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A modern state in embryo
To pan-Celticists the year 1922 should have been one of triumph. The ideal of ‘autonomy for small nations’ was cited by the American president Woodrow Wilson in his 1918 programme for a new League of Nations. Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, new and revived states were springing into life across Europe, from the Baltics and Poland to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans. Boundary commissions were crawling across the landscape, seeking to determine the allegiance of villages and towns to new governments. Leaders born of war had to mutate into leaders for peace. Their domains might have been conceived in violence but they must set violence aside in the cause of unity.
Britain’s reluctant contribution to this movement was Ireland, a gift bequeathed bruised, divided and desperately poor, still notionally a Commonwealth dominion of the crown. For two years on either side of independence, pro- and antitreaty factions fought each other, both in Dublin politics and within IRA factions on the streets. When Collins was assassinated by anti-treaty rebels in August 1922, Ireland lost its ablest leader since Parnell. Desultory fighting continued, with atrocities exchanged between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. By the time of ceasefire in 1923 some 2,000 Irish had died by Irish hands.
In 1926 de Valera made a critical stabilising move. He severed himself from Sinn Féin and founded a new party, Fianna Fáil. This established a formal parliamentary opposition to the governing Fine Gael and was probably crucial in keeping Irish politics off the streets through the remaining interwar years. Whatever debate was to take place on Ireland’s future, it should be by representatives of the Irish electorate in peaceful conclave. De Valera took power from Fine Gael in 1932. First as prime minister and then as president, he was for thirty years the dominant figure in consolidating the new state. In 1937 he changed Ireland’s name to Éire. In 1948, to Britain’s fury, it left the Commonwealth and became simply the Republic of Ireland.
At the time of independence the border with the six counties of Ulster saw customs huts erected and duties imposed on all goods except for farm produce along what was a 300-mile boundary. These remained in place until the UK and Ireland both joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Partition now saw a gradual separation of Catholics from Protestants within Northern Ireland, driving it towards a de facto apartheid state. This further fuelled communal tension. One Catholic family living in a prosperous suburb of Belfast kept a car ready and permanently packed in their garage, to leave for the south ‘in the case the Prods come for us’.
Probably Britain’s most valuable donation to Dublin was virtually unseen. It was the leaving in place of the old Irish civil service, especially those administering the nation’s finances. Ireland began independence as one of the poorest countries of Europe. Its economy was mostly agricultural and its productivity low, estimated at half that of similarly sized Denmark. The island’s only substantial industry, engineering and shipbuilding in Belfast, was now on ‘foreign’ territory. The economic outlook was bleak.
The cold wind of fiscal reality was greeted with fierce conservatism from the Dublin bureaucracy. In the final years of British rule, the Irish had been benefiting from the state pensions and unemployment pay introduced by Lloyd George. Ireland on its own could not afford them and officials advised austerity. The pension was cut by a shilling a week and wages and unemployment pay were frozen. When strikes broke out in 1922, former IRA units were deployed by the new government to suppress them. Each austerity measure was introduced into the Dáil as ‘paying the price of independence’.
With 1920s inflation rampant across Europe, Collins, briefly finance minister in 1921, had been desperate that his new state should win a reputation for sound money. Before independence, he had been working from a private house, even succeeding in raising an international loan backed by gold hidden under its floorboards, some of which was lent to Russian revolutionaries in return for Tsarist jewels. These in turn were hidden in a chimney. Collins’s legacy lasted even after his death. Throughout the interwar years, the Irish state maintained a tight monetary policy with a sound international credit rating.
Where Ireland held up its head was overseas. It appointed ambassadors and was active in the League of Nations, de Valera even becoming the League’s president and a champion of neutralism. He was assiduous in maintaining a public hostility to Britain, though he kept doors open for a de facto alliance. In particular he needed co-operation over residual Irish debts to Britain and over the future of British sovereign ports.
