The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace
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THE CONDITION OF affairs suggested by the term ‘the Irish Troubles’ was already some three centuries old when Columbus discovered America. A degree of strife between the inhabitants of the islands of what now constitute Ireland and the United Kingdom existed long before the discovery.
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The tragedy of the last twenty-five years did come upon the two islands both gradually and suddenly – like bankruptcy.
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To the physical force school of Irish nationalism the Norman coming is generally regarded as the starting point for ‘eight hundred years of British oppression’
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Insularity therefore ensured that, unlike its neighbour, Ireland did not become influenced by Roman laws and culture or, for some centuries, by significant changes in living patterns such as the development of cities.
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But indicators such as the near-Pharaonic knowledge of mathematics and building skills needed to construct huge tombs, like that at Newgrange in Co. Meath, or the survival of skilfully worked golden artefacts suggest that Ireland had achieved high levels of learning and wealth long before the coming of Christianity.
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The power of the Vikings was broken in 1014 at the battle of Clontarf, in which armies of the provinces of Connacht and Munster, under Brian Boru, defeated those of Leinster, under King Maelmordha, for the high-kingship of Ireland. Viking contingents fought on both sides, but the destruction of Maelmordha’s forces also entailed breaking the grip of the Norse King Sitric on Dublin, which because of its fleets and anchorage facilities had effectively grown into the commercial and political capital of the country.
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By the time of the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 the effect of such controversies had been heightened and added to by reports that Irish Christianity had wandered into barbarity, far from the path aspired to by the Gregorian reformers favoured by Rome.
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Where the question of control was concerned it should be noted that Celtic usage had resulted in great abbeys frequently passing into the hands of powerful families whose appointees exercised far greater ‘clout’ than did the bishops appointed by Rome.
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Irish also possessed a distinctive and highly developed religious tradition renowned for both its scholarship and its missionary zeal, to a degree that caused Thomas Cahill to claim that the Irish ‘saved civilisation’.
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the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books.
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The travels and settlement of Irish monks and scholars on the Continent of Europe, that complex movement of expansion… is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the early Middle Ages.
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As a result of direct anti-Irish lobbying with Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, by his compatriot, the celebrated philosopher and clerical diplomat John of Salisbury, Salisbury was later able to write with accuracy: ‘In response to my petition the Pope granted and donated Ireland to the illustrious king of England, Henry….’
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the Pope issued the King with letters ordering the Irish to be subject to him.
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One of the ironies of history is that Salisbury’s initiative on behalf of Anglo-Norman imperialism was given its final successful impetus by an Irishman, Diarmuid MacMurchada, King of Leinster, who invited the help of Henry II in putting down his local enemies.
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The difference was that the Normans would not so much assist Irish kings as supplant them. Henceforth the King of England considered himself the King of Ireland. Norman methods of warfare, involving chain mail, the use of cavalry and the building of castles, devastated the lightly armed Irish foot soldiers.
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However, though Ireland lay too close to England for independence, unlike the other Celtic regions of Wales and Scotland, she lay just too far away for complete conquest.
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imbued with the same attitude towards the natives as that displayed by the whites towards the aborigines of both Australia and North America,
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The English throne continued with varying degrees of success to exert its influence in Ireland, through making invasions and settlements, the difficulties posed by geography and terrain being partially compensated for by the Irish tendency to either feud amongst themselves, or follow Diarmuid MacMurchada’s example of entering into alliance with the outsiders.
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a tradition of guerrilla warfare entered Irish folklore to emerge finally with a degree of success in the early part of the twentieth century.
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He added to the pro-Protestant policies of the Tudors, and their resultant slaughter, by ‘planting’ six of the north-eastern counties of Ulster, in the process creating the new county of Londonderry around the hinterland of the ancient settlement of Derry. The plantation involved settling both English colonists and Scottish Presbyterians and Episcopalians on confiscated Irish lands.
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The massacres by Catholics of Protestants, which occurred in the religious wars of the 1640s, were magnified for propagandist purposes to justify Cromwell’s subsequent genocide.
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‘fought for the freedom of religion…
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In fact William was fighting for the English crown against his rival James II as part of a far wider European campaign in which the Pope was opposed to Louis XIV and his allies and supported a coalition which included William of Orange. The papacy was thus on the side of the Protestant William, not the Catholic James.
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leaving the treaty’s administration in the hands of the victorious Protestant settlers who had fought alongside him. To them the term ‘Catholic’ equalled ‘treacherous’, and they interpreted the treaty not in terms of equity, but as a means of ensuring Protestant ascendancy.
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The effects of the penal laws further depressed Catholics, making it nearly impossible for them to own property, receive an education, or enter the professions without renouncing their religion. The penal laws bore severely on English Catholics also, but the difference between the Irish and the English Catholics was that in Ireland the laws were used as a means of subjugating a race as much as a religion.
