Dr Niamh Gallagher (Respondent

Respondent

Dr Niamh Gallagher Breaking down binaries: Empire, the First World War and Partition

Machnamh 100 – Seminar Two participants: Professor Eunan O’Halpin, Professor Alvin Jackson, Dr Marie Coleman and Dr Niamh Gallagher Machnamh 100 – Rannpháirtithe Seimineár a Dó: An tOllamh Eunan O’Halpin, an tOllamh Alvin Jackson, an Dr Marie Coleman agus an Dr Niamh Gallagher

Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to respond to Professor Horne’s paper on the wider dimensions of the centenary we are now living through.

I have found, President, your own reflections on ‘ethical remembering’, Richard Kearney’s ‘hospitality of narratives’, and on challenging what you call a ‘feigned amnesia’ around the uncomfortable aspects of the shared history between Britain and Ireland to be very useful when contemplating the themes of sovereignty, nation and empire.1

An imperial world

Professor Horne reminds us that sources of sovereignty were not fixed in the period leading up to and after the First World War and that the world map of 1920–1 looked very different to that of today. We are often accustomed to remembering only one empire when we think of Ireland in these years, but this was a world made up of empires. During the First World War the British Empire was joined by the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Romanov, and German Empires, whose territories extended across continents and incorporated a diverse array of peoples, ethnicities, and nationalities. Some of these entities, such as the Ottoman Empire, had existed for more than 600 years.

1 President Michael D. Higgins, ‘Of Centenaries and the Hospitality Necessary in Reflecting on Memory, History and Forgiveness’, President of Ireland, Media Library, 4 December 2020 <https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/of-centenaries-and-the-hospitalitynecessary-in-reflecting-on-memory-history-and-forgiveness>.

This is to say nothing of the Spanish or Portuguese, who had conquered large parts of the world in earlier centuries, or the East, where the Empire of Japan had begun to exercise rule across sections of Russia, China and the Pacific.2 We often anticipate the demise of empire when we think about Ireland one hundred years ago, but we have forgotten how powerful these entities seemed to the people who lived in their midst. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, many Irish and British people of all backgrounds therefore came up with solutions to the question of Irish self-government in an imperial, rather than a post-imperial world. To give three examples: in 1904, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, devoted himself to thinking about what the future of Ireland might look like. He published a series of articles, later included in the second edition of his book, The Resurrection of Hungary, in which he dwelt on what he considered to be the historic fallacies of British governance in Ireland.3 Griffith sought to critique a particular brand of imperialism – ‘English imperialism’ – which he argued had subverted the interests of northern Protestants as much as it did those of Catholics in order to secure English national greatness: ‘English Imperialism decreed that Ireland must be struck down and kept down’.4 Yet he simultaneously argued that the late eighteenthcentury Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Younger), had missed an historic opportunity to create an Anglo-Hibernian empire, modelled on what would later become the Austro-Hungarian example under the 1867 Ausgleich. Griffith’s analysis of empire was not one of subjugation or repression but was instead about the spread of power relations across Europe in which he felt that Ireland could have been co-equal with Britain in managing its overseas empire.5 For Griffith in 1904, Irish nationality seemingly could be reconciled with empire. His vision for the future, two kingdoms of Ireland and Britain modelled on the Austro-Hungarian example, was an imaginative use of empire to solve the question of Irish sovereignty. These ideas were the very opposite of what James Connolly proposed. In his work, Labour in Irish History, published in 1910, Connolly wrote that ‘the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must … keep pace with … the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation’.6 For Connolly, drawing on the ideas of nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Marx, democracy, and the essential sovereignty of the people, lay within the working classes, not within the middle and upper classes, who had been corrupted by capitalism and exploited the workers for their own gain. For Connolly, these were the true imperialists. No question of sovereignty could be solved by territory alone when the imperialist class continued to exploit the sovereign – the working classes of the world who had no territorial boundaries. Nationhood must therefore rest on the achievement of a republic, for only a world made up of individual republics could abolish the capitalist system and allow the proletariat of all nations to manage their own affairs with minimal influence from statecraft. Connolly’s republicanism was intimately tied to syndicalism, class conflict and the abolition of empires. Both of these nationalists used ideas of empire and imperialism in different ways to explore the question of Irish sovereignty, and the same is true for those who resisted Irish selfgovernment. Leopold Amery, a renowned academic, journalist, imperialist, and British Conservative politician, wrote an extended essay in 1912 called Home rule and the colonial analogy to make the Unionist case against self-government. Nationalists such as John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule party, and Erskine Childers, a one-time imperialist who later became an Irish republican, had repeatedly referred to some colonies within the British Empire where self-government had been a success.

