The Irish Difference E-Book

Fergal Tobin

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

An Irish TImes Book of the Year 'The beauty of this book is in the telling: The Irish Difference lays out its themes and chronologies with impeccable clarity, and is full of fascinating detail... Exemplary.' Irish Independent For hundreds of years, the islands and their constituent tribes that make up the British Isles have lived next door to each other in a manner that, over time, suggested some movement towards political union. It was an uneven, stop-start business and it worked better in some places than in others. Still, England, Wales and Scotland have hung together through thick and thin, despite internal divisions of language, religion, law, culture and disposition that might have broken up a less resilient polity. And, for a long time, it seemed that something similar might have been said about the smaller island to the west: Ireland. Ireland was always a more awkward fit in the London-centric mini-imperium but no one imagined that it might detach itself altogether, until the moment came for rupture, quite suddenly and dramatically, in the fall-out from World War I. So, what was it - is it - about Ireland that is so different? Different enough to sever historical ties of centuries with such sudden violence and unapologetic efficiency. Wherein lies the Irish difference, a difference sufficient to have caused a rupture of that nature? In a wide-ranging and witty narrative, historian Fergal Tobin looks into Ireland's past, taking in everything from religion and politics to sports and literature, and traces the roots of her journey towards independence.

Leseprobe

THE IRISH DIFFERENCE

Fergal Tobin is a freelance writer and historian. Now retired, his career was in publishing and he was president of the Federation of European Publishers in Brussels from 2010 to 2012. Under the pen name Richard Killeen he is the author of several acclaimed works of Irish history, including Ireland in Brick and Stone: The Island’s History in Its Buildings, The Historic Atlas of Dublin and The Concise History of Modern Ireland.

‘Witty, thought-provoking, wide-ranging and highly readable.’ The Irish Times

‘You may not agree with everything Fergal Tobin says… But the book is so entertaining, so well-written, and so thought-provoking that you are certainly likely to enjoy it.’ David McCullagh, RTÉ Online

‘The beauty of this book is in the telling: The Irish Difference lays out its themes and chronologies with impeccable clarity, and is full of fascinating detail... Exemplary.’ Irish Independent

‘The Irish Difference marshals its arguments with a light touch and many witty asides, making for a consistently lively read.’ Sunday Business Post

‘A witty and entertaining gallop over Irish history.’ The Irish Catholic

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Fergal Tobin, 2022

The moral right of Fergal Tobin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-263-1

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-262-4

Printed in Great Britain

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This book is for Leo, Alex, DJ and Hugo: welcome, lads

CONTENTS

Map

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

1. Faith and Fatherland

2. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

3. Half In and Half Out

4. Jackie Goes to Ballybay

5. Gallant Allies in Europe?

6. The Empty Centre

INTERLUDE

7. Looking Down on Inistioge

PART TWO: A JOURNEY TO THE EXIT

8. Encumbered Estates

9. Disestablishment

10. Of Man’s First Disobedience

11. The Association

12. The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish People

13. The Death of Cromwell

14. Cyclops

15. We Don’t Want to Fight…

Conclusion: Still the Stone in Your Shoe

References

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index

PREFACE

LIKE A LOT of books, this started out as something else. I was fascinated by the considerable number of travellers who visited Ireland, for one reason or another, in the sixty years before the catastrophic Great Famine of 1845–52. I thought that, in aggregate, their reports might yield a portrait of an utterly vanished world: pre-Famine, pre-industrial, pre-urban for the most part, and teeming with people. English travellers’ accounts of Irish backwardness and poverty could too easily be dismissed as the cultural condescension of metropolitans for provincials, especially when the English had centuries of previous form in that regard. It was harder to play that card when French and German visitors were furnishing corroborating evidence. But they were also spotting things that the English tended to miss or minimize, such as the extraordinary bond of loyalty that subsisted between Catholic clergy and laity.

It might have made an interesting study of a pre-modern world, now otherwise lost to us and beyond imaginative recovery. But then, it suddenly ran into a new course for reasons that I can’t quite recapture. But there is no doubt that Brexit was a proximate cause of change. Once the UK voted by plebiscite to leave the European Union, it was clear that no matter how the thing played out – and it played out nearly as badly as the worst pessimist might have supposed – it meant nothing but trouble for Ireland.

Yet the English – for it was they who carried the vote – never gave a moment’s thought to Ireland. That was true from the top down. People in Ireland were perplexed by this. We simply had to be a crucial factor in the inevitably protracted negotiations with Brussels, but it was abundantly clear that the English knew nothing about our strategic position, or how it must inevitably affect the EU’s negotiating strategy; indeed, they seemed to know nothing much about us at all.