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Just when people would be getting a little prosperity, every fifty years or so there’d be some new devastation and they’d be pounded back into the slime.’
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the Japanese used English colonial practice in Ireland as a headline for their own policy in Korea: extirpation of native culture, systems of land-holding, and inculcation of feelings of inferiority where things like language and traditional dress were concerned.
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London regarded the Protestant settlers in Ireland not merely as members of the favoured Church but as bulwarks of the Crown.
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Hardy, self-reliant, and, unlike their dispossessed Catholic counterparts, generally possessed of a trade, money, and a woman kinswoman, be it sister or spouse, the Ulster planters were ideally suitable for dealing with the challenges of Canada’s lonely opportunities. Accordingly the scheme was at first given official backing, but on further investigation a government committee vetoed it in fright at the prospect that it might lead to ‘depopulation of Protestant communities in Ireland’.
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the Protestant ruling class set up their volunteer force, in 1782, ostensibly to defend Ireland from any foe. The strength of the Irish Volunteers forced the British to agree to the setting-up of a parliament in Dublin the following year. It was of course subservient to the House of Commons and, like the Volunteers, dominated by the landowning Protestant Ascendancy, chiefly Anglicans or Church of Ireland.
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The Anglicans looked with disfavour on one section of Protestantism, almost with as much disfavour as they did Catholics.
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However, the concerns the Dublin parliament addressed, with varying degrees of success, were the concerns of Ireland: the destruction of the Irish woollen trade in favour of Britain’s; edicts forcing Irish merchants to sell their produce to England, not its colonies; the evils of absentee landlordism; and, significantly, defence.
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The aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters in setting up an Irish republic which would separate from England.
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The Orange Society, which swiftly became the Orange Order, held its first Twelfth of July demonstration the following year, 1796. To this day the Order is a powerful political and economic force in Northern Ireland. Also in that year, one of the United Irishmen’s principal leaders, Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant, generally regarded as the father of Irish republicanism, made contact with the Directory in Paris with a view to acquiring arms and soldiers with which to put teeth into the United Irishmen’s doctrines.
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‘the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under… creating universal discontent and hatred of the English name’.
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The rebellion itself, and in particular the capture of Wolfe Tone and a part of the French fleet which he was bringing to Ireland, gave the British a pretext for proroguing the Irish parliament.
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Gladstone later said of the bribery and intimidation which secured the Irish votes necessary for the passing of the Act mat there was ‘no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man’.
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Nevertheless, the Anglo-Irish representation did have Irish interests at heart, and it took a massive exercise in bribery and coercion to secure the 162 votes (out of a total of 303) by which the Union passed.
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Economically Dublin began to decay as the centre of power shifted to London and society went with it. Bereft of their patrons, both arts and crafts entered upon a period of prolonged decline.
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One consequence of the attempt to maximise yields from smallholdings was the reliance on the potato which created the great famine of the 1840s. I say ‘great famine’ advisedly, because in fact fertile Ireland had been afflicted by some ten other serious famines, accompanied by war, pestilence and starvation to the death, in the previous five hundred years.
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Catholics found loopholes in the penal laws to slip into positions of some prosperity in trade and commerce.
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A certain leniency in the entry regulations to the legal profession, combined with the availability of education on the Continent for those who could afford it, produced a number of successful Catholic lawyers, of whom the most eminent was Daniel O’Connell. To paraphrase Joyce, it became possible for some Irish Catholics to achieve a relatively prosperous domicile by silence and cunning.
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Rome was not unmindful of the merits of being brought more closely into the orbit of a great imperial power and at the same time gaining a powerful bulwark against the spread of godless French republicanism.
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They got value for their money, with the natural conservatism of the Church and its abhorrence of secret societies being continuously deployed against Irish revolutionary forces.
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The greatest mass movement to emerge in the country following the Union was Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation. Emancipation was finally conceded in 1829.
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The injustices of the system eventually led to a ‘tithe war’ in which the tradition of underground secret agrarian societies came alive once again in Ireland. The ‘tithe war’ culminated in the ‘Rathcormack massacre’ in Co. Cork during May 1834.
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By that time O’Connell had built up what deserves to be regarded as the first successful non-violent civil rights organisation in history, the Catholic Association.
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O’Connell’s success therefore carried with it the demerit of creating a bogeyman figure for either anti-clerical Nationalists, or Protestant propagandists: the Priest in Politics.
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The following year, 1848, the Young Irelanders’ Revolution, which was in effect nothing more than a burst of outraged idealism on the part of a group of O’Connell’s more radical young opponents and disillusioned former followers, petered out in a fracas in the widow McCormack’s cabbage garden.
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In all, the famine years consigned some one million people to the grave, a further million to emigration and probably condemned a further million to a half-life of poverty and near-starvation.
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