Books
Mischief in Ireland
George Gale
Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 Charles Townshend (Oxford University Press £22.50)
Terrorism in Ireland Edited by Yonah Alexander and Alan O'Day (Croom Helm £16.95)
Not by Bullets and Bayonets: Cobbett's Writings on the Irish Question Molly Townsend (Sheed & Ward £9.50)
In 1835 William Cobbett, just before he died, addressed an Open Letter to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, which con- cluded: 'it is your bounden duty, and the duty of every man who at all meddles with public affairs, to neglect nothing within his power, now to undo all the mischiefs which England has inflicted upon this valuable part of His Majesty's dominions.' This valuable part' was Ireland, and apart from the fact that most of it no longer is part of the British dominion, what Cobbett had to say remains surely true, that prime ministers and all others who meddle with public affairs have a duty to undo the mischief which England has inflicted upon Ireland.
It is a duty which most prime ministers — indeed all, we can pretty safely say — have done their best to avoid. Only when forced, have they bothered with Ireland. And what has forced them above all has been Irish violence. Had any prime minister done his bounden duty without waiting to be forced, then the mischief might have been undone by any one of them. Not acting until forced by violence to act meant acting under duress and pressure, and meant being seen not to give in to terror but to uphold and enforce the law. Each English reaction to Irish violence augmented the mischief and has indefinitely postponed its undoing.
It is frequently observed, not least by the Irish themselves, that there is a propensity towards violence in Ireland. Charles Townshend in his brilliant and masterly ac- count of political violence in Ireland since 1848 acknowledges that 'the tradition of violence in Ireland is unmistakably import- ant' and declares 'a necessity to explain the manner in which violent acts or threats con- tinued for so long to be an acceptable sup- plement to, if not an actual substitute for, political dialogue.' The explanation which emerges from his book is threefold. The first ply may conceivably — fancifully, Townshend suggests — come from ancient Celtic tradition which, as in its Breton law, envisages 'a community without govern- ment or executive... without laws in the modern sense of the term', in which rights had to do with the family, not the in- dividual, and were determined not by rulers but by custom, which 'underlay a general repudiation of English law, a resistance which found expression in violence.' The second ply, much easier to distinguish and assert, is provided by the clear evidence of political experience in the 19th and 20th centuries, that violence worked and paid. The third ply is the way in which violence became a political activity in itself, 'self- validating, autotelic', and may always have been so: fighting as recreation, rioting as fun, the blood sacrifice as an ethical affir- mation. Patrick Pearse welcomed the arm- ing of the Orangemen; he wished all Irishmen to be armed. `We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people, but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood', he declared when the Irish Volunteers were formed.
We are in deep and dark waters here, although they are recognisably the same waters that Yeats, in 1916, was swimming in. The combination of a propensity towards violence, the knowledge that it worked, and straightforward hostility towards alien, English rule is more than enough to explain the persistence of violence. It was clearly also underpinned by the hunger of the Irish for land, land denied to them not only by absentee English landlords but also by Irish proprietors and kept from them also by English property laws quite foreign to their Celtic tradition. Mass, as opposed to conspiratorial, violence was usually found to have agrarian unrest as its base, and the ungovernability of Ireland rested upon the foreign imposi- tion of a foreign system of land tenure and a foreign religion. The Roman Catholic church, whenever pushed into it, sided with the Irish peasantry, whose deepest instincts were as conservative as its own.
Townshend allows that a subtitle of his book might be 'crimes and follies', and in- deed his catalogue of both makes for sorry reading. His work has no heroes and plenty of fools and villains. It is possible, in retrospect, to argue that a more ruthless, systematic and persistent anglicisation of Ireland might have worked; but after Cromwell there was no sufficient English will for this. Instead, there was a natural enough English preoccupation with the strategic protection of its western flank:
England needed sufficient control of Ireland to deny Ireland to France or to anY other potential enemy; but otherwise it was not bothered. Gladstone might have settled the problem had he insisted upon Home Rule. Parnell might have pulled the trick off, and kept Ireland united, had scandal not destroyed him. Carson was a wrecker whose treachery was as bad as Casement's. Thomas Ashe killed himself by hunger strike. Michael Collins was killed by has fellows. Lloyd George was not up to the demands of statesmanship required, and nor, come to that, was de Valera, the even- tual beneficiary of the 1916 Easter rising.
The IRA is the successor to the Irish Volunteers, and they in turn descend from a powerful tradition of rural secret societies accustomed to cruel and violent practices, initiation rites and the exercise of their own kind of law and discipline. The Ulster Volunteers, like the Orange Order, are within, not without, the Irish tradition. England has constantly sought to impose its law, but 'British government in Ireland has shown the uncanny knack of getting the worst of both worlds: of appearing to rest on force while seldom exerting enough force to secure real control.' This is as true of the north, of Ulster, as of the south. History has legitimised the use of illegal force; conversely the British failure t°, secure consent to its rule has denied legitimacy to British government in Ireland.
The useful collection of essays, Terrorisfil in Ireland, supports the same opinion. It does us no good to pretend that the IRA Is composed of psychopathic murderers, sub' standard people from the bogs. 'IRA ter; rorism is firmly anchored in the physical force tradition of Irish Republican nationalism which has a continuous history which goes back to the French Revolution, Martha Crenshaw writes. When Darnel O'Connell died in 1847, his heart was sent to Rome, and in a vast sermon the preacher, Father Ventura, proclaimed tbao,t O'Connell had joined what the Fren revolutionaries tore apart — 'true liberty and true religion'. The church's continued endorsement of Irish nationalism and the Irish people's continued love for then church sustained each other and continue t° do so, and between them they continue I° provide the water in which terrorist fish can move and live. Even when they are official; ly and hierarchically disowned, 'the boYs are tolerated, admired and sung abotIt'e They will not go away, not as long as tiler, is an English presence to justify their as istence and their violence.
Cobbett, in his visit to Ireland near the end of his life, saw the poverty and the°, justice associated with English rule at that time. He was right then, when he wr°te about the mischief which England had in flicted upon Ireland. A hundred and fifty years later we are still inflicting mischief, as we still continue to insist — when no longer, is there any strategic necessity at all —111).°,0 directly ruling part of that very fore* island.
Previous page
