The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (13 page)

Yet eighteenth-century Ireland seemed a country finally beginning to emerge into prosperity. The English landowners built lavish country houses. Dublin was a major and bustling European city. Irish writers (Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinley Sheridan) and politicians (Edmund Burke, Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington) were of the highest caliber. In some ways, the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland should not have been surprising. As Lord Macaulay noted of Ireland's history,

“To this day,” Macaulay noted, “a more than Spartan haughtiness alloys the many noble qualities which characterize the children of the victors, while a Helot feeling, compounded of awe and hatred, is but too often discernible in the children of the vanquished.”
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Such was the state of Ireland,
though of course on the surface normal life carried on, and relations between the Spartan English and the Helot Irish could be cordial enough, though the imperial English—who would govern races as diverse as the Maoris and the Zulus, the Pathans and the Burmese—would always remain fundamentally baffled by the Irish in a way they were not by more exotic peoples.

The Anglo-Irish ruling class was so successful that it soon began bruiting about the idea that it deserved more of a hand in governing, even perhaps an independent Ireland. Indeed, simultaneous with the American War for Independence, the Protestant Irishman Henry Grattan led a movement for free trade and an independent Irish legislature. It is, perhaps, an irony of Irish history that many of the leading calls for Irish independence in the eighteenth and nineteenth century came from Protestants, and that in the twentieth century many of the agitators for Irish independence were half English or at least only half Irish (including Eamon de Valera, the dominant political figure of the Irish republic who was born in New York City to an Irish mother and a Spanish-Cuban father).

Indeed, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland (if not all its priests) was almost always on the side of maintaining the Union with England after Parliament began repealing the penal laws against Catholics in the late eighteenth century. As a supranational institution, the Church distrusts nationalism, even Irish nationalism; and the Church condemns secret societies, especially those prone to violence, which meant that, for instance, in the twentieth century, members of the Irish Republican Army were held to be excommunicated. Moreover, since its foundation in 1795, the British government had provided a generous subsidy to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, and Catholic seminarians took an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. And it did not go unnoticed that so many independence
movements were led by Protestants, which made the Catholic hierarchy suspect some devilish heresy was afoot.

The evocatively named Wolfe Tone gave Catholic bishops plenty of reason for pause, despite his pleas for Catholic toleration. He was an Enlightenment radical, which meant, among other things, that he was a Protestant who had imbibed heavy doses of agnosticism; one of his allies, and rivals, was the equally wonderfully named Napper Tandy. Tone led the Presbyterian-dominated United Irishmen, meant to unite Protestant Dissenters and Irish Catholics against England. The French Revolution made Francophiles of Tone and Tandy, and Tone was actually commissioned in Napoleon's army. He returned to Ireland to lead an uprising with the help of the French in 1796 and again in 1798. Both were miserable failures, and after the latter, he was captured. Threatened with hanging, he died of self-inflicted wounds in prison.

These rebellions—however easily stifled—were a reminder that Ireland remained a possible springboard for an invasion of Britain, then embroiled in its long war against Napoleonic France. The logical solution was to hug Ireland closer to the bosom of Britannia, and in 1800, Ireland was integrated fully into the Parliament at Westminster with the Act of Union (effective 1 January 1801). The Union with Scotland (1707) had been a success, and it was hoped union with Ireland would end that unhappy country's endless turmoil. Of course it did not. At first Catholics greeted the Union as they had greeted the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—with hope, for the Irish people, despite their contumacious cussedness, are naturally conservative, and peace and prosperity, such as England might offer, would have been a refreshing change. But they soon found themselves swept up by a charismatic leader who spoke for Catholic emancipation and whose goal was dissolving the Union while keeping Ireland under the Crown in a sort of self-governing commonwealth status. This was the patrician Catholic Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), a man
naturally conservative by his aristocratic birth and political inclination, who became a champion of Irish reform. It was he who created the populist support within Ireland that led the Tory government of the Duke of Wellington (Anglo-Irish himself) to grant toleration to Irish Catholics in the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, allowing them to vote and serve in Parliament.

Though Ireland remained ever turbulent, there were certainly hopeful signs in the prosperity of Ulster and the removal of the penal acts against Catholics. But all this was put at hazard by the Irish potato famine (1845–49), which Irish farmers could not overcome and which British relief efforts could not alleviate to anywhere near a sufficient degree. It is clear, despite pernicious mythmaking to the contrary (mythmaking enshrined in law by the state of New York, which requires that the Irish potato famine be—outrageously—compared to “genocide, slavery, and the Holocaust”
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) that there was no intentional effort to starve the Irish or inflict genocide on Ireland. There was, however, a misguided sense among some members of the British government that relief efforts that violated laissez-faire would only make matters worse, and it was hard for the British government to comprehend the full extent of the calamity.

The government of Sir Robert Peel responded to the potato blight with the lifting of the Corn Laws—which protected British farmers from free trade and thus kept prices artificially high. Peel's assumption was that free trade would help lift the Irish economy and provide jobs for the poor tenant farmers squeezed unto death between the demands of their landlords and the failed crop. When famine propagandists talk about starving Ireland exporting food to England, this is what they mean—Ireland did indeed export food to Britain, but the money earned from the exports was supposed to create Irish jobs. However misguided the policy, it was meant to help the Irish, and it was so unpopular with the agricultural lobby in England that the Peel government fell.

