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Professor Michael Laffan (Respondent
Respondent
Professor Michael Laffan
An tOllamh Michael Laffan
The past is not dead; it lives on, or it can be brought back to life, and it can be re-shaped. Sometimes it haunts us. It should be treated with respect.
President Higgins has raised important and stimulating matters in his address. Prominent among them is his insistence that commemorations of past events should be open to different narratives of historical experience, and in particular that they should include the narratives of ‘the other’, the ‘enemy of yesterday’. They should not censor the memory of ‘painful events’ – even though aspects of the past can often be embarrassing or distasteful. In commemorating people and events of earlier generations we should take heed of Eric Hobsbawm’s shrewd warning: ‘National myths do not arise spontaneously from people’s actual experiences … it is not a question of the people constantly remembering: they remember because someone is constantly reminding them.’1 All too often, those who remind the people use the past as a weapon with which to attack their present enemies, and ceremonies in remembrance of historical events can provide opportunities for stirring up old hatreds. Commemorative rituals have become historical forces in their own right; 2 they can be occasions for fostering myths and inventing traditions. In contrast, some important aspects of the past are seen as inappropriate to current needs or interests, and they remain uncommemorated.3
1 Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London, 2000), 24-5. 2 Ian McBride, in McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 2. 3 R. F. Foster, The Irish Story. Telling Tales and making it up in Ireland (London, 2001), 44-5.
We should try to ensure that when governments ‘remind’ the people, they do so in a generous and inclusive spirit. Emmet O’Connor pointed out recently that annual state commemorations ‘normally focus on one or two big events, chosen not for their historical weight, but because they are deemed emblematic of how the regime would like to see itself’.4 The past should not be used, or abused, to glorify present leaders and their preoccupations. There is another and opposite danger: that they may result in ‘a bland, bloodless and bowdlerised hybrid of history, designed to offend no one, in the pious hope that it may command unanimous acquiescence.’5 Historians have a dual role: one is to try to understand what happened, why it happened, and with which consequences; to discover what the past was like; to see it in its own terms (often strange, and even alien); to avoid tidying it up, gentrifying it, or projecting back into it some of our own ideals or fantasies. History is a record of what one age finds interesting in another,6 but in looking at our ancestors we should avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.7 We should not mock the dead by distorting them and their beliefs; they did not share, and could not possibly have shared, all our values. In some respects they must disappoint us, as we would disappoint them. We should not search the past simply in pursuit of comfort or reassurance. Whenever there is historical falsification, whether by the state, by political or paramilitary groups, or by individuals, it is the task of those who study and write history to point this out – even at the risk of making themselves unpopular. On the other hand, historians also have to try to understand how the past relates to the present – in effect, how we came to be what we are, and how other societies came to be what they are. In doing this they should avoid a Whig interpretation of history in which everything leads naturally and inexorably towards our own times, one that ‘follows the furrow of progress to the present and praises the dead ploughman who deviated least from the appointed line’.8 Sometimes it is in this sense that history is abused for purposes of commemoration. Without falling into the trap of creating ‘alternative histories’ we should appreciate that what happened was not predestined to happen; it was only one of many possibilities available at the time, and things could easily have turned out differently. In the context of the Irish Revolution, we should cast our net widely when looking at the ‘others’. These should embrace innocent victims of violence – who were often women and children; the defeated Irish Parliamentary Party, whose vision of a Home Rule Ireland within the United Kingdom was destroyed between 1916 and 1918; and ‘losers’, such as the minorities in the two new political entities that emerged in 1921-22 – northern nationalists and southern unionists. The ‘others’ should also include the triumphant Ulster unionists, and the British, who had their own perceived national and political interests – in particular, a refusal (at that time) to accept the idea of an Irish republic. Even now, some Irish people find it hard to accept that there was a ‘British point of view’. This was often at odds with the views of most Irish people, and therefore a particular effort may be needed to understand it.
The teaching of history in Ireland should reveal that England and Britain have a long and fascinating (and often admirable) history, quite independently of their (often destructive) involvement in Irish affairs. Elizabethan England should be remembered for massacres in Ireland, but for many other and estimable reasons as well. Gladstone’s conversion to Irish Home Rule was important, but so was Disraeli’s commitment to the Empire. It can be too easy to fall into a Hibernocentric view of our neighbouring island. And in return, particularly during a phase of Brexit insularity, the English people should become better informed about the present and past of other European countries, including Ireland. An openness to multiple narratives involves seeing the Irish Revolution in a wider, international context. From this standpoint it is striking how mild and moderate were the changes that resulted from years of upheaval.