This was amplified, if not actually confirmed, by a number of people I know in the tourism and hospitality business who reported on the astonishing ignorance of Ireland exhibited by some English visitors. My initial reaction was to say, well, what does even the average well-educated Paddy, let alone hoi polloi, know about Wales or Scotland? Could even a humanities gradu ate, with a good first-class degree, talk about either country’s history or society coherently and extempore for more than five minutes without drying up? On the same basis, why should the English be expected to know all about us?

The relationship between England and Ireland is, of course, hugely asymmetrical and skewed towards the bigger island. English power, both hard and soft, has been a constant presence in Irish life for centuries. We have been less visible to them. But that seemed inadequate to explain how the British political and diplomatic elite could be so utterly indifferent to the Irish dimension when a child could see that that very dimension was bound to be in play. This is especially so in the context of the hard Brexit that eventuated, with the UK departing the single market and the customs union – something that even Nigel Farage considered too extreme a possibility at one stage.

The fact that the dyspeptic, ill-educated and alienated provincials who constituted a significant, perhaps decisive, element of the pro-Brexit vote in England were ignorant of Ireland was neither here nor there. Knowing nothing about Ireland is no crime, any more than Irish ignorance of Wales and Scotland is. It’s just that, in the English case, this ignorance is bought at a price. Ireland has a well-developed habit of making a nuisance of itself in British affairs. Your average Brit need not be alert to this. But the fabled British elite, with centuries of political stability, a parliamentary system admired and copied all over the world (including in Ireland) and a tradition of skilled and sedulous diplomacy behind it, should have known better.

So this book is first of all addressed to a British, or more precisely an English, readership. It aims to explain the degree of Irish difference, such as carried us out of the United Kingdom a century ago and latterly made us such a stone in the Brexit shoe. But it also places more emphasis on British imperatives and motives than many Irish writers do. We may be different, but we are still cousins. Irish people need to reflect on the historical and strategic imperatives that drive British indifference towards Ireland: they are not just being bad-minded. So a little mutual knowledge and understanding will cut both ways. That is the primary purpose of this book.

When I write Ireland, I generally mean geographically nationalist Ireland. That is roughly coterminous with the territory of the modern Republic of Ireland. I am well aware – who could not be? – of the large nationalist minority, perhaps soon to be a demographic majority, in Northern Ireland. There is already a monumental library of history and analysis available on Northern Ireland: I don’t think that I have anything useful to add to it. My primary focus therefore is on that large chunk of the island, roughly 83 per cent of its total land area, that has left the United Kingdom altogether. I started by asking myself: why are we the only part of the British Isles that has not made some sort of viable accommodation with the other parts? I realize that other accommodations, the Scottish one in particular, are strained and may not hold. But historically, the Scottish union, even if it is now ailing, has been remarkably successful and durable. Why are we so different? It is an inversion of the normal default setting for Irish thought, for we take the separate nature of independent Ireland as the natural order of things. What if it’s not, as appeared to be the case for centuries? By inverting the question, the route to an answer or two may take in some scenic byways.

THERE ARE A few technical terms, or more properly shorthands, scattered through the text. It is as well to explain them now.

Old English The descendants of the Normans who first arrived here in 1169. Their ‘tribal’ difference from the Gaelic population, who had been in undisturbed possession of the land for more than a millennium except for the relatively minor and recent Viking presence, was always acknowledged. But a degree of accommodation between the two tribes softened these boundaries in medieval times. What was far more important was that both Gaels and Hiberno-Normans remained Catholic at the time of the Reformation. So the Old English, as they came to be called, were persons of Hiberno-Norman descent whose emotional ties to the distant English monarch were stronger than those of the Gaelic lords, but not so strong as to detach them from their confessional allegiance to the Pope. It was their Catholicism, not their tribal ethnicity, that was crucial.

New English A very different kind of beast. These were Elizabethan and Stuart adventurers and conquistadores bent on a civilizing mission and possessed of a ruthless hunger for land. They were the backbone of the Dublin Castle colonial administration from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Their land holdings were principally in Leinster and Munster. They were ignorant of Ulster until after the defeat of Hugh O’Neill’s great rebellion in 1603 and may be thought of separately from the Anglo-Scottish planters who settled Ulster after the lands of the defeated Gaelic chieftains – O’Neill’s allies – had been declared forfeit to the crown. The New English were solidly, indeed stridently, Protestant: they encompassed most tendencies in early Anglicanism, although inclining towards Puritanism. Unlike the Ulster settlers, they had no significant number of Presbyterians.

