BOOKS

The Patriot Game

By ROBERT KEE

BETWEEN 1841 and 1920, a period which saw the population of Ireland halved by poverty and starvation and Irish reduced from the language of the majority to a curiosity, the instruments of 'British oppression' were 12,000 Irishmen, mainly Catholic peasants, of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Something pretty ridiculous here? 'Typically Irish' in fact? Just right for the brisk treatment which Mr. Bennett deals out so smartly in his book about the RIC in its last inglorious year?*

Well, no; not really; not unless you are as brilliant at that sort of thing as Mr. Bennett, and can make nothing else count. Still, play it Mr. Bennett's way for the time being; round off a good terse laugh with a cool grim shrug; there's richer to come.

For although the first half of this period saw all the bitterness one might expect from a long phase of inequitable and bigoted misgovernment, this was largely set to rights in the second half by the great Land Acts of successive Liberal and Conservative governments. By September, 1914, with qualified Home Rule promised for the end of the war, Ireland was probably more contented than at any other time in all the seven centuries of the English connection. And yet it happened at the end of this period of the RIC's history (early in 1920) that for the first time Irishmen could no longer be got to fill its ranks. Their vacant places had to be taken by a restless bunch of English ex-servicemen who, though they may conceivably have been noted for their intelligence and character, as Winston Churchill claimed, were at least partially addicted to drink, trigger-happiness and loot and were all of them glad of the ten shillings a day offered in the emergency. Because at first there were not enough of the distinctive RIC bottle-green uniforms to go round, the deficiencies in uniform were made good, like those in personnel, with khaki remnants and the RIC ended its days, nicknamed after a famous Tipperary pack of hounds, as the Black and Tans.

Typically Irish again? Typically English, more like it, though not so as you'd laugh if you love England or Ireland or both. The various exploits of the Black and Tans and their better-paid associates, the Auxiliaries, built up a hatred for England in Ireland that lasted long after Britain had withdrawn altogether from twenty-six of

the thirty-two counties, and after these them- selves had withdrawn from the Common-

wealth. This was not only an emotional tragedy—like some traumatic family quarrel leading to permanent estrangement; there *THE BLACK AND TANS. By Richard Bennett. (Hulton, 21s.)

were concrete effects, too, and not only for Ireland. Many thousands of English seamen who were drowned in the Battle of the Atlantic would be alive today if memories of the 'Tan war' had not made it impossible for de Valera to allow Britain the use of bases in Ireland.

How did it happen? Mr. Bennett pin- points some of the reasons efficiently in his streamlined introduction. First there was the stupid behaviour of the British General Maxwell after the brave but farcical and extremely unpopular rebellion of a tiny republican minority in 1916. Maxwell shot two leaders a day until he had effectively stirred long-slumbering memories of martyrs in a land which had once had little else but martyrs to live on. A ballad about a young IRA man of 1955, who was killing British troops by the time he was sixteen, runs: They told me how Connolly was shot in the chair, His wounds from the battle all bleeding and bare, His fine body broken, all twisted and lame, They soon made me part of the patriot game ...'

And Yeats, who had despised the republi- cans, wrote, 'A terrible beauty is born.' But Generals don't bother with that sort of thing.

Secondly, there was the stupid British Generals' attempt to c...nscript Irishmen in 1918. This rallied many moderate Home Rule opponents of the 1916 rebels to the republican cause (Sinn Fein, as it was now called). It also rallied still more Irishmen who were prepared to be on the side of anyone who would keep them from being conscripted. Thirdly, there was the arrest and imprisonment of Sinn Fein leaders on trumped-up charges in 1918. And, finally, there was the stupidity of British politicians.

But there Mr. Bennett is less willing to apportion blame. At the 1918 General Election for Westminster. Sinn Fein won 73 out of 105 Irish seats; twenty-four of the thirty-two counties returned nothing but republican members; of the nine counties of Ulster the Unionists had a majority only in four. The Great War had been fought ostensibly to preserve the rights of small nations to determine their own destinies; you might think that on the basis of the Irish election results the British government would have come at least some of the way to meet the wishes of the Irish people. But what happened? Disregard was followed by political repression. This in its turn was met by the only means open to a small non-pacifist community whose democratically expressed wishes are ignored by a much more powerful one: the filthiest form of war, called terrorism when it is directed against your side, or patriotic resistance when it is your ally. As de Valera wrote in 1920, 'If they may use their tanks and steel-armoured cars why should we hesitate to use the cover of stone walls and ditches? Why should the element of surprise be denied to us?' Terrorism can only be met either by counter-terrorism or martial law, and even here the British government could not make a right decision, hovering between the two and thus making the worst of a bad job.

Mr. Bennett chronicles the ensuing squalor competently as well as entertain- ingly, making copious use, apparently, of contemporary newspapers. But he sees in it all only the squalor—a running gun battle of rival murder gangs with, on the whole, the Irish one more squalid because it was necessarily the more hole-and- corner affair. To a very limited extent this is historically useful. It is high time that some of the heroic myths of the 'Irish War of Independence' were exploded. But on a more important level, just because of his preoccupation with vivid detail, Mr. Bennett's book is historically insignificant.

I don't know how he failed to find the evidence that the Irish people voted for a republic in 1918: the words 'Sinn Fein stands for the establishment of that Republic' were left in the Sinn Fein election manifesto even after the excisions of the British censor. I don't know how he makes out James Connolly as 'the first Irishman to declare for a Republic.' I don't know how he can quote the contemporary British account of the Macroom ambush as if it were gospel and at the same time give in his bibliography the memoirs of the IRA leader who refutes it.

But It is not this sort of thing which drains the history from his book. For all the squalor, and for all the improbable last-minute suddenness, what was being played out in Ireland between 1920 and 1921 was the climax, long after everyone thought the climax had come and gone, to seven centuries of love-hate relationship between England and Ireland. Only some idea of the course which this had run and of the emotions involved can help one make sense of what happened then or of the Irish Civil War that followed.

The real villains were not the IRA or the Black and Tans, both of whom fought the way circumstances compelled them to fight. The real villain—insofar as it is proper to talk about villainy at all—was the Govern- ment at Westminster. As a Unionist historian wrote after the 1921 Treaty, 'if the government had accepted the verdict of the Irish elections of 1918 and made it the excuse for adopting the line it adopted in 1921' (with the Treaty), 'it would have spared Ireland much of the bloodshed and misery and itself the ignominy of the years that followed.' Today it is fashion- able to vilify the IRA or the Black and Tans or both. The only surviving member of that government is the most honoured and respected public man of our time.