4 Emmet O’Connor, ‘Toasted Heretic’, Dublin Review of Books, November 2020. 5 Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 (London, 2013), 5. 6 Jacob Burckhardt, quoted by Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York, 1995), 214. 7 E. P. Thompson, quoted in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (London, 1970), 427. 8 Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: a Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980 (London, 1983), 6.
Despite persistent urban poverty there was little social unrest, largely because many Irish grievances had been resolved. Under British rule (particularly under Conservative rule) Ireland had already experienced its great social revolution: the change in ownership of most of the country’s land from unionist landlords to tenant farmers. This transformation has not received the recognition it deserves. The violence that played a central role in bringing about the new Irish state was limited in scale, especially when it is seen against the background of the Great War. The toll of violent deaths between 1916 and 1921 has recently been calculated at being under 3,000, 500 of them occurring during the Easter Rising.9 In the same week as the rebellion the Irish 16th Division suffered 570 killed and over 1,400 wounded, and the total number of Irish soldiers killed in the war was probably more than 27,000.10 In contrast, British casualties in Ireland between January 1919 and July 1921 were less than those on an average day on the Western Front.11 Ireland was one of the more peaceful areas of Europe. Irish revolutionaries were fortunate in their opponents. After the Easter Rising ninety rebels were sentenced to death, but only fifteen of them were executed. This is a modest figure compared with the 15,000 who were shot after the suppression of the Paris Commune; or with the fifteen hundred executed after the failure of the Kronstadt revolt against the Soviets in 1921; let alone with the murder or expulsion by the Turks of one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1922. Empires normally fight to maintain their possessions; ‘a Great Power does not die in its bed’.12 We should not be surprised that Britain used force to suppress rebellion in Ireland, or that until as late as May 1921 it refused to contemplate the idea of Irish dominion status.13 The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were responsible for atrocities, collective punishments, reprisals and economic destruction. But, sadly, in all guerrilla campaigns government forces resort to brutal and bloody measures. Individuals suffered, and their sufferings should be recorded, but Ireland’s experience a century ago was benign compared with that of more recent victims – for example, those who endured the campaigns carried out by the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, or the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even the British, who were milder than most other dominant or imperial powers, acted far more savagely elsewhere. In March 1919, two months after the first meeting of the Dáil, they shot at least 379 (and probably far more) peaceful Indian demonstrators in Amritsar. In 1920 they killed thousands of rebels in air and gas attacks in Iraq. The Irish were lucky to be white, not brown or black.
In Liam Kennedy’s words we must continue to shun the old, absurd idea that the Irish were ‘MOPE – the most oppressed people ever’.14 They weren’t. In the past century, the Jews, the Poles, the Kurds and the Palestinians are among many whose experiences were vastly worse than those of the Irish. The British government could be – and was – shamed into changing its actions and policies. Irish rebels benefited from the fact that they were fighting a democracy whose leaders were responsive to domestic and international opinion. The centenary commemorations must also acknowledge that a quarter of the Irish population wanted to remain loyal subjects of the British crown; they wished then (and their descendants wish now) to exercise their citizenship and collective participation within the United Kingdom, not in an Irish republic. A century ago, if a war between nationalists and unionists was to be averted – a war that might have been comparable to that which destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s – partition was the obvious, natural solution. In 1914 John Redmond accepted it as a temporary expedient. It was also acknowledged in practice (although of course, not in theory) by the leaders of the Easter Rising two years later.
9 Eunan O’Halpin, in O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, The Dead of the Irish Revolution (New Haven and London, 2020), 8. 10 Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), 51; David Fitzpatrick, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 392. 11 D. G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy 1918-22 (London, 1972), 56-7. 12 Martin Wight, Power Politics (London, 1978), 48. 13 Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: the Anglo-Irish Settlement and its Undoing (New Haven, 1991), 173, 178. 14 Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? (Dublin, 2015).
Any attempt then to stage a rebellion in Ulster would have resulted in bloody sectarian conflict – with the unionists as the probable winners – so they confined their plans for insurrection to the three southern provinces. Ulster would be abandoned, and their northern followers were expected to retreat to the safety of Connacht.15 In similar fashion, with only a few exceptions, the War of Independence was fought in the south and not in the north – although there was much killing in Belfast and elsewhere, with nationalists as the principal victims.16 In the Treaty debates most Dáil deputies were preoccupied by the oath of fidelity to the crown and the degree of sovereignty to be exercised by the new state; partition was almost ignored. A century later many Irish people still find this hard to accept or understand. Without partition there would have been no full independence for what became the Free State. The British government did not begin to negotiate seriously with Irish nationalist leaders until the Ulster unionists had been satisfied, until after the Belfast parliament and government had been established. Only then did a compromise settlement become possible. In 1920-21 Ireland was partitioned in a manner that reflected the balance of power in British politics rather than the wishes of the people concerned. Ulster unionists got what they wanted – the largest possible area that they could control (and as a corollary, the area with the largest possible nationalist minority that could be controlled). By the standards of the 1920s – the only ones that really matter – it was a repudiation of the ‘spirit of the times’, of the ‘rights of small nations’. To resolve the problem posed by the existence of a one-quarter minority in the whole island, a new minority of one-third was created in the north. The result was a pattern of discrimination and resentment that endured for half a century and that ultimately destroyed the Northern Irish state. The fall of Stormont in 1972 had its origins in the events of 1920 and 1921. All commemorations of the Irish Revolution should include this victory – a Pyrrhic victory – of its most determined enemies, the Ulster unionists.