Creoles This is the term I sometimes use for a later group of settlers. The Old English date from the twelfth century, the New English from the sixteenth. This group, a further influx of English, came to occupy most of the lands east of the Shannon and outside Ulster from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. After his final and complete conquest of Ireland in the early 1650s, Cromwell confiscated almost all existing Catholic land titles in these areas, settling those Catholic landowners not reduced to trade or emigration on the poorer land in Connacht, although ensuring that coastal areas were settled on loyal Protestants, lest hostile navies come calling. In short, these Cromwellian settlers who replaced the dispossessed Catholics were the basis of the fabled Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In 1640, Catholics owned most of the land of Ireland outside Ulster; by 1703, that number had fallen to 14 per cent and would fall further in the course of the following century. The term creole requires some explanation. Anglo-Irish has always been a maddening term, satisfying very few. Were they English or Irish, or what, some kind of hybrid?

Rather than looking for a European analogue, I have reached for a South American one. The ascendancy behaved more like the light-skinned Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores who established themselves all over that continent, while remaining quite distinct and aloof from the natives. In South America, differentiation was by pigmentation; in Ireland, by religious confession. In both cases, possession of land was crucial. The difference was that in the various South American countries, the white creoles established colonial nation states that endured – usually at the material expense of indigenous people. The Irish creoles attempted a version of this in the eighteenth century – generally known as Grattan’s Parliament. It did not endure. Instead, the Irish difference found a new voice, in the social group that bore a likeness to the South American indigenes: Catholics.

I realize that not everyone will agree with this term creole – some may even find it offensive – but I think that it gives an explanatory glimpse of how the ascendancy actually functioned: dominant but never integrated into the wider fabric of the country they now owned on leasehold from London; often admired but seldom loved. In this, they were quite distinct from the medieval Old English. It all fell apart for them at the end of the nineteenth century. The lighter-skinned descendants of the Spaniards and Portuguese in South America have had a longer innings and are still the dominant minority on that continent.

THIS BOOK IS a work of explanation and interpretation. I have therefore kept source references to a minimum. It is the product of many years as a publisher, not least a publisher of Irish history. It cheerfully plunders the work of many whom I have published and others whom I have not, but whose work it has been a pleasure to read. It has germinated in libraries, pubs and restaurants and in the course of conversations with people – academics, journalists and some deeply learned friends – who know more about the subject than I ever will. I am extremely grateful to them all.

It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Atlantic Books. Will Atkinson commissioned this book and gave me every encouragement, especially valuable at times when I doubted myself. How times change: for many years I used to do what Will is doing now and often wondered if it did any good. It does. James Nightingale is a scrupulous editor whose many structural suggestions for change – moving material to more appropriate locations, for example, or dumping it altogether – has made this a better book. Tamsin Shelton copy-edited the text and saved me from much embarrassment, as well as ensuring consistency of presentation throughout the text. Copy-editors are the indispensable, and often unsung, heroes and heroines of publishing.

INTRODUCTION

LET’S TALK ABOUT the British Isles. It’s a term that Irish nationalists profess to dislike, as representing an imperial sense of propriety over the little archipelago at the edge of North-west Europe. But it has the merit of brevity, a quality that has not always commended itself to Irish nationalist gasbags.

For half a millennium, these islands and their constituent tribes have subsisted next door to each other in a manner that, over time, suggested some movement towards political union. It was an uneven, stop-start business and it worked better in some places than in others. Wales has been subordinated to the English crown since 1282, having been occupied and overrun by Normans and Flemings in the previous century, without ever losing a distinct sense of its cultural difference. Scotland retained its ancient regnal separation until the union of crowns in 1603, followed by a full political union in 1707, caused largely by the bankruptcy of the kingdom of Scots.

Still, the bigger island has hung together through thick and thin, despite internal divisions of language, religion, law, culture and disposition that might have broken up a less resilient polity. And, for a long time, it seemed that something similar might have been said about the smaller island to the west. Ireland was always a more awkward fit in the London-centric mini-imperium but no one imagined – other than dreamers and loonies – that it might detach itself altogether from the mother ship, until the moment came for rupture. Then, quite suddenly, in the fall-out from World War I and the Easter Rising, the dreamers and loonies were proved to be the very essence of common sense and practical reasoning; and the solid, temporizing men of affairs were left with their arses out of the window.