Amery argued that their comparisons were ‘based on a series of confusions due … to … the vagueness of the phrase ‘Home Rule’, and to the general ignorance of the origin and real nature of the British Colonial system’.7

2 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3 Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, with Appendices on Pitt’s Policy and Sinn Féin, 3rd ed., (Dublin: Whelan and Son, 1918).

4 Ibid, p. 138. 5 For further discussion, see Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds.), The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 6 James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel and Co, 1910), p. 11. 7 L. S. Amery, M.P., ‘Home Rule and the Colonial Analogy’ in S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Against Home Rule: The Case for the Union (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1912), p. 129.

Quite simply, Amery showed that governance within the British Empire took a wide variety of forms; there was no easy parallel between Ireland’s case and the colonial model. Canada was practically a sovereign nation state whereas South Africa had little more than county council powers; the Isle of Man continued to be operated on the age-old principle of ascendancy that resembled the much-hated law in Ireland, Poynings’s Act, passed in 1494 and repealed only in 1782. After demonstrating that there was no single model of colonial legislation within the Empire, and that nationalists who dwelt on the colonial analogy were fudging a complicated reality, Amery went on to dismiss the muchtouted Unionist case against Home Rule – that Ireland was richer because of the 1801 Act of Union. He wrote ‘Ireland suffers to-day economically and politically, from the legacy of political separation in the eighteenth century, and of economic disunion in the nineteenth.’ He argued that the Union had never really united all of Ireland with Britain; it had privileged some parts and exploited others. In contrast to many nationalists however, his solution was not one of separation, but of further integration by extensive social and economic improvement. For Griffith, Connolly and Amery, their respective visions for Ireland involved, resisted, and complicated empire in ways we are not accustomed to remembering. Their writings demonstrated that there was no easy dichotomy between nationalists and unionists in their position on empire, nor was there even agreement on what exactly empire was or its usefulness in solving Ireland’s dilemma.8 In the rush to explain the past using simple binaries – such as imperialists versus the colonised, physical force nationalists versus Home Rulers, nationalists versus unionists – we have done our shared history a disservice by simplifying complicated realities into easily accessible narratives about our past.

The long shadow of the First World War

This is especially true when we think of the First World War. In recent years Ireland has engaged in much soul-searching about this contested conflict, and the efforts of President Higgins and former President McAleese have been significant in bringing the Irish who served in that war back into the forefront of national memory. It is difficult for us today to understand what that conflict was about. It has none of the certainty that comes with the Second World War, where moral judgements on good versus evil are much easier to make. But participation in the First World War made sense to millions of Irish people at the time. Motivations to back it were wide ranging. We are used to hearing the well-worn view that many nationalists signed up to secure Home Rule while unionists did so to prevent it, but the reality is less stark than this simple binary suggests. To take a few examples: Francis Ledwidge, the Catholic poet, famously joined up after a spat with his girlfriend; Tom Kettle, the Home Rule MP was in Belgium when the war began, and the atrocities he witnessed by the invading German Army encouraged him to join the Allies as ‘an Irish soldier in the army of Europe’.9 Charles Brett, a northern Presbyterian, couldn’t work out his motivation for enlisting until he saw the hundreds of dead civilians washed up in Cobh in Cork following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-Boat on 7 May 1915. These men undoubtedly had other motivations as well, which differed from the incentives that enabled them to endure the war. Religious belief, the support of one’s comrades, military sanctions, and perhaps above all, the sending of letters and parcels through the lifeline that was the postal service, were the everyday support mechanisms behind why Irishmen of all backgrounds fought – and for so long. This is to say nothing of the thousands of Irish women whose motivations were just as diverse in the assistance they rendered on various home fronts and in field hospitals near the front lines.

8 For further information on the range of political thought expressed during the Irish Revolution, see Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds.), The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 9 Senia Pašeta, ‘Thomas Kettle: “An Irish soldier in the army of Europe”?’ in A. Gregory and S. Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War To Unite Us All?’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 8–27.

