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

  The Unionist government failed to take warning from the Divis Street riots in Belfast in 1964—localised and short-lived though they were—which demonstrated that savage political and sectarian animosity remained virulently alive. Meanwhile the 1947 Education Act had done much to create a new Catholic middle class which was, in the words of the Cameron Commission in 1969, ‘less ready to acquiesce in the situation of assumed (or established) inferiority and discrimination than was the case in the past’. In the past nationalists had simply demanded an end to partition. Now they put forward a more sophisticated demand that British standards be applied to eliminate unfairness. A civil rights movement was already in formation when O’Neill met Lemass, a movement influenced, with the help of vastly improved communications, by the black civil rights campaign in America, by protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, and later by direct action in the streets in Paris and Prague. At the same time more and more loyalists were becoming convinced that O’Neill was conceding too much to Catholics.

  In 1963 O’Neill had set out in an optimistic spirit to regenerate the economy of Northern Ireland. Just six years later the region was in a state of near-revolutionary crisis. The unchained sectarian dragon leaped from its cage as fear, suspicion, atavistic hatred and memory of ancient wrongs gushed to the surface, inaugurating thirty years of destruction, conflict, forced population movement, mutilation and slaughter.

  EPILOGUE

  An island on the north-western edge of the Eurasian landmass, Ireland had from the eighth millennium BC attracted successive waves of people advancing westwards to make it their home. Newcomers and their descendants had brought in new technologies and ideas and in time had mixed in with the descendants of those who had arrived before them. The related cultures, from the English Pale in the east to the most remote Gaelic lordships, were all a product of importation and blending over the centuries. Until the end of the fifteenth century AD Europeans were unaware that they could find fresh lands by venturing further west into the Atlantic. Then the age of exploration across the oceans began. The quickening of economic life in western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had much to do with the exploitation of overseas discoveries. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland made the island a colonial opportunity for the British in the reign of James i as much as Mexico and Peru became ones for the Spanish. In Ireland this opportunity was ruthlessly exploited throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.

  The tragedy was that the arrival of ‘New English’ administrators and planters from across the Irish Sea coincided with the deadly struggle for supremacy between the supporters of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. A much greater blending of these newcomers and indigenous inhabitants occurred than is even realised or admitted today. Nevertheless, particularly in Ulster but in varying degrees across the whole island, conflict arising from religious division blighted the country’s development for centuries.

  By the late twentieth century the memory of earlier convulsions and past wrongs was fading fast in the Republic. In Northern Ireland, however, the memory of previous dispossessions and bloodletting remained virulently alive. Here intercommunal suspicion and clashing political aspirations, combined with institutional unfairness, plunged the region into near chaos. A vibrant civil rights movement, inspired by direct action on the streets overseas, dissolved into sectarian conflict, bloodshed and destruction in 1969. Although troops were sent into Northern Ireland on active service that August, it was not until the spring of 1972 that London stood down Stormont to impose direct rule.

  In October 1972 Secretary of State William Whitelaw published his proposed solution: the restoration of devolution, but with an administration in which unionists and nationalists shared power; an acceptance that the Republic had a legitimate interest in the affairs of Northern Ireland; and decisive action to eliminate unfairness. With refinements, all ensuing Westminster governments and their official oppositions mutually agreed that this was the blueprint for peace. In time Dublin too came to accept that this formula was the most realistic one available. In December 1973 at Sunningdale in Berkshire Whitelaw got representatives of an elected assembly to accept power-sharing and a Council of Ireland. The Sunningdale agreement, however, was rejected by an overwhelming majority of Protestants in the general election of February 1974, and then the power-sharing executive was destroyed by the loyalist strike in May.

  Two more decades of savage bloodshed followed, on occasion spilling over into the Republic, Britain and the European mainland. The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland became the longest-running conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War. By the end of the millennium a total of 3,651 men, women and children had lost their lives in Northern Ireland as a direct result of the violence. Though shorter-lived, the much bloodier ethnic slaughter accompanying the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s grimly demonstrated what could happen in an all-out conflict in Northern Ireland.

  The region turned a corner with the paramilitary ceasefires of the autumn of 1994. Certainly hatreds remained, and the deep divisions in Northern Ireland’s society were periodically demonstrated by confrontations at Drumcree, outside Holycross School in Belfast, at Harryville in Ballymena, and by further killings and paramilitary violence. Nevertheless, the ‘peace process’ was under way. Only in 1998 was Whitelaw’s solution accepted by a majority in Northern Ireland—with much truth the SDLP deputy leader, Séamus Mallon, described the Good Friday Agreement that year as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.

  The era of terrorism and sectarian murders seemed to be over in spite of repeated false political starts. The horror of ‘9/11’ across the Atlantic did much to dissipate any lingering romantic attachment in America to the Irish militant tradition. Finally, in May 2007, a power-sharing government was in place with a realistic prospect of functioning for more than just a few months. Reflecting in March 2008 on the delight in London greeting this event ten months earlier, Max Hastings, who had reported the Troubles on the ground during the most violent years, felt ‘the irony that the fanatics, reformed or otherwise, now crow atop the Ulster dunghill, while the political corpses of decent men, Protestant and Catholic alike, lie mouldering among the weeds’.