So, what was it – is it – about Paddy that makes him that different? Different enough, I mean, to sever historical ties of centuries with such sudden violence and unapologetic efficiency. Why can’t we just bloody well fit in? Wherein lies the Irish difference, a difference sufficient to have caused a rupture of that nature?

The answer is in no sense obvious because just as the precarious unity of Great Britain occludes regional and national differences that might yet break it up, Ireland’s political separation conceals a cultural accretion to the bigger island – or, more particularly, to the dominant English element of it – that is adhesive. I mean, fish and chips, double-decker buses and Manchester United: that sort of thing.

I was in a pub one night a few years ago in rural Co. Wexford – a county that was the epicentre of the 1798 rebellion against English rule, an event still celebrated with pride in popular recollection – and every eye in the place was fixed on the various screens, all of which were showing the same thing. It was a game in the English Premier League between Liverpool and Newcastle United. There were lads in there wearing replica jerseys and referring to their teams as ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if this were Wexford playing Kilkenny in the hurling. Liverpool you could half-understand, given the long historical connection across the Irish Sea (why don’t the English moan about that proprietorial claim?), but Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for God’s sake, as distant as the moons of Saturn.

In trying to measure the difference, you cannot forget or ignore the common culture that holds the British Isles in a kind of unity. Anyone travelling here, even from the near abroad of North-west continental Europe – say from the Benelux, Germany and France – let alone from the Latin south, would immediately register that common culture. It is palpable in its similarities, which in turn could be readily contrasted with what they had left behind at home. Suburban housing patterns alone would mark the difference as the plane descends anywhere in the Isles. British and Irish suburbs look quite like each other, less like continental suburbs. This little archipelago looks different – and its difference is distributed across both islands, which are more like each other than anywhere else.

So there is a common culture. Grand. It’s there in language and literature and football and food and suburban housing patterns and double-decker buses and replica football shirts and a regrettable tendency to honk up surplus beer on the pavement after closing time. Except that it doesn’t find any higher institutional or political expression.

Most of Ireland is a sovereign state, politically independent of the United Kingdom and an enthusiastic member of the European Union, a body from which an ageing, irritable element of the Englishry has managed to extract the entire UK.1 For the best part of a millennium, the whole island of Ireland had some sort of a relationship with England; at the start of the twentieth century the feeling was that that relationship was going to be re-set to give Ireland some devolved autonomy in domestic matters – home rule, it was called – but no one imagined that the Great Rupture was on the cards. Yet that’s what happened.

So, for all the common culture of the Isles, when it came to the sticking place, the Irish difference proved decisive. It is, therefore, worth exploring wherein this difference consists. What is it about the Irish that the Scots and the Welsh lack? Or should that question be inverted?

THE TRADITIONAL NATIONALIST analysis sees the root of Ireland’s woes in the English presence in the island, which goes back to the first arrival of the Normans in the late twelfth century. Thus, the 800 years of slavery narrative, which sustains and comforts the perpetually affronted. It is, of course, unhistorical rubbish, but emotionally potent rubbish. (A pantomime is always going to fill a theatre faster than Hamlet.) Ireland’s difficulty begins not with a success – the arrival of the Normans – but with a failure. What failed in most of Ireland was the Reformation, and that failure sowed dragon’s teeth.

The reasons for the failure of the Reformation in most of Ireland are not the subject of this book, although they give a glimpse of other causes whose effects, over time, marked the difference of Ireland. The great ecclesiastical historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has touched on one: the failure to evangelize in the Irish language, the common vernacular of the majority. Crucial to the enterprise of conversion was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. But the earliest Irish-language version of the New Testament did not appear until 1603, almost a century after Luther. The Old Testament was not translated until the 1680s. The contrast with Wales is instructive: as early as 1563, the process began at Westminster with the passing of an Act for the Translation of the Bible into Welsh.

This meant that Ireland was a latecomer to the print revolution, as to so many other things, because the Bible was the text. Gutenberg invented printing by moveable type in Mainz in 1454; yet the historian Maurice Craig, in his classic Dublin 1660–1860, states that ‘anything printed in Ireland before 1700 can be classed as “rare”’. Contrast this with the continental core: the first Italian press was established in 1465. The first printed books in Paris and Venice appeared in 1470, less than twenty years after Gutenberg’s breakthrough. By 1480, more than a hundred towns and cities had printing presses, the most easterly being Krakow, the most southerly Naples.

By 1500, it is estimated that there were already seventy million volumes in circulation – the so-called incunabula – and the number of towns with presses had risen to more than two hundred. In the course of the sixteenth century, more than a hundred and thirty thousand new books were published in France, Germany, Italy, England and the Netherlands. But in Ireland, two centuries later, books were still ‘rare’. By the mid-eighteenth century, books in the French language alone were being printed in major cities outside France, from London to Dresden and Geneva. Ireland was coming from a long way back.

The Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, writing of his own country, entitled one of his books The Tyranny of Distance, something that even the modern traveller to Oz can appreciate. But the tyranny of distance affected Ireland, too. Until the discovery of the Americas, it was the island at the end of the world, Europe’s cul-de-sac. In school, we were taught that of course the Romans never came to Ireland. This was said with pride, as if it marked our insular purity and inviolate status. It was never suggested that the Romans just couldn’t be bothered, any more than they could be bothered to go much farther north than Hadrian’s Wall.2

I mean, why would you bother with places like these, so remote from the centre of a civilization rooted in the Mediterranean? We don’t lust to live in Greenland or the Faroe Islands for the same reason.

Of course, Rome fell. It took about three centuries for Europe to recover. Then two things happened, both of which still left Ireland a long way from the heart of things. First, the spiritual authority of the papacy remained in Rome (with occasional excursions to Avignon in Provence). Second, political power now moved north of the Alps, out of Italy, and began to solidify on either side of the Rhine.

Ireland was not merely distant from this civilizational heartland: it was of little interest to it. (I am deliberately ignoring the fabled Irish Christian missionaries who re-evangelized parts of the continent at the end of the Dark Ages: it was magnificent traffic, but one-way traffic.) The only intruders who had disturbed the island’s long isolation had come from the other direction: the Vikings. They did much good, not least by forming towns – unknown in Gaelic Ireland – and introducing seaborne commerce. But their presence was not in any sense definitive. They were a damned nuisance or a handy ginger group, depending on how you regarded them, but they did not change the basic dynamic of Gaelic society. For that, the island had to await the Normans in the late twelfth century.

The proximate reason for their arrival in 1169 was a dynastic dispute among Gaelic warlords, one of whom sought military assistance from Normans already well established in Britain. The Normans themselves were Frenchified Vikings who had established themselves on the lower reaches of the Seine and paid homage to the King of France. Their arrival was traditionally taught as the first English invasion of Ireland. It was not: they weren’t English at all, being mainly Normans – swaggering conquerors in England itself and now sovereign there – with some Flemings. Between the lot of them, they did not speak a word of English. Best day Ireland ever saw, the day they arrived.

A good question is why their sovereign, Henry II, didn’t just invade Ireland anyway. After all, he was an empire builder; through conquest and marriage, he controlled vast territories, England itself, of course, and the entire western half of France. Indeed, he exercised control over more territory in France than did the French king. This endlessly restless man, bursting with energy, none the less couldn’t be bothered with Ireland. Why? For the same reason as the Romans before him and every English or British government after him: he couldn’t work up the interest. For England/Britain, foreign begins at Calais, not at the back door. Only when the back door is a threat or a nuisance does it pay attention.

The place just wasn’t important enough. Only when his Norman-Flemish military adventurers threatened to establish a separate kingdom in the east of Ireland did Henry feel the need to take things in hand and remind them of where their ultimate loyalty must lie. So he came over and bullied them and the Gaelic kings into submission. This was the fateful moment that inserted the English crown into Irish affairs.

Ireland did not see another English king until the wretched John Lackland came first as a child, then as king in 1210, laying the early foundations for English royal power in Dublin. Richard II arrived twice, to little effect, in the 1390s. After that, we had to wait until James II and William III fought things out in the 1690s at Derry, Aughrim and the Boyne. In fact, no English king arrived on a wholly peaceful mission until George IV in 1821 – and he was as pissed as a butcher’s boy most of the time he was here and a martyr to the runs (these twain being not unconnected).

Ireland’s unimportance was compounded by the tyranny of distance. Ireland was an enormous distance from the centre of royal power, just as the Highlands and Islands were remote from Edinburgh and effectively remained independent of the kingdom of Scots until the sixteenth century. Land travel was a nightmare: things were not too bad once you were on board ship – although they could be bad enough, as generations of travellers testified – but the overland part of projecting English royal power – centred then as now on London and the south – in Ireland was an enormous challenge. As late as 1690, nearly a hundred years after O’Neill’s rebellion, William of Orange brought an army to Ireland. It mustered at Hounslow Heath, just west of London, with cavalry going ahead to clear the road to Chester. There followed 3,000 ox-carts stretching back a whole 29 kilometres carrying the supplies alone. At Chester, 300 ships made sail for Belfast Lough.

