Imagine a festive rally staged by the Daughters of the American Revolution–held annually on the seventeenth of October to commemorate the American defeat of the British at Saratoga in the year 1777–and featuring brass bands, colorful displays of the American flag, and thousands of paraders marching through Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and other Canadian cities where the memory still lingers about who fought whom for what in the American Revolution.
Or imagine–in a sadly much less far-fetched example–that you lived somewhere near a border between Serbs and Croats or Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and that you knew you and your family might today be menaced by someone whose parents had been killed by “your folk” during World War II (or whose grandparents to the sixth generation removed had been cast off their land by “your folk”).
If you can imagine both situations–the flaunting of partisan victory square in the face of the defeated or the threat of ethnic violence beclouding every day–and if you can put yourself in a frame of mind in which the effects of history really and truly matter, then you have come to Northern Ireland. Or at least you have come to what Northern Ireland has been for much of its population for much of the last four centuries.
As set out succinctly, though not for the first time, in Michael Hughes’s “Ireland Divided: The Roots of the Modern Irish Problem,” a helpful combination of interpretation and documents, the tension between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland (or “Protestant” and “Catholic” in a rough simplification) could not exist apart from an “obsession with history.” This obsession, as Hughes phrases it, has led to parallel, but antithetical, “myths by which each defines itself and its position regarding the other.” One of the myths goes like this:
The Nationalists believe that they are the heirs of the original inhabitants of Northern Ireland. … Even after the decline of the Irish language as a consequence of the Great Famine of the 1840s, the distinctiveness of this group did not disappear. The Roman Catholic religion replaced language as the most obvious badge of Irishness. A major element in the consciousness of this community has been … an idealized vision of Gaelic Christian culture, something pure and uncontaminated, long protected by the sea against the Romans, Dark Age barbarism, and the horrors of industrialization.
A contrasting myth has been constructed by the Unionists who trace their origin to Scottish settlements on the Antrim coast that were augmented dramatically by the “plantations” of Scottish and English settlers during the seventeenth century. In this myth, the settlers had come not merely to cement England’s control of Ireland but also to civilize the wild and dangerous native Irish. … These regard themselves as custodians of an idealized vision of the “British way of life” and British liberty, symbolized by the Crown and the Union between Britain and Northern Ireland, which they see as protecting them against destruction by an alien Catholic Irish state.
Hughes’s book offers a good introduction to a modest review of recent historical studies on Northern Ireland because it features a discussion of the historical revisionism that has overtaken myth-making as the dominant approach to Irish history by professional academics in the twentieth century. However vigorously the myths survive in other domains, for at least two generations most professional historians writing on Northern Irish subjects have been more concerned about discovering what actually happened in the past than with providing ideological inspiration for one side or the other in the contemporary struggle. And in the works of such scholars, one begins to measure the long reach of Northern Irish history:
* Origins. In 1155, Pope Adrian IV awards overlordship of Ireland to King Henry II of England and so establishes the relationship of imperial dependency between England and Ireland that survived for nearly 800 years.
* Middle Ages. English efforts to subdue the Irish are successful only in Dublin and the surrounding region–the Pale, that is, the zone in which English jurisdiction is established. To be “beyond the pale” thus carries ethnic, political, and religious as well as geographical significance.
* Plantation. Following more effective efforts by her grandfather (Henry VII) and father (Henry VIII) to promote English interests in Ireland, Elizabeth I from 1584 begins the “planting” of English and Scottish settlers throughout Ireland. In the reign of her successor, James I, these efforts are intensified, but also concentrated in the six easternmost counties of Ulster. The “flight of the Irish Earls” aids this process when in 1607 the leading Celtic chieftains in the North abandon their land and go into exile. (Ulster is the most northern of Ireland’s four provinces; Protestant settlement was strongest in counties Antrim and Down, which includes Belfast; and also very substantial in counties Armagh, Londonderry [or Derry], Fermanagh, and Tyrone. These are the six counties that now make up “Northern Ireland”; the other three counties of Ulster, with smaller Protestant populations, are part of the Republic of Ireland.)
