The lessons of history

F. S. L. Lyons

Dublin 'All a poet can do today is warn.' Wilfred Owen's reflection on the pity of war applies with equal force to the Irish historian asked to comment on the latest phase of his country's unending troubles. To warn — but perhaps also to try to restore a sense of perspective. It has been said that Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget. Alas, Irishmen show no sign of forgetting one iota of their past, while Englishmen understandably find it hard to remember something they never knew in the first place. Writing primarily for an English audience, I therefore want both to stress the continuity of Irish history and to suggest that it is not so unchanging as it often seems.

. Continuity has to be stressed because both nationalist and unionist attitudes are rooted in events which, though centuries old, still affect the present. This is, of course, most obvious in Northern Ireland, where the profound sense of insecurity that affects the Protestant community goes back to their 17th century origins as a too thinly spread colonising class. Their early history was lurid with massacres and sieges, and their hard-won victory over the native and Catholic population could only be maintained by a ruthless use of whatever weapons lay to hand: brute force or the threat of it at ohe stage, civil, political and economic discrimination until recently. The necessity to dominate sprang ultimately from fear — fear of revenge should those who had been so long at the bottom rise to the top, fear of losing both power and identity should their precarious ascendancy be toppled.

Catholics have suffered no less from a sense of insecurity, also derived from the 17th century. The absence of a firm economic base, the prescription (for a time) of their religion and their virtual exclusion from political life condemned them to inferiority. This was just bearable so long as the island was a unity and they could feel themselves part of a larger community whose status was improving during the 19th century, but with partition and the ensuing 50 years of one-party government their alienation was complete.

That Protestant and Catholic tensions should be expressed in religious terms baffles British secularism and puzzles even Irish historians. No doubt the religious label often merely covers fundamental economic and political divisions within the society, but it also has its own reality. Just as the Catholic, isolated in the Six Counties, identifies strongly with the culture of his co-religionists in the south, so the Ulster Protestant fears the Catholicism of the majority of Irishmen as a threat to social life and intellectual freedom.

That is why it is impossible, as British governments have come to realise, to discuss Northern Ireland without reference to the Irish Republic. Though northern Unionist politicians may denounce it as a foreign country with which they have nothing to do, the realities of history and geography are hard to gainsay. The legacy of history in the south, however, has much to do with the relationship with the north. Irish nationalism has been shaped or rather distorted, by an obsession with England as, in Wolfe Tone's words, 'the never-failing source of all our ills'. To end the English connection by armed rebellion and establish an all-Ireland republic became, from the end of the 18th century onwards, the goal of militant nationalism, as it is still the motive force of the Provisional IRA.'

But precisely because the republican demand led so often to armed insurrection it is easy to forget that only once — during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21 — did it have anything like a democratic suffrage behind it. The support of most Irishmen most of the time has been given to a different nationalist tradition which was peaceful, constitutional and gradualist. It was also more effective. For if republicanism has given us most of our martyrs and nearly all our rhetoric, constitutionalism has given us what we live by — parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, an uncorrupted civil service and an economic base (however shaky it may be at the moment) good enough to yield most citizens a reasonable living. Even the achievement by the. south of republican status itself came, ironically enough, by agreement and not by violence.

It is essential to realise that while for most nationalists the creation of a united Ireland seems a natural aspiration, the use of violence to bring it about has been comprehensively repudiated by all save the militant minority. That minority is not, indeed, insignificant. A year or so ago it was reckoned at about 20 per cent in terms of broad sympathy (though much less in terms of active participation): nevertheless, though it has certainly been increased by the hunger-strike campaign, it still remains a minority.

Outsiders, understandably enough, find it difficult to distinguish between the verbal republicanism in which politicians ritualistically indulge and the militant republicanism which speaks out of the barrel of a gun. But even the ritual ranting had two important, if negative, consequences. First, being directed towards England, 'the neverfailing source' etc, it conveniently allowed the politicians to ,forget that the real source of this particular ill was the determination of a million Ulster Protestants not to be governed from Dublin. Secondly, it masked the fact that nothing was actually being done to establish an all-Ireland republic. Southern politicians ingeniously reversed Gambetta's dictum about the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, 'Think of it always, speak of it never'. They talked about the North incessantly, but they hardly ever gave it constructive thought.

This, however, appears to be changing. Not only do the major political parties in the Republic repudiate violence, but they now recognise that if unification ever comes it must come by consent. That has two important implications. One is that it will take decades, perhaps generations, since not only has the North to be persuaded, but the South has also to be psychologically prepared, which at the moment it manifest ly is not. The other is that the road to Dublin will have to be made much more attractive to northern Protestants. Economically, it is true, this may already have begun to happen. A case can be made that the Republic's economy — were it to be properly handled for a change — is, or potentially could be, more buoyant than that of Northern Ireland, a reversal of the tradftional situation that has hardly yet been understood north of the border.

