Ireland
IRELAND
the united irishmen and the 1798 rebellionthe act of union
celts and saxons
the famine
cultural impact of the famine
the catholic church and the devotional revolution
the land league
charles stuart parnell
the rise of sinn fÉin
home rule
the first world war and the 1916 rising
the aftermath
bibliography
The gravitational force of the French Revolution reoriented the tides of Irish history, energizing its stagnant ponds. Theobald Wolfe Tone's famous Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland cogently demonstrated that if French Catholics could display such obvious political maturity, so could their Irish counterparts. The leading Catholic power in Europe had, astonishingly, produced a revolution more radical than the much vaunted Glorious (and Protestant) Revolution of 1688. The French Revolution was perceived in Ireland as a Catholic effort at liberty, and it rendered obsolete the old equation between Catholicism and despotism. It was in this sense that Tone described the revolution as "the morning star of liberty" in Ireland, ushering in the possibility of a novel alliance between Presbyterian and Catholic radicals. The Volunteers, with their enthusiastic Presbyterian backing, had acrimoniously disintegrated over the old bugbear of popery, but the French Revolution released this sectarian blockage, which had immobilized Irish political radicalism.
the united irishmen and the 1798 rebellion
In 1791 the United Irishmen were founded simultaneously in Belfast and Dublin to give cohesion and momentum to this new energy. It represented a novel attempt to breach the sectarian limits of England's Glorious Revolution (1688) by extending full citizenship rights to Catholics. The movement for the first time united in a single political organization a coalition of Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican radicals. By linking parliamentary reform and what was called the Catholic question, the United Irishmen offered the possibility of fundamentally altering the Williamite sectarian state that had been established in the 1690s and which excluded Catholics from citizenship rights through penal laws. The United Irishmen therefore created a moment of political optimism that lasted throughout the early 1790s. The moment passed, however, and the decade ended in a bloody uprising that cost thirty thousand lives.
By the early 1790s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the French Revolution would unleash a titanic European struggle between democracy and aristocracy, between republicanism and monarchy. As France and Great Britain moved inexorably toward conflict, it became apparent that the ensuing struggle would be a new kind of war, one based on principle and ideology and the clash of ideas, in contrast to earlier wars of tactical and dynastic advantage. The number of combatants and casualties escalated to unprecedented levels and the theater of war expanded to embrace all of Europe. The 1790s became the pivotal decade in modern European history as Britain and France locked horns in an international battle for domination and in the first war in which modernity confronted tradition. In Ireland, the United Irishmen, and with them political modernity, were among its casualties.
The success of the republican project in Ireland ultimately depended on the Franco-British struggle, and in the 1790s the outcome of that struggle was by no mean self-evident. Once war broke out, in 1793, the United Irishmen, which had been grudgingly tolerated in peacetime, was banned as a treasonable organization. An increasingly rigid conservative regime under William Pitt (1759–1806) took over in Britain, instinctively siding with the ancien régime in France and thereby demonstrating how shallow the democratic credentials of the Glorious Revolution were.
A severe crackdown on the United Irishmen followed. The founding of the Orange Order and the Armagh expulsions (the forcible removal of Catholics) in 1795 made sense in this context. The Orange Order was established in North Armagh, discreetly backed by local gentry and generals, to stiffen the loyalist backbone and to drive an Anglican loyalist wedge between Presbyterian/United Irish Antrim and Down, on one hand, and Catholic south Ulster, on the other. The nonsectarian appeal of the United Irishmen would now be met by a resoundingly sectarian Orange stance, which emphasized Englishness not Irishness, the past not the future, and disunited rather than united Irishmen. The United Irish project was derailed by the London and Dublin governments, which deliberately encouraged sectarianism to counter its influence. Ireland was to be returned, at a cost of thirty thousand lives in the 1798 rebellion, to the sectarian molds from which the United Irishmen had tried to rescue it.