Push came to shove with the outbreak of the Second World War, a conflict known as ‘the Emergency’ in Ireland. It evoked every kind of Irish ambivalence. Dublin’s self-described ‘pro-British neutrality’ located behind Britain’s maritime front line was to London insecure. Northern Ireland was British territory, its coasts guarding the northern approaches. Dublin was thought to be teeming with German spies, despite some 42,000 Irish soldiers having departed to serve in the British army. When Belfast docks were bombed by the Germans during the Blitz, the south sent fire engines to its aid – de Valera declaring, ‘these are our people’. Conversely, his signing of the German embassy book of condolences on Hitler’s death appalled British opinion.
The search for an Irish identity
If the Irish were Gaels, they were first and foremost Catholic Gaels. Though the church was not mentioned in the 1922 constitution, a draft had declared ‘that the true religion is that established by Our Lord Jesus Christ’ and that it was ‘the Catholic Church’. This phraseology caused de Valera much trouble, not least when it was revealed that it had been vetted, if not actually written, by the Vatican. The phraseology was not just sectarian, it negated any hope of Irish reunification. The measure was amended in favour of the church having a ‘special position’, which the pope diplomatically ‘did not approve and did not disapprove’.
At first the Catholic clergy enjoyed a virtual veto on social and educational policy. Divorce and abortion were banned, working mothers were discouraged and literary censorship introduced. The church retained control over state education ‘in Catholic schools by Catholic teachers under Catholic control’. Teachers were mostly clergy. Monasteries and convents also supplied much of social welfare, often in institutions whose behaviour and conditions were to shock later generations. But while Catholics continued to suffer discrimination in the north, Protestants rarely did in the south. They remained prominent in Dublin’s professional establishment, though numbers declined with continuing emigration. Just 7 per cent of the south was declared Protestant by 1930.
Ireland in 1945, after two decades of wrestling with independence, was still enduring severe economic hardship. It received £150 million in post-war Marshall Aid and its government benefited from assistance from London on trade alignment, loans and migration. But when London’s Labour government blessed Belfast in the north with its ‘cradle-tograve’ welfare state, Dublin could not possibly follow suit. Throughout the 1950s and 60s increasing divergence in living standards between the south and the north weakened the southern economy and led to continued migration to the north and to Britain. The old Irish curse still applied: the brightest and best left home. In 1961, four decades after independence, southern Ireland’s population hit a new low of 2.8 million, having roughly halved over fifty years during which populations across Europe had been rising. The cause of independence was not prospering.
An economic corner began to be turned with the 1958 Whitaker Report advocating a shift to state interventionism. Its aim was forcefully to move the country from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Crucial to this was assistance from the International Monetary Fund and, in 1973, Irish membership of the then European Economic Community. The EEC opened Ireland to foreign loans and freer trade with Europe. The Dublin government responded with exceptionally low levels of corporate and personal taxation. Gradually, the impact of these innovations took hold. By the mid-1970s some 350 foreign firms had set up shop in Ireland. Net emigration ceased and the population moved back above 3 million.
As part of this process of reinvention, Ireland sought to free itself of the grasp of the Catholic church, whose authority over education and social welfare still had widespread support. A 1962 poll showed 87 per cent of Irish citizens saying they would support the church in any clash with the state. The government now devoted an exceptional one-third of its EEC structural funds to state education, drawing secondary schools away from church control and expanding universities.
In the 1960s Irish student numbers doubled, and for once Irish graduates did not automatically seek to leave Ireland. The Protestant Trinity College Dublin even became fashionable for students from England. At last Ireland began to emerge from the torpor so often associated with post-colonial status. Half a century of independence at last gave it the muscles of economic manoeuvre, the strength of true autonomy.
The reborn Ireland also had little time for the nuances of Gaelic identity and gradually came to feel it did not require them. It knew and needed to know only that it was not English. None the less, in intellectual quarters independence initially yielded a mild identity crisis. As if by instinct, the 1921 settlement and its surrounding conflict had recalled symbols of an old Ireland. The Dáil was filled with alumni of the 1890s Gaelic League and its leaders were quick to demand primacy for the national language. Even if few spoke Irish, an independent Ireland should surely assert itself by speaking ‘its own native tongue’. This would wipe out Matthew Arnold’s gibe that Irish was ‘the badge of a defeated race’.