In other respects, though, the Republic is not very inviting to the lost sheep it seems to attract. For although the special position of the Roman Catholic Church guaranteed in the Constitution was deleted some years back, the Constitution still largely reflects Catholic values. Moreover, the fact that in denominationally mixed marriages the Roman Catholic authorities still demand that children should be brought up in that faith confirms the worst fears of northern Protestants. On the other hand, the realisation that half the population is now under 25 suggests that the pace of change will quicken. Already, indeed, there has been a loosening of the old rigidities and taboos and Irish society today, however conservative it may seem from outside, is in fact being rapidly transformed. The significance of these developtnents has, like much else, been obscured by the impact of the hunger-strikes which, for historical reasons, is very great in Ireland. Yet, in the cold light of hindsight, the hunger-strikes may yet come to be regarded as largely irrelevant to the main question. They are a continuation of the war between the Provisionals and the British, but they contribute nothing to a solution of the problem of Northern Ireland. Or rather, their contribution has been negative, to make that problem more insoluble, by intensifying the 'polarisation' which the media proclaim so repetitively. Certainly, it would be idle to deny that they have strengthened extremism in both the Catholic and Protestant camps, and that by heightening the emotional tension they have affected the stability of north and south.

But it is easy to be hypnotised by the here and now and to forget that Irish violence tends to be cyclical. Between the peaks there are periods when constructive movement is possible. Historians will probably point to the relatively quiet years before the hunger-strikes as a wasted opportunity. What has now to be done is to ensure that the years after the hungerstrikes are not similarly wasted. In effect this means that if the British Government continues to hold firm as it surely must against anything that could remotely be construed as the concession of political status to terrorists, it is the more incumbent upon it to prepare the way for political movement after the episode is over, and to show a greater will to maintain its impetus than was the case in the aftermath of Sunningdale. ,‘ While it is'extremely difficult to see what form the movement might take it is not yet necessary to be entirely pessimistic. It is, after all, something to the good that the rapprochement between Britain and the Republic has so far survived the strain put upon it by the hunger-strikes. While it is unlikely that the outcome of the Anglo-Irish talks will be as dramatic as some Irish observers anticipate, their true significance is the recognition by Britain that the northern problem is not wholly internal to the United Kingdom, but something with which the Republic has a legitimate concern. And since the trend in the Republic is to accept that unification can only come through consent, the southern impact on the problem in the future might reasonably be expected to be more constructive than hitherto.

It is important also that over the past dozen years moderate Catholic nationalism has become a force of considerable, if fluctuating, influence in the North. It has already shown its willingness to work within a Northern Ireland context, provided always that the civil rights of Catholics are respected and that they can play the political role to which their numbers entitle them. We are told that British inflexibility is in danger of 'losing' this immediate Catholic population to the extremists, and the election of the late Bobby Sands is cited as an instance. But, as the local election results recently showed, the SDLP (the embodiment of this moderate Catholic nationalism) held its ground against all odds. Battered 'and bloody it may be, but it still has an essential role — if it can find a stage on which to play it.

Against all this there stands, as always, the rocklike intransigence of Ulster Union ism. But it too has been a casualty of the 12-year crisis. No longer the monolith (in reality it was always a coalition) it was once held to be, its fragmentation has weakened it and intensified its extremism. Its future is deeply uncertain. If the worst were to happen — say a precipitate British withdraw al from the province — the politicians might give way to, or make common cause with, the para-militaries, in which case the possi bility of civil war could not be ruled out. But for the moment it would seem that a regrouping under Mr Paisley is taking place. Obviously, this will make a negotiated settlement more difficult, but it will also serve to emphasise the point made earlier in this article, that the insecurity of the Northern Protestant lies at the heart of the problem. Mr Paisley may play upon the fears generated by the insecurity and it is customary to vilify him for doing so. But the insecurity is real and he articulates it with absolute conviction. It has to be reckoned with, and no settlement will be possible that does not attempt to meet it by the most emphatic restatement of the guarantee that Northern Ireland will not be compelled to leave the United Kingdom unless a majority of her people vote to do so.

Even with that, will Unionist opposition make a settlement impossible? So it has proved hitherto, so it may prove in the future. Where political scientists recoil baffled, the historian would be foolish to rush in. But he may end with three observations, First, while it is obvious that no settlement stands any hope of success unless it recognises the depth of the division between the communities in Northern Ireland, matters have reached such a pass that the Government, having done its utmost to safeguard each community, must steel itself to impose a settlement whatever resistance it may meet. Second, reconciliation within Northern Ireland must surely take priority over the question of all-Ireland unification which indeed can scarcely be feasible until reconciliation has been achieved, itself a process which will require a British presence in, and a British contribution to, Northern Ireland, perhaps for many years. Finally, although Irish violence may be cyclical, there is nothing to indicate that we have yet reached the peak of the present phase. On the contrary, unless firmness towards ter rorism is accompanied by much more political imagination than we have seen so far, we could have violence beside which the present campaign would fade into insignificance.

All a historian can do today is warn . . .