the act of union
When news of the 1798 rebellion reached London, Pitt saw the opportunity to implement his plans for uniting England and Ireland, which had been frustrated until then. The Irish parliament would become a client parliament, existing solely to do England's bidding. The 1782 settlement, "Grattan's Parliament," which had strengthened the commercial and political autonomy of Ireland, had been a disaster for Britain, prized reluctantly from them at a moment of imperial vulnerability, and represented a fundamental loss of authority and of the assumption of Irish subordination. The Act of Union of 1800, however, which abolished the exclusively Protestant Irish parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, immediately raised the issue of Catholic emancipation. Catholics had falsely assumed that their acquiescence in union would guarantee their emancipation, giving them the right to be elected as members of Parliament (MPs). The hypocrisy at the heart of the Union was that it was simultaneously sold to Catholics as a defense against the Protestants and to Protestants as a defense against the Catholics. The Act of Union was an imposed imperial solution to Irish problems. Its central failure was the inability to accompany it with Catholic emancipation, a failure determined by intense elite and popular British hostility to the idea of Catholics as fellow citizens.
The Union raised the stakes more for Britain than for Ireland. With London in the driver's seat, Ireland's problems could no longer be summarily dismissed as the result of Irish (Protestant and Papist) inability to rule themselves. Irish separatism threatened to break up Britain. Three short years after its passage, the Union itself was called into question by Robert Emmet's insurrection of 1803, which was fought on the streets of Dublin and shocked the complacent London elite, whose response was to safeguard the Union through a policy of coercive integration. By prioritizing Orangeism, Britishness, and the empire, while reinstating Protestant ascendancy (the position of Irish Protestants as a privileged minority within Ireland), the English ceded the concept of the Irish nation to the Catholics. In choosing an exclusively Protestant and coercive strategy, the British government ensured that Catholics would be turned from neutrality to hostility toward the Union. Once Catholic political activism revived, it would inevitably be pitted against the sectarian administration at home and a hostile or indifferent imperial parliament in London. In such circumstances, Catholic emancipation could only be taken, not granted, and the adversarial stance between Catholics and Protestants and between Catholics and the British state would be hardened and perpetuated.
Daniel O'Connell's political campaign for Catholic emancipation rocked British politics to its foundations. The Union had not delivered Ireland from sectarianism, poverty, or violence but rather deepened their insidious influence. Looked at in the long term, the Union also marked a decisive shift in the balance of power between Great Britain and Ireland. In 1800, when the Union passed, the ratio of population was two to one (ten million British to five million Irish). When the Union began to break up over a century later, the ratio was ten to one (forty million British to four million Irish).
celts and saxons
It had been assumed by key British decision makers that Ireland's problems emanated from an Irish (Protestant and Catholic) inability to rule themselves and that the Westminster wand would magically metamorphose the Irish (like the Scots after their 1707 Union) into pliant British citizens. But Irish society under the Union became spectacularly more violent and poorer, posing a difficult question: Was it possible that British liberties were so narrowly conceived as to be incapable of making the short crossing to its nearest neighbor? Rather than conceive of such a devastating failure, they threw the blame for Irish problems back on Irish shoulders by blaming an old bugbear, Irish popery,
and a new one, Irish Celticism. Under the Union, Ireland became the Other within, whose poverty and violence became a curiously comforting antithesis to British prosperity and virtue. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the reorganization of the older European concept of national character, with its relatively sympathetic understanding of the interrelationship of geography, history, and culture, into a narrowly "racial" concept, which claimed that each country had a unique and unchanging racial destiny, genetically imprinting its national character. Ireland was Celtic, and that was a lower racial order, which accounted for the country's inferiority to Anglo-Saxon England. Celts were naturally lazy, feckless, and violent, lacking the integrity, individualism, and self-reliance of the Saxon.
