public affairs eolas
A CONTESTED CENTENARY
The failure of partition When Ireland was divided in 1921, few people thought that partition would last 100 years. Not that there is much reason to celebrate, writes Kieran Allen, senior lecturer in sociology at University College Dublin, and author of 32 Counties: The Failure of Partition and the Case for a United Ireland. Consider only the strangeness of Irish politics. Where else in Western Europe would the first move to depose a political leader arise because she abstained on a vote on conversion therapy? Where else would a primary school system be 94 per cent owned by the Catholic Church, there being no public education at this level in the South? In neither part of Ireland did a substantial labour or social democratic party emerge. There was simply no left-right divide. Why? The conventional answer is that there are two cultures or two identities on the island. A Protestant British one versus a Catholic Irish one. But let’s deconstruct. The South can hardly be labelled a Papist, priest-ridden state when it was the first country in the world to vote for marriage equality by popular suffrage. If it is defined by its Catholic identity, why did it vote by 66 per cent to legalise abortion? And if a Protestant identity in the North is so strong, why do only 43 per cent attend church regularly? Religious identity was supposed to be the foundation stone for partition, but it makes little sense today. Instead, there is talk about a fundamental difference between ‘Britishness’ and ‘Irishness’. Yet these concepts are extremely vague. The ‘Britishness’ of a member of the Orange Order differs fundamentally from a multi-cultural Londoner. As one not unsympathetic writer on unionism put it, the allegiance of the former is ‘to a form of national imperial Britishness whose origins remain associated with a bygone empire nostalgia’. We should, therefore, be more precise. The dominant strain of unionism is not just based on a ‘cultural’ disposition rooted in deep psychic identity. We are really talking about right wing political views. Far from partition being the ‘logical outcome’ of two cultures, it locked the population of Ireland into spurious identities that sustained conservative regimes. The northern and southern states were mirror images of each other. The supposed threats that one posed to the other were used to discipline their respective populations. The origins of partition can be traced to an alliance that the Tory party forged with a Unionist movement to undermine British democracy. In 1911, the Liberal Party introduced a Parliament Act which removed the veto of the House of Lords. This infuriated the Tory backwoods and they focused on opposing Home Rule as a war cry to unite their divided party. Home Rule, it should be added, was an extremely mild measure for devolution within the empire.
110
eolas public affairs
