Edward Norman on Irish nationalism
The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism Robert Kee (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.95).
A massive history of Irish nationalism by a television journalist is not a promising prospect, and those given to professional pursuit of historical scholarship must be forgiven some initial reservations. This book, by Robert Kee, begins unfortunately with one of those silly opening paragraphs describing the weather in London on the day in 1921 on which the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed — the sort of stuff which one learns to expect from American PhD students. But thereafter the book at once becomes quite extraordinarily good: balanced, lucid, accurate and sustaining the interest of the reader through eight hundred pages. Histories of Ireland tend to be written either by Irishmen soaked in nationalist polemicism or by English liberals incapable of disbelieving them. Mr Kee is aware of it. The British, he writes, "accept almost any interpretation of their former behaviour," and he adds, "they have thus come to accept almost without reserve that what took place in Ireland between the years 1916 and 1922 was a bitter struggle by a small subject nation battling for its independence against British imperialist might in a conflict the British morally deserved to lose."
The book traces the growth of two quite distinct elements of Irish political consciousness from the end of the eighteenth century to 1923. One of these was the development of reform politics; the other the fragmented movements seeking the complete separation of Ireland from England. It becomes quite clear, from Mr Kee's analysis, that most Irish people during this period favoured the former. He notices that the salient disruptions of Ireland's recent past did not result from British oppression ' but from differences between Irishmen themselves. Nor did England "hold Ireland by force," as classical Irish nationalism has continued to maintain. "Both of these notions," he writes, "are a large enough distortion of events to amount to historical untruth." Government policies, on the other hand, were often insufficiently ambitious, he argues, and in the end it was an accumulating series of unintended insensitivities by the imperial parliament which created the climate of opinion in which extremist elements were able to propagate their fantasies and, ultimately, to seize power. Mr Kee's analysis, in fact, is so near to the truth as to make it unlikely that he will elicit much sympathy in Ireland itself. (But the Irish are impressed by long books, so he may get by for that reason.) What will the present custodians of Irish nationalism make of his conclusion that the Act of Union in 1800 was not "the result of treacherous English villainy "? Or that " the accusations of genocide made by some Irish writers " about government policy during the Great Famine are "unjust and absurd "? Or that the Fenian Manchester ' Martyrs ' of 1867 "were undoubtedly guilty of murder "? Or even that the appeal of Sinn Fein "can be explained by the opportunity it extended to a snobbishly afflicted middle and lowermiddle class independently to assert a new social self-respect "? But if he is allowed these truths, what will Irishmen make of his description of the undemocratic basis of the Republican movement between 1916 and the Treaty? Catholic Ireland had before it the teachings of the Church, which sanctions rebellion "only when the government is a tyranny, ruling by force against the will of the governed." Yet as Mr Kee agrees, " by no stretch of the imagination could it be maintained that such a state of affairs prevailed in Ireland in 1916." Nor did it prevail in the next few years.
Any real test of public opinion between 1919 and 1921 would have revealed a huge majority against an armed rebellion. The book traces the appalling sequence of events, especially concentrating on 1919, the year in which the shootings of policeman by Rupublican gunmen began.
The expected ' backlash ' from the police did not occur — it took another year of terrorism before the police and troops began to use considerable force in return. When that happened the minority of Republicans had, succeeded in their object. A revolution is most effective, as Trotsky said, when it is made to look like self-defence. Mr Kee quotes Beaslai's justification of the Republicans' use of violence — that it was "forced solely by the violence of the British government." This was the standard argument. Mr Kee shows that it was untrue: " if by 'violence' in this context is meant physical brutality and bloodshed the statement cannot possibly be maintained." His final conclusion on the Republican minority is unequivocal: There can be no doubt that their actions were immoral by the standards of the Church at the time, and were often by any standards vile. There can be no doubt that, like all revolutionaries, they had cynically exploited democratic processes to give the Irish people what they judged good for them rather than what the Irish people wanted.
Mr Kee is less satisfactory when writing of personality. The leaders of opinion and the revolutionary Republicans are only sketchily described, and the reader is left wondering why they believed the things they did. In a book of such length there should have been room for elaboration here. Why were the large majority of discontented Irishmen prepared to abide by constitutional politics, like the Home Rulers, and a few to advocate violence? They were confronted by the same evidence of what they were agreed in regarding as misgovernment, and they inherited the same sense of grievance. It is always useful to know exactly what facets of personality impelled some to extremes. He correctly sees Pearse enveloped in a religious fantasy in which he supposed the approaching blood sacrifice as the Redemption of Ireland with himself as the Redeemer. Two days before his execution in 1916 Pearse wrote to his mother to explain that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, he would be "blessed by unborn generations." "You too," he added, "will be blessed because you are my mother." More characterisation of this sort would have been helpful to the reader. Perhaps Mr Kee was anxious to avoid offending Irishmen too much by kindly refraining from describing their heroes. The Fenian leader, James Stephens, had shown no such tact when he toured the country in 1856 seeking to elicit support for his own version of Republican;,:rn: "Did Christ ever die for such a people?"
"The logical and reasonable solution to the Irish problem was Home Rule for all Ireland with special safeguards, and even a degree of internal autonomy for parts of North-East Ulster," Mr Kee finally concludes. So be it. But he does fail to notice that it was probably Gladstone who, paradoxically, ensured that that was not the outcome. He shows, indeed, the conventional respect for Gladstone and "the labyrinthine recesses of his remarkable mind." Yet in 1885 and early 1886 there was a general feeling at Westminster that the problem of Irish autonomy could be solved by a scheme of regional councils. The matter had been discussed for some years and had run into a lot of difficulties inside the Liberal Party. But at the time of the 1885 general election there was every chance that all parties could be induced to support such a plan. Even Parnell might well have accepted a suitable package. The Conservatives were not unsympathetic. To the general astonishment Gladstone opted for a Home Rule parliament instead, and the English parties, which increasingly had been moving to a bi-partisan view of Ireland, were divided.
The great merits of Mr Kee's book ought to ensure it a wide readership. His common-sense cuts through to the truth where the niggling meanness of vision of professional historians often leads them to an opaque suspension of judgment. This is structurally a conventional book but it discloses unusual insights to those prepared to read it closely. Mr Kee has established himself as a very considerable analyst of Ireland's troubles.
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