According to the theory, these racial flaws, combined with popery, determined Ireland's endemic poverty and violence. Irish problems were not socioeconomic or political in character but genetically and religiously rooted. Irish crime and poverty were endemic, irrational, and natural, and were therefore impervious to moral or political persuasion. As a result, England could deny Irish Catholics democratic freedoms, run Ireland on British and essentially Orange lines, and to establish a lethal distance between Westminster and its Irish citizens—a distance so lethal as to kill over one million during the Irish famine barely a generation later.
the famine
By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Irish diet had become ever more potato-dependent. By the 1830s, one-third of the population (three million people) relied on potatoes for over 90 percent of their calorie intake. Only in the northeastern oatmeal zone did the potato not triumph utterly. The presence of cheap food in the form of the potato, fuel in the form of turf, and housing in the form of mud walls and thatch had permitted the population to expand prodigiously between 1760 and 1815, which in retrospect was the golden age of both the potato and the Irish poor. That golden age ended in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when a sharp depression bit into the area. Agricultural prices halved, the fickle
herring deserted the west coast (where they had been abundant between 1780 and 1810), the linen industry was dislocated by the advent of factory-based spinning and weaving—in all, a succession of hammer blows, accentuated by a series of wet summers and bad harvests.
In these circumstances, a crop failure would cause disaster; repeated failures would decimate the population. An unprecedented attack of Phytopthora infestans, the virus that caused potato blight, destroyed one-third of the crop in 1845, three-quarters in 1846 and 1847, and one-third in 1848. Massive mortality and emigration ensued: one million died and two million emigrated, largely to America, paralleling the three million people who had been almost totally dependent on the potato in the pre-famine period.
The Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) was the single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. Famine had become an increasingly remote event in Europe, and that Ireland should suffer a devastating episode was made all the more unusual because it was part of the richest, most powerful, and most centralized state in the world, the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union. The Great Famine disproportionately affected the three million potato-dependent people who comprised the notoriously poverty-stricken base of Irish society. These effects were compounded by doctrinaire government policies, designed as much to appease British opinion and to promote social engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. The population of the island had been halved by 1900, a change precipitated in part by a new social regime of endemic emigration by young people, delayed marriages, and abnormally high rates of celibacy.
How did the wealthy and powerful British state allow so many of its citizens to die of starvation? Its failure to shoulder the fiscal burden of the famine was clear. From 1845 to 1850, the British treasury spent £7 million on relief, less than half a percentage point of British gross national product over two years. It also expended millions on futile imperial wars in the same period. The culture of the pre-Darwinian mid-nineteenth century was still predominantly religious. The early nineteenth century witnessed numerous efforts to reconcile new sciences such as geology, botany, and economics to Christian doctrine, and it was in this hybrid form that they gained greater popular currency. The dynamics of religious enthusiasm and scientific advance combined to produce an interpretative framework for natural and social phenomena, and the British response to the famine was profoundly informed by the prevalent Protestant religious sensibility. The phenomenon of famine—saturated in biblical resonances—was understood in essentially religious terms as a form of providentialism—God's direct, personal intervention in the natural world.
From within this providentialist perspective, the evangelicals stressed the necessity of allowing the unrestricted operation of natural moral law, encouraging a minimalist response to the famine. This evangelical economics married Malthusian pessimism and a strident eschatological emphasis, both stressing the inevitability of the famine and its function as a retributive sign. The blight would allow the pernicious potato to be replaced as a food source by a better form such as grain, and this change in itself would force the feckless Irish up the ladder of civilization. The famine would thus present a short-term loss for a long-term gain. It would teach the Irish poor the immutable laws of political economy, encouraging them to exercise moral and religious restraint; by eliminating the potato that underpinned their monstrous overpopulation, it would give them room to become civilized.
cultural impact of the famine
The Great Famine marked a watershed in many areas of Irish life, including demographics, economics, society, and culture. Yet the immediate response was sluggish. Ireland remained culturally comatose in the immediate post-famine period. The period beginning in the 1880s, however, when the post-famine generation took over, witnessed the creation of a series of radical responses to the famine legacy, including the Land League (1879), the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), the Gaelic League (1893), and the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890s.
the catholic church and the devotional revolution
Among the most significant impacts of the Great Famine was a shift in religious practice. The Devotional Revolution marks a startling transformation within Irish Catholicism, which occurred within a generation of the famine. It created an entirely revamped religious practice that hardened into a powerful and rigid cultural formation and remained essentially intact for over a century, only slowly dissolving from the 1960s onward.