Along with the Corn Laws (1846), the Navigation Laws were repealed (1847), allowing relief supplies from other nations to go directly to Ireland rather than first being transferred to British ships. In addition, the Peel government imported corn from America specifically to feed the hungry Irish—though the Irish didn't know what to do with the corn, as it required a relatively complicated process to make it edible—and set up a vast, if mismanaged, system of poor relief, which the successor government of Lord John Russell developed into subsidized government works projects that failed to achieve their aims.

The botched response to the famine, when Britain prided itself on bringing good government to Ireland, could only engender bitterness in the Irish who suffered horribly—not only from famine, but from a concurrent outbreak of cholera. There were numerous private charities—endorsed by the Queen—devoted to famine relief, but even these caused resentment; starving Catholic Irishmen did not like having Protestant pamphlets foisted on them with their soup.

There is no telling with certainty how many died, though we know that poorer areas suffered most, and that Ireland's population fell by about two million people between 1845 and 1851. More than half this number was made up of emigrants, many of whom left for America—an exodus that would continue in startling numbers over the next half century. In 1846, Ireland's population was about eight million people. In 1901, it was about four million. There were some, it is true, who took a Malthusian view—that the famine was the inevitable result of Irish overpopulation, or the inevitable result of a hapless, improvident people. But there were many others in England who considered the Irish famine a problem that should have been dealt with by the wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners; to their mind it was the Protestant Ascendancy's failure, not England's. It was nevertheless a catastrophe for the Irish, and a direct repudiation of the advertised benefits of British rule.

The former Tory turned Liberal, William Ewart Gladstone (prime minister 1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94) said before his first premiership, “My mission is to pacify Ireland.”
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That, needless to say, appeared a Herculean task, but the great tree feller and prostitute reformer took it upon himself with the vigor of a true Victorian. In 1868 he repealed the article of the Act of Union that made the Anglican Church of Ireland the established church over a largely Catholic people, and he made some attempts at supporting Irish tenant farmers. But the real driver of events in Ireland was the Protestant Irishman Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), whose Protestant Ascendancy ancestors had opposed the Union. Parnell led Ireland's Home Rule party and was quite content to make common cause with the murderous Fenians, precursors (along with the Irish Republican Brotherhood) of the Irish Republican Army. He was, however, disgraced by an adulterous affair. His own party divided over the scandal, just as Gladstone's Liberal Party divided over home rule, and Parnell's efforts for an independent Ireland collapsed. He remains a tragic hero to some Irish nationalists (but not the Catholic Church), and also something of a political enigma (not unusual in Ireland): a radical who considered his natural allies to be the Conservatives.

In Presbyterian Ulster, English talk of Irish home rule was seen as treason, consigning the province to the Catholic South. Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's father, taught the Tories “to play the Orange Card” against home rule, to stand fast for the Union, and to rouse the crowds with the threat that, if home rule came to Ireland, “Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right”
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—and it very nearly happened. Dependent on Irish votes in Parliament, the Liberals passed a Home Rule bill in 1914. But the Ulstermen, led by the distinguished barrister and Member of Parliament Sir Edward Carson, had already raised an Ulster Volunteer Force of more than one hundred thousand men in 1912, and Irish-born or Ulster-sympathizing officers in the British army were preparing to defend Ulster against its absorption into an Irish parliament (where it was doomed to permanent minority status). Gun-running to both the Ulster and the nationalist Irish Volunteers proceeded apace. Ireland came very close not only to civil war between North and South but a war that would have divided the British army between Ulster loyalist officers and those willing to coerce Northern Ireland. (As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill was prepared to use the Royal Navy to enforce home rule.)

It is somehow fitting that this pending catastrophe in Ireland was averted by the holocaust of the First World War, which deferred the enactment of
home rule and diverted the belligerent energies of the Ulster Volunteer Force and most of the Irish Volunteers (save those in the nationalist Irish Brotherhood) to fighting against the aggressive designs of the Central Powers that put the rights of small countries like Belgium at forfeit. The Irish Volunteers were treated to a speech by the Irish member of Parliament, John Redmond, who was a truly remarkable man. From a distinguished Irish family, of mixed Protestant and Catholic heritage (he was himself a Jesuit-educated Catholic), Redmond was a moderate nationalist and advocate for home rule, but also a liberal imperialist who, in his own words, thought that Ireland's voice should be heard in “the councils of an empire which the genius and valour of her sons have done so much to build up and of which she is to remain.”
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He admonished the Irish Volunteers headed to the front to “account yourselves as men, not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the firing line extends, in defense of right, of freedom, and of religion,” which he believed were truly at stake in the Great War in which Ireland was duty-bound to take part.
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Redmond's goal was to lead the home rule cause to “that brighter day when the grant of full self-government would reveal to Britain the open secret of making Ireland her friend and helpmate, the brightest jewel in her crown of Empire.”
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Such an outcome was devoutly to be wished—and he thought the shared sacrifices of the First World War would help ensure its outcome, as Irishmen, singing “It's a Long Way to Tipperary” boarded the troopships—but the Easter Rising of 1916 put paid to that.