The cost of raising troops, equipping them, feeding them, paying them and transporting them to Ireland to fight in alien conditions was incredibly expensive and only worth considering out of the most compelling strategic necessity. Elizabeth I’s eventual success against Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion in the 1590s almost broke the English Treasury, as earlier incomplete military efforts had always threatened to do. Ireland just wasn’t worth it. It was awkward to get to – the tyranny of distance again – and not worth the expense when you finally landed.

Then, as with so many other things, all changed with the Reformation. Suddenly, that unignorable strategic necessity presented itself. England had lost its medieval empire in France, with even the last redoubt, Calais, falling to the French in 1558.3

France and its southern neighbour Spain were Catholic, England Protestant. Spain had a sense of mission, which found expression in the Armada and also in the assistance given to the Gaelic lords in the latter stages of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. For, as we saw, Ireland had not embraced Reform and thus presented a potential back door for England’s Catholic enemies. Strategic imperatives – terrible necessity – meant that Ireland had to be conquered, even at the cost of almost emptying the Treasury.

After a nine-year war (1594–1603) that Ireland’s Gaelic lords under O’Neill very nearly won, Elizabeth’s army eventually secured victory in the first few years of the seventeenth century. But it had been a desperately close-run thing. Cromwell finished off the job fifty years later.

THERE ARE OTHER themes that contribute to the Irish exception: colonial condescension and cultural cringe; a poorly developed agriculture; antique church customs surviving into relatively modern times before finally being suppressed by the ferocious ultramontanism of the post-Famine settlement.4 Most of all, the destruction first of the old Gaelic aristocracy at the beginning of the seventeenth century and later the defeat of the Old English5 lords and burghers in the Williamite wars at the end of the same century. That robbed Ireland of its only two sources of native social leadership. The Anglo-Irish ascendancy creoles were no substitute. There remained for centuries a social leadership vacuum, which has only been filled by the slow and halting development of an Irish middle class in the twentieth century. There are other, minor themes, and the purpose of this book is to explore them all further, the better to try to understand the Irish difference.

The Irish difference is unique but it has echoes everywhere. Europe is an immense patchwork of subcultures, dialects and regional particularisms. There is no reason other than the vagaries of political and military history why Bavaria and Catalonia are not independent states. The same may be said of Scotland, which was independent for the best part of a millennium and may yet be again – although there, the further subdivision between the Lallans-speaking Lowlands and the Gaelic-speaking Highlands formed another line of exception. There are nations and regions – highly differentiated from their metropoles – which are not separate states: Wales and the Alto Adige.

And then there is Belgium, where religion used to matter and no longer does but language marks a particularly virulent line of internal division. The territory now called Belgium was a remnant of the Holy Roman Empire which had passed from the Spanish to the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. It was (like little Luxembourg adjacent) a scrap of the ancien régime left over in the tidy-up that followed the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But the Spaniards had earlier saved it for Catholicism, just as they had lost the Calvinist Netherlands to the north.

So Belgian unity, such as it is, rests principally on its embrace of Catholicism and rejection of Reform – sounds familiar? – but that unity is in turn fractured along the horizontal line of language division that runs through the middle of the country, Flemish to the north and French to the south. They really don’t like each other.

So, Europe is full of little Irelands. The Irish exception is not so very exceptional. But it’s there. Let’s take a closer look.

_______________

1 Except for Northern Ireland, which remains in alignment with the EU customs regulations, in an act of cheerful Tory treachery which sold the province, or rather its irreconcilable unionist majority, down the river.

2 Whereas they could be very much bothered to go to Cornwall, where there was tin to be mined, which when alloyed with lead produced useful compounds such as pewter. Lead mines have been discovered all over Roman Britain, even as far north as Alston Moor, practically on the Scottish border. Lead was crucial for the Roman economy and society, not always with long-term benefits, as in lead piping which caused poisoning. There was tin and lead to be mined all over Roman Britain. But there was nothing to be had in Ireland: had there been, you may be sure that they would have known of it and hastened there.

3 Every British schoolchild can – or could – rattle off the English victories in the Hundred Years War, Crécy, Agincourt and Sluys, while remaining perfectly ignorant of the two decisive French victories, at Formigny and Castillon. The Anglo-Welsh archers had been superseded by a new French fancy, artillery.

4 Ultramontanism (meaning ‘beyond the mountains’ [the Alps]) identified those Catholics who supported direct papal authority.

** As explained in the Preface, the Old English were descendants of the twelfth-century Normans who rejected the Reformation.