That motivations were not exclusively tied to one’s position on Home Rule helps explain why 210,000 Irishmen from Ireland voluntarily joined up and thousands more enlisted in the British Dominion and American forces, but none of this would have been possible had it not been for a general belief that the Allies were fundamentally in the right while Germany was in the wrong.10 This is one binary not commonly discussed in analyses of the Irish at war, and while opinion towards the conflict evolved as time went on and varied across a spectrum, it helps explain the agency of so many Irish people in a conflict we find difficult to relate to today. Professor Horne has shown that some of the common expressions of right and wrong in wartime even endured in the War of Independence, as the discourse of Prussianism (that Britain had resorted to barbaric methods just as the Prussians – equated with all Germans – had done in wartime) was commonly expressed. He has also reminded us that the war did not end in 1918 and has suggested that it was part of a greater crisis that lasted until 1923. I would add that other chronologies are equally important. Most of the 210,000 Irish men who joined up from Ireland returned there in 1919, and some continued to serve in a military capacity well into the 1920s. Remembrance Day ceremonies across Ireland, which began in 1919, accelerated after 1923 when the civil war formally came to a close. They often demonstrated a sense of solidarity between Protestants and Catholics which had been fostered in various capacities during the war, even despite the new wars of 1919–23.11 Grief, trauma and disability had timelines which do not map onto the dates we commonly recall when marking centenaries. In 1915 the former Trinity College Dublin student, Captain David Campbell, lost his friend, Levis, at Gallipoli. Campbell wrote his memoirs in the 1970s and said that ‘I remember him every Armistice Day, and mourn his loss afresh’.12 In February 2021 I read an article in The Guardian about Europe’s oldest person who had just celebrated her 117th birthday. Sister Andrée, born in 1904, now in a care home in the south of France, had miraculously survived COVID-19. When asked why she felt she had lived so long, she answered ‘no idea… I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life and during the 1914–18 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else’.13 For Sister Andrée, that conflict was still painfully present in her recollections. The First World War, rather than later wars including the Second World War, was the traumatic event she recalled more than one hundred years later as she pondered her life. For David Campbell, and the tens of thousands of Irish families who also lost loved ones in that war, the conflict did not end in 1918 or in 1923 but had its own timeline. For all of us who have experienced grief – and the present moment deserves its own reflection – histories of trauma, loss and memory remind us that the dates commonly used for marking centenaries are of limited use in understanding the lived experiences of the events we are now living through.

Power, empire and nation

I wish to say a few words on some other aspects of empire we are not accustomed to remembering. Cormac Ó Gráda has reminded us that in the devastating famine of the 1840s, emigration was a vital lifeline that allowed many Irish people to survive. It enabled them to gain employment, freed up resources in Ireland so that those who stayed could manage, and helped successive generations build futures that were simply not possible in Ireland.14 Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and of course the United States became homes for Irish people during the Famine,15 but these places and others had already been homes for the Irish long before 1845, and they continue to be destinations right up until the present day.

10 Niamh Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 11 Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War. 12 David Henry Campbell, Forward the Rifles: The War Diary of an Irish Soldier, 1914-1918 (Dublin: Nonsuch, 2009), p. 59. Also see p. 81. 13 The Guardian, ‘Europe’s oldest person survives Covid and set to celebrate 117th birthday’. Access online <https://www. theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/09/europe-oldest-person-sister-andre-survives-covid-celebrate-117th-birthday>. 14 Cormac Ó Gráda and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Migration as disaster relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine’, European Review of Economic History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April, 1997), pp. 3–25.

All of these territories – and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large parts of the African continent – were part of the British Empire at one time or another. Ten million or so Irish people left Ireland between 1600–1921, eight million of whom left after 1801. Perhaps a further 1.5 million left between 1921–2000.16 The Empire wasn’t divorced from the dominions and territories in which millions of Irish people emigrated and settled. How the Irish were treated once they ‘got off the boat’ is a vast subject and differed across time and space, but the existence of hyphenated identities such as Irish-Americans, Irish-Canadians or IrishAustralians reflects attachments that endure today. Understanding why Irish people left Ireland is as complicated a question as deciphering the motivations that propelled Irishmen and women to participate in the First World War. There are push factors which completely deprived people of agency, such as deportations to penal colonies, refugees fleeing the Cromwellian conquests, or successive famines. There are those which incentivised people to leave, including economic dislocation and malaise, civil and religious discrimination, and poverty. But pull factors were also important, including the economic opportunities provided by the New World, religious and sexual freedoms, familial connections, and the opportunity to gain land and resources, much of which already belonged to indigenous populations, such as in America and Australia. Emigration and settlement are only one strand of the multitude of ways the Irish were connected to Empire. Illuminating these connections does not mean one is ‘taking sides’ on whether Empire was ‘good or bad’ but deepen our understanding of a complex ‘relationship’. Complicating the history of Ireland and Empire does not mean replacing one strain of experience with another. Experiences, even if contradictory, can sit alongside each other. We are good at remembering the worst excesses of the British Empire and Professor Horne has reminded us of the hard power and abuses wielded by imperial administrators. And there is a long list to choose from, particularly from the land grabbing campaigns which began in the 1870s.17 But here too we can be more critical. If we look at the processes by which ‘hard power’ was exercised, the picture is less black and white than it first appears. In independent Ireland, civil society, the state, and churches wielded forms of repression that victims would find difficult to distinguish from some of the imperial power exercised within the British Empire. Penalties enacted on single mothers, separated families, those suffering mental disorders, and people of different sexualities were just as severe as some of the repression meted out to populations that were marginalised, incarcerated, and forced to suffer civil disabilities within the Empire. It goes without saying that there are major differences between the worst excesses of imperial power deployed within the Empire and power exercised within the new Irish state, and these distinctions should be preserved. But there is a gradation in how power was deployed in both empire and nation that muddies the boundaries between both. Ireland was not unique in marginalising groups of citizens and interwar Europe was hardly a beacon of tolerant liberalism in the aftermath of the First World War. Even in Britain, single mothers were pressurised into giving their babies up for adoption in the height of the ‘swinging sixties’ and ‘cultural revolution’ (approximately half a million babies were forcibly given up from the 1950s–70s).18 But some penalties did endure in Ireland longer than elsewhere, as the legacies of the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes have demonstrated. If we are to really adopt a ‘hospitality of narratives’ about our past, we need to think harder about the processes behind power – whether Ireland was in the Empire or outside of it – and to recognise that after 1921, the freedom that was at the essence of the Irish demand for sovereignty was not granted to all Irish citizens in an equal share.

