The most distressful country
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Since .I wrote on the Ulster problem last week, it has become evident that the Ulster govern- ment is, for the moment, battening down the hatches, that any overt or even covert attempt to overthrow Captain O'Neill has been post- poned and that a policy of solemn rebuke of people who assault the Royal Ulster Constabu-. lary with their heads, privates, etc, is, for the moment, deemed enough.
If the Ulster government is thinking over its situation, I have no objection to the nonsense that Captain O'Neill has been forced to utter and that Mr Craig possibly believes. They are both against breaches of the law, especially by win. I have never seen it, but I am told that there is a statue of Lord Carson outside the Parliament House at Stormont. But that for- midable Connaughtman, former member of the Reform Club and me for Trinity College, Dub- lin, only entered Ulster politics as the preacher of armed resistance to the law. And he was an eminent lawyer. So was `Galloper' Smith, a `Yeoman captain' who was prepared for service in a civil, if not in an international war. He showed great wisdom in his plans for his cursus honorum as Roger Casement pointed out. So I suggest that Captain O'Neill belt up. After all, Catholic Emancipation, the, first Gladstonian Land Act, the series of land Acts that followed, were all the results of actual or threatened violence against British authority. So is the existence of the United States.
Nor is there anything especially wicked in this wicked world, in the Protestant Establish- ment in Ulster digging itself in. Unless its members are men of a saintly political virtue, they have no more reason to weaken a political system that gives them a monopoly of jobs, power, official respectability. It will be remem- bered (say I, lying politely) that it took a recent decision of the Supreme Court in the United States (Baker v. Carr) to upset an equally watertight system in the American South. (That decision has not hampered Mr Wallace very much.) Justice Frankfurter protested that the wrongs of the majority of the voters of Ten- nessee should be remedied by political not judicial action. Chief Justice Warren, who knew a Gordian knot when he saw one, cut it. A de- mocratisation of the local franchise in Ulster and a redistribution of seats would not only diminish the formal grievances of Ulster Catho- lics, but might lead to a highly desirable crea- tion of new political parties. What Ulster needs is an effective Labour party with a large num- ber of Catholic members, putting off to the Irish Kalends the abolition of the boundary,
and of Ulster Protestant workers, remembering the radical traditions of. Belfast (where the United Irishmen were founded) and revolting against a party system that has them voting in favour of the Boynem the Diamond, Aughrim instead of more relevant topics.
But this postponement till the judgment day of next century of the undoing of many wrongs and the abandonment of many rights involves emotional sacrifices on the other side. And here I might say that my Ulster ancestry is Protes- tant as well as Catholic. One of my father's
closest friends in the old IRB was a i.e. a Plymouth Brother (the Plims, by the way, were founded not in Plymouth but in Dublin). It is possible that had Lord Randolph Churchill, a man of passionate religious feeling, not decided to `play the Orange card,' Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1886 might have passed. I think it unlikely, but it is just possible. It is more in- teresting to consider what might have happened if Hoche's flagship had not been blown off course in the Bantry Bay expedition, or if his second in command, the ci-devant Marquis de Grouchy, had not behaved with the same in- competence in 1797 as in 1815, Ireland might have become a Jacobin Republic, to the horror of both brands of bishop in Ireland, but not necessarily to the horror of many priests and ministers. But that is water over the dam.
It is also possible that the various efforts to revive Ireland across religious and political
barriers might, but for the First World War and the disgraceful exploitation of religious passions by, Tory leaders (including English Catholic Tory leaders like the Duke of Norfolk), have succeeded. There might have been a healing of
wounds kept open by fanatics and political rogues. The Gaelic League was designed by its main if not only begetter, Douglas Hyde, son of a Protestant rector, as a non-political union of men and women who did not want to see `our ancient Irish nation sink into a West Britain.'
One of the first people to join it was that most redoubtable Orange orator, the Reverend Dr Kane. When taxed by one of his brethren with this treason, he replied: 'I am an Orangeman but I never forget that I am an O'Cahan.' Dis aliter visum. But there are signs of something of the old hopes reviving. Irish history is being rewritten by scholars who will not please Mr Paisley or the traditional Irish nationalist his- torians. The pedantry of some of the Gaels is diminishing.
I was glad to note that, at a recent celebra- tion of Easter Week, there was a friendly re- ference to the tens of thousands of Irishmen who volunteered to fight in the First World War and got the Black and Tans for their pains.
Hearing one of the more pure Gaels of Baile ath Cliath sneering at attempts to preserve Georgian Dublin as mere 'un-Gaelic' intrusions, I remembered my father's indignant protest against one of these pharisees who asserted that the author of Who Fears to Speak of '98 was one of those who did. But John Kells Ingram, Fellow of Trinity College, was ready to 'fill a glass with us' in their honourable memory to his dying day. And I can rernetnlier my father telling me as a boy: 'never despise the English. They beat the Irish.' He used to tell a story that would have seemed near-treasonable to the professional Gaels. The Gought,he pointed out, were a Limerick not an Ulster family and he told the story of, I think, Chillianwallah in the Second Sikh War. In the Sikhs, the East India Company met the only really formidable native army, one trained by French officers and especi- ally formidable in its great artillery park. That was the great weapon of the Khals. Sir Hugh Gough was rather in the position of Napoleon at the Borodino and unlike the emperor, de- cided to 'dormer la Garde,' that is, he launched what was later the Munster Fusiliers on the battery. The Munstermen stormed the great battery and bayoneted the gunners at their guns. The battle was won and Sir Hugh stood in his stirrups and shouted '0 glorious Tipper- ary.' Much Irish history is of this mixed kind. How many singers of a once popular ballad about Patrick Sarsfield know that his men didn't wear `the jackets green,' but the red coats
of the army of King James II, i.e. the red coats of Cromwell's New Model? 'How many Ulster- men know that many of their ancestors were United Irishmen (many do and, good Unionists all, are proud of it)? Eppur si muove. Christo- pher Hollis has told us in this journal that thanks to the vigilance of the local bishop, there are more Maoists in University College, Cork, than in any other Irish institution of higher learning. One of the great needs of Ireland, north and south, is youthful anti-clericalism, revolt against the Order of Preachers in the Republic. revolt of that not totally dissimilar body, the Orange Order in the north. Time is running out when a Cork theologian defends contraception despite the firm lead given by John Charless MacQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, and even students of the Queen's University of Belfast think it is time for a change.
Previous page