In the pre-famine period, a vernacular style Catholicism had inserted deep roots among those social formations that the famine would decimate. This vernacular inheritance evolved organically out of the life of an intensely agrarian society, whose ritual rhythm was dominated by calendar custom and embedded in a numinous landscape of holy wells and pilgrimage sites. In this cultural matrix, behavior was regulated by custom and tradition: the central religious events were rites of passage and communal occasion like the pattern (annual commemorations at the local graveyard), the wake (ritualized mourning of the dead), and the station (community-based celebrations of the Mass). The trauma of the Great Famine, the associated decline of vernacular religion and popular culture, and the erosion of the Irish language created a cultural vacuum, which the Devotional Revolution filled. It institutionalized going to mass, new devotional practices such as novenas, forty-hour devotions, exposition of the host, and other ritualistic practices. The devastation wreaked by the famine strengthened the church's hand in the imposition of its modernizing moral crusade. Catholicism invaded the vacated cultural space and solved an identity crisis by offering a powerful surrogate language of symbolic identity in which Irishness and Catholicism were seen as reciprocal and congruent and religion articulated an artificial, symbolic language of identity to replace the living one being swept away by famine, emigration, and jolting sociocultural transformations. The institutional Catholic Church could also take advantage of the more homogenized post-famine social structure, which was receptive to bourgeois Roman Catholicism while the pre-famine potato people, the bruscair an bhaile (trash of the town), with their vigorous popular culture, were decimated and demoralized. The culture of poverty was supplanted by the culture of piety as the church injected a new social discipline of respectability. A growing political rapprochement with nationalists from these same bourgeois classes cemented an unusually cohesive and ideologically impregnable marriage of church and nation.
the land league
The founder of the Land League, Michael Davitt (1846–1906), was the son of evicted peasants who had emigrated from County Mayo to Lancashire as a result of the Great Famine, and he used his personal famine experiences as the spur to undermine Irish landlordism, which he blamed for his predicament. When Davitt returned to County Mayo in 1877, his goal was to organize "a war against landlordism for a root settlement of the land question." Remarkably, in a society that was still profoundly agrarian, Davitt's grassroots organization set in motion the legislative displacement of an entire landed class, predating the massive upheavals in Russia a few decades later. This achievement was predicated on his ability to fuse the agrarian and the political issues, bringing together under a common umbrella the Fenians' tradition of physical force and constitutional nationalism of the proponents of Home Rule. The Irish landed class had generally forfeited British sympathy during the famine, when they were blamed for having selfishly allowed huge pauper populations to build up on estates in order to swell their rentals. They were therefore seen as disposable, and this encouraged the British government in endorsing unusually broad state intervention in the rights of private property. This remorseless legislative euthanasia and the shift toward peasant proprietorship accelerated in the wake of the Land League and the novel and potent combination of agrarian and nationalist issues in Parnellite politics. The Gladstone (1881), Ashbourne (1885), Balfour (1891), and the generous Wyndham (1903) and Birrell (1909) Land Acts all encouraged or forced Irish landlords to divest themselves of their lands. By 1914, two-thirds of Irish tenants owned their land and a remarkably quiet social revolution had been effected.
charles stuart parnell
In 1880 the political stage was set for a new development in Anglo-Irish relations with the election of William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) as British prime minister. Gladstone wooed the rising star of Irish Home Rule politics, Charles Stuart Parnell (1846–1891), who led a block of sixty-one Home Rule MPs at Westminster. The aloof and patrician Parnell, who disdained theory for political practice, ran a disciplined party machine. The Irish nationalist Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) described him as "an embodied conviction," and his single-minded pursuit of Home Rule generated messianic fervor. In the 1880s, Parnell launched the New Departure, with its three defining elements: (1) link the land and the national questions, identifying land agitation as the engine that would pull the Home Rule train; (2) bring together under Parnell's leadership the hitherto bitterly opposed traditions of constitutional and physical-force nationalism; and (3) hammer out an alliance between the Catholic Church and nationalist politics. These innovations united Irish politics around him and allowed Parnell to position Home Rule at the heart of the British political agenda. The downside was that the issue polarized British politics. Gladstone's Liberals traded Parnell's votes in Westminster for Liberal support for Home Rule, but the rival Conservatives supported the Ulster Unionists (playing the Orange card). Home Rule eventually became a casualty of internal British political divisions.
