of Ireland’, was arguably the most popular and enduring product of the Irish cultural revival. Michael Cusack, an Irish-speaker from Co. Clare, gave the organisation a firm foundation based on parishes, counties and provinces, while Maurice Davin, who once held the world hammer-throwing record, drafted rules which won general acceptance. Davin also persuaded Archbishop Croke of Cashel to become the GAA’S patron. Its success can be measured by the fact that over most of the island throughout the twentieth century the leading games were hurling and Gaelic football.

  The drive to reinforce a separate identity was underscored by the GAA rules banning ‘foreign games’ (including cricket, rugby and tennis) and excluding members of the crown forces, including the Royal Irish Constabulary. Hyde and MacNeill, however, became increasingly alarmed by a growing tendency of ‘Irish-Irelanders’ to refuse to accept Protestants as true Irishmen. D. P. Moran, the acerbic editor of the Leader, bluntly stated that the Irish nation was Catholic—if Protestants refused to accept the majority culture, then the only solution was partition, ‘leaving the Orangemen and their friends in the north-east corner’.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century the establishment of a Dublin parliament seemed but a dream. By 1912 Home Rule appeared to be just round the corner.

  Episode 210

  HOME RULE PROMISED

  In the momentous general election of 1906 the Liberals won their greatest victory. But their triumph dashed the Irish Parliamentary Party’s expectation of Home Rule. The Conservative and Unionist vote crashed so dramatically that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new Prime Minister, had no need of Irish Nationalist support. Indeed, one leading Liberal, Herbert Asquith, made it clear in his election address that ‘it will be no part of the policy of the new Liberal government to introduce a Home Rule Bill in a new parliament’.

  Younger nationalists had become impatient with the party’s reliance on the Liberals. Some transferred their allegiance to a new party founded in 1905: Sinn Féin. The name Sinn Féin—which means ‘Ourselves’—had been suggested by Máire Butler, Sir Edward Carson’s cousin. The party, founded by Arthur Griffith, a Dublin journalist, called on Irish MPs to abstain from Westminster, to set up an assembly in Dublin and use passive resistance to undermine British rule in Ireland. Looking anxiously over his shoulder, the Nationalist MP John Dillon wrote to his leader, John Redmond, in 1908: ‘An effort must be made to put some life into the movement. At present it is very much asleep, and Sinn Féiners, Gae
lic League, etc., etc., are making great play.’

  Little did Dillon know that at that moment, to his party’s advantage, the United Kingdom was entering the most dangerous constitutional crisis since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For three years the House of Lords had been rejecting or emasculating bills sent up from the Commons. Campbell-Bannerman had died in 1908; Asquith had become Prime Minister; and David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ready for a robust struggle with the peers of the realm. As expected, the ‘People’s Budget’, introduced in 1909 to wage, in Lloyd George’s words, ‘implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’, was haughtily rejected by the Lords. Asquith had no choice but to take the issue to the people.

  In the general election of January 1910 the Liberals were so reduced in numbers that they now needed the support of the Irish Party to stay in power. The Lords, with no choice but to accept the budget, then faced a Parliament Bill designed to deny peers the right to reject bills outright. When the Lords threw out this bill, once again the issue could only be solved by an election. The outcome of the election of December 1910 was almost identical to that at the beginning of the year. The Liberal government still needed the Nationalists to stay in office.