To demand that all Irish now learn what was virtually an alien tongue seemed absurdly exclusive, another burden to add to that of economic self-sufficiency. It demonstrated the gulf that had arisen between the Gaelic-speaking leaders of the revolution and the mass of Irish people. In the 1911 census 17 per cent of the population claimed to speak Irish, but this was almost entirely on the isolated west coast.
None the less, lessons in Irish were made compulsory in schools and every child was expected to pass an exam in the language, notably if they wanted government employment. Educational documents sought ‘to revive the ancient life of Ireland as a Gaelic state, Gaelic in language and Gaelic and Christian in its ideals’. The Gaeltacht – the Gaelic-speaking areas of the west – were designated a linguistic reservation and showered with money. The word was always Gaelic, never Celtic.
The project was severely hampered by a lack of Irishlanguage teachers. The Catholic church had long been English-speaking, but its eagerness to retain a dominant role in education made it supportive of the language project. Parents and pupils alike, the true victims of the policy, were almost totally opposed. Teaching was further complicated by Irish’s impenetrable spelling, invented by academic orthographers but incomprehensible to non-speakers. I came across one spelling of the Irish word for ‘bear’ as beirbhiughadh and ‘lament’ as beochaoineadh. The prime minister was pronounced ‘teesoc’ but spelled taoiseach. To conservatives, the spelling was the essence of Irish subtlety; to others, it was a further obstacle to learning an already difficult tongue. Some reform did take place – ‘bear’ became beiriú – but nothing better illustrated elitist Gaelic obscurantism than the refusal of its champions to reform its spelling. Romantics might see the Irish tongue as a token of rebellion, the one-time voice of a ‘not-English’ peasant class. But England had gone and an Irish-speaking peasantry with it. The point had been made. Irish was becoming the private language of a Dublin mandarinate.
In 1988 a Dublin Education Board report admitted defeat. It stated that, given ‘changes in Irish society … the previous mobilising rhetorics do not operate in the same way or as effectively as in the past’. The reality was that ‘the symbolic significance attached to Irish as an official emblem’ was not reflected by the ‘vernacular in everyday life’. Compulsory Irish was also a deterrent to what was now being accepted as an absolute economic necessity – immigration. Compulsion should therefore end and learning Irish should be a matter of personal choice, in effect a hobby. It was an intriguing lesson in nationalist psychology. When its objectives had been achieved, its authoritarian disciplines could relax.
By the 1926 census just 18 per cent of the population claimed, dubiously, to have some Irish – a tiny increase on the 1911 figure. A later generation of compulsorily educated meant that by the 2016 census 40 per cent of respondents claimed an ‘ability’ in Irish, but just 1.7 per cent used the language on a daily basis. Activists scored occasional victories, such as reserving new housing in Connemara for Irish speakers.
Irish as a language remained a political issue where ‘mobilising rhetorics’ still applied, most significantly in the north. Here Sinn Féin encouraged adherents to learn Irish as a mark of loyalty. Later, during the troubles, inmates of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison took Irish lessons and the prison came to be dubbed the ‘jailtacht’. Belfast’s Catholic Falls Road neighbourhood was even bizarrely designated a Gaeltacht area in 2018. Today, Irish-medium schools exist in both Belfast and Londonderry, against fierce Protestant resistance.
In the same way that Irish was coming to seem a relic of past conflicts, so too was Ireland’s national anthem, ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’, ‘The Soldier’s Song’. It was a battle cry of Irish rebellion associated with Sinn Féin’s early campaigns. It told the ‘Sons of the Gael! Men of the Pale! … See in the east a silvery glow/ Out yonder waits the Saxon foe/ So chant a soldier’s song’. The anthem had long been controversial for its outdated belligerence, a problem eased by many trying to sing it in phonetic Irish translation. Since 1995 it has often been replaced by an anodyne song ‘Ireland’s Call’, particularly in such all-Ireland games as rugby.