* Massacre I. Taking advantage of confusion during England’s Civil War, Catholics in 1641 arise and slay approximately 2,000 Protestant settlers, with most of the deaths taking place in Ulster. Further thousands of Protestants are stripped of everything–including the clothes on their backs–and driven from their homes. Reports of this revolt reach horrific proportions in Protestant retellings.
* Massacre II. In the fall of 1649, the English Parliament sends an army to Ireland under Oliver Cromwell to subdue the supporters of King Charles I (those supporters include some Protestants and English as well as Catholics and Irish). At Drogheda, Cromwell offers the garrison a chance to surrender, but, when that offer is refused, he overwhelms the garrison and kills virtually all of the soldiers, all Catholic priests he can find, and quite a few civilians–a total of around 4,000 dead. A similar scenario is played out at Wexford. Reports of these battles reach horrific proportions in Catholic retellings.
* The Battle of the Boyne. In 1690, the deposed English king, James II, tries to stage a comeback for the English throne, from Ireland as his base. He is met in battle by King William III, whom Parliament had summoned as James’s replacement the year before. The decisive battle in this encounter is the defeat of James on July 1, 1690, at the Boyne River, not too far from Drogheda. (Because of changes in the calendar in the mideighteenth century, this event is later celebrated by Protestant Unionists on July 12.)
* Penal Laws. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Irish Parliament, which “represents” only the Anglican “ascendancy,” under the general oversight of the English king and Parliament, passes measures that strip Catholics of almost all civil, religious, and political rights. (These measures also affect non-Anglican Protestants.) Though never enforced systematically, the penal laws forbid Catholics to own arms, ban priests from the island, bar Catholics from all professions except medicine, withdraw the franchise, and in effect outlaw higher education for Catholics.
* Amelioration and Vigilantes. In the second half of the eighteenth century, several Relief Acts are passed in both English and Irish Parliaments that ease legal restrictions on Catholics. At the same time, levels of vigilante sectarian violence rise dramatically, especially in those parts of the North where Catholic and Protestant populations are roughly equal and where cloth manufacturing disrupts the older agricultural economy.
* Revolution. Inspired by the political revolutions in America and France, a corresponding movement arises in Ireland that seeks liberation from traditional hierarchical rule. The most visible manifestation of this spirit is the United Irishmen movement, which has some success at bringing together theologically liberal Protestants, theologically conservative Protestants, and Catholics in a political alliance against British rule. When, however, an armed revolution actually begins in 1798, it quickly degenerates in the South into sectarian slaughter (with Catholic peasants rising up against Protestant landlords). The British army and Ireland’s loyal militia brutally suppress the rebellion, with many times more fatalities (in only one summer of fighting) than had occurred in the six years of military action during the American Revolution.
* Union, Emancipation, and Home Rule. In the wake of the 1798 Rebellion, the Irish Parliament votes itself out of existence, and Ireland is incorporated into the United Kingdom (which already includes England, Scotland, and Wales). Immediately agitation begins to end legal restrictions on Catholics, which continues until Catholic Emancipation is won in 1829. By that time, however, agitation has begun for “home rule,” or the transformation of Ireland into a semi-autonomous dominion (as Canada would soon become). Throughout the nineteenth century, Home Rule is blocked by a coalition of English political conservatives, Ulster Protestants uneasy about absorption into a Catholic Ireland, and some elements of the older Anglican ascendancy.
* Revolt and Division. During and after World War I, agitation for home rule is transformed into violent revolt. During Easter week 1916, Irish patriots stage a rebellion in Dublin that Britain puts down, but not before the cause of Irish independence gains much ground. At the same time, Protestant agitation in the North grows ever more intense to maintain the tie with Britain. In 1920, an act of the British Parliament partitions Ireland into two home rule states–the six northern counties under Protestant domination, the rest of Ireland heavily Catholic. In 1922, Nationalists proclaim the creation of an Irish Free State. After brutal civil war in the South and much violence between Irish and British fighters (both military and guerrilla), the republic gains its independence. (In 1937 a new constitution is adopted that transforms the Irish Free State into Eire, or the Republic of Ireland.)
