From Professor R. Dudley Edwards, Sir: Any proposal for a
final solution of the Irish conflict is unlikely to be realistic if it fails to take account of the failed final solutions of the past. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland sur vived the nineteenth century only by drastic modification of the final solution of 1800. The establishment of separate governments for Northern Ireland and for the rest of the island was drastically modified two years after the final solution of 1920. Each of these solutions failed because of inadequate atten tion to demands for change by minorities revolting at the failure to reform outmoded institutions. Each subsequent solution failed by un duly strengthening unreformed vested interests against constitutional reformers. Each failure dictated a new solution when violent protest took over after the minority lost confidence in frustrated constitut ional reformers. What is required now is a more flexible solution without too rigid a guarantee for existing interests, nor too drastic concessions to transient revolutionary forces.
Was it all the fault of the Irish? Since St Patrick's time, they have been trying to be less Irish and more European. St Patrick, however, was too much of an ignorant Briton to be approved by the more civilised Romanisers and the vested Gaelic interests which grew up in his wake had to be displaced by Henry II, with the blessings of the Pope, in the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1171.
Unfortunately, Henry's final solution, however, did not please the Normans who retorted by taking more lands from the Irish. The revolt of Henry's sons thereaf ter distracted him, and the Normans failed to conquer all Ireland, though they dug into part of the country. Richard II's final solution was to force the Irish, in their four provinces, to swear al legiance to the leading provincial Anglo-Irish nobles, as well as to the king. Unfortunately, the nobles in England then deposed him.
By the time Henry VIII got round to a final solution it was
necessary to get rid of the Pope. The conservative Irish thereafter were too slow in accepting the new anti-European policy and even the English provincial nobility in Ireland had to be forcibly subdued. James I produced a new final solution, the evil consequences of which, in encouraging beggarly Scots to settle in Northern Ireland, are still with us. Its failure, how
ever, was apparent in his son's time, and when he, Charles I, got around to reforming it, his English republican subjects felt obliged to remove his head. But Oliver Cromwell's final solution — to transport the popish Irish to hell or Connacht — was so unacceptable that the English royalists hanged his rotting corpse at Tyburn. King William of Orange's final solution secured his immortal memory in Northern Ireland. He left his Irish Protestant supporters the powers to break his treaty of Limerick with the Catholics in Ireland and enslave them, but he could not prevent his Catholic allies in Europe from supporting Irish exiles, who, in time, returned to Ireland in sufficient numbers to confirm their fellow-countrymen in allegiance to the European tradition and to Rome.
When the revolting American subjects of George III established their republic, inevitably, his Irish Protestant subjects rose in rebellion to demand a new, final and democratic solution which drove poor George so mad that Pitt had to promise never again to mention the Irish question. Now, Pitt's final solution was the anti-revolutionary union of 1800, but it entailed the permanent subsidising of three conflicting Christian creeds in Ireland, until their rivalries had made the union unworkable. There followed the Gladstone final solution which would have divorced the churches from the state and established 'home rule' for the Irish. But by this time the Irish Protestants were so mad as to regard self-government as ' Rome rule.' They felt driven to revolt once more, but fortunately the Protestant Kaiser saved them by making Germans more revolting to the British than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America. This enabled the Americans to influence the Lloyd George final solution of two Irelands, which permitted the fiction to be maintained that there were still Irish as well as British constituents in the United Kingdom. By this time the revolting Irish had become so confused as to establish a republic allegedly to conserve Gaelic traditions and freedom from Britain — and they fought the British to win it.
So Lloyd George drastically revised his final solution, arguing that Ireland could become a domi nion to be known as the Irish Free State, to which Northern Ireland might belong. The Irish republicans thereafter became divided between ' Free Staters' who ac cepted this and ' Sinn Feiners ' who did not. Northern Ireland was permitted to recruit Sir Henry Wilson, former chief of the Imperial General Staff, to organise resistance to the reunification with the south. On his assassination by the IRA the republicans, at England's order, were shelled out of Dublin and a civil war started which divided Irish republicans to our own day. Even the conversion of the Free State to a republic did not end it. The refusal of republican Ireland to become involved in the second world war seemed ample reason to avoid a final solution thereafter. Instead His Majesty's United Kingdom government, despite the disastrous Polish experience of the 'thirties, were persuaded to guarantee the perpetuation of a separate Northern Ireland until its parliament at Stormont wanted otherwise.
It now seems clear that the abolition of Stormont would provide an opportunity to attempt another final solution. Have the English forgotten 1066 and All That? The English, we are told in that notable historical work, were always trying to solve the Irish question. By the time they had found a solution, the Irish had changed the question. The Irish would certainly change the question if Stormont was abolished, even if they had to break up the European Economic Community, which they are now preparing to accept, in order to do it.
The abolition of Stormont might seem necessary to end a situation in which a local parliament within the United Kingdom has exploited the conventions of the British constitution to perpetuate the treatment of Irish nationalists as second-rate citizens, if not as traitors. The IRA depended on the backing of the fair-minded Irish community when the British refused to meet the leaders of the Irish majority returned at the 1918 general election. They lost that backing in the civil war within the Free State, and republicanism did not again win a nationalist majority until it had become constitional. The IRA in Northern Ireland today will continue to enjoy sympathy from Irish nationalists as long as Stormont is permitted to employ British forces and British conventions to prop up the unreformed vested interests which have ruled since 1920. The IRA will be obliged to change the question if the common interests of Britain and Ireland can be secured Spectator, January 1, 191; by better organised partners int'l European community.
Union with Great Britain did M
save Ireland from the catastroPY of the Great Famine in the 1 Union with the Common Marker( a matter of public concern in tilk islands which should no longer Pt/ mit the violent distraction of Is' IRA versus Orangeism to interfeh with the public transaction of mon British and Irish comma" efforts to contain the coming nomic union. If the British gover ment is to win out, it must el" manoeuvre the IRA by bringing,, parties to common council boaE c, and re-establishing the habit of"
Pi
stitutionai participation in e!' affairs. Stormont must be served and reformed so that Council of Ireland visualised 1920 can be set up to represent!211 Ireland. Such a council could r,11 with a council of Britain to , with the common issues which III( come before a council of EuroPt„
R. Dudley Edv'CZ 31 Castle Avenue, Clontarf, ' ' (i
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