The Tiger roars
The innovations made to Ireland’s economic policy in the 1970s and 80s were startlingly successful. The term ‘Celtic Tiger’ was coined by Kevin Gardiner in a Morgan Stanley market report in 1994, suggesting that Ireland was mimicking the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies of Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Why it was called Celtic is a mystery. It did not refer to any country other than Ireland, while the Irish did not refer to themselves as Celts.
Dublin was now aggressively marketing itself as a hub of the new and bracing international capitalism. It offered a base for business with minimal corporate and personal taxes, attracting European headquarters for such mammoths of the digital age as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Dell. By the 1990s Ireland was registering the fastest growth rates in the EU. Unemployment fell from 18 per cent in 1990 to 4.5 per cent in 2007. Immigration turned into a rush, and Dublin property prices soared.
Largely through the residency of big American corporations, Ireland now contrived to appear on lists of the ‘world’s richest countries’ as measured in gross domestic product per head. The international cyber-economy was swirling through the ether, touching down wherever a quick-witted finance minister might give it floor space or a nameplate. Immigration was such that, soon, 10 per cent of Ireland’s residents were born outside its shores. The economy matured from tax haven to serious manufacturing base for electronics, pharmaceuticals and processed foods, even if 70 per cent of new plant was American owned. By the end of the 1990s Ireland was producing 50 per cent of Europe’s packaged digital products.
The Celtic Tiger was the subject of much controversy. To some it was mere froth, robbing its EU neighbours of tax revenue to garner a thin layer of speculative cash. To others it was laying aside the British incubus, allowing Irish self-rule to give full rein to home-grown enterprise and initiative. What was incontrovertible to those who had known Ireland in the 1970s was that it had become unrecognisable. In 2004 a muchtrumpeted accolade from The Economist proclaimed Ireland to have ‘the best quality of life in the world’. This was ahead of Norway and Switzerland, with Britain down at twentyninth. The Irish novelist Colm Tóibín remarked that ‘the Word was no longer made flesh, it was made a set of astonishing statistics’.
In 1990 the election as Irish president of the civil rights activist Mary Robinson gave the Tiger a human face, and a secular one. The Catholic church was already losing its authority as well as its political status. Attendance at Mass fell from 85 per cent of adults in 1990 to under 60 per cent within a decade. Reforms came, albeit slowly, to contraception, divorce and homosexuality. Over it all hung the emerging shame of what the church’s historian Derek Scally called its ‘catastrophic failures of sexual and institutional abuse’, which left Ireland’s welfare services sorely in need of what he suggested should be ‘a truth and reconciliation commission’.
The new state still had problems aplenty. Breakneck expansion slowed. In 2001 the governor of the Bank of Ireland, Maurice O’Connell, announced that ‘the Celtic Tiger is over’, while pockets of both urban and rural poverty remained. OECD figures showed the Gini coefficient, the gap between the richest citizens and the poorest, was well above the European average. The impact of EU grants was also mixed, blighting the Irish countryside with squalid half-built developments in the manner of Sicily. Dublin saw swathes of Georgian and Victorian buildings smashed to the ground. A Dublin planner told me that Georgian buildings were ‘just the last relics of England’ and had no place in a new Ireland. The truth was quick profit and an Irish blindness to townscape beauty.
Ireland was badly hit by the economic recession of 2008–9, when unemployment surged to 14 per cent. A financial crisis led to an IMF rescue of €85 billion and resulting austerity, with the nation’s quality-of-life index diving from fifth to forty-first place. In the event the recession proved a blip and the economy recovered after 2010, though net disposable income in 2019 remained below the OECD average. The Tiger lived, but on a reduced diet.
Whatever the statistics foretold, what was undeniable was that southern Ireland had been transformed within two decades from being a minority contributor to its island’s economy compared with the north to contributing ten times more in industrial output and fifteen times more in export value. Dublin’s population had risen from 526,000 in 1980 to approaching a million four decades later. Net emigration from the south – endemic for two centuries – all but ceased. Ireland was now able to keep its talent.
