Any advance on four?
John Biggs-Davison
Culture and Anarchy In Ireland 18901939 F.S.L. Lyons (Oxford £6.95) Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690-1800 Ed. Thomas Bartlett and D.W. Hayton (Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast £8. £4) Neighbours Conor Cruise O'Brien (Faber £2.95) A main theme of Professor Lyons is the 'essential unity of Ireland' but a unity very much in diversity. The political differences of today reflect a variety of ways of life and a collision of cultures — amounting to 'anarchy' in the sense of the title he gave his Ford Lectures at Oxford in 1978.
Although it signifies nothing to those terrible simplifiers who seek, in contempt of their countrymen and of Christianity, to impose by force their passionate thesis, Professor Lyons discerns in the island of Ireland, which only foreigners united, 'at least four cultures'. They are the Gaelic, the English, the Anglo-Irish (Brendan Behan's 'Horse Protestants', with some Catholics too) and the Protestants of Ulster. The lecturer was prepared to pick out more categories than four; but he was principally concerned with a conflict of cultural traditions. Which is not to be confused, as it often still is, at least on this side of the water, by those other terrible simplifiers of the 'media'' with a conflict of religions.
The distinct identity of Ulstermen predates the Protestant Reformation. You may see Scotland from Antrim and across the narrow intervening water they moved and warred back and forth. The Lordship of the Macdonnells linked Gaelic Scotland with Gaelic Ireland. Under James I and VI 'a new and ultimately far more powerful strain was added to the Scottish element' and concentrated upon eastern Ulster.
Outside that peculiar part of the island of Ireland the love and the hate was for England rather than for Great Britain, which seemed an abstraction. The modern Republic is more English than is Northern Ireland. English culture has been a unifying influence. The Catholic Church, for whose reform and assimilation the English Pope launched the Anglo-Norman conquest, was, in cultural terms, both a unifying and an Anglicising influence.
Industrial and commercial Ulster and the Orange Order opposed the Parliamentary Union. The Parliament in Dublin was completely Protestant while the later 'Protestant Parliament' at Stormont was not wholly so. Contrariwise, the Catholic bishops of Ireland welcomed Pitt's policy, which was intended to frustrate the designs on Ireland of those who were persecuting the Gallican Church. The hierarchy did not foresee the souring broken pledge of Catholic emancipation.
Spanish counter-Reformers, French kings and revolutionaries, Hohenzollern and Hitler, Bolsheviks, old and new, have aimed at England through Ireland and found allies there. From Penal Era and Golden Age I single out — though the entire selection is of scholarly merit Marianne Elliott's essay on 'Irish Republicanism in England'. It demonstrates the threat of revolutionary and Bonapartist France to both kingdoms. Napoleon said that he should not have gone to Egypt but to Ireland. There were the United .Irishmen and the United Britons. Wolfe Tone said in 1791 that he knew no single Roman Catholic. He sneered at 'Poor Pat' and his priests. He .rejoiced at the Pope's discomfiture — and Gaelic-speaking Catholic militiamen contributed to his. Yet Pearse in 1913 pronounced the grave at Bodenstown, where the rosary is said, as holier 'even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down'. For 'Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us . .' Tone detested the English whom Pearse held to be a race inferior to the Gael, morally, intellectually and in their 'mongrel' language. The blood sacrifice of 1798 and that of 1916 was nothing Christian and there is a whiff of pagan fascism in Pearse's cult of death. This glorification of massacre was shared with Connolly who , saw redemption in the shedding of blood.
Pearse did not, however, share Connolly's -socialism. The modern republican movement veers between that and a nationalism that claims to be Catholic. Long before we heard of 'liberation theology' and priests took arms in Latin America, Irish revolutionaries were confounding Catholicism with Marxism, as their ancestors in revolt had drawn help and ideology from the Jacobins. An extreme example, Aodh de Blocam who, like Pearse, spurned the English language and culture, wrote of Lenin and Trotsky as waging, along with Labour, the Gaelic revivalists and the republicans of Ireland, 'the warfare of the Christian States against the Gates of Hell'. Shades of the militant godless! The Provos claim to champion oppressed Catholics; yet anti-clericalism and admiration of the Marxist liberators in the Third World is not confined to the Marxist Officials.
Conservative of tradition and order, the Church slowed down the separatist movement. The Union, after all, was a means to the revival in John Bull's main island and in his possessions oversea of the evangelising mission that, in Professor Lyons's words had 'laid much of Europe in its debt'. One might say that what the Roman Empire was to St Peter and St Paul the British Empire was to the Catholic Missions. So not only the Anglo-Irish saw advantage in the Union. Nationalists too found careers in the Services and the Empire. Dr O'Brien cites a survey of Father MacGreil as appearing to show that modern Dubliners, despite all the republican rhetoric, 'prefer . . . to identify themselves with the imperialist rather than with the fellow victims of imperialism'. Casement bit the feeding imperial hand; but Kettle died on the Somme. What the Church came to dislike about England was socialism and syndicalism and the 'cloaca maxima' — a phrase Professor Lyons quotes from a 1913 issue of the Catholic Bulletin to describe what is now termed permissiveness.
According to a poll analysed by Dr O'Brien, the Southern Irish in general prefer the English to other foreigners, although a certain minority hate them bitterly. He also distinguishes between the very different entities in these islands and their attitudes one to the other. He accepts British direct rule in the North and puts forward the idea of a Consultative Assembly, which is neither new nor particularly hopeful. What emerges from these lucid lectures is that an inevitable partition desired by a majority in the North — by no means all Protestant — is decreasingly desired by the South, least of all perhaps by the rulers of the Republic.
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