A NATION PROUD, FREE AND DULL
Scotland is seeking political and cultural distance from England. But, says Paul Bew, Ireland's experience since independence provides a cautionary tale
understandable self-denying ordinance on the part of Scots, Who look at Ireland with emotions both of recognition and of irritation. Being aware of Irish-related sectarian tensions in parts of Scottish society, they have been anxious to avoid an Irish contamination of purely Scottish arguments. But it is surely high- handed to presume that Scotland can learn nothing from Hibernian experience.
Let us take the case of Irish indepen- dence, which has been enjoyed in the 26 Counties of what is now the Republic of Ireland since 1922. As Garret FitzGerald has recently reminded us, the Irish chose to leave the United Kingdom at precisely the Point when United Kingdom government expenditure in Ireland began to exceed substantially — revenue raised in Ireland. Liberal welfare reforms, old age pensions
and expensive measures of land purchase all combined to end any notion of Irish over-taxation — a staple theme in 19th- century nationalist rhetoric — and replace it with an acceptance on all sides that Ire- land was receiving a subvention. Unionists like Sir Edward Carson had no difficulty with this — it was the benign way the Unit- ed Kingdom should work. Nationalists felt a renewed urgency to break the link with Britain and this, in part, explains the timing of the 1916 Rising. As Dr FitzGerald has put it in his defence of his father's revolu- tionary generation: 'If the case of indepen- dence had been postponed beyond the first third of this century — and more especially if national sentiment had not been aroused by the Rising of 1916 — might not Ireland have remained in the United Kingdom with some limited form of home rule?'
There was a considerable price to pay for the course actually followed. If Ireland had remained within the United Kingdom it would have obtained agricultural protec- tion and benefited from rising public expenditure. The insurrectionaries of 1916 confidently expected that national indepen- dence combining policies of industrial pro- tection, agrarian radicalism ,.•and compulsory Irish would produce a Gaelic- speaking nation of 20 million. But there was to be no 'take-off of this sort — by the mid-1950s the consistent application of such policies had had a rather different effect. 'If the present trend continues,' the Irish Times wrote in a famous editorial of 1956, 'Ireland will die, not in the remote unpredictable future but quite soon.' Lev- els of emigration — in particular to Eng- land — exceeded those of the last decades of British rule. Two iconoclastic mod- ernisers, prime minister Sean Lemass and a senior technocratic official, T.K. Whitaker, set about unpicking the old order; a new set of 'liberalising' policies emerged — including the embrace of foreign capital and Europe — which over the next generation produced very much better results, including a cultural vitality which many Scots admire. Even so, unemployment remains higher than in North- ern Ireland. Social inequali- ties are marked, notwithstanding a generalised But what of the impact of independence on the life of the mind? Intellectuals asso- ciated with the old parliamentary party led first by C.S. Parnell, later by John Dil- lon and John Redmond and, which domi- nated Irish politics in the years from 1885 to 1918 — tended to take a dim view of the new 'parochial' culture generated by their rivals in the victorious Sinn Fein movement after 1922. As early as 1912, admirers of Parnell like James Joyce had already voted with their feet and left for continental
Europe; another Parnellite, W.E. Yeats stuck it out, but in 1923 he was flirting with the idea of a British return. A decade later, Yeats was infuriated but not surprised when the government opposed the Abbey Theatre's intention to tour the United States with Synge's Playboy of the Western World and O'Casey's Shadow of a Gunman — because they allegedly presented a sub- versive picture of the Irish peasantry and the Irish revolution respectively. Alexander Sullivan, a Redmondite supporter and Tim Healy's nephew, wrote, 'The children of a Catholic peasantry cannot raise their own culture by contemplation of one another. A mutual admiration society can never ele- vate itself.' Professor Myles Dillon, John Dillon's son, added that after 1925 the Irish language was used as an 'instrument of dis- cipline', as a 'means of transferring power — or rather authority — in the cultural institutions of the country' away from those who had been dominant within them. In the world of science, in particular, the effects were quite dramatic. In 1941, Robert Lloyd Praeger, the famous natural- ist, recalled Dublin's scientific elite in the era before independence:
They formed a brilliant group; eleven stand enrolled in the Fellows of the Royal Society of London — a scientific honour more prized than those which any university can confer. In the Dublin of today there are only two men who write FRS after their names.