* The Troubles. In 1969 Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland initiate public protests against Protestant discrimination and what they perceive as the long-standing evils of British rule. These demonstrations, which begin in Derry, quickly spread to other parts of the province and soon are linked with terrorist campaigns, and then reprisal terrorism. In 1972, the British Parliament suspends Stormont, Northern Ireland’s parliament, and assumes direct control over Northern Irish affairs. This is the situation, with undulating levels of violence from paramilitaries and a massive British military presence, that prevails until the summer of 1994 and the start of the current cease-fire.
The books that try to push past myth-making to explain the complexities and significance of these events now range widely and deeply, from surveys such as R. F. Foster’s “The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland” to sharply focused monographs. Of multitudes of studies that treat circumstances since the partition in 1920, two are especially noteworthy. “Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983,” Oliver Rafferty’s general survey of Ulster Catholicism, details the extent to which the Catholic hierarchy and the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests have opposed the violence perpetrated, often in the name of Catholicism, by Nationalist extremists. And “Shaping a City: Belfast in the Late Twentieth Century,” Fred Boal’s wonderfully illustrated history, contains a treasure of insights on the settlement patterns that have made this city a focal point of sectarian tension. Of Boal’s many illuminating prints, charts, and maps, the most telling are those that show the steady growth of segregated housing patterns, from a situation in 1850 where about 50 percent of Belfast’s population lived on streets where 90 percent or more of the residents were Catholic (or Protestant) to the situation today where almost 90 percent of Belfast’s citizens live in such segregated districts.
Other especially notable volumes include fresh approaches to the role of women in the tangled history of Northern Ireland. The essays in “Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics, and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840- 1940,” edited by Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart, are important for showing how women sometimes abetted sectarian tension, but also how, especially in times of religious revival (whether Catholic or Protestant), intense religious experience could overwhelm, at least for short periods, preoccupation with sectarian differences.
The most illuminating series of recent historical works arises out of fresh attention to the last decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth. The conclusion conveyed by these books is that this period was the crucible from which Northern Ireland’s seemingly intractable Troubles emerged. A number of volumes are helpful on the reasons for increasing sectarian violence in the countryside among what today would be called the lower and lower-middle classes, especially David Miller’s “Peep O’Day Boys and “Defenders: Selected Documents on the County Armagh Disturbances, 1784-96.” Miller’s book excels at showing how and why Catholic Defenders and Protestant Peep O’Day Boys felt it was necessary to adopt guerrilla tactics in the years surrounding Britain’s response to the American and French Revolutions. What Miller details with special clarity is how thoroughly fear of the other religion led to specific local acts of vigilante terror, expulsion from homes, and contention over economic opportunities. Modern Catholic and Protestant sectarians who look upon violence as a noble option in defense of noble causes would do well to ponder the documents Miller presents, for they present a sordid struggle for power much more than a high-minded defense of lofty religious ideals.
The greatest concentration of outstanding recent writing, however, concerns the other major story of the late eighteenth century, which was the momentary alliance of some Protestants and a few Catholics in the United Irish movement against British rule. Protestants in the United States should have a special interest in this tale, for it reveals a situation with some parallels to the alliance between evangelical religion and republican politics that fueled the American Revolution. The dynamics of the United Irish movement–with connections to events in France, America, Italy, and elsewhere on the continent–have been depicted in two outstanding volumes by Marianne Elliott, in Nancy Curtin’s recent monograph, and in a wide-ranging symposium edited by David Dickson, Daire Keough, and Kevin Whelan.