  The restoration of peace in the north was hastened in no small way by the transformation of the south. As long as the ‘Free State’ appeared to be poverty-stricken and priest-ridden, representatives of the northern majority had rarely felt the need to reconsider their position. At the same time, northern nationalists had to face the fact that, as the south cantered forward towards previously undreamed-of prosperity, Dublin governments were quietly consigning to the dustbin the rhetoric of their predecessors on the urgent need to end partition.

  By the middle of the twentieth century it had become plain that a miserably weak economy and a falling population reduced by emigration could no longer be blamed on British colonial misrule. Then, under Seán Lemass in the 1960s, a remarkable turnaround began. Multinational firms eagerly took advantage of inducements and the staged reduction in tariffs to set up in the Republic. Employment resulting from the influx of foreign capital not only soaked up the large numbers leaving the farming sector but, in addition, virtually wiped out net emigration as a distinctive feature of Irish life.

  In 1972 86 per cent of citizens had voted in favour of joining the EEC. The Republic’s successful application for membership provided an opportunity to widen export markets and benefit from the Community’s support funds. Many of the expected benefits of membership were postponed by the quintupling of oil prices and alarming fluctuations in the world economy. The high rate of natural increase—six times the EEC average—meant that even a slight contraction in the demand for labour would result in a vigorous leap in the number of unemployed. By 1977 116,000 were out of work.

  In his first televised address as the new Taoiseach in January 1980 Charles Haughey warned that belt-tightening was essential: ‘As a community we have been living beyond our means.… We have bee
n living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amount of goods and services we are producing.’ By the calculations of many, the state was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy: the exchequer borrowing requirement was more than a fifth of GNP by the end of 1981. Emigration from the Republic averaged 25,000 a year in the 1980s. Between them, Fine Gael and Labour coalitions and Haughey’s Fianna Fáil administrations applied the strong medicine of expenditure cuts and tax increases required.

  It is now widely agreed that rigorous control of the public finances in the 1980s laid firm foundations for the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Even as the cuts were still being applied, Irish GDP rose by 36.6 per cent between 1987 and 1993 (in the European Union as a whole the increase was 13.3 per cent). Unemployment, which had reached 17 per cent in the mid-1980s, fell to 4.4 per cent by 2000. Early in the new millennium living standards were reckoned to be higher than those in the United Kingdom. The OECD observed of the Republic in 1999: ‘It is astonishing that a nation could have moved all the way from the back of the pack to a leading position within such a short period, not much more than a decade in fact.’

  The creation of a Single Market from 1987 onwards in the European Union resulted in transfers from the Structural and Cohesion Funds amounting to over £6 billion; this probably hoisted the Republic’s GNP by between 2 and 3 per cent. The Industrial Development Agency had tax breaks, generous grants and an English-speaking workforce to woo overseas enterprises, most of them American; these included Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Kodak and Pfizer. The arrival of the American company Apple in the 1980s was an indicator that a highly important accelerant was the rise of the knowledge-based economy. Any competitive disadvantage which Ireland possessed when traditional manufacturing still held sway, because of its small domestic market and an island’s cost of access for imports and exports, rapidly disappeared. When wealth in the advanced economies was increasingly being created intellectually, circumstances changed to give the country a competitive advantage.

  One American commentator observed: ‘Ireland’s well-educated workforce today offers multinational businesses perhaps Europe’s best ratio of skills to wages.’ This was not a situation which could last, but there is no doubt that without a determined drive to upgrade the state’s education provision there would have been no ‘Celtic Tiger’. The vast majority of those who had exported themselves in the 1940s and 1950s had acquired no more than elementary education at National School and, without formal skills, tended to enter the British labour market on the lowest rung. The ground was prepared by Patrick Hillery, appointed Minister for Education in 1959. Then in September 1966 his successor Donogh O’Malley made his celebrated announcement that the government would make free post-primary education available to Intermediate Certificate level for all children in ‘academic’ secondary, vocational and comprehensive schools. It is highly doubtful that this sweeping reform had been fully approved in cabinet; but in any case the scheme was given full sanction in December. The appearance of yellow school buses soon afterwards seemed to demonstrate to people in rural districts in particular that the era of population haemorrhage was drawing to a close.

  Meanwhile Northern Ireland’s economy was in a parlous condition. In 1969 output per head in the region was still around one-fifth higher than in the Republic. Then, the eruption of violence frightened foreign investors away, and, in addition, the leap in oil prices in 1973–4 effectively killed off the briefly flourishing synthetic fibre industry. Yet in 1984 the average material living standard in Northern Ireland was still more than 25 per cent above the level in the Republic. How can this be explained? The answer is that massive financial transfers from the Treasury in London prevented a fall in living standards. As the private sector continued to shrivel, citizens depended to an extraordinary degree on employment in the public service. Economists were heard to remark that Northern Ireland had become the most dependent economy in the world with the exception of Western Samoa. By 1995 living standards north and south were about equal. Then, as the Celtic Tiger began to roar, the Republic left Northern Ireland trailing further and further behind.