A survey prepared for InterTradeIreland in 2013 looked back over a quarter-century and compared ‘current industrial structures’ north and south of the border. It found the south showing ‘dynamism, export openness, attraction of foreign direct investment, intensity of R&D, patenting and SME innovation’. The north, on the other hand, suffered from ‘industrial restructuring and social unrest … its economy is relatively more dependent on the public sector’.
Irish independence had come at the price of half a century of hard times, but its essence, self-government, had been vindicated. No Irish person of my acquaintance hankers after reunion with England. The tiger metaphor might be glib, but it rebutted the caricature of a ‘Celtic’ people genetically workshy, immersed in nostalgia and unsuited to self-government. At an end were Trevelyan’s useless Celts compared with the ‘orderly, moral, industrious and frugal’ Anglo-Saxons, a caricature finally drowned in the mud of a Fermanagh bog.
The dreary steeples of the north
The 2015 DNA survey of the People of the British Isles identified ten Irish clusters. Seven in the south were overwhelmingly of ‘Gaelic Irish ancestry’. The northern counties were quite different. One-third of their population was like the south – broadly identified with the Catholic population – while two-thirds fell into two groups. One shared links with those living across the Irish Sea in western Scotland, echoing the ancient Dalriadan diaspora. The others were descendants of the plantation from the Scottish Lowlands and England. Elsewhere in the British Isles such genetic differences might have vanished into the warp and weft of migration, intermarriage and political accommodation. This had not happened in Northern Ireland.
Whether the 1922 partition could have been avoided is now academic. Collins had known that the north would have been an intolerable challenge to his new state. De Valera had disagreed. To him, Ulster was ‘an accident arising out of the British connection and which will disappear with it’. He even boasted of the Gaelic ancestry of many Protestant leaders. At the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966, he declared Ulster to be ‘the land of the O’Neills, the Ó’Cathains, the MacDonells, the Maguires, and the MacGuinnesses’. Surely they could be one happy family again?
In practice, it was not to be. Churchill after the First World War had remarked that, even ‘as the whole map of Europe has been changed … as the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions unaltered in the catachysm which has swept the world.’ This graphic depiction remained as true after the Second World War as after the first. England might feel it had washed its hands of Ireland. A ‘home ruled’ north could bury its own dead. But Churchill’s quarrel was still England’s legacy and England’s responsibility. It remained the unfinished business of English imperialism. The Ulster poet Seamus Heaney portrayed the north as the bastard child of an English rape, a ‘boom burst from within [that] sprouted an obstinate fifth column/ Whose stance is growing unilateral.’ That fifth column was Catholic militancy.
By the 1960s the province was one of the most divided communities in Europe. It was supposedly a prize exhibit of home rule. London showered it with privileges previously denied to Catholic Ireland as a whole. The north had its own parliament, yet with equal representation in Westminster, a status denied to the Scots and the Welsh. It received a lavish annual ‘subvention’ and a commitment from London not to interfere in its internal policies, however archaic and divisive. It taught creationism in its schools and banned abortion. It perpetuated Protestant discrimination against the Catholic minority, making no moves to bring the communities together. Religion continued to determine admission to public housing, education and public-sector jobs.
Money did not buy harmony. While southern Ireland enjoyed an economic dawn, Northern Ireland slid into greater dependency on London. The province’s core shipbuilding and linen industries went into decline. Since jobs in the former were largely confined to Protestants, this led to a build-up of resentment when any concessions were made to Catholics. Parts of Belfast and Londonderry where communities had previously been mixed now divided into separate zones, often with violent overnight evictions.
In the 1960s the IRA, now ‘provisional’ in the north, reemerged as putative defenders of the Catholic interest. Over against it was a revived Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force. In the winter of 1968/9 tension exploded in battles between Catholics and the police in Londonderry, spreading to Belfast. In 1971 a Protestant preacher and demagogue, Ian Paisley, founded a new Democratic Unionist Party. In speeches of rabble-rousing power – I heard him mesmerise a freezing crowd in the rain on a Stormont hillside – he fashioned himself as a defender ‘to the death’ of Protestant majority rule. He was to be its unofficial champion for forty years.