In 1890, just when it seemed that Parnell had generated irresistible momentum behind home rule, a sensational sex scandal involving his married mistress, Kitty O'Shea, erupted and overnight
destroyed Parnell's carefully constructed alliances. The fallout poisoned Irish politics for a generation. A broken Parnell died soon after.
the rise of sinn fÉin
On 11 October 1899, the Boer War broke out. When it was revealed that the British had maintained concentration camps for Boer women and children, where at least 16,000 died in a single year, the brutality of the British imperial mission was exposed and sympathy was created for the Boers. A pro-Boer Transvaal Committee was established in 1899, which provided the nucleus of the deeply anti-imperial Sinn Féin. By contrast, the Irish Parliamentary Party, under the leadership of John Redmond (1856–1918), espoused Home Rule within the empire and supported the Boer War. A growing divide between radical separatists and conservative parliamentarians was emerging.
Cultural energies were also flooding into the political arena. The Parnell scandal poisoned young people's attitude to Home Rule infighting, and an entire generation turned instead toward cultural activities. Building on the cultural separatism of the Gaelic Athletic Association (promoting the games of hurling and Gaelic football in place of soccer and rugby) established by Michael Cusack in 1884, other organizations were created, notably the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893 (with the aim of reviving the Irish language), and the Irish Literary Theatre of 1899, which evolved into the Abbey Theatre in 1904. A positive emphasis on the Celtic nature of Ireland also emerged. By a strategic inversion, the attributes that were previously ascribed to the Celts and despised as vices—non-materialism, dreaminess, instability—were reinvented as virtues, with Celtic charm rebuking the Saxon culture, which was
recast as stolid and slavish, bringing with it a "filthy modern tide" (Yeats). Ironically, that inversion began at the metropolitan center with the English critic Matthew Arnold, but it was quickly championed by the poet William Butler Yeats and appropriated by the Irish Literary Revival. The belief grew that a Home Rule parliament in Dublin meant little if no distinctive Irish nationality existed to be guarded and developed.
The Irish Revival was not some dreamy Celtic literary movement of writers and mystics looking nostalgically backward to a romantic past. It was a progressive movement, featuring a series of self-help groups that focused on local modes of production both cultural and economic: Irish literature, Irish theater, Irish games, Irish economic development. A considerable overlap in membership existed in these cultural organizations at both executive and grassroots levels, and their activities crossed class, party, and sectarian divisions. These networks shaped the emerging nationalist political movement. They did not involve a clear-cut severance of (highminded) culture from (grubby) politics. No conflict between Protestant Anglo-Ireland, representing high culture, and a philistine Catholic/Gaelic middle class or peasant culture was involved. Cultural self-belief was the bedrock of the struggle for national independence, for economic advances, for cultural autonomy. These ostensibly different activities shared a common goal: to generate a new public sphere in Ireland, which would form the basis of a revitalized citizenship and a new civic nationalism based on republicanism.
The spirit of self-reliance was the spirit of Sinn Féin (Ourselves), the separatist party founded in 1907 to harness these energies in the political sphere. Sinn Féin saw culture as instrumental: "The language itself is not an end but a means to an end." The party was viciously anti-Redmondite, espoused abstention from the Westminster parliament, and claimed the right to use physical force if necessary to win Ireland's freedom. The split
between the constitutional and the militant versions of Irish nationalism was widening dramatically, and tensions rose.
home rule
The British Liberals under Gladstone initially aligned themselves with the Irish Parliamentary Party to secure party political advantage over the British Tories. After the 1910 election, Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power at Westminster. The Liberal Party had to turn to Redmond to shore it up, and his price was the passage of the Third Home Rule Bill, which gained royal assent in May 1914. This created a massive Ulster Unionist backlash. In July 1912, thirteen thousand people attended an anti–Home Rule rally in London, which was addressed by Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Tory-Orange Alliance, who ratcheted up the tension by proclaiming that "I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I should not be prepared to support them."