PART ONE

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

ONE

FAITH AND FATHERLAND

THE MOST OBVIOUS place to begin with is religion, from which no discussion of anything Irish can escape for long. It can be exasperating, especially for liberal post-religious people, who are disproportionately represented among opinion-formers: journalists, academics and the social gratin of the urban elite. Oh, you know, those tiresome sectarian quarrels, such as subsist in Ulster, are just so – so archaic. Well, yes, but only if you know no history and are incurious about the world.

Otherwise, you’ll note that well within living memory crimes against humanity and something not far short of genocide returned to the European continent. Yugoslavia, patched together after the collapse of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans following World War I and run with an iron fist by Tito following World War II, fell apart with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. It descended into a vile civil war, whose principal markers were sectarian: Catholic Croats against Orthodox Serbs and all against the Bosnian Muslims.

The world’s two most unstable powder-kegs are the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. In the case of the latter, the unity of British India was shattered by religious conflict, as Muslims carved out their own state of Pakistan (part of which became Bangladesh in due time) leaving Hindus as a dominant majority in India proper. For decades, India was formally secular in its politics but the hyper-nationalists now in power use religion unapologetically as their principal marker of difference and their standard of allegiance.

Border disputes between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, are frightening. In his memoir Reporter, the renowned American journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a senior US foreign policy official as saying that a threatened Indian invasion of Kashmir – the disputed border province – was ‘the most dangerous nuclear situation that we have ever faced… It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.’

It is hardly necessary to rehearse the mess in the Middle East. It’s not just Jew against Muslim, although it’s that as well. The founders of Israel were, for the greater part, secular Jews, many of them non-observant. But successive waves of immigrants have brought in deeply religious Jews and they are over-represented among the new settlements on the occupied West Bank. Whereas the founders of Israel relied on the Balfour Declaration and land acquired by proper legal purchase – the latter, of course, hotly disputed by Arabs – the newer, religious Jews claim their warrant to the land from a covenant made with their god three thousand years ago. And we know, without fully comprehending, the fissiparous tendencies within Islam which have been such a trigger for the mayhem in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

Confessional allegiance tore Latin Europe apart at the time of the Reformation. At the Bavarian town of Augsburg in 1555, a formula was agreed that kept the peace between Protestant and Catholic for two generations. The Latin formula which summarized the agreement was cuius regio, eius religio, which effectively meant that the king or ruler of any territory could choose between the old church or Reform and his decision was binding on his people. Persons for whom this created a crisis of conscience were allowed a period of grace to remove to another territory whose ruler had made a choice more congenial to them.

This rickety formula worked for almost seventy years but when it fell apart the result was the Thirty Years War, the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I. It retarded the development of Germany for two centuries. Estimates of fatalities are problematic; Peter Wilson, the leading anglophone historian of the war, suggests a population loss within the Holy Roman Empire (which included most of modern Germany) of 15 to 20 per cent. As he points out, even the lower figure is sufficient to make the Thirty Years War the most destructive conflict in all of European history. By comparison, population losses in the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of casualties in World War II, were 12 per cent.

Religion was the ideological question of the era, as keenly felt as the rivalry between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century. The Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus summed it up: ‘This is a fight between God and the Devil.’ And in this fight, Ireland proved to be the great exception. It did not follow the Augsburg formula. The English crown had embraced the Reformation and Protestantism became a key marker of English – and later British – identity, especially in contrast to menacing continental Catholic powers – first Spain, then France.

Ireland, which had been a lordship of the English crown since 1172, was declared a sister kingdom in 1541. And yet, in most of the island, the Reformation failed. Diarmaid MacCulloch sets the context: ‘In Elizabethan Ireland… the Protestant Reformation became fatally identified with Westminster’s exploitation of the island and made little effort to express itself in the Gaelic language then spoken by the majority of the population. Ireland became the only country in Reformation Europe where, over a century, a monarchy with a consistent religious agenda failed to impose it on its subjects.’

The only country in Europe! Our theme is Irish exceptionalism and here it is laid bare in respect of the supreme question of the age. For this was not just dissent on an insular but on a continental scale. It is tempting to see all of subsequent Irish history as a footnote to the failure of the Reformation. That’s far too schematic: history is a series of accidents and contingencies. We know only what happened – and then that imperfectly – and cannot even imagine what might have happened had Ireland, like England, Scotland and Wales, embraced some form of Protestantism.