These warning signs should have led to instant action from London. As it was, the British government did little to defuse the growing confrontation. All it did was form a reservist Ulster Defence Regiment to aid the police, fuelling the flames. Street hostilities continued for four years into 1972, with civilian murders, kneecapping and retaliation. Gradually, the local constabulary lost control and the British army was drawn into policing the conflict, almost always a prelude to disaster. In January 1972 disaster occurred with the so-called Bloody Sunday massacre by British paratroops of fourteen unarmed Catholics. It was a sickening rerun of past Anglo-Irish wars, with IRA retaliation carried over into ‘mainland Britain’. The IRA declared quaintly that they would not commit terrorist incidents in Wales or Scotland, as they ‘stood with their Celtic brothers’.
Northern Ireland’s devolved government, in being since 1921, now collapsed and Belfast fell under ‘direct rule’ from London. This led in turn to the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, whereby the cabinet of Edward Heath agreed with Dublin a power-sharing executive in the north and a ‘consultative’ council of all Ireland. This structure failed largely through militant unionist opposition whipped up by Paisley. The moderate unionist first minister Brian Faulkner stood down and provincial politics fled to the extremes.
Northern Ireland now stumbled through a quarter-century of failed devolution, ruled sometimes from Stormont and sometimes by a London secretary of state resident in Hillsborough Castle. Hapless British ministers traipsed to Belfast like imperial apprentices with retinues in tow, all painfully inexperienced and at a loss as to what to do. Every dispute was soothed with money. Two-thirds of the Northern Irish population was working for the government or under its patronage. One home secretary, Reginald Maudling, returned from a visit and remarked to an aide, ‘Get me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ He seemed unaware it was his responsibility.
Direct rule was rolling chaos. Northern Ireland’s democratic institutions, relieved of any job to do, became a display of polarised intransigence. Money seemed to subsidise division. Millions of pounds in grants were wasted on a dodgy American carmaker named DeLorean. Housing was ever more segregated, as were schools. Back in the 1960s a third of housing estates were mixed Protestant/Catholic. By the 1980s direct rule had reduced that proportion below 10 per cent. Britain was the only country in Europe where a government practised and financed religious apartheid, even as it lectured the rest of the world on such evils.
Emblems of division
In the 1980s, at conferences of the British-Irish Association and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, I would listen to Northern Ireland being grouped with South Africa and Israel/Palestine as implacably divided societies. Across Europe, the conflicts within the Christian faith that historically split nations apart might have left symbolic relics and fine buildings, but few left raw political wounds. Europe’s Catholics and Protestants, torn asunder by the Reformation, had shown they could live together and govern together. They moved on. Only in Northern Ireland does such religious antipathy have a lasting reality. Foreign participants at these conferences were baffled that, in liberal Britain, Catholics should be unable to live alongside Protestants.
To visit the north during what came to be called ‘the troubles’ was to sense a people imprisoned by history, yet unsure of their jailers. The most public witness to this imprisonment was the erection of cynically entitled ‘peace walls’ between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. These involved the emptying of whole streets and turning parts of inner Belfast and other towns into war zones. At the height of the troubles there were thirty-seven such walls in the province, a figure that by the 1990s had risen to eighty. These remain. In the Short Strand area of Belfast, Catholics put up Palestinian flags to vie with Israeli ones put up by Protestants. Local police stations and army barracks became fortresses of steel and barbed wire.
Cities everywhere have their divided communities, their outbreaks of gang violence and signs of communal collapse. But rarely on this scale and with this depth of hatred. When I walk the two-storey walls that divides the Catholic Falls and Protestant Shankill districts of Belfast, I see them festooned with the tribal symbols of an antique conflict. Round them lies a rubble of stones, weeds and barbed wire, an obscenity now witnessed by silent coachloads of grim-faced tourists and watchful minders. Is it possible to call this a United Kingdom?