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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5134 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

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Conor Cruise O'Brien's States of Ireland (I might have mentioned this book in response before, it's a short book but I took a break and got distracted).

It was first published in 1972, just as the Troubles were getting out of hand, and while it therefore lacks hindsight on some things the foreword shows such a good grasp on the fundamental issues that I'm expecting it to be very good (and I haven't been disappointed by the first few chapters). O'Brien was an Irish Labour politician and as far as I can tell also a Marxist, but so far that hasn't lead him to saying anything I disagree with. He criticises Marxist analysts for ignoring the role religion and ethnicity play in the conflict and he even picks apart socialist and hero of the 1916 Rising James Connolly's Labour in Irish History for being unacceptably vague on where the Protestant worker who rejected Irish nationalism stood in his analysis of class conflict (Connolly disappointed many contemporary Marxists by becoming more nationalist as time went on). Though O'Brien would later become a unionist, it's obvious that in this book he fits comfortably in neither the nationalist nor unionist camp. Neither side would be entirely happy with this summary of the situation in the foreword but I think it's a very perceptive one:

Specifically: The population of Northern Ireland consists of about two-thirds Protestants to one-third Catholics. But Protestant fear and suspicion of Catholics in Northern Ireland do not correspond to these proportions, but to the proportions between Catholic and Protestant in the entire island of Ireland, in which Protestants are outnumbered by Catholics by more than three to one. And Catholics in Northern Ireland are also strongly conscious of this proportion, and of rights which they believe it to imply.

Also: The manner in which the island is divided - with the "Protestant' area of Northern Ireland including cities, towns and counties with Catholic majorities, while the 'Catholic' republic includes no city, town or county with a Protestant majority - does not reflect a 'natural' balance between the communities that make up the population of Ireland; it reflects the different historical relations between these communities and the people of Great Britain. The British Government of 1920 did not create – nor does the British Government today artificially preserve – the relations between the two communities in Ireland which resulted in the partition of the island, but when partition became inevitable, the British Government of 1920 ensured that the benefits of all doubts went to one community: the Protestant community descended from settlers from Britain.

Oddly enough he spends a few chapters analysing the history of Ireland through his own family history, but given that his was an influential family and he himself had some influence on the later development of the situation (as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs he was responsible for banning spokespersons for Sinn Féin from appearing on the national broadcaster RTÉ) this doesn't seem out of place. I read this excerpt a few weeks ago and it struck me today as something worth going back to, in one short account from one person's family history nearly all of the conflicting loyalties of early 20th century Ireland are touched upon:

Tom Kettle came back to Dublin, on leave from the Western front, in the early summer of 1916. He went to the house of his sister-in-law, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, where his daughter Betty was playing with her cousin Owen. When the children saw him coming they ran away. He was in uniform.

Men in that same uniform had ransacked that house in April. They had been looking – unsuccessfully – for evidence, which could be used to justify the murder by firing-squad in Portobello Barracks, Dublin, of Tom Kettle's brother-in-law Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. Skeffington, as a pacifist, and also as a socialist and a nationalist, had opposed the war, and his anti-recruiting activities had naturally made him unpopular with the military authorities. He was picked up as a hostage and then shot on the orders of an officer named Bowen-Colthurst. He had earlier witnessed a murder committed by the same officer, and had said he would denounce the murder. Bowen-Colthurst was found 'guilty but insane', and released after some months in Broadmoor. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington went to America, to tell the story of her husband's death, and to rouse Irish-American opinion against America's entry into the war as England's ally. . . The men who, like Redmond and Kettle, had favoured 'fighting for England' began to look like traitors, or at best dupes. Tom Kettle was killed at Guinchy in the autumn of 1916. If he had come back he would have been rejected, for essentially the same reason that made his daughter run away: his uniform.

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