The Ulster Unionists were led by the talented and aggressive lawyer Edward Carson (1854–1935), who had achieved notoriety through his brutal prosecution of Oscar Wilde in the celebrated 1895 law case. In 1912 Carson organized the Solemn League and Covenant—a potent brew of history, religion, and imperialism that cemented the diversities of Ulster Protestantism into a common political cause—to resist Home Rule on the grounds that it would be Rome rule. Two hundred thousand people signed the covenant. Belfast was then at its zenith as a British industrial giant and saw no advantages in being yoked to the agrarian south. The idea of partition began to be floated in British political circles. The paramilitarization of Irish society started with the Ulster Volunteer Force, established by Carson in 1913 with the aim of defending Ulster militarily against Home Rule, by force if necessary. It quickly organized the Larne gunrunning, illegally importing twenty-four thousand German rifles.
Nationalists were provoked to respond in kind. Redmond established the Irish Volunteers to match Carson's. The Fenians regrouped as the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the workers movement had its Irish Citizen Army. As all these paramilitary bodies mobilized in a massive militarization north and south, many felt that a civil war was looming.
the first world war and the 1916 rising
When the First World War unexpectedly broke out in 1914, Redmond offered unconditional support for the British war effort, and with his assent the Home Rule bill was shelved until the end of war. Sinn Féin, adept at propaganda, now broke with Redmond over Irish involvement in what it portrayed as a futile imperial war and organized vigorously against recruitment and the threat of conscription. This aligned Sinn Féin for the first time with the hitherto Redmondite Catholic Church, which also opposed conscription. Between 140,000 and 200,000 Irish enlisted in the war, and a minimum of 27,000 died. The Ulster regiments were decimated at the Battle of Somme in 1916.
Physical-force nationalists saw the war as offering the possibility of achieving independence though insurrection on the ground that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." Others, notably Patrick Pearse, believed that the Irish cause needed to be redeemed through a blood sacrifice. At Easter 1916, Pearse led an insurrection, seizing the General Post Office (GPO) and proclaiming an Irish Republic. The rebels fought against overwhelming odds and Pearse surrendered to prevent bloodshed.
The Irish public, aghast at the center of Dublin being reduced to rubble, were initially hostile to the rebels. However, the British shot sixteen leaders at Kilmainham Gaol following peremptory courts-martial. Public sympathy then swung back behind the rebels as the executed men were seen as martyrs. Sinn Féin unexpectedly benefited from the 1916 Rising partly because they were credited for organizing it (the British insisted on calling it "the Sinn Féin rising"). As a result, Sinn Féin grew in authority and used 1916 as an effective propaganda and recruiting device. Support leached away from Redmond as the carnage of the unpopular world war deluged Europe in blood.
the aftermath
Eamon de Valera (1882–1975), the senior survivor of 1916, was elected president of Sinn Féin and soon eclipsed Redmond as the principal Irish leader. In 1918, the recruit-starved British decided to extend conscription to Ireland. Sinn Féin could now legitimately present itself as a peace party that alone could save the country from the horrors of war into which Redmond had so recklessly plunged Ireland. In the general election of 1918, two million voted, delivering a Sinn Féin landslide. They stood on an abstentionist platform and claimed that they had now been given an overwhelming democratic mandate to withdraw from Westminster. On 21 January 1919, they unilaterally set up their own parliament, Daéil Éireann, in the Mansion House in Dublin with de Valera as the first president. The seeds were now sown for a war of independence, a divisive treaty, a bloody civil war, and partition. As the critic Edward Said put it: "Imperial powers begin by divide and rule: they end by divide and quit."
See alsoColonies; Dublin; Great Britain; O'Connell, Daniel; O'Connor, Feargus; Peasants; Scotland.
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Kevin Whelan