Further Thoughts on the Irish Question

I’m asked why it was all right for the Queen to visit memorials to Irish rebels in Dublin, but wrong for her to have Martin McGuinness at Windsor Castle. I’m also told that her visit to Dublin would have been impossible without the 1998 surrender. These are good points to which the answers must remain matters of opinion and contention.

 

But my responses are these . The two conflicts, from 1916 until 1921 and from 1969 to 1998 (its official end, though in fact it continues) , are very different. It is true that, in bald terms, the British government was entitled to use considerable force to repress the Easter 1916 rising in Dublin, coming (as it did) at the height of the Great War, and being (as it was) aided and abetted by Imperial Germany.

 

I have often stated here that legitimate authority is entitled to use violence to defend itself against violent attack, and that is why I am so suspicious of the term ‘killing his own people’, used of a ruler who is said to have lost his right to rule by doing so. This means that any rebellion merely has to provoke the government into the use of lethal violence, and ‘ world opinion’ will then condemn that government as too barbaric to stay in power, and begin calling it a ‘regime’.

 

As the Irish government which took over after the 1921 Treaty swiftly found, it could not have long survived had it not ‘killed its own people’ in quite large numbers. And the emergency measures taken in the late 1930 and early 1940s by the De Valera state against its IRA enemies were extremely ruthless, and pretty much put paid to IRA activity in the Free State from then on (I am told there have been one or two small exceptions. I don’t doubt it). The point is that the Dublin state, by legitimate force, repressed a violent threat to its internal sovereignty.

 

Why was that state legitimate? Because, in the 1921 Treaty, the British government, formerly the sovereign power, handed over that power to the new Free State, and to the Republic which succeeded it, by incremental steps asserting greater and greater independence from the British Crown until the formal departure from the Commonwealth in 1948-9. Interestingly, on that day, King George VI sent the following message to Sean O’Kelly, then President of the Republic of Ireland : ‘I send you my sincere good wishes on this day, being well aware of the neighbourly links which hold the people of the Republic of Ireland in close association with my subjects of the United Kingdom. I hold in most grateful memory the services and sacrifices of the men and women of your country who rendered gallant assistance to our cause in the recent war and who made a notable contribution to our victories. I pray that every blessing may be with you today and in the future.’, which seems quite a pleasant, good-natured farewell to me.

 

It was followed by swift legislation cementing the absolute right of Irish men and women to live, work and vote anywhere in the UK, which was hardly an act of spite. And of course the mysterious an elusive ‘common travel area’ by which one is supposed to be able to travel between the two countries without a passport (though in my own personal experience arrivals from London at Dublin airport cannot rely on this being the case any more, though it still seems to work the other way round).  

 

Before and since, the official name of the country whose capital is Dublin ( or Baile atha Cliath for those who think that Peking is called ‘Beijing’ and Kiev ‘Kyiv’) has been a point of contention between London and Dublin, Britain always having been unwilling to use the name ‘Ireland’ because that would imply Dublin sovereignty over the whole island of Ireland, as claimed in the 1937 constitution and now sort of not claimed any more. So we have said either ‘Eire’, in Free State days, or ‘The Republic of Ireland’ since then.

 

And did I hear President Higgins, in his speech on Tuesday, referring to ‘the relationship between our two islands’ ? I did .Three times. (http://www.newstalk.ie/Full-speech-by-Michael-D-Higgins-to-UK-Houses-of-Parliament ).

 

It’s the sort of thing only detail-hunters such as I would notice, but I enjoyed the gentle teasing implied, in a speech whose spirit was rather fine. I particularly treasured the quotation I had not heard before,  from someone I am ashamed not to have heard of before, Tom Kettle : ’Free, we are free to be your friend’.

 

You’ll find similar enjoyable little tweaks of the British nose in the new series of Irish ordnance survey maps, jointly numbered in an act of wise co-operaton, which have (inevitably) an overlap which causes parts of the Republic to be included in ‘Northern’ maps, and parts of the ‘North’ to be included in ‘Southern’ maps (memo to pedants, yes, I do know that Donegal lies to the North of the Six Counties, that Ulster has nine counties etc etc etc). There are some interesting contortions in the Republic's maps, to avoid dwelling more than is strictly necessary on the existence of Northern Ireland,  but without having one to hand I can’t recall them for sure. I believe it is possible for a very patriotic citizen of the Republic to avoid using a Northern Map at all, for the South takes care to have maps covering every inch of its territory, even if they duplicate large swathes of the Northern ones. I’m not absolutely sure it works the other way. I think it’s possible that a militant Protestant ‘loyalist’ might just have to use what he’d call a Fenian map.

 

Anyway, the point about the 1916-22 conflict was that it was largely based on a very bad mistake by us, Britain - the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. It was perfectly reasonable (and mostly applauded by Dubliners) that we put down the rising itself with all necessary force. But the executions were  (as Talleyrand said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duc D’Enghien in 1804) ‘ worse than a crime. They were a mistake’.

 

Patriotic Irish men and women, from that moment, could envisage no future under the British Crown. They felt that they had been treated as enemies. They regarded many of the executed men (with reason) as innocent or victims of vindictive fury. All that followed, in my opinion, up to the atrocities of the Auxiliaries and the disgraceful massacre at Croke Park, was a product of that mistake. 

 

I think it was the descendants of those gentle, honourable Irish patriots who quietly took down their portraits of the King in May 1916, who were won over to a new friendship by the visit of his granddaughter 95 years later. And I think that, by visiting the sites she visited, she made it plain that this was what she intended. So it seemed to me, anyway.

 

 

Martin McGuinness represents a strand of militant republicanism far beyond that part of Ireland which the Queen hoped to reach in 2011 (a fact he acknowledged by playing no part in that visit, though I believe he had the chance to do so) . Those who might say that Bloody Sunday in 1972 played the same part in the modern troubles as 1916 did in the former ones do have a general point. But remember that Martin McGuinness was already committed to his cause well before Bloody Sunday, and needed no such event to harden his heart against the Crown.

 

AS to whether the visit could have taken place without the 1998 agreement, I know that I can say this five million times and some people will never hear me, but John Hume’s ‘Irish Dimension’, by which reconciliation could be achieved by moving towards reunification, was neither the only route towards justice for Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic minority, nor was it the best.

I still say that more justice, and more lasting happiness, could have been achieved through the (now utterly lost and gone) path of enlightened direct rule, which removed forever any ability of the majority to bully or discriminate against the minority, and which removed the issue of sovereignty from the argument

 

Thus, under a UK parliament and normal county councils, all discrimination in housing,  employment, law and justice, policing and education could have been removed, while the only ‘power-sharing’ would have been at local levels where it is in fact most important. Above all, this would have preserved the democratic, tolerant and non-violent political leaderships of both communities, instead of enthroning and rewarding men of violence or intolerant views. ‘Loyalists’ would have had nothing real to fear, and might have had to address the real problems of their communities. And the border would have gradually become a ghost, symbolically present for those who needed it for reassurance, actually absent for any practical purposes.  I do not myself think the future of Ireland will be as kind as this. We have bought a present ‘peace’ of sorts, in return for strife in times to come.