16 Enda Delaney, ‘Migration and Diaspora’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 128–31. 17 For example, the Ashanti Wars (1870s–1900s), Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), Anglo-Zulu War (1879), Anglo-Boer Wars (1880–1; 1899–1902), Occupation of Egypt (1882), Matabele Wars (1893–7), Amritsar massacre (1919), Mao Rebellion (1952–60) and Cypriot War of Independence (1955–9). 18 Pac-UK, ‘Overcoming Trauma from Forced Adoption: Rebuilding my Life with PAC-UK’, available at <https://www.pac-uk.org/ about/casestudies/overcoming-trauma-forced-adoption-rebuilding-life-pac-uk/>. Also see recently news reports, BBC ‘Mothers demand apology over forced adoptions’, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57231621>, 25 May 2021.

I want to finish by saying a few words about the ongoing centenary of partition and return to the discussion of binaries. The creation of two administrations on the island of Ireland following the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the permanency of these entities since 1925, created new majorities and minorities across the island. The idea that Ireland could be divided into two homogenous populations was central to the Cabinet’s thinking behind the Act and this notion has been usefully deployed by politicians, and even historians, ever since. This ‘binary’ is of limited use when understanding partition. As Robert Lynch has shown, there was nothing homogenous about it. The new states barely represented two thirds of people within them.19 Partition created a corresponding sense of statelessness for southern Protestants, northern Catholics, and republicans, both North and South. It forced reimaginations of identity, from counties within an island to counties within one of two states, and new understandings of what it meant to be Irish or British were generated. Yet partition could never be all-encompassing. Rivers, harbours, and mountain ranges defied both partitions of the mind and physical realities. Ecclesiastical jurisdictions were maintained.

Communities that lived along the border were forced to come to terms with the hybrid spaces they now occupied, simultaneously having no clear geographical demarcation between the new Northern or Southern territories yet also having very real demarcations when roads were blocked or at customs checks. Border communities of all backgrounds, both North and South, shared their frustration towards the new social and economic problems generated by partition. But they also exercised their own agency to adapt to the new conditions. As George Sheridan, a Protestant farmer from Marlbank on the Fermanagh border explained: ‘you couldn’t live on the border and not smuggle… I myself have been in gaol ten times’.20 The lived experiences of partition both intersect with, and complicate, the hegemonic narratives of nationality and sovereignty which are deeply intertwined with well-known political identities in Northern Ireland. Attempts to scratch beneath the surface of those narratives can provoke frustration and anger, if not complete dismissal of history which tramples on ‘sacred cows’. As I have stated elsewhere, the history of Northern Ireland is messy. Whether one marks, acknowledges, remembers, celebrates or boycotts the centenary, no single narrative can be drawn from its turbulent past, and engagement with its history is not a prescriptive exercise in telling one how to remember.21 The history of partition should be part of the process of ‘ethical remembrance’ which the President has so aptly called for, and it should be explored both North and South. Reflecting on the past in a way which can assist and complicate, rather than threaten and simplify, is one of the ways we can come to terms with Irish experiences of Empire, the First World War, and Partition.

19 Robert Lynch, The Partition of Ireland, 1918-25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 162.

20 Ibid., p. 135. 21 See Northern Ireland Historical Advisory Panel platform piece on how to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland, Irish News, 1 May 2021; Belfast Newsletter, The Belfast Telegraph, 3 May 2021.

A coloured British empire map 1920 showing its expansion since 1688 (and losses) with dates Contributor: Colin Walter / Alamy Stock Photo Léarscáil daite ó 1920 le dátaí ar a dtaispeántar leathnú (agus cúlú) Impireacht na Breataine ó 1688 Foinse: Colin Walter / Alamy Stock Photo