INEVITABLY, RELIGION WILL weave its way through this book. Of all the things that made the Irish difference and that eventually detached most of Ireland from the British state, it is foremost. Before the Reformation, there were cultural tensions between the Old English and the Gaelic lords. But these were frontier warlord tensions. They were not so urgent as to prevent intermarriage between the two groups; the gaelicization of the Old English to a degree that offended English sensibilities; or military alliances – usually short-term, opportunistic and provisional – between the two. In aggregate, it amounted to a reasonably coherent provincial warlord culture, with a top-dressing of urbanity in small port towns like Dublin and Waterford.

What never happened in pre-Reformation Ireland was an open revolt against the crown. The crown was vastly far away, below the horizon in London, as uninterested in Ireland as Ireland was in it. The modern idea of a centralized royal (or republican) sovereignty, projecting its power into remote places, did not exist in Ireland any more than it did in most of France until after the Revolution. This was an antique world which we can only apprehend through a glass very darkly.

There was no need to rebel against the crown, because the crown didn’t matter. It did not trouble the Gaelic lords of Ely O’Carroll in the Irish midlands any more than they troubled it. What troubled the Ely O’Carrolls was the nearness and potency of the Kildare FitzGeralds, just next door. The fact that the house of Kildare acted as some sort of point man for this faraway crown was neither here nor there as far as the Ely O’Carrolls were concerned. We all have our eccentricities.

The problem was those old school-day twins, the Renaissance and Reformation. They marched together – and the effect was transformative. The story is well known and requires only the briefest summary here. Henry VIII’s understandably desperate desire for a male heir eventually caused him to cast aside his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favour of the younger (and hopefully more fertile) Anne Boleyn. In doing so he managed to alienate the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Catherine’s nephew. The Pope might have nodded Henry’s divorce through, in the cynical way of the papacy, but at the material time he was effectively a prisoner of the emperor, who naturally wanted to protect his aunt.

All this got caught up in the early Reformation, the great theological fissure in the Latin Christian church begun in 1517 when Martin Luther proposed doctrines that were offensive to the papacy. By the time the dust had settled in England, Henry had secured his divorce, broken with Rome and declared himself sovereign in church affairs; he had encouraged Protestantism without fully embracing it himself. In asserting sovereignty in church affairs, he also embraced the fashionable new concept of Renaissance kingship, which entailed a more powerful central state and the submission of over-mighty provincial magnates – something that would have dire consequences for the Kildare FitzGeralds, as we shall see later.

The encroachment of royal authority upon traditional semi-independent magnate power in the provinces was resented, and not just in Ireland. But it took a fatal twist in Ireland by becoming mixed up with the religious question. Basically, the Irish magnates didn’t want Henry VIII all over them, nor did they want the Reformation. So resentment towards the importunities of the king became enmeshed with loyalty to Rome. When the revolt of Silken Thomas, 10th earl of Kildare (p. 43ff, chapter 2), broke out in 1534, it was thought by the Kildares to be just a traditional reminder that the king should do as his predecessors had done for the most part – keep his distance and let the Kildares get on with doing what they did best, namely running Ireland while nominally acknowledging the king’s lordship – happily occluded below the far horizon.

Too bad for the Kildares, the world had changed. Lenin’s remark that there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen might almost have applied. By asserting an aggressive new royal dispensation, Henry turned what might otherwise have been an exercise in magnate muscle-flexing into a revolt against the crown. He was asserting a centralizing policy which meant that resistance perforce became rebellion. It was a fundamental change to the rules of the game. Henry was alert to it; the Kildares were not, or at least not yet.

Fatally, Silken Thomas now rather desperately – seeing that these strange new rules were in play – appealed to anti-Reformation sentiment. He tried to contact recusants in England and Wales, denounced the new Lutheran theology and appealed (without success) to the Pope and the emperor. Here, right at the start of the entire Reformation saga – less than twenty years after Luther first announced his novel theology – a bit of local Irish bother inflates into an unprecedented rebellion against royal authority both in church and state. That junction of faith and fatherland, first made in the 1530s, proved incredibly durable. Every subsequent difficulty between the two islands bore this watermark.

From here on, rebellions came thick and fast. The other branch of the FitzGeralds, the earls of Desmond in central and west Munster, rose in the 1570s. The Ulster Gaelic lords followed suit in the 1590s, as we’ll see in greater detail later. The recusant Old English maintained a strained relationship with an English crown that was, by the end of the sixteenth century, decisively Protestant. The Ulster rebellion of 1641, directed at the recently planted Protestant colony, was openly sectarian, something that burned itself into the collective memory of Ulster Protestants ever after. Cromwell was hardly a religious neutral. He dispossessed nearly all Catholic landowners in Leinster and Munster and established new settlers – all reliably Protestant – who mutated in time into the fabled ascendancy.