In the south a parallel development occurred. The British, no longer having to worry about protecting ‘Ulster’, abandoned the small unionist minority to its fate. Embarrassed by the nature of the campaign they had waged, and feeling that nationalist Ireland now caused more trouble than it was worth, they conceded a degree of independence unthinkable only a few years earlier. The Protestant minority in the Free State, being small and harmless, was treated well, apart from having to make distasteful but minor concessions to Catholic norms and to the government’s imposition of the Irish language. Compared with other European minorities at the time, it was lucky. In commemorating the revolutionary decade we must appreciate that independence was achieved not only by violence but also by the votes of most of the people – including, for the first time, the votes of women. The Irish Volunteers were accompanied in their struggle by the second Sinn Féin party, the Dáil, and a formidable underground administration. We should acknowledge the remarkable attempt – partly successful – to set up a ‘counter-state’ that tried to run the country as if British rule had already come to an end. To a limited extent, a rebel Irish government was already functioning before the handover of power in 1922,17 thereby helping to preserve the Irish democratic tradition in a time of revolution. Until recently this tradition has been neglected in national commemorations, which have been concentrated on military engagements, and it deserves an appropriate if belated recognition.
15 Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: the Easter Rebellion (London, 2005), 109, 225. 16 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Dublin 2002), 154; Charles Townshend, The Republic: the Fight for Irish Independence (London, 2013), 175-6. 17 Tom Garvin, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), 63-91; Mary E. Daly, The Buffer State: the Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment (Dublin, 1996), 47-92; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party 1916-1923. (Cambridge, 1999), 304-45.
Decades ago an English academic wrote that ‘the anniversary of the passing of the Great Reform Bill is an unlikely candidate for a national holiday, and old ballot boxes make dull shrines... where Marianne is on the barricades, an exposed nipple pointing the way to a contested future, Britannia is sedately seated, perhaps a co-opted member of some ad hoc committee.’18 In Ireland, too, people are lured to romanticize the barricades of the past at the expense of significant but unglamorous consolidations of democracy. Michael Collins’ leadership of the Squad and his escapes from capture have distracted attention from his achievements as an administrator. Even now, only a minority would share the view that the 1918 general election was the most important event of the period between 1910 and 1922.19 Commemorations need not revive old animosities, although all too often they do – and it is quite possible that there are too many of them.20 Ideally they should reveal the past in its confusion and complexity, both the aspects that we can admire and others that we regret or deplore. We can select from the diverse patterns of our history those that we find valuable and constructive, and try to incorporate some of them in our present and future. Over time, the chosen features will change, to match society’s changing needs. This can and should be done without ignoring negative characteristics of the country’s history, such as intolerance and discrimination, with which the more congenial elements were often intermixed.
The Irish Revolution involved cruelty and bloodshed; all revolutions do. Commemorations, while not glorifying such features, should not erase them. When the time comes to mark the centenary of the Civil War the atrocities carried out by both sides must be recognized, but also put in context; civil wars are normally more vicious than wars between rival states.21 Commemorations held in the spirit of the President’s remarks should be welcomed. But we should have no illusions; a generous inclusivity will prove controversial in some quarters, and it will provoke resistance. In particular, some sections of Irish society remain dominated by their hatred of Britain, and they wish to project past grievances into the future. That should not be a deterrent. In recent years there has been much to admire in the ways in which the people and the state have examined and commemorated the events of a century ago, and we should build on this achievement.
18 Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 1987, 52. 19 Brian Girvin, From Union to Union: Nationalism, Democracy and Religion in Ireland – Act of Union to EU (Dublin, 2002), 61. 20 Eberhard Bort, in Bort (ed.), Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Dublin, 2004), 11. 21 On the Irish case see Bill Kissane, The Politics of the Irish Civil War (Oxford, 2005), and Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War (Cambridge, 2003).