  Between 1995 and 2005 the Republic’s exports quadrupled, output increased by 350 per cent, and personal disposable income doubled. In 2004 the Economist concluded that Ireland’s quality of life was the best in the world. That assessment has to be treated with caution. Other European states, such as France, Italy, Germany and Belgium, had an infrastructure—particularly in roads, public transport, health provision and the extension of broadband—which was vastly superior to the one the Republic possessed. Very little was done to reduce to reduce dependence on non-renewable energy sources. Too much emphasis was being placed on the value of property in the form of bricks and mortar. In the Sunday Tribune on 22 July 2001 Diarmuid Doyle listed thirty unpleasant facts about life in the Republic, authenticated by official reports, in an article ironically titled ‘Aren’t We a Great Little Country?’ They included:

  Irish people have the worst life expectancy in the European Union.… Ireland has the lowest number of acute hospital beds per capita in the EU.… More than 60 patients a day are having to wait on trolleys for up to six hours in the casualty departments of Dublin’s acute hospitals.… Proportionately, more people live in poverty in Ireland than in any industrialised country outside the United States.… Ireland has the highest rate of child poverty in the EU.… Twenty-three per cent of the Irish population cannot perform basic literacy tasks like reading a bus timetable.… Dublin has a higher murder rate than London….

  In the Irish Times on 13 February 2008 Vincent Browne concluded that his nation was divided by wealth. In 2007 there were between forty and fifty private jets based in Ireland, 140 registered helicopters, about 25,000 leisure boats and some 33,000 millionaires in the country. The Bank of Ireland Private Banking Limited reported that in 2006 the top 2 per cent of the population held 30 per cent of the wealth. ‘Meanwhile’, Browne continued, ‘almost 7 per cent of the population are living in consistent poverty, that is, almost 300,000 living in consistent poverty, that is, living on incomes of less than the equivalent of about €11,000 for a single person and being unable to afford two pairs of strong shoes, or unable to afford a meal with meat or chicken or fish every second day.’

  Certainly the hectic race towards greater prosperity had its downside. Beautiful riverscapes had been ruined by crude dredging in an economically questionable drive to improve farm drainage. Tens of thousands of Italians cluster around the shores of Lake Como, but the water there is pristine. In Ireland, however, loughs in areas of low population, bombarded by urban sewage and agricultural effluent, suffered acute blooms of deadly green-blue algae—the visual impact but not the pollution later eased by an invasion of the alien zebra mussel—and the citizens of Galway had for a time to endure a contaminated water supply. Archaeologists in the field were forced to devote almost all their attention to rescue operations as new roads advanced on ancient sites. The abolition of domestic rates following Lynch’s electoral triumph in 1977 had left local authorities weak and badly funded. The inevitable outcome was bin charging and a plague of illegal fly-tipping. The ‘brown envelope’ culture attached to planning permission proved difficult to eradicate and contributed to a proliferation of unsightly developments and ugly homes erected in the ‘Irish hacienda’ and ‘Toblerone’ styles.

  In the twenty-six counties democracy between the world wars had survived a civil war and the threats posed by Blueshirts and IRA activists. In the final decades of the twentieth century it was imperilled again by financial corruption and the abuse of power. When Taoiseach Charles Haughey broadcast to the nation in January 1980 to declare that the community was living beyond its means, his personal overdraft with one bank had reached £1 million, and it emerged over the course of time that he had been in receipt of very large payments for favours rendered.

  Nevertheless, life in Ireland was incomparably better for the great majority than it had been when Taoiseach Seán Lemass had shaken h
ands with Prime Minister Terence O’Neill in January 1965. The corruption infecting political life did not spread to other institutions which played a key role in the development of the state, in particular the civil service, the judiciary and the banks. The country experienced a remarkable social, cultural and economic transformation over a very short period of time. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in his 1971 Lenten pastoral had declared: ‘Civil divorce is evil, and contraception is evil … a curse upon the country.’ By then, however, the Catholic Church’s moral monopoly was already being corroded by secularisation and modernisation. Three years later, following the highly publicised ‘contraception train’ from Belfast, the Dáil made a hesitant first step by making birth control available by prescription. Eventually all attempts to restrict availability were abandoned, and by 1991 the Republic was importing ten million condoms a year. Then followed a stream of revelations about the double lives of Bishop Eamon Casey and of Father Michael Cleary, and about the sexual abuse of children by Brendan Smyth, Seán Fortune and other clergy and members of religious orders in Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries and elsewhere. All this did much to diminish respect for the church, particularly as members of the hierarchy were so hesitant in making apologies. Vocations dropped by nearly a hundred per cent between 1966 and 1996, and between 1970 and 1995 the number of religious in the state declined by over a third. Eighty-five per cent attended church at least once a week in 1990, but just seven years later this percentage was down to sixty-five. Civil divorce, rejected by two-thirds in the 1986 referendum, was accepted—admittedly by a tiny majority—ten years later.