In 1950, George Bernard Shaw reflected on this sterility in a bitter letter to Sean O'Casey. Ireland, once 'the first flower of the earth', is now an 'insignificant cabbage garden'. E.R. Dodds, another Irishman once sympathetic to the ideals of the revo- lution, who later became Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, employed a more dev- astating phrase: 'the grocers' republic'. Such judgments are harsh and notoriously subjective; in recent decades Irish literary and cultural life has greatly improved, but it remains the case that Ireland's expendi- ture on scientific research and its successes in this field are remarkably scant.
It also remains true that — except, per- haps, for some dark moments in the 1950s — most Irish people living in the Republic regard independence as a good thing. As defined against aloof Dublin Castle offi- cialdom, the new Irish political structures were experienced as a welcome democrati- sation. The new state also offered major cultural compensations — the most obvi- ous being an even more intense celebration of Catholicism, operating in part as a reli- gion of consolation in the face of material disappointments. De Valera's rhetoric insisted that independence inevitably involved material sacrifices.
In 1921, Northern Ireland was given its own devolved parliament. Unionists, ini- tially suspicious, soon fell in love with its comfortable, intellectually stagnant 'good old boys' culture created around the Stor- mont building. Devolution had a stupefying effect, rewarding the inward-looking. There is one striking proof. The Ulster Unionist leadership had been proud to support a Catholic candidate, D.S. Henry, as Union- ist MP for Londonderry South from 1916 to 1921; by 1960 the Ulster Unionist lead- ership found it hard to accept the notion of ordinary Catholic membership of the party.
Stormont, by and large, was content to engage in copycat legislation as it imple- mented Westminster's social reforms. The results here were relatively good. Thus in 1966, after over 40 years of independence, the population of the Republic at 2.88 mil- lion was less than it had been in 1926 (2.97 million) whilst that of Northern Ireland, still 'unfree', had grown (1.25 million in 1926 and 1.48 in 1966). When Stormont attempted anything of a distinctive or origi- nal sort, it frequently succeeded only in annoying the Catholic minority.
Northern Ireland also offered a proto- type operation of the 'West Lothian' ques- tion. When in 1886 Gladstone first publicly espoused home rule for Ireland, he consid- ered the retention of Irish MPs at West- minster an impossibility; by 1888 he had, as was his wont on Irish affairs, changed his mind. Such inconsistencies delighted English unionists, but the possibility remains that a home rule arrangement with Irish MPs returning to Westminster and even sitting in United Kingdom Cabi- nets, as John Redmond suggested — might have reconciled Ireland and England and moderated historical discords far more intense than those between Scotland and England today. In the end, by a bitter irony, it was the reluctant Ulster Unionists who were asked to work the Redmondite model after 1921. By the mid-Sixties, though, the Labour government wanted to know why Northern Ireland MPs could vote against steel nationalisation at a time when Westminster did not permit debate on internal Northern Ireland issues.
The Stormont system worked, in so far as it did — and in 1968 even Tony Benn admired its responsiveness — because the United Kingdom Treasury was willing to subsidise a small community of one and a half million and also because (until 1969-70) separatist pressures were so weak. By 1972 this double strength had turned out to be Stormont's double vulnerability and led to its prorogation by Edward Heath. Those Stormont ministers — and they exist- ed as a vocal minority in almost every Cabi- net — who argued that a local parliament by implication had to live on its own finan- cial resources and avoid antagonising the Catholic minority were vindicated. The les- son for the Scots is quite clear; devolution is only stable if separatist pressure — and also pressures for increased public expenditure — are kept at a minimum.
None of these reflections proves any- thing for the current Scottish case. A dif- ferent people at a different time might well achieve quite different results. Neverthe- less, before 1989 the record of 'actually existing' socialism in the East was believed to have implications for the socialist pro- ject in the West. Likewise, the historical record does suggest that 'actually existing' devolution within the United Kingdom or 'actually existing' separation it offered a relatively low rate of return on 'material' expectations. The best results for both Protestant North and Catholic South in Ireland were achieved in the creation of cultural self-satisfaction — how much do the Scots really want or need that?
Paul Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at the Queen's University of Belfast.
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