One of the intriguing religious questions raised by these works is whether political liberalism–the desire for greater freedom vis-a-vis Britain–acted as a solvent for traditional theology. It is a fact that the influence of Tom Paine–as a religious as well as political radical–was strong among United Irishmen in the 1790s. And it is also true, as outlined especially in “A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen”–A. T. Q. Stewart’s sensitive study of the intellectual roots of the United Irish movement–that Irish political liberalism drew directly from the secular side of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Yet, at the same time, the religious liberalization at work among the United Irishmen is not the whole story, for, just as in America, there were also intensely biblical Protestants who thought that their conservative faith demanded a politics of republican liberation as well. The way in which such theologically conservative strands contributed to the anti-British, pro-reform movement of the 1790s is an important theme in Stewart’s book and also in Pieter Tesch’s contribution to the symposium on the United Irishmen.1 What is especially intriguing from an American angle is the fact that some of the Irish political radicals used the same kind of apocalyptic interpretation of Scripture that was so common among patriotic evangelical supporters of the new American nation. The Irishman who promoted such speculation most intensely was Thomas Russell, a tormented, unstable, but uncompromisingly biblical figure who is the subject of a judicious biography by Denis Carroll.
In the unrolling of events, however, the Rebellion of 1798 failed, and with that failure vanished both efforts at bridging the divide between Catholics and Protestants and links between Protestant evangelicalism and republican politics. To be sure, the lock-step alignment of Northern Protestants with militant anti-Catholicism, ardent Unionism, and strict political conservatism did take several decades to develop. But the failure of the Revolution in combination with a growing surge of Catholic self-assertion moved inexorably in the direction of hardened sectarian boundaries.
That process receives scrupulous, and scrupulously fair, treatment in Finlay Holmes’s history of Irish Presbyterianism. Its genesis among the Methodists and other evangelical Protestants is also illuminated with breadth of research and economy of interpretation in David Hempton and Myrtle Hill’s history of Ulster evangelicalism, as well as in Hempton’s forthcoming book on Methodism and popular religion in the British Isles. “Religion and Society in 19th-Century Ireland,” a substantial booklet by Sean Connolly, first published in 1985 but reprinted once again last year, provides a most helpful summary of religious-political events in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Connolly’s picture, several circumstances–a rising evangelical tide among Protestants, a revival of self-conscious Catholic devotion, and a new politicization of religion among both Protestants and Catholics–combined to fix sectarian antagonism on all parties in the North.
This whirlwind tour of recent historical writing is hardly sufficient to indicate the depth of sectarian feeling that four centuries of religiously charged animosity and two centuries of hardened religious-political battle lines communicate to the present situation in Northern Ireland. But it is enough to suggest why, with such a past, it is a temptation to despair for the future, despite the apparent opportunities created by the present cease-fire.
In the current situation, voices of realism must contend with voices of hope. One of the most realistic of such voices during the last half-century has been Conor Cruise O’Brien, a peripatetic journalist, diplomat, historian, politician, and savant. As described nicely in Donald Akenson’s recent biography (and illustrated in Akenson’s carefully chosen anthology of selections from O’Brien’s shorter writings), O’Brien has offended the Roman Catholic church by criticizing its influence over the Irish Republic, the IRA by denouncing its violence in the North, and serious believers both Catholic and Protestant by abandoning religious solutions to sectarian strife. Such a range of offense suggests that O’Brien’s relentless realism is close to the mark. He seems to be reminding all concerned that it is not so simple to deny what, over the centuries, you have become.
Next to such realism, hope may seem insubstantial. But believers in the Prince of Peace cannot afford to let go of hope entirely. The path of hope may be hard to discern in Northern Ireland, but it is there–in occasional acts of charity across the sectarian divide and in moments when leaders urge reconciliation upon their followers. Such moments appear regularly, if also somewhat sparsely, in the books cited in this essay. As an example, I was pleasantly startled to read in Rafferty’s history of Ulster Catholicism that in 1838 Protestants in the village of Roslea, County Fermanagh, actually assisted their Catholic neighbors in constructing a bell tower for the Catholic parish church of Saint Tiernagh; this magnanimous occasion took place only 15 years before my great-grandfather and his family, who were serious Methodists, migrated from Roslea to the United States.
Hope has also been sustained by voices as memorable in their way as Conor Cruise O’Brien is in his. In the fall of 1979, a notable visitor stepped up alongside the courageous Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who appeal for reconciliation. In his first visit to Ireland as head of the Catholic church, Pope John Paul II chose Drogheda as the site of the major address of his trip–Drogheda, where 330 years earlier (almost to the very day) Oliver Cromwell’s troops had massacred the town’s garrison; Drogheda, near where 289 years before William, Prince of Orange and King of England, had defeated the deposed Catholic James II. At this place, and (if memory of television coverage serves) turning north to face the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the pope said: “[Violence is] unacceptable as a solution to problems. … Violence is a lie, [it] destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings. … To those engaged in violence, I appeal to you in language of passionate pleading. On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the days of peace.”
Even if–as reported by Oliver Rafferty–the IRA soon rejected the pope’s appeal, and even if buses and trains carrying Catholics from Northern Ireland to hear the pope at Drogheda were stoned in the course of their journey by Protestant toughs, the pope’s words still pointed to a way of hope. If there ever is to be a new Northern Ireland of peace, the way is going to lead not around but–in repentance and faith–through such places as Drogheda.
1. Both of these works, in turn, draw on the most detailed studies showing the links between conservative Protestant theology and radical political dissent in the years before the 1798 Rebellion: D. W. Miller, “Presbyterianism and ‘Modernization’ in Ulster,” Past and Present 80 (1978), pp. 66-90; and A. T. Q. Stewart, “The Transformation of Irish Presbyterianism in the North of Ireland, 1792-1825” (master’s thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1956).
Books mentioned in this essay
Donald Harman Akenson, “Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien” (Cornell University Press, 573 pp.; $39.95, 1994).
Frederick W. Boal, “Shaping a City: Belfast in the Late Twentieth Century” (Institute of Irish Studies, 127 pp.; 10, paper, 1995).
Denis Carroll, “The Man from God Knows Where: Thomas Russell, 1767-1803” (Dublin: Columba Press, 256 pp.; 9.99, paper, 1995).
Sean Connolly, “Religion and Society in 19th-Century Ireland” (Dublin: Dundalgon, 69 pp.; 4.50, paper, reprinted 1994).
Nancy J. Curtin, “The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798” (Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 317 pp.; $52, 1994).
David Dickson, Daire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds., “The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion” (Dublin: Lilliput, 378 pp.; 15, paper, 1993).
Marianne Elliott, “Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France” (Yale University Press, 411 pp.; $22, paper, 1982).
Marianne Elliott, “Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence” (Yale University Press, 492 pp.; $22, paper, 1989).
R. F. Foster, “The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland” (Oxford University Press, 382 pp.; $45, 1989).
David Hempton, “The Religion of the People: Studies in Methodism and Popular Religion, 1750-1900” (Routledge, forthcoming).
David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, “Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740-1890” (Routledge, 272 pp.; $74.95, 1992).
Finlay Holmes, “Our Irish Presbyterian Heritage” (Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 187 pp.; 3.95, paper, 1985).
Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart, eds., “Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics, and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840-1940” (Institute of Irish Studies, 213 pp.; 6.50, paper, 1994).
Michael Hughes, “Ireland Divided: The Roots of the Modern Irish Problem” (St. Martin’s Press, 143 pp.; $16.95, paper, 1994).
David W. Miller, ed., “Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders: Selected Documents on the County Armagh Disturbances, 1784-96” (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 155 pp.; 6, paper, 1990).
Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Conor: An Anthology.” Selected by Donald Harman Akenson (Cornell University Press, 356 pp.; $39.95, 1994).
Oliver P. Rafferty, “Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983” (University of South Carolina Press, 306 pp.; $39.95, 1994).
A. T. Q. Stewart, “A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen” (Faber & Faber, 225 pp.; $29.95, 1993).
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
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