Professor Eunan O’Halpin (Respondent

Respondent

Professor Eunan O’Halpin The Irish ‘nation’ and the challenge of ethical commemoration

Nationalist Ireland was unified, and to an extent radicalised, as much by the Conscription Crisis of 1918 as by the 1916 Rising and its immediate aftermath. Citizens of Ireland should be careful that we in turn don’t now attempt to conscript everyone on the island into a single commemorative cohort. Our shared island includes people who see themselves both as Irish and as British, and others who are British through and through.

Commemoration is not legitimised simply by inclusiveness, by remembering Ulster’s as well as nationalist Ireland’s dead of the First World War, or by belatedly discovering the role of women in the Irish revolution. Richard Kearney’s cheery nostrum of a ‘Hospitality of narratives’ is all very well, but we must recognise that some people will not wish to avail of it, just as we expect others to respect James McClean’s well-grounded unwillingness to wear the poppy. In 2018 I complacently observed how the selection of Heather Humphreys TD, a Border Protestant woman, to handle centenary commemorations had been an inclusive masterstroke. Afterwards a man who identified himself as a ‘Donegal Protestant’ told me that the use of the Defence Forces to bring the National Flag and the Proclamation to primary schools in 2016 had greatly troubled some in his community. Furthermore, he felt Minister Humphreys could not ‘speak for us’ while holding her commemorations role. This exchange brought home to me the reality that it is not only nationalists north and south who continue to grieve about the consequences of partition: there are families and communities within this state who feel still on the wrong side of the border. What should we expect as the centenary cycle continues? Should that cycle conclude not in 2023, with the miserable trailing away of the Civil War, but with the quiet disavowal of the Boundary Commission’s report in 1925 and the dashing of faint hopes along the unchanged frontier?

Equally, how should we commemorate the nationalist experience in the newly created Northern Ireland, enduring what Diarmaid Ferriter terms ‘the tyranny of the ‘Special’’? Between 1920 and 1922 many hundreds of them lost their homes and livelihoods, and scores their lives, in sectarian attacks. In 1922 my newly married Co. Down republican grandparents had to choose between the near certainty of my grandfather’s indefinite detention, or exile in the new Ireland.1 How many other active republicans faced that choice I don’t know, but the vast majority of Northern Ireland Catholics remained in a home rule Ulster which neither trusted nor respected them. In the new Irish Free State, many Unionists and Protestants, though not directly oppressed by the state’s agents, felt abandoned and unsafe. At least until 1924 they had every reason to be fearful and resentful of intimidation and violence by anti-Treaty forces, often administered under the authority of antiTreaty commander Liam Lynch, who mandated reprisals for the execution of republican prisoners including the shooting ‘on sight’ of all members of the Oireachtas who supported repressive legislation, along with ‘aggressive civilian supporters of Free State Government’ and employees of ‘papers unfriendly to [the] Republic’, and the destruction of the homes of ‘Imperialists … and those of the English interest’.2

1 Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation And Not A Rabble: the Irish Revolution 1913-1923 (London, 2015), p. 306; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, HA/5/617 and HA/32/1/360; Military Archives of Ireland. 24SP7067 HughEdwardHalpenny.pdf. 2 Lynch to An Ceann Comhairle, 28 Oct. 1922, quoted in Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: the Irish state and its enemies since 1922 (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 27; University College Dublin Archives, Mulcahy papers, P7/B/89, text of captured IRA Dublin Brigade order, 7 Feb. 1923.

Should we commemorate and explore such directions and their consequences, or is it best to follow Basil Fawlty, and just not ‘mention the war’ as experienced by religious and political minorities in this new state?

This leads on to the question of whether we can ethically commemorate what we don’t yet fully understand. The 1916 centenary was notable for good humour and respectfulness more or less all round, but it did valorise rather than problematize the use of physical force by a small unsanctioned militant minority operating in tandem with ‘gallant allies’ who themselves were, incidentally, genocidal imperialists in colonial Africa (of this Roger Casement, who had first come to prominence as a British diplomat uncovering the atrocious excesses of colonial rule in the Belgian Congo, was well aware). Former Taoiseach John Bruton was surely right to argue that an uncritical focus on the Rising risked discrediting the achievements of John Redmond’s constitutional politics, which had culminated in the 1914 Government of Ireland Act. Bruton fairly asked whether valorising 1916 might not also validate the use of armed force ever since, whatever the democratic will, provided only that this was in the name of the unachieved sacred republic. Where does that leave electoral politics? People will differ on the achievements and limitations of the Irish state since 1922; most would surely recognise that her unbroken century as a functioning electoral democracy merits both explanation and respect, rather than passing acknowledgement on the margins of 1916 and War of Independence pageantry. The same phenomenon of the valorisation of armed force within a broadly based nationalist movement is visible in contemporary India. The overwhelmingly peaceful political means by which India – and Pakistan – won independence and partition in 1947 under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammed Ali Jinnah are largely elided in Hindu nationalist political discourse in favour of a teleological and selective public narrative of armed struggle centred on a handful of iconic figures, particularly the youthful Sikh revolutionary socialist Baghat Singh (1907-1931) and India’s would-be wartime liberator Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), whose independence project failed with that of his Japanese ‘gallant allies’ in 1945.3 There is never a mention of the one group and territory which the British could never conquer, the ‘tribal areas’ of the Pashtuns (Pathans) along the North West Frontier. The absence of these uniquely successful resisters to British colonialism from contemporary nationalist narratives of India’s freedom struggle is plainly because they are a Muslim people, and in any case are now Hindu India’s hated neighbour Pakistan’s problem.4 Our state has done well in enabling family, communal and academic research into the revolutionary era through the release online of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, the Bureau of Military History records and the extraordinary Military Service Pensions archive. These initiatives made long-closed records available uncensored and unfiltered not only in Ireland but across the world. Yet acute problems remain. Firstly, revolutionary records intensify focus on political violence and the relatively small number of people involved, at the expense of wider reflection on Irish society. That is why work such as Fionnuala Walsh’s new study of Irish Women and the Great War, exploring women’s lives on this island within a wider international framework, and Pádraig Yeates’s quartet of studies of Dublin life between 1913 and 1923, are so valuable.5 We need far more such scholarship on what might be termed prosaic lives and ordinary living on the island during and after the revolutionary era, if we are to have holistic histories. Such studies in social, economic and cultural histories are far more advanced elsewhere, not least in Northern Ireland.

But to study ordinary lives in extraordinary times, people need records. This state is failing in that ethical and democratic challenge: the inaccessibility of the 1926 census records, and of the Land Commission’s vast archive, have delayed the systematic exploration of key human questions relating alike to ordinary lives and to the experiences of religious minorities during and immediately after the revolutionary decade. How can we understand the dramatic decrease in independent Ireland’s non-Catholic population between 1911 and 1926 without data? How can we work out how many northern minority families migrated south after partition rather than live under Unionist hegemony?

3 Judith Brown, ‘India’, in Judith Brown and W. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol IV The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 421-46. 4 See, e.g. Council for Historical Research, Dictionary of Martyrs: India’s Freedom Struggle (1857-1947) (Delhi, 2012), and https:// www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/release-of-dictionary-of-martyrs-of-indias-freedom-struggle-1857-1947/ (accessed 18 Feb. 2021). For a vivid account of Britain’s struggles with the tribes, see Sir Andrew Skeen, Passing It On: Short Talks on Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier (1st ed., 1932, Aldershot). 5 Fionnuala Walsh, Irish Women and the Great War (Cambridge, 2020); Padraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Dublin, 2000); Dublin: A City in Wartime 1914-18 (Dublin, 2011); A City in Turmoil: Dublin 1919-21 (Dublin, 2012); A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921-4 (Dublin, 2015).

These are questions of rather greater moment and moral weight than how many men and women were in the GPO in 1916, or the size of Tom Barry’s pension, and they mirror the post-First World War experience of people elsewhere.

Without access to crucial sources we cannot meaningfully explore the questions which John Horne’s paper begs, of how politicallydriven Irish migration compares with what was experienced in the new Europe created by the collapse of the continent’s empires. In not releasing these records which it created and which it holds, the state is failing in its duty both to the past and to the present.

Partition

The new states of post-First World War Europe, and the ‘mandate’ territories of the Middle East, all contained uncomfortable minorities as well as ethnic majorities. After both world wars, almost all new states and territories nursed ethno-territorial grievances which poisoned relations with their new neighbours. Even today, Hungary mourns the loss of Transylvania to Romania. Russian minorities implanted by Stalin in the Baltic states after their brutal absorption into the Soviet Union in 1940 – by secret agreement with Hitler – are both resented and resentful. Germany herself became two states after Hitler’s defeat, and although reunified in 1990 – not without help from Taoiseach Charles Haughey during Ireland’s EU Presidency – never regained her pre-1938 eastern borders. What was once German Königsberg is now, bizarrely, part of Russia. Finland, which won independence from Russia in 1918, lost much of Karelia to Soviet invasion in 1940, regained it in 1941, and lost it again to Soviet Russia, this time presumably permanently, in 1944. What is striking about Irish partition is, in comparative terms, not its existence, its anomalies and its arguable injustices – still quietly felt as much in minority communities in parts of East Donegal or Cavan or Monaghan, as amongst nationalists generally – but its persistence. The Irish/UK land border is one of very few confirmed in the early 1920s – Turkey’s and Afghanistan’s are other rare instances – which have remained unchanged for a century. British India was partitioned in 1937, when Burma was hived off for colonial administrative reasons. Neither of the two states created in 1947 – Pakistan, which lost secessionist East Pakistan in 1971 after decades of brutal misgovernment, and India, which lost territory to China in the 1962 war – now enjoy the borders which the British accorded them on departure. And partitioned Kashmir, or rather that part of it which fell to India in 1947 on the whim of its Hindu princely ruler despite the clear wishes of its Muslim majority, remains a running sore between two nuclear powers.

Empires

Empire, imperialism and colonialism are easily denounced in the abstract. Varieties of conquest, migration, exploitation and expropriation have been the way of the world for as long ago as history and archaeology permit us to look. We may indict Christopher Columbus and stout Cortez for bringing European hegemony, despoliation and cultural ruin to the Americas, but colonisation and imperialism did not begin with them. Spain had itself just been freed from Moorish domination.

Writing with all the confidence of modernity in the 5th century b.c., Thucydides speculated that there had once been a time when places and peoples had not interacted, traded, fought with and conquered each other. But he wrote of the struggle for mastery of the Greek world between democratic and yet relentlessly colonising Athens, and authoritarian, monarchical, austere and colonising Sparta, with the Persian empire waiting in the wings. His work still shapes how we conceptualise interstate conflict and conquest. John Horne’s paper reminds us that we must appraise Irish independence in parallel with the break-up of European empires and the emergence at the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of a range of new states, all of which faced complex internal ethnic and other difficulties. Irish separatists certainly looked to Versailles in 1919, but the British government was thinking of Ireland entirely in imperial terms. Britain was facing what the late Keith Jeffery termed ‘a crisis of empire’, yet that was then seen as a crisis essentially of expansion, not of disintegration.6 Russia’s collapse in 1917 appeared to reduce future imperial competition in Persia and Central Asia; the Middle Eastern mandates conferred on Britain and France promised opportunities as well as responsibilities. Compared to these challenges, fixing Ireland, once the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was in the bag, was an irritating second-order problem.

It is no accident that the British Treaty delegation’s key advisor on constitutional matters in 1921 was neither diplomat nor lawyer but Lionel Curtis, an apostle and architect of empire reform. He had already drafted the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms introduced in India in 1919, designed as the first step towards home rule and perhaps even qualified dominion status once Indians acquired sufficient experience in disciplined governance. A cynical friend wrote: ‘he was anxious, by bringing India into a parliamentary system, to cast her for a chief role in his master plan … He it was who had the chief part in devising the constitution of the two Irelands … while his theories did much to advance popular causes both in India and in Ireland, there were many who forecast that his main political objectives –a united Empire – would never get off the ground’.7 The British aim in the Treaty negotiations, partition being already a reality, was to achieve an autonomous twenty-six county Ireland which over time would blossom within an empire reimagined by Curtis as a Commonwealth of near-equals. To an extent the British succeeded: the new Ireland and the United Kingdom concluded a treaty which more or less disposed of the Irish question in British politics for fifty years, and produced an unexpectedly robust working relationship which generally met the needs of both states. Ireland under Cosgrave proved a surprisingly ‘restless dominion’, to borrow from David Harkness, but not an impossibly difficult one (indeed, in 1933 Senator James Douglas appealed personally to Curtis to secure ‘financial support for the Party supporting Mr Cosgrave’, to ensure that ‘Ireland is to remain in the British Commonwealth’). Free movement of people was maintained without fuss or fanfare until the Second World War, and was quietly reinstated as soon as possible thereafter. Britain’s overseas empire remained a magnet for Irish people in civil, military, police and missionary roles. Even de Valera, seen in London in 1932 as an unpredictable anti-Christ, did, through the ingenious External Relations Act 1936, maintain what Britain regarded as the essential unity of the empire as he methodically dismantled obnoxious features of the 1921 Treaty. Irish religious denominations continued to colonise souls abroad, inside and outside the British empire. 2018 marked the centenary of the Maynooth Mission to China, now the Columban Missionaries, in which order two of my uncles made their lives. However noble their intentions, or those of the longer-established Dublin University Mission, we might reflect on the ethical implications of challenging entrenched and revered belief systems across Asia and Africa.

The trope of the Irish, whether soldiers, policemen, officials, or male and female Catholic and Protestant missionaries, as somehow magically capable of connecting with indigenous peoples runs through British writings. We don’t have to rely on Rudyard Kipling for examples: an English woman missionary, reflecting on north-eastern India in the 1930s, recalled ‘the Irishness of the Dublin University Mission … the Irish folk are far more like the Indians than the English, in that time means nothing to them, they sit there, accepting people as they are’.8 It is perhaps too easy for Irish people to congratulate ourselves as having a special empathy for the oppressed because of our own often oversimplistic narrative of colonisation, of exploitation, of famine and of a freedom paid for in blood.9 In Africa and Asia, if truth be told, the Irish may not have been all that much holier than the British ‘thou’.

7 Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910-1922 (London, 2013), pp. 200, 274 and 310; British Library, MSEurF203/78, ‘A Soldier in India’, p. 17 (Caroe papers). Sir Olaf Caroe (1892-1981) was a senior British official in India until independence. 8 Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, Oral History Collection 043a (Dr Ruth Hardy, 23 June 1983). 9 These are key themes in the state’s supporting video for Ireland’s campaign for a UN Security Council seat: see https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lBX9E01YCv